Work Text:
The commission had been perfectly routine right up until it wasn't.
That was how Belle would describe it later — if she ever found the courage to describe it, which she wouldn't, because describing it would require her to form sentences about what happened, and forming sentences about what had happened would require thinking about it too directly, and thinking about it too directly was currently medically contraindicated.
But before any of that: the commission.
It started, as most things in Belle's life started, with the Inter-Knot. Someone posted a request to their queue — a quick job, standard parameters, nothing that should have taken more than two hours. A missing document. A low-level Hollow incursion at the Ballet Twins. The client wanted a Proxy on-site to run interference while their runner retrieved something.
Wise looked up from his laptop, tilted his head the particular way that meant I could do this one, and Belle had already grabbed her jacket off the back of the chair.
"I'll take it," she said.
"You sure? I was going to—"
"I said I'll take it."
Wise gave her the look. The one with slightly too much older-brother energy in it, the one that said I know you've been cooped up for three days and you're going feral. He was annoyingly perceptive, Wise. It was one of his least charming qualities.
"Fine," he returned to his laptop. "Check in at the two-hour mark."
"Yes, mom," Belle answered, and left before he could clock her with a VHS tape.
The Ballet Twins job went fine.
It went fine in the way that Hollow jobs always went fine... meaning it went completely sideways for thirty minutes, during which Belle's heart rate climbed high enough to void her theoretical warranty, and then it resolved, and afterward everything was technically fine. The runner got the document. Belle got a notification that the commission fee had cleared, which always felt like getting a gold star from the city of New Eridu itself.
She was walking back through the commercial district, decompressing the way she usually decompressed (namely, by listening to music and pretending she was in a movie) when she heard the voice.
Not Wise's voice, through her earpiece. Not a Bangboo. Not a client.
A real voice, about fifteen feet to her left, behind her at a street-level archway. Low and precise, the way someone speaks when they're not accustomed to being interrupted, because they simply don't allow it to happen in the first place.
"—tell Zhao that the window closes at midnight. If the compliance report isn't filed by then, the KCA's position on the matter becomes considerably less comfortable for everyone involved."
Belle slowed down. She probably shouldn't have, but it was the kind of voice that made a person slow down against their own better judgment, like audio gravity.
She glanced sideways.
There was a woman standing in the archway.
Belle's brain, which prided itself on being quick, took approximately three full seconds to produce any useful output. The woman was... she was... the word that eventually surfaced was striking, which felt catastrophically inadequate for the job it was being asked to do. Tall. Dark coat, long enough to move like a shadow had learned to be clothing, a large dramatic assemble that framed her like something out of a noir film that hadn't been made yet. Her hair fell forward over one eye, which should have looked artless but instead looked like a deliberate decision made by someone who didn't bother making decisions twice. The one visible eye — sharp, scanning the middle distance — was currently doing something that Belle's brain classified as looking deeply unimpressed by the entire concept of the physical world.
She was speaking into a flip phone, one hand in her coat pocket. Her posture communicated, with absolute clarity, that she had never once worried about whether she was taking up too much space.
Belle's feet stopped moving without consulting her.
The woman — still talking, unhurried, clinical — glanced over. Not a full turn of the head. Just that eye, sweeping sideways with the kind of precision that suggested she studied her surroundings at all times whether she wanted to or not.
The glance lasted roughly one second.
It landed on Belle with the approximate emotional weight of being assessed by something that hunts.
Belle's entire nervous system had a brief, private emergency.
The woman's expression didn't change. She looked away. She kept talking into her phone as though Belle did not exist, had never existed, or that the concept of Belle's existence was simply not relevant to her current operational parameters.
Belle's legs finally remembered what legs were for and carried her away.
She walked three blocks before she realized she'd been holding her breath.
She released it in a long, controlled exhale that did absolutely nothing for the weird static buzzing behind her sternum. She put her hands in her jacket pockets, looking up at the afternoon sky — the particular kind of New Eridu afternoon sky that was always sort of amber and industrial and beautiful in a way that didn't try too hard — and she decided it was time to have a serious talk with herself.
You just made eye contact with a woman. That's it. That's the whole event. You're walking home from work. Everything is fine.
Her brain offered a very detailed memory of the coat's silhouette.
Stop it.
Her brain offered the voice. —tell Zhao that the window closes at midnight.
I said stop it.
She pulled out her phone, checking the time out of habit even though she didn't need to. She typed a message to Wise. Commission done. On my way back. She stared at the message. Added a period. Deleted the period. Sent it without the period because the period made it look like something was wrong, and nothing was wrong, everything was completely fine.
Her phone buzzed. Good. Bangboo 18 restocked the display tapes, could you grab coffee on the way? We're out.
Belle stared at this for a moment.
