Chapter 689 | A Blanket of Not-There

Chapter 689: 689 | A Blanket of Not-There

The word landed in the room like a stranger’s footprint. Nobody would connect that voice to Lukas Belmont, Badge 138, the gold kid from the dome.

Good.

The cognitive static field activated, and I felt the Emotional Duplex with Sloane dim to a muffled pulse, still there but indistinct, like hearing music through a wall of insulation. She would feel the change right now, wherever she sat in her room on the other side of campus. She would know I had put the mask on.

She would wait.

I climbed out the window, caught the ledge with both hands, and swung myself up to the second-floor roof overhang in a single pull. The Demigod trait made the motion feel casual, like stepping onto a curb. From there, the fire escape railing provided a launch point, and I hit the main dormitory roof in two bounds, landing on gravel that crunched under Dralun’s nephew’s steel-capped boots.

Campus spread below me in white concrete and glass, security lights painting everything in overlapping orange pools. The WARDEN pillars glowed at every door. The licensed Heroes on patrol moved in their documented rotation, covering the walkways and training fields in patterns Percy had mapped during the first week.

None of them looked up.

I ran.

The route from Prometheus House to the campus perimeter took eleven minutes on foot along the covered walkways. It took me forty seconds across the rooftops, each jump eating fifteen feet of air as the Demigod multiplier turned my legs into something the architects of this institution had never planned for. The security cameras tracked ground level, a design assumption built on the reasonable expectation that first-year students with Rare-tier Channeler abilities did not parkour across academic buildings at midnight.

The assumption was reasonable. It was also wrong.

I cleared the perimeter wall at the northern edge of campus where the eucalyptus line met the access road, dropping twenty feet to the far side and rolling to absorb the impact. The checkpoint Heroes stood two hundred meters south. They did not hear the landing because the cognitive static field extended beyond just my face. It wrapped my presence in a blanket of not-there that made surveillance equipment decide I was a glitch and dismiss me from the frame.

The ridge road carried me down to the highway overpass. I crossed it at a dead sprint, covering the span in six seconds, and dropped into the industrial district on the city side. From there, the route to the Eastside followed the river path south and east, through blocks of shuttered warehouses and construction staging areas that smelled like diesel and wet concrete.

The city changed as I ran. Creston Hills money peeled away in layers, the hedged estates giving way to mixed commercial, then to the flat-roofed residential sprawl that marked the boundary between two Veranos that shared a name and nothing else.

I hit the Halverson Avenue roofline at eleven fifty-three.

The Eastside at midnight felt different than the Eastside at noon. The barbershop was dark. Grandma Lin’s curtains showed no light. The laundromat sat locked and silent, with dryer number four keeping its secrets behind fogged glass. The streetlights cast their disconnected orange pools across cracked sidewalks and boarded windows, and between them the shadows ran deep enough that anything could be standing in them.

The bodega on Halverson, six blocks from Lin’s, had a green awning that looked black in the dark. The sign still read MIGUEL’S in letters that were losing a fight with weather. A camera mounted above the register inside would show nothing useful if someone reviewed the footage tomorrow. The display case sat in the window, lit by a single spotlight that Kask left on overnight to discourage exactly the kind of entrepreneurial redistribution that Lamia specialized in.

I landed on the water tower platform above the adjacent building and crouched in the tank’s shadow, scanning the surrounding rooftops.

She was already there.

Two buildings south, crouched on the edge of a fire escape with her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands, Lamia sat waiting like someone who had arrived early to a restaurant and was considering ordering without me. The domino mask covered her eyes, and her hair was pulled back in the tight knot she used for operational work. The neoprene suit caught a stray beam of streetlight and turned her scales emerald green from hip to thigh.

I dropped from the water tower to the bodega roof.

"You’re early," she said without looking up.

"You’re earlier."

"I scope my approaches."

"You sit on fire escapes and think about lip gloss."

Her head turned, and even through the domino mask I could see the grin that showed both fangs. "That was one time, golden boy. And I maintain that tactical kissing has legitimate field applications."

"So does showing up on time."

"I was on time. The clock is late." She unfolded from the fire escape railing and stood, stretching in a way that arched her spine and pulled the neoprene taut across her chest before settling back on her heels with a bounce that made her corset belt jingle. "The bodega’s got a side window with a latch that sticks. I can get it open in forty seconds if nobody parks a car in the alley between now and go time."

"Camera?"

"Single unit above the register, same as Kask’s place. Covers the front counter and the door. Does not cover the back shelves where the consignment jewelry sits." She pulled a slim piece of metal from one of her belt pouches. "Music box is on the second shelf, between a ceramic bulldog and a set of commemorative shot glasses from Atlantic City that nobody has touched since March."

"How do you know nobody has touched them?"

"Because there’s a dead fly on top of the bulldog and it has been there for four months. I check weekly."

I looked at her for a beat.

"What?" she said. "I’m thorough."

"You visit this bodega once a week to check on a dead fly."

"The fly is my control variable. It tells me whether Kask’s people are actually doing inventory rotations or just marking checkboxes." Her grin widened. "Spoiler. They mark checkboxes."