Reeve's first training session lasted eleven minutes before he threw up in the alley behind Cole's building, which Cole considered, on balance, a reasonably successful start.
"That's not encouraging," Reeve said, wiping his mouth, pale and sweating despite the mild morning air.
"You watched four hours of footage of people's worst moments back to back. Your brain's not built for that kind of density yet. Give it time."
"You do this every week and you're fine."
"I'm not fine. I just look fine. Big difference." Cole handed him a water bottle, sat down on the curb beside him, and let the silence stretch a moment before continuing. "Here's the actual lesson, since your stomach already paid the tuition. Everyone's got a tell that shows up right before they commit to something big — a fight, a lie, a decision they're scared of. Small. A held breath. A weight shift. You don't need to read someone's whole soul to catch it. You just need to know where to look."
"And where do I look?"
"Hands, first. People forget their hands exist right up until the second they need them. Then the jaw. Then, if you're paying real attention, the eyes — but eyes lie easiest, so save that one for last." Cole tossed a stray bottle cap at him, which Reeve caught without thinking. "See? Your hand moved before your brain finished deciding to catch it. That's the whole lesson, right there. Bodies commit before minds do. Learn to watch the commitment instead of waiting for the decision."
Reeve turned the bottle cap over slowly, something clicking into place behind his eyes. "That's actually useful."
"Told you my methods were unconventional. Didn't say they weren't useful."
"I still think you could've started with something that doesn't make me throw up."
"Where's the character growth in that?"
Reeve threw the bottle cap back at him, hard, and Cole let it hit, grinning the whole time.
Dana was already at the diner booth when Cole and Vesper arrived, coffee untouched in front of her, a manila folder closed on the table with the careful precision of someone who'd rehearsed exactly how casually to present it.
"You're the Fourth," Dana said, before either of them had fully sat down. Not a question. Never a question, with her.
"You're the sister," Vesper said back, just as flat, sliding into the booth across from her with the wary economy of someone used to sizing up rooms before committing to a seat in them. "Cole mentioned you. Didn't mention you'd skip small talk entirely."
"Small talk wastes time I don't have anymore. Four years of it, actually." Dana slid the folder across the table. Didn't open it herself — let Vesper do that part, which Cole recognized as deliberate, a small mercy dressed up as procedure. "That's my sister. Elena. She went missing four years ago. Officially relocated. Unofficially, I've spent every year since finding evidence that says otherwise."
If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
Vesper opened the folder. Went very still, the same stillness Cole had seen on her at the honey toast table when something had cracked slightly further than she meant to let it.
"I don't recognize her," she said slowly. "But I recognize the feeling of looking at her. Does that make any sense?"
"No," Dana admitted. "Explain it anyway."
"It's like — you know when you walk into a room and you're sure you've been there before, but you can't place when? Not déjà vu, exactly. Closer to a scar you don't remember getting. You just know, somehow, that something happened here, in this exact shape of memory, even though the actual memory's gone." Vesper closed the folder, hands not quite steady. "I get that feeling a lot. About people. Places. This is just the first time I've gotten it looking at someone else's missing sister instead of my own missing years."
Dana's jaw tightened, the same half-millimeter tell Cole had learned to read off her weeks ago in an interrogation room that felt, now, like it belonged to an entirely different lifetime.
"Do you think you knew her?" Dana asked. Quiet. Careful. The question costing her more than her voice let on.
"I think whatever took my memories might have taken something of hers too. I don't know if that's the same as knowing her." Vesper met Dana's eyes, steady despite the rawness underneath. "I'm sorry. I wish I had something more solid to give you."
"You gave me more than I've had in four years." Dana's voice cracked, just slightly, before she caught it and forced it back into its usual controlled register. "Confirmation I'm not chasing a ghost. That's not nothing."
The three of them sat with that a moment, coffee going cold, the diner's ancient radio playing something none of them were listening to closely enough to name.
"There's a pattern," Cole said finally, working through it out loud, the way he'd started doing more often since deciding honesty was worth the discomfort. "First, Second, Third, Fourth. Numbered like they're building toward something. If the Choir's collecting pieces—"
"Or hunting anomalies," Dana cut in. "We still don't know which. Could be both, depending who inside the organization you ask, if it's even one unified organization rather than factions pulling in different directions."
"Either way, they're running out of numbers to find," Vesper said quietly. "Which means whatever they're actually waiting for is close. I can feel it, some days. Like weather coming in before the sky actually changes color."
Cole thought about the hum beneath his ribs, awake more often lately than it used to be, patient and hungry in a way that unsettled him more each time it stirred. He didn't say that part out loud. Some doors, apparently, he still wasn't ready to open even now.
Halden's call came before they'd finished the coffee, cutting through the booth's fragile, hard-won calm like a blade through paper.
"The hearing's moved up," she said, no preamble, straight into it same as always. "One week. Not three."
"Why the rush?"
"Because somebody filed a report about unusual activity in an alley two nights ago. Structural damage. Witnesses describing something that doesn't match any known resonance signature in Ministry records." A pause, tighter than usual, genuine urgency bleeding through the careful professional flatness. "People upstairs are asking questions I can't answer anymore, Cole. About you. About the pattern. I'd tell you to prepare, except I'm honestly not sure anymore what preparing for this actually looks like."
"One week," Cole repeated, meeting Vesper's eyes across the table, then Dana's, feeling the shape of everything they'd just started building together suddenly, urgently, running out of time to finish forming properly.
"One week," Halden confirmed. "Make it count."
She hung up. Cole set the phone down slowly, honey toast sugar long faded from his tongue, replaced by something considerably harder to swallow.
"Well," he said, to no one in particular, to all three of them at once. "Guess we're not easing into this the slow way after all."
Nobody argued. Nobody had a better plan ready, either. Outside the diner window, the ordinary street kept being ordinary, indifferent to the fact that everyone inside had just quietly run out of easy time.
[End of Chapter 22]