I come home like people come back from small wars: smelling of smoke, rosemary, and the faint, indignant static of a helicopter's hair. The hideout greets me with the sort of ordinary comforts criminals build around themselves — a kettle that has learned to forgive me, Jess's tangled headphones like a domestic crown, and Raven pretending he isn't a black hole of loyalty wrapped in fur. The Meridian Compass sits in my bag like a smug animal. It buzzes in a way that says everything and nothing useful.
I peel the mask off in the stairwell because melodrama is best served in small, private portions. The porcelain leaves a cool ghost on my skin and for one delicious second I am not the thing the city talks about in hushed, scandalized tones. I am just a woman with a ridiculous haircut and an alarming number of bruises that will make excellent stories later.
Jess has the kettle going. She always has the kettle going. She has learned the rhythms—feeds, loops, emergency improvisations—and she reserves a small, furious tenderness for us both. When she looks up, she is all professional calm and the inside of her is an inferno that keeps me alive.
"You look like you rode a goat across a thunderstorm," she says, which is her way of being kind.
"I prefer 'dramatically inconvenienced,'" I answer, dumping the Compass on the table like a guilty sun.
Raven pads forward and inspects the prize the way a proper sentinel inspects contraband. He gives it a perfunctory sniff and then a look that reads, roughly: Nice; please don't let this thing make breakfast an existential crisis.
We are a wrung-out constellation: Noctis in the corner smoothing maps as if folding paper can flatten panic, Reven chewing a protein bar and trying not to make it look like he's replaying how hard he nearly had to actually kill anything, Mara offering pastries because compassion is her preferred weapon.
The room is full of small sounds: the kettle, the creak of the old floor, the low satisfied murmur of machines that have served us well. I could fall into the couch and sleep like the dead, or I could do the thing I always do after a near-heart-attack: apologize.
"Sorry," I say to everyone and everything, the word carrying more baggage than a traveling minstrel.
Jess snorts. "You mean 'sorry I forced you to invent new curses for municipal systems.'" Her eyes soften. "But—thank you. For not being a headline screaming murderer."
"Headline would have been dramatic," I muse. "Less useful."
She taps a spoon against the mug she's filling for me. "You could stop being a dramatic thing sometimes."
I laugh and it comes out half-sob and half-trumpet. The truth: I could stop. The truth also: I would be bored senseless if I tried. There is a difference between choice and habit, and mine has a flair for the theatrical.
Noctis clears his throat. "We should file a coordinated repair request with the municipal surveillance network before the admin notices the gaps."
Reven grunts. "Or we celebrate our minor victory by not being punctual."
Mara slides a pastry across the table with the ease of someone who understands that pastries are both diplomacy and bribe. I eat, because even legends need carbs.
When the adrenaline subsides, the edges of things peel back and the quieter truths settle in. I catch myself staring at the mask in the velvet box. It seems neither pleased nor ashamed—only patient, the way a cat is patient on the brink of asking for more attention. It hums with possibility, and sometimes that hum is an interrogation.
"Did it act up?" Jess asks, causing Raven to twitch with the internal radar only shapeshifters and battered dogs possess.
"Not like last time," I say. "It — resisted being worn by one fool. It preferred me."
That sentence sits in the air like a thrown coin. We are all people who know the rules: artifacts choose, bargains bite, apologies are sometimes forms of currency. But there's a difference between the mask acting possessive and the world deciding to be theatrical. Last night felt like an encore where the house lights blinked on and off just to hear itself gasp.
Jess studies me, magnifier eyes and all. "You okay?" she asks, but not in the way people ask when they mean "clerk of concern." She asks like the engineer she is: precise, ready to diagnose.
"I am fine," I lie politely and then tell the truth immediately after because that's how I prefer to be faulty. "I'm tired. And a little annoyed at the universe's timing."
She hands me the mug and I take it like contraband. The warmth steadies fingers that have been used as tools far too long. "Promise me one thing," she says. "Call me before you do anything that involves airborne furniture."
I want to roll my eyes into another arrondissement, but instead I nod. "Promise."
The knot in my ribs eases by the thickness of pastry and voice. Promises to Jess are not perfunctory. They are stakes. She'll keep me alive for reasons finer than common sense; I'll keep her amused so she doesn't implode from being too sensible.
After the quiet fills for a beat, I wander out onto the small balcony. The city looks like a spilled map tonight: lights and arteries, occasional sirens stitched two blocks away. I feel the tug again—the small, private thing that has been threading through my days since the reliquary: Echo. The name presses at corners of my thinking like a curious finger.
I had touched the glass and heard a hum that felt like attention, not threat. It answered like a living thing. A thing that remembers. A thing that repeats.
"What was that?" Mara asks from the doorway; she has that look—curiosity boxed in a smile. She doesn't pry because she knows to wait for what is offered.
"Echo," I say, and the word tastes different on my tongue now than when I read it on a pew label. It feels like a promise and a question. "It hummed when I tapped the case. It—felt alive."
Mara sits beside me and watches the city, the way people watch the sea without knowing the current's name. "That sounds like trouble," she says, grinning despite herself.
"It is trouble that listens," I murmur. Trouble that listens can be useful. Trouble that listens also knows what you said when you thought no one was listening.
Raven nosed my hand and I let him. The wolf's warmth is the unarguable fact I return to when metaphors grow teeth. He is steady, a reminder that someone will always be at the edge holding space for me.
I think of the thief and his brief, hysterical worship when the mask fed him a thousand voices. The mask is jealous; artifacts often are. But there's a different current under that possessiveness, a deeper pull when Echo's name telescoped into reality. The relic in the church that shares a word with my own private storms might not just be a curiosity. It might be an instrument. It might be a ledger. It might be the next thing that rearranges who we are.
I do not share everything aloud because secrecy is a tool we wield with ridiculous finesse. Some things I keep as a private, dangerous hunger. But I also don't want to keep Jess in the dark — not because she deserves it but because she would forgive me less if I kept secrets and then tripped.
"Tomorrow," I say finally, "I go back. We'll do it clean—recon, not robbery. I want to know what Echo answers to."
Jess blinks. "You're planning to flirt with relics in a church. Cute plan."
"It's research," I correct. "And confessionals make good listening posts."
No one laughs at that, because confessionals do make good listening posts and because we all know how my jokes age badly when gods are concerned.
Night thins into morning like a good curtain call. We prep the Compass for a safer hiding place and tape over any obvious tracking runes—old habits; older than some municipal bylaws. Reven disappears for a bit to grease a contact. Noctis writes three versions of a travel route and folds them like prayers. Mara practices a look she thinks will distract a particularly officious sacristan. Jess updates her loops with the kind of meticulous love only hackers and librarians possess.
I tuck a card into the Fool's corner of my pocket—small superstition, big comfort. I think about masks and mirrors and the strange staging of my life. I touch the small scar at my thumb, the one that's a catalog of ridiculous choices, and smile. Not everything gets fixed with swagger; some things require the quieter courage of showing up again.
"Stay safe," Jess says as we leave, which reads like a plea and a benediction.
"You too," I return, because she needs fewer adventures of the dramatic variety and more sunrises that involve pastries and not helicopters.
As we step into the city, I feel the seam between Eclipse and Elara tug, as if the two halves are passing a note: be loud when necessary; be kind when possible. The mask hums in its hidden place, patient and pleased by the tiny stirrings we make. Echo's name sits like a new card in the deck, folded and waiting for its reveal.
Whatever it is, it is not content to be a footnote. And neither, I think with equal parts dread and delight, am I.