Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Age 0-2

The world was soft and warm.

That was the first thing Miles knew. He didn't have words for it, not yet, but he understood warmth, the feeling of fabric wrapped around his tiny body, the distant murmurs of voices, and the occasional rustling of movement. Any sound came muffled as if it had to push through layers of thick fog before it reached him. Sometimes, the voices were closer and softer. Sometimes, they were sharp and curt.

Usually, they were just angry.

There were other sounds, too. Tiny wails, hiccupping sobs, the shifting of weight against padded surfaces. He wasn't alone. He never was.

Yet he always felt like he was.

Hands lifted him, and he stiffened at the change, the abrupt shift from the familiar heat of blankets to the air outside. A moment later, he was pressed against something else, something warm and breathing, something alive. A steady heartbeat thumped beneath his cheek.
A voice rumbled above him. Not directed at him, not really. Directed about him.

"Poor thing. No one's come for him."

The voice belonged to one of the caretakers. He knew that much. He had begun to recognize them, by sound, by touch, by the way they handled him. Some hands were rough, hurried. Others lingered, uncertain. When they held him, he felt something different. A pause, a hesitation. He was used to it.

A second voice, lower, a whisper. "You know why. Two tails. It's ghastly that we even took the thing in. He's not natural."

"Shush you," The first voice rebuked the second, "Like such a thing as natural even matters. Those are strong tails, two strong tails. They could choke someone to death with those tails when he grows up..."

Two tails. He had not just one, but two tails. That was more than a little bit odd to my memory. He was pretty sure that humans didn't have tails at all, but whatever they currently were had a tail. Them having two tails set me apart.

That was pretty familiar.

Later, when the warmth faded and he was settled back into his crib, he lay still. Listening.

The world stretched beyond this place. He knew it, though he had never seen it. Through the walls, he could hear the distant chatter of older voices, the laughter of children, the scuff of feet on wooden floors. The world was full of people. More than just the ones here.

But none of them came for him.

He had a name. He had heard it, over and over, spoken by those who fed him, who wrapped him in blankets, who carried him from place to place.

Miles.

Just Miles. No other name, no attachment, no whispered promises of a family waiting for him. The other children, he had heard their names spoken differently, with expectation, with certainty. But his name was always just that.

An orphan's name. There were more than a few times people argued around him.

The weight of it settled over him like a second blanket. Miles shifted, stretching his small limbs, feeling the pull of something behind him. Something that moved with him, brushed against his legs.

Two tails.

The two tails he'd heard so much about. They were fluffy to his touch, like the soft fur of a young puppy. Which really narrowed what type of body he'd ended up in. Miles knew that he had fingers too, four fingers and two thumbs. From what he'd been overhearing, the first tail was normal though the second wasn't, no one said anything about hands being weird. Miles was pretty sure it meant he was some sort of animal person, like Sonic the Hedgehog and his pals.

That was concerning more than a bit.

Either Miles was living in a happy-tappy world, which given the comments he could overhear about how 'freakish' he was, so he held doubt, or Miles was going to be emboldened into the dangerous and wacky adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog. It didn't take him long to put an 'Animal child' named Miles with two tails with Miles 'Tails' Prower.

The genius inventor adventure 'brother' of Sonic the Hedgehog. Miles himself didn't recall a lot of the lore regarding Tails' childhood, just that he was bullied and met Sonic when the dude crashed his plane near him. Tails then fixed it up and the rest was history. The Power Duo of the Sonic franchise was born. Many lives were saved, many worlds, and even an entire timeline.

He hadn't been a particularly smart man in his prior life, so there was some pressure to live up to the legacy of that.

When in such a delicate stage of his biological development, the months blended together for Miles. It wasn't like he could do much more than swing his limbs around and breathe air. All he had were the natter of the orphanage workers and prospective parents.

What he could do is run numbers in his mind, keeping it as sharp as possible. Boredom for the basic arithmetic soon overcame him though, as even the most complicated equations Miles could remember from his past life were too easy for him to do.

Eventually, Miles' eyes developed enough to see light. This verified his earlier theories of being in the world of Sonic the Hedgehog when a humanoid with a dog's head, a great dane's to be exact, popped into his vision constantly to feed him.

She was mostly grey from each ear, but black around the eyes. She had massive eye bags that one would expect from someone who needed to attend to children from infancy to teenage years. Little consistent sleep and high stress would do that to a person. She was sour-toned constantly, incapable of holding a smile for more than a few moments at a time.

Her name was Diane The Dane. The headmistress of the Orphanage. At least that was what people called her. If her name was something else, Miles certainly never heard it.

Miles' main form of interaction with her, after being fed and cleaned, was being picked up and shown off to people wanting to adopt. Most needed to only see the second tail and out came to talk about how 'difficult and costly it would be to accommodate'. So rarely did someone show interest in adopting Miles.

And when they did, it was always with a level of sleaze that gave Miles the shivers. So he'd do nothing but cry and cry in their presence and off they scurried. It was obvious to him that these 'parents' had plans that didn't actually involve playing happy families. The fact they couldn't handle a crying baby proved more than that to him.

Though... sometimes, just sometimes. Some couples didn't react negatively to his crying. They acted concerned, but Miles still ended up not going with them. Miles was more than willing to guess there were pieces of the puzzle missing, maybe they were inspectors, or maybe they found another child they thought needed them more.

There were a lot of reasons Miles never got adopted, these were just the reasons he could think of and the ones knew for a fact.

More time passed and Miles had truly started to be mobile. It was merely crawling, but it was enough to give Miles something else to occupy his time with. It also meant he could grab things to read whenever he could. The other kids in the orphanage didn't like this, so they made sure to take the things Miles grabbed off him, but that was a minor issue at the time.

Because he could read, these people had a language that at least looked and functioned close enough to English that Miles could read. He was ecstatic. Hungry for knowledge even. Miles would even go as far as to steal the few textbooks that orphan kids would bring from the public school they were going to.

"Diane," One of the other orphanage workers asked the woman, after having spotted me stealing a textbook on literal equations, "You don't think he can understand those books, right?"

Miles ended up rolling his eyes and sticking a tongue out at the woman's back. It was spotted by Diane but not the woman in question.

"I don't know," Diane responded, holding back a smile. "Miles is a smart kid, I'm pretty sure he understands most things we say."

"... I've said my bank details around that kid," The woman cast a suspicious glance.

Miles had to stifle a snort. Not that he had any use for her bank details, but the idea that a one-year-old was out to rob her blind was hilarious. Only a moron would think an infant could reach a phone, never mind operate one or get into a bank to operate an ATM.

The days passed in measured, quiet progress. As Miles crawled more confidently through the dim corridors of the orphanage, he began to discover his own little world, one of hidden nooks behind heavy doors, of secret spots where shafts of sunlight spilled onto neglected books and faded wallpaper. In those stolen moments, while the other children played or cried, he would quietly slip away to his favorite hiding place beneath a dusty window sill, poring over books that whispered secrets of numbers and letters.

Each page he turned deepened his understanding of a world he could feel only in fragments. Though the words were foreign, he was captivated by the order they promised, a world where logic and reason reigned. Even as hushed voices echoed down the hallways, reminding him with every whispered remark that he was different, an anomaly marked by his two tails, Miles clung to the silent lessons the books offered. In those moments, he wasn't merely the orphan with an extra tail; he was a seeker of knowledge, a mind already plotting its own escape from the fate others had seemingly reserved for him.

The caretakers, too, began to notice the small miracles of his progress. When Diane, with her perpetually tired eyes, cradled him in the early mornings, there was a gentle kindness in her touch, as if she hoped his brilliant mind would someday lead him far from the confines of the orphanage. But even her rare, soft smiles couldn't erase the sting of every derisive word or every furtive glance exchanged by those who saw only his oddity.

By the time Miles neared his second birthday, his movements had grown surer. He took tentative steps along the worn wooden floors, each one a silent rebellion against a world that had always labeled him an outcast. His inquisitive gaze, still unburdened by the full weight of the cruelty that awaited him, scanned every corner of his little universe, absorbing everything with an intensity that belied his tender age.

It was just the time his fingers started to become dexterous enough to start tinkering with gadgets, a goal he'd been looking forward to for years.

So Miles' life wasn't too bad in comparison to some of the things he remembered happening to children around from his prior life. And he always had the hope of Sonic, when the name-calling, the bullying, and the disappointment got too much.

Sonic would bring with him adventure and Miles wanted that more than nearly anything.

Age 2-6

For a long while, Miles's days at the orphanage passed in unchanging monotony. As he learned to walk, a new set of social expectations emerged. He was expected to mingle with other children his age, to share in conversations about trivial interests, and to join in games of Tag, Catch, and even soccer. Yet none of these pursuits stirred any genuine interest in him. His mind was preoccupied with puzzles and ideas far beyond the simplicity of childish play.

Indeed, none of those common interests appealed to Miles. His peculiar behavior, accentuated by the unmistakable presence of two tails, marked him as different, a fact that his peers detected with unnerving precision. Children, it seemed, possessed an uncanny talent for spotting oddities, and Miles's extra tail was the ultimate sign of anomaly.

At first, the bullying manifested as quiet exclusion, a mere sidestepping of his presence during group activities. Miles tolerated this rejection with a stoic indifference; after all, he had little desire to participate in the frivolous games of his peers. His focus remained steadfast on nurturing his intellect, on deciphering the secrets hidden within tattered textbooks and salvaged scraps of paper.

When it first became apparent to Diane that the other children were deliberately leaving him out, Miles had timidly requested a toolkit, a set of tools that might help him further his experiments and discoveries. Instead of fulfilling that request, Diane chose to enforce a reluctant camaraderie by reprimanding the other children until they allowed him to join their games. This decision, intended as a remedy, soon proved to be a grave misstep.

What began as hesitant participation rapidly devolved into calculated cruelty. The children, masters of malicious compliance, turned their forced inclusion into an arena of torment. Overzealous tackles during soccer matches, relentless shins-kicks, and the cruel tugging of his two tails became common occurrences, each acts a reminder that Miles was an outcast.

Despite his tender age, Miles understood his situation far better than most children could. He realized that reporting the bullying would only lead to minor punishments for his tormentors, punishments that would likely cause them to double down on their cruelty. As the taunts and physical abuses escalated, and as disciplinary measures began to fall upon him for refusing to engage in unwanted play, a casual sort of resentment took root right in the knock of his soul. This bitterness was directed not only at his peers but also at the caretakers, especially Diane, who had, perhaps unwittingly, set him on a path where his differences rendered him vulnerable.

It was lucky that despite the punishments, his third birthday awarded him with the toolkit Miles had so asked for. It was enough that within the week, he'd managed to cobble together a crude remote control toy helicopter. The fun Miles had with that far eclipsed the bullying attempts during that month.

This was noticed by the village itself. A child MacGyvering his own remote toy helicopter was a feat to expect from a young teen with advanced electrical and aerodynamic knowledge, not a three-year-old fox with the extra tail. So new focus was brought to the orphanage, a new focus on a genius fox child, much to the disdain of the other children hoping to be adopted.

Even Miles didn't think much of the parents that came in, a lot of them liked the concept of a smart child, and most hated the way Miles would address them as if they were equals. Till one middle-aged couple came in, a pair of foxes actually.

They were taller than the average person Miles had become equated with, their tails were on the short side proportionally, that is. And their glowing red eyes were a touch concerning.

But the entire conversation between Miles and them was as pleasant as any conversation Miles had with people in his prior life. More so, it was the best parental interview he'd ever been a part of.

The couple settled into the small, worn chairs in the orphanage's common room, and the atmosphere shifted noticeably. Miles sat quietly on a low cushion, his prized toolkit arranged neatly beside him, and the couple exchanged a look of genuine interest before the man spoke.

"Tell us, Miles," he began in a gentle tone, "how did you build your little helicopter?"

Miles's dark eyes flickered with concentration as he picked up one of the toy's components, a piece of twisted wire, and held it up for emphasis. In his soft, measured voice, he explained, "I found scrap metal in the back room and used some of the wires from an old radio. I studied the pictures in the books and experimented until the pieces fit together."

The woman leaned forward, her glowing red eyes reflecting warmth rather than the sternness that some others had shown. "That's quite impressive," she said. "Your method shows a clear understanding of mechanics, even if it's rudimentary. What do you plan to create next?"

For a moment, Miles's gaze shifted downward, his small fingers absentmindedly tracing the worn edge of his cushion. Then, with a quiet certainty, he answered, "Something that flies higher. Something that doesn't just hover, but soars. I want to see how far I can push what I know."

It was his only real means of becoming good enough to fix Sonic's plane in the future. If he could grasp the aeromechanics of smaller objects first, the mechanics of lift itself, while also exercising and creating skills in engineering, then there wouldn't be a question when the time came of if Miles could fix Sonic's plane.

The man nodded slowly, clearly impressed by the clarity of the child's ambitions. "It sounds as if you have a vision, a spark that is rare to see at your age. We believe that with the proper tools and a supportive place to learn, you could develop that vision into something extraordinary."

A soft smile touched the woman's lips as she added, "We'd be honored to help you, Miles. We have a workshop where you could work without distraction, where every bit of your creativity could be nurtured."

Miles's eyes widened slightly at the promise of a new environment, one that seemed filled with potential rather than the usual gloom of the orphanage. For the first time, he felt that his peculiar talents and extra tail were not burdens, but marks of distinction that could lead him somewhere beyond the relentless cruelty of his current home.

The conversation flowed naturally from that moment. The couple asked about his favorite parts of the books, the specific mechanics behind his helicopter's design, and even his ideas for future projects. In return, they spoke of their own experiences with invention and art, sharing stories that resonated with a depth that Miles rarely encountered.

Things stopped there. There had been promises of a return, there had been smiles and grand plans of adoption. But nothing came of it. They never returned.

It was unusual for him, but Miles couldn't help but cry over it. It had been the first time since he was capable of speech that Miles had cried, for some of the newer caretakers working in the orphanage, it marked the first time he'd ever cried at all before them.

It was so shocking that Diane couldn't not try to uplift his spirits.

"A Lot of people like the idea of children, just that's it, the idea of children. Not actually having children," Diane comforted Miles a week afterward, "They make grand promises, and that's all they want to do. I'll tell ya, if I ever see the pair again, I'll be giving them a piece of my mind."

It was cold comfort, but comfort all the same. For hopes to have risen so high and fallen so fast, it was something the rest of the orphanage could feel on their toes. Many might have expected sympathy among the kids; they would've had this happen to them at least once, but the truth was that they took joy in Miles's misery. Joy that he hadn't been picked and would never get picked.

Even children can take solace in the idea there is someone worse off than them. It was then that Nicknames started being applied to Miles. The most obvious one wasn't the first, because it was obvious to the kids living in the orphanage Miles was sensitive to his duo of tails, if they knew that then Diane did and she wouldn't be easily convinced any such nickname wasn't bullying.

Egg-head, and Gears-for-Brain, were the common ones. Focused on his mechanical skills rather than his deformities. Miles had first thought the first nickname was a reference to Eggman, but nothing else seemed to indicate that Eggman was even active yet. Which Miles supposed was good, but bad for his boredom.

It was by his fourth birthday that things shifted for the worse, gone were the quiet days of tinkering, here were the days of raw dread. Diane had gotten sick, leaving the care of the orphans, like Miles, to the general staff. In a normal orphanage, this wouldn't be much of a problem, but for some reason the people manning this one were scummy.

For the lack of a better word.

Miles was sure Diane wouldn't have hired them if she had the choice. They let the kids run rampant whenever they were left in charge. Furniture would end up smashed, children would be hurt, and knees mainly skinned but a few broken noses and black eyes would pop in at times. But most importantly, at least for Miles, was how quickly things got broken. Nothing was off limits, TVs, remotes, his collection of electronic gadgets that he'd been amassing.

Everyone involved took a tormented glee in smashing his things.

But what they didn't realize?

Their carnage left Miles with more to play with. He used the broken stuff with far greater access than he'd used the prior scraps Miles had found lying around. There was enough variety that Miles was able to couple together a pc from the materials, it was slow and needed to run based on old software from around twenty years prior, but it was a workable base for Miles to program with after he managed to nick a keyboard from the local library.

Miles managed to take what he could and also build a USB fryer, a USB flash device that uploaded a specific kind of virus into a computer that would scramble the system files. It wasn't the greatest invention, as there were methods around such a thing working, like the lack of external USB ports being the easiest one, but it was good enough to break any computer Miles could find in town.

Useless against the future robots Robotnik would send against Sonic. But if developed further, Miles could easily use it to attack the actual computers in the Dr.'s bases.

Given the chaotic mess that the orphanage had fallen into, Miles knew he couldn't exactly keep his new gadgets under his bed. They'd broken the helicopter he'd kept there, so a better spot was needed to store his stuff.

He'd found that the basement boiler room was never used, the building had long been converted to electrical heating, but the room containing the boiler remained. A long and deep clean was needed before Miles would keep his stuff there, but it was easily done.

No one ever bothered him while he was in the room, no one even bothered to look inside. Why would they?

He also started to train his tails, Miles knew from what little he knew from the franchise that 'Tails' could use his duo of tails to achieve flight, much like a helicopter could. That required a lot of muscle to build up to. In theory.

In fact, the first week of training was enough for him to hover. It wasn't enough to fly, but it was more than enough to give him an unfair advantage in the long jump, he was outjumping the kids in the 10-plus age range. It was another reason for kids to be jealous of him, another reason for their bullying to intensify.

Luckily, things eventually calmed down as Diane recovered within two months. Fewer people were working in the Orphanage after that though, Miles even noticed intense screams during the middle of the night that followed some departures. No one disappeared, Miles had seen these people around town after they left, but it did point Diane in a different light for Miles from that point on.

In fact, something had changed about the kind matron during her leave of absence. Miles wasn't sure if it was just that he'd gotten old enough to notice her true demeanor or if the brief mysterious illness had just affected Diane's character. Either way, this was a harsh change that only seemed to apply to people other than Miles himself.

To him, she was still a sweet kind, grandmother figure whereas with other orphans she'd become strict, and demanding.

It was like she knew what they'd been up to while Diane had been sick and was super pissed about it. Miles certainly hadn't told her, while better, he had not been a perfect angel either, and tattling on the misbehavior of the others would get him called out just as quickly.

It wasn't long before this change in attitude made Miles feel very, very paranoid about interacting with Diane. Being nice to him didn't change that he knew this behavior wasn't universal, and Miles had too many memories as an adult to not find the behavior suspect. The long-term isolated meetings between the two became awkward and full of long silences. The tension rose so much that at times Miles would speak technobabble, using framing in the terms he was currently researching to draw out nonsense to talk with.

One day, things were extra tense as she put him in one of the living room areas the orphanage had and locked the door. It was typically where one went to meet with prospective new parents, but being locked inside the room was a new experience for Miles.

He didn't like it.

A full half-hour passed before a sign of Diane returning. Miles started to examine the room in full, searching through the stuffed toys in the right corner of the room for signs of cameras without it being obvious that was what he was doing. He rooted through the blocks on the other side of the room, then, absentmindedly building a house out of the knock-off Lego bricks as his mind came up with possibilities.

It was then that he spotted a vent grill, it was several feet high up on the wall, higher than Miles could reach while standing on a chair. He understood from other children that they could crawl about in the vents with room to spare, and Miles was the smallest current resident of the orphanage, so it wasn't like he expected to get stuck trying it. The vents did, however, only lead to the basement, which had been locked earlier that day by Diane, or the roof. Both would be hard for a normal child to escape from, but Miles wasn't an ordinary child. He could fly…

...in theory.

Miles stood from his chair, his courage gathered to reach the roof of the orphanage regardless only for the door to the room to suddenly click open with a roar of noise behind it. It was a shocking noise, something that Miles had never heard in his life as a two-tailed fox, it was a celebration.

"Happy birthday!" A crowd of people led by Diane screamed as the woman in question entered the room with a large cake. The cake had six candles and read on it, Happy 6th​ Birthday Miles.

There wasn't a single thing in this current life that prepared Miles for this. He'd never received a birthday cake before, he'd never seen anyone living in this orphanage receive one either, neither adults nor kids. Miles hadn't even been aware that he'd missed his fifth birthday last year, till now the young Fox believed he'd been four still.

Miles had expected this to have been some sort of trap, not a surprise birthday party. To go from planning to escape the building to being given birthday cake was such a large swing in mood that Miles found himself just staring at the folks as they surrounded him singing Happy Birthday to him.

"What the fuck!"

"Miles!"

There wasn't a person in sight as Miles made his way through the orphanage in the middle of the night. The changes with Diane had continued, she was ultra-strict with everyone, even resulting in physical punishment such as slapping kids across the face or spanking them hard enough to force them to stand for several hours, or worse laying on their stomachs while sleeping.

But even though Miles had been largely exempt from these actions, his curiosity had grown to such levels that he had to investigate. So for two weeks, he stayed up later than usual, he took notes on when the caretakers, especially Diane were asleep and the nights that she stayed in their office bed, a strange thing in hindsight, compared to when she went home.

With this information, Miles knew that Diane wasn't here tonight, but he did need to watch out for two caretakers, two of the stricter ones. If caught there wouldn't be a massive deal, but they might take the chance in over-punishing him now and deal with the fallout from Diane later, just for the satisfaction. Luckily, Miles had further trained his hover, and his spinning tails sounded a lot like the spinning of the fans that went on throughout the orphanage, so he was able to silently move through the building without floorboards creaking or any such noises drawing attention to him.

He still had to deal with one or two doors that had been between him and Diane's office but those weren't loud enough to matter. If there was a single point of maintenance that the orphanage took pride in, it was the silent doors. None of the workers could stand the squeak of an unoiled door hinge.

When Miles finally got to Diane's office, he found the door unlocked and the room empty as he expected. There was a tall file cabinet behind an oak desk with a leather-bound chair between them. But those weren't the files Miles was interested in, those were deeds, chains of parentage, and physical copies of the orphanage's financial records.

Instead, Miles turned on the laptop Diane kept on the desk and pulled out a USB flash drive he'd prepared for the moment. The regular operating system had been locked out, and password protected. Miles expected the password to be easy to crack but didn't want to waste the time it would take to crack it if Diane took even the most simple of precautions, such as spelling it with a mix of letters and numbers in unusual spaces. So he compiled a simple Linux-sk operating system based on the bits of open-source software that existed here, which ran on the USB flash drive once connected to the computer.

