(Hooded Figure's POV with brief intercuts)
They had tuned the wind chime wrong on purpose.
A quarter-tone off. Just enough for a nervous ear to hear the mistake and wonder why. People ignored perfect music; they noticed the scrape. And noticing was the first step to remembering.
From the ridge of the neighboring roof, the hooded figure watched the Amster estate exhale day and inhale night. Lanterns blinked out one by one. Guards traced their loops. Cameras blinked at preordained intervals. The world liked routines; routines were lullabies for the powerful. Lullabies made teeth dull.
They lifted a small tuning fork and struck it against the gloved palm. Ting. Clean, true. They set it down and adjusted the chime again, a breath closer to correct. Not yet. Not yet. Almost.
Patience, they reminded themselves, and smiled.
Beneath the hood, the ring glinted: A.M.
It had cost extra to have the letters etched that deeply. The leatherwork, too—the boots with the stamped initials hidden in the lining. People thought initials were vanity; they were actually a weapon. They turned every footprint into a whisper you controlled. You could be seen without being known. You could be found in a way that still led nowhere.
Across the gardens, a curtain moved. A silhouette passed the balcony doors—hers. The figure's breath stilled the way it always did, the way it had for years: a small pause, an ache, a relief that hurt.
Hello, Lyn.
They'd used to say it out loud—to the echo of an alley, to rain, to a cracked bus shelter that reflected her face for a fraction of a second. Here, the word hung in the dark where it belonged, without sound.
Phones were safer.
Phones understood ghosts.
The figure opened the disposable handset and scrolled through the thread.
—DID YOU ENJOY YOUR PERFORMANCE TODAY?
—ONLY WHAT WAS PROMISED.
—ASK MICHAEL.
They didn't regret that last line. It had been both warning and gift. Lyn deserved direction. Clarity. She had always deserved those things, and men with softer hands than Michael Lawrence's had denied her anyway.
They pocketed the phone and settled into the crouch that had become second nature—weight on the balls of the feet, spine soft, every escape measured. Below, at the estate's edge, two figures ghosted past the hedges: the tall one with the ironed soul (Kai) and the bright one who walked like music (Daren). Good men. Professional. Dangerous. Loyal to a fault.
Loyalty was the problem.
Loyalty made smart people foolish.
The figure's smile tilted.
(Intercut – Lyn, in her room)
Lyn traced the locket with her thumb: For the day you forget, I'll remind you. She pressed the cold metal to her lips. "What did I forget?" she whispered, to no one and to someone.
The figure remembered.
Rain on neon. Cheap coffee heat on cold hands. A quiet girl who solved problems like riddles and wore headphones to survive cafeteria cruelty. She had smiled at strangers by mistake—because she always forgot that kindness was a language with a dialect, and hers had no accent. The world punished accents.
They had watched misfortune follow her like a stray. They had watched rumors become architecture around her life. They had watched her talent shrugged off by men who couldn't read simple code.
They had stepped in where they could, in the only ways that didn't look like interference. Fix a gradebook that miscounted; return a gossip thread to its author with all the timestamps and IP addresses visible; "misplace" paperwork that would have denied her a scholarship. Little surgeries. Bloodless.
It hadn't helped enough.
When the river took her, they had screamed without sound.
When she woke somewhere else, they learned a new word for grief: after.
After is what you live inside when you arrived too late.
After is what you weaponize.
The Council chamber had been a gift wrapped in a trap. They knew the cameras, the angles, the seating assignments (people put their power where the light fell best—it was almost sweet). They knew Hale would perform; he always did. They knew Seraphine would sit where a lens could love her and where Lawrence could not ignore her. Predictable.
Lyn had been less predictable. She had said kale with a straight face and punctured a room upholstered with egos. The figure had laughed—silently, shoulders shaking—behind the gallery pillar, then had gone still again when Michael took her hand beneath the table.
That was the other problem. Not loyalty. Proximity.
Michael Lawrence had proximity to her life, and proximity was the most dangerous resource in the world.
It made thieves of saints.
It made gods of thieves.
The figure lifted the tuning fork again and closed their eyes, breath syncing to the frequency. A true note could shiver you into honesty. They had never been fond of true notes; they preferred dissonance. It felt more like the world.
The phone vibrated.
A new number. Different region code, scrambled route. They answered on the second pulse and said nothing.