Who was that woman, she did not type.
I had a normal and unremarkable walk home, she did not type.
I need you to confirm that random strangers around town do not actually look like that because I think something is wrong with my perception of reality, she absolutely did not type.
She typed instead: yeah sure. coff cafe order?
The usual.
She put her phone away.
She walked to Coff Cafe and ordered two coffees from the Tin Master barista, who was having a good day and said so at some length. Belle smiled and nodded in the appropriate places. She took the cups. Walked back.
Everything was fine.
The bell above Random Play's door chimed when she pushed it open with her shoulder. The store had the smell it always had — old tape cases, the dry-electric smell of CRT monitors, something faintly like cedar that she'd never been able to trace to any object. Bangboo 18 was reorganizing the drama section. It looked up, registering her, making a small satisfied noise before going back to alphabetizing.
Wise was in the back room, on his laptop, doing something that was probably either Proxy logistics or music, because those were the two modes he operated in. He heard her come in and said, without looking up, "How'd it go?"
"Fine."
"Any complications?"
"Nothing major. Some building collapsed, rerouted, resolved. Classic." She set his coffee next to the laptop, sitting down on the edge of the sofa and wrapping both hands around her own cup.
Wise, to his credit, worked in silence for approximately forty-five seconds before saying, "Okay."
"Okay what?"
"Whatever it is."
Belle took a long sip of coffee. "There's nothing."
"There's definitely something."
"I had an uneventful commission and walked home. That's it. That's the whole story."
Wise closed his laptop halfway. This was the gesture he used when he was going to actually pay attention, which Belle found annoying on principle because it was effective. He was looking at her with that expression: the patient one, the one that meant I will simply wait you out, I have nowhere to be.
"I saw someone," Belle blurted out before she could stop herself.
Wise's expression shifted to careful neutrality, which meant he was actively trying very hard not to have an expression.
"A person," Belle added. "Just. Someone during a comission. While I was walking back."
"Okay."
"It was fine."
"Right."
"I'm just—" Belle gestured vaguely with her coffee cup. "I'm mentioning it. As an anecdote. You know how sometimes you see someone and you just think, hm. Like. As an observation."
"Sure."
"It was that."
"A hm."
"Yes."
Wise picked up his coffee. He took a sip. His eyes, over the rim of the cup, had acquired a quality that Belle recognized and resented: being patient while waiting for the part where she actually started telling the truth.
"She was," Belle started. Stopped. The coffee cup became very interesting. "She was just. Really."
"Really?"
"Really."
There was a pause.
"Hot?" Wise supplied.
"Objectively," Belle said, with a conviction that surprised both of them. She pointed at him. "And I want to be clear that this is purely a, you know, an aesthetic observation. A neutral appraisal of someone's visual presentation. Like seeing a really good piece of architecture."
"Sure," Wise was doing the thing where his voice was completely flat and therefore completely impossible to read.
"Because she was basically — she was dressed like — okay so you know how sometimes in movies there's a character who walks in and the whole vibe just shifts—" Belle made a gesture indicating a vibe shift. "Like the temperature drops two degrees. Like everyone in the room suddenly becomes a background character."
"I'm familiar with the concept."
"She was that. But like, real. Like, in person. On a regular street. At like three in the afternoon." Belle's voice was developing a quality she was aware of and could not prevent, of someone reporting on an event that they are still slightly processing. "She had this coat — it was this long dark one — and her hair was covering one eye, but the other one was just—" She stopped. Pressed her lips together. "You know what, it doesn't matter."
"It sounds like it kind of matters," Wise commented, very gently.
"She looked at me for literally one second," Belle continued, ignoring this. "Like a sweep. Completely blank. And then just — moved on. Like I was a lamppost."
"And that was bad?"
"No! I mean — no. I mean, obviously no, she doesn't know me, she doesn't owe me a — it was just very—" Belle made another gesture. This one communicated something less specific than architecture.
Wise set down his coffee cup, as if disarming something. "Belle."
"Don't."
"I'm not doing anything."
"You're going to make a face."
"I'm not making a face."
"You're pre-making a face. You're in the pre-face stage."
"I'm sitting here drinking my coffee," Wise said, in the tone of someone who had been her brother for her entire life and knew every version of this conversation she'd ever had, and was currently filing this one under a new category that he would be thinking about for some time.
Belle stood up abruptly. "I'm going to check on the tape inventory," she announced.
"We checked it this morning."
"I'm going to check it again. To be thorough." She picked up her coffee and walked toward the display shelves, doing her best to adopt the posture of someone performing an extremely important task. Behind her, she heard Wise pick up his laptop. He said nothing. He was very good at saying nothing when he wanted to.
Belle stood in front of a shelf of sorted VHS tapes and stared at them.