It was slow, but Diane hadn't set up protections within the standard operating system the computer had against an outside OS accessing the files, so Miles was on the easy road to her files.

The first thing he looked for was some sort of diary, a thing he expected older folk to do. But if Diane kept one, it wasn't on this laptop. The next thing Miles tried was looking through orphan files; this was where the oddities started compiling themselves in his head onto a list. They listed the orphans by their weight, height, eye color, and the animal type they were, but nothing about personality and history. It was a list as if they weren't children to be adopted, but animals raised to be a certain size and weight.

A chill ran up Miles's spine that felt like spiders were tap dancing on it.

There was a list of potential parents for each child, but they were listed as parents rejected. This included kids that Miles had been told had been adopted, instead, the file listed them as bought. The rejected parents were given a rational reason on the page for why they were rejected.

Usually money, but a few were rejected for inefficient will. A claim that Miles required more context to figure out what it meant. But the children who were 'bought' were never given a reason.

Miles copied the files over in batches, planning on reading them all later from the safety of his boiler room when his curiosity led to him reading over his file. It was more than chilling. There'd been only three sets of parents that had shown genuine interest in adopting Miles, two more sets that Miles had even been aware of. The first two were folks that Miles barely remembered, but they'd been rejected for much the same reason as others he'd read about.

The final couple had been the duo from just before Diane's sick leave. The duo showed such a public interest in Miles that the young fox had genuinely thought he would be adopted. But had disappeared just as quickly as any other would-be parent after that. Diane had said they only showed up for the social clout that looking into adopting would bring them into their social circles.

Diane's files showed a different story, such a different reason for disappearing. Because they'd been written down as Deceased.

Chapter Text

The next day, he was fiddling with a new gadget, a stun gun. Usually, Miles wouldn't have made a weapon that could cause actual harm, one didn't need to be a genius to know while usually nonlethal Stun Guns still did enough damage to leave scars.

That was usually enough to warn him off from making one. It wasn't like Eggman would leave his robots weak to external electrical charges. So it was just a painful device that Miles wanted little to do with.

Miles found that he had a sudden shift in motivation regarding that.

Miles tapped his tails against each other nervously as his mind went over the events of last night. Deceased. The happy couple that had been so excited to adopt him hadn't ghosted him. They'd died. It was a rather stark difference that caused him no small amount of anguish. After all, he spent a long time hating them for giving him false hope. Sonic's eventual arrival was a consolation prize, something that kept him emotionally together but didn't plaster over the betrayal Miles felt.

Angrish replaced it, guilt too. There was guilt sitting in his chest too. Churning around there till it was thick and heavy. Miles felt suffocated by it.

Though Miles was aware there was a little fault to be had on himself. It wasn't like he'd denounced them, ruined their reputations, and gathered an angry mob to run the couple out of town. It wasn't like he'd even been there for whatever had killed them; they didn't die to protect him, nor had any action Miles done caused their deaths. They just mysteriously died.

Still, Miles felt guilty for the harsh thoughts he'd had running through his mind over the months since they died.

There was a question to be had about the rationale behind Diane having such files in the first place. She was head of an orphanage but kept detailed files on several people, which could be excused if it were just those looking to adopt or had adopted from her. But Miles had a very quick look through those files, she had files on people who'd never so much as looked at an orphanage. The chilling fact of the files was that the majority of people on them were deceased.

Diane had other files on the computer, but the dead people files were the thing that stuck with Miles. It gnawed at his mind, keeping him awake at night.

Her attitude lately, the files on the computer, and the way that people disappeared from the orphanage. It told a story that Miles didn't want to believe, one that he struggled to find an argument against. Diane was involved in their deaths, she caused their deaths. Miles just couldn't figure out why?

As he finished off his rather mundane stun gun, it was a rod with metal tips at the end where the electrical current would travel between, he started up his other project. It was a smaller version of his earlier drone, only this one had a small camera and a WiFi module. Essentially, it would stream visuals to his hidden pc, though audio was out of the question till he found a microphone small enough but also sensitive enough to actually be useful for it. He took inspiration from the dragonfly, the insect, not the Mobians who happened to correspond with them, when designing this drone.

This meant the material for the wings needed to be light enough that the small motors inside the drone could move them up and down for flight, but durable enough not to snap off from the stress. It was easier than Miles thought it would be, as a cheap polymer had been introduced to the market by some inventor by the name of Kintobor recently. Duranin was what it was called. It was cheap to produce, easy to find, easy to cut, but durable to bashing.

What was most extraordinarily duranin was the limited shelf-life, something plastics usually were famous for having such a long-term self-life. Usual plastics would outlife people, maybe by centuries, before breaking down, making them hard to dispose of and a pollutant for the environment. Duranin had a shelf-life of twenty years.

It did mean that Miles wouldn't ever pass this drone, or at least the wings, off to children he could have in the future. But it was a design trade-off he was more than willing to make. Duranin was too perfect otherwise, too cheap, too easily found, for his designs to have problems with their low shelf-life.

It wouldn't hold up to gunfire; that wasn't the type of thing the material was designed to do. But you wouldn't want to be wracked across the face with something even as light as an empty bottle made from it.

Miles spent the next few days spying on Diane, trying to make out that he wasn't at the same time. It was tough, as Diane spotted him or even a drone of his floating around her too often as suspicious. And if she had been involved with all those deaths, then Miles needed to be very careful. It was possible that the apparent fondness she had for him would shield Miles from lethal options the woman would employ, but it was also possible she was a sociopath with a useful favorite orphan.

And Miles was sure that the 'useful' part of that equation would be removed if he started to look too deeply into things Diane didn't want to be uncovered.

So a mix of surveillance was needed, and the drone was the first step. It would be the only step for another month, given how long it took for cameras that small to ship out to a town so far away from big cities. Miles next considered RC-style drones as his next project. Sure, their range would be limited compared to the aerial drone but it would also be expected to be around an orphanage.

No one expected RC cars to be spying on them.

He picked up a controller for the aerial drone, flying it out through the small window frame that the boiler room had, leading to the world outside. Its camera feed led straight to the computer system he'd built. It wouldn't be suitable for combat, the second delay from what Miles was being shown on screen and what the drone was doing made sure of that, but it was more than good enough for spying.

When the drone found Diane, she was talking with a tall rabbit woman. The rabbit had black fur and wore a golden dress that sparkled in the daylight. From what Miles could see from the position, the two were speaking with calm faces. In fact, the rabbit smiled in a manner you'd expect from the purity of saints or angels.

If Miles hadn't known about the files of deceased people on Diane's computer, he probably would've taken this at face value. A simple meeting between adults, maybe they were even friends.

But he did know.

And that made the little movements, the awkward tension between the pair obvious to Miles rather than subtext. The rabbit woman could barely look Diane in the eye, only rarely meeting her eyeline in a skittish manner few people could fake.

As the two broke apart, Miles noticed the folder, a thick binder really, of files the rabbit woman was taking with her. It had been in Diane's hand moments earlier, he hadn't even spotted her handing it over. Miles wouldn't have thought too much about it, not usually. But he was already concerned with Diane; he wanted to know what was going on, and what those files meant, and knowing what was in those files could be helpful, especially if Diane created them as Miles suspected.

If the files on her computer have information on the life status of the people listed. Who knew what information was in files that Diane felt needed to be handed over? He supposed it could've been an innocent transfer of files, perhaps the rabbit was a government worker?

But as far as Miles was aware, there wasn't a relationship between the orphanage and the Kingdom. It didn't do social work, Monarchy rarely did. From memories leftover of his previous life, this usually meant that orphanages should mainly be run by and funded by communities or religious organizations... Not that Miles had ever heard of a local religion since he'd been born here, just that would be how an orphanage would gain funding to be run.

He followed after the rabbit with his drone, watching as he went along her day in a very casual fashion. She waved to some folk, greeted them with what Miles presumed were pleasantries, and even hit up a bakery for some bread.

Miles grew somewhat concerned with the range limit of the Drone, it didn't have range enough to cover the whole town. He'd need to have a notable radio tower to send and receive the signal to cover that area. So when the rabbit went further into town, Miles decided it was better to return the drone back home.

Before he could pilot it back, Miles heard the stairs to the basement creak. Someone was coming down here. No one ever came down here. Miles was sure they didn't even know he was using the closed-off, unused boiler room on this level as a computer room.

So quickly and with no care for the drone that could drop from the sky and smack someone over the head, Miles turned off his computer and moved to face the door.

The door creaked open, slow and halting. Miles's grip on the screwdriver tightened, though he doubted it'd help against anything bigger than a rat. He kept his breathing shallow, ears swiveling toward the shifting shadows in the hallway.

It wasn't Diane.

The figure that slipped through the half-open door was smaller, hesitant—one of the other orphans. Lanky, gray-furred, nervous. Reese the Squirrel. The kind of kid who'd been in the orphanage longer than most but managed to make it through mostly unnoticed. Miles lowered the screwdriver a little, frowning.

Reese paused when he saw Miles, his eyes darting from the darkened monitor to the whirring of the fan in the corner. "Didn't know anyone came down here," he muttered. "Didn't mean to... You know, interrupt or anything."

"What do you want?" Miles asked, voice guarded.

Reese shuffled. "I-I was looking for a quiet spot. Mr. Harlin's on the warpath again. Said he found a scratch on the hall wall. Think he's gonna blame me. He always does."

That wasn't a surprise. Harlin worked as the orphanage's maintenance man-slash-enforcer, a broad-shouldered weasel who always seemed to have a mop or a wrench in one hand and a chip on his shoulder in the other. Diane rarely raised her voice or even seemed to care about the day-to-day running of the place, that was Harlin's job. And Harlin liked making kids flinch when he walked by. He liked picking favorites. And Reese definitely wasn't one of them.

But Miles wasn't interested in sob stories right now, and it wasn't like Reese had been kind to him over the years. Reese had been one of the numerous bullies who liked to tag on his tails, had him names, and even once tripped him going down the stairs.

Miles didn't have a lot of pity for the likes of him.

"You'd better find somewhere else. I'm busy."

Reese hesitated in the doorway, half-turned like he was about to leave, then slumped just a little. His shoulders curled inward and his ears drooped in that defeated way Miles recognized too well. It was the posture of someone who'd already been kicked around too much and just expected it to keep happening.

And maybe that shouldn't have mattered.

But for some reason, it did.

Maybe it was the guilt still churning in Miles's gut over things he couldn't control. Maybe it was the way Reese didn't meet his eyes and didn't get defensive or snarky like usual. There was no sneer, no smug glint of superiority. Just a tired kid with nowhere else to go, looking for a dark corner to hide from the world.

Miles sighed, long and sharp through his nose.

"You can sit on the other side," he muttered, gesturing to the far wall with a tilt of his chin. "Don't touch anything. Don't talk to me."

Reese blinked, surprised. Then nodded quickly, eager not to push his luck. He crept inside and settled into the opposite corner, knees tucked up to his chest like he expected to be told to leave at any second.

Miles turned back to his equipment, but his ears kept a bead on Reese, listening for any shift, any movement near his things. None came. Miles returned to his work in silence, but the unease settled into the room with them—quiet, patient, waiting.

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

The town didn't have a name. Not one that anyone ever used, anyway.

It had streets and shops and a clock tower that still rang every quarter hour, but when Miles asked, even the grown-ups would shrug and say, "Just the town," like that was normal. Like all towns were nameless and they simply hadn't noticed.

But Miles had noticed. With his last life as a human on an average human world, he couldn't help that details like that stood out to him.

It wasn't just laziness, either. Somewhere buried in a book he'd stolen, one about regional maps of the kingdom, he'd read that this was the kind of thing the last king had tried to enforce during the so-called Great Peace Era. Strip the towns of their history, their crests and names and customs, and replace it all with a singular, sanitized idea of "Kingdom." No more border feuds. No more tribal markings or family ties. Just unity through erasure.

It hadn't worked, of course. People clung to old things. But in places like this, quiet and distant and unremarkable, the forgetting had sunk in deep. The town had no name, and nobody cared that it didn't.

Except Miles.

He walked the cobbled path through the market square, his backpack bouncing lightly against his shoulders, two tails tucked up and swaying just enough not to draw attention. It was rare for a child to be left alone here, even rarer for one from the orphanage. But Miles had managed to carve out an exception.

He was allowed to go to the library.

Once a week, he'd asked. Once became twice. Then daily, so long as he promised to be back before supper and didn't speak to strangers. Diane hadn't objected. If anything, she'd seemed pleased. "Better than wasting time picking fights," she'd said.

If only she knew.

The library was an old building, pressed like a secret between two rows of squat brick storefronts near the town's center. Its roof was uneven and shingled with mismatched tiles, one corner perpetually under repair. A brass weathervane shaped like a quill sat rusted and bent at the peak, and the stone steps leading to its front door were worn smooth with use. The paint on the door had long since faded from navy blue to a tired gray.

Miles pushed it open with one hand, stepping into the cool hush of paper and dust and silence.

Inside, the place looked bigger than it should've been. The ceilings arched high, timbered beams overhead casting long shadows when the light was just right. Shelves lined the walls in every direction, some so tall they required sliding ladders to reach. A large globe sat cracked in one corner, its oceans faded to green. A fireplace in the reading nook flickered with artificial flame; it hadn't worked in years, but no one had removed it.

"Back again?" came a voice from the front desk.

Miles gave a polite nod.

The owner of the voice was a badger woman named Miss Irlin. She was older than anyone Miles had ever met, her fur silvery white, and her glasses so thick they made her eyes look three times larger. She didn't ask questions. She never hovered or pried. If he came in muddy or bruised, she only nodded to the washroom. If he didn't speak at all, she simply returned to her paperwork.

She liked the quiet. So did he.

He moved past her now, past the old oak desk with its chipped corners and overflowing inbox, and slipped between two rows of fiction where the surveillance camera couldn't see.

Then, crouching low behind a rack of atlases, Miles pulled open his backpack.

Inside, nestled between a cracked notebook and an old repair manual, was a box no bigger than a deck of cards. He flipped it open. The controls inside had been gutted from an old RC toy, soldered, and rewired with microchips lifted from discarded orphanage tablets. He'd fitted the screen from a broken phone into the lid. Tiny joysticks, carved from the tips of toothbrushes, jutted up just enough to grip.

The drone itself was already in the air, launched from the outskirts of town an hour earlier and guided in a slow spiral toward the district where Diane had met the rabbit woman in.

The rabbit woman.

He didn't know her name. Didn't know what she did, or where she worked. All he had was the image burned into his mind from the drone's footage: tall, black fur, long ears, and a golden dress that glittered like coins in sunlight. She'd looked important. Polished. Clean in the way only someone with real money or real power could be. Diane had leaned in close when they talked, too close for something casual.

That meant something.

Now, from the safety of the library, Miles calibrated the drone's trajectory again. He pinched two fingers over the tiny screen and dragged them outward, zooming in.

It was flying low over the market square now, catching snatches of conversation and blurred glimpses of shoppers. Fruit carts. Butchers. Fabric sellers. And then, there.

Gold. A shimmer of it near the cloth merchant's stall.

Miles adjusted the altitude, slowly and carefully.

There she was again. The rabbit woman. Still tall, still black-furred, and still in that same radiant dress. She was talking to a stall owner now, someone with a box of rolled silks and measuring tape looped around his neck. Her body language was relaxed, familiar. No signs of secrecy now. No hushed tones.

That meant this was her public face.

Miles studied her posture, her gait, and the way others moved aside to let her pass. He wasn't sure what he expected, but it wasn't that people would treat her like they knew her. Like she belonged here.

Maybe she did.

That didn't mean she wasn't dangerous.

He adjusted the drone's zoom again, following at a safe distance.

She didn't act like a criminal. Then again, he didn't really know what criminals looked like in this world; people barely wore clothes, never mind name tags saying 'bad guy'. The word "Mafia" had come up once or twice at the orphanage, muttered between staff when they thought no one was listening. He guessed that a famous Mafia family, group, or whatever was living in the town. And at times, they had dealings or fights with other Mafia families. But the majority of the time, it had the same weight as a ghost story for Miles. Bad people who did bad things living around you, better take care or the Mafia will take over.

He didn't think she was a Mafia Member, but again, Miles didn't know anything about them. Human Mafia members from his prior life were polite. They dressed to impress, with flashy clothes and jewelry but clean outfits. Designer suits.

Miles guessed that it matched the Rabbit woman, but she didn't appear to have anything to hide, laughing with a vendor as if they were friends. No one feared her, at least, no one seemed to hold back in her presence.

The woman, by accounts, didn't appear to be a dangerous criminal.

Miles frowned, fingers tightening on the controls. He would follow her until she led him somewhere, anywhere, that told him what she was. The storefront she entered. The people she met. The doors they locked behind them.

The street she entered was different from the rest of the town.

It wasn't just the paving stones, clean, polished, not cracked by decades of frost and carts; it was the way people held themselves. No one shouted across stalls here. No one haggled or leaned out of windows to gossip. Miles watched from the drone's camera as the rabbit woman passed two storefronts, and the doors opened for her before she reached them. Not by sensors. By people.

A shopkeeper in a three-button vest bowed, actually bowed, before ushering her into what looked like a perfume parlor. She didn't go in. She only smiled and waved, and the man looked satisfied just to have received it. Another woman, an older white-tailed deer in a tailored coat, adjusted her brooch as the rabbit passed like she wanted to look better by proximity.

There were no signs here. No hand-painted prices. No cracked windows with flyers tacked up.

Even the bakery had a uniformed attendant at the door, and Miles would've bet anything that the bread inside didn't come wrapped in paper, but cloth.

She was in her element here.

Miles adjusted the drone's height again. The signal was clean, with no interruption. He drifted it forward just enough to keep her framed, but high enough that she'd only appear as a shadow overhead if someone looked up.

Eventually, she stopped at a two-story building on the corner of a sunlit avenue. It looked more like a private townhouse than a business. Trim white exterior. Brass fixtures. A flower box hanging from the upper window, not a leaf out of place.

She stepped inside with no key. Just a knock. The door opened immediately.

Miles didn't recognize the person who answered, but they were dressed like staff. Not a doorman or clerk. A personal servant.

He leaned back from the screen, silent.

This wasn't what he'd expected.

When he'd first seen her with Diane, the image had made sense. Someone important, maybe dangerous. Miles didn't trust powerful people. Diane didn't show deference to anyone. But in that meeting, she stood back, offered coffee, listened more than she talked.

Now, looking at this, the way people here acted around the rabbit woman, it wasn't fear they showed.

It was warm.

Not forced, either. Not the anxious obedience that came from having something to lose. These people liked her. They treated her like someone who'd always been here, who belonged here.

And that made something in Miles's stomach twist.

Because if they liked her, and Diane liked her, if that whole meeting hadn't been about secrets and coercion but about... friendship, then what did that mean about Diane? About all of it?

Was he just seeing ghosts where there weren't any?

No.

No, that couldn't be it.

He remembered the files.

He remembered the list of names, marked deceased, people who had once intended to adopt children and now apparently didn't exist. He remembered the way Diane closed her office door a little too fast. The way she covered her screen when someone walked by. The Red Setter with the bruised cheek and haunted look in her eyes.

Those things didn't vanish just because the rabbit woman, whoever she was, had friends and warm smiles waiting for her. The contrast only made it worse. Miles felt it in the pit of his stomach, a creeping unease that went deeper than suspicion.

He wasn't sure what frightened him more: the idea that the rabbit woman was part of something sinister, or the possibility that she wasn't.

Because if she was innocent, if this was normal, if Diane had been comfortable around her...

Then maybe Miles really didn't understand what was going on.

Maybe he'd built a web out of fragments and shadows, and now he was staring down the fact that his image of Diane, the cold manipulator pulling invisible strings, might not hold up in the light. That she could have connections in places like this. Real ones. Ones that came with trust.

It made him feel smaller somehow.

The drone feed was still stable. The rabbit woman hadn't come back out. There was no sign of anyone else entering the townhouse either. No security cameras, no coded locks, or black-suited guards. Just a clean building on a clean street in a part of town he'd never been welcome in.

He made a mental note of the address. He'd have to come back here. Maybe even follow someone else who walked through that same door.

For now, though, he had what he came for.

Or so he thought.

The rabbit woman reappeared at the door, not leaving, just stepping out briefly. A male raccoon with dark brown fur followed her not a second later, his hands in the pockets of a suit jacket. Miles couldn't tell, but there was something about the way his pocket bulged that told him there was a weapon in there.

The two of them waited for a few moments till a black van drove into view. Then things got very tense, at least as far as Miles could tell from a viewscreen. A towering rabbit with light brown fur, but dark brown ears longer than any rabbit Miles had ever seen, proportional to the rest of her body. She wore a dark dress that would've contrasted too much for someone so light of color otherwise to wear, but somehow it just added to the sense of danger Miles could feel.

She towered over the other two like they were children themselves, exchanged some words, then clapped her hands together. Suddenly, two more raccoons, in a similar style to the other one, came out of the van, grasping the shoulder of a child very familiar to Miles.

"Reese?" Miles said, the surprise causing him to say it accidentally.

He'd only seen the other boy three days ago, he hadn't even been aware that he'd been out. But he also recalls hearing that someone had been adopted. Suddenly, Miles was glad he'd stayed an orphan for so long. If this was the treatment Reese got.

Reese looked worse for wear, his tail was even bent at an angle that made Miles cringe just seeing it. His eyes were bright pink, like he'd worn out his tears crying some time ago. He was pushed forward into the smaller rabbit woman's arms, who made some odd noises before shoveling the lad inside the building.

The first raccoon shuffled out the contents of his pockets. A wad of crash, bundled together with a rubber band, was handed off to the remaining rabbit woman.

And the group disbanded from there, the first raccoon walking back into the warehouse while the others drove off in their van.

Chapter Text

The night air bit against Miles's fur as he crouched behind the chimney stack, watching the warehouse below. The lanterns that lined the cobbled street were guttering low now, their oil nearly spent. Shops had long since closed. The distant clack of hooves and wheels had faded into stillness. Even the polished windows of the tavern across the plaza sat dark and silent. The town's rich quarter had finally gone to sleep.

