The storm came in like a sentence. The sky over the Heights was a black board the wind wrote on with chalk, every stroke a white vein. Glass towers took the punishment and glowed brighter for it, like saints who believed pain was proof.
Inside the white Metro Mechanics van, the air was thick enough to chew. Limar hunched at the terminal, ten knuckles working ten separate anxieties; Tev's hands rested easy on the wheel, that calm that only very strong men and very tired ones understood; Breuk and Tara zipped black fabric to the throat, faces already choosing their masks.
Limar's fingers landed on the last sequence. He didn't look up. "And… go. Ten minutes on the clock. No alarms, no power log. House has a cold."
Breuk pulled his mask down—cloth, seam, breath. "Then pray that's enough."
"Pray to who?" Limar said, like a laugh with the sugar burned off.
"To the parts that don't fail," Tara said, and checked her earpiece.
They moved.
The side gate didn't so much open as forget to be closed. Breuk and Tara slid through—two silhouettes folding into a third—their steps barely whispering on marble. The villa smelled like nothing. Not cleanliness; absence. White stone, old-world paintings, curated air. When Tara spoke, it was a thread.
"I hate when it's this clean," she breathed. "It's never a good sign."
They peeled the house open like a book and found blank pages. Library—empty. Bedchambers—made, untouched. Office—cool, waiting. The silence was thick enough to touch. Breuk felt the itch along the scar at his jaw: not fear, not yet. Recognition. Houses like this had taught him long ago how indifference could be designed.
"Maybe Kane fed us smoke," he murmured.
"Or we walked into someone else's plan," Tara said.
They split at the long corridor that seemed to lengthen as you looked. Tara ghosted east. Breuk went west. The carpet made him a rumor. The storm's fist thumped the windows. A light somewhere far away blinked once, like an eye closing on purpose.
The scream didn't belong here.
It arrived wrong—dull, swallowed, as if the house tried to eat it and failed. Breuk stopped mid-step. Footfalls, frantic, bounced toward him. He slid into shadow. A young woman—dress like a blizzard, hair in panic—ran past, the perfume of money and fear trailing her. He let her go. He counted two in his head and turned his face to the open door she'd fled.
A child's room. Color in a world that had outlawed it. Toys neatly arrayed; a mobile of glass planets turning without draft; books so new they looked fake.
On the floor: a young maid. Face swollen, blood stippling the white tile into punctuation. Alive, barely.
Breuk dropped to a knee. Her breath found his hand and trembled. Words rattled behind her teeth with no strength to climb out.
"Easy," he said, and the word felt stupid in his mouth. "Hey. Look at me."
Her lids fought and won a thin line of sight. For a heartbeat she saw him, and in that instant her face stopped being a stranger's. He recognized the expression, if not the person: the lucid second people get before they fall away. A second that decides stories.
"Don't—" she rasped, and the syllable tore something small and important in her throat.
The room breathed. The house waited. Memory arrived like a blade—a village, fire swallowing its own smoke; women and children with their mouths open in a sound the air refused to carry; the certainty that someone was about to give him something he did not deserve.
Tara's voice in his ear cut like wire. "I've got it," she said, fast, excited, professional. "Case is open. The necklace is in hand. We need to move."
"Copy," he said, but his eyes were on the girl's hands.
She had been holding something and could no longer hold it. Her fingers were blood-slick and stubborn. He pried as if he were untying a knot that didn't want to be unmade. She hissed—not pain but refusal; not fear but the last muscle a human can flex when the rest have betrayed her.
"Hey," he said, and put the weight of himself into the gentleness. "You want me to take it. You didn't hide it to keep it. You hid it to give it."
She stared at him as if taking inventory of his soul and finding it untidy. Then she let go.
It was small in his palm and infinite against his skin. A silver loop, a disc like translucent glass, the faintest filament running through its center—a nerve, a hair of light, a scar in ice. It gave off no heat and still felt like a fever dream. For a second the air around his hand changed subscribers and signed its name.
