By the time Raphael got back to the hotel that night, Evelyn's absence had already been sitting in the back of his mind for longer than he'd been willing to name.
He showered, changed back into the insurance salesman's cheap suit, and sat on the couch with the white paper spread on the table in front of him.
The investigation notes had accumulated into a dense web.
Crossed lines and circled names converging toward two remaining suspects. One incident site still unchecked.
After that, he'd have enough to either call in the Red Gloves' intelligence infrastructure for a formal search or go through the front door of wherever the suspect was and handle it directly.
Both options were available. Neither required Evelyn to be late.
He waited.
He tried the life band when the time stretched past reasonable.
The signal returned nothing, not a connection failure, the more specific response that indicated the device on the other end was simply outside coverage range.
"Strange." He said it quietly, to the room. "She doesn't go off-grid without telling me first. Even if the mission pulled her somewhere outside town, she'd have sent something."
The thought completed itself in the next second.
He was already on his feet.
"Eva. Can you reach Evelyn? I've lost her signal."
The sound from the other end was keyboard noise, rapid and sustained, layered under Eva's voice dropping from its usual register into something more controlled.
"No. No, no, no... that's not possible!"
A short, deliberate breath. Forcing herself level.
"I've pulled every camera in Keynes. Last confirmed sighting was at the university gate, she exits, enters the crossroads intersection.
After that, nothing. Not one exit camera, not one street-facing lens, anywhere in the city. She went into that intersection and didn't come out of it."
Raphael processed the shape of that. A crossroads that swallowed someone whole.
"I can find her signal, it's faint, somewhere in the city center, but there's interference I can't get through. Like trying to see through frosted glass. I can't pin the exact location."
"That's enough." He was already moving.
First stop: the local police station.
"Eva. Contact the station commander. Tell them a Red Gloves operative with a restricted identity needs to requisition a motorcycle. Don't give them my name."
More keystrokes. Her voice had a thread of tension in it she wasn't quite smoothing over.
"Done. I'm taking over the local camera network now. Raphael..." A pause. "Bring her back."
---
The Keynes station was running at the kind of pace that came from four unresolved homicides stacking up over a short period.
Every desk occupied, phones going, officers moving through the building with the particular exhaustion of people who hadn't been home at a reasonable hour in a week.
A junior officer received the station commander's instruction and headed for the parking lot to prepare a motorcycle for the unidentified operative.
He got as far as the entrance to the lot before he found his colleague flat on the ground.
Unconscious, breathing steadily, an empty fast-acting sedative cartridge still embedded in the side of his neck. The man's taser was still in his outstretched hand, pointed at nothing.
The officer looked around the empty lot.
One police motorcycle was missing.
He keyed his radio with the expression of someone who has arrived somewhere after the relevant events have already concluded.
"He's already gone, sir. Used a precision-dose sedative, clean administration, no injury. Professional."
The commander's voice came back after a brief pause.
"...A shame I missed him."
---
*Bffffffffff—*
The engine cut through the nighttime streets at 120 kilometers per hour, the alternating red and blue of the police lights strobing across the buildings on either side.
The roads were quiet, one of the few genuine advantages of a small city, and the sparse late traffic moved aside without much prompting. Raphael was at the university gate in minutes.
The campus was dark except for scattered lights in the teaching blocks.
The final incident site was in one of them, the life band had the location from Eva's earlier analysis. He checked the perimeter from the street.
The fence had wire along the top. The main gate was steel-framed, retractable, the kind that made a significant amount of noise if you forced it. He could force it, but he didn't need to.
He took Eva's projection device off his belt and held it, calculating the angle. A brief activation of Blood Frenzy, just enough to bring his arm up to the necessary output, and he threw it.
The device crossed the fence in a high arc, punched through a window in the target building's stairwell, and clattered down the steps inside.
Eva's projection materialized a moment later, disoriented and swaying, one hand going to the wall.
She'd been in the middle of a normal sitting position when her consciousness was routed through a projectile. She stood in the stairwell trying to determine which way was up.
"...Ugh. This is, Eva, I'm, I've arrived."
"I can see that." Raphael kept his voice neutral. "The crossroads are where I'm going. The incident site is yours."
Her projection was incorporeal. Whatever happened to it didn't reach the original. He trusted her with the building without particular concern.
"Understood." She steadied herself against the wall and started moving toward the men's bathroom where the last incident had occurred.
---
The city was complete and entirely silent.
Every building in its correct position, every street lamp in place, the rubbish bins on the pavement reproduced with the kind of fidelity that shouldn't have been possible.
The cars on the road moved, but haltingly, with the intermittent, stuttering quality of something processing on a delay.
No people. Not one.
Evelyn had been inside the mirror for several hours.
She'd tested the space methodically. Walking in a single consistent direction for long enough to confirm that the city's replica extended far beyond the intersection where she'd entered it.
The geometry of the place was unnerving in its completeness, she was increasingly convinced that if she walked far enough to reach the edge of the city, the world beyond it would continue, equally faithful to the original, equally empty.
She came back to the crossroads.
The source had to be here. Whatever anchor held the mirror world in place, it was in this intersection, and dismantling it from inside was the only option available to her while her connection to the outside remained severed.
She was examining the ground surface when she felt it.
A connection. Faint, interference-dense, like a voice heard through a wall, but present, the particular quality of a familiar signal finding the edge of her perception.
She looked up.
Through the distortion, through whatever layer of separation existed between this space and the real Keynes, something moved in the air above the teaching building. Small, fast, tracing an arc.
She recognized it before it hit the window.
Eva's projection device.
"Raphael?"