Forty-eight hours, the message had said, and true to their word, the follow-up landed exactly two days later — a street address in a part of the city I didn't recognize, an old textile building converted, according to the message, into "a private venue," and a time: 10 PM, Saturday. Formalwear and mask mandatory. No exceptions.
Which left me with a problem, because everything I owned that qualified as a mask had a smiling white face and a voice changer built into the jaw, and the last thing I needed was to walk into a room full of people who'd apparently already connected an internet handle to a name before I'd earned the paranoia to expect it, wearing the exact same face I wore when I made men break each other's arms on camera for donation money.
Jester was a brand. Jester was useful precisely because everyone who knew that name knew what it meant, and that meaning was violence, entertainment, a voice you couldn't place and a mask you couldn't see behind. That was a good thing to be known as in the part of the internet where fight clubs and dark-web gun dealers lived. It was a spectacularly bad thing to be known as in a room that might contain people with actual, verified, world-bending powers, people who — if the deep web's "Secrets" page was telling the truth — worked for governments, sat on the boards of companies, and occasionally broke eighteen men's necks at once when the mood struck.
If I walked into that masquerade as Jester, and Jester ever slipped and hurt the wrong socialite's kid at a stream three months from now, I wanted there to be zero chance anyone in that room connected the dots.
I needed a second face.
I spent most of Thursday online, scrolling through costumer after costumer, most of them selling the same tired stock designs — generic Venetian beaks, gold filigree, the kind of thing you'd see on a hundred other people in that same room. None of it felt right. I wanted something that said what I actually was without saying it in words, and it took me longer than I expected to land on the idea, sketched out in the margin of a school notebook between two periods I wasn't paying attention to anyway: sleep. Not a smile. Not a threat. Something quiet enough to be underestimated and strange enough to be remembered.
I went back and forth for over an hour on whether to commission it custom or find something close enough off the rack and modify it myself. Custom meant a real person handling my measurements, my address, a paper trail with my burner details on it somewhere in a stranger's order history — a risk I didn't love. But off-the-rack masks were built for parties that ended at midnight with everyone laughing about how silly they'd looked, not for a room that had already proven it could read more off a person than their face was supposed to give away. In the end the risk of a bad mask felt worse than the risk of a good one, and I placed the order.
By Thursday night I had it placed with a costumer two cities over who specialized in "gothic formalwear" and didn't ask a single question about a fourteen-year-old buying a bespoke half-mask with an adult's measurements attached to a burner address. Money, I'd learned, made most questions evaporate before anyone bothered to ask them.
The mask arrived Friday afternoon, and I locked my bedroom door before I opened the box.
It was beautiful, in the specific, unsettling way beautiful things sometimes are. A half-mask, porcelain-white, covering from the bridge of my nose up over my brow — smooth, expressionless, no smile carved into it the way Jester's mask smiled. Just a face at rest. A face asleep. Painted across the forehead and temples in fine, near-black indigo were a scatter of stars and a crescent moon, done so delicately they were nearly invisible unless the light caught them at an angle, and along the edge where the porcelain met skin, a thin line of dark purple — a color I told myself was a coincidence and knew wasn't.
I set it on my desk and looked at it for a long moment before I started dressing.
The suit I'd ordered alongside it was black, cut close, no tie — just a high collar that closed at the throat like something out of a period drama, dark enough that under low light it would read as formal without reading as costume. I buttoned it slowly, watching my hands in the mirror the whole time, feeling the room around me go quiet in the specific way it always did right before I put a mask on. There's a ritual to it whether I mean to build one or not. My pulse slows down instead of speeding up. My shoulders find a different set. By the time I lifted the porcelain half-mask and settled it against my face, tying the black ribbon behind my head with fingers that had done this exact motion a dozen times with a different mask entirely, I wasn't entirely fourteen anymore, and I wasn't entirely Jester either.
I looked in the mirror and a stranger looked back — something that belonged in the space between a funeral and a dream, quiet, patient, the kind of face you'd tell a secret to because it looked like it already had a thousand of its own.
"Somnus," I said out loud, testing the shape of it in my mouth. My real voice, no changer, pitched a half-step lower than usual, slow enough that it didn't sound like it belonged to someone who still had a curfew.
It fit. God help me, it fit better than Jester ever had.
