Episode 3 — Blood on the Badge (Rewritten: No Prestige Trigger)
Cold Open — The Long Hall
The precinct sounded wrong when Theo stepped in—a pressure in the air like thunder that wouldn't break. Phones rang. Radios crackled. But the hum didn't feel alive. It was cautious. Predatory. Every voice dropped to a whisper as if the walls had started taking notes.
Captain Reynolds—Iron Jaw—stood at the center, his steel-plated cheek catching the fluorescent light like a blade. "Lock the doors," he said to the sergeant without looking. "Nobody leaves until Internal Affairs finishes. And somebody get this godforsaken coffee replaced with something that doesn't taste like tire rubber."
On the floor, a thin spread of yellow markers dotted the tiles, leading from the bullpen to the stairwell. A chalk outline like a white ghost dragged across the linoleum. That was where they'd found him before dawn—Detective Morales—face down, two in the back of the head. No robbery. No struggle. Just certainty.
Theo swallowed the ash taste gathering at the back of his throat. He'd only traded three jokes with Morales in two weeks, but the man had that smile cops got when they'd seen too much and were still trying to pretend they hadn't. Now he was a whisper on tile and a bag in the morgue.
The HUD flickered in the corner of Theo's vision like a skipped heartbeat:
[New Case: Detective Homicide (Internal).]
[EXP Potential (variable): 200–400+]
[Current: Level 6 | EXP 625/1000]
Marisol flicked ash into a styrofoam cup, eyes scanning the room without moving her head. Vega leaned against a pillar, arms folded, jaw extra tight. Briggs stood near the board with the old cases, hands clasped behind his back like a soldier waiting for orders he already knew were bad.
Internal Affairs arrived in a tidy column of navy suits and clinical stares. Agent Keller led them—razor-parted hair, eyes like clean glass. "Nobody leaves," he repeated, which made six people laugh without smiling. "We'll start with command staff."
Reynolds jerked his chin toward his office. "You can start with me."
As the door shut behind them, the bullpen exhaled a slow, mean breath.
Marisol sidled up beside Theo. "You keep quiet," she said softly, not looking at him. "Let IA do their performance theater. Let them sweat everyone. Then we actually work."
Theo stared at the chalk outline. "He was killed inside the building."
"Mm." She sipped bad coffee like wine. "And whoever did it thinks they're smarter than the rest of us."
The HUD pulsed once, as if listening.
⸻
Act I — Interview Room A
Keller asked all the right questions and none of the true ones.
"What time did you leave? Did you see Morales after shift? Any disagreements? Was he working a case?" His pen skated over paper like the answers were prewritten.
Theo watched the agent's mouth move and took measure the way he'd learned to since the artifact changed him. Not the words. The odds. The tiny, stupid coincidences that should mean nothing, except they didn't around him: Keller's pen failed twice when he asked about Theo's whereabouts; the clock hand skipped on a second question about the evidence lockup; the fluorescents flickered only when Keller said, "We will find the truth," which usually meant we will find a target.
[Lie Proximity: minor]
[Observation Check: +5 EXP]
Theo kept his answers clipped. "I went home. I watched tape from the Calderon arraignment. I didn't see Morales after shift." True, mostly. He didn't add that he watched the arraignment twice because he could feel the courthouse bending around him like a crooked spine.
Keller tapped the folder. "Your division has a reputation, Mercer."
"For what?" Theo asked, deadpan.
"Surviving." Keller's smile was thin. "We'll be in touch."
Outside, the bullpen buzzed louder. Vega drifted in circles, stopping to talk to no one. Briggs made a slow loop along the markers, hands clasped. Marisol didn't move at all. She stood at Morales's empty desk and stared at the chair like it owed her money.
Theo approached, the HUD dimming to a soft ember. "What was he working?"
Marisol's mouth twitched. Not a smile. "Everything that mattered."
"Calderon?"
"Calderon's the wrapper. The gift is inside: judges, lawyers, cops, transport, money. Morales kept threads in different drawers. He's old school that way."
