Turn 8 of 10

Ask Daniel what the message says

You keep your distance from the doorway, your hands still visible, your posture open in a way that feels almost theatrical—like you're performing trustworthiness for an audience of one frightened man and one unimpressed cat.

"What's the message say?" you ask.

Daniel's thumb hovers over the screen. You can see the muscle in his jaw working, the same tension you saw in Sera's license photo, the same refusal to look away from hard choices. The phone's glow catches the moisture gathering in his eyes.

"'The observation continues,'" he reads, and his voice shakes on the word. "'New subject: confirm identity. Previous subject: locate. Reward for both.'" He looks up at you, and something has shifted in his face—the fear hasn't left, but it's found company with grief, with the terrible understanding that his sister's precautions weren't paranoid, they were insufficient.

"It's not her," he says, though you haven't asked. "Sera would never—she made this number invisible. Burner, registered to a dead woman in another city, routed through—" He stops, the technical explanation collapsing under the weight of its own failure. "Someone found it anyway. Someone who knows I'm here, who knows you're here, who—"

The cat meows, a low sound that seems almost conversational. Commissioner Gordon has moved to the arm of the couch, closer to you now, close enough that you could reach out and touch gray fur. The trust of animals, you think, is simpler than the trust of humans. They don't need explanations, only consistency.

"The Understudy studies the mask," you say, speaking carefully, feeling your way toward something Sera glimpsed and couldn't finish. "But someone else is studying The Understudy. Or using it. Someone who collects names, who rewards location, who—" You stop, the pattern assembling itself from fragments: the blank emergency contact, the hidden brother, the burner phone now compromised, the timing of your arrival and the message's arrival.

"Whoever they are," Daniel says, "they know the mask changed hands. They know before The Understudy does. That means—" he swallows, "—that means they're closer than Sera thought. That means we're already being sold."

Commissioner Gordon head-butts your hand, demanding attention. The small insistence of it, the ordinary need, steadies you. You are in a stranger's apartment with a stranger's cat and a stranger's brother, and someone you cannot see has already placed you on their ledger.