A hand tapped my shoulder on my way out of London headquarters.
I turned. A young man stood right behind me, close enough that I should've heard him coming and hadn't.
Black hair fell into his face. Dark red stitching ran along the seams of a collar pulled high enough to cover his mouth and nose. All that showed above it was a pair of blue eyes and the dark smudges underneath them.
He held a plastic key card out between two fingers.
"Doyle told me to give you this." His voice was flat and unhurried. "Address is on the back."
I took the card. Hartwell Court, Flat 202.
He pointed a thumb over his shoulder and started walking, assuming I'd follow.
"Nox. First Division. Same as you." He kept his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the corridor ahead. "Your neighbour. Flat 200."
We walked. I still didn't hear his boots on the tile.
"You talk to yourself," he said.
"What?"
"The vending machine. Arguing with a can of drink." A short beat. "I was standing right next to you."
I stopped. "You were following me?"
"I was buying a coffee."
You would not have. You only suspected it.
"I was in the room too," Nox added, as if continuing the same sentence. "Doyle's office. When he brought you in. I was in the corner."
A cold knot tightened in my chest. Doyle had questioned me in that office with the heavy door shut, Azazel answering through my mouth for half of it. We'd struck the deal that put me here, and neither of us had registered a third person.
He is lying.
Azazel's voice carried a rare, sharp edge.
I notice everything. I would have felt his mana.
"The whole time?" I asked.
"You told him anything that crosses his desk that doesn't make sense comes to you first." Nox kept his eyes straight ahead. "He said that was his line. You said it felt right coming from either of you."
I stopped looking for a polite way to doubt him.
"Nobody notices me," Nox said, adjusting his collar. "Doyle stopped asking about it years ago. Everyone else usually needs a demonstration first. Makes my job easier anyway."
The collar hadn't moved once during the walk. I put it down to the London chill, then stopped putting it down to anything when he didn't lower it inside the warm lobby either.
✦ ✦ ✦
Hartwell Court was a four-story brick building off the main road that smelled faintly of wet cement and paint. Nox let himself into Flat 200 without another word, the latch clicking shut before I'd finished turning toward my own door.
The door to 201 opened as I reached for my handle.
Someone stepped out carrying a paper cup. We collided. Dark liquid splashed down the sleeve of her coat, running over the bone-white stitching at the cuff.
She looked down at the stain, then up at my face. Blonde hair, sharp green eyes, and an accent that had never been anywhere near London.
"Are you blind?" she asked.
"You walked into me."
"I was standing still. You were walking." She shook the coffee off her fingers. "This is the part where you apologize."
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"Sorry about the coffee."
"That's the most insincere apology I've ever received."
Oh, I like her. She is not going to let you leave.
She studied my face, her irritation sharpening into curiosity. "You stand like you're expecting someone to hit you. You aren't a delivery driver."
"I'm not."
"Then what are you? The Association doesn't send new hires to this building unless something's already gone wrong with them."
"Something like that."
"That's a dodge."
"It's the only one I've got today. I'm running low."
A flicker of a smile touched her mouth before she caught herself, pointing right back at the dark patch on her coat.
"You're the one Doyle brought in," she said, pressing a hand to her forehead. "The third one. I spilled coffee on the third one."
"I spilled it on you. We've established that."
"I'm Lisa. Flat 201."
"Noah. Flat 202."
"That's not a name people actually have."
"Neither is Lisa, given how you said it."
"Lisa's a perfectly normal name."
"So is Noah, where I'm from."
The door to Flat 200 swung open again. Nox stood in the frame holding a mobile phone, his thumb hovering over the screen.
"Doyle. A dormant gate in the Chilterns is spiking." He read the text off the screen in a flat, administrative monotone. "Wants eyes on it now."
"Now?" Lisa asked.
"He used the word ASAP." Nox slipped the phone into his jacket. "That's usually the only warning we get."
