The system notification arrived with its usual impeccable timing.
SYSTEM NOTIFICATION
New Part-Time Job Available — Check Inbox
MISSION: Tears of the Despicable
Regarding Constantine, the consensus is settled: shameless, immoral, unscrupulous. A dark sorcerer who manufactures crises. A conman assembled entirely from lies. In this world, Constantine is a proper noun for all of the above.
So when he sacrifices his friend, everyone nods. Of course he did. Because he's Constantine — the heartless scoundrel. And over time, even Constantine comes to believe it.
But you're different. You know his story. He couldn't be genuinely good — but he wasn't genuinely evil either. He knew he'd never make it to Heaven, but he refused to go to Hell. He is, simultaneously, a ruthless operator and the only person willing to do what needs to be done.
You heard the exorcist crying in the dead of night.
Heartless scoundrels don't cry.
Status: Pending (0%)
Reward: Special Skill — Smuggling
Note: If you ask how many universes exist, you'll get different answers depending on who you ask. Your world will say "unknown." The original Superman will say "infinite." The Supreme Superman will say "52." Dr. Manhattan will say "52 new ones." The Hand will have its own answer. What's more interesting is that for you specifically, some universes live inside paintings — and some live on screens — and none of them are aware of each other.
Note 2: Whatever the correct answer turns out to be, one thing is certain: crossing between them is not easy, and some barriers are, for most people, insurmountable. Then again — a good worker always finds a way to the destination.
Jude read through the skill's parameters in the elevator. Cross-universe travel — to places he'd visited before and, with conditions, to places he hadn't. The constraints were significant: full physical transit was off the table for most destinations, to avoid attracting the attention of entities he'd rather not attract. The mechanics of how it would work in practice weren't fully clear yet.
Am I going to turn into a ghost? he thought, stepping out of the elevator. Some kind of projection?
He shelved it for later. There were more immediate things.
He knocked on Constantine's door.
Not loud — three sets of quiet, even knocks, spaced with enough patience to make clear he'd keep going. The third round hadn't fully finished before the door swung open.
Constantine looked at him with the flat hostility of a man who has been awake for the wrong reasons and is not pleased to be confirmed in this.
"Do you know it's three in the bloody morning?"
"I do," Jude said. "But you're not sleeping anyway." He shrugged. "You're not going to sleep tonight. So we might as well talk through tomorrow."
Constantine stared at him for a moment. Then, with the injured dignity of someone who resents being understood, he started to close the door.
"Take Lester to Midnight," he said through the narrowing gap. "Rooftop. Lure Mnemoth in. Midnight handles it. Done. Go home."
Jude put his hand on the door.
"Is it really that simple?"
"It's that simple." Constantine looked at the hand on his door. "And don't touch me. I'm not interested."
"I'm not interested either," Jude said patiently. "It's three in the morning and I'm here to discuss a plan, not to proposition you." He kept his hand where it was. "We don't have much time. Let's be quick."
"There's nothing to discuss," Constantine said, louder now, with the specific frustration of someone who has had a very bad night and would like to stop having it. "Everything waits until tomorrow. That's the plan. Goodnight."
"By tomorrow," Jude said quietly, "your fate and Lester's are already decided."
Constantine went still.
It was brief — a half-second, maybe less — but Jude caught it. The slight stiffening across his shoulders. The pause before the next word that was just slightly too long.
"I have no idea what you're talking about," Constantine muttered. He tried the door again. "You're raving."
"I have a better way." Jude didn't move his hand. "A way that doesn't require sacrificing anyone. No one gets hurt, the problem gets solved, and you don't have to be the one who did what you were planning to do."
Constantine's eyes moved to his face for the first time since he'd opened the door.
"Things like that don't exist," he said. The words were automatic. "I stopped believing in perfect endings before I was old enough to know what a perfect ending was."
His hand dropped away from the door.
Jude smiled, and walked in.
"You haven't heard my proposal yet," he said. "How do you know it won't work?"
Mnemoth had not had a good night.
Nighttime was normally its richest season — the hours when the city's hunger surfaced and spread, when desires that spent the daylight hours behind professional composure came looking for expression. New York after dark was, from Mnemoth's perspective, an extraordinary pantry. More variety than anywhere it had ever been, more flavour, more concentrated and specific want per square block than the African grasslands had produced in seasons.
New York had everything a person could want, and therefore produced everyone who wanted everything: power, money, recognition, pleasure, more of whatever they'd already had. Wall Street's ambitions. Times Square's spectacle. The slow, grinding need radiating from two thousand arts institutions full of people trying to matter. Columbia and NYU producing generation after generation of young people absolutely certain they were owed something from the world.
Mnemoth had arrived hungry and found itself in a city with an infinite buffet.
Until last night.
Last night it had been interrupted mid-feeding, slashed by something that had disrupted its form badly enough to matter, and then trapped inside a church by two pieces of paper that it could not, despite sustained effort, push through. It had spent the hours between midnight and dawn contained, frustrated in the only way it knew how to be frustrated: unable to eat.
It felt no anger. Anger was a human thing, a product of ego and expectation. Mnemoth had neither. It had appetite, and appetite deferred was simply appetite — the same drive, accumulating.
The moment the talisman's hold finally gave, it poured itself through the gap and up into the open air, leaving the street and its ordinary occupants completely alone. They were unremarkable. Generic. It had already eaten their kind.
There was a scent on the wind coming from a rooftop nearby that was something else entirely — specific, concentrated, processed through layers of experience and knowledge and particular suffering in a way that made it extraordinary. As if something had been slowly cooked by its own history into a flavour unlike anything Mnemoth had encountered in New York.
It had been hungry all night.
It turned toward the scent and began to move.
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