The satisfaction of cracking the burglary case was a thin shield against the Davidson file. Foster had done everything by the book. He'd tracked the pattern of power fluctuations, cross-referenced them with antique dealers who had recently acquired new inventory without proper paperwork, and identified a fence operating out of a clockwork repair shop in the industrial district. A day of coordinated surveillance with the tactical unit led to a clean, quiet arrest. The burglar, a wiry man with an electrical engineer's certification and a deep resentment for "old money," had confessed readily.
Captain Hanson had given a curt, "Satisfactory work, Ambrose." in the morning briefing. It was the closest thing to praise Foster had received. For a day, he felt the ghost of Andrew Garfield recede, and the persona of Foster Ambrose solidify. He attended to paperwork, drank bad station coffee with Eliza Ramirez, and even shared a dry, muttered joke with Ben Frank about the suspect's poor taste in stolen candlesticks.
But the normalcy was a performance, and every performance is exhausting.
The Davidson case was a needle he couldn't pull out. He found himself walking the alleyway again after his shift, the cobblestones still stained a dark, imperfect brown where the scene had been cleaned. The official report was closed: death by misadventure, probable animal attack. But the facts were stubborn things. The lack of animal hair or saliva.
He looked up at the buildings looming over the alley. One was a modern apartment complex with blank, dark windows. The other was a much older structure, its brickwork crumbling, with a heavy, rusted door leading to the basement. A faded, peeling sign read: "Sub-Level Access - Authorized Personnel Only." The city was full of such forgotten places, pockets of the old world swallowed by the new.
"A grifter's den."
Foster spun around. An old woman was watching him from a stoop across the alley, wrapped in a shawl despite the mild weather. Her eyes were milky with cataracts.
"Sorry?"
"The things in the dark," she said, her voice a dry rustle. "They don't like the new lights. The buzzin' hurts their ears. They stay in the deep places." She pointed a gnarled finger not at the modern apartment, but at the old basement door.
It was the same superstition Ortego had mentioned, given weight by age and conviction. A week ago, Foster would have dismissed it as the ramblings of an old woman. Now, he saw it as data.
"Have you seen them?" he asked, keeping his tone conversational.
She chuckled, a sound like stones grinding. "Seen? No. Felt 'em. The air gets cold. The lights flicker. You hear a scratchin', like metal on old stone." She described the exact symptoms of the power drains from his burglary case, but applied them to a phantom. Fact and folklore together.
He thanked her and walked away, his mind racing. The burglary had been solved with logic and procedure. It was a human crime. But what if the method—the power drain—wasn't an invention, but an imitation? What if someone had learned to replicate the effects of these "Grifters"?
Back at his desk, he pulled the Davidson file one more time. He ignored the coroner's report and the witness statements and looked at the evidence log. Personal effects. One pair of trousers, one shirt, one pair of boots, one wallet containing forty-three dollars, and one key. Standard issue.
And one other item. He found a small, circular chip of polished bone, about the size of a coin, loose in the victim's pocket. It had been catalogued and dismissed as a personal trinket. Foster stared at the photograph of it. It was etched with a symbol he didn't recognize: a series of concentric circles intersected by a single, straight line.
It looked old. It looked ritualistic.
He needed to know more. He needed resources outside the police database, outside the official channels. His thoughts returned to the grand marble building, The Aethelstan Club. A place where people with various affiliations met. A place where secrets might be traded, where a man could learn about old symbols and city legends without raising the suspicions of a Captain Hanson.
The idea, once a curiosity, now felt like a necessity. He was a policeman, but the truth he was hunting seemed to exist just outside the jurisdiction of his badge.
That night, over a dinner he cooked for a chatty Ortego, he made a decision. The stolen money from Foster's wallet was almost gone. He had his police salary, but it was meager. The Aethelstan Club, with its marble facade, looked incredibly expensive.
"How does someone around here make extra money?" he asked Ortego, trying to sound casually curious.
Ortego shrugged, chasing a pea around his plate. "Mr. Gareth, next door, fixes those new-fangled data-slates for people. Mom, before she... well, she used to do transcription work for the city records. Why? Police work not paying enough?" He grinned.
Foster managed a smile. "Just thinking ahead."
Transcription. Data-slates. They were leads. The following day, on his lunch break, he visited the public library, a building that was itself a battle between old and new—card catalogues sitting beside public access terminals. He inquired about transcription work and was given a test. His handwriting, a relic from Andrew's life, was deemed "adequately legible" and he was given a stack of handwritten civic records from the early 1900s to digitize. The pay was minuscule, but it was a start.
As he left the library, his mind on the tedious work ahead, he saw her. A young woman, maybe nineteen, with a stunning cascade of ginger hair, walking down the street with her two exuberant dogs. She was laughing, reining them in, her white, flowing gown billowing around her. For a moment, the weight of his situation lifted at the sight of such unburdened joy. She and the two dogs turned towards a side street, and disappeared from view, a flash of color and life in the city's grey expanse.
A trivial moment. A girl and her dogs. He forgot about it almost instantly, his mind already calculating how many hours of transcription would equal the membership fee for a club he couldn't yet afford.
But the pieces were moving. The burglar was in jail. The old woman's testimony was in his notes. The bone chip was in evidence. And he, Foster Ambrose, was no longer just surviving. He was building a foundation, brick by brick, for a war he didn't yet understand.