Nacy's finger moved toward the door.
"Who was that?" she called out, her voice unhurried — the kind of unhurried that came not from calm, but from complete control.
Mohammed glanced toward the entrance. "Oh — him. He's the one I mentioned once. The boy who asked if I was some kind of weirdo."
Nacy's eyes shifted to Jerry. Sharp. Immediate.
"Jerry. Go get him."
Jerry hesitated, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. "Are you sure? Do you actually think I can take him?"
Silence.
A silence that lasted exactly long enough to mean something.
"...Patrick." Her tone didn't rise. It didn't need to. "Where is he?"
Jerry cleared his throat. "Oh — Patrick, right. He just went to the bathroom."
Nacy looked at Jerry the way someone looks at a door that refuses to open. Cold. Patient. Faintly irritated in the specific way of someone who had asked for one simple thing and received everything but that.
Jerry was already moving. "I'll get him right now —"
"Get him out there," Nacy said.
He was gone before she finished the sentence.
Across the room, Boran and Adam sat bound and motionless, their wrists pulled tight behind them. They exchanged a glance — brief, wordless, the kind that carried entire conversations. Mayex had appeared out of nowhere, opened the door, taken one long look at everything inside this room, and quietly closed it again. If he wasn't ready to act, why had he opened it at all?
Neither of them had an answer.
Near the far wall, Elara slowly lifted her head.
The gymnasium stretched wide around her — too wide for how suffocating it felt. The ceiling hung low with shadow, the kind that gathered in old buildings and never quite left regardless of how much light came through the windows. Every corner held someone. Pipes rested across shoulders. Knives turned lazily between fingers. Heavy sticks leaned against walls, waiting. All of them patient. All of them watching. All of them answering to one person.
Elara's gaze moved across the crowd the way water moves over stone — without urgency, without expression — and somewhere beneath the stillness of her face, a question formed slowly, the way questions do when you already suspect the answer.
Whether Nacy could actually hold all of this together. Whether anyone could hold something this large, this restless, this sharp-edged, without it eventually turning inward and consuming itself.
Nacy noticed the look.
She always noticed.
She crossed the room without sound — no rush, no performance — and settled near Elara with the unhurried ease of someone who had never in her life needed to announce herself. Close enough to speak. Far enough that the space between them remained deliberate, chosen, a boundary she was setting rather than crossing.
She sat with the ease of someone who had never needed to explain herself to anyone.
For a moment, she simply looked at Elara. Not studying her — observing her. The way you observe weather. The way you observe something that doesn't yet know it's being watched.
"So," Nacy said quietly. "You're the hollow one."
The words weren't cruel. They carried no edge, no mockery. They were simply accurate — stated the way one might name a color, or identify a season.
"I met someone like you once." She didn't look away. "A man — same kind of absence behind the eyes. Same quiet that didn't feel like peace, but like something that had been where peace used to be." She paused, something shifting briefly in her expression before it settled again. "His reason was different from yours, probably. His uncle had raised him after his parents died young, and the raising hadn't been kind. He was a friend of Johan's."
She let Johan's name sit there for exactly a moment.
"And he told me a story once — childish in a way, the kind of story you'd tell around a fire to children who couldn't sleep. But interesting. The kind of story that stays with you longer than it has any right to." She tilted her head slightly. "Do you want to hear it?"
The gymnasium breathed around them. Distant shuffling from somewhere near the back wall. The low, barely audible creak of old wood settling somewhere above them, the building shifting its weight the way old things do.
Elara was still.
The kind of still that wasn't emptiness — or at least, not entirely. The kind of still that was also waiting.
Then — barely. A movement so small it could have been imagined.
She nodded.
It was rare enough that it meant something. Nacy's expression didn't change dramatically — but something behind her eyes did. Quiet acknowledgment. Like a door opening one inch.
"Good," she said.
She settled back slightly, as if preparing to carry something heavy a long distance.
"It's called The Suspicious Boy."
She let the title exist in the air for a moment before she continued, her voice dropping just slightly — not for effect, but the way voices naturally drop when the story being told is one that matters.