"Drawers," Theo repeated, eyes drifting over the desk.
"Don't." Marisol's tone sharpened. "IA will audit every box. We play clean, or we burn. You want to help? Then do the one thing you do better than anyone."
Theo blinked. "What's that?"
Marisol's eyes cut sideways to meet his. "You make impossible things happen and pretend it's luck."
He didn't ask how she knew. Maybe she didn't. Maybe it was instinct, or maybe Marisol's specialty was naming the crimes the world wanted to hide.
⸻
Act II — The Drawer
Rules said wait for IA. Theo waited—long enough for Keller to parade three more detectives through Interview Room A, long enough for Reynolds to come out wind-creased and angrier, long enough for the coffee to die in the pot.
Then a screw on Morales's desk drawer fell out on its own.
It rolled across the surface in one smooth line and dived into Theo's palm like a coin choosing its cup.
Theo looked up. No one else saw. He pressed his fingers under the lip of the drawer, tugged. It stuck. He tugged again, thinking about dice, about the art of leaning—not forcing, never forcing; forcing broke things—but tilting.
The drawer slid out an extra half inch. Enough to catch on the hidden latch and pop the false back.
Inside: a burner phone, a thumb drive, and a Manhattan transit card in a plastic sleeve with three punch holes in the laminate. Not two. Not four. Three.
The HUD blinked:
[Hidden Cache Discovered: +40 EXP]
[Total: 670/1000]
Marisol's breath warmed his ear. "I told you to wait."
"I waited for the screw," he said.
She shot him a look, then plucked the burner out with two fingers and snapped open the back. "Last outgoing: 2:11 a.m." She slipped the SIM into her pocket, production-simple. The thumb drive she twirled once, tossed, caught, and handed to Briggs as he approached.
"Can you image this without IA laying hands?" she asked him.
"Can a shark swim?" Briggs rumbled. He pocketed it and melted away.
Theo turned the transit card over. Three holes at the top, punched clean, spaced like code. Behind the laminate, a faint stamp: Heights–EAST / 158.
He saw it again—the old textile warehouse from his first night. The coin, the symbols, the death. 158th.
His palm prickled.
"Marisol," he said softly. "Look." He showed her the stamp.
Her lips pressed into a straight line. "Morales was mapping something under our noses."
"Or someone wanted it to look that way."
"Then we go look." She palmed the card. "You, me, Briggs. Vega sits this one out."
Theo glanced toward Vega, who stared back, unreadable. "Because you don't trust him."
"I trust that he needs money like the ocean needs salt," Marisol said. "And I trust that Morales was worried. Those two trusts add up."
⸻
Act III — Heights-EAST
They took Briggs's unmarked to avoid the IA cars idling in the lot like mosquitoes. The evening was a bruise when they rolled under the overpass on 158th. The warehouse sat farther off than Theo remembered, iron grin of broken windows, lock on the chain like a black tooth. Rain freckled the air without deciding whether to fall.
Inside, the candles were gone, the chalk washed, the spiral marks where blood had once dried now scrubbed to a lighter shade of concrete. The artifact coin—dead as a stone—had been tagged, bagged, and filed. Theo could sense it anyway: a pulse at the edge of hearing. A presence like a whisper you remembered after the sentence ended.
Briggs swept with the cool, practiced patience of a man who'd learned to move through rooms like they were already exploding. Marisol's light cut harshly along floor-level seams, between pallets, under a collapsed staircase. Theo drifted the way the dice suggested, letting his eyes rest on corners a fraction longer, letting his foot fall where the ground felt too soft.
Two things happened at once.
Briggs grunted—"Got a drag mark"—and Theo's toe caught the lip of a loose board that shouldn't have been loose. He crouched, pried it up, and found a cavity lined with rigid plastic. Inside: a plain spiral notebook, wrapped in cling film.
Briggs traced the drag mark to a square of wallboard and popped it with the heel of his hand. Metal screeched. Behind it, a cavity like a locker mouth gaped open. Empty. Dust patterns on the back of the cavity made the outline of a suitcase.
