Chapter 141
"This is starting to piss me off." Ray shoved his face into the mask. His breath fogged up inside it, warm and damp around his mouth. "I feel like I just got caught stealing laundry, Milady. Nothing cool about this."
Milady stayed half a step ahead and didn’t look back. She fixed the sling bag on her shoulder like she had all the time in the world. Ray, next to that, looked like a guy fighting his own hair.
"If that idiot face of yours ends up on a neighbor’s camera, the plan dies in five minutes," she said. The white mask softened her voice a little. The attitude still came through. "Can you be quiet? Complaining won’t give you more air."
"It’s stuffy in here." Ray matched her pace, still fried from the stream. "Where are we even going? The server crashed. People online are hunting me. And you want to take a walk."
Milady stopped and turned so fast Ray almost walked into her. He caught himself.
She looked him over. "Instead of talking, why don’t you take today’s hard mission?"
Ray blinked. Then he folded his arms and put on a grin behind the mask. "Fine. Let’s go. You think I’m scared? Long as I’m not fighting some interdimensional monster with a kitchen knife, I’ll annoy the system all day."
A small laugh slipped out of her.
"Finally," she said. "There’s a little backbone left. I thought it was just fat and despair."
"Your mouth is vicious," Ray said. He was smiling anyway.
They kept walking through the old neighborhood. Quiet street. Big trees. Evening wind. Long shadows on cracked pavement. The calm broke when they passed a faded green fence and a yard full of potted plants.
An older woman in simple clothes was watering chrysanthemums. Silver hair pinned up. Reading glasses on the end of her nose. She looked up at the sound of their steps and her eyes widened behind the lenses.
"Oh my. Is that Charlotte?" Her voice was warm, a little rough. She turned off the hose and came toward the fence, smiling.
Ray stopped. Charlotte? His stomach clenched around a laugh. That name. For her. Then it clicked. Alias. Right. She wiped the old memories.
Milady locked up like someone had poured cement in her spine. If Ray could see under the mask, he knew her face was either white or burning.
"Ah. Grandma Gina." Milady’s voice flipped so hard Ray looked twice. Soft. Polite. Suddenly she sounded like a girl who never missed Sunday service. "Good evening."
Grandma Gina chuckled and looked from Milady to Ray.
"And who is this, Charlotte? Both of you all covered up." She pointed between them with a slightly shaky finger. "New boyfriend? He’s tall. Handsome, too. No wonder I haven’t seen you on the porch lately. You’ve been busy."
"That’s not—"
"Oh, don’t be shy." The old woman didn’t let her finish. "I’ve lived long enough, Charlotte. The way you two walk together already told me. Reminds me of your late grandfather when we were young. Evening walks. Holding hands. Shy, but stuck together."
Ray kept his face straight, stood a little taller, and bowed just enough.
"Good evening, Grandma Gina," he said, voice polite and a little deeper than usual. "Yes, ma’am. I’m just walking Charlotte around. She said she was getting tired of staying in."
Milady’s look said she was going to kill him later.
"You chose well, Charlotte." Grandma Gina waved, clearly delighted. "Go on, then. Don’t stay out too late. And take good care of him."
"Yes, Grandma. Thank you. We’ll be going." Milady bowed quick and yanked Ray’s jacket.
"Take care," Ray said, waving, smiling under the mask.
They picked up speed. About fifty meters around the next quiet bend, Ray lost it.
"Pffhahahaha." He bent over on the sidewalk, holding his stomach. "Charlotte? Your fake name is Charlotte?"
Milady stopped.
Ray stepped closer and dragged it out.
"So where are we going now, Char-lo-tte?"
THUD.
"Ah! Shit!"
Her heel came down on his right big toe. She put weight on it and twisted. Pain shot straight up his leg. Ray hopped, grabbing his foot.
"That mouth needs to go," Milady said. She’d pulled the mask down. Her face was red, split between rage and embarrassment.
"You stomped like you meant it!" Ray leaned on a fence, rubbing the front of his shoe. "You never said the neighbors call you Charlotte. And you sounded so sweet back there."
"She’s just a neighbor. That name has nothing to do with you." Milady pulled the mask back up and folded her arms. "One more word about it, and your system won’t save you tonight."
Ray winced. The laugh was still in his eyes. "Okay. Okay. Damn. Sensitive."
"Shut up and walk."
She turned and moved faster. Ray limped after her.
