He came back from the other direction, keeping to the side streets, and found the university perimeter already sealed off behind police tape by the time he reached the outer edge.
That was fine, his target was the crossroads outside, not anything within the fence line.
He looked at the crowd.
Dense. Most of them had been pulled out of bed at an unreasonable hour and hadn't fully arrived at consciousness yet, standing in loose clusters with their arms crossed against the morning chill, blinking slowly.
The IFSA teams working the outer perimeter were moving far too slowly to process this many people efficiently.
There were gaps everywhere, stretches of cordon with no one standing at them, the manpower simply not there to fill every position.
Raphael slipped through one of those gaps from a side alley, absorbed into the crowd before the officer who'd half-noticed the movement could do anything useful about it.
He found a spot near the back, put his shoulder against a wall, and closed his eyes.
To anyone looking, he was one more sleep-deprived civilian waiting to be told he could go home.
In reality he was going somewhere else entirely.
He'd already left Lyndon's sword at the scene, the blade had been badly compromised by the street fight and wasn't worth carrying in its current state.
The revolver was still on his hip, spare rounds in his coat. The left hand was still gone, the stump sealed shut with repurposed flesh. None of that mattered right now.
He found the door in the deep part of his consciousness and let himself through it.
[Connecting to Second Hunting Ground — Witch.]
When his awareness opened again, he was in a room.
Small, maybe five meters square. Perfectly symmetrical.
No door anywhere in the walls, no window, no opening of any kind, the geometry of a sealed box, the kind of place that had been closed from the outside.
Every surface was a mirror.
Floor, ceiling, all four walls, nothing but reflective glass from edge to edge. He looked left and saw himself looking left. He looked up and saw himself looking up.
Every direction returned another version of himself standing in the same strange room, and all of them looked back at him with the same expression of careful assessment.
Then his right hand changed.
A line emerged from the wrist, tracing along the inside of his palm, branching as it spread, a tree diagram pressed into skin, the main trunk running from the wrist to the center of his hand and the branches extending outward from there across his fingers and the heel of his palm.
Most of the branches were short and faint, rendered in dotted lines, each one reaching toward something not yet connected. One branch was different.
Thicker, fully drawn, running to a clear terminus, roughly twenty percent of the main trunk's width.
He understood it immediately.
The system had been calling it Crossroads of Fate every time the synchronization rate updated.
He was looking at the physical manifestation of the concept, the trunk was himself, and the branches were the witches whose paths intersected with his.
Most were theoretical connections, not yet formed. One was real.
He focused on the solid line.
[Crossroads of Fate — Evelyn Vigo.]
[Synchronization rate: 21%.]
[Information accessible at current synchronization level:]
[Name: Evelyn Vigo.]
[Race: Witch.]
[Age: 21.]
[Current location: Mirror World, Northern Federation — 3rd District, Keynes City, crossroads outside Keynes University perimeter.]
[Vital signs: Stable.]
[Psychological state: Self-withdrawn. Reality avoidance.]
[Status: Following recovered memories, has refused further negotiation. Has reached an agreement with her mirror-self, allowing the mirror-self to fulfill her outstanding desires in her place.]
[Limited privacy access: Born during the Seventh Witch's Night, 2007.
Abandoned by her mother and taken in by the Black Truffle Monastery. At age fourteen, responsible for the Red Monastery Incident.
Subsequently lost her memories. Recruited at sixteen. Joined IFSA as a Black Gloves operative.]
The information ended there. Twenty-one percent, no further.
He hadn't been looking for any of this. But now he had it.
"She has no memory before age fourteen." He said it quietly to the mirrored room. "She's never mentioned it. She may not even know herself."
Everything pointed back to the Black Truffle Monastery.
A small institution, peripheral, the kind of place that didn't turn up in the records he'd worked with during his Black Gloves years despite regular contact with church organizations.
The Red Monastery Incident, the name had no context he could attach to it, but the timing fit.
Whatever had happened there had preceded her recruitment into the organization, had preceded the period he'd known her.
She'd been in the same intake facility he had, at sixteen. That was after whatever the incident had been.
"Witch's Night."
He'd seen the concept in fiction, the popular mythology attached to lunar eclipses, the gathered covens, the stone circles, the ceremony.
The romanticized version that showed up in illustrated histories and fantasy novels.
But the system entry said seventh. Which meant the event had a count, a sequence, a history of actual occurrences.
The legend was probably closer to documentation than metaphor.
He set it aside. These were questions for after. Right now the relevant information was her current state, and her current state was a problem.
She'd recovered memories she hadn't known she was missing. The contact with Vigo had given them back.
And whatever those memories contained had been enough to make her close down, agree to some kind of arrangement with her mirror-self, and stop responding to the outside world.
Getting her back wasn't a matter of finding her location, the system had provided that.
It was a matter of reaching her past whatever wall she'd put up, which meant understanding what was on the other side of that wall first.
He pushed his awareness into the branch line.
The sensation was like falling into water that had no temperature, the mirrored room dissolved around him, the reflections going transparent, the walls fading out, and then he was somewhere else entirely.
The soil under his feet was dark. Almost black, the particular color of earth with a high organic content, northern soil, the kind that characterized the upper federation territories.
It didn't cling to his feet but gave slightly underfoot, and it carried a smell that wasn't unpleasant but wasn't quite right either, old, dense, slightly sweet in a way that sat at the back of the throat.
The boundary between farmland and city. An abandoned stretch of black-earth field, and at its center, a monastery.
Not large. Not well-maintained. The stone walls had the specific quality of buildings that had been standing for a long time and receiving minimal attention for most of it.
Several crows crossed the sky above it, their calls dropping into the quiet and dissolving. One landed on the sign mounted beside the entrance.
The iron nail holding one corner of the sign snapped from rust.
The board swung loose, hanging from the remaining corner, the wood warped from years of weather.
The crow startled and lifted. The letters on the board were faded to the edge of illegibility, the paint having surrendered to the elements long ago.
Raphael read them anyway.
"Black Truffle Monastery."