Marisol was already flipping pages on the notebook. Names. Dates. Monetary figures in unlabeled currencies. More important—the same spiral sigils Theo had seen carved into skin and scrawled in blood—but here, pencil-clean, paired with street corners and courthouse chambers.
Briggs tapped the cavity with one finger. "Somebody pulled the suitcase this morning."
Theo flipped through the notebook faster. Near the back: an entry in Morales's block-cap handwriting.
CALDERON OUTER RING → JH / CH / V
JH likely HALLORAN. CH?
V. V. V.
—they're laundering evidence through lockup
THREE HOLES.
—If I'm dead, it was one of ours.
Thunder finally broke somewhere far off; the warehouse roof twitched. Theo's neck prickled. The HUD curled an alert along the bottom of his vision like a tide of text.
[Case Thread Connected: Calderon → Judicial / Lockup / Internal.]
[Clue Quality: Major +60 EXP]
[Total: 730/1000]
"Three holes," Marisol murmured, running her thumb over the transit card. "It's a route. One entry point, three exits. Or three stops."
"Or three buyers," Briggs said. "Suitcase full of what? Cash? Drives? Evidence."
Theo listened to the rain gather its courage. "Morales was tracking what goes into lockup and what comes out," he said. "And the map runs through us."
Marisol's eyes softened for half a second, which was how she showed fear. "We need the lockup logs. IA will seal them by morning."
"Then we go now," Briggs said, and that was that.
⸻
Act IV — Behind the Cage
Wicked Spies lockup was a steel-grate throat with a bored clerk perched behind it, tapping through a word puzzle with a pencil that kept snapping. He looked up when they came in—Marisol leading, Briggs behind her like a shadow, Theo trying to look like a paperclip.
"Got an audit order?" the clerk asked.
"Got a captain who thinks your hours are unconstitutional," Marisol said, friendly as a razor. "Pull the last thirty-six hours of check-ins and check-outs, then the last six hours minute-by-minute."
The clerk shrugged, slid a battered ledger along the counter. "Scanner died. Old school."
Theo watched the pencil snap a third time.
Three holes. Three snaps. Three buyers. The number kept turning up like a bad penny. The HUD didn't sizzle or explode. It tilted, a soft lean, and a paper—out of order, slightly misfiled—slid free as the clerk flipped a page.
Theo caught it between two fingers. "This one."
Marisol looked. The form was a lawful, lovely thing: neat initials, stamped dates, a hardened signature. Evidence Withdrawal Authorization for "Case: Calderon related" which was not the same as "Calderon" and thus not the same as needing the DA's sign-off. Initials: JH.
"Judge Halloran," Marisol said softly. "You slippery bastard."
Briggs tapped the time. "Two-fifteen a.m."
Theo's blood cooled. Morales's burner had pinged 2:11 a.m. Last outgoing. Four minutes later, Halloran's runner skates evidence through with a rubber-stamp.
"Who signed out the box?" Briggs asked.
The clerk squinted. "Courier number—huh. That's one of ours. V-19."
Theo and Marisol looked at each other. Not Vega's badge, not a clean line like a name you could arrest. But V. The letter lodged in Morales's notes like a splinter. V V V.
Vega stepped into the doorway like a ghost who hadn't decided whose grave he wanted. "You called me?"
"No," Marisol said, voice sugarless.
"Then why is everybody not answering their phones?" Vega asked coolly, then to the clerk: "I need the copy lists for—"
"The courier on Halloran's 2:15," Briggs rumbled.
Vega's lips parted. That flicker. Surprise that didn't plan to be surprised.
"Don't know," he said too slowly.
The clerk, bless his oblivious, pencil-snapping heart, flipped to the courier appendix. "V-19 is … precinct runner rotation … Valdez. Night shift transfer last week."
"Where is he now?" Briggs asked.
"On delivery." The clerk glanced at the wall clock. "He should be back twenty minutes ago."
The HUD crawled cold text:
[Chain: Halloran → Lockup → Runner (Valdez) → Unknown.]
