By the time Raphael got back to the university, a loose crowd had already gathered outside the wreckage.
Most of them had been pulled from their beds by the noise and had come over once the sounds of destruction stopped.
They stood in clusters at the perimeter, a cross-section of whoever happened to live or work nearby, residents in sleepwear still rubbing their eyes.
A young freelance journalist working themselves into visible excitement, a few students who had come in early to study and found something considerably more interesting to look at instead.
He listened to what they were saying.
"What happened? Does anyone actually know?" A confused passerby, turning in slow circles.
"I saw them. Two of them, fighting, from the sky all the way down to the ground, neither one stopping. The shockwave alone did all of this."
An elderly man, shaking slightly, gesturing at the collapsed wing. "God help us. There are actually monsters in the world."
"Big story, this is a Big! story!" The freelance journalist was photographing and typing simultaneously, bouncing on the balls of their feet.
"Front page, no question, promotion, raise—"
"I'm hearing it was a terrorist cell. Grievances about the federal government's marginalization policies toward border districts."
Someone with a phone and a platform, already composing, already broadcasting, the facts already somewhere behind the narrative.
"Stay tuned, first-hand coverage..."
"Police vehicles everywhere, coming from multiple cities. And IFSA, federal-level. They're saying citywide lockdown. Nobody in or out."
A retired officer, mouth open, staring at his phone screen.
"What do we do? Transfer? There's no other university here, rebuilding will take years. Our coursework, our tuition..."
Three students looking at each other with the specific helplessness of people whose problems are real and very small compared to everything else happening, and who know it, and for whom that knowledge provides no comfort whatsoever.
Different people, different reactions, different angles on the same sudden rupture in the ordinary.
The one thing they shared was that the future had gone blurry overnight, and none of them could see what came next.
Raphael watched all of it from the edge of the crowd.
He exhaled and stepped into the crowd, drifting toward the crossroads, moving like someone who had stopped to look at something on his way somewhere else.
His eyes were open but his attention was turned inward, feeling along the connection that existed between himself and Evelyn, that faint thread that the Second Hunting Ground had established, thin as a signal through static but undeniably present.
There.
Weak. Very weak. But there, two worlds apart, separated by whatever the Mirror of Self had placed between them, and still findable.
"Evelyn. I'm coming."
He closed his eyes. Let his awareness sink inward, past the noise of the street, past the blood and the exhaustion, down to where the Second Hunting Ground sat quiet and waiting.
A door at the bottom of his consciousness, faint and shimmering, not fully formed.
The Witch's Hunting Ground.
The idea arrived complete.
Both the Demon ground and the Sinner ground allowed mutual perception between hunter and contracted partner. The Second Ground was built on synchronization, on the bond that had been accumulating between him and Evelyn since the first night.
If that bond had a presence in this space, and she was trapped somewhere adjacent to a mirror world, there was a real possibility that the ground could serve as a channel.
It might work.
Then the red and blue lights came around the corner at the far end of the street.
An IFSA convoy, moving at a controlled pace, the broadcast starting before the vehicles had fully rounded the bend.
"Citywide lockdown in effect immediately. No entry or exit permitted. All residents are required to vacate their residences and gather in designated open areas. A criminal suspect is believed to be present within the city limits. All residents are required to cooperate with the investigation..."
Raphael weighed his options for a moment and decided the crossroads could wait twenty minutes.
He went to a bank.
The staff were all at the windows watching the street. The interior was nearly empty and very quiet.
Raphael considered whether a disguise was appropriate, decided it probably wasn't, smoothed his hair down, and walked in.
"Withdrawal."
He fed his anonymous card into the machine.
The teller who eventually noticed him didn't flag anything.
There was a specific logic to this: no criminal on a citywide wanted notice would walk into a bank in broad view of the street and make a withdrawal with this level of composure.
The transaction processed without incident. He took the case with the cash in it and pushed the door open.
A uniformed officer came in as he was going out, running a routine check of the premises. The officer looked at him, neat clothes, unhurried expression, briefcase, and looked away.
Raphael didn't look back.
He followed the address he'd pulled from Manson's records during the investigation and knocked on the door.
The woman who answered was in her fifties, but her hair had gone almost entirely white. The lines in her face were the specific kind that came from years of work done without enough rest, the kind that didn't soften with age but deepened.
"Yes? Who are you? I don't know you."
Raphael offered a polite nod and presented his credentials, thumb over the photo.
She couldn't parse the full document, too many departments, too much institutional language, but the federal seals and the rank insignia communicated enough.
"You're... you're a federal official? What's happened? Is something wrong?"
He was quiet for a moment.
Then he told her something that was not the truth, and was as kind as he could make it.
"Your foster son, Manson Vanessa, left home last night when the disturbances began. During the incident, he intervened to protect the child of a local businessman from serious harm. He succeeded. He didn't survive."
He let that land.
"The businessman wished to express his gratitude. He made a donation, and I was asked to deliver it on his behalf. Your son was a good person. I'm sorry for your loss."
Manson's mother stood very still. After a long moment she turned and looked down the hallway, toward Manson's room. The door was open. The room was empty.
She'd known before he'd said it. Maybe for longer than that.
Raphael handed her the case.
The amount inside would cover twenty years of reasonable living, without her working another day of it.
He'd taken it all out because his accounts would be frozen within hours once the information networks caught up, the money was already unreachable to him in any practical sense. Better this than a number on a frozen ledger.
He didn't tell himself it was generosity. It was logistics and a promise kept.
He looked at her face one more time. Memorized it. The look of a person from whom something essential had been removed.
"This falls under a special federal jurisdiction. Investigators will be visiting residents in the area. Please keep the details of this conversation to yourself."
He turned and left before she could find words.
The street received him again. The convoy lights were still moving somewhere in the distance. The crowd outside the university had grown.
He walked through it without hurrying, a man with somewhere to be and no particular urgency about getting there, and the city moved around him the way cities do, carrying its own weight, indifferent to the specific weight any one person was carrying through it.