Perfect.

His eyes locked onto the building ahead, the warehouse with no sign, no name, just the three golden dots painted above its entry arch. It looked clean. Innocuous. Like the sort of place, you'd store art or wine or bolts of imported silk.

But Miles knew better.

His fingers curled tighter around the strap of his backpack. He needed answers, needed to know what exactly was going on, the warehouse had those answers. And hopefully, it still had Reese. If he had to tear apart every box and wall inside that place to find them, he would.

He dropped the strap and straightened, stepping back from the edge. Then, with a short run, he spun his tails into motion.

Miles had practiced flying before, but never pushed himself to the limit, only brave enough to float down from the top of the stairs. Or used his tails to push himself forward while running. Full-on flight was scary.

But lots of things were scary, it wouldn't stop Miles from doing them.

The lift was wobbly. The wind caught him as he rose, shifting his balance just enough that his shoulder grazed the building's parapet. He grunted softly, correcting his course, keeping the rhythm tight. The air felt heavier at night, colder, more resistant, but he pushed through it, climbing just high enough to angle down onto the roof.

His landing was hard. Quiet, but jarring. The soles of his feet stung as they hit the shingles, and he let himself crouch for a moment, steadying his breath. One tail twitched behind him, more from nerves than effort.

Ahead was the ventilation shaft, painted the same off-white as the rest of the roof, its bolts rusted but still holding. Miles crept toward it on all fours, knees, and knuckles were kept close to the surface.

A hastily gotten multitool came out from a side pouch Miles had on a tool belt. It was nothing custom just something he picked up cheaply from a hardware store. He flicked it open, twisted it into screwdriver form, and began loosening the screws one by one.

Each pop of metal made his heart pound louder in his ears. Not from fear of being caught. From fear that he wouldn't be fast enough.

"I'm just going in to check," he told himself. "To see if he's ok. If he's not, I'll leave and get help. I'll get out."

He didn't believe it.

Not really.

If Reese so much as whimpered, Miles wouldn't be able to stop himself from taking the older boy out of there.

So deep into his thoughts, Miles hadn't noticed when the final screw flopped out of the panel till the thing clattered onto the rooftop with enough force to send his heart racing. The opened vent had just enough space for someone small to slip inside. He picked the panel up gently, moving to the side so if he came back up this way Miles wouldn't make noise stepping on it, and then swung his legs into the shaft.

It smelled like steel dust and old paper. The air circulated faintly through it, cool but artificial. Miles let himself slide forward, using his elbows and tails to guide his descent. The duct curved once, then again, until the dim light below came into view.

He paused just above the grate, listening for any sign people were nearby.

There was nothing. No voices. No footsteps.

Just the faint hum of fluorescent lighting, humming like an insect trapped in a glass jar.

He dropped the last foot and landed on the padded flooring of a small second-floor corridor, tucked between what looked like two upscale offices, too upscale for a "warehouse." The walls were painted cream, the floorboards buffed to a soft shine. There was a glass water decanter on a side table.

He crouched, keeping low to the floor as he padded forward.

Reese was still here, Miles could feel it. Somewhere behind one of these perfectly lacquered doors. And Miles would find him. No matter what else was on the other side.

The room was dim and sterile, with bare walls, a cot in the corner, and a single flickering overhead light that buzzed faintly in time with Miles's heartbeat. And there, slumped against the far wall, knees drawn up, wrists bound tight with industrial flex cuffs, was Reese.

His fur was matted, his tail twisted unnaturally at the tip. A ragged cloth gag hung from his mouth, and his eyes were puffy and unfocused. No fresh tears, just the hollow stare of someone who had cried too hard, too long, and had nothing left to give.

Miles didn't hesitate.

He dropped to his knees beside him, pulling a thin filament wire from a porch on his belt. With quick, practiced movements, he threaded it beneath the cuffs and gave a sharp tug. The plastic bindings gave way with a quiet snap. He did the same to the gag, tossing it aside.

Reese coughed once. Then blinked, sluggishly. Recognition sparked behind his eyes.

"Miles...?"

"Shh." Miles's voice was soft but urgent. "Don't talk. Not yet. Can you walk?"

Reese swallowed, his voice barely a rasp. "I-I-I think so."

"That's good enough." Miles looped an arm around Reese's shoulder and helped pull him upright. It was awkward, given Miles was a good few inches smaller than Reese, but it was good enough to support the boy. Reese only stumbled once, never once knocking down.

They turned back to the hallway. Miles peeked out first, no movement. No sound but the hum of overhead lighting. They slipped out, hugging the wall, moving quickly and quietly toward the stairwell.

And then, they heard it.

Footsteps. Heavy, deliberate.

Above them.

Not many. Just one pair.

But one was all it would take.

Miles's grip on Reese tightened. He didn't look back.

"Come on," he whispered. "We have to move. Now."

They bolted for the stairs.

The stairs were just ahead, ten steps, maybe twelve. Reese's breath came in weak wheezes beside him, every step like dragging a sandbag uphill. But they were almost there.

Almost.

Then the light hit. An extra one that illuminated the halls far better than the low lights that the place had been using before.

It was bright enough to blind Miles, causing him to freeze in place for a moment. It came from above them. A spotlight from the ceiling clicked on with a mechanical thunk, flooding the hallway in a pale yellow glare.

Footsteps creaked above them, closer now. A shadow spilled into view over the upper stairs.

Then a voice, casual, almost annoyed.

"Hey. Someone forgot to bolt the- "

Miles didn't wait to hear the rest.

He shoved Reese forward and grabbed his wrist. "Move!"

The first door on the left was no good, it had been locked tight. The next was worse, just a mop closet. But the third, the far one, a rusted metal door with peeling green paint, looked promising... or desperate. They were the same thing for Miles right now.

He slammed his foot into the latch.

It didn't budge.

Once.

Twice.

A third time the bolt cracked with a sharp metallic pop.

The door flung open, and a cold gust of night air rushed in.

It was a loading chute, a sloped metal runway-box combo, grime-slicked and steep, with a drop into open alley darkness at the end.

He didn't think.

He just pushed.

Reese went first, sliding with a startled grunt. Miles followed, ducking into the narrow space just as another footstep echoed behind them.

The chute dumped them both out behind the building, onto damp pavement scattered with leaves and broken glass.

They landed hard, scraping elbows and knees, tumbling into each other.

No alarms rang.

No voices called out.

No one chased them.

Miles sat up, panting, heartbeat hammering in his ears.

That's what made it worse.

Because they didn't care.

They didn't expect anyone to break in.

They didn't expect anyone to break out.

They didn't think it mattered.

Miles looked back up at the chute's mouth, now just a square shadow above them.

The silence pressed in.

They thought no one would come for kids like Reese.

And that was worse than being hunted.

With no alarms raised and no footsteps in pursuit, the boys fled through the twisting back alleys of the upper district. The lanterns lining the polished walkways burned low, swinging in the night breeze like sleepy fireflies.

The district's usual sheen, ivory walls, polished brass signage, and little hanging gardens perfectly trimmed, meant nothing in the dark. In the quiet. It all felt hollow.

Miles moved fast, keeping close to the walls. The sharp wind tugged at the edges of his jacket, and his twin tails swayed low to keep balance. Every time they crossed an open lane, he paused, scanned for movement, and signaled Reese with a flick of his hand.

Reese stumbled once. His foot caught on an uneven cobble. He pitched forward with a strangled grunt, but Miles caught him before he hit the stone.

No words passed between them.

They pressed on.

Eventually, they reached the arch, an old, moss-covered structure that stretched across the road like the husk of a fallen gate. A few chunks had been chipped away by time or carts too tall to pass clean. Here, the roads turned from white marble to cracked brick and dirty stone. The lights were dimmer. The buildings are closer together.

They'd left the rich behind.

"Where are we going?" Reese rasped, barely able to lift his voice. His throat sounded raw like it still hurt to speak.

"Not the orphanage," Miles muttered. "Can't trust them."

"But Diane, "

"No." Miles didn't look at him. "Especially not her."

He'd seen enough not to trust Diane with this, even if she wasn't in league with the rabbit woman. Diane was close enough that she might've disregarded whatever Reese and he had to say about her.

Reese didn't argue again.

The older merchant quarter still held a pulse this late, faint tavern music bled out from shuttered windows, and somewhere off to the south, a voice barked in drunken laughter, but the boys stuck to side roads. Back alleys. Routes that even rats second-guessed.

A crooked flower shop marked their next stop. Miles pulled Reese into the alley beside it, sheltering behind a row of stacked clay pots and a tarp-covered trellis.

The shop was shuttered now, the painted sign hanging sideways by one chain: Petal and Thorn, Open at Dawn. The air smelled faintly of soil and fading hyacinth.

Miles crouched with him, gave him a second to catch his breath, then asked the question already clawing at the inside of his throat.

"Why'd they take you?" he whispered, sharp as broken glass. "What did they want?"

Reese hesitated, shifting his weight. His tail dragged in the dust behind him like it didn't want to follow anymore.

"They said I got adopted. Put me in a car… said I was going to meet my new family."

Miles stared at him, unmoving.

"But it wasn't a house," he said flatly.

Reese gave a small, miserable nod. His ears drooped.

"It was this… building. Fancy, but wrong. They locked me in a room. Gave me food, yeah, but only if I stayed quiet. If I knocked, no one came. I asked where my new parents were and, one of the raccoons laughed. Told me to stop talking unless I wanted to be 'passed down the line.' after they... took a stick at me."

Miles's mouth tightened.

"What line?" Miles asked, drawing on the phasing 'passed down the line.'

Reese shrugged, rubbing his arms. "They didn't say. But one of them… he called me 'the spare.' I think someone else backed out. Like I was a backup choice."

Miles looked away.

His hands clenched at his sides, jaw tight. His whole body wanted to shake with anger, but he didn't let it. Not here. Not yet.

Instead, he stood and offered a hand.

"We're going to the Sheriff's station."

The Shieff, Halden the Cat, wasn't an unknown figure to Miles, he'd seen the cat man walking around town with a smile on his face. Miles had seen enough TV to know that the sheriff could've been on it, but it was a good bet. And this was a Sonic the Hedgehog-based universe, there had to be some good people out there.

Taking a chance is all Miles could do in this situation.

Reese blinked up at him. "You trust the sheriff?"

Miles paused, just for a breath.

"No," he said. "But we're not exactly swimming with options here."

They moved again, ducking under a low arch and past the dried-up fountain that had once marked the heart of the merchant quarter. The stone statue at the center, some long-forgotten badger noble, had a chipped snout and a cracked scepter, half-sunk in ivy. No one bothered to fix it anymore.

From there, they crossed into the town square, wide and open beneath the looming silhouette of the clock tower. The tower struck a quarter past the hour, a dull chime that echoed across rooftops and down empty streets.

The sheriff's station sat at the far end of the square, nestled between the records hall and the apothecary, tucked low beneath a squat gabled roof.

It was built more like a converted home than a real law office, worn brick and faded shutters, with a wooden sign swinging from a bent hook: Sheriff, Peacebound Township. Someone had tried to scratch through the old crest beside it. Probably during the last succession riot.

The lights were still on inside. Lanterns glowed gold behind the frosted windows.

Miles didn't hesitate. They approached the stoop.

Reese slowed just before the steps.

"Miles… thanks. I thought, " he began.

"Don't," Miles cut him off. "Just get ready to tell them everything. Don't leave a thing out."

His voice was steel now.

"Especially not the part where she paid for you."

Reese's brows furrowed. "Who?"

Miles didn't answer. He guessed that was something he'd have to talk about seeing.

He looked back. One last glance at the rooftops. Toward the clean white street with its perfect townhouse. Toward the balcony with the flower box.

Still blooming.

He raised a hand and knocked on the sheriff's door.

Chapter Text

The oil lamp on Sheriff Halden's desk crackled faintly as it burned. Its light cast long shadows across the shelves and filing cabinets behind him, making the room feel tighter than it was. Folders were stacked high along the walls. Maps of the region, pinned and re-pinned with colored tacks, curled slightly at their edges.

Diane the Dane sat in a straight-backed wooden chair opposite him. Her coat was folded over her knees, damp from the rain she had walked through to get here. Diane didn't speak. Just watched Halden as he took his time shuffling through papers on the desk.

He waves Diane in with a nod, and motions to the chair across from his desk. "Sit. You look half-frozen."

Diane does, slowly. She's damp from the night air, coat speckled with moisture. Her posture is stiff like she's trying to brace for a blow that hasn't landed yet.

Halden pours a measure of something warm into a second mug, no theatrics, just familiarity.

"Still take yours without sugar?"

Diane blinks. "Yes." Then, cautiously, "What's this about? You typically don't call people in for a bit of tea in the middle of the night... not as far as I'm aware, anyway."

He sets the mug in front of her. He doesn't answer right away.

Instead, Halden leans back in his chair, sips from his own cup, and looks around the room like he's only now realizing how quiet it's gotten. "Never liked the rain this time of year; it was too cold for it to feel nice. That sort of thing seeps into your spine."

Diane stares. "Halden."

It sounded like a warning, it was in fact the same tone Diane would use on one of her children in the orphanage.

He nods before taking another sip.

"You run a tight ship," he says finally. "Always have. Do you remember that grey fox girl, the one who used to sneak ink cartridges under her vest? She painted the side of Martin Shield's house bright purple. Of course, the tortoise never noticed, since he was color blind."

Diane hesitates for a moment before deciding to name the girl in question, "Lisbet."

"That's the one. Well, of course, when she went to repeat the process the week after, this time with Blue, you caught her before Lisbet even got out of the store with them. Knew something was wrong just by the way she moved. You've always been sharp like that. And once you knew about that, you looked and found the empty purple cartridges, and... well, it all fell together after that."

Diane doesn't smile.

"What is this?" she says, more directly this time. "You didn't call me here to talk about ink theft and vandalism."

"No," Halden agrees. He sets his mug down with a soft clink. "I want to talk about the kids you have now."

He lets the words hang there.

"You've got a lot of them lately," he adds, tapping a finger lightly against the edge of the desk. Halden slid across a sheet of tables, detailing the names and ages of the kids living in the orphanage. "I've seen the turnout sheets. Dozens waiting, not enough homes."

Diane nods, wary. "We're full, yes."

"That must weigh on you."

She nods again. "Of course it does."

Halden leans forward, elbows on the desk now. His eyes are steady, not accusing, not yet.

"Have you ever lost one?"

Diane furrows her brow. "Lost?"

"A child. Ever lose track? Papers get mixed. Maybe someone picks up a placement you didn't sign off on."

"No," she says quickly. "We don't make mistakes like that."

"Don't or haven't?" he asks softly.

She narrows her eyes. "Halden, what is this?"

He doesn't answer right away.

Instead, he reaches into a drawer and pulls out a file. Not dramatically. No flourish. Just routine.

"Let's talk about Reese the Squirrel," he says, voice low and smooth. "Tell me everything you remember about his adoption."

Diane folds her hands in her lap, trying to keep her fingers from fidgeting. "Reese was one of our quiet ones. Skittish. Kept to himself. Always looked like he expected someone to shout at him."

Halden listens, hands folded on the desk in front of him. "And his adoption?"

"He was matched late last week," she answers. "A private arrangement. Not public."

Halden raises an eyebrow. "Rare."

"Not improper," Diane replies quickly, Halden's frown at the answer only caused the woman to match. "Occasionally we get private inquiries. Some prospective adopters want a quieter process. Especially from wealthier families."

"Who brought it to you?"

"A woman. She'd been around before. Never filed directly, but the people she had signed for the children spoke of her and she routinely verified their authenticity. Talked with the staff. Asked thoughtful questions."

Halden scribbles something into a worn notepad. "Name?"

"Klara. Klara the Hare."

Halden jotted down the name on a notepad he had off to the side before leaning in close to Diane with a blank stare that felt like being judged damned.

"She didn't raise any alarms," Diane says, seeming to realize what direction this conversation was going. The Dane didn't like it, "Klara has been polite. Respectful. Donated a lot of money in the prior quarter of the year. She's covered the damage to the roof in last year's storm, on her dime I might say. I'd call her a generous soul if there ever was one."

"Any paperwork?"

"Yes. Eventually, she submitted formal intent."

Halden tilts his head. "And where's that?"

"In the file cabinet. Under H for Hare. I filed it myself."

"And the address?"

"She provided one for the adoption but since Klara's never looked for one, I never got her address if that is what you're asking."

Halden doesn't blink. "Did you verify it?"

Diane's frown deepens. "No red flags came up. I cross-checked the location with the few fellows I knew from the area. Nothing pinged them as suspicious. And it's only been a few days, I was planning a surprise home visit before the week's end."

"So you don't actually know where Reese is."

Diane bristles. "Of course I do. She gave the address. It's barely been three days. I give new families space to settle before unannounced check-ins."

Halden leans forward, folding his arms.

"And she picked him up herself?"

"No. I already told you, she never collects the children herself. She sends someone. That isn't uncommon in this line of work. Klara said she had business in the southern district that morning that needed to be taken care of, so you could probably find her if you want more details on her man."

"Describe him."

"I didn't see him. Maren, one of my longtime staff, handled the hand-off. I was in the storeroom at the time."

Halden's eyes narrow slightly. "You weren't present for the exchange?"

"I reviewed the documents. I met with Klara three times before that. I had no reason to think it would go wrong."

Halden is quiet for a beat. Then-

"Did you try to follow up?"

Diane answers at once. "As I've said, I haven't had the chance. It's only just happened. I had a visit planned for Friday at the earliest, next Tuesday at the latest."

Halden slides his notepad aside and picks up a file from the corner of the desk, letting it rest
unopened beneath his fingertips.

Then he asks, soft but direct: "Do you know where that boy is right now?"

Diane doesn't hesitate. "I believe I do."

Halden doesn't blink. "That's not what I asked."

And for the first time, Diane falters. Just a little.

Halden opens the folder with a flick of his thumb.

Inside: a grainy black-and-white surveillance still, side profile, low angle. Reese the Squirrel. His wrists were bound with plastic cuffs. One eye is swollen half-shut. A bruise under the fur on his cheek. Another image shows him slumped between two adult figures, both raccoons, half-carried, half-dragged.

Halden doesn't slide it across. He doesn't need to.

Instead, he speaks.

"That boy didn't make it to a family, Diane. He was taken to a warehouse. Locked in a concrete room with a single light. Gagged. Bound. Beaten."

Diane's face goes slack. She stares at the open file. She didn't look at the photo. Just stared above it, at nothing.

"No," she says faintly. "That's not... That can't be. Klara… Klara has facilitated legitimate adoptions, I've checked the others before this. That's why she wanted the file. Klara said she had someone nearer to Knothole wanting to adopt, so she picked Reese up herself to bring him there."

Diane finally looks down. Her breath hitches. Her lips part, then close again.

"No," she whispers. "That's not possible. I… I screened her. I looked into it, she had connections. Reputable ones."

"From where?"

"A name from a cathedral registry, a few former government ministries. People vouched for her." Diane's voice is faltering now. "I called. A woman answered. She said she'd known Klara since childhood."

Halden's voice sharpens.

"Didn't visit the address?"

Diane hesitates.

"I-I told you already-"

"Didn't pull a land claim?"

"She seemed safe," Diane says. Her composure begins to shake. "She brought books. Blankets. Asked about trauma cases. She never, she never even met with the kids. Sick people who'd do this would meet the children, they'd be obsessed with doing it at every chance."

"And that made her clients real?" Halden snaps. "That made her trustworthy?"
Diane presses her fingers against her forehead. Her voice is barely audible.

"I thought she was safe."

Halden stands, and steps slowly around the desk, not to loom, but to close the space. To take the room from neutral to claustrophobic.

"You thought-" he says coldly, "-that because she smiled because she was well-spoken, that she wasn't looking for inventory."

Diane jerks her gaze upward, wide-eyed.

"Don't you dare call them that!"

"Then don't let them be that."

"I didn't know! I didn't know!"

"You didn't check."

Her breath catches.

The room goes silent, save for the distant tapping of rain.

Diane's voice, when it comes, is barely above a whisper.

"Do you know how many children I care for? How many cases do I juggle every week, while running the orphanage, begging for donations, trying to keep the lights on? Most of my staff are just there for the pay. I can't check every home monthly. I don't have the time. I barely have time to feed the ones still here.

Klara seemed like a blessing, she brought food, blankets, and was always kind. I thought she cared. I thought-I'd never have let Reese go if I'd known what she was."

She wipes her nose with the back of her sleeve, quick, instinctive.

"And how many children cry themselves to sleep every night because they think no one wants them? Because they've been passed over too many times, or shoved behind better-behaved ones?"

Halden doesn't blink. He doesn't interrupt. He lets her spiral.

"We don't get state gold. No royal funding. No paperwork couriers or oversight councils. Just ink-stained folders and staff who quit as soon as the roof leaks. I'm holding this place together with charity and hope. And then Klara came."

Her voice firms, just slightly.

"She didn't act squeamish about the work. Didn't pretend to care with flattery and smiles. She asked about the process. Offered help, not just words and empty promises, real help. She brought supplies. Paid to replace the leaking roof tiles in the dorm wing. Said she knew people who could help fund some therapy rooms. It was everything I ever hoped for."

Diane wipes her eyes again. This time she doesn't stop the tears.

"And now you're saying she... this. That she was this. And I didn't see it."

She slumps in the chair, staring down at the photo Halden had pushed forward earlier.

"I thought she was kind."

Halden speaks finally, quiet, but without softness.

"You were desperate."

"Yes," Diane breathes. "I was desperate."

"And reckless."

"I tried-"

"You gave her a child. From what I'm hearing a lot of children, I don't count that as trying."

He taps the photo of Reese again. Just once. Not hard. But the sound echoes in the room like a hammer blow.

"You gave him to her. You sealed the folder, signed the handoff, and let him walk out of your building."

Diane is trembling now. Her ears pulled low, her paws clutched tight against her lap.

"He asked me if it was real the night before," she whispers. "When I told him he'd been chosen. I said yes. I smiled at him. I told him he was lucky."