[New Objective: Intercept Valdez.]
[Case EXP Potential Increased.]
Marisol was already moving. "We need eyes on his last route. If he's late, he's either dumping the goods or being paid to vanish."
Vega hesitated half a beat, then fell in step. "You're sure this is wise?"
"Wise?" Marisol said. "We're cops, Vega. We get paid to do the stupid thing with confidence."
Briggs passed Theo the ledger. "You drive," he said.
⸻
Act V — The Route
They found Valdez's route in a binder that smelled like dust and cheap soap. Three holes. Three stops. Theo traced the path with his finger: Lockup → Municipal Annex → Courthouse Sub-Basement → East Side Storage.
"Sub-basement?" Theo asked.
Marisol's mouth bent. "That's where deals go to cool off."
Briggs grunted. "We start there."
They didn't use sirens. They used the city like a veil. Tires hissed through damp avenues, shadows lifted and settled. The courthouse loomed, its pillars a lie in the rain.
Valdez wasn't at the sub-basement. His clipboard was. His radio was. The guard on the freight door chewed gum and swore up and down he'd seen Valdez walk toward the annex with a rolling case and a nervous step. "Said judge's man needed it direct," the guard muttered. "Didn't like it. Didn't stop it."
The annex corridor smelled like copier heat and stress. Theo felt the coin whisper in his blood again—the echo from the warehouse—and let the sensation tilt him. Left at a door he shouldn't have tried; right past a sign that said AUTHORIZED ONLY; into a stairwell where a wet footprint bled out halfway down.
Briggs found him first. Valdez lay wedged behind a vending machine, eyes open, pulse fluttering like a trapped moth. Not dead. Drugged. Pupils pinwheeling.
Marisol knelt. "Hey, baby," she said, voice turned soft and velvet. "Who gave you the candy?"
He blinked, tried to swallow, failed. "C-C-C—" He shuddered. "Courier … Judge … said hurry…"
"What did you deliver?" Theo asked.
Valdez tried to raise a hand; it jittered and fell. Theo saw a smear of black on his fingers—not grease. Ink. The kind that bled from evidence seals when peeled too fast.
"He had a suitcase," Theo said.
Valdez twitched once toward the end of the hall. Then his eyes rolled. He wasn't gone—just spiraling. Briggs slipped an arm under his shoulders with a gentleness that looked wrong on a man that size. "EMS?" he asked.
"Quiet," Marisol said. "I want him alive and not explaining things to IA until we understand the shape of this."
Theo followed the ink smear. The hall reeked of too-clean cleaners and the faint acid tang of toner. Around the corner, a door stood slightly open. Not much. Enough to say someone had left. Enough to admit a breeze that shouldn't exist in hallways.
Inside, a small conference room lay empty. Water glass sweat ring. Chair askew. A rolling case parked under the whiteboard like a student late to class. Its lock was snapped—professionally. Inside: foam, cut to cradle something heavy and coin-round and a stack of small sealed bags the size of paperback index cards.
The coin wasn't there. The bags were.
Theo lifted one. Court-issue evidence slips—unsigned. Stamped with Halloran's court seal but missing the signature itself. A scent of rubber stamp ink like a cheap cologne.
"Halloran's laundering the seal," Marisol breathed. "Authorize first, deliver later. Or deliver never."
Briggs pointed to the wastebasket. Torn paper curls nested there—the strips of a courier sticker. He lined them on the table like ribs. V-19. A second set of strips, thrown deeper: V-16.
"We've got a second runner," Briggs said. "Or a counterfeit that reads close."
Vega stood at the door. He hadn't stepped in. He watched the hall instead, posture too tall, too still, as if a camera lens lived behind his eyes.
Theo's HUD ticked:
[Intercept Achieved: +50 EXP]
[Clue Recovered: +30 EXP]
[Total: 810/1000]
"Ink on Valdez's fingers," Theo said, turning the slip in his hand. "Evidence seals. He touched the sealed coin or the sealed bag. Then someone took one and left the other."
