Chương 5: Chapter 4: Lurking Beneath the Change

Afternoon passed with Cecilia walking the streets alongside Dario—a simple assessment of how the neighborhood and its people had adapted in the first day. The sky stayed a bruised purple streaked with shifting bands of gold. The shadows cut deeper at noon, stretched thinner as the light failed. The air smelled like rain that wouldn't fall, and when the wind moved, it carried something sharp that made people wrinkle their noses and turn their faces away. The city was quiet.

The first panic had burned out, replaced by a wariness that sat on people's shoulders like wet wool. Groups gathered in corners and broke up when they noticed someone watching them. Cars stayed parked. Most shops were shuttered, the few that were open doing business through narrow gaps in locked doors, prices scribbled in chalk on cardboard signs. The System's deadline hung at forty hours and change. They crossed from the Quadrilatero into Centro Storico and found it worse.

A bakery had been boarded up with mismatched plywood, a crowd gathered outside until someone came to the door and shouted them away. They left in sullen clusters, glancing over their shoulders as they went. Three blocks later, they saw a man standing in the middle of the street, staring at his hands. Cecilia slowed, watching from the corner of her eye. His palms were glowing faintly, a blue light that pulsed in time with his breath. A woman walked around him without looking, her face drawn tight with fear.

Cecilia stopped at the next corner, letting Dario lean against the wall beside her.

"He's figured out how to activate something," she said.

"Looks like it," Dario agreed.

"And he has no idea what it does."

"Neither does anyone else." She watched the man for another moment.

"He's not going to be the only one."

"No." Dario shifted, looking past her.

"Speaking of which." She turned her head. Across the street, a young woman with short red hair stood on a bench, addressing a small crowd. Her voice carried in the quiet.

"It's magic," she was saying.

"Or as close as it gets. I've got a Skill. It lets me see people's Intent." She pointed at a man in the front row.

"Yours is red. You're angry about something you didn't get." She pointed at a woman.

"Yours is green. You're looking for something you think you lost." She swept her arm toward the crowd.

"You're all showing me what you are without saying a word. And I'm Level One. Think about what happens when we get to Level Ten." A murmur moved through the crowd. Some stepped back. Others leaned in. Cecilia watched the woman's posture: confident, rehearsed, but with a tremor in her hands that suggested she'd figured this out last night and hadn't slept since. She glanced at Dario.

"Is she one of ours?"

"No. But she's smart. She knows how to pitch to a crowd." The woman raised her voice.

"The System gave us powers. Some of you are going to waste them because you're scared. Don't be. Choose now. Choose fast. And when you've chosen, find someone who can teach you what it means."

"Good advice," Dario murmured.

"Too public," Cecilia said.

"She'll attract attention."

"She already has." He was right. Three men had stopped on the sidewalk across from the bench. They weren't part of the crowd. They were watching the woman with an interest that had nothing to do with her speech. Cecilia started across the street, Dario a step behind her. She moved into the crowd and stopped near the back, letting the bench and the woman block the three men's line of sight. The red-haired woman didn't notice her. She was too focused on her audience. Cecilia leaned toward Dario.

"You know them?"

"Never seen them before." That narrowed the options. Not law enforcement. Not local muscle. If they were here to cause trouble, it was opportunistic, not organized. That was manageable. She waited, watching the woman finish her pitch. When she stepped down from the bench, Cecilia moved with the dispersing crowd and intercepted her before she reached the sidewalk.

"Nice speech," she said. The woman blinked, surprised. She was younger than she looked from a distance, maybe nineteen or twenty. Her eyes were bright with adrenaline and fatigue.

"Thanks."

"You're drawing attention. Not all of it's friendly." The woman glanced past Cecilia and stiffened when she saw the three men waiting.

"They followed me from Piazza Vittorio."

"You're telling strangers about your abilities in public," Dario said, his tone light.

"You're going to get more than followers."

"I'm trying to help." She looked back at Cecilia.

"If people know what's happening, they can make better choices."

"They can also make worse ones." Cecilia held her eyes.

"What's your name?"

"Elia."

"Well, Elia, I have an offer. Come with us. You can keep helping people, but we'll make sure you don't get robbed or worse for it." Elia hesitated.

"Who are you?" Cecilia didn't answer directly.

"We're people who understand how power works in this city. And we're very interested in people who understand how it's going to work now." Dario smiled.

