Eli set both his palms on his kitchen counter, his too-warm hands cooled by the granite. The front door had been locked, the curtains drawn. His phone was in his bedroom, in a drawer, under a blanket. Not that the blanket was going to do much—but it did make him feel better.

Sweat made his hands slip against the counter. He should have been nervous about the fact that files—very illegal files—were sitting right in front of him, in between an empty fruit bowl and a stack of junk mail. And he was, to an extent.

But he was more nervous about what the files contained.

He wiped his hands against his jeans and opened the folder once more, as if the text might have changed since he last read it. Sharp photos stared back at him, the somber eyes of the four previous agents that had tried to hunt Icefall. Their expressions matched the severity of the word typed underneath their names.

Dead, it said. Not Discharged, as Pearce had told him. Not Retired, not Injured, not even Missing. Dead.

And that wasn’t even all. There were other related agent files, dozens of them, that Dawn still couldn’t source, not without attracting too much attention. She had already risked her neck over the past few weeks to get him this folder, and Eli wasn’t about to let her do it again. For now, he’d have to work what he had.

He stared down at the papers. How had the agents died? Had Beake’s mind control—or whatever he did, if it wasn’t mind control—eventually kill them after their discharge? Eli flipped through the pages. Killed in action, they said.

But that wasn’t right, either. Eli had seen one of them—Raven, he recalled—in the hallway the day after the agent’s mission. There was no missing him, nor mistaking him for anyone else. He had been yelling, asking about where his partner was. Repeating something about needing to know why.

Pearce had sent Raven off moments later, claiming the influence of both Icefall and icefall for the nonsense he was spouting. But to Eli, Raven’s words didn’t sound like nonsense. He just sounded angry.

A low hum made Eli slam the folder shut. He listened for a moment, standing perfectly still, before he realized what it was. His phone was buzzing, barely audible from its hiding place.

After stashing the folder under his cutlery drawer and checking the lock on the front door one more time, he caught his phone on the last buzz.

“Dawn?” he said with a frown. She had said she was busy this weekend.

“Hey!” she answered. Her tone made him freeze. It was bubbly, in a false, saccharine sort of way.

It was specifically, very specifically, unlike her.

“What’s up?” he tried to sound casual in return, hating the way his voice shook at the end. He didn’t even dare close the drawer, as if the sound would pose a danger.

“Not much,” she said, as if she were twirling one of her curls around her finger. “Just sitting with a friend, watching the sunset. It’s gorgeous tonight, have you seen it?”

Eli turned to the window. He had drawn the curtains in this room, too. “No, I haven’t.”

“Well, you should totally check it out.”

He approached the window as quietly as he could and drew the curtain back with one finger. There was no beautiful sunset on his street—only tired apartment buildings, grimy recycling bins, someone walking their dog…

The walker passed by a car parked on the curb. Eli was about to look away when he spotted the driver still sitting inside it. They had a laptop in their lap, and if he looked closer, a small black device in their ear. Their mouth moved, then paused. They glanced up at Eli’s window.

Eli let the curtain fall and took a hurried step back, hoping his rapid breathing couldn’t be heard over the phone.

“Sure is nice,” he said, unable to keep his voice steady as he opened his closet and grabbed his bug-out bag. “Hey, where are you and your friend? I need some new bars to check out.”

“Oh, it’s new,” Dawn said, losing none of her pep. “You’ll like it. Friendly, cozy…”

Good, so she was in a safe place. Eli ran back into the kitchen, grabbed the folder, and stuffed it into his bag, hoping his sweaty fingers didn’t stain the paper. “Your friend like it, too?” he asked.

“My friend was the one who found it, actually.”

Footsteps echoed in the hall, muffled through the front door. Eli rushed for the kitchen window, eyes on the fire escape beyond it. But where to go after that? He had no plan for this, he should have had a plan for this—

“Yeah?” was all he could manage into the phone as he shoved up the windowpane.

“Yeah,” Dawn said, sounding almost reassuring. “You know him.”

“I do?”

A pause on the line, then brief mumbling, as if Dawn was listening to someone next to her. When she returned, there was a slight question in her voice. “Yeah. You’ve danced with him before.”

As Eli’s hand paused on the window, the lock on the front door clicked open.