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Gregory groaned before he opened his eyes.
The alley smelled of standing water and something worse underneath it. When his vision cleared he was sitting against a brick wall, knees drawn up, a beggar child asleep against a crate a few feet away, curled around a bundle of rags like it was the only warm thing left in the world.
He looked down at his own hands.
They weren't the Knight of the Moon's hands. They were older, spotted at the knuckles, wrapped in the sleeves of an alchemist's robe he didn't remember putting on. He turned them over once, studying the lines across the palm like they belonged to someone he was meeting for the first time.
The Dusk title. He'd bestowed it on Silas himself, hours ago, standing in a clearing outside the capital with the old man's gratitude still ringing in his ears. He remembered the decision clearly now: a second body, ready and waiting, in case the first one didn't survive the night. He'd told himself it was a courtesy. It hadn't been. It had been exactly this. The bestowal carried more than a rank. It carried a door, and he'd built the door on purpose, and then let himself half forget he'd built it because thinking about needing it too directly would have meant admitting how likely tonight was to kill him.
It had triggered the instant the Knight of the Moon's head came apart, pulling him whole into the vessel he'd prepared for exactly that outcome.
"Aghh." He pressed two fingers to his temple. "Fucking shit."
Then something clicked, and the shock of it eased into something closer to relief. He exhaled through his nose.
"Good thing I'm smart enough to leave myself a way out."
He pushed himself to his feet, joints complaining in ways that felt unfamiliar, and crossed to the puddle collecting near the alley's drain. He crouched over it, elbows on his knees, and waited for the water to settle before he looked.
The face looking back was Silas's. Same gold-flecked skull, same lined forehead, except the eyes weren't the mad alchemist's anymore. They glowed, faint and gold, in a way Gregory recognized because he'd been reading that exact signature off other people's faces for thirty years.
"Fuck."
He sat with that for a second, turning his jaw side to side, testing the unfamiliar geometry of a face that wasn't his but currently obeyed him anyway.
Then he almost laughed.
"Serves you right, you old fuck." He turned his new hand over, inspecting it like a tool he'd just been handed. "You betray me, I take your body. Fair trade."
He rolled his shoulder. Something in it ached at a frequency that didn't match his memory of feeling pain, an old injury he hadn't earned catching up with him secondhand.
"This body isn't in great shape." He flexed his fingers, watching the knuckles crack one at a time. "But it's Legendary rank underneath the wrinkles. Could be worse."
He rubbed the back of his neck, thinking.
"I should go into hiding for now." A pause. "Contact Malvick."
He tapped one finger against his thigh, working through it, the rhythm of the tap keeping time with whatever calculation was running behind his eyes.
"If that horror doctor is coming for me, he's coming for Malvick too." His jaw tightened. "And that motherfucker owes me compensation for dragging me into this mess in the first place."
"Fuck."
He looked up at the strip of sky visible between the buildings, grey going toward morning, and let the silence sit for a moment before he broke it himself.
"Why did it turn out like this."
His expression settled into something grim, the corners of his mouth pulling down without him deciding to let them.
A guildmaster of one of the most powerful guilds in the world, one morning. A sewer rat hiding from his enemies by evening of the same day. He turned the thought over once more, pressing on it like a man checking whether a bruise still hurts, and found that it did.
"Life is a fucking bitch."
He huffed a breath through his nose, not quite a laugh.
"Hmm?"
Something small and warm had closed around his hand.
He looked down.
The beggar child had woken, or had never quite been asleep, and small dirty fingers were wrapped around two of his. The boy's eyes were huge in a thin face, the particular hollow-cheeked look of a kid who hadn't eaten a full meal in longer than he should have gone without one. His clothes were patched in three different fabrics, none of them matching, all of them clearly someone else's discards first.
"Uncle. Are you a priest?"
Gregory's first instinct was to pull his hand away.
He didn't.
Instead something in his posture eased, calculation settling into the shape of warmth so smoothly it would have fooled anyone who hadn't spent the last hour learning exactly how easily that transition could happen to someone else's face.
Maybe I can use him. A local kid knows every alley in a district like this. That's worth something.
"Child." He crouched to the boy's level, letting his voice go soft, the same register he'd used a thousand times in guild meetings to make junior staff feel heard right before he overruled them. "I'm a priest. I can heal people."
The boy's grip tightened.
"Do you need me to heal someone?"
"Yes." The boy's voice cracked on the word. "My mother's been really sick."
Gregory's smile didn't move. Underneath it, something colder was already running the calculation forward: sick mother, no father mentioned, a boy young enough to trust a stranger's robe over a stranger's face, old enough to have learned caution from somewhere.
"But." The boy hesitated, chewing his lower lip, glancing once toward the mouth of the alley like he was checking for a way out he already knew wasn't really there. "Are you a good guy, uncle? My mother said not to trust bad guys."
Gregory's expression twitched before he caught it.
He smiled wider to cover it.
"I'm as good as a human being can be." He spread his hands, palms up, the universal gesture of a man with nothing to hide. "If I said I was the second kindest man in the country, nobody would dare claim the first spot."
The boy's face stayed careful, weighing him rather than relaxing.
He tilted his head, small brow furrowing with the specific suspicion of a child who had been taught to read adults carefully because nobody else was going to protect him from the ones worth avoiding. His thumb traced a slow circle against the back of Gregory's hand, an anxious habit rather than an affectionate one.
"If you're really a good guy." The boy's grip on Gregory's fingers loosened, just slightly, the first small give before a hand lets go entirely. "Why would you go out of your way to hunt an innocent doctor? The one who works at his clinic. Everyone talks about him. They say he only ever helps people."
Gregory's expression froze.
The child watched him with the patient, unblinking directness only children and very old men ever seemed to manage, small fingers still resting against Gregory's palm, waiting for an answer that Gregory, for the first time in longer than he could remember, did not have ready.
Somewhere down the alley, water dripped from a broken gutter, counting off the silence one drop at a time.