"And we have coffee." That broke the tension slightly. Elia glanced back at the men on the sidewalk. They were still watching. One of them nudged another, and they started moving across the street. Elia made up her mind.

"Okay." Cecilia nodded and led her away from the corner, turning down an alley that cut between two buildings. Dario fell in behind them, casual but alert. They were halfway down the alley when the men appeared at the entrance. One of them called out, "Hey, girlie. We just want to talk."

"She's not interested," Cecilia said without turning. The man laughed.

"She didn't say that." Elia stopped. Cecilia stopped with her.

"You're making a mistake."

"You're the one making mistakes," the man said. He was the tallest of the three, with a scar under his left eye. He reached behind his back and pulled out a knife, not a large one. Cecilia sighed.

"Put that away."

"Or what?" If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. Dario stepped forward, smiling.

"Or you don't get to use it again." The man with the scar hesitated. The other two spread out, trying to flank. Dario moved to meet them, his hands loose at his sides. Elia looked at Cecilia, her eyes wide.

"What do we do?"

"We wait," Cecilia said. The first man lunged at Dario, knife forward. Dario sidestepped, caught his wrist, and twisted. The knife fell. Dario kicked it away and shoved the man into the wall, hard enough that he dropped to his knees. The second man threw a punch. Dario ducked it and drove an elbow into his ribs. The man gasped and staggered back. The third man ran. Dario turned to the first one, still on the ground.

"Pick up your knife." The man reached for it with a shaking hand.

"And leave." He did. Dario watched them go, then turned back to Cecilia and Elia.

"Well," he said.

"That was fun." Elia stared at him, then at Cecilia.

"Who are you people?" The question sounded less suspicious now, more curious. Cecilia started walking again.

"People who don't waste time on small problems. You'll learn more if you come with us." Elia followed, her steps quickening to catch up.

"I didn't mean to cause trouble."

"You didn't," Cecilia said.

"They did. And now they won't do it again. Are you currently employed?"

"Not since yesterday." Elia grimaced.

"My boss called it a day when the message showed up. Said we'd reopen when things were normal again."

"You might be waiting a while."

"I figured." Elia looked around as they reached the main street.

"Where are we going?"

"Somewhere you can be useful," Cecilia said. After dropping off Elia with Bianca for an informal evaluation, Cecilia and Dario resumed their walk, heading northwest toward the San Donato neighborhood. Corso Umbria had been an ordinary street and was now a quiet one. The shops were mostly shuttered. A tabacchi had been forced, the metal grate bent back from the frame, and everything inside had been taken except the things that required reading the label to understand.

The shelves still had medicines with long names and specialist goods that no one in a hurry had stopped to identify. A few doors down, a pharmacy showed the same selective logic: the obvious things gone, the specialist things remaining. A pair of reading glasses on the floor near the door. A blood pressure cuff still in its plastic packaging on the bottom shelf. She stopped at the pharmacy window long enough to look at what had been left.

"Nobody knows what's useful yet," Dario said, standing beside her.

"Panic is a bad inventory manager." He smiled slightly.

"So's greed." They kept moving toward Parco Dora. The park had been a steelworks before it had been a park, and the city had left enough of the original bones that you could see them. The great covered hall opened ahead of them, the strip-mill shed the city had kept when it tore down everything around it—a long roof on rows of steel pillars holding up nothing now but weather.

Beyond it the open lots ran toward the river, and the Dora itself moved below in its concrete channel, gray-green and fast, walled on both sides by the embankments the factory had poured over it decades ago. The sight lines were good in every direction, which was why she'd chosen the route, and why she registered immediately when the sight lines stopped being reassuring. The sound was wrong first.

The neighborhood behind them had its own reduced ambience: cars idling somewhere, voices in the distance, a hammer tapping at metal where someone was already trying to lock something down for whatever was coming. No birds. The river itself seemed quieter, though that was probably her own attention sharpening and crowding out background noise the way it did when something had her full focus. She had something's full focus. Dario had stopped a step before she did.

Across the open ground, along the base of the concrete embankment that walled the channel, something was moving fast. She registered it in stages, the way you registered something your brain initially tried to file as ordinary and then revised. Low to the ground, roughly a meter at the shoulder. It moved on four limbs, fast enough that the joints registered wrong before the limbs did. Not quite a run.

