Rain stayed with him after the hallway.
Not actual rain. The Glasshouse did not allow weather to touch anything important. The air was filtered, polished, stripped of scent and season until even breathing felt supervised. Still, Levi could feel it somewhere under his skin: the remembered cold of water on his face, the ghost of pavement shining beneath streetlights, the impossible ache of a girl he had called Saint Dawn because the Department had left him with the title and stolen everything warmer.
He walked because stopping would have been suspicious.
He walked because Riven Cross had given him a route.
He walked because Wisteria’s file did not say dead.
The two escorts flanked him through the inner passage with the bored alertness of men who had been told their patient was recovering and also dangerous, which meant they expected trouble but preferred it to arrive politely. One kept half a step ahead. The other stayed just close enough that Levi could feel the man’s hand ready near his elbow, as if he were a child, a prisoner, or an expensive object being moved between rooms.
Riven followed on Levi’s right, tablet tucked under one arm, coffee in hand, posture so thoroughly irritated it almost looked natural.
“Try not to fall before Imaging Two,” Riven said. “It makes the paperwork suggest I failed to anticipate obvious incompetence.”
Levi kept his gaze forward. “That concern almost sounded human.”
“Don’t spread rumors.”
The escort ahead of them glanced back. “Doctor, is he cleared to walk this far?”
“No,” Riven said.
The man slowed.
Riven gave him a flat look. “That was sarcasm. He is ambulatory, conscious, and only mildly determined to ruin my day. Continue.”
Levi’s mouth twitched despite himself, which annoyed him. His body felt like it had been badly reassembled by someone working from memory. Every step sent a dull ache through his skull. His balance kept arriving half a second late. The hallway lights seemed too white at the edges, too sharp, like the world had been overexposed.
Under his thumb, hidden inside his closed fist, the joker card bent softly.
RAIN.
He had not put it away.
He should have. It was evidence. It was weakness. It was an inexplicable piece of paper someone had smuggled into a locked room after the Department had cut through his mind. He should have given it to Riven, or hidden it in the hem of his jacket, or destroyed it before someone noticed the way he held on.
Instead, he kept his fingers closed around it like a prayer he did not remember learning.
At the next intersection, the escort in front turned left.
Riven clicked his tongue.
The man stopped again. “Problem?”
“Several. Your route is one of them.”
“Imaging Two is left.”
“Imaging Two’s main corridor is left,” Riven said. “The main corridor currently contains three press liaisons, two Saints security officers, and a communications aide having what appears to be a quiet spiritual emergency near the east checkpoint. Unless your goal is to parade a post-declassification patient through a hallway full of people who think confidentiality is a decorative word, take the service loop.”
The escort frowned. “That wasn’t in the transfer note.”
“The transfer note was written by someone who thinks neurological patients are furniture with pulse rates.”
Levi looked at him.
Riven did not look back.
The second escort checked his device. “Service loop adds four minutes.”
“And yet,” Riven said, “time continues to burden us all.”
The first escort hesitated just long enough for Levi to feel the shape of it.
A possible argument.
A possible call to confirm.
A possible turn back.
Then the hallway shifted.
Not physically. Not in any way the cameras would catch. But Levi felt the next few seconds separate from one another, thin as stacked glass. He saw the escort lift his radio. Saw Riven interrupt. Saw the second escort sigh. Saw a door opening somewhere ahead before anyone reached it.
Then the moment snapped back.
The first escort lowered his hand from the radio without calling. “Fine. Service loop.”
Riven took a drink of coffee and grimaced. “Excellent. One of us can be taught.”
They turned right.
The service loop looked like every part of the Glasshouse the public was never meant to imagine: narrower, duller, less elegant. The walls were still clean, but not ceremonial. The cameras were more obvious here, black half-domes tucked into corners, tracking angles instead of appearances. Utility panels lined one side of the hall. A locked maintenance door sat beneath a red emergency light that did not blink. Somewhere behind the walls, machinery hummed with a steady, insectile patience.
Levi’s pulse changed.
Not faster.
Focused.
He counted the doors as they passed.
One.
Supply.
Two.
Staff washroom.
Three.
Access panel.
Four.
Imaging support.
Riven had said: service corridor behind Imaging Two. Shift change at thirteen hundred. Badge reader on the north stairwell unreliable since last week.
The north stairwell should be beyond the imaging support junction.
If Riven had not lied.
If Riven had not been caught.
If this was not a trap dressed as help.
Levi’s fingers tightened around the card.
Wisteria’s voice moved through him again, bright and distorted by memory.
Call me back, okay?
His throat closed around the answer he had not given.
The escort behind him touched his arm. “Keep moving.”
Levi almost turned.
For one ugly second, his body considered breaking the man’s wrist, taking the badge, running until the hallways became weather. The thought came too clearly. Too easily. He hated that the Department had left him damaged but not harmless.
Before he could move, Riven’s voice cut in.
“Do not touch him unless he falls.”
The escort removed his hand. “Procedure says—”
“Procedure also says you should not stimulate a post-cognitive intervention patient experiencing acute stress response, familial trauma, and visible nasal bleeding, and yet here you are, pawing at him like a poorly trained airport official.”
The escort’s jaw tightened.
Levi stared straight ahead.
“Pawing?” he asked.
Riven sipped his coffee. “I stand by my word choice.”
They reached the imaging support junction.
The hallway widened slightly near a set of double doors marked IMAGING TWO: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Beyond the glass panel, Levi could see the dim blue glow of a scan room, the shadowed shape of equipment, the bright line of a monitor left on standby. Clean. Official. Expected.
To the right, half-hidden behind a rolling cart stacked with sealed linens, was a narrower door.
No sign.
Only a badge reader beside it.
North stairwell.
Levi knew before he read the tiny directional arrow on the wall. His body recognized the door with the same sick certainty it had recognized Wisteria’s name in the file. A path. A hinge. One of those small places where the world could go one way or another and pretend later it had never had a choice.
