Back then, they’d been Cuckoo House’s best.

  Intelligence operatives, specialist investigators, black-baggers, and deep-cover agents. Between them, they’d had Skills to die for. Classes that were specifically calibrated to uncover misdeeds and do it with flair. They’d been precision instruments honed for targeted application, and yet none of them had been able to figure out Coda was the Black Knight.

  So, it should have been harder than it was proving right now to unpick it all.

  That it wasn’t, was just plain embarrassing. How fucking arrogant had they been back then?

  However, now they knew what they were looking for, it had been almost insultingly easy to piece things together.

  Lowe would have liked to think that something which had completely evaded the best minds in the Security Service might have taken more effort than a few hours of late-night spitballing from a Classtrated washout, a Temple Warder with something approaching an eating disorder, a Drudge, and an on-again-off-again zombie.

  But once the theory stopped being a theory - once they started working on the assumption that Cenorth had been looking for a successor in his off-the-books operations, and that Coda had clearly been the one he tagged - it was like the whole thing came loose.

  It was like a dam bursting.

  Lowe thought back to Coda’s throwaway comment about the rope. Something said eighteen odd month ago that had stuck in the back of Lowe’s mind, useless until now. But once he started really combing through Grid View, using the right lens, the slips were everywhere. It was humiliating, really. Coda had made a stupid number of such mistakes for someone in their unit - with all their wonderful Skills - not to have picked up on.

  As he came upon the . . . well, not clues. Massive flashing red flags with ‘it’s me!’ written on them, Lowe marked each down in his notebook, his stomach sinking further with every example. By the tenth instance of Coda demonstrating knowledge of something he shouldn’t have known, Latham hissed between his teeth.

  “Fucking hell, little man. He was basically confessing. Was this guy an idiot? Or was he mocking you?”

  Lowe and Rook exchanged a glance. Because they were both thinking the same thing.

  Coda had been one of them. After all, they’d worked together for years. He might not have been the best of them, but he had been solid. Dependable. Funny. He might never have been the unit’s shining star - that was Lowe’s role, after all - but if you got partnered with him, you knew it was going to be a good job. A safe job. Working with Coda was far better than being saddled with Arman, bitching endlessly about procedure. Or Faulks, twitching from blitz stick withdrawal, ready to storm a room three steps ahead of the plan.

  He’d been a decent guy. Not too quick. Not too slow. But the one you could rely on never to drop a ball.

  And, after everything, Coda was the fucking Black Knight? Coda had gotten his hands on something of Arkola’s and delivered it to the Mayor. Coda had been murdering the great and the good of Soar?

  It didn’t make sense.

  But then, after a few messages to and from Staffen—messages that mostly involved her screaming in FUCKING capital letters—it turned out Coda’s bank account was far, far, far too healthy. Which is why his melted semi-corpse was able to be residing comfortably in ‘Kalhorgan the Never Merciful’ General

  Lowe had stared at the numbers Staffen had quoted. “I thought you looked into this,” he said, as he turned to Rook. “Back then? I have a distinct memory of giving you the order to look into all of us.”

  “I did,” Rook said. “But according to this, all the gold is in his wife’s name.”

  “And that was enough to baffle you?”

  “Don’t break my balls over this, Jana. I didn’t really think it was any of us. Neither did you. I looked but, to tell the truth, I didn’t look that hard.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Fuck,” Rook agreed.

  And now, here they were.

  Standing at the bedside of a man who, as far as they could tell, had spectacularly betrayed them all.

  Lowe looked down at what remained of Coda. He had seen bodies burned, shredded, torn apart. But this—this was something else. This was a man caught halfway between survival and whatever came after.

  “I don’t know about you,” Rook said, “but I don’t see this guy blowing his way into the Vault and massacring a bunch of Shimmerskins. Unless he’s much more spry than he looks.”

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  “No. And, after what happened to him in Goldleaf Park, I doubt he was the one who killed the Highberg child, either.”

  “So we’re putting that on Cenorth?”

  “Probably,” Lowe said.

  “Who is also dead.”

  “Who is.”

  “So who sent us the files?”

  “No idea. But I bet Coda’s got all sorts of tales to tell that will probably help us work that out.”

  There was a pause. “Let me guess. You want me to Threshold Guardian this up?” Rook said.

  “Well, we’ve gotten this far,” Lowe said, “but we’re fucking nowhere, are we?” He gestured at Coda’s broken form in the bed. “I’m coming round to the realisation that Coda might have been the Black Knight once upon a time, but he’s sure as fuck not it right now. And sure, maybe Cenorth was pulling his strings back then, but it’s clearly not the boss calling the shots now. I’m all for people coming back from the dead but, believe me, once Hel’s sisters had finished with him, there definitely wasn’t enough left behind for an encore. ”

  Lowe looked around the room’s spacious interior and out its window, where the Celestial Temple dominated the skyline. Was Arkola watching even now? “Look Rook, we’ve got just over a day and a half before Arkola pulls the plug on Soar, and we’re no fucking closer to finding his statue. I don’t know about you, but personally, I’d love to avoid being in the city when an Eldritch god-king has a temper tantrum because his favourite toy hasn’t been returned to him.”

