Turn 9 of 10

Examine the research on the table for Sera's breakthrough

You move past Daniel with a careful slowness, giving him space to track your every motion, to decide moment by moment that you are not yet a threat. The kitchen table occupies the center of the small apartment like a command center abandoned mid-campaign. Maps of the warehouse district overlap at angles that suggest obsessive revision—red circles marking locations where The Understudy appeared, blue lines tracing escape routes Sera must have memorized in her bones.

The photographs show a figure in dark panels that seem to shift with the light, never quite resolving into a fixed image. You understand suddenly why the witness descriptions in the incident reports sounded so uncertain—The Understudy doesn't wear a costume so much as become whatever shadow it needs to be. But Sera had found something. A timeline pinned above the photographs tracks seventeen encounters, and in the margins she has written observations in that cramped handwriting that crowded toward truth.

"Line of sight," one note reads. "Gravity requires seeing the target. But he only adapts to what he witnesses directly." Below that, underlined twice: "The mask inherits observation. The person does not."

You spread your hands over the documents, feeling the texture of her desperation and her hope. Daniel stands at your shoulder now, close enough that you can smell the stale coffee on his breath, the sleepless nights in his silence.

"She thought she could beat him," he says, not quite a question. "She thought if she understood him, she could—"

"She found his limit," you finish, your finger resting on the underlined words. "He studies the mantle, not the wearer. Which means—"

"Which means you have one fight," Daniel says, "before he knows you're someone new. One fight where he's preparing for her, and you're not her."