A voice purred, blurred through modulation. "You owe me a favor."
They rolled their neck until it cracked. "I owe you a receipt. You'll get it when I'm finished."
"Ominous," the voice said, amused. "The cobbler asked questions."
"I gave him answers."
"Your letters are sloppy."
"They're bait."
"Hm." The voice sharpened. "You're certain about her?"
"I am."
"And him?"
The figure watched Michael through the glass—seated, motionless, reading in the chair by her doors like a siege and a lullaby at once. "He breaks what he loves to keep it from being stolen," the figure said. "You can stand under that roof, but you will not see the sun."
"You speak like a poet when you're braced for murder. It's charming."
They hung up.
Charming was what people said when they couldn't decide if they were on your side.
It had taken months to track the seam between worlds. Years, if one counted the first life—the long, hungry apprenticeship to necessity. The figure wore necessity the way other people wore perfume: first you noticed the presence, then the way it changed a room.
This world wasn't magic. It was choice stacked on choice until it pretended it had been fate all along. But there were valves in the machinery. The figure had found one in the smallest place—a convenience-store supply chain. A distributor whose invoices had timing like a tide. A river where the city exhaled. Tiny engineering. You only had to breathe in one world at the right time and exhale in the next.
People thought crossing between worlds would look like lightning.
Most of the time, it looked like work.
(Intercut – Michael, in the doorway)
He watched Lyn fall asleep in a halo of lamplight, her hand still around the phone. He wanted to take it gently from her fingers. He wanted to break it against the wall. He did neither.
The figure took the dead handset from the roof ledge and snapped it cleanly. Two pieces. Then the SIM, broken to dust. They pocketed the powder; evidence was an ethic, not a chore. The other phone, the live one, they left in the dark of their pocket where messages went to be brave.
Streetlights pooled at the end of the service road. A van hummed. They checked their watch (expensive, stolen, returned, stolen again—ritual had a shape). Two minutes late. They didn't look up when the van door slid open.
"Package," a voice said.
The figure turned. A canvas roll lay on the floor: tools that looked like lockpicks to the untrained and like questions to the initiated. They crouched, tested weight, balance, bite. Good. Enough.
"You never asked what for," the driver said.
The figure closed the roll. "I don't ask questions when I know the answers."
"Then you know this is not what you do if you want to live."
"I don't do anything to live," the figure said, standing. "I do it to make living worth it."
The driver pulled away with the kind of speed that belonged to the guilty. The figure climbed the lattice to the roof in four soft movements and settled again into the shadow that knew the shape of their back.
They waited until the guard rotation turned. Timing was a river; you swam with it or you drowned. The chime sang wrong again, by design. They smiled and moved.
A leap to the maintenance lip. A slide under camera sightlines. A patient pause at the blind corner while Kai's shadow gilded and moved on. Then the small marvel—the window they knew she left unlatched when her hands were shaking. She latched it when the day had been kind. The figure's heart told them which it would be before the latch confirmed it.
Unlatched.
They slipped in.
The scent of her room hit first: faint tea, pages, the soap rich houses believed smelled like clean rather than money. The figure didn't breathe for three counts, then took a measured inhale and let the ribs remember.
Lyn slept at an angle that said she didn't trust sleep. The thinnest blanket covered her knees. Michael had stepped out; the chair was empty; the reports were squared with a brutality only neat people managed. A small basil plant sat on the desk, absurdly loyal. The figure stepped past it and bowed their head in an apology it couldn't hear.
They did not touch Lyn.
They never would without her consent. That was a rule that held like bone.
They moved to the vanity and set down a small envelope. No seal. No name. Inside: a photograph—old, worn, edges chewed by the years. Two kids: a boy with a laugh not yet sharpened by money and a girl with a braid and a stubborn chin, half-smiling like she didn't know the smile was for anyone but herself. A city fountain arced behind them, catching light. On the fountain's base, etched: "First and last catastrophe."
On the back of the photo, a line written in ink that had bled in the rain: You asked for a promise. He gave you two.
They did not write which he. Explanation was a kind of theft. She would ask the right question without help.
On the vanity's glass, they breathed a whisper and wrote with the fog—two initials, then their thumb dragging through the mist to erase the second letter. A. They let the M smear into silence. She had learned to see the world's edges. Let her finish the letter herself.
