Doyle's desk was covered in printouts when he called us back in, three days into the grounding.
"Every dismissed case for the last several years," he said, without looking up. "Every one of them closed within a week."
"Removing evidence," Nox said.
"That's not wrong." Doyle rubbed his jaw. "What about the ground? Did any other site show what the Chilterns showed?"
"None of them," Nox said. "The Chilterns is the only site on record where anyone actually caught the ground changing."
Doyle went quiet, turning that over.
"That's not a small detail. If every other site stayed invisible and ours didn't, it means one of two things. Either they made a mistake there, or they stopped needing to hide it."
"Which one's worse?" Lisa asked.
"Depends whether you'd rather fight something careless or something confident." Doyle stayed focused on the printouts. "I haven't decided. Ask me again once we know more."
He tapped the folder in the centre of his desk.
"There's one more name in here."
"I saw it," I said. "When you opened the file the first time."
Doyle didn't pretend not to know what I meant.
"Tom Weller. Aegis Guild. Foreign liaison visiting the Edinburgh building the week before the incident." He watched my face. "You know that name."
"I know him," I said, keeping the answer short.
Doyle let it stand.
"Right," he said. "Then you understand why I'm not chasing that thread today. A coincidence is a coincidence until you've had time to prove otherwise, and we don't have that time."
He closed the folder with a flat thump.
"Being grounded is over."
"Why now?" I asked.
"Because sitting on my hands stopped being the safer option. I only just caught up to that fact." He looked across at the three of us. "I spent days watching you do nothing. You did it well. I trust you with actual information now. That's different from the trust I walked in here with."
He pointed toward the hallway.
"Edinburgh. This afternoon, all three of you. Ask that regional office exactly what they saw. The train leaves in three hours."
✦ ✦ ✦
We were two blocks clear of headquarters before Lisa spoke up.
"I watched your face when Doyle said that name. I've been watching it since the file came out." She kept her eyes on the pavement ahead. "If there's more to it, I'd rather hear it from you than spend the ride to Edinburgh guessing."
Nox stayed quiet, his silence asking the same question.
I'd carried it alone since the gate. Three years of it. Somewhere along the way the habit had stopped feeling like a choice.
"Tom was my friend," I said. "From the life I had before the gate. Aegis. You've probably heard of them."
"I've heard of them," Nox said.
"The man who had that life is dead." I forced the words out. "Officially. A gate closed on him three years ago, and the Association wrote him off with everyone else it swallowed. Nobody came looking. There was nothing left to look for."
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
I kept my eyes on the street ahead.
"I'm not going to tell you the name, and it isn't about trust." I kept my voice steady. "A dead man staying dead is the only cover I have, and the only protection anyone standing near me gets. You two are already standing closer than anyone has since."
Neither of them answered for a few paces.
"Tom doesn't know you're alive," Nox said.
"Nobody from that life does. Doyle thinks the gate made me, and I'd like him to keep thinking of it that way." I looked at both of them. "You don't owe me anything for this. I just didn't want you finding out from someone else."
"We won't," Lisa said. "There's nothing to find out. A man told us about his friend Tom, and the rest was traffic."
Nox exhaled slowly through his collar, letting the topic drop.
✦ ✦ ✦
Edinburgh smelled like rain that hadn't started falling yet.
The regional office had pulled everything on Jason, the sole confirmed survivor of a site the Association had marked closed eleven months ago. He sat across from us in a room too small for four chairs, his hands wrapped around a paper cup he wasn't drinking from.
"I don't know what you want me to say that I haven't already said."
"We're not here to make you say it again," I told him. "We're here because whatever happened to your site is happening somewhere else too."
That got him to look up.
"Somewhere else." He repeated it flatly. "How many somewhere elses?"
"Three that we know of. Possibly more."
He set the cup down.
"There was a woman with me. Nadia. We went into the gate together, came out separately." He stared down at the table. "I keep telling people I don't know what happened to her, and that's true. It's also the part nobody wants to hear, because it means there's nothing to actually investigate. No body, no trace. Just a name that used to have a person attached to it."
"What do you remember before she disappeared?"
"The ground moved wrong." He held up a hand, flat, and tilted it. "Not an earthquake. Like the whole floor had decided to lean, just enough that you'd doubt your balance before you doubted the ground."
He pressed his fingers against the wood. "Then the cave came down, though not on us. Around us. Like something had decided exactly which parts of the ceiling it wanted to keep."
"And Nadia?"
"Gone by the time the dust settled. I didn't hear her scream." His jaw tightened. "I've had eleven months to decide whether that's worse than if I had."
Lisa let the quiet sit before she asked her next question.
"Then you marked the site."
He looked at her directly for the first time. "How did you know that?"
"We didn't. We're asking."
He was quiet long enough that I thought he'd refuse to answer.
"There's a tree," he said softly. "Low branch, easy to miss unless you're looking for it. I carved a ring into the bark, for me and nobody else. Just so I'd know, if I ever came back, that something had actually happened there. That I hadn’t made all of it up."
✦ ✦ ✦
We got what we came for, stayed the night in Edinburgh, and caught the early train south.
By evening we were at Nox's favourite noodle shop, a few streets from the flats.
Two hunters at the counter had been arguing since before we sat down. They were debating qualifying brackets for the centennial World Hunter Games, one insisting that guilds were buying up rosters and the other telling him none of it mattered to anyone below A-rank. Neither lowered their voice.
Azazel had been silent since we left the regional office.
He marked it for himself. A grave he can visit without anyone asking why.
I'd thought the same thing in that small room. I just hadn't said it to Jason. You don't ask a man to confirm his trauma on the day you've made him relive it.
"So the circle around the gate doesn't erase itself," Lisa said, once the bowls were cleared. "It just goes invisible to anyone who isn't looking for it."
"That's how it reads," I said.
"Then every dismissed case is a place worth returning to," Nox said. "We don't have the manpower for that yet."
"Not yet," I agreed. "But it matches the Chilterns. Somebody's been doing this for a long time, and getting careless is the only reason we caught it at all."
✦ ✦ ✦
We left the noodle shop a little after nine.
The evening air was cold, the street quiet. A couple lingered by a closed shopfront. Someone walked a dog on the corner. A cyclist passed on the far pavement, head down.
The street exploded before I heard anyone arrive.
A parked car to our left folded inward. Sound caught up half a beat later, rattling through my teeth.
Someone screamed down the block. Feet slapped the pavement as people ran. The dog-walker dropped the leash, the dog bolting loose beside him. The cyclist went down hard trying to swerve.
Nox was already moving. A fist-sized crater sat punched into the pavement where he'd stood a moment before.
"Up. Now."
Two men stepped out of the alley across the street. Plain clothes. The same half-second lag I'd learned to dread in the woods.
A third figure walked behind them, unhurried, wearing a long dark blue robe. A plain white mask covered the face, featureless except for two narrow eye slits.
"You've been loud," the masked figure said. "We're the Void Order. Edinburgh and the records, then the visit from Oversight. You three knew too much for your own good."
The mask tilted slightly.
"The Vice Head is asking for your heads. Specifically. All three." A brief pause. "No hard feelings. It's just work."
Three of them. Two ordinary, one that is not.
Azazel's voice was tight and cold.
The masked one is the one that matters. Watch the other two only long enough to make sure they stay dead.
I didn't answer him. None of us had time.