Turn 7 of 10

Tell him about Mars's warning that someone collects names

You keep your voice low, as if the walls themselves might be listening, which—given what Sera believed—they might be.

"Mars Kelleher," you say. "Guild caseworker, forty years processing second-stringers. She told me something before I left. Said Sera left the emergency contact blank because retirement means paperwork, and paperwork means names, and somewhere out there, someone collects them."

The color drains from his face in stages, like a photograph developing in reverse. His thumb finally leaves the phone screen, and the device dips in his hand, no longer a weapon, suddenly too heavy to hold.

"She never told me that part," he whispers. "She said the Guild was dangerous, that they traded information, that keeping me invisible meant keeping me alive. She never said—" He stops, his throat working. "Who collects them? Did Mars know?"

"She knew enough to warn me. Enough to think Sera was running from something worse than The Understudy."

He laughs then, a broken sound that edges toward hysteria.

"Worse. She was fighting someone who learns every move, who becomes what you are, who—" He gestures at the table behind him, the research scattered like a life in fragments. "She mapped his patterns. She thought she could predict him. But if there's someone else, someone watching the watchers—"

Commissioner Gordon stands, stretches, and leaps from the windowsill to the couch with a grace that seems to mock human anxiety. The movement breaks the tension somehow, reminds you that the world continues its ordinary miracles even in the middle of crisis.

"I'm Daniel," he says, the introduction arriving late, after the danger has been named. "And I don't know where my sister is."

The phone in his hand buzzes. He looks down, and his face crumples with something beyond fear—recognition, perhaps, or the end of hope.

"Unknown number," he says. "She's the only one who ever called me."