A floorboard murmured outside.
The figure slipped behind the drape, became a shadow behaving like furniture.
Michael stepped in.
He looked at Lyn first, as he always did, and the figure felt a cold anger at the tenderness in his face. Not because it was false, but because it was true. True made knives turn inward.
His gaze moved to the vanity. He saw the envelope immediately. His jaw went still. He crossed the room, picked it up, did not open it. He held it the way he held threats—in the same fingers he used to hold her hand. The figure watched that and filed it under evidence.
Michael set the envelope down neatly and turned his head fractionally, like a predator acknowledging an audience without breaking eye contact with the prey. His voice was almost quiet enough to be polite.
"Come out."
The figure smiled. Politeness as strategy. Good.
They stepped from behind the curtain like a magic trick, hood up, hands away from the body, a posture that said careful and try me at the same time.
Michael's eyes were a winter river. No push, no tremble. "You've been busy."
"Only making music," the figure said, tipping their head toward the garden where the chime sang wrong again.
"Off-key," Michael said.
"Memory is off-key before it is melodic."
"You trespassed," he said.
"You stole," they said.
Both were true.
He took a step that shortened the world between them and made the air taste like metal. "You will stop sending messages to her."
"You will start answering them," the figure said, and heard the rage hit the back of his teeth like brakes.
"She is safe here."
"She is contained here."
"Protected."
"Curated."
Silence did something heavy on the floorboards between them.
The figure took the photo from the envelope and held it up between two fingers. "Do you remember this fountain?"
He didn't look at the photograph; he looked at them the way men look at maps when they think they remember the road but fear there's a new city. "Yes."
"She doesn't."
"I know."
"Because of you," the figure said, soft as wool and twice as smothering.
That landed. In the tiny change around his eyes, the figure saw the admission and the bruise it had lived as for years. They lowered the photo without triumph. Triumph belonged to people who thought endings were possible.
They slid the picture back into the envelope and set it on the edge of the dresser. "I came to remind her," they said. "I will keep reminding her until she remembers what she asked you to do."
"She asked me to protect her," Michael said.
"Two promises," the figure replied. "You kept the first. The second is the one that ruins you."
A heartbeat. Two. The basil plant smelled a little brighter; the window breathed.
Michael said, "Name."
The figure tilted their head, amused. "You first."
"Michael," he said, and the figure's smile curled sharper.
"Not the one the city fears," they said. "The one she used when she was ten. The one carved under the fountain for a dare."
A flicker. That was enough. They bowed, a mocking little dip, and moved to the window.
"Tell me your name," Michael said.
The figure swung a leg over the sill. "I have two," they said, and let the night take them.
They ran the roofline in five bounds, dropped to the maintenance stair, slid into the dark like a habit. The chime behind them sang wrong, then right for a single accidental second, and the figure grinned because sometimes the world helped if you bullied it gently.
On the far side of the property, a phone vibrated where they'd taped it under the lip of a drain. They peeled it free, read the message—COBBLER #2 CONFIRMED—and snorted. Of course. Let the wolves have a footprint. It kept them off the throat.
They typed one new message to Lyn from a number that wouldn't exist in an hour:
IF YOU WANT THE TRUTH, MEET ME WHERE YOU LAST CHOSE TO BREATHE. MIDNIGHT.
They didn't say river. They didn't need to.
Choice had a gravity all its own.
(Intercut – Lyn, half-awake)
Her phone buzzed. She opened one eye, dread and relief wrestling. The message burned white against the dark.
Midnight.
She sat up, heart wild, fingers cold. She looked at the balcony door, at the hall, at the chair where Michael had been. She looked at the envelope she hadn't noticed before.
The locket lay heavy against her sternum, a coin minted in promises.
"Okay," she whispered, to herself and to the person she had been somewhere else. "Okay."
The figure, three roofs away, adjusted the hood and started down the ladder into the night that had taught them how to walk. They didn't know if Lyn would come. They didn't know if Michael would let her.
They knew only this: promises were bridges and knives. Tonight, one of them would finally be used for what it was built for.
They smiled, the small, crooked thing that had been mistaken for cruelty in a dozen lifetimes, and tuned a wind chime in their head until it matched the world exactly.
Then they disappeared, which is to say: they kept going.