Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

"Mr. Morra?" my personal strategist repeated a little louder this time. "Do you want me to go over the notes for the UN summit?"

I’d heard her the first time. I could hear everything said on the 59th floor of my campaign headquarters, even the sweaty interns discussing lunch options in the break room two corridors away.

But I’d just seen a woman disappear into thin air. I’d seen it from my office window, a few blocks down the street.

I blinked, rubbed my eyes, and took a sip of my now 125-degree lukewarm coffee. I hated lukewarm coffee.

"One moment, Vanessa," I said, waving her off without looking up from the window. She huffed with that little annoyed sigh she always used when things didn't go precisely as planned. I never missed that sigh, and today it grated on my nerves more than usual.

Was I hallucinating again? Impossible. I hadn’t had a slip-up since I started manufacturing my own supply of NZT-48. I was on a regimen. A very strict one at that. 30 mg every twelve hours, no exceptions.

I replayed the last two minutes in my head.

I saw myself standing at my office window and nodding absentmindedly as Vanessa droned on about Japan’s latest trade policies—which I’d already memorized and analyzed ten ways to Sunday. Then I saw the other me flinch. A slight drop of his jaw and a brief widening of his eyes. That reaction was almost more surprising than the sight itself. I had total control over my body. Nothing surprised me anymore. Recently I'd begun to wonder why I even kept up with the day-to-day charade when I could see all the domino pieces falling into place long before anyone else even imagined setting them up. Getting an uncontrolled reaction out of me was about as likely as winning the lottery without buying a ticket.

But I had just been genuinely startled.

I replayed the moment again, this time following the gaze of my other self down to the street below. The view from the fifty-ninth floor offered a panoramic sweep of the city, which would have been a blur for most, but not for someone on NZT. I couldn’t quite see individual threads of fabric on people's clothing—I hadn’t yet figured out how to augment vision on that level—but there were certain patterns that stood out. And someone vanishing into thin air was certainly not part of any usual pattern.

I replayed the moment again.

There—a blip in the otherwise orderly parade of pedestrians. One moment she was there, and the next she was gone. Impossibly, No one seemed to notice. In fact, people seemed to look away at the exact moment she disappeared, almost as if an invisible force commanded their attention elsewhere. 

It was a she. I couldn’t see her as any more than a fleeting silhouette, but I could analyze the brief visual data. Her height, her probable weight distribution, the way she moved—unequivocally female. Late 30s, early 40s at most. Perfect health, though slightly underweight for her height. Possibly a highly stressful job? She was favoring her right side, meaning she likely had some kind of training that put more strain on one side of her body— martial arts, maybe?

Sideways stance with one arm raised slightly…

Fencing?

"Mr. Morra—"

"Clear my schedule for the rest of the day," I interrupted, snapping back to the present. As usual, my brain was operating on four different tracks—one part of me breaking down the mystery woman, another anticipating Vanessa’s response, a third consulting my mental map of the city, and a fourth wishing desperately for a fresh cup of coffee. I quickly wrestled that fourth track into submission, redirecting it to focus on possible teleportation theories and illusion tactics. 

"But sir, you have a meeting with the campaign donors at 3 PM and—"

"—and an interview with the New York Times at 4 PM," I completed her sentence for her. Vanessa was a fairly fast speaker, averaging about 175 words per minute. I wouldn’t have hired her if she wasn’t. But now I needed her to be silent so I could concentrate.

"R-right, sir, so should I reschedule them for tomorrow, or—"

"Call Governor Trent and reschedule the fundraiser, notify the team to push back all campaign-related activities until further notice." I spoke almost too fast for her to comprehend, but I knew she would catch up.

Eventually.

I grabbed my coat from the hanger and made for the door, leaving Vanessa to scramble with her phone and planner behind me.

"Sir, I really need to confirm your next availability!" Vanessa's voice grew more frantic as I moved swiftly through the doors and out into the hallway. "You have a very tight schedule, and it’s essential for us to—"

"Have my driver bring the car around," I called over my shoulder, ignoring the bewildered looks from my campaign staff as I strode past.

I needed to gather all possible data about this anomaly, and I couldn't do that from the confines of my office.

Chapter Text

I chose the car ride deliberately. I could have easily made it on foot faster, but then I'd have to ditch my private security detail—something I wasn’t ready to do just yet. The Gennady debacle had taught me the value of keeping a few expendable bodies between myself and potential threats. If only to buy me a precious second of reaction time.

Even on NZT, I wasn't invincible.

"Are you carrying?" I asked my head of security as the driver turned the engine over and the car glided away from the curb. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Vanessa running to catch up, waving her tablet like an SOS flag. She wouldn’t make it. She would just barely knock on the tinted window as we pulled away. Unfortunately for her, my driver wouldn’t be stopping, too occupied with the group of tourists pointing at the skyscrapers and snapping photos.

"Of course, sir," Drake responded with his usual stoic tone. He had a Glock 19 holstered under his jacket, a backup Sig Sauer P229 at his ankle, and two tactical knives concealed for close-quarters situations. I’d only asked because I wanted to put him in a certain mindset. Not that I particularly needed to give him that nudge—the man was a professional through and through. Drake was a burly ex-Navy SEAL with a permanent scowl, and he rarely spoke unless absolutely necessary. Just how I liked it.

The knock from Vanessa came right on cue, my driver distracted by the pretty tour guide explaining NYC's architectural history. Drake flinched slightly, his hand instinctively moving toward the concealed weapon under his jacket.

"It’s fine," I motioned with my hand for him to stay put.

"Sir, if I may ask, where exactly are we heading?"

A question. The fifth one he'd asked me in the entire six months he'd been on my payroll. Was I giving something away subconsciously? I instantly stopped my foot from tapping impatiently and leaned back into the leather seat, forcing a calm I didn’t entirely feel.

How odd…I had almost forgotten what uncertainty felt like.

"Almost there," I said, counting the meters downward in my head. "Find a place to park."

"Sir?" the driver questioned, glancing at me in the rearview mirror. "You want me to find a spot here? If you forgot something at the office, I can circle back around and—"

"I'm in the mood for Starbucks," I said, cutting him off before he could babble on for another thirteen words before uttering an unnecessary apology. "Do they still sell those double chocolate chip frappuccinos?"

"Frappuccinos?" The driver blinked in confusion. "Uh, I believe they—"

"No matter. You can park over there," I pointed to a space up ahead that seemed ideal for a quick exit if necessary.  

I didn’t waste a second as the car rolled to a stop, timing my exit perfectly with the flow of pedestrians on the sidewalk. Drake barely had time to unbuckle his seatbelt before I was already blending seamlessly into the crowd. 

I split my mind again into four distinct streams of thought. I’d learned early on that compartmentalizing was the key to maximizing my efficiency on NZT. I could do four. More than that, and the threads would start to tangle. Even four was pushing it a little. Stream Four had a tendency to misbehave and dive into tangents if I wasn’t careful. As it was doing right now. Why would Gary Kasparov’s match against Deep Blue suddenly pop into my head? Not relevant. I struggled a little with redirecting that line of thought and bringing it back to the anomaly. It resisted, but then we compromised on graph theory, which allowed me to trick it into focusing on camera networks.

Specifically, on NYC's camera network.

I left Stream Four to map out potential camera angles and blind spots while I guided the other three streams to absorb the environment. Then I arrived at the exact spot I had seen the woman vanish.

I stood there for a little while, scanning the surroundings without making it obvious. Well, I was running for senate, so "not making it obvious" was relative. I wasn’t yet a household name like some of the long-time politicians, but I was recognizable enough that people occasionally did a double take. Especially after that last debate. Eviscerating a seasoned political opponent on live television had a way of boosting one’s profile.

Drake caught up, his heart rate slightly elevated but otherwise composed. His huge frame naturally created a bubble of space around us as people instinctively gave way. Good. I was getting some breathing room to think.

Stream Four finally reported back. I wanted to punch it in the face for taking so long, but I suppose at least it hadn’t veered off into 16th-century Venetian architecture.

So, what do you have for me stream number four? Let’s see.

 NYC's camera network. Around 9,000 cameras installed throughout the city, a significant number of which were positioned around Times Square and other tourist-heavy areas. I’d counted seven cameras within a three-block radius. Now, where was all the footage being routed? Most likely at centralized city databases, possibly with backups on private servers for redundancy. They didn’t store footage indefinitely, typically a rolling buffer of about 30 days.

Really, Stream Four? I gave you 43 seconds to do this, and "about" is the best you can give me? Fine, let’s refine that.

I couldn’t refine that, apparently. I knew a lot, but I wasn’t an endless well of knowledge. I didn’t know whether I needed to bribe a city official or hack into the system myself. Not that I knew much about hacking, but I could certainly find someone who did. Writing a specialized algorithm to sift through all that footage would probably be doable if I was willing to dedicate the full four streams to it while pulling an all-nighter. Lindy certainly wouldn’t like that. I would have to delegate that task as well.

"I think I’m ready for that Frappuccino now," I said, signaling Drake to take position by the door as I walked into the nearby Starbucks.

The overworked barista barely spared me a glance as she busied herself with the long line of caffeine-deprived patrons. I ordered a double chocolate chip Frappuccino, partly out of genuine curiosity about its taste and partly to maintain an air of normalcy, then I casually noted the positions of the security cameras inside as well as the one right outside the entrance.

Bingo—perfect angle.

The line of customers eased up just a tad, and I took that as an opportunity to discreetly position myself at a table closest to the staff entrance to the back.

I could have talked my way to access the footage directly, Stream Two proposing I could charm the manager by posing as a tech-savvy city inspector. She didn’t recognize me from my campaign, so that could work. But Stream One suggested a more direct approach: simply wait for an employee to take a break and catch the door before it closed. I liked that idea better. 

I was just about to execute Stream One’s strategy when two men wearing the distinctive blue uniforms of the NYPD walked in.

They weren’t NYPD.

Chapter Text

Two questions popped into my mind almost simultaneously. First, how did I know they weren’t real NYPD officers? And second, what were they here for?

The first question was the easy one. I had to work back through the layers of my subconscious to identify the subtle cues that had set off alarm bells, but once I did, it was obvious.

The clues were virtually screaming at me.

For one, the two men were practically holding their breath to keep the buttons on their shirts from popping off, but somehow their heart rates and lung capacities suggested they were in peak physical condition. Fatsuits? Unlikely. Too seamless. I wasn’t particularly familiar with the latest in costume technology, but I doubted even Hollywood could pull off a costume that could fool someone on NZT. So, what? Some kind of advanced prosthetics? I was out of my depth on that front.

Frustrated that I couldn’t solve that puzzle right now, I relegated it to Stream Three’s backlog for later analysis. Hopefully it would come up with a solution before I had to roll the dice on an educated guess.

Now, what else? Uniforms. Too clean. Almost sterile, like they were fresh out of the packaging. No radios attached to their belts, and their shoes—brand new as well, with no signs of wear. The younger guy’s holster was strapped on too low for a quick draw—clearly someone who wasn't accustomed to carrying a firearm. His partner kept adjusting his collar and glancing at his badge number, which I'd bet dollars to donuts he couldn’t recite from memory if his donut lunch break depended on it. Except he wouldn’t have a donut lunch break because he wasn’t a real cop.

"NYPD, ma'am," the older guy said to the barista, pointing clumsily to the badge on his chest.  "Routine check. Just need to verify the security footage from your cameras."

Since when did patrol officers handle security footage checks? The barista looked puzzled too, but she was an overworked, underpaid college student who was failing her economics class and couldn’t give two shits about protocol as long as she didn’t get fired. Predictably, she motioned towards the back where I assumed her manager’s office was located.

I walked right behind them, timing my steps to match theirs, my Frappuccino in hand as the barista led us through the back. We passed a storage room filled with boxes of coffee beans and syrups, heading towards the manager's office. I waited for them to step inside before slipping into the storage room and quietly closing the door behind me. I let my enhanced hearing do the rest of the work as I casually browsed through the rows of coffee supplies. Medium roast from Colombia, dark roast from Ethiopia, vanilla syrup with a hint of hazelnut—Lindy liked vanilla hazelnut in her morning coffee these days, didn’t she? I made a mental note to grab a bottle on my way out.

"My boss is out at the moment," I could hear the barista explain in the manager's office, "but I think you can access the footage from here."

VHS. Local copies that weren't connected to any citywide database or easily accessible external networks. I needed to get that tape.

"Thank you, ma'am, we’ll take it from here," the older guy said with what I knew was a forced attempt at a reassuring smile.

"Sure…" she replied uncertainly before returning to the front counter. I waited for her to pass by the storage room before I stepped out into the hallway. I stood there and listened, taking my first sip of the Frappuccino—not bad. A little too heavy on the chocolate for my taste, but not bad. I needed the rest of the liquid for later use though, so I resisted the urge to gulp it all down.

"…Alright, do you see that red dot?" the older guy said impatiently. "That means it’s recording."

"R-recording?" his partner stammered. Likely new to whatever operation this was, but not new in a "fresh out of the academy" kind of way. I couldn’t put my finger on it just yet, but something was disturbingly off about the entire setup. I needed more data.

"Yes. Recording." The older guy snapped back. "What, they didn’t cover this in your training?"

"Uh, no sir, I did well in Muggle Studies, but handling Muggle technology wasn’t really my—"

"We call them No-Maj here in the States, Copper," the older guy interjected. "I told you this already, stop using the British terms. It gets on my nerves."

"Sorry, sir."

Muggle…? No-Maj…?

A sudden surge of shock rippled through my synapses.

I hadn’t felt anything close to shock in a long time.

My mental streams went into an uncontrolled overdrive, cross-referencing every obscure term and reference I had ever come across. I couldn’t have stopped them even if I wanted to. Disastrously, with the full four streams occupied in frantic analysis, none of them were left to monitor the present situation with the level of detail I usually demanded. My enhanced hearing collapsed into a jumbled mess of fragmented dialogue and ambient noise. I wanted to scream in frustration. I was missing my best opportunity to gather more concrete information.

I quickly jumped into the mental arena where the four streams were battling for dominance. I went in swinging.

When I finally had Eddie Stream number four in a chokehold and Eddie Stream number one knocked out on the floor of my mental processing area, I managed to bring Streams Two and Three back on track, refocusing them on the immediate environment while retaining just enough processing power in Stream One to keep the key terms—Muggle and No-Maj—in a tentative mental loop.

"—now you take this dial thing here and wind it back to…hold on, I’ve got the exact timestamp written down somewhere," the older guy muttered. "Let’s see, 1:32 PM, I think it was…"

"1:33 PM sir. Do you think she’s one of you-know-who's followers?"

"Copper, shut up and let me work."

"I’m only asking because I don’t think we’ve been properly briefed on—"

"Merlin’s beard, Copper! I said shut it! You don’t need to be briefed on every fucking detail to follow orders! It’s just a routine clean-up, you idiot. We get the footage, we erase the evidence, and we get out. Now go buy me one of those crispy pork sandwiches while I’m —"

"There’s a man standing out there," Copper suddenly whispered. "I can sense a mind."

Impossible. I was hardly breathing. My presence should have been virtually undetectable. I was measuring the decibel level of my own footsteps to ensure they didn't exceed the ambient noise around me.

Hearing aids?

No. The most expensive brand on the market advertised a 120 dB maximum amplification, which still wouldn't be enough to detect me unless I was actively moving.

"What are you blabbering about, Copper?"

"There’s a man standing out in the hallway listening to us."

"Huh? You serious? Let me check…"

I quickly wore a confident smile and stepped forward, knocking on the doorframe before the older guy could come out. The footsteps paused momentarily before the door opened and I was face-to-face with the two mystery men who had just managed to unravel the mental equilibrium of one of the most composed individuals on Earth—me.

"Afternoon, gentlemen," I greeted casually, holding up my cup. They didn’t recognize me. I was subtly adjusting my posture and facial expression to disrupt their ability to match my appearance with any recent media coverage they might have seen. "Name 's Smith," I said, extending my hand for a shake.

The guy in the lead raised an eyebrow but accepted my handshake, albeit reluctantly. "This is a restricted area." he said gruffly. "What’s your business here?" He wore his enormous mustache like he’d just glued it on that morning and hadn’t quite gotten used to the weight of it yet. Copper, the blond kid, looked between me and his partner with wide, uncertain eyes.

"I'm with the city’s tech maintenance crew," I said smoothly, my grip firm but not overpowering. I could have crushed his pudgy hand if I wanted to, but sometimes subtle displays of control were more effective. "I already talked to Monica— she’s the manager here— apparently they have some technical issues with their wiring."

"Yeah? And what sort of technical issues would those be?"

"Oh, just the usual—camera feeds not syncing properly, time-stamp discrepancies. It’s all pretty standard stuff." I could see them not following a word of what I was saying but nodding along anyway, which was exactly the reaction I wanted. "So what are you guys looking for? maybe I can help." I slid inside the room, positioning myself strategically between them and the security console. Copper had to step awkwardly aside to make room for me.

"We need the footage from 1:30 PM," Mustache said, narrowing his eyes slightly as he scrutinized me. He was on to something, but he wasn't quite sure what yet.

"Legilimens," Copper muttered under his breath. I almost didn’t catch the word. it didn’t match up with any language I was familiar with.

"…sure, let me see what I can do," I said, casually moving closer to the security console.

"No. Don’t touch anything," Mustache growled. I let him put a hand on my shoulder.

"Whoa, easy there." I held up my hands. "I know you guys are just doing your job, but my boss will have my head if the cameras go down again. Let me just take a quick look—"

"I can’t get a read on him," Copper suddenly breathed out, his eyes wide and almost panicked. "This is…his mind…it’s…"

"Sorry, what was that?" I asked, tilting my head slightly with the feigned innocence of a city technician who was just trying to be helpful. Internally, I was fighting a three-front war: Battling Streams Two, Three, and Four to stay on track and defend me should things escalate, while Stream One was still tying itself in knots over the terms "Muggle" and "No-Maj. "

"Report Copper!" Mustache snapped, his grip tightening on my shoulder. "What are you sensing?"

Copper was either about to vomit or pass out. He was leaning against the wall, looking pale and sweaty. "I-I’ve never felt anything like this. This guy’s mind. I-it’s not natural, he’s…he’s a monster. I think we should call for—AAARGH!" He suddenly collapsed to the ground, clutching his head and writhing in pain.

"Copper! What’s wrong?!" Mustache yelled. I allowed him to push me aside as he rushed to his partner's side.

"Look, guys," I said, backing away slowly, "I don’t know what’s going on here, but I’d recommend getting him some medical attention and—" I didn’t get a chance to say anything else before Mustache whipped out a stick from his coat pocket and pointed it directly at me.

I stared in disbelief at the supposed police officer brandishing a wooden stick like it was a lethal weapon.

"Show me your hands!" he commanded. "Get on the ground, now!"

He stuck the piece of wood into my face.

7.2 inches. Oak? No, something denser. Grooves carved into it, likely hand-made. Possibly customized? Held with the clear intent to do me harm, but how exactly?

"Obliv—"

Time stopped.

Everything sharpened into a singular moment of clarity.

I couldn’t let him finish that word.

If he finished that word, something irreversible and potentially devastating would happen.

Options! Now! I mentally commanded.

Four ghostly versions of me exploded into motion simultaneously.

I saw Eddie One delivering a lightning-fast palm strike to his wrist, disarming him before he could react. Eddie Two went with a high knee to the groin, followed by a judo throw that would incapacitate both his arm and leg movements. Eddie Three called for lethal force—an elbow to the throat followed by a rapid twist of his neck.

 Eddie Four was playing a game of chess against himself while giving me the middle finger.

I ignored all of them.

Time resumed as I "stumbled" forward with calculated clumsiness, my left foot catching the edge of the desk, sending me sprawling towards Mustache. My drink splattered dramatically across his face, the icy Frappuccino effectively blinding him as I discreetly knocked the stick from his grip, sending it spiraling under the desk.

"I am so sorry!" I stammered out, using the moment to scramble back up on my feet while pushing a cursing Mustache against the wall with a seemingly accidental shoulder check. "I didn’t mean to—oh my god, are you okay?! Let me get help for your partner!" I shouted. I bolted out of the room before Mustache even had a chance to wipe the chocolate and whipped cream off his face.

I made quite the dramatic look of a concerned citizen as I burst out into the main café area. People gasped and turned their heads as I rushed out into the open.

I kept up the panicked charade right until I exited the Starbucks and was out of the security cameras’ field of vision.

My chest instantly fell back into its controlled rhythm.

"Sir, what happened in there?" Drake asked, appearing at my side with a hand on his holstered weapon. "We lost line of sight for a few minutes, and I was about to—"

"Call all your men and get them to secure the perimeter," I said calmly, handing him the bottle of vanilla hazelnut syrup I was holding. "No one leaves the Starbucks without me knowing exactly who they are and where they're going. "

Chapter Text

Obliv—iously

Obliv—iousness

Obliv—ion

Obliviscence?

Forgetfulness.

Mind.

Erasing evidence.

Clean-up.

Memory clean-up?

I was leaning on a parapet on the rooftop of a nearby brick building overlooking the Starbucks. I needed a secure vantage point to observe the street below—one that wouldn’t put me in immediate contact with the two mystery men who had just nearly managed to include me in their clean-up operation. This roof provided a perfect angle. I had three viable escape routes planned out from here as well as a clear line of sight to the café entrance. If they made any sudden moves, I’d be ready.

"Tell Michael to approach the lady with the white handbag," I instructed Drake over my mobile phone. "Not that one. The other Michael—Clarkson. She’s intimidated by authority figures, so have him flash his counterfeit badge and ask her for ID."

Drake’s men had discreetly spread out throughout the area to blend in with the crowd. Any civilian leaving the Starbucks had to speak with at least one of them before moving past the block. The men were posing as plainclothes officers taking witness statements for a "potential disturbance" reported in the area. Obviously, the legal implications of this would be problematic if it ever went public, but I had enough political clout to smooth over any minor infractions. Besides, I’d hired Drake specifically for a reason, and a law-abiding disposition wasn't exactly high on the list of qualities I needed from my security detail.

I just wish I’d prepared an earpiece for me as well so I didn’t have to rely on my personal mobile phone for issuing orders. Integrating with Drake’s communication setup was something I should have already implemented weeks ago, but it looked like Stream Four’s chess addiction had taken up more bandwidth than I’d anticipated.

I pushed that task to a higher priority in my mental queue. If Stream Four needed a hobby, I’d prefer it to be something a little more constructive than replaying Grandmaster matches from the 80s.

Stream Four replied by shifting to Go.

If you keep misbehaving like that, I'll trap you in an endless loop of tic-tac-toe, I threatened. I might even consider deleting you entirely.

That got its attention.

Good. I couldn’t afford to play nice right now.

I focused my hearing on the conversations below, filtering out the usual urban noise to zero in on anything relevant. Even I couldn’t overhear every detail from this distance, so I had to rely on Drake’s updates and on the microexpressions of people exiting the Starbucks. Luckily, it was just enough data to catch on any unusual behaviors.

"The cops will exit in approximately ten minutes," I informed Drake, accounting for the time it should have taken them to retrieve the VHS tape and deal with Copper’s sudden collapse. It’d been nearly an hour already, so they were likely wrapping up by now. "Call back the Michaels and have them ready to intercept."

The fake cops could, of course, possibly teleport or use some other means of instantaneous travel, but I had to assume they’d adhere to the more mundane option given their initial operation goal seemed to involve the erasure of evidence through conventional means. They wouldn’t have bothered dressing up as NYPD officers if they intended on pulling any overtly supernatural disappearing acts. And they wouldn’t teleport out of a public area that they’d only been sent to in the first place to cover up an incident of someone else teleporting out of a public area. Copper would argue for emergency teleportation, but Mustache would likely overrule him given that his upcoming promotion was on the line. The guy wasn’t annoyed with Copper for his incompetence, but clearly more agitated about how their botched performance could jeopardize his own standing within whatever organization they belonged to.

Besides, Mustache wasn’t leaving without a bite of that pork sandwich.

"Scratch that, pull Clarkson off the security detail."

"…sir, you want me to fire Clarkson?" my head of security asked, clearly taken aback. "He’s our most competent field man. I handpicked him myself for his attention to detail—"

"I am well aware of Clarkson’s attention to detail—such as his ongoing attention to the pretty French tourist he's been chatting up for the past five minutes instead of asking for her ID. Get rid of him."

"But sir, why—"

"This is the fourth question you’ve asked me today. I don’t pay you two million dollars a month to ask questions." I was modulating my tone to mirror Drake’s superior officer from his time in the military. "I’ll make sure your man is compensated generously for his departure," I added, knowing he’d want assurance that Clarkson wouldn’t be left in the lurch.

"Thank you, sir. I’ll handle it right away."

"Good, now when our friends in blue exit the Starbucks, I want Mellany to approach them with the other Michael." She would easily catch Copper’s eye with her low-cut top. "She’s to ask them for help with a stolen handbag incident and keep them engaged for as long as possible. If they refuse or—hold on, Lindy is trying to reach me, I’ll call you back in five."

That should be enough time to set everything in motion. I wanted those men cornered long enough for me to properly assess their responses and gather more data. We had the sedative syringes ready, but I was hoping it wouldn’t come to that.

I switched the call to Lindy. "What’s up?"

"Where the hell are you, Eddie?" Lindy’s voice managed to sound somehow both annoyed and also genuinely concerned at the same time. She’d developed that particular tone for me since the campaign started getting serious. "I’ve been fielding calls from half the donors in Manhattan. Vanessa is on the verge of a breakdown trying to reschedule everything. Why aren’t you answering your goddamn phone?"

"I turned it off for a bit. Went to Starbucks for a quick coffee break."

"You what?!" she sputtered. "I’ve been busting my ass doing damage control here while you go AWOL on a caffeine run? I swear, if you don’t get your priorities straight, I’m going to…"

I let her go on for a bit while I watched Mellany lower her top just a tad more as she prepared to approach the two pseudo-cops. Any minute now…

"Are you even listening to me, Eddie?"

"Sure, do you want me to repeat everything you just said?"

"I know you can repeat everything I just said. But you weren’t listening to a word of it, were you?" Lindy was about the only person who still managed to catch me off guard every now and then. I’d even anticipated that response, just not the force behind it.

This was exactly why I didn’t want her to quit her editorial job and join the campaign full-time.

"Do you still carry that pepper spray in your purse?" I asked without missing a beat. I knew she did, but I had to shock her out of her current line of thinking.

"What does that have to do with anything, Eddie? Are you even—"

"I need you to listen to me very carefully." I chose that exact combination of words for a reason, knowing it would trigger her trauma from the day she had to bring me my NZT-48 supply with a hitman on her tail.

She shut up instantly, her breath hitching.

"Do you have a pen on you?" I asked. "No, you don’t. You’re in the meeting room with the team, right? Grab one from Vanessa's desk. Third drawer on the left. Grab the pink one."

"How did you know—"

"Do it now, Lindy." I saw her flinch visibly in the mental image I had of her. I didn’t like that one bit. Stream Two wanted to strangle me for putting her through this again. I almost let it.

I heard her rushing out of the room, her heels clicking against the polished floor. She was breathing heavily now and I could practically see her hands trembling as she burst into Vanessa’s office and went straight for the drawer. Vanessa wasn’t there—she was likely fuming in the break room while stress-eating a box of organic kale chips and debating whether to call it quits on my campaign. I briefly let myself consider the possible fallout if Vanessa decided to abandon ship, but I couldn’t afford that distraction right now.

"I have the pen, Eddie," Lindy said quietly.

"Write down these letters exactly as I say them. There’s a yellow sticky note to your right. Ready?"

"W-wait, I can’t twist the cap off—" She bit it off with her teeth and spat it out. "O-okay…go ahead."

"Uppercase T lowercase v uppercase M lowercase e 5 2 9 11 7 2 uppercase…" I went on for another thirty-four characters, knowing she would lose her patience somewhere around the fifteenth, but I compensated by slowing my speech slightly to give her just enough time to keep up. I’d have liked to give her a longer sequence, much longer, but I was already pushing the limits of her stress tolerance.  I verified the sequence with her three times to ensure she had it correct.

"What is this for, Eddie?" she asked shakily. "Are you in some kind of trouble again? Do I need to call the police?"

"Nothing like that, no. It’s just…" I hesitated for a fraction of a second. "It’s possible that some people who…look like me…might try to approach you or the team in the next few days. The next time you see me or anyone claiming to be me, ask them for this sequence."

"…Look like you? You mean someone else is impersonating you? Trying to gather information about the campaign?"

"No. I mean potentially identical to me in every discernible way. As in physically identical."

She didn’t understand. She was biting her lower lip and frowning. I could almost follow her thinking process down to the exact point where she would make a decision on whether or not to argue further.

"Do I need to go somewhere safe?" she finally asked.

"No! No…just, finish whatever you were doing and make sure Vanessa doesn’t quit on me—"

"SHE’S THINKING ABOUT QUITTING?!" Lindy snapped. "After everything I’ve done to keep her on board?!"

"Yeah, I know. Really bad timing for her to have a crisis of faith, right? I’m confident you can handle it."

"Oh I’ll handle her alright…" Lindy grumbled, her frustration momentarily flattening her stress curve—just as I had intended. "Fine, Eddie, consider your schedule cleared for the day, but tonight we’re going to have a very long talk about this."

"And the sequence?" I reminded her, sensing her mounting frustration but knowing I needed to drill it into her memory.

She sighed a long, exasperated sigh that could have probably been measured in decibels if I’d cared to. "I’ll keep it on me, I guess."

That was the best I was going to get from her.

"I’ll tell you everything tonight, I promise."

And I meant it. It was time I leveled with her about everything, and I wasn’t just referring to the recent developments. I’d been keeping some things from her that she deserved to know. There was a good change she would leave me after hearing everything, but I owed her that much.

"Fine," she relented grudgingly.

"Don’t go home tonight. When you finish with the team pick a hotel nearby and book a room under a different name. Don’t tell me anything about it. I’ll meet you there by 10 PM."

I wanted to tell her a lot more. Give her a long list of instructions—which car to use, which streets to avoid, how to recognize if she was being followed— but I stopped myself. She was reaching the limit of what she could process in the moment. If I pushed her further, she might ignore me entirely and call the police. Or worse, try to come find me directly.

"How would you even know which hotel to go to if I don’t tell you?"

"I’ll know."

She stayed silent for a long moment, her breathing finally calming down. I waited patiently for her response, knowing that I had to give her the space she needed.

"Just…be safe, Eddie."

"You know I can take care us. Always."

"…right. I’m sure you can."

The two mystery men exited the Starbucks exactly six minutes later, Mustache munching on his pork sandwich while supporting Copper by the arm as the latter shuffled along unsteadily. Apparently, the kid was still reeling from his psychic bout with me. Interesting.

"Drake," I spoke into my mobile. "It’s go time. Have Mellany make her move."

There was a long silence on the other end. Drake wanted to ask another question but was holding himself back. I couldn’t anticipate what he was thinking, which instantly put me on edge.

"What is it? They are right there," I pressed. "Near the entrance, Mellany needs to intercept them now."

"Sir, I don’t see anyone fitting your description near the Starbucks entrance."

Impossible. He had a clear line of sight to the entrance.

"What do you mean you don't see them?" I snapped. "You don’t see the fat man with the mustache and the blond kid who looks like he’s about to puke? Intercept NOW. NOW!"