Riven stopped.
So did the escorts.
The doctor looked at the scan room, then at Levi, then at the escort in front.
“Wait here.”
The escort frowned. “Why?”
“Because I need to confirm whether Imaging Two has been sterilized after yesterday’s radiological calibration issue.”
“There’s no note about that.”
Riven stared at him.
The silence lasted long enough to become medical.
Finally the escort said, “Fine.”
Riven handed him the coffee.
The man accepted it automatically, then looked offended to find it in his hand.
Riven opened the imaging door and stepped inside, leaving Levi in the corridor with two escorts, one rolling cart, one unmarked stairwell, and the sound of his own heartbeat tightening into something too close to a countdown.
The door hissed shut behind Riven.
Levi waited.
One second.
Two.
The escort holding the coffee looked at it as if it had personally betrayed him.
The other checked his device.
A voice crackled from his radio, faint and distorted.
“Unit Seven, confirm patient movement status.”
The escort lifted the radio. “Unit Seven, patient is—”
The badge reader beside the stairwell blinked.
Green.
Once.
Then red again.
Levi saw it.
So did no one else.
His breath caught.
Inside Imaging Two, something metal clattered loudly against the floor.
Both escorts turned toward the sound.
Riven’s voice came through the door, sharp and furious. “Absolutely not. Who calibrated this, a raccoon with institutional access?”
The escort with the radio lowered it. “Doctor?”
The badge reader blinked green again.
Longer this time.
Levi moved.
Not fast enough to look superhuman. Not clean enough to be elegant. His body was too weak for either. He simply shifted behind the linen cart while both escorts were looking toward Imaging Two, angled his shoulder against the unmarked door, and pressed the stolen seconds Riven had made into motion.
The stairwell door opened with a soft click.
Levi slipped through.
For one second, he was nowhere.
The door shut behind him before the escorts turned.
The north stairwell was cold, concrete, and blessedly ugly. No polished floors. No white walls pretending purity. No cameras in immediate view, though that did not mean none existed. The air smelled faintly of dust, metal, and old disinfectant. A green emergency light buzzed above the landing.
Levi stood still with one hand against the wall, breathing through a rush of pain so sudden it nearly dropped him.
His skull pulsed.
The stairwell tilted.
He saw himself already caught: door thrown open, escort shouting, hand at his shoulder, sedation needle, Drey’s calm face.
Then that version vanished.
He saw himself one flight down, missing a step, blood on the concrete.
Gone.
He saw himself at the bottom door, badge reader red, siren beginning.
Gone.
The images came too fast, not prophecies so much as broken reflections. Possibilities slicing through him without permission. His power had always been a warning. A pressure change before disaster. A glimpse. A chance.
Now it felt like someone had cracked a clock inside his head and left the pieces spinning.
Levi pressed his fist against his eye until sparks burst behind the lid.
“Not now,” he whispered.
The joker card scraped his cheek.
RAIN.
The word grounded him.
Not because he remembered.
Because something in him did.
Above him, the stairwell door opened.
“Vale?”
An escort.
Levi started down.
The first flight nearly took him with it. His knee buckled halfway to the landing, and he caught the railing hard enough to tear skin from his palm. Pain cleared his vision. Good. Pain was honest. Pain did not arrive in polite language and call itself stabilization.
He kept moving.
Behind him, the door slammed fully open.
“Patient is in the stairwell!”
Patient.
Not agent. Not man. Not brother.
Patient.
Levi laughed once, breathless and ugly, and took the next flight faster.
The radio above crackled. “North stairwell. Lockdown protocol.”
A warning light blinked at the landing below.
Red.
The door at the bottom might seal before he reached it.
Levi pushed harder.
His vision flashed again.
A woman in gold watching him from a hallway.
Are you safe?
His own voice asking, though he did not remember choosing it.
No, she had said.
But I am still here.
The words hit harder than the steps.
He missed one.
The world lurched.
Time stuttered.
For a fraction of a second, Levi was both falling and not falling. His hand was on the railing and not there. His foot struck empty air and concrete at the same time. The stairwell split into versions of itself: one where he broke his ankle, one where the escort caught him, one where the door below locked, one where he kept moving because some stubborn, ruined part of him refused to choose the version where he stopped.
He chose.
His hand closed around the rail.
His shoulder slammed into the wall instead of the floor.
Pain cracked bright through his arm.
Levi kept going.
By the time he reached the bottom landing, the alarm had started.
Not loud yet. Not public. A contained, pulsing tone that probably meant the building was deciding whether he was worth embarrassing itself over.
The exit door waited at the end of the landing with a badge reader glowing red.
Levi hit the push bar.
Locked.
Of course.
Above him, footsteps pounded down the stairs.
He looked at the reader.
His breath came hard. His palm was bleeding. His skull felt full of knives and old rain. The reader stayed red, smug as a tiny god.
Levi lifted the joker card without knowing why.
Not to scan it. That was ridiculous. It was paper. A playing card with one word scratched into it by someone he could not remember.
Still, he pressed the card against the reader.
For one terrible second, nothing happened.
Then the building lights flickered.
Not the reader.
The lights.
A shiver moved through the stairwell, subtle and deep, like something under the Glasshouse had shifted in its sleep. The reader glitched yellow, then green.
Levi stared.
The door clicked open.
He did not waste the miracle by understanding it.
He shoved through.
The corridor beyond was dimmer, older, and lined with exposed pipes painted the same dead gray as the floor. Service level. He had made it beneath the polished parts of the building. Somewhere ahead, a loading bay door stood half-open, letting in a blade of daylight and the smell of wet concrete.
Rain.
Actual rain.
Cold air pushed into the hall.
Levi staggered toward it.
Behind him, the stairwell door opened at the bottom. Someone shouted his name.