Her shoulders shudder.

"And now you show me this."

Halden circles back to his side of the desk, but he doesn't sit.

He doesn't need to.

She's already sunk.

The lamplight burned low. Shadows curled like vines along the office walls, and Sheriff Halden stood across the desk like a judgment rendered in flesh.

Diane didn't cry anymore. Her hands had settled on her knees, her posture slouched. What broke wasn't her voice, it was the way she no longer met his eyes.

"I should be locking you up right now," Halden said. "But I don't have enough. So you walk... for now."

Diane looked up, startled. "What are you saying?"

"You'll go home. You'll sleep in your own bed. But understand this, I'm not done. Not even close."

He leaned forward, his tone low and tight. "I'll be going through every child you've given over to that woman. Not just Reese. All of them."

She stiffened, something faltering behind her eyes. "You… you think they're all-"

"I think you gave children to someone who deals in lies. And you didn't stop after one."

He stepped around the desk and dropped a file in front of her. Reese's file. The photo inside is still visible beneath a few pages.

"I don't care what smile she wore, what stories she told. You handed her adoption papers. You gave her the tools."

"I thought she was legitimate," Diane said softly, barely audible. "I thought she was helping."
Halden's tone didn't change. "Then why aren't you helping now?"

"I didn't know."

"You didn't check."

"I did-!"

"Not hard enough. Not often enough."

His voice snapped like dry wood.

"You didn't knock on the door. You didn't demand to meet a family. You never once followed up, not on Reese, I doubt you did on the others either. And now one of those kids crawled out of a warehouse half-dead, and I have to ask you if any of the others are buried in ditches."

Diane stood there, shoulders trembling.

Halden pointed at the door.

"You're dismissed."

She didn't move at first. Then slowly, woodenly, she turned toward the exit. But before she could leave, his voice hit her one last time, it was cold, sharp, undeniable.

"If I find even one lie in your files, if even one child's gone missing without explanation, then next time, I won't let you walk out of here."

Diane didn't speak.

She walked out, silence clinging to her heels like a second shadow.

Behind her, Halden returned to his desk, ran a thumb along the edge of the folder, and snapped it shut like a verdict.

Chapter Text

The sheriff's station smelled like iron and old wood. Somewhere under the front desk, oil from the lanterns was burning low, leaving a faint tang of smoke in the air. Miles sat on a bench just inside one of the back rooms "for your safety," Halden had told him, as if that explained anything. The door wasn't locked, but it might as well have been. Every time he shifted, a floorboard creaked. Every time he stood, someone in the front would glance toward the hall.

He wasn't a prisoner, but a "witness." Miles wasn't told his life was in danger.

But he wasn't stupid. They didn't want him out yet because it would be easy for an accident to happen to either himself or to Reese if they went back to the orphanage.

The walls here were thin, thinner than they should've been for a place meant to hold people even temporarily. But it could've been the intention, as Miles had learned that the voices were bleeding through. Not from the main hall, but from the office just down the corridor. Halden's voice was unmistakable: clipped, serious, always a few syllables away from sarcasm. But the other voice? Miles didn't recognize it. It wasn't a town voice. It was too smooth. Too quiet. The kind of voice that never needed to raise itself to be heard.

"…I'm saying this doesn't need to get any worse," that stranger was saying now. "The child's back. No one's hurt that matters."

Miles sat up straighter.

"I'm not in the habit of cleaning up someone else's mess," Halden replied, voice sharp.

There was a pause. Miles could almost feel the look being exchanged between the two. Whoever this was, they weren't afraid of the sheriff. It wasn't much of an achievement, this was a small town sheriff, Halden had all of five deputies to work the area with. But Halden didn't show any fear of this other person, so that was a good sign. At least, Miles thought it was a good sign.

Then came the words that froze the back of Miles's neck:

"You've already got your boy. Let's not make more trouble than we need. Especially not over her."

Her?

Diane. They were talking about Diane. Miles felt he should've realized that much earlier; it wasn't like there were a lot of other messes he was aware of that could've been cleaned up.

Miles pressed closer to the wall, ears twitching.

"You expect me to pretend this was clean?" Halden asked, tone unreadable.

"No," the stranger said. "Just quiet."

A faint rustle, Miles knew it was from paper being moved. A drawer opened, then shut again. Something heavy was placed on the desk.

Miles didn't need to see it to know what it was. Bribes were universal. He'd read enough books, watched enough films in his old life to recognize the sound of hush money hitting polished wood. He might've even paid a bribe or two to get out of a traffic ticket.

His stomach twisted. He should've been angry. Should've stood up and shouted.

But instead, Miles focused, he schemed..

Because if Halden was going to let Diane walk…

Then maybe justice needed someone else to carry it. Someone small. Someone unnoticed.

Someone like him.

The voices stopped. Not all at once, but gradually, like they'd stepped away from the desk, or closed a drawer loudly. Halden's boots thudded once, then silence.

Miles didn't move.

He waited until the air felt empty again. Until the light under the door dimmed and the lantern in the hallway hissed, settling back to its idle burn. Then he slid from the bench and crept out of the side room with far more grace than a 6-year-old child should ever be capable of.

No one stepped out to stop him, if anyone was awake at the time. They certainly didn't happen across Miles as he snuck outside.

They'd left him in a room near the back hallway, closest to the storage rooms. So Miles moved past the wall where he'd been listening, then toward the far door-half expecting a deputy to appear, but no one did. The main office was dark. The sheriff's private room, locked.

But one thing was certain now.

Diane wasn't in a cell. She wasn't being held here. Miles didn't need to be a genius to know what just happened; he'd long learned how to add one plus one to make two. The She that had been discussed was Diane; someone had come in and bought her freedom. Bought her out of the consequences.

By the time Miles reached the alley behind the station, the moon was out again, half-covered by fast-moving clouds. He pulled his coat tighter and made the walk back toward the orphanage on autopilot, eyes forward, mind racing.

She'd lied. He'd been so sure. Not just of her involvement, but of her trustworthiness, her false kindness, her calm speeches, the way she always looked a little too proud when a kid got adopted.

Miles had hoped she'd be caught.

But now he realized she was protected.

The drone footage. The bruises. The warehouse. None of it had mattered. One envelope, and it was swept away. It made sense given how little evidence they had so far, Halden was corrupt, but Miles was pretty sure a lot of his Deputies weren't. Miles had a lot of footage, but nothing that showed Reese being abused, just the result of the abuse. The state Miles found him in, locked up in a warehouse? That was word of mouth. Nothing that could be collaborated with other witnesses outside himself and Reese.

While Halden appeared to have been corrupt, Miles wasn't sure yet about the deputies. It would be impossible for one of them not to spread the word. They'd be too proud not to announce it if they found important evidence. Not if one found evidence directly of Diane's involvement. Halden could make the current evidence not include Diane, but he couldn't stop those deputies from running his mouth.

And Miles was aware, they'd be searching that office tomorrow. Halden had only taken the files marked as Orphanage property; any personal property of Diane had to stay behind. But tomorrow was a different story.

Why this was, Miles didn't know. He frankly presumed it's something stupid, like most of the Kingdom's laws, about the chain of evidence finding.

By the time he reached the orphanage, he wasn't scared. He wasn't second-guessing.

He was cold. Whatever rage he felt about the situation had simmered off into a burning cold sensation right in his heart. Miles snuck inside through the basement window, slid the grate shut behind him, and crossed to the boiler room where he kept his tools.

There had to be something he could leave. Something simple. Something that proved what Diane had done, or at least made Halden think twice about what she was hiding.

The right photo. A signature. A note. Anything.

Even if he had to fake it. It was something of a speciality of him in this life after all.
The boiler room was still warm from the day's heat, the stone walls humming faintly with pressure from the dormant pipes. Miles flicked on the lantern, its golden glow spilling over the cluttered bench of wires, old batteries, and scavenged screens. This wasn't where kids played. It was where he worked. Where he thought clearly.

He laid out the folder he'd nicked from the storage room a week ago, one of Diane's older paper files. Not Reese's. That was already on record, already part of what Halden had seen. No, this had to be new. Something... overlooked. Something that made it seem like Diane had given more than just one child to Klara.

He flipped through until he found what he needed,a dull, out-of-date form with faded ink and Diane's looping signature on the bottom corner. A file for a girl who'd left the orphanage last season, one Miles remembered vaguely, but not well enough to feel bad about using.

He pulled out a pen and began to write.

Not a letter. Not even a forged legal document. Just a single line, clean and sharp, added in a different hand across the margins:

Transferred directly to K. R. – arrangements handled off record.

He hesitated. Then underlined it. Twice.

It wasn't even clever. Not really. But it looked like something hastily scrawled, the kind of note you didn't expect anyone else to see. And if Halden wanted Diane to be guilty, this would be enough to make sure of it.

Miles folded it back into the folder, pressed it flat, and cleaned the pen with the hem of his sleeve.
Most of the children were asleep, the younger ones curled like animals in shared bunks. Miles moved like he'd trained for it, padding down the corridor with his breath held and his twin tails folded low. No creaks. No echoes. He paused at every shadow, every change in airflow.

He didn't have a key to the office.

But he didn't need one.

The door lock had a soft give to it, older than the others, misaligned at the catch. He used a plastic handle from a snapped comb and a file edge he'd ground down himself. A push. A twist. A soft click.

He was in.

The office smelled of ink, starch, and something older; like dust baked into the grain of the wood. There were three filing cabinets, two bookshelves, and a desk stacked with reports she hadn't filed yet.

Miles didn't need to search, he already knew where she kept the photos.

There was a small chest near her desk, hinged, unlocked. Inside, a stack of images. Kids, mostly. Laughing. Smiling. Staring down the barrel of a camera during orientation, awkward and stiff. All tagged with names. Notes. "Excels at arithmetic." "Timid but observant." "No known relatives."

He found the photo of Reese in seconds.

He slipped it free, peeled off the backing label, and replaced it with one he'd written himself, clumsily, in pen, just close enough to Diane's handwriting to look authentic in bad light.

A second slip of paper, folded to look official, a staged letter from Klara herself, was tucked between folders in the drawer. It was a thank you, for the product transfer, asking her to burn the letter when she was finished, they couldn't leave evidence.

He stepped back, checked the room, checked himself.

No prints. No trail. No reason to doubt.

He closed the door behind him just as softly as he'd opened it.

He'd done the right thing.

Hadn't he?

Miles started to make his way back toward the Sheriff Station, his head light but his heart pounding against his chest. His stomach felt like it was hanging down by his knees. Miles glanced up into the sky, the full moon hanging over him with promises that proclaimed a brighter future.

"She'd never hurt another kid again," he whispered.

When he finally got to the station, back to the room they put him in. Miles drifted off into sleep with few tears in his eyes.

It was just the reaction coming from the cold air of the night outside the station.

Nothing more.

The morning dragged on.

Reese dozed on and off, curled in the corner beneath a worn blanket one of the deputies had tossed their way. The broth had gone cold in both their bowls. Miles didn't touch his again.

He kept glancing toward the hallway. Toward the door of Halden's office. It hadn't opened once. Not since he'd woken.

No shouting. No arguments. No sign of arrests or alarms.

Just the tick of the wall clock above the filing cabinet, slow and regular and dull.

At one point, a deputy, a heavyset badger with a faded red sash, passed by with a bundle of documents and paused at the doorway. He looked in, eyes lingering for half a second on Miles, then gave a slight nod and continued on.

Miles watched him go.

Nothing about the movement seemed off. No tension. No hesitation.

He almost wished there had been.

Time passed like water dripping into a bucket. Steady. Shallow. Too slow to notice until it overflowed.

Then came the voices.

Soft. From the far end of the hallway. Miles caught them only because the station had gone so still.

Two deputies, speaking in low tones near the side desk. Not whispering, but not trying to be heard either.

"…Halden's orders. Said not to mention any of her belongings unless someone really important asks directly."

"What, not even the staff?"

"He said they'll find out soon enough. And when they do, it's not our job to soften the blow."

Miles stiffened.

He turned slightly, enough to glance toward the cracked door frame, enough to catch the reflection in the brass light plate across the room.

The deputies were too far to make out clearly. But the tone said enough.

Something had happened.

Something important.

He stood up, quiet, careful.

Reese stirred beside him. "Where're you going?"

"Just to stretch," Miles lied. "Back in a sec."

He slipped out of the room, hugging the wall as he made his way toward the corridor bend. The deputies had already moved on, but the ripple remained. He could feel it in the air, like static before a storm.

The sun had risen behind a veil of thin, colorless clouds. Light filtered through the streets like it was unsure of itself, neither warm nor strong, but just enough to chase the frost back into the gutters. Miles walked with his hands tucked into his sleeves, coat wrapped tight around his shoulders.

He hadn't told anyone where he was going.

No one had asked.

The streets were quieter than usual. Not silent, just subdued, like the town had collectively decided not to raise its voice today. Market carts rolled into place without the usual bickering over pitch space. A baker at the corner stall loaded loaves onto a tray without humming his usual tune. A pair of kids kicked a ball near the bridge but didn't shout when it bounced too far.

Miles didn't look at any of them. He just walked.

The further he got from the station, the more tension settled into his legs. His steps slowed. His eyes flicked toward the upper district without meaning to, scanning the rooftops as if expecting someone to be watching. No one was.

The turn into the orphanage's lane came too fast.

He hesitated.

The building was still there, still the same, a wide, flat-fronted structure with patched windows and ivy climbing up the back half like it was trying to escape. But something was wrong. Not loud-wrong. Quiet-wrong.

No sounds from the yard.

No rustle of laundry being strung. No clatter of boots on the stairs through the cracked upstairs windows.

The side gate had been left half-open.

That never happened.

He stepped through slowly, every nerve humming now. Still no voices. No staff in sight. The porch was empty.

The front door hung ajar by less than an inch.

Miles felt his throat tighten.

He didn't step forward yet. Just stood in the middle of the path, his breath coming shallower, as if he was being affected by some anti-person field, caused his heart to skip and stuttered. Miles pushed himself forward, pushed past those feelings and entered the orphanage. The building was empty.

The children weren't in sight, no screaming children could be heard, no staffers were running after wayward rascals. It was as if Miles had entered a ghost house. He was about to step up the stairs when Miles finally spotted a shadow on the floor.

He looked up... he wished he hadn't.

Hanging there, from the bannisters opposite to where Mile was standing, was Diane. Hanging by the neck.

Chapter Text

Closed it.

Opened it again.

"…They're not serving lunch today," he said.

It wasn't the answer Reese needed to hear. But it was at least an truthful answer. As if he finally felt just how out of it Miles was, Reese didn't push further. He just nodded and went quiet again.

Across the station, someone opened a file drawer too loudly. A stack of papers slipped and fluttered to the floor. The sound made both boys flinch.

It was nearly midday before Halden emerged from his office.

The sheriff looked worse than usual, his fur pressed down at odd angles, eyes sharp but the rings of sleepless etched onto his face. Halden didn't look at the boys as he passed by their door. Just walked out the front door and left it swinging behind him.

A deputy muttered something and moved to follow.

That was the first crack of the mood of the general staff at the station.

By midafternoon, it had turned into a fracture. The front desk saw a steady shuffle of boots and quiet requests. Locals asking for updates. Staff from the orphanage filtered in one by one, not bustling, not even confused, but subdued. Like they knew something and didn't know how to say it.

Miles stayed on the bench. So did Reese.

He wanted to ask questions, but his mouth wouldn't work right. Every time someone passed, every time someone opened their mouth, he braced for it. For the line. For the word. For someone to say it.

But no one did.

Until they did.

"She's gone," one voice finally said, low but plain.

Reese was asleep again,curled sideways, breathing slow,and didn't stir.

Miles didn't look up.

"...They say it was the evidence," the voice continued. "Said they found something in her things. Real damning. Enough to make her think there was no way out of this."

Another voice responded. Quieter.

"I heard she was cleared last night. Halden didn't file charges. Meant that he had nothing on her... right?"

"That's not how it works, but doesn't matter now, does it?"

That was it. Three sentences. No name. No location. Not even a confirmation of what "gone" meant.

But Miles knew.

He could feel it behind his eyes. Cold and sharp.

He stood, slowly. Pulled crossed his arms. Didn't say anything to Reese.

No one stopped him.

He walked to the hallway, turned the corner, and reached the records room. Closed the door behind him.

And sat down hard on the wooden stool beside the filing cabinet.

He didn't cry.

Not yet.

He just sat.

Still. Small.

The lie had worked.

And now it was permanent.

The records room was quiet. Too quiet for a building still half-alive.

Miles could hear the world outside it: doors creaking open, boots thudding across floorboards, someone coughing once in the hallway beyond. But inside this space, sound stuck to the corners like dust.

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. Then pushed up, slowly, and crossed to the filing cabinets against the far wall.

They hadn't been touched yet. Halden's office had claimed most of Diane's files this morning, probably after they found the body, definitely after Miles had planted that evidence, but her personal ones, the unofficial ones,were here. Tucked in mismatched folders, labeled in looping script, some tagged only with initials or simple descriptions like "schooling delays" or "sensitive to cold."

Miles needed to see through some of this, needed to remind himself of the turth. Diane didn't deserve his pity. She was in on this.

He opened a drawer. The middle one. His fingers moved carefully,not hurried, not even with intent, just idly flipping.

He stopped at the document he'd forged.

It was there. Just where he'd left it.

The ink hadn't smudged. The label was still peeled at the corner. The signature, hers, sat neat at the bottom, and above it, his addition, as sharp and final as a chisel mark:

He stared at it for a long time.

Then he pulled it free, held it up to the weak light through the window.

There was no guilt in the paper.

No shame in the ink.

Just the cold weight of cause and effect.

He folded it once, twice, then tucked it into the pocket of his coat. Not to destroy it. Not to show it. Just to have it. Because now, it belonged to him.

Every lie did. It didn't matter anymore, she punished herself. Took the coward's way out of her guilt... so why did he feel like this?From down the hall, someone called for one of the staff, something about a cleanup, something about kids being relocated, about the orphanage being shut down.

He didn't react.

He just slid the drawer shut.

And stood still.

For a moment, he wondered if this was how Diane had felt. Surrounded by records, trying to figure out where she'd come up short, and still coming up short.

But that was her failure.

Not his.

He'd succeeded.

Hadn't he?

The door to Diane's old office was still unlocked when Miles later snuck off to recheck it. They'd checked her cabinets, but with her death, Miles pondered if they'd check the entire room properly. Already, he could tell they never checked some drawers; already, he could see there were still plenty of documents left behind.

It wasn't a wonder why this happened.

The Sheriff had been paid off to let her go, someone did that paying. He was probably being pushed not to look any further into it. At least those were his conclusions.

Miles stepped inside and shut it gently behind him.

The smell hit first, old paper, dried ink, the faintest trace of her perfume buried beneath dust. It wasn't the scent of rot or blood or horror. Just... emptiness. Like a museum room closed after hours. Miles had never noticed the smell before.

He crossed to the desk.

Everything was where she'd left it. Her quills, ledgers. The little wooden stamp she used for outgoing records.

Her seat was pushed in.

He pulled it out and sat.

It was too large for him. His feet didn't reach the floor. But his hands reached the desk, and that was enough.

He placed the forged file gently in front of him.

Stared at it.

Then past it to the chair across from his own. The one she'd sat in during meetings with nobles, caseworkers, and families who never came back.

She'd never sit there again.

He imagined her voice. The clipped tone when she was annoyed. The soft one when she was tired. The quiet pride she carried whenever a placement succeeded. The pride she had for him, for how smart he was, how little he cared about being bullied, how Miles never responded with anger or violence.

He hadn't seen her die.

But now, sitting here, he understood what it meant.

The absence was louder than a scream.

A soft shuffle sounded behind him, but when he turned, no one was there.

Just the cracked door. Just the distant hum of wind through warped frames.

He looked back down at the desk. At the pen. At the page.

His hands curled into fists on the wood.

"She still gave Reese away."

He said it aloud. Not with rage. Not even with conviction. Just a whisper of fact. The thing he'd clung to. The thing that had made all this feel necessary.

But the words didn't feel like armor anymore.

They felt like an echo.

And when he looked at the chair again, he didn't see Diane.

He saw himself.

Alone.

In charge.

Just like she'd been.

He stayed in her office longer than he meant to. The light moved slowly across the desk, striping the wood with bars of amber and gray. The clock didn't tick. Nothing did.

Eventually, he stood up.

Miles couldn't put off searching any longer. He opened drawers, one after the next. Pulled open the file cabinet where she kept old notes. Half-expecting, half-hoping for something to prove him right. Something to justify it.

A scribbled payment log. A second signature. Anything.

He found none of that.

Instead, he found a sealed envelope.

It wasn't labeled.

Just tucked in the corner of her personal ledger, the one no one was allowed to read. The one she kept locked,except now, the key still sat on the hook under the desk.

He opened it.

Inside was a letter. Handwritten, quick, messy. The loops and slants weren't hers.

It was from Klara, if the signature was to be believed.

Not the note he'd forged. The real one.

He read it once. Then again. Then a third time.

Klara had sent this weeks ago.

It wasn't a request, it was a threat. Carefully worded, friendly on the surface, but cold underneath. A demand for expedited approval. A promise of donation if things moved quickly. A warning of political connections if they didn't.

"You've always been such a compassionate soul, Diane. I know you wouldn't want to delay a child's better future over red tape. Not when I've already done so much for your little home."

Miles stood frozen.

His eyes scanned the bottom of the note,there, in ink darker than the rest, was Diane's handwriting.

"I don't like this. But if I delay, this placement will fall through, I couldn't live with it if this was a good family. I have no proof of anything yet. I'll go myself. I'll check the house in person. I'll bring Reese back if anything feels wrong."

A date. A time.

The night beforeMiles forged the file.

The same day Miles had seen Reese pushed into that warehouse.

He felt something in his chest collapse inward. Not a break. Not a snap.

A sinkhole.

No noise escaped his mouth. No scream. Just the slow sound of paper crumpling in his palm as his body went cold and stiff and small.

She was going to check.

She was going to fix it.

She didn't sell Reese.

She didn't sell any of them.

She was trying to protect them, and he'd buried her before she had the chance to find a ladder.