Lisa vanished back into 201, emerging three seconds later with a dark coat pulled over her shoulders and a book bound in dark wood tucked under her arm.
"I hate the word ASAP," she said, locking her door with a quick turn of the key. "It never actually means immediate."
"Feels accurate," Nox said, already two paces ahead down the carpeted hall.
I kept my mouth shut and followed. Having two people fall into step beside me without asking permission was a new kind of noise, but it moved fast enough that I didn't have time to argue with it.
✦ ✦ ✦
The bus to the Chilterns took the better part of an hour, most of it spent watching wet hedges sweep past in the dark. Lisa sat across the aisle with her knees pulled up to her chest, the wooden cover of her book facing outward, carved in the shape of a sleeping dragon. Nox sat two rows back with his eyes closed, resting his head against the glass.
Lisa broke the silence first, watching her reflection in the window.
"You're both going to ask eventually," she said to the glass. "Might as well get it over with. I come from a family of mages. Good, righteous ones. The kind that gets written up in Association pamphlets."
I looked over. "They don't like your magic?"
"My family likes magic that builds," she said, her voice dropping a fraction. "Fire and light, mostly. Things you can point at and call noble. Mine doesn't signal virtue."
She turned her head to look at me directly. "It's death magic."
Necromancy. We have it, back home. Feared, not embarrassing. Your world never worked out how to give it that kind of respect.
I kept Azazel's commentary to myself.
"Nobody asked," Nox said from two rows back, without opening his eyes.
"You were about to."
"I wasn't."
"You had the face."
Nox didn't dispute the face.
"I don't care what you practice," I told her. "I've seen worse things on the news before breakfast."
I did nothing before breakfast. I was asleep.
Lisa twisted in her seat to glare back at Nox. "What about you? Since we're sharing."
"Sharing what?"
"Backstory."
"Hard pass."
"Everyone takes a turn eventually."
"I'll take mine some other month." Nox didn't open his eyes. "Ask again when you've earned it."
He is guarding something specific, and it is not shame. It is a grief that has not finished happening yet.
I let the silence sit. It wasn't my business to pry into.
Lisa went back to watching the dark outside, though her hands stayed tight around the edges of her book.
"Doyle found both of you the same way he found me," she said quietly. "Picked up from somewhere he wasn't obligated to look."
"Something like that," I said.
"That's the whole division, then. Three people nobody else wanted." She didn't sound bitter, just thorough. "Explains why he's protective of the roster. You don't build something out of leftovers and treat it carelessly."
"Is that what we are? Leftovers?"
"I prefer recycled materials. Sounds more expensive."
Nox let out a brief, dry huff from the back seat that might've been a laugh if he'd bothered to finish it.
The bus slowed at a dark rural shelter, the doors hissing open to reveal an empty pavement. Nobody got on. The driver waited ten seconds, closed the doors, and pulled back onto the road.
"Did Doyle give either of you a proper brief?" Nox asked. "Or just a grid reference and a deadline?"
"Grid reference and a deadline," Lisa and I said together.
"Figures." Nox shifted against his window, trying to find a comfortable angle. "Mine was the same. He does that when he doesn't know much more than we do."
"Does he do that often?" I asked. "Send people in blind?"
"Not often anymore," Nox said. "He used to do it more when it was just the two of us. He'd rather send us in knowing nothing than send us in knowing something wrong. Wrong information gets people killed faster."
"That's a very specific policy for a man who mostly communicates in one-word texts," Lisa observed.
"He didn't always. I've had four years to watch his messages get shorter."
Lisa glanced at him, filing the timeline away. I did the same. Four years meant Nox predated the current roster by a long margin.
The bus driver called out the Chilterns turning a few minutes later, his voice crackling over the small speaker above the windshield. We stepped off onto the gravel verge, the engine noise fading down the lane until the country dark settled over everything.
Ahead, the treeline stood black against the sky, the air carrying a faint smell of wet pine and cold copper.
We didn't talk. We turned toward the trees and walked into the dark together.