The whisper came out of her like she owed it to nobody. "Not… her," she said. The words were crushed grapes. "Don't let… her wear it."
The pronoun hung between them like a noose. The daughter. The house. The story. Breuk didn't ask the follow-up. He didn't have time for truth, only for honesty.
"Okay," he said.
He looked at the amulet and something in him looked back. Not a face. A shape. The shape of falling. The word Kane had fed him slithered under the ribs and turned over: recognize.
Tara's voice—urgent now. "Breuk. We have to go."
He slid the amulet into his breast pocket. Not the inner jacket. Not the bag. The pocket over the heart, the old superstitious trick men use when they want to pretend at protection.
"Sorry," he told the girl, barely sound. He turned her to her side, cleared her airway with a knuckle like he'd learned in rooms with fewer toys and more knives, and stood.
He did not look back. That was the only kindness he could afford.
The corridor made a throat for him; he ran down it and felt the house try to swallow. The storm slammed a palm against the glass and left its print. As he cut a corner he caught a reflection he didn't own: himself in a museum he shouldn't be in, a man built by mistakes, running toward the only choices he could stand.
He hit the side exit as Tara did, both of them breathing like they'd agreed to keep going only because stopping would be worse. The rain came horizontal, needles and thread both.
"Got it," Tara said, lifting the case's prize—the Necklace of Ascent glinting colorless in her black glove. In the storm's light it looked sacred. In his memory it looked wrong.
"Yeah," Breuk said. He felt the weight against his chest—a weight no pocket should have. Two necklaces, two stories. Or one story told twice, once for the house, once for the people who clean it.
They ran.
The van's back doors flew open. Tev's engine voice rose from idle to promise. Limar had sweat on his upper lip and a smile shaped like disbelief at his own good luck. "Ninety seconds till the system remembers it was born to betray us," he said. "Hustle."
They dove in. The doors slammed. Tara cradled the object like an egg she couldn't afford to drop. Limar slapped the panel, the jammer's hum dying like a lullaby, and wiped a hand across his mouth because sometimes even small victories taste like blood.
"Thirteen minutes, thirty-five seconds," he crowed, unable not to. "No alarms, no logs—a a damn Childs play!"
Sirens woke up as if he'd insulted their mothers. Blue tore the rain into strips and taped them to the windshield. Tev checked a mirror with his shoulders instead of his eyes and let the van become a decision. "Childs play, huh?"
"…Okay," Limar said, deflated and still grinning. "Maybe a miniboss."
The van leapt into the street like a fish that had learned legs. The Heights blurred—white into black into light; the storm wrote faster, the towers read slower. In the back, Tara held the necklace to the laptop's sensor, the case's echo winking obediently for the camera, the kind of proof you show a buyer who can't afford doubt.
Breuk had his palm over his chest without realizing it. The disc under the fabric wasn't warm and yet it colored the air. For half a beat he felt something that belonged in churches and held onto it the way men hold onto railings on bad stairs.
"Everything clean?" Tev asked, the question a ritual.
"Clean enough to pass," Tara said. "For now."
Limar peered through the slit between the seats. "You good, boss?"
"Fine," Breuk said, and tasted the lie shrug.
He closed his eyes and saw the girl's face the instant it stopped being stranger and became task. Not her. He felt the shape of the amulet press back at his sternum, not like a heart, not like guilt. Something that could choose to be either.
The sirens got closer and then farther and then irrelevant. Tev cut down a service lane where the rain smelled like metal and apologies. The radio in the corner of the dash picked up a song that didn't exist and lost it. Limar counted down from ten because he'd been counting since he was born.
At six, Tara glanced at Breuk. She didn't ask. He didn't tell. That was their covenant: truth traded only when the price wouldn't bankrupt the job.
At three, he took his hand off his chest. The fabric was damp and cold. The weight stayed. In his head, the word recognize ended its crawl and uncoiled like a patient animal. The house had kept its copy in a case; the girl had kept the real thing in blood and bone. One was for display. The other was for use.
At one, the city finally blinked. The street ahead opened like an eye.
Tev drove them into it.