Hayes refilled his coffee mug and settled into his office. He reviewed his interview list and called Aidan Sterling.

  “Hello, Mr. Sterling, this is Detective Jubal Hayes, Destiny Pointe PD. I hope I’m not disturbing your Christmas Eve.”

  “No, it’s fine,” said Aidan. “Why are you calling?”

  “I’m following up on the John Wallace case. Neil Ames mentioned that your mother may have set aside a box of her research file for him awhile back. I’m wondering did he receive those files?

  Aidan sighed. “Yes, a few months ago. I found it when I was decluttering her possessions. She had written “For Wallace” on top the box. I didn’t open it; I just delivered it to him.

  “Thank you very much for your time, Mr. Sterling. You’ve been very helpful. Merry Christmas.”

  Hayes made a note about the conversation. Then he called Sloane Everly.

  Her voicemail chirped, bright as glass: “I’m out of town for the holidays. Grieving privately. Leave a message.”

  Hayes muttered, “Privately, my ass.” Left his name and number, no details.

  Hayes let himself into his apartment, the cold giving way to the resinous green smell he’d enjoyed all month. Tall and freshly cut, the Christmas tree stood by the window, filling the room with the scent of pine. He’d brought it home the day after Thanksgiving, and it still filled the room like a living thing.

  Handmade ornaments hung from its branches: carved wood, knitted bells, blown-glass baubles he’d picked up at Christmas fairs. He turned the lights on, a soft golden glow, and stood a moment with the smell of pine and cinnamon warming the air. His girls would tease him, because he was more excited by Christmas than they were.

  He changed into a flannel shirt, poured hot chocolate into his OCTANE mug, flipped on the radio, and carols filled the room with brass and harmony. Then he sat, turned on A Christmas Carol, and let the familiar story flicker across the screen.

  But his thoughts weren’t with Scrooge. They circled around Rucker and why he chose to expose something about Wallace.

  What did Wallace do? He wondered. What did Rucker have on him?

  Chapter 27

  Kozo Tanaka arrived early for Octavia’s Kyoto Christmas Eve dinner, practically bouncing in his indoor slippers as he helped his guest ease off her boots at the genkan. “Ms. Octavia!” he called down the corridor, his usual calm edged with excitement. “I brought someone I want you to meet!”

  He glanced at the girl beside him, tugging at her sleeve. “Come on. You’ll like her. I promise.”

  The sound of a faint, steady hum of calibrated circuitry approached them before the pools of corridor lights illuminated a fleeting glimpse of a draped cashmere wrap over black tailored loungewear that moved like a second skin.

  Octavia Clarke stepped into view, shoulder-length blond hair feathered into soft layers. Her sapphire eyes flicked between Kozo and the girl. She moved like a conductor, her cane’s subtle whir syncing to her stride. Step, hum, anchor, release.

  “Please,” she said, voice smooth as aged scotch. “Come in. Make yourselves at home.”

  Kozo gestured toward the young woman beside him. “This is Penelope Jones. An artist. A real one. We met at AnimeJapan … by chance, I thought. But now … I’m not so sure.”

  He looked back at Penelope, his eyes shining with a mixture of earnest pride and a touch of reckless abandon, aware of the emotional risk he was taking. “Her manga … It sees things. I mean that. It’s like another dimension bleeding through.”

  Penelope shifted. Her cardigan hung loose, sleeves tugged down over her hands. She clutched a sketchbook to her chest as if it might vanish if she let go.

  “And she’s beautiful,” Kozo added, softer now. “In an earth spirit kind of way.”

  Octavia laughed. “Kozo, you’ve gone full poet.”

  She turned her attention fully to the girl. Slight. Willowy. Wavy ginger hair twisted into a loose bun. Ink-stained sleeves. Soft blue-gray eyes that never settled on any one thing. Behind them, years of watchfulness. A subtle tension in her posture, as though the world had taught her to move furtively, always one step from vanishing.

  Kozo isn’t wrong. There is something about her.

  “Merry Christmas,” Octavia said, tone warm but measured. “And welcome, Penelope.”

  Penelope dipped her head but said nothing.

