The mission’s nature afforded Evalyn some shut eye: they were twiddling their thumbs until news came from the wired telephone. Her nap only lasted so long, though. She’d stripped the covers off the bed and unbuttoned her shirt as far as she still considered decent, the ceiling fan her only defense against the choking heat.

And yet the heat was only an annoying buzz in the back of her head, fading as her body grew to adapt to it. What really kept her eyes wide was the feeling of the bristling carpet against her armour, fabric like the hooks on a cat’s tongue. Still fresh in her mind, it haunted the soles of her feet.

She looked over at the hairpiece on the table, left abandoned, and not wholly without reason either. Her daughter had looked as though she were struggling back at the garage, and the way it had been the Queen that demanded Evalyn to act made it easy to deduce what had happened, if not the specifics.

“Why did you do it, Your Majesty?” Evalyn asked as she watched the ceiling fan whip about, kicking hot air up and out of the window.

“It was our only option in the moment,” Amestris replied. “It was a Thursday sort of matter, and time was running out. There was no clean way about it.”

“Sure, but that can’t be the only reason,” Evalyn said, and the Queen was silent for a few moments. The fan whirred, and the hot air danced.

“It is not,” she finally admitted, “but considering her future, she has no choice but to learn, eventually.”

Evalyn fidgeted with her own fingers, the heat getting to her head as she frowned deeply, sweat sticky in the creases in her skin.

“And what if I didn’t want her to, Your Majesty?” she asked. “If it gets to a point where it’s too dangerous to let things continue like this.”

“You mean to say release her from her duties?”

“…yeah,” she said tentatively. The Queen, in response, gave a long, silent pause. The fan rocked, and a distant phone call somewhere in the building weakly chimed through the floorboards. After she counted the fan rock back-and-forth seven times, Her Majesty finally gave her answer.

“I am always open to disputes. Even if they turn violent. Just know I won’t concede easily—”

“But she’s still a child.”

“She is your child. She’s rare, but not unique. You know that, Hardridge.”

“That doesn’t—”

“If you wish to fight me, then fight me with a mother’s wrath. Then you may stand to challenge me.”

Fight to protect her daughter and her daughter alone. Even if it was the Queen herself suggesting it, the small feat of fighting with one’s life for a single child felt like a monumental task. One impossible even for an absolute power.

But on matters of law, talking to the ruling monarch was about as final as things were. She held her tongue; the Queen knew exactly how ‘unfair’ it all seemed. Yet Evalyn had rarely seen ‘fair’ outside of board and ball games in her thirty years: the Queen’s philosophy suggested things she couldn’t expect different from another few hundred.

“I’m going to find her. You won’t get stolen, right?”

“I won’t be helpless, Hardridge. Feel free.”

“Thank you, Your Majesty.”

Evalyn rolled out of bed, buttoned up her shirt, and headed for the door.

“Hardridge,” the Queen called after her, stopping her by the door. “I mean it. I would never hold it against you, especially for that young one there.”

“I know, Your Majesty, but I can’t extend you the same impartiality.”

“And that love is why the Spirit of Desire chose you.”

Evalyn smiled weakly, the hand resting on the doorframe finally parting with it as she left and closed the door behind her. Her lips quivered: after a conversation like that, it was hardly right to say she was thinking of retiring.

Evalyn found her outside, sitting on a bench by the main entrance.

“Are you wearing sunscreen?” Evalyn asked, the words almost embarrassingly motherly.

“I’m in the shade,” Iris said, glassy eyes still listlessly wafting over the cramped street before them. Two no-through road signs on either end of the street kept things quiet, the office buildings teeming with workers presenting outward nothing but dead facades.

Evalyn sat close to her daughter, leaving enough room to let a draught pass through comfortably.

“How are you feeling?”

“Hot,” Iris said.

“…anything else?”

Her daughter remained silent, pressing her thumbs into each other as the dead stare remained idle. It was one of her trademarks—a stare that passed through anything and everything, but sometimes they were too much to bear to look at.

“What you did, back there,” Evalyn ventured, placing a hand on Iris’s thigh, “that was very brave of you.”

She moved her hand to the back of her daughter’s head, caressing the long, silver hair. “Thanks to you, things are going smoother.”

“I didn’t want to do it.”

“I know. We end up doing a lot of that sort of thing, don’t we?”

“Yeah.”