"Because they only needed one," Marisol said. "And wanted us to see the other. Which means…" She scraped a hand through her hair, eyes narrowing. "Which means we're not chasing thieves. We're being walked."
"To where?" Vega asked, finally stepping inside.
Briggs's gaze slid over him like a brick cloud. "To whoever benefits when we swing and miss."
Theo stared at the rolling case and imagined the pulse of the artifact coin under foam—silent now, but never dead. The impossible had rules. Someone else had learned that, too.
⸻
Act VI — The Alley With No Name
They left the annex with Valdez on a gurney and the rolling case locked in Briggs's trunk. Rain fattened to real weather, the kind that made gutters talk in their sleep.
Marisol directed them through streets Theo hadn't learned yet. She didn't need the map. She read the city by its vices.
They cut the lights two blocks early and coasted into an alley that didn't show up on any cheerful tourism brochures. The East Side Storage facility backed onto it in concrete gray. A security door yawned an inch. The metal stuttered in the rain like teeth.
"Briggs," Marisol said, handing him a crowbar that wasn't a crowbar. "You knock like you grew up rough."
"Ma'am," Briggs said, and used a bone-colored grip to encourage the latch. The door sighed, indignant.
The storage bay smelled like cardboard and the last ten years. A line of units stretched like patient coffins. Midway down, a light burned over a half-rolled gate. The unit number had three in it twice.
Three holes. Three stops. Three buyers.
Theo didn't force a thing. He set his palm to the gate and leaned probability with the gentlest of breaths. The lock's cheap spine chose that moment to remember it had been poorly installed.
Gate up.
Inside: a suitcase. The foam cutout was a twin to the one in Briggs's trunk. This one cradled a coin—not the same artifact from the warehouse, but cut from the same lunatic geometry, spirals etched deeper, edges chipped like it had gnawed its way out of a rock. The foam glittered with flecks of dark residue like dried blood turned graphite.
Beside the coin: a stack of court slips fully signed. Halloran's name scrawled with careless power.
And because no story at Wicked Spies played fair, three men stepped out of the deeper dark with weapons that weren't scared of the rain.
"Hands on your heads," the first one drawled. "Or we close the book on Morales and his little apprentice class."
Briggs didn't lift his hands. He shifted his weight—slow—but the guns clicked in a way that said Not Today. Marisol's mouth crooked. Vega stepped sideways, angling for space, his off-hand out as if to calm.
Theo felt the dice rattle without moving.
He didn't yank them. He tilted.
The HUD slid a translucent bracket across every small hazard in the next five feet: a puddle slicker than it looked; a coil of packing strap with a bite; a light whose ballast would pop if more current surged than the wire wanted to carry.
"Last chance," the lead man said.
"Sure," Marisol said, soft as silk. "You first."
The light blew out as the packing strap rolled under the second man's boot, pulling his leg sideways and sending his muzzle up at his own ear. His shot took the bulb. The sudden dark was electric. Briggs used it like a cloak; something heavy in his hand met something soft in a face and the soft thing went out like a wet candle.
Vega moved faster than Theo had seen him move. He struck the wall deliberately to make a sound in one place and moved in another. The third man's panic shot tore open a stack of boxes and set a wave of mothballed linen blooming in the dark. Theo stepped left before he knew to step left and the first bullet took only the air his shoulder had recently rented.
The lead man lunged anyway—close enough to taste the tin on his breath. Theo brought his forearm up, felt the gun's slide scrape bone, stepped into the man's chest. They fell in a tangle. Theo's head hit concrete. A spark lit behind his eyes. The gun skittered.
The coin in the suitcase vibrated like a struck bell.
The HUD flared a warning he had never seen:
[Foreign Probability Source Detected.]
[Caution: Interference / Resonance.]
The lead man rolled to his knees and reached for the suitcase. "Boss wants his change back," he grunted.
Theo didn't think. He didn't push. He let the other source pull, then stepped diagonal to it—like playing pool with gravity. The suitcase slid one inch the wrong way at the right time. The man grabbed air and met Briggs's shoulder instead.
