I slept badly.
Not nightmares. Not exactly. More like the kind of sleep that keeps interrupting itself — thoughts surfacing, images, half-formed conclusions that dissolved before I could grip them.
The festival. The bombs. The way the whole thing had felt assembled rather than organic.
Bella's voice, quiet against the last fireworks: I think it would look exactly like this.
I gave up at six and moved to the balcony, a mug going cold between my palms. The city was muted at this hour. Even Annex City, which never fully surrendered to silence, had a narrow window in the early grey where it almost exhaled.
I was still sitting there when my phone buzzed.
Not TRAD.
Kenzie.
I stared at the screen longer than made sense.
Hey stranger. I heard there was excitement at Sunfire last night. Are you okay?
Three things registered in quick succession.
First — heard. Not saw, not read about. Heard. Like someone had told her directly.
Second — the timestamp. 6:04 AM. Either she was an early riser or she hadn't slept.
Third — I wasn't surprised to hear from her.
That last one bothered me more than the others.
I'm fine, I typed. How did you know I was there?
The reply was immediate, which answered the sleep question.
A city this size has a lot of eyes. I worry about you, you know. Even when I probably shouldn't.
That last line arrived somewhere I wasn't prepared for.
She always did that. Left things open just enough that you had to decide how much weight to give them. Said things that could be casual and weren't. Smiled like she had a hundred more thoughts behind the one she let you see.
I thought about what TRAD had told me weeks ago. About the Princess choosing me. About eyes on me since I first arrived in Annex City. About the pub, and the extra money under the cup, and the way Kenzie had looked at me that first night — like she was solving something she already knew the answer to.
You should sleep, I sent.
Should and will are different things, she replied. Come find me this weekend. I mean it this time.
A pause. Then:
I miss you. The real kind. Not the polite kind.
I set the phone face-down on the railing.
The city breathed below.
Somewhere behind me, the soft click of the balcony door next to mine.
I didn't turn around.
"You're up early," Bella said.
"Couldn't sleep."
She appeared at the partition, coffee already in hand, hair loose around her shoulders for once. Without the ponytail, without the jacket, she looked younger. Not softer — just less armored. Like a version of herself she didn't often let out before noon.
"Me neither." She leaned on her railing, mirroring my posture, the city stretching out in front of us both. "Thinking?"
"Thinking."
She didn't ask about what.
I didn't ask about her.
We stayed like that — two people separated by a thin dividing wall, watching the city slowly remember itself in the growing light. It wasn't comfortable, exactly. It wasn't uncomfortable either.
It was something harder to name than either.
She spoke first.
"Yesterday went well," she said, low and measured. "All three devices neutralized, no civilian contact, no direct confrontation with active units." A pause. "But something's off about the whole brief."
"The placement was too deliberate," I said.
"And the timing." She turned the coffee mug in her hands. "TRAD had the coordinates within an hour of deployment. That's not surveillance. That's a source inside the operation."
"Which means someone wanted us there."
"Someone wanted to see us work." Her eyes stayed on the city. "Together. In daylight. Trackable."
I thought about the drone that had swept the thoroughfare. The four-second window before it would have caught us. The mobile unit on a device that was supposed to be stationary.
"They upgraded the third bomb last minute," I said.
"I noticed."
"That's not standard protocol for a distraction op. If you want a diversion, you keep it simple. You don't add moving parts that could complicate your own exit."
Bella was quiet for a moment.
"Unless the moving part wasn't for the distraction," she said carefully. "Unless it was for documentation."
The word landed clean and cold.
Documentation.
Someone hadn't just wanted to flush us out.
Someone had wanted footage.
Before I could pull that thread further, three sharp knocks hit my front door.
Bella glanced toward my apartment with a slight raise of her brow.
"Expecting someone?"
"On an off day, at seven in the morning?" I pushed off the railing. "No."
Sky stood in the doorway looking like a man who had been personally wronged by the universe.
He was still in a hoodie that suggested he'd thrown it on approximately forty seconds ago. His hair was doing three separate things. In his hand, phone screen-forward, was an image I recognized immediately even from a distance.
Two figures at Sunfire.
Lanterns overhead. A crowd blurred soft in the background.
Her arms around my neck, hair loose, face tilted just slightly toward mine.
The angle was from behind and above. Clean. Deliberate. Like whoever took it knew exactly what they were doing.
At the bottom of the post, the account name: @nobody_asked — and below that, already sitting at two hundred and forty-seven likes at barely past six in the morning:
Mystery boy carries the Ice Witch through Sunfire? who is he and why does she look human?? 👀 #Socials #AnnexCity
I kept my face very still.
