I’ve missed this smell. Mika’s jacket doesn’t leave me any room to actually look out at my surroundings, but I’d recognise that aroma of grilling meat and dozens of fragrant spices anywhere. I haven’t been back to that wonderful spice market in weeks – at first because I didn’t want anything to do with this part of town anymore, and then because Jaeger explained it was a Triad-run operation and that it’d be far too risky for me to head out and pinch a couple of treats.

And yet, I can still picture it as clearly as it was when I was last here. The endless stalls, nestled beneath a roof of tarpaulins and corrugated sheets of iron and plastic that offered only tantalising glimpses of the night’s sky above, while rainwater streamed down dozens of gaps in a steady trickle that was just strong enough to remind everyone that this was a wild space, so far from the horrifically bright shops where most of the city goes to find their food.

The Covered Market, by comparison, is an intimate space. The wide aisles and spacious seating are nowhere to be found; instead everyone’s piled on top of each other in a warren of stalls and alleyways. Where there are seats, they’re stools tucked right up against the counters of some of the more robust shops, only feet away from the people who sold and cooked them the food.

The only lights are simple lamps dangling from wires tied to wooden poles, the struts of buildings and even parts of the roof. They’re not enough to banish the darkness, instead creating a warm intimacy that forces people to lean in close to make each other out, to go slow because they need to watch their footing. Like the Red-Light District, it’s a place where light and shadow can exist side-by-side.

It’s taking all the willpower I can muster to not leap out the back of Mika’s jacket, sneak myself a couple of bits of the weirdest and most interesting food I can find, then track her down again and slip back in. I have to keep reminding myself that I’m here for a job, not for myself, and that slipping out blind into one of the busiest places I’ve ever seen would be close to suicide.

From the feel of Mika’s movement, she’s reminding herself of the same. She’s jostling through the crowd, pushing her way through in the way that only someone in padded leather clothes can. Every now and then, my hiding space will compress as she squeezes through a gap between two people, her shoulders shifting subtly as her head darts from side to side. The whole time, she’s muttering to herself: “Where the fuck is it?” “Better not be shut already.” “Fuck this babysitting Cape bullshit.”

That sort of thing.

Eventually, she seems to spot something and doubles her pace, her angry muttering becoming shouts.

“Hey, you! Don’t you fucking dare close!”

Someone shouts something back at her in a language I don’t understand. Mika doubles down, yelling right back and pushing me a little as she pulls something out of her pocket. Not the switchblade she has in her right pocket, but something smaller from her left. Probably cash.

After some more rapid-fire conversation, switching in and out of what I think are three different languages, Mika starts to push her way back through the less-dense crowd with every bit the same amount of speed she showed on her way in, but less of the obvious panic. I listen intently as she stows the food in some sort of compartment on her bike before gunning it down the road in an orchestra of sound.

I’ve seen the occasional motorbike out on the streets, even if they’re nowhere near as popular as cars, but there’s something different about this one. Maybe it’s the speed Mika’s going at, but it roars like no other bike I’ve ever heard. It’s a crescendo of sound, rising in volume and intensity before being abruptly cut off and starting again from the beginning.

Mika’s jacket fits her closely, but not close enough to stop it from flapping in the wind from the sheer force of her speed. Every now and then, the rise of her collar is matched by a passing streetlight, and a beam of orange light plays down her back, sending me scurrying around her body before finding purchase just above her stomach. There, I wait, feeling the motion of the bike through the vibrations that travel up through her, and the sensation of imbalance that comes as she leans into corners.

After a while, the speed starts to slow: the jacket shakes less, the crescendos begin again less frequently, the vibrations get worse and the brief bursts of light disappear entirely. Mika is turning more, her pace slowing to a crawl at times as she weaves around obstacles that only she can see. The road stops being flat, instead rising and falling in abrupt jumps that have Mika focused solely on the controls of her bike, her arms tensing as she wrestles with the handlebars.

Eventually, she pulls to a stop, kicking out the stand for her bike and shifting her weight as she steps off. Her arms move up, and I hear a slight noise as she sets her helmet down onto the seat of her motorcycle before opening up the compartment and pulling out the food she’s been sent here to deliver. It’s such a low-priority item that there has to be a Cape here to justify sending a courier to deliver it. Probably one of the new ones, too. They’re more likely to get this red carpet treatment, if only to keep them on the ‘right’ side.

