The locked office was on the fourth floor of a Bushwick walk-up, behind a door that hadn't been upgraded since the Reagan administration. I stood in the stairwell, pretending to check my phone, while Vex disappeared into a ventilation grate the size of a shoebox.
"Adequate ductwork," her voice echoed from somewhere inside the walls. "Dusty. Your species has appalling maintenance standards."
"Focus," I murmured, keeping my voice low enough that anyone passing wouldn't notice. "Filing cabinet against the east wall. Third drawer. There should be a red folder."
"I'm aware of the objective. You've stated it four times." A pause. Scrabbling sounds. "This cabinet is locked."
"Can you—"
"Please. I've been opening human locks since before your grandfather was conceived."
I waited. The building was quiet — early afternoon on a Tuesday, most residents at work or pretending to be. The hallway smelled like old carpet and cabbage, the particular perfume of low-income housing that hadn't changed since the building went up in the fifties.
My phone buzzed. A text from the client — Mrs. Rosen, a sixty-three-year-old woman whose business partner had been siphoning inventory for months. She wanted proof. I was getting it.
Three minutes passed. Four. I started calculating exit strategies, the paranoid arithmetic that had become second nature since waking up in someone else's body.
Then Vex's head appeared from the vent grate, green eyes gleaming with satisfaction.
"Red folder. Contents: shipping manifests for the last eighteen months. Destination addresses don't match your client's authorized distribution channels." She recited the addresses from memory — six of them, scattered across three boroughs. "The forged signatures are competent but inconsistent. Your partner's hand trembles on the G's."
I pulled out a notepad and wrote quickly. "You remember all of that?"
"I remember everything that matters." She squeezed through the grate and dropped to the floor with impossible grace. "The insignificant details I discard. Unlike you, apparently, given that warehouse in your head."
I didn't ask how she knew about the Memory Palace. Vex knew things. That was simply part of what she was.
We descended the stairs together, Vex padding silently beside me while I processed the implications of our successful infiltration. An office I couldn't have accessed. Information I couldn't have retrieved. A job completed in minutes that would have taken me days through conventional methods.
"This is useful," I said when we reached the street.
"Obviously."
"I mean the partnership. What we can do together."
Vex's tail flicked. "I'm aware of what you meant. You're not particularly subtle in your assessments." She glanced up at me, those green eyes carrying something that might have been amusement. "But yes. You're marginally less boring than I anticipated. The Palace is interesting. The way you use foreknowledge is interesting. Even your tedious moral calculations have a certain entertainment value."
"My moral calculations are tedious?"
"You spent eighteen minutes last night debating whether to warn a woman you've never met about a danger that might not materialize. Tedious." She started walking, and I followed automatically. "Also pointless. You won't warn her. You've already decided. The debate was just noise."
The woman in question was Amy Dampier. The pilot episode's victim. A person who would die in four days if canon held, murdered by a husband who wanted insurance money and a life with his mistress.
I hadn't decided. Not fully. But Vex was right that the shape of my thoughts was bending toward a particular outcome.
"How do you know that?" I asked.
"Because I've been watching interesting people for longer than your civilization has existed." She turned a corner, leading us toward the subway. "The interesting ones always choose the same thing. They sacrifice the small to preserve the large. They make calculations that horrify the ordinary and then they live with the consequences."
"That's not reassuring."
"I wasn't trying to reassure you." Vex paused at the entrance to the Bedford-Nostrand station. "I was telling you what you are. Accept it or don't. The outcome will be the same."
---
Mrs. Kozlov was a different kind of client.
Fifty-seven years old, married thirty-two years, about to divorce a husband who'd spent the last decade hiding assets in shell companies and offshore accounts. She sat across from me in a coffee shop near Prospect Park, hands folded around a cup she hadn't touched, eyes red from crying that had happened hours ago and might resume at any moment.
"I need proof," she said. "The lawyers say suspicion isn't enough. They need documentation."