He did not turn.
The loading bay spread out ahead, all concrete, parked service vans, yellow hazard lines, and stacked crates marked with Department inventory codes. Two workers in gray uniforms stood near a vending machine, staring up at the alarm light as if hoping it would explain itself. Neither noticed Levi at first.
He grabbed a jacket from a hook near the door and pulled it over his recovery shirt. It was too large, dark, smelling faintly of oil and someone else’s cigarettes. Perfect.
The bay door opened onto a narrow service drive behind the Glasshouse.
Rain fell in thin, steady lines.
Levi stepped into it.
For one second, the city touched him without permission.
Rain struck his face, cold and real, washing across the places the hospital light had made sterile. It slid into his hair, down his neck, over the bruise near his temple and the dried blood beneath his nose. He stood under it, breathing harder than he should have, one hand braced against the brick wall, the joker card wet in his fist.
The word did not run.
RAIN stayed carved into the paper.
The service door banged open behind him.
“There!”
Levi pushed off the wall.
His legs wanted to betray him. His head wanted to split. The world kept offering him versions where he fell, where he was caught, where he woke strapped down again with Drey’s voice explaining that this was for his own safety.
He ignored all of them.
At the end of the service drive, beyond the chain-link gate, a black car rolled to a stop with illegal timing and theatrical lack of shame.
The passenger window lowered.
Hector Voss looked out at him, dry, immaculate, and deeply displeased.
“You look terrible,” Hector said.
Levi stared at him through the rain.
Then, because grief, blood loss, memory damage, and relief had apparently ruined him beyond dignity, he smiled.
“Missed you too.”
Hector looked at him through the rain as if Levi had just done something personally offensive, like bleed on upholstery from a distance.
“Do not get sentimental in a government service drive,” Hector said. “It lowers the property value.”
The service door behind Levi slammed fully open. Two D.E.A. officers spilled out into the rain, one with his hand near his sidearm, the other speaking into a radio with the bright panic of a man who had expected a sedated patient and found a problem with legs.
Levi grabbed the passenger door handle.
It did not open.
He stared at it.
Hector stared back.
“Hector.”
“Yes?”
“Unlock the door.”
“I was deciding whether this counts as kidnapping.”
“Pretty sure that ship sailed around the time you pulled up to a federal building during an alarm.”
“A fair legal interpretation.”
The lock clicked.
Levi opened the door and half-fell into the passenger seat.
Marcell accelerated before the door fully shut.
The force of it dragged Levi back against leather that smelled like rain, expensive cologne, and a faint trace of gun oil. The passenger door slammed closed on its own momentum. Behind them, one of the officers shouted something that was swallowed by tires hissing over wet pavement.
The black car shot toward the end of the service drive.
A chain-link gate waited ahead, closed and very confidently locked.
Levi braced a hand against the dashboard. “Gate.”
“Yes,” Hector said from the back seat.
“Gate, Hector.”
“I heard you the first time.”
Marcell did not slow.
The gate’s keypad sparked.
Not dramatically. Not enough to explode or shower the service drive in cinematic fire. It simply made a small, defeated sound, the kind cheap electronics made when the universe had decided to hate them. The red light on the gate control flickered to green. The lock released with a metallic snap.
The gate rolled open just enough.
Marcell threaded the car through the gap with less than an inch to spare on either side.
Levi twisted to look back.
The D.E.A. officers reached the gate as it began closing again. One slapped a badge against the reader. Nothing happened. The other kicked the frame, which seemed emotionally satisfying and mechanically useless.
Hector watched through the rear window. “That one has spirit.”
Marcell glanced at the mirror. “SUV exiting the east ramp.”
“Of course there is.”
Levi turned forward again. His skull pulsed in time with the windshield wipers. The world outside came in broken streaks: gray morning, wet brick, white D.E.A. lights sliding across puddles, security barriers shrinking behind them. Rain ran over the glass in thin lines that made the city look like it was being erased by someone patient.
His hand was still closed around the joker card.
He forced his fingers to loosen.
RAIN stared back at him, wet but intact.
Hector’s gaze dropped to the card.
For once, he did not say anything.
That was almost worse.
Levi shoved the card into his jacket pocket. The borrowed jacket was too big and smelled like someone who had terrible cigarettes and worse life choices. It hung off his shoulders, rough at the collar, but it covered the recovery shirt and the medical adhesive marks. It made him look less like a patient.
Not less like a man who had just escaped a government building while actively bleeding, but one problem at a time.
“Rowan,” Levi said.
Hector leaned back in the seat. “Alive.”
The word hit too hard.
Levi closed his eyes for one second, only one, because if he let it last longer he might see Wisteria’s name in that file again. Redacted. Not dead. Not safe. Not anything clean enough to grieve.
“Where?”
“The Broken Halo.”
Levi opened his eyes. “You took my brother to Alex’s bar.”
“You are welcome.”
“I didn’t thank you.”
“Yet.”
Marcell turned sharply onto a side street. The tires slipped for half a second on wet pavement and caught again. Behind them, the black SUV from the Glasshouse cut into traffic two blocks back, lights off but intent obvious. It did not need sirens. Government vehicles had a way of making every ordinary car around them become smaller.
Levi looked at Hector through the rearview mirror. “Why is Rowan with you?”
“Because he was attempting to get himself arrested at a scene full of D.E.A. agents, Asterion collectors, and firefighters being kept from doing their actual jobs.”
Levi’s stomach tightened. “Collectors?”
Hector’s expression shifted.
Slightly.
Enough for Levi to see he had chosen the wrong word by accident, or perhaps the right one too early.
“Evidence team,” Hector said.
“That is not what you said.”
“No. How observant. Your head injury is improving.”
“Hector.”
A car horn blared as Marcell slid them between a delivery truck and a city bus with the calm of a man who had made peace with insurance fraud as a concept.
