The footage had long stopped playing, but the weight of it lingered like smoke after a fire, thick, choking, impossible to ignore. The grainy monitor cast a weak glow in the hallway, tinting the shadows along the walls a sickly blue. Dust drifted lazily in the amber shaft of late afternoon light filtering in through the high windows. Neither of them spoke.
Maisie sat with her back pressed to the wall just below the projection screen, arms wrapped around her knees, as if the pressure might hold her together. Dash stood a few feet away, unmoving, his fingers digging into the wood frame of a shuttered display case. The silence between them was like an aftershock that hummed under their skin.
Igor's image still burned behind Maisie's eyes. His wings, one dragging, broken, his bare feet bloodied and raw, and that look in his eyes. Haunted. Hollow. But not empty. No matter how badly he'd been hurt, there was still a flicker of recognition, of something real, burning beneath all that pain.
"He was calling out," Maisie said, at last, voice so soft it barely qualified as sound.
Dash didn't turn to face her. "You sure?" he asked, but his voice lacked its usual edge. It was flat. Hollow.
Maisie nodded. "Not with words. But... I saw it. In his eyes. He wasn't just wandering. He was looking for something."
"For us," Dash said after a beat. "Or for the past. Might be the same thing."
A cold breeze traced its way through the cracked hallway vent, ruffling a few loose papers on the floor. One of them fluttered past Maisie's boot, the list of emergency rations she'd scribbled two nights ago. She caught it with a distracted hand, and the crumpled sheet seemed suddenly... convenient.
She reached for her comm unit, thumb-swiping to the archived transmission Gene had sent earlier. The coordinates still glowed faintly on the screen. No message. No voice. Just numbers.
Maisie stared at them, her mind whirring. There'd be no follow-up. No second chances. Gene wasn't broadcasting from a place of safety, she was gambling. And Maisie understood the stakes better now than ever before.
She pulled a pen from the inside pocket of her coat and crouched beside a low cabinet. The paper smoothed awkwardly beneath her hand as she wrote out the coordinates with slow, deliberate strokes.
"You are writing it down?" Dash asked, voice dry. Tired.
"I don't trust the tech anymore," Maisie murmured. "If something wipes this, if they track it... at least we'll have this."
Dash finally looked at her then, eyes shadowed but not entirely closed off. "And if it's a trap?"
Maisie folded the paper twice, creasing it neatly, and slid it into the inner lining of her coat. "Then it's one we walk into with our eyes open."
A long pause. Then Dash exhaled slowly through his nose and nodded once as if that was all the answer he needed. "She's not going to wait forever," he said and started toward the west stairwell.
Maisie didn't move right away. Her fingers lingered on the screen one last time, tracing the static-thin border of the coordinates as if trying to memorize the numbers through touch alone. The hallway seemed to lean inward around her, walls closing in with secrets and half-buried ghosts.
"I don't think he knows who he is," she whispered to herself. "But I think he knows who he's not."
She stood and followed Dash without another word. The house was quiet except for the sound of their footsteps, slow, deliberate, and fading into the bones of the estate as they made their way toward the old cellar door.
──✦──
The stone steps spiraled down into silence.
Maisie's flashlight cut a pale arc through the dust-choked dark, illuminating fragments of long-forgotten history, splintered crates, rusted iron racks, and bottles too thick with grime to read. The air was damp and still, and each footfall echoed as if the cellar itself was holding its breath.
Behind her, Dash carried a backup lantern, its mechanical hum faint but constant. The noise grated on his nerves. Or maybe everything did now. He hadn't spoken since they left the hallway. Neither had Maisie.
At the base of the steps, the cellar opened into a vaulted chamber. Rows of support columns loomed like rib bones, and the walls were stone, thick, old, and untouched by light for decades. Dust hung heavy, disturbed only by the two beams slicing through it.
Then, movement.
A flicker. Subtle. From beyond a central row of collapsed shelving.
Maisie halted, her hand drifting toward her side. Not a weapon. Just instinct. Her voice barely rose above a whisper.
"…Gene?"
Silence.
Then, slowly, a figure stepped into view.
She wasn't armed. Not visibly. She didn't raise her hands or call out. She simply emerged, quiet, deliberate, and composed, her silhouette defined by the glint of silver from her utility belt and the faint halo of her glowstick set on the floor behind her.
Gene.
Her eyes met Maisie's and held. Neither girl moved.
Dash kept to the side, his stance tense, unreadable. His fingers hovered near the strap of his knife holster, though he didn't reach for it. Yet.
Gene didn't flinch. "You came."
Maisie's throat tightened. "You sent us a message. We came for Igor."
Gene gave a small nod. Her expression didn't change, but something in her posture softened, just slightly. "I wasn't sure if you'd read it."
"We read it," Dash said, his voice like gravel. "We've seen what they did to him."
Gene's gaze flicked to him. "Then you understand why I had to disappear."
"I understand a lot of things," Dash muttered. "Doesn't mean I trust you."
Maisie stepped between them before the tension could snap taut. "This isn't about trust," she said, quietly but firmly. "It's about making sure Igor doesn't end up back in their hands."
That, finally, made Gene blink. "Then we're on the same side."
Maisie didn't answer right away. She studied Gene with a gaze that had sharpened since their last meeting in the greenhouse two days ago, not with malice, but with a wariness born from betrayal. Gene looked hollower now, the kind of thinness that came from evasion and exhaustion, not time.