More like an undulation, as if its spine had been designed to let it slide across broken terrain rather than bound over it. Its head was wedge-shaped and tapered, and it didn't look up. It had the look of something following a scent. It continued along the wall. Then it stopped. The stillness was worse than the movement. A large thing that had been moving fast going completely still was its own category of wrong.

She was aware of her own breathing in a way she hadn't been thirty seconds ago, and she made herself slow it deliberately. Beside her, Dario had gone into the particular kind of motionlessness that meant he was doing the same calculation she was and arriving at the same answer: don't. The thing's orientation shifted. She couldn't see its face clearly against the gray of the concrete, but the body had turned. She could feel it looking. Dario's hand had found his pistol under his jacket.

She reached out and pressed his wrist lightly, not stopping him from drawing but telling him to wait. The open ground between them and the channel wall was perhaps twenty meters of broken concrete and weeds. She was aware of every centimeter of it. The moment stretched. Time moved badly during this kind of attention. Then it turned back. It moved along the wall again, the same low wrongness, faster now, and reached the place where the embankment dropped toward the covered river and went down it and was gone.

The open lot beyond stretched empty and still. She waited another count of thirty before she moved.

"Alright," Dario said, very quietly.

"That was not a dog."

"No," she agreed.

"It wasn't." He let out a slow breath and put his pistol back.

"What the hell was it?"

"I don't know." She scanned the river's edge. Nothing moved.

"But it wasn't interested in us."

"Lucky us." He looked at her.

"Do you think they're all like that?"

"Like what?"

"Whatever it was." She started moving again, picking a path that would take them back to more familiar ground.

"I think that was probably one type of thing. And I think we're going to find others."

"Fun," he said, but the tone made it clear he didn't mean fun at all. They returned to Palazzo Valperga by midafternoon. The reports were waiting. Bianca was in the front office when Cecilia came through the door. She stood from the desk and handed her a phone.

"His handle is Archimede. The IP address is registered to an apartment in Parella. Thirty months of activity on that forum. Build analysis, economy modeling, theory threads across at least four different games. His community knows the handle well. A few of them know him in person."

"Who is he?" Cecilia picked up the phone. The forum post was still displayed. It had two replies. Both were short, and one was in German.

"Luca Terranova. Twenty-six. Data analyst at a financial firm in the Crocetta. Works mostly remote." She placed a folded sheet of paper next to the phone.

"Photo from his company's website. I have his address and two secondary locations." Cecilia looked at the photo. The man had a long face and dark hair cut close. He looked like someone who spent too much time indoors. There was nothing about him that suggested he had been preparing for something like this to happen by thinking through how games worked.

"Does he have a family?"

"Parents in Genoa. One sister. Single. He lives alone."

"Employment history?"

"Two years at the firm. Before that, freelancing. No criminal record." That was disappointing. A criminal record would have given her a cleaner way in. As it was, she'd have to make her own leverage.

"Is he at the address now?"

"As of this morning. I have someone near the building."

"How long before we lose eyes on him?"

"Long enough." That was all she needed to know.

"I'll take Dario. We'll leave shortly." No more walking though. She wanted wheels between her and anything that looked like the thing at the river.

"Should I come?" Bianca asked.

"Not this time. I need you here if the situation changes while we're out." Cecilia pocketed the phone.

"If anything comes in from your contacts while I'm gone, you make the call. Don't wait." Bianca nodded and stepped back.

"The girl. Elia."

"Did she pass?"

"She's untrained but smart. And she's loyal to the idea of being useful."

"Keep her close. She might develop into a good liaison." Bianca didn't argue. That was enough approval from her. Cecilia sat at the desk and looked at the folded sheet of paper with Luca's photo on it. She could have sent someone else. There were people in the organization who could extract a person like him from a situation like this with less risk. But she needed to see his reaction firsthand. If there were no surprises on arrival, the acquisition wouldn't take long.

If he wasn't what she needed, they'd be back before evening. If he was, things would move faster. She took a minute to think through the angles. She didn't have many options for leverage. His job was corporate, which meant he wouldn't be intimidated by threats unless she made them specific and credible. She had no interest in killing an asset to prove a point. His family in Genoa was too far away to be useful as pressure without more infrastructure. She needed to approach him like he was a new supplier.

Find the thing he wanted and make sure it came through her. She'd know what it was when she saw it.