Location: Tunaro Portside — Erickson and Wilder's Private Residence — Industrial District Loft
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The screen glowed in the harsh white light of the side room.
Elijah's fingers moved across the keyboard in bursts—tap, pause, tap-tap-tap, pause again. He was not typing randomly. There was a rhythm to it, a logic that Wilder could not follow and Erickson pretended not to be impressed by.
On the monitor, the frozen image of the bluish beast mask expanded and contracted. Layers peeled away. The spectral analysis had finished its work, reducing the headpiece to its component parts—texture mapping, color gradient, edge detection, contour tracing.
Now Elijah was cross-referencing.
The left half of the screen displayed the mask's outline. A skeletal wireframe rendering that captured every curve, every horn, every scale etched into the material. The right half of the screen was divided into smaller windows—each one displaying a different image pulled from somewhere on the vast digital expanse of the public network.
A children's toy sticker. The outline was crude—simplified, rounded, meant for small hands and smaller attention spans. But the shape was there. The broad snout. The sweeping horns. The suggestion of scales rendered in glitter and primary colors.
An animated program. The characters moved across the screen in a loop—bouncing, spinning, singing a song that Elijah kept muted because he valued his sanity. They wore costumes that were supposed to be friendly, approachable, marketable to preschoolers and their exhausted parents. But the outlines of their headpieces... the shape was there. Distorted by budget constraints and the demands of child-safe design, but unmistakable.
"The Besty Pals," Wilder said.
He was leaning over Elijah's shoulder now, close enough that his breath fogged the edge of the monitor. His finger pointed at the animated characters.
"That's what they're called. The Besty Pals. I used to watch them when I was little."
Erickson made a sound that might have been a sigh.
Wilder ignored him.
He stepped back from the monitor, raised his arms, and began to move. His feet shuffled in a simple rhythm—left, right, left, right—while his hands traced circles in the air. His voice, when he sang, was not good. It was not meant to be good. It was meant to be remembered.
"Besty Pals, Besty Pals,
We're the friends who never fails!
Hop and skip and jump and run,
Being together is always fun!"
His knees bent. His arms swung. His body moved in the loose, unselfconscious way of someone who had done this a hundred times as a child and had never fully unlearned the choreography.
"When you're sad or when you're blue,
Besty Pals will help you through!
Clap your hands and stomp your feet,
Every day is a special treat!"
He finished with a pose—one hand on his hip, the other raised above his head in a gesture of triumph. His chest heaved. His glasses had fogged again.
Erickson pressed two fingers against his temple.
He rubbed small circles into the skin. His expression was the face of a man who had witnessed something he would never be able to unsee—and who had accepted, somewhere deep in his soul, that this was his life now.
Wilder, oblivious to his stepbrother's internal suffering, grinned.
"Banger," he said. "Absolute banger. They don't make theme songs like that anymore."
---
Elijah did not look up from the screen.
His attention was divided—one part of his mind cataloging Wilder's performance for future blackmail purposes, the other part continuing the search. The wireframe of the bluish beast mask remained on the left side of the monitor. The right side flickered as new images loaded.
A wine label.
The bottle was elegant—dark glass, gold foil, the kind of design that suggested expense and exclusivity. The brand name was embossed in flowing script: Crestwood Reserve. Beneath it, smaller but still prominent, was the image.
A creature. Bluish in color, though the printing process had shifted it toward teal. Its posture was aggressive—head thrown back, chest expanded, something that might have been a roar or a challenge frozen in gold leaf. The horns swept back from its temples. The snout was broad. The scales were suggested, not explicit, but present.
"Interesting," Elijah murmured.
His Australian accent had softened. The theatrical edge was gone, replaced by something closer to genuine curiosity.
Wilder leaned over his shoulder again.
"Nathy," he said. "What is it? What did you find?"
Elijah did not answer immediately.
He sat back in the rolling chair—the same one from the main room, which he had dragged into the side room without asking permission. He pressed his fingers together in front of his chest. His masked face tilted slightly, as if considering the weight of his next words.
The expression was meant to be mysterious.
It was the expression of a man who knew something you did not and was deciding whether to share it. The sharp jaw of the Azaqor mask caught the harsh white light. The vacant eyes somehow conveyed depth. The whole package said I am about to say something important, and you should listen.
Wilder's eye twitched.
"Come on," he said, his GenZ accent sharpening with impatience. "Would you stop doing that and just tell us?"
Elijah's shoulders relaxed. The performance dropped—not entirely, but enough.
"Crestwood Reserve," he said, gesturing at the wine label on the screen. "One of the top-selling wine distributors in the country. They have a significant operation here—warehouses, shipping routes, supply contracts."
Erickson stepped closer. His arms remained crossed, but his posture had shifted. He was listening.
"Interesting part," Elijah continued, "is their supply chain. There are farmers who provide the grapes. Independent growers, mostly—family operations passed down through generations. Then there are processing and manufacturing partners."
He paused.
"Orphagenx Industries holds a substantial portion of that partnership. And Orphagenx... well. The congramulate families—Halverns, Saiyan, Wycliffe—all have stakes in Orphagenx. Different percentages, different levels of control, but they're all in the same pot."
Erickson's brow furrowed.
"How is all of this connected?"