  The rhythmic tapping of Neil’s fingers on his phone came from a low bench just off the kitchen. He sat facing the narrow courtyard garden, lost in concentration. Octavia knew who was on the receiving end of his texts. Athena Sailto.

  He’d grown quieter since finding the photograph in Katherine Sterling’s journal. Athena’s husband, Kurt Devlin, was alive in that image, standing vigilant in the bright Singapore sun. Construction workers had discovered his body. Police had recovered his remains from the upper beam of a bridge in Kallang Bahru.

  “Hello, Mr. Ames,” Kozo called brightly toward the courtyard.

  Silence.

  “He’s working,” Octavia said’ “And eager to talk to you.”

  Kozo blinked and swallowed. “About what?”

  She smiled. “You’ll find out.”

  Octavia’s eyes fell upon Penelope’s sketchbook, edges worn, pages bowed. “So, now I have two artists under my roof,” she said, casting a glance toward Neil. “Be warned, he has a habit of sketching people mid-conversation. It’s flattery by ambush.”

  Penelope gave the barest nod of acknowledgment, a flicker of a smile tugging at one corner of her mouth.

  Octavia turned to Kozo. “Still wired in?” she asked, nodding toward the laptop case on his shoulder.

  He gave a sheepish smile. “Always.”

  “Tea or cider?” she asked. “Your choices tonight are traditional or festive.”

  “Tea for me,” Kozo said. “Thank you, Ms. Octavia.”

  “Cider, please,” Penelope added, voice soft but steady.

  Octavia nodded and turned toward the kitchen.

  “The sitting room’s warm,” she said. “And the garden lights just came on. If the wind stays down, they reflect off the koi pond like candlelight.”

  Kozo’s encrypted phone buzzed sharply as they moved forward. His face tightened.

  “Excuse me,” he said quickly, already retreating down the corridor, fingers moving fast.

  Penelope hesitated, then drifted toward the sitting room, her sketchbook still clutched tight, a shield of paper and ink.

  Octavia lingered at the edge of the hall, watching the girl walk into the room. Then she whispered under her breath, “I wonder …”

  Neil drifted through Octavia Clarke’s Kyoto house, away from the clink of dishware and murmured greetings. The corridor narrowed, walls paneled in pale Japanese cypress, its smooth grain catching the light like water over stone. The scent was sharp and clean, like lemon peeled with a steel blade.

  Halfway down, he spotted Kozo, laptop open, shoulders hunched, fingers hammering the keys.

  “Kozo, we need to talk.”

  Kozo nodded without looking up. Code streamed across the screen: live logs, script loops, silent defenses coming online.

  Neil stepped closer. “Intrusion?”

  “Recon,” Kozo muttered. “Port sweeps. Injection probes. Precise.”

  “Target?”

  “Yuu’s Tokyo node. They’re probing the firewall. Custom payloads.”

  Neil scanned the screen. “Botnet?”

  “Handwritten. Precise. Someone good.”

  A traceroute flared and blinked out.

  “You contain it?”

  “Barrier’s holding. For now.”

  Neil nodded. Kozo typed on.

  “Later,” Neil said.

  “Yeah.”

  Neil left the corridor behind, but the lines of code stayed with him. New. Precise. Troubling. A fracture in the grid. A collapse waiting to spread.

  The old cedar beams overhead gave the illusion of a secluded forest, with the scent of incense and pine mingling in the air. Tatami mats and heated floors softened every footfall. Winter was leaving its frosty secret calligraphy on the rice paper windows. Its message would disappear with the morning sun.

  Neil found Penelope tucked in a corner of the sitting room, sitting cross-legged in her oversize socks on a yoga pillow beneath a stretch of cedar shelves. A warm light spilled from a shoji lamp. She sat behind a low lacquered table that held a bottle of sake, a tray of citrus and sweets, and an untouched glass of sparkling cider alongside Penelope’s sketchbook and scattered manga sketches. She was flipping through the pages with a pencil in her hand. The sleeves of her cardigan were shoved up to her elbows, and a graphite smear cut across the side of her hand like a bruise.