The drama section. Alphabetized, just as Bangboo 18 had left it.
She pulled one out, looked at the cover without seeing it, and put it back.
"She was probably a KCA judge or something," Belle said to the shelf. "Like from the Krampus Compliance Authority. She had that whole—" She moved her hand vaguely, indicating that whole thing. "Enforcement energy."
From the workbench, Wise: "Mm."
"Which means she's probably terrifying professionally."
"Mh."
"Which is fine. Completely neutral information about a stranger I will never see again."
"Mm," Wise repeated, and Belle could hear, in that single syllable, the entire rest of the conversation he was not having. The one where he asked a reasonable follow-up question and she said something increasingly incriminating and they eventually arrived at some kind of clarity that Belle was actively fleeing at a brisk pace.
She turned around. "Do we have anything in the action section from the Goldfish Syndicate distributor? I feel like we're low."
Wise looked at her.
"What?”
"Nothing.”
"Stop looking then."
"I'm just sitting here."
"You're sitting there with intent," Belle said. "I can see it. You're storing this for later."
Wise's expression did something very small in the vicinity of the corners of his mouth. "I'm not storing anything."
"You absolutely are. You have a whole—" She pointed at his face. "You have a whole filing cabinet going on right now."
"Belle," he said.
"What?"
He looked at her with the particular fond-exasperated patience of someone who had, once again, been handed a gift they hadn't asked for.
"You have tape inventory to attend to," he said, and opened his laptop.
Belle stood there for one more moment.
Then she turned back to the shelf, pulled out a random VHS, turned it over, and read the back of it with tremendous focus for a woman who was not absorbing a single word.
Dark coat, some part of her brain offered, unhelpfully.
The temperature drops two degrees, it added.
One second, it concluded, with unnecessary precision.
Belle put the tape back.
"I'm getting more coffee," she said.
"You have coffee," Wise said.
"I'm getting different coffee," Belle said, and walked back out the front door into the amber New Eridu afternoon, while behind her Bangboo 18 finished alphabetizing the drama section and Wise sat at the workbench and did not, very deliberately, say anything at all.
The group call started, as it usually did, with nobody's camera properly oriented.
Yuzuha's thumbnail was sideways for a full thirty seconds before she noticed. Lucy's feed came in crystal clear with professional framing, because Lucy treated every video call like she was presenting before a board of directors, even when she was sitting on a crate in the Outer Ring with what appeared to be a boar napping behind her left shoulder. Jane was in some unidentifiable location with bad fluorescent lighting and fast food wrappers visible in the background, which was completely normal for Jane, and she had her chin propped on her hand with the expression of someone who had answered a call she had full information about before it began, which was also completely normal for Jane.
Belle had waited until Wise was occupied with inventory before slipping upstairs. She had then sat on the edge of her bed for four minutes staring at the call button. She was aware this was unhinged. She pressed it anyway.
"Belle!" Yuzuha's face filled one quadrant of the screen, now correctly oriented. She had candy somewhere — her jaw was doing that slow working motion. "I was wondering if you'd call tonight. Something felt auspicious."
"Yuzuha," Lucy said, from her crate. "Not everything is an omen."
"I don't say everything is an omen. I say some things are omens. This—" she pointed at her own screen with emphasis "—felt like one."
"It is not."
"It turned out to be, didn't it? Belle called."
"Belle calls regularly."
"Not on Tuesdays. Belle, do you call on Tuesdays?"
Belle opened her mouth.
"See, she's hesitating," Yuzuha said to Lucy, as if this settled it.
"She's hesitating because you're interrogating her before she's said a single word," Lucy said, and then turned to face the camera with the particular effort she made to look approachable, which was sweet in the way that effort usually is. "Hello, Belle. You look like you have something on your mind."
Jane said nothing. She just watched. This was Jane's baseline state, and it should not have been as unnerving as it was.
"Hi," Belle said. "I don't — I mean. I had a thing happen today. It's not important. I just wanted to talk."
"A thing," Yuzuha repeated, with the tone of someone logging this for later.
"A small thing."
"Things are never small," Yuzuha said. "Small things are just big things that haven't finished arriving yet."
"That is—" Lucy started.
"Statistically supported by folklore from no fewer than—"
"Yuzuha."
"Okay, okay." Yuzuha held up her hands. She was wearing fingerless gloves with little candy wrappers printed on them, which was very on-brand. "Belle. What happened?"
Belle looked at the ceiling of her room for a moment. The familiar shapes of it. The little strip of light from the monitor on her desk. The very, very ordinary room of a very, very ordinary person who had a completely normal and unremarkable day.
"I saw someone," she said.