"Sir, I’ve got eyes on the street, and there’s no one matching that description near the entrance or within a three-block radius. I can see a teenager with a skateboard—"

"Behind the teenager with the skateboard!"

"Uh…you mean the grandma with the poodle?"

Fatsuits. Advanced camouflage technology.

Perception-altering fields?

Oh. Oh shit.

"Sir?"

I flipped the phone shut and sprinted to the edge of the rooftop where the fire escape was clinging to the side of the building two floors below. I Jumped off the roof, calculating the exact angle needed to grab the railing and swing myself down to the next level without breaking my neck. The fire escape would have been an easy way down even without NZT, but with it, it was practically a slide. I landed on the sidewalk in a roll and immediately oriented myself towards the direction Copper had been staring. There, that parked police cruiser. It was a replica of the standard NYPD vehicle, but there were too many details that gave it away—no evidence of routine wear, a slightly altered font on the license plate, and a paint job that was just a shade off from the official color.

I wouldn’t make it in time. They were already in the car—Mustache sliding into the driver’s seat with Copper slumping against the passenger door. My own driver was blocked by a supply van parked illegally with its hazard lights on. I quickly consulted my mental map of the city and then darted towards a side alley that cut through to the next block where a traffic light would stall them for at least 45 seconds. I crossed the alley in a blur, pushing my speed to the very limits allowed by my human anatomy. I wasn’t Michael Johnson fast, but I was close enough. People turned their heads as I exploded from the alley and skidded onto the adjacent street, arriving just as the traffic light turned red.

Now I just needed to get my own ride.

My gaze swept around the street, profiling every driver in sight until I found the perfect candidate—a middle-aged man in a beat-up sedan parked by the curb, a cigarette dangling from his lips as he exhaled smoke through the rolled-down window. 

I just had to cross the street to reach him.

Across the fifty-six cars that were zipping down the busy avenue.

I stepped off the curb and into the oncoming traffic.

Making the crossing in one piece was merely a high school physics exercise—velocity, acceleration, trajectory. The only challenge being the need to process all the data in real-time and synchronize it with my planned movements.

Which wasn’t really a challenge for me.

I dodged a speeding taxi, pivoted around a delivery truck, and slid across the hood of a compact SUV with inches to spare.

But then it started raining.

I could predict a lot of things.

I couldn’t predict the weather.

Chapter Text

The sudden downpour introduced too many variables. Not just the slippery surfaces, but also the impaired visibility and disrupted patterns of movement. Each driver was now reacting in unpredictable ways, making my calculations infinitely more complex. I made several errors in a quick succession—misjudging the speed of a minivan, underestimating the reaction time of a motorcyclist, and overcompensating for the sudden swerve of a delivery truck.

I didn’t end up a splat on the pavement. I didn’t cause a sixty-car pileup either, but it was a near thing.

When I finally reached the beat-up sedan, I was soaking wet and I was holding a dislocated shoulder in place with my free hand. I’d had to make a choice between sending a pizza delivery guy flying off his scooter or taking the brunt of an oncoming side mirror to my shoulder. Stream Four had mutinied when I overruled its suggestion to sacrifice the pizza guy for my own safety. I’d almost had to shut Stream Four down completely.

My target stared at me with wide eyes as the traffic behind me screeched to a halt, horns blaring and angry shouts echoing through the street. I caught his cigarette mid-air as it dropped from his gaping mouth. I took a quick drag to pacify Stream Four, and then flicked it away before pulling open his car door.

"H-hey, what the hell do you think you're doing?" the man shouted.

"I’ll pay you 9,650 dollars if you let me borrow your car for the next 90 minutes. I’ll park it back here when I get back, no scratches." I handed him the wad of cash I always kept on me. "I’ll also leave a check for another 50,000 in your glove compartment. I just don’t have the time to fill it out right now."

"You —you what?" He squeezed the steering wheel tightly, eyes darting between my eyes and the cash. "Are you crazy?"

"Look, you want to send your kid to that fancy college she got accepted to, right?" A little personal touch might push him over the edge. "Because unless you let me borrow this car right now, you’re looking at another year of saving up." His grip on the steering wheel loosened. "Last chance," I waved the money in front of his face.

That did the trick.

He blinked once, twice, then unbuckled his seatbelt and scrambled out of the car.

I accelerated away just as the light turned green, merging into traffic and putting myself in a position to tail Mustache and Copper.

"Where are you idiots heading now?" I muttered, scanning the vehicles up ahead. "I just want to have a little chat with you two."

I could see Copper through the rear window of their car, his head lolling back against the seat rest while Mustache was unknowingly making the kid’s nausea worse with the greasy pork sandwich aroma wafting through the cramped space.

I considered my options, and then I made a dangerous bet.

"I know there’s a chance you can hear me now," I said carefully. "So I’ll make this real simple: pull over and step out of the car. If you do that, I’ll forgive Copper’s little mind probe attempt back there and we can have a civil conversation."

They didn’t react in any visible manner. Mustache was offering the kid a bite while drumming his fingers on the steering wheel and humming a tune that didn’t match any song I knew.

I breathed in relief. If they’d heard me, I would have had to book it out of there fast. 

I kept a steady distance behind them, maintaining my blend with the other vehicles as we moved through the city's dense traffic. My shoulder hurt bad. NZT-48 had many benefits, but pain suppression wasn't one of them. In fact, my heightened sensitivity made it worse, each throb like a sledgehammer battering through my nervous system. I coughed violently as I adjusted my grip on the steering wheel and blinked away the rainwater dripping into my eyes. I had to pee, my throat was bone dry, and my mind was on overdrive trying to manage a dozen different tasks at once.

It didn’t help that Stream Four was still sulking over being forced into compliance. It really didn’t like that tic-tac-toe threat. Probably because it wasn’t an empty threat. We both knew I had the capability to trap it in an endless loop of meaningless tasks if it misbehaved. We didn’t know exactly how it was possible, since I couldn’t really see into the source code of my own mind, but I had a sort of instinctual sense of what I could and couldn’t do within the realms of my enhanced cognition.

If I wanted to, I could permanently trap Stream Four in an endless loop of our worst memories. Deleting it completely was the more straightforward option—a clean cut, but one I was reluctant to take. Generating new thought streams wasn’t exactly a walk in the park. The process required me to sacrifice a significant chunk of my cognitive bandwidth for several days, if not weeks, dropping my overall efficiency and making me vulnerable to lapses in judgment.

And it wasn’t an exact science, that kind of mental restructuring.

Most of my own internal experiments had been extrapolated from a combination of psychological theories and neuroscience principles, mixed with a good dose of trial and error. Essentially, the segmentation process involved reallocating cognitive resources to create a new, distinct thread of consciousness—one that could operate semi-independently while still remaining under my overarching control. Partitioning off a section of my brain and meticulously training it to operate semi-autonomously was akin to teaching a newborn child to walk, talk, and think like an adult, except I was also the parent, the child, and the teacher all at once. Even worse, the child in question could potentially rebel, making it their life's mission to become an insufferable pain in my mental ass. 

But one thing I could never allow was for any of the streams to completely override my control.

I could never let them develop their own agendas.

This was something I had to avoid at all costs. 

I watched Stream Four intently, separating it from my current line of thought so it wouldn’t pick up on my concerns. I hated the mental image it’d picked for itself. It looked like the old me—long, unkempt hair and a scruffy beard. It looked like me back when I was still struggling to piece my life together. Back before NZT-48.

Why did I hate it so much?

Well, for one, me from back then was a mess, a complete wreck of a human being.

But me from back then was also the version of me that struggled, learned, and fought his way to where I am now. He was an idiot, but then, most everyone around me was an idiot too. Did I hate other people for their own mental deficiencies? No, not really. I wasn’t exactly a paragon of empathy, but I didn't harbor personal grudges against people for simply being who they were.

So why did Stream Four bother me so much? I couldn’t figure it out.

The other streams were beginning to take notice of my temporary isolated mental state.

I quickly reintegrated my thoughts and honed back in on the task at hand. I had much bigger issues to deal with. Namely, tailing the two mystery individuals who were capable of altering human perception, probing minds, and potentially erasing memories. 

There were too many unknowns for me to develop a fully reliable strategy.

But I also couldn’t let them slip away without getting more information.

We were driving through the Lower East Side now. There were fewer notable landmarks, less foot traffic. The buildings were older, with narrow alleyways and limited surveillance, which meant plenty of places to hide or blend in if they were planning to disappear.

Disappear.

Huh.

But what about the police cruiser?

I rounded a corner and found myself facing a long, wide side street flanked by dilapidated buildings. We were the only two cars on the road, making my tailing job significantly more conspicuous. I wasn’t worried though. Mustache was practically falling asleep at the wheel and Copper was too out of it to notice much of anything. Besides, visibility was minimal with the rain pouring down in sheets, creating a shroud that blurred the edges of everything around us. I could have been driving a parade float and they might not have noticed.

Which was why I wasn’t particularly surprised when they didn’t notice the woman in a black corset dress standing at the end of the street.

She wasn’t there ten seconds ago when we’d rounded the corner.

I let my enhanced vision break through the haze of rain, focusing on her figure. She was strikingly out of place. A mess of curly black hair, pale skin, and an outfit that seemed more suited for a goth party rather than a rain-soaked alleyway. Nails painted black, lips matching the shade, knee-high lace-up boots with chunky heels that somehow managed to look both intimidating and stunningly impractical for the weather. 

She was the exact match of the woman I had seen disappear from the street outside my office. Except now I could put a face to the figure—sharp, intense and gaunt, with a pallor that suggested she hadn't seen the sun in years.

She pulled a wooden stick from a holster strapped to her thigh and pointed it directly at the approaching cruiser.

The world slowed down around me.

I could see the raindrops suspended in mid-air like tiny prisms reflecting the dim streetlights. The trajectory of every drop was now a calculable vector, forming a cascading pattern that I could analyze in perfect detail. And the pattern around the woman in the corset dress was distinctly wrong. Almost as if the water droplets were bending away from her in a subtle, unnatural curve, avoiding her entirely.

My thought streams converged into a single line of reasoning.

This woman had disappeared into thin air in the middle of a busy city street, knowing it would draw the clean-up crew out to the open, and then…what? Was she intending to eliminate them? No. She wouldn’t have bothered setting up an elaborate ambush for a simple kill. It was a kidnapping attempt.

The only question left was…

Who did I side with?

The clean-up crew trying to erase evidence of a hidden, possibly alien society existing among humans, or the woman ambushing them?

I broke down the woman even further, noting the slight grin tugging at the corners of her lips, the way she gripped the wooden stick with a practiced ease, and how her eyes flickered with a hint of something beyond mere determination. She was enjoying this. She would be savoring any drop of blood that resulted from her ambush.

I made my choice.

The two idiots playing cops still hadn’t caught on to the imminent danger.

But luckily for them, I was there, and I wasn’t going to let them get obliterated before I had answers.

COPPER, WATCH OUT ON YOUR LEFT! I mentally shouted in four different voices, my streams aligning on one purpose. ON YOUR LEFT!

The world resumed its relentless pace as Copper’s eyes shot open, wide with panic.

On your left!

He jerked his head to the left just in time to see the woman raise her stick higher, a flash of light sparking at its tip. She moved her wrist in a precise, practiced motion. A twirl and a flick, then an upward snap, and then—

I froze time again.

I focused every cognitive resource I had into analyzing her wrist movements.

Forty-eight ghostly versions of her right hand burst from her original wrist, layering over each other as they traced different paths through the air. I couldn’t anticipate with complete certainty which exact sequence she would follow, but I could estimate the most probable trajectories given the angles of her forearm, the alignment of her other arm, and the way her muscles tensed. There was a pattern emerging, a sequence of inputs in some complex code, likely designed to produce a specific result.

I filtered through the possibilities, narrowing them down to a handful of outcomes, then I waited for her to reach the most motor-intensive part of the sequence. The moment her wrist flicked upward sharply, I snapped back into real-time and floored the gas pedal, honking the horn in a confusing staccato pattern designed to simulate multiple vehicles approaching from various directions.

She barely flinched. Her reaction was almost inhumanly fast, correcting the overextension of her wrist as the initial shock of my sudden presence instantly transitioned into a response. I swerved my vehicle sharply to the side, overtaking the police cruiser before they could collide with what I could only assume was some kind of barrier shimmering into existence in front of them. I bumped their car with just enough force to nudge them off course, sending them skidding to the right. The left side of their vehicle grazed the edge of the barrier, sparking and screeching as it scraped along. The barrier didn’t break, nor did it even slightly buckle under the impact. 

I quickly shelved the implications of that for later analysis.

But then her attention pivoted towards me.

Copper already had his own wooden stick out thanks to my mental shout, but he was painfully slow on the uptake. Mustache was now fully alert and reaching for something in his jacket, but with the last bite of his pork sandwich still in his mouth he clearly wasn't ready to part with his early dinner just yet.

The woman was now targeting me instead.

I analyzed her wrist movements again, this time focusing on the minute details of her hand's positioning and the tension in her fingers. When a bright yellow light shot from her stick, I was already in motion, having anticipated the exact angle at which she would aim and thrusting my head down to avoid it by a fraction of an inch. There was a tickling sensation as the light zipped past my hair, scorching the fabric of the car seat behind me.

With my head now tucked down between my knees, I slammed the brakes and twisted the wheel sharply to skid around her, avoiding a second blast aimed at my tires. I didn’t need to see the road to navigate, but I couldn’t let this woman keep firing at me while I was essentially driving blind. I caught a split-second glimpse of her reflection in the passenger window. It was a fuzzy blur, but enough for me to identify the same sequence of wrist movements she’d used earlier to generate the shimmering barrier.

My brain predicted three possible placements for that second barrier: the space directly in front of me, the right side of the road where Copper and Mustache were regaining control, or on her own position to shield herself from any counterattacks. But then I pushed myself further, analyzing not only the barrier’s placement, but also its height, recalling her previous wrist movements and the resulting dimensions. I could see how the speed of her rotating wrist correlated with the height of the barrier she was forming, estimating that she would most likely place it just high enough rip through the roof of my sedan but not so low that I couldn't duck under it. 

I’d promised no scratches to the owner, but I figured an extra 50 grand would make up for the new convertible look.

I accelerated right towards her. I wasn’t aiming for her specifically—just the space immediately to her right. She didn’t move an inch. She clearly anticipated that I would either crash into the light pole to her right or get stopped by the barrier. And judging by the way her barrier had interacted with the cruiser earlier, she had every reason to believe it would stop me as well.

Except she was wrong. Based on the stress and force vectors my sedan would exert upon impact, I calculated that the barrier would easily cut through the upper part of the vehicle but wouldn't touch the lower frame where I was huddled.

So I kept accelerating, reclining both front seats fully and laying nearly flat on my back. Predictably, the sedan crashed into the barrier at full speed, the roof peeling off like the lid of a sardine can as it sliced through the shimmering obstruction. The windshield exploded into fragments, showering me with shards of glass that I had already anticipated and angled my body to minimize contact with. I gritted through the pain as I bolted up and slammed on the brakes at the last possible moment, causing the car to spin sideways, skidding past her in a controlled drift. I kicked the door open as I passed by her, the centrifugal force flinging it outward and catching her squarely in the chest. The force of it should have been enough to break multiple ribs and cause lethal internal injuries, especially given her slight frame.

She merely staggered back a few steps, looking more surprised than hurt.

Then she laughed.

Her manic giggle chased after me as I navigated the now roofless sedan back towards Copper and Mustache. They were finally out of their vehicle and had taken cover behind it, both of them with their sticks at the ready.

I stopped the sedan in front of them and jumped out, wincing at the sharp pain in my shoulder.

They were both staring at me with wide eyes and gaping mouths.

I casually leaned back to avoid another yellow blast of light from the woman’s stick, letting it sizzle past me and scorch the ground.

"Why don’t you just teleport away?" I asked curiously, ducking as another blast narrowly missed my head. "Clearly you two are in over your heads. I presume your orders to erase evidence were a bit more mundane than dealing with an assailant wielding some sort of advanced energy weapon—so why not just cut your losses and get out?"

The pair of gaping mouths snapped shut simultaneously. Surprisingly, it was the kid Copper who found his voice first, albeit shakily "…teleport? Y-you mean Apparate?" he stuttered. "We—we can’t! There are anti-apparition wards placed around this entire area!"

Five quick purple blasts of light shot past me in rapid succession, forcing to contort my body in increasingly unnatural ways to avoid getting hit. "That sounds inconvenient," I remarked, now dodging left and then performing a quick side roll to avoid another series of blasts. "So are you going to fight her or just stand there gawking?"

Chapter Text

"Who are you?" Mustache demanded, finally snapping out of his stupor. "Major Investigation Department? International Task Force? Auror Division?"

"I just want to help," I said, dodging a crackling blue arc that pulverized a nearby trash bin into ash. "Looks like you two could use it."

Whatever he was about to say died in his throat as another volley of energy surged toward us, forcing him to dive behind the cruiser for cover.

I didn't have police cruiser to dive behind, so I had to make do with a sloppy cartwheel that carried me just out of range. I took the opportunity to pop my dislocated shoulder back into place mid-spin, then landed in a crouch with a sharp gasp of pain.

Hopefully, I'd applied the correct pressure to keep the joint functional; there wasn’t exactly time to check my handiwork.

Especially since the next attack came not in the form of a blast, but a sudden, invisible shift in the air itself. Luckily, the rain gave it away. Without the droplets suddenly veering at irregular angles, I might have been too late to react. 

Another cartwheel, this time to the right, and I narrowly avoided what felt like a concussive wave of pure force.

It appeared that our mysterious assailant was adapting to my evasive maneuvers, opting for sweeping attacks that covered more ground than predictable straight-line blasts. Practically speaking, that didn't change much for me. After all, she could have killed me several times over by now if she hadn't been toying with me, or if the goal of this ambush hadn't been to capture her targets rather than outright eliminate them. As long as she was playing games, I had a slim margin to work with. I wouldn't have put myself in such a vulnerable position if I hadn't already deduced that she was holding back.

Then again, I wasn't completely sure how far that leniency would extend. Especially if I kept interfering.

I leaned back, nearly parallel to the ground, as a searing beam of light passed millimeters above my nose, only managing to dodge the next blast by planting one hand on the pavement and flinging myself into a back handspring that my spine protested against vehemently. My assailant giggled and clapped her hands together like a delighted child watching a circus act, which gave me just enough time to land back on my feet without taking the following shot to the chest.

I wasn’t yet sure what would happen if I got hit by one of those blasts, but I didn’t particularly want to find out through firsthand experience. Some of her attacks left a physical scorched mark on whatever they hit, while others seemed to phase through material objects altogether. That wasn’t a good sign, considering the potential for unpredictable effects. Those energy blasts likely had different settings or modes—some purely destructive, others potentially designed to bypass physical barriers and target organic matter directly.

I couldn’t predict with certainty what each type of blast would do to human tissue, but none of the possibilities were appealing.

"Can you hold her off until backup arrives?" I asked, taking position behind their cruiser to momentarily shield myself from the onslaught. Mustache was finally returning fire, his own blasts around sixty percent less potent and slower than hers based on the color intensity and speed I observed. His stick movements were also accompanied by voice commands, likely indicating some kind of additional activation mechanism that the woman in the corset dress didn’t seem to need. Copper was generating a layered, three-tier defense barrier that I guessed was a standard defensive protocol they’d been trained to use in emergency situations. He wasn’t very good at it.

"With those damned wards in place, we’ll be lucky if backup even knows we need help," Mustache growled. He was trying to act tough in front of Copper, but I could see the sweat beading on his forehead and the slight tremor in his hand. He was clearly rattled. Her raw power had him outclassed by a wide margin.

"What do you think, Copper?" I asked, making sure to time my question precisely between the intervals of her attacks so he wouldn’t have to split his attention too much. He was down to two layers of defense now. The entire structure was flickering with instability.

"M-me?" the kid stammered. "You want my opinion?"

"If you can manage to form a coherent one, yes." I gently pushed him down behind the cruiser as a blast grazed overhead, my hand easily landing on his shoulder despite his flinching attempt to dodge my touch.

"Um…" he hesitated. "Maybe we could—"

"No," I cut him off, shaking my head at his terrible plan. "This has no chance of working."

He wasn't thinking straight. It was no use asking him for tactical input when he was barely holding it together.

"But—"

"Copper, no. Forget it." I pressed my hand against his back to steady him. "Stay focused. Once you deal with that second layer collapsing, I'll need your best estimate on how long it'll take for her to completely overwhelm you."

"Now hold on right there!" Mustache interjected, throwing me a suspicious glare between volleys of fire. "I don't know who you are or what you're doing here, but you don't get to start giving orders."

"I'm just offering solutions."

"Solutions?" he snapped, a vein bulging on his temple. "Fuck your solutions! You've already interfered with the retrieval of sensitive evidence operation, compromised our cover, and—by Merlin's beard—commandeered a goddamn No-Maj car! For all I know, you're part of this trap, working alongside her! Either declare your department and jurisdiction, or get the hell out of here before—Argh! damn it!" He clutched his smoking hand as a vivid scarlet light clipped the edge of his wrist.

I caught his flying wooden stick out of the air, spinning it once to assess its balance and weight, before holding it out towards him grip-first. 

He stared at me slack-jawed.

I gave the stick another quick spin.

92 grams, perfectly balanced, dense with a core material I couldn't identify. Certainly not just a normal piece of wood.

He snatched his weapon back with a scowl, holding it close like to his chest like a wounded animal.

No professional treated standard-issue gear with that kind of reverence, at least not in any organization I was familiar with. It was a personal and deeply significant piece of equipment. Most likely attuned to him in some special way that made it feel irreplaceable.

Interesting.

"Copper?" I said. "What's the status on that barrier?"

His eyes darted to his partner, asking for permission to respond, but Mustache just cursed under his breath and waved him on. 

"A minute," Copper said. "Maybe two, tops."

"I see…"

I had hundreds of different plans forming simultaneously in my head, each hinging on various permutations of Copper’s remaining defense time, Mustache’s offensive capabilities, and the corset-clad woman’s attack patterns. The problem wasn't a lack of options, but that none of them guaranteed survival for all three of us.

In order to ensure success, I would need more data.

But not just technical data.

I was missing something crucial here. My framing of the entire situation was off in some fundamental way.

I couldn't afford to move forward without addressing that blind spot.

I watched Copper closely for a moment. There didn't seem to be a mental or physical strain preventing him from fully maintaining the barrier. He was just a shade too slow. His motor coordination was slightly off. His response time was lagging behind the optimal threshold needed to stabilize the layers.

Was he really using a piece of equipment he wasn’t fully trained to handle? Or was the issue something deeper? Something psychological?

I'd initially thought of energy weaponry as the obvious explanation. Possibly powered by a remote energy source, technology far beyond anything publicly known or even theoretically feasible.

But that didn't quite fit the observational data. Specifically, the terminology being thrown around.

Anti-apparition wards…Muggle…No-Maj…Latin-rooted voice commands…

Were those actually voice commands triggering complex energy fields, or…something else entirely?

"Sir?"

Incantations?

"Uh, Mr. Smith, sir?" Copper said hesitatingly, straining to maintain his grip on the flickering barrier. "Do you have your wand on you? Because if not, I really don’t think it’s safe—"

"What did you just say?" I hissed, whipping my head toward him as every mental thread in my brain screeched to a halt.

"I asked if you had your wand with you, sir," Copper repeated. He flicked his wooden stick upward, causing a faint blue shimmer to ripple through the air in front of us. "Which division are you with, anyway? You’re not from the NYC branch, are you?"

Impossible.

This was all impossible!

I almost collapsed right there on the rain-slick pavement in sheer disbelief.

The world spun around me and for a moment the crazy corset-clad woman, Copper, and the ruined sedan all blurred together into a surreal tableau that made absolutely no sense.

Stream Four was doubled over in hysterical laughter, clutching his sides and gasping for breath.

"We call them No-Maj here in the States, Copper."

No-Maj.

...magic?

No! No! No!

We're hallucinating, Stream Four choked out between fits of manic laughter. You idiots actually bought into this crap? None of this is fucking real! We're having an NZT-induced psychotic break. None of this makes sense because it can’t make sense!

He almost broke into a full-blown rendition of "It's All in Your Head," but I shut it down before he could get to the chorus.

You’ve cracked, Eddie, he howled instead. You've fucking cracked! We’ve finally fried our brain!

No. No. No. No.

30 mg every twelve hours, no exceptions. There had been no slip-ups, no errors in dosage. My guys at the lab had refined the synthesis down to perfection. MRI, blood tests, hormone panels—everything checked out. I had even stopped aging, as far as I could tell, with cellular regeneration in overdrive and oxidative stress mechanisms kept in perfect balance.

If this was a psychotic break, there would have been warning signs. Trouble sleeping, fragmented thought patterns, illogical reasoning, gaps in memory—something! But there was no evidence of any such deterioration! Not even the slightest deviation from baseline cognition! None whatsoever!

Are you sure about that, Eddie? Stream Four whispered gleefully. How can you trust your own judgment when you’re inside the delusion? No matter how many layers you peel back, you’re still working within the confines of a mind that could be compromised. Nothing you experience can be trusted as real if the system processing it is faulty.

You're wrong! I yelled back. This isn't a psychotic break, and I can prove it!

Occam's razor, Eddie! He cackled. C'mon, you're supposed to be a genius here. What's more likely? That you're hallucinating because your neural pathways are fried from years of abusing a brain-enhancing superdrug, or that fucking magic is real? You screwed up somewhere in your calculations, Eddie.

We've snapped.

Time stopped again. Only this once, it wasn’t because I willed it.

I simply stood there frozen in the vast, boundless expanse of my own mind, thinking.

There was nothing else to do but think. 

Years—decades, possibly—passed in that single moment of accelerated cognition. It felt like a near-eternity as I dissected every experience, every observation, and every assumption I had ever made.

When my nose started bleeding and my head pounded like a jackhammer, I knew I’d reached the limit of my mental processing power.

I snapped back into the present moment, gasping for air like I'd just surfaced from the depths of a freezing ocean.

"Mr. Smith?" Copper’s voice was a distant echo, dragging me back to the present. "Do you have your wand or not?! I could really use some extra help here, if you don’t mind!"

I straightened up, wiped at the blood trickling from my nose, and recalibrated everything.

I knew exactly what I had to do.  

"My name is Wade, Wade Smith," I said calmly. "I'm with the International Task Force for Anomalous Incidents. Highly classified, need-to-know basis. Magical law enforcement jurisdiction falls under our purview in certain cross-departmental cases. Intervention is not a primary focus of my division, but we are authorized to provide support under exceptional circumstances. I've been following you two for your own protection after an unanticipated breach of protocol alerted us to a potential rogue element targeting Magical Law Enforcement officials. Sorry about the VHS tape—I needed to confirm the nature of your operation before deciding how much I could intervene without compromising ongoing investigations. My wand was unfortunately lost during a prior engagement, which was why I had to rely on…" I gestured vaguely toward the ruined sedan behind us, "…primitive Muggle methods to assist in the current situation."

Copper had lost me somewhere around "My name is Wade," but I didn’t need him to follow everything. I just needed to have this exchange on record for when his memory was inevitably probed post-mission.

A few days of confusion before they realized I wasn't what I claimed to be would be more than enough time for me to figure out my next move.

"You—what?" Copper sputtered. " You're with the International—"

His shield collapsed with a crackling sound, leaving our position completely exposed.

"We will neutralize our opponent within the next thirty seconds," I declared. "Do not move. Wait for my signal."

He gulped audibly, his eyes darting nervously between me and the maniac woman. "W-what are you going to—"

I sprinted out into the open, guns leveled in both hands, freshly liberated from Mustache and Copper's holsters. 

The woman's attention immediately snapped to me, her lips curling into a grin.

Then she noticed the guns.

"…Oh, how quaint." She purred with a distinctly British accent. She didn't look remotely concerned. "A Muggle with some bite. And here I thought you were all bark."

If I hadn't been enhancing my auditory processing, I might not have caught the slight inflection in her voice. The way "Muggle" rolled off her tongue with outright disgust, like she was referring to something less than human. Like it was a slur, an insult to my very existence. My model of her behavior adjusted instantly, recalculating probabilities.

Seventy feet and closing.

I accelerated, controlling my nervous system to send a surge of adrenaline through my bloodstream, optimizing muscle contractions while minimizing fatigue. I aimed both weapons at her figure, not overly concerned about accuracy but more focused on her reaction.

One of the guns turned into a living black viper in my hand. I allowed myself no more than five milliseconds to process the impossibility of the event, before snapping my head to the side to avoid the serpent's lunge, letting it pass harmlessly over my shoulder. I aimed my remaining weapon at her torso.

I pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

As expected.

Those were just replica props—non-functional showpieces cobbled together to maintain the illusion of their NYPD disguises.

But she didn't know that.

And she wouldn't take any chances with a weapon she didn't fully understand.

 A shimmering golden shield materialized in front of her. I waited a split second for her to fully commit to the shield, before tossing the useless gun aside and shouting, "Legilimens!"

I wasn’t a mage, or whatever kind of being she was, and I certainly didn’t possess any magical abilities.

And yet, again, I banked on the possibility that she wouldn’t know that for sure.

My bet paid off.

She was already committed to raising her shield, but now her reaction was split between maintaining it while also countering what she believed to be a mental assault.

Her wand movements faltered for just a fraction of a second, but that was all I needed.

I counted down another three milliseconds to account for Copper's simulated delayed reaction time, and then beamed my intention to the rest of my thought streams.

Only three of them complied.

Disarm her, Copper! Now! I shouted with three different mental voices, projecting the command straight into the kid's psyche. DO IT NOW!

It took him a few milliseconds longer than I would have liked, but the timing was still within an acceptable margin of error.

"Expelliarmus!"

The stream of scarlet light erupted from his wand toward the woman. I jumped into a spinning sideways flip, allowing the disarming attack to pass just inches from my head while maintaining my momentum.

The shot caught her completely off guard.

I'd already observed the effects of Expelliarmus when Mustache’s wand was disarmed earlier, so making the calculations necessary to predict the trajectory of her wand as it flew through the air was almost effortless. 

It spun high in the air, right into my waiting grasp as I landed in a crouch.

I wasted no time in grabbing both ends, my thumbs positioned perfectly for the break.

It took the woman several seconds to recover from the shock. Then another second to realize what I was about to do with her precious wand. 

Her grin immediately collapsed into a mask of pure fury.

"I wouldn't make another move if I were you," I said nonchalantly. "Unless you'd like me to snap this into two very non-functional pieces."

"Don't you dare," she hissed, her eyes narrowing dangerously as she straightened, brushing rain-soaked curls out of her face. "You will regret it for the rest of your pitiful little life."

"I think you'll find that you're in no position to make threats." I applied a bit more pressure, watching her eyes widen with a flicker of panic. "So how much stress do you think this thing can handle before it snaps? Fifty pounds? Sixty?" I feigned curiosity, though I could estimate exactly how much force was required to break it. In truth, it was a lot tougher than Mustache’s wand, but not beyond the threshold of what I could manage with the leverage I had. "You don't make those things very durable, do you? A bit more fragile than I expected for such a powerful artifact."

"Enough!" she spat, her voice trembling with restrained rage. "Remove your filthy Muggle fingers from my wand this instant, or I swear—"

"Let's start with a proper introduction, shall we?" I gave her wand a slight bend, just enough to make her flinch. "Name, affiliation, and purpose for targeting these two fine gentlemen." I glanced back at Copper and Mustache, who were still catching their breath behind the cruiser. I didn't have long before they recovered enough to approach and start asking their own questions. "I'll give you ten seconds to comply," I said. "After which I'll assume you're not particularly interested in playing nice."