The office around him felt larger now. Harsher. The light from the window didn't feel warm.

Miles stood there, still holding the letter.

He couldn't move.

Not yet.

Because now, he didn't know where he stood.

He wasn't some hero, he wasn't exactly living up to 'Tails' super genius status.

Miles was just… a boy.

Who had done something terrible.

And nothing could take it back.

Chapter Text

It hadn't been long after Diane was found dead that Reese and Miles were sent back to the orphanage. It was as Miles expected since overhearing the conversation between the Sheriff and that mysterious voice, even if the reason was totally different than he'd expected.

With Diane gone, so was the crime. Reese and Miles were no longer under threat from a woman trying to silence them. Though Halden claimed that the matter was still being investigated, Miles wasn't sure if he believed him.

Many mornings, the children of the orphanage were woken up by an adult, usually one of the caretakers; when Diane was alive, it had regularly been her. Today, Miles woke to the sound of a thousand footsteps instead.

The dorm wing was half-lit by morning sun filtering through the grimy windows, turning the dust in the air into soft static. The beds across from him were already empty, blankets shoved back, pillows left crumpled. One of the smaller kids had dropped a shoe near the footlocker and left it behind.

No one had come to get him. It wasn't the most unusual thing, but it felt notable.

He pulled on his shoes in silence, wincing as the worn sole of one scraped against the stone floor. As Miles did that, he couldn't help but overhear the sound of someone crying down the hall. It was thin hiccupping sobs. Miles thought it would best not to check

Oddly, the usual rustle of the morning, the low murmur of the kitchen crew, the rattle of trays, the hiss of the tea kettle, none of it was there. Just the occasional thump of a box being moved, and voices speaking too quietly to make out.

Miles walked into the hallway.

The walls felt taller than they had yesterday. The light is weaker. There was a coil of rope on the floor near the stairwell, probably used for tying boxes shut. But it looked out of place like someone had dropped it mid-job and no one had bothered to pick it up.

He passed two staff members standing near the arch to the kitchen. They didn't stop him. Didn't look at him. They were speaking in hushed tones about something being "ahead of schedule" and "someone coming by midday." The words didn't mean much to Miles; he lacked too much context.

And he didn't dare to find it out. Inside the kitchen, the pantry door was open, the shelves bare. Only a few sad vegetables sat in a crate on the counter, next to a loaf of bread someone had half-sliced before leaving the knife behind. A bowl of cold oats had been abandoned on one of the tables.

If the fact that a person died in the building not even a day or two ago didn't cause Miles to feel uncomfortable with his surroundings, this did. Even when Diane had been sick, things ran, even if it was corrupt and abusive at times.

But now there was no breakfast.

Just the shape of a morning going through the motions of being interrupted.

Miles sat down in one of the corner chairs. There were a few people, a single staffer or a trio of children, coming now, but no one went to make breakfast, no one moved to ask about it. Miles wondered if he missed something during the time he spent in the Sheriff's Station.

From the window, he could see the old garden wall. A group of children stood beyond it, some kicking a rock, others sitting with their backs turned to everything. One was just staring up at the clouds.

By late morning, the front rooms were cluttered with crates.

Not organized ones, just boxes half-filled with blankets, stuffed in the way you expect a child uninterested in folding would do, but ones with old toys, and random paperwork. Some had names scrawled on them in charcoal, and others were marked with numbers, as they belonged to furniture and not children.

One of the older girls, barely twelve, was trying to gather her things into a satchel that clearly belonged to someone else. A caretaker passed her in the hallway and didn't even look. She moved like someone who'd already quit in her head but had to finish out the day.

Down the hall, two boys argued over which of them got to keep a wooden sword someone had carved years ago. They weren't shouting. Just standing there, faces red, each holding one end.

Neither of them won. One of the staff just walked by and took it from both of them. Said nothing. Didn't stop walking.

From upstairs, more thumps. Furniture being moved. Beds stripped bare. The sound of metal against wood. Someone had pried open the storage trunk by the top landing.

No one explained anything to the kids.

They didn't have to, Miles was just late to the party. He stood from his seat and stalked through the halls with an eye that struggled to grasp what was happening in real detail. A mind that refused to believe it.

It was in the way the little ones clung to each other without words. The way even the troublemakers kept quiet. The way some of the younger girls kept peeking at the front door, hoping someone would come through it.

Someone who never did.

Miles kept to the edge of it all, He just watched it unravel.

He watched the orphanage, his home, for better or worse, become less itself with every hour. The rhythm was gone. The structure. The rules. The people who made it what it was, good and bad.

Even Reese, who normally talked through everything, had gone quiet since that morning. He sat by the garden door with his knees to his chest, watching the road.

Waiting for something.

Maybe nothing.

Maybe just trying to feel like he had a place to wait for at all.

There wasn't Lunch.

No usual clang of trays and bowls from the kitchen, and no one shouted roll call out. Not even a single pot set out in the common room, usually a lukewarm stew, mostly liquid, carried in by a staff member who wouldn't say anything. A basic lunch.

They didn't even get that.

One of the smaller girls asked if Diane was coming back.

No one answered.

A boy near the back muttered, "She's dead, stupid."

The girl didn't cry.

She whaled.

Miles stood in the doorway and watched. It was obvious to him that Diane had been nice to more than just him, she'd been caring and kind to many of the other orphans. Why did he think he was special again? Because he'd been reborn as 'Tails'? No, Diane hadn't been trying to use him, she had just been that kind.

It ate away at his chest, like a rope being tied far too tight over and over.

This was what was left, a handful of children waffling about, arguing and crying in a cold empty manor.

Miles tried not to think of Diane in her office, staring across the desk at no one. He tried not to imagine her reading that letter. Deciding. Failing. Falling.

But the silence made it hard to block out.

Even the staff weren't pretending anymore. They kept to the corners, whispering to each other, passing around a clipboard that clearly wasn't about the kids. Miles caught part of a phrase, final inventory, and felt it like a splinter in his jaw.

Reese sat near the window with his bowl untouched. He was watching the road again.

Same place. Same posture.

People began leaving.

Not in a line. Not with ceremony. Just quietly, in pairs or threes. A few bags. A hand on a shoulder. A glance back at the halls they grew up in, then nothing. Some were escorted out by people Miles had never seen before, others by handlers from other towns that Miles only saw about four times in his life, but he recognised them as people that worked in other orphanages. Most kids just went with whoever called their name.

No one explained what would happen to the rest, what was going to happen to people that weren't. No one offered promises.

One older teen, a catgirl named Elsie, hugged two of the younger kids and whispered something about letters. She didn't look at Miles as she passed. Didn't say goodbye. Didn't blame him either.

It wasn't like they talked, they weren't friends. The children weren't even aware that it was all Miles's fault this was happening. They hadn't realized that his half-arsed investigations, his preformed conclusions had wrecked the closest place to a home that any of them had ever had.

That was almost worse.

The staff gave up pretending around noon. One of them just walked out and didn't come back. Another handed the last ledger to a deputy and left without looking at the kids at all. Their absence felt like holes punched into the walls.

The building creaked more with each footstep. Not because it was falling apart, but because it was emptying too fast.

By mid-afternoon, there were only a few children left. Miles hadn't moved from the window where he watched Reese. He saw how the boy's hands gripped the edge of the bench. How his eyes didn't blink often enough.

Something was going to happen.

The deputy who'd been hovering earlier returned, not the heavyset one, but a thinner dog with quiet footsteps and tired eyes. He approached Reese, knelt, and whispered something. Reese nodded. Slowly. Then looked over at Miles.

Not with sadness. Not with guilt. Reese was grateful, it made Miles feel sick to his stomach.

Then he got up, took the deputy's hand, and left.

Miles didn't follow.

He stayed in the hallway.

He stayed while more drawers were emptied, cabinets were wheeled out, and boots scuffed the floors that used to echo with laughter. And when it was quiet again, truly quiet, he turned and realized he was the only one still standing there.

Everyone else was gone.

The orphanage had finally emptied itself.

And he was still here.

The orphanage no longer sounded like a place for children.

No laughter. No thudding footsteps. No high-pitched whining from the younger ones arguing over toys or chores or who was stealing whose blanket. No clatter of dishes from the kitchen. No scolding voices. No voices at all.

It wasn't even quiet anymore.

It was empty.

It was final.

The last of the staff had packed up just before dusk. A hawk woman named Carla, who once ran the schedules and kept the older boys from throwing fists in the washroom. She didn't say a word to Miles. Just folded her ledger, clipped her bag shut, and left a half-marked stack of supply sheets behind on the corner of the desk. She didn't look at the kids still in the room. She didn't look at the pictures on the walls. She didn't lock the door.

She didn't even shut it properly.

The rest had vanished hours before her. Some muttering about new posts at other homes down the road, some grumbling about late pay. None stayed long enough to offer anything close to comfort.

No explanations.

No goodbyes.

Just space where people used to be.

The air had changed.

It no longer felt like waiting.

It felt like an aftermath.

Miles stood in the main room with his hands in his pockets, watching dust gather in the cracks between the floorboards. There was no dinner. No cleanup. There were no lights on save for the pink-orange streaks bleeding in through the high windows.

The couches were still here. The bulletin board with the meal schedule still had paper pinned to it, curling at the corners. The games' cupboard hadn't even been locked. But these weren't signs of safety anymore. They were artifacts. Like someone had picked up and run, and the world forgot to erase the outlines of their lives.

He sat.

Not because Miles was tired, he couldn't feel tired anymore, but because standing felt pointless. The cushions were threadbare under his butt. The fabric smelled faintly of starch and distant firewood.

There were no footsteps overhead. No ticking clocks. Even the mice seemed to have left.

Miles almost expected Halden to come back, but Halden didn't come back. It created a very eerie vibe in the building. No one was left to even leave the building.

For a moment, Miles still thought Diane walk in at any moment, holding that clipboard and barking at people to brush their fur or clear the plates.

Miles didn't believe that. But he thought about it, imagined it happening. It was a bittersweet thought for Miles.

He wrapped his arms around himself and leaned forward, elbows on knees, back curved over nothing. The weight in his chest hadn't lightened. It had settled.

Then, just as the last rays of daylight began to fade from the floorboards, he heard something that didn't belong.

A sound.

Not a voice. Not a cry. Just… motion.

A click.

Not from upstairs. Not from the kitchen.

From the front door.

A latch. Turning slowly. Not forced open, like someone trying to break in.  But instead, it opened with the calm pace of someone that knew they were walking in when that latch went down. There was the creak of hinges, gentle, deliberate. Like the house itself

was bowing to its new tenant.

Footsteps.

Not stomping. Not tentative.

Just measured.

Poised.

Miles straightened, barely breathing.

And then she was there.

Klara the Hare.

Her silhouette filled the front entry like it had always belonged there. Her

coat was immaculate, not a single speck of travel dust on the hem. Her boots made no sound on the worn wood floor. Her golden dress, less glittering in this light, more muted like molten glass cooling, clung perfectly to her frame, untouched by the chill that had crept through the cracks in the walls.

Her ears stood tall. Her expression is unreadable. Her hands, clasped lightly in front of her, framed by gloves that weren't meant for work. They were meant for presence. For theatre.

She stepped further in, her eyes gliding over the room. Not searching, surveying. Like someone taking inventory. Like someone choosing which parts to keep and which to discard.

Miles didn't speak.

Couldn't.

She looked at him last.

And then she smiled.

"I heard this place had vacancies," Klara said. "But I never expected this much space."

As if she hadn't been part of the reason it was empty.

As if she hadn't left the hook for him to hang Diane from.

As if none of it touched her.

The dust didn't dare rise in her presence. The cold in the room folded itself politely out of her path.

Miles stared at her, throat dry, lips slightly parted.

This was the first time Miles felt true hatred.

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

Miles crouched beneath a tilted trash bin behind the bakery. The metal was damp with dew and streaked with soot from the chimney above. He'd scouted the place twice before, once during early morning when the baker dumped the ash, and again when the delivery boy forgot to latch the back gate. It was then that Miles saw it: loaves left on a cooling rack, within arm's reach of a narrow back window.

Tonight, that window was cracked open just a thumb's width. Just enough for a seven-year-old fox child to work with.

His breath fogged in the cold. He didn't dare shiver. Any sudden motion might knock something loose or startle some stray animals, and in a small town like Miles had found himself in, a dog would bark first, and people would ask questions later. He didn't need questions right now, so he stayed still. He'd become very good at being still.

Two weeks out on his own had burned the fat from his cheeks, blunted the shine from his eyes, and thickened the soles of his feet as it wore down the soles of his shoes. He hadn't spoken out loud in a week. Food came whenever and wherever Miles could get his hands on it. He'd scavenge from bins, finding half-rotten food usually, but sometimes there was a raw gem, metaphorically speaking.

Miles had been in this town long enough that he knew which bins would be emptied first by the garbage men and which would be ravaged by rats before then. He had a small window of time to move in, and Miles would make the most of it.

It was a shame that he didn't have access to his tools. They'd been left behind at the former orphanage, and he couldn't risk returning to the place. Not now, maybe not ever. His attempts to make some out of junk or to raid a hardware store had caused too big of an alarm for him to even chance taking anything. Miles attempted to go to the junkyard and make a transmitter, one that would've allowed him to access the wires this world still used for their internet, but the thing didn't last more than half a day; it shorted out as soon as the rain came. All that effort, the days pouring over junk so dirty that a scratch was likely to kill him from infection, gone in one bad downpour.

But right now, none of that mattered. Miles cast it all from his mind; the bubbling rage growing in his chest would only get in the way. He had one job: get some bread. His brain repeated this as a mantra, one to wave off the hunger otherwise trying to tear him down.

The plan was simple. Wait till the nearby clock tower chimes. It always struck twice. That would mask the sounds of his movements. Allowing Miles to fly over the back fence, then drop as harshly as he wanted onto the ground. Then he'd slip through the window feet first, grab a loaf and smash open the back door, and fly off before anyone could investigate the alarm.

Miles' eyes narrowed as he waited, as his heart raced faster with the passing of time.

When the chimes began, he moved.

The first chime echoed through the night air, coming in loud thanks to how close the bakery was to the town center. Miles should've moved a second earlier.

But that mistake alone wouldn't make him turn around.

His tails blurred into motion, shifting back and forth faster than they would've two months prior. Since escaping Klara, Miles had become stronger, tougher, it was true, but the actual fact was more about his confidence. Before recently, Miles was just too scared of falling from high places to give his all to flight. Hungry changed that.

Miles was just fast enough to be over the fence by the time the first chime finished its tone. Already wasted enough time in the air, Miles let himself drop hard against the rough concrete ground with a loud thud that was only just timed right to be masked by the clock tower's second chime.

He couldn't pause to recover, so with a sore ankle, he slid through the gap of the window frame. It was tight, narrow, but not impassable for someone who's been on the child homeless diet. He resisted the urge to turn sideways to gain a better footing as he got in. His shoulder scraped on the latch when Miles' two feet did touch the floor inside. The scrape nearly caused a hiss to escape his mouth, but Miles was quick to bite his lip softly to hold the cry out.

Miles took the moment, took the moment to let the scents of the bakery fill his nostrils. It was like a dream: the warm flour, the faint cinnamon, and the roasted seeds. The roasted seeds themselves almost made him dizzy from hunger, and Miles didn't particularly like seeded food. Miles could almost forget why he was there, so tempted to bask in the ambiance of the place.

But he forced himself to focus.

Loaves lined the far table, moved further from the window than when he'd last peered through the window. His stomach growled, and he pressed his right hand to it as if warning the rebelling organ not to act out.

Don't you dare mess this up for me

Miles only wanted one loaf; it wasn't asking for much. He didn't ask the universe for a lot; this one loaf was all he wanted at this moment.

But when he reached a donut, a groan echoed from upstairs, causing him to freeze in fright. There was a creak of a bed frame as someone shifted as they uttering a curse loud enough to be heard. Miles couldn't breathe till the silence returned and stayed for longer than three seconds.

He quickly moved, grabbing the nearest loaf, crushed with oats, and hugged it to his furry chest, uncaring of the fox hair there. The warmth alone was like a blessing on his otherwise cold fingers. He backed away from the table, retracing his steps to the window as his tails waggled in happiness.

Another mistake, the second of the night.

His tails were far too strong to be used liberally. Even what Miles would consider a mild effort would cause them to swing with the force of an adult's fist. His tails brushed across a rack of measuring spoons hanging on the counter.

They jingled first, then clattered against the floor as they were knocked off the rack.

A sudden rush of movement came from upstairs; footsteps weren't so much steps as they were stomps. Miles didn't wait as he spun his tails around to smash through the back door with enough force that the hinges cracked apart and the door itself slammed against the fence. He flung himself into the air and then started moving his tails to fly.

A shout followed after him, the word 'thief' running out like one of the coolest curses known in the world. To the baker, it might've been.

Miles landed on a rooftop some ways away, before sprinting along it, to the other rooftops attached to it. The cold bit through his fur as he ran barefoot over the roofs, cradling the stolen bread like it was the childhood toy he'd never gotten attached to in this life. He didn't stop, he didn't even when good hiding places were before him, sheds, an overturned barrel. After twenty minutes of running, he found his pathway to his current hideaway. He leaped to the ground, rolling through a broken fence to help bleed off some momentum.

From there, Miles kept to the shadows, his breathing coming in ragged clouds thanks to the cold weather.

Eventually, the shouts from the baker stopped. It was a surprise from Miles that the old man could keep up with him so well. Though it might've been just the baker having a powerful voice rather than being able to follow him at all. Miles never turned around to see if he had been followed after all.

Still, Miles didn't let himself believe it was safe till he'd doubled back twice through that broken fence, and then climbed into a storm drain he knew emptied near a half-burnt barn. It was wet and smelled of mildew, but it was better than the one time he tried to use the sewers.

Those were smaller and smelled much worse. The worst thing was that the two of them had rats, but at least Miles was only afraid of disease from those things. Otherwise, the rats left him alone after a swipe or two of his tails.

Eventually, Miles sat in the dark, the bread still offering warmth to his hands. He broke a piece off and shoved it into his mouth. Miles barely chewed it, and mostly swallowed. Over and over, till there was only half a loaf.

The edge of hunger didn't pass, but Miles' little experience told him it wouldn't be a good idea to eat it all now. He'd never know when his next meal would be, and he could go a day or three more without the bread going stale.

As his adrenaline wore down, Miles found that his fingers were hurt. One of his knuckles had a split, probably from a splinter coming from the door he'd broken. His left foot had a dark bruise near the top of his leftmost toe.

Miles considered his next move carefully. He needed a new set of tools, at least the basics. Screwdrivers, hammers, wrenches. Sure, he'd love and prefer electronic tools as well, much like what he'd lost. But those would be far too susceptible to the wet environments he'd found himself living in so far.

His current tinkering was thought exercises more than anything else. Sketches were written into the dirt or half-used pens on the back of receipts people had thrown into the trash. He'd tried to make a coil a while back, using scrap fencing, but the material corroded fast under the heat of electricity and snapped within a day of being created.

He didn't even have time to test if they properly carried a charge using an old broken phone he'd managed to find.

His general state of hunger didn't really help with his tinkerer mindset; it was just too hard to focus on so little food. Miles was straining at the bit to make more, to do something more than fail at engineering while being homeless.

He was supposed to be capable of making jet engines. JET ENGINES. But here Miles was, and he couldn't even construct a crank-powered flashlight without the rain breaking it.

His ears folded down to his forehead, and he stared at the half-loaf in his lap with a musty gaze. Part of him wanted to finish it all right now, just to feel full for once, just to be at his best. But he resisted the urge, surviving would require not giving into short term desires like that.

Tears filled his eyes as the hunger ate at him. Miles didn't want to cry; he was too old to cry over a damn half-loaf of bread. But the tears came regardless.

His throat stayed tight, though. Miles refused to whimper no matter what. He rested his head against the damp stone wall and waited for his pulse to come down.

After that, Miles moved to finish his journey. He slipped through the back entrance of an abandoned textile warehouse on the edge of town, one of the several half-collapsed buildings he'd used as temporary shelter over the past two weeks. This one, at least, didn't leak too badly. There were dry spots in the building regardless.

With trembling hands, he put the rest of the bread inside a broken toolbox he'd washed out before jamming into a beam joint. It wasn't airtight, but it would keep out rats... In theory.

Miles found his makeshift bed where he'd left it. A dry spot in the building. It was less a bed and more old coats, some sheets, and some sort of fluff he'd found in the trash, fashioned together to be soft enough to be slept on. It didn't help during the cold months of the year, but Miles planned on moving further south before that happened.

He settled in, ignoring the slight stomach cramps as he let his head imprint onto his bed.

Outside, the town would be quiet again. The area he lived in didn't get patrols from the local cops, not unless there was especially loud trouble going on.

As he drifted to sleep, Miles mentally charted the town's rhythms. When the trash got tossed out, which Windows were commonly left open, who had guard dogs. How long their chains were. None of it was left unthought of.

Miles knew he was adapting to the homeless life quickly, but that was a dull mercy to his mood. It wasn't the same as thriving, and his dreams of tinkering out amazing tools to rival Eggman were fading. He needed practical solutions to his problems.

Given how notable he was in stealing the loaf of bread, Miles figured it was about time to leave this town. There was always another town, another place to store his stuff. He'd exhausted what little he could do with this town already, now he needed to store food for the journey south.

To Miles' sudden shock, a siren rang out, causing him to jolt awake. He didn't move too fast in case someone was able to spot him through the windows.

A man walked along the building's perimeter, and they didn't bother crossing the fence. They were searching for something, or someone, Miles was sure of this.

Eventually, they left, and Miles' thoughts were consumed by rage.

Rather than the fear he'd felt just moments earlier.

Klara

He clenched his teeth hard enough that something cracked in his mouth. Miles still remembered that dismissive look, the way she'd acted like he was so small. The way she acted like nothing he'd done mattered. He'd gotten Diane killed, but Miles saved Reese. He wouldn't ever regret that.

But still... Klara was why he was stuck homeless; she was behind everything bad that ever happened. Klara was the reason Diane was dead; she manipulated Diane's good heart, she manipulated the law. She stole his home.

