Illusion Report

After she hung up, Dylan turned to glance at Brianna.

He didn’t know her well enough to just say whatever was on his mind, so he sat with it for a few seconds before finally clearing his throat. "Not to overstep, but... this isn’t exactly airtight."

"What do you mean?" Brianna was pulled back from her thoughts.

"That property management company you just called — their information is public. Anyone with half a brain could look them up and figure out exactly what buildings they cover."

Dylan kept his eyes on the windshield, watching the wipers slice through the rain, opening up brief glimpses of the wet road ahead before the silver curtain closed back in. "If whoever’s tracking you gets to them first, your destination is blown."

"You’re right," Brianna murmured. "That’s a real possibility."

"More than a possibility," Dylan said. "If I were the one tracking you, even if I already knew you’d gone somewhere with no connection to the Westley Group — say, a boat at the docks — I’d still sweep every Westley-controlled location first, just to rule it out."

He was probably hinting at how she could hide more safely. But the thought sparked something in Brianna’s mind.

"Say you’re the one tracking me. You’ve gotten my destination out of the property company. What’s your next move?"

"My next move?" Dylan hadn’t expected the question. He tapped his fingers lightly on the steering wheel a few times. "Given that we don’t have that big of a head start, I’d go full speed and close the gap immediately."

He paused, then added, "And I’d come loaded for a fight."

"Oh?"

"You had plenty of other places to hide, but you took the risk of going to a Westley Group property anyway. I’d assume that building has high-level security — that you have backup waiting inside. And where there’s backup, there’s going to be gunfire."

Brianna gave a small nod.

...Would Chaisi think the same way?

Very likely.

If he assumed the fighting would happen near the building...

***

"...Brother Chaisi."

Han Liuyue had looked like a walking nightmare ever since she’d taken the hit, but right now the back seat had turned into something closer to a mobile haunted chamber.

Jin Xueli had her face pressed flat against the window and had somehow made herself half her usual size, while even Tian Xi couldn’t help quietly adjusting his seat forward a notch, hunching over the wheel as he drove.

"My face really hurts, Brother Chaisi," Han Liuyue said, her voice drifting out like smoke from a hollow room.

After the window had been rolled down, the wind swept the rain inside in fine, slanting threads — each one landing on Chaisi’s face and body like a tiny blade of ice.

He pulled his arm back through the window, drew a slow breath, then turned to Han Liuyue. "...Give me another piece."

Han Liuyue raised her head. Her face — once smooth and pale as porcelain — was now riddled with jagged black voids, holes of uneven shapes punched through where flesh should have been. Her red lips floated in the darkness like something untethered, her cheeks and chin simply gone.

The upper half was a cracked, crumbling mask. The lower half was a floating mouth suspended above an abyss.

Every time she spoke, something churned up from that abyss — countless small, tendril-like things writhing at the edges of vision, as if trying to push through from some black fog into the Human World. You’d catch them slithering at the periphery of your sight, and the moment you tried to look directly at them, they’d shrink back and vanish.

"You’ve already taken quite a lot," Han Liuyue pointed out, her tone perfectly calm. "There isn’t much left. Much more and it won’t qualify as a face at all."

"Did it ever qualify as a face to begin with?" Jin Xueli said, in the tone of someone personally offended on behalf of faces everywhere.

"Then you should be getting your original face back by now," Chaisi said, his expression giving nothing away. "Unless the car’s going too fast and it can’t catch up? Tian Xi, slow down."

"Got it."

Han Liuyue let out a sigh that was almost disturbingly human.

"You’d wring a cow dry and turn it into jerky — there’s nothing you can’t find a use for, Brother Chaisi." She was clearly borrowing from Han Liuyue’s old vocabulary to complain. "I actually thought you were just about done messing around with this... fine, fine. Hold on."

Chaisi leaned back against his seat, the gun resting across his knees.

A few seconds later, out in the slanting dark rain beyond the window, a swarm of small white fragments began rising and falling — hard, jagged things trailing what looked like countless tiny feelers, like butterflies made of broken shell. Tian Xi caught a glimpse and eased off the gas again. The fragments moved with an almost eager energy, like creatures heading home — they wheeled around, poured in through the car window, and dove straight for Han Liuyue.

"...You probably don’t get it," Jin Xueli murmured, "but as a normal person, I am genuinely suffering right now."

***

There was only one way from the main city to Central Bay Island — the cross-sea bridge that connected them.

Both she and Chaisi were probably racing toward it right now.

She could already see it ahead — the great silver bridge rising into the night. Was Chaisi right behind her?

Brianna rolled down her window. Cool rain fell in fine threads against her skin, and within moments her face and hair were damp.

