Alternate Adrien tucked Alternate Plagg carefully into his shirt pocket, schooled his expression into something that he hoped read as mildly sheepish rather than calculated, took one steadying breath, and went downstairs.
Nathalie was in her office. She had the particular stillness of someone who has been managing too many things for too long and has found a moment to simply exist — her fingers pressed to her temples, her eyes briefly closed. The stack of documents on the desk beside her suggested the moment wouldn't last.
When the door opened, she straightened automatically, and the weariness smoothed itself out of her expression with the practiced efficiency of someone who has spent years ensuring that her face communicates exactly what she intends it to.
Her gaze went — reflexively, before her attention had fully arrived — to his left hand.
Empty.
She had developed the habit in the first week of having two identical faces in the house, and she maintained it without thinking about it now. Left hand: Alternate Adrien. Right hand: Adrien.
Left hand. Empty.
"Adrien," she said, with the warmth she reserved for him specifically. "Is something wrong?"
Alternate Adrien felt the small, quiet relief of a test passed. He let the embarrassment he was constructing settle into his face — a slightly rueful look, a hand moving toward the back of his neck. "Nathalie, I... there's a file in my room. I've forgotten the password." He paused, as though this cost him something to admit. "Could you help me with it?"
Nathalie looked at him for a moment. Something in her expression shifted — not suspicion exactly, but the careful attention of someone who knows a person well enough to notice when they're not quite themselves.
Adrien asking for her help with a locked file was unusual. Adrien asking for her help with anything he could manage alone was unusual.
"Is it important?" she asked.
"Yes." No elaboration. No performance. Just the word, and the steadiness behind it.
That, more than anything, decided her. She knew Adrien's relationship with his father. She had spent years navigating the space between them, translating for both sides, absorbing the tension that neither would fully acknowledge. If he had come to her, there was a real reason.
"Of course," she said, and rose.
She didn't ask what was in it.
She would see when she got there.
---
On the outskirts of Paris, the afternoon had been quiet in the way that afternoons at animal rescue stations tend to be — full of small, undemanding work and the particular satisfaction of tasks that are finite and measurable and ask nothing complicated of you.
Jaden, Kagami, and Mylène had returned the last of the cats to their cages, straightened up in the small, warm-smelling room, and allowed themselves a moment of the particular tiredness that follows work done with your hands.
Mylène pushed her hair back from her forehead and smiled — the easy, unhurried kind. "How do you feel? Both of you?"
"Good," Jaden said.
Kagami considered the question with the seriousness she brought to all questions. She had not expected to find the work interesting. She had found something else in it instead — something she wasn't entirely sure how to name. The cats had been wary at first, drawn tight into themselves, watching her from the backs of their cages with the careful eyes of creatures that have learned not to assume. She had been patient, not because she felt patient but because it was the efficient approach. And gradually — by increments so small they were almost invisible — they had come forward. One had pressed its head against her hand.
She was still thinking about that.
"From a practical standpoint," she said, "the method has significant inefficiencies. The intake will always exceed capacity. Many of them won't be placed in time."
She said it the way she said most things — evenly, as observation rather than criticism. But Mylène heard something in it that Kagami perhaps hadn't intended to put there.
She straightened. Her voice was quiet, but it didn't waver. "Even if that's true — right now, in this moment, they're warm. They're cared for. Whatever comes later doesn't erase that." She looked at the row of cages, the small faces watching them through the wire. "It's not nothing."
"Both of those things are true simultaneously," Jaden said, before the silence could become a disagreement. "Different approaches to the same problem. Neither of you is wrong about the part you're looking at."
Kagami considered this. Mylène smiled.
Then all three of their phones went off at once.
The alert was sharp and immediate — the kind of sound designed to reach through whatever you're doing and land in the front of your attention. They looked at their screens in the same moment.
*Akumatized Person Alert — Puppet Master. Ability: control of others. Current location approximated below. Citizens advised to remain indoors and avoid all public areas.*
Jaden checked the map. Close. Closer than was comfortable.
"We need to leave," Kagami said. She was already dialing. "Smart sedan — my coordinates—"
The red car arrived at the rescue station entrance within two minutes. They got in.
They didn't see the birds.
