SCUMBACK

Chapter 8

The camera above the notary's door bothered him more than he let himself admit walking away that afternoon. Cheap notary offices didn't typically wire cameras to anything worth watching twice, and yet something about its angle — positioned not toward the register, where theft might reasonably be a concern, but toward the street itself — suggested Ms. Grant's slow season wasn't the only thing she'd been less than honest about.

He returned after midnight, when the street had emptied of everything but a stray cat picking through a dumpster two doors down and the faint hum of a streetlamp flickering toward the end of its life. The shop's lock gave him no trouble at all — not because Ryu Han's borrowed hands had any particular skill with locks, but because a fraction of pressure applied with more precision than strength turned out to work just as well as any pick.

Inside, the filing cabinets he'd noticed that afternoon yielded exactly what he'd expected and considerably more than he'd hoped. Beneath a false bottom in the third drawer — clumsily hidden, the work of someone who'd never expected anyone competent enough to look — he found a ledger that had nothing to do with wills or property transfers. Shipment manifests. Payment records routed through the same three shell companies he'd already traced. And beneath those, tucked at the very bottom, a slim folder of photographs that made him go very still.

Warehouses. Interiors, mostly, shot from angles that suggested surveillance rather than documentation — crates stacked in patterns he recognized now as identical to the one Feng Li had abandoned the night he died. And in three of the photographs, half-visible in frame, a face.

Not Feng Li. Someone else. A young woman, perhaps twenty, restrained and clearly unaware of the camera, in a room he didn't recognize but the metadata — helpfully, carelessly untouched — placed less than four blocks from where he currently stood.

~[MISSION UPDATED: SUBJECT LOCATED. TIME-CRITICAL.]~

He didn't wait for the System to elaborate further. He photographed the ledger's key pages with his phone, replaced everything precisely as he'd found it, and was out the door and moving before the streetlamp two doors down had finished its next flicker.

~~~

The warehouse sat at the edge of the Docklands district, close enough to the water that the salt smell reached him a full block before the building itself came into view — smaller than the one Feng Li had died defending, unremarkable from the street, the kind of structure that drew no attention specifically because it had been built to draw none.

He circled it once before approaching, cataloguing exits, counting the shapes of two men stationed near a side entrance who carried themselves with the particular alertness of hired muscle rather than casual security. He could have gone to Osei. Could have called it in, waited for backup, done everything the file on his desk and three years of Ryu Han's service record insisted was the correct procedure.

He didn't.

The first guard didn't see him coming at all — a hand at the base of the skull, precisely calibrated, and the man folded without sound onto the wet concrete. The second turned in time to see something move in the shadows and had exactly long enough to reach for his weapon before a burst of telekinetic pressure, tightly controlled this time, pinned him bodily against the warehouse wall hard enough to knock the air from his lungs and nothing more.

'Careful,'he reminded himself, feeling the faint drain of the System's ledger tick downward. 'Measured. Not the mountain-breaking kind.'

Inside, the warehouse smelled of motor oil and mildew, sodium lights buzzing overhead in a way that reminded him unpleasantly of the alley where he'd died. He found the young woman from the photographs in a back room, bound to a chair, her head down, breathing shallow but steady. Alive. Frightened, but alive.

"I'm with the police," he said quietly, crouching in front of her, keeping his voice level in the particular register the System's borrowed instincts told him would read as reassuring rather than threatening. "I'm going to get you out of here."

Her head came up, eyes wide, disbelieving, and he had just enough time to register the shape of relief crossing her face before a third guard he hadn't accounted for came through the doorway behind him with a gun already raised.

He didn't turn. He didn't need to. The bullet struck him squarely between the shoulder blades and did precisely nothing — no wound, no blood, not even the force of impact staggering him forward the way it should have. He heard the guard's sharp intake of breath behind him, the particular silence of a man recalculating everything he thought he understood about the situation he'd walked into.

He turned then, slow, almost lazy, and watched the color drain from the guard's face as the man took an instinctive step backward, gun hand shaking.

"That's... that's not..." the guard started, and didn't finish, because there was no sentence available to him that made sense of what he'd just watched.

"You should sit down," he said, not unkindly, and a thread of telekinetic force folded the guard's knees without violence, dropping him neatly to the concrete where he stayed, too stunned to do anything but stare.

He freed the young woman's bindings with hands that were, for her benefit, gentler than strictly necessary, and helped her to her feet as her legs threatened to give out beneath her.

"Who are you?" she managed, voice cracking.

"Nobody important," he said, which felt, in the moment, more honest than anything else he could have offered her. "Can you walk?"

She could, barely, leaning heavily on his arm as he guided her out past the two unconscious guards and the third still frozen against the wall, out into the cold clean air of a street that had no idea what had just happened four blocks from a notary's peeling gold sign.

He called it in anonymously from a payphone three streets over, gave the location and nothing else, and was gone long before the first patrol car's lights swept across the warehouse's unremarkable face.

~~~

Across the city, in a parked car with a clear line of sight to the Docklands' main access road, Jin Rae lowered a pair of binoculars she'd been using more out of habit than necessity and stared at the anonymous 911 call transcript scrolling across her police scanner app, cross-referencing it automatically against the notary's address she'd been quietly surveilling for two days on an entirely separate hunch.

Same night. Same four-block radius. A missing woman recovered, three armed men incapacitated with no visible cause of injury, and an anonymous male caller whose voice, distorted through the payphone's cheap speaker, sent a small, cold prickle up the back of her neck that she couldn't yet explain.

She didn't know it was him. Not yet. But she wrote the timestamp down in her folder anyway, beneath the sticky note that already read 'watch this one', and underlined it twice.