  Neil sat on a low ottoman opposite her. “Octavia says you draw.”

  Penelope didn’t look up. “She said you do too.”

  Neil gave a half smile. “What do you draw?”

  She lifted her head, her expression unreadable. “Other worlds.”

  “I sketch crime scenes and people I don’t trust. This world.”

  “Same thing,” she said.

  He considered the comment, pulled out his sketchbook, and then asked, “What are you working on?”

  Penelope didn’t respond, except for a stubborn silence. She picked up a pen and began inking a page. He waited, then began sketching her. She glanced at him from time to time but remained silent. Lost in their work, they continued in focused silence, broken only by the soft scratching of pen and pencil on paper.

  Penelope set aside her ink pen, picked up her graphite pencil and a straightedge, then began drawing panels on a blank page. She stared at the panels and took a drink of her cider. Neil paused his sketching, poured sake into a glass, and sipped it. Penelope glanced up and met Neil’s eyes. She set her cider aside and popped a mandarin orange segment into her mouth, the bright citrus fragrance escaping as she bit down, and began to draw.

  But the line she was drawing halted mid-curve. Her fingers paused over the page, then resumed … lighter, more deliberate. Her shoulder twitched once, the way animals do when a breeze carries the wrong kind of attention.

  She tucked her chin to the side and shifted her body away from Neil. A strand of hair slipped loose from her bun. She self-consciously attempted to put it back in place but caused more to loosen and tumble toward her face. Neil turned his sketchbook around and pushed it toward her.

  She examined the sketch with a critical eye, as if it were a mirror showing her both her strengths and flaws. She looked up; her gaze locked with his intense blue-gray eyes. She blushed and gently pushed his sketch toward him.

  Penelope looked down at her simple line drawing, then up at him, her gaze lingering on the network of fine lines etched around his eyes and mouth as he slowly sipped his warm sake.

  In return, Neil casually studied her, a slow, deliberate appraisal in his gaze. She looked away and fiddled with her pencil. With a sudden, swift movement, she closed her sketchbook and pushed it toward him.

  He pulled it closer and opened the front cover.

  Centered on the page, scrawled in high-contrast ink, bold, angular, surgical:

  SHARD

  Each letter fractured, like glass struck mid-fall, its edges jagged and dangerous. Behind the title, a single graphic: A shard. A razor-thin sliver of white sliced through the black ink and ruptured it. White veins spidered through the dark, branching like lightning cracks across a windshield just before it breaks.

  Neil tilted the page. The shard shifted. Not a trick of ink, an engineered illusion created with precise cross-hatching of fine-line patterns. Penelope had drawn micro-fractures and negative-space cuts. He narrowed his eyes. “Your title page quivers like a portal. The shard feels alive.”

  At first, Penelope said nothing. Then a shy, apologetic smile flickered. “Thank you.” Her fingers brushed her mouth as if to tuck the smile away before it got too bold. “I just hope my editor feels the same.”

  “You have an editor?”

  She hesitated. “Well … they call them editors, but they’re more like instructors. Real editors, though. They’ve worked on series you’ve probably heard of. I mean, if you follow manga.” Her fingers toyed with the edge of her sleeve. She scratched the side of her neck and looked down.

  “You’re attending an art school?” Neil asked.

  “It’s not a school exactly,” she said. “It’s an international artist village north of Kyoto. Used to be a hot springs hotel. A legendary manga editor turned it into a creative retreat, a place to train serious artists from countries that don’t have formal manga programs.”

  Her voice steadied as she continued, but the words still felt like she was trying them on. “It’s super competitive. They take only a few people. You must be fully committed. Like … eat-sleep-draw levels of serious.”

  Neil waited.

  “They call us mangaka. It means manga creator. Or, in my case, rookie manga creator.” She gave a nervous laugh, almost a breath.

  “And that’s what you are?”

  Penelope nodded, slower this time. “I submitted my portfolio for their contest, and I … I won. That’s how I got in.” Her eyes met his briefly, then dropped again. “I left university to be here. To learn the proper structure, the visual language, the discipline. I want to debut for real … Get published.”