Hundreds of them — pigeons, sparrows, corvids — moving in the particular way controlled things move: too coordinated, too purposeful, banking in slow, overlapping arcs above the streets below. Eyes that had been bright an hour ago, hollow now. Watching everything. Reporting everything.
*There.* The red car. The prince inside it.
*Found him.*
---
The Puppet Master's smile appeared before the thought had fully finished.
She raised one hand, threads extending from her fingertips like the spokes of a wheel spinning outward, and the puppet army responded without being asked twice.
The vehicles came from three directions simultaneously — cars, a delivery van, a bus whose driver stared straight ahead with that same absent sweetness on his face — converging on the intersection ahead of Smart Sedan with the calm, unhurried certainty of a net being drawn closed. Smart Sedan's navigation recalculated. Then recalculated again. Then stopped suggesting alternatives.
The car came to rest in the middle of the intersection, surrounded on all sides, the hum of engines forming a wall of sound around it.
Inside, Mylène had both hands pressed to the window glass, looking out at the circle of blank, smiling faces. "What do we do?"
"We wait." Kagami's voice was completely steady. "Going outside puts us in range of her strings. We have no way to fight her, no way to resist the threads, and nothing useful to contribute except additional targets." She looked at the surrounding vehicles with the analytical calm of a fencer reading a position. "Ladybug and Cat Noir will come. The safest thing we can do is still be here when they arrive."
Jaden said, "She's right."
Mylène nodded. Her hands stayed on the glass.
They waited.
The silence outside was stranger than noise would have been. The puppet army didn't fidget, didn't speak, didn't look at each other. They simply held their positions with the perfect stillness of things that have no inner weather. Dry leaves skittered across the asphalt. An engine idled.
Then the Puppet Master arrived.
She came through the gap in the puppet lines the way a figure enters a stage — unhurried, surrounded, already central to everything. The black and cyan of her costume caught the afternoon light. She stopped in front of Smart Sedan and looked at the car with the patient, certain expression of someone who has already resolved how this scene ends.
Her voice, when it came, was both childlike and entirely serious — the combination that children produce when they are being very sincere about something that sounds like a fairy tale.
"My prince." A pause, warm and declarative. "Your princess has come. It's time for you to greet her."
The car door opened.
Jaden stepped out.
He didn't hurry. He didn't scan the surrounding puppet army with the evaluating look of someone cataloguing threat levels. He simply stood at the open car door, composed and unhurried, and looked at the Puppet Master the way you look at someone you're taking seriously.
Then he tilted his head toward the car behind him.
"You came for me," he said. His voice was gentle, and very calm. "Not them. Can they go?"
The Puppet Master looked at him.
She had prepared for resistance. She had prepared for questions and arguments and the need to demonstrate her power before he would believe in it. She had prepared for the complicated negotiation of forcing someone to comply.
He was simply standing there. Asking her a reasonable question in a reasonable tone, as though this were a conversation between equals — as though she were a princess and he were a prince and that was simply the situation, and they were discussing it like two people who both understood the situation.
Something in Manon's chest, underneath all the dark energy and the mask and the borrowed power, went very warm.
She moved forward without answering — simply stepped into the space between them and wrapped her arms around him, her masked face pressing briefly to his shoulder.
Jaden let her. His arms came around her carefully, steadily, one hand making a slow, reassuring pass across her back.
After a moment she looked up at him from the circle of his arms, and her eyes behind the mask were bright.
"Of course," she said. "They can go."
---
Inside the car, Kagami had gone very still.
She had been prepared for a great many outcomes. This had not been among them.
She gave herself exactly one second to process it. Then: "Smart sedan. Drive."
Mylène had both hands pressed together, watching through the back window.
The puppet vehicles drew back. The road opened. Smart Sedan moved forward into the gap, and the wall of controlled cars closed behind it like water behind a ship, and then the intersection was behind them, and Jaden was not.
Mylène watched until he disappeared from sight.
She didn't say anything.
---
Three streets away, Kagami ordered the car into a quiet alley and sat in the silence for a moment.
