Mouse didn't make it far.
He'd barely rounded the next bay when the retching hit—sharp, gut-deep, impossible to swallow. He pressed his forehead to the rain-cold metal of a crate, tail tucked close, breath coming in little mouse-chitters. The port was a graveyard now. The hiss of the rain covered everything: the wet slap of blood in puddles, the soft settling of magic-burned flesh. Somewhere out of sight, a drone buzzed past, sensors flashing in the blue-violet dark. For a moment, the world stank of ozone and old salt, and Mouse's only comfort was the water-logged paper in his shaking hands.
He read his own scrawl, not understanding half of it, trying to make sense of what he'd seen. The runes from the BME agent's spell burned afterimages behind his eyelids. He shivered, then carefully licked a thumb, turned the notebook to a blank page, and started again—every detail, every scrap of the scene that might mean something to anyone but him.
Lightning flared, close this time. The roar cracked the air and, for a split second, Mouse saw the whole harbor: shipping cranes like praying mantises, the corpse-stained tarmac, and the neat, clinical footprints of the BME team, already fading as the rain washed away the evidence.
Mouse braced his back against the container and drew his knees up, making himself a target as small as the artifact he'd just watched men die over.
Then he heard it—a clatter, sharp, metallic, much closer than the thunder.
He froze, all his senses suddenly alive, tail fluffed in terror. There, maybe a meter from his paw, lay something small and bright, reflecting the pulse of overhead lights. Mouse squinted through the rain, whiskers twitching.
It was a cylinder. Maybe ten centimeters long, heavy-looking, made of metal as black as the inside of a coffin. Around it, strange symbols—like the runes the agent had drawn, but cut deep and jagged, lit with a blue-white glow. As Mouse stared, the etchings seemed to shift, always one shape away from making sense.
He crawled toward it on all fours, the way his mother used to when teaching him how to avoid giant hawks in the wild. Every centimeter felt like a lifetime. His fingers hovered, then wrapped around the artifact.
It hummed.
No louder than a purr, but it was alive in his grip. The vibration ran up his arm, set his teeth on edge, made his ears ring. His first instinct was to drop it—no, to hurl it away, to let someone else become the target—but the idea of leaving it behind was worse. He stuffed the cylinder into an inner pocket, ignoring the chill it spread across his ribs.
A shout snapped his head up. Voices, close, the slap of boots on wet concrete.
Mouse jammed himself under a ledge, body pressed flat, whiskers crushed to his cheeks. He listened: three agents, their speech clipped, almost bored. They were dragging the bodies, making piles, one by the dock wall and another by the chemical bins.
"Boss wants it clean," one of them said. "Media arrives in twenty, sweep it all."
"All evidence?" another replied.
"All. No witnesses, no mess. Orders."
Mouse's tail wrapped twice around his ankle. He couldn't move. The cylinder burned like dry ice through his hoodie, but he kept his hand over it, pinning it in place.
One of the BME agents came within a meter of his hiding spot, boots making squishy little explosions in the rain. Mouse watched the man's legs—he was tall, well-muscled, the kind who could snap a mouse-boy in two without breaking stride. The agent paused, then bent, picking something out of a puddle. For a heartbeat, Mouse thought it was the artifact—but the agent only scooped up a spent cartridge, dropped it into a plastic evidence bag.
Mouse held his breath so long he saw white at the edges of his vision. The agent moved on.
He waited. Ten seconds. Thirty. One hundred and thirty. Then, like an animal born in darkness, Mouse slithered out, keeping low, crawling with a grace his friends in Lockwood would have called "feral." He paused once, just once, to look back.
The agents had covered the bodies in a gray film, thick and quick-hardening—like watching someone vanish under a flood of ash. A drone hovered above, scanning every square meter with a blue laser, burning away the last scraps of blood and bone. The artifact in Mouse's pocket throbbed in time with the drone's pulse.
He ran. Down a corridor of containers, then ducked into a gap no wider than his shoulders, moving until the lights and the voices faded. There, in the space between two crates, Mouse finally let himself breathe.
He pulled out the artifact, holding it up. It didn't just glow—it pulsed, a faint blue heartbeat. Mouse flipped open his notebook, hands still shaking, and drew it again, this time from memory and from touch.
He tried to write down the runes. Every time he copied a line, the next had changed, the pattern shifting like a living thing. He bit his lip until it bled, frustrated, frightened, angry in a way he hadn't been since his brother vanished under similar circumstances.
After a few minutes, he gave up. He snapped the book shut, pressed it hard to his chest, and looked up at the slice of acid-soaked sky above.
He could have left the artifact. He could have run to any one of a dozen holes and never told a soul what he'd seen. But the images wouldn't leave him: the BME agent's cold brown eyes, the way the artifact had made even a professional killer nervous, the casual murder of their own contact.
He knew why he was still alive. Because nobody cared about street kids, especially Feran, especially mouse-brained ones who didn't even have a clan. He was invisible, but he'd seen everything.
He slid further back into the gap, so deep the rain became only a distant hiss. There, in the private dark, Mouse held the artifact, feeling its pulse, and whispered into the empty:
"They can't just bury this."
Then he closed his eyes, and shivered until dawn.
By sunrise, the acid rain had turned soft, almost gentle. It left a haze over the bay, muting the city's neon scars to a pale, sleepless glow. Mouse watched the cleanup from a perch inside the skeleton of an old cargo loader, fifty meters from the scene. Here, the wind carried the briny tang of the docks and the sharp bite of chemical neutralizers that city crews sprayed onto the pavement.
Hazmat teams in white suits moved with the precision of ants, hosing blood into the drains, bagging the scraps that the rain and magic hadn't erased. The BME had already left, but their work continued: drones swept back and forth, blue lasers mapping every inch, logging what was left before the forensics people boxed it up or disintegrated it on site. Nobody looked up. Nobody looked for a witness smaller than the smallest Feran.
On a massive LED billboard hanging over the port entrance, a newscaster's face gleamed, perfect and flawless, not a hair out of place. The anchor's voice, pitched to soothe, bounced through the dawn:
"In a bold pre-dawn operation, Bureau of Magical Enforcement agents seized a large shipment of illegal arcane contraband. The Bureau assures us there were no civilian casualties. We repeat: no civilian casualties. The streets of Nueva Arcadia are safer this morning thanks to the vigilance of the BME, as always."
The billboard cut to a video loop. It showed four agents in BME black, stacking evidence boxes and giving thumbs-up to the camera. No mention of the bodies, the magic, the massacre. The public feed flickered, cut to a commercial for a water-purification system, then went black.
Mouse watched all of this, ears twitching under the hood of his jacket. He kept the artifact close—so close he could feel its warmth through the layers. The blue pulse had faded to a gentle throb, almost like a heartbeat, almost like it was waiting for something.
He waited, too, until the hazmat crews packed up and the drone whir faded to nothing. When the port was empty, Mouse slipped out of the cargo loader, darted along a channel of dry concrete, and climbed the chain-link fence at the rear of the loading bay. He landed in a crouch, eyes wide, tail trailing behind like a whisper of smoke.
At the gate, a single security guard watched the sunrise, back turned, smoking a cigarette with the tired indifference of a man who'd seen too many things to care. Mouse passed behind him, unnoticed, then melted into the labyrinth of alleyways that twisted through Lockwood's underbelly.
He didn't slow down until the city swallowed him whole.