Three days had passed since that night. Cohen Elias sat before his desk. The copy of the Gehenna Document's third volume lay open, but his gaze had stalled on the page, unmoving. The second-floor living space, its walls consumed by bookshelves, remained unchanged as always. A bottle of whiskey sat at the desk's edge. The glass beside it remained dry. Yet something had shifted. Three days ago, in the basement, he had made a sound that wasn't quite a voice. He had wept with his forehead pressed against the cold metal of the examination table. For the first time in twenty-nine years. The final pillar called pride had fallen quietly that night. Since then, something had been missing—or more precisely, he could no longer settle himself without constantly confirming where Al-Rashid Zayed was. (How pathetic.) He told himself that, yet his feet moved of their own accord. Cohen Elias rose to fetch water. Al-Rashid Zayed stood with his back against the wall, arms crossed, watching him intently. Always in that same position. Cohen Elias stepped toward the kitchen—two steps, three steps forward. His feet stopped. He had turned back. He confirmed Al-Rashid Zayed's silhouette in his field of vision. There. He was there, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. It was only tonight that Cohen Elias first noticed that this motion had come from his own body, and that it had become a habit at some point. Something unpleasant rippled in the depths of his chest. He was dependent on this man—the fact crawled up his throat, and Cohen Elias averted his eyes. Out the window, into the darkness of Boundary Street. November nights ran deep with fog. The streetlight's glow blurred, and the cobblestones of Boundary Street gleamed dully. The shadows of the abandoned factory complex formed dark masses in the distance. "[cold]...There's something outside." The voice fell into the room. Cohen Elias turned. Al-Rashid Zayed's eyes had narrowed. He uncrossed his arms and shifted his posture slightly—when that man changed his stance, it meant business. Cohen Elias had learned that through his body over three months. "[serious]What do you mean?" "[cold]A human. But the presence is abnormal. Approaching the building's exterior wall." A demon's senses differed from those of humans. Heat signatures, breathing, the vibrations of minute footsteps—Cohen Elias had read of this in the Gehenna Document. If Zayed said something was there, it was there. --- In the shadow of the abandoned factory complex on Boundary Street, Perry Nathan was confirming the placement of his third sensor. Seventeen years old. Natural perm, blonde hair cut short, large round blue eyes that couldniously betrayed his curiosity even in the darkness of night. On his left wrist, a tattoo of electronic circuit diagrams he'd done himself. Two weeks had passed since he'd arrived in Greyvan as an external collaborator for the Helmon Agency—the supernatural surveillance organization hidden in the Pentagon's shadow—after skipping grades through MIT. The sensors were homemade. More than three times as sensitive as the Helmon Agency's standard equipment. Over the past two weeks, he'd narrowed down the source of the anomalous energy emissions from Cohen Lab at Boundary Street number forty-seven to the exterior wall itself. Perry Nathan was operating independently from Toll Margaret's surveillance team. You could call it "reckless." But his curiosity wouldn't stop. That energy pattern didn't match any existing data. A single contact-type sensor pressed against the brick exterior would give him the spatial distribution. Twenty minutes of work. Just a few meters to the brick exterior of Cohen Lab. He reached out his arm. Then something changed. It was a sensation he couldn't explain. Before the word "danger" could even surface, his body had already stepped back. A primitive warning—the instinct that sleeps in the depths of human consciousness, the same one that activates when a beast senses a predator. Something was in the shadows of the factory complex. Invisible. Inaudible. But something was there. Perry Nathan swallowed. He should retreat. --- "[serious]It moved. Was hiding in the shadow of the factory complex to the north. Carrying equipment—sensors or something similar." When Zayed said that, Cohen Elias was gripping both sides of the desk. The joints of his fingers had gone white. An outsider had come. Someone who might know of his research, his immortal body, the existence of the Gehenna Document. What that meant—capture. Dissection. Research material. A different kind of fear from the terror of losing control he'd felt on the examination table three days ago, something far more primal, crawled up from the pit of his stomach. Give an order, part of his mind said. Eliminate them, that's your job—words like that reached his throat. Reached it, and stopped. Cohen Elias looked at Zayed. Dark skin. Eyes like lacquer. The 188-centimeter frame turned toward the window. The hands that had broken Cohen Elias three days ago were now uncrossing, moving into a stance of readiness. Watching that figure, something caught in Cohen Elias. "[scared]...I want you to handle this with me." The words that came from his own mouth surprised Cohen Elias himself. It hadn't been a command. Not "eliminate them" but "handle this with me." A request. Cohen Elias's first genuine plea for cooperation, directed at another person in