They’d swung by to pick up Latham before heading across the city for a follow up visit to Sovereign Bank HQ. Maybe it was all Lowe’s extra points in Perception, but the way he figured it was that if they had any hope of getting ahead of this mess, the Warden of the Reserve seemed like the most obvious nut they had available to crack.

  As the other two escorted him—Lowe was keeping his eyes shut to avoid being flattened by the onslaught of new sensations—Rook filled them in on what he’d managed to wrench from Coda’s spirit. It was less than inspiring.

  "I was able to determine precious little, I’m afraid," Rook said. "The potions they’ve got him on in there have his spirit pretty much completely spaced. Honestly, I think he’d be easier to interrogate dead than he was back there."

  "In case you’re wondering, little man," Latham muttered, "I’m finding your friend really creepy."

  "One man’s creepy is another’s useful resource when questioning the nearly dead. Tomatoes, tomatoes."

  Lowe cracked an eye open, nearly threw up, and squeezed them shut again. Even the noise of Soar was too much. "Can you two stop bickering for a second?" he said. "There’s only so much I can concentrate on at once, right now. You must have got something out of him, Rook?"

  "Sure. But it was mostly emotional impressions and general vibes. Nothing very concrete or clear. I can tell you that he is wallowing in a lot of guilt. And he seems to be reliving the Black Knight murders over and over. I don’t have anything for you that would stand up before the Council, but it was definitely him doing the . . . you know, stuff, with Cenorth directing traffic." Rook hesitated. "I’ll tell you what, though."

  "What?" Lowe asked.

  "I don’t think he saw what happened in the park coming. If there’s one emotion stronger than all the guilt, it’s rage. Rage towards the boss. He’s pretty certain Cenorth was the one to ice him."

  Lowe chewed on that for a moment. "I mean, that makes sense, doesn’t it? If the boss betrayed him, I can see why he’d be more than a little pissed. I mean, what did he think was going to happen that day? If he was the Black Knight, he had to know nobody was actually coming to collect Highberg’s ransom."

  Lowe felt Rook shrug. "No idea, Jana. But for what it’s worth, I don’t think he expected us all to be wiped."

  "That’s not worth all that much to me, to be honest" Lowe said. "You?"

  There was a pause. "No. Not much to me either."

  "Sorry to interrupt this sentimental trip down memory lane," Latham cut in, yanking Lowe to the right to avoid a pothole in the pavement, "but did your little hospital excursion actually accomplish anything? Other than, currently, making the little man an even bigger liability than he was previously?"

  "Well," Lowe said, "we flushed out another Shimmerskin. That’s not nothing. And I’m not an ‘even bigger liability’. I’m just taking a moment to adjust to a new and awesome power."

  “I don’t know about anyone else, but when I get a new Skill, I tend not to need to be dragged around Soar like a bucket of shit until I acclimatise. I’m struggling to see the net-benefit of this version of you, right now. Would it not just be best if me and the undead dropped you off at home and cracked on ourselves?”

  “Technically, I’m not ‘undead’. As I didn’t actually die, I’m more of a revenant than your classic undead.”

  “I so don’t fucking care. What about it, Lowe? Take you to Mylaf for coffee and crumpets until you properly manage to adjust?”

  “No,” Lowe said, trying to stand up a bit straighter under his own steam. “I think once I get a handle on this it’s going to be useful. And I absolutely need to be there when we talk to Morholt again.”

  “I don’t completely disagree with Jana,” Rook said. “But I’m having all sorts of worries about how this shape-changing OOB squad knew we were going to the hospital. I didn’t notice anyone following us - and I was keeping a more than careful eye - which suggests . . .”

  "Which suggests, considering the rest of our group were ambushed - albeit crappily - we’ve got all kinds of surveillance issues right now," Latham finished

  Lowe thought back to what Arkola had put in that notification about not being able to speak freely in its own Temple. If the supreme being in Soar couldn’t guarantee they weren’t being overheard, what chance did they have? And, yeah, he was pretty sure they were being monitored.

  But that was a problem for another time, because Lowe was suddenly dragged to a halt. He carefully cracked open an eye and girded his loins. They were at their destination.

  ***

  “I honestly don’t know what else I can tell you," Morholt wheezed, his jowls trembling with each breath.

  The Warden of the Reserve dabbed at his glistening forehead with a silk handkerchief, though it did little against the damp sheen of sweat pooling in the folds of his skin. "The Vault suffered a significant—and might I add, entirely unexpected—security breach. The kind of breach that should not be possible, not with the precautions that we have in place. And yet, here we are.” His lips pursed in wounded indignation, his beady eyes darting between them as if expecting sympathy. None came. "I reached out to Cuckoo House because I was assured—assured, mind you!—that you people knew how to handle situations like this. That discretion and efficiency were your hallmarks. And yet, and yet—” He wheezed, shaking his head, pressing a pudgy hand to his chest as though the betrayal was physically painful. “I must say, I am profoundly disappointed to hear that you are no closer to recovering that which was stolen nor apprehending the individual responsible."

