The first thing Roan felt was the cold.Not the cold of the marble floor beneath his knees. Nor the cold of the evening air drifting through the mansion’s open doors. Something deeper. Something that had no name in any modern language — a chill that came from inside his chest and spread outward like frost across glass.He didn’t understand it yet.He was too busy bleeding.“Say it again.” Cole crouched in front of him, tie loosened, expression bored. Like this was an inconvenience. Like Roan was furniture that had stopped working. “Tell everyone here what you did.”The grand hall of the Crest mansion was full. Dozens of guests at minimum — business partners, socialites, city officials. All of them still holding their champagne glasses. All of them watching him.Roan looked up at Cole through the blood running into his left eye. “I didn’t steal anything.”Cole sighed.The next blow came from behind — one of the two men Cole had positioned at Roan’s back all evening. A fist between the

Roan made it six blocks before his legs decided they were done negotiating.He didn’t fall. He caught himself against a streetlight pole, gripping the cold metal with both hands, breathing through the white heat radiating from his ribs. His vision blurred once then steadied. The rain hadn’t let up. If anything it was heavier now, the kind of rain that didn’t care what it fell on.He had found a twenty-four-hour laundromat two blocks back. Warm, empty, no one to ask questions. He had sat there for forty minutes calculating his options with the System screen open beside him until a night attendant appeared and told him customers only.So he was back outside.The street was not completely empty. A businessman in a good coat walked toward him from the far end of the block, phone pressed to his ear, briefcase swinging. He saw Roan against the pole from twenty feet away. His stride didn’t break. He simply angled his path to the far edge of the pavement and walked past without looking over o

The woman on the pavement didn’t move.Roan stood at the window four floors up, water glass in hand, watching her. She was facing the building directly, her dog sitting obediently at her feet, and there was something wrong about her stillness. People standing on empty streets at dawn shifted their weight, checked their phones, looked around. She did none of those things.Just stood. Just watched.“Ancient enemy proximity alert still active,” the System said quietly. “Recommend host move away from window.”Roan stepped back.He kept his eyes on the street until a bus rolled past and when it cleared the pavement on the other side the woman was gone. Dog and all. Like she had simply stopped existing between one second and the next.He stood in the middle of Selene’s living room and filed that information carefully.Not a coincidence. Not a random early morning dog walker. Something had been close enough to trigger the System’s alert and had looked directly at this building before disapp

The lecture ended at eleven forty instead of twelve.Selene was already packed before the professor finished his closing remarks, sliding her notebook into her bag with the practiced efficiency of someone who had learned to optimize every available minute. She had three hours before her next class. Enough time to go home, check on the stranger she had inexplicably brought into her apartment, and figure out what exactly she was doing.She already knew what she was doing. She just hadn’t decided how she felt about it yet.Her phone rang as she pushed through the lecture hall doors into the corridor.She looked at the screen.Her stride didn’t break but something in her shoulders did, a subtle shift that anyone who didn’t know her well wouldn’t have caught. She stepped to the side of the corridor, let the stream of students flow past her, and answered.“Baba.”“You didn’t call last night.” Her father’s voice was the same as it had always been. Measured. Precise. The voice of a man who c

Zero dollars was not the same as zero options.Roan sat on the floor of the empty third floor room with his back against the wall and the System library open in front of him, working through the finance section with the focused attention of someone who understood that the difference between a good plan and a dead plan was usually the quality of the starting assessment.Current assets: one phone, zero cash, functional body rated E minus, and access to a library of accumulated knowledge that most people on this planet would have paid fortunes for if they could see it.Current liabilities: fractured ribs, no shelter beyond a condemned building, and at least two people in this city actively looking for him.He had started campaigns from worse positions.The finance section’s entry level module was direct about the first principle of building from zero. Identify convertible assets before identifying cash requirements. A convertible asset was anything in your current position that could be