Dylan Marsh was in the GU theater department's rehearsal space at 4 PM Monday, running lines with a partner who stopped when Elijah knocked on the open door, and Dylan's expression went immediately to the specific register of someone who had been hoping for and dreading this conversation simultaneously.
"I already stopped," he said. "I got your message Saturday."
"I know." He'd seen the forum activity — Dylan's last performance-post had been Friday, nothing since. "I wanted to say it in person. What you were doing took real skill. It mattered, in some ways, that it was happening." He paused. "The person who hurt Jake Torres won't stop at one. Stay off the streets until I tell you it's clear."
Dylan's scene partner had the specific quality of someone trying to be invisible. Dylan himself looked at the floor for a moment. "Is Jake going to be okay."
"The jaw heals. The ribs heal. He'll have a good story." He kept it even. "You both will, eventually."
He left the rehearsal space and took the subway to Midtown for Lisa Park.
Lisa was harder. She was a philosophy PhD candidate who had arrived at the Pale Rider legend through a research interest in Gotham's civic mythology and had been performing as the Gray Ghost variant — not the Pale Rider directly, but the connected archetype — for five weeks from a principled position about the legitimacy of embodied legend. She opened her apartment door with the expression of someone who had been thinking through the argument they were about to have.
"You're going to tell me it's dangerous," she said.
"It's genuinely dangerous. Jake Torres is in Gotham General with a wired jaw." He let that sit. "The people who did that will do it to you. I can't protect you and fight them at the same time — those are different operations and I only have enough capacity for one of them."
She looked at him — still in civilian register, not the Costume Shift, just Elijah Green making the argument as himself rather than as the archetype — and he could see her working through the calculation.
"You're asking me to trust that you'll handle what you're asking me to step away from," she said.
"Yes."
"And if you don't?"
"Then you can make the other decision afterward with full information." He kept his voice level. "Right now, I'm asking you to step back while I have the chance to address the root cause. If I can't, I'll tell you."
A long moment. "Two weeks," she said. "If nothing's changed in two weeks, I reserve the right to resume."
"Two weeks is all I'm asking for."
Marcus Webb was in a parking garage in Midtown at 6 PM.
Elijah had found him through the forum's private message chain — the same route he'd used for Dylan, the same approach, except Marcus had responded with unusual speed and had proposed the parking garage as the meeting location, which was a choice that made more sense after the first ten seconds of the conversation than it had before.
The body language was wrong from the entrance. Not frightened, not cautious — the specific stillness of someone who had already made a decision and was presenting themselves on the far side of it. Too confident for a person who'd been summoned by a figure who'd terrified a Falcone associate last week. The arms were crossed in the way that wasn't anxiety but self-satisfaction.
He stood in the third level of the parking structure with the Brand warm on his palm and ran the assessment through Clarity of Judgment in thirty seconds: Marcus was mid-twenties, had the physical bearing of someone who worked with his hands, and had the expression of someone who had been given something and was waiting to see if it was going to appreciate in value.
"The owls already made me a better offer," Marcus said, before Elijah could deliver the warning.
Elijah stopped walking.
"They want to know everything about you." Marcus's voice had the specific texture of someone enjoying a leverage position they hadn't had before. "How you recruit, where you operate, what you look like under the appearance thing." A pause. "I told them everything I know."
The Clarity of Judgment assessment completed: truthful. Not performing confidence. This is his actual position.
"What did you tell them," Elijah said.
"You use something to change how you look. The mark on your palm does something with heat. You operate from Old Town mostly, some Bowery, one LES event I heard about." Marcus tilted his head. "I never met you without the mask. I don't know your face."
That was accurate. The imitators had encountered the Pale Rider persona only — Costume Shift active, face nonspecific, no identifying features. Marcus couldn't give the Court Elijah Green because he'd never met Elijah Green.
"Why are you telling me this," Elijah said.
"Because you should know what they have." Marcus uncrossed his arms. "I also told them you were probably coming to the old tunnels under Old Town to prepare before the deadline. I don't know why I thought that — just seemed like where someone like you would go."
He hadn't given Marcus that information. He'd never mentioned the catacombs to any imitator.
He's guessing. But the Court will use it.
There was nothing useful to be gained from the confrontation continuing. He turned and walked back toward the parking garage elevator.
"You're not going to do anything?" Marcus called.
"No." He hit the call button. "You made your choice. So did I."
The Moldavia Theater's backstage wall was solid brick, which he confirmed when his fist connected with it at 7:15 PM. The impact traveled through his knuckles to his wrist and he stopped after one because one was enough to make the specific physical point that breaking his hand two days before the Court confrontation would not help anything.
He sat down on the prop room floor.
The Court had: the appearance-shifting ability, the Brand's properties, his performance locations, and — through the invitation's delivery to his dorm — his civilian identity. Marcus had independently given them the catacomb hypothesis, which combined with the Court's existing operational intelligence would confirm the catacomb as a likely preparation site.
What Marcus hadn't given them — couldn't give them — was the Zatanna alliance, the Dissonance buffer, or the second chapel passage that Blood had revealed.
He pulled the catacomb map out and spread it on the prop room floor and looked at it for four minutes.
Then he pulled out the Court brownstone blueprints — obtained from the city archive's building permit records on Monday the 13th, before the deadline week had compressed into its current state — and spread those beside it.
The Court expected him in the catacombs. They'd commit surveillance and potentially personnel to monitoring the catacomb entrances. Which meant the brownstone would be operating with whatever was left after those deployments.
He picked up his phone and called Zatanna.
"Marcus Webb told them about the catacombs," he said, when she answered.
A moment. "The decoy plan."
"Yes."
"You want me in the catacombs making it look like something is happening, while you go to the brownstone."
"Can you do it safely."
"I can do it more safely than you can do anything near Talons alone." Her voice was measured — the tone of someone problem-solving rather than objecting. "Blood's passage. He showed you a second exit. If they seal the known entrances, I use his route."
"You've never been in the catacombs."
"You're going to tell me the layout."
He looked at the catacomb map and the brownstone blueprints side by side, two arrows in his head — one real, one designed to convince the Court's intelligence apparatus to look at the wrong target while he walked to the right one.
"Tuesday night," he said. "We go into the chapel together. You learn the layout, set the wards, we get the resonance event. Wednesday you hold the decoy position while I approach the brownstone." He ran the math on his BP gap one more time — the chapel resonance would help but probably not enough to reach Tier 3 cleanly. He was going into this confrontation as the most powerful version of himself available, which was not the same as the most powerful version he needed to be. "If this goes wrong—"
"It won't."
"Zatanna."
"If it goes wrong, I extract from the catacombs and come to the brownstone." A pause. "Two days."
He folded both maps along their creases and stacked them and put them in his jacket, one on top of the other, the way you put two plans in the same pocket when they were supposed to be two parts of one plan.
"Two days," he said.
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