Hector looked out the rain-streaked window. “There was residue near the foundation. Black-gold. Asterion cared deeply about hiding it. Your brother cared deeply about punching everyone near it. I considered the situation unstable.”
Levi’s hand went cold around the edge of the seat.
Black-gold.
The photo Rowan had sent. The smear beneath the gray tarp. Milo Vesper’s name beneath Wisteria’s in the alert. Collection priority active.
Wisteria’s voicemail echoed in his head.
I had another weird dream. Or not a dream. I don’t know. It was the city again, but wrong. Like the lights were breathing?
Levi swallowed. “Did Rowan see it?”
“Yes.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Enough to make him leave. Not enough to make him hopeful in public.”
Levi looked at him.
Hector met his eyes in the mirror. “You may want to be angry about that. Choose a later time. Your brother was standing at the edge of a restricted scene, grieving loudly enough to become convenient. I removed him before the Department did.”
The SUV behind them gained half a block.
Marcell clicked his tongue. “They’re catching up.”
“How embarrassing for them,” Hector said.
“For them?”
“I have faith in you.”
“That is your worst habit.”
“I have several worse habits.”
Levi dragged a hand down his face. His fingers came away damp with rain and a little blood. The bleeding had slowed, but not stopped. His body was shaking now that it had realized the immediate escape was over and the damage had permission to be noticed. His shoulder throbbed from hitting the stairwell wall. His palm burned where the railing had torn skin open. Every pulse in his skull carried white noise.
He hated that Hector noticed.
He hated more that Hector noticed and, for once, did not immediately make fun of him.
Instead, Hector reached into the pocket of his coat and withdrew a folded black handkerchief.
He held it out.
Levi stared at it.
“What is that?”
“A handkerchief.”
“Why do you have that?”
“Because some of us were raised with standards.”
“You’re a crime lord.”
“With standards.”
Levi took it and pressed it under his nose.
Hector’s mouth tightened in disgust. “I liked that one.”
“Then don’t hand it to bleeding fugitives.”
“Excellent advice. Tragically late.”
Marcell took another turn, this one smoother, guiding them into an older part of Bellwether where the buildings leaned closer together and the streets narrowed into wet, brick-lined corridors. The Glasshouse towers receded behind them, pale and sharp against the morning sky. Levi watched them shrink in the side mirror and felt no victory at all.
Only distance.
Distance could close.
Doors could lock again.
Files could change while no one watched.
Wisteria could be alive somewhere and still be disappearing.
Levi gripped the handkerchief tighter.
“Tell me everything,” he said.
Hector gave him a long look. “You are pale, bleeding, neurologically questionable, and wearing a stolen janitorial jacket.”
“Service technician.”
“Forgive me. A stolen service technician jacket. Naturally, that changes the medical picture.”
“Hector.”
“You need to sit still before you collapse.”
“I am sitting.”
“Poorly.”
Levi turned his head toward him, and the car seemed to tilt with the movement. For a second, Hector’s face blurred. Behind him, rain crawled up the rear window instead of down.
Levi blinked hard.
The rain fell normally again.
He kept his voice low. “My sister’s file does not say dead.”
Hector went still.
Marcell’s eyes flicked to the mirror but stayed on the road.
Levi waited for the joke.
It did not come.
“What does it say?” Hector asked.
“Redacted.”
Hector’s expression did not change in any obvious way. No widened eyes. No dramatic curse. Nothing that would have made him look less controlled.
But the air in the car sharpened.
Hector Voss was many things: cruel, charming, useful in the way knives were useful, allergic to obvious sincerity. But he knew what it meant when grief turned into unfinished business.
“Who told you that?” he asked.
“Riven.”
“That explains why the Department has not killed him yet. He is entertaining.”
“He also said Milo Vesper reacted to Wisteria’s incident.”
“Milo Vesper.”
“Jinx’s brother.”
“Yes,” Hector said slowly. “I know who he is.”
That was not comforting.
Levi caught it. “Why?”
“Because people in power do not keep Saints obedient with speeches. They use family, debt, medicine, reputation, controlled access to things that should never have been theirs to control. Vigil’s brother has been a leash for years.”
Levi looked toward the windshield.
Rain blurred the city ahead.
Celeste’s voice came back, soft in a hallway.
No. But I am still here.
His chest hurt.
Not like Wisteria. Not like Rowan. Not like the memory-wound around the word rain.
Different.
Clean and sharp.
He pressed his eyes closed, and for one second there she was again: gold gown, tired smile, looking at him like he had walked into a room carrying her own heart and called it by the wrong name.
Saint Dawn.
He had called her Saint Dawn.
The title tasted wrong in retrospect.
Not because he knew what else to call her.
Because some part of him hated that he did not.
Hector watched him too closely.
Levi opened his eyes. “Don’t.”
“I said nothing.”
“You were thinking loudly.”
“A tragic side effect of intelligence.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.” Hector’s voice shifted, losing a layer of polish. “What did they take from you?”
Levi looked at the rain.
He almost said nothing.
But the question had been sitting in him since the hallway, since Riven, since the card, since the name Saint Dawn had left his mouth and wounded someone before he understood why.
“I don’t know,” Levi said.
It was the worst answer.
The honest ones often were.
Hector sat back.
For once, he did not push.
The SUV behind them appeared at the end of the street again.
Marcell sighed. “Persistent.”
Hector looked annoyed. “How unfashionable.”
“They’re angling to box us before Halden Bridge.”
“Take Mercer Cut.”
“Mercer Cut floods in rain.”
“Then they should have worn boots.”
Marcell turned hard into a narrow side lane.
The car dropped into a pothole full of water with a bone-jarring thud. Levi grunted despite himself, his injured shoulder slamming the seat. Hector’s hand snapped forward to brace against the back of the passenger headrest, not touching Levi, but close enough to keep him from knocking backward too hard.
Levi noticed.
