The phone rang like a single, precise sharpness in the dark — the kind of ring that slices clean through sleep and leaves an ache behind your eyes. Brendon slapped at the bedside table before he'd even fully opened his eyes, grabbing the handset blind and grunting as the world reassembled one limb at a time.
He muttered, half-awake and wholly annoyed. "Who the—"
A voice folded him into attention.
Ninja Fox
It was a breathless whisper because he knew that was what she called herself for him — the legend in black, the woman in the mask. In the darkness she could have been anybody. Even wrapped in a disguised voice, she moved like the night: too composed to be friendly, too amused to be gentle.
"Damn it. You woke me up," he said bluntly, trying to keep his tone from wobbling. He could hear the bunker's echo in his ears, the slow engine-breath of the building, the distant scrape of some late-night motor.
She chuckled, low and amused. "Isn't that the idea? I like my conversations when other people's thoughts are half-dreams. Makes it easier to get your honest one-liners."
Brendon rubbed at his temple, the sleepiness shredding as adrenaline threaded into it. "This had better not be one of your riddles. How's—" He stopped himself. No point starting that sentence; he already knew how the investigation looked from the outside. A town hemorrhaging headlines, a mayor sharpening knives in meetings, a media circus with teeth.
"How's the investigation going, sheriff?" she repeated, softer now, like she was genuinely asking.
He exhaled long and slow. The weight of three weeks drilled into his chest; weariness had a taste. "What do you think?"
"It looks like someone decided to film a forest barbecue." He couldn't stop the bitter edge.
Ninja Fox made a quiet sound between a sigh and a laugh. "You're not wrong. It was... theatrical."
"Your stunt doesn't help," Brendon said, cutting the word 'stunt' like it had made him into an accusation. "You bringing TRIAL_ONE out to the world — if you wanted corruption exposed, this — this just burned down our credibility. Mayor, press, everybody piling in. You blew it up to fix it. How is that a plan?"
There was a beat of silence. Then she said, precisely, "You always ask me to be a hero, Brendon. You always ask me to save people on a clock. I'm not your hero."
He bit, more sharply than he intended. "I'm not asking you to be anything. I'm asking you not to make things worse."
"You want simple," she said finally. "I want the truth."
"What the hell does that mean?" he demanded. "Truth how are you going to achieve that? Burning a woman doesn't make her more true. It just—" He stopped himself again because the anger that wanted to shout was heavier than his sleep-fuzzed voice could carry.
The question hung between them — an accusation and a plea braided together. After a long, weighted breath, she said, "Because truth is messy. You're impatient for clean things. Clean names. Clean arrests. Clean press conferences. Real traumas are made of dirt and compromise and people who know where to hide. I needed to move the timeline."
"By making us the laughingstock?" The words tasted like ash.
"I moved the timeline to expose a network," she said. "Networks don't collapse at once. They fall apart at the seams — leaks, bad payrolls, a single email that shouldn't exist. TRIAL_ONE wasn't a performance to humiliate Ridgecliff. It was a signal. You can't see all of it from your local paper."
He wanted to chew that apart, to demand proof, to ask why she'd pick this town like some petty stage. "And now we have the mayor breathing down our necks and people afraid to leave their doors. You think this helps the hybrids you said you protected?"
"The same argument again, God! I don't know if you are ask me to be sentimental or not." she said, voice tight for a second. Then: "No. I always think strategically. Get your head out of the mud, Brendon. Think three moves ahead."
He felt the familiar hot stir — irritation veined with the old, old ache of betrayal and dependence. He knew her enough to know when she chose to threaten with silence. "All right," he said carefully. "Three moves ahead. Give me one move I can work with that doesn't blow the station to rubble pieces."
"For now? Don't trust Mark," she answered without preface.
The name hit like cold water. "What?"
"Don't trust him," she repeated, softer. "Not fully. Not until you hear things that sound like they're not said by a scared man but by a scripted one. Don't treat his grief as fact. Treat it as evidence." The voice on the line was flat, but the warning undercut it. "If someone is using him, you'll feed them by believing him."
Brendon closed his eyes. He had expected denials or instructions — not this. "How do you even know—"
"Because Camelia reads into things you don't," she cut in, and the answer was a knife behind the simple cadence. "You have worked with Camelia, right? So you should know she gets into places. She has a node watching the station's crap. She found odd pings, late-night logins to a procurement account. She likes to tinker with things. Don't ask how — don't you ever get that way? People doing the things you don't know are possible? Just accept sometimes someone else will do the ugly work."
Brendon felt equal parts exasperated and resigned. Camelia. Of course Camelia. The chameleon anthro had a way of slinking into systems like moss — silent, efficient, potentially illegal, and always useful. Brendon had relied on her before because he had few options but also because she had saved them. He'd paid for it with nights where he lay awake wondering how many lines they'd crossed.
