Chapter 28: Flagged

Chapter 28: Chapter 28: Flagged

Director Samuel Crane started every morning the same way: black coffee, the overnight incident reports, and a legal pad on which he wrote down anything that didn’t add up.

For three weeks, one name had been at the top of the pad.

He had pulled every record the Association kept on Elias Pierce, and he’d done it quietly, through clerks who owed him favors, so that no request would show up in anyone else’s logs. Then he’d done what he always did. He’d counted.

In the past five weeks, an E-rank Assassin with one combat skill had logged nineteen solo gate clears through the public kiosks. Eleven were E-rank, which was ordinary. Eight were D-rank, which was not. Four of those D-rank gates had closed afterward, which meant their bosses were dead.

E-rank Assassins did not kill D-rank bosses alone. E-rank Assassins did not usually survive D-rank bosses alone.

The exchange records said Pierce sold only small cores, scrap, and spearheads, exactly what a struggling E-rank would bring in. But a field agent’s report from the Market District mentioned a salvage dealer named Osgood Brill, known locally as Ozzie, who had started moving D-rank boss cores to collectors in the last month. Four of them, the agent estimated. Maybe five.

Crane underlined four twice.

Then there was the Drowned Cathedral, where a porter had survived an irregular boss by "hiding." Fifth Street, where twenty-two stalkers and an alpha had died with no hunter on record. And a break chaser named Royce Kell, still insisting from his hospital bed that a knight had stepped out of thin air to break his sword hand.

He could take it to the council. That was protocol.

But Councilor Everett Marsh sat on the council, and Marsh had spent the past year pushing a motion to detain "unregistered anomalies" on sight. If this file reached Marsh’s desk before Crane understood what was in it, a twenty-two-year-old porter would end up in a room with no windows, and Crane would never get a straight answer out of him.

So Crane picked up his phone and made one call.

She arrived forty minutes later, and she didn’t use the elevator.

Crane was waiting on the roof with two coffees when he felt it: a faint hum in his teeth, the steel railing beside him vibrating like a plucked string. Every loose bolt on the helipad rattled. Then, from the edge of the building, a figure rose into view, standing upright in the empty air eleven stories above the street, riding the magnetic field of the building’s own steel frame like a surfer on a wave.

Iris Blackwood stepped off the air onto the helipad as if stepping off a curb.

She was twenty, and she had been the youngest S-rank in the city’s history for six years running. She wore a long charcoal coat with steel buttons, and her black hair was tied back in a braid that reached halfway down her back. Three steel coins orbited lazily around the fingers of her left hand, a habit she’d had since she was a child and had never bothered to break.

She looked at the coffee Crane held out. Then she looked at him.

"I was in the middle of a harbor break," she said. "B-rank. Serpents. I had three of them in the water and two on the docks."

"I heard. Sunward is finishing it."

"Sunward is finishing my break."

"Julian sends his regards." Crane kept holding out the coffee. "Sit down, Iris."

She didn’t sit. But she took the coffee, which from Iris was practically an apology. Crane handed her the folder.

She read it standing up, flipping pages with one hand while the coins kept circling the other. She read fast. She always had. He had once watched her memorize the layout of an A-rank gate from a single pass of the survey photos. One minute later, she closed the folder and handed it back.

"A porter," she said flatly.

"An Assassin, technically."

"An E-rank Assassin who carries bags for Ironfang." The coins stopped orbiting and hung perfectly still in the air above her palm. "You pulled me off a serpent break for a porter?"

"For a porter who’s killed four D-rank bosses in five weeks," Crane said. "Alone. On paper."

"Paper’s wrong, then. He’s got a crew he isn’t logging."

"Maybe." Crane took out his phone, pulled up the video, and held it out. "Watch it to the end."

Iris sighed, took the phone, and watched.

Crane watched her face instead. He’d known Iris since the week the Crimson Break tore open the sky over Ashby Street, when she was ten years old, covered in plaster dust, and nobody could explain why every steel beam in a collapsing building had bent toward her like flowers toward the sun. He’d learned how to read her a long time ago. For the first twenty seconds, she was bored.

Then she paused it.

She dragged it back a few frames and played it again. The flash of white light at the far end of the platform. Then the hooded figure moving toward the platform edge, stepping and then simply being somewhere else, two meters farther on, faster than the camera could follow.

"That’s Quick Step," she said slowly. "It’s an E-rank Assassin skill. Everybody has it, and nobody’s that fast with it." She dragged it back again. "And that light, there. That’s not a skill flash. Skills flicker. That’s..." She frowned. "That’s an opening. Something came through."

"The break chaser says it was a knight."

"The break chaser was probably concussed."

"His arm was broken by someone with a joint lock, not a sword," Crane said mildly. "And his sword was disarmed by a shield. The ER doctor noted the bruise pattern on his hand. Rectangular." He took the phone back. "Two different fighters, Iris. In an alley where only one man walked in."

Iris didn’t say anything. The coins began to orbit again, faster now, the way they did when she was thinking.

"Why me?" she said at last. "You have investigators."

"Because if he’s what I think he might be, an investigator won’t survive finding out. And because if Councilor Marsh hears about this before I understand it, Marsh will have that boy in a room with no windows by Friday." Crane met her eyes. "I need someone who can watch him without being seen, and handle whatever happens if she is."

Iris looked out over the city for a long moment, the coins whirring above her palm.

"Fine," she said. "What are my orders?"

"Observe. Not engage. Find out what he is, who’s helping him, and whether he’s a danger to anyone. Then come back and tell me."

She drained the coffee in one long swallow and handed him the empty cup. Then she walked to the edge of the helipad and stepped off it into eleven stories of empty air, the steel frame of the building humming as it caught her.

"Observe, not engage," she called back over her shoulder, already dropping out of sight. "I’ll do the first half."

Crane looked at the empty cup in his hand, sighed, and went back downstairs to his legal pad.