  He stopped, hands on his hips, staring down at the ruined man before them.

  “So,” Lowe said, voice dropping into something cold. “Because I’m all about a redemption arc, here’s your chance—Threshold Guardian—to make up for being thwarted by the equivalent of ‘no ill-gotten money in this hand, my good sir.’ Why don’t you use your newly acquired Class to find out exactly what this fucker might still know.”

  Because Coda might not be able to talk. But that didn’t mean he had nothing to say.

  ***

  Rook reached out, placing his fingertips lightly against Coda’s ruined temple, the waxy, melted skin barely warm under his touch. His other hand braced against the bed frame, fingers curling like he was already pulling something from the air. Then the mana began to flow between them. It came in slow at first—a shimmer around his shoulders, a barely perceptible tremor in the air. Then it built.

  Lowe could feel it from where he stood in the doorway. A crushing pressure in his skull. A strange, oppressive squeezing that sent a shiver down his spine. Gods know how Rook might be feeling when he did this. The air bent towards his friend like something unseen was being siphoned through him, pooling at the point where his hand met Coda’s flesh.

  Then the room dropped in temperature.

  Not a slow creep of a chill, but an immediate, violent snap—like stepping out into a snowstorm after leaving a furnace.

  Lowe watched Rook grit his teeth, eyes narrowing as his body jerked and bucked against some unseen resistance. He’d explained that the mana draw in accessing Coda’s mind would be massive. Certainly far more than Lowe could have channelled himself. The sigils on Coda’s medical frame blew out, their careful balancing of his suspended existence interfered with by whatever Rook was doing.

  A hum filled the air and the smell of burned mana curled at the back of Lowe’s throat. Even the lights dimmed, just slightly, but enough to notice as the Level 50 Threshold Guardian took charge of the man’s . . . soul? Was that what Rook did when he used this Skill? Lowe wasn’t clear. He really did need to find out more about his friend’s Class.

  But that was for another time, Lowe thought, turning away and looking up and down the corridor outside the room..

  He was keeping watch because neither of them thought that the Nurses were going to be wild about them fiddling with such a well paying patient. He needed to be watching the hall to give Rook a head’s up to . . . well, get out of Coda’s head.

  Lowe leaned against the doorframe, absently watching the corridor beyond. Another expensive room in an expensive building full of expensive people. He’d been spending a lot of his time around wealth lately. The kind that could bury secrets deep enough that most people would never think to dig.

  Outside, the crowds around the hospital moved with an effortless rhythm. White-coated staff walked briskly between rooms, their uniforms crisp and newly pressed. Carts rattled by, stacked with neatly arranged alchemical vials and glowing diagnostic tools that most public-sector clinics would kill to get their hands on. Money couldn’t buy you happiness, maybe. But it could certainly buy you a better class of healthcare. Which, Lowe thought, was probably much the same thing.

  Down the far end of the hall, someone was arguing over a dosage of something or other, their voice hushed but heated. Near Lowe, a doctor, expensive coat unbuttoned, leaned against the wall, rubbing at his temples. Lowe didn’t have to hear him to know exactly the complaint he was making - shifts too long. Pay too short. It was interesting that universal truth was the same, even in a place like this. People could always use more money.

  Coda’s bank account . . .

  Lowe banged his fist into the wall. Of all the names - of everyone who could have been the Black Knight! He still couldn’t square it away. And yet, here they were.

  But if Coda had been the Black Knight, and Cenorth had been pulling his strings, who the fuck was running the show now they were both off the table?

  A nurse walked past him, pushing a cart. Lowe barely registered her. Then, maybe half a minute later, he saw her again.

  He frowned. Had she looped back?

  No, there she was moving in the same direction. She was still pushing a cart at the same pace, with the same sense of vacant determination about her body language. But she hadn’t turned around. He turned his head, scanning down the corridor in the opposite direction.

  Another Nurse. Same uniform. Same cart. Same fucking face.

  Twins? Sure. Maybe. But—

  Fucking Shimmerskin.

  Lowe turned back into the room, running straight to Rook, who was still locked in his deep-channel Skill, face tense. He grabbed his shoulder, shaking him hard. “Wrap it up, Rook! We’ve got company!”

  Rook’s fingers twitched against Coda’s skull, eyes unfocused like he was halfway between worlds. Which, Lowe thought, was a pretty damn accurate bit of description.

  Frustrated, Lowe crossed back across the room and looked back down the hallway. The nurse—the second one—was almost at the door. And she didn’t have a cart anymore. Just a fucking massive sword.

  And a slow, deliberate smile.