Read Chapter 23: The Missing Piece

The address Old Crow had scrawled on the back of a MetroCard led Mack and Elena to a storefront in the Diamond District that looked like it hadn’t seen a customer since the Carter administration. The sign above the door read *LANGER & SONS—FINE IMPORTS*, but the windows were caked with decades of grime, and the gold lettering was peeling like sunburned skin.

Mack tapped the bell. It didn’t ring. The door buzzed anyway, and a voice crackled through a speaker above the frame.

“State your business.”

“Third eye,” Mack said, reciting the phrase Old Crow had given him. “Seeing what’s already there.”

A long pause. Then the lock clicked, and the door swung inward.

Inside, the shop was a museum of things that shouldn’t exist together. A Ming vase sat next to a rusted samurai helmet, which leaned against a glass case holding what looked like a genuine Egyptian funerary mask. But Mack’s eyes went straight to the back wall, where a massive map of New York was pinned behind a desk, crisscrossed with red thread and annotated in handwriting so small it looked like spider tracks.

The man behind the desk was older than Old Crow, which was saying something. His face was a roadmap of wrinkles, his white beard stained yellow around the mouth, and his fingers were stained with something darker than nicotine. He wore a three-piece suit that might have been expensive fifty years ago.

“You’re Thomas’s boy,” the old man said. It wasn’t a question. “Got his jaw. His stubbornness too, I’d wager.”

“I’m looking for a piece,” Mack said. “Old Crow said you might have it. A piece of metal, old, reacts to other pieces like it. He said you deal in—”

“Archaeological anomalies,” the old man finished. “Langer. Eli Langer. And you’re right, I’ve got something that fits your description. But I don’t give it away to just anyone who walks in claiming lineage.”

Elena stepped forward, and something flickered across Langer’s face. Recognition. Fear, maybe.

“You,” he said quietly. “I heard you were dead.”

“Rumors,” Elena said. “Eli, we don’t have time for theatrics. The Warden knows we’re hunting the fragments. He’ll have people out. If you have the piece, sell it. Name your price.”

Langer’s eyes darted between them. His hand drifted toward a drawer in his desk, and Mack tensed, but the old man only pulled out a velvet pouch, heavy in his grip.

“This came into my possession twelve years ago,” he said, loosening the drawstring. “A man brought it in claiming he’d found it in the rubble of the old Cortlandt Street station. Paid me in gold, asked no questions, never returned. I’ve kept it safe ever since, waiting for the right moment to—” He stopped mid-sentence, his rheumy eyes fixing on something behind them.

Mack turned. The shop door was swinging shut, but there was no one there—just a ripple in the air, like heat rising off summer asphalt. Then the temperature dropped ten degrees, and the shadows along the floor twisted into shapes that didn’t belong to the furniture.

“Down,” Mack shouted, grabbing Elena by the arm and pulling her behind the desk.

The shot came a heartbeat later. It punched through the glass case beside them, shattering it into a thousand glittering shards. Langer cried out and crumpled, clutching his chest, the velvet pouch falling from his fingers and rolling across the floor.

Mack dove for it, but the shape in the shadows moved faster—a figure in black, featureless as a knife cut, materializing from the darkness between the shelves. Its hand closed around the pouch an instant before Mack reached it. There was no face, but Mack felt its attention on him, cold and patient.

Then it was gone. The door rattled, and the shop was silent except for Langer’s ragged breathing.

Elena was already at the old man’s side, pressing her hands against the wound on his shoulder. He’d been hit, but the shot hadn’t been clean—a graze, not a kill shot.

“He took it,” Langer gasped. “Son of a bitch took it.”

“What did you see?” Mack demanded. “There was nothing there. A shape, a shadow, but no—” He stopped. The Warden had moved like that too. *Not human*, the Warden had said of himself and Salazar’s forces.

Langer’s hand shot out and gripped Mack’s wrist with surprising strength. “The Deep Station,” he wheezed. “That’s where they’ll take it. Under the old Penn Station freight tunnels, the ones that don’t appear on any map. They say it isn’t real, that it’s a myth, a ghost story told to scare the new recruits, but I’ve seen the schematics. My grandfather worked on the original excavation in 1912, before the railroad bought out the rights. He said they found something down there that made the engineers quit in the middle of the night. Never went back.”

“It’s a trap,” Elena said firmly. “Mack, you know it’s a trap.”

“It’s the only lead we have.” Mack found the note the assassin had dropped—a scrap of paper, covered in handwriting that looped and curled like old script. He read it aloud. “*The fragment settles in the belly of the beast, where the City’s heart beats in iron and stone. Come and take it, child of Riley.*”

“It’s addressed to me,” Mack said, his voice flat. “He knew we’d come here. He knew about Langer, about the fragment. This was bait, and we took it.”

“Which is exactly why we shouldn’t go chasing the next hook,” Elena said. “The Warden wants you underground, in a place where he controls the terrain. That’s the worst possible battlefield.”

“And if we wait, he’ll have three fragments to my one,” Mack countered. “The Key half-built, and whatever he needs it for, he can finish without me. My father died protecting these pieces, Elena. I won’t let his death buy nothing.”

Langer coughed, blood flecking his lips. “You want to find the Deep Station, you need to go in the way the old ones did. Through the water.” His eyes rolled, fixing on the map behind him. “There’s a drain in the East River, under the Brooklyn Bridge anchorage. Old storm runoff tunnel, sealed in the sixties when they found a leak they couldn’t plug. The schematics my grandfather saved showed it connecting to the Penn freight line, a hundred feet below the riverbed. If the Deep Station exists, that’s the way in.”

“And if it’s a trap?” Elena asked.

“Then you’re already caught,” Langer said, and his hand loosened around Mack’s wrist. “Thomas was a good man. Better than the organization deserved. If you’re half of what he was, you’ll find a way.”

His eyes closed. For a terrible moment, Mack thought he was gone, but then the old man’s chest rose again in a shallow, rattling breath.

“We need to get him a doctor,” Mack said.

“We need to move,” Elena countered, but her voice was softer now. “The assassin will report back to the Warden. He’s probably already expecting us at the station. If we wait, he’ll fortify the approach. But if we go now, fast, we might get there before he’s ready.”

Mack looked at the note again. *Child of Riley.* The Warden had known his father. From birth, he’d said. What did that mean? What kind of creature watched a man from the moment he drew his first breath?

“I’m going,” Mack said. “You don’t have to come.”

Elena’s jaw tightened. “Don’t be an idiot. You need someone who knows how the Warden thinks.”

“You said yourself it’s a trap.”

“I said it’s a trap,” she agreed. “But that doesn’t mean we don’t spring it. It just means we walk in with our eyes open.”

She helped Langer into a chair and grabbed a grimy coat from a peg by the door, tossing Mack’s to him. He caught it one-handed, the fragment in his pocket humming against his ribs—not with warning, but with something closer to hunger.

It knew where they were going. It wanted them to go there.

Mack pushed the door open, and the Manhattan afternoon hit him like a wall of noise and exhaust. But beneath it, down through the soles of his boots, he could feel the faint tremor of the city’s bones—the deep rumbling of trains, the distant pulse of something older, waiting beneath the lines.

“Brooklyn Bridge anchorage,” he said. “Let’s move.”