Her clothes were smudged with dust and dried leaves, but it was the wear behind her eyes that Maisie focused on, the strain of someone who'd seen too much and said too little.
And yet, it wasn't sympathy that rose in Maisie's chest; it was something tangled and wary. Because Gene had been part of the system that hurt Igor.
Because Gene had lied to her for years. Because even now, she was still acting like an operative, calmly listing her efforts: scrubbing surveillance, rerouting signals, tracking them from a distance.
"You've been watching us," Maisie said quietly, the accusation soft but unmistakable, her voice catching not with rage, but with a grief-laced caution that said I want to believe you, but I can't, not yet.
"Watching out for you," Gene corrected. "Not just you. Him too. I didn't know what they'd done to him, not completely,until I saw it myself. Until I saw what was left."
Dash stepped forward, his voice sharp. "And now what? You want us to believe you've switched sides?"
"No," Gene said. "I don't care what you believe about me. I care about what's coming."
She crouched down, picked up a worn leather pouch from beside the glowstick, and slid it toward them across the stone floor. Maisie knelt and opened it, half-drawn maps, printed satellite stills, scribbled red notes.
Transit points. Sightings. A marked circle along an old industrial tunnel line.
"Igor's moving. Erratically. Like he's being pulled toward something, but he doesn't know what. Or who."
Maisie's hands hovered over the paper. "Can we still reach him?"
"I think he wants to be reached," Gene said, and this time her voice cracked just slightly. "But I also think we're running out of time. The White Angels don't leave variables uncollected for long."
Dash crossed his arms. "And what happens if we find him and he's not Igor anymore?"
Gene didn't answer immediately. Her eyes lowered, not in guilt, but in grief. When she spoke again, her voice was soft and certain.
"Then we remind him who he is. And we stand between him and the people who made him forget."
Silence settled over the room again, but it was a different kind of silence now. Not cold. Not empty. Waiting.
Maisie rose to her feet and extended the pouch back toward Dash. Her expression was unreadable, but her eyes shone with resolve.
"Then we find him," she said. "Before they do."
"Wait." Dash's voice cut through the murky silence like a wire snapping under tension. He turned sharply to Gene; eyes narrowed with something between suspicion and dread.
"One more thing before we go, Marlow. The police were called in after one of the human staff reported him missing. It's official now, a file, a case number, all of it. You said before he might've been connected to the White Angels. So, if that report's in circulation, do you think they've already been tipped off?"
Gene's jaw clenched. "I tried tracing him through his comm signature. Nothing. Either the unit's been destroyed, or, more likely, he shut it down himself. And not just the surface-level disconnect. I think he scrubbed the whole chip matrix." Her voice dropped a pitch.
"If he is who I think he is, then yeah… he'd know how to ghost the system. And if that report hit the police mainframe, it's already bounced into White Angels' databases. They monitor for names like his."
Maisie shook her head slowly, like the gesture alone could hold back the flood. "It's only a matter of time now," she murmured. "If the White Angels haven't figured it out already, they will soon, about Marlow, about Dad. That something's happened inside the estate."
"I thought I slipped in clean," Gene muttered, almost to herself. "I hacked the outer perimeter, no pings, no alerts. But when I dug into the internal logs... something felt off. There were deletion trails, cookies someone tried to erase. Multiple files were wiped. And only two people had that kind of backend clearance: Harry... and Marlow."
Dash's brow furrowed, fingers twitching up to twist a lock of hair as he processed. "So, someone's covering tracks," he said flatly. "And doing a damn good job of it. That's not just suspicious, that's premeditated."
Gene's voice dropped to a whisper. "It wasn't just me they scrubbed. The records of Igor, his tearing off the collar, the restraints, are gone. Like he never rebelled at all. Whoever did this knew what to delete and why. They weren't protecting the estate. They were protecting him."
Maisie blinked. "I don't... I don't get it." Her voice cracked with quiet disbelief. "Why would anyone help him? No one helps the Alucards. Not without a price." Her fingers curled against her palms. "There has to be a reason, some angle. It's not kindness. It never is."
Gene nodded slowly. "I'm betting it was Marlow. No hard proof, but the timing fits. That charred corpse they claimed was his. No identifiers. No real chain of evidence. If he's alive, and he's the one who did all this, we need to know why. If he's helping Igor, maybe we can reach him. But if he's planning to use him, or worse…" Her expression hardened. "Then we need to shut it down. Fast."
A hush fell over them like a dustcloth over an old mirror. Maisie stared at the floor, her heart hammering against her ribs. The idea of being watched and hunted by the White Angels again made her blood run cold.
After everything they'd done to her family, to Igor, to the world itself. Dash sat beside her, shoulders rigid, eyes clouded with the weight of a dozen contingencies.
"All I know for sure," Gene said at last, "is that when I was still inside, I tried pulling Marlow's file. Standard clearance, nothing fancy. But his file? Restricted. Red-tagged and locked. I wasn't even allowed to see who had access to it." She looked between them. "That doesn't happen with field agents. Not unless there's something they're hiding."
A chill skated down Maisie's spine. Who was Marlow? And what the hell was a man like that doing hidden in plain sight, as a servant, in their own house?