Evalyn held her tongue, knowing the next words she wanted to say wouldn’t help in the slightest.

“Because of…what you did…I don’t think we’ll have to make good on our promise. You know, of handing that evidence in. Without you, I don’t think that threat would’ve held enough weight.”

“That was this time,” Iris muttered. “It’s not always this easy, is it?”

Evalyn sighed through her nostrils, realising that measured responses wouldn’t get her anywhere, not with Iris in such a state.

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“I don’t know if you know this but…when Dad and I first got…well, not married, but close to it, Marie gave me three months. Three months to fall in love with him without a war going on, without emotional highs and lows and all that. Just…three months of normal life. Obviously, that went well, but how do you think I felt when three months were up and Liam showed up at my door?”

Iris shrugged her shoulders and shook her head. “Not good?”

Evalyn nodded. “He kept it simple. First assignment, we were following up on a gang war, basically tracing a trail of blood and building a timeline. What happened yesterday, what happened today, what would happen tomorrow. And what those thugs did to each other, I don’t think either of us is creative enough to come up with.”

Iris’s stare didn’t change, and Evalyn lost confidence in the line of thought, but not so much that she could find the courage to cut things short. Words were flowing out of her mind, only to live a brief life in the street’s silence.

The sun beat down on the pavement a few metres ahead, and she saw the bodies from twelve years ago burning in the sunlight of an Excalan alleyway.

“Once we caught up to them, Liam told me to wait outside while he took care of the fight. It was in a big nightclub, you know? I know I’ve never taken you into one, but you can imagine. Anyway, left on door duty. Four younger guys pull up in their old beater, all swinging their guns around, no trigger discipline. Green, don’t know what’s what; maybe they’re new recruits, I don’t know. My rules of engagement stated that the moment they pointed a gun at me, I could fire, so I did.”

She could recite the words to the story, the way things happened, their order, even describing it down to the details were all in her capacity. But, to remember a single face, to remember the feeling of pulling the trigger in that moment, she had overwritten those memories over and over and over again until they were meaningless.

All she could conjure was a memory no more emotional than a police report.

“Four guys, most older, one my age, all dead on the spot. Liam heard the shots and came out, said he’d done his work anyway, but I’m sure I cut things short for him. I…think it was the lack of magic that irked me, nothing that had been in my training, just…pulling the trigger a few times. Turns out they had stolen the vehicle, and they were newly inducted, but they weren’t that far gone. Their lives would’ve never been the same again, but a point in the right direction, they could’ve at least been, I don’t know, a grocer. Maybe a hairdresser if they were trustworthy enough to handle scissors.”

She looked over to her daughter, relieved to see that the eyes had at least moved a little, now looking down at Evalyn’s hand.

“Am I talking too much?” she asked, and Iris shook her head.

“You never tell me these stories,” she said. “You only tell me the ones where you save cats and find old ladies.”

“But those are the good ones—”

“And you tell dad about the ones where you find out the client’s wife is sleeping—”

“And you shouldn’t be listening to those young lady…they’re still good…well, for people with a morbid sense of humour.”

Evalyn smiled, sighing through her nostrils as she patted Iris’s thigh. “Maybe it’s not a bad idea to tell you these once in a while.”

Iris shook her head. “It’s not. I like them.”

“There’s plenty more where that came from, unfortunately.”

They sat in silence as the buzz of the cables overhead trickled into their ears. Evalyn closed her eyes, trying to make peace with the heat, swaying back and forth along with the waves of warm air rising off the concrete.

Eventually, a bout of footsteps interrupted her as they grew louder and louder, closing in on the embassy’s front entrance.

The doors flew open, and their guide from the night previous looked up the street, then down, until their eyes finally landed on them.

“We’ve gotten word,” they said.

Evalyn sucked in her breath, returning to reality. “And?”

“Whoever they called, they said they’d consider the offer…if we can find them. We’re tracing the call now.”

The phone rang again, stirring the two out of their late afternoon stupor. Angry, it rang repeatedly until Crestana’s hand crawled across the desk and picked up the receiver.

“Excalan International P.I, how can we help you?”

Alis watched her ready her pen and notepad, shutters only at half-mast.

“Sorry, no, this isn’t Evalyn. Yes. I can take your name down and leave a message. I see, thank you for calling. No, I can’t confirm a date, but she’ll call you back when she’s in the office. Yes, thank you. Bye.”