"There was once a boy found alone in the wilderness. No village nearby. No road. Just open land and silence, and this boy standing in the middle of it like he had grown there." She paused. "Dark hair. Black eyes — a combination so unusual that people who saw him couldn't quite explain why it unsettled them. He wore nothing but black, head to toe, every piece of clothing the same lightless shade, and something about him made people uneasy before he had moved, before he had spoken, before he had done anything at all except exist."
"A traveling party came across him. They were fascinated — not by him exactly, but by what he carried. Dark magic. The kind that hadn't been seen in centuries, that most people had begun to believe was legend. They brought him back to their kingdom, and the king saw him, and the king recognized immediately what he was looking at."
"Potential."
"He gave the boy a castle. Gold. Servants. Everything a person could need, everything a person could want. In return, the boy would serve the crown. Simple as that."
"The king asked for his name."
"The boy said he had none. That he was no one."
Nacy was quiet for a moment.
"So the king thought — and gave him one."
Her voice slowed, the way it does when something is worth the extra weight.
"Garry Linx."
She let it hang in the air.
"Garry Linx." She said it again, tasting the syllables. "Garry, after the king's own uncle — a man the king had loved. And Linx after the lynx, because a lynx moves alone. Because a lynx moves with purpose. Because a lynx does not wait for permission and does not explain itself and does not belong to anything it hasn't chosen." She glanced at Elara. "That was how the boy carried himself. Solitary. Deliberate. Like something that had never belonged anywhere and had stopped expecting to long before anyone found him."
"Garry Linx." One more time, quieter. Almost to herself. "Isn't that a wonderful name?"
She didn't wait for an answer.
"It is. Garry Linx — a truly wonderful name. And yet."
Her expression didn't change, but something in her voice did. Something cooler moved into it, the way a cloud passes over without stopping.
"Garry was everything but good. Every person in that kingdom said so from the very beginning. They said his appearance was not just unusual — it was a warning. That the darkness surrounding him, the color of his eyes, the clothes he wore, the way light seemed to sit differently near him — all of it meant something. That one day it would bring ruin. The king refused to listen. He stood before his full court, in front of everyone who served him and everyone who feared him, and he declared — loudly, firmly, with the certainty of a man who believed in his own judgment — that no one must ever judge another person by appearance alone."
"And so the kingdom listened. And the kingdom trusted. And the kingdom moved on."
"Years passed. Garry fought alongside the hero party — a group of the kingdom's finest, the people chosen specifically because they were capable of facing things that would destroy ordinary men. Together they traveled. Together they fought. They hunted demons across every corner of the known world, survived battles that should have killed them several times over, and finally — after years of it, after everything it had cost them —"
"They killed the demon king."
"It was over. The horror that had existed for generations, that had shaped the world around it the way a river shapes stone — it was finished. The hero party stood in the ruins of the demon king's throne room, and it was done."
The gymnasium was very quiet.
"And then Garry Linx turned his dark magic on every member of the hero party."
She said it the same way she had said everything else. No change in volume, no dramatic pause before it. Just the words, arriving like something inevitable.
"And killed them all."
No one moved.
"It turned out," Nacy continued, her voice completely level, carrying no particular emotion, "that Garry sustained himself by consuming souls. Demons. Monsters. Humans. It made no difference to him — a soul was a soul, and he needed them to survive. He had been feeding since before the king ever found him. Since before anyone knew his name. He had killed every demon they faced not out of loyalty, not out of duty, but because he wanted what was inside them. And when the last demon was gone —"
"He wanted what was inside the hero party too."
"After that day, he vanished. No body recovered. No trace left behind. Just silence — and the specific kind of silence that follows something so terrible that people can't agree on how to speak about it. That silence stretched for centuries." She let that settle. "And the name Garry became cursed. Not uncomfortable, not avoided out of superstition — cursed. Anyone in the kingdom who carried that name was executed. No trial. No question. The name was never written down again. Never spoken aloud. Never trusted with so much as a whisper in an empty room."
She turned and looked at Elara directly. Fully. The way she hadn't quite looked at her until now.
"Do you know what the point of that story was?"
Elara neither moved nor responded.
The silence stretched between them, unhurried.
Nacy smiled — slow, certain, the smile of someone who had already known the answer before they asked.
"Always judge the cover," she said. "Don't open the book hoping it will surprise you. The name alone told you everything — the suspicious boy. That was what he was, from the very beginning, and the only people who suffered were the ones who chose not to see it." Her gaze settled on Elara, steady and without blinking. "Appearance speaks first. And it speaks honestly."