Outside the window, Vex perched on a fire escape, watching. Her voice came to me as a faint vibration in my inner ear — another aspect of our developing bond that I didn't fully understand.
She's not lying about the amount. But she knows more than she's saying. Watch her hands when you ask about the Cayman account.
I hadn't mentioned the Cayman account yet.
"Mrs. Kozlov," I said, keeping my voice gentle. "Tell me about the Caymans."
Her hands tightened on the cup. Knuckles whitening. "I don't— how do you know about that?"
"I know a lot of things." I leaned forward, lowering my voice. "I also know you've been to that account yourself. Two years ago, maybe three. Your husband showed you. Bragged about it. And now you're afraid that if you mention it, you'll be implicated."
The tears started again. Silent ones, running down cheeks that had probably been beautiful once, before thirty-two years of marriage to a man who treated her like furniture.
"He made me sign things," she whispered. "I didn't understand what they were. He said it was just paperwork."
She's telling the truth now, Vex observed. The guilt is genuine. She's not his accomplice — she's another victim.
I handed Mrs. Kozlov a napkin and waited while she composed herself.
"Here's what we're going to do," I said. "I'm going to find the documentation your lawyers need. The accounts, the shell companies, the hidden assets. When I deliver it, you're going to tell them exactly what you told me — that you signed documents without understanding them, under pressure from your husband. That makes you a witness, not a co-conspirator."
"And you can really find all of that?"
"I have sources." Vex's tail flicked in the window. "Three days. Maybe four. My fee is eight hundred dollars, payable when you see results."
Mrs. Kozlov reached across the table and gripped my hand. Her fingers were cold, trembling, desperate.
"Thank you," she said. "Thank you."
I extracted myself gently and left her with instructions about how to contact me. Outside, Vex dropped from the fire escape and landed beside me.
"That was almost compassionate," she said.
"Don't sound so surprised."
"I'm not surprised. I'm noting the data point." She started walking, and I fell into step beside her. "You care about the outcomes. Not just the problems, but the people inside them. That's rarer than you might think."
"Isn't that why you picked me? Because I'm interesting?"
"It's part of why." Her green eyes caught the afternoon light. "The other part is still under evaluation."
The Kozlov job took three days, exactly as I'd predicted. Vex mapped the husband's movements — his trips to the mistress's apartment, his visits to a lawyer who specialized in asset concealment, the routine patterns of a man who thought he was too smart to get caught. I handled the legal documentation, leveraging connections that Dmitri had provided and building a paper trail that would hold up in court.
When I delivered the package to Mrs. Kozlov's lawyers, they looked at me like I'd performed a magic trick. The divorce settlement would be significantly adjusted. The husband would lose everything he'd tried to hide.
Eight hundred dollars. My fee. Fair compensation for three days of work and the certainty that one fewer woman would be left with nothing after decades of partnership.
That night, Vex slept on my windowsill for the first time. Not in my room, exactly — cats didn't ask permission for anything — but close. Present. A gray-and-white shadow against the city lights.
"You're staying," I observed.
"The heating is adequate." She didn't open her eyes. "And your surveillance on the Dampier situation needs improvement. We'll discuss it tomorrow."
"Vex—"
"Tomorrow. I'm sleeping."
Her breathing slowed, and I lay in my narrow bed listening to the radiator hiss and the city hum and wondering when exactly my life had become this. A talking cat. A growing reputation. A moral calculation I couldn't escape.
Nine days until Sherlock Holmes landed at JFK.
Nine days until the game truly began.
Note:
Read the raw, unfiltered story as it unfolds. Your support makes this possible!
👉 Find it all at patreon.com/Whatif0
Timeline Viewer ($6): Get 10 chapters of early access + 5 new chapters weekly.
Timeline Explorer ($9): Jump 15-20 chapters ahead of everyone.
Timeline Keeper ($15): Get Instant Access to chapters the moment I finish writing them. No more waiting.