Yuna Park sat near the back of a half-empty evening bus, phone pressed to her ear and a fresh bruise on her throat. Her guild leader's voice sounded warmer than it had in three years of employment.
That alone was enough to put her on guard.
"Rumors?" she managed.
"Unsettling ones." Mercer gave the word room to breathe, an old negotiation-table habit, waiting for the other side to start filling silences. "A friend sent me a note. Eclipse held some kind of recruitment circus on the city's eastern edge today. Five hundred hopefuls getting tossed around a government training hall by monsters, and in the middle of it, allegedly, was a girl in a cap and a mask, organizing strangers into formations and skating on ice she'd laid down herself."
The bus leaned through a corner, and Yuna watched the streetlights slide across the window, her reflection sliding with them, cap lost somewhere in that hall, mask still on.
