The Butcher — The Polymorph

The butcher's name is Kwon.

He's sixty-three, built like a freezer, and he interviews you by handing you a knife and pointing at a side of pork. "Break it down," he says. "I'll watch."

You've never broken down a side of pork in your life. Your brain does the thing — the quiet acceleration, the understanding-before-doing that runs on calories you can now afford. Your hands find the joints. The knife follows the seams between muscle groups. It's not elegant. It's not fast. But it's accurate, and Kwon watches you separate primal cuts from a carcass with the particular expression of a man who has been cutting meat for forty years and knows competence when he sees it, even when it's wearing borrowed confidence.

"Where'd you learn?" he asks.

"Previous job," you say. Which is a lie, but a boring one, and boring lies don't get follow-up questions.

He snorts. He hires you. Cash. Three days a week. You work the back — no customer contact, no wrist-screen required, no cameras. You break down carcasses, wrap cuts, clean the cold room. The work is physical and repetitive and perfect for the part of your brain that needs to be occupied while the other part runs portal calculations in the background.

The money is better than Soo-Yun's. Kwon pays for skill, not just presence. Between the two jobs, you're earning enough to build a reserve — cash hidden in three different locations in MC's apartment, because keeping all your resources in one place is a habit you broke on day seventeen when someone left crosses at your exit.

You don't tell MC about the butcher job. She knows about Soo-Yun's — she arranged it. The butcher is yours. Separate. Unconnected to the particular web of obligation that MC's generosity has woven around you, one dinner and one book and one pair of borrowed trainers at a time.

Day eighty-five. MC has visitors.

Not Jenna this time. A man — tall, dark-haired, moving through MC's apartment with the easy familiarity of someone who has a key but doesn't need it because MC opens the door before he knocks. She lights up when she sees him. Her whole posture shifts — shoulders down, face open, the particular softening of a woman in the presence of someone she loves.

He's a doctor. You can tell before MC introduces him — the hands, the posture, the way he scans the room when he enters. Not a tactical scan like a Hunter. A diagnostic scan. He's reading the apartment the way he'd read a patient, cataloguing variables, assessing conditions. His eyes land on you for three seconds. You feel measured.

"This is Zayne," MC says.

You nod. He nods back. His face is controlled — polite, professional, the expression of someone who has practiced being pleasant so thoroughly that pleasantness has become its own kind of mask. But his hands are interesting. They rest at his sides, still, composed, and then — when MC turns away to make tea — they tremble. Small. Brief. A vibration in the fingers that he corrects immediately, pressing his thumb against his palm as if resetting a mechanism.

He's afraid of something. Not you — you're furniture to him, the same way Jenna treats you. He's afraid of something larger, something chronic, something that lives in the space between his composure and his hands.

You write in the steno later: Zayne. Doctor. Controls everything except his hands. Watch.

The others come in pieces over the next two weeks.

You don't meet them all formally — some you observe from the desk, some from the closet with the door open three inches, some from the kitchen where you stand with your back to the wall and a cup in your hands and the particular stillness of someone who is cataloguing everything she sees.

The second one arrives on day eighty-eight. You hear his footsteps before MC opens the door — measured, deliberate, the cadence of someone who has been trained to move with precision. Military. Not just military — the kind of military that doesn't wear a uniform in public because the uniform would attract the wrong kind of attention.

He's built differently from the doctor. Broader. His left hand moves naturally — gestures, reaches, rests on surfaces with the unconscious ease of a hand that feels. His right hand doesn't. His right hand is still. Positioned rather than resting. A prosthesis, high-grade, indistinguishable from biological unless you know what to look for. You know what to look for.

He sees you and his whole body changes. Not visibly — not to MC, not to anyone who isn't watching for it. But you've spent eighty-eight days reading people the way other people read books, and you see it: the contraction. Every muscle in his body tightens a fraction. His eyes go flat. His left hand — the real one — clenches once, then opens.

He knows who you are. Not your name — your function. The anomaly. The thing that stabilised MC's heart and now lives in her apartment. He has an opinion about you and he's keeping it behind his teeth.

"Caleb," MC says. Warm. Unguarded.

You nod. He nods back. His smile is perfect and his eyes are calculating and his left hand trembles when MC isn't looking.

Caleb. Military. Watches MC like she might disappear. Left hand = real, trembles. Right hand = prosthesis, never trembles. The hand that doesn't feel is the one he trusts.

