I didn't tell Doug's men, waiting exactly where I'd left them, anything beyond "handled" — and I didn't tell Yankovic, or Ashford's world, or anyone else, about hollow_choir at all. Some information, I'd decided somewhere in the ten silent minutes of that car ride, was safer carried alone than shared, at least until I understood better what sharing it might actually cost me.
What I did instead, over the following two weeks, was build.
It was, I recognized somewhere in the middle of that stretch, the closest thing to a coherent strategy I'd managed since discovering what I was. Every previous escalation in this second life had come reactively — a bully's fist, a homeless man's convenient invisibility, Kyle's hand where it shouldn't have been, a fighter's strength revealed live on a stream I hadn't fully controlled. This was different. Nobody had forced my hand yet. hollow_choir had given me a runway, however grudgingly, and for the first time since I'd woken up fourteen years old with a stranger's memories layered under my own, I had the rare, uncomfortable luxury of choosing my next move instead of simply surviving somebody else's.
I doubled the Numbers' patrol schedule around both warehouses and, for the first time, around my own home — quietly, carefully, men in plain clothes rather than masks, positioned far enough back that my parents would never clock them as anything other than neighborhood traffic. I chose the two most reliable of them personally, ran them through a specific set of instructions I'd never had to give before: watch for black cars with no visible plates, watch for anyone lingering too long near the building, and above all, watch without being watched in return. It was strange, giving that particular order — the first time I'd ever built a defense around a threat I couldn't name, couldn't picture, and couldn't even be certain was still watching me at all.
I found, doing all of it, that the work itself was almost a relief — concrete, actionable, the kind of problem that yielded to effort in a way that Emma's silence and hollow_choir's patience both refused to. I walked the patrol route myself once, late at night, just to see the house the way an outsider would see it — porch light on a timer, my father's truck in the driveway, Santiago's window with its faint blue glow of a phone screen behind drawn curtains. It looked, from the street, like exactly the kind of house nothing dangerous had ever happened near. I stood there a long moment, feeling the specific, cold weight of knowing how thin that appearance actually was, and how much of my own effort now went into keeping it that way for people who had no idea it needed keeping at all.
I had Doug quietly expand our reach into two more corners of the dark web's underground economy, not for the money, though the money came anyway, but for the information that came bundled with it — more eyes, more ears, more chances of hearing a name like hollow_choir mentioned somewhere I could actually trace it back to a face. He came back after the first week with nothing but rumor: a name half-remembered from a decade-old forum post, a claim that a similar group had once "recruited" a fire-manipulator out of a city three states over and that the man had never publicly resurfaced afterward, alive or otherwise. It wasn't much. It was, at least, confirmation that I wasn't chasing a ghost of my own invention.
Doug relayed the rumor to me sitting across a table in the new warehouse's back office, a space I'd started using more and more for exactly this kind of quiet, unhurried conversation. He looked older than he had a few months ago too, I noticed, the same way Ivan had looked older at his grandmother's funeral — not in his face exactly, but in the specific weight he carried into a room now, a man who'd signed onto something considerably larger than he'd originally bargained for and had decided, somewhere along the way, to see it through anyway. "You want me to keep digging?" he asked. "Or is this the kind of thing where digging too hard just tells them you're looking?"
"Keep digging," I said. "Carefully. I'd rather know what's actually out there than stay comfortable in the dark about it."
"You know that's usually how people get themselves noticed. Digging."
"I know," I said. "I'd rather be noticed and informed than invisible and blind. At this point, I don't think invisible's really on the table for me anymore anyway."
He gave a short laugh at that, tired but genuine. "Fair enough. Never figured you for the invisible type from the start, honestly." He shook his head slightly, gathering his jacket. "You want me to loop Yankovic in on any of this? She's got reach we don't."
"Not yet," I said. "Let's see what you find first. I'd rather bring her something real than another rumor she has to sort through herself." Doug nodded once and let himself out, and I sat alone in the office a while longer, the quiet hum of the warehouse's old wiring the only sound left in the room.
He nodded, unsurprised, and I understood, watching him go, that some part of him had stopped expecting me to choose the safer option a long time ago. "For what it's worth," he added, pausing at the door, "whoever these people are, they went to a lot of trouble just to talk to you instead of just taking whatever they wanted. That's either a good sign or a very calculated one. I haven't decided which."
"Neither have I," I admitted. "I'll let you know once I do."