A pause.
"And yours," she said, "is telling me not to trust you."
She held Elara's gaze for one moment longer.
Then she looked away, as easily as closing a book.
"Though I suppose that's not my concern. You don't work for me."
The words landed quietly. They didn't need to be loud.
Silence fell over the gymnasium completely — the kind that has weight, the kind that presses down on the shoulders of everyone inside it — until the door swung open and Patrick entered at full speed, slightly breathless, smoothing down his jacket with both hands and wearing the expression of a man who was very aware he was late and had decided that energy would compensate for it.
"I am so sorry for being late! I genuinely needed to handle some urgent personal business —"
"Just go," Jerry said flatly, not looking at him. "Stop talking and move. Every second you spend explaining is a second wasted."
Outside, the world was quiet.
Mayex pressed his back against the cold wall, hidden in the shadow between two overgrown bushes. His eyes were fixed on nothing in particular. His mind, however, was moving fast.
"...Well," he muttered under his breath. "We really managed to screw this one up."
He exhaled slowly, tilting his head back against the rough concrete.
"Boran tied up. Adam tied up. Elara too. And I'm out here alone, talking to a bush." He paused. "Just how am I supposed to get them out of that?"
The question sat there, unanswered and inconvenient.
Then something shifted behind his eyes.
He straightened slightly.
"Wait."
His mind went back — to the corridor inside the gymnasium. To the moment before everything had gone sideways. To the girl standing at the front of the room, composed and bloodstained and completely in control.
That girl.
He had seen her before. Not in person — on a board. Underground. A photograph pinned above everything else. Red hair. Green eyes. Freckles scattered across her face. He hadn't needed to read a single word to understand what the layout of that page meant.
Most wanted.
A slow smirk crossed his face.
I think I have an idea.
He allowed himself exactly 1 minute of quiet satisfaction —
Then the door across from him exploded outward.
Not opened. Not pushed.
Kicked.
Mayex watched it swing violently on its hinges, the impact still ringing through the frame as Patrick stepped through — scanning the empty street with the focused expression of someone who was absolutely certain they were about to find someone.
He looked left. He looked right.
Nothing.
Patrick frowned. Then, after a moment of genuine deliberation, he cupped his hands around his mouth.
"If you don't come out, boy —" he announced to the street at large, "— then you're GAY."
The world went very still.
A bird somewhere stopped mid-call. The air itself seemed to pause, as if reality needed a moment to process what had just been said.
Then Mayex stepped out from behind the tree directly to Patrick's left, expression completely serious.
"I ain't GAY."
Patrick stared at him. Then at the tree. Then back at Mayex.
"...Were you behind that tree the entire time?"
Mayex held his gaze. "...Yeah."
A long pause.
"Just how did I not see —" Patrick stopped himself, shaking his head slowly. "Whatever. I need to look around before I act next time."
"Tell me something," Mayex said. "What exactly is the plan here? Why did you tie up my team?"
Patrick blinked. "Plan?"
"Yes. Why capture them? What's the point?"
Patrick scratched the back of his neck. "Honestly? I have absolutely no idea. I wasn't listening to any of it — I was in the bathroom the entire time." He shrugged. "But if I had to guess, your group wasn't supposed to be there. You just kind of... showed up. Though like I said, that's just what I'm assuming. Nacy isn't exactly someone you can predict."
"Nacy," Mayex repeated quietly.
"Yeah. That's her name." Patrick rolled his shoulders back, the casual tone dropping slightly. "But anyway — enough of that. I need to bring you in. And looking at you —" his eyes moved over Mayex with the practiced assessment of someone who had done this before, "— I'd say you're around eighteen. Which means I'm your senior."
Mayex frowned. "Senior in what?"
Patrick's answer came not in words but in movement — a straight punch, fast and clean, crossing the distance between them before Mayex had finished the question.
Mayex's arms snapped up on instinct. He caught it on his guard.
The force shoved him back two full steps.
He stared at his own arms. They were trembling — not from pain but from the sheer weight behind the strike. He steadied himself and said nothing, but the thought settled quietly in the back of his mind.
He's dangerous. This is going to take a while.