Hector noticed him noticing.
“Do not look at me like that,” Hector said. “You are difficult to replace.”
“Touching.”
“I mean professionally.”
“Sure.”
The lane narrowed further, brick walls close on both sides. Marcell drove without hesitation. The SUV behind them tried to follow, but its turn was too wide. Its rear tire clipped the curb. The driver corrected, too late, and hit a trash bin left too far from the wall.
The bin tipped.
Its lid flew open.
A glorious wave of wet garbage spilled across the lane.
The SUV braked hard.
Marcell checked the mirror. “Convenient.”
Hector inspected one cuff. “Sanitation is a vital public service.”
Levi stared at the mess behind them, then at Hector. “Did you do that?”
“I did not place the bin there.”
Levi smiled.
It faded quickly.
They emerged from Mercer Cut into a quieter stretch of Bellwether where neon signs still glowed weakly from the night before and old brick storefronts huddled beneath dripping awnings. The Broken Halo sat at the end of the block, tucked between a closed pawn shop and a laundromat with half its letters burned out. Its black-painted door looked unimpressed by weather, crime, and possibly God.
Above it, the sign buzzed in red-white light.
THE BROKEN HALO
Beneath it:
NO SAINTS. NO SERMONS. PAY YOUR TAB.
Levi let out a breath he had not realized he was holding.
It was not home.
It was not safe.
But Alex owned the building, Hector had somehow gotten Rowan inside it, and the Department had not yet set it on fire.
That made it a miracle by Bellwether standards.
Marcell pulled into the alley behind the bar and killed the headlights before the car fully stopped. Hector was out first, opening an umbrella with the kind of unnecessary elegance that made Levi want to hit him on principle.
Levi opened his door.
The pavement rose to meet him.
Or he dropped toward it.
Hard to tell.
Hector caught his arm before he hit the alley wall.
For one second, neither of them moved.
Rain struck the umbrella above them, soft and steady.
Levi looked at Hector’s hand on his arm.
Hector looked at absolutely anything else.
“You tell anyone,” Hector said, “and I will deny this with religious conviction.”
“You’re helping a lot for someone who hates feelings.”
“I do not hate feelings. I hate amateur displays.”
Levi straightened carefully. “My brother?”
“Inside.”
The word almost broke him.
Hector saw that too and, mercifully or strategically, looked away.
Marcell came around the car carrying Levi’s stolen jacket from where it had slipped half off his shoulder. He adjusted it with a brisk tug, then stepped to the back door of The Broken Halo and knocked twice, paused, then once.
A lock slid open.
Alex Blackwood appeared in the doorway, dark braid over one shoulder, eyes tired, expression flat enough to hide how fast she took Levi in: blood, pallor, borrowed jacket, shaking hands, card-shaped crease in one fist.
“Well,” she said. “You look like government healthcare.”
Levi huffed something that might have been a laugh if the day had been kinder.
“Where’s Rowan?” he asked.
Alex’s expression softened by a fraction.
Not much.
Enough.
“In the back,” she said. “Trying not to break my furniture.”
Levi stepped past her into the warmth and dim light of The Broken Halo.
The bar smelled like stale beer, old wood, rain-damp coats, and coffee brewed by someone angry. The front room was empty, chairs still stacked on tables, neon halo sign flickering weakly above the shelves. Cards lay scattered across the bar top in a loose half-circle, their edges twitching slightly as Alex closed the door behind them.
Voices came from the back room.
One low and furious.
One smoother, likely Marcell’s.
Then a chair scraped.
Rowan appeared in the hallway.
For a second, he did not move.
Neither did Levi.
His brother looked wrecked. Soot on his sleeve. Hair damp from the fire scene. Eyes red in a face held together by anger because grief had not been strong enough on its own. He looked older than he had yesterday and somehow younger too, like the morning had stripped him down to the boy Levi used to pull behind him through crowds, one hand locked around his wrist so neither of them lost Wisteria.
Rowan stared at him as if not trusting the evidence of his own eyes.
Levi tried to say his name.
Nothing came out.
Rowan crossed the room in three hard strides.
For half a second, Levi thought his brother might hit him.
He almost would have deserved it.
Instead, Rowan grabbed him.
Not gracefully. Not gently. One arm locked around Levi’s shoulders, the other hand gripping the back of his head like he was checking that it was still attached. The force of it hurt every bruised part of Levi’s body, which was nearly all of him.
Levi held on anyway.
Rowan smelled like smoke.
Levi closed his eyes.
“I’m here,” he managed.
Rowan’s grip tightened.
“You didn’t answer your phone,” Rowan said into his shoulder.
The words broke something open.
Levi almost laughed.
Almost sobbed.
Neither came out right.
“Yeah,” he said, voice rough. “I’m starting to think that runs in the family.”
Rowan pulled back just enough to look at him.
His face crumpled for one terrible second before anger rushed back in to save him.
Then he shoved Levi’s shoulder.
Not hard.
Enough.
“Don’t do that again.”
“Get kidnapped by the Department?”
“Breathe where I can’t see you.”
Levi looked at him.
Rowan looked back.
The room went painfully quiet.
Behind them, Hector closed the umbrella with a soft snap.
Alex said nothing.
Marcell looked away.
Levi wanted to tell Rowan that Wisteria’s file said redacted. That her voicemail came from Asterion rail. That maybe, maybe, maybe the fire had been a lie in a world where lies often wore official seals and carried clean folders.
But Rowan was standing in front of him, alive, shaking, and already broken enough for one morning.
So Levi said the only thing he could say first.
“I heard her message.”
Rowan’s jaw tightened.
“The last one?”
Levi nodded.
Rowan looked down.
For a second, all the fury left him, and grief stood there bare.
Then Alex’s cards rustled on the bar.
All of them turned at once.
Not toward Levi.
Toward his pocket.
The pocket where the phone sat.
