"Can you finally tell me who Alina is?" Ash asked.

The two were in a beauty salon. While two girls expertly tended to Lucia’s hair, another two were operating on her hands and feet.

"Are you sure you don’t want anything done? Not even a glass of their flavored water?" Lucia asked, her eyes closed, completely ignoring his question.

"No. I’m fine." He persisted.

Ash looked around the room. The air was thick with the expensive scent of jasmine oil and acetone. Despite having nine other open chairs and several employees lingering in the back, the space had been completely cleared out for them.

Lucia was reclined in a plush leather chair, her cropped blazer draped over an armrest. That left her in just the crisp white blouse, the top two buttons undone to bare her collarbones. She looked less like a student and more like a young queen holding court.

And she absolutely knew he was looking.

"Hmm, suit yourself." She opened her violet eyes, catching his gaze with a faint smirk before reaching for a small lookbook. "Kana, I think we’re going to go with the glossy ones today."

Kana nodded before pulling out a small vial of deep, glossy red polish.

"Alright, I’m leaving," Ash said, standing up from the waiting area and walking out the front door.

Their driver was still patiently waiting outside. He wasn’t looking at a phone or at the surroundings. He was patient and focused in waiting for Lucia.

"Hey, can you tell me about her?" Ash said trying to make small talk.

The driver’s gaze didn’t shift from the steering wheel.

"Can you at least take me back to the academy? She dragged me out in the middle of a lecture, and I don’t have the best attendance to leave halfway through," Ash further explained.

The driver’s gaze remained fixed.

"Fine, I’m walking back to the academy," Ash said.

"I would advise against that." The driver’s low voice stopped Ash in his tracks. "There are a dozen Workshop operatives securing this block. If you leave on your own, they will secure you."

"You can’t be serious," Ash muttered. He let his Shade-sense slip its leash, extending his perception. He felt the small congregation of normal Shades in the salon, the driver’s own surprisingly dense signature, and exactly twelve suppressed, highly trained Shades spaced evenly around the perimeter of the building.

Ash sighed. "Alright, you’re serious." He turned around and went back inside.

The bell above the door chimed.

"Oh, good. What did you decide you want? Your bangs could use a little work," Lucia said, not looking up.

"Answers," he said, taking an empty chair to the side of her.

Kana was working a fine-tipped brush along Lucia’s left hand with the focused patience of someone paid to make zero mistakes. Lucia watched Ash settle into the chair with the deep satisfaction of someone who had expected him to come back and had been proven right on schedule.

"Alina," Lucia said, her eyes tracking Kana’s brush. "She’s a second-year over at a satellite campus two districts over. Picked up by the Workshop’s intake team three months ago. Her Shade pressure is consistent with advanced suppression. Estimated duration: four-plus years." She turned a page in the small book without disrupting Kana’s work. "No Guild affiliation, no Awakened family background. The suppression appears self-developed, which the intake team considers significant."

"Self-developed how?"

"She figured out how to hold it down without anyone teaching her." Lucia’s tone carried the weight of a researcher who had read the intake report multiple times and still found the detail interesting. "Four years is a long time to carry that alone."

Ash looked at Kana’s work. The red gloss was going on in clean, lethal strokes.

"Why me specifically?" he said. "Doesn’t the Crimson Workshop have resources of its own?"

"We have documented methodologies." Lucia turned another page. "You have something that isn’t in any documentation. The three students who underwent resolution in your proximity didn’t receive Guild-standard treatment. What they received was faster, more complete, and produced zero secondary complications." She glanced up at him through her lashes. "I want to know how. Alina is how I find out."

"You’re using her to study me."

"I’m using the arrangement to help Alina and gather data simultaneously." Her violet eyes held his with the calm of someone making a distinction they considered important. "Those aren’t the same."

The second technician working on her feet switched tools. Lucia stretched her toes and looked pleased.

"You’ll meet her tomorrow," Lucia said. "I’ll send the address."

She looked down at the finished polish, then checked her hair in a hand mirror. "Kana, your girls were excellent as usual. I apologize for my sloth over there. Maybe next time."

The next morning Ash was at the academy’s east gate at six. Lucia was already there, waiting.

