Two days passed inside Precinct Nine like two years.Vega kept the lockdown tight. Dale ran surveillance on the Bureau's public notices. Boone whistled entirely too much for a man who used to hate whistling. Hattie sharpened tools she never used and stared at her locked cabinet like it owed her rent. Dolores had taken over the break room entirely and was teaching Bjorn to knit, which was the single strangest thing Elias had seen in a week full of strange things.On the third morning, a slip of paper landed on Elias's desk. Dale had clipped it from the public obituaries, the ones the Bureau let bleed through into Halfway so the freshly dead could see their own send-off.ELIAS J. THORNE. SERVICE THURSDAY, 10 A.M. RIVERSIDE CHAPEL."No," said Vega, the second she saw his face. "Absolutely fucking not.""It's my funeral.""It's a trap with a fucking guest book, Thorne.""Cap." Boone's voice was quiet. "Let him go. I'll go with him."Vega glared at both of them for a long moment. Then she

Boone didn't wait to see what black ink did.He grabbed Elias by the collar and threw them both sideways into the shadow of the organ pipes as the clerk swept the stamp through the air where Elias's chest had been a half second before. It didn't hit anything. It didn't need to. The air itself seemed to curdle where the stamp passed, and every flower in the nearest vase turned black and crumbled to ash."Go, go, go!" Boone roared, and fired.The white bullet took the clerk square in the shoulder. It didn't fold him into paper like the others. It just staggered him, one step, two, and the black stamp swung around toward them again, patient as a clock.Elias didn't burn anything. He just ran, dragging Boone by the sleeve, straight through the side door into the alley behind the chapel, and didn't stop running until the red phone box on the corner swallowed them both whole and dropped them, gasping, onto the marble floor of Precinct Nine."What," Vega said, looking up from her desk, cigar