The two moons of Athelas hung low over Thornwick.

Together they cast the city in a sickly light that made shadows pool in corners and turned ordinary streets into something from a nightmare. The family home across from Kael and Sage’s position glowed warm behind curtains—father, mother, two children, visible through gaps in the fabric, living their last normal hours without knowing it.

Sage shifted against the wall for the twenty-seventh time.

"Kael."

No response.

"Kaaeeel."

He didn’t look away from the window.

"Kael, I swear to every god that exists—"

"What’s will you and swearing?" he murmured.

"What?"

"That’s the twenty-eighth time you’ve tried to complain since we started waiting."

Sage’s jaw clenched. Her tails bristled behind her, curling and uncurling with restless energy. Two hours. Two hours of crouching in a dark alley that stinks while watching a house where nothing was happening.

"If they’re not coming, we should just—"

"Wait."

Sage’s mouth snapped shut.

Kael’s purple eyes flickered. The Essence Trace technique hummed behind his vision, painting the street in signatures—the family inside the house, warm and mundane; the neighbors two doors down, sleeping; a cat prowling three rooftops over; and—

There.

Five signatures. Approaching from the south. Moving in tight formation. No attempt to mask their presence—they weren’t expecting watchers.

Foundation Establishment Rank 4. Rank 4. Rank 5. Rank 5. Rank 6.

Sage felt the shift in his posture and tensed.

"Finally?"

"Five targets. Rank four through six. Don’t do anything yet."

Sage was already moving—muscles coiling, tails flattening for streamlined motion—when Kael’s hand caught her wrist.

She glared at him.

"Let go."

"No."

"They’re going to take that family!"

"And then they’ll drive somewhere. And that somewhere will be their base. And their base will tell us more than five dead bodies in an alley ever could." He released her wrist. "Why rush when the thugs can lead us exactly where we need to go?"

Sage stared at him.

Then she grabbed his face with both hands and kissed him—hard and possessively.

"You’re so smart, hubby."

"Don’t call me that in the field."

"Hubby, hubby, hubby."

"Focus."

She smiled—before she turned back to the street.

The five figures arrived.

There wore black clothings with red full-face masks. Horns protruding from the foreheads—curved, stylized, more ceremonial than practical. They moved like professionals. No wasted motion. No hesitation.

The Rank 6 raised a fist. The others stopped.

Hand signals. Quick, practiced. Two went to the back door. Two flanked the windows. The Rank 6 approached the front. 𝕗𝚛𝚎𝚎𝐰𝗲𝗯𝗻𝚘𝚟𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝕞

He knocked.

A pause. The father’s signature moved toward the door.

It opened.

The Rank 6’s fist connected with the father’s face before he could speak. The man crumpled. Inside, the mother screamed—briefly—then silence. The children’s signatures went still.

Thirty seconds.

The back door opened. Two masked figures emerged carrying the father’s unconscious body. The other two followed with the mother and children. Limbs limp. Necks at awkward angles.

Sedated, not dead. Kael could tell by the steady pulse of their signatures.

The five masked figures loaded the family into a windowless truck parked at the end of the street. The engine rumbled to life. Red taillights flickered.

"Go," Kael said.

They moved.

The truck wound through Thornwick’s streets at a measured pace—not fast enough to attract attention, not slow enough to seem suspicious. Kael and Sage followed three blocks back in a vehicle they had acquired twenty minutes into their wait.

Borrowed was a generous term.

"It’s not stealing if we return it," Sage had said while hotwiring the ignition.

"That’s literally what stealing is."

"Semantics."

The car—a battered four-seater that had seen better decades—rumbled through streets that grew progressively narrower and older. The nice districts fell away. Then the working districts. Then the abandoned districts where buildings sagged and streetlights flickered and even the desperate didn’t wander after dark.

Thirty minutes passed on the road.

The truck turned into a warehouse district—crumbling structures, broken windows, weeds pushing through cracked concrete. It pulled up to a building that might have been a factory once. Massive. Multi-story. Completely dark except for the truck’s headlights.

The five masked figures unloaded the family and carried them inside.

Kael killed the headlights and parked two blocks away.

"This seems to be their processing center. Or one of them." Kael stepped out of the car. "Come on."

They approached the warehouse on foot. Sage’s illusion barrier wrapped around them—bending light, muffling sound, making them ghosts.

The main entrance was a rusted door hanging half off its hinges. Kael pushed it open and slipped inside.

The warehouse interior was vast and empty. Dust covered everything. Old machinery loomed like skeletons in the dim light filtering through broken skylights. The family’s signatures were deeper in—moving, being carried.

Kael and Sage followed.

At the far end of the warehouse floor, the five masked figures stood before something that shouldn’t have been there.

A door.

Free-standing. No wall around it. Just a rectangular frame of black metal set into the concrete floor, covered in runes that pulsed with faint red light. The edges shimmered like heat haze—spatial distortion.

The Rank 6 stepped forward and pressed his masked face against a panel beside the frame. Red light scanned his features. The runes flared brighter.

The door opened.

The space within the frame rippled like water, revealing stairs descending into darkness.

The four subordinates carried the family through.

The Rank 6 turned to the one who’d stayed behind—a Rank 5 with slightly shorter horns.

"Guard the door," he said. "The other groups will be arriving soon. Let them through. No one else."

"Yes, sir."

The Rank 6 descended.

The Rank 5 turned and settled against the doorframe, arms crossed, apparently content to wait.

Kael and Sage pressed deeper into the shadows of an old machine.

Other groups.

The words hung in the air.

Sage’s voice was barely a breath against Kael’s ear. "There’s more than one abduction tonight."

"Multiple teams. Multiple targets. All converging here." Kael’s purple eyes tracked the guard’s signature—steady, relaxed, not expecting trouble. "That’s why they move so many people. Not one crew doing everything—multiple crews hitting different locations simultaneously, bringing the product to a central point."

"And we’ve been focusing on a single target location this whole time."

Kael raised his hand to his face and pressed his palm against his forehead.

He should have known.

Twenty-eight people per night across a city of forty thousand. He’d calculated that in the guild hall. Multiple teams was the obvious conclusion—the only logical conclusion—and he’d spent two hours watching a single house like an amateur.

Two hundred people per week didn’t vanish because of one truck making rounds.

"Stupid," he muttered.

"What?"

"I’m stupid. We’re stupid. The math was right there." He dropped his hand. "Doesn’t matter now. What matters is what’s under that door."

Sage peered around their cover. The guard hadn’t moved. The runic door pulsed steadily.

"How do we get past?"

Kael’s eyes drifted to the guard.

Then to the scanning panel beside the door.

Then back to the guard.

"We need his face," he said.

Sage’s golden eyes gleamed.

"Finally," she whispered. "I was getting bored."