I noticed, adjusting the mask's ribbon for the third time, that my hands weren't quite steady — not fear, exactly, closer to the specific electricity of standing at the edge of something I'd wanted for longer than I'd admitted to myself. I made myself stop fussing with it and just look, the way I imagined a stranger would look, someone with no idea a fourteen-year-old boy lived somewhere underneath all that porcelain and black wool.
I spent a few more minutes in front of the mirror finding the posture that went with it — Jester leaned into big gestures, played to a crowd, needed the mask's fixed grin to do half the emotional labor for him. Somnus wanted less. A slower blink. Hands that didn't reach for attention, just waited for it to arrive on its own. By the time I'd practiced saying my own name three more times in three slightly different registers, I understood something about the two personas that I filed away for later: Jester was who I became to be seen. Somnus was who I became to watch.
I packed the Glock into the inside pocket of the jacket — not because I expected to use it, but because the version of me that had learned anything at all from the last few months didn't walk into a locked-address invitation from strangers who already knew his internet handle without a way to argue back if the conversation turned. I told my parents I was staying at Danny's for a "school thing," a lie so threadbare it wouldn't have survived one follow-up question, and none came, because I'd stopped giving them reasons to ask follow-up questions months ago. That was its own kind of victory and its own kind of loss, and I didn't have room to sit with either one tonight.
Before I left, I texted the Numbers a short instruction through the phone Doug had helped set up — nothing urgent, just a standing order for one of them to check the burner every hour after midnight, in case a night like this one ended somewhere I couldn't walk myself home from. It felt paranoid, writing it out. It felt more paranoid not to.
I stood in front of the mirror one last time before I left, running through the small, practical checklist that had become as automatic to me as tying my shoes: gun seated where I could reach it without looking, burner phone charged and silenced, the porcelain mask's ribbon tied twice so it wouldn't loosen if the night got physical. It was a strange kind of comfort, running that checklist. Six months ago I hadn't owned anything worth checking twice before I left the house. Now I had a routine for walking into rooms that might try to kill me, and the routine itself was almost enough to make the fear feel manageable — a problem with steps, instead of a problem with teeth.
The address turned out to be exactly what it sounded like: an old textile mill on the edge of the industrial district, four stories of dark brick with most of its windows blacked out, and if you didn't know to look for it you'd have walked past the unmarked door on the north side without a second glance. I didn't walk past it. I stood across the street for a full two minutes first, watching — a habit the last few months had built into me without my noticing, the same instinct that made me check a warehouse for cameras before I'd ever touched a mask.
Two men in plain black suits stood either side of the door, neither one wearing a mask themselves, both scanning the street with the specific stillness of people who did this for a living. Security, obviously, and not the kind you buy off a corner. I crossed the street with my hands loose and visible and my collar up, and one of them stepped forward before I'd said a word.
"Name."
"Somnus."
He looked at me a beat longer than felt comfortable, then produced a tablet from inside his jacket, scrolled, and nodded once.
"Mask stays on inside. No photography. No weapons past this point." His eyes flicked, very briefly, to the line of my jacket where the Glock sat, and I understood, with a small cold drop in my stomach, that he already knew it was there and hadn't said anything about it until this exact moment — which meant either the check was theater, or they simply didn't care, because whatever was waiting for me past that door didn't need me disarmed to feel entirely in control of the room.
"It's for peace of mind," I said. "I'll leave it in my jacket. Doesn't have to come out."
He held my eyes a moment longer, and I felt the ghost of a temptation — one flicker of purple and this entire conversation could end differently — before I let it go. Not here. Not on the doorstep, with a partner six feet away and cameras I hadn't spotted yet somewhere in these walls. If this was a test, and I was increasingly sure it was, failing it in the first ninety seconds by doing the one thing that would out me completely seemed like a spectacularly bad opening move.
"Fine," he said finally, and stepped aside. "Enjoy the party, Somnus."
The door opened onto a stairwell lit by candlelight — real candles, dozens of them, set into brackets along raw brick walls that still smelled faintly of old dye and machine oil under a newer layer of incense — and from somewhere above, muffled through two more floors of stone, I could already hear music that didn't belong anywhere near a warehouse district: strings, low and unhurried, the kind of thing that got played in places with marble floors, not places with rats in the walls.
I climbed the stairs with my pulse steady and my hands loose at my sides, and somewhere around the second landing I caught my own reflection in a tall, spotted mirror bolted to the wall — porcelain, moon and stars, purple at the edges — and thought, with a small, private thrill I didn't examine too closely:
Nice to meet you too.