Alex’s eyes narrowed.
“What was in the background?” she asked.
Levi looked at her.
The old train bell rang in his memory.
Low.
Metallic.
Rhythmic.
He reached slowly for his phone.
Levi stood in the middle of The Broken Halo with his phone in his hand and his brother in front of him, both of them staring at the screen like it might become kinder if no one pressed play.
It did not.
Phones were terrible little things. They held grocery lists, missed calls, bad photos, passwords people forgot, voicemails from people who were supposed to call again. They made the dead portable. They let grief fit inside a pocket and buzz at inconvenient times.
Wisteria would have hated that description.
She would have called it dramatic, then stolen it later and pretended she invented it.
Levi’s thumb hovered over the voicemail.
Rowan watched the movement with the raw, fixed attention of someone waiting to be hurt on purpose. His hands had curled into fists at his sides. There was still soot near his wrist, pressed into the creases of his skin. He had washed his face badly or not at all. Levi wanted to fix that, which was ridiculous. Rowan was older than him. Rowan had dragged him out of more bad decisions than Levi could count. Rowan had once carried Wisteria three blocks in the rain because she had twisted her ankle and refused to admit she was crying.
But grief did strange things to order.
It made everyone a child in the wrong room.
Alex moved behind the bar without a word and shut off the neon halo sign. The red-white buzz died, leaving the room dimmer, quieter, held together by rain against the windows and the low hum of the old refrigerator under the counter. Her cards slid across the bar in a loose circle around Levi’s phone, not touching it, but close enough that the air above them seemed to tighten.
Hector leaned against the end of the bar, arms folded, face too still. Marcell stood by the back door with his hand near his coat, listening for trouble outside as much as inside.
No one told Levi to hurry.
That made it worse.
He pressed play.
For half a second, there was only city noise.
Wind against the microphone. A car passing somewhere close enough to smear sound across the recording. The faint scrape of movement, keys shifting against metal, Wisteria breathing like she had been walking while talking because she never could stand still when something bothered her.
Then her voice filled the bar.
“Hi, congratulations, you’ve once again failed at owning a phone.”
Rowan flinched.
Not much.
Enough for Levi to see it.
Wisteria sounded alive. Annoyed. Bright in the way she got when she was pretending not to be scared. The sound of her made the room smaller. It pulled all of them closer to the phone without anyone moving.
“Seriously, why do you have this thing? For decoration? Is it an emotional support rectangle? Because if so, I support you, but also I hate you.”
A rustling sound came through the speaker, followed by a muffled curse.
“Sorry. Dropped my keys. Do not judge me from afar. I can feel you doing it.”
Levi closed his eyes.
He had judged her from afar.
He remembered doing it before he had even heard the message the first time. Wisteria dropping her keys somewhere on a wet sidewalk, probably rolling her eyes at the sky, probably wearing Rowan’s stolen jacket with the sleeves swallowing her hands. He had imagined it so clearly that his body seemed to mistake it for rescue, as if picturing her alive hard enough could undo the rest.
“Anyway, before you get mad—”
Wisteria laughed softly in the recording.
“Okay, bad opener. You’re already mad. I can sense it. Big brother disapproval travels through walls. It’s a medical condition. Very tragic.”
Rowan made a sound that might have been a laugh if it had survived longer.
It did not.
His mouth twisted, and he looked down at the floor.
Levi kept the phone steady. Barely.
“I need you to call me back,” Wisteria said. “Not emergency-emergency. Do not do the thing where you hear the word need and suddenly act like a divorced action hero. I’m fine.”
A pause.
Then, quieter:
“Mostly.”
The word changed the room.
It was tiny. One small correction tucked behind a joke. But every person in The Broken Halo heard the fear under it. Not panic. Not yet. Wisteria had been too stubborn for panic. This was worse. This was Wisteria trying to give Levi enough truth to make him call back without giving him enough to make him run.
Levi swallowed around something sharp.
Rowan looked up.
Alex’s cards stopped moving.
“I had another weird dream. Or not a dream. I don’t know. It was the city again, but wrong. Like the lights were breathing? That sounds insane. Don’t tell Rowan I said that. He’ll do his concerned eyebrows and replace every lamp in my apartment with, like, emotionally supportive bulbs.”
Hector’s gaze flicked toward Rowan.
Rowan did not react to the joke this time.
His face had gone very still.
Another small laugh came through the speaker.
It broke apart near the end.
“I heard a kid crying, I think. Or maybe he was talking. I couldn’t see him. There was water on the road. And a door that kept opening into the same room. And you were there, but older? No, not older. Just tired. Actually, that’s normal. Never mind.”
Levi’s grip tightened around the phone.
A kid crying.
Milo Vesper.
Water on the road.
A door opening into the same room.
Older. No, not older. Just tired.
His stomach turned cold.
Riven’s words came back with clinical cruelty.
Milo Vesper reacted to something connected to your sister’s incident.
Levi had thought the voicemail was strange before. Now it felt like Wisteria had been standing with one foot in a future no one else could see, laughing because the alternative was screaming.
“I’m probably being dramatic,” Wisteria said, forcing brightness back into her voice. “Family curse. You have brooding. Rowan has control issues. I have theatrical dread. Very balanced household.”
Marcell looked away.
Hector looked down.
Alex stared at the phone as if she could hear something in the sound beneath Wisteria’s voice that the rest of them could not.
“Call me back, okay? Or don’t, and I’ll assume you’ve perished tragically under paperwork and come identify the body by its terrible posture.”
The Wisteria in the recording exhaled.
For a second, there was only city noise behind her.
A car passing.
Wind against the phone.
Keys shifting again, brighter this time, close to the microphone.
And underneath all of it, so faint Levi almost thought his grief had invented it, came a low metallic sound.
Not a horn.
Not a siren.
A bell.
Old. Distant. Rhythmic.
Alex’s cards lifted from the bar.
