Turn 10 of 10

Take the research and leave before whoever sent that text arrives

You gather the maps in both hands, the photographs sliding between them like evidence in a case that keeps expanding. The timeline you fold carefully, Sera's handwriting too precious to crease, her discovery too fragile to lose. Daniel watches you pack her work into the empty laptop bag hanging from the kitchen chair, his body still half-turned toward the door, still waiting for the knock that will mean someone has come to collect.

"We can't stay here," you say, and your voice sounds strange in your own ears—too certain, too much like someone who knows what they're doing. "Whoever sent that text has this address. They have your number. They may already have someone watching the building."

Commissioner Gordon leaps from the couch arm to the table, then to the floor, a gray streak that seems to approve of motion over stillness. Daniel hesitates at the threshold of the kitchen, looking back at the apartment his sister built as a hiding place, at the life she assembled from absence and care.

"She'll come back here," he says. "If she can, she'll come back. If we leave—"

"If we leave, we leave a note she'll understand. A place she can find us." You pull a marker from the junk drawer, its cap cracked but the ink still wet, and you write on the back of a utility bill: "The Rook flies. Ask Mars." You leave it weighted under her heaviest book, the one about theatrical makeup techniques, the one she must have consulted to keep her own face as changeable as her enemy's.

Daniel stuffs clothes into a backpack with the mechanical efficiency of someone who has packed in a hurry before, who has learned that survival means traveling light. The cat winds between your ankles, then his, binding you together with fur and insistence. At the door, you pause, listening to the hallway's silence, trying to hear if it contains the particular quality of someone waiting.

The stairwell carries sounds upward like a well. Footsteps below, casual but converging. You pull Daniel toward the service door at the hallway's end, the one Sera's maps marked as an emergency exit, the one that drops into the alley behind the loading dock. Commissioner Gordon trots ahead, tail high, trusting you because you have given him no reason not to yet.