His hand tightened into a fist, the pressure enough that his fingernails cut into the palm of his hand.

Miles found he couldn't bring himself to care who was behind Klara. Whoever it was, whatever their grand plan of trafficking children was for, whether money or a perverse pleasure in hurting others. Miles would find out. He'd take every scrap of knowledge he had. Miles wouldn't stop at that; he'd gain more, he'd use it all like a knife to cut this rot out of society.

He'd burn it all down.

He knew there had to be a way to strike back at them, something to ruin their entire organisation in one swoop.

They thought he was a loud kid; they thought he'd hide forever, scared and broken. Alone.

Good.

He'd let them think that.

Miles went back to his bed, drawing lines in his mind, sketching out what he knew about Klara. Her voice, her dress style. That other rabbit that she met, the one she bowed her head to. Miles knew she wasn't on top of that organisation just from that interaction. It was obvious Klara was trusted enough to run an operation like that, but that meant she had a weakness.

Failure.

If Miles stopped just enough of her business, they'd stop giving her work.

He'd start there.

"I'm coming for you," he muttered to the shadows.

Chapter Text

His seventh birthday had passed without the fanfare he was used to. Miles found himself even more motivated to survive though. Memories of what he had lost, what his reckless distrust and actions had caused only pushed him to keep going on the metaphorical path before him.

It helped that city life was far easier to live in than the remote towns. Like most places, it lacked a name, but the current city had such notable landmarks, like three clock towers that were in different rates of decay, that he had no trouble walking around it without getting lost.

And the larger population made it much easier to scavenge for food as he did now.

The alley behind the tavern stank of sour ale and overcooked meat. Miles crouched beside the waste barrel, breath held as he sifted through the pile with his gloved hands. He paused, sniffed at a discarded pastry crust. Mold. Not enough to kill him. He pocketed it, it would be easier to cut the molded parts off and still have an edible meal..

A soft rattle made Miles duck lower, just as a random girl kicking a bucket by the back door. Lucky for him, she didn't look his way. Few ever did. People just didn't case an area when they first entered it, not unless they were trained for it. The cops were people Miles needed to watch out for in that regard; random girls weren't.

Miles crept to the next pile. A broken crate lay beside it, splinters wet from yesterday's rain. Miles spotted a tin can, dented and half-full of congealed stew, he couldn't help but wonder what was up with the sheer waste this society left behind... well that and mentally shouting Jackpot. He twisted the lid off carefully.

The edge nicked his thumb, and blood beaded through the wool, cutting through the white glove.

He sucked it clean without wincing.

Miles knew that some would consider that bad, but he could tell that this can had only been out for a short hour or more. He knew this because he'd gotten here much earlier, before sunrise, and it hadn't been there then.

By the time he returned to the edge of the alley, his bag bulged with scraps. Nothing great. Nothing solid. But enough to fill the corners of his stomach and keep the hunger from stabbing too deep as it had when Miles was living in small towns.

The sky above the buildings was a flat gray. No birds. They weren't common in this city, not even the pest birds that you could expect at times like crows or pigeons.. His breath misted as Miles walked, faster once the ache in his feet faded into numbness again. The left sole of his boot had separated entirely. He'd tied it back on with a cloth string. It flapped with each step.

By the time he reached his new dwelling, his arms were sore and the cold had crept past his scarf.

Miles had started to live in the second of three clocktowers the city had.

It wasn't a working clock tower anymore. There were no gears to move the thing, no bell to ring at noon or six o'clock. It still had power though, something that Miles would've found suspicious but it was answered when nightfall happened.

At night the building was actually part of the city's light infrastructure. Leaving it without power would've been a disaster for the city, leaving a full quarter of a city block without a major light source. Miles thought it was bad design, but even with his intellect Miles never considered himself an expert of city planning.

He floated high into the air, careful to stay in the shadow of the build so most people wouldn't see him. Then Miles climbed through a side window the same way he always did: one foot on the crooked drainpipe, the other on a jutting brick. His tails swayed behind him for balance, twitching from the cold.

Inside, it was dark and smelled like mildew and burnt wax.

He dropped his finds beside the crates that made up his current bed. The pastry crust went under his coat. The stew would wait until later. The tin might be useful once cleaned, those sort of things were good to heat food with.

Miles took time to sit in the corner of the loft, it was directly below where the clock mechanisms were once stored. Then wrapped himself tight in a musty quilt he'd found by the riverside. His hands trembled, not from fear, just from being too small in too big a world, without the fuel to fight back.

Outside, the city moved on.

Inside, Miles listened to his stomach growl and ignored it.

He needed better. Shelter was a start. But shelter was only a box if you didn't have a way out.

Tomorrow, he'd scavenge again.

Tomorrow, he'd look for copper wire. Nails. Especially Miles wanted broken electronic toys, they were the best source of microchips he could find in his current living state. With those, he'd rebuild his drones

But not tonight, tonight he just breathed.

And stayed quiet.

He was lucky that the section of Clocktower he'd taken to living in was hard to reach. Miles was basically the only homeless person in the city who could reach here. The normal entrances were boarded up, providing Miles with a security blanket in case anyone like Klara found him living here.

Anything that could burst those boards down would cause more than enough noise to wake up from sleep. The floor he was living on too would mean even then he'd have plenty of time to escape too, perhaps even set a few of the dangerous traps Miles had roaming in his noggin.

The next day, Miles went around to the spots he'd found that had useful trash..

The heap behind the old printer's shop? Useless, mostly paper, soaked through and sagging. The one near the abandoned tram yard? Better. Old wires. Bent nails. Metal panels with just enough give to pry. You had to go early, though, before the teenagers showed up to smoke and smash bottles for fun.

They didn't take anything, but there was a danger to go near. Too slow to catch Miles, but were fully willing to try regardless.

He crouched beside a pile now, sleeves rolled to his elbows, fingers blackened with soot. It hadn't been a good haul. He had two stripped bolts, half a rusted hinge, and something that might've been a heating coil, if he could get it straight again. But it was something. And right now, something beat the nothing that had been most of the past week.

His breath came in soft puffs as he pried a nail from a broken plank using the edge of a spoon he'd sharpened on a brick days ago. The nail slipped free with a dry squeal. He dropped it in his pouch, next to the others. Nine so far.

Good enough to try and fashion a fastener for that flap in the clock tower's roof, he didn't need people to note that it was broken from the ground and someone to be called in to repair it before it affected the building's electrical systems.

A clatter down the alley made him freeze.

Just a rat.

He kept moving.

Every sound was louder now. Miles had grown used to silence in the worst way, not because the city was quiet, but because no one spoke to him. Or rather he didn't stay in places that people bothered talking to him, the closest he got were those teenagers. But those usually were just yelling stuff at him.

That and the general paranoia Miles understood he had, justifiably, made him all too aware of even the slightest noise.

Sometimes, someone would stare at him, sometimes he'd stand in just the wrong way so that people would notice his tails. Usually, he had them covered by a cloth, or hidden away pretending to be a belt. The latter was something Miles hated; he needed to swap out which tail was pretending to be a belt as it grew,swore over time very quickly. A saiyan Miles wasn't.

So sometimes people could notice he had two tails, then they'd have a flick of their eyes to the twin tails behind him and then glancing away. As if staring too long might turn them strange too.

At one point, he'd managed to build a tiny crank-light, just a tin box and a wire filament powered by a spring. He'd even drawn diagrams for a second version. But this was more than good enough, unlike his last attempts, this one managed to last in light rain. Not that Miles was in a rush to test it in heavy rain. And he was sure the lightbulb itself would burn out within the week.

But Miles planned to keep it regardless of if he made a better design. Because he'd made it.

Made it with no support, not Diane's, not the charity of strangers. He, Miles the Fox, made a gadget in the depths of poverty. It was a good sign, Miles would look at this crank-light and think I am smart, I can do more.

Back in the clock tower, he dumped his findings out and arranged them by size. He worked on the floor, a length of burlap wrapped around his knees. One of the bent bolts almost looked like it could be turned into a clamp. If he straightened it, welded it.

But there was no welding torch. No soldering kit. No proper wire cutters.

What he did have was an electric stove and a fire iron, these were the closest things he had to welding tools. A fair way down from the welding set he'd been given for one of his birthdays back at the orphanage.

By midafternoon, his fingers were red with cold and scraped raw from friction. He'd gotten the coil unwound, the rust knocked loose, and wrapped a stripped nail into a crude shape that resembled… something. Not useful yet. But promising.

He would've gone out once more, this time for food to complement the strew and moldy crust. But it rained, it rained for hours.

Miles lacked the clothing to really venture out there without risk of serious illness. Which were most of them when you were homeless.

The rain had stopped by sundown, but the streets still glistened like oil-slick paper. It was good enough for Miles, so he descended from the clock tower. Then journeyed through the city till he was mid-center. He pressed his back to a wall under a shallow eave, hood tugged low, watching the bakery door across the lane. The same one he'd stolen from two nights ago.

He wasn't planning to do it again.

He told himself that twice.

But he'd seen the old man running the joint toss a burnt loaf into the bin out back, and Miles's stomach had made the decision for him. His thoughts had drifted to Reese, for no reason at all, just a flash of him with a spoon in his mouth, laughing at something Miles hadn't thought was funny. That memory had come uninvited. And stayed.

Miles pushed it down.

The plan had been simple. Dash across and grab the loaf from the bin, even if the old man saw him do it. It wasn't likely he'd complain about his trash getting taken. Miles didn't fear the old baker, he feared Klara's people grabbing him if he was out in the open too much.

But his simple plan had a flaw, someone had beaten him to it.

A teenager. Bigger than Miles, dressed in a coat with the sleeves cut off and a busted pipe in one hand. already lifted the lid of the bin, the loaf was in his hand already.

"Too slow, fuzzball," the teen said, flashing a crooked grin when he noticed Miles's shadow. Miles didn't know how the teen knew he'd been going for the food, but that was beside the point that annoyed him. "Try again tomorrow."

Miles stood frozen in the alley, tails twitching, shoes half in mud. His fingers curled tight around the brick he hadn't realized he'd picked up.

He could take the teen. Miles knew he was faster, far faster, than the teen could ever be. Miles could nail him with this brick, he could trip him with one tail, while he snatched the bread with the other, and be gone before the guy even stood up.

He'd done worse to better people.

But he didn't.

He let the moment pass.

The kid shoved the loaf into his coat and wandered off, whistling.

Miles stared after him until the whistling faded into the clink of wet cobbles. Then he slumped to the ground, brick slipping from his fingers. He felt stupid. Not for letting the food go. For being there at all. For needing it.

Miles' head dropped against the wall.

This wasn't supposed to be the price of doing the right thing.

In the quiet, he punched the brick beside him. Once. Twice. Again.

The second time split the skin on his knuckles. The third split the brick in half.

Miles didn't feel better.

He didn't feel much at all.

When the tears came, they didn't sting. They just ran. Silent. Warm against the cold.
The rain came back without warning.

One moment it was drizzling, cold and lazy. The next it was a wall, sheets of silver hammering Miles clenched his jaw until his teeth ached. He thought of Klara, pristine and poised, walking without fear down streets like this. Never slipping. Never scrambling for garbage. He thought of her stupid smile. Her stupid dress..

He thought of Reese. Of how warm he'd looked curled up under Halden's coat that last day.

He thought of Diane.

His fists trembled.

"It's not fair," he muttered aloud. His voice sounded strange. Unused. Childish.

He swallowed.

Then softer: "I'll make it fair."

The rain poured harder. But he didn't move.

He just sat there with the shape of a promise forming behind his eyes, no blueprint, no schematic. Just heat.

And the beginning of something sharp.

He flew up to his home base and, through the side window, dropped the soaked bag onto a tarp-covered crate. Miles walked over to a corner and shook his coat to free himself from the majority of the rain water, before drawing himself off with some ratty towels he'd managed to collect during his time in the city. Cold air bit at the wet patches on his shirt, but he ignored it. There were more important things than comfort.

Knowing that having wet towels around would lead to mold, and that he himself wasn't fully dry, Miles went to start a fire. He used broken chair legs and a shredded broom handle as kindling and an electrical spark generated from a battery and copper wire with a reverse current meeting a positive one. The fire sputtered to life, hungry and dim, but alive.

He fed it slowly. Patiently. Just enough to keep the coals going while he laid out the towels over it using a metal bar that sat on a pair of legs he fashioned from wood, keeping the towels just far enough away that they didn't catch on fire.

He sat back and stared at the fire. Let the heat touch his fingers. Let it reflect in his eyes. It didn't chase away the cold, not really, but it gave him something to look at. Something that moved. Something that didn't look away.

The shadows on the walls flickered. Miles didn't move.

The sound of rain muffled the rest of the world. But the shape of what came next had already begun to form behind his eyes.

Not just revenge. Not just anger.

A plan.

Something small, for now. But it would grow.

Like fire.

Chapter Text

Miles lay flat against the shingled roof, his twin tails curled low to reduce their silhouette. The sky had only just begun to shift from steel to pale amber, the sun still lurking behind the eastern skyline. The city was already stirring, wagons creaking over uneven bricks, a dog barking somewhere two streets over, but up here, the world felt slower. Removed.

He lifted his opera glasses, a battered pair he'd salvaged from a scrap stall and modified with a bit of twine, copper wire, and sheer will. The lens was cloudy in one eye, but the other still focused well enough. He adjusted the dial with care, zeroing in on the orphanage below.

The building was squat and old, three stories of weather-worn brick, fronted by an iron gate and trimmed with carved stonework that had seen better decades. A child's drawing hung in one of the second-story windows. The front steps were cracked. But the gate opened on time. Every morning.

Miles watched the woman who unlocked it. Same as yesterday. A heavyset doe with dyed white hair and a limp in her right leg. She arrived at 6:45 sharp, rain or shine, and wore the same faded shawl no matter the season. He flipped over the scrap of flyer resting on the chimney beside him and scribbled the time down with a pencil stub sharpened too many times to be comfortable. Below the note, he added: Right-leg drag, keys on left hip, soft-voiced. Don't yell.

He flipped through the rest of his notes, thumbing pages crammed with observations. The short staffer with the mole only smiles at Klara. The thin one with the green coat always leaves ten minutes after Klara arrives, doesn't return. Klara never stays longer than twenty minutes. Never touches the kids. Always wears gloves.

Always in the afternoon. Never on Sundays.

He'd been watching this place for almost two weeks. The routine was set.

Miles adjusted his position slightly, elbow brushing the crumbling clay ridge of the roof. From up here, the city looked like a quilt sewn too tight, rooftops jammed together, bricks sagging from age, chimneys coughing smoke into the chill morning air. Between the buildings ran a tangle of alleys, so narrow a child could vanish in them with ease. He had. Many times.

This was his first city. Bigger than anywhere he'd been before. Louder. Meaner. But also full of corners, blind spots, and places no adult ever looked.

Especially above.

No one looked up.

He tapped the pencil against his teeth. Thought. Waited.

The front door of the orphanage opened again. A man stepped out. Thin, wiry, nerves visible in the twitch of his fingers as he lit a cigarette with trembling hands. Miles knew him. Not by name, just as Cougher. He always took two drags before retreating back inside, always stood on the second step, always left his lighter in his left pocket.

Miles wrote that down too.

Routine mattered. Patterns built stories. And stories held truth.

A gust of wind made his ears twitch. He ducked lower behind the chimney, watching as the man disappeared back through the door, smoke trailing behind him like a whispered lie.

Miles looked down at his scribbled notes. Names he didn't know. Faces burned into his memory. Movement paths. Behavior tics.

He didn't know what Klara was doing here. Not yet.

But he was watching.

And he would know. Soon.

The library was cold.

Not frigid, not cruel, but the kind of cold that came from high ceilings and walls that hadn't been insulated in fifty years. Dust clung to the corners of the windows. The overhead lamps buzzed faintly, casting pale orange pools of light onto faded tile.

Miles sat in the farthest corner of the records room, tucked behind a shelf labeled Local Archives (pre-consolidation). His stool creaked every time he shifted, so he made a point not to move unless he had to.

The screen in front of him flickered, amber text on black, displayed through a plastic monitor nearly as old as the shelves. The system didn't connect to anything modern. No network. No web. Just files that hadn't been digitized properly, dumped from older archives and left for people who cared enough to squint through broken indexes.

Miles was one of those people it turned out.

He tapped at the terminal with careful fingers, typing slower than usual. The keyboard stuck on the A key. His gloved fingers made faint clicking sounds. He paused every few minutes to cross-check what he saw against the notes he kept folded in his coat pocket, page after page of flyer backs and torn envelopes.

He searched for the orphanage first. Not the one he'd grown up in. That was gone.

This one.

It had an official name, something long and self-important with the word Hope in it. Miles didn't write that part. He just copied the names of listed staff members. One jumped out at him, D. Elwin. That matched the man with the trembling hands. He scrawled a quick note beside it: smoker, light cough, exits front step @ 7:14, returns @ 7:20.

Then he moved on to property records. The storefront Klara always visited after her drop-ins, Drell & Co., Curios and Consignments. The name alone smelled fake.

It was owned by a trust, not a person. Registered out of a different city entirely. Miles gritted his teeth. Trusts were harder to trace from what his previous life had told him, there were hidden behind lawyers, behind false names, even at times were controlled by large families of three dozen people.

That was too much information to root through all at once.

But he made note of the address, of the discrepancy in the listed contact versus the person who actually locked the front door at night. A mouse woman with red spectacles and a limp. She wasn't mentioned anywhere in the archive.

Another wrinkle.

Another piece.

He leaned back from the terminal, rubbing his eyes.

From across the room, the librarian glanced his way again. A middle-aged lion with a half-buttoned vest and a pair of spectacles so thick they warped the shape of his pupils. He'd been watching Miles for days now, long enough to suspect something was up, but not long enough to decide if it was his problem.

Miles gave him a blank, tired look. The kind of look that made adults dismiss him as quiet, maybe a bit sad, but never threatening.

The lion returned to his papers without a word.

That was the trick: don't cause trouble. Don't talk. Don't draw focus. Just sit. Just read. Just copy notes.

And that's what Miles did.

Name. Note. Pattern. Line.

The data didn't line up easily. It never did. This wasn't the kind of story you could piece together in order. Half the files were missing. Others had been poorly scanned, with blurred ink or mismatched dates. But that didn't matter.

You didn't need full answers to catch a pattern.

You just needed the same beat to repeat.

Miles flipped his note page again, then wrote one last sentence:

Klara – Mondays / Thursdays – arrives 3:45, departs 4:08. Always uses same exit. Avoids eye contact with Head Nurse.

He underlined same exit twice.

Then, without standing, he closed the terminal and pulled the page into his coat.

It wasn't a map yet.

But the outline was taking shape.

The city didn't rest between meetings.

It wheezed. Groaned. Rattled with the sound of handcarts and uneven stone. The smell of baking clay and hot oil mixed in with horse dung and chimney soot. Miles moved through it like a thread through needlework, careful, small, invisible if you weren't looking right at him.

He stayed across the street. Always. Never closer.

Klara was ahead of him, striding through the narrow market lane with the same confidence she always wore like a coat. Her ears were tucked under a dark hood today. Her boots clicked sharp and soft, a rhythm Miles had memorized without trying.

This was her Thursday route.

That meant Elwin had been on duty. Which meant she wouldn't take the main boulevard back. She'd go west instead, through the cobbled rows of artisan shops and tailor stalls. It was always the same, always precise, but not quite predictable.

She passed the glassblower's stall without looking. Stopped outside a bakery, but didn't go in. Then paused again near the old fountain where vendors hung laundry on lines strung between rusted poles. Her hand dipped into her coat, pulled something small, maybe a list, maybe a watch, and vanished just as fast.

Miles, pressed between a leaning water barrel and the side of a grain cart, didn't blink.

He just waited.

And then, like always, she turned down Inkpot Row.

The hat shop was there.

No sign. Or at least, half of one. Just charred wood hanging by a single chain, swaying faintly in the breeze. The window had a split down its center like an old scar. Inside, dust shimmered in the slats of sunbeams, but no figures ever moved. No hats in the display. No sign of merchandise.

Klara stopped at the door.

Miles ducked behind a stone archway and peeked just enough to see.

She didn't knock. Didn't use a key. Just stood there, as if waiting to be recognized. Thirty seconds passed. Then forty. Then the latch clicked, and the door creaked open. She slipped inside.

No one else had touched that door in the past week.

He knew. He'd checked.

He scratched a quick mark into his palm with his pencil stub, five. This was her fifth visit. Always the same time of day. Always alone.

Never came out with anything. Never lingered.

If it wasn't a front, it was a shrine.

Miles glanced both ways, then slid into the alley that ran along the shop's east side. No windows. No crates to climb. But a chimney spout leaned low against the wall above a slanted rooflet, if he got up there, maybe next time…

A sharp voice cut through the street.

"Did you see something?"

It wasn't Klara.

Male. Firm. Close.

Miles dropped instantly, pressing himself flat behind a basket of leather scraps dumped by a tanner's back door. A moment later, bootfalls echoed too near, crisp, clean steps, the kind made by someone used to discipline. A driver, maybe. Or a minder.

The steps paused.

Miles didn't breathe.

"You imagined it," another voice said. Lower. Dismissive.

The boots moved on.

Not fast. Not concerned. But still close enough that Miles waited a full minute before he dared peek.

Clear.

He didn't leave the alley. Not right away. He crouched low, heart thudding behind his ribs like a drum with torn skin. Too close.

He made a new note in his mind: One shadow too many, and they're not alone.

After another moment, he slipped away.

Back to the crowd. Back to his rhythm. Always moving. Always watching.

They were careful.

He would be better.

The sun had sunk just enough to drag long shadows across the bricks. The air held the bite of evening, a kind of coolness that clung low to the stone and whispered of rain yet to come.

Miles crouched behind a fence near the back garden of the orphanage, where the wall dipped low enough for him to perch without being seen. A low stretch of crumbling plaster, overgrown with ivy and disuse. A corner no adult ever checked.

He'd been here before.

Watched from here.

Waited.

This time, he didn't watch, he waited to be seen.

