This KAC branch was built beneath a city that had learned to pretend nothing was wrong with it.
Aboveground, the world wore normalcy like a suit buttoned one notch too high. Streets ran where they were supposed to run. Traffic lights cycled. People bought groceries and argued over weather forecasts and checked their phones while passing public monuments erected over historical events that had never happened in any sane timeline. But the sky above the city had a flaw in it, faint and permanent as if a pale diagonal seam crossing the clouds from horizon to horizon like reality had once been cut there and poorly repaired.
Naturally, the local KAC branch had been buried under a courthouse.
Thanatos walked half a step behind the Founder as they descended through the final security corridor with her hands in the pockets of her coat and expression somewhere between boredom and private amusement. The fluorescent lights overhead buzzed in the stale way only institutional lights could. Moña walked at the Founder's other side with her hood down for once and pale hair loose over her shoulders with her gaze moving over the layered containment wards etched into the walls with the mild interest of someone evaluating whether the builders deserved praise or correction.
The staff they passed were doing an admirable job of pretending they were not watching the three of them. Though, some of them failed.
One analyst carrying a stack of files caught a glimpse of Thanatos gold eyes and nearly walked straight into a reinforced glass door. Another operative froze for half a second as Moña passed, as if some ancient part of the nervous system had tried to kneel before the rest of the body remembered it was at work. Neither Thanatos nor Moña said anything as both were keeping themselves under tight control with their powers leashed down as far as they could manage.
At the end of the corridor, the branch director met them outside a blast door marked ANOMALOUS INVESTIGATIONS DIVISION.
Director Elian Cross was a severe-looking man in his late fifties with iron-gray hair and the posture of someone who had spent too many years standing in rooms where the wrong answer killed people. He shook the Founder's hand first, carefully did not stare too long at Thanatos, and then made the far more understandable decision to only incline his head toward Moña from a respectful distance.
"Founder," he said. "I was informed you would be arriving. Though not..."
He added after a brief glance at his two companions.
"...with quite this degree of company."
The Founder said.
"We are here for Watson."
Director Cross's expression shifted by a fraction.
"Of course you are."
Thanatos lifted an eyebrow.
"That sounded weary."
Cross exhaled through his nose.
"It is not weariness. I am merely exercising caution."
Moña spoke for the first time since entering the branch.
"The reports say she has never failed an anomalous investigation."
"That is correct..."
"Then why the caution?"
Cross's mouth twitched in a way that might have become a smile in a more forgiving face.
"Because expectations tend to arrive here dressed incorrectly."
Thanatos glanced sideways toward Moña.
"Well. That's promising."
The Founder, unsurprised, merely said.
"Where is she?"
Cross turned and gestured toward the division beyond the blast door.
"In Records Annex Three. She requested isolation after concluding the Bellweather House case at 05:12 this morning. She has not yet gone home."
Thanatos frowned faintly.
"She solved a case before breakfast?"
"At 04:37, actually," said Cross. "The remaining thirty-five minutes were spent writing a report so thorough that our theoretical department is still arguing with it."
Moña's red eyes narrowed slightly.
"Interesting."
Director Cross put his hand to the scanner beside the blast door. As it unlocked with a low metallic thud, he added.
"One piece of advice."
Thanatos smiled.
"Oh, this should be good."
Cross looked at her directly.
"Do not approach her too quickly."
That actually made Thanatos blink.
"You're warning me not to startle your detective?"
"I am warning all of you," said Cross, "that Watson is not at her best when she believes she is about to be eaten. Especially those who are practically gods..."
Moña looked at him.
"That is a very specific concern."
"It has happened twice."
The blast door opened.
Beyond it, the Investigations Division looked less like a combat wing and more like the inside of a mind trying to keep up with too many realities at once. Glass walls were covered in marker-scrawl equations, timelines, sketches of anomalous symbols, and maps that had arrows leading not only across space but into margin notes labeled IF MEMORY IS THE VECTOR and DO NOT TRUST THE FOURTH FLOOR AFTER SUNDOWN. Tables overflowed with evidence boxes, teacups, half-disassembled recording devices, and pinned photographs of things too geometrically offended to be called corpses. The air smelled of coffee, paper, ozone, and the dry heat of overworked processors.
Analysts moved quickly but quietly. A woman at one desk had six monitors open, each displaying a different impossible hallway. A man in gloves was carefully bagging up what looked like a human shadow peeled from a wall. Somewhere deeper in the division a printer was spitting out pages faster than seemed structurally fair.
Thanatos slowed as she took it in.
"I expected less paper."
Moña's gaze moved over a murder board that appeared to connect an extradimensional parasite to three church fires, a municipal tax discrepancy, and a violin recital.
"I expected less competence."
The Founder continued walking.
"You both expected theatrics."
"Naturally," said Thanatos.
Cross led them through the maze of desks and evidence boards, then toward a side corridor lined with old archive cabinets and corkboards stained yellow by age. The deeper they went, the quieter it became. By the time they reached RECORDS ANNEX THREE, the sounds of the main division had dulled into a distant administrative murmur.
