The Inquisitor's smile widened as she stepped back, betting on the same thing she'd been betting on since she'd spread her arms.
"You know, perhaps you're marginally better than that bastard father of yours. At least you have some fragment of conscience. At least you won't..." She stopped. Frowned. "...Hm?"
Something was wrong.
She noticed it slowly, then all at once, her skin had gone loose, the muscle underneath it losing its tension by degrees, the strength draining out of her limbs in a quiet, steady hemorrhage that had no specific point of origin.
"Did you notice?"
Raphael holstered the revolver without ceremony and held up his right hand.
Complete. All fingers present, the flesh knit together seamlessly, even the ones that had been snapped off and thrown across a battlefield thirty minutes ago.
The arm that had been the Inquisitor's had finished integrating, and with it, everything attached.
She stared at the hand.
Her next step went wrong. The one after that didn't happen.
Her knees found the road and she went down to them without deciding to, her hands dropping to her sides with nothing behind them, her neck losing the argument with gravity.
Her forehead touched the concrete.
She couldn't lift it.
The position was completely without dignity, bowed forward, face against the road, arms folded uselessly under her, and she could feel that she was in it and could do nothing at all about it.
Her mouth wouldn't shape words. Her tongue sat in her mouth like something foreign. Her eyelids came down on their own and stayed.
Raphael walked over and stood beside her.
"What exactly made you think," he said, his voice carrying the same flat quality it always carried, "that your story would move a killer?"
He paused.
"Perhaps I do have things I care about. You're not among them."
Rick came to mind for a moment, unbidden. He let it pass.
The Inquisitor tried to make a sound. Tried to push herself upright with arms that had stopped receiving the relevant signals.
She could feel her own life doing what lives do when the mechanism that runs them has been interrupted, winding down, with the particular slowness of a thing that doesn't understand it's ending.
Her skin began to go first.
It softened against the concrete, the boundary between surface and ground becoming negotiable, the tissue losing its cohesion and spreading laterally in a dark, spreading film.
The muscle underneath was briefly visible, still twitching, the fascia catching the streetlight, before it followed.
Her fingers dissolved from the tips inward, the flesh detaching from the bone with the slow liquidity of wax running off a candle, the resulting fluid spreading and mixing, pale red against grey concrete, the edges of it diffusing outward in the way that spilled things do.
Raphael sat down on the kerb beside the road, turned sideways, not quite looking at her.
"Your hatred for my father is your own business. You tried to kill me, so I'm killing you, that's the full accounting of it. You wanted to harm my partner and you'd have tried again given the chance, so I'm not giving you the chance."
A single tear tracked from the corner of her closed eye, following the curve of her dissolving cheek.
Her lungs had stopped cooperating. The muscles controlling her throat, her airway, the cartilaginous architecture of her respiratory system, all of it inert, the tissue present and non-functional, the breathing reflex sending signals into dead wire. Each attempted inhale arrived and found nothing to work with.
Raphael glanced at her briefly.
Inertia. He'd been on the receiving end of it more than once during the Lance mission, had held it off with distance and vampire regeneration.
A human warlock, however powerful her magic, with no voice and no mobility, was operationally equivalent to nothing.
"Your story is your own," he said again. To himself, mostly. He wasn't sure she could still hear.
He activated the life band and tried Eva.
The response was the same as the one he'd gotten when Evelyn went dark, device unreachable, signal absent, the specific quality of disconnection that meant something had swallowed the connection rather than broken it.
His eyes went to the teaching building immediately.
He was running before the implication had finished assembling.
He wasn't concerned about Eva's physical safety, she was a projection, her body still in the base.
Whatever had caught her consciousness could hold it, but it couldn't reach the original. What it did mean was that whoever or whatever had created the mirror-trap was still inside that building, right now, operating.
And he knew which crossroads to start from.
Behind him, the birds had already started arriving.
A vulture first, then crows, descending in a loose spiral toward the pale shape left kneeling on the road.
They settled over it in a dense, shifting mass, and the sounds they made were businesslike.
---
"Hey. Eva. Wake up."
The voice was familiar. The shaking was gentle.
Eva fought her way back through the particular misery of a consciousness that had been treated roughly and surfaced with her eyes open and her head disagreeing with the entire concept of being upright.
Evelyn's face. Close. Worried in the specific way that Evelyn was worried, present and measured, nothing spilling over.
"Ugh..." Eva pressed both palms to the sides of her skull, which didn't help but felt like the appropriate response.
"Where, I was at the first-floor exit, getting ready to go support Raphael, and then some kid with a dog pointed a mirror at me and my brain turned into a smoothie."
She looked around.
Still the first-floor exit. Or something that was identical to it in every particular except for the quality of the air, which had the deadness of a space that had never been breathed in.
"Evelyn. Did you rescue me? What happened to you earlier?"
Evelyn sat down beside her and exhaled quietly.
"Not exactly a rescue. You were pulled in the same way I was."
Eva absorbed this.
"So. The mirror world got both of us." She looked at the ceiling, which was a perfect replica of a ceiling, which somehow made it worse.
"Which means Raphael is out there handling whatever that was entirely by himself. His second mission.
We're not even through the first week and we've already achieved near-total incapacitation as a unit."
Evelyn walked her through the past several hours, the crossroads, the empty city, the failed communications, the systematic failure to find an exit or an anchor or anything resembling a point of entry she could reverse.
Eva chewed on it.
"So it's a mirror image. Everything present, one to one, except for us, we read as our actual selves instead of reflections."
"That's what I've concluded."
"Okay." She straightened, winced, straightened again.
"Okay. Then here's the thing about my projection, there are two ways it terminates. Voluntary disconnect, which requires me to feel the link between projection and body, which I currently cannot. Or..."
"External stimulus." Evelyn had already done this calculation.
She looked at Eva with the focused expression of someone who had arrived at a conclusion they found uncomfortable and had decided to pursue it anyway.
"Strong enough to force the consciousness back through the break. Which means if the projection is destroyed, your awareness returns to your body automatically."
Eva looked at her for a long moment.
"You're not."
Evelyn's expression was entirely serious.
"Raphael is out there alone. We're a team." She said it the way she said things she'd already decided. "That matters."
Eva stared at her.
Then she laughed, short, a little helpless, the laugh of someone who has just confirmed that their team leader is exactly who they thought they were.
"...At least buy me dinner first."