Three different silences occupied three different quadrants of her screen. They were, notably, three different types of silence. Yuzuha's was the thrilled kind, eyes going wide. Lucy's was the careful kind, reassessing. Jane's was the already-knows kind, which was deeply irritating.
"On the walk back from a Ballet Twins commission," Belle added. "In one of the archways near the commercial district."
"Okay," Yuzuha said, very controlled, which was unusual for Yuzuha, which meant she was trying very hard not to explode.
"And it was just—" Belle gestured vaguely. "She was just standing there. On a call. And I walked past and she looked at me for like a second and then looked away."
Yuzuha erupted. "She looked at you?!"
"For a second. Like a glance."
"A glance is still a look, Belle! A glance means—"
"Yuzuha," Lucy said. "Let her finish."
Yuzuha pressed her lips together.
"It was nothing," Belle said. "It was just that she was. Very." She picked up the pillow next to her and held it. This was not helping her seem like a person who had everything under control. She held it anyway. "She was very something."
"Define something," Jane said. It was the first thing she'd said since the call started. Her voice had the quality it usually had — like she was reading a report on the event and found it mildly interesting.
"You know that thing," Belle said. "When a person walks into a room and just—" she made the vibe-shift gesture, which didn't translate well over video but everyone seemed to understand "—and you can tell they've never had to try to take up space because they just do."
"Oh," Yuzuha said, softly. She had gone from thrilled to something more reverent. "Oh, that is extremely something."
"It was objectively," Belle said. "I'm being objective. I'm a professional. I assess things objectively. And objectively, she was absolutely—"
"Hot," said Jane.
A pause.
"I was going to say striking," Belle said.
"You can say hot," Jane said. "The word exists."
"The word does exist," Yuzuha confirmed. "Very useful word."
"I know the word exists," Belle said. "I use the word regularly. For—" she gestured at nothing "—appropriate things."
"And this was not an appropriate thing?" Jane asked.
"This was a stranger on the street who looked at me for approximately one second and went back to her phone call. The appropriate response to that is to continue walking and complete my commute, which I did."
Lucy had been quiet for a moment, watching this with the expression she got when she was triangulating something. She said, "And then what did you do?"
Belle looked at the pillow in her lap. "Walked home."
"Directly?"
"I got a second coffee."
"Belle."
"I needed a second coffee."
"Did you or did you not walk an extra two blocks in a direction that was not toward home before getting the second coffee?"
A longer pause. "Why would I—"
"Because that's what you do," Lucy said, with the patient certainty of someone who has watched a pattern operate across multiple instances. "When you need a minute to think, you walk. You walked an extra two blocks and then you got a coffee and then you came home and you waited until Wise was busy and now you're calling us."
Belle looked at her. "Sometimes I think you're terrifying," she said.
"Lady Lucy," Lucy agreed, without particular modesty.
"She's right though," Yuzuha said, swiveling to face Lucy's quadrant admiringly. "That was really good. Okay—" she turned back to Belle with renewed energy "—tell us about her. Describe the whole thing. What did she look like?"
"I don't want to make a whole thing of it."
"You called us at—" Yuzuha checked something offscreen "—nine forty-seven on a Tuesday to tell us you saw a woman and felt feelings. This is already a whole thing, Belle."
"I don't have feelings. I have an observation. About an attractive person."
"Which you have been turning over in your head," Jane said, "for approximately seven hours."
"Five," Belle said, automatically, and then heard herself and said, "It's been a normal amount of time. I had a commission. And dinner."
"And the second coffee," Lucy said.
"And the second coffee, yes, can we—"
"What was she wearing?" Yuzuha said.
Belle closed her eyes briefly. "A long coat. Very dark, like — like a shadow but better. Long, down to about down there … like it was designed to be dramatic."
"It sounds," Yuzuha said, "incredibly dramatic."
"It was somewhat dramatic. In a very — understated way."
"That's the best kind of dramatic," Yuzuha said.
"Her hair was covering one eye," Belle continued, because she had apparently decided to just describe it now, like pulling a bandage off, just get it done. "And the other eye was—" she paused. "You know how some people look at you like you're a problem they haven't decided whether to solve yet?"
Three faces across the call did slightly different things in response to this. Yuzuha pressed both hands to her face. Lucy raised both eyebrows in a single synchronized motion of someone revising their assessment upward considerably. Jane looked, for a half-second, like she was going to say something, and then chose not to, which was its own kind of damning.
"She looked at me like that," Belle said. "For one second. And then went back to her phone call."
The silence that followed had weight.
"Belle," Yuzuha said, through her hands.
"What?"
"You are suffering."
"I am not suffering. I'm relaying an anecdote about—"
"You called us on a Tuesday."
"People call their friends on Tuesdays, Yuzuha, that's not—"
"You're hugging a pillow," Lucy said.
