The Demiguise was invisible when Bankole found it.
The air in the warehouse was cold and damp, heavy with the smell of salt and rust and the faint animal musk of something that had been confined too long.
The harbor beyond the corrugated walls sent up the low moan of fog-horns, muffled by the evening mist that had rolled in from the bay.
Somewhere in the maze of stacked crates, water dripped into a puddle with a sound like a slow clock.
He knew the Demiguise was there because the plate could track it — a shimmer in the cartouche’s rim, a sense of something present but not quite there — and because the dockworker who had reported a monkey-like creature vanishing into the warehouse had been very specific about the silvery fur.
It had escaped from a smuggler’s crate.
The smuggler wanted it back.
MACUSA’s harbor patrol was looking for it.
And Bankole had a narrow window to reach it first.
The warehouse was a maze of stacked crates and shifting shadows.
He moved through it slowly, the Half-Step warm in his awareness but not yet channelled; he hadn’t earned the bond, and the trait wasn’t his to use.
His footsteps echoed on the concrete floor.
A rat scurried across a beam overhead, disturbed by his presence.
“This is pointless,” Augie said from behind him, his voice low.
“An invisible monkey that sees the future.
How do you catch something that knows you’re comin’?”
“You don’t catch it.” Bankole stopped in the middle of an aisle, scanning the darkness between crates.
“You give it a future it wants to walk into.”
The Half-Step stirred.
He could feel the Demiguise’s attention: a creature watching him from a future it had already seen, deciding whether to let this meeting happen.
The plate flickered: Aware of you.
Has seen this conversation occur.
The outcome isn’t yet fixed — it is deciding whether to participate.
“I know you’re there,” he said to the empty air.
His voice echoed off the corrugated walls.
“I know you can see what I’m going to do before I do it.
So I’m not going to try to catch you.
I’m going to tell you what I’m offering.”
He crouched, making himself smaller, less threatening.
His knees cracked in the cold.
He placed his open hands on his thighs, palms up.
“I have a case.
It has a habitat.
It’s safe and quiet, and no one will sell you again.
You can stay as long as you want.
You can leave when you want.
I won’t lock the door.”
The air shimmered.
A shape began to resolve: the Demiguise, its silvery fur catching the dim light that filtered through the high windows, its large, pale eyes watching him with ancient wariness. Enjoying the story? Read on at novelping.com.
It was smaller than he had expected, adolescent, its limbs long and delicate.
It stood on a crate ten feet away, perfectly still, as if it had been there all along and had simply chosen to become visible.
It had seen this future.
It had seen him say these words.
And it had chosen to show itself.
The bond warmed.
The Half-Step eased into his awareness, not yet channellable, but present, offered.
The Demiguise’s nature unfurled in his mind like a scent he had never smelled before: the sense of branching paths, of moments that hadn’t yet happened pressing against the moments that had.
The Demiguise stepped forward, placed a delicate hand on his knee, and vanished again, invisible, but present, a warm weight against his leg.
“You know it’s still here, right?” Augie said, his voice strained.
“Yes.”
“And it can see the future.”
“Yes.”
“And you can’t.”
“No.”
“So it could be leadin’ you into a trap.”
The Demiguise made a soft sound, almost like a laugh, a low musical trill.
Bankole reached down and felt the invisible shape of its head under his hand, the fine silky fur warm against his palm.
It pressed into his touch, then pulled away.
A test passed.
“It’s not leading me into a trap,” he said, rising to his feet.
“It’s testing whether I’ll walk into one for it.”
A crate lid banged somewhere behind them.
Augie went rigid.
“That’s not the harbor patrol.”
It wasn’t.
A man came around the stacked crates fast, blackjack already swinging low, the smuggler’s face set in the flat calm of someone who did this for a living and didn’t enjoy it or hate it either way.
The Half-Step flared, unbidden, and for one borrowed instant Bankole saw the arc of the blow before it existed, a half-second of a future the Demiguise had decided to lend him.
He stepped inside it instead of away, catching the man’s wrist and driving him into the crates.
“You’ll pay for that monkey,” the smuggler wheezed, but Bankole already had his own case open a crack, and the man’s eyes found the gap between his ribs where a stunning charm was gathering, and he chose the smarter fight and ran.
The flicker came again a breath later, weaker, showing him a second man closing from the left.
He turned to meet it and there was no one there.
Nothing but shadow and the drip of water into a puddle.
He’d trusted a future the Demiguise hadn’t finished deciding, and the wrongness of it left him a half-second slow when the real second man did come, close enough that the man’s shoulder clipped his before Augie’s stray hex sent the fellow sprawling into a stack of empty crates.
“Fortune-telling monkey,” Augie said, breathing hard, hauling the man’s collar to check he’d stay down.
“Do you know what a fortune-telling monkey is worth on the wrong street?
“It’s not fortune-telling.
It’s a preference.”
“Tell that to my heart rate.”
“It showed me the first man clear as day and missed the second one entirely.”
“Marvelous.
So it’s an unreliable fortune-telling monkey.
That’s worse.
That’s the kind of thing that gets a man comfortable right before it gets him dead.” Augie kicked the unconscious smuggler’s boot for good measure and glanced toward the crate where the invisible weight still pressed against Bankole’s leg.
“Does it know we’re talking about it?”
“Probably.”
“Then it should feel bad about the second one.”
He had the Half-Step now.
Unreliable, partial, the Demiguise’s chosen future rather than the one he needed, proven exactly that in the space of one warehouse.
But it was his.
He left with an invisible adolescent monkey at his side, four bonds deep now, Augie muttering about the price of nerve the whole way to the door.
Outside, the harbor fog had thickened, turning the streetlamps into diffuse orange orbs, and somewhere behind them a man was already dragging himself upright to spread word along the docks that someone had lifted a Demiguise without a fight and without a wand.
⟦ SYS❦
────────────────────────────────
BOND: Hal (Demiguise) → BONDED
THE HALF-STEP: Channellable.
UNRELIABLE: it shows the future the Demiguise chooses to show, not the one Bankole needs.
A wrong flicker can cost more than no foresight at all.
────────────────────────────────
STATUS
▹ KEEP: [moderate, five bonds, balancing act growing]
▹ EXPOSURE: ✕✕✕ (“stole a Demiguise without a fight, without a wand”: the ghost’s signature spreads)
▹ [THE OBSCURA]: ◚◚
⟦ /SYS⟧
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