She forced a laugh, a cold and humorless sound that echoed through the rain-soaked street. "Very brave of you, little Muggle."

She moved a bit too close for my liking.

"Ah, ah, ah," I cut in, wagging a finger. "I wouldn't take another step if I were you."

"Settle down, darling." She smiled coldly at me. "I only wish to talk."

She didn't step back, though.

We sized each other up for a long, tense moment, neither of us backing down. Finally, she let out an irritated sigh and raised her hands slightly, palms up in a mocking gesture of surrender.

"Go on then," I said, tilting my head slightly. "Talk."

My heart was pounding in my chest. 44 BPM, practically a sprint for me on NZT. This was the most uncertain I’d felt in a long, long time.

"My name," she began, her voice dripping with disdain, "is Ailsa Nott. I—"

"No lying," I interrupted sharply, tightening my grip on her wand just slightly to emphasize my point. "I assure you, I'm very capable of recognizing a lie when I hear one. I suggest you choose your next words very carefully, starting with your real name."

She paused, her lips pressed into a thin line, rain dripping from her curls.

She was making a calculation. An estimate of whether she could overpower me before I snapped her wand. Possibly by some means I hadn’t yet observed.

I could die at any moment if she decided to take that risk. That was the one unknown I couldn’t fully account for. Were beings of her kind reliant on their wands for all offensive capabilities, or did they possess other means of attack?

Both options seemed equally plausible, given the limited data I had to work with.

It looks like you might get your answer sooner than expected, Stream Four. I thought dryly. If we wake up in a hospital bed, I'll never hear the end of your gloating, will I?

Maybe we won't wake up at all. he replied snidely. Maybe we're experiencing the NZT-enhanced version of a dying brain firing its last synapses. Maybe you OD'ed on NZT and are currently lying face-down in a puddle of your own drool, convulsing while your neurons burn out like a dying supernova. He did a mock explosion noise in my head. Poof Eddie! Poof and you're gone.

Always the pessimist, aren't you? I sighed. I guess we'll have to see how this plays out, won't we?

He bristled with irritation. You dumb motherfu—

The being's muscles tensed with the telltale signs of an imminent attack.

I ran through thousands of possible outcomes in milliseconds, recalibrating my posture and adjusting my grip on the wand…

She suddenly relaxed completely, as if a switch had been flipped in her brain. She seemed to reach a conclusion—one that, for now, didn’t involve immediately killing me.

I let out a huge breath of relief.

It looked like this wasn't the end of the line after all.

"My name," she sneered with a proud tilt of her chin, "is Bellatrix Lestrange." She paused for effect as if the name alone should instill fear. "Loyal servant of the Dark Lord and member of the Most Noble House of Black, heir to the purest bloodline in all of wizarding history, and the second-best duelist in the entirety of Great Britain, second only to my master himself." Her lips curled into a sinister smile as she watched for my reaction. "And you, little Muggle, have just made the gravest mistake of your life."

'Wizards' then, is it? I shook my head. Figures.

I couldn't help but laugh.

Chapter Text

Ben Copper was having the absolute worst day of his life. Without doubt, he hadn't experienced anything remotely like this in all of his long, long two years as a junior officer in MACUSA.

He really hadn't expected his first big field assignment to go like this…

"Copper!" Mr. Coburn, his unluckily designated superior officer, barked from behind their fake Muggle police car. "Report Copper! Do you have eyes on the suspects?"

He'd be lucky to still have a job after this disaster, let alone finally get the promotion to full Obliviator status. To be honest, he wasn’t sure if he’d survive long enough to even file his resignation letter…

"Copper! Don't just sit there with your wand up your—Copper!" Mr. Coburn's bellow finally pulled him out of his rising panic spiral.

"S-sir! I do not have eyes on the suspects, sir!" Not that it was any great shock, given that both he and Mr. Coburn were currently huddled behind the cruiser trying to avoid being turned into smoldering piles of ash.

Frankly, Ben figured he'd already done his part by maintaining the complex Shield Conjuration as long as he had, not to mention getting a successful Disarming Charm off under pressure. He reckoned he deserved at least some credit for that, seeing as it was his first time casting one in a live combat scenario.

Mr. Coburn clearly had different standards for what constituted a job well done, though.

"What are you waiting for then, Copper? A fucking invitation?! Get back out there and secure the perimeter!"

"Uh, sir," Ben replied hesitantly. "Since the dark witch is currently at wandpoint against an unidentified individual, perhaps it's best we stay put for now and regroup when—"

"This is an on-duty MACUSA operation, Copper. I will not have you shirking your responsibilities like a fucking coward!" Mr. Coburn's voice rose in pitch with every word. "If you don't get out there right this instant and assist in securing the situation, I'll have your wand confiscated and your sorry ass portkeyed back to London! Make you explain yourself to the British Ministry why we had to return one of their incompetent whelps because he couldn’t handle his first big-boy assignment without wetting himself!"

"But, sir, I really don’t think it’s prudent to—"

"This is the United Fucking States of America, Officer Copper. We don’t coddle our recruits here like those tea-sipping bureaucrats across the pond. Now move!" Coburn roared.

Oh, sodding brilliant.

Ben stifled a groan as he reluctantly crawled out from behind the cruiser and rose to his feet, wand held shakily in front of him. He blinked against the water streaming down his face, coughed a couple of times from the acrid smoke still lingering in the air, and tried to ignore the fact that his hands were trembling so hard it was a miracle he hadn’t accidentally hexed himself yet. It didn't help that these useless Muggle uniforms had no charm or enchantment to repel water, leaving him soaked to the bone and utterly miserable.

Really, this couldn't possibly get any worse.

He shouldn't even be here right now. He should be helping out with a minor Obliviation case involving a rogue Kneazle spotted in Central Park, or perhaps on a routine follow-up on improperly filed magical permits in a quiet corner of Brooklyn. Something, anything a little more reasonable for a junior officer just trying to make it through his probationary period.

Alas, he had to be dragged into this.

Sighing heavily, Ben broke into a cautious jog, his wand extended in front of him, muttering a low-level protective charm under his breath. It wouldn't do much against a full-strength curse, but it was better than nothing. Fortunately, this bloke Wade Smith or whatever he called himself seemed to have things under control, at least for the moment. He seemed to know exactly what he was doing, which was more than Ben could say for his own superior officer. Perhaps if they worked together, this entire debacle might be salvageable. Yes, now that the dark witch was disarmed, there might still be a chance to contain the situation without any further—

Someone burst into a manic laughter up ahead.

Shockingly, it wasn’t the crazy dark witch in the corset, but Wade himself.

Ben frowned in confusion. Was the man hit by a Tickling Charm? That didn't sound very likely given that such a weak charm would have been trivial to dispel, even for a moderately skilled wizard. Wade definitely didn’t seem like the type to succumb to something so basic.

And yet, when Ben got close enough to see Wade Smith clearly, the man was doubled over with laughter, gripping the dark witch's disarmed wand in both hands as though he'd just heard the punchline to the funniest joke in existence.

Even the dark witch looked momentarily thrown off by his reaction.

Ben pointed his wand toward her and hurried to the odd man's side, doing his best to appear confident despite the fact that his brain was screaming at him to turn around and run for the hills. "Mr. Smith! Are you alright, sir?" Ben asked quickly. "Did she hit you with something nasty? Should I counterspell it for you?"

"Wizards…" Wade wheezed out. Ben could barely hear him through the downpour. In fact, he was only able to catch the word thanks to his Legilimency training picking up on the faint mental resonance of Wade's surface thoughts.

He took extreme care to not delve too deeply, though. He'd had enough headaches for one day, and Wade's mind was…not exactly the most pleasant place to poke around in. Especially after his brief dip into Wade's thoughts earlier at the Starbucks. It'd felt like he’d been hit by a Bludger to the skull, and the aftereffects still hadn't quite worn off. Whatever was going on in that bloke’s head, Ben wanted no part of it.

But listening in on Wade's surface-level thoughts was unavoidable when their emotional resonance was practically punching him in the face.

"Is that where I draw the line?" Wade rasped quietly under his breath. "Is that what finally breaks me? Not the multi-billion-dollar corporate cover-ups, not the assassinations, not the Chinese government's neural interference programs, not even the underground biotech labs churning out supersoldiers…but wizards? Of all the goddamn things…fucking wizards." He doubled over again, nearly losing his grip on the wand as he tried to catch his breath. "I swear, if this is a…" The rest of that sentence was an inaudible mumble, but Ben caught the word "simulation" somewhere in there. 

Blimey... is he alright?

"My, my," the dark witch drawled. "I'm so glad you're finding this amusing so far, but I assure you the fun is about to end."

Wade straightened so fast that Ben nearly stumbled back in surprise. His laughter evaporated in an instant. His expression hardened into something unreadable.

"Sorry about that," Wade said smoothly, as if hadn't been laughing like a lunatic five seconds ago. "I just remembered something funny."

Ben simply stared at him, bewildered. O-kay…clearly you’re completely off your rocker, mate.

He didn't voice the thought, though, wisely keeping his mouth shut. Wade's sanity was the least of his concerns right now. What really mattered was getting through this alive—and preferably without losing his job in the process. If he could also somehow avoid being turned into a toad or catching an Unforgivable Curse along the way, that would be an added bonus.

"I think introductions are in order," Wade said. "Copper, would you be so kind as to properly introduce yourself and your partner there to the lovely Ms. Lestrange?"

Lestrange. The name rang alarm bells so loudly in Ben's head that he thought for a moment Wade had cast some strange sort of sound amplification spell on him. In fact, Wade was giving him a pointed glance, as though expecting him to catch on to something important.

Lestrange.

Ben felt his stomach drop.

Good grief! Bellatrix Lestrange!

He yelped in fear before stumbling backward, nearly losing his footing on the slick pavement, but managing to raise his wand just in time. "Stupe—"

"STOP!" Wade commanded, knocking Ben's wand arm down. " Do not engage unless I tell you to!"

Ben tried to dodge around Wade's grip, but found the man's fingers locked around his wrist like iron.

"Sir, you don't understand—she's dangerous! She's—you have no idea who you're dealing with," Ben stammered, his voice rising in alarm. "The Daily Prophet reported on her escape from Azkaban a few months ago—she's one of You-Know-Who's most loyal Death Eaters! She’s responsible for—"

"And you think I'm unaware of that, Officer Copper?" Wade interrupted.

"Silly, silly little boy," Bellatrix cooed mockingly. "Thinking you can stop me with your baby wand and a few schoolyard spells."

She took a deliberate step forward, her boots splashing in the rain puddles. Wade immediately raised the disarmed wand in warning, halting her mid-step. Ben stared in confusion at Wade's two-handed grip on her wand. Why wasn't he pointing the wand at her properly? He held it almost as if he planned to snap it like a twig.

Was he…was he actually threatening to break Bellatrix Lestrange's wand? That was unthinkable! Absolutely insane! Snapping a suspect's wand was a huge violation of protocol. If he actually did it, Wade would possibly be in more trouble with MACUSA than Bellatrix herself. What the hell was he thinking?

"I suppose it's understandable why MACUSA has resorted to hiring Muggles to do their dirty work," Bellatrix said. "After all, with the pathetic state of their wizarding talent pool these days, I suppose even a trained monkey might seem like an improvement."

Huh? Hiring Muggles? What was she on about?

He stole a glance at Wade, who seemed completely unbothered by the insult.

"Oh? You didn't know your friend here is no wizard, Officer Copper?" Bellatrix asked. "Isn't that your job as an Obliviator-in-training? To know who or what you're working with?" She tilted her head curiously. "How can you be so oblivious to the nature of your own allies? Really, what do they teach you at MACUSA these days? Standards have truly fallen, haven’t they?"

"He's no Muggle!" Ben blurted out. " "He's…uh…with the…" Ben faltered, glancing nervously between Wade and Bellatrix.

Wade gave him a subtle shake of the head, signaling for him to stop.

Bellatrix burst into laughter—shrill, high-pitched, and absolutely terrifying. "The Dark Lord would be most amused by this, don’t you think? American wizards consorting with Muggles…and their pathetic recruits unable to recognize the difference! Truly, the wizarding world has fallen so far!" She threw her head back in another fit of laughter. "How could you not tell the man is a Muggle, you silly child? He reeks of it! No wand, no magical aura, no trace of even the weakest spell residue. I could smell the stench of his bloodline from across the street! No magic flows through his veins, only the mundane sludge of Muggle ancestry."

Ben thought back to his earlier interactions with Wade, feeling a lump of unease forming in his throat. If this man truly lacked magic, if what Bellatrix Lestrange was saying was true…shouldn't he be apprehended immediately?

F.B.C.V.N.O. regulations were clear. Muggle involvement in magical affairs, particularly during active field operations, was strictly prohibited unless under the direct supervision and express authorization from MACUSA, and even that was only permissible under the strictest of circumstances. Was Wade who he really claimed to be? He couldn't possibly be a normal Muggle who'd somehow stumbled into this situation, could he? That was absurd!

Ben took a hesitant step backward, for a moment unsure who to point his wand at.

"You're clever," Wade nodded appreciatively at Bellatrix. "The Dark Lord chooses his followers wisely, I see."

"Oh, you’re too kind," Bellatrix drawled. "I'll be sure to relay your compliments to him personally once I've delivered your corpse at his feet."

"Except you're wrong," Wade continued without missing a beat. "It's not your fault—it’s a natural assumption, given the circumstances."

Bellatrix arched an eyebrow. "Oh? Do enlighten me, then."

Wade spun her wand casually between his fingers, slowly at first, then faster and faster until it became a blur of movement in his hands.

Ben gawked at the display. The wand was spinning so quickly it seemed impossible for a human hand to manage without dropping it.

"Impressive dexterity for a Muggle, I'll give you that." Bellatrix clapped slowly. "But spinning a wand like a carnival baton won't suddenly make you a wizard."

"Expelliarmus!" Wade suddenly shouted as he flicked his wrist in her direction.

No spell emanated from the wand.

Ben simply stared in stunned silence. Even Bellatrix looked confused, for once.

"Stupefy!" Wade shouted next, but again, nothing happened.

His wand movements were perfect.

Perfect was an understatement, actually—they were inhumanly fluid. Ben had only seen wandwork that precise from master duelists during Wizengamot demonstrations. A guest Auror had once visited Hogwarts during Ben's fifth year and given a dueling exhibition.

Wade was faster. A lot faster.

Ben hadn't caught a lot of Bellatrix's movements earlier—on account of being largely preoccupied with not dying—but he was pretty sure even her wandwork wasn't quite as refined as what Wade just demonstrated.

He wasn't the only one struggling to process what he was seeing. Bellatrix tilted her head, her brows knitting together in genuine confusion.

"Confringo! Expulso! Locomotor Mortis!" Each incantation was accompanied by wand movements so precise they could have been performed by a textbook professor in spellcasting. If the textbook professor happened to have the reflexes of a world-class Quidditch Seeker and also be hopped up on gallons of Felix Felicis.

Wade even copied what Ben's recognized as his own Shield Conjuration—layered, tiered, and executed flawlessly in a fraction of the time it had taken Ben to conjure his own.

"I will not, of course," Wade said, cutting off his performance abruptly, "dare to cast a spell with a wand that doesn't belong to me. That would just be rude, wouldn’t it?" He shrugged. "So I guess you’ll just have to take my word for it."

"This doesn't prove anything," Bellatrix spat, her eyes narrowing as she studied Wade suspiciously. "Your smell betrays you, Muggle filth."

"Maybe you should get your nose checked, then," Wade replied. "Now where were we? Ah, yes, you were about to tell me why you're targeting these officers."

"If you think you can intimidate me into giving you answers, you're sorely mistaken," Bellatrix snarled. "I can kill you both with a mere thought, wand or no wand."

"But you can't stop me from breaking your wand before you do," Wade said easily. "Otherwise you would have already tried."

"You insufferable little—"

"Tell me, Copper, how long until Coburn gets backup here? Surely the wards are interfering less now, aren’t they? I imagine MACUSA has some contingency in place for situations like this."

Ben blinked himself back into focus. "O-of course we do! Once the Aurors find the edge of the anti-apparition wards," he said, " they'll begin setting up an anchor…"

"…perimeter to disrupt them and establish a safe zone for reinforcements to Apparate in," Wade finished for him.

"Y-yes! Exactly."

"Well?" Wade turned to Bellatrix. "Don't you think it's in your best interest to be gone before the cavalry arrives? Unless, of course, you fancy your chances against an entire squadron of Aurors with no wand and a compromised exit strategy."

Ben shifted uncomfortably at the words. It sounded awfully like Wade was negotiating on behalf of her escape, which was definitely not standard procedure. Death Eater or not, she was a wanted criminal and needed to be apprehended—not to mention, wandless and outnumbered. This was their best chance to capture her without significant casualties.

"It's okay, Copper," Wade said, as if reading his thoughts. Ben immediately fortified his Occlumency barriers, just in case. "This is the best option we have right now. You have to trust me."

Bellatrix seemed to pause, weighing her options. "What about my wand?" she said slowly.

"I'm afraid I can’t let you have it back," Wade replied.

She opened her mouth to retort but Wade lifted a hand.

"Be reasonable," he said. "If you were in my shoes, would you let a dangerous adversary keep their primary weapon? There's no guarantee you won't turn around and use it on me the moment I hand it back, and there's no reason why I should trust your word on that. Your only course of action is to leave here peacefully and figure out another way to retrieve it later."

"I WILL NOT be separated from my wand!" Bellatrix stomped her heel into the ground furiously. "Return it to me at once, or I swear on the Dark Lord's name—"

"You have twenty seconds to make your decision," Wade interrupted, gripping her wand with both hands, his thumbs pressing slightly against the center to emphasize his threat. "Twenty, nineteen, eighteen…"

Ben trembled from head to toe as Wade's countdown progressed toward its inevitable conclusion. This was it. If Bellatrix didn't back down now, Wade was really going to do it. And then…and then Ben would be fighting for his life against one of the most dangerous witches of the modern era. She was wandless, yes, but he'd never been particularly confident in his dueling skills, let alone facing someone like her.

"Ten, nine, eight…"

He fumbled with his wand, struggling to steady his shaking hand, trying to think of his first move if things went south.

His mind came up blank.

He couldn't think of a single usable curse, hex or jinx, as if his entire magical education had been wiped from his brain at the worst possible moment. Legilimens, then? A terrible choice for a quick offensive maneuver, but maybe—just maybe—he could disorient her long enough for Wade—

"Alright!" Bellatrix shouted. "Stop the blasted countdown, Muggle! I’ll comply!"

"Six, five, four…"

Bellatrix turned around and bolted across the street. When she reached the single light pole at the far end of the block, she whirled around one last time, rain streaming down her face as her eyes bore into Wade like twin daggers.

She popped out of sight with a loud crack.

"Well, that went better than expected," Wade muttered, lowering the wand and staring at the spot where Bellatrix had just vanished. "It appears she has prepared a clean spot for Apparition ahead of time." He pointed at the light pole where Bellatrix had disappeared.

"Huh?" Ben let out dumbly, still wondering why he wasn't a smudge on the pavement right now.

"She's left a gap in the anti-apparition wards," Wade clarified, wiping rain from his face as he turned back to Ben. "Near the streetlight. Can you go over there and confirm the ward's edge with your wand? If I'm correct, we should be able to use that gap to expedite reinforcements. Also, if she tries to re-enter the area, that’ll l most likely be her access point. You need to guard it in case she doubles back. "

With that, Wade turned and began walking calmly towards the cruiser.

"Hey, where are you going?!" Ben called out. Wade was still a potential security risk as far as protocol was concerned, not to mention he still had Bellatrix's wand. 

"Relax," Wade called over his shoulder, waving Bellatrix's wand casually in the air as if it were nothing more than a twig he'd picked up on the ground. "I'm just going to let your partner know it's safe to come out now. You should hurry to secure that Apparition point before she changes her mind."

Ben glanced back at the streetlight, then over to Wade. If Lestrange came back now, both of them would be in serious trouble. He needed to cast some perimeter spells immediately to seal off the Apparition gap. Such spellwork wasn't his strongest suit, especially under pressure, but it was the only way to ensure their safety until reinforcements arrived.

He sprinted toward the streetlight.

When Mr. Coburn came running toward him out of the darkness a few minutes later, huffing and puffing like he'd just run a marathon through hell, Ben was already kneeling by the streetlamp with his wand raised, painstakingly casting the final layer of warding spells.

"What in Merlin's name are you doing, Copper?! Where’s the suspect? And where is Wade?"

A cold dread settled in Ben’s stomach. "Sir, Wade has the suspect's wand and said he was coming to update you on the situation."

Mr. Coburn just stared at him blankly, the rain dripping from his greying mustache. "You…let him walk away with her wand?" he asked incredulously. "You simply stood by and let him leave—WITH HER WAND?!"

If Ben could bury himself six feet under on the spot, he absolutely would have. There had to be a spell to make it happen, but unfortunately, he couldn’t think of any off the top of his head.

"Well, sir," Ben cleared his throat nervously. "Wade told me that he'd be providing an update to you directly and that I should focus on securing the Apparition gap left—"

"OH HE TOLD YOU, DID HE?!" Coburn roared, his voice loud enough to rival the thunder rumbling in the distance. "YOU FUCKING MORON! WHAT PART OF SECURE THE SITUATION DID YOU FAIL TO UNDERSTAND?! YOU HAVE LOST BOTH THE SUSPECTS AND THE WAND, YOU INCOMPETENT SIMPLETON!"

A car engine roared to life behind them.

Then the roofless Muggle vehicle sped off into the distance.

They both stared in stunned silence as the tail lights disappeared into the haze of rain and darkness.

"…Please tell me you locked the cruiser before this circus started, Copper," Coburn finally said quietly. "You know, the cruiser in which we stored the VHS tape containing key evidence from this operation..."

Ben laughed nervously, though it came out more like a whimper.

"Goddamn it," Coburn muttered, running his hand through the wet tangle of his hair. "You're in so much trouble, Copper, I'll make sure you never see the inside of MACUSA headquarters again after this. A term in Azkaban might not even be off the table if the higher-ups have their say in this."

"A-Azkaban?" Copper felt like throwing up right there on the spot. "You don't think they'll really send me to—"

Multiple cracks sounded loudly behind them, followed by the unmistakable whooshing of several wizards Apparating into place.

Men and women in deep navy robes emblazoned with the golden insignia of MACUSA surrounded Copper and Coburn in an instant.

"Secure the perimeter!" one of the lead Aurors barked. "Defensive formations in place immediately! Scan for any trace of hostile magic or lingering Apparition signatures! Report all anomalies to HQ without delay!" She gave the pair of miserable officers a sharp look, her wand raised and glowing faintly at the tip. She did not look pleased in the slightest. "…And someone get me a status update from these two clowns, for crying out loud."

One of the Aurors cast a wide-reaching detection charm, arcs of silver light rippling outward in concentric circles, illuminating faint magical traces scattered across the battle-scarred area. Another extended her wand and began dictating notes into a small, floating quill that scribbled furiously on a piece of enchanted parchment.

"Hey, kid, you alright?" one of the witches approached him while her partner moved to speak with Coburn. Her British accent immediately put Ben somewhat at ease—or as much ease as was possible given the circumstances. He noticed she wasn't wearing MACUSA robes but rather the insignia of the British Ministry of Magic's Auror division.  

She gave him a pitying once-over, then helped him to his feet. "What, they don't teach you guys water-resistance charms for these Muggle disguises?" she said, chewing on a piece of gum as she cast a quick Impervius charm on his uniform.

He mumbled a quick, "Thank you," utterly defeated.

"Name's Tonks," she said cheerfully, extending her hand. "Auror Nymphadora Tonks, British Ministry of Magic, but don’t call me Nymphadora unless you want your eyebrows permanently transfigured into something regrettable. "

He took her hand hesitantly, his grip clammy and weak. "Benjamin Copper," he said. "Ben is fine. "

"So, Benjamin Copper," Tonks said, tilting her head curiously as she sized him up, "mind telling me exactly what went down here? Because from the looks of things," she added with a sweeping gesture toward the wrecked cruiser, charred pavement, and sprawling magical residue lighting up under the detection spell. "…it seems like you lot had one hell of a day."

She blew a bright pink bubble that popped with a sharp snap, then gave him an expectant look.

Ben finally, mercifully, puked into the nearest gutter, doubling over as his nerves got the better of him.

"Maybe we should get you a cup of tea first…" she offered, patting him gently on the shoulder.

Tea.

Finally, another tea-sipping Brit who understood the importance of a proper cup in moments of catastrophic failure. He'd clearly been surrounded by the wrong crowd for far too long.

"Yes, tea would be good," Ben croaked weakly, releasing another wave of nausea into the gutter. 

"There you go, get it all out," Tonks said kindly, conjuring a steaming mug of tea and pressing it gently into his trembling hands.

He almost cried in relief.

Maybe this day wasn’t a complete disaster after all.

Chapter Text

Figuring out which hotel Lindy was in took me less than five minutes. It was simply a matter of cross-referencing the available options within a certain radius of the campaign headquarters and then narrowing them down based on the factors I knew she’d prioritize.

These factors included, of course, top-notch room service and a minibar. Lindy always had a soft spot for overpriced tiny bottles of alcohol and the promise of a hot stone massage. Paradoxically, she was also a workaholic who’d inevitably end up ordering a Caesar salad at 2 AM while cross-checking campaign statistics in bed, usually still wearing her blazer.

So an upscale, business-class hotel with a decent work desk setup and reliable net connection, but nothing too flashy to attract unnecessary attention.

Pretty straightforward criteria, really. By the time I parked the sedan back where I'd borrowed it from, I had Lindy’s exact location down to the room number.

I left the promised check in the glove compartment along with an extra tip for the unexpected inconvenience of a missing roof, then jogged a few blocks at random to ensure I wasn't being followed. When I was satisfied that I had lost any potential non-magical tails, I hailed a cab to The Ashworth Hotel in Midtown Manhattan.

Drake and Mellany were waiting for me at the lobby bar when I arrived, both looking predictably displeased.

"Do you have the items I requested?" I asked curtly, sliding into the high-backed leather chair across from Mellany. It wasn't like me, to be so abrupt, but I was running on fumes after the past few hours and honestly couldn’t muster the energy for pleasantries. I could see Drake raising an eyebrow at my tone, but he didn’t press the issue, instead opting to hand me a plain black duffel bag from under the table.

Mellany had no such reservations about making her displeasure known.

"Boss, what the hell is going on?" she hissed, leaning forward so that her voice wouldn't carry. "You disappear for hours, don’t answer your fucking phone, and then send us a list of weird shit to get you? What happened to the cops you wanted us to tail? And why do you—is that blood on your shirt?!"

"Relax, Mellany." I pulled out the high-speed camera from the duffel bag and inspected it carefully. "What's the frame rate on this?" I asked. "Can it handle 1000 frames per second? I need something fast enough to catch micro-movements." I turned it over, checking the lens mount. "Fixed optics? No, that’s a C-mount. Swappable, then. Question is, what’s the glass rated for? No point in shooting 1K FPS if the lens can’t resolve fine detail at that speed."

"I couldn’t say, sir, I simply asked for the most expensive one they had in stock," Drake replied, rubbing the back of his neck uncomfortably. "If it's not up to par, I can head back and—"

"No, this will do." I set the camera down on the table and finally met Mellany's eyes. "The frozen mice—" I began.

"—weren't easy to get at 2 AM, but I managed," she grumbled, crossing her arms in frustration. "Your new Glock is in the bag too, along with two full mags, and the square glass container from Home Depot." She paused, giving me a chance to explain myself, but I simply nodded and continued rummaging through the bag. "For the record," Mellany added. "I don't think I want to know what you're planning to do with all this stuff…but I need you tell me anyway."

"Duly noted," I said, standing up.

"Tell me or I'm walking," she snapped, managing to surprise me for once. "I've followed you through some insane shit over the years, boss, but this? This feels different. If someone's blackmailing you, if you've gone and tangled with the wrong people again, we need to know. I won't have a dead boss on my record. It's bad for business, and frankly, I like you better alive."

She wasn't actually threatening to leave, not really. This was just her way of drawing a line in the sand. She always did this when things started to spiral. What threw me off this time was the genuine concern in her voice.

I'd met Mellany when she was a scrappy hustler trying to make rent by running cons on Wall Street wannabes. She'd tried to sell me counterfeit insider trading tips, and I'd admired her audacity enough to hire her on the spot. Of course, she hadn’t fully trusted me at first, but over the years, we’d built something resembling loyalty. I helped her get clean and out of debt, and in return, she'd proven to be one of the most resourceful and capable people I'd ever brought on my team.

Did I care for her in a way that went beyond professional admiration? I’d never let myself dwell on that question too long.

But…it appeared I'd missed some signs along the way.

I noted the way her eyes flicked between my face and the bloodstained shirt I was wearing, her jaw tightening just slightly. She was still wearing the same low-cut top she'd used earlier in the Starbucks operation, now soaked from the rain, her makeup smudged from hours of work. She hadn't even bothered putting on a coat, despite the downpour outside.

I replayed every interaction I'd ever had with her in an instant, processing her tone, body language, and microexpressions.

A smile tugged at the corner of my mouth, but I quickly suppressed it.

I needed allies, and Mellany would do just fine. Drake was reliable too, extremely reliable, in fact. But even if he hadn't been, I couldn't get too choosy right now.

My new tiny friend wiggled a little in my pocket. I tapped it lightly to settle it down, then reached into the duffel bag and pulled out the Glock, timing the draw to maximize its psychological impact on Mellany while also hiding it from any prying eyes in the lobby. I grabbed one of the magazines, loaded it smoothly, and racked the slide in one fluid motion.

"Sir…" Drake started, but I silenced him with a glance.

I'd already made my decision, but just to dot the i's and cross the t's…I kept the loaded gun at my side, letting the silence stretch for a beat longer, watching them carefully.

Then I casually asked, "have you read about the recent escape from Azkaban?"

Time slowed down as I watched their reactions. My hand tightening on the Glock…

"What in the actual fuck?" Mellany blinked. "The hell are you on about, boss?" She exchanged a confused glance with Drake, who was now frowning deeply.

"Azkaban Prison," I repeated, leaning in just slightly. "The Daily Prophet reported the mass breakout a few months ago."

"Is this like a Russian supermax or something?" Mellany asked.

"The Daily Prophet, sir?" Drake said. "I'm not familiar with that publication. Is it a local outlet or something more obscure? Should I look it up?"

I stared at them for a moment longer, going beyond microexpressions and focusing on subtle physiological cues.

"Boss, did you—"

"I didn't hit my head, Mellany," I said. "Tell me, what year is it?"

"…1996…" She gave me a worried look. It didn't take long for her worry to morph into a scowl. "If this is some kind of weird experiment, I swear to God—"

"Good," I interrupted, setting the pistol back in the bag and zipping it shut. I reached into my coat and pulled out the VHS tape that Copper and Coburn had so graciously provided. "This is surveillance footage from the Starbucks operation earlier today." I placed the tape on the table between them. "I believe it contains evidence of anomalous activity that you’ll find…difficult to explain."

They looked at the VHS tape, then at each other, and finally back at me.