Belle looked down at the pillow. She put it to the side, which was a mistake, because now she had nothing to do with her hands, so she picked it back up.
"What was she doing," Jane said, "when you saw her."
"I told you. Phone call."
"What was she saying?"
Belle hesitated. This felt like a test. "Something about a compliance report and a midnight deadline. And — Zhao."
Jane tilted her head approximately four degrees. "Purple coat, one eye obscured, discussing KCA compliance windows by name at three in the afternoon while dangerously close to the Ballet Twins Hollow."
"I didn't say it was KCA—"
"You said the window closes at midnight, and you just name-dropped Zhao," Jane's voice hadn't changed but her eyes had gotten slightly more present, the way they did when she was assembling something. "That's KCA language. Standard enforcement window for regulatory filings."
"Do you know who she is?" Belle said, before she could catch herself.
A pause. Jane looked at her. Then she smiled — not broadly, just a small controlled thing that was somehow worse than a broad smile because of what it implied about what Jane knew and wasn't saying yet.
"I know of several people it might be," Jane said. "Ballet Twins, KCA contacts, that kind of presence." She let the word presence sit there.
"Stop enjoying this," Belle said.
"I'm not enjoying anything. I'm being informative."
"You're being informative enjoyably," Belle said. "Which is different."
"Bell-le," Yuzuha said, elongating the syllable in a way that communicated she had been physically restraining herself and could no longer do so. "Did you want to find her again? Like — is that a thing you want? Because if you don't know her name I can post on the Spook Shack forum, like, a description, and—"
"Please do not post a description of a woman I made eye contact with on the Spook Shack forum," Belle said.
"The forum is very discreet—"
"The forum posted a forty-page thread about the mystery of who left a half-eaten onigiri outside the Faunus Quarter community board."
"That was legitimate investigation," Yuzuha said, with dignity. "There were fingerprints. There were—"
"No forum posts," Belle said. "Nobody is doing anything. I am going to go to sleep and wake up tomorrow and this will be an anecdote that I tell you once and never again." She paused. "Which I maybe should not have told you about in the first place."
"You definitely should have," Yuzuha said. "This is the best thing that's happened on a Tuesday in months."
"Something is wrong with your concept of 'good things,'" Belle said.
"And something is wrong with your concept of 'fine,'" Lucy said, and her voice had that particular gentleness it got when she was being sincere instead of formal, the softness underneath the Montefio bearing. "It's okay, you know. To be affected by a person."
Belle looked at her.
"You don't have to call it a neutral aesthetic observation," Lucy said. "It doesn't have to be architecture."
A pause. "Wise said the same thing. Not exactly but—"
"Wise says things," Lucy said, "and then he files them."
"He absolutely files them," Belle agreed. "He has an entire cabinet."
"Siblings," Lucy said, with a sighing comprehension born of being an only child who had somehow accumulated a whole found family anyway.
"Siblings," Belle agreed.
On her side of the call, Yuzuha had gone slightly quiet — which was, for Yuzuha, the equivalent of someone else going very quiet. She was doing the thing she sometimes did, where you could see the story-brain working, connecting things in ways that weren't always wrong. She said, "Belle."
"What."
"What if it wasn't a one-time thing?"
"What does that mean?"
"I mean," Yuzuha said, slowly, like she was feeling out whether to say this, "New Eridu is not actually that big. And if she's dealing with KCA compliance in the Ballet Twins, she probably has reasons to be in the Ballet Twins. And you have reasons to be in the Ballet Twins because you take commissions there. And sometimes—" she spread her hands "—the city gives you a second look."
The room was quiet for a moment.
"That is," Belle said, "a very Yuzuha thing to say."
"I'm a very Yuzuha person," Yuzuha agreed.
"It's also," Belle said, more quietly, "completely irresponsible to think about."
"Nobody said think responsibly," Yuzuha said. "I said the city sometimes gives you a second look."
Jane, who had been watching all of this with the quality of someone watching a very familiar film she had already correctly predicted the ending of, uncapped something — a pen, possibly — and tapped it once against whatever surface she was sitting near. She said, "For what it's worth."
Everyone looked at her quadrant.
"Long coat, KCA compliance language, Ballet Twins at three PM." She tapped again. "I'll look into it."
"Jane," Belle said.
"Professionally. As a matter of general intelligence gathering."
"You are not—"
"It would be irresponsible," Jane said, with a completely straight face, "not to know who is operating in that district with those connections. From a public safety perspective."
"You are doing this to be—"
"I'm doing this," Jane said, "because you called us on a Tuesday and you're still hugging that pillow."
Belle looked down.
She was, in fact, still hugging the pillow.