The door to the annex was slightly open.
Cross stopped there.
"I'll leave the introduction to you," he said.
Thanatos glanced at him.
"You're not coming in?"
"I prefer my survival," he replied.
Then he stepped away. Thanatos watched him go, then looked at the Founder.
"I am beginning to like this place."
The Founder pushed the annex door open.
Inside, the room was long, narrow, and crowded almost beyond use. Filing cabinets stood shoulder to shoulder beneath yellow lamps. Two rolling ladders were set against opposite shelves. The floor had nearly disappeared beneath stacked case files, open notebooks, pinned maps, and color-coded folders arranged in patterns only one mind could possibly understand. A chalkboard at the far end had been covered with names, dates, red string, three contradictory diagrams of the same staircase, and a note written in large hurried script:
NO, THE BUILDING IS NOT SENTIENT. IT IS JUST SPITEFUL. DIFFERENT PROBLEM.
At a central table, half-hidden behind towers of paper and a brass desk lamp, sat their next team member. Thanatos stopped. So did Moña.
The detective looked nothing like the silhouette the reports invited.
She was young. Far younger than the reputation surrounding her should have allowed. Blonde hair fell in loose disorder around her face, slightly flattened on one side as if she had run both hands through it too many times over too many hours. Her eyes were blue, sharp and intelligent but currently fixed with exhausted concentration on an open notebook. She wore what looked almost absurdly like an early-nineties detective outfit: a brown coat draped over a vest and collared shirt, tie loosened, sleeves slightly rumpled, like someone had built a detective out of old film stills and then forgotten to give her the corresponding confidence.
She had a pencil tucked behind one ear. Another in her hand. A third had somehow ended up in her hair. For three seconds she did not notice them. Then the Founder took one more step into the room.
The detective looked up and froze.
The effect was immediate and total.
Her eyes went first to the Founder, widened, then slid to Thanatos and widened further, then to Moña, at which point she seemed to experience an internal systems failure so complete that the pencil fell from her hand and bounced off the notebook without her attempting to catch it.
The room went very still.
Thanatos, who had clearly expected a trench-coated savant carved out of cigarettes and arrogance, stared back.
Moña's gaze narrowed, not in disdain, but in recalibration.
The Founder, already knowing exactly who he had come to find, said mildly:
"Good afternoon, Ina Watson."
Ina stood too fast and clipped her knee against the underside of the table, made a short, strangled noise of pain and alarm, then immediately apologized to no one in particular.
"Sorry—I mean—good afternoon—sorry—"
She took one step backward, saw Thanatos properly this time, and took a second step backward into a stack of archive boxes. The boxes wobbled dangerously.
Thanatos moved on instinct to steady them. Ina made a sound halfway between a gasp and a yelp. Thanatos stopped at once with both hands raised.
"I wasn't going to kill the paperwork."
Ina pressed herself against the edge of the table as though trying very hard to become part of the furniture.
"I know, I know, I just—sorry—it's just a lot of you at once..."
Moña glanced at Thanatos as she looked offended.
"A lot of us?"
"Sorry... I have social anxiety... I'm not used to being around a lot of people..."
Ina said before she seemed to realize she had spoken aloud. Then she looked horrified at herself. Moña, to her credit, did not look offended. The Founder stepped forward just enough to become the focal point of the room again.
"Watson," he said, "I am not here to unsettle you. Nor are we here to discuss your condition."
Ina swallowed, nodded too quickly, then made a visible attempt to gather herself. She straightened her tie. Failed to make the gesture look natural. Tried again. Worse result. Finally she gave up, pushed a lock of hair behind one ear, and looked at the Founder with the expression of someone forcing her intellect to drag the rest of her body into cooperation.
"Right," she said. "Yes. Of course. Sorry. You are... you."
Thanatos looked at the Founder.
"An inspired description."
Ina's eyes flicked to Thanatos and immediately away again.
"Sorry."
The exchange might have become cruel in lesser hands, but Thanatos only tilted her head, curious now. Moña moved her gaze slowly over the room as there were precise stacks, the coded annotations, the open case files filled with impossible details, and the single central chair worn smooth from long hours of occupation.
"This is the detective?" she asked the Founder quietly.
Ina heard it anyway, but her face reddened at once.
Thanatos, less subtle, said, "I expected someone taller."
Ina's gaze dropped to the floor.
"Yes," she murmured. "I get that a lot."
The Founder said-
"And yet both of you were wrong."
That quieted the room more effectively than any raised voice could have. Ina looked at him again with uncertainty.
The Founder gestured lightly toward the annex around them.
"The Bellweather case," he said, "it was solved in under four hours. The Harlowe Station phantom-passenger anomaly, resolved without civilian loss. The Greaves Mirror Murders, concluded in a week despite three contradictory realities insisting on mutually exclusive suspects. The Choir Street disappearances, the Black Briar homunculus chain, the Candle-glass inheritance curse. Watson has cleared cases entire branches wrote off as structurally unsolvable."
