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It's strange to watch something with his face be so extraordinarily unlike him. With Seven and Canary and even with Ezekiel there'd been an unsettling familiarity to the way they moved and spoke, the patterns made by their hands and their words. It's absent in this one. He follows it for the better part of the evening, and it's as well that he's light-footed and good at vanishing because once, twice, three times it's a close call that he's spotted and it's after the third one that he calls it quits, both out of paranoia and because the thing with his face keys into a shitty apartment complex and Taym, at least, knows where to focus.

He finds it hard to sleep, knowing that it's a mile away, and he wonders what it is behind its own door: not the person it had been chatting with a shady-looking weasel of a man on the corner when it had handed over a bag that Taym knew was full of concentrated FEAR, not the person it had been buying cigarettes that weren't even the right ******** brand, not the third person it had managed to be when it was shouldering through a busy sidewalk. Maybe it's restless. Maybe it's like Lawrence: a blank non-entity stripped of its various personas. Maybe by now even it doesn't know. Its memories as Taym recalls them are shifting and strangely-formed and detached. Even he doesn't know.

He knows it's light on its feet. He knows it's quick and perceptive, and he knows that of all of them it was the one that most inherited his natural grace. It'll be hard to catch, whoever it is when it's alone.

He gets up early, very early, so that he can watch it leave. There's no close call this time. He's back to an excess of caution. It means he's not able to see exactly where it is that he leaves from.

The complex seems like the sort of place that might have paper-thin walls to complicate the situation, but if the thing's not already aware of Taym's presence in the city--and it might be; the thought makes his skin crawl--he will be, if Taym starts trailing him around to find some better place to set up an ambush.

It's four days and he's still not sure what to do with it. He hops a fence. He spends the most nerve-wracking two hours of his life jumping at shadows and wheeling on the noise of the wind rustling garbage bags and trying to narrow things down based on what he can see from outside: which apartments have the tidiest blinds, the ones without a welcome mat; he looks for cigarette butts and finds none.

In the end, he gets his hands dirty and the universe rewards him with sheer dumb luck. It's not the first time he's gone dumpster diving. He slices open bags with a pocket knife, and there's nothing, nothing, nothing, and then there it is: a cigarette butt, not even the right ******** brand, and three bags later, more of the same. A copy of Howl's Moving Castle that looks like it's been dropped in a bathtub. A cheap plastic phone broken into pieces. And a copy of a lease agreement. It's signed John Shade.

He's too shaken up. He's too nervous. He wants to go back to the motel to regroup but he knows they move often and erratically and if it's been there long enough to fill up a garbage bag it's not going to stay much longer.

Nothing for it. It's today or never. He might not get so lucky a second time.

After a few minutes he's wavering between wishing America was there, being fervently glad that she isn't, and wondering if there'd be some way to discreetly go in through the bathroom window on the other side of the building.

In the end it takes only two tries. The window gives way much easier than the door had, the shitty sill half-crumbling as he hauls himself up and into the bathroom.

He only gives the rest of the apartment a cursory inspection that involves touching absolutely nothing, taking the steadiest cellphone photos he can manage of what he finds--more school grounds maps, piles of notes--before he withdraws to the bedroom, startled by a noise outside and Fiona already in one hand, the trapgun in the other. He places himself off to the side of the door, and it's not the most ideal setup for an ambush but it's the best he can do.

There's voices. They're muffled but the walls are, as he expected, paper-thin, and he can make them out, if he tries.

"Oh," he hears a woman's voice say, all cheery and familiar in a way that makes his stomach turn, dread cresting in. "You found your key."

He can't hear the rest of the exchange. He just knows that the other half sounds like him, and it's confused but it covers it over smoothly.

The front door opens and closes, and then there is silence. It's broken, finally, with a question:

"Raskol? Obadiah?" A pause, and then, almost hopeful: "Zeke?"

And then there is silence again. The trap gun trembles in Taym's hands.

He thinks of Zeke's empty and untouched apartment, and he sifts in frantic silence through what of this thing's memories that he has.

There's a swell of sudden hope at the idea that Zeke is still out there somewhere, that he can still get his claws in it, that itll be waiting out the storm, that it might, even, come to wait out the storm here. That maybe that's what they're pinning Zeke's absence on--that it had crossed some path it shouldn't have.

But Taym is also aware that it's hope, and he's aware that he's in no position to make assumptions about what the thing in the hallway is thinking. It is, after all--the thought is not comforting--exactly what he would have said, were the roles reversed.

So he says nothing. He doesn't slip into the surly teenage voice he'd had before, and he isn't sure he could have if he wanted to. He's shaken and nervous. He doesn't want it to know exactly where he is and there'd be no better way to ensure that it does than speaking up.

He wonders what it is that it's doing that it wants him to think is shuffling papers. He does not believe for an instant that that is it. He doesn't believe that he would have heard it walking if it hadn't wanted him to hear it.

He pauses, and he thinks: what would other people do in this situation? Probably, he guesses wildly, they'd try to make it think he was somewhere other than where he was. He could do that, or maybe it would see it for the elaborate double bluff that it was. Maybe it suspects for some ungodly reason it's him, and if it does it knows it knows, firsthand and intimately, that Taym's an inveterate liar.

But maybe it thinks it's one of the other ones. Maybe it thinks it's a business contact gone bad. Maybe it thinks it's a common burglar. Maybe it thinks it's a test.

In the end what decides it isn't rational planning or what would be best. As is often the case, what decides it is that Taym can't stand the tension, and he acts for the sake of doing something, of pretending to have some control. He tosses his shoulder up lightly against the doorframe with a thump and slides as low as he can, righting himself in total silence and gracefully and silently pivoting to the open, unprotected side of the door, where no one in his right mind would be camping--the stupidest, the worst possible place. It sounds exactly like someone across the room--or in the bathroom--throwing a jacket or a pillow to make some indecipherable noise, trying to make it sound like there's someone behind the door. Or someone trying to sound like that's what they're doing, maybe.

There's no one there or across the room. There's Taym, pressed to the wall with the gun aimed and waiting.

Taym's fought many people, and he's generally found that he's best off waiting for someone else to go first. He has a distinct advantage when he's reacting rather than acting and if that's true for him it's doubly true for the thing in the hallway.

He opts to keep the advantage for as long as he can. He startles, bites his lip hard to keep the instinctive yelp from erupting, hopes like hell no one's calling the cops. Fiona makes half a restless, taut suggestion, and he silences her before the thought is finished. He'd have faked that it hit, had he not noticed, just in the nick of time, the not-right trace of violet left in the bullet's wake.

Stifling the urge to curse, Taym abandoned his hopes that the clone's curiosity or sense of obligation would overcome its common sense, and he took a deep breath before he darted out, gun already leveled toward the door.

For a half a stomach turning second he thought of America underground in Russia and he faltered, but the net didn't.

It was enough to make it fumble with the gun, even drop it. But there was still the dagger, because there was always a dagger, and the net parted swiftly enough. Without a word it attacked, motions so very familiar.


HP: 54
Dmg: 5