It ended with speed and silence. Marisol kicked a gun away. Briggs zip-tied wrists with a competence that made plastic sound like shackles. Vega panted, then laughed once—too loud—and cut it when he saw Theo's face.
"You okay?" Vega asked.
Theo touched the back of his head. His fingers came away damp, not bloody. "Yeah."
Marisol crouched by the suitcase. She didn't touch the coin. Her eyes almost did. "Not the same one," she murmured.
Theo knelt beside her. The coin's etched spirals didn't move, but he felt movement under the skin of reality, the way you felt a subway arrive before you heard it. "They come as a set," he said.
Briggs leaned down. "Who's boss?" he asked the zip-tied leader.
"Nobody you can touch," the man said, bleeding confidence but not enough blood. "Calderon gives orders like a puppet opens its mouth."
"Name," Briggs said.
"Judge," the man coughed. "The one who likes to watch."
Theo saw the water ring on the courthouse glass in his mind, the tilt of a chair, the scent of rubber stamp ink.
Marisol's voice uncoiled. "Halloran."
Act VII — The Paper Knife
They brought the men in without sirens, because light and sound attracted the wrong kinds of moths. Keller was waiting, which meant IA had been waiting all along. He had a file under his arm and an expression aimed like a dart.
"You conducted an off-clock operation," Keller said mildly. "Without notifying Internal Affairs."
Reynolds stood behind him with his arms folded. "They conducted police work," he said. "What did you conduct, Keller, other than interruptions?"
Keller opened his mouth, closed it, then shifted the dart to a different target. "What did you bring me?"
Marisol set the stack of signed evidence slips on the table like a neat plate of poison. "Halloran's hobby."
Keller didn't break. He took a pen. He clicked it twice. He did not write. "Alleged."
Briggs set the rolling case beside the table, popped the latches, and lifted the coin with both hands. It pulsed under the fluorescent like an eye that liked bad hospitals. Keller took a half step back before he corrected himself.
"Alleged," Marisol said again, pleasantly, and slid a thumb drive across the table. "And that's Morales's last three days of notes."
Keller's gaze sharpened. "Where did you get—"
"From the desk Internal Affairs is responsible for securing," Reynolds cut in, iron-dead. "If you plan to charge my detectives with saving your job, make sure your paperwork fits in the same kind of suitcase Halloran likes."
Keller's jaw worked. "This coin—"
"Is an object you don't understand yet," Marisol said, no heat, all sugar. "Here's what you do understand: Morales was murdered after tracking a pipeline that starts in Halloran's chambers and runs through lockup with our runners. We intercepted one runner drugged and one suitcase stocked. We also have three men who will name a judge if it means they don't go to the grave with Morales's zip code." She leaned forward. "Now you can either play hero and try to cuff the only unit doing your job, or you can pick up a knife and start cutting paper where it bleeds."
Silence hummed. Rain rattled the window.
Keller clicked his pen once more, then stopped. "If I'm to move on a judge," he said at last, "I need a pattern and a motive. And I need your people clean."
Vega's jaw flexed, but he said nothing.
Theo felt the tilt again, gentle, inevitable. He reached for the paper stack and let his thumb land on the third slip, third from the top, third row from the signature—third all the way down. The seal had a bubble caught under one edge. No one but a bored clerk or a cursed cop would care. He cared. He lifted the corner. Underneath, a second stamp had been used first, then covered. Not Halloran's. Another judge's mark, blurred but legible in reverse: Chambers: HOLLIS.
The HUD danced clean text:
[Forgery Pattern Isolated: Dual-Seal Overlay.]
[Evidence Integrity Breach Identified: +70 EXP]
[Total: 880/1000]
"Motive is control," Theo said quietly, sliding the slip to Keller. "Pattern is arrogance."
Keller peered, brow rising despite himself. Reynolds grunted. Marisol shot Theo a look that promised two things: danger and a drink.
"Get me Hollis's docket," Keller said to no one and everyone. "Get me a list of every time Halloran's chambers and Hollis's chambers crossed hands near lockup authorizations in the last ninety days. And get me protective detail on anyone who's ever delivered a suitcase for those two."