I brought Elias in twice more, carefully, spaced further apart than before to give him proper recovery time between sessions — a decision that cost me speed but bought me something I was slowly starting to value more: a resource that didn't resent me quite as visibly for using it. The warmth in my hands, by the fourth test, lasted nearly three full minutes before fading, and I could, for the first time, feel the edges of what it might eventually let me do if I found the discipline to keep building it slowly instead of grabbing for more all at once. I thought, more than once during those sessions, about Ashford's eleven years of patient discipline, and wondered whether I had that kind of patience in me, or whether I was constitutionally built for exactly the kind of recklessness he'd warned me about on sight.
The fight club's back room started to feel, during those quiet weeks, less like a warehouse and more like an actual headquarters — schedules pinned to a corkboard, Doug's ledgers stacked neatly beside my own, the Numbers rotating through their new patrol assignments with the same flat, practiced efficiency they brought to everything else. It was, I thought more than once, starting to look like something that could survive scrutiny if it ever came to that, which was exactly the point.
Yankovic sent a message near the end of the second week, brief and businesslike, informing me that her network had turned up nothing new on either the telekinetic from the old video or on anyone matching a description of hollow_choir's operation — though she added, almost as an afterthought, a line that stuck with me longer than the rest of the message combined: Careful who you go looking for information about, Jester. Some names get noticed the moment you start asking after them, whether or not you get an answer.
I filed that warning next to all the others, in the growing collection of cautions I'd received from every direction and heeded selectively, on my own terms, the way I'd heeded almost everything since the day I woke up fourteen years old with a power nobody had warned me about at all.
I thought, reading her message a second time, about how strange it was that Yankovic — a woman who dealt in violence and leverage for a living, who'd once described our entire arrangement to me in the flat language of a business transaction — had become, without either of us ever acknowledging it out loud, one of the more consistently honest voices in my life. She had no reason to warn me about anything. My exposure was my own problem, not hers, and yet she kept doing it anyway, in her clipped, businesslike way, as though some part of her had decided I was worth the effort of keeping alive a little longer than strict self-interest required. I didn't know what to do with that observation, so I filed it, the way I filed everything now, and went back to work.
The fight club continued on its normal schedule, Marcus back in the rotation once his ribs healed enough to spar again — genuinely glad to be back, from what I could tell, in the specific way professionals are glad to return to the thing they're actually good at after time spent healing on the sidelines. Elias I kept carefully out of the ring entirely now, too valuable a secret to risk on a stage, however profitable the last exposure had accidentally proven; I paid him instead for quieter work, running security alongside the Numbers, his strength held carefully in reserve rather than performed for an audience. He seemed, if anything, relieved by the arrangement — a man who'd spent six years hiding what he was clearly preferred a version of employment that didn't require him to reveal it to a crowd of strangers every Friday night. Viewer counts settled somewhere above the old baseline and below the hollow_choir-adjacent spike, a plateau I was, for once, content to let sit rather than push.
I used the quieter stretch to finally open the account book properly, sitting at my desk one Sunday afternoon with actual numbers in front of me instead of vague impressions — fight club revenue, Yankovic's cut, Doug's expanded operations, the fifty thousand still mostly untouched — and found, doing the math in full for the first time, that I had crossed comfortably past six figures in total assets before my fifteenth birthday. I sat with that number a long while, turning it over, and felt almost nothing at all — not triumph, not the giddy disbelief I'd felt counting out my first hundred dollars from chocolate sales all those months ago. Just a flat, quiet confirmation that the machine was working exactly as designed, the way a man checks a gauge and moves on rather than celebrating that the gauge still reads correctly.
And underneath all of it, quiet and constant, the throne kept coming for me most nights — the mountain, the strings, my family's upturned faces — except now, more often than not, a new shape stood at its edge: tall, faceless, hands raised, fingers poised to snap, never quite stepping close enough for me to see who or what it actually was.
I stopped being afraid of that shape somewhere in the second week. I started, instead, trying to make out its face, every single night, patient in a way I was only beginning to understand might actually be the most useful thing Ashford had ever taught me.
Some nights I woke from it with my jaw sore from clenching, sheets twisted around legs that had apparently spent the whole dream trying to run somewhere they never actually got to. Other nights I woke calm, almost curious, turning the shape over in my mind the same methodical way I'd turned over the siphon's mechanics with Elias — depth, duration, cost, the patient cataloguing instinct that seemed to follow me even into sleep now, whether I wanted it to or not. I didn't know yet which nights meant I was winning against whatever the dream represented, and which meant I was simply growing numb to it. I suspected, lying awake after one of the calmer ones, that the answer mattered a great deal more than I currently had the courage to examine.