Several days after the night of surveillance at the warehouse, Karel became a shadow passing without a trace once more. A Cleaner called from one place to another, from one point in Sanjaya Consortium territory to the next, carrying the same folder, wearing the same expressionless face, with reasons that always sounded convincing: a damaged heirloom that needed inspection, a small corpse that needed disposal, a warehouse that needed to be inventoried again.
No one realized that each visit had a second purpose.
At the residence of an old capo in the southern district, Karel pretended to inspect a leaking water pipe while the purple-black lens of his glasses quietly read the neon line flowing from the capo's chest: thick, stable, but beginning to thin at the end—a sign that his Tirakat Opium doses were rarely renewed because the capo was too confident in the decades-old age of his bond.
At a young capo's weapons warehouse near a small port, his neon line instead flickered rapidly and erratically. His sigil had not been drawn with ink and blood like those of the older generation. It was projected from a small panel implanted in his wrist—a cyber dukun, the cheap version, the rushed version, the version that left far too many gaps for anyone who knew how to read them. Karel collected all of it in secret, storing it not on paper. Paper could be confiscated, searched, and read by someone else. He stored it in his own head instead, rearranging it every night before bed like someone reshuffling a deck of playing cards.
He began to see patterns that never appeared in Sanjaya Consortium's official documents: who was truly strong, who only looked strong because of their position, and whose chain had already grown loose without its owner realizing it.
There was one other thing he recorded, something subtler than mere magical strength: the difference between generations. The old capos treated their Khodam like savage dogs that had to be tamed again and again, with endless rituals, offerings, and caution born from bitter experience.
The young capos treated their Khodam like software that only needed to be updated through a digital panel—fast, practical, and, in Karel's opinion, far more fragile precisely because of that convenience. They did not truly understand what they controlled. They only trusted an interface that gave them the illusion of control.
That shadow map grew every day, more accurate than any official hierarchy Sanjaya Consortium had ever printed. He almost let his guard down.
At the home of an eastern-district capo, while inspecting the “damage” to a heirloom cabinet he had deliberately damaged himself the day before as an excuse to visit, Karel stood too long, staring at an empty spot in the corner of the room—the spot where the capo's Khodam, invisible to everyone but him, was huddled in its forced form, giving off an unusual, strange pulse of light.
The pulse was unstable. Flicker, fade, flicker again, like something struggling against its own sedative dose. Karel knew he should have moved from that spot ten seconds ago. But something about the flickering pattern felt different, faster than usual, more desperate—and for once, his curiosity overpowered his caution.
“What do you see?”
The voice came suddenly from behind him, too close for him to have heard the footsteps that preceded it. Everything slowed.
Karel felt every second unspool one by one: his own heartbeat suddenly pounding too loudly in his ears, the breath caught halfway out, the muscles in his back tensing without command.
In his head, over a span of time that felt far longer than what actually passed, he had already calculated three possibilities at once: turn around with a convincing excuse, confess and rely on his Arcane Blindness as a shield, or the worst possibility, one he always kept as a last resort—move faster than anyone in this room could anticipate.
The capo, a solidly built man with eyes too sharp for an ordinary underling, stood in the doorway, watching him with suspicion that had not yet fully hardened into a suspicion burning hot. His right hand rested casually on his hip, too close to the pistol holster hidden beneath it to truly be called casual. Karel turned.