"The three men we brought in?" Briggs asked.
"They're ours for an hour," Keller said. "Then the DA will want them and Halloran will have opinions and the press will invent their own universe. Use your hour."
Keller left in a wake of papers and a smell like crossed wires. Reynolds lingered, iron jaw catching devil light again. He looked at Theo—not kindly. Not unkindly. Just like a man weighing a tool that had cut through something too clean.
"You don't touch desks before IA," he told Theo.
Theo nodded once. "Yes, sir."
"You don't run off-clock into annexes with a coin that hums like a tumor."
"Yes, sir."
Reynolds's good cheek creased. "And you keep doing exactly what you just did until the floor stops chewing on our boots."
He left. The bullpen started breathing again—louder. The hour Keller had gifted would feel like thirty minutes.
Marisol leaned against the table, hip warm against Theo's hand. "You tilted luck a little too clean in there."
"I just looked," Theo said.
"Mm." She lowered her voice. "Important rule about this city: you don't get to be inevitable and anonymous at the same time. Pick which you like more."
Vega cleared his throat. He hadn't moved closer, hadn't moved away. "What's next?"
Briggs cracked his knuckles. "We talk to the men who wanted to shoot us." He looked to Theo. "Sometimes chance says more when it's under a hot lamp."
Theo nodded, pulse steadying. The coin in the case hummed at a frequency he could feel in his teeth.
⸻
Act VIII — Hot Lamp
Interrogation B had one mirror and a chair that wobbled; Marisol always made sure it wobbled. The lead man from the storage unit sat cuffed, lips split, smiling like a man who enjoyed the taste. Theo sat across from him with a legal pad he didn't need. Briggs stood behind the mirror, a wall pretending to be a man. Vega paced the hall outside, eyes never leaving the door.
"What's your name?" Theo asked.
"Pick one," the man said. "Tonight I like Lucky."
"Lucky," Theo repeated, pen still. "Who sent you?"
"Same person who sends everyone," Lucky said. "The person with money."
Theo let silence be the first tilt. He had to learn not to grab at the dice. Let them roll. Let the world want to talk.
Lucky's smile thinned. "You don't have to chase the judge," he said. "Even if you could catch him."
"Halloran?" Theo asked mildly.
Lucky's eyes flickered. Not at the name. At the way Theo said it like he'd known it all along.
"The judge is just a door," Lucky said. "You don't need a key if the wall isn't there."
"You should try poetry," Theo said. "What's behind the door?"
Lucky's smile returned. "A room with no floors."
Theo leaned back. He thought of the coin. The way the spirals etched into metal weren't decoration. They were instructions. He pictured the other artifact still locked in their own evidence cage, humming away like a wasp under glass.
"Where did you get the coin?" he asked.
Lucky hummed in answer, a tuneless line. "Where do you think?" He tilted his head, eyes on Theo's face. "You're the one who died and came back."
Theo didn't move. Marisol didn't move. Even the mirror felt the tremor.
"How would you know that?" Marisol asked lightly.
Lucky's teeth showed. "Because it starts rumors when a reality hiccups."
Theo kept his breath level. The HUD dimmed—then ticked:
[Threat Assessment: Information Leak / Source Unknown.]
[Restraint Maintained: +10 EXP]
[Total: 890/1000]
"Here's what's going to happen," Theo said, voice gone soft without his permission. "You're going to name the person who pays you, or you're going to name the door, or you're going to name the floor. One of those will be a name I can write, and after that the math gets simple."
Lucky's smile, finally, cracked. Not fear. Calculation. He shifted in the wobbly chair. He let it wobble, and when it wobbled, a rivet on the underside scraped the floor with a little ping that was nothing and everything.
Theo wrote PING on the pad. He underlined it twice. He pushed the pad to Lucky and let the man read a word that wasn't a word.
Lucky laughed. It turned into a cough. "You're not like them," he said, nodding toward the door where Vega's shadow paced by. "You're not like me either."