All at once.
No one breathed.
Then Wisteria’s voice softened.
“Love you, idiot.”
Levi looked down.
The room blurred.
A pause.
“And if you tell anyone I said that, I’ll deny it in court.”
The voicemail ended.
The silence afterward was worse than the message.
It did not feel empty. It felt full of everything the recording had not known it was leaving behind. The last joke. The last breath. The last proof that Wisteria Vale had been alive somewhere near wind, traffic, keys, and a train bell before the Department decided the story should begin with fire.
Rowan turned away first.
He made it two steps before stopping near the end of the bar, one hand braced against the wood. His shoulders rose once. Fell once. Then he went still in that awful way people did when they were trying to keep grief from becoming sound.
Levi wanted to go to him.
He also could not move.
Alex reached across the bar and paused the audio file even though it had already ended. Her fingers hovered above the screen for a moment, careful not to touch anything else.
“Play the last thirty seconds again,” she said.
Rowan’s head snapped toward her. “No.”
Alex looked at him.
Not coldly.
That would have been easier to hate.
“I’m not asking because I want to hear her hurt you twice,” she said. “There’s something under the street noise.”
Rowan’s jaw flexed. “I heard it.”
“Did you hear where it was?”
He did not answer.
Levi looked at his brother. “Rowan.”
Rowan stared at the bar top, eyes shining and furious. “Play it.”
Levi replayed the last section.
This time, no one listened to Wisteria first.
That felt like betrayal.
It also felt necessary.
Her exhale filled the room again. City noise followed. The car. The wind. The keys.
Then the bell.
Low.
Metallic.
Rhythmic.
Alex’s cards tilted in the air, turning their faces toward the phone like little paper receivers.
“There,” she said.
Hector’s expression sharpened. “Old crossing bell.”
Marcell nodded once from the door. “Rail line.”
Rowan turned slowly. “There aren’t any active rail crossings near her apartment.”
“No,” Levi said. His voice sounded distant to himself. “There aren’t.”
Hector looked at him.
Levi met his eyes.
“The voicemail did not ping near North Mercer,” Levi said. “Riven checked the routing. It came from the southwest industrial edge, near the old Asterion rail line.”
Alex’s cards dropped flat against the bar.
One of them slid, slow and deliberate, toward the black-gold photo Rowan had left beside an untouched cup of coffee. The photo had been printed from his phone in some back-office machine Alex apparently owned for reasons no one had time to question. The image was grainy but clear enough: wet foundation, gray tarp edge, D.E.A. barricade, and the strange residue shining darkly near the ground like ash that had swallowed a star wrong.
Alex picked up the photo.
“This is not ash,” she said.
Rowan’s voice went rough. “Then what is it?”
Alex did not answer right away.
Her left eye flickered red, just once, faint under the bar’s dim light. The cards nearest her hand shifted as if something had breathed across them.
“I don’t know,” she said finally. “But I saw something like it in the Glasshouse after we pulled Levi out of the memory pull. Not this much. Trace amounts. Edges of equipment. Under a sealed panel Hector absolutely did not open.”
Hector lifted a finger. “Allegedly.”
Alex ignored him. “It reacted to the cards.”
Levi looked at her. “Reacted how?”
“Like they hated each other.”
“That is not a measurement.”
“It is when the cards are mine.”
Levi almost had enough energy to argue.
Then Rowan stepped back toward them, eyes fixed on the photo.
“They said it was a fire.”
Hector’s mouth tightened. “People say many things when paperwork requires a noun.”
Rowan looked at him. “Was it?”
The question hung there.
No one wanted to be the first person to answer it plainly.
So Levi did.
“No.”
Rowan looked at him.
Levi’s chest hurt so badly it felt physical, like someone had pressed a thumb beneath his ribs and kept it there.
“Riven said not to call it that until we have evidence it began as one.” He swallowed. “And her file doesn’t say dead.”
Rowan went completely still.
Alex’s eyes moved to Levi.
Hector did not.
He already knew this part, and for once he seemed to understand that repeating it in front of Rowan would make it real in a way the car had not.
Rowan’s voice came out barely above a whisper. “What?”
Levi took one step toward him.
Careful. Not like Rowan was breakable. Like the hope was.
“Her internal Department status was redacted,” Levi said. “Not deceased. Not confirmed. Redacted.”
Rowan stared at him.
For a second, the room seemed to forget how to be a room. The rain blurred the windows. The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere upstairs, pipes clicked in the walls. Ordinary sounds. Cruel sounds. The world continuing around a sentence that had just torn grief open and put something worse inside it.
Hope.
Rowan shook his head once.
Not denial.
Defense.
“No,” he said.
Levi’s throat tightened. “Rowan—”
“No.” Rowan stepped back, one hand lifting like he could physically keep the words away from him. “Don’t. Don’t hand me that if you’re not sure.”
“I’m not sure.”
The honesty landed harder than a lie would have.
Levi forced himself to keep going.
“I am not sure she’s alive. I’m not sure where she is. I’m not sure what they did, or why Milo Vesper’s name was in the same alert as hers, or why her voicemail came from Asterion rail instead of her apartment. But I know the Department is lying about the fire. I know Asterion cleaned the scene before anyone could ask the right questions. And I know Wisteria called me from somewhere else before everything burned.”
Rowan’s face twisted.
He looked younger again.
Terribly young.
“She said mostly,” he whispered.
Levi closed his eyes for half a second.
“I know.”
“She said she was fine, and then she said mostly.”
“I know.”
Rowan pressed the heel of his hand against one eye. “God, she always did that. She always—she’d make it a joke so you had to chase the part where she was scared.”
Levi could not answer.
Because yes.
Because he should have answered his phone.
Because he should have called back.
Because every older brother in the world lived with a private religion of should have, and his had just found a voicemail to worship at.
