Amelia's room was the smaller one.
She'd taken it without comment when they arrived — Gura got the one with the television, which was the only logical allocation given the circumstances. Amelia's had a desk, a window facing the alley, and a single overhead light that buzzed faintly if you left it on too long. She'd left it on too long.
It was fine. She'd worked in worse.
The desk was covered by morning.
Not messy — organized, the way a mind that couldn't afford to lose things organized. Photocopies in one stack. Field notes in another. The tablet propped against the wall showing a satellite overlay of the northern ranges, a blinking red marker where the thermal event had been logged three days ago. Pins connected by string on the corkboard she'd found in the closet and immediately requisitioned.
Five points. Converging.
She had two confirmed — Gura, and whoever had lit up Ignis like a second sun. The Underworld signature in the city's eastern sector was a strong third, though the spiritual division's data was patchy and she didn't fully trust their instrumentation. The São Paulo footage was a fourth, grainy and half-corrupted, a slight figure moving through wreckage with calm efficiency and then gone.
The fifth was a gap. A silence where data should be.
Amelia didn't like gaps.
She wrote #5 — nothing. why nothing in the margin of her notepad and stared at it for a while, then moved on.
Through the wall, intermittently, the sounds of the game.
Combat music. The specific sound effect of something being hit very hard. Occasionally, quiet — long enough that Amelia would think Gura had finally fallen asleep — and then it would start again.
She didn't check on her.
Gura had food, water, and something to do. That was more than most people got. And honestly, the sounds were useful — background confirmation that the most dangerous unknown variable on the planet was accounted for and currently occupied with fictional demons rather than real ones.
Amelia refilled her coffee from the small machine on the dresser and went back to the northern range data.
She found the watch around two in the morning.
Not literally — she knew where it was, it was in her coat pocket where it always was. She found it the way you find something you've been not-thinking-about for long enough that not-thinking-about it becomes its own kind of weight.
She'd been cross-referencing the Omega Prophecy variants — the Sumerian tablet transcription, the medieval manuscript scan, the Yucatan photographs — looking for secondary constants, anything else that survived the thousand years of translation drift intact. And she'd hit a reference in the manuscript margin. A small notation, almost a footnote, in a different hand than the main text.
The keeper of the Seal walks between moments. Her anchor is stolen time.
Amelia sat back in her chair.
She reached into her coat and put the watch on the desk in front of her.
Gold casing, worn smooth at the edges from handling. The chain was old — older than it looked, older than anything she'd owned before or since. The face was plain. No maker's mark. The hands moved with a precision that no watchmaker she'd ever consulted could fully account for, keeping perfect time against atomic clocks in a way that shouldn't be possible for a mechanical movement this old.
She'd taken it from a place she couldn't fully explain.
Not stolen, exactly. Or — stolen, exactly, but from a place that the word stolen didn't quite cover, because the place itself existed outside the normal jurisdiction of ownership. She'd been nineteen. A case had gone wrong in a way that cases shouldn't be able to go wrong — a localized paradox that had folded in on itself and taken her with it, depositing her somewhere that wasn't a somewhere, exactly. A threshold. A place between the ticking of one second and the next.
She'd been there for what felt like three days.
The watch had been on a table.
She'd picked it up because it was the only thing in the threshold that felt real — solid, weighted, ticking with a certainty that the rest of the place lacked. And then she'd found the way out, which had taken another day and a half and a level of lateral thinking she still wasn't entirely proud of, and when she'd come back through, the watch had come with her.
C.O.V.E.R. had run every test they had on it. The metallurgy dated it to no known period. The movement used no known mechanism. The hands had never been wrong, not by a second, not in fifteen years.
Enma had wanted to put it in containment.
Amelia had said no, in the way that she said no to things that weren't actually up for discussion, and that had been that.
She turned it over in her hand now, looking at the back. No inscription. Just the worn gold and the faint warmth it always carried, like it had been sitting in sunlight.
Her anchor is stolen time.
She put it back in her pocket.
Filed it under think about later and went back to the satellite data.
At some point she slept, briefly, with her head on her arms at the desk. She woke up to grey morning light through the alley window and the sounds of the game still going through the wall.
She sat up, rolled her neck, and checked the time.
The watch read 6:47.
Sunrise. Or close enough.
She made coffee, looked at the corkboard, looked at the satellite overlay, and started packing.
They'd leave tomorrow. Give Gura the day. The northern range marker wasn't moving — whoever had lit up Ignis was either still there or long gone, and one more day wouldn't change which.
But Amelia had a feeling it was still there.
Something that burned that bright didn't tend to move quietly.
She knocked on Gura's door at seven.
No answer. She opened it anyway.
Gura was on the floor, asleep, controller still in her hands, the television showing the game's pause menu over a screenshot of mid-combat. The noodle cups were lined up along the wall — four of them, empty, arranged with a neatness that suggested she'd done it consciously rather than just leaving them where they fell.
The DMC5 case was on the floor beside her, within arm's reach.
Amelia looked at the empty cups. Looked at the controller still gripped loosely in her hands.
She went back to her room, made a second coffee, and put it on the floor outside Gura's door.
Then she went back to the desk, opened her notepad, and wrote:
Leave tomorrow. North. Pack light.
And underneath it, after a moment:
Bring the console.