Keynes sat in the northern reaches of the 3rd District, remote, unhurried, the kind of town that had stopped keeping pace with the rest of the Federation sometime in the previous decade and hadn't particularly minded.
They drove in shifts through the days and found a roadside motel for the nights. On the fourth morning, they rolled into Keynes just after dawn.
Evelyn had the documents ready before Raphael was fully out of the car. Cover identities, with matching clothes folded underneath.
"Alternate identities. The target's level is unknown, location unknown, motive unknown. We're visible and they're not, that's an ambush waiting to happen.
"She kept her voice practical, no particular urgency in it. "In a town this isolated, that includes the local police. Possibly IFSA contacts as well."
She didn't finish the thought out loud, but Raphael followed it without help.
A place this far from the center of things was exactly the kind of environment that religious organizations moved into quietly.
The cult from the Lance case hadn't operated in isolation,it had infrastructure, doctrine, reach.
Whatever was killing people in Keynes at night might be the visible part of something with considerably more underneath it.
"Can't rule out a trap. Given the ambush at the Lance property, they're running organized hunts against transcendents."
Evelyn nodded. "That's the concern."
He opened the credentials. Insurance salesman, a regional company, the kind that sent people door to door in smaller markets. Evelyn was a journalist from a minor outlet.
Both covers gave them legitimate reasons to approach strangers, ask questions, turn up in unexpected places. Neither would raise flags in a town where outsiders occasionally passed through.
They changed in the open air beside the car, backs turned to each other, neither of them treating it as a thing worth acknowledging.
"Split up?" Raphael offered. As ordinary civilians on paper, moving together drew more attention than moving separately.
Evelyn's eyes went to the scabbard on his back.
He waved it off. "I'll manage."
A pause. Then: "Keep in contact. Don't push past your limits."
She took the car and headed for the outlying incident, one of the four attacks had occurred on the city's edge, and that was her first stop.
Raphael started walking.
The north quarter's commercial street was the kind of place that made you adjust your internal clock without meaning to.
He was accustomed to the rhythm of the Federation's larger cities, the density, the noise, the sense that every street was operating at slightly above capacity and everyone in it was being carried along by something they hadn't chosen. Keynes was something else.
The asphalt looked recently laid but imperfectly finished, the surface uneven in the way that suggested the equipment hadn't been adequate for the job.
The buildings ran to two and three stories, none of them new, the paint on most of them in various stages of peeling away from the underlying plaster.
Shop signs had aged into indistinction. The security shutters were rust-streaked.
Inside the shops, the owners sat behind counters and talked to their staff. Not about customers, just talking. A few people moved along the pavement without any particular pace. The cars on the road were slow and infrequent.
If a major city operated at something like one-and-a-half times the speed of ordinary life, this place ran at maybe seventy percent. Not depressed, just unhurried.
The residents looked like people who had made an arrangement with time and found the terms acceptable.
Raphael slowed down without deciding to.
He stopped at a small coffee shop near the end of the block and bought something hot.
The temperature here was lower than the city, and walking in it with a cup between his hands felt like a reasonable use of the next twenty minutes.
The warmth worked its way through his palms and into his wrists and he stood on the pavement and drank it and watched the street move at its own pace.
He arrived at the incident site shortly after.
Police tape cordoned off a section of pavement adjoining a stretch of planted greenery.
A single officer stood watch, middle-aged, heavyset, the particular stance of someone who had been standing still for too long and was compensating with visible authority.
A white sheet covered the remains on the grass.
Even from outside the tape, the sheet told him things.
The outline underneath it was wrong. Too interrupted, gaps where continuous form should have been. The left leg below the knee was absent. The right arm, entirely.
Whatever had done this hadn't taken pieces incidentally; it had removed them with a specificity that didn't fit random animal predation.
The ground around the body showed drag marks. Someone, or something, had moved her after the initial attack, pulling her toward the site from further up the path.
A public bench sat not far away. Bloodstains mapped the route between them in irregular intervals.
He shifted his gaze to the grass. Among the crushed blades, strands of hair, dark, with a sheen to them, each one fine and taut, holding its shape rather than lying limp.
Not human.
The officer had spotted him.
"Back off! This is a crime scene, unauthorized personnel stay behind the line!"
Raphael kept looking at the grass.
The officer's voice went up a register. "Hey! You hear me? Back off!"
Raphael finished his read of the scene and straightened. He pulled the brim of his cap down and turned his attention toward the officer with the expression of someone who had just become aware that noise was happening near him.
"I'm very sorry, officer." He produced an apologetic tilt of his head and a slight widening of his eyes, the performance of a man caught where he shouldn't be and immediately embarrassed about it.
"My hearing isn't what it should be, I didn't catch your earlier instructions. I really do apologize for the intrusion."
The officer had his taser out. He was holding it at an angle that had lost its intention, caught between the gesture of warning and the fact that the man in front of him seemed genuinely contrite.
"To make up for it, I have something here..." Raphael reached into his right jacket pocket with deliberate, visible motion.
The officer's eyes dropped to the pocket.
Raphael's left hand came across in a clean horizontal strike, the edge of the palm finding the back of the neck at the correct angle and with the correct weight behind it.
The officer's eyes rolled and he went down without drama, folding at the knees first and then sideways, the taser landing in the grass beside him.
The whole thing took less than two seconds.
In the moment before unconsciousness reached him fully, the officer caught a sliver of the man's face from below, a fragment of profile, one visible eye.
Pale blue. Unusually pale.
Then nothing.