Rain clung to the city like guilt.
Velridge never slept, but it always whispered.
When I came to, I was lying face-up on wet cobblestone. My coat was scorched, my lungs cold, and the folder—gone. I didn't remember falling, but that seemed to be a recurring theme lately.
The cat was sitting a few feet away, licking its paw with irritating calm.
"You explode, black out, and still look like you just got out of a noir photoshoot," it said. "Truly impressive."
"Where's the folder?" I rasped.
"Gone. Vanished. Vamoosed. You should really work on keeping important secrets somewhere less flammable."
I sat up slowly. My hand glowed faintly again, only this time the light pulsed in rhythm with the street lamps. Like the city was breathing with me. Or worse, because of me.
"Someone pulled me out," I said. "Right before the explosion. I felt it."
The cat's tail flicked. "If that's true, they didn't do it out of kindness. You were supposed to die twice tonight. Someone's rewriting the rules."
I turned my head. That's when I saw her.
She stood under a flickering streetlight at the far end of the alley — tall, poised, wearing a grey trench coat that seemed to shimmer between light and shadow. Her face was hidden beneath a wide-brimmed hat, but I could feel her eyes on me.
When she spoke, her voice was smooth, calm, and unmistakably human — which somehow made it even stranger.
"Detective Elior Vane," she said. "You have a very bad habit of surviving."
I froze. "Do I know you?"
"Not yet," she replied. "But you used to work for me."
That made my pulse stutter. "You're from the Bureau?"
She tilted her head. "Once. Now I'm with something older. We audit the Bureau's mistakes."
The cat hissed softly. "An Auditor," it whispered. "They're the kind that investigate the investigators. No record, no name, no leash."
She approached slowly, boots echoing in perfect rhythm. The closer she got, the colder the air became. Her eyes were silver — not glowing, not artificial, just… wrong in a way my brain couldn't categorize.
"You shouldn't have gone into the archives," she said. "Case Zero was never meant for you to see."
"Kind of hard not to look when it's got my name on it."
"Your name," she said softly, "was assigned to you. Your soul was not."
My breath caught. "Meaning?"
She looked past me, at the skyline flickering with blue light. "Meaning whoever built you didn't finish the job."
The cat's fur bristled. "He's unstable, then?"
"Unstable," she said, her tone like a closed door. "But salvageable. For now."
She turned to leave, but I stepped forward. "Wait. You know what I am. You know who killed me."
"I do," she said without turning. "But if I told you now, you'd stop digging. And I need you to keep digging."
"Why?"
She looked over her shoulder, her silver eyes catching the neon glow.
"Because the moment you stop looking, he wins. And if he wins, we all burn."
Then she vanished — no sound, no shimmer, just gone.
The cat jumped onto my shoulder again, muttering. "I don't like her."
"I don't like not knowing who's running this circus," I said, brushing ash from my coat. "But if she's right, someone's using me as bait."
The cat blinked. "You realize that means—"
"Yeah," I sighed. "Time to bite back."
The streetlights flickered once more. Somewhere deep in the city, a clock tower struck three.
And as the echoes faded, I realized something I hadn't noticed before:
Every time my heart didn't beat, the city did it for me.