Jonah skipped the elevator five stories of empty parking deck on a weekday afternoon didn’t need the ping announcing him and took the concrete stairs instead, because concrete didn’t creak.
The roof access door gave without complaint, and October cold hit him along with a sky the color of bad coffee.
The Academy sat across the street.
The lawn was green, the hedges clipped, the iron fence painted black and set with finials that looked expensive and useless.
Jonah counted seven people on the grass.
He counted them twice.
Luther in the suit that was too small in the shoulders.
Diego on the stairs with his hands near the knives he thought nobody saw.
Allison in black with her phone in her hand.
Klaus in something velvet.
A woman in her sixties with pearls.
The chimp.
The urn.
The timeline matched.
Jonah let the breath go slow.
Behind him, cloth moved.
Footsteps on tar, light, deliberate.
Jonah did not turn.
He counted doors in Spanish under his breath.
Uno, dos, tres.
The roof access, the maintenance shed, the fire-ladder.
He was three steps from the railing and six from the fire-ladder and the man behind him was four steps behind and coming closer.
“Hell of a view,” the man said.
Jonah turned.
The man was forty, maybe, white, with the kind of haircut that cost money and looked like it didn’t.
Black raincoat.
Black shoes.
No umbrella.
He carried a leather folder under his left arm and his right hand was in his coat pocket.
He smiled the way a man smiled when he was checking whether you smiled back.
Jonah smiled back.
Kept his hands still.
Kept his voice flat.
“Yeah.”
The man walked to the railing three feet to Jonah’s left and looked down at the lawn.
He did not take the hand out of the pocket.
The folder stayed under his arm.
Jonah watched the folder.
Brown leather, standard legal size, the corner worn soft.
On the lawn below, the woman with the pearls was speaking.
Jonah could not hear the words.
He could see Luther shift weight and Diego stop moving and Klaus light something that was not a cigarette.
“You here for the funeral?” the man said.
“Passing through.”
“Long way to pass through.” The man tilted his head toward the Academy.
“Big house.
Big family.
Big news when the old man died.”
Jonah said nothing.
The man’s coat cuff rode up when he shifted.
There was a pin at the wrist, small, enamel, dark blue with a white infinity loop.
Jonah had seen the pin twice before.
Once in a file photo on Klaus’s Commission-kidnapping arc.
Once on the janitor with the radio at Griddy’s.
Commission.
Jonah did not look at the pin twice.
He looked at the sky.
“Storm’s coming.”
“Ten minutes,” the man said.
He said it like he knew.
On the lawn, the chimp walked to the center of the group and opened the urn.
Ashes into the air, gray on green.
Diego moved.
Luther did not.
Klaus laughed.
Allison stepped back.
The woman with the pearls put a hand to her mouth.
Jonah watched.
The man beside him opened the folder.
Inside the folder was a photograph.
Klaus, from the Griddy’s security camera.
The angle was bad and the lighting worse but the face was clear.
Beneath the photograph was a name typed on Commission letterhead.
Hargreeves, Klaus.
Number Four.
Active.
Beneath the name was a grid.
Locations, timestamps, surveillance log.
Griddy’s Donuts, 3:17am.
The mansion, 11:00am.
A bar on Seventh, 6:45pm.
The funeral, now.
The man was tracking Klaus.
Jonah kept his face on the lawn.
The man flipped a page.
On the second page was a rifle sight-grid.
Diego’s head, photographed from above, crosshairs centered at the base of the skull.
The photograph had been taken from this roof.
Recently.
Within the hour.
“They don’t know you’re taking that shot,” Jonah said.
The man looked at him.
The smile thinned.
“They don’t authorize everything.
Sometimes you see an opportunity.
Sometimes you take initiative.”
“You’ll miss.”
“I don’t miss.”
“The storm,” Jonah said.
He nodded at the sky.
The clouds were low and fast and the wind was picking up the way it did when rain was nine minutes out, not ten.
“Wind shear.”
The man studied Jonah.
His hand came out of his coat pocket.
No gun.
Just the hand.
He closed the folder.
“Who are you?”
“Nobody.”