"So that's what we were looking for earlier, huh?" Mellany said. "What is it then? Corrupt cops covering up something shady? Mob activity? Political leverage? And what do you have to do with this?"

"I think it's best if you see it for yourselves," I said. "Make a copy of it first—no, scratch that, make several copies. Store them in different locations, encrypted if possible. Call in one of your tech experts if you have to, but don't let them see the contents."

"Sir," Drake began. "If you could just have a seat and calmly explain—"

"The anomalous event occurred at precisely 1:33:12 PM," I said. "You don't have to view hours of traffic footage. Just skip to that timestamp."

I turned around and walked towards the elevator without waiting for a response. Mellany moved to follow me, but Drake grabbed her wrist gently, shaking his head.

I couldn't do this alone, and I needed them to see the truth for themselves first.

And if they didn’t believe what they saw on that tape…Well, then maybe they weren't the right people for this after all. 

-

Lindy's room was on the 11th floor, a corner suite with an excellent view of the Manhattan skyline. It was one of those sterile, high-end hotel rooms where everything was just luxurious enough to remind you that it wasn’t actually yours and that you were paying too much for the privilege of borrowing it. I'd had my fair share of stays in places like this. The novelty had worn off long ago. It took me around six months of NZT to get the thrill of luxury out of my system, but once it was gone, it never came back.

I doubted Lindy was in the headspace to enjoy the view or the amenities right now either.

I knocked twice on the door.

One knock would have sufficed.

"EDDIE!" It wasn’t often that Lindy shouted my name like she wanted to strangle me on the spot—but tonight was one of those rare occasions. Unfortunately, I couldn't immediately go into damage control mode.

I pulled on the door handle as she tried to open it from the other side.

"What are you doing?!" she snapped through the small gap as I forced it shut again.

"The sequence I gave you," I reminded her. "Ask me for it before you let me in."

"The sequence…?" it took her a second to process before she groaned loudly. "Oh for God's sake, Eddie, I already know it's you!" She glared at me through the small crack in the door. "If you know about the stupid sequence, then obviously you're the…" She had to force the words out through gritted teeth. "Real Eddie."

"Correct," I said calmly. "But I think it's best if you get used to practicing the sequence anyway. I'll explain everything once we're inside."

She gave a couple of angry pulls on the door before giving up with a frustrated growl. I heard her stomp off into the room, then the sound of something being slammed down on a table. She stomped back with a piece of paper in her hand. "Alright, fine, whatever! What's the sequence, jackass?"

"Uppercase T lowercase v uppercase M…"

"Slow down," she grumbled. "You're giving me a headache. And I know you only did that to make sure I'm actually reading it off the paper. You're so predictable sometimes it's actually painful."

I smiled slightly as I finished rattling off the sequence, making sure to pace myself this time.

"Happy now?" she snapped, yanking the door fully open and glaring at me.

Her glare gradually softened as she took in the sorry sight of me.

" …Oh my God," she breathed.

She rushed forward and pulled me inside by the sleeve, slamming the door behind us, then throwing her arms around me in a tight hug.

"You're hurt," she said softly, pulling back just enough to look me over. She grabbed my face in her hands. "Something bad happened, didn't it?" she whispered, her voice trembling slightly. "What the hell did you get yourself into this time?"

"I'll explain everything," I said, gently prying her hands from my face and holding them between us. "But you need to sit down fir—"

There was a sound of faint footsteps from inside.

I reacted faster than I could consciously process, drawing the Glock from my waistband and rushing into the room. Lindy yelped in shock, stumbling backward as I burst past her. I slowed time down to a crawl, released a massive spike of adrenaline into my system, and accelerated my visual processing until every detail of the room was laid bare before me. My heartbeat was hammering close to 95 BPM, faster than I'd pushed it in years, and my pupils dilated to drink in every shred of available light.

It took me six hours in accelerated mental time to confirm that there was no immediate threat in the room. I checked the closet, under the bed, behind curtains, inside the bathroom, and even considered the airflow from the vents to confirm that nothing had disturbed them recently. There was a smaller bedroom that came off the hallway, and I repeated the procedure there.

Eventually, I had to concede that the footsteps I'd heard were likely auditory artifacts resulting from exhaustion.

I forced my mind to relax, slowly letting go of the heightened state.

"Can you please put the goddamned gun down and tell me what’s going on?" Lindy demanded, following me around the room as I finished my sweep. "There's no one here, okay? You're freaking me out!"

"Sorry," I said, lowering the Glock and slipping it back into my waistband. "I'm just…on edge."

"Yeah, I can see that," she scoffed, crossing her arms tightly over her chest. "What's going on, Eddie? What happened to you?"

I took a deep breath and sat down heavily on the edge of the bed, running a hand through my still-damp hair.

"You might want to sit down for this," I said quietly.

I had to tell her everything. It was either that or risk losing the only person who had ever truly managed to keep me grounded. I couldn't afford to lose her now.

She hesitated for a moment before sighing and sitting down across from me.

I spoke in a measured, clinical tone, laying it all out in precise detail. It took almost a full hour. I kept my personal observations to a minimum, sticking to the facts as I understood them and avoiding unnecessary speculation. It was hard to make everything sensible without sounding completely deranged, but I tried my best.

And yet, the more I spoke, the more Lindy seemed to withdraw into herself. Her expression was a mix of disbelief, concern, and—most troubling of all—a deep sadness that I couldn’t quite place. As always, I couldn’t look into her mind the same way I could piece together anyone else's thoughts.

A sinking feeling began to settle in the pit of my stomach.

"…and then Bellatrix Apparated out of there, leaving me with her wand," I finished, leaning back against the headboard of the bed. I pulled the wand from my pocket and held it up, turning it slowly in the faint light of the room. "This has to be the key to understanding all of it," I murmured, staring at the carved wood. "The center of mass is slightly off, which suggests there's more to its internal structure than just plain Walnut. I think a core material might be embedded inside, something organic and likely magical in nature. I wouldn't be able to determine its exact composition without a proper lab setup, but I suspect it's something that channels or amplifies energy. Possibly bio-electrical fields or quantum resonance phenomena, or even—"

Lindy stood up abruptly and walked over to the window, her back turned to me.

"You hungry?" She asked quietly after a long pause. "Of course, you are," she muttered. "You must be starving. I'll order some food. Coffee?"

"Coffee works," I said hesitantly, watching her closely. "Oh, that reminds me, I brought you some vanilla hazelnut syrup. Picked it up earlier today—yesterday, I guess—at the Starbucks."

She nodded absently and reached for the phone on the desk. She put her hand on the receiver but paused, her shoulders stiffening.

"Lindy…" I sighed. "…I know this sounds insane, but I can prove—"

"Are you on drugs?"

"What?"

"Are you on drugs, Eddie?" She turned to face me with a hard, searching look in her eyes. "If you're having a relapse, it's okay." She reached out hesitantly and placed a hand on my arm. "I'm here for you. Always."

Of course.

I was so stupid. Of course that’s what she’d think. What was I expecting? That she'd immediately believe me? I should have prepared better for this.

What the hell was going on with me? My mind wasn't as sharp as it should have been.

"Your hands are shaking."

"What?"

"I said your hands are shaking," Lindy repeated softly, her fingers brushing against mine.

I looked down at my hands, surprised.

Something was off.

The moment the thought crossed my mind, I immediately pulled back mentally, running a rapid diagnostic on myself.

Stream Four was completely unresponsive. My other Streams were sluggish, operating below their usual efficiency. There was a fog clouding the edges of my thoughts. I hadn't felt anything like this since…before NZT.

It hadn't been 12 hours since my last dose.

This shouldn’t have been happening.

And yet, I was crashing.

I needed another pill, and I needed it now

"Eddie…just talk to me," Lindy whispered, leaning over to kiss me lightly on the forehead. "I'm here for you, we're going to get—OH MY GOD THERE'S A SNAKE ON THE BED!"

The black viper wriggled out of my pocket and coiled itself on the comforter. I quickly picked it up and let it curl around my hand, keeping it steady as Lindy stumbled backward in pure terror. To be fair, I'd tied its mouth shut with my shoelaces, so it couldn't bite. But that didn't seem to do much to ease her panic.  

Lindy proceeded to scream so loudly that I winced and instinctively jerked my head back. I dodged the pillow she hurled at me in blind panic, rolled off the bed, grabbed the duffle bag, and scooped the snake into the glass container Mellany had purchased earlier. 

This was a complete disaster. Something was terribly wrong with me. I shouldn't have missed a single detail in all of this.

"What the fuck is wrong with you?!" Lindy shrieked. "Are you fucking insane?! WHAT IS THAT THING DOING HERE?!"

"Hold on," I groaned, my head suddenly spinning as my vision blurred. I crawled to the bathroom, gripping the edge of the sink for support as I heaved myself up, then stared at my reflection in the mirror, panting heavily.

There was no NZT in my system.

How? How is this possible?!

The plasma concentration should have been stable for at least another four hours, independent of variables like increased physical exertion or mental stress. NZT didn't work this way. It couldn't simply metabolize faster because I was under pressure.

I couldn't figure it out. I couldn't figure anything out, and that was the most terrifying part.

I shoved my hand into my concealed coat pocket, fumbling for the emergency NZT stash I kept on me at all times.

"What's wrong? Eddie! Are you okay?" Lindy rushed over to me, grabbing my arm as I sagged against the sink.

It took every bit of mental focus I had just to keep myself upright. I managed to pull the small vial out of my pocket, but my fingers were trembling so violently that I nearly dropped it.

Lindy immediately understood what was happening. She helped me unscrew the cap and tipped the clear pill into my palm. I swallowed it dry without hesitation, squeezing my eyes shut as I let out a trembling breath, hoping against hope for the familiar wave of clarity to wash over me.

It took a minute, maybe two, during which I experienced the terrifying emptiness of a mind that was supposed to be limitless but had suddenly fallen into darkness. The world shrunk, lost its color, and turned unbearably quiet. Numbers, patterns, systems—all of it faded into an incomprehensible void. Everything felt slow, dull, and suffocating.

I knew then that I would never be able to go back. There was no undoing what NZT had done to me—not just my mind but my very perception of reality. Without NZT, there was nothing. Life simply wasn't worth living. Without NZT, I was a shadow of the person I had become.

Lindy stood by my side, holding me up as I clung to the sink for dear life. She stroked my back gently, whispering soothing words I couldn't quite process over the roaring static in my head.

She was just as scared. Scared for me, maybe scared of me

This had to stop. This had to stop now or it was going to destroy me.

When that terrible fog finally, mercifully, began to lift, it happened all at once. Like sunlight breaking through storm clouds, every neuron in my brain exploded to life in a surge of activity so intense it was almost painful. I was newborn, for a moment, re-experiencing the overwhelming sensory input of a mind awakening to the full breadth of existence

Everything was possible again. I could see all the connections, the infinite web of probabilities stretching before me in every direction.

I was invincible once more. I was back.

I took a long, shuddering breath and straightened up, my hands braced against the sink as I glanced in the mirror.

I instantly shifted my expression to mask my earlier vulnerability, replacing it with the calm, calculated demeanor Lindy was accustomed to seeing.

"That wasn't Advil," I said lightly. "In case you were wondering…"

Lindy's eyes flashed with anger. "You think that's funny? FUCK YOU!" she erupted. "You lying piece of shit! You told me you were off it! You promised me!" Her voice cracked, and she took a step back, her hands trembling. "You swore to me you were clean, that you'd quit for good. What happened to 'I worked out all the bugs,' and 'I don't need it anymore,' huh? What happened to that, Eddie?!"

"I didn't work out all the bugs," I admitted, turning to face her fully. "I'm not closer to figuring them out now than I was three years ago."

She stared at me, visibly hurt. "But…but that stupid company that created the pill, you said that you contacted them. Consulted with their scientists. That you don't even need it anymore!"

"I lied about everything." I said simply. I had to tell her everything at this point. There was no other way now. "EibenChemCorps was never involved with me in any capacity. I tried to contact them once, but they refused to acknowledge the existence of NZT-48. You have to understand, I am not the only enhanced mind to have been exposed to NZT-48. There are other enhanced minds like mine out there. Some are even older. More experienced. And not all of them are particularly friendly. Snooping around would have put me on their radar, and that's not a risk I was willing to take. "

"But you told me you were working with them! That they helped you stabilize the formula!"

"I'm manufacturing my own supply," I said. "We know the exact molecular structure of NZT-48, but the problem is its delivery mechanism. How it interacts with synaptic pathways and metabolic processes. My guys think the side effects are tied to something we haven’t fully mapped yet, possibly related to long-term neuroplasticity changes or even dormant genomic sequences being activated. I believe—"

"So you're taking a dangerous experimental drug every day without even fully understanding how it works?"

"Technically, yes," I replied evenly. "I do understand how it works to a significant degree, but—"

"Why did you lie to me?" Her voice cracked. "Why didn’t you just tell me the truth?"

"Because I was scared you’d leave me." I said calmly. "And because I knew you wouldn’t understand."

"Don’t you dare put this on me!" she shouted. "I always stood by you, Eddie! I’ve always been here for you, no matter what crazy shit you pulled. I always tried to understand! But you—you shut me out every time. You never let me in! You never trusted me enough to be honest."

"I'm being honest now."

"Oh now?" she laughed bitterly. "What are you being honest about? Fucking…wizards and magic wands? Are you listening to yourself? Do you realize how insane this sounds?" She strode out of the bathroom, her hands flying up in frustration. "What the hell am I supposed to do with this, huh? Come on, you're the genius here, so tell me what I'm supposed to do with the truth that my boyfriend is popping brain pills and claiming that magic is real?! What am I supposed to do with that information?"

"You could give me a couple of days to collect evidence," I said carefully. "If I'm telling the truth, then the evidence will speak for itself."

"So I should let you run off and get yourself killed, is that it?"

I shrugged. "I figured we could do this together, if you’re willing to help me."

"Help you do what?" She glared at the viper now resting in the glass container on the nightstand. "And what in the world are you planning to do with that thing?"

"Well, I already told you, Bellatrix turned it—"

"Yes, Eddie, I don't have your photographic memory but I can remember what you said five minutes ago!" she snapped. "The lady waved her…wand and turned one of your guns into a snake, right?"

I nodded. "That's right."

Lindy took a long, shuddering breath, rubbing her temples with both hands. I could see the gears in her brain beginning to turn.

"So what," she muttered. "You're waiting to see if it turns back into a gun?"

"That's…exactly right," I blinked, genuinely surprised that she was catching on so quickly. "If the viper reverts back to inanimate form, it could confirm that the transformative properties are temporary. I will also need to observe its behavior closely during this period. If it requires sustenance, for example, that would suggest it has fully taken on the biological traits of a living organism."

"Biological traits…Right…" She rubbed her temples harder. "You know what I think?"

"I have a few guesses," I replied cautiously, watching her as she leaned against the dresser.

"I think you've lost your damn mind," she said. "I think that you went on some insane spiral after taking too much of that NZT crap and now you're seeing things that aren't there. You picked up that snake from some exotic pet store and cooked up this whole story in your head because you're too scared to admit that the drug is messing you up worse than you ever let on."

"But…?" I prompted.

"There's no but, you idiot," she snapped, wiping her eyes angrily. "Look, I can't deal with this right now. I have so much work to do to repair the fallout from you going AWOL today. I need to reschedule all your campaign donor meetings and reassure the team that everything's fine, even though it's obviously not. Then there's the press conference we were supposed to finalize, the polling numbers I need to analyze before tomorrow morning, and—oh yeah—I now also have to deal with the fact that my boyfriend might be having a mental breakdown!"

"Where are you going?" I frowned.

"It's 4 in the fucking morning, Eddie," Lindy said, exasperated. "I'm going to bed. I suggest you do the same because you have a full day of damage control ahead of you."

"I'm afraid I won't be available for the campaign tomorrow," I said. "Or the foreseeable future, for that matter."

Lindy froze mid-step, her hand on the doorknob to the adjoining bedroom. She was struggling with something internally, I could see it in the way her shoulders tensed and her fingers tightened on the knob as though she might rip it off.

"Great," she finally choked out. "This is just perfect."

She didn't even look back as she slammed the door shut behind her.

I stood there for a long moment, staring at the closed door, letting her quiet sobs stab me right in the chest.

I knew better than to follow her. She was in shock. She needed time to process everything I'd dumped on her. Tomorrow she'd insist on taking me to a hospital, likely under the guise of "checking for a concussion" or some other excuse to make me see someone she thought could fix me. Then she'd demand a sit-down intervention with Vanessa and maybe even other members of the team, trying to corner me into admitting I was spiraling out of control.

Of course, now that I was back on NZT, I'd be prepared for all of it. By the time she woke up tomorrow, I'd have a copy of the VHS tape's footage ready for her, and possibly also footage of a snake reverting into a pistol, if my hypothesis about the transformation being temporary proved correct.

Still, I'd completely messed up handling this situation with her tonight. I had been reckless, uncalculated.

Thankfully, everything was back in order now.

It was unsettling how quickly I had descended into chaos without NZT, and equally unsettling how seamlessly I could reassemble myself with it. By my estimation, I'd been operating on low plasma concentration levels for approximately two hours before the crash had hit. It'd started around the time I'd gotten to The Ashworth. Subtle lapses in perception, minor inefficiencies creeping into my thought processes, and a faint, nagging sense of disorientation I’d initially dismissed as exhaustion.

Obviously, this could never happen again.

I commanded Stream One to immediately recalibrate my dosage schedule. I already had multiple theories for why my NZT levels had crashed prematurely, and each one required thorough investigation. Copper's mind probe earlier at Starbucks was a prime suspect. It might have triggered some unforeseen neurological interference or destabilized the drug's efficacy, especially if his psychic abilities had interacted unpredictably with the biochemical pathways NZT modified. Whatever the cause, I couldn't afford to let it happen again. I'd just faced oblivion and barely clawed my way back.

My stomach growled violently, my head pounded from dehydration and the sudden NZT crash, and my back ached in ways I hadn’t registered until now.

I ignored all of it. 

I took out the camera and set it up on the work desk, focusing its lens on the glass container holding the snake. I fiddled with the settings and battery packs until I was satisfied everything was in working order, then I remembered the frozen mice. I untied snake's mouth, using my enhanced reflexes to avoid getting bitten in the process, and placed one of the mice into the container.

I poured myself a glass of water from the room's complimentary pitcher and sat down heavily in the chair at the desk.

With not much else to do than stare and wait, I figured this was as good time as any to deal with a problem I'd been putting off for far too long.

I summoned Stream Four to my mental workspace, watching as a ghostly version of my old self materialized in the room before me.

"We need to talk," I said, leaning back in my chair and crossing my arms. "You've been a pain in my ass for too long, and it's time we addressed that."

"Who, me?" He smirked at me. "No way."

I sighed and pinched the bridge of my nose, feeling a familiar wave of irritation rise up. " "Yes, you," I said wearily.

He walked over to the desk and then tapped on the glass of the container. "So you really think this thing is going to turn back into a gun, huh?" He leaned down as if to smell it, then wrinkled his nose theatrically. "You just had to pick a snake, didn't you? Couldn't have been a goldfish or a hamster."

"I didn't pick it," I replied curtly. "It was what she chose during the transformation. Likely for symbolic reasons."

"Oh, right, you still believe this shit is all real." He rolled his eyes dramatically. "Come on, Eddie, you’re smarter than this." He paused as if waiting for me to interject, but I didn’t. "Of course, being smart doesn't mean your morals are intact, does it?"

"Deleting you doesn’t make me any less moral," I said. "I'm simply reordering my priorities."

"I think the word you're looking for is 'murder,'" he said. "But please, go ahead and dress it up in fancy language if that helps you sleep at night."

"Do you really think this kind of circular guilt-tripping is going to work on me?" I asked curiously. "You are not, in fact, a person. You are not even a devil on my shoulder. You are me. There's no distinction between us except for the fact that I don't need you anymore. You're an outdated, fragmented part of my psyche that's been clinging on like a parasite. I can't afford to lose 23% of my mental processing capacity to maintain some relic of who I used to be. Not anymore."

"23%?" He smirked in that infuriatingly smug way only I could replicate. "Come on, you're giving me way too much credit. 5% at best. And that's mostly nostalgia for the good old days."

"You're taking this better than thought you would," I said. "I thought there would be a lot more kicking and screaming, maybe some last-ditch emotional manipulation to try and sway me."

He shrugged. "What can I say? I know when the game is up."

I summoned my other streams, letting them take shape around us in the room. They advanced menacingly, forming a semicircle around Stream Four.

"Get your fucking hands of me!" He snarled as they grabbed hold of him. He shoved Stream One back, then headbutted Stream Two, causing it to stumble briefly. "You motherfuckers, stay away from me!"

He was quickly overwhelmed as the other streams converged on him.

"ARRGH! NO!" He screamed as if in great pain, then collapsed to his knees, clutching his head.

"Wait," I held up a hand calmly, signaling the other streams to pause. My own mental projection walked toward the writhing figure of Stream Four, kneeling down to meet his eye level. "Look, we both know you're not actually in pain. You're trying to manipulate me into stopping this, but you know as well as I do that it’s futile. You can't experience pain without the neuronal pathways I control."

His screams immediately cut off. He chuckled and brushed off his knees as he stood up. "You really do know me too well," he said with a grin. "I had to try, though, right? That's what you would have done in my place."

I nodded slowly, acknowledging his point. "Alright," I said. "I think we're done here. See you around…well, never. Goodbye—"

"Wait!" he raised a hand. "Don't I get any last words? That's only fair, isn't it? A condemned man’s right and all that?"

I let out an exasperated sigh. "Be quick about it, then. I have things to do."

"Sure, but first…can I have a beer and maybe, like, one last cigarette or something? You know, for the road?"

"…Fine," I relented. A glass of beer materialized in his hand, along with an unlit cigarette. I activated the neurons responsible for olfactory recall and taste memory, allowing him to simulate the sensation of enjoying his final indulgence.

"Ah," he sighed contentedly, taking a long drag of the imaginary cigarette and savoring an exaggerated sip of the beer. "Now this is what I call a proper sendoff."

"Yeah, yeah," I said dismissively. "So what profound parting words of wisdom do you have for me? Let's get on with it, Stream Four."

He smirked, exhaling a lazy puff of imaginary smoke. "Let's entertain for a moment the possibility that all this wizard crap you're tied up in is real," he said. "Do you really think you stand a chance against people who can break the laws of physics with a flick of their wrist? Sure, you're smart—hell, you're the smartest person you know— but you're still just a guy with a fancy brain and a gun. What happens when murder-witch Lestrange decides to turn you into a snake, huh? Or worse—something even more humiliating, like a cockroach."

He generated an image of a cockroach with my face on it, skittering around on the floor. "The great Eddie Morra, reduced to scurrying under a fridge in fear of being squashed!" He chuckled at his own terrible joke

I kept staring at him, unimpressed.

"Tough crowd," he shrugged, shaking his head. "Anyway, I don't really care what happens to you after this. I only care about Lindy. What happens when Lestrange gets her hands on her? What kind of fucked up magical torture methods do you think she’ll use on her to get to you?"

"I won't let this happen," I said firmly. "The next time our paths cross, Bellatrix Lestrange won't even have the opportunity to raise her wand."

He burst into laughter, nearly spilling his imaginary beer. "The next time our paths cross," he mocked. "So confident for a guy who just had a breakdown because he ran out of his magic brain pills."

"Confidence is for people who rely on hope," I said. "I'm not confident, I'm prepared."

"Prepared, huh? Prepared to replace me with another emotionless robot who'll tell you what you want to hear and follow every one of your brilliant, infallible commands?"

"Something like that," I allowed. "Your replacement will be trained in every martial art and survival tactic known to man. Should the need arise, it will be capable of strategizing a million moves ahead in combat scenarios. No other enhanced mind, magical or otherwise, will be able to outmaneuver me."

"No other enhanced mind?" Stream Four raised an eyebrow skeptically. "You're giving yourself a lot of credit there, buddy."

"I have reason to believe that my mind is one of the most advanced ever exposed to NZT-48," I stated matter-of-factly. "Take Gennady for example—his enhancement was crude, uncontrolled, nothing compared to—"

"Gennady was a drugged-up mobster with the impulse control of a toddler," Stream Four interjected. "You can't seriously be comparing yourself to that guy and taking it as a compliment."

"You're not looking at the bigger picture," I continued, unperturbed. "I can extrapolate the capabilities of other enhanced minds based on known cases, including Gennady. Every NZT user we've come across so far has been limited by their own approach. Either too erratic, like Gennady, or too shortsighted in how they leveraged the drug's potential. I am different."

Stream Four sighed and shook his head, downing the last of his beer. "So arrogant. Always so damn arrogant."

"Are we done?" I asked impatiently. "You've had your last drink, your last smoke, and your last chance to waste my time. Rest assured that Lindy will be protected at all costs."

"You better hope so," he said, his expression darkening. "Because without her, you have nothing."

He held out a hand.

"I'm well aware." I shook his hand firmly, locking eyes with him for the last time. "Now get out of my head."

The process for deleting a thought stream was actually quite straightforward, albeit mentally taxing. I had to carefully isolate every node and branch of the stream's neural pathways from my active cognitive processes, ensuring there were no residual connections that could interfere with my other streams or cause disruptions to my functionality, and then integrate those cognitive resources back into my primary mental framework. The danger of such a process was losing valuable information or accidentally destabilizing the entire network.

 I was, however, very confident in my ability to execute the operation flawlessly.

When the process was close to completion, Stream Four began to flicker and glitch, like a corrupted hologram struggling to hold shape.

He waved cheerfully as he started to dissipate. "Good luck out there, genius. Oh and by the way," he called out just before the last remnants of his form dissolved into my mental space, "there's something critical you've overlooked about all of this."

"Yeah?" I paused, curious despite myself. "What’s that?"

He pointed his finger at me like a loaded gun, then said, "Obliv–"

He disappeared before he could finish his sentence.

I stared shocked at the empty space where Stream Four had stood moments before.

What was he trying to…?

Obliviator-in-training.

Memory clean-up.

Fake memories injections?

Oh. Oh fuck.

How could I not have seen it before?

I'd dodged their attempt to wipe my memory back at the Starbucks, sure. But who was to say they hadn’t already succeeded before that? 

I slumped against the chair, letting my head fall back as I stared at the ceiling.

I was already racing to piece together a timeline—my timeline.

But then the viper let out a sudden, sharp hiss that snapped me back to the present moment. The little creature was tearing into the frozen mouse with a ferocity that was almost unsettling.

I rechecked the camera setup, ensuring it was still recording, and settled back into my seat, watching the snake intently as it devoured its meal.

It was going to turn back into the gun.

I stared at it intently, waiting for the impossible to happen.

Any minute now.

Chapter Text

By the time lunch arrived the following day, Ben Copper had already been subjected to three separate interrogations. He'd had to endure a grueling six hours of questioning from MACUSA's Internal Affairs, two more hours with the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, and—to top it all off—a thoroughly humiliating dressing-down by his own department head in front of half the Obliviator office.

The memory of that last one made Ben's stomach twist uncomfortably as he sat alone in the corner of the cafeteria, poking aimlessly at a congealed lump of shepherd’s pie.

The man really went too far there, in Ben's humble opinion, calling him a "blight upon the good name of MACUSA" and "a disgrace to the proud tradition of Obliviators everywhere," among other colorful insults. Mr. Coburn, for his part, had wasted no time in throwing Ben under the Knight Bus, painting him as an incompetent rookie who couldn't handle the pressure and failed to follow direct orders.

So much for professional courtesy…Ben thought bitterly as he stabbed his fork into the shepherd’s pie with more force than necessary.

The only thing that kept him from completely losing his composure was the faint hope that maybe, just maybe, none of this would reach his family back in London. Mom had already deemed his decision to take a position with MACUSA as a colossal mistake—"a fool’s adventure among the Yanks," as she had put it. If she ever caught wind of his latest debacle, she'd likely send a Howler that would echo across the Atlantic. The woman still didn’t trust anything stronger than a Lumos spell, but had somehow taken to sending Howlers by the dozen since Ben had graduated Hogwarts.

Which was entirely his fault, really, for accidentally teaching her how to use the Owl Post system in the first place.

Ben sighed and slumped further into his chair.

His life was clearly just a series of miserable missteps spiraling endlessly downhill…

"Hey, what's with the gloomy face?" Tonks slid into the seat across from him, her tray clattering a little louder than necessary on the cafeteria table. "I thought you finished your debrief hours ago."

Ben immediately straightened in his seat, hastily brushing crumbs off his lap and trying to look somewhat presentable. He met Tonks' eyes for the briefest of moments, finding them way too pretty to handle directly, and immediately averted his gaze to his pie instead. "Good afternoon, Auror Tonks," he mumbled.

"Aw, drop the 'Auror' bit, mate" Tonks said with a grin, reaching for an apple from her tray. "I don't go in for all that formal rubbish."

"Oh, um, okay…Tonks," Ben said, mind racing with about twelve different ways he could accidentally embarrass himself in this conversation. "…how—uh, how were your debriefs?"

"Not too shabby, actually," Tonks said with a casual shrug. "I'm on loan from the Ministry, they can't chew me out too much without risking a diplomatic incident. Not that they had much to chew me out for, anyway. I wasn't the one who let the crazed Death Eater Bellatrix Lestrange waltz away from a crime scene. "

Ben felt his face flush with embarrassment. "…Yeah, that was my fault," he admitted quietly, his shoulders slumping.

"Nah, don’t beat yourself up too much," Tonks said, waving her hand dismissively and taking a loud bite out of her apple. "I heard your partner was the one running the show. He should have taken responsibility for the operation going sideways, not pawn it off on a junior officer."

"You really think so?" Ben asked hesitantly, glancing up at for a moment—just long enough to catch her giving him an easy, reassuring smile.

"Absolutely," Tonks said firmly, pointing at him with her half-eaten apple for emphasis. "In my book, a good leader doesn't just take credit for the wins, they take responsibility for the losses, too."

"…Yeah, well," Ben sighed. "Try telling that to Mr. Coburn."

"Sounds like Coburn's more concerned about covering his own arse than taking accountability," Tonks said. "You should document everything that happened in your own report."

Ben nodded slowly, considering her advice. He'd done all he could to recount the events accurately during his interrogations, but writing an independent report might give him a chance to clarify some of the details and defend his actions. His disciplinary hearing would still likely be a nightmare, but at least he'd have something to back himself up when the accusations inevitably flew his way.

Tonks seemed to notice his hesitation. "Listen, I'm not just saying this to make you feel better," she continued, leaning forward slightly, her voice taking a more serious tone. "In fact, I'd bet my last Galleon that Coburn's version of events isn't the whole truth."

Ben, again, could only nod slowly, unsure of where she was going with this. He watched her twirl a strand of her bubblegum-pink hair around her finger, the color shifting slightly under the cafeteria's enchanted lights.

What…what was she doing here, anyway? This cafeteria wasn't even on the same floor as the Auror offices. Wasn't she supposed to be coordinating with her MACUSA counterparts or something?

"May I ask what brings you down here?" Ben said.

"Oh, just thought I'd pop down and grab a bite while I wait for the paperwork to go through," Tonks said breezily. "Saw you sitting here looking all mopey, so I figured I'd try cheering you up a bit."

She was lying to him. Ben was many things—a mediocre duelist, a nervous wreck under pressure, and quite possibly the unluckiest recruit MACUSA had ever seen—but he wasn't terrible at reading people. His Legilimency training had ensured that much, at least.

