When Danny left the system for the first time to seek out an information broker, he already knew the answer.
He simply refused to acknowledge it.
The Ability Bureau's database had never been designed to explain why.
It was built to record outcomes, timestamps, confirmations.
It could tell him what had occurred, where it had occurred, and how the aftermath had been processed.
But why was never part of the architecture.
And now, the problem was not that the data was incomplete—
It was that the part which should have existed had been deliberately removed.
Not erased in the usual sense.
Not redacted.
Taken.
The gray district lay at the outer rim of the old city, a place most transit routes no longer bothered to optimize for.
Urban renewal had stalled here years ago, leaving behind half-updated infrastructure and buildings that had survived purely by being inconvenient to demolish.
The distance between the buildings was narrow enough that daylight barely reached the ground.
Looking up, Danny could only see the sky in thin, uneven strips, broken apart by concrete edges and tangled wiring.
Signal strength dropped the moment he stepped inside the block.
Not a dead zone—
something worse.
Intermittent connectivity.
Brief flashes of access followed by sudden absence, as if the air itself rejected sustained communication.
The information broker was on the second floor.
There was no sign.
No number.
No indicator that anyone lived or worked there.
Danny climbed the stairs anyway.
When he knocked, the sound was dull, absorbed too quickly by the door.
Three seconds passed.
Not the tense kind of silence that followed fear.
But the measured pause of someone deciding whether acknowledging you was worth the risk.
Then the door opened a narrow crack.
"You're in the wrong place."
The voice carried no emotion.
No curiosity.
Just statement.
"I'm looking for what happened in the last three days."
Danny didn't raise his wrist to display credentials.
Didn't invoke jurisdiction.
He gave only a time frame.
The door opened slightly wider.
The room beyond was dim, lit by a single overhead strip that flickered faintly, its power supply unstable.
The walls were covered with outdated district maps—versions that no longer matched the city's official grid.
Red markings covered them.
Circles, arrows, intersecting lines layered over one another until the original layouts were barely legible.
Some markings had been traced over repeatedly, as if someone had tried to emphasize a location, then changed their mind, then tried again.
The air smelled faintly of old circuitry.
Burnt dust.
Components that had been powered for too long, then forgotten.
"Which incident?" the broker asked.
"Loan sharks," Danny said. "The ones that disappeared."
The pause that followed was different.
Not apprehension.
Calculation.
"Your system should already have that answer," the broker replied.
"Only the result," Danny said. "Not the process."
A soft laugh escaped the broker's throat.
"Then it's not something you're meant to touch."
Danny said nothing.
He placed a storage chip on the table between them.
It wasn't currency.
Not even black-market credit.
It was access.
Permissions that bypassed layers most people never knew existed.
The laughter stopped.
The broker stared at the chip for several seconds longer than necessary.
"…It's strange," he said finally. "Very strange."
He explained that in the underground information flow of the past few days, something had clearly shifted.
There were no reports of mass casualties.
No spike in violent encounters.
No turf wars that would justify sudden silence.
Instead—
"Locations were cleared."
Not seized.
Not repurposed.
Cleared.
Rendered inert.
"Like someone removed the function from the space itself," the broker said.
"As if the idea that this place exists to do harm was erased."
Danny's fingers tightened, almost imperceptibly.
"Anyone see it happen?"
"See what?" the broker asked. "A person? An ability? A weapon?"
He shook his head.
"Nothing."
Only outcomes.
Forced entries without damage patterns.
Structural destruction from the inside.
Containment rooms broken open with no residue consistent with struggle.
"There's no narrative," the broker said. "Nothing that can be reconstructed."
He pulled up an image.
The resolution was poor.
Zoomed too far.
Compressed through multiple transfers.
It showed a wall.
Or rather, the absence of something on it.
A marker had once been there.
A sign, a symbol, a code—something meant to identify purpose.
Now it was gone.
Not painted over.
Not obscured.
Scraped away with deliberate precision.
"So clean it looks intentional," the broker said.
"Like someone didn't want confirmation that it was ever marked at all."
Danny stared at the empty patch.
The longer he looked, the more unsettling it became.
"What are people saying?" he asked.
The broker hesitated.
"Official cleanup," he said first.
"Unauthorized ability user, neutralized or detained," he added.
Then he paused.
"And some say the Cleaner is back."
The temperature in the room seemed to drop.
Not physically.
Conceptually.
Danny stood.
He didn't ask follow-up questions.
He already knew the rest would be myth, layered over uncertainty.
That afternoon, he visited one of the cleared locations.
The perimeter seals were intact.
Documentation complete.
Response logs cleanly filed.
Everything matched protocol.
Yet the moment he crossed the threshold, something felt wrong.
Not disorder.
Absence.
The kind that didn't belong.
There were no stains where there should have been stains.
No residual marks where desperation usually lingered.
Even the air felt neutral.
Emotionless.
Danny stood where the holding area should have been.
This was supposed to be the dirtiest part of the site.
Instead, the floor was bare.
He activated his recorder.
The residual footage began to load—
And his vision swam.
Not pain.
Not interference.
Rejection.
As if the moment his perception reached outward, it was pushed back.
The image froze.
Danny braced himself against the wall, breathing shallow.
He understood then.
It wasn't that there was nothing to see.
It was that he was not allowed to see it.
Not even afterward.
He shut down the recorder and slid down the wall.
His heartbeat echoed too loudly.
This wasn't about authority.
It was about cost.
Some things demanded a price just to be observed.
Danny closed his eyes.
A boy stood in the street.
Lights on.
Wind moving.
Then silence.
"…Not taken," Danny whispered.
"Picked up."
He didn't write it down.
On the ride back, he marked a single name in his private terminal.
Lucian.
Not an accusation.
Just an anomaly that could not be ignored.