Elijah pointed at the screen. At the wine label. At the bluish creature in gold foil.
"Every wine brand has a mascot. Crestwood's mascot is... this." He tapped the screen. "The facial structure. The horn sweep. The scale pattern. It's not identical to the masks from your dashcam footage—but the outline is the same. The underlying geometry."
He pulled up another window. The wireframe overlay appeared again—this time superimposed over the Crestwood mascot.
The fit was not perfect. But it was close. Close enough to be intentional.
"Whoever designed these masks," Elijah said, "started with this image. Modified it. Adapted it. But the bones are the same."
He turned to face Erickson and Wilder.
"Gentlemen. I believe we have found our perpetrators."
---
Erickson's expression shifted.
The skepticism was still there—it would always be there, Elijah suspected, a permanent feature of the man's face. But something else had joined it. Something uglier.
His jaw tightened. His nostrils flared. The residue—that faint shimmer that Elijah had noticed in the warehouse—stirred beneath his skin, visible now in the harsh white light as a subtle distortion around his shoulders.
"You're saying," Erickson said slowly, each word precise, each syllable weighted, "that the people who have been robbing our shipments—hijacking our trucks, stealing our cargo, costing us months of revenue—are connected to Crestwood. To Orphagenx. To the congramulate families."
"I'm saying the masks match."
"It's the same source."
"The same design lineage, at minimum. Enough to be actionable."
Wilder's hands had curled into fists again. His knuckles were white. His breathing had changed—faster, shallower, the breathing of someone who was doing arithmetic in his head and did not like the sum.
"Crestwood," Wilder said. "The wine people. The fancy wine people with the fancy bottles and the fancy prices."
"The same."
"And Orphagenx."
"The same."
"And the congramulates—the Halverns, the Saiyan, the Wycliffe—they all have pieces of Orphagenx."
"The same."
Wilder was quiet for a moment.
Then: "So we've been getting robbed by people who answer to the same families who probably put Elena in the ground."
The name landed differently this time.
Elena.
Elijah watched the two brothers process the implication. Erickson's face had gone still—the stillness of a man who was containing something volatile. Wilder's fists had unclenched, but only because his hands had started shaking.
They think she's dead, Elijah realized. They don't know. They don't have proof. But they think it.
He filed the observation away.
---
Elijah turned back to the screen.
His fingers found the keyboard again. The wireframe of the bluish beast mask remained on the left. On the right, he began pulling up additional reference images—not masks this time, but supply chain documentation. Public records. Shipping manifests that had been filed with regulatory bodies and were available to anyone who knew where to look.
"Crestwood sources its grapes from three main agricultural cooperatives," he said, his voice taking on a clinical quality. "All three are located in the eastern agricultural belt—the same region where your shipments have been getting hit most frequently."
He pulled up a map. Red dots marked the hijacking locations. Green dots marked the Crestwood supplier farms.
The overlap was visible even to someone who had not spent the last hour studying the data.
"Your robbers aren't just attacking randomly. They're operating out of Crestwood's supply chain. Using the same routes. The same warehouses. The same trucks, probably."
Erickson moved to stand beside Elijah. His eyes tracked across the map.
"So we go after Crestwood."
"We go after the connection between Crestwood and the people wearing the masks. Crestwood itself is too big—too many lawyers, too many politicians, too many layers of plausible deniability. But the people who are actually doing the robbing..."
Elijah tapped the screen.
"They have to be getting their orders from somewhere. Someone in Crestwood's operation is coordinating this. Someone with access to shipping schedules, warehouse locations, route information."
"You want to find that person."
"I want to catch them. And I want to use them."
Wilder stepped closer. His shaking had stopped. His fists had re-clenched, but differently now—less anger, more resolve.
"Use them how?"
Elijah spread his hands. The gesture was theatrical again, but softer. Less performance, more explanation.
"Think of it like fishing. You don't just throw a net into the water and hope. You use bait. You put something on the hook that the fish wants. And when the fish bites—when it takes the bait—you pull."
He paused.
"But here's the thing about fishing in deep water. Sometimes, the fish you catch isn't the fish you were after. Sometimes, the fish you catch is bait for a bigger fish. And that bigger fish... that bigger fish is the one you actually want."
He looked at Erickson. Then at Wilder.
"We catch one of these masked thieves. We make them talk. They give us the person giving them orders. That person gives us the person above them. And so on, up the chain, until we reach the people who have been making your life hell for the past three months."
The room was silent.
Erickson's expression had gone from ugly to something colder. Something more focused. The residue was still there—Elijah could see it, the faint shimmer around his shoulders, his knuckles, the back of his neck—but it had settled. No longer stirring. Waiting.
"How long?" Erickson asked.
"To set the hook? A few days. Maybe a week, depending on how careful they are."
"And if they're very careful?"
"Then we make them careless."
Wilder looked at Erickson. Erickson looked at Wilder.
Something passed between them—a communication that did not require words. The shorthand of people who had known each other long enough to speak in glances and micro-expressions.
Erickson turned back to Elijah.
His face was still hard. His eyes were still skeptical. But the guard—that constant, ever-present wall of suspicion—had lowered. Not dropped. Not disappeared. But lowered.
"Show us," Erickson said.
Elijah smiled behind the mask.
"Gladly, mate."
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