“I felt a fluctuation,” I said, keeping my face bored. “Old pipes bursting. A mana line backfiring. The Lows are always leaking.”
“It was a detonation,” Korenth contradicted. He moved closer, and the gravity in the room ratcheted up. “It tripped sensors I haven’t seen active in years.”
He moved towards me, studying my pupils, tracking my pulse. He looked at me the way a craftsman looks at a tool he repaired after a bad break—checking for cracks, ensuring the glue held.
“The asset,” Korenth muttered, his voice tight. “The Umbrakynn who stole from me. Tell me you’ve located him.”
“I haven’t,” I said, meeting his gaze with a mask of professional failure. “He’s gone to ground. If he’s still in the city, he’s staying behind my radar. But most likely, he has already fled the city.”
The lie tasted like cold ash. The Umbrakynn he’s looking for wouldn’t be talking to Korenth, or anyone else, ever again. I’d made sure of that.
“He was seen in the area right before the sensors tripped,” Korenth said, choosing his words with frustrating care. “But he is missing. My recovery teams swept the blast radius. They found nothing. No body. No residue. Just emptiness.”
He looked at me, gaze hardening. “It takes a very specific skill set to clean a scene that thoroughly, Riven.”
My hand twitched in my pocket. I knew that skill set better than anyone. Erase the trace. Nullify the signature. It was the first dark art he had drilled into me after I resurfaced from the wreckage of the lab. I had crawled back to him two days later, playing the part of the broken survivor with a hollowed-out core, and he had decided to make me useful in a different way. He taught me to scrub a room of magical resonance to bury his mistakes, never realising I perfected the technique to hide the one thing he was desperate to find: the truth of my own power.
“You remember what happens when things get messy,” Korenthsaid, his voice dropping to a silken threat. “You remember the cost of losing control.”
The feeling at the base of my skull flared—a vivid, phantom memory of the lab, of the pain before the explosion. He thought he was reminding me of my fear. He thought my loyalty was a scar tissue formed over that trauma.
For a long time, he had been right. I had let him and Varessia blind me, content to play the broken soldier. But the surge had burned the blindfold away.
I met his gaze without blinking. “If you want me to dig deep to find him, just say a word.”
“Continue the search,” Korenth snapped,his hand cutting through the air in a tight, impatient arc.“The asset is an expensive liability, and I want him found.”
He walked past me to his desk. On the sleek black surface, a holographic display showed a live feed of the city news—police lights flashing at the edge of the Low Warrens.
“A body was found that day,” Korenth said. “A Calysteri man. The seventh victim, if we are counting the girl from earlier this week.”
“The police found him,” I noted, keeping my voice neutral.
“The MCIU found him,” Korenth corrected, his voice cooling.“Detectives. They were on site before the surge even registered on our sensors.”
He tapped the desk, killing the feed.
“Morrow has intervened, of course. The Arcane Compliance Division has formally taken jurisdiction. But the transfer was messy. The police saw the body. They witnessed the aftermath.”
“Morrow is a blunt instrument,” I said, stepping closer to the desk. “He relies on paperwork and intimidation. He doesn’t know how to handle detectives who ask the wrong questions.”
Korenth paused, looking at me. “You think they know something?”
“I think the MCIU is persistent,” I said smoothly. “They foundthe Calysteri woman before your teams did. Now they’ve found this man. They are tracking the pattern, Korenth. If Morrow pushes them too hard, they won’t back down. They’ll dig.”
I let the threat hang there. I knew Korenth hated exposure more than anything.
“If they start connecting dots between these ‘anomalies’ and our operations in the district,” I added, “it becomes an issue you can’t bribe your way out of.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“Don’t leave it to Morrow,” I said. It was a gamble, but I kept my face impassive. “Put me in the room. Let me embed with the investigation as a ‘Consultant’. I can monitor what they know in real-time.”
Korenth considered this, tapping his finger against the glass desk. He thought I was offering to be his spy. He thought I was desperate to prove I was still his perfect, obedient creation. He didn’t know I was positioning myself to intercept the truth before he found it.
“You want to babysit the police?” he asked, a faint sneer on his lips.
“I want to ensure containment,” I lied. “If the MCIU has data that compromises us, I can corrupt the files. If they have theories, I can dismantle their logic before it ever creates a paper trail. Morrow tries to shout them down; I can make them chase ghosts.”