"Who am I like?" Theo asked.
Lucky looked at the coin case through the window as if he could see through steel. "You're like the part of a story that ruins a different one."
He said the name then, almost gentle, as if it was a confession. Not Halloran. Not Hollis. Not Calderon. A fixer with a reputation like ice water in veins.
"Jericho Vale."
Theo didn't look to Marisol; he didn't need to. He could feel her focus sharpen into a point that could open a throat. Briggs's shape behind the mirror became heavier, like gravity liked him more suddenly.
Vega opened the door. "Jericho Vale?" he repeated. "He's a ghost."
"Ghosts love judges," Marisol said. "They never have to knock."
"Where do we find him?" Theo asked.
Lucky smiled again, new this time, not a pretense. "You don't. He finds you when you turn the wrong page."
Theo collected the smile and put it with the other evidence. He felt the coin hum through the wall. The hour Keller had given collapsed into minutes.
⸻
Closing Sequence — The Coin That Wasn't
It was late when the bullpen emptied down to the insomniacs and the cursed. Rain had become fog, hugging the windows with dirty hands. Theo walked the hall alone, the coin's vibration tracking him like a mosquito's song.
He stopped at the evidence cage. The clerk had abandoned his puzzle for a paperback with a cracked spine. He nodded Theo through without looking hard. The coin case waited on a high shelf, a patient eye.
Theo stood with it. He didn't open it. He set his hand near it and let the odds tilt.
The hum changed—rising, falling, finding resonance somewhere behind him, somewhere above, somewhere that made old pipes tick.
The HUD breathed text across his vision:
[Calibration: Passive.]
[Foreign Probability Sources: 2 Detected in City Grid.]
[Signal Strength: Weak → Moderate.]
[Threat / Opportunity: Unknown.]
Two sources. Not one coin. Not one story. Two.
Theo closed the case.
On the way out, he passed Vega by the coffee pot, which had given up six hours ago. Vega's eyes were flat river water.
"You think Lucky is telling the truth?" Vega asked.
"I think truth isn't a straight line," Theo said.
Vega snorted. "That's a yes you dressed up for court." He paused. A beat, then two. "Morales liked you."
Theo blinked. "We barely spoke."
"Yeah," Vega said. "He liked that you didn't flinch when the world broke in front of you." He studied Theo's face like it might confess something if he memorized it. "Don't start flinching now."
He left Theo with the machines and the fog-glued windows and a feeling like he'd just been told a warning in a language he almost understood.
Theo returned to his desk. Morales's empty chair looked back, daring him to sit. He didn't. He stood, palms flat, and watched the rain smear the city.
The HUD slid one more update:
[Case Status: In Progress]
[EXP Awarded (Interim): +300]
[Level: 6 | EXP: 925/1000]
[Next Level Threshold: 75 EXP]
[Prestige Threshold: Level 1000 (Distant)]
He breathed, steady. Slow grind. No flash levels. No cheating the rule. He wasn't close.
But something in the city had noticed him.
At the bottom of the screen, a line of text scrolled once and vanished, like a fortune cookie that burned in your hand before you read it:
[Message: "You keep making odds into roads."]
Theo shut his eyes. The roads were coming. Judges and runners, coins and ghosts. A fixer with a library of doors and no floors. A room at the center where probability didn't bend; it broke and then pretended it had always been that way.
He opened his eyes and wrote two names on Morales's blotter in clean block letters:
HALLORAN.
VALE.
Then he added HOLLIS because patterns preferred three, and pinned the paper to the corkboard under a photo of the warehouse where he had died and come back.
He didn't call it fate. He didn't call it luck.
He called it work.
And when the artifact coin in the cage gave a sigh that only a man who had learned to hear probability could hear, Theo didn't flinch. He listened. He leaned without grabbing. He let the world tilt. And he waited for the road to turn of its own accord toward whatever ugly truth had killed a good detective and marked three holes in a laminate card.
The city whispered back, patient and mean:
Next case, rookie. Grind for it.