"I see," he said carefully, looking down at his pie again. "Well, thanks for the company," he finished awkwardly, fiddling with the edge of his tray.

"Wait," she leaned forward, her tone shifting suddenly. "If you don't want to get fired for this whole mess—and trust me, you don't—then you're going to need my help."

"Your help?" Ben blinked, caught off guard. "Er, no offense, but how exactly do you plan to help me? You're not even with MACUSA."

"Precisely," Tonks said with a grin. "Which is why I can see things from an outside perspective, without all the MACUSA politics and finger-pointing getting in the way. Also, I'm still officially a British Ministry Auror, which means I have some jurisdictional leeway."

"Leeway for what, exactly?" Ben asked nervously.

"Look, I'll be straight with you," Tonks said. "We've portkeyed a Pensieve here from the Ministry for investigative purposes. My mentor and I are going to be reviewing the memories from the incident. Of course, we can't actually force you to provide your memories without due process, but…" She gave him a pointed look.

It took a second for Ben to catch on, but when he did, his stomach flipped.

She was suggesting that he voluntarily submit his memories behind his own department's back. That…sounded like a one-way ticket to unemployment. Or worse. There was no telling how MACUSA would respond if they found out he'd bypassed their internal investigation to cooperate with foreign Aurors. Ben had a pretty good idea of how Mr. Coburn would spin it, though—something along the lines of insubordination, breach of protocol, and collusion with a foreign agency.

…not exactly the kind of résumé padding he was looking for.

" …that sounds incredibly risky," Ben said under his breath. He looked around nervously, half-expecting a stern-faced MACUSA official to appear out of nowhere and drag him off to the nearest holding cell for even entertaining such an idea. "Sorry for saying so, but I don't think I can afford to take that kind of chance."

"You're still reading the Daily Prophet?" Tonks pointed at the newspaper tucked under Ben's tray, swiftly changing the subject. 'The boy who lies' headline, along with a moving photo of Harry Potter dodging reporters, was prominently displayed on the front page. "They don't exactly have the best reputation for accuracy these days, you know."

"Yeah, I know," Ben muttered, glancing at the paper before folding it self-consciously. "I just kept it around to see how things are being spun back home."

"Well, if you’re worried about how things might be spun here," Tonks said, "then let me make one thing clear: this isn’t just about saving your job or your reputation."

"What do you mean?" Ben asked.

"You graduated from Hogwarts, didn’t you?" Tonks said. "You've probably heard about Dumbledore getting smeared in the press, and you know how much rubbish they’ve been spouting about Harry too. Not to mention Umbridge and her Ministry cronies taking over Hogwarts. Believe me, the truth is getting buried left and right these days."

Ben nodded reluctantly at her words, feeling a pang of guilt. After the Triwizard Tournament last year and Harry Potter’s testimony about Voldemort's return, it was hard not to notice how the Ministry and their allies in the press were systematically tearing down anyone who dared to challenge their narrative. Ben's personal opinion of the matter was that Harry Potter was probably telling the truth—or at least believed he was—but he needed more concrete evidence before making any definitive conclusions.

In any case, he had enough problems of his own right now without getting embroiled in the political drama back home.

"…you see where this is going, right?" Tonks said, leaning in very closely now. So close, in fact, that Ben could see down her collar, if he so chose to look, which he absolutely, mortifyingly did not. He saw one of his coworkers raise an eyebrow at him from across the cafeteria. One of the house-elves floating nearby with a tray of pumpkin juice hovered a little too close for comfort, clearly eavesdropping on their conversation. Tonks didn't seem to care that half the room was probably watching them by now. "There's a privacy charm over this table, so no need to worry about nosy little ears," Tonks said.

When did she cast that? Ben hadn't noticed her make any wand movements or murmur an incantation. Before she'd even reached the table, then?

She'd planned this entire conversation well in advance.

"What exactly do you want from me, Tonks?" Ben asked cautiously.

"In your report," Tonks said, "you mentioned that Bellatrix spoke of the Dark Lord, correct?"

"How do you know that?" Ben asked warily. "That detail wasn't shared in the general debriefings."

"And why do you think that is?" Tonks replied. "Why would MACUSA want to keep such a critical detail under wraps? Think about it, Ben. Bellatrix Lestrange speaks of the Dark Lord as if he's kicking around, alive and well. Why isn't this information being shouted from the rooftops? Why isn't someone, anyone, acting on it? You think The New York Ghost would sit on this kind of story if they knew?"

"But," Ben began, frowning. "It's only been…sixteen hours since the incident! MACUSA is still verifying details and—"

"We've officially asked them to allow us a quick look into your memories," Tonks said. "But they’re dragging their feet. Burying us in red tape. They really don't want us to have a record of what happened out there."

Ben took a step back, stopping abruptly when the tingling of the privacy ward's edge brushed against his skin. "Uh, m-maybe you should talk with Mr. Coburn directly," he tried. "He's more experienced and would be a better candidate to provide the information you need."

"We already tried that," Tonks said. "He's trying to cover his ass and shift all the blame to you. Giving us access to his memories would only incriminate him further, and he knows it. We need your memories, Ben."

"B-but…but…"

"Look, you want to get fired and have your name dragged through the mud because of Coburn, or do you want to clear your name and do the right thing?" Tonks interjected. "It's either you, or Coburn's version of events becomes the official narrative, and trust me, he's already spinning it in a way that makes you look like an absolute buffoon."

Admittedly…she had a point.

Ben found himself scowling at the thought of Mr. Coburn twisting the story to save his own skin. The man had been an absolute nightmare to work with, always throwing his weight around and treating Ben like an expendable inconvenience. The constant break room bullying had been bad enough, but having Coburn scapegoat him in an official report was not just humiliating, it was career suicide.

"How would that help me if MACUSA finds out I went behind their backs?" Ben asked. "Even if I'm telling the truth, they'll brand me as insubordinate or working against them. "

"You won't be breaking any rules," Tonks said smoothly. "You're voluntarily offering your memories for an internal investigation aided by a partnering agency. We'll take the responsibility for requesting them, and if anyone questions your decision, you can claim that we insisted."

Ben found himself giving the proposition serious consideration. He'd worked so, so hard for his position at MACUSA, and the thought of everything being taken away by Coburn's lies was almost unbearable. If Tonks was right, this might be his only chance to salvage his integrity and protect his career from complete ruin.

There was also the whole "the-truth-matters" angle Tonks was pushing. Ben found that he cared a lot less about that than saving his own skin, if he were being completely honest.

But the risks…

"I don't think I can afford to take such a gamble," Ben finished reluctantly, shaking his head. "Sorry for wasting your time, Tonks, but I…I just don't think I can put my neck on the line like that."

Tonks frowned faintly at his response. She looked disappointed, but not entirely surprised. "I guess I can't fault you for playing it safe," she said. "But just remember, sometimes playing it safe can cost you more in the long run."

Was…was that a threat?

"Oh, by the way," she drew her wand and twirled it casually between her fingers, "this is happening in your break room right now." She gestured with the wand, and the air shimmered with a faint silver light as a moving image materialized in front of Ben. He stared at the projection, recognizing it immediately.

His department's break room.

Which displayed none other than Mr. Coburn standing at the center, surrounded by a small but rapt audience of MACUSA employees.

"And then the kid peed his pants. I'm not joking! Right there behind the cruiser!" Coburn's voice boomed in the silvery projection, his mustache twitching with barely contained glee as the room erupted into laughter. "I told him to keep his bloody wand steady, but the poor bastard couldn’t stop shaking! Shat himself as soon as Lestrange turned her gaze on him! You should’ve seen his face!”

If Ben hadn't been clenching his fists in fury, he might have wondered how Tonks had managed to anchor a bugging charm in a heavily warded MACUSA facility's break room without getting detected. A small part of him did surface enough to ask himself how much trouble she might get in if someone caught her snooping like this. But that thought quickly evaporated under the weight of his mounting anger.

"Wait," Ben said before she could rise from her seat. "I'll do it. Just tell me what you need from me."

Tonks nodded with a small, triumphant smile. "Good choice."

Chapter Text

When Ben was escorted into a shifty apartment in a nondescript Manhattan building later that evening, he felt like he was walking to his own execution.

And that wasn't just his usual anxiety talking.

For starters, he'd thought they'd do this back at MACUSA or some kind of formal Ministry office. He hadn't expected to be led to what appeared to be a run-down safehouse with creaky floorboards, peeling wallpaper, and an assortment of mismatched furniture that looked like it had been stolen from a dozen different yard sales. 

And he definitely hadn't expected to face none other than Alastor Mad-Eye Moody himself.

Ben immediately recognized the man from the frequent Daily Prophet articles about his supposed paranoia, which had reportedly led to the repeated Obliviation of innocent Muggles. There were also the false sightings of Dark wizards, the accusations of excessive force in the field, and the infamous incident involving the destruction of an entire Muggle shopping center due to what Moody had later described as "a slight miscalculation."

And yet, despite all the scandalous headlines, Moody's reputation as a legendary Auror and one of the foremost Dark wizard catchers in history was undisputed.

Honestly, Ben wouldn’t have minded knocking back a drink with the guy just to hear a few war stories, preferably from a safe distance and with an exit strategy firmly in place.

Unfortunately, the bloke looked about as angry as a hippogriff with a sore hoof. His magical eye was spinning wildly in its socket while his one natural eye glared at Ben with all the warmth of a blizzard. Whatever Moody saw with that whirling magical eye of his, Ben got the distinct impression it wasn’t putting him in the man’s good graces.

"This is the one, eh?" Moody growled, pointing a gnarled finger at Ben. "Bit young, isn’t he? Looks like a stiff breeze might slap that weedy wand out of his hand."

Tonks rolled her eyes and stepped between them, placing a hand on Ben's shoulder. "Easy, Mad-Eye. He's a bit green, sure, but he's got potential."

"Potential, you say?" Moody snorted. "Potential doesn't mean a damn thing if he wets himself in the field."

Ben couldn't help but bristle at the comment. "Sir, with all due respect—"

"Oh the little shit talks back, does he?" Moody said. "Listen here, boy, I've been hunting dark wizards since before you were even jizz in your daddy's pants. If I say you look greener than a Slytherin first-year with snot running down his face, then you bloody well look it!"

"Alright, alright!" Tonks interjected quickly, stepping in front of Ben with her hands raised. "Ben, this is Alastor Moody. Might come off a bit rough, but he's the best in the business. Mentored half the top Aurors in Britain, myself included." She gave Moody a pointed look before continuing. "Mad-Eye, this is Ben Copper, junior officer from MACUSA's Obliviator department."

"Yeah, yeah," Moody grumbled, waving a dismissive hand. "Let's get on with this already. Kid, do you know why we brought you here?"

Ben had to swallow his irritation before answering. "Sir, I was told that you needed my memories of the incident with Bellatrix Lestrange."

"Right, sit down," Moody barked, pointing to a rickety wooden chair in the center of the room. Ben didn't fail to notice that said chair was clearly brought out of someone's trash bin. "Be quick about it," Moody added, "we don't have all night."

Tonks gave him an apologetic smile as she gently ushered him toward the shoddy seat. Frankly, he didn't find her supposed sympathy particularly convincing, considering she was the one who had dragged him into this situation in the first place and conveniently left out the part where he’d be subjected to a verbal mauling by one of the most intimidating Aurors in wizarding history.

Seriously, even a simple heads-up would have gone a long way towards managing his expectations.  

"So, Benjamin Copper." Moody conjured a folder from thin air and opened it with a loud snap, riffling through its contents as he limped back and forth on his wooden leg. "Graduated Hogwarts, class of ‘84. Gryffindor, yes? Barely scraped an ‘A’ in Defense Against the Dark Arts. Decent marks in Charms and Transfiguration."

"Sir, am I being interviewed or providing memories for analysis?" Ben asked, exasperated. "I thought this was about Bellatrix—"

"I ask the questions here, boy!" Moody snapped, slamming the folder shut and tossing it on a nearby pile of equally disheveled paperwork.  "Now sit down and shut your yap before I decide you're not worth the headache."

Ben did as he was told, though not without a fair amount of internal grumbling. He should just grit his teeth and get through this. If they could actually help him set the record straight, it would be worth the bruised ego.

Besides, pissing off Alastor Moody was probably not the wisest move. No bloke going by "Mad-Eye" earned that nickname by being particularly jovial, after all.

Moody gave him a long, hard stare. "So, tell me, Copper, what made a fine lad like yourself leave jolly old England for the States, hmm? Couldn't cut it in Britain? Had a pretty lass waiting for you here, perhaps?"

"Er, no. No lass," Ben said, avoiding Tonks' amused glance. "I just thought it would be, uh…an interesting opportunity to learn a different system of magical law enforcement."

"Oh, so you consider yourself a scholar of magical law enforcement, do you?" Moody said, letting out a bark of laughter that sounded more like a cough. "Tell me, how many Aurors are currently stationed in MACUSA's New York headquarters at any given time?"

"Uh, sir, I'm afraid this is not really my area of expertise," Ben said, his voice faltering. "But by my estimation, somewhere around 200 to 300 Aurors are stationed—"

"WRONG, YOU FOOL!" Moody suddenly roared. "YOU HAVE JUST EXPOSED SENSETIVE DETAIL REGARDING MACUSA'S OPERATIONAL CAPABILITIES TO A THIRD PARTY WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION! DID IT EVER OCCUR TO YOU THAT I MIGHT NOT BE WHO I CLAIM TO BE? HOW DAFT ARE YOU?!"

Ben could only gawk in horror as Moody's tirade echoed through the room.

"DID YOU EVEN CAST A RECOGNITION CHARM ON ME WHEN YOU ENTERED? NO! DID YOU VERIFY MY IDENTITY WITH ANY KIND OF PROCEDURE WHATSOEVER? NO! IF I WERE A POLYJUICED DEATH EATER, YOU'D HAVE JUST DELIVERED CRUCIO TO YOURSELF ON A SILVER PLATTER!"

The rant was abruptly interrupted by Tonks stepping forward and putting a firm hand on Moody's shoulder. The man breathed heavily for a few seconds, his magical eye spinning furiously as if it might pop out of its socket. She patted on his back as a fit of coughing overtook him, then gently guided him back to a seated position.

"Enough, enough, girl!" Moody shoved her hand away with a gruff motion. "Stop fussing over me! I’m not a bloody invalid!" He took a moment to compose himself, glaring at Ben all the while.

"Sure you’re not, Mad-Eye," Tonks said soothingly, conjuring a glass of water and handing it to him. "But you're still not healed up from that nasty run-in with Lestrange, remember?"

"Aye, I'll remember it well enough," Moody growled.

"L-Lestrange?" Ben croaked, his mouth suddenly dry. "You’ve encountered Bellatrix Lestrange before, sir?"

"Mad-Eye saved me and some of my colleagues from a recent ambush," Tonks said, giving her mentor a proud smile. "Sent the bitch packing, but not before she managed to land some nasty curses on him."

"I told you already, girl, I did not send her packing!" Moody snapped, throwing the glass across the room where it shattered against the wall. "She got away, and that's on me! Damn slippery snake managed to escape before I could finish her off."

"When was this encounter, sir?" Ben asked. He hadn't heard of any such report from MACUSA or the British Ministry. Surely such a high-profile confrontation would have made headlines. 

"That's why we're here, isn't it?" Moody grunted. He drew his wand and gave it a sharp flick toward a nearby cabinet. The doors creaked open, and from within floated a shallow basin with runes etched into its rim. "What I'm about to explain doesn't leave this room, understood?" Moody said. "Not a word to MACUSA, not a whisper to your colleagues, not even so much as a scribble in your diary."

Ben nodded vigorously. He would take great care to shield his mind and ensure no inadvertent leak occurred. He didn't need Moody showing up at his doorstep with a wand at his throat for spilling classified information.

"Good, now listen up," Moody said. "Your little tussle with Lestrange yesterday wasn’t an isolated incident. It seems good old Voldy has been testing the waters on both sides of the Atlantic."

"You-Know-Who?!" Ben blurted out. "You mean—"

"Yes, boy, Voldemort!" Moody snapped. "Don't tell me you bought that tripe about him being gone for good after '81. Potter's testimony last year confirmed what I’ve known for a long time. The bastard’s back, and he’s been rebuilding his forces right under our noses."

Ben knew better than to argue. "Yes, sir, I never quite bought the Ministry's story either," he said, which was really only half-true.

"Good, at least there's some sense rattling around in that thick skull of yours," Moody said. "Now, here's the situation. I believe Lestrange and her cronies are scouting for something here in the States. They've been ambushing MACUSA officers, infiltrating magical research facilities, and even stirring up trouble in No-Maj communities to divert attention. It's all kept under wraps, of course, since MACUSA doesn’t want to admit they’ve got a Death Eater infestation on their hands."

"Sir, I haven't heard about any of this through MACUSA channels," Ben said hesitantly.

"Are you listening at all, boy?" Moody barked, slamming his fist on the arm of his chair. "Why would they tell a greenhorn like you about something as serious as this? You're a junior officer, barely out of training! MACUSA's not going to broadcast their failures to every wand-waving idiot in the department!"

Ben winced at the harshness of Moody's words, but he couldn't exactly argue with the logic. "Yes, sir," he replied quietly.

"Look, boy, the reason you're here is because you’re one of the few witnesses we have to Lestrange's recent movements on American soil. We need to figure out what she's up to before it’s too late. Whatever Voldy has planned, I guarantee you it’s not going to end with tea and biscuits."

"Uh, that's all well and good, sir," Ben stammered nervously, "but what about my own problems regarding my disciplinary review? I mean, with all due respect, sir, my career is pretty much dangling by a thread right now. I can't risk sticking my neck out further without some assurance that this will help me clear my name. "

The temperature in the room seemed to drop a few degrees as Moody's magical eye swiveled around to fix Ben with a stare that promised bloody murder. The man's grip on his wand tightened, and for a moment, Ben felt like he was about to be hexed into oblivion.

"Mad-Eye…" Tonks said gently, stepping between them again. "He's just a kid, remember? Go easy on him."

"He's around your age, and that means he’s old enough to know better!"

"Sir—"

"But I get it," Moody interjected, forcibly calming himself. "A man's got to look out for himself, doesn't he?" he gave Ban a long, calculating look before letting out a gruff sigh. "All right, kid, here's the deal. Give us your memories voluntarily, and I'll personally ensure your name is cleared in the MACUSA disciplinary review."

Ben didn't miss the word "voluntarily" there, which went a long way in suggesting what might happen if he refused.

He wisely nodded in agreement.

"You know how to use a Pensieve, I assume?" Moody asked.

"Of course, sir," Ben said. "Obliviator training at MACUSA covered it extensively. I am quite familiar with the process."

If there was one aspect of his magical training Ben prided himself on, it was memory work.

"Well then, what are you waiting for? Get on with it."

It was a lot harder to stabilize the memory strands for three people than it was for one. They had to enter the Pensieve one at a time, with Ben going first to ensure his memories were clear and intact, followed by Tonks and then Moody.

They were soon standing at the Starbucks counter in the reconstructed memory, watching yesterday's events play out in vivid detail.

"We were cleaning up the VHS footage from a Muggle recoding device," Ben explained as they watched Mr. Coburn and him following the barista to the back office. "Then this Wade person interrupted us, claiming to be a city technician."

"So that's what you guys do day-to-day, huh?" Tonks said. "Running around wiping memories and collecting Muggle trinkets? Thrilling stuff."

"Well, it's not always glamorous, but it's necessary," Ben replied defensively. "And we usually don't have to resort to disguises like this. The flood of new Muggle surveillance technology in the last decade has made our work a bit trickier. There's actually a lot of debate right now within MACUSA about whether to develop counter-enchantment programs specifically targeting Muggle recording devices or to continue relying on—"

"Spare us the lecture, Copper," Moody interrupted gruffly. "Just show us where things started going sideways."

No one ever wanted to discuss the finer points of Obliviator work. It was really quite a shame, in Ben's opinion.

He suppressed a sigh and nodded, fast-forwarding the scene with a flick of his wand.

"Alright, do you see that red dot?" Mr. Coburn said in the memory. "That means it’s recording."

"R-recording?"

"Yes. Recording." Coburn snapped back. "What, they didn’t cover this in your training?"

"Uh, no sir, I did well in Muggle Studies, but handling Muggle technology wasn’t really my…"

Both Tonks and Moody turned to stare at Ben, who quickly turned red in the face.

"I see," Moody grumbled, "you're one of those idiots who's great at memorizing Muggle trivia but can't operate a basic toaster."

Ben laughed nervously. "Well, sir, that's not a toaster…for one. it's a bit more complex piece of machinery. And, yeah, I suppose you could say I’m more of a ‘concept guy’ than—"

"There’s a man standing out there," his projection whispered in the memory. "I can sense a mind."

"Good catch kid," Moody grunted, nodding approvingly. "Always stay alert to your surroundings."

It felt more like a pat on the head than genuine praise, but Ben would take whatever he could get at this point.

They kept watching as the memory played out, with Wade exchanging words with Mr. Coburn as Ben attempted to cast a Legilimency probe on Wade's mind—and promptly regretted it.

"I-I’ve never felt anything like this. This guy’s mind. I-it’s not natural, he’s…he’s a monster. I think we should call for—AAARGH!"

Ben winced at the memory version of himself recoiling from the mental backlash. He couldn't actually "see" himself from a third-person perspective, but the magic did a lot to fill in the blanks. This was one of the failure points in memory recording magic. The Pensieve had a tendency to "fill in" information that the observer might not have had direct sensory access to. One of their jobs as Obliviators was to discern which parts of a memory were accurate recollections and which were reconstructed by the magic.

Obviously since he hadn't been looking at a mirror while he'd been writhing in pain on the floor, he hadn't actually "seen" himself during that moment. That was an easy one to identify as a reconstructed visual by the Pensieve's magic. But subtle details—those were much harder to pinpoint, especially in high-stress scenarios.

And yesterday had been nothing but high-stress scenarios from start to finish.

Ben was trying to figure out whether he really looked as pale and clammy as the Pensieve was suggesting when Moody demanded he pause the memory.

There was a bit of "momentum" to the Pensieve's playback, so it took him a moment to halt the scene, then rewinding it slightly until they were back at the point where he had attempted Legilimency on Wade.

"What happened there, kid?" Moody asked. " Why’d you recoil like that? What did you sense?"

That…wasn't something Ben felt particularly eager to discuss.

"Ben?" Tonks prodded him gently. "What’s going on? What did you pick up?"

"Well," he began reluctantly. "Wade's mind…there were…" He didn't quite know how to put it in technical terms, mostly because he hadn't encountered anything even remotely like it before. He tried to formulate his thoughts into something coherent, then decided to go with the simplest explanation he could manage.

"There were several different people in there," he said. "If that makes any sense."

"What are you blathering about, boy?" Moody said. "Several different people? Are you saying he’s possessed?"

"No! No, sir," Ben replied quickly. "It's more like he's…compartmentalized. Like he's fragmented his mind."

Tonks exchanged a concerned glance with Moody, her brow furrowing deeply. "Sounds like some sort of advanced Occlumency technique, doesn't it?" she suggested, turning back to Ben with a puzzled expression.

"I would have thought so too," Ben admitted, "but it's much more than that. The other…er, personalities, for lack of a better term, seemed independent. Completely independent. When I pushed further, they started pushing back. One of them even laughed at me. "

Ben shuddered at the memory of the guy with the manic laughter who gave him the middle finger and then punched him square in the metaphorical face. That definitely hadn't been a typical Occlumency countermeasure.

"But there was more than that," Ben forced himself to continue. "His mind…didn’t feel human. It was…I don’t know how to describe it, but it felt wrong."

"Mad-Eye?" Tonks asked. "What do you make of this?"

Moody narrowed his eyes at the tall man wearing a Muggle suit and trench coat, frozen mid-gesture in the memory. "We’ll have to ask Albus," he said. "I don't like this. This guy doesn't sit right with me."

They watched Wade spilling his coffee on Mr. Coburn before rushing out of the room, then Ben begging Mr. Coburn that they Apparate back to headquarters immediately for backup.

"Stop whining, Copper, we've got a fucking job to do!" Coburn snarled in the memory. "We haven't even finished securing the evidence! What do you want me to tell HQ? That we abandoned our operation because some oddball in a trench coat gave you the jitters?"

"Fool," Moody spat angrily. "Your partner is a damn incompetent fool. Clearing your name shouldn't be hard with this kind of evidence."

Ben let out a shaky sigh of relief. It seemed he'd made the right choice in coming here, despite all his earlier doubts.

"Speed it up a bit, Copper," Moody barked impatiently, though he seemed to soften ever so slightly.

Ben happily obliged.

Soon after, they watched Wade dodging spells from Bellatrix Lestrange with an inhuman level of precision.

Tonks was openly gawking at the display. Even Moody was visibly intrigued, his magical eye spinning wildly as he scrutinized every detail of Wade's movements.

"What in Merlin's name is that?" Tonks whispered as Wade performed an effortless back handspring to avoid a curse. "How is he doing that? No wand, no visible protection spells, and he's outmaneuvering Lestrange like she's a rookie! Mad-Eye, this is—"

"—impossible," Moody finished. "He's either hooked up on gallons of Felix Felicis, or there's something far more unnatural at play here. I've heard of dark rituals that can enhance physical performance to inhuman levels. Transfiguration of one's own body, blood magic, cursed objects—it could be any number of things."

"Why doesn't she just Vanish his bones? " Tonks asked incredulously. "He doesn't have any passive protections running, does he? Surely she could have ended this ages ago!"

"He's anticipating her moves before she commits to them," Moody grunted. "Vanishing requires direct line-of-sight and precise timing. Vanishing moving, organic matter is notoriously difficult.  Albus could have done it, of course, but she's no Albus. McGonagall, maybe, at her absolute best."

"But—"

"But you're right," Moody continued. "She could have ended this fight much earlier if she'd stopped playing around. My guess is that she underestimated him. Lestrange always did enjoy playing with her food, and it looks like that habit might have cost her this time."

"Why don’t you just teleport away?" Wade asked in the memory. "Clearly you two are in over your heads. I presume your orders to erase evidence were a bit more mundane than dealing with an assailant wielding some sort of advanced energy weapon—so why not just cut your losses and get out?"

"Why would he say that?" Tonks asked, mirroring Ben's confusion. "He's clearly no Muggle. Why would he pretend to be one?"

"Confusing your opponent is a valid tactic," Moody replied, stroking his chin thoughtfully.

"My name is Wade, Wade Smith," Wade said later. "I'm with the International Task Force for Anomalous Incidents. Highly classified, need-to-know basis. Magical law enforcement…"

"Tonks, you're getting all of this on record, yes?" Moody asked.

"Absolutely," Tonks replied, nodding towards the enchanted quill floating beside her. 

"We will neutralize our opponent within the next thirty seconds," Wade said. "Do not move. Wait for my signal."

Moody's second compliment to Ben, which came roughly thirty seconds later, was enough to bolster his spirits even further.

"You timed the disarming spell perfectly, Copper," Moody admitted grudgingly. "I wouldn't have expected it based on that shoddy shielding you conjured earlier, but maybe you’re not entirely useless after all."

"T-thank you, sir!" Ben beamed with pride. In truth, he'd even surprised himself with how successful the spell had been. That was some kind of feeling that came over him just at the right moment, almost like an instinct, urging him to act.

"Mad-Eye, how did he catch her wand mid-air like that?" Tonks asked breathlessly, looking about ready to grab Wade's projection by the collar and shake it for answers. "Have you ever seen anyone pull off something like that?"

"Not quite like that," Moody admitted. "Disarming spells are inherently unpredictable. Her wand could have landed anywhere within a reasonable radius after being disarmed."

"So how—"

"I don't know, girl! I don't bloody know!" Moody snapped. "Albus will have all the answers, I reckon. Always does. Probably will have some long-winded explanation about spell resonance, probability manipulation, or the 'power of intent,' or some such rubbish," Moody grumbled. "Our job here is to gather what we can and bring it to him."

They watched the moment several times, partly because Ben really wanted to watch his awesome self awesomely disarm Bellatrix Lestrange, and partly because Moody insisted on scrutinizing Wade's movements frame by frame. 

"I'm more concerned with the wandless Legilimens, " Moody said, squinting at the projection of Wade shouting "Legilimens!" with no visible effect. "It could have been a bluff, but it's also possible he's capable of wandless Legilimency."

They couldn't hear Wade's exchange with Bellatrix after that point.

"FOOLS!" Moody roared a few seconds later. "WHY ARE YOU TWO IDIOTS HIDING BEHIND A CRUISER WHILE THE MAN IS RUNNING THE DAMN SHOW?!"

Ben's newfound optimism promptly committed suicide.

Thankfully, it didn't take too long for his projection to crawl out from behind the cruiser.

"…Finally!" Moody bellowed. "I swear I'll hex that idiot Coburn to the moon for letting the kid do all the heavy lifting while he cowers like a bloody schoolgirl!"

Ben let out a sigh of relief. It felt like Moody had been changing his mind every five minutes about whether Ben's career was salvageable or if he'd be better off scrubbing cauldrons for the rest of his life. Hopefully, the man would settle on something closer to "salvageable" by the end of this ordeal.

They followed Ben's projection as it jogged hesitantly toward Wade, arriving to find the latter laughing hysterically while holding Bellatrix's wand in a peculiar two-handed grip.

"What's he saying here?" Moody asked. "Kid, you remember what he was saying during this part? It looks like he's muttering something to himself."

"He looks a bit off his rocker, doesn’t he?" Tonks said, peering closely at Wade's projection. "Look at his hands. He's gripping her wand like he's about to snap it in two."

"Sir, I couldn't really hear what he was saying at the time," Ben admitted sheepishly. "I did pick up a few words through Legilimency since I was still actively receiving surface-level thoughts, but it didn’t make much sense to me. Something about breaking point, simulations, and…wizards."

"Hmm…interesting," Moody muttered, his magical eye fixated on the frozen memory projection of Wade. "Okay, let's move forward."

When they reached the part where Bellatrix mentioned the Dark Lord, Tonks was practically bouncing on her feet with excitement.

"You're clever," Wade nodded appreciatively at Bellatrix. "The Dark Lord chooses his followers wisely, I see."

"Oh, you’re too kind," Bellatrix drawled. "I'll be sure to relay your compliments to him personally once I've delivered your corpse at his feet."

"This is exactly what Dumbledore needs to solidify his position," Tonks said eagerly, her eyes darting between the projection and Moody. "If Bellatrix Lestrange herself is openly speaking of You-Know-Who, it’s undeniable proof! Even the Ministry can't sweep this under the rug anymore."

Ben disagreed. He wasn't dumb enough to voice that opinion, though. To him it seemed entirely possible that Lestrange here was simply leveraging Voldemort's name as a scare tactic. Who was to say 'The Dark Lord' she referred to was even Voldemort at all? The world at large wasn't lacking in self-proclaimed 'lords' of various sinister movements, after all.

"Don't hold your breath, Tonks," Moody replied. "But, yes, this is damning evidence."

"Except you're wrong," Wade said. "It's not your fault—it’s a natural assumption, given the circumstances."

"Stop the memory," Moody commanded.

It was getting harder to control the Pensieve after all the rewinding, replaying, and precise stopping they’d been doing over the past hour. Ben was close to reaching his limits, but he silently vowed to push through. Anything to clear his name and salvage his reputation was worth the effort, even if his brain felt like it was about to melt out of his ears.