Two kids were out in the garden. Young. Younger than Reese. One had a wooden hoop and a stick, tapping it along the packed dirt path. The other was sitting in the grass, humming tunelessly while tugging dandelions up by their roots. Miles guessed five, maybe six years old.

He took the little carving from his pocket.

It was a tiny bird. Not polished, not detailed, just smoothed and shaped from scrap wood, carefully balanced to rock on its base if nudged. He'd made it two nights ago from a crate slat and the blade of a broken safety razor. Not because he needed it, but because the habit of tinkering hadn't died yet.

It was the kind of toy he would've loved. Something small and pointless. Something that didn't have to survive a fight or hold a charge. Just something to hold.

He slipped over the edge of the wall in one silent motion, landing on bent knees. The kids didn't see him until he was already halfway across the garden.

The older one gasped.

Miles held up the bird.

"I made this. You can have it."

The younger one blinked at him. The older one stepped forward, wary but curious. He took the bird, turned it in his palm, and gave it a nudge.

It rocked. The smaller child giggled once, bright and short.

Miles knelt, keeping his posture low. "Do you know the tall rabbit lady who visits sometimes? With the long ears and fancy clothes?"

The bird stopped rocking.

The boy's face changed. Not frightened. Just... shuttered. As if something behind his eyes had closed all at once.

The younger one pointed at him. "You look funny," she said.

Miles blinked.

"You got too many tails," she added. "That's weird."

"Does she ever talk to the other grown-ups?" Miles tried again, voice quiet.

The boy stepped back, clutching the bird to his chest now, like it might vanish if he wasn't careful.

A woman's voice rang out from the doorway.

"Inside. Now."

Both kids jumped. The girl ran without hesitation. The boy hesitated for half a second, then followed, ducking past the door without a glance back.

Miles didn't wait.

He turned and slipped behind the ivy-covered fence again, moving fast but quiet until he hit the safety of the alley.

He crouched low between two crates, heart steady, breath slow.

It hadn't worked.

Not because he was clumsy. Not because he'd said the wrong thing. But because something in those kids already knew to be afraid of questions.

He thought of Reese.

Of the way the boy had watched the road every day before leaving.

Of how many others might've watched too, before they vanished.

Miles stared at his hands. The skin under his claws was rough, dirt-stained, the cuts from the bread door still healing in slow, scabby lines.

Words wouldn't do it.

Not here.

Not now.

He needed more than trust.

He needed records.

Patterns.

Proof.

Something that couldn't run. That couldn't lie. That couldn't be scared away.

He pulled out his flyer scrap and scribbled another name down, staff member who called them in. Round shoulders, red scarf. Always stands with arms crossed.

Then, with a glance toward the darkening rooftops, he vanished again.

Back to the shadows.

Back to the hunt.

The wind moved like a whisper through broken shutters, rattling loose boards and brushing cold fingers through the rafters. The city below had quieted, no more bells, no more market hollers. Just the occasional echo of a cart's wheel or the bark of a dog somewhere far beyond the rooftops.

Miles sat alone in the upper loft of what had once been a chapel. It smelled of old wood and forgotten incense, the latter clinging to the beams like ghosts. The altar was long gone, stripped out and sold or stolen, but the tower above it remained. Dusty. High. Forgotten.

Perfect.

He lit a candle stub he'd found in a broken drawer days ago, its wax laced with old perfume. It sputtered but held. The flame was thin, but enough.

He laid the first of the papers across the stone sill. Then another. Then another.

A map, hand-sketched from observation. Street names penciled in by memory, corrected only when he found a posted sign to prove otherwise.

Scraps of flyers with scribbled times and names. Bits of library print-outs with orphanage rosters and old permits. A few blurry pictures clipped from junkmail, the same storefront in the background twice, six months apart, unchanged.

And at the center: Klara's name, inked in thick charcoal. Underlined once. Then again.

Beside it, a crude sketch, her tall ears, her half-lidded gaze, the flare of her coat drawn by hand from memory, corrected over days.

Miles leaned back, shoulders tense beneath his scavenged coat. It didn't fit right, and one sleeve was torn, but it kept the wind off his spine.

He took a bent nail from his pouch and pinned one paper higher. Then another. Then two pieces together, connected by a charcoal line that linked a name to a location. To a pattern.

Every so often, he circled something.

Every so often, he crossed something out.

When he stepped back, the wall looked less like evidence and more like a shrine, built not to worship, but to witness. A place to remember everything he wasn't allowed to forget.

The candle hissed. The flame trembled.

Miles didn't move.

He was tired.

So tired.

The kind of tired that pressed down from the inside, that made even breathing feel like work. His stomach had long stopped growling. It just sat now, empty and quiet, like the rest of him. But his fingers still worked. His mind still turned.

He stared at Klara's name.

Stared through it.

"Keep talking," he whispered, voice low. "I'll keep listening."

He didn't say it like a threat.

He said it like a promise.

The wind howled again. Somewhere below, a shutter slammed shut. Somewhere beyond the city, a storm was moving in.

Miles curled into the corner of the loft. He wrapped his coat tighter, pressed his back to the stone, and pulled his knees to his chest. The candle flickered behind him. His notes shifted with the breeze, rustling like paper ghosts.

The moonlight cut through the slats overhead, casting pale lines across the wall of evidence. The sketch of Klara's face watched him from the center. The string of names beneath it stood like gravestones.

He didn't shiver.

He didn't blink.

Miles watched the board until sleep found him.

And the city, unaware, kept breathing.

But Miles's war had already begun.

Chapter Text

The city had stopped feeling new more than a week ago, even this late at night.

Miles had lived in a city in his past life, so it wasn't supposed that the newness coming from living in an animal-people city would wear off rather quickly, especially as he spent his time in an animal-town since his rebirth. Together, this all formed a rather great sense of street smarts, at least in Miles' opinion.

Grime clung to every corner; the streets were rarely ever washed. So all the rain made the mess and dirt stick to the ground, only to be stepped on by the streetwalkers. On a sunny day, it all looked like moss. But he knew better just from his prior life's experience.

Miles sat tucked between the pipes behind a building's vent shaft, wrapped in the patchwork of rags he called a coat. Normally, he wouldn't bother wearing one at all, but this way it helped further hide his second tail. It was a notable piece of clothing, but winter was creeping through the city at this time of year, so a coat was less notable than having a second tail.

It also helped hide the utility belt he'd fashioned for himself, where he kept the few assortments of tools he'd managed to scavenge for, or nick in some cases from stores. It wasn't Batman-grade, just a series of pouches sewn to a belt. It could also hold whatever evidence he gathered or a notepad to write things down that he observed.

Miles' stomach gnawed at itself. He hadn't eaten anything solid in almost two days; it was his own fault, it was his own plan. He'd made sure to drink; he even put some solid food into a blender and ate it that way. Miles typically wouldn't have done such a questionable diet, but it was important to his plans.

A fox's diet affected the color of their coat. Miles typically had a bright coat; the diet would change it to be darker, if what Miles had read in the library recently was true. He needed this color change; he needed to look as unlike Miles, as the future Tails, as was possible. Miles couldn't afford to back off the diet.

Not for now.

In line with his future plans, Miles tracked them again that morning, them being Klara's group. Different faces, same pattern. Men in quiet clothes passed off small bags outside the orphanage. One of them, a woman with a clipboard and cold eyes, spoke to the matron and left smiling. That smile chilled him worse than the wind.

Miles rubbed his fingers together to keep the numbness from spreading. His gloves were caked in grease and dirt from the junkyard crawl last night. He hadn't found much. A stripped servo motor, a few lengths of wire, a busted actuator. Useless in most cases, though he guessed the wire could be used as a weapon.

But they were preparing something. Miles could feel it. So he didn't mind trolling away in the garbage for supplies. Even as strong as his tails were, Miles needed more than just strong wackers to take on more than one or two adults at once. At least right now.

He'd followed one of the vans across the Lower East Side, past the broken bridge, toward the freight docks where the porters didn't ask questions. It was obvious that they weren't taking deliveries, they were sending them. Huge shipping crates were moved with obvious care, too much for Miles to think they'd be anything other than children

He swallowed hard, his throat dry. He recognized one of the men; he'd been the one with Klara that night with Reese at the warehouse.

Too soon. Miles wasn't ready. Time hadn't passed enough for his more gaunt features compared to about two months ago, to let him get by unnoticed. He'd planned on changing his colorization naturally, and shift his features through lack of solid foods. But that wouldn't work yet; Miles still looked too much like himself. If Klara had used a picture of him and shown it around her people. It wouldn't be a surprise if they caught him lottering around the place.

But Miles knew, it was happening. A transfer of kids, a trafficking.

He clenched his fists and closed his eyes. The rage came fast, but he held it down, choking on the taste of helplessness.

Not yet. But soon.

The fence around the port wasn't high; Miles was sure he could jump it if he made a running jump and bounced off a crate first. But his legs were tired due to his day spent sleuthing. So the temptation of taking the coat off, wrapping it around his shoulders and then just flying over the fence and then to the rooftops. Miles made his way around the area, coming to the office. It was where they stored documents on what was coming in, who was bringing it in.

His landing was rough. His knees barked in protest as he dropped into an alley's shadows. The service gate was chained, but the bolt was loose. He shimmied through, breath held, then scanned the lot. Empty containers. A broken dolly. And, there.

The trash bins reeked of mold and oil. He didn't care. Miles dug through half-rotted food, shredded foam, then hit something dry. A stack of discarded paperwork, partly rain-soaked but not unreadable.

Shipping manifests. Cargo receipts. Most were printed with generic stamps, but a few had handwriting along the margins.

He scanned them fast, eyes darting. One sheet stood out.

Vessel: Kestrel.
Dock: Pier 6 – East Port.
Departure: 36 hours.
Cargo Description: C7 Inventory, sealed crate.
Sender: Longpaw Freight Ltd.
Receiver: Thistlebridge Holdings – Regional Division.

Miles's breath hitched. No product list. No crate dimensions. Just shorthand and rabbit-themed corporate names, ones he hadn't seen before—but they'd come from somewhere. Fronts, maybe. Shell companies. The kind that folded when someone asked too many questions.

He flipped the page over. Nothing but a barcode, useless without some sort of barcode scanner. Miles folded it sharply, stuffing it into the pouch at his waist.

Whoever Longpaw and Thistlebridge were, they were funding this. Backing it. Maybe they weren't in charge, but they were facilitating it, benefiting from this.

"We'll see for how long."

Miles' hands trembled, fingers tightening on the page, his mind figuring on a number of ways he could wreck this organisation. Briefly, he wondered if he'd ever manage to fish up a bank account number, with that Miles could do some serious damage to their organisation. This was the first step in finding out.

So he stuffed it into his coat.

Then Miles shifted; he heard a sound. Footsteps.

He darted back, but a beam of light swept past him, too late.

"Hey!" a voice barked. Miles bolted, vaulting a crate, slipping on wet plastic. A hand grabbed for his shoulder and missed. He shoved past a barrier, scrambled up a leaning scaffold.

Too slow.

He grunted, scrabbling with one arm while the other flailed for grip. His legs found purchase, but his chest was burning. Another step. Another slip.

Miles flung himself over the edge of a half-assembled frame and dropped into the dark. It would've been too much a fall for anyone else, but even with a single tail, he could generate enough lift to float. He scampered into the alley and didn't stop until the city swallowed the shouts behind him.

Another near miss like this, just like that baker last time, was showing Miles just how bad his overall stealth skills were. Sadly, Solid Snake-like stealth training wasn't something Miles had in his prior life. And the life of an orphan, now homeless, didn't exactly give him time to find a trainer.

Even if Miles felt he was getting better at it.

He took a moment to catch his breath when he got back to his clocktower hideout. His lungs were burning. His face was slick with sweat and grime. He stared at the stolen page in his shaking hands.

The hideout was never silent; there was a slow creak of settling pipes, the ticking of the clock, and the occasional hum of a train passing in the distance. But it was never loud enough to annoy Miles; it actually helped him focus. It reminded him of the orphanage, even if the noises were different. The fact that it was never quiet was soothing enough on its own sake.

Miles pulled the curtain closed and turned on the single hanging bulb. It buzzed weakly, casting a yellow cone over the folding table stacked with parts, metal scraps, cabling, stripped motors, and plastic shell fragments scavenged from broken machinery.

He sat heavily, pulling the manifest page from his coat and pinning it to the wall. Longpaw and Thistlebridge were underlined now, smudged where his thumb had pressed too hard. He didn't look at it again.

Miles would have time later to find out what he could about the companies.

Instead, he picked up a coil of tension cable and started threading it through a salvaged joint assembly. His hands moved on muscle memory, tracing routes and anchor points. The design wasn't elegant; it was desperate. A crude rig: jointed tubing with an actuator mounted at the base and claw like pincers at the end, meant more for grasping and bracing than for striking. He adjusted the counterweight again and again, trying to balance the unwieldy limb.

It was an idea that had come to him in a dream. Sure, he couldn't design a cybernetic extra tail, Miles lacked the understanding of biology at the moment. But that didn't mean he couldn't create a harness and some controls to recreate the style of device Doctor Otto Octavius from Spider-Man had.

Just tails rather than tentacles.

Miles shook the thought off and focused harder to finish the prototype..

The hours blurred. He didn't eat. He hardly blinked. The air was filled with the soft grind of a file, the snap of stripped wire, the metallic thunk of trial and error.

By the end of it, the tail was ugly. Awkward even. A frame of misaligned rods and exposed cable that clacked faintly when it moved. He bolted it to a harness, a rig made from salvaged backpack straps and reinforced tubing, and slung it over his lower back.

It groaned as it lifted for the first time.

Miles watched its movement in the cracked mirror, head tilted.

It responded. Slowly. But it responded.

A snaking motion. A steady clamp of the claw. It held the edge of the table, released it, and held it again. Miles then tested the lifting strength of the mechanical tail, lifting the table up high.

What he noticed was that the weight pressed down on him, rather than purely on his new creation. The harness would need some adjusting to better spread out those kinds of effects, otherwise, the tail would stab into his back with far too much force.

Still, it worked better than he could've hoped for, so Mile hid it beneath his coat, folding the tail down along his spine and tightening the belt. Not invisible, but unremarkable. In the mirror, he shifted his weight and let the tail lift slightly behind him, testing balance. It was like a phantom limb, sluggish and new, but his.

Miles stared at his reflection.

This would have to be enough.

Chapter Text

The wind off the bay tasted like old iron and damp rope.

Miles crouched low beneath the rusted lip of a control tower overlooking the east docks, one knee tucked under his chest, the other balanced carefully to avoid the broken glass that littered the roof like brittle ice. The city behind him still pulsed with life, but out here, at the edge of the port, everything was slower but louder. And far more dangerous.

At least for him, given the situation.

He unwrapped a thin cloth bundle from beneath his patched coat and removed the spyglass. A cracked opera model, salvaged from the side of a waste chute two weeks ago. Its brass had tarnished, and the inner lens housing had to be realigned using a twist of copper wire and a strip of waxed string, but it worked. Mostly. Miles adjusted the small knob with his thumb until the image sharpened.

The ship was there—the Kestrel. Miles wasn't sure of the exact model; there were no numbers on the hull for him to take down. So he couldn't just find the model in the library.

Regardless, it was a low-profile freighter with twin smokestacks used for funneling the engine's exhaust. The deck was worn from constant use, and containers had been dragged across it so often that Miles could see the metal beneath the painted surfaces make tic tac toe games. But recently scraped clean, so it did shine. Its outer hull bore a fresh coat of matte gray paint, but underneath the stenciled letters that said its name, the weld lines ran old and crooked.

Miles didn't trust anything with new paint. New paint covered things.

History.

Guilt.

He narrowed the eye behind the lens of his telescope. The freighter's ramp was lowered, just slightly. A few forklifts moved along its edge, unloading innocuous-looking containers. All unmarked. One crate was padlocked with six thick metal bars. Another had no labels at all, just a coded barcode and what might've been a warning sigil partially scratched off.

Miles tilted the scope slightly, tracking motion along the perimeter.

There were two guards. They didn't appear to have any weapons, but that didn't mean much for the people of this world. Sonic was super powerful, and Miles himself could move his tails fast enough to fly, but that wasn't entirely unique. A Lot of people could punch through weaker metals without a bruise. And these people, their movements were tight, rehearsed. They weren't dock hands. These were professionals in a rather different craft. That was worse.

Miles hadn't much experience with professionals in his prior life, the most he'd ever managed to fight were thugs that tried to mug you. Trained fighters weren't on that list. He clicked his tongue softly against the back of his teeth and leaned back, breathing slow. One tail curled across his lap, the other still strapped down and flattened by the cloth belt across his waist. Neither moved. Neither dared.

He marked three possible escape routes in his head, fire stairs on the south wall, a rusted service ladder near the waterline, and a blind corner behind the warehouse's supply shed that offered a ten-second sprint to a drainage tunnel. All rough. All risky. But not impossible.

One of the guards yawned. The other lit a cigarette and stared off toward the water.

Miles took another slow breath. He'd watch. As long as it took. As long as he needed to. He adjusted the focus ring, wiped the lens with his thumb, and kept watching. Quiet. Still. Waiting.

The minutes stretched. Then blurred. Miles watched.

He counted the movements of dockhands, measured the rhythm of forklift loops and noted when the men switched out at the gate. The Kestrel wasn't being hurried. This wasn't some frantic midnight smuggling job, it was methodical. Quiet. The kind of operation that trusted its silence to keep people away.

He marked each trip in a dog-eared notepad balanced on his knee.

15:32 – 2 crates. Guard change.
15:44 – One marked van departs (rabbits on license plate).

The license plate was a bit of a shock, it was odd to see something so memorable. Most criminal enterprises, at least in the fiction Miles had experienced in his past life, would've had the criminal use standard, average vehicles with no remarkable features. Not going around with a custom license plate.

He didn't recognize the driver, though Miles never expected to, but he did recognise the van. It was the same that had once brought Reese to that warehouse. Mile wasn't good enough with makes and models to point out what exact this van was in that regard. But that didn't really matter to him, as he traced its path with his scope until it disappeared through the southern road gate, a security checkpoint with only one bored-looking officer, half-asleep with a sandwich in his lap. Miles made a note of him, too.

After that, Miles continued scouting out the vessel and surrounding dock best he could.

The pattern was steady now. Every twelve minutes, one new container. Two forklifts. One overseer with a clipboard who barely looked at the paperwork before waving them on. Miles didn't need to see the faces to know they were practiced. They weren't confirming contents, they were checking boxes to make it all look right on paper.

He swept the scope across the yard again.

A black tarp fluttered briefly along the edge of one crate. Miles caught a glimpse of reinforced steel. That wasn't normal for freight. Food didn't require that much protection. Not even tech, unless it was some sort of heavy weaponry. No, Miles saw the vents, the air vents that was. This was a container for living being.

Heavy-duty stuff, if low-tech compared to what Miles expected to see in the future from Eggman.

Still, at the sight of it, his gut turned cold.

He pulled out the crumpled manifest from the previous raid and compared the dock numbers, Pier 6. Same ship. Same timeline. This was the transfer. It was real.

Klara's group didn't just traffic kids randomly. They did it like an international business. With chains of command. Schedules. Procedures.

Miles should've expected all that, given what little he'd seen back in his hometown. But there was a difference in seeing the scale of it here. Thinking it was a regional problem made it seem doable, thinking it was national made it seem like a large problem, and international was a whole other level.

It reminded him of something out of 'Taken' a film he'd seen about Liam Neeson, the actor, where their child was taken by some group and he went to Europe to find what happened to her. Miles did have a certain set of skills that had proven good to track these traffickers, so the comparison wasn't unfair.

He just wished he'd have a gun like Liam Neeson did too.

Miles hifted slightly, eyes following the upper catwalks along the warehouse roofs. There were gaps in coverage there. Blind spots. If he could get inside tomorrow night, he could set traps, trip wires, noise makers, maybe a lock jam if he could get enough chicken grease to cause rust to set. It would be useful to lay if only to delay them if he ever managed to free any of those children. Following him would be a lot harder if they tripped over each other like that.

The wind picked up. Distant clinks of chain rattled somewhere out of sight. Miles pulled his coat tighter and huddled deeper into the shadows of the tower's broken wall.

He marked two more guards. One laughed. Too loudly.

They didn't know he was here. Not this time.

He would wait.

And when the time was right, he'd make sure this wasn't clean anymore.

Miles didn't leave when the sun dipped past the rooftops. He waited until the cranes powered down, until the forklifts idled and the last shift change rippled through the dockyard like a tired breath. That was when the layout revealed itself most clearly, not in blueprints, but in rhythm.

He closed the telescope and tucked it under his belt.

Then, crouching low on the cracked ledge of the forgotten watchtower, Miles began drawing.

Not with precision. Not like the schematics he's practiced back in the orphanage, this didn't require it.. This was scrawled in stubbed pencil across an old paper sack, each fold flattened against the stone. Lines for fences. Squares for crates. Arrows for motion. A cluster of dots for the quiet alley where the guards stepped out to smoke. X's over the camera mounts he'd seen, more than he expected. But only one was actually powered. A dummy system. It made him sneer.

The docks weren't a fortress. They were a funnel, their entire defense system worked as a funnel. Useless against someone that can just quietly fly over things like him. Hell, even a good jump would be enough.

He sketched out escape routes next, pathways from the loading ramp to the fences, the runoff tunnels, the low-hanging scaffolding that led to the neighboring grain warehouse. He paused by one scribbled note: Storm drain near Pier 3.

He tapped his pencil against it, thinking.

Too tight for an adult. But he wasn't an adult, nor would the children he was going to rescue be. Miles was strong enough to take one or two children around his size on a bit of a flight. But he wouldn't be able to do it that fast. Miles needed to really get down how a group of children would escape the docks.
So he marked it again.

Then came the traps. The ones he'd been holding in his head since yesterday.

A rigged wire across the gravel by the side gate. A jammed lock on the forklift shed door. A stack of wooden pallets just loose enough that a push could cause a small landslide, if anyone chased him.

The cold started biting at his fingertips, but he didn't move.

He just sat with his rough map spread out beneath him and his eyes scanning the half-lit yard below, memorizing it all, again and again. Every stairwell, every alley, every blind angle where a shadow could slip through unnoticed.