"You're telling me to trust a hacker?" he said, but it came out with less contempt than he'd meant. There was, despite everything, a quiet gratitude that undercut his annoyance.
"I'm telling you to be careful," Ninja Fox corrected. "If Mark says names — don't take them at face value. If he points to Kelvin and says 'this is him,' see where Kelvin's counsel moves first. People like Kelvin don't go to ground alone. They have teams. They have lawyers who f*cking delay everything. Watch delays. Watch the rehearsed answers. Then bind them by timing, Brendon. We have to bring them out by their impatience."
He thought about Kelvin Richardson — the Lidless Eye behind Eris Noir, the man who owned a Lamborghini and smiled like it cost nothing. The web of corporate accounts that Sofie had begun to thread hinted at him. Ninja Fox had fingered him, but hadn't given him proof — only a pointer. All of which was both maddening and useful. He exhaled, aware his voice had thinned. "All right. Don't trust Mark. Wait for the right time. Don't go public with assumptions."
"Exactly," she said. "For now, let them spin. Keep your team locked. Keep the evidence clean. Don't let the mayor or the council make you turn into their scapegoat."
"You tell me that as if it's easy."
"Because it isn't," she said without apology. "But you've got an advantage you don't use: people underestimate you because you look like a wolf. They see the roar and they ignore that damn brain. Use that. Let them talk. While they talk, you will checkmate them."
It should have been comforting — the idea that his scorned face was a kind of camouflage — but the reassurance was brittle. He could be hidden and hunted at the same time.
"One more thing," she said after a pause.
He braced himself.
"If we're going to make this do something besides burn the town, you'll need to make a small concession."
"A concession being what? — "I let you orchestrate everything and the station writes 'hero' in neon while I take the heat?"" He said it before he could stop, and the anger in it cooled her laugh.
"Not that," she said. "You let Camelia have access to certain records she can't get without a watcher. She won't tweak the evidence. She won't touch the crime-scene files. She'll look for procurement, for transfers, for the backflow. If you let it happen, she can find who's funding what. If you don't, you're stuck looking at bodies and costumes and nothing to bind them."
He felt the electric prickle along his skin — the old argument, the only one that had ever really made him pause: break rules quietly and you might save more people, or obey rules purely and let predators keep their masks on.
"Are you insane? You are asking me to authorize illegal access?"
She didn't bother denying it. "Yes."
He stared at the ceiling and the small, ugly number of things that had become his life: a mayor more worried about tourism than justice; a chief who wanted no leaks; a town that loved a simple villain. He thought of Whitney/Jackson/Johnson — whatever name he had in the real world — naked in a rim of fire, a camera panning like it was art.
"You keep telling me the right time will come," he said slowly. "You keep telling me to wait."
"I told you to stay calm," she said. "I'm telling you to be ruthless when it's necessary. Not to be reckless. Wait. Camelia will get you the strings. Pull them and see who trembles."
Brendon sat up all the way then, the bed a naked platform under him. "If Camelia touches our evidence, if anything's tampered with—"
"Then I'll find it and burn it," she said. "And I'll burn the burners who touched it. You don't have to like how it happens. You only need to be able to present results. This is how it works in the dark corridors you never visit. If you can't stomach that, hand the case to someone with marble hands and clean nails."
He closed his eyes. He knew the woman on the line well enough to guess how far she'd go. He knew Camelia well enough to know her fingers could dance through firewalls. He knew his own limits: the law he loved and the beast he carried in ruined generations of muscle. He had, in the past, chosen shades of wrong to keep people alive. He wasn't innocent of that calculus.
"So I won't trust Mark," he said finally. "I don't give Camelia the keys to a crime scene. She will only be allowed to look at administrative and financial records. Procurement, transfers, shell companies. Nothing on forensics. Nothing that burns a case. Pass the order through the chief."
"You make it sound diplomatic," she said. "Good."
He could almost hear her smile. "And Brendon — for your sake — take your pills."
The bluntness landed like a hand on his shoulder. It was neither patronizing nor clinical. It was practical; it was a command.
"Hu...huh what?" he said.
"Uh! Nothing." She said. "Keep your people in the safe loop. Don't broadcast panic. I'll let Camelia know."
The line switched to a soft click. The night hummed again. Brendon lay back down, the mattress folding around his weight like an old, indifferent friend. The dark was thick and private.
He replayed the call in the quiet. The words had the taste of orders and alliances. Ninja Fox lived in that grey place he had always resented and secretly needed. She gave him a plan that was both helpful and dangerous. Camelia would get access to the administrative back channels. Mark was on warning. Kelvin's lawyers would keep delaying. He had a rope to pull, but the end of it was knotted into a place he couldn't see.