"I hate all of you," she said, without heat, the way you say things to people you have called on a Tuesday at nine forty-seven because you needed somewhere to put the static in your chest and these were, annoyingly and without question, the people you trusted with it.
"We know," Yuzuha said warmly. "Good night, Belle."
"Good night," Lucy said, and her screen clicked off first, which was a Lucy thing, decisive and clean.
Jane's feed lingered for one more moment. She looked at Belle through the screen slowly, seeming to record things as she so often did. She said nothing. She smiled the small controlled smile again. Then she clicked off too, and Belle was left with only Yuzuha's quadrant still open.
Yuzuha was grinning. Not the explosive kind. The fond, private kind that she kept for people she had decided to care about, which was a list she apparently could not stop adding to.
"She's going to be so pretty," Yuzuha said. "The person you haven't found yet."
"I found her once," Belle said, before her brain caught up with her mouth.
Yuzuha's grin widened. She reached for her screen.
"Good night, Belle," she said again, and the call went dark.
Belle sat in her room. The Inter-Knot light from her monitor. The familiar ceiling. Bangboo 18 making small organizing sounds a floor down. Wise, probably, still at the workbench, filing things in the cabinet.
She put the pillow down.
She lay on her back and looked at the ceiling for a while.
Dark coat.
She closed her eyes.
The temperature drops two degrees.
She pulled the actual blanket up.
One second, her brain offered, with the same precise, useless fidelity it had maintained all evening.
"I know," Belle said, to no one.
The store hummed quietly below her. New Eridu went on being amber and industrial and beautiful outside the window. Somewhere outside, probably, a midnight compliance deadline had either been met or hadn't, and either way it was someone else's problem, and the woman in the long coat was somewhere in this city doing whatever it was she did in the hours when the rest of the world was filing toward sleep.
Belle closed her eyes.
Her phone lit up once on the nightstand. A message from an unsaved contact that had sent her a single Inter-Knot link with no text. The link resolved to a public records profile — a name, a position, a listed office.
Below it, a message from Jane.
You're welcome.
Belle stared at the ceiling.
"I hate her," she said.
She did not close the tab.
The name in Jane's link was Promeia.
No surname listed. Just the one name, the way certain people have — the way people have when the single name is already doing more work than most names do in pairs. The public record was sparse: Judge, Krampus Compliance Authority. A listed professional contact channel that Belle looked at for ten seconds and absolutely did not save.
She closed the tab.
She opened it again.
She closed it again and went to sleep, or attempted to, which was a different thing that her brain performed a reasonable imitation of for approximately seven hours before she woke up at six-fifteen to the sound of Bangboo 18 moving boxes.
Promeia, her brain offered, with the cheerful persistence of a process that had been running in the background all night.
Belle put a pillow over her face.
She didn't go back to the Ballet Twins. She was sensible about it. She had commissions in the Hollow Garden district for three days running — standard work, nothing unusual, hollows and corrupted zones and the ordinary choreography of a Proxy who knew what they were doing. She came home. She ate dinner. She helped Wise update their commission board. A normal person doing normal person things.
She did not, at any point, open the closed tab again.
On the fourth day, Eous dropped a new request into their queue. Short-form commission, Ballet Twins, compliance clearance, routine stuff. The kind of job she could do in ninety minutes with her eyes half-open.
Belle looked at the request for a long moment.
She took it.
This was, she told herself, purely a professional decision based on the commission fee and her familiarity with the district layout. She was good at the Ballet Twins. She had done six jobs there this month alone. There was nothing unusual about this. She was a Proxy and this was a commission and she had normal, healthy, professional reasons to accept it.
She went to the bathroom, fixed her hair, came back out, and then stood in the middle of the store for a moment trying to remember what she'd gone to the bathroom for.
"You look fine," Wise said, from behind the counter, without looking up from whatever he was reading.
Belle left without dignifying this.
The commission took sixty-three minutes.
Standard Ethereal Realm incursion. Belle's runner retrieved the file. Belle cleared the route. Everything was textbook. She emerged into the afternoon light feeling the normal post-commission clarity, the specific satisfaction of a thing being solved, and she thought: good. Done. Home.
She had made it approximately forty feet when she heard the voice.
Not the same phone call. A different conversation — shorter, lower, in the middle of something. But the same voice, the same register, with the same quality of someone who had never once said a sentence they hadn't already decided to say.
Belle's legs stopped.
It was a different archway this time, but the same general geometry — a recessed entrance to some building with frosted glass and lobby plants and no signs that told you who worked or had worked there. The woman — Promeia — was finishing something on her phone. Same coat. Same hair. Same complete and utter indifference to the material world.
Belle stood on the pavement fifteen feet away and conducted a rapid internal audit.