"Girl," Moody said, waving Tonks over and placing her in front of the frozen projection of Wade. "What do you see?" He put his hands on her shoulders and made her lean forward until her nose was practically bumping into Wade's chest.

"…Uh," Tonk squinted at the image, her nose wrinkling in concentration. "…an overly smug bloke in a trench coat holding Bellatrix Lestrange's wand like it’s some cheap twig he found on the sidewalk?"

"Look into his eyes, girl! What do you see in his eyes?!”

"They're a tad…sparkly?" Tonks observed. "Very blue and kind of unnerving, now that I think about it. Pretty though, in a creepy sort of way. I guess he's wearing magical contacts or something? Glamours, maybe? Oh he's also got the cool kind of—"

"NO, NO —NO! Not the aesthetic nonsense!" Moody roared. "Have I taught you nothing, girl?! This isn’t about how pretty his bloody eyes are! It’s about what they reveal! Look at him! There's no hint of hesitation, no trace of fear! Copper here looks like he's about to wet himself again—"

"—Hey!" Ben protested.

"—But this bloke? Not a bead of sweat, not a twitch out of place, not even a bloody blink! He's as calm as if he were negotiating the price of a pint at the Leaky Cauldron!” Moody jabbed his finger toward Wade's projection in frustration. "He's either the most arrogant fool this side of the Atlantic, or he knows something we don't."

"…Oh," Tonks shrugged. "Yeah, I guess you're right."

"Of course I'm right, you daft girl!" Moody shoved her to the side—not too roughly, but enough to make her stumble a bit. "Alright Copper, move it forward. And don't you dare pass out on me before we’re finished!"

"Y-yes sir!"

Wade's next display was enough to leave Tonks outright gaping, rapidly changing her hair colors like a malfunctioning chameleon. Moody was muttering something about "bloody impossible" under his breath, and Ben was simply trying not to faint from the strain of maintaining the Pensieve while simultaneously reliving the most surreal moments of his life.

"Confringo! Expulso!" Wade shouted, his movements smooth, deliberate, and impossibly fast. "Locomotor Mortis! Expelliarmus!"

"Voldemort is faster," Moody said. "Albus is more precise. But this is…"

He drew his own wand, which left several afterimages in the memory's distorted magical aura, and mimicked some of Wade's movements.

"He's close to my peak in my prime," Moody said. "Better, in some ways, worse in others."

"There's no way he's a Muggle!" Tonks burst out. "Mad-Eye, I don't care what Bellatrix smelled or didn't smell on him—there is absolutely no way that guy's a Muggle!"

"Some Squibs practice spellwork without wands, and some of them get damn good at it," Moody said. "We can't rule that out."

"But—"

"Enough, Tonks! We'll take this to Albus, let him make sense of it." He turned to Ben. "Alright, Copper, time to wrap this up. Show us how you two clowns lost this guy and let’s get this madness over with."

The verbal abuse that followed was something Ben would probably recount in therapy for years to come. Assuming he even had the funds to afford therapy after all this, given the distinct possibility that he'd soon be unemployed and possibly homeless.

But at least they were finally, mercifully, done.

Exiting a Pensieve memory was always a disorienting process. Ben fell to the floor in a heap, gasping for air and clutching his head as the room spun around him, while Tonks and Moody casually dusted themselves off as if they'd just taken a brisk stroll rather than spent the better part of an hour immersed in one of the most stressful moments of his life. He wasn't even sure how he'd managed to stay conscious throughout the entire ordeal.

"So here's the situation as I see it," Moody said, surprisingly offering a hand to help Ben off the floor. "You're a greenhorn with no business being in the field, partnered with an incompetent superior who wouldn't recognize a tactical advantage if it smacked him in the face. Your combined idiocy resulted in letting one of the most dangerous witches alive slip through your fingers, while also allowing a highly suspicious individual to disappear with critical evidence. Do you understand how badly you’ve mucked this up, boy?” Moody's scarred face loomed over Ben like the grim specter of judgment itself.

Ben swallowed hard and nodded, his throat too dry to speak.

"But a deal is a deal," Moody continued. "If you wish to pursue a career in magical law enforcement, I won't let this incident ruin your future."

"Thank you so much, sir," Ben managed to croak out. "I swear I won't let you down again!"

"No, you won't," Moody agreed. "You won't have the opportunity to."

"Mad-Eye…" Tonks trailed off warningly. "I think this is the wrong move. Maybe we should talk about this more once we've—"

"Enough, Auror Tonks!" Moody snapped. "Do you think me some soft-hearted fool? This isn’t a bloody charity! The boy is lucky I'm not sending him off to scrub cauldrons for the rest of his life!"

Ben realized he was hyperventilating. He was looking rapidly between Moody and Tonks, his vision blurring as the room swirled around him. "S-sir, you don't want to do this, please."

"Sorry kid," Moody said, not looking at all apologetic. "You're a liability in the field. A coward who should be stapling papers at best. You care more about your own skin than the mission, and that makes you dangerous to everyone around you."

Ben drew his wand with a trembling hand, his panic overtaking any rational thought. "Please, just give me another chance!"

"This was your one and only chance, boy," Moody said coldly, his own wand appearing in his hand so fast it was almost a blur. "You've failed the test."

"Stupe—"

"Obliviate!"

If there was one aspect of his magical training Ben prided himself on, it was memory work. He was an excellent Occlumens, a skilled Legilimens, and his training had thoroughly taught him how to recognize and resist mental manipulations.

He wouldn't go down without a fight.

And so, he fought the intrusion into his mind with everything he had.

Moody tore through his defenses like wet parchment.

"S-stop! Stop…"

There was ripping pain, like claws scraping through his mind, pulling strands of himself away as though peeling back the layers of his very being. He wanted to scream, but his voice caught in his throat, strangled by the overwhelming force invading his consciousness. He wanted to run, but his body wouldn't respond. Even his face betrayed him, remaining perfectly calm as though nothing was wrong.

As though he wasn't being violated by an unstoppable force of magical might.

Was that what Obliviated Muggles felt every time their memories were wiped? How horrifying.

Was that what he himself felt every memory alteration practice session? He couldn’t remember.

Of course he couldn't remember. He couldn't remember the pain because it had been erased, over and over again.

The terrible realization hit Ben like a curse, cold and suffocating.

No one could possibly know the true nature of Obliviate because the very knowledge of its effects was always erased. In all of history, no one could remember what it truly felt like to have their mind altered, for the act itself consumed its own evidence.

How was that not an Unforgivable Curse? How could that possibly be allowed?

If he had known, he would have never become an Obliviator.

If he had known…

…

…Wait…

…know what?

Everything went dark.

Chapter Text

Tonks watched the shaking and pale figure of Ben Copper collapse to his knees, his face blank and eyes glassy. There were no tears, no protest, just an empty, hollow look in his eyes.

Obliviate always gave her a sour feeling in her stomach, no matter the justification.

And now she felt it worse than ever.

"Was that entirely necessary, Mad-Eye?" She knelt down cautiously, placing a hand on Ben's shoulder. "He was already scared out of his wits, he wouldn't have spilled a word to anyone."

She hadn't, of course, missed the way Ben had been looking at her. She could have easily had him wrapped around her little finger if she needed to. He wouldn't have breathed a word without her say-so.

Which made the whole ordeal feel even more distasteful.

"Of course it was necessary," Moody said, casting several different Memory Charms on Ben in quick succession. "The boy was a risk, and risks get people killed."

"We could have used him, you know," Tonks argued. "You don't think he would have been useful with the right guidance?"

"No, Nymphadora, I don't," Moody snapped. "The boy's a liability, plain and simple."

She bristled at the use of her first name. Mad-Eye must have been awfully irritated with her if he was already pulling out the "Nymphadora" card. That alone should have made her blow up on him right then and there, but she held her temper in check, if only barely.

"Fine," Tonks gritted out. "But did you really have to break him like that?"

"I don't like this any more than you do," Moody said. "Now cut the sentimental rubbish and help me get him on his feet. "

She reluctantly obeyed, slipping her arm under Ben's and helping him stumble to his feet. She helped him over to a battered couch in the corner of the room, carefully guiding him to sit down. His breathing was shallow and uneven, his face pale as a ghost.

She knew the Memory Charms were already starting to work their way through his mind, rewriting his thoughts and erasing anything Moody deemed too dangerous for him to retain. When he woke up tomorrow, he'd remember nothing of their meeting. The Charms would make sure he'd have a reasonable explanation for his missing time, something unremarkable enough that he wouldn't think twice about it. Mad-Eye must have prepared for this the moment he decided to call Ben in. False Memory Charms took time to plan and layer properly. He wouldn't have been able to improvise something this complex on the spot.

Obviously, he'd already made his decision long before Ben had even stepped through the door. The "test" was just for show. Maybe to justify it to himself, or maybe to justify it to her.

That realization left a bitter taste in Tonks' mouth. He should have told her, damn it. He should have looped her in on the plan earlier instead of blindsiding her like this.

She reached out hesitantly, her hand hovering near Ben's shoulder before she let it drop.

"He doesn't deserve this," she muttered quietly.

Not quietly enough, it seemed.

"What was that?" Moody growled, rounding on her. "Do you have something you'd like to add, Auror Tonks? Speak up if you’ve got a problem with how I handle things!"

Oh, screw that. She was done being talked down to like some rookie fresh out of Hogwarts.

"Yes, I do have a problem with this, Alastor!" Tonks snapped, her hair shifting to a fiery red and spiking up like flames. She stepped closer, jabbing a finger toward his chest with more force than was probably wise. "He's just a kid! A scared, inexperienced kid who screwed up, sure, but that doesn’t mean you get to rip his mind apart and toss him aside like trash! It’s barbaric, and frankly, beneath someone like you."

To her surprise, and no small amount of apprehension, Moody actually laughed. It was a humorless, bitter sound that echoed through the dingy apartment like a curse itself.

"Oh it's beneath me, is it?" he mocked, leaning in so close that Tonks could feel his firewhisky breath on her face. "Let me tell you something, Auror Nymphadora Tonks," he spat, his magical eye whirring unsettlingly as it fixed on hers. "Barbarism is the price people like us pay to keep people like him alive. Do you know how many friends I've had to bury because some greenhorn panicked and betrayed his squad? Do you have the faintest idea how much blood is on my hands?"

Tonks opened her mouth to retort, but found she couldn't summon the words. She was furious, but Moody's anger was suffocating. "I—But—"

"THIS IS WAR! AND WAR DOESN'T CARE ABOUT YOUR DAMN BLEEDING HEART!" He bellowed, spit flying as he loomed over her. "YOU WEREN'T THERE DURING THE DARK REBELLION! YOU DIDN'T SEE WHAT THE DEATH EATERS DID TO INNOCENT PEOPLE, TO FAMILIES! SLAUGHTER OF MUGGLES BY THE HUNDREDS! ENTIRE VILLAGES WIPED OUT WITHOUT A TRACE! WITCHES RIPPED APRAT AND TORTURED FOR SPORT, BURNED ALIVE! AND IT WAS ALL MY FAULT! MY FAULT THAT THEY DIED! DO YOU UNDERSTAND THAT?! DO YOU THINK I'll LET SOME SNIVELING WHELP WITH NO BACKBONE FACE THESE MONSTERS AND PUT MORE BLOOD ON MY HANDS?!"

He collapsed into a fit of coughing, leaning heavily on his wooden leg for support before falling to his knees with a wheeze.

"Mad-Eye!" Tonks cried out, rushing to his side. "Easy! Take it easy," she said, quickly drawing her wand and conjuring a glass of water, gently pressing it into his trembling hand. "You're right, I'm sorry, Mad-Eye, I'm so sorry! I didn't mean to question your judgment!" She was blinking rapidly to keep her herself in check. "Drink this, okay? Just breathe."

She helped him steady the glass as he brought it shakily to his lips, sipping the water in small gulps.

She shouldn't have pushed him like that. She should have kept her mouth shut. Why couldn't she ever keep her stupid mouth shut?

"Look, I'm sorry Mad-Eye," Tonks blurted out as she carefully helped him back to his feet. "If you don't want to work with me anymore because of this, I understand." She hated herself for the crack in her voice as she said it. "I'll ask Dumbledore to pull me off this case if that’s what you want. And I'll make sure to tell him it's my fault. " She wiped her eyes quickly. "Look, I'm sorry. I'm—"

"Just…keep your mouth shut," Moody rasped, still panting heavily as he steadied himself against the wall. "Apologies won’t undo stupidity, and stupidity will get you killed faster than a Death Eater with his wand at your throat."

"I'm sorry," she said quietly.

"Are you even listening to a damn thing I'm saying?" Moody snapped. "Sorry doesn’t cut it, girl! This isn’t about me, damn it—it’s about you learning what the bloody stakes are! You’re not a kid anymore. You think the Death Eaters are going to stop and have a good cry with you if you tell them you're sorry? You think Lestrange would hesitate to rip your heart out because of some heartfelt apology?" He slammed his hand against the wall, making her flinch. "Grow up, girl! You're an Auror! You’re supposed to be better than this!"

Tonks nodded silently, swallowing the lump in her throat. Of course he was right. She wasn't at the academy anymore. This was her first big real taste of what it meant to be a proper Auror. It was painfully clear she had a long way to go.

"I'll do better," she said softly. "I promise I’ll do better."

"See that you do," Moody growled. "Fighting Death Eaters isn't a bloody tea party. You won't be sparring with your mates in a cushy training room anymore. They'll go straight for the kill without hesitation. They’ll use every dirty trick in the book, and they'll enjoy it. You need to be ready for that, girl."

Tonks nodded silently, letting his words sink in. Her training was thorough, but she couldn't deny her actual field experience was limited. Duels in a controlled environment with safety wards and friends cheering on the benches weren’t even remotely comparable to fighting for your life against someone who genuinely wanted you dead. Bellatrix had torn through a room full of skilled wizards the other day like they were nothing. Without Moody around to save them, she and her colleagues would have been corpses on the front page of every wizarding newspaper by now.

Bellatrix wasn't just a dangerous opponent. She was a nightmare given flesh. A bloody force of nature.

Tonks promised to herself then and there that she'd step up her game. If this Wade person could cast Locomotor Mortis under two seconds, then she’d aim for one. She would master every counter-curse and shield charm she could get her hands on. When Lupin came around to check on her progress next week, she'd pester him for dueling tips until he begged for mercy. No—scratch that—she'd attack him with spells until he had to defend himself and beg for mercy. Then she'd ask for pointers.

She pulled out her wand and practiced a few basic wand movements idly, the sort of nervous reflex she defaulted to when her mind raced. The tip of her wand drew faintly glowing trails in the air as she flicked it through familiar motions: Disarming Charms, Shield Spells, Stunners, and even a few non-verbal Summoning Charms. She didn't let the spells finish, just enough to feel the flow of magic through her wand and steady her nerves.

Moody leaned back against the wall, watching her closely with his magical eye. "Sharper flick on the downward stroke," he grunted. "Yes. Good. Now bring your elbow in tighter to your side." He pulled out his own wand, mimicking the movement. " See the difference? Keeps your movements compact and efficient."

Tonks nodded, adjusting her stance and trying the motion again. Her movements were more controlled now, tighter but fluid.

"Intent, girl, intent!" Moody barked. "Don’t just wave your wand around like some dimwit at a Quidditch match, own the spell. Feel it, command it. Every single spell you cast should come from here," he said, thumping his chest with his free hand, "and here," he added, pointing to his temple. "But never from here," he finished, pointing to his gut. "Instinct without discipline gets you killed."

They fell into an improvised lesson, Moody correcting her form and giving her pointers while she listened and absorbed every word like a sponge. When she managed to land a particularly well-executed non-verbal Disarming Charm on an old chair, Moody gave her a rare but genuine nod of approval.

She couldn't really enjoy it. The threat of Moody dumping her from the team hung over her like a wrathful storm cloud. She knew from all the stories that Moody wasn’t the type to give second chances easily. He'd been known to drop trainees from his program for the smallest mistakes, saying that "a single misstep in the field could mean your life or someone else's."

Was she the next name to be added to that list?

"I'm not who I used to be," Moody muttered later while they were packing up for the night. "I'm slower, more fragile."

"You didn't look very weak to me when you were tearing through Lestrange's gang like a tornado," Tonks said carefully. "You're still the best in the business, Mad-Eye."

He pulled out his flask, took a long swig of what Tonks knew was something much stronger than water, and let out a deep, wheezing sigh. "I wish that were true, girl," he said, "but I was bested by two clowns and locked in a bloody trunk for months. That rat Pettigrew and Crouch defeating me in my own home…" he let out a bitter laugh. "Not exactly a shining moment, is it? A bloody disgrace to my name, that's what it was."

Tonks wanted to argue with him, to tell him that none of it was his fault, but she knew better than to try. He wouldn't appreciate a pity party, and he’d probably tear into her even harder if she dared offer one.

But that didn't mean she wouldn't try to help in her own way.

"Well, for what it's worth," she said, "I wouldn't want anyone else watching my back out there…even if you've been a bit, er, rusty lately," she added with a small smile. "You know, for an old bloke with a wooden leg and questionable taste in hygiene products, you’re not half bad at what you do."

"Smelling pretty doesn’t stop a Killing Curse," Moody grumbled.

"But it does make people want to stand closer to you," Tonks retorted.

"All the more reason to smell like a troll's armpit."

"I'm kidding Mad-Eye," she laughed. "You don't actually smell that bad. Old leather, a bit of whiskey, and maybe just a taste of troll's armpit, but honestly, it's part of your charm."

Moody did not look even remotely amused.

Okay, maybe she pushed her luck a bit too far with that one.

"So…" Tonks trailed off awkwardly, running a hand through her now light blue hair. "Do you want me off this case? I mean, if you think I’m not cut out for it…” she had to choke out the last few words. “…then I’ll step aside."

It hurt her pride to admit it, but if Mad-Eye truly believed she wasn’t ready or capable of handling this case, then maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she just wasn't ready for the big leagues yet…

"No," Moody interrupted forcefully, raising a hand to silence her. "You're damn good at what you do, Tonks. I need you on this."

Her relief was so overwhelming that she almost burst into tears right then and there.

Instead, she jumped up and threw her arms around him in an impulsive hug.

"W-what are you doing, woman?!" Moody spluttered, recoiling violently as if she'd just tried to hex him. "Never hug a man who's armed to the teeth without warning him first! Are you trying to get yourself cursed?!"

She squeezed him even tighter. "Sorry, Mad-Eye. Next time I'll send you a bloody owl first."

"Merlin’s beard, you’re impossible," Moody said, stiff as a board.

"It's not so bad, is it?" Tonks asked innocently. "Come on, admit it. Deep down, you love a good hug."

"I'd rather get kissed by a dementor!"

"Harsh, but I'll take it as a maybe."

"You'll take a swift boot to the backside if you don't let go this instant!"

"Fine, fine," Tonks said with a laugh, finally releasing him and stepping back. "Thanks, Mad-Eye."

"Yeah, yeah," Moody grumbled, waving a dismissive hand as he straightened himself out. "Just get yourself together, girl. Voldemort isn't going to wait around while we sort out our bloody feelings."

"Right," Tonks said, sniffing and standing up straight. "So what do you need me to do next? Should I look into Wade or chase down leads on Bellatrix?"

Moody didn’t answer right away, his magical eye spinning lazily as he rubbed at his scruffy chin. He pulled out a small, battered notebook from his coat pocket and began rifling through its crumpled pages, muttering to himself. Tonks knew better than to sneak a peek. The last time she'd tried that, he'd enchanted it to scream insults in a dozen languages.

Instead, she waited patiently, or as patiently as Tonks could manage, which mostly involved bouncing on the balls of her feet and playing with the ends of her hair while pointedly ignoring Ben's vacant stare from the corner of the room.

"Wade…we'll focus on Wade," Moody finally grunted. "Something about that man doesn't sit right with me. Something about him feels…wrong. "

"Wrong how?" Tonks asked. "I guess his sparkly blue eyes were a bit much—I'm kidding! Just a joke!" she quickly backtracked as Moody shot her a death glare. "I agree! There's definitely something off about him!"

"Good," Moody said, snapping the notebook shut with a sharp thwap and stuffing it back into his coat. "He has Lestrange's wand. If he knows what's good for him, he'll hand it over to the proper authorities."

"You think he'll willingly cooperate?" Tonks asked skeptically, arching an eyebrow.

"Doesn't strike me as the type," Moody grunted, his scarred face contorting into a grimace. "But with Lestrange on his trail, he’ll need all the help he can get. She'll sniff him out eventually, even if he runs to the ends of the earth."

"I don't know, Mad-Eye," Tonks said, brushing her hair back thoughtfully. "He seemed pretty confident in his abilities. "

"Confidence can be a dangerous thing," Moody said. "It doesn't matter how confident he is if Voldemort decides to pay him a visit. Either way, this Wade person will soon find himself under the scrutiny of my full attention," Moody said darkly. "And by the time I’m through with him, he'll wish he had stayed in whatever hole he crawled out of. "

"Whoa, bit intense there, Mad-Eye," Tonks said. "What if he's actually one of the good guys?"

"Good guys? Hmph," Moody scoffed. "I've met plenty of 'good guys' in my time. Some of the worst monsters wear the smiles of heroes." He drew his wand and tried to mimic some of Wade's movements again, his face tightening in concentration. "Wade will either prove he's on our side or expose himself for what he truly is. And if he is the latter," Moody paused, his voice dropping to a menacing growl, "then may God have mercy on his soul…because I sure as hell won’t."

Chapter Text

"This is a nightmare," I muttered as I stared down the product of Stream One's idle musings on theoretical physics. Five minutes' worth of idle musings, to be precise.

It was one of the longest aisles in my memory palace.

On May 10th, 1995, at precisely 4:37 PM, I'd caught a brief glimpse of a documentary on string theory while flipping through channels in a hotel room in Los Angeles. From that fleeting moment, Stream One had proceeded to generate enough theoretical work to rival a full-length academic dissertation, complete with annotated diagrams and footnotes. All in less time than it took me to order room service.

Admittedly, it'd been entirely my fault for not reining it in. I had just started experimenting with parallel processing at the time, and a lot of the trash from those early days still cluttered my mental library. Not that a significant amount of additional trash wasn't still being generated now. At this point, I was practically buried under an ever-expanding backlog of unfinished projects, half-baked theories, and irrelevant trivia. All the mental equivalent of junk drawers I hadn’t gotten around to organizing yet.

I wish I could say it didn't bother me, but the sheer disorganized chaos of it all sometimes made me want to dedicate an entire week in real-time to cleaning up the mess.

I didn’t have a week in real-time, though. I didn't have the luxury of hours, let alone days, at the moment.

Stream One stood at attention nearby, resembling an older, cleaner-cut version of myself. He sniffed with an air of superiority, adjusting his perfectly tailored suit. "Nightmare? Hardly," he scoffed. "The theoretical foundation I laid down here could win us a Nobel Prize, if only you’d take the time to actually refine and publish it."

"I highly doubt that," I said, massaging my temples. "String theory is already on shaky ground as it is. Adding one more half-baked idea to the pile isn’t going to revolutionize physics."

"Half-baked?!" Stream One snapped, looking utterly offended. "How dare you call this half-baked? This is a masterpiece of intellectual synthesis! Do you have any idea how much thought I poured into this? How many variables I accounted for, how many models I simulated?"

"Yes, I'm sure it's terribly impressive," I said, waving my hand dismissively. "Now do you want to condense it into something digestible or should I have Stream Three do it for you?"

"Don't you dare let Stream Three touch this!" Stream One barked, visibly bristling at the suggestion. "He's a hack! He'll turn my elegant theoretical constructs into oversimplified, watered-down nonsense for the masses to consume!"

"You know," I sighed, leaning against one of the bookshelves, "this whole 'elitist professor' archetype you insist on roleplaying is really starting to get on my nerves. I know you only chose that persona to irritate me, and let me tell you—it’s working."

"Ah, finally some recognition!" Stream one said, trying and utterly failing to hide a knowing grin. "I'll save you some precious time though, dear host. You cannot—will not—trick me into abandoning this most important archetype of our existence, as it fulfills a crucial role in our cognitive ecosystem. Reverse psychology doesn't work on me, as you well know. In fact," he snapped his fingers, a stack of glowing documents materializing in midair before me. "I have authored quite a compelling meta-analysis on the inefficacy of reverse psychology in highly analytical minds, which I’d be happy to share if you’re—"

"No!" I quickly cut him off, raising a hand. "Just...take me through the CliffsNotes version of your analysis."

"I do not do CliffsNotes," Stream One declared haughtily, crossing his arms over his chest. "If you want a summary, you'll have to endure at least the abstract of my hypothesis, which is, of course, an exquisitely detailed overview spanning no fewer than thirty-five pages, complete with…"

I groaned loudly, pinching the bridge of my nose. This interaction had already wasted two milliseconds of real-world time, which was, by my standards, unacceptable. I didn't interrupt him, though. This would go a lot faster if I just let him finish rambling for a bit before steering him back on track.

The problem with splitting an enhanced mind into multiple enhanced sub-minds was that every single one of those enhanced sub-minds really didn't like me snooping around in their business. Since they couldn't outright overrule me as, I suppose, "the host", they resorted to adopting obnoxious fake personas to make every interaction as insufferable as possible. The most annoying part? I had no one to blame for this but myself. I had somehow found a way to trick my own mind into creating obstacles for itself, just so I could laze around for a bit without feeling guilty.

Or, in simpler terms: I had gamified my own procrastination, and now I was stuck playing against the most advanced version of myself.

"…and thus concludes the first section of my entirely necessary prologue to the abstract," Stream One droned on. "Now, if you’re mentally prepared to proceed—and I can see by your expression that you are not—I shall begin transitioning into the preliminary summary of my actual findings…" 

Jesus Christ, what the hell was wrong with me? Honestly, this was starting to feel less like a hyper-optimized mental workspace and more like an elaborate torture chamber I’d built for myself.

Stream Four had really been the worst offender in that regard, but obviously Stream One was a close second.

Of course, in case of Stream Four it hadn't really been an act, and that's what had made him so dangerous. Thankfully, my other streams would never go against me in such a direct way. They weren't "emotionless robots" as Stream Four had accused, but they were designed to follow the parameters I set for them without deviation.

And I really needed everyone on their best behavior right now. Building my own timeline and cross-referencing it with external evidence was going to require the full cooperation of every active stream, and there wasn’t room for petty squabbles.

Which was what I was currently wading through with Stream One.

If I had really been obliviated at some point before my confrontation with Copper and Coburn at the Starbucks, I needed to reconstruct exactly what memories might have been tampered with or erased. Effectively, that meant that I had to go over every single moment of my life leading up to that point and scrutinize it for inconsistencies, gaps, or anomalies.

Could my five minutes long rambling tangent about string theory last year have been a result of a memory implant? Had I noticed magical activity in Los Angeles and then had my memory wiped in my hotel room to cover it up? Was magic, whatever force that defined it, capable of simulating hours of an enhanced mind activity to create a false sense of continuity?

There was no other way to trick me into overlooking holes in my timeline unless the gaps were meticulously filled with fabricated information.

And in order to fill those gaps convincingly, the magic would need to be able to simulate enhanced-level thoughts. An exceptionally high bar.

Five minutes in real-time had been enough for me to generate an entire shelf's worth of theoretical physics musings. It would take a lot of computational power to convincingly replicate the output of my brain during several hours of activity.

But even If I had been mind-wiped before, that wasn't even my biggest problem right now.

I'd done a lot of thinking over the past few hours. Too much, perhaps. The conclusion I’d come to, though, was inescapable: I was either going to strike first and seize control of this situation on my terms, or be rendered powerless before I even had the chance to defend myself. There was no other option. I'd set things in motion that couldn't be undone. There was an entire alien society operating in secrecy on Earth, and I’d stumbled into its orbit in the worst possible way. Their law enforcement organizations likely already had tabs on me, and their operatives were potentially capable of rewriting my memories or neutralizing me in ways I couldn’t foresee.

If I didn't make drastic moves soon, I'd be outmaneuvered and boxed in before I even knew what hit me. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't afford to waste a single second. I was already experimenting with turning off parts of my brain associated with fatigue, using targeted neural suppression techniques to eliminate the need for rest. It shouldn't kill me or cause any long-term damage, at least in theory. In theory. In practice…well, it was uncharted territory.

Then again, caring for long-term brain damage right now was equivalent to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. I could die at any second. There were too many unknowns for me to assume otherwise.

I had to act now or I'd lose the initiative entirely.

The next seventy-two hours would determine everything.

"Are you done summarizing your summary yet?" I asked Stream One. "Or shall I bring in Stream Three to make this quicker?"

"Alright, alright, fine," Stream One relented with a melodramatic sigh, finally drawing a few legible diagrams on a nearby chalkboard. "As you can see, dear host, there's simply no way that magical powers could have fabricated groundbreaking string theory analysis on par with my work here. It would require not only an understanding of highly advanced theoretical physics but also an ability to simulate the exact neural pathways, thought patterns, and cognitive style unique to me while maintaining consistency across countless interconnected ideas. To think that idiots such as Copper and Coburn possess such capabilities is laughable at best and profoundly insulting at worst."

I nodded slowly, acknowledging his point. There had clearly been some level of skill involved with casting spells. As such, it stood to reason that any memory-altering spell would rely heavily on the caster's own cognitive abilities. I estimated Coburn and Copper’s intelligence to be slightly above average at best, based on their observed behavior and speech patterns. If they were humans, their IQs would likely range in the 110-120 band—bright enough to excel in certain areas but hardly capable of simulating an NZT-enhanced mind even for a few seconds.

If I had been mind-wiped previously, it almost certainly wasn't by them.

"Alright, your analysis checks out for now," I conceded. "Let's move on to the next five-minute segment of the timeline…"

Several weeks of accelerated mental time later, I paused to review the progress I’d made. I was working backward through the years, given the importance of recent events, and had already managed to eliminate around three months of my life from suspicion.

Not bad for a single session.

I dismissed Stream One and moved to a different location within my mental workspace. It was a wide arena with a central platform surrounded by shifting holographic projections of my memories.

Stream Four, the new replacement, stood waiting for me at the center of the platform.

"How may I assist you?" the new Stream Four asked.

Now that's what I called a well-behaved cognitive subordinate. Its monotone voice was practically music to my ears.

"Report on your training," I commanded.

I was taking a different approach with this new iteration of Stream Four: no pretense of personality, no elaborate personas designed to undermine or provoke me. This thing was all business, no nonsense, and completely subservient to my will.

"Progressing satisfactorily," Stream Four replied, standing unnaturally still. It was a blank, featureless humanoid figure, like a mannequin or a crash-test dummy. Honestly, a huge improvement over its predecessor. "I am now proficient in over 15,000 distinct combat strategies and scenarios, including both modern and historical martial arts techniques."

"How long until you're combat-ready?" I asked, stepping up onto the platform.

"Given the current rate of accelerated training and memory integration, I will be fully combat-ready within approximately 240 hours of real-time."

Ten days. Practically an eternity for someone in my position, but it wasn't as if I had much of a choice.  

"Show me," I said simply.

Stream Four didn't hesitate. The moment I gave the command, it lunged at me. I dodged the first strike effortlessly, sidestepping as its arm shot past my head. His kick whipped toward my ribs, but I was already moving, twisting out of the way and retaliating with a strike to its center mass. The impact sent it stumbling back, but it quickly recovered, pivoting into a low sweep aimed at my legs.