The neighborhood thinned out after two more turns. Nice fences gave way to chain-link. Porch lights gave way to flickering streetlamps. Ray was still favoring his right foot when the sound of the street changed. Less houses. More engines. A metal roof in the distance, stained and sagging.
They stopped in front of a train station that looked like it had given up ten years ago and just never told anybody.
The sign was half-dead. One letter buzzed. The other three didn’t bother. The entrance smelled like old rain, fried oil, and people who had been sitting in the same clothes too long. A guy slept on a bench with a plastic bag for a pillow. Two kids in hoodies watched every passerby a little too carefully. A woman argued with a ticket machine that had a cracked screen and a handwritten OUT OF ORDER taped over the card slot.
Ray stared at it.
"Okay," he said. "What the hell are we doing here?"
Milady didn’t slow down. She walked under the busted sign like this was a cafe.
"This is a good place for your hard daily mission."
Ray stopped at the threshold. "A good place. This?"
"Yes."
"Milady. Look at it. This station looks like it eats wallets for breakfast."
"That’s why it works."
Ray dragged both hands down his mask, then dropped them. "You always do this. You always drag me to the weirdest possible version of a public space. First it was that park full of crackheads. Now it’s a train station full of pickpockets. What’s next, a hospital waiting room during a blackout?"
Milady glanced back, unimpressed. "You’re being dramatic."
"I’m being accurate." Ray pointed at a guy near the turnstiles who was pretending to check his phone while watching a woman’s purse. "That man has not looked at his screen once. He’s hunting."
"Then don’t stand there looking like an easy wallet."
"I look like a guy in a mask with a sore toe because somebody stomped me over a name."
Milady ignored that and kept walking toward the side corridor, away from the main ticket hall. The lights there were worse. One fluorescent tube flickered like it was dying in slow motion. The floor was sticky in patches. A vending machine hummed with its glass kicked in. Somebody had written CALL ME on the wall in marker and then crossed it out.
Ray followed because the alternative was standing alone in a station that already felt like it wanted something from him.
"Hard mission," he muttered. "Of course it’s hard. You wouldn’t bring me to a quiet bookstore and say, ’Go alter one old man reading the paper.’ No. It’s always this. Dirt. Eyes. People who look like they already lost the day."
Milady stopped near a row of scratched plastic seats facing the tracks. A train horn sounded somewhere far off, then died. She turned to him.
Ray dropped onto one of the seats, then immediately regretted it. The plastic was cold and slightly wet. "You planned this."
"I walked us here. That is planning."
"You walked us past Grandma Gina first so I could get emotionally damaged, then you brought me to crime CINEMA."
Milady’s eyes narrowed. "Say that name again."
Ray lifted both hands. "I’m not saying it. I’m saying the route was evil."
A kid on a skateboard cut through the corridor too fast. A man cursed. Somebody’s bag zipper sounded. The whole station felt like it was waiting for a mistake.
Ray leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "Last time you picked a park, I had to work around people who were either high, yelling, or both. I finished the mission and still felt like I needed a tetanus shot. Now you want me doing hard-tier work in a place where half these people would steal my shoes if I blinked too long."
"Then don’t blink too long."
"That’s not a strategy."
Milady sat on the seat beside him, not close enough to look friendly. Her mask made her expression hard to read, but her voice was clean and cold.
"You complained the stream got too big. You complained Angelo grabbed the narrative. You complained Hime has institutions. Fine. Then stop expecting your missions to happen in a cute little bubble."
Ray watched a guy in a stained jacket drift too close to a couple arguing over tickets, fingers loose at his side, ready. The couple didn’t notice. Ray noticed. That was the problem with this place. Once you looked, you saw too much.
"I didn’t ask to be the guy who rewrites how people think," he said. "I asked why it had to be here."
"Because if you can do it here, you can do it anywhere." Milady stood again. "Open the panel. Take the hard one. Don’t pick Medium because you’re sore and tired. I’m not walking you back across town for a consolation prize."
Ray stared at the tracks beyond the dirty glass. A train slid in, brakes screaming, doors opening on a crowd that already looked impatient. Pickpocket weather. Too many bodies. Too many hands. Too many chances for something to go wrong.
He laughed once, no humor in it.
"Park full of crackheads. Station full of thieves. You’re building me the worst tourist map on earth."
Milady looked down at him.
"And yet you followed."
Ray sat there another second, toe still throbbing, mask still damp, the system already itching under his thoughts. Then he pushed himself up.
"Yeah," he said. "That’s the part that’s starting to piss me off."