Alex came around the bar with the photo in one hand and Levi’s phone in the other. Her expression was still sharp, still guarded, but there was something gentler beneath it now.
“She left a trail,” Alex said.
Rowan lowered his hand. “She didn’t know she was leaving one.”
“No,” Alex said. “But she did.”
Hector glanced toward the covered front windows. “And the Department likely knows that now, if they have had time to review routing.”
Levi looked at him. “How much time do we have?”
“Before Drey realizes you are not in Imaging Two? Already happened. Before they connect you to here? Less than I’d prefer. Before they understand what you heard in the voicemail?” Hector’s eyes moved to the phone. “That depends on whether anyone in their building has imagination.”
Marcell’s phone buzzed.
He checked it, then looked up.
“Glasshouse alert has gone external. Patient recovery request. Quiet channel.”
Levi huffed. “Patient recovery.”
Alex’s cards rustled.
“Patient,” Rowan said, and there was such venom in the word that Levi looked at him.
Rowan’s grief had not vanished.
It had changed shape.
Good.
Anger could stand when hope could not.
Hector straightened. “We cannot stay here long.”
Alex looked offended. “This building has survived three raids, two Saints, and one man who tried to pay his tab in antique teeth.”
“This is charming,” Hector said. “But not invisible.”
“It is when I want it to be.”
“Against local police, yes. Against D.E.A. and Asterion when they are embarrassed and hungry? No.”
Marcell nodded toward the back door. “We should move before they put watchers on the block.”
Levi grabbed the edge of the bar to steady himself.
The movement cost him more than he expected. His vision narrowed, then widened badly. For a second, he heard the old train bell again even though the phone was silent. The room tilted, and rain crawled up the window before correcting itself.
Rowan caught his arm.
Levi hated that he needed it.
Rowan hated that too, probably.
Neither of them said so.
“You are not going anywhere right now,” Rowan said.
Levi gave him a look. “You’re not in charge of me.”
“I have been in charge of you since you tried to microwave a fork at thirteen.”
“That was scientific curiosity.”
“That was arson with confidence.”
Hector looked between them. “This is touching and educational.”
Alex pointed at Levi. “He’s right, though. You look like if a migraine became a person.”
Levi exhaled through his nose. “We need to go to the rail line.”
“Yes,” Hector said. “Eventually.”
“Now.”
“No.”
Levi’s gaze cut to him.
Hector did not blink. “You can glare at me all you like. You are actively bleeding, recently escaped, and one emotional inconvenience away from falling through time in my bar. We are not taking you to an abandoned Asterion rail line in that condition.”
Levi’s jaw tightened. “She could be there.”
“Or she was there. Or she was moved from there. Or it is bait. Or it is a door to something none of us understands yet.” Hector’s voice sharpened. “You charging at it half-conscious helps exactly one group of people, and they own better restraints than I do.”
Levi hated him.
Mostly because he was right.
Rowan’s grip tightened on Levi’s arm. “We go smart.”
Levi looked at him.
Rowan’s face was pale, eyes ruined, mouth set.
“We go smart,” he repeated, voice unsteady but firm. “Because if she’s alive, she needs us smart. Not dead in a ditch outside Asterion property because you decided bleeding was a personality trait.”
Alex nodded toward the stairs behind the bar. “Upstairs first. You sit. I pull the audio clean and isolate the background. We check the bell pattern against old city maps. If the crossing still has a maintenance code, we can narrow the location.”
Marcell looked at Hector. “I can get the maps.”
“Do it.”
Hector looked at Alex. “And if your building is about to become less invisible?”
“I’ll know.”
The cards on the bar lifted slightly, as if agreeing.
Levi looked at the phone in Alex’s hand.
Wisteria’s voicemail sat on the screen, small and bright, marked with a timestamp that had become a wound.
He wanted to play it again.
He wanted never to hear it again.
Instead, he reached into his pocket and pulled out the joker card.
RAIN.
Rowan saw it.
“What is that?”
Levi looked down at the word.
The memory did not come.
Only the feeling did. Wet pavement. Gold light. A girl’s voice telling him goodbye like she had done it before. Saint Dawn looking at him in the hallway with heartbreak hidden behind a smile.
“I don’t know,” Levi said.
Rowan stared at him. “Levi.”
“I don’t know,” he repeated, quieter. “But I think someone wanted me to remember something they took.”
No one spoke.
Then Alex, because apparently she had decided the morning did not contain enough terrible questions, said, “Rain was in Wisteria’s message too.”
Levi looked up.
“Water on the road,” she said. “Rain outside. Rail bell in the background. Your card. That’s either a coincidence, or the universe has developed a very annoying theme.”
Hector made a small sound. “The universe has always been tacky.”
Levi slid the card back into his pocket.
His hand shook.
Rowan pretended not to see.
That was love too.
Alex held up the phone. “I’m going to pull the audio.”
Levi nodded.
She hesitated. “Do you want me to cut out her voice and isolate only the background?”
The question was careful.
Kinder than he expected.
Levi looked at Rowan.
Rowan looked back.
For a second, they were both boys again, standing outside Wisteria’s bedroom while she yelled at them to stop hovering because she had a cold, not the plague, and also they were both terrible nurses.
“No,” Rowan said first.
Levi’s throat tightened.
He nodded once. “Leave her in.”
Alex’s expression softened.
“Okay.”
She set the phone on the bar and tapped the screen.
Wisteria’s voice returned, bright and impossible.
“Hi, congratulations, you’ve once again failed at owning a phone.”
This time, no one flinched away.
They listened.
For her fear.
For the kid crying.
For the water on the road.
For the door opening into the same room.
For the bell.
And when it rang beneath her voice, low and metallic and distant, Alex’s cards rose from the bar in a slow, trembling circle.
One by one, they turned toward the southwest.
Toward the old Asterion rail line.
Toward whatever had taken Wisteria before the fire learned her name.