Avinash knew how to clean blood from concrete.

Cold water first. Never hot. Hot water cooked the proteins and set the stain permanently into the pores. People always got that wrong.

Wood was different; it required immediate absorption before the grain expanded. Upholstery was a nightmare. Tile looked forgiving until the iron settled into the grout lines, turning them a dull, telltale rust color. Clothing depended entirely on the weave of the fabric.

There were precise formulas. Hydrogen peroxide for organic breakdown. Salt for moisture extraction. Patience. Steady pressure. Experience.

Far more experience than any nineteen-year-old should reasonably possess.

Shane had taught him most of it. Or rather, Shane had acquired an alarming amount of practical medical knowledge to make sure they keep breathing after the life-altering decisions they seemed to be frequently making.

The pressure dressing currently wrapped around Nicholas's massive ribs was a direct translation of one of those lessons. Firm enough to hold the laceration closed. Loose enough to let the lungs expand. Check peripheral circulation. Monitor skin temperature. Never trust a wound simply because it stopped actively leaking.

Avi stared at the unconscious giant occupying his twin bed. Nicholas hadn't moved a fraction of an inch in nearly three hours. His chest rose. Fell. Rose again. Steady, calm, and maddeningly rhythmic.

The sight should have reassured him. It didn't.

Avi's foot tapped a restless, frantic beat against the scuffed floorboards. The mesh desk chair creaked beneath his weight as he shifted, chewing feverishly on a ragged thumbnail. The small bedroom smelled faintly of rubbing alcohol, copper, and pine-scented floor cleaner. Wonderful. Exactly how every normal, well-adjusted university student spent their Sunday night.

Avi glanced at the digital clock on his desk. Then back at Nicholas. Then at the clock again.

Still out cold. Still seeping a dark, wet circle through the center layer of the gauze. Still very much a structural liability.

Because this wasn't supposed to happen. None of this was supposed to part of the design.

Apartment 4B had been selected through a rigorous process of elimination specifically because nobody from his past would think to look for him inside a building that looked structurally offended by its own existence. It wasn't because he enjoyed the aesthetic of peeling green paint or because the rent was dirt cheap. It was invisible. That was the sole criteria.

An invisible city. An invisible university. An invisible, useless degree. An invisible life.

Avi had completely abandoned computer science, despite spending his entire childhood breathing digital infrastructure like oxygen. He'd changed states, changed his daily routines, changed his future-everything. Because the second he had started looking into the anomalies surrounding Shane's fatal crash, the dark corners of the web had started looking right back at him.

Avi had gotten careless. He'd found an encrypted data trail, followed a routing node he shouldn't have touched, and someone high up the food chain noticed his digital fingerprint.

That had been enough. Enough for Avi to scrub his identity and disappear. Enough for him to end up studying social sciences, despite possessing the technical ability to dismantle half the university's internal network before breakfast.

The entire purpose of this place was total obscurity. The bleeding man on his mattress was not assisting with the uptime. At all.

+++

Of all the useless, chaotic skills Shane had violently beaten into him over a decade of friendship, Avinash had always considered lockpicking the single most practical.

People tended to wildly overestimate locks. Most standard commercial locks weren't actual security; they were merely polite suggestions of privacy. Five pins. A tension wrench. A delicate touch. Feel, don't force. Listen, don't rush. The fundamental secret of the trade was understanding that mechanisms inherently wanted to move. You simply had to convince them they were being turned by a key.

Shane had once successfully broken into their principal's office at age fifteen just to retrieve Avi's confiscated graphic calculator.

"One of these days, Shane, we are definitely going to get arrested."

"Well, then I'll just have to teach you how to pick handcuffs before that happens."

"See? This is exactly why I can't take you to nice places."

"And yet, you keep taking me places."

Back then, Avinash had laughed, dismissing the bravado. Now, kneeling on the cold floorboards outside Nicholas's locked bedroom door he found himself deeply appreciating the educational value of juvenile delinquency.

Honestly, if Nicholas had planned on coming home partially dead the absolute least he could have done was leave his bedroom door unlocked. Common courtesy wasn't dead, though the man currently bleeding through a temporary bandage on his bed almost was.

Click.

The cylinder yielded with a soft, metallic surrender.

"Thank you," Avi muttered under his breath, carefully withdrawing his makeshift tools.

He pushed the door open, stepped into the dark room, and blinked.

The space was immaculate. Unnaturally, terrifyingly immaculate.

The mattress had military-grade hospital corners, the sheets pulled so taut you could probably bounce a coin off them. A precise, uniform stack of textbooks occupied the corner of the desk: Business Management, Advanced Accounting Principles, Macroeconomics, Financial Statistics.

Pens sat in a matching mesh holder-black, blue, red, perfectly segregated. Even the pencils appeared to be strictly organized by their physical height. The desk lamp stood mathematically centered on the wood, flanked by sticky notes aligned in flawless geometric squares. The entire room radiated the distinct, oppressive energy of a man who ironed his socks recreationally.