The eastern district opened differently from the old district that the gallery sat in. The old district had enough quiet money to look tasteful. The eastern district had the noise of people who had decided to stay somewhere difficult and had built a life inside that decision.

The buildings ran lower, the shop fronts older, the streets wide enough that the morning light reached the pavement rather than stopping at the rooflines.

Ash’s Shade-sense ran louder here.

Not louder in the way the academy ran loud after the Gate incident. This was ambient. The district had more Shade activity per block than anywhere Ash had operated outside a Gate fight; the signals layered and varied and old, some of them residue dating back years, others present and moving. He recalibrated as he walked. The academy had been a controlled environment. This was not.

"Is something bothering you?" Lucia said without looking at him. She was watching the street ahead.

"It’s different."

"The Threshold hit this district harder than most. Higher incident rate, longer recovery period, more Awakened per square kilometer than the academy’s intake data suggests exists in the city." She turned down a side street. "The Guild has a monitoring station four blocks north. They’ve been here since the second year post-Threshold."

"Do they know you operate here?"

"The Workshop and the Guild have an understanding." She stopped at a narrow building between a hardware store and a restaurant with its chairs still on the tables. A buzzer panel beside the door. She pressed the third button and waited.

A voice came through the panel: "Workshop?"

"Workshop, ID number zero-zero-two-one," Lucia confirmed.

The door clicked open.

"Do I get to have an ID number?" Ash asked.

"You get to be with me. That’s better."

"I’m starting to doubt that."

Inside, a narrow corridor opened into a workspace. Three desks, filing systems along the east wall, and a map of the district pinned to the west wall with markers in three colors. A man in his forties looked up from the nearest desk with the expression of someone who had been expecting this visit and had prepared for it.

"Ms. Lucia. Your documentation is ready."

"Thank you, Renfield." She took the folder he produced and opened it at the desk. "This is my new associate. He reads Shade signatures. Show him the residue locations on the map while I review the updates."

Renfield crossed to the map and began walking Ash through the marked locations. "Reds are confirmed, blue is probable, yellow means—"

"Likely?" Ash butted in.

"Anomalous," Renfield corrected.

The red markers clustered in three areas of the district. The blue ran in a loose arc connecting two of the clusters. The yellow markers sat at the arc’s midpoints.

"The residue readings," Ash said. "How old are the oldest ones?"

"The northeast cluster goes back eleven months," Renfield said. "The southwest cluster is newer. Give or take eight weeks. The arc connecting them developed over the past three months."

Ash looked at the yellow markers.

"So these have moved then," he said.

Renfield looked at him. "We believe so, yes."

Lucia closed her folder. "That’s the question. The residue pattern is consistent with a Shade that has been active in this district for nearly a year and has been gradually relocating. The working theory is that the relocation is intentional. Whatever produced this residue is moving toward something."

"Or away from something," Ash said.

They spent the next hour walking the arc. Lucia moved through the district the way she had navigated the salon. Confidence, as if she had arrangements in place with people who recognized her. A vendor at the corner of the third block greeted her by name and passed her a paper bag without transaction. She opened it, produced two pastries, ate one, and threw the other in the trash.

At the southwest cluster, she stopped and let him read the residue undisturbed. He stood at the location and let the Shade-sense run full, picking out the layers. The residue was unlike the Hollows he had felt at the Gates and unlike anything compared to the suppressed human Shades he read about daily at the academy. This residue had been from something that was neither.

"This isn’t a Hollow," he said.

"No," Lucia said.

"Not fully human either."

"That’s consistent with what the Workshop’s analysts concluded." She wrote in her notebook. "Can you characterize it further?"

He tried. The residue was old enough that most of the reading had degraded. What remained suggested a Shade of considerable mass, a density that implied long accumulation, but with an outward orientation he hadn’t encountered before. Not the dam-pressure of Phoebe. Not the gravity well of Sora. Something that had been projecting rather than containing.

He was still running the read when he stopped walking.

Lucia was three steps ahead before she realized he wasn’t beside her. She turned.

Ash stood on the pavement looking toward the end of the block. The Shade-sense had shifted from residue to present tense.

"There’s someone nearby," he said.

Lucia looked down at her documentation. Her manicured finger traced the map to their current location. She checked the yellow markers, the blue arc, and the confirmed residue points.

"That’s not in my data," she said.