his entire life. Al-Rashid Zayed turned back. A beat. It held. That single beat stretched unnaturally long. Zayed's black eyes were looking at Cohen Elias's face—what he was seeing, Cohen Elias couldn't read. "[serious]Understood." It was brief. That was all. --- They moved. Cohen Elias pulled out the copy of the Gehenna Document's third volume and searched for a page separate from the summoning rituals. The latter half of the third volume—the description of sensory concealment. A protective barrier technique that temporarily obscured external perception, not the sort of thing a typical summoning researcher would use. It took several minutes to decipher the twelfth-century Aramaic text. The materials were close at hand. Salt. Ash from parchment. He descended to the first-floor laboratory and quickly retrieved them, then returned to the second floor. He wrote the ritual characters on the floor at the four corners of the building. A simple diagram combining salt and ash. Unlike the elaborate summoning circles, this could be completed in minutes. Al-Rashid Zayed left without a word. The demon's sentinel ability—the three-dimensional perception of presences around the building—scanned the factory complex. From angles invisible to humans, he confirmed the exterior wall and sensed the positions of the three sensors Perry Nathan had installed. The very presence of Zayed, the pressure it radiated, set off the primitive alarms in human consciousness in the darkness. Perry Nathan remained frozen in the shadow of the factory complex even after retreating from the exterior wall. He couldn't recover one of the sensors. Every time he tried to go back for it, that sensation returned. Something invisible was there. Not logic. His body refused it. He retreated. --- When Al-Rashid Zayed returned to the lab, Cohen Elias was just finishing the final ritual character of the sensory barrier. "[serious]Drove it away. But there are equipment remnants. Three units in the factory complex. One couldn't be recovered." Cohen Elias's hands, stained with parchment ash, stilled on his knees. They were trembling. Not violently. Finely. In small, rapid tremors. The final stroke of the ritual character wavered slightly. Whether that was an echo from three days ago in the basement, or tonight's fear, Cohen Elias couldn't determine himself. Both, probably. Al-Rashid Zayed's hand reached out. It grasped Cohen Elias's trembling hand. Not with force. With the strength to still it. The same hand that had broken his humerus three days ago was there now for a different purpose. Cohen Elias tried to put that into words and couldn't. Cohen Elias kept his eyes lowered and didn't pull his hand away. Silence stretched for a while. Cold air from the Greyvan River seeped through the building's gaps. From the direction of the south bank, the faint call to prayer—the Adhan—drifted through the deep night. Or perhaps it didn't. Boundary Street's nights always mixed in sounds like that. --- In the corner room on the third floor of Riverside Inn, Toll Margaret—former FBI, Helmon Agency operative, twenty-four years old—had stopped her ballpoint pen before the detector's display. The wave pattern of magicule reactions that had spiked sharply after midnight had settled quickly. Not an activation pattern of a ritual. This was a wave pattern indicating the construction of a protective barrier. Moreover, there had been a different kind of spike just before the increase—coinciding with the time of human approach. Her sharp gray eyes moved to her notebook. "Target is beginning defensive actions. Has sensed external approach." As she composed the FAX report, Toll Margaret organized Perry Nathan's movements in her mind. She was aware he'd approached independently. That he'd installed three sensors and failed to recover one. If that one unit continued operating— She sent the FAX. Requesting immediate dispatch of a full investigation team. Target possesses external sensing capability. Surveillance protocol enhancement necessary. --- After finishing the defensive work, Cohen Elias and Al-Rashid Zayed returned to the second floor. Cohen Elias sat not in the desk chair but on the floor against the wall. His body had lost its strength. He drew the Gehenna Document to his lap, and his hand stopped on its cover. "[serious]Who are those people outside?" "[cold]Humans. But not equipped with what ordinary humans possess." Cohen Elias stared at the Gehenna Document's cover. The latter half of the third volume—sixty pages still unread. Knowledge to counter external threats might be there—he recognized that. But at the same time, those sixty pages might also contain the complete conditions for breaking the summoning contract. His hand stopped. Al-Rashid Zayed saw it but said nothing. Not tonight. Fog from before dawn had settled on Boundary Street outside the window. In the shadow of the factory complex, the sensor Perry Nathan couldn't recover continued sending data quietly—the pattern of demon-species-specific existence energy recorded during the minutes Zayed had been outside, converted into signal and flowing through Greyvan's night. Cohen Elias didn't take his eyes from the Gehenna Document's cover. Whether to open it or not—that question had been born for the first time tonight. Al-Rashid Zayed stood a few steps away from Cohen Elias, unmoving. Waiting for no command to return to the basement. Simply there.