Avinash sighed.

Nicholas had been searched already. Thoroughly.

The very first day he arrived. The exact day Avi had subtly memorized his legal name from a stray piece of mail sitting on the kitchen counter. Avi would have been an absolute idiot not to check.

Nicholas Damine.

Twenty-six. Business student. Part-time employee at a private security firm. No criminal record. No outstanding warrants. No glaring financial irregularities. There were absolutely no digital footprints that screamed serial killer, cult member, or government assassin. Just a painfully ordinary man with an aggressively boring credit history.

Avi had completely dismissed him after twenty minutes of digging.

Which, in hindsight, was rapidly becoming one of the dumbest decisions of his entire life.

His eyes landed on a small, silver picture frame resting on a desk against the far wall. A man and a woman smiled warmly at the camera, a young boy and a little girl standing in front of them with full, toothy beams. A family vacation, probably. It was normal. Painfully, aggressively normal. Nothing about the clean-cut people in that photograph screamed climbs buildings for a living or carries suspicious firearms.

He set the frame back down carefully. Then, after a beat of deliberate thought, he nudged it exactly two inches to the left, completely ruining the alignment. Petty acts of terrorism were vital for personal growth.

Right beside the frame, sitting with dignified seriousness on the corner of the desk, was a rabbit plushie. It wore a faded navy-blue Victorian tailcoat with polished brass buttons, a matching top hat perched proudly between its oversized ears, tiny round spectacles balanced on the bridge of its stitched nose, and a crooked wooden walking cane tucked beneath one arm. One glass eye reflected the glow of the desk lamp, completely unbothered by the fact that its left whiskers had been permanently bent out of shape.

Avi stared back at the stuffed animal, a soft, baffled laugh escaping him. "Who raised you?" he muttered to the bunny.

Shaking his head, he turned his attention to the desk drawers, which proved to be equally disappointing. Books, lecture notes, highlighters, folders with meticulous color tabs, and more books. Why on earth would a man who looked like a walking brick wall own this many textbooks?

Avi searched beneath the bedframe. Nothing. He checked inside the few shoe boxes stacked in the closet. Nothing but perfectly preserved leather boots. One lone, empty cardboard box under the bed yielded only a light coating of dust. Apparently, Nicholas's hidden life did not involve secret compartments or aluminum briefcases full of diamonds.

Frustrated, Avinash slid open a deeper drawer in the dresser-Nicholas's underwear compartment.

Avi paused, his jaw dropping slightly. "This is completely nuts."

Blue. Gray. Black. White. Everything was meticulously folded into tight, identical squares. Everything was sorted. Everything was strictly color-coded. His eyes widened in sheer disbelief. "Jesus Christ."

He picked up a perfectly folded gray pair, then a black one, staring at the sheer discipline required to maintain such a ridiculous system. With the solemn, quiet dignity of a priest performing a sacred ritual, Avi began swapping several pairs around. Blue forcefully invaded the white section. Gray actively betrayed the black. Order descended into chaotic asymmetry. Balance was officially restored to the universe.

His gaze drifted toward the smaller divider drawer right next to it. He pulled it open, paused, and slowly raised one eyebrow. Then the other.

Condoms. Large size. Very large size.

"...Okay," Avi murmured.

He slowly, quietly closed the drawer, his cheeks warming slightly despite the empty room. "Good for you, big guy."

He wasn't entirely sure why he suddenly felt awkward; the man wasn't even conscious to witness the invasion of privacy. Turning back to the primary search, however, Avi began to discover something far more alarming than Nicholas's excessive organization.

Nothing.

There was no spare wallet. No old IDs. No expired passports. No secondary phones, no bank cards, no crumpled receipts, and absolutely no personal photographs beyond the single family picture. Normal people left a paper trail. Even the most careful criminals left digital or physical friction behind them.

Nicholas's room felt entirely strange. It was occupied and clearly used, yet somehow completely empty. Temporary. It looked like the quarters of a man who had moved in fully expecting to pack everything into a single duffel bag and vanish by tomorrow morning.

Avi frowned, pulling the door shut behind him and ensuring the lock clicked back into its secure position. He was significantly more perplexed now than he had been before he broke in.

He walked back out into the dim light of his room, where Nicholas was still passed out on the bed, breathing with a slow, heavy regularity.

Avi stared down at him, crossing his arms. "What the hell are you?"

Nicholas continued to breathe peacefully, offering absolutely no answers to the room. Very helpful.

Avi's gaze drifted to his desk, where Nicholas's heavy, black semi-automatic handgun rested directly beside Avi's open laptop. And suddenly, that visual equation looked completely backwards.

Normal citizens carried wallets. Fugitives carried fake identification. Normal people carried smartphones and credit cards.

People generally did not carry military-grade firearms and absolutely nothing else.

+++

The problem with having a very particular set of skills was that sometimes they just sat there, staring at you. Judging. Waiting. Eventually, they became entirely impossible to ignore.