The hook switch clattered as Crestana gently rested the receiver back into place before face-planting into her half-finished homework.

“I can take over if you’re tired,” Alis said.

“I’d rather Mrs Hardridge still have her customer-base when she returns,” Crestana grumbled into the desk. “There’s little else to do, anyway. This entire place is spotless.”

Alis sighed. In the absence of any dust to clean, they’d given a go at the cases on Mrs Hardridge’s corkboard but found how she organised her thoughts more puzzling than the case itself.

Every moment they weren’t dusting or answering phone calls, their eyes were on the large spread currently pinned to the wall.

“So…we’ve established its something to do with a missing person,” Crestana revised.

“Yes. Some…debt collector mix up. Fairly common story where I’m from.”

“And this part here…is she suggesting a collector erased her debt and relocated her?”

“Well… ‘relocated’ is a stretch of the imagination. That note just says ‘erased’. Very different implications.”

“Don’t say things like that.”

“It’s a possibility. Not likely, when it comes to debt.”

They stared at the board in silence, but Alis only felt his brain short-circuit as his eyes glazed over. The intricate patterns and myriad connections read as nothing more than shapes and lines.

“You must develop a calloused mind dealing with these cases day in, day out. Do you think Iris understands what this all means?”

“In an apprenticeship capacity, yes,” Alis said, answering from similar experiences. His superiors had included him in operation meetings as a matter of principle; for training rather than out of want of his input. Iris’s relationship with her mother wasn’t purely that of master and apprentice, so there was room for nuance.

“I’d like to think she knows what she gets into every time she goes out on assignment,” he muttered, the draught floating through the windows catching his small words and wafting them towards Crestana.

“Otherwise, she’d be just like you were,” she said. There was a hint of mischief somewhere in her tone. It was a prod, ever Alis could discern that much. He nodded along anyway.

“Couldn’t be a mutt for the Empire, nor for the U.L.E.F., any plans to make sure it doesn’t happen again?”

Alis slumped into Iris’s seat once again. “Do you have any questions less…demanding?”

Crestana shrugged. “I’m told I need to think these things through. I thought I’d do my research.”

She’d put him in a bind; figuring out the answer to that was what had him paralysed in the first place. Moving forward with no proper action plan, towards what simply felt like the most obvious answer had left him stranded once before.

“Can I get back to you on that one?” he said, and Crestana gave him a disinterested nod, making him wonder if she had ever cared in the first place. Instead, she lay her head on the desk again, and began a long, drawn-out groan.

“I feel like I left Iris on bad terms,” she mumbled. “Maybe I was too forceful.”

Alis nodded absent-mindedly, his attention drifting out of the window as a brief parade of every long face Iris pulled behind Crestana’s back ran through his mind.

“That’s all you have to say?”

Alis wrenched himself back into the room. “Sorry?”

“At least make me feel better about it.”

“I sincerely cannot tell if you’re serious.”

“…half, half.”

The doorbell rang, and the two jumped out of their languor, heads swivelling towards the front of the flat. Alis stood first, dragging his feet into the hallway with Crestana a few paces behind.

The doorbell rang, the finger pressed against the buzzer refusing to leave in an orderly manner.

“Coming!” Alis shouted, the infuriating sound hastening his footsteps until he reached the door and flung it open.

There was no one in front of him until he adjusted his eyes to face downward. There, a child, a girl about six years his junior, waited for him, wide eyes glassy with desperation.

“Sorry, we aren’t taking commissions at the moment.”

“Please?”

“No.”

“Please!”

Crestana wormed her way past Alis, shoving him to the side and giving him a terrifying glare for all his troubles. She knelt in front of the girl, but the moment she did, the girl recoiled. Terror flashed across her face, and she cowered behind the doorframe.

“What’s wrong?” Crestana asked, taken aback. She took another step forward, but the girl only cowered further, hair sticking on its ends like a frightened kitten.

Crestana stood, flabbergasted, and turned to Alis. “Ask her what’s wrong?”

Alis pursed his lips and kept his sigh to a minimum. His eyes met with the girl’s, her stare more mellow resting on his face.

“What request did you have for us?”

The girl’s eyes warily flicked towards Crestana, keeping watch as she unconsciously drew her body closer to Alis. “I want you to…find someone for me.”