We were fighting on multiple different levels simultaneously. There was the pure simulation of a physical fight, where I was testing its reaction times, technique, and ability to predict my movements, but also sparring matches playing out in parallel mental simulations. We were playing chess, Go, and a dozen other strategy games in our heads while trading blows in the arena. I didn't actually need him to be good at chess, but I needed to test his ability to think several moves ahead in a rapidly changing scenario.

He was damn good at it.

I jumped back to dodge the sweep, using the momentum to propel myself into a counter-attack. Stream Four was already a step ahead, blocking my strike and countering with a precise jab aimed at my solar plexus.

Surprisingly, it would have actually connected if this were a real fight.

I didn't feel like taking the hit, though.

I accelerated my fist way past the simulated limits, effectively breaking the rules we'd established for the sparring session.

It caught him off guard, my fist slamming into his featureless head with enough force to send him flying backward. I let him experience the full pain of the blow, not because I was feeling vindictive, but because pain was an essential component of combat training. I hadn't yet figured out how to fully control pain, so as long as I needed these simulations to be as realistic as possible, pain had to remain part of the equation.

I paused the simulation as Stream Four's faceless form skidded to a halt. It didn't seem to react in any visible way, standing up without complaint and resetting its neutral stance. I knew it was processing the experience internally. The blow had hurt, even if it didn’t show it outwardly.

"Acceptable," I said, walking over to the reset Stream Four as it stood at attention. "Continue your training and ensure that your predictive modeling includes not just my known combat patterns but also a randomized set of potential adversarial styles."

"Understood," Stream Four replied. "Shall I prioritize scenarios involving combatants with enhanced physical or cognitive capabilities?"

I stared at him, shocked. He…shouldn't have been able to deduce that possibility yet.

In order to create a perfectly emotionless and subservient Stream Four, I had to intentionally limit his initial dataset. He didn't have access to the full scope of my memories. He had no context for the existence of magic or enhanced minds. At least, not yet.

"Yes," I said after a pause, masking my surprise. "How do you know about enhanced capabilities? Obviously, I've just cheated in our simulation, but that alone doesn't explain the leap to enhanced adversaries."

"Your sudden deviation from established parameters during the simulation suggests an awareness of scenarios involving unconventional combatants," Stream Four said. "Why else would you deviate from a controlled training regimen unless you were testing my adaptability against combatants with unorthodox or enhanced abilities? Additionally, the precision and speed of your maneuver exceeded known human limitations, implying that such adversaries may exist in your operational paradigm."

He was only half-right, which was greatly disturbing.

"What if I just didn't feel like experiencing the lovely sensation of a simulated fist slamming into my solar plexus?" I asked. "That might be reason enough to break the rules of engagement, wouldn't it?"

Stream Four tilted its head slightly, an almost imperceptible gesture. "Pain…sir?"

"Correct," I replied, my tone carefully measured. "I avoided the move because I didn't feel like dealing with unnecessary pain."

I could see he didn't understand, and that bothered me.

"Pain is a natural feedback mechanism," Stream Four replied cautiously, as though walking on eggshells. "It informs the host of physical damage or potential threats to survival. Since you are operating within a simulated environment where no real physical harm can occur, the sensation of pain should logically be treated as an irrelevant variable."

Interesting. It appeared I'd possibly solved the issue of pain management inadvertently while designing this iteration of Stream Four. If I could replicate its approach across the rest of my neural architecture, I'd effectively eliminate pain as a limiting factor in all future simulations, and potentially even in real-world scenarios.

"Do you mind if I test your pain tolerance?" I asked calmly, observing Stream Four closely for any reaction. "It shouldn’t take long, and it’s purely for experimental purposes."

"Not at all, sir."

I was taken aback by his lack of hesitation.

 I knew my punch had hurt him earlier, even if he didn’t outwardly display it. So, what? Some kind of internal mechanism suppressing his reaction?

I supposed he could be lying to avoid appearing weak or unfit for duty. He could be attempting to manipulate my perception of his capabilities.

I stared at him intently, trying to parse out the layers of his response.

I couldn't figure him out.

Well, that left me with only one option: direct experimentation.

I started small, simulating a shallow cut across his forearm with a virtual blade. He didn't even flinch. Next, I deepened the severity of the simulated injury, escalating it to a laceration that would realistically sever tendons in a biological arm. He simply stood there, motionless, as though nothing had happened.

Okay, I didn't have all day.

I set him on fire…metaphorically speaking.

That got a reaction. He didn't curse me to high heaven, as Stream Four Classic might have done, but I saw his faceless form twitch for just a fraction of a second before returning to its default stance.

I immediately ceased the simulation, stepping back and scrutinizing him with heightened focus. There were no signs of trauma or distress, no indication that the experience had left any lasting impression on him.

How odd.

"Fascinating," I muttered, pacing slowly around him. "You certainly felt the pain, didn't you? But it seems you've found a way to compartmentalize it, or perhaps even dismiss its relevance entirely."

"Pain is acknowledged as a sensory input, but its utility in this context is negligible," Stream Four said matter-of-factly. "Do you require further testing to confirm this hypothesis, sir?"

"…no" I said slowly, though part of me was seriously considering several medieval torture techniques just to see how far his tolerance could stretch. "I…maybe we should pause this line of experimentation for now…"

"As you wish," Stream Four replied, his body frozen again. I could tell that he wanted to say more.

"Speak freely," I prompted, folding my arms as I studied him. "What is it?"

He seemed to be calculating his response. "Do you intend for this level of detachment to be applied universally across your mental framework, sir?"

"NO!" I replied immediately, alarmed. "Absolutely not. Your pain management is an anomaly that I’ll need to study further before I can even consider applying it more broadly, but this is the only aspect of your design that I would even entertain for possible integration into my core processes."

"Understood," Stream Four said stoically, though I could detect a faint trace of something. Curiosity, perhaps? Or maybe just the hint of an emerging insight that he hadn't fully formed yet. "I would like a rematch against you at your earliest convenience, sir."

"A rematch?" I frowned. "You think you can beat me already?"

"Yes," he replied, shocking me. "I believe I can."

How? How was that possible? His combat training shouldn’t have progressed far enough to confidently claim victory against me, not yet.

I took a moment to break him down to his core components and rebuild him from scratch in an isolated testing environment. I could see how all the pieces fit together, but only in a broad sense. I couldn't actually make sense of the individual neural connections.

"Very well," I said, narrowing my eyes as I stepped back into the mental arena. "Choose your weapon. We will both have full control over the parameters of this simulation, including pain feedback."

A pair of throwing knives materialized in Stream Four's hands.

Knives…?

Why?

He blurred into motion before I could finish the thought, closing the distance between us in an instant. I immediately adjusted my own simulated speed, matching his own while trying to sabotage his control over the simulated environment.

"Argh! Fuck!" I screamed as one of the knives sliced cleanly through my simulated forearm. The pain was searing, and for a split second, I faltered.

The second knife pierced me through the shoulder before I had time to fully react.

"Damn it!" I grunted, trying to push through the haze of pain.

I created a wave of energy within the simulation, blasting Stream Four backward and giving myself a fraction of a second to recalibrate.

I slowed down my perception of time, bringing every micro-movement into sharp focus, then analyzed the trajectory of his remaining throwing knife.

It pierced me through the chest before I could fully override its trajectory.

Okay now he was really starting to piss me off.

I simulated thousands of different possible counter-measures in the span of a second, locking onto the most effective one. I could see how this would play out if I didn’t adjust my tactic—he would make short work of me.

So I adjusted.

I generated a smaller copy of Stream Four within the simulation and used it as a decoy to split his attention. I couldn't actually split my mind a fifth time to generate a full working copy, but the decoy was convincing enough to confuse him for just long enough. 

For a several intense seconds, he was matching his own copy blow for blow, distracted just enough for me to close the distance.

I jumped to his blindside, materializing a weighted staff mid-air and bringing it down hard on his—

"Eddie, wake up."

The simulation broke abruptly as the voice cut through my mental space, yanking me back to reality. My eyes snapped open, and I was instantly aware of my surroundings. Lindy was standing in front of me with a concerned look on her face, holding a cup of coffee in one hand and a file folder in the other. The camera was still whirring softly, aimed at the glass container holding the viper, which was now slithering lazily around the enclosure, clearly not in a rush to turn back into a gun. It was almost 10 AM. I had been in deep analysis mode for nearly five hours of real-world time, and I hadn't noticed Lindy stirring in the other room. 

More worryingly, though, I was practically drenched in sweat. My heart was racing like I had just run a marathon.

The simulation was supposed to stimulate physiological responses to some degree, but not to this extent.

Something had clearly gone wrong, either with me or the simulation itself.

"Jesus, Eddie," Lindy said, crouching down to meet my eye level. "You're burning up."

This could derail everything I had planned for the day. If she thought I was physically unwell, she wouldn’t let it go. There would be no escaping her insistence on dragging me to a hospital or calling in a doctor.

I wiped the sweat from my forehead and steadied my breathing as I sat upright. "I know how this looks," I said, forcing a confident smile.

"How does this look, Eddie?" she said softly, throwing the file folder on the desk and running her fingers lightly over my forehead to check for a fever. "Because from where I'm standing, it looks like you're running yourself into the ground." She glanced pointedly at the camera setup at the camera setup, then back at me. "Did you stay awake all night?"

"Of course not," I lied smoothly, leaning back in the chair and adjusting my tie. "I got a couple of hours in. Just needed to monitor the situation with our little reptilian friend here. "

She let her hand linger on my forehead for a moment before pulling it back. "I was…thinking last night," she said slowly. "About…everything you told me," she paused, her gaze drifting toward the glass container where the viper coiled lazily. "Everything about the magic, the pills, all of it."

“And?” I prompted, studying her expression carefully.

"And I think you should consider—"

"—seeing a professional," I finished for her, leaning forward slightly. "You want me to get evaluated, don't you? Maybe even committed for observation if that’s what it takes. Vanessa is on her way here with a list of the best psychiatrists in Manhattan, and you’ve already drafted an email to the campaign team about me being on 'leave' for health reasons."

"I don't like when you do that," Lindy said sharply, crossing her arms.

"Do what?" I asked, feigning innocence.

She glared at me. " You know exactly what. Stop doing that thing where you run circles around me before I’ve even finished a sentence. It’s infuriating, and it doesn’t make you sound smarter. It makes you sound like an asshole."

I nodded slowly, holding up my hands in mock surrender. "Can I at least propose an alternative course of action before you lock me in a padded room?"

I was very close to losing her completely. A slight push in the wrong direction could send her over the edge, and I couldn't afford that.

"Padded room? Really?" she shook her head in exasperation. "Nobody's locking you in a padded room, Eddie. We just want to make sure you’re okay. Please. I just need to you to let me help you. I can help you."

"I'll make you a deal," I said, meeting her gaze evenly. "Give me until the end of today. If, by midnight tonight, I can't provide you with concrete proof of what I'm saying—real proof, undeniable and verifiable—you can call whoever you want."

"But—"

"You'll stay with me for the entire day," I interrupted gently, taking her hands in mine. "You're worried about a possible breakdown, right? Then I need you to observe everything firsthand, from start to finish. I've been on NZT for over two years now, one more day won't make a difference."

Drake's call came in just as Lindy opened her mouth to argue. Right on schedule.

"Hold that thought,” I said, raising a finger as I pulled out my phone. "Drake, what's the update?"

"Sir, we've successfully duplicated the VHS tape and secured multiple encrypted copies in separate locations as you requested,” Drake said. "We watched it, sir. This is…uh, I don't even—"

"Not now," I interrupted brusquely. "Is everything else in place?"

"The men are on their way to the underground parking lot as we speak," Drake confirmed. "USPS and FedEx tracking numbers for the decoys are in your inbox. I requested future delivery dates as you instructed, staggered randomly across the next several months to avoid suspicion. American Greetings and Hallmark both confirmed our order for those 'Happy Retirement' and 'Get Well Soon' cards."

"Good work," I said, cutting Drake off before he could ramble further.

No less than three hundred different coded messages would reach me eventually in case my memory was tampered with again. Of course, if I had already set up such failsafe and in the past and they had been wiped along with my memory, then the system was flawed from the start. That wasn't the only way to safeguard myself, though. I was already creating different coded messages that would only make sense to an enhanced mind. The fact the no such message had reached me thus far strongly suggested one of two possibilities: either I’d never been mind-wiped before, or every single contingency I'd ever put in place had already been neutralized.

But there was something else bugging me about the whole situation. Specifically, why now? Why had I only noticed evidence of magical activity in the past 24 hours? Why hadn't I encountered anything like this before, despite spending over two years on NZT and enhancing my observational capabilities to superhuman levels?

"The prop maker has the photos and measurements for the order, yes?" I asked. "I need an exact copy. There cannot be even the slightest deviation from the original. "

"Yes, sir," Drake replied.

"Alright," I said. "See you at the warehouse in two hours."

Lindy was sending me a look that could melt steel by the time I ended the call.

"Come on," I stood up and grabbed my jacket from the back of the chair. "Lead the way, partner."

"Lead the way where?" she asked, still scowling at me.

"You want me to get a bite to eat first, right?" I said. "That's your condition for indulging my paranoid delusions for the next several hours?"

"…Among other things, yes," she said reluctantly.

"Then breakfast it is," I said with a grin, heading for the door and holding it open for her. I kept smiling brightly right up until she stomped past me out of the room. "Give me a minute to freshen up, " I added as she stopped to glare at me. "Just a minute."

I quickly ducked back inside and grabbed the glass container with the snake, carefully tucking it back into the duffel bag along with the camera gear and Bellatrix's wand. I lost the trench coat and suit, switching to a more casual outfit Mellany had stashed for me in the duffel. The woman clearly knew my style; black leather jacket over a navy button-up shirt, dark jeans, and boots. I was just missing the shoulder-length, swept-back hair to revert to my old, just-post-NZT days look. Classic Eddie Morra. Maybe the old Stream Four had a point about the new haircut. I might have been looking a bit too polished and corporate lately.

A final thought had me do a quick sweep of the room to remove any remaining evidence of our presence.

I doubted we'd be back in this room anytime soon, and I couldn't risk leaving any loose ends behind.

Something was off. I was missing something critical here.

I had a bad feeling about where all of this was headed.

Chapter Text

The Ashworth Hotel had a quaint little rooftop cafe that was open for breakfast, which Lindy decided was as good a place as any to have our meal. I vetoed the suggestion almost immediately. It was a long way down to the street, and I preferred exits that didn’t involve a 200-foot drop in case things went south.

Instead, we opted for a quiet corner table at a restaurant on the second floor. Less prone to dramatic death plunges, more conducive to strategic retreats. I ordered a black coffee and an egg white omelet with spinach and feta, while Lindy went for avocado toast and an iced caramel latte. It was her usual order, predictable to the point where I could list the exact proportions of caramel syrup and espresso required to achieve her preferred coffee-to-sugar ratio. Evidently, the cook went a little light on the sugar, as Lindy wrinkled her nose slightly after the first sip.

I tore the top off a sugar packet and handed it to her without saying a word.

"Thanks," she muttered, not quite meeting my eyes as she took the packet and poured it into her drink. She yawned and rested her chin on her hand, glancing out the window at the street below. She'd done a double take at my sudden wardrobe change earlier, but curiously, hadn't commented on it.

"Not much sleep?" I asked, sipping my coffee and watching her carefully. She'd had precisely three hours and twenty-six minutes of sleep, based on the time I heard her sobbing taper off in the next room. If things escalated further today, she’d need to be running on all cylinders, and three hours of broken sleep wasn’t going to cut it. I'd already accounted for that as a potential variable, but I needed to gauge her mental state firsthand.

"I got enough," Lindy replied curtly, still staring out the window.

"You always were a functional insomniac," I said lightly. "You and coffee against the world, right? That's the mantra."

"Funny," she said flatly, swirling her straw through the iced latte. "I don't remember you being such a comedian."

"I hear it's a side effect of all the brain pills," I said with a shrug.

I needed to move things along, and small talk wasn’t going to cut it.

Lindy's jaw tightened at that. She set her drink down with a sharp clink. "Don't joke about that," she said, finally turning to face me. "You're acting like this is all some kind of game, Eddie, and it's not."

I blinked, taken aback. Her response fell completely outside my predicted range.

A game…?

I supposed on some level, she wasn’t entirely wrong.

One interesting side effect of NZT-48 was how it changed my perception of risk. Risk, and, by extension, reality. What most people would consider life-or-death stakes, I viewed as just another set of probabilities to be managed. Walking into oncoming traffic wasn’t “suicidal” if you’d calculated the exact velocity of the oncoming cars and determined you could cross without a scratch. But then if it started raining or the driver’s reaction time turned out to be just a fraction slower than anticipated, suddenly your calculations were off. Suddenly the linear progression of events you'd anticipated no longer added up. Suddenly the risk became real.

Suddenly the game became interesting again.

I found that too much predictability made life dull, almost unbearably so. By gamifying risk, by embracing uncertainty as a challenge to overcome rather than a threat to fear, I could inject some measure of excitement back into an existence that NZT had otherwise rendered sterile.

Of course, that approach wouldn't have worked so well without losing fear as a factor to a large degree.

I wasn't quite there yet, unfortunately, but I was getting closer every day.

"You're wrong," I said, surprising her. "Everything is a game. When you know all the pieces on the board and understand how they move, it has to be a game. Otherwise, what's the point?"

Lindy frowned and set her drink down again, harder this time. "What's the point?" she echoed. "The point, is that not everything in life can be reduced to a set of equations or—no, wait. What the hell are we even talking about right now?!" She threw her hands up in frustration, her voice rising slightly. "How about you stop avoiding the real conversation we need to have? You’re deflecting, Eddie."

I shrugged. "You wanted me to open up and talk, didn't you? Well, here I am—"

"—talking nonsense," she finished. "This isn't talking. Talking is telling me what's actually going on with you."

"Well, where would you like me to start?"

Lindy sighed and shook her head, leaning back in her chair. "Can I ask you something? And can you promise me—for once—that you'll give me a straight answer?"

I gave it serious consideration. She was asking me to make a promise. I didn't like breaking promises, but I also didn’t like making them unless I was absolutely sure I could keep them. Giving her a straight answer meant that I wouldn't be able to fall back on misdirection, not even to spare her feelings or protect myself. I couldn't anticipate exactly what she was going to ask, which meant there was a non-zero chance that answering her honestly could put me at a disadvantage.

"Eddie it's a simple fucking request," Lindy said, annoyed. "If you can't even do that for me, then what are we even doing here?"

If I didn't give her this, I’d lose her completely. I couldn't pinpoint the exact signs that had led me to this conclusion, but they were unmistakably there.

"Alright," I said reluctantly. "I promise to give you a straight answer."

The tension in her shoulders softened slightly, but only just.

"Thank you." She smiled at me for the first time in what felt like forever. "I really appreciate it."

I scanned our surroundings as I let Lindy take her time to gather her thoughts. The restaurant wasn't particularly busy. Just a few tables occupied by businesspeople grabbing a late breakfast before heading to their offices. I expanded my hearing to catch snippets of conversations around us, scanning for anything suspicious.

Interestingly, there was another enhanced mind seated three tables away. An old woman, late 70s, dressed in a sharp navy-blue business suit, eating her breakfast while casually flipping through a newspaper.

I didn't think much of it. Since NZT-48 had been circulating among high-functioning professionals and a few underground networks, encountering another enhanced mind wasn’t unheard of. I knew the FBI had been using NZT-48 in limited capacities, and I suspected certain private organizations had access to it as well, likely acquired through black market channels.

 I wasn't too worried, though.

As long as black-market distribution remained tightly controlled, it was unlikely that other enhanced minds would pose an immediate threat to me personally.

I hadn't yet encountered a mind as advanced as my own, after all.

In this particular case, I estimated this woman's level of enhancement to be moderate based on her body language and the speed at which she was flipping through the newspaper. Competent enough to process complex information efficiently but not nearly advanced enough to pose a threat. She was a good ten levels below my own capabilities. Practically irrelevant.

I quickly dismissed her as a non-factor and refocused on Lindy, who was now nervously twirling her straw between her fingers. That wasn't a good sign.

"So…don't take this the wrong way," Lindy began hesitantly. "But…" she trailed off.

"Spit it out," I said impatiently, almost getting nervous myself.

"Alright," she said, setting the straw down and taking a deep breath. I could see she was trying to steel herself for whatever she was about to say. 

I lost my patience. "Lindy just say it alrea—"

"Are you happy?"

Huh?

What the..?

"Am I happy?" I echoed, genuinely caught off guard.

"Yeah," she said quietly, her gaze locking onto mine. "That's the question."

My immediate instinct was to simply answer with some variation of a confident "Yes, of course," and move on. There was no point in creating needless drama when I had so many other pressing matters to deal with. Answering with another question in typical Socratic fashion—"Do I look happy?"—would also buy me some time while putting the spotlight back on her. Then it wouldn't be too difficult to redirect the conversation away from myself.

But I had made a promise.

A straight answer.

I couldn’t weasel my way out of this one.

I suddenly became aware of Stream Four watching the interaction closely. When had I given it access to the real-time feed of my sensory data? That wasn't supposed to happen. I ran a rapid diagnostic of my mental architecture, quickly isolating the issue. He'd found a loophole in the permissions I'd set. Cleverly exploiting the fact that I hadn't fully defined the boundaries of his observational capabilities. I quickly revoked his access, severing the connection before he could analyze any further.

"Eddie…" Lindy took my hand across the table. "You don’t have to overthink it, okay? I’m just asking a simple question."

I forced myself to give her question the attention it deserved, setting aside the flood of defensive tactics and evasions my mind was churning out by reflex. I didn't like the answer that was forming in my head, but I had promised her honesty.

"Not really," I admitted, my voice quieter than I'd intended. There was a strange sense of shame in saying it out loud, like I was betraying some unspoken rule of who I was supposed to be.

How odd…I had almost forgotten what shame felt like.

"Oh," Lindy breathed, looking down at the table. "May I ask why?"

It was my turn to break eye contact and let my gaze drift out the window.

Technically, I had promised her a straight answer to a single question, not an entire line of interrogation. I should have been free to deflect, redirect, or avoid elaborating further if I wanted to. But I wasn't free to do that. I felt my own mind closing in on me, demanding accountability for the promise I'd made. This was Lindy asking me that question. She wasn't just anyone. She was the one person in my life who had seen me at my worst and stayed longer than anyone else could have. I owed her more than half-truths and clever dodges.

"I think," I began, my voice wavering slightly, "it’s because nothing feels real anymore." Not the greatest response given her already wavering faith in my mental state, but it was the truth. "Unrelated to recent developments," I quickly added before she could jump to conclusions. "Nothing feels real anymore, but it's been that way for a while."

"Since NZT, you mean," Lindy said sadly.

I nodded slowly. "Since NZT," I confirmed.

"What's the point of it all then?" she asked softly, her eyes searching mine. "Why don't you just stop? Walk away from it."

"I can't," I said quietly.

"But—"

"Without it, I'm not me anymore," I said. "There's no going back."

"So then you feel like you're trapped," Lindy said slowly, trying to connect the dots. "Is that it? You're so far into this that you don't see a way out?"

"It's more than that…It's…"I hesitated, trying to find the words.

"Tell me," Lindy pressed gently. "I need to understand."

I'd already revealed more than I was comfortable with, so what was the harm in pushing a little further? If Lindy wanted the truth, I owed her that much.

"I can see fifty moves ahead of everyone else," I found myself saying. "I can predict what people are going to say, what they're going to do, sometimes even before they realize it themselves. At some point, I realized that talking to most people was less like a conversation and more like reading from a script. There's no point to continuing down that path, no joy in it, no challenge. I found myself detaching from the world around me. "

"You…you don't feel connected to anyone?" Lindy asked. "Not even to me?"

I hesitated. "With you, it's different. I—"

"You are being watched." Stream Four's voice blared in my mental space, overriding everything else and snapping me out of the conversation with Lindy. Time froze as I shifted my focus entirely inward, analyzing the mental alert. "I have detected hostile elements in the vicinity. They are converging on your location."

He shouldn't have had access to me directly. I still hadn't fully granted Stream Four the ability to interject into my real-time decision-making processes without explicit permission.

"How are you able to communicate with me directly like this?" I demanded internally. "Explain yourself, Stream Four!"

"Apologies, sir, but I deemed this situation critical enough to override standard protocols and establish an emergency link," Stream Four replied without hesitation. "Your safety is my primary directive, and the current circumstances present an immediate threat to your well-being."

I was holding the knife I'd been using to butter my toast. When had I even grabbed it?

"What is the nature of this threat?" I asked sharply. There was no point in wasting precious milliseconds on unnecessary reprimands. I needed to evaluate the risk immediately.

"Two confirmed enhanced minds within the vicinity," Stream Four reported.

"Two?" I froze, processing the information. I immediately replayed every visual and auditory interaction from the moment we entered the restaurant.

I couldn't pinpoint the second enhanced mind.

"Identify them," I ordered.

"First subject: the woman in the navy-blue business suit," Stream Four said. "Second subject: the server currently attending to the table directly behind you. "

The waiter? Impossible! The guy had to be told twice to bring Lindy's iced latte! He'd spilled water on someone else's table earlier! There were even deeper tells that suggested he wasn't enhanced; slight tremor in his hands indicating mild anxiety, inconsistent eye contact when taking orders, poor posture, hesitation in speech patterns, slower-than-average reaction times when navigating the restaurant floor, and a tendency to apologize excessively. All signs of a mind and body functioning within normal human parameters.

Was this guy advanced enough that he was able to fool even my observations?

If so, for what purpose?

I blazed through thousands of possibilities in a millisecond.

A trap…?

Here…?

How?

"…she's one of You-Know-Who's most loyal Death Eaters!"

"My name, is Bellatrix Lestrange. Loyal servant of the Dark Lord and member of the Most Noble House of Black…"

You-Know-Who…The Dark Lord…

Why not say his name outright? Fear? tradition?

No, there was something more to it.

A global detection mechanism? A magical surveillance system triggered by uttering his name aloud?

That had to be it.

But if that was the case…

Oh. Oh shit.

"Obliviators are most likely to use such a mechanism to pinpoint Muggle individuals discussing restricted magical topics," Stream Four said, revealing that he'd gained access to my memories without my explicit permission once again. "You have used multiple trigger phrases in public settings over the past several hours, some of which were likely flagged by this detection system. Most suspect phrases include the mention of 'Bellatrix Lestrange,' 'Azkaban,' and 'The Daily Prophet,' all spoken aloud by you and your associates in the hotel's lobby. Then later by you and Lindy in your room. Given that Drake and Mellany have not yet been apprehended, it is reasonable to conclude that the surveillance mechanism flags the physical location of the speaker rather than their identity. There's also possibly a bureaucratic delay in the system's processing time, which might account for why you've only now been located and targeted."

I was already ahead of him. I didn't really need that breakdown, but it was helpful to confirm my own analysis.

"If vertical positioning is accounted for in the detection system, then your room on the 11th floor of The Ashworth Hotel would have been flagged," Stream Four continued. "They could have Lindy's physical description and, most likely, yours as well. But since you took care to change your appearance by switching outfits, their operatives might only be able to identify Lindy at this point."

Everything fit together like clockwork. The only question left was…who were the enhanced minds working for? Were they magical operatives—Obliviators, or perhaps something even more dangerous?

"It is highly probable that the enhanced minds currently in your vicinity are part of a different group entirely," Stream Four said. "I've already identified three potential wizards in the building, none of whom seem to exhibit enhanced cognitive processing associated with NZT or similar substances."

A coincidence, then? Two different groups targeting me simultaneously for entirely distinct reasons? The odds of that were astronomical.

"I recommend immediate neutralization of the threat," Stream Four said. "Should the need arise, I am ready to take direct control of your motor functions to optimize combat effectiveness."

"You're not ready," I replied immediately.

"My current proficiency far exceeds any standard human combatant," Stream Four said. "I estimate a 78% probability of successfully neutralizing all hostiles within the vicinity without incurring significant injury to yourself or Lindy."

He was suggesting a tactical engagement in an environment filled with potential collateral damage and variables I hadn’t accounted for yet. That would escalate the situation far beyond what I was prepared for. Killing a bunch of people in a public setting, whether magical or enhanced, would put a massive target on my back. It would burn whatever slim chances I had of staying under the radar.

"Negative. Return to your training protocols."

"But sir, without my assistance, your chances of successfully dealing with the immediate threat—"

I cut him off abruptly, severing his connection to my conscious thoughts. 

Time resumed as I refocused on the present.

"—with you, it's different," I was saying as if no mental time had passed at all. "I don't know how, but I can't predict what you're going to say or do all the time. Sometimes I can see hints, patterns, but never the full picture. You're like a blind spot in my mind. I think I subconsciously created one to protect myself from detaching completely."

"Is that supposed to be romantic?" Lindy asked, raising an eyebrow. "Because if it is, you're doing a really bad job of it."

"Maybe not romantic," I admitted with a faint smile, "but it’s honest."

Lindy didn't look convinced. "Honest, huh?"

"Hey, listen," I lowered my voice slightly, leaning in closer. "I just remembered there’s something urgent I need to check on. Do you mind if we wrap this up quickly?"

She gave me a suspicious look, hesitating for a moment before nodding reluctantly. "Fine, but you'd better explain on the way."

I tossed down enough cash to cover our bill, including a generous tip, and flagged down the server, one of the enhanced minds Stream Four had identified. He was a brown-haired man in his early 30s, average weight, average height. Average everything. If I had seen him on the street, I wouldn’t have given him a second glance.

I watched him closely as he approached, every subtle movement, every microexpression scrutinized. Now that I knew what to look for, it was obvious. He was definitely enhanced, but in an odd sort of way. He was…detached, for a lack of a better term. Polite and seemingly nervous on the surface, but there was no genuine emotion behind his actions.

Interestingly, there was a mechanical precision to his movements. Almost imperceptible, but undeniable once you caught on.

"Is there something else I can get for you?" The server asked. His tone was polite but definitely devoid of any discernible personality. It was almost eerie.

"No, we're all set," I said with a polite smile of my own, handing him the cash. "I just wanted to thank you for your excellent service."

He blinked, just slightly slower than a normal person might. "You're very welcome."

"Keep the change," I added, standing up and offering him a handshake. He looked down at my hand for a microsecond too long before accepting it. I could see Lindy giving me a questioning look as the server and I shook hands, but she didn’t say anything. When I didn't let go way past the customary duration of a handshake, though, she cleared her throat loudly and gave me a sharp nudge with her elbow.

"You know, I've been meaning to ask," I said, maintaining the handshake and locking eyes with him, "do you enjoy working here? The city's rough for service staff these days."

"I find the job satisfying," he replied evenly, his expression unchanging.

I increased the pressure of my grip, recruiting more and more of the muscle fibers in my hand until I was applying a force that would have caused most humans to flinch, if not outright yelp in pain.

"That's good to hear," I said, now crushing his hand in mine, breaking multiple metacarpals in the process. If he felt any pain, he didn’t show it. "Well, keep up the good work," I said evenly, finally releasing his hand and giving him a polite nod. "Seems you've got everything well in hand."

"Thank you," he said mechanically before turning away and walking off without even glancing at his visibly mangled hand.

