Sophia's plan was embarrassingly simple.
"You don't need cursed eyes to track a federal agent," she said, sliding a folded diner receipt across the kitchen table like a top-secret document. "You just need a regular customer who happens to work in the same building and loves complaining about his coworkers over pancakes."
Adrian stared at the scrawled handwriting on the back. Arrival times, lunch windows, and a specific note: Leaves early on Thursdays. "Family thing." Won't elaborate.
"You got a federal agent's schedule from diner gossip?"
"I got a federal employee's entire life from diner gossip," Sophia corrected smugly. "Gary from records hates 'the guy on the sixth floor' who never takes vacation days and treats every single case like a personal crusade. Two coffees and a stack of blueberry pancakes, and Gary sang like a canary."
Never underestimate a bureaucrat's desire to vent.
"Did Gary mention why it's personal?" Adrian asked.
Sophia's smile faded slightly. "Not specifically. Just that Reyes transferred into the DODC's Anomaly Division right after the invasion. He volunteered for it. Gary said nobody does that. Everyone else was assigned. Reyes explicitly asked for the job."
Adrian stared at the note, the threat of Agent Reyes suddenly taking on a distinct human shape.
Volunteered. Something broke in his life before he ever heard the phrase 'blue-eyed vigilante.'
For the next two days, Adrian did something that felt unnervingly unnatural.
He didn't hunt. He didn't train. He just watched.
The Six Eyes made counter-surveillance almost absurdly easy. From rooftops and fire escapes, Adrian tracked Reyes's sedan with the same silent patience the agent had used against him.
Reyes's routine told a story his official file never could. Early arrivals at the DODC field office. Late departures. Eating lunch alone at his desk while staring at the photographs he'd taken in Adrian's burned training ground.
He wasn't cruel. He wasn't a fanatic. He was just tired, relentless, and completely convinced he was protecting people.
Then, on the second afternoon, Reyes broke his own pattern.
Instead of heading toward the hazard zone, the sedan drove east toward a residential cemetery on the edge of Queens—a plot opened shortly after the invasion once the morgues finally cleared the backlog.
Adrian followed from a parallel rooftop, keeping his distance.
This isn't surveillance anymore. This is personal.
He told himself to turn back. He didn't.
Reyes parked, walked through rows of fresh headstones without checking a map, and knelt in front of a lone grave in the back corner.
From two hundred feet away, the Six Eyes involuntarily locked onto the headstone's carved text.
MARIA REYES
BELOVED DAUGHTER
TAKEN TOO SOON
The dates placed her death squarely within the week of the invasion.
Adrian felt a heavy knot tighten in his chest.
He isn't hunting me for a promotion or a badge. He's hunting anything that might explain why his daughter died in a war he couldn't understand.
I'm not just a case file to him. I'm an answer.
Reyes stayed on his knees for twenty minutes in absolute silence, carrying a crushing grief that six weeks of grinding investigation hadn't even touched.
Adrian slipped away into the shadows before the agent stood up.
That night, Adrian didn't tell Sophia everything. He gave her the facts—the cemetery, the grave, the dates—but left out the image of the grieving father alone in the grass. Some things didn't belong on a corkboard.
"His daughter died during the invasion," Sophia said quietly, the tactical spark draining from her voice. "God, Adrian... that changes things."
"It doesn't change what happens if he catches me," Adrian said, though the words lacked conviction. "He's still building a case. Still narrowing down a pattern."
"Maybe," Sophia replied softly. "But he's not doing it because he hates anomalies on principle. He's doing it because something destroyed his life and he can't make sense of it. He's just a person trying to survive his own version of what happened to us."
She's right. And it complicates everything.
"So what now?" Adrian asked. "I can't just knock on his window and say, 'Sorry about your daughter, but I'm the guy you're chasing. We cool?'"
Sophia gave a small, tired smile. "No. But maybe you stop treating him like purely an enemy. Maybe he's just someone who needs an explanation you're not ready to give yet."
Adrian fell silent.
In the back of his mind, the future loomed—registration acts, government pressure, the slow machinery that turned people with powers into targets. Reyes could become a crucial ally. Or he could be the man who hands Adrian over to a cage.
Three miles away, in a quiet apartment, Reyes sat at his kitchen table.
The warehouse photographs were spread out, but his eyes weren't on the scuff marks or the rigged pulley. They were fixed on a framed photograph resting next to his laptop.
A seventeen-year-old girl with a gap-toothed grin, laughing mid-photo three years before the sky ripped open over Manhattan.
I couldn't save you, Reyes thought, the same silent mantra that drove him every single morning. But if there's something out there fighting the things that killed you... I need to know what it is. I need to know if it's a monster, or if it's the only thing keeping someone else from losing their child.
He closed the folder for the night.
Whoever you are... I'm not stopping. I owe her that much.
Outside, the city hummed under the quiet night—two men separated by shadows, no longer just hunter and prey, but bound by a quiet, dangerous understanding.