The man in the corner booth was still nursing his coffee when they approached — not looking at them, but with the specific quality of someone who had been tracking the door since they walked in and had simply chosen not to show it.
Levi slid into the seat across from him. Sylvia and Priscilla took either side.
"You the informant?" Levi said, quietly.
"Who's asking?"
"Steve, Margret, and Karen."
The informant looked at them for a moment. Then he laughed — genuine, low, the laugh of someone who had been doing this long enough to find the absurdity of it funny rather than frustrating. "Those are some lame names, homie. Which one's Karen though?"
Levi and Sylvia pointed at Priscilla. Priscilla pointed at Sylvia. There was a beat of silence while the three of them processed that they had given two different answers.
"That one," said Levi, pointing more definitively at Priscilla.
Priscilla elbowed him.
"You look like a Karen," the informant said to her, with the satisfied expression of someone who had identified a fact. "I mean that respectfully."
"That phrase has never meant anything respectfully," said Priscilla.
The waitress arrived. Levi and Sylvia ordered with the commitment of people who had been on a plane for four hours and hadn't eaten since Graviton. Priscilla ordered a lobster roll and a milkshake and watched Levi request three separate mains with the expression of someone who had accepted this about him.
"She'd also like one manager," Levi added to the waitress. "And a side complaint about the temperature of something."
"I will end you, Steve," said Priscilla.
The informant was grinning. "Alright alright. Around here they call me Jamal Ballin. JB works."
"JB," Levi said. "How long you been in Levatia?"
"Five years. Building connections, gathering intel, keeping a low profile." He said it with the ease of someone who had made peace with the life. "Been on Olympia's payroll for three of those years. They needed eyes in a place they couldn't officially put eyes."
"Respect," said Levi. "So what you got for us?"
Jamal leaned forward slightly — not dramatically, just enough to lower his voice. "Word from good sources is your ambassador's in the palace dungeon. They're keeping him deep — not surface level, below the main structure." He pulled papers from his bag and slid them across. "Good news is, I got you three job interviews. Maid, kitchen assistant, garden maintenance. Tomorrow, eight AM. Don't be late."
Levi picked up his résumé. Steve Bell, twenty-two, prior experience in domestic service. "You made these?"
"Spent two days on those, homie. Read through them tonight, memorise the work history, have an answer ready for why you want to work at the palace." Jamal looked at each of them. "They'll be checking references. I handled that too."
"You've been busy," said Sylvia.
"That's the job." He glanced around the diner — quick, professional. "One more thing. You get the ambassador out, you're going to need to leave the city. They're not going to let you walk. I have a route — coordinates on your phones now. Get there, ask for JB. My people will handle the rest."
Levi's phone buzzed. He checked it. "Got them."
"There were supposed to be four of you," Jamal said.
"The fourth one's... around," said Levi. "We don't really know his deal."
Jamal was quiet for a moment, his expression doing something specific. "One of those," he said.
"What does that mean?"
"It means on this kind of mission, there's usually someone with a task that nobody talks about." He picked up his coffee. "You'll figure it out. You seem sharp."
The food arrived. Levi and Sylvia engaged with their meals with the focus of people for whom this was not a social activity but a logistical one. Jamal watched them with the amusement of someone who had expected this.
"Y'all ordered half the menu," he said.
"This is restrained for them," said Priscilla.
When the plates were cleared and the conversation wound down to its natural end, Levi stood and they said their goodbyes. They were halfway to the door when the waitress appeared beside Jamal with the bill.
"Two hundred," she said.
Levi heard this from across the diner. He turned.
"Yo, homies—"
"You got us, right JB?" Levi said, already moving toward the door.
"You gon do me like that?" Jamal called after them. "I got expenses too, you know—"
They were outside. The door closed. They kept walking.
"He's going to remember that," Priscilla said.
"Good," said Levi. "He'll remember us. Assets remember people who owe them favours."
Sylvia looked at him. "That's either very strategic or a complete rationalisation."
"Why not both," said Levi.
✦ ✦ ✦
They hired a car and spent an hour driving the capital.
Levi had learned to do this on deployments — learn the shape of a place before you needed to navigate it quickly. The grid streets were easy to read but deceptive: the uniformity meant fewer landmarks, which meant disorientation under pressure. He noted the positions of the checkpoints, the patrol patterns of the security vehicles, the location of the main transit hubs.
The palace was in the city's northern quarter — set back from the main road behind a wall and a tree line, the architecture deliberate and slightly severe, the kind of building that communicated permanence rather than welcome. Levi looked at it from the car window as they drove past.