She squinted and raised a hand to wipe her face — but her palm caught on stubble that hadn’t been there before, a dry rasp of a sound against her skin. She dropped her hand immediately. Her stomach clenched involuntarily.

...No matter how much time passed, there were always these details — things she’d never have noticed as a woman — that pricked at her like a needle out of nowhere.

"It’s not safe to have the window open," Dylan said.

"I know," she replied. "I just need some air."

She wanted to say that she was nervous — her palms were sweating. That even though she’d run through every scenario in her head a dozen times, she was still inexplicably afraid. Part of her even hoped time would just stop, hoped Chaisi wouldn’t catch up — but there was no one to say any of that to. No one who would listen.

There wasn’t a single person left in the world who would.

"Traffic’s thin at night,"

Dylan still wasn’t letting it go. "Even if they don’t know which car you’re in, if your window’s open, there’s a chance someone sees your face."

It was past three in the morning, and the roads had thinned to a trickle — but cars still appeared now and then, tearing past with complete indifference, their blurred red taillights trailing through the wet air before dissolving into the dark.

Brianna had no idea what brought people out at this hour, or where they were headed.

Still, she was glad for it. In a metropolis of tens of millions, the roads were never truly empty — which was fortunate, because if Chaisi caught up and found a single car ahead of him, even an idiot would know George Green was inside it.

The security chief had also been generous, sending cars from the fleet that had belonged to Westley in life. Every window was tinted and bulletproof. As long as she kept them up, Chaisi could drive right past without knowing who was inside.

This isn’t the time for self-pity, she told herself.

You have to keep moving.

To get herself out of this neither-human-nor-ghost existence. To rid the world of the Illusions that had been tearing through it like a waking nightmare. She had to reclaim the rumor, seize the key, and collect all seven targets, one by one.

Only the one who ruled the Nest had the right to close it.

"I’ll leave a crack then," Brianna said, her hand clenched tight around her pant leg. "I just feel like I can’t quite breathe."

***

The cross-sea bridge was visible in the distance now.

Chaisi’s car was cutting along the coastal road, driving hard toward it.

On one side, the city blocks sat dim and drowsy — murals, walkways, and tourists all having retreated with the daylight. On the other side, the open sea stretched wide and heavy beneath low rain clouds.

Far ahead, above the straight line of the bridge, thousands of steel cables caught the streetlights and turned to silver threads — like the hem of a god’s robe, spreading open from somewhere above the dark.

The window was still down. Cold wind and rain kept lashing at Chaisi’s face. He’d thrown on one of Tian Xi’s jackets but it barely helped — his neck and chest were already dotted with rain.

He dragged a hand across his face and asked, "...How much farther?"

"Ten minutes after we cross the bridge." Tian Xi hesitated, then asked, "Brother Chaisi, do you think he’s already at the building?"

"No idea." Chaisi slapped a fresh magazine into the pistol. "From here to the destination, he could turn up anywhere along this stretch."

"If only we knew what car he was in..." Tian Xi clicked his tongue with mild frustration.

Chaisi leaned forward, peering ahead through the gap between the wiper blades as they swept back and forth across the windshield. "Slow down."

"Sure."

"Don’t you ever wonder why before you just go along with it? You’re way too easy," Jin Xueli muttered from the back seat.

Tian Xi remembered what Chaisi had told him and responded with a vague "Mm."

But this time Jin Xueli wasn’t so easily brushed off.

She leaned forward and stuck her head between the front seats, firing off question after question: "Shouldn’t we be catching up to him faster? Why are we slowing down? What if he gets inside the building and locks himself in — how are you supposed to get close then? And what are you even looking at?"

...Like a dam bursting. She must have been holding that in for a while.

Chaisi was still working out how to answer when she suddenly let out a sharp cry. "Oh!"

She lunged forward, her entire upper body surging between the seats, one hand slamming down hard on Chaisi’s shoulder for support, the other jabbing at something ahead on the road. She was too excited to string words together — just single syllables firing out one at a time: "That — right there —!"

"What?"

"That car!" Jin Xueli said, slapping his shoulder several times in rapid succession. "You see it? The one that just turned onto the bridge approach?"

Chaisi followed the direction she was pointing. His gaze landed on a black SUV that had just swung into the lane ahead.

Something shifted in his chest.

Even as he asked, he already half-knew the answer. "What about it?"

"That SUV belongs to Westley,"

Jin Xueli finally pulled herself together enough to speak in full sentences. "I’ve seen Westley’s motorcade — and I’ve seen it up close, over and over again, from very close range. Every car in that fleet is the same make, the same model, identical. That car right there? That is one hundred percent Westley’s."