  She gestured toward the sketchbook like it was both shield and confession. “We’re supposed to finish a full project by the end of next semester. Pitch it to publishers. If no one picks it up …” She shrugged. “It’s a pass-fail program. No gray area.”

  Neil raised his eyebrows slightly. “That’s demanding.”

  She nodded again, a little more guarded now. “It’s a demanding field. Especially for someone like me.” She hesitated before continuing. “It’s mostly male. That’s not an excuse. I … I know my perspective isn’t always what they’re looking for. But I think it matters.” She trailed off and looked away. “Anyway. That’s why I’m here.”

  She reached for the sketchbook. Neil’s hand moved, not to block, but to steady. Two fingers pressed the page, like a bookmark.

  “Wait,” he said calmly. “Do you mind if I take a look?”

  She hesitated, glancing at the sketchbook as if seeking its approval, then pulled her hands back and nodded.

  Chapter 28

  Neil began to turn pages.

  First panel: A girl and her mother beside a fire. Shadows drawn with a dry brush, brittle at the edges. The sky overhead thick with constellations, each star a needle of ink, too sharp to be still.

  Second panel: The mother pointing upward. Beneath them, a caption. You must know how to find your way … even when maps lie.

  Neil continued turning pages.

  A wide horizontal panel. A train window. The girl, asleep. Her reflection fractured in the glass. Speed lines ripped across the frame, left to right, nearly breaking panel borders. Beyond the window: stark black trees, distorted into violent slashes.

  “Your movement perspective’s strong,” said Neil. “Tracking-shot feel. The trees streak diagonally, elongated, as if being uprooted by an ominous force.”

  Penelope hugged her knees tighter. “The two of them are always running. Always hiding. She’s never in one place long enough to leave a mark. She never has the same name. Sometimes she forgets.”

  “She forgets her name?” Neil asked.

  “Sometimes,” Penelope said. “Sometimes she forgets she had one.”

  He flipped again.

  Train station platform: crowded, blurred motion. But one figure stood still. Tall. Angular. Draped in navy vapor. His face hidden behind a visor that cast a golden glow.

  “The Masked Man,” Penelope murmured. “This is the first time she sees him.”

  “She knows what he is?” Neil asked.

  “She knows her mother told her not to look.”

  Neil studied the panel. “No eyes. Just that visor. You’ve drawn it too smooth.”

  “She can’t connect unless he removes it.”

  Neil tilted the page. The visor caught the light, just enough shimmer to suggest motion. Or warning.

  “You draw him like he’s unfinished,” Neil said.

  “Because he is,” Penelope replied. “This is a disguise. He slips between dimensions through the Shard.”

  “Does the mother see him?”

  “She senses him. And fears him. Like … Like she knows what he remembers.”

  “Maybe he knows something she buried,” suggested Neil.

  Penelope stared at the ink. “Or maybe … Maybe she’s the one hiding it from him.”

  “That’s what makes him dangerous,” said Neil.

  She nodded, lips pressed tight.

  Neil turned back to the page. The Masked Man stood alone on the platform, not moving, but the lines around him vibrated with tension. The shadows near his feet were drawn thicker than they should’ve been, as if something was waiting just behind him.

  “He doesn’t step forward,” Neil murmured. “But the panel feels like he might.”

  The visor shimmered again.

  “And your girl, your protagonist. What’s her name?”

  “She’s decided to call herself Ena.”

  “Ena.” He let the name settle. “What does she do when she sees him?”

  Penelope hesitated. “She only catches pieces of him. Corners. The edge of a coat. A sound. He’s always close to something she misunderstands … until later.”

  Neil leaned back, rubbing his chin. “Will you show who’s under the mask?”

  She blinked slowly. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “She’s not ready to see him.”

  Neil held her gaze for a moment. Then he looked down again.

  The Masked Man hadn’t moved. But the panel still hummed with threat, like a bomb sealed in ink, waiting for the right frame to detonate.

  He kept turning pages. A city of narrow corridors and blinking towers, maps posted like graffiti on walls. Ena flipping through one of her mother’s old journals, page after page of hand-drawn symbols layered over grids.