Heavy main gate. Guard posts at the corners visible above the wall line. Cameras at the entrance arch. The tree line was maintained at a distance from the wall that prevented cover — cleared intentionally, probably recently, the grass too even.
Someone had thought carefully about this place.
"Garden maintenance," he said, looking at the tree line. "That's the best position. Line of sight to the eastern wing."
"I called that one," said Priscilla.
"You called it because you wanted to be outside."
"I called it because it's tactically superior and I wanted to be outside."
They went back to the hotel.
✦ ✦ ✦
Zarraz was in Levi's room when they arrived, lying on the bed, watching a Levatian television programme with the focused attention of someone who had decided this was the best use of his time and was committed to the decision. A bag of snacks sat on the nightstand. He didn't look up when they came in.
"When did you get here?" Levi asked.
"An hour ago." Zarraz reached for the snack bag without looking away from the screen. "Where have you been?"
"Meeting our informant. Ambassador's in the palace dungeon. We have job interviews tomorrow at eight."
Zarraz nodded, still watching the screen.
"When you've got the ambassador out," he said, "tell me. That's when I do my part."
"Right," said Sylvia. "Your little classified task."
Zarraz said nothing.
The girls went to their room. Levi stood for a moment looking at Zarraz — the economy of him, the complete absence of any information he hadn't consciously chosen to give out — and then sat on his bed and looked at the ceiling.
The television murmured. Outside, the capital of Levatia went about its evening.
"Can I ask you something?" Levi said.
"Probably not."
"Our informant said something. About missions like this, there's usually someone with a task nobody talks about. And then you just said 'tell me when you've got the ambassador out' — which means your task happens after we complete ours. Which means your task is something that becomes possible once the ambassador is already safe and we're about to leave anyway." He looked at Zarraz. "And you're here with a classified task and nobody will tell us what it is."
Zarraz was watching the television.
"I think your task is to kill Emperor Lyon," Levi said.
The television kept murmuring. Zarraz reached for a snack. He chewed it.
Then he said: "I won't confirm that."
"But you're not denying it."
"I'm not confirming it."
Levi looked at him for a moment. "How many?" he asked.
Zarraz looked at him now — properly, the first time he'd given Levi his full attention. "How many what."
"You know what I mean."
A pause. The television filled the silence with something inconsequential.
"Seventeen," Zarraz said. "Soon to be eighteen."
The room was quiet.
Levi sat with that number. Seventeen people. He was seventeen years old. The coincidence of it sat in the room between them without either of them saying so.
"How old are you?" Levi asked.
"Nineteen."
Another silence.
"Your ability," Levi said. "What is it?"
Zarraz looked at him for a moment. Then a magic circle appeared in the air in front of him — not the floor circles Levi used for his own spells, but a free-floating one, mid-air, perfectly still. From it, a sniper rifle emerged and settled into Zarraz's hands with the ease of something that had always been meant to be there. He held it for a moment, letting Levi see it, then the circle reappeared and took it back.
"It's more complicated than it looks," Zarraz said. "But I'm not going to explain why."
"Conjuration," Levi said.
"Among other things."
They sat in the quiet for a moment. Then Zarraz turned back to the television.
"You're not what I expected," Zarraz said, after a while. Not to Levi specifically. More like a fact he was recording.
"What did you expect?"
"Rookies."
"We are rookies."
"Yeah." Zarraz reached for the snack bag. "You don't feel like it."
✦ ✦ ✦
Later, after Zarraz had fallen asleep with the television still on, Levi lay in his bed and looked at the ceiling.
He thought about the palace wall. The cleared tree line. The guard post positions.
He thought about Jamal's hint — *on this kind of mission, it's obvious* — and about Zarraz's seventeen. About the emperor holding an ambassador to demonstrate what he could do rather than because he needed the money.
Tomorrow they would walk into the emperor's palace through a job interview. They would learn the interior. They would find a dungeon. And somewhere in the city, Zarraz would be doing something he hadn't confirmed and wouldn't deny.
This was nothing like Celia. Celia had been a straight fight — myth against MK, everyone on the same side, the objective visible and the enemy identifiable. This was a place where the enemy wore the face of a functioning government and the danger was invisible until it wasn't.
He turned the dagger handle in his hands under the blanket. His mother's leather, his father's grip, Gabriel's blade.
He thought about what Melissa had said: *trust yourselves. You know more than you think you know.*
He turned off his bedside light. The television's glow from Zarraz's side of the room was the only illumination, casting the ceiling in moving patterns.
Tomorrow at eight.
He closed his eyes.