"I should have gone down," Mylène said. Her voice was very controlled, which meant she was working hard at it. "I should have—"
"To what end?" Kagami's voice wasn't unkind. It was simply precise. "You step out of the car, and the Puppet Master has three people to manage instead of one. The vehicles don't clear. The road doesn't open. Jaden still ends up in her custody, and so do you, and I lose the ability to call for help." She looked at Mylène with the clear, even gaze of someone who has genuinely thought this through. "The outcome with the highest probability of Jaden coming out safely was the one we chose. That's not a comfortable fact, but it's the true one."
Mylène was quiet. Then: "He won't be hurt?"
"She doesn't want to hurt him." The certainty in Kagami's voice was real — she had watched the Puppet Master's eyes through the car window. She had seen what was in them. It was not harm. It was something considerably more complicated. "She wants to keep him. Which is a different problem entirely, and one that Ladybug and Cat Noir are better equipped to solve than we are."
Mylène looked out the window.
She looked up.
"Kagami." Her voice changed. "*Kagami.*"
On the rooftop three stories above — moving fast, leaping between buildings with the particular fluid economy of people who do this constantly — two figures. One red and spotted. One black, with a tail.
Mylène was out of the car before it had finished registering, waving both arms above her head, shouting upward with everything she had.
---
They had been slowed.
The birds had formed a dense, shifting interference pattern above the rooftops — hundreds of them, banking and wheeling in overlapping layers, responding to the heroes' movements with the coordinated intelligence of a single organism. Every line Ladybug tried to establish with her yo-yo found birds in the way. Every roof Cat Noir gained gave him a new wall of wings to navigate around. They'd lost several minutes to it — frustrating, deliberate, effective.
When the voice came from below, both of them stopped.
Cat Noir spotted Mylène first. Then Kagami, standing a step behind her with her arms folded and her expression neutral.
They dropped to street level.
"Mylène." Ladybug's voice was careful in a specific way — controlled worry, the professional kind that doesn't let itself become unhelpful. Her eyes moved across both of them quickly. "Are you both alright? What happened?"
What she didn't say: *where is Jaden.*
She didn't need to say it. His absence was its own answer.
Kagami spoke before Mylène could fully organize the words. She described the sequence of events in the same tone she would have used to debrief a training exercise — complete, sequential, unembellished. The alert. The birds. The intersection. The Puppet Master's arrival and her titles for herself and Jaden. Jaden's negotiation. The exchange. The departure.
Cat Noir's expression cycled through several things. He landed on something between impressed and deeply amused, and let out a slow breath. "I have to say. Being abducted as a romantic lead by a supervillain with a princess-and-prince fixation is a very specific outcome. He's having a more eventful afternoon than I expected."
"Cat Noir."
"I'm done, I'm done."
Ladybug had already turned to face the direction Smart Sedan had come from — the direction of the city center, of Notre Dame's towers visible at distance, of wherever the Puppet Master was taking her procession. Her yo-yo was already in her hand.
"Go home," she said to Kagami and Mylène. Not harshly — with the focused economy of someone who has already moved past this part of the situation and is thinking about the next one. "Both of you. We'll handle it from here."
She didn't wait for a response. The yo-yo arced outward, caught a drainpipe four stories up, and she was moving — pulling herself up and forward, the city opening ahead of her.
Below, Cat Noir looked at Kagami and Mylène, offered a small salute that was significantly more casual than the moment warranted, and followed.
---
In the mental link, Hawk Moth watched the procession rolling through the streets of Paris — the open-top car, the puppet escort, the Puppet Master's hand laced through Jaden's with the absolute confidence of a child who has gotten exactly what she wanted — and tried to locate, somewhere in the spectacle, the original operational objective.
It was not immediately visible.
"This is going to be a problem," he said, to no one in particular.
"Did you expect otherwise?" The other voice in the link carried the dry amusement of someone who has stopped being surprised by this. "She's six years old and she has an army and a prince. The Miraculouses are a theoretical concept to her at this point. She's planning a wedding."
Hawk Moth was quiet for a moment.
"...Notre Dame," he said finally, with the tone of a man who has identified where something is going wrong and is not yet sure how to stop it.
"Notre Dame," the other confirmed.
A pause.
"She said she knows our conditions."
"She said she knows them, yes."
They both watched the procession turn a corner and disappear toward the Seine.
"Children," Hawk Moth said, in a tone that encompassed a great many things, "are extremely difficult to work with."