Options: Walk past normally. Walk past on the other side of the street. Turn around and walk back the way she came, which would look strange but would accomplish the goal of not — of being somewhere else. Or: continue standing exactly where she was, like a person who had just received a faint electrical shock and had not yet completed the process of recovering from it.
She was currently doing option four. She noted this.
Walk, she told her legs. I gave you an instruction. Execute the instruction!!
Promeia closed her flip phone.
She looked up.
The look swept across the street in a single efficient pass — the casual surveillance of someone who was always, on some level, accounting for their environment — and it landed on Belle.
Stopped.
Belle's entire cardiovascular system had a brief conversation with her nervous system that she was not party to.
Because this was not the one-second glance from four days ago. This was recognition. The look of someone seeing a specific thing they have filed and are now retrieving. Promeia's visible eye — pale, precise, with an expression that communicated I have no interest in performing warmth for your benefit — stayed on Belle for a beat longer than a stranger warranted.
Then, with the ease of someone accustomed to being the most controlled person in any given room, she moved.
Not away. Toward.
Belle's brain made a sound like a modem connecting.
Promeia walked across the pavement as though she had a scheduled appointment with it. Her coat moved the way Belle had spent four days not thinking about. She stopped approximately three feet away — close enough to speak without raising her voice, far enough to communicate that proximity was a thing she controlled — and she looked at Belle with the specific, patient blankness of someone who is accustomed to waiting for other people to begin speaking.
"Proxy," she said.
It was not a question.
Belle heard her own voice say, "Yes," and it sounded almost like someone who had prepared for this.
Promeia did not blink. "Sector seven of the east commercial block?"
"That was — yes. I just finished."
"Efficient." This was delivered as a statement of observed fact with no particular warmth attached to it, the way you might say overcast when describing the weather.
Belle stared at her. "I — yeah. Thanks. It went fine."
"I know. I reviewed the post-clearance log." A pause that lasted exactly as long as it needed to and no longer. "The KCA has a standing interest in that block. I like knowing who is working in it."
I like knowing, Belle thought, and her brain unhelpfully supplied the word like in that voice, in that register, and did something deeply irresponsible with it.
"That makes sense," Belle said, like a normal professional.
Promeia looked at her for another moment. She had, Belle noticed, the quality of someone for whom silence was a tool they were very comfortable holding. She wasn't filling it. She was just — standing in it. Waiting to see what Belle did with it.
What Belle did with it was: talk.
"I — we do a lot of work in this district. My brother and I. So if there are — if the KCA has ongoing interests here, it would probably make sense to have some kind of — a standing communication channel. So that there's no overlap. Or friction. Between, you know, KCA operations and Proxy work." She heard herself. "Professionally."
Promeia regarded her.
"Professionally," she repeated, in a tone that was entirely flat and entirely impossible to read.
"Yes," Belle said. "As a — as an operational efficiency thing."
"You want to exchange contact information?”
A pause. "That is what I'm suggesting, yes."
Another pause, this one slightly longer, during which Promeia looked at her with the expression of someone running a calculation. Belle had the distinct impression of being assessed very efficiently by something that assessed things for a living. It was not a comfortable feeling. It was also, and she could not do anything about this, a feeling she wanted to survive and describe to three separate people later.
Promeia reached into her coat pocket. She produced a card — matte black, thick stock, minimal text — and held it out.
Belle took it. Their fingers did not touch. This should have been unremarkable. It was, somehow, not unremarkable.
"Direct channel," Promeia said. "Not the public KCA line." She said this the way she seemed to say most things, which was without emphasis, letting the information sit and not explaining its implications. "If you encounter any further irregularities in the sector, use it."
"Right," Belle said. "Yes. I'll — yes."
Promeia looked at her for one more moment.
Then she turned and walked back toward the building entrance, coat moving, without looking back, in the manner of someone who had completed a task and filed it appropriately.
Belle stood on the pavement and held a matte black business card and watched her go.
The door closed.
The street went back to being an ordinary afternoon in New Eridu — amber and industrial and full of people who were, every single one of them, unaware of what had just happened.
Belle looked down at the card.
Promeia. KCA District Judge. Direct line.
That was it. No first name. No second name. Just the one, doing all the work.
Belle put the card in her jacket pocket very carefully, the way you put something down when you don't want it to move.
Then she walked away. She walked at a normal pace, approximately. She walked in the direction of home, mostly, with only one unplanned deviation that she corrected after half a block. She put her hands in her pockets and kept them there because they were doing something they didn't need to be doing. She breathed in the amber New Eridu air and she thought, with total clarity, I have to call someone immediately, and then thought, I cannot call anyone because I will explode, and these two things were both true.
She made it back to Sixth Street.
She pushed open the door to Random Play. The bell chimed.
Wise looked up from the counter.
He looked at her face.