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  His lower lip quivered and, for a moment, Lowe thought the man was about to cry. "Nor," he added, voice climbing in pitch, "have you managed to ascertain who butchered my employees like cattle! Do you have any idea the logistical nightmare this has been for me? The paperwork alone—" He let out a strangled noise, somewhere between a sob and a gasp, as if the sheer enormity of his administrative woes might be enough to bring on his scheduled heart attack.

  "Yeah. That does seem like a bit of an issue," Lowe said, forcing himself to keep his focus on Morholt’s face so that all the other myriad of things pulling at his attention in the office didn’t distract him. The problem was, his newly buffed Perception simply didn’t want to cooperate. If he wasn’t absolutely committed to where he was looking, his gaze kept snagging on details he’d never have noticed before, each one demanding a slice of his attention.

  The hairline crack running down the far wall, so fine it was nearly invisible—except for the way dust had settled into it, marking it out like a fault line waiting to split.

  The subtle click-click of a loose ceiling manablade, half a second out of sync with the rest, the irregular rhythm making his teeth itch.

  And the faintest smear of something dark and dried beneath Morholt’s heavy wooden desk, barely visible unless you were really looking. Or had a newly ranked-up Perception attribute. Blood? Ink? Whatever it was, someone had tried to wipe it away but hadn't done a good enough job.

  With a colossal effort, Lowe dragged his focus back to Morholt. However, that sort of intense scrutiny wasn’t ideal when the subject in question was so physically repellent. Unfortunately, Lowe’s expanded Perception didn’t come with any sort of filter. Every pore, every ingrown hair, every bead of sweat rolling down the wattle of Morholt’s neck . . . it was all there in ultra excruciating, high-definition clarity. A lesser man might have gagged.

  Still, Lowe was realising there was a considerable upside to all this. Along with the horrifying level of detail, Lowe was fairly certain he could see when the man was lying. Not just suspect it. Know it. The little hesitations. The micro-expressions. The way Morholt’s eyes darted half a second too late to be convincing. It was like Lowe’s brain had started running some internal truth-detection wetware, flagging every half-truth and omission in real-time. He didn’t think he was about to put Arebella out of business anytime soon—her Skills were clearly leagues ahead of a little PErception buffing—but it was nice to have an edge.

  Even if it meant having to look at this . . . blob in such grotesque detail. He wondered whether Arkola had suggested the Progress Point dump for just this reason? But he dismissed the thought. He could go mad trying to second-guess that god.

  “Where’s your PA gone?” Rook asked from his left.

  As Morholt turned to look at the Threshold Guardian, Lowe noticed the tell-tale frown which he was coming to recognise meant the man was about to lie. “Miss St Clair called in sick today.”

  “Really?” Latham said from Lowe’s other side. “And you spoke to her, did you?”

  “I did. First thing this morning. Women’s problems, apparently.”

  Lowe thought that was a pretty generous way of describing the torn remains of a body they’d left in the basement of the Temple. It didn’t take much truth-telling ability to tell that Morholt was speaking out of his very generous arse. Rook had obviously noticed that too.

  “Tell me, Warden. Has your PA been with you long?”

  “A few years (lie). She was recommended to me by a colleague (lie). I felt I needed to shake things up a little in my staff and Miss St Clair’s resume suggested she would be just the ticket. (lie). But I must say, I fail to see why the personnel arrangements in my office are of interest to an Inspector in the Security Services (lie).”

  Lowe looked at the stain on the floor again. He really did think it was a bloodstain . . . “Have you ever had cause to employ an OOB squad to work for the bank?”

  “OOB squad?”

  “Out of Bounds,” Latham said. “Assassins. Unofficial problem-solvers. Off-the-books bastards. The kind of people you send when you don’t want a problem solved so much as erased. You get the picture? It is entirely illegal for them to operate within Soar, in case you did not know that. Treasonous, apparently. And I’m told that on very good legal authority.”

  “Well, I for one have never heard of a . . . Out of Bounds squad. (Big, fat, sweating LIE)”

  Lowe moved forward, much to Morholt’s disquiet and knelt down to touch the stain on the floor, beneath the heavy wooden desk. His new Perception rendered it in excruciating clarity. It had seeped deep into the grain, the wood darkened and swollen around the edges. It wasn’t exactly fresh—no gloss, no stickiness—but it hadn’t had time to fully settle either. The colour had turned that particular shade between rust and old wine, and there were small ridges where the liquid had clotted, like the broken surface of a dried-out riverbed.

  Whoever had bled here had done so in earnest. And reasonably recently.

  For a moment, that detail consumed his attention. But then something shifted in his peripheral vision, something bigger, something more wrong.

  From his current angle, Lowe could now see past the feet of the desk. Behind the desk. And there, slumped unnaturally against the carved mahogany panels, was Morholt. His eyes bulged, mouth frozen in an unfinished plea, a congealing rivulet of blood trailing from his slack lips. His corpulent frame had been dumped like so much discarded meat, the vastness of him crammed between desk and chair in a way that made it obvious—this hadn’t been quick.

  Slowly and deliberately, Lowe looked upwards at the figure seated above him.

  The - well, at least ‘a’ - Warden of the Reserve met his gaze, then sighed. His shape rippled, the details of Morholt’s sweat-slicked face unraveling, reforming into something else entirely.

  "You just don’t know when to give up, do you?"