Avi wasn't expecting miracle answers. Not really. He simply couldn't sit perfectly still and do nothing while the chaotic aftermath of the Velvet Deck pressed heavily against the walls of his apartment. And if Nicholas planned on bleeding all over his couch without even providing the basic courtesy of carrying identification, then Avi reserved the absolute right to be invasive.

Shane's voice drifted into his head, clear as a bell cutting through the mental static.

"Promise me something."

"Depends."

"If I die first-"

"Shut up."

"Humor me."

"No."

"If something happens, don't go all Batman. No stupid investigations. No revenge. No disappearing into some cyber-vigilante cave."

"Batman had money."

"Avi."

"Fine."

"Promise me you'll stop all this."

"No. Why should I be the only one to stop shit? What about you? What about the questionable life choices you are actively making?"

"This isn't about me, no? I'm hypothetically dea."

"No"

"Avi-"

"No."

"Avinash!"

"Fine. Promise."

God. What an absolute joke.

Avi stared at his waiting interface, his fingers hovering directly over the mechanical keyboard. Old habits died incredibly hard. He had promised himself and Shane that he wouldn't get back into this cave. But the hesitation vanished the exact millisecond his fingertips struck the keys. Because unfortunately, this part was easy. Disgustingly easy. Like riding a bicycle. Or breathing.

A few commands. A spoofed protocol. A clean firewall bypass. He borrowed active credentials from people who didn't even know they'd lent them, quickly linking disparate databases into one massive, aggregate search grid.

Just like old times.

He could almost see Shane sprawled lazily across the corner of his desk, casually eating chips while Avi worked.

"Are you in?"

"No."

"You're smiling."

"I'm not smiling."

"That's your smiling face."

"I hate you."

"Love you too."

Then both of them laughing as though they had all the time across the world. Back when this had actually been fun. Back when they were just two idiots far too clever for their own good.

Back before the funerals. Back before the blood. Back before the promises.

Avi blinked, and the memory violently shattered.

The terminal cursor continued to blink in the dark room. One minute passed. Three. Five.

Search complete.

The query results populated the center monitor. Avi leaned forward, but what he found wasn't a digital trace on Nicholas. Instead, it was the strict registry file for the heavy firearm he'd stripped off the man earlier.

Registered Owner: William C. Dias

Occupation: Head of Systems & Infrastructure, Millennium Co-operations Pvt. Ltd.

Firearm License Status: Active

Avi frowned, his eyes scanning the lines. "Huh."

He cleared the system cache and executed a different search.

Name: William Cornwell Dias

Age: Forty-seven

Status: DECEASED

Date of Death: 13.06.2019

"And there we have it." Avi pinched the bridge of his nose.

The harsh blue light of the monitor reflected off his tired eyes.

Of course. Of course it wasn't going to be that simple.

He cross-referenced a completely different database. Same result. Insurance records, a digital death certificate, tax audits-every single record agreed.

William Cornwell Dias was a ghost. He had been dead for seven years.

The gun wasn't Nicholas's. Somebody had stolen it, sold it, or-

No, he didn't like that train of thought. Not one bit.

Avi leaned back heavily in his desk chair and looked at the bruised creature currently sprawled across his bed. Nicholas remained stubbornly alive, utterly irritating, entirely mysterious, and right now, completely useless.

"Looks like we'll have to wait till you wake up, yeah?" he muttered to the empty room.

Silence.

"Motherfucker."

He stood up and wandered slowly toward the window. Pulling back the edge of the curtain, he peered outside. The neighborhood looked disturbingly peaceful beneath the pale, bleeding fingers of dawn. Sleeping houses. Empty streets. Tree branches swaying lazily in the cold morning breeze. It was a stark, mocking contrast to the storm raging beneath his own ribs.

Avi let the curtain fall, cutting off the encroaching daylight, and walked back to his desk.

The pistol waited exactly where he'd left it on the workspace. He removed the magazine and checked the chamber. Twice. Old habits. Shane had drilled that specific brand of paranoia into him from the very beginning.

"What's rule one?"

"Treat every weapon as loaded."

"Rule two?"

"Check it anyway."

"Rule three?"

"Check it again because apparently you have trust issues."

"Good. You do listen to me."

He carefully unloaded the live rounds, setting the brass casings aside in a neat, orderly row on the desk. He wiped the cold weapon down with a microfiber cloth until his fingerprints disappeared one by one. Opening his desk drawer, he placed the heavy metal inside and slid it firmly shut.

The click of the drawer lock echoed loudly through the quiet room.

Avi stared at the wood for several long seconds. Nicholas was still out like a light, bandaged, bruised, and sleeping like he wasn't personally responsible for the slow, agonizing collapse happening around Avi's carefully crafted, invisible life.

He needed leverage. He needed an angle.

Fishing his phone out of his pocket, he opened an encrypted thread stream with an ID he absolutely despised seeing on his screen. His thumbs work a few lines before hitting send. He threw his head back in pure, unadulterated exasperation, as he tossed the phone away.

"Arrrggh. To hell with that."