That was magical. Anna remembers. She read about them the first time she saw the word “zeevonk” on the news, and watched videos of shorelines erupting into a splash of blue whenever the sea threw itself in waves unto land at night. It was enchanting, truly, to see even the gentlest lapping of water cause a fleeting shimmer, like aquatic fireflies awoken by motion. However, she’d never seen that in person, much less with a Scrapper. (Was that what the Zeevonk meant, though? Was the thief spying on her that night?)

Nonetheless, sea sparkles were magic. And when a criminal vanishes in a veil of smoke, it’s stake-worthy sorcery. That is just the way things are to her.

But the way things are in her world, is not just. She can worry about that pain in the neck later. For now, she had to figure out what to do about those drums of scopolamine that Billy looked into.

Adrian is not in the business of manufacturing meds for motion sickness. He runs a trucking company. Scopolamine transported in this volume, this discreetly, in this medium and in these containers, can only be for the production of Devil’s Breath.

“That’s not all,” Abelardo tells Anna, pointing to the table on his screen. “Those weapons? They were never declared.”

“How could a dead city declare anything, though,” the Zeevonk pipes up.

“What’s wrong?” Billy asks when Anna abruptly turns away from the screen.

“Nothing,” Anna reassures him, then muses aloud as she scanned the parking area, the periphery. and whatever she could see of the building. “What do you think could the Zeevonks want with it?”

“Why take that out of all the rest?” There were a number of other weapons in the building after all, some more sophisticated than others. And the Zeevonks were known to steal artifacts from museums, not CA storage facilities. She ponders as she counts one van, one truck, and three cars. She notes the same plastic palettes still stacked tall on their side of the building, rows of metal doors still completely shut all the way to the end where Marcus’s car is parked, and not a blade of grass out of place on the lawn. Lieutenant Yalanci is on the phone by the hedge while all three of the explosive ordnance disposal team are finishing up, watched by two of Adrian’s men outside, near the doorway.

“Sarge,” a man in an airtight hazmat suit interrupts them.

“Sir,” the cop acknowledges the head of the EOD crew with a nod, and Billy returns to his position in the nearby van.

“The bomb was non-hazardous,” he reported, adjusting the mask over his face. "Just a harmless smoke bomb made by Scrappers. The team has documented the scene as well. Investigators are free to enter now. You’re good to go."

“Perfect. Thank you.” She dips her head one last time before heading over to her Lieutenant, but the man blocks her path.

“I said you’re good to go.” He emphasizes the last four words and nods at the white truck behind Billy’s van.

Leaning against the door of the driver’s side was a smaller figure whose face was not visible through no fault of the hazmat suit, but boy does she recognize that cocky wave.

“Real enough?” Anna hears her voice through the earpiece.

Anna blinks.

The woman blinks.

“Well?”

Fine, Anna thinks to herself. She’s earned it with persistence. (No, it’s not because she was impressed and wants to know how they did it.)

She approaches the, uh, member of the cleanup crew, ignoring Billy’s look, and asks, “So, where should meet you?”

“Meet me?” The woman straightens up, blue eyes meeting green. “I came to pick you up.”

Anna can hear a smile in the girl’s hushed voice, somewhere between a nervous and a pleading one.

“I can’t just leave my post.”

“Oh, you’d rather get your ears chewed off by Linthaym?”

Not at all. She’d rather catch them once and for all. Who’s to stop her from ending this and finally focusing on her own search?

Well, apparently, it’s the crew’s leader. He catches her wrist when she reaches for the cuffs on her belt, eyes dark as his skin piercing through her. “Let’s not go there.”

“We really don’t have much time,” the woman adds. “He’s near.”

The guy’s grip is painless but firm.

Anna could go there. She has everything she needs. Billy is watching her through his side mirror with chips in his mouth, ready to signal her team, and true to the Zeevonk’s statement, Adrian just hung up on the lieutenant, who’s now making her way to her. If she were to apprehend them here and they decided to fight back. It would be a minimum of five trained combatants against a group of four escape artists in cumbersome layers that limit their sights and movements.

“Fine,” she feigns surrender. “At least get out of your suit before I join you.”

The woman’s eyes smile, hopeful, and nods sideways at her superior, signaling him to join the other two in the truck and begin doffing.

“You too.”

She tilts her head, and Anna hears the smirk in her question. “Are we already at that stage?”

Anna rolls her eyes and shakes her head and pulls out her baton.

Tonight is the night. Anna is putting an end to this wild monkey chase. She’s getting her answers. About her. No, them. About the weapons and that specific frame. About Adrian.

“Suit off. Now.”

“Can I get a little privacy? It’s not safe to doff —”

“You said the bomb’s harmless. Take your suit off.”

“What’s going on?” Billy asks over comms.

With Marcus’s image reflected on her glasses, the woman relents and gets down to take her shoe covers off. Anna hears his footsteps halt just behind her.

“What’s going on here?” Lieutenant Yalanci asks her.

“We got the Zeevonk,” Sergeant Verloren informs him.

Anna catches a pause in the woman’s breathing, a quiet reaction to her immediate betrayal followed by a steady increase in her heart rate. She wants to feel bad for ruining the girl’s trust but feels no guilt in having used it. After all, it’s just part of her job. Either way, she was getting answers, whether it was at the beach or in the interrogation room.

“Anna,” the Lieutenant’s low voice implies a warning, “this is one of our cleaners.”

“Just wait,” she hisses sternly.

He’ll see. She has to look up to detach her mask from the edge of the suit below her face.

“Anna, I hate to remind you, but if you —”

“I know.”

The sergeant’s title and practically perfect track record is a fragile shield, protecting her from the threat of being owned again. One mistake could send her back to that godforsaken labyrinth of white walls and cold tiles. One mistake could take away her hard-fought second chance at life and send her back to a fate worse than death.

“You have the right to remain silent.”

After those first words, there followed a quiet woosh, clear as day to her ears. She looks up but catches no sight of anyone on a flying hoverboard. The Zeevonk before her could not possibly try to escape either. Instead, she could only drop the last of her protective suit and reveal her face to the Ketherian she trusted. And for the Ketherian, time itself seems to pause.

The woman before her is not as she’d imagined, her light brown skin glowing subtly in the light of dusk. Her eyes, almond-shaped and a piercing blue, holds a brightness that fit right into their neon-lit cities in stark contrast to the plain buildings she kept stealing from. Beneath those eyes, prominent collarbones frame the suspect’s delicate build, each line and curve speaking to an elegance that belied her current predicament. Most striking to Anna is the beau’s long black hair cascading down her shoulders, shimmering with hints of brown where the lights hit just right — an arresting contrast to the unnatural blue she had previously thought it to be. Anna concludes it must have been dyed during their last encounter.

“Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law,” she continues in an attempt to compose herself when she couldn’t even tell if it was the poor girl’s panic or her own heart pounding in her ears. “You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, …”

No one stops her. Not even the Scrapper offers any resistance.

“Do you understand?” Anna asks at the door of the police car.

“Yeah,” the woman replies with a frown. “I just wish we could’ve taken the truck instead. I had blankets ready in the trunk,” she adds with a wink before Anna shoves her into the back seat and slams the door as gently as she could.

As she walks back to the rest of the group, she realizes it was her heartbeat.

Billy gives her a look. Adrian parks and rolls down his window. Marcus raises a brow. The rest of the cleaning crew are lined up, guarded by her men. Their suits are being gathered. Soon, there’ll be a caravan to the station.

The chase is over.

She did it.