“Nobody doesn’t stand on a roof across from a Hargreeves funeral and call a weather window to the minute.” The man’s voice dropped a register.
“Nobody doesn’t clock a Commission cuff pin without staring at it.”
Jonah said nothing.
On the lawn below, the ashes were settling.
Lightning cracked the air above the group, blue and sharp and loud enough to rattle the railing under Jonah’s hand.
A boy appeared in the center of the lawn.
Small, thirteen, maybe, in a too-big suit with a tie that hung crooked.
He looked up at the sky and then at the people around him and then he opened his mouth and said something Jonah could not hear.
Five.
Jonah checked his watch.
2:43pm.
Canon to the second.
The man beside him was staring at the boy.
The folder was forgotten in his left hand.
His right hand went back into the coat pocket and this time when it came out there was a phone.
He swiped.
Typed.
Sent.
The phone went back into the pocket and the folder came up and the man pulled a pen from his coat and wrote a single line at the bottom of the Klaus page.
Anomaly: 2:43pm, spatial jump, origin unknown, subject male approx.
age 13, Hargreeves-adjacent, priority escalation.
The man looked at Jonah.
“You knew that was coming.”
“I didn’t.”
“You checked your watch.”
Jonah met his eyes.
Kept his voice flat.
Kept the notebook in his back pocket and his hands on the railing and the exits counted.
The man was four steps away.
The fire-ladder was six.
The door was eight.
The kit was a last resort.
The hand-craft said: walk.
“I checked my watch because I have a bus in twenty minutes,” Jonah said.
The man smiled.
It was not a kind smile.
“What’s your name?”
“Jonah Vega.”
The man wrote it down.
He wrote it on a blank page at the back of the folder, and he wrote the time beside it, and he wrote parking deck, 5th floor, observed funeral, clocked cuff pin, called weather window, no visible tools.
The man closed the folder.
Put the pen away.
Studied Jonah the way a man studied a face he was going to have to describe later.
“Carl,” the man said.
“In case you were wondering.”
“I wasn’t.”
Carl laughed.
It was a short sound.
“You’re in a file now, Jonah Vega.
Might take a week to reach the desk.
Might take a month.
Might take an hour if the anomaly downstairs gets priority.
But it’ll reach the desk.
And when it does, somebody’s going to want to know why a man with no tools and a bus to catch knew exactly when the sky was going to crack.”
Carl stepped back.
He walked to the roof access door and opened it and the sound of the stairwell echoed up cold and metallic.
He looked back once.
“Stay off rooftops,” Carl said.
The door closed.
Jonah stayed at the railing.
On the lawn below, Five was gesturing, sharp and fast, and the others were stepping closer.
Klaus was laughing.
Diego had his hand near a knife.
Luther looked lost.
Allison was staring at the boy like he was a ghost she had decided to believe in.
The wind picked up.
The first drop of rain hit Jonah’s hand.
He counted to sixty.
No door opened behind him.
No steps on the tar.
He turned and walked to the fire-ladder and climbed down five stories in the rain that came all at once, cold and mean.
By the time he reached the alley his coat was soaked and his hands were shaking and the notebook in his back pocket was dry because he had wrapped it in a plastic bag that morning and that was the only thing he had done right today.
He walked four blocks west.
Found a coffee shop.
Ordered black coffee and sat at a table in the back with his coat dripping onto the linoleum and the notebook open to a new page.
He wrote: Commission field scout, Carl.
Cuff pin (blue enamel, white loop).
Tracking Klaus.
Unauthorized shot on Diego, aborted.
Logged Five’s arrival 2:43pm exact.
Logged me.
Folder goes to a desk.
Timeline: 1 hour to 1 month.
I have a name in their system now.
That’s new.
He wrote: Foreknowledge holds.
Canon matched to the second.
The math works.
I can use it.
He closed the notebook.
Drank the coffee.
It was burnt and bitter and the cup was warm in his hands.
Outside, the rain kept coming.
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TL;DR —
Silver / $6 / 10 ahead
Gold / $9 / 15 ahead
Platinum / $15 / 20 ahead, no weekly wait
That’s it.