The Discarded Disguise

Lightning crossed the west bridge in a single white line.

For half a heartbeat, Morgan Draxler saw everything inside its glare. She saw the Castro attackers braced behind the webbing. She saw the pale shapes hidden by the illusion, packed against the parapet where no people had seemed to be.

Then the spell struck.

The illusion collapsed with the thunder.

Civilians appeared across the bridge. Some were tangled in webbing. Others had been crouching behind the false image of an empty roadway. Every one of them lay still. The lightning had passed through the enemy line and through the people concealed behind it.

Nothing moved.

Morgan stood with one hand still raised. The smell of rain became the smell of burned cloth and scorched flesh. Around her, the battle continued. Steel struck stone. Someone shouted for the party to keep moving west. Another Castro spell burst against the bridge and sent chips of masonry into the runoff.

Morgan looked at the dead because looking away would not change what she had done.

She counted them once. Then again.

That was when she saw the grime below.

A gray-black streak clung to the underside of the bridge. It was too thick to be river mud and too pale to be tar. Lightning had burned a line through it, exposing threads of hair, flakes of skin, and softened cartilage.

The streak continued down a bridge support and disappeared into a maintenance channel.

Morgan climbed over the broken parapet. An explosion swallowed the voice that called after her. She lowered herself onto a wet ledge and descended beneath the bridge.

The first body part lay where the grime crossed the stone.

It was a severed finger. It did not twitch. It did not bleed. Gray-black strands had hardened like glue around its base. The fingertip held several fingerprint patterns layered over one another.

Morgan wrapped it in waxed cloth and placed it in her satchel.

“Not a corpse,” she said. “A draft.”

The battle above shook dust from the arch as she entered the channel. Every spell cast on the bridge arrived below as a dull concussion.

The second piece was an ear pressed into the grime on the wall. Its lower half was human. Its upper edge came to an elven point. Tiny blue scales had formed along the cartilage, but several had collapsed into shapeless skin.

Morgan cut it free and wrapped it separately.

Farther in, she found a hand beneath an iron grate. The palm was broad and callused. The fingers were narrow, smooth, and unequal in age. A purple Lawful checkpoint stamp marked the wrist. Beneath it, the skin had been assembled in overlapping layers, like paper pasted over a frame.

The hand was completely still.

There was almost no blood at the wrist. The grime had sealed the vessels before the piece was discarded.

“Useful,” Morgan murmured as she added it to the satchel.

The trail bent toward an old inspection chamber. Near the doorway, Morgan found a jaw containing human molars, two narrow fangs, and a gold-capped tooth engraved with a green leaf. The hinge was packed with hardened grime.

By then, she understood.

The pieces did not belong to one victim. They were failed components from several stolen identities. The grime was the tissue that bound a disguise together.

Morgan entered the chamber.

A Castro infiltrator sat against the closed sluice gate. It wore the torn uniform of a Lawful guard, but the shape inside was failing. One shoulder was too small. One leg bent at the wrong angle. Half its face held the stern features of a middle-aged man. The other half had slipped into a smooth, unfinished mask.

It was alive. Barely.

Its gaze fixed on Morgan’s satchel.

“You found them,” it said.

The voice began as a man’s and ended as a frightened woman’s.

“I found what you could not keep attached,” Morgan said.

“Give them back.”

“Who are you pretending to be?”

The infiltrator touched the stable half of its face. “The person who opens the next door.”

An impact struck the bridge. A crack ran across the chamber ceiling. The infiltrator flinched, and a strip of false skin peeled from its neck. The material beneath was colorless and wet with the same binder.

Morgan removed the wrapped finger from her satchel but kept it beyond reach.

“Where are the originals?” she asked.

“Some are gone.”

“Some are not.”

Morgan touched the gold-capped tooth. A residue of memory clung to it. Fear. Hot air. Leather straps. The creak of a heavy door.

“Where?”

“Under the old tannery,” the infiltrator whispered. “Warm rooms. Keep them breathing. Memory holds better while they breathe.”

Morgan folded the finger back into its cloth.

The infiltrator lunged.

Its damaged leg failed on the first step. Morgan caught its uniform and drove necrotic force through the tissue beneath the disguise. The binder dried at once. Cracks spread across the borrowed face. Several incomplete features appeared in the broken surface.

Then the infiltrator fell.

Morgan waited until its breathing stopped. She did not mistake stillness for death. When she was certain, she collected a vial of the binder, the gold-capped tooth, and the Lawful-stamped hand. She sealed the remaining body behind the sluice gate and scratched a necromancer’s warning into the stone.

When she climbed back to the bridge approach, smoke had turned the daylight dark and bruised. Her companions were already pushing toward the sewers. She fell back into formation before anyone had time to stop her.

“Where were you?” someone shouted.

“Below,” Morgan answered.

The satchel struck softly against her hip as she ran.

Later, with the bridge behind them, Morgan unwrapped the finger beneath her cloak. She compared its layered prints with the hands she remembered among the dead.

One pattern matched a civilian from the bridge.

The Castro had not hidden those people only to use them as shields.

They had been taking inventory.