I’m here to watch, not to listen, so I’m not going to make the same mistake I did last time. Staying with Kelsey might have got me here, but it’s also the closest I’ve come to being found out since I first started spying on the Triad. This time, there’s no need to take that risk. So I slip out the back of Mika’s jacket the moment she starts purposefully walking to her destination, and land silently on the driveway of a suburban home.

Looking around, it quickly becomes clear that I’m not in Seattle anymore. Not properly. I’m on a short stretch of road that ends in a circle before doubling back on itself, surrounded by houses in various states of disrepair. Some of them are simply gone, with only a few scant bits of wood, concrete or metal where they might have once stood. Others are half-collapsed, without roofs and with only the skeletal remains of the walls holding up occasional patches of flooring.

The road is cracked and warped, sunken in places where whole segments have broken away and been partially swallowed by the earth. The ground around them – what might once have been beautifully manicured front lawns – is nothing but swampy marshland filled with the chitter of insects and the gentle sway of plant life that’s slowly starting to reclaim the last ruins of the man-made structures around it. The steady drizzle of rain fills the air with a gentle drumbeat of ambient noise, as rainwater patters against the marsh.

The house Mika is walking towards is by far the most intact on the street, though even saying that much feels like I’m overselling it. The paint has almost all disappeared from the wooden side panelling, revealing rotten boards that look like they’re barely holding together, with some parts having rotted away completely to expose the insulation within. And yet, it looks sturdy enough, with boards behind all the windows to hide any light-bleed The perfect place to hide someone away from prying eyes.

I follow Mika as she steps up to the door, ducking into the shadows beneath a parked car as she turns to look back at her bike, before dashing silently up behind her as she pushes the door open. The inside of the house is lit well enough to get me to hesitate for a moment, only to watch the door close behind Mika. There goes that way in!

I pace around the front of the building for a few moments, looking at the sealed windows before spotting a set above the garage doors that haven’t been covered up. The lip of the garage and the overcast rain has cast them into shadow and the distant glow of Lynnwood, though closer than I’ve ever seen it, doesn’t reach far enough to banish the shadows. The garage behind the doors is completely dark.

I pace back down the driveway before turning and sprinting at the doors, pouncing at the last moment and merging with the shadows, letting my momentum carry me through the pane of glass like a ghost before emerging into a damp-filled garage occupied from end to end by the shattered remains of some old life. It’s clear that the people who lived here were either drowned in their shelter or in the streets or just never came back to their home; they’ve left everything.

There’s a car parked in the garage, kept safe from the elements for all these years. The shelves are lined with tools and trinkets and all the other flotsam that gathers in any space like this. The only part of the room that doesn’t look like it’s from before Leviathan is the generator placed in the one spot of empty space, quietly thrumming as it pumps power through a series of wires that stretch along the walls and past the door to the rest of the house.

“Hello?” I hear Mika shout from somewhere in the house. “Ma’am? I got your delivery! Anyone home?”

I edge closer to the door, ringed by lines of light-bleed, and listen as Mika starts to angrily pace around, before she speaks again, sounding like she’s on the phone.

“Hey, Charlie? She’s not here. Must’ve got bored and wandered off, or whatever she does. I’m just gonna leave the food by the door and head back, if that’s alright with you?”

There’s a moment’s silence.

“Great!” she exclaims. “I’ll be there soon.”

I wait until I hear the sound of the front door closing before opening up the door between the garage and the house. Unsurprisingly, the first thing I notice is the light. It’s not as well-lit as the arms depot was, but that seems to have more to do with the house itself; the overhead lights are dark, with some of the bulbs missing their glass, and light is instead provided by a series of lamps that have been scattered about the place.

It looks like it was set up recently, but someone’s taken the effort to make it feel lived-in. The walls are covered in posters for a whole bunch of bands I’ve never heard of, with the old family photos of whoever used to live here left scattered in heaps on the floor. Over the top of a whole wall of the posters, someone’s used spray paint to scrawl a big message that just reads ‘FUCK OFF.’

Shaking my head in dismay, I ignore the walls and the posters and move deeper into the house. The kitchen looks fairly well-used, with an extension cord leading to the microwave and the fridge while the rest of the appliances have been left to gather dust. I open up the fridge, seeing shelf after shelf of pre-packaged meals, cans of beer and some other food packets I don’t even try to make sense of.

Looking around the kitchen some more – and turning my nose up at the empty meal packets that have been idly tossed around the room – I spot a door that looks like it might lead to a basement. Sure enough, when I open it I’m immediately hit by the stench of mold and the sight of a rickety staircase that’s half rotted through, leading down to a basement that’s been partially flooded by water seeping through the walls.