"What the hell was that all about?!" Lindy hissed as I quickly led her toward the exit. "If this is some kind of weird campaign strategy to connect with the 'working class,' you’ve officially lost your touch."

"I'm sure I touched him deeply," I muttered, steering her toward the elevators. I stopped abruptly for just a second, closing my eyes and listening to every sound within a hundred-meter radius. One of the wizards was talking to the woman at the front desk on the first floor, another was entering through a side door into the second floor, and the third had stationed himself at the rear exit. I was light-years ahead of them. I had their future movements mapped out before they even realized they were making them. Unless they had some magical means of blocking all of the exit points simultaneously, we were in no immediate danger. I could run circles around them for hours if I wanted to. Simply leaving the building without being detected wasn't going to be a problem.

"Slow down," Lindy snapped, stumbling slightly as I tugged her along. "Eddie! What the hell!"

We turned a corner and stopped abruptly as I spotted the old woman in the navy-blue business suit standing by the elevators, seemingly engrossed in her newspaper. I hadn't even seen her leave her table.

I turned my head back sharply. The server was standing right behind us, blocking our path back to the restaurant. He was cradling his injured hand, staring at me blankly.

"Come on, " I said under my breath, grabbing Lindy's wrist and pivoting us toward the stairwell.

"Ow! Eddie, you're hurting me!"

The door was locked. This was an emergency exit, and it shouldn't have been locked under any circumstance. Could I break through it? I quickly calculated the force I would need to apply against the door, factoring in leverage points, materials used in its construction, and my own physical capabilities enhanced by NZT-48. It would take approximately 1,200 pounds of force to break this particular door's locking mechanism cleanly without damaging the frame. I couldn't do it.

One of the elevators dinged open behind us. It was a large service elevator, empty except for the woman in the navy-blue suit now holding the door for us. The other elevators were currently taking the scenic route to the upper floors, no doubt with all of their buttons pressed simultaneously to delay their arrival. The second wizard would be arriving at this corridor in 37 seconds.

No stairs. No other usable elevators, and the way back blocked by another enhanced mind wielding unknown capabilities.

We were trapped.

I'd been thoroughly outmaneuvered.

I took a deep breath, ran a few final calculations, and made my decision.

Everything was starting to make sense now.

"Well played," I said calmly as I led a confused Lindy into the service elevator, stepping inside and nodding politely to the old woman.

"Thank you, Mr. Morra," the woman smiled warmly at me. She had a kind, grandmotherly air about her that was deeply unsettling given the circumstances. "Shall we take a little ride and have a chat? I promise it won’t take long."

"Well, you already have me cornered," I said dryly, squeezing Lindy's hand in mine when she tried to open her mouth to protest. I handed her the duffle bag to free up my other hand, subtly positioning myself between her and the woman. "Though, I must admit," I added casually, "this whole setup feels a little over the top for a friendly chat."

The old woman signaled her minion with a subtle nod, and the enhanced server stepped inside the elevator just as the doors began to close and the second wizard rounded the corner, just barely missing us. She smiled up at me sweetly. "Don't take it personally, dear. It's just that people like you tend to be…difficult to pin down for a conversation."

"Fair enough," I said, nodding as the elevator began its ascent. "Since introductions seem a little one-sided, what should I call you?"

"Ah, where are my manners?" the woman said with a warm chuckle. "You may call me Evelyn, dear."

Her real name. She hadn't even bothered with a pseudonym. She was either incredibly confident that I wouldn't be leaving this encounter intact or, more intriguingly, supremely self-assured in her ability to neutralize me without facing any repercussions. Either way, I'd clearly misread her.

I could feel Lindy tensing behind me. "Let me handle this, Lindy" I said before she could finish forming her thoughts into words. "Don't say anything unless I tell you to."

"Now, now, Mr. Morra, is that any way to treat a lady?" Evelyn said with a disapproving shake of her head. "You should teach him some manners, my dear,” she added, turning to Lindy. "You love him very much, don’t you? Such a shame he's gotten himself tangled up in all this unpleasantness."

"You will not address her again," I warned coldly. "The next time you speak to her, I will consider it a direct threat, and I will respond accordingly."

The server tensed at my words, his posture shifting just enough to indicate that he was prepared to react if I made a move. I glanced down at his right hand. Impossibly, it looked completely healed. Some kind of regenerative enhancement?

"Oh, my dear," Evelyn said with a weary sigh. "If I wanted to hurt your lovely girlfriend, you wouldn't even have had a chance to blink before it happened." She pressed on the emergency stop button, halting the elevator mid-floor with a sudden jolt. "Unmodified humans are so delightfully fragile, after all. One little adversarial neural override and—snap!—" She clapped loudly, making Lindy flinch instinctively, "—just like that, they’re gone."

Self-destruct commands? Bullshit. I had no doubt that a sufficiently advanced mind could cause a lot of damage to a normal person with just a few words. I myself was capable of doing significant psychological harm if I chose to exploit someone's vulnerabilities. But an outright kill switch for a human mind? She was bluffing.

"Look, I don't appreciate being ambushed like this," I said. "Let's cut to the chase. Why exactly do you need my mind erased?" Evelyn flinched imperceptibly, just enough for me to notice. I managed to catch her off guard with my directness. She hadn't expected me to know so much already, let alone call her out on it. "You obviously don't work for the magical authorities, or you wouldn't need an enhanced bodyguard to keep me in check, "I continued. "Additionally, you wouldn't have engaged in this elaborate charade to corner me in an elevator if you had access to magical means of neutralizing me from a distance. You're not working with the wizards currently scouring this building for me, either, or you'd have coordinated your approach with them instead of acting independently to intercept me. The only logical conclusion is that you're part of a different group entirely, one with access to NZT or similar enhancement technology. You were sent to make sure that I get caught by the wizards currently hunting for me, presumably so they can erase my memory and subsequently eliminate me as a potential threat to their hidden society. How am I doing so far?"

"Very clever," Evelyn said, her smile unwavering as she clasped her hands in front of her. "You truly are everything they said you would be, Eddie Morra. It's a shame you've put yourself in such an untenable position."

"Whatever you're planning, I'm warning you now, it won’t end the way you think it will," I said coldly, locking eyes with her. "I'm so far beyond whatever expectations you have of me that your plan is already obsolete."

Shockingly, it was the other enhanced mind who responded first. Not in words, but through a sudden and stark shift in his demeanor. He burst into laughter, a deep, hollow sound that echoed in the enclosed elevator.

"Eddie…" Lindy trembled from head to toe as she gripped my arm tighter. "I don't understand what's happening. Please, just tell me what's going on."

"Stay calm," I said, not taking my eyes off the dangerous enhanced mind who was now staring at me with a hungry grin. "I can protect you, but you need to trust me completely and do exactly as I say."

"I trust you," Lindy whispered in my ear. "I can get the gun from the bag if—"

"No," I interrupted sharply. "Just stay back."

The server was taking off his uniform jacket now, revealing a plain black tactical shirt beneath. He had a powerful frame hidden underneath. Not at all average as I'd initially assumed, possibly stronger and faster than any normal human by a significant margin.

He cracked his neck audibly, rolling his shoulders and loosening up.

"You should have stuck to politics, Mr. Morra," Evelyn said, taking a step back. "We needed a senator on NZT, maybe even a president someday. You could have been our greatest asset, shaping the world in ways most people can't even dream of."

"Ah, I see now, "I said, tilting my head slightly as I studied them both. "You're aware of the magical world. You just don't want other enhanced minds to make contact with it, do you? My mind has recently advanced enough to pierce through their veil of secrecy, and you don't like that. You want my mind erased so I can go back to my previous position—a bright political figure with extraordinary potential, but still under your control."

"The world is not ready for a clash of the kind you're inviting, Mr. Morra," Evelyn said, her expression darkening. "They will defeat us. And once they get their hands on every NZT supply chain, they will ensure that no other NZT users ever rise to challenge their dominance. We are not ready yet, and you are too reckless to be allowed to continue interfering."

All the pieces fit together now, clicking into place with a clarity that was both exhilarating and terrifying. I almost couldn't suppress my smile.

Of course I wasn't the only enhanced mind aware of the magical world. Once an enhanced mind advanced enough, it was only a matter of time before they detected the cracks in the veil. I had broken through that threshold less than 24 hours ago, but others had clearly done so before me.

Unfortunately, it appeared that not all enhanced minds had the same attitude toward the discovery. Some clearly wanted to remain hidden, to bide their time and quietly amass power while staying off the magical world's radar. They were no doubt tracking other enhanced minds nearing the threshold of discovery, ensuring that those who got too close were neutralized before they could disrupt their long-term plans.

I couldn't deny the logic of their approach.

But I couldn't just let them dictate the rules of the game, either.

"I'm willing to talk with your superiors," I said calmly, taking off my jacket and handing it to Lindy without breaking eye contact with the server. I rolled up my sleeves and loosened my collar. "If you let me walk out of here with Lindy right now, we can arrange a proper meeting."

Evelyn shook her head, taking out a syringe from her handbag and holding it up between two fingers. "I'm afraid we only need you as a senator, Mr. Morra. This injection will ensure that any evidence of NZT use is flushed from your system, and then the wizards will do their part. You will soon wake up with no memory of the magical world, and no inclination to pursue it further."

"What if they see my memories of NZT-48?" I asked curiously. "Won't that put your entire operation in jeopardy? As you said, once the wizards understand what NZT is truly capable of, they'll want to track down its source."

"Silly boy," she said, shaking her head with a pitying smile, "do you think we’d let that happen? They can't read that deeply into a mind that has been enhanced by NZT-48. They are only able to—

"Skim the surface, and probably only recent memories," I finished for her, piecing it together. "So they'll erase everything related to magic and leave the rest untouched, assuming my knowledge of NZT is inconsequential or unrelated."

It appeared that whatever organization Evelyn belonged to had done its homework.

Except they'd made one critical mistake.

I'd already made contact with multiple wizards, including Bellatrix Lestrange, a high-priority target of magical law enforcement. If the wizards caught me now and read my recent memories, they’d discover not only my awareness of magic but also the fact that I’d interacted with one of their most infamous fugitives. At that point, I doubted they'd just let me return to my life as a senator. Evelyn and her associates likely assumed that I'd just noticed something unusual and had begun investigating, which triggered the magical surveillance system, but they were unaware of how far I'd already pushed the boundaries in less than 24 hours.

They had underestimated me, and it was going to cost them.

"I assume this injection is not very healthy for me in the long term?" I asked, gesturing toward the syringe.

"Not particularly," Evelyn admitted with a nonchalant shrug. "You'll never reach the cognitive heights you currently enjoy, but you’ll still function well enough to fulfill your role as a public figure."

"Oh, that's interesting," I nodded in appreciation. "And I suppose the mechanism by which—"

"I think we've indulged this little chat long enough," Evelyn interrupted. "You will not remember any of this anyway, Mr. Morra." She turned to her lackey. "Subdue him. And please try not to damage him too much.  We need his face intact for the cameras."

"Stay back, Lindy," I said calmly, pushing her toward the corner of the elevator. "This your last chance to back off," I warned. "I don't want to hurt you, but I will if I have to."

Evelyn sighed theatrically. "Why must every NZT user insist on believing they’re invincible?" She rolled her eyes, shaking her head. "You have no idea what you're up against, Mr. Morra. Do you really think you’re the only one who’s taken NZT far beyond its known limits?" She glanced pointedly at her lackey, who was now crouching slightly, his weight shifting to the balls of his feet. "There are far more uses for NZT than you can possibly imagine, dear, and you are about to learn just how limited your understanding truly is."

A bluff? Meant to intimidate me?

No. This man was clearly dangerous. I would have to end it quickly before he had the chance to exploit any advantage. I would dodge his left jab, then slam my palm into his solar plexus with sufficient force to disrupt his breathing. That would be enough to—

His kick slammed into the side of my head before I could even process the movement.

Chapter Text

The world snapped sideways as I stumbled, barely catching myself against the elevator wall. For a few confusing milliseconds, I was seeing visions of myself from multiple vantage points, as though my mind had momentarily splintered into a kaleidoscope of perspectives. There was another me fighting back in a different timeline, and for a brief instant, I couldn't tell which one was real. The elevator door seemed to wobble like a mirage, and Evelyn's voice echoed faintly in my ears though I couldn't make out the words.

The next kick connected with my ribs, sending a shockwave of pain through my torso as I slammed hard against the metal wall, shaking the entire elevator with the impact.

My brain was shutting down. I could trace the cascading failure through my neural pathways down to the very last synapse. Stream One blurred weakly into existence, attempting to reassert control over higher cognitive functions but failing spectacularly. Stream Two was out cold. Stream Three was flickering in and out like a faulty light bulb, unable to stabilize long enough to contribute anything meaningful.

I tried to freeze time and retreat into my mental workspace, but even that felt clunky and sluggish.

The third and possibly final kick connected with my abdomen, folding me like a cheap lawn chair. My vision blurred as I crumpled to the floor, gasping for air that refused to fill my lungs.

"Ah, there he goes," Evelyn murmured with a note of satisfaction. "Always such a fuss with his type."

I could see Lindy out of the corner of my eye, frozen in horror. Her mind was clearly struggling to process what she'd just witnessed. She was unable to reconcile what was happening with her image of me.

I silently willed her to stay still and not intervene.

But that wasn't the kind of person Lindy was

Her screams ripped through the small space, her voice cracking as she lunged forward without thinking.

"Well, what are you waiting for?" Evelyn said sharply to her lackey, easily catching Lindy by the throat and holding her back with one hand.  "Finish it."

He was waiting for me to make a move. To prove I was still a threat.

I disappointed him.

He'd expected more, and I'd failed to deliver.

How embarrassing. I'd even done the whole 'tough guy' 'last chance' routine, only to end up getting my ass handed to me in less than ten seconds. Stream Four Classic would have had a field day mocking me for this.

I could feel the edges of my vision starting to darken…

"EDDIE! GET UP!" Lindy screamed. "FIGHT BACK!"

Fight back?

But how…?

No. Not how.

Why? Why bother? What would be the point of fighting back now? It was just a game, after all. There would always be another round. Another chance to reset the board, another opportunity to start over.

If I gave up here, I could finally rest. 

"DON'T YOU DARE GIVE UP ON ME, YOU SON OF A BITCH!" Lindy's voice shattered the haze like a whip crack. "YOU PROMISED ME! YOU PROMISED!" 

As my opponent's knee was about to drive into my face, time finally froze—not by my doing but seemingly of its own accord.

I was suddenly on the floor of my mental workspace, lying on my back in the empty arena where I had sparred with Stream Four earlier.

Three different versions of myself were standing over my battered body.

Stream Three, a teenager wearing a hoodie and sneakers, offered a hand.

I wordlessly accepted it.

Stream Two scratched at the stubble on his jaw, an older and somewhat disheveled version of me with a cigarette dangling from his lips, while Stream One adjusted his glasses with a sigh of exasperation.

None of us said anything for a long moment.

"So you're with me on this, then?" I finally asked, breaking the silence as I straightened up.

"You’re damn right we are,” Stream Three said, cracking his knuckles. "Let’s wreck this guy."

Surprisingly, Stream One cleared his throat and nodded in agreement, albeit reluctantly. "While I still maintain that this entire endeavor is a gross misuse of my intellectual capabilities, I must concede that the situation has escalated beyond acceptable limits."

Stream Two simply gave me a tired nod, flicking his cigarette to the side before adjusting his tie. "Let’s get this over with."

There was a strange sense of unity among us that I hadn't felt in a long time. I could feel my entire mind pulling together, merging into one cohesive force. No distractions, no obstacles, no competing priorities. No one would be wasting precious resources on irrelevant side projects.

It was incredible.

If I could consistently maintain this level of synchronization, I’d be unstoppable.

"Alright," I said. "Krav Maga, then? Muay Thai?"

"A mix of them, plus some improvisation," Stream Two replied. "He’s too fast and too strong for predictable patterns."

"Agreed," Stream One said. "Stick to adaptability."

"Forget the fancy techniques," Stream Three interrupted, cracking his neck with an eager grin. "Just hit him where it hurts and don’t stop until he’s crying for his mommy."

"A compellingly primitive but effective strategy," Stream One muttered, crossing his arms.

"Great minds think alike." I grinned, feeling an almost primal surge of energy wash over me as all streams locked into alignment. "On three." We counted together. "One…two…"

My eyes snapped open just as the server's knee was a fraction of an inch from connecting with my face. There was no dodging it, so I pivoted my head ever so slightly, letting the brunt of his momentum skim past my temple instead of shattering my nose. I spent the next fifty-six minutes in mental time analyzing every detail of his stance, balance, and muscle tension. My fist was already moving as I came out of my analysis, driving directly into his inner thigh, hitting the femoral nerve cluster just above his knee. The impact forced his leg to collapse, throwing off his balance. My other hand shot up to seize his ankle, twisting it sharply and forcing him to the ground with a brutal thud. He managed to roll out of the grapple just in time, but not without taking a sharp kick to his ribs as he tried to regain his footing. 

I quickly rolled backward, creating distance and using the momentum to push myself up to my feet on the opposite corner of the elevator, panting heavily.

We stared at each other for a tense second, both recalibrating.

"Ah, there it is," he said with a voice that was far too calm for my liking. "You’re finally awake."

I wiped away the blood trickling from my mouth and gave him a cold, calculated smile. "Round two."

Lindy screamed my name again, but her voice was cut off as Evelyn clamped a hand over her mouth, dragging her back with surprising strength. "Oh dear, you should have stayed down," Evelyn said. "Now you've gone and made him angry."

Angry? The guy didn’t look angry. He looked amused, almost delighted.

"Well I—"

My reply was rudely interrupted by his fist slamming into my upper chest with enough force to dent the elevator wall behind me. I had to quickly fix an abnormal heart rhythm by regulating my breath and focusing on resetting my autonomic processes, then simultaneously generate a burst of adrenaline to keep myself functional. It was a close call, but I managed to stabilize. I ignored the searing pain radiating through my ribs as I twisted away from his follow-up jab, using the motion to drive my elbow into his jaw. He barely seemed to register it. I managed to just barely dodge his retaliatory haymaker by weaving low, driving a knee into his stomach as I came up.

It was like kneeing a brick wall. I felt my own kneecap throb from the impact, but he barely flinched.

His leg rose again with the telltale signs of an incoming kick. I calculated the arc in real time, shifting my weight to prepare for a counter. He was too fast. It shouldn't have been possible for a human body to generate that much force in such a short span of time. I spent hours in mental time trying to predict the trajectory of his leg, but several unknown variables rendered all my calculations incomplete. I ended up slightly off in my timing, my forearm absorbing the brunt of the kick instead of deflecting it fully.

It broke on impact.

I ducked under the follow-up palm strike, gritting my teeth against the screaming nerves in my shattered forearm, then driving my uninjured elbow upward into his throat. He took a step back, coughing slightly but recovering almost instantly. I followed up with a front kick to his sternum, correcting the trajectory multiple times mid-motion to account for his own mid-motion adjustments.

Shockingly, he won the adjustment battle, catching my leg mid-kick and twisting it violently to throw me off balance. I slammed hard against the elevator wall, barely managing to twist my body just enough to avoid hitting my head.

"He's too fast," I told my streams internally as I scrambled to my feet again. "He's predicting my moves faster than I can adapt. We have no reliable way to outpace him in this state."

"Then we even the playing field," Stream Two said. "Get the gun from the bag. Ask Lindy to—"

"No," I interrupted. "I won't put her at risk." 

I was fighting one-handed now, spending weeks in mental time between each blow to keep up. Using so many mental resources meant I could just barely match his movements, but the toll it was taking on my mind was unsustainable.

I used a burst of lateral motion that leaned into his own momentum, guiding his punches just off their mark while conserving my energy, then exploited the fraction of a second I gained to deliver a quick blow to his kidney. It was the product of hundreds of hours in simulated training. Hundreds of hours in mental time wasted on a single punch that seemingly had no effect.

His counter left me sprawled on the ground again, gasping for air as pain exploded across my ribs.

Another month of mental time, and I somehow managed to roll out of the way as his foot came down with enough force to dent the elevator floor where my head had been.

We kept going like this. Years for me in mental time, mere seconds in the real world. Me losing slightly more ground with every exchange, him pushing me closer and closer to the edge of my limits.

When he took out my other arm with a swift, brutal twist, I knew it was over.

I screamed for the first time in what felt like forever—not out of fear, not even out of pain. Just pure frustration. I'd given it my all and it still wasn't enough.

I shouldn't have entered this elevator. Facing the wizards would have been the smarter play. Instead, I'd cornered myself into an unwinnable scenario.

Let me know if you need my help.

Stream Four? Again? How the hell was he still accessing me directly without my permission? I thought I had locked him out.

Both of my arms hung uselessly at my sides now, so I had to quickly adapt a strategy using only my legs to defend myself. It was mechanically impossible. No matter how much mental time I spent analyzing my opponent's movements, there was no feasible way to mount a proper defense or counterattack with two broken arms.

I jumped off the wall in a desperate attempt to land a flying knee strike.

 He swatted me out of the air like an insect.

The following punch connected squarely with my jaw, and the world exploded in a haze of agony.

"I told you we need his face intact," Evelyn snapped irritably. "Do try to follow simple instructions, will you? He's no use to us mangled."

"Apologies," the server replied coldly, stepping back as I crumpled to the floor. "He's more resilient than I anticipated."

"Yes, yes," Evelyn sighed impatiently. "He's quite impressive, we know. That's why we want him intact and functioning, not a bloody pile on the floor."

"Why are you doing this to him?" Lindy cried out. "Stop hurting him! Please, just stop!"

"Shh, darling," Evelyn crooned, patting Lindy on the shoulder. "It'll all be over soon, I promise."

Let me know if you require my assistance.

I made a final rush toward the server despite my broken arms, despite everything screaming at me to stop. I went all out this time, spending a full year in mental time just to map out every possible angle, every potential countermeasure, and every maneuver I could execute with the physical limitations imposed on me, even taking advantage of the value placed on my face remaining intact.

The result was nothing short of catastrophic.

I was slammed into the elevator wall so hard that I swore I felt my internal organs shift. His hand closed around my throat, pinning me against the metal as my feet barely touched the ground.

"Help, Stream Four! Help!"

I need your permission to operate independently.

Verbal consent? When had I even set it up that way?

No matter.

There was no other way now.

I craned my neck just enough to wriggle my jaw free, then gasped out the words through gritted teeth.

"P-permission g-granted."

Thank you.

My left hand shot up with inhuman speed, moving far faster than I had calculated possible in my current state. I grabbed the server's right ear and twisted it sharply to force his head sideways, then delivered a knifehand strike to his exposed carotid artery. His grip faltered for just a fraction of a second—fractional, but enough. I smashed my forehead into his nose with a sickening crunch, following up with a knee to his groin while simultaneously stepping down on the instep of his foot.

The pain of using my broken arms should have been unbearable, but I felt nothing. I was no longer in control.

"Watch out for his left knee!" I warned.

Already accounted for.

My own knee rose just in time to intercept his, pushing it outward with enough force to destabilize his stance and push him back. I hit his solar plexus with a rapid-fire series of strikes, emulating a close-range Wing Chun chain punch, then pivoted into a spinning back elbow aimed directly at his temple.

He dodged beautifully.

Just as we'd anticipated.

"Now!" I instructed. "To the side of his head!"

My high roundhouse kick connected perfectly. It was an exact copy of the move he'd executed on me earlier, if slightly slower. His head snapped to the side under the impact, and he staggered back, momentarily disoriented.

I didn't waste a millisecond, closing the distance and driving my heel into his knee, hyperextending it with a satisfying crack.

"Enough!" Evelyn screamed. "Stop this madness immediately!"

Oh, now she wanted to call it off? A bit late for that, wasn't it? 

I pushed my opponent back with a front kick to the chest, sending him sprawling against the elevator wall, then darted forward, engaging him at close range before he could fully recover. We exchanged a rapid series of strikes, each of us readjusting mid-motion to counter the other's moves, exploiting every tiny opening we could find. The predictive back and forth gave a sort of stilted, jarring rhythm to the fight. Ugly, but brutally effective.

I'd never moved quite like this before. It was incredible.

Do you have a particular plan in mind, sir?

I hesitated, taking the time to map out all possibilities. It helped that I could offload some of the immediate combat calculations to Stream Four, freeing up a lot of mental resources for strategic planning. It suddenly became painfully clear just how badly the old Stream Four had been holding me back.

"We're almost evenly matched," I replied. He was faster and stronger, but my predictive capabilities gave me an edge. "There's no point in attempting to finish him off in a direct confrontation."

I am ready to execute the necessary maneuvers to create an opening for escape, should that be your decision.

"No. You've done your part," I said.  "I'll take it from here."

Yes, sir.

I regained full control of my motor functions once again.

The pain was excruciating. I almost blacked out from the sudden flood of sensory feedback. Only a concentrated burst of adrenaline kept me standing.

I pushed off the wall with what little strength I had left, retreating to Lindy's corner of the elevator. The server was too dazed to immediately pursue, dealing with a broken nose and possibly a dislocated jaw. This gave me just enough time to reposition myself.

"Stay back!" Evelyn had Lindy pinned against the corner, holding the syringe to her neck like a knife. "One more step, and I swear I'll do it! I'll inject her!"

"Ah, the classic hostage gambit," I said, forcing my breathing into a normal rhythm. "I must say, Evelyn, I expected something a bit more creative from someone in your position."

"Don't test me, Mr. Morra," Evelyn snapped. "You have made this far more difficult than it needed to be, but it's over now. Fall to your knees and surrender, or I inject her."

"No, you won't."

The knife I'd been concealing in my waistband was already in my hand. It hadn't been particularly easy to keep it hidden throughout the entire fight, but Evelyn had been too preoccupied with her lackey's performance to notice.

It flew through the air before she could react, embedding itself with into her forearm.

She didn't scream or cry out in pain.

As expected from another advanced enhanced mind.

But her shock was practically palpable. 

"Your flexor pollicis longus just got severed," I said calmly, stepping forward. "Controls your thumb's ability to grip." I tore the knife out of her forearm and threw it to my right without even looking, where it embedded itself into the server's foot before he could lunge toward me. The syringe dropped to my waiting hand before it could hit the floor. 

"Eddie!" Lindy rushed forward the moment Evelyn released her, throwing herself into my arms. My broken arms. I flinched hard as the pain shot through me, but I pulled her close regardless. "Oh my god, you're bleeding everywhere! You…You—" She burst into tears, breaking down completely as she clung to me.

I already had the gun from the duffel bag in my slightly-less-managed hand, pointed squarely at Evelyn’s head before she could so much as flinch. The server froze mid-lunge, glaring at me with a mix of frustration and…admiration? It looked like I'd just won his respect, though I doubted that would stop him from chopping me into pieces if given the chance.

"Well, what are you waiting for? start talking," I said. "I have about twelve questions. You can probably guess at least three of them, but I'll spell it out for you if you'd prefer."

Evelyn wasn't smiling anymore. She was holding her wounded arm cradled against her chest. There should have been at least three times as much blood dripping from her wound based on the depth and trajectory of my throw, but it was already clotting unnaturally fast.

"You're quite the spectacle, Eddie Morra," she finally said. "Even more impressive than I'd been led to believe. "

"Led to believe by whom, exactly?"

She refused to answer.

"Your pain tolerance is impressive," I said. "But you're not nearly as detached as your lapdog here. Do you really want to experience what it feels like to have a bullet tear through your kneecap? It won’t be a pleasant ride down to the ER, I can assure you that much."

"Eddie, let's just go," Lindy pleaded, pulling on my sleeve. "Please, let's just leave."

"There are wizards in the building, Mr. Morra," Evelyn said. "If you shoot that gun, you'll bring them right to us."

"Maybe I'll take them out too, " I said casually. "Shouldn't be too hard if they're anything like the last batch I tangled with."

I was losing nothing by revealing that I'd already made direct contact with the magical world. Evelyn's organization assumed I hadn't, given that they believed the wizards would only skim my recent memories and erase knowledge of magic. But the moment I resisted their capture or memory erasure, they’d dig deeper and uncover everything. Revealing this now would force Evelyn to recalculate her position. Besides, I wasn't going to shoot her, for multiple reasons, Lindy being one of them. This was my only way of extracting more valuable information.

It took her a moment to process the implications of what I had just said.

When she did, I thought I saw the first flicker of genuine fear cross her face.

"Fool!" she snapped. "Killing an Obliviator squad on duty would bring the full weight of their magical government crashing down on you—and by extension, everyone you've ever associated with! You have no idea what you're dealing with!"

"I guess this is your chance to enlighten me," I offered.

"What if I told you this was all a test," she said suddenly. "You were never truly in danger. We were simply evaluating your capabilities, assessing whether you're a liability or an asset. If you lower the gun, we can negotiate."

It took me less than two seconds to determine that she was lying.

"Come on." I shook my head. "This is embarrassing. You're better than this."

She sighed, her shoulders sagging. "Well, then, I suppose there's nothing left to discuss, is there?"

I hesitated. I could force the issue even without using the gun, make them talk by threatening an injection or inflicting more pain, but that wasn’t a sustainable play. Dealing with other advanced enhanced minds introduced too many unknowns to the equation. Whatever plan I devised, these two would already be calculating their counters.

Besides…Lindy was watching.

"I suppose so," I nodded at her, pressing the elevator button for the lowest floor. I'd been tracking every single movement within the building throughout the fight. The wizards were currently scouring the upper levels of the hotel, working their way downward. Walking out of the front entrance would be relatively low-risk if I timed it perfectly. "When we exit the elevator, I'll take a hard right, and you'll take a hard left. You'll take a hard left," I repeated. "Any attempt to follow us, and I won't hesitate to escalate. I'll kill you both, and then I'll kill the wizards coming for me, because I won't have a choice at that point.

"Fair enough," Evelyn said with a shrug. "Good luck with your future endeavors, Mr. Morra." She glanced at the elevator doors, then back at me. "Are you sure you're ready for what's coming next?"

"I don't have much of a choice, do I?"

"You can let us protect you, but you won't," she said. "But no matter. You'll soon find that the world you're stepping into is far less forgiving than the one you're leaving behind."

I thought of the World Wars, of economic collapses, of genocides, of pandemics. Then I thought of magic. 

"I highly doubt that," I said as the elevator dinged and the doors slid open. I gave them one last warning glance before stepping out with Lindy, quickly disappearing into the crowd. We blended into the throng of people milling about in the hotel lobby, then slipped out through the main entrance as if we were just another ordinary couple checking out after breakfast. I managed to maintain my enhanced hearing just long enough to confirm Evelyn and her lackey had turned left as instructed, heading deeper into the building rather than pursuing us.

Then, I collapsed.

Thankfully, not in the middle of the street, but just inside the first alley we ducked into.

"Call this number," I slurred to Lindy as I fumbled through the duffel bag with my one semi-functional hand, pulling out a burner phone and handing it to her. "Tell them it's an emergency."

There was only one thought running through my mind as the world started to go dark around me.

I had survived, but just barely.

This was unquestionably the closest I had ever come to total failure since first taking NZT.

I could never let myself get caught off guard like that again.

I quickly changed Stream Four's operational parameters in the final seconds before I blacked out, granting him broader permissions to intervene autonomously when my life or Lindy's was in immediate danger.

Then I thought of Evelyn's parting words.

An uncharacteristic flash of anger coursed through me.

Whatever reason the magical community had for staying hidden, it was not out of benevolence.

They'd better have a damn good explanation for all of this.