Sector 9-B didn’t get visitors. Not unless they were scavenging, squatting, or doing something that needed to stay off the books.

  Christine approached on foot, hood up, collar zipped. The sun was rising somewhere, but it hadn’t reached this part of the city yet. The towers here were bent and blackened—half-melted things with broken wards still sparking faintly between the cracks. Magic didn’t die in places like this. It just went feral.

  A leyline conduit ran along the gutter beside her, pulsing faintly under soot and grime. Someone had tried to cap it with scrap iron and sigil chalk. It hadn’t worked.

  She checked the key again—iron, slightly warm, still humming like it knew its destination.

  The coordinates led her to what used to be a receiving vault: low stone building, half-sunk into the earth, ivy growing through glyph-carved eaves. The door was arched, reinforced, and completely unmarked—except for a ward-stamp so old it was barely readable.

  Christine crouched near the threshold, running a finger just above the surface. The runes didn’t respond. That was almost worse than if they’d sparked. Old mage sites had a way of playing dead.She straightened and reached into her coat, pulling out a small aluminum penlight—non-magical. She clicked it on, scanned the doorframe, the lock, the shadows under the overhang.

  No fresh boot prints. No spell traces.

  But the air here?

  It buzzed. Not loud. Not obvious. Just… wrong.

  Christine’s gut twitched.

  She flipped the key once in her hand, then slid it into the vault’s keyhole.

  It turned with a soft mechanical click—no resistance, no grinding, no flourish of unlocking spells.

  The door swung open.

  The container wasn’t especially large.

  Oval, almost egg-shaped, about the size of a cantaloupe. Reinforced copper bands crisscrossed its smooth surface, etched with fine, rusted runes that hadn’t glowed in years. Christine approached slowly, penlight cutting a narrow arc of clarity through the dust-heavy air.

  There was no trap glyph. No ambient hum of active magic. No ticking, twitching, or whispering. It looked like something left behind by accident.

  But nothing in this job felt accidental.

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  She crouched beside the pedestal, eyes narrowing.

  The object didn’t radiate danger. Not the obvious kind. But her breath felt too loud in her chest. Her skin itched beneath her jacket. That subtle wrongness again, coiling just under her ribs.

  Christine didn’t have magic sight—not trained, anyway—but her instincts were another matter.There was a presence to this thing. Not awareness exactly, but… potential. Like a fire that hadn’t been lit yet, but already knew how to burn.

  She pulled her courier pouch around and popped the secure lining open. The inside was warded—simple shielding, nothing fancy, just enough to block minor tracking charms and obscure magical signatures. She’d had it reinforced after the Mindthirst job—which was better left unmentioned.

  Carefully, she wrapped the container in a velvet sleeve, then slid it into the warded pouch.

  The moment it was sealed, the pressure in the room seemed to ease—like something had exhaled.

  Christine didn’t like that one bit.

  She stood, took one last scan of the vault, and started toward the exit.

  No alarms. No sparks. No footsteps in the dark.

  Still, she didn’t put her penlight away.

  Christine stepped out of the vault and back into the cold.

  The door swung shut behind her without a sound. No hiss of magic, no locking mechanism, no finality. Just a quiet click that felt too polite.

  She paused at the threshold, letting her eyes adjust. The sky above Sector 9-B had lightened just enough to stain the clouds a murky gray. Still no traffic. Still no witnesses.

  Still… wrong.

  She scanned the rooftops, then the cracked walls of the adjacent buildings. Nothing moved. No spells flickered. But the back of her neck prickled all the same.

  Like something was watching.

  Not from the street. Not from the sky.

  Just... somewhere.Christine breathed out slowly through her nose. Let the fog of it curl past her lips and drift into the air.

  That gut-tight feeling hadn’t started in the vault—it had followed her inside.

  She tugged her gloves tighter, adjusted the weight of her courier bag, and started walking. Not fast. Not slow. Just the measured pace of someone who belonged here and wasn’t afraid to prove it.

  The feeling didn’t go away.

  She didn’t look back.