You never meet Xavier.

Not formally. Not in the apartment. But you know he exists because MC mentions him — careful, always careful, the particular way she talks about someone she loves but can't explain. And because your scanner picks up traces. Light-spectrum anomalies in the vicinity of the apartment — brief, controlled, the same frequency signature as the flash in the alley. He's close. He's always close. He just doesn't come inside.

You understand that. Some people protect from the perimeter, not the centre.

Xavier. Light-Evol. Doesn't enter. Doesn't show his face. Protects the boundary. The shadow.

Rafayel you see once. Day ninety-three — he comes to the apartment to return something of MC's. A book, you think, or a piece of equipment. You're in the kitchen. He's in the hallway. You see him for twelve seconds through the gap between the doorframe and the wall.

He's beautiful in the particular way that artists are beautiful — not symmetrical, not polished, but assembled with intention. Paint on his fingers. His eyes move around the apartment and land on the one thing you brought into this space: a frequency chart pinned to the wall above the desk. He looks at it the way someone else might look at a painting.

He doesn't see you. MC walks him to the door. They speak quietly. He leaves.

Rafayel. Artist. Looks at data like it's art. Not present — passing through. The one who's already gone.

The supplier you don't see at all. You don't know his name, his face, his affiliation. You know he exists because the supply chain tells you — the shell companies, the pay supplements, the materials that appear where they shouldn't. He operates through infrastructure, not presence. The kind of person who reshapes the world around you and never enters the room.

The supplier. No name. No face. Operates through systems, not proximity. Can't read what isn't there — only what he leaves behind. Can't watch what I can't find.

And there's one more. Not a person — a corporation. EonCore. You found their sensor data when you hacked Ever Group's files — references to a private monitoring network that tracks dimensional anomalies with more precision than the Hunter Association's. Someone at EonCore has been watching the same energy signatures you produce. Not the public data. Private archives. Flagged, filed, categorised by someone who finds you interesting for reasons that have nothing to do with public safety.

EonCore. Corporate. Watching from above. Different kind of predator — the kind that buys what it wants instead of hunting it. Nothing I can do about that.

Day ninety-five. MC is in the kitchen. You're at the desk. The apartment is quiet. Normal evening, normal rhythm — the shared silence that has become your language, the coexistence that runs on tea and steno and the particular understanding that neither of you is going to be the first to break it.

MC breaks it.

"How long have you been here?" she says.

You look up. She's leaning against the kitchen counter, arms crossed, her expression carrying something you haven't seen before — not frustration, not sadness. Directness. The unguarded look of a woman who has decided to ask a question she's been holding for weeks.

"Forty-six days," you say. "In the apartment."

"In the city."

You calculate. "Ninety-five days."

MC nods. She's quiet for a moment. Then: "You treat this like a transit lounge."

You don't answer. She's not wrong.

"The closet. The pack by the door. The three different hiding spots for your cash — yes, I know about those. The way you count exits every time you enter a room, including rooms you've entered a hundred times. The way you keep your boots laced when you sleep."

She pauses. Looks at you.

"You've been here for forty-six days and you haven't put a single thing on the walls. Not a picture, not a note, not one of the frequency charts you make — you pin them up and take them down every morning. You live here like someone who's leaving tomorrow."

You hold her gaze. Your pen is still in your hand. Your steno is open on the desk, fourteen pages of portal calculations buried under the stack, the mathematics of leaving written in a language she can't read.

"I am leaving tomorrow," you say. "Or the day after. Or next week. Whenever I find a way home."

"And if you don't find one?"

The question hangs between you. It's the question you've been avoiding — not because you don't have an answer, but because you do. You will find one. The calculations converge. The maths works. The Aether Core in her chest is a door and you are the key and the only thing standing between you and home is the willingness to turn it.

"I'll find one," you say.

MC looks at you for a long time. Her arms are still crossed. Her heart beats — steady, stable, the rhythm you gave her.

"I hope you do," she says. And means it. Completely, genuinely, without reservation — the woman whose heart you need to break to get home hopes you find a way to break it.

You go back to your steno. You don't write anything. You just look at the page and the ink and the symbols that mean the cost is her and you think about a woman who hopes for something that will hurt her because she loves you enough to want you to be happy more than she wants you to stay.

Day ninety-five.