Thanatos's gold eyes shifted back to Ina with renewed attention. Moña's expression changed more subtly, but just as completely. Ina went redder.
"I had help," she said quickly.
The Founder ignored that.
"She does not fail because she is loud. She does not fail because she is theatrical. She does not fail because she resembles the stories written about detectives by people who have never had to survive one. She fails to fail because her mind continues where other minds stop."
There was no grandness in how he said it. That made it land harder. Ina stared at him like she wasn't sure whether to flee, thank him, or die on the spot from being perceived. Thanatos leaned one hip against a filing cabinet with her eyes still on Ina.
"Well," she said. "This is becoming more interesting."
Ina looked at her cautiously. Thanatos smiled, though not unkindly as she spoke.
"The reports described your exceptional fighting prowess, intelligence, perfect case resolution. They did not mention that you'd be frightened easily."
Ina winced.
"I don't frighten easily," she said, then after a beat of honesty added, "I frighten... comprehensively. There is a difference."
For the first time, Moña almost smiled.
"That is at least precise."
Ina, perhaps encouraged by not yet being dead, drew in a quiet breath and tried once more to stand like a person who had spoken to other people before. Her hands were trembling slightly. She hid them by reaching for the notebook on the table. Then, because she was apparently incapable of being anything except herself for more than ten seconds, she blurted:
"You are here because something is wrong."
Ina's eyes flicked between the three of them with astonishing speed now that panic had somewhere useful to go.
"Not with this branch. With something larger."
She looked at Moña, then immediately away before the pressure of looking too long could become unbearable.
"She's not from the same world or reality as the woman beside you. Both of you are suppressing catastrophic levels of energy in different ways. Though, one is... adaptive."
Her gaze moved, briefly, to Thanatos's hands.
"The other is withholding judgment from the room by choice.
Moña went still as Thanatos grinned. The Founder remained quiet.
Ina swallowed again.
"You came together out of cooperation, not conflict. You came here looking for specialists. Not soldiers. Not archivists. Not faith interpreters. But most importantly, you came to me."
She looked toward the case files on her own table as if embarrassed to be doing this while being watched.
"So you need me to find a thing, identify a thing, or prove something impossible before it becomes fatal."
Thanatos folded her arms.
"She does have teeth."
Ina went pale again.
"I didn't mean—"
"It wasn't an insult."
"Oh."
A beat passed.
"Oh," Ina said again, smaller this time.
The Founder stepped closer to the table.
"You are correct. We require an investigator."
Ina looked at him.
"For what scale of the problem?"
"Something that has to deal with the Manifolds of Worlds themselves," said the Founder.
The silence after that was almost impressive. Somewhere outside the annex, a phone rang. Someone shouted for a medic. A copy machine jammed with bureaucratic despair. Inside the room, Ina just stared. Thanatos, perhaps deciding that honesty would be kinder than suspense, said.
"Before you ask, yes, it is as bad as it sounds."
Ina closed her eyes for a second. Opened them. Closed them again. When she spoke, it was with the very distinct tone of a woman whose anxiety had been forcibly evicted by professional reflex.
"What kind?"
"An expanding campaign of systematic negation. We are gathering individuals with specific capabilities."
"And you think I am one of them."
"I know you are."
She was still frightened. That had not changed. It lived plainly in the tension around her eyes, the care with which she held her shoulders, the minute way she kept herself angled near the table as if ready to use it as partial cover should either of the women beside him turn into abstract violence.
But beneath that, just as plainly, was a mind already moving.
Ina looked down at the open pages on her desk, then at the notes around the room, then back to the three impossible figures standing in her annex.
Finally she said, very quietly:
"You could have sent a message."
Thanatos snorted.
"And miss this introduction? Certainly not."
Ina gave her a look that might have been indignant if it weren't so alarmed. Moña spoke then, voice calm enough to keep the room from tipping.
"You are not what she expected," she said, glancing at Thanatos.
Thanatos nodded once.
"Or I."
Ina looked between them.
"I'm... sorry?"
Moña considered her.
"Do not apologize for being mismeasured."
That shut Ina up for a second.
Then, because apparently the universe enjoyed humiliating her in installments, she looked at the Founder and asked:
"Am I allowed to sit down?"
The Founder said-
"Of course."
She sat immediately. Thanatos, watching this, smiled to herself. Yes, the reports had been correct. Just not in the way she had anticipated. The detective across from them was not imposing. She was not charismatic. She did not fill the room with presence or certainty or danger. The room was filled instead with evidence of a mind that had kept going past exhaustion, past fear, past the point where other people needed company. That, Thanatos realized, was another kind of prowess entirely.
Ina pulled the notebook closer, clearly using the motion as an excuse to anchor herself. Then she asked, almost in a whisper:
"Do I get details before I have my breakdown, or after?"
Thanatos laughed aloud as Moña looked at the Founder. The Founder, as ever, remained composed.
"Before," he said. "It seems more efficient."