Every place where he could strike and vanish like a ghost.

The moon rose, casting long shapes across the port. The Kestrel didn't move. It waited.

And so did Miles.

But not for much longer.

Miles didn't sleep that night.

He didn't need to. Not when the plan kept unfolding behind his eyes, reshaping itself each time he blinked. By dawn, the paper sack map was stuffed into a pouch, and he was already slipping down from the old tower, feet light, tails wrapped tight against the wind.

This wasn't the mission. This was the rehearsal.

He crept through the underlayers of the city, storm grates, forgotten service corridors, and alley crawl spaces that only someone his size could move through. The kind of paths people had stopped caring about when the city outgrew them.

By midmorning, he was crouched behind the stacked barrels behind a storage shed on the outer ring of the port.

He started small. Counted the guards again. Noted their new winter coats, how stiffly some of them moved, how one of them smoked too much and always wandered near the fence line for his second break. Good to know.

Then, without really announcing it to himself, Miles began the run.

He crossed between loading zones, stuck to shadows cast by towering crates. He rolled under a parked truck when a worker passed too close. He made it to the scaffolding, scaled it hand over foot, one tail keeping his balance with quiet precision.

The view from the upper walkway gave him what he needed, confirmation. There was a new stack of crates tagged for "C7 inventory." The same label from the manifest. And two of the crates had ventilation holes drilled in the sides.

Children were already here.

Miles didn't let the rage overtake him. He held it tight and kept moving.

He tested the storm drain by Pier 3, just like he'd sketched. It creaked when he pulled the cover loose, but it held. The tunnel inside was wide enough to crawl if he stayed flat. A good exit. He added a mental note to reinforce it if he had time, maybe build a friction ramp to slow pursuers.

Back outside, he moved to the opposite end of the yard. His idea with the pallets worked too, a little push shifted the stack just enough to tumble when prompted. Nothing deadly, but enough to buy time.

He circled back toward the old watchpoint by midday, sweaty beneath his makeshift cloak, breath held tight through every movement.

No one saw him. No one shouted. No alarms.

Not perfect. But close.

Back at the top of his roost, Miles dropped to his knees and opened his pouch. He smoothed out the paper sack again and marked it up with everything new: sightlines, names, schedules, variables.

Then, in the bottom corner, he added a single new word.

Soon.
The wind scraped the rooftops that night like knives across metal. Miles barely noticed. His small fire had long since died down, and the bulb overhead flickered weakly before finally going dark. Power surges weren't uncommon in this district, and the clocktower wasn't a priority. The city might replace the grid one day. Or not.

He didn't move to fix it.

Miles sat cross-legged on the floor, a dozen notes fanned out in front of him. Paper scraps from takeaway menus, the backs of library slips, a half-charred newspaper pinned beneath a rusted washer. Each piece held marks: time stamps, crude drawings, names reduced to initials, crude arrows pointing between buildings. His charcoal had worn to a nub, his fingers blackened with smears, but he still moved like he was carving something holy.

There were no gaps left in the map. No more variables he hadn't accounted for.

He had drawn the docks from memory now, over and over, until the layout haunted his sleep. The stacked crates at Pier 6. The rust-locked storm was covered by the drainage runoff. The high fencing at the northwest edge of the yard weakened near the base where rain had eroded the concrete.

Every entry point. Every fallback. Every blind spot.

He tapped his claw against one drawing, his primary path. From the canal fence, up the scaffolding, over the admin office rooftop, down behind the loading crate. He could make it in under five minutes. Maybe three, if nothing slowed him.

Maybe less if he used the tail properly.

He turned and looked at it. The mechanical third tail sat beside him on a pile of bundled cloth. It didn't look like much. Just a snaking cable spine with bronze joints, one side rewrapped in fraying insulation tape. The clasping end was a simple grip claw now, he'd burned the last servo trying to make it rotate. That idea had gone in the trash. But the rest worked. Mostly.

He reached for it. Slid the harness over his shoulders and tightened the chest strap. The weight settled against his spine with a dull clack. A reassuring noise.

His hand reached back and clicked the wire spool into place. The claw lifted. Not fast. But steady. Controlled.

Good enough for now.

Miles stood and walked to the mirror he'd propped against the pillar. His reflection stared back: a slight, dirty fox-boy in fingerless gloves, with soot rings beneath his eyes and fur matted down where the cold had won.

He adjusted the cloth wrapping that kept his real tails hidden. Then pulled the loose cloak down to cover the metal one. A single tail. A poor orphan. One among many. His cover was in place.

His voice, when he spoke aloud, barely rose above a whisper. "You can't mess this up."

It wasn't a prayer. It was an order.

He turned back to the papers and knelt again.

One by one, he reviewed each step. Not just the movement, his contingencies. If the storm grate was locked: use the pry bar. If the northwest exit was too busy: take the roof over the chainlink. If someone spotted him early: distract, misdirect, retreat.

If they moved the children early… he'd run anyway.

Because the boat was scheduled to leave the next night. Thirty hours. Maybe less. Whatever this transfer was, it was happening soon. And after that, nothing. They'd be gone. Buried in some system or dumped into something worse.

And if he let that happen…

He didn't finish the thought.

Instead, he moved to the stash beneath the floorboard and retrieved the last of his scavenged food, a brittle chunk of dried bread and a foil packet of preserved jelly. He smeared the jelly on with a rusted knife and ate slowly, chewing even slower. The sweetness coated his tongue, made him feel like his mouth was working wrong.

He hadn't eaten like this in days. Not properly.

He forced himself to finish every bite.

There was no room for weakness tomorrow.

His gaze flicked again to the map. To the word he'd underlined twice now in the corner:

Klara.

And beneath it, the corporate names:

Longpaw Freight Ltd.
Thistlebridge Holdings – Regional Division.

He didn't know if they'd be there in person. He doubted it. People like that didn't linger. But their people would. Their machines. Their patterns. And Klara's polished boots might show up just to make sure everything was tied up with a pretty little bow.

Maybe she'd even smile again.

Miles's hands tightened at the thought. His claws bit into the edges of his palm. Not enough to bleed. Just enough to feel real.

"I'll be ready," he whispered.

Then he stood, picked up the tail harness, and climbed back to the rafters, where the moonlight filtered in through the shattered dome. He placed his notes into a weathered satchel, checked the rope he'd stashed near the window, then curled up on his bedroll with one tail still twitching beneath him.

Sleep didn't come quickly. But eventually, the cold settled into something bearable.

The wind howled.

The docks awaited.

Tomorrow, the hunt began in earnest.

Chapter Text

The water lapped at the concrete lip of the docks, gentle and ceaseless. Miles emerged from a storm grate just below the waterline, his fur slicked from the crawl but his movements deliberate. Cold grit clung to his palms. The tunnel behind him yawned black and fetid, but the night ahead was clean, crisp, and narrow in purpose.

He paused, one hand on the rusted rim of the storm outlet, listening.

Miles exhaled, quiet as breath over glass, and slipped from shadow to shadow.

Before he did anything, he snapped a look through his telescope at the bomb he'd built and planted. It would go off eventually. Miles had set it for thirty minutes from now, but the rain and wind could always cause it to go off early. Not much of a problem in his mind.

Either way, once it did, there would be a great distraction for Miles and the kids held on the Kestrel to escape the pier.

The Kestrel loomed ahead like a slumbering machine god. The faint stink of oil and old steel clung to its frame. Miles moved parallel to its flank, keeping low, close to the rows of freight crates stacked three high. The port was asleep, mostly. But his tails twitched in time with every echo, every gust of wind that shifted the tarp lines.

When he reached the service ladder, Miles didn't bother to climb it, as that could create creaking noises. Instead, Miles spun up his tails and rose into the air, slowly but at a steady rate. It only took him a few moments till he reached the top.

The hull was cold under his hands. Painted steel with the faint trace of salt rusting beneath. Each movement was slow, steady. He'd taken to wearing his mechanical tail, much to his annoyance, which clicked softly with each shift of his hip.

Miles wished he'd noticed that before deciding to take the mechanical tail prototype with him. But the lure of using it in action was too much for Miles to resist, it was a mechanical limb after all.

He reached the lip of the supply hatch, crouched, pulling his coat tighter, and his flesh tails wrapped close beneath the cloth sash.

A single guard stood two decks above, smoking, not looking. Miles slipped over the threshold and into the Kestrel's belly.

It was dark inside. No overhead lights, only the thin glow of instrument LEDs across the interior railings. Cargo nets hung slack. The space reeked of chemical preservatives and cold iron. But it was quiet, which only caused the ticking and clacking of his new tail to give him more anxiety.

He padded across the grated floor, every footfall a controlled whisper. His eyes swept side to side.

There it was.

The crate.

It was exactly where it had been last night. Crate #C7. Six padlocks. Vent slots along the sides. Reinforced seams. Nothing you'd need for food. The kind of container that they didn't want to be checked, or for anyone to hear what's inside.

He especially didn't want the wrong person to hear the occupants' whimpers.

He crept closer and dropped to a crouch, making sure to keep all his tails pulled tight to his body. His hand hovered over the first lock.

"First lock," he whispered to himself. "Then the spark."

His mechanical tail came up from under his cloak, the tip of it opening to reveal a rather dangerous tool.

A small solder rod. It wasn't exactly a plasma cutter, and Miles was sure it would break after the end of the night. But he had revamped it, which was why it was built into his mechanical tail, rather than being held by his hand. A regular solder rod would melt wires, not large steel locks. That wasn't going to stop Miles from giving it a go around with a larger power source and a lack of care for safety standards. An electrical coil let him juice it more, though it would eventually melt, which was another reason he didn't use his hands for this.

In the end, MIles had made a jury-rigged bolt cutter.

In the grand scheme of things, it wouldn't last long, but as long as Miles was fast with it, that didn't matter.

Miles didn't look up as he worked; he couldn't afford to with such a hot piece of equipment. It was after ten minutes that Miles thought

Not yet.

As he pressed the rod to the second lock. The metal began to glow.

So far, so good.

He took a deep sigh and took a look around him, the Kestrel hadn't moved. But it would if Miles took too long, it wouldn't matter if he broke through the crate to save the kids, they'd be trapped on the ship out in the sea.

The lock hissed as it met the heat, slowly bubbling from within. Rust flaked off like skin. He watched it carefully, breath held. One spark too much, and the coil melts too soon, and the heat rod wouldn't be able to generate enough heat on its own, he'd already gone through two during testing.

The first lock gave with a sharp metallic pop. Miles caught it before it hit the floor.

He set it aside gently, nestled in a rag he'd kept in the cloak's pocket. His hands moved fast now. The solder rods dipped toward the second shackle. A hiss, a soft glow, the stench of burning metal.

Above him, the ship creaked. Nothing unusual, just the metal settling under its own weight as waves crashed against the dock. It was something he watched the night before, he'd studied enough to know the difference between when it moved and when the water beneath it was moved. .

So far, so perfect.

He checked his watch. Two minutes.

Then;

A flash lit the edge of the sky, yellow-orange like someone shoved his eyes near a open fireplace. .

BOOM.

The sound rolled over the yard like a freight hammer. The metal beneath Miles jumped. He nearly dropped the rod even though he should've been aware of the noise coming, it was his bomb after all..

Then came the shouting, distant and panicked.

"Fire at the gate!"

"What the hell was that?!"

"Everyone to the east gate, move, move!"

Footsteps slammed overhead. Heavy boots thudded across the deck around him. Miles flattened himself behind a container as a spotlight wheezed by.  One pair. Then two. Then the watchlight above the hold flicked off. Power diverted, maybe. Or panicked hands throwing switches without care.

He waited. Counted to five. Then ten.

No return footsteps.

He slipped back toward the crate.

The second lock was glowing. Almost ready. A sharp flick, and it gave way, barely resisted the heat rod compared to the first. The third was even smaller, but denser, the heat rod bent back as he pushed it forward.

His chest rose and fell in quick, shallow bursts. The air in the hold had grown hotter. He didn't notice until he felt sweat trickling past his ear.

Somewhere in the distance, a siren started up, but it sounded hesitant, like the people running it weren't sure if they were supposed to, or if they were already too late.

Miles grinned. A small one. Barely a twitch at the corner of his mouth. But it was there.

First time in days. Maybe even months.

This was working.

He'd made the tools. Scouted the place. Set the trap. Timed the guard rotations. Even got the weather on his side, fog curling low off the water, cloaking the dock's edges in smoke and ghostlight.

This was the plan.

And there wasn't a single sign of this going wrong so far.

The third lock snapped open.

Three down.

Halfway there.

He glanced at the vent holes in the crate. No noise inside. No movement.

That was good. Or bad. He didn't know yet.

The heat rod buzzed again in his hand.

He lifted it toward the fourth lock.

Miles didn't see the flicker of emergency lights on the dock.

Not yet.

A low whine filled the air. Not from his tool.

Not from the docks.

It came from deep within the ship's spine. Mechanical. Urgent.

Miles froze halfway through the lock.

The deck rumbled beneath his feet. Subtle at first, like a breath held too long. Then,

Screech.

Steel cables retracting.

Clang.

A crane arm locked into place.

Then came the voice, loudspeaker static cutting through the hold.

"Emergency departure in progress. All personnel to assigned stations."

No. No, no, no.

Miles scrambled to the crate's edge and peeked through a gap in the bay doors.

The dock was moving away. Inch by inch. No, foot by foot. The mooring lines had been severed or reeled in. The Kestrel was pushing off. Smoke billowed from the twin stacks, churning the sky into ink.

The ship wasn't waiting for an all-clear.

It had been waiting for trouble.

And Miles had just lit the fuse. A literal fuse with a nice flash to signal them to go.

He whirled back to the crate. The fourth lock mocked him, still sealed, metal warping but unbroken. The heat rod sparked wildly as he pressed it down harder.

"Come on. Come on!"

A lurch nearly sent him off his feet. The ship groaned as it pivoted away from Pier 6, engines now fully engaged. Floodlights blinked across the stern, sweeping the waterline. Alarms screamed from the dock's main tower, too late. A fire blazed somewhere behind the loading bays, but no one chased the ship.

No one would.

The Kestrel was running because of it.

It was a failsafe. The engines must've been on standby, a getaway ready whenever trouble came. And he'd triggered it.

Think.

Miles shoved the rod hard as he could into the fourth lock again, jaw clenched, teeth grinding.

The deck trembled with every churn of the engine. Somewhere nearby, a crate slid and crashed into another, metal ringing sharp in the tight space. Bolts popped loose from a stack. The ship was accelerating.

Too late to jump.

The lifeboats? Maybe. But too exposed. If he bailed with those kids now, they'd catch them before he even made it to shore.

He was on the ship.

Locked in with it.

And the cargo wasn't open.

The fourth lock cracked, half-melted, barely holding. Miles wrenched it sideways and finally felt it give way with a snap.

Four.

He staggered back, panting.

The ship's artificial lighting flickered overhead. Something tripped, fuse or surge. Half the bay dipped into a red emergency glow. Outside, the dock vanished in fog and smoke. Just water now. Open sea ahead.

He hadn't planned for this.

It was supposed to be in, out, gone.

Not trapped on a ship out in the water. Sure, Miles could fly out, but with this fog, he could easily be heading out further into water rather than closer to land. He had already lost which way the docks had been, too focused on the locks. .

Miles turned slowly, eyes scanning the walls for ladders, exits, and pathways.

He'd mapped the dockyard.

He hadn't mapped the ship to the same level.

"What can I do?, he thought, swallowing hard. "If I want to get these kids out of here l… I need to take the whole ship now."

His fingers flexed. One tail braced against the wall as it came back out from his clock. The mechanical one clicked softly as it adjusted its angle, useless in a fight, but maybe not in a chase.

Above him, boots thundered across the catwalk.

Below, the ship surged into deeper water.

Miles stood there, surrounded by metal and smoke and locks he hadn't finished.

Plan B?

There wasn't one.

Not yet anyway, Miles just needed some time.

The wind hit Miles in the face like a slap when he burst topside.

The night had curdled into a mix of fog and diesel exhaust. Salt lashed at his eyes. The docks were distant now, gray outlines dissolving into the horizon. City lights blinked like distant stars behind smoke.

He ran to the railing, cloak flapping behind him like a torn flag. Below, the water churned into froth. Not close. Not impossible, but not something he could expect normal children his age to wade through, never mind abused and probably malnourished children like were in the crate.

His eyes locked on the lifeboats.

Two of them. Manual release. Ropes coiled, tarps half-unfurled. One was practically hanging already, swaying with the motion of the ship. A clean jump. He could drop straight in. Paddle to shore... or at least out of the fog, from there he should have no problem finding the shore as long as he tried the boat to his leg whenever he flew up for a vantage point.

Nobody would know.

Nobody would follow. No one on the ship would be aware he'd ever been there.

His foot slid forward, half a step. Instinct. Just half.

But he didn't move farther.

He stared at the lifeboat. Then in the city. Then down.

No guards behind him yet. No one  blaring about intruders. Not here.

He could still make it.

His hand twitched.

And then he looked down at himself, at the belt sagging against his side, the scorched wire tucked in one pouch, the final explosive nestled against his thigh.

His eyes went to the broken off locks already on the ground..

His gaze turned inward, then back toward the hold.

The crate.

He spun around.

It was still there. Quiet. Waiting. Bolted down in shadow, six locks deep. Only four gone. Two still clamped tight like iron fingers.

And whoever was inside,

Still inside.

Still waiting.

His breath caught. Not in panic. Something colder. Something heavier.

Miles could leave. He knew that. Even now.

But they couldn't.

Not unless he opened that crate.

Miles felt the shift in his weight, the indecision in his spine. One tail twisted reflexively around his leg. The mechanical one flexed, jittered slightly, trying to balance him.

He reached into his pouch and pulled out the last tool. Not a shaped charge, not really. A homemade canister, part explosive, part smoke, fused to a timer wired by guesswork and desperation. He'd built it as a fallback, noise, chaos, maybe a breach if he needed one.

Now?

It might be his key.

He turned it in his fingers.

Not perfect.

Not safe.

Not tested.

But Miles worked best when trusting his mind, not his fears. He knew that. If all he could do right is blow shit up, then he was going to blow this fucking door open.

It was the kind of thinking Sonic would applaud, at least that was Miles' mind on the act. It was fast, it was quick, it was very messy. All very much Sonic the Hedgehog!

His claw tapped lightly on the metal rim. A tick. A thought.

He looked back toward the crate and stepped toward it.

Slow.

Purposeful.

The boat rocked underfoot as if trying to stop him. Waves cracked against the hull. The steel hummed. Somewhere below, engines roared with mechanical thunder.

He reached the crate and laid his hand on the fifth lock.

Cool metal.

Unmoving.

His claws pressed tighter.

"I came to open cages," he whispered. "Not run from them."

He pulled the explosive from his belt.

The ship groaned again, like it had heard him.

Too late.

He was already setting the charge.

The fifth lock dropped with a clatter. The sixth hissed red under the heat wire, the coil pulsing with strain.

Come on, come on,

The filament snapped. A burst of smoke, the sharp tang of burning copper. Sparks bit his fingers. Miles recoiled, then snarled low in his throat.

No time.

He hurled the failed wire away, snatched the flathead prying tool from his belt. The metal groaned as he jammed it under the last clamp. No leverage. He shifted. Braced his boot. Pressed in with both hands. The lock didn't want to give.

He gritted his teeth and slammed his weight into it.

With a crack and a sudden pop, the lock exploded off the crate. The recoil flung him back onto the floor. His palms scraped, one knuckle split wide. Blood smeared the side of the crate. He didn't care.

He scrambled up, hooked his fingers under the lid, and wrenched it just high enough for moonlight to slip inside.

The light fell across still forms.

Three children. Maybe more, but he only saw the closest.

Fur dull. Limbs slack. Eyes half-lidded but unfocused. Breathing, slow and shallow.

Drugged. Packaged. Stowed like cargo.

Not for delivery.

For disposal.

He gagged. Not from the smell, though there was one ,  chemical, earthy, like sedatives spilled over metal. No, it was the realization.

The vents weren't for keeping them alive.

They were there to let the death fumes out. So the workers didn't notice. So the trail stayed clean.

The Kestrel wasn't a courier.

It was a coffin.

His vision swam. For a second, he didn't move.

Then his hands reached back into the crate. Pulled a cloth from one girl's mouth. She didn't stir. Still breathing. Still alive. Barely.

He didn't whisper anything. No comfort. No lies.

There was no time.

He slammed the crate shut, bolted the loose edge to keep it steady, then ran.

Past the hold. Up the stairs. His mechanical tail thumped behind him, struggling to keep pace.

He reached the deck in seconds and skidded to the edge.

The lifeboats.

One was already gone. Dislodged. Sinking back toward the port waters. Maybe a watch team had seen movement. Maybe they'd triggered it. Maybe they thought someone jumped.

Good.

Let them think that.

He yanked the last smoke charge from his side pouch, flicked the striker with his thumb, and watched the coil light up.

Then hurled it.

A tight arc over the water.

It burst mid-air. White vapor bloomed outward, caught the moonlight like a ghost. Somewhere far off, a bell rang. Maybe a harbor alarm. Maybe just the wind.

He didn't wait to find out.

He turned and sprinted up the next stairwell ,  metal thudding under his feet.

Toward the wheelhouse.

Toward the helm.

The bridge door loomed ahead, a reinforced panel with a glass window just wide enough to see the dark outlines of the controls inside. Empty.

The captain wasn't steering.

The ship was on autopilot.

A timer. A route. Pre-planned.

Miles didn't slow.

He grabbed the railing with his left hand, his mechanical tail twisting behind him to balance, his right hand already reaching for the multitool he'd packed for emergency bypasses.

He wasn't here to call for help.

No one was coming.

This wasn't a rescue.

This was a reroute.

"If I can't stop it from leaving…" he growled, voice tight in his throat as he braced himself on the deck.

His fingers curled around the wheelhouse handle. The door resisted,  locked,  but the hinge had rusted. One good twist from the mechanical tail, and it might give.

He looked back once. Toward the crate. Toward the smoke still trailing over the water.

Then forward.

At the steel door.

"…then I'll decide where it goes."

He surged forward, tail ready.