As much as the darkness down there looks welcoming, I know it’s not likely to contain anything important. So I shut the door and head back out into the kitchen, pushing through a fairly sparse dining room and into what looks like a living room. The couches seem to be in decent condition – like they were replaced when the building was turned into a safehouse – and there’s a surprisingly large stack of books piled up on and end table next to the biggest.

Idly, I pick the topmost book off the stack. The front cover has a photo of a shirtless man wearing handcuffs, for whatever reason. I set it back down on the stack, taking care to make sure it’s facing the same way it was when I picked it up. If I can get out of here without anyone knowing I ever visited, that would be absolutely ideal.

Along with the stack of books, a brand new television has been perched on a water-damaged coffee table, but I leave that one alone. The screen always seems too bright to my eyes, which is why I prefer radio. Ember tried to do a movie night once, with a film she promised was as dark as she could find, but I barely made it a quarter of the way through before I got so scared I had to dive beneath the couch for safety.

I shake my head to dislodge the memory, focusing on the job at hand. There doesn’t seem to be anything particularly important in the living room – except for the pistol sitting next to the books, but at this point I’m pretty numb to that sort of thing. All there really is to find here is more evidence that whoever lives here is a total slob with no concept of cleanliness or good taste.

Still, all I can do is move on and keep up the search. It doesn’t take me long to find the stairs up to the second floor, which is just as desecrated as the rest of the house, with posters on every wall and the occasional spray-painted expletive adding a little extra flair. Most of the rooms here look abandoned, their bedding torn to shreds in what looks like a deliberate act of violence; someone venting their frustrations by taking a knife to the poor, innocent sheets.

After briefly glancing into the bathroom, the only room I haven’t checked is the remaining bedroom. Once I push open the door, a wave of fear and exhilaration rolls over me like a tsunami.

Every inch of free wall space is absolutely covered in mirrors, ranging in size and style from a long flat mirror that could have been lifted from a public restroom to some ancient gilded thing that looks like it belongs in a museum. It’s exactly what I came here to find; it couldn’t be more obviously a Cape’s bedroom if it tried, and I’m pretty sure I know which one. Thus, the fear.

The last thing I want to do is to run into Bloody Mary, and yet here I am in her bedroom. I can’t just cut my losses and run; there has to be something here that can give me a clue as to where the other safehouses are, or a clue that points to another clue that has the answers I need. I just have to search this place as quickly as possible and get out as fast as I can. Let Jaeger do whatever he wants with this information, I just want to get this done.

The first thing that draws my eye is the vanity set against the wall. Where the rest of the house is – at best – a complete trash heap, the vanity is a bastion of order and effort. It’s covered in bottles of makeup and accessories, all of them either lighter or darker than I’d been expecting, matching the black and white style of a lot of the band posters. It seems there is something Bloody Mary can bring herself to care about.

As I’m looking over the bottles, the top of the vanity seems to shake for a brief moment, as a whirr fills the air. Brushing aside a couple of bottles of very black lipstick, I find a black phone that’s currently lit up by an incoming text.

‘Meeting at 22:00 tomorrow, site B. Try to actually show up, this time.’

I grin from ear to ear – as much as I can grin with a beak for a mouth. Now all I have to do is figure out where site B is, but maybe Jaeger can pull something from the phone that’ll tell us.

Taking the phone is a risk, but maybe Bloody Mary won’t notice it’s missing? I mean, she’s already left it behind while she went… wherever she’s gone. Besides, someone who’s this untidy has to be so used to losing things they’d never even consider it was stolen.

Wrapping my hand around the phone, I turn to make my way out of the room. As I do, I catch a glimpse of something out of the corner of my eye. Something in a mirror. I snap back, but there’s nothing there except my own reflection.

Fear spikes in my chest as a woman appears in an entirely different mirror, standing right behind me and dressed from her neck to her toes in an outfit made of close-fitting leather that’s held together by an array of belts and straps. Her face is almost unnaturally white, with deep red lips and red hair that cascades down her shoulders. The upper half of her face is covered by a plain leather mask that does nothing to hide the manic look in her eyes.

As I watch, she drops the takeaway bag she’s holding and pulls a straight razor out of a pouch on one of her many belts, slowly thumbing out the blade as her angry expression shifts into a sickening grin.

I whirl on my feet, spinning on the spot with my beak open as I put my whole body behind the bite, only to snap down on empty air. I get a brief glimpse of the woman again – in every mirror in front of me – before a jolt of white hot agony shoots through my body as she drives her blade into my back.