He pushed forward anyway, throwing a straight punch of his own.
Patrick slipped it without effort.
Mayex threw again. Patrick moved. Again — and again — each strike cutting through empty air, each miss tightening something in Mayex's chest.
Patrick watched him with the expression of someone waiting for a bus.
"You're really a disappointment," he said.
Then he stepped in and delivered an uppercut.
The impact snapped Mayex's head back and dropped him. He hit the ground hard, the sky tilting above him, and through blurring vision he watched Patrick close the distance and crouch down with something almost like pity in his expression.
"Let's not drag this out," Patrick said. "I'll take you in quietly."
The words landed somewhere specific.
Mayex lay still for a moment. The sky above him was pale and wide and completely indifferent.
He remembered the fight with the unknown boy. How that had ended. How it had felt afterward.
Not again.
Something ignited low in his chest — not quite anger, not quite pride. Something older than both. His hand found the dirt beside him. His fingers closed around a fistful.
The moment Patrick reached down to take him, Mayex threw it directly into his eyes.
"Ah — you cowar—"
Mayex was already up.
He drove his shoulder into Patrick's chest and took him to the ground, and before Patrick could register the shift in weight, the first punch landed. Then the second. Then Mayex stopped counting and simply threw — one after another, a relentless, unbroken current of strikes that gave Patrick no room to think, no room to breathe, no room to do anything but absorb.
Patrick smiled through it.
"Now," he said, blood on his teeth, "this is finally getting interesting."
He brought both elbows up to shield his head. It didn't stop Mayex. Nothing stopped Mayex — not the ache building in his knuckles, not the burning in his shoulders, not the way each impact was starting to send pain shooting up through his own hands.
"I WON'T LOSE PATHETICALLY THIS TIME!"
Then one punch landed wrong.
A sharp, immediate pain cracked through his knuckles — the skin split, blood rising instantly to the surface. It was only a fraction of a second. A single beat of hesitation.
It was enough.
Patrick seized the gap. He drove both palms into Mayex's chest and shoved — hard enough to send him stumbling backward — and was on his feet before Mayex had fully recovered his footing.
He pressed two fingers to his nose and cleared the blood from it without flinching, then looked at Mayex with something that wasn't quite respect but was adjacent to it.
"I take it back," Patrick said. "You're not a disappointment after all."
He moved without warning — a low sweeping kick that caught Mayex's leg and knocked him off balance.
"Arg—"
Patrick was already lining up the follow-through. He swung his leg in a wide arc — a full, committed kick aimed at Mayex's head, the kind that was meant to end things cleanly.
It connected.
Mayex's head snapped sideways. His vision fractured at the edges. But his hand shot out and caught the ground before he went down completely, and in the single moment that Patrick's weight was forward — committed, unguarded, balanced on one leg — Mayex drove his foot sideways into the other one.
Patrick went down.
Mayex grabbed another fistful of dirt and threw it before Patrick could rise.
"Oh, come on—"
Mayex was already backing away. His chest heaved. His knuckles were bleeding. His legs felt like concrete.
I can't win this.
The thought arrived without drama. Just quietly, clearly, like a fact.
I can't win this.
Patrick stood and brushed himself off. He wasn't angry. If anything, he looked more relaxed than when the fight had started. He watched Mayex breathe and said nothing for a moment.
Then —
"You know," Patrick said, "even if you stall me here — it won't help them. Your friends are surrounded. Pipes, knives, and I don't know, some fairly heavy sticks. Even if they somehow got free of the ropes, they'd still lose. They're completely encircled." He tilted his head. "So what exactly is the plan? What are you waiting for?"
Mayex said nothing.
"Come inside," Patrick continued. "Maybe I can put in a word with Nacy. Maybe she lets you join. You'd have a real crew — people who actually have their act together." He paused. "Better than whatever the Brown Organisation's been giving you."
The words sat there.
Mayex stared at the ground for a long moment. Then, slowly, something in his expression shifted — not defeat exactly, but something that looked like the careful, deliberate surrender of someone who had decided that losing this particular battle was worth it.
"...Well," he said quietly. "That doesn't sound bad."
A beat.
"Yeah. I'll join." His voice was flat, unhurried. "The Brown Organisation hasn't exactly treated me like family. Maybe it's time I found one that does."