The blade found Marcus's chest with a sickening, liquid heat, void-energy flash-vaporizing everything it touched, and Kael screamed on the stone platform of Floor 2.
The sound ripped out of him like tearing metal. He collapsed forward, clawing at his sternum, where white-hot agony flared in the exact spot the steering wheel had crushed his ribs in the 2025 Chicago crash.
It wasn't a similar pain. That was the horror of it. Even mid-collapse, his detective brain refused to let the comparison stand as a resemblance. The two agonies weren't siblings; they were the same signal, recorded twice. Same bloom under the sternum. Same heat curve. Same sickening half-second before the body tells the mind how bad it is.
The file in his head reconfigured, every contradictory piece of data slamming into a single verdict. His Earth death and the phantom ache he'd carried since waking on the Threshold were a psychic bleed-through of this exact moment. His soul hadn't drifted into an empty vessel at random. Whatever mechanism decides which broken soul goes into which broken body had matched wound to wound, death to death: a soul that knew how to die this way, poured into a body that already had. The two deaths were locked gears clicking into place across dimensions. His murder on Earth hadn't been an accident that happened to land him here. It was the anchor — driven in from the other side of the multiverse by a blade he hadn't known existed yet.
The memory didn't give him the rest. It never did. The parts the static spared, it had already spent: a boy's baton half-raised, a pivot away from a flank that no warden should have ignored, and three broken syllables buried in white noise — "—for the new rea—" — gone before he could hold them.
Marcus heaved, lungs burning as if he'd swallowed a frozen sea. The sigil on his palm didn't just throb; it bled cyan light up his forearm in a frantic, defensive pattern. The same pattern it had tried, and failed, to raise in the vision, the instant before the blade.
"Marcus!" Taryn's voice, cracked, her boots skidding across the quarry stone as she lunged forward, a stabilizing vial white-knuckled in her fist.
Across the landing, Lysara went rigid, staff striking stone with a heavy thud, eyes scanning the bruised violet sky for a threat. Her gaze fixed on the silver tracings crawling across his skin.
Marcus pushed himself up onto one knee, left-forward guard locking in by sheer discipline. He was trembling. His mind was clear.
He had no face for the killer. No name for the silhouette. Whoever had stood inside that memory and swung that blade, the static had kept their face, and the Choir had kept the rest.
But he had the fingerprint of the crime.
"I'm here," he managed. His flat detective voice sounded cold against the ringing silence. He closed his fist, locking the sigil's fading light away. "The case isn't cold. Someone is waiting for us at the top. And we're going to find them."