Sky stared at me with the energy of a man assembling a trial in real time.
"Explain," he said.
"Good morning to you too."
"Marx."
"Sky."
He shouldered past me into the apartment, still holding the phone up like evidence in a courtroom. His eyes swept the room with the methodical desperation of someone looking for confirmation of a theory — and found it immediately when they landed on the coat draped over the back of my couch.
He stopped walking.
Looked at the coat.
Looked at me.
Looked at the coat again.
"That's not your coat," he said slowly.
I said nothing.
His voice went up slightly. "That is a woman's coat. That is a woman's coat on your couch. At seven in the morning. On an off day." He pointed at the phone. "And this — this is you. And her. At Sunfire. And she is on your back, Marx, which means you were close enough for her to be on your back, which means—"
"Sky."
"—which means you lied to me. Multiple times. With your face. Which I trusted—"
"Sky."
"—I trusted that face—"
"Nothing happened."
He pressed his palm flat to his forehead. "You carried Isabella Lopez on your back through the Sunfire Festival and you're telling me nothing happened."
"The coat was from before. She came over, we—"
"She came over." He said it like a confession. "She. Came over."
"It's not what—"
He had already drifted, the way Sky drifted when he was processing something too large for standing still, hands gesturing at invisible points in the air. He moved through the living room, past the couch, toward the open balcony door.
He stepped outside.
I saw it happen in slow motion and could do absolutely nothing about it.
Sky at the railing.
His gaze traveling automatically to the left.
Finding Bella at her own railing, still in the loose shirt and sleep shorts, hair unbound, coffee cup at her lips, expression calm the way a lake is calm when there's nothing threatening it.
Their eyes met.
She lowered the cup.
And then — in a tone I had never once heard her use with another person — warm, unguarded, almost amused:
"Morning."
Sky's brain left his body.
I watched it happen. The slight slackening of his jaw. The blink that lasted about half a second too long. The way his hand gripped the railing not because he needed support but because his nervous system had quietly suspended operations.
Bella glanced at me over his shoulder. One eyebrow lifted just a fraction — not a question, more like acknowledgment.
Then she straightened, tucked her hair behind her ear, and stepped back inside.
Her door clicked shut.
Sky stood at the railing for another three full seconds.
Then he walked very carefully back into my apartment, closed the balcony door behind him, and sat down on the couch.
He sat there.
In silence.
Which, for Sky, was genuinely alarming.
"You okay?" I asked.
"She said morning to me," he said.
"She did."
"Like a normal person."
"Yes."
"She smiled." He pressed both hands against his knees. "It was a real smile. Like, it reached her eyes and everything. I didn't know her eyes did that." He looked at me with the expression of a man whose entire worldview had just been gently restructured. "Marx. The Ice Queen has a morning voice."
"Don't call her that."
"Everyone calls her that."
"I know. Stop."
He looked at the coat again. Then at me.
"I need details," he said. "Everything. From the beginning."
"No."
"Marx—"
"Not happening, Sky."
"Just the broad strokes—"
"No."
"One sentence—"
"We're not doing this."
He fell back against the couch cushions with the dramatic collapse of a man who had tried his best and been failed by the world. He stared at the ceiling.
"You know," he said eventually, "for someone who claims nothing happened, you're being very secretive about nothing."
I handed him a mug of coffee.
He took it.
We sat in the kind of silence that had already said too much.
Three floors up, in a corner apartment that always smelled faintly of cold tea and old books, a different morning was unfolding.
The phone appeared over a shoulder — slid into view by a girl whose name she'd already forgotten, one of those people who collected information the way others collected receipts, keeping everything until it became useful.
"Look at this," the girl said. "It's already everywhere on Socials."
The screen showed the post.
Lanterns. A crowd. Two figures.
She took the phone.
Studied it the way she studied most things — without hurry, without expression, with the particular quality of attention that made people feel simultaneously seen and uncertain.
The mystery boy's face wasn't visible.
But she didn't need to see his face.
She recognized the coat.
She recognized the way he stood.
She recognized, with the quiet precision of someone who had been trained to notice exactly these details, the particular angle of his shoulders under the weight he was carrying.
She handed the phone back without comment.
"Do you know him?" the girl asked.
"No," she said simply.
She picked up her own phone, opened a blank note, and typed a single line.
Then she set it face-down on her desk and went to make tea.
The note read: Confirm: Lopez and Cartez. Operational or personal?
She didn't send it to anyone.
Not yet.