He set his pen down.
"What happened?”
"Nothing," Belle said.
"Belle."
"Nothing happened. I finished the commission and I came home. Everything is fine." She walked to the back of the store. She stood facing the tape shelves. She pulled a random VHS out, looked at it, and put it back.
"You look," Wise said, carefully, "like you did that time you almost fell off the scaffolding in the Hollow Garden district, except you're not bleeding."
"I'm fine."
"Your ears are red."
Belle's hands came up briefly toward her ears and then redirected to the shelf. "They're not."
"Both of them."
"Wise."
"I'm just — I'm reporting what I'm seeing."
She turned around. He was leaning on the counter with both forearms, watching her with the patience of someone who had, at this point, opened a second cabinet just for this particular ongoing situation.
"I talked to her," Belle said.
The counter became very still.
"She — she came over. She knew who I was. Phaethon, she knew — the KCA tracks Proxy activity in that sector, so she — she approached me. And we talked." Belle's voice was doing something that she recognized and could not prevent. "She gave me her card. Her direct line."
Wise said nothing for a moment. Then: "She gave you her personal contact?”
"Direct line. KCA business. Professionally."
"Right."
"She said to use it if there were operational irregularities in the sector."
"Right."
"That's all it was."
Wise picked up his pen. He looked at it. He set it down again. "What was she like?"
Belle stared at the middle distance for a moment.
"You know how some people are — they're just. They don't explain themselves. They don't — they're not performing anything. They're just completely— like there's no—" she made a gesture with her hand that meant gap between inside and outside, between the thing they are and the thing they present. "She just is. Like a fact."
Wise was very carefully not having an expression.
"And she knew exactly how the comission went," Belle continued, with a conviction that had started as professional admiration and had not stayed there. "She'd reviewed the post-clearance log. She checks her district. She pays attention." A pause. "She has a really good coat."
"You mentioned the coat before," Wise said.
"I'm mentioning it again. It warranted a second mention." Belle looked at the ceiling. "She said efficient. That was her — that was basically a compliment. From her. It felt like one. Is that insane? Am I—"
"You're not insane," Wise said.
"She uses the word like — like, I like knowing. She actually said that. And she said it like it meant something but you couldn't tell what the something was because her face doesn't—" Belle stopped. Put both hands over her face briefly. "This is a disaster."
"It sounds like it went well," Wise said.
"It went — I fumbled words, Wise. I said the word professionally twice in the same exchange about exchanging contact information. She noticed. I could tell she noticed. She repeated it back to me."
"Did she seem bothered by it?"
Belle thought about the pause. The calculation. The card, produced from a coat pocket with the unhurried certainty of a person who doesn't second-guess their own movements.
"No," Belle said, and she wasn't sure what to do with that.
Wise picked his pen back up. He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, in the particular gentle-neutral tone he used when he was making an observation he thought was important enough to risk: "You have her number."
Belle's hand went, involuntarily, to the jacket pocket where the card was.
"For KCA operational coordination," she said.
"Sure," Wise said.
The store was quiet. Bangboo 18 made a small contented sound from somewhere in the drama section. The afternoon light came through the window at its usual angle, falling across the display cases in the way it always did, on an afternoon that was like all other afternoons except that it wasn't.
Belle pulled the card out and looked at it again.
Matte black. Minimal. Direct line.
She was going to text her. She knew she was going to text her. She was going to sit with the card for three to five days doing nothing with it and then she was going to find a completely legitimate professional reason, and she was going to text her.
And then what, she had no idea. She was choosing not to think about and then what.
"I'm going upstairs," Belle said.
"Dinner's in an hour."
"I know."
"Bangboo 18 made something with the leftover—"
"I'll be down in an hour," Belle said, and walked to the stairs, and climbed them, and sat on her bed, and held the card between both hands like it was a thing she was trying not to drop.
Her phone lit up. A message from Yuzuha. No context, just: ⁉️
Then, three seconds later, one from Lucy: Well?
Then, from Jane, only: .
Belle looked at the ceiling.
She typed back to all three: I'll call tonight.
Yuzuha replied immediately with seven different emojis in no particular order. Lucy replied with a single acknowledgment. Jane replied with nothing, which meant she was already thinking about it, which was somehow both reassuring and terrible.
Belle set her phone down.
She set the card on her nightstand.
She lay back and closed her eyes, and the city went on around her, amber and loud and quietly electric, and somewhere in the street a woman in a dark coat was walking back into a building with frosted glass and lobby plants, probably already having filed this entire encounter and moved on to the next thing, probably not sitting on the edge of her professional composure thinking about the word efficient.
Probably.
Belle picked up her phone and opened the closed tab.
Promeia. KCA District Judge.
She closed the tab.
She was fine.