✦ MAXINE ✦

She lowered her camera.
The decisive moment, Cartier-Bresson had called it, that impossible fraction of a second when every element in the frame conspires to mean something, light and shadow and motion and stillness collapsing into a single truth the eye almost misses. Maxine had been chasing that fraction for three years and had caught it maybe twice. Tonight was not going to be one of those nights.
The alley between the humanities building and the old stone wall of the library had looked promising an hour ago, the way the sodium lamp threw a hard orange cone against the wet cobblestones, the shadows underneath that sharp enough to cut yourself on. Caravaggio would have wept. She had set her exposure, waited, and watched a grand total of two pigeons and one very disinterested grad student walk through the frame.
Maxine capped her lens and tucked the Nikon FM2 into the crook of her arm. Film, not digital. Her professor, Dr. Osei, called it affectation. She called it honesty. Digital gave you everything and forgave you everything and you came away with two hundred images and none of them cost you anything. Film cost you. Every frame was a decision you couldn’t take back, and she had always believed that things you couldn’t take back were the only things worth doing.
It was nothing like the light at home. Nothing in this city was.
She checked her phone. Eleven forty-seven. No messages from Priya.
That made four days.
She told herself what she had been telling herself since Saturday, that Priya was fine. That she had gone home to her parents for a long weekend and forgotten to tell anyone. That the unanswered texts and the dark apartment window and the missed Thursday darkroom session without a word were all explainable. She was being the anxious catastrophist her therapist had gently suggested she sometimes was. She told herself this with the confidence of someone who did not quite believe it. (She didn’t.)
Across the city, somewhere in the middle distance, a siren climbed and fell.
She started walking.
She passed the chip shop on the corner of Northgate, still open, hot oil and vinegar briefly cutting through the cold, and a small queue at the cash machine outside the Spar.
Ashmore was the kind of city that remembered things. You could feel it in the weight of the buildings and the way the streets bent around corners that hadn’t changed in a hundred years. She had spent three years studying what the Accord had built here and lately she was finding it harder to keep the study academic, the advocacy groups outside the council offices getting louder, the Draveth question that the textbooks called a contained incident starting to feel, from the inside of it, like something else entirely.
She turned her collar up against the October cold and tried not to think about Priya, which meant she thought about Priya, and then about Marcus who had gone quiet two weeks ago and stopped responding to anything, and then about Lena who had sent one text on a Thursday that said I’ll explain later and then nothing after that.
She had been in this city for three Octobers and she had not forgiven a single one of them.
The city felt wrong in the way a photograph felt wrong before you could name the reason, not obviously, not in any way she could point to yet, just off at the edges in a way she couldn’t shake.
She kept walking and she kept not being able to name it.

✦ DAIMON ✦

Forty minutes watching her work.
He didn’t need the cameras or the satellite coordinates or any of the files the council’s intelligence team had sent along with his briefing. Three centuries of practice had made the rest of it simple, a street, a good position, and the kind of stillness that most people couldn’t hold for five minutes but that he could hold for as long as he needed. She came out of the side entrance of the photography building at ten past eleven with a film camera tucked under her arm that probably predated the internet, moving like someone who knew exactly where she was going even when where she was going was just an alley to stand in.
He had watched her work.
It wasn’t what he had expected, which was a problem, because he had learned a long time ago not to form opinions from paper before he had eyes on the subject himself. The briefing had given him a name and a face and a blood type and a clinical breakdown of what that blood type meant, and he had read it the way he read everything, once, completely, and then set it aside and waited to see what was actually in front of him. Opinions formed from paper were liabilities. He knew this.
The girl, Maxine Reyes, twenty-two, third year, stood in an alley for forty minutes waiting for pigeons and a graduate student to stop ruining her frame. She did not check her phone compulsively. She did not shift her weight or huff or abandon the shot the way most people abandoned things that made them wait. She held her position with a patience that struck him, unexpectedly, as familiar.
He let it go.
She turned south toward the halls and he moved with her, parallel on the opposite side of the street and forty feet back, which was closer than protocol suggested and further than instinct wanted. Both things were true. He didn’t resolve the contradiction.
The council had pulled him off a retrieval in Prague for this. Director Vayne had delivered the assignment personally, which meant it was either a great honor or a significant problem, and Daimon had long ago learned that with Vayne those two categories were the same thing. She had set the briefing folder on the table between them and said: the Draveth know about the girl. They will move within the month.
He had been surprised. He did not often find himself surprised. Not at the Draveth, their movements had been predictable since the defection, brutal in a way that three centuries had taught him to read the way a physician read symptoms. What surprised him was Ashmore.
He had been here before. 1961, briefly, on a transit assignment that had lasted three weeks and left no mark on the city worth noting. He remembered a different university building on this corner, stone, replaced now with glass and steel, and a pub on the corner of Carver Street, and across from it a café that had been a butcher’s shop in 1961, and the particular amber quality of the October light on this latitude that had not changed at all. Cities changed. Light did not.
What surprised him was being sent back. In three centuries Vayne had never sent him somewhere twice. He had asked her why, directly, in the way he asked her things he genuinely did not know the answer to. She had looked at him with the expression that meant the answer was in the question.
He had not yet worked out what the answer was.
He asked how certain they were about the blood’s properties.
Certain enough, Vayne had said, that I am sending you.
He moved through the amber streets of Ashmore and watched Maxine Reyes walk home without any idea of what she was carrying, the reversal agent, the thing that three centuries of peace had been built to make sure never ended up in the wrong hands, and he was old enough to remember clearly what the world had looked like before the Accord made that peace possible, and he had absolutely no desire to see it again.
She stopped at a corner and looked at her phone and her face in the glow of it was open and unguarded in a way it hadn’t been all evening, worried, clearly, about something or someone, and then she smoothed it away fast and kept walking like she had decided that whatever it was, she was going to deal with it later.
Someone she was worried about. Someone who wasn’t answering.
He knew about the missing students. It was in the briefing. He did not let himself think about what it meant that she did not yet know they were connected to her.
She put her phone away and kept walking.
He would make contact tomorrow. Tonight, he was learning the geometry of her life, the routes she walked, the habits she kept, the exits and the chokepoints and the places where she was most exposed. He did his job.
He was not thinking about her standing in that alley, the way she had held her ground and waited for the world to become what she needed it to be.
That was not what he was thinking about.

Want to keep reading? Bloodright is coming fall 2026.