“They are watching. Trust the one who walks between.”
The handwriting scratched at something deep in her memory, an itch she couldn’t scratch. But before she could puzzle over it further, her commlink buzzed. Sam Riaz. Another case.
Father Gabriel Moreau had been no ordinary priest. Once a corporate Hermetic researcher, he'd abandoned that world to protect disenfranchised metahumans and runaway Awakened youth. His small chapel in the Bayou district had served as a refuge for those who had nowhere else to go.
And now he was dead.
The crime scene was brutal. A soul-bound ritual blade had ended Moreau’s life, leaving behind a scorched, hollowed-out husk where his heart should have been. Sam was already examining the scene, his usual skepticism buried beneath his frustration.
“Whoever did this wasn’t just looking to kill,” he muttered. “They wanted to make a point.”
Nearby, Rafael "Raf" Delgado, a street shaman Moreau had been mentoring, hovered with fists clenched. “Spider,” he growled. “It was Delacroix. Moreau was gonna expose his racket. That’s why he’s dead.”
Lucien "Spider" Delacroix, an enforcer with connections to the underworld and corporate-backed illicit arcano-tech rings. If Raf was right, Moreau had been on the verge of uncovering something huge—something that cost him his life.
Phoenix felt the air ripple. Something left behind. She stepped closer, stretching her awareness toward the residual energies clinging to the ritual site.
And then she saw it.
A flicker of movement. A trace of a signature—not just from the killer, but from something else. Something she was supposed to remember.
On the way out of the Bayou, she ran into Armand Leclair, an old, eccentric mage who watched her with unsettling familiarity.
“You’re looking in the wrong places,” he murmured, eyes gleaming. “Moreau knew something. And now he’s gone. How many times are you going to let history repeat itself?”
Phoenix frowned. “Do I know you?”
Leclair chuckled, shaking his head. “Not yet. But you will. Just listen to your instincts.”
Before she could press him for answers, he was gone.
Moreau’s hidden safehouse contained something unexpected—a small, pulsing shard nestled among his artifacts. It hummed with a faint energy that made Phoenix’s skin prickle.
“Another shard?” Sam asked, watching her reaction.
Phoenix hesitated. It looked like one of her soul shards—but something was off. The energy signature wasn’t quite the same.
Raf, eyes still burning with grief and anger, cut in. “This is proof. Moreau was protecting something bigger. We need to hit Spider now before he disappears.”
But something tugged at Phoenix’s senses. Another presence. A whisper of something wrong in the next room.
In the farthest corner of the safehouse, they found her—a young woman in a near-catatonic state, eyes flickering with glitched-out AR overlays that shouldn’t exist.
Phoenix reached out instinctively, tracing the aura around the girl. Instead of the astral plane, her essence was somehow caught between the physical world and the Matrix.
That shouldn’t be possible.
Sam exhaled sharply. “We need Maya.”
Maya wasn’t thrilled to be dragged into a crime scene, but when she scanned the girl’s digital patterns, her smile faded.
“This isn’t hacking,” she whispered. “This is… something else.”
A deep frown settled on her face as she sifted through the layers of corrupted data intertwined with magical residue.
“Someone did this to her,” Maya muttered. “They’re trying to bridge something between the astral and the digital. But it’s unstable. If we don’t fix it, she’s gonna come apart.”
With Maya and Phoenix working together, they managed to stabilize the girl’s condition—but she didn’t wake up. Before slipping back into unconsciousness, she uttered a single phrase:
"They know you're looking."
Raf’s anger finally boiled over. When he received a message saying Spider had taken one of the runaways hostage, he stormed off alone.
Phoenix and Sam arrived just as Spider was ordering Raf to prove his loyalty by executing Phoenix.
Instead, Raf hesitated. Spider turned his gun on him instead.
Time slowed. Phoenix felt the energy beneath the old church—the ley lines, the lingering power of past rituals, the ghosts of the forgotten.
Without thinking, she reached out and twisted reality.
A wave of fire erupted around Spider, an illusion so powerful he stumbled back in pure terror. In his mind, he saw something else in Phoenix’s place—something ancient and monstrous.
That was all Raf needed. The shaman struck, sending a surge of force at Spider, knocking him to the ground.
Before Raf could land the killing blow, Phoenix stopped him. “This isn’t what Moreau would have wanted.”
Through gritted teeth, Raf relented. Sam cuffed Spider, but his smug expression made Phoenix uneasy.
“You think this ends with me?” Spider rasped. “You have no idea how deep this goes.”
With Spider in custody, the case seemed closed. But Phoenix knew better. Moreau had known something dangerous. And the shard in his stash wasn’t hers—but it was connected to her.
That night, she found another message waiting for her. This time, the handwriting was different.
"You are not alone. But you need to remember before it’s too late."
Turning the note over, she found a glowing sigil, faint but unmistakable.
A piece of her past. A warning. And a promise.
