Chapter 39: Chapter 30: Chaisi: The Form of the Illusion

Chaisi hauled himself up onto the platform and rolled clear just in time — the subway train screamed past, grazing his back as it thundered into the station.

The frozen bite of metal, the wall of hard air it threw out — it felt like something had stripped a layer of flesh clean off his back. If he’d reached back and found half his skull missing, he wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised.

He pushed himself up off the ground, breathing hard, as the train gradually shuddered to a stop. In the reflection on the car windows, he was still in one piece.

...He’d always had pretty good luck.

The train departing from this platform rumbled in right on cue, like it had been arranged that way — blocking the police on the other side of the tracks. Even if they tried to follow his lead, they’d have to go the long way around and lose a good chunk of time doing it.

The shouting from the other platform was swallowed up by the train, only fragments drifting back through the noise: "You two, go after him — get to the other exit and check everyone who leaves, every single person!"

Chaisi couldn’t help but laugh. He rolled out his neck and shoulders, tipped his head back, and let out a long breath.

For just one second, he let himself sink into it — the rush of adrenaline, the heat of it flooding through his blood.

When he opened his eyes, all the doors were sliding open. Passengers poured out and spread across the platform.

"Hey!" A man in a driver’s uniform was climbing down from the front of the train, shouting across at him. "Are you out of your mind? You almost got yourself killed —"

Before the man could get a good look at his face, Chaisi pivoted smoothly and slipped into the crowd of departing passengers. The driver muttered a few choice words, then turned and climbed back aboard. The moment he did, Chaisi shouldered past the person next to him and lunged through the car doors just before they closed.

The entire train was empty. Not a soul in sight.

He looked both ways — the carriages stretched out ahead and behind him, an endless repetition of hanging loops and plastic seats. Strip away the people, and a subway train became something else entirely: a narrow, repeating corridor like the belly of a roundworm. Strange, really.

The train began to ease forward at a crawl — probably heading to the turning loop before it came back around for passengers. Chaisi walked toward the rear, the floor swaying gently underfoot, and stepped into the last carriage.

Ads plastered on the walls, hanging grips, poles, seats, graffiti, food wrappers, a plastic bottle rolling around on the floor — looked like any ordinary carriage. Plenty of places to hide something, when you thought about it. Not too many, not too few.

...The part that required the most patience was about to begin.

That was fine.

Whether you were in the Nest or the waking world, whatever you were hunting, a good Hunter needed patience. And patience was something Chaisi had in abundance.

"If I were a clever idiot," he murmured to himself, "...where would I hide an Illusion?"

To have any hope of answering that, he first needed to know what kind of Illusion he was actually after.

Illusions came in every shape imaginable — and plenty that weren’t — endlessly varied, stretching far beyond the limits of human imagination. But he didn’t need to go fishing blind. Any Hunter in Blackmoor City worth their salt had heard something about Westley’s Illusions.

And Kai Luonan had been a Hunter for decades, his network of contacts in Blackmoor City deep and wide. Intelligence connected to Illusions almost always found its way to his ears eventually.

"I need you to get your hands on at least one of the Illusions from Westley’s study. Even just one will do."

Kai Luonan had summoned Chaisi the moment news of Westley’s death came through. The sky outside had still been that pale duck-egg blue, a thin haze hanging over everything. Chaisi only learned later that when he’d sat down at the breakfast table, Westley had been dead for exactly three hours.

At that moment, Madam Westley — still alone in Blackmoor City — was asleep, not yet knowing she was a widow.

And in one hour and twenty-one minutes, Ivan would walk out of Westley Manor with the Illusions he’d stolen.

"The first Illusion — he bought it from me years ago. A black cube, about ten centimeters on each side."

Kai Luonan’s voice was flat and even. It was impossible to tell whether he regretted the sale.

Westley’s Illusions had built him a business empire that ranked among the most powerful on the planet. Looking back at the wealth and reach he’d accumulated, it was almost strange that anyone had ever been willing to sell him those four Illusions in the first place — but perhaps that was exactly what set Westley apart: his ability to look at something and see a future in it that no one else could.

If anyone had known just how valuable those Illusions would turn out to be, no one would have ever sold them to him.

"The second one is a set of tailoring tools."

Kai Luonan paused. "I’ve heard the set is roughly the size of a laptop, though I can’t say for certain whether that’s accurate. By all accounts, it’s the most precious of the four — the most important. If getting it means trading away the entire Family Faction, so be it."

Chaisi had once, in his spare time, tried to put a number on the Kai Family Faction’s worth.

Family Factions were hard to categorize — they operated like criminal gangs but ran like modern corporations, some hybrid of both. By corporate standards, the Kai Family Faction’s valuation ran well into the tens of millions. And from the way Kai Luonan said it, trading the whole thing away sounded almost like getting a bargain.

"What does it do?" Chaisi asked.

"If you get your hands on it, you’ll know. Until then, the less you know, the better off you are."

Chaisi nodded. "What about the other two?"

Kai Luonan sighed and set down his coffee cup.

"The later the Illusions came into his possession, the less I know about them... He sealed off most of the channels through which information could leak. The third one is said to be extremely dangerous. After he acquired it, any adversary that money, power, law, or market forces couldn’t remove would simply disappear from the world in a neat, convenient way — oil merchants as far away as Yemen were no exception."

Beyond "extremely dangerous," he gave no details. Chaisi didn’t raise a single objection.

He was the man the Kai Family sent in when there was a problem that needed solving. Incomplete information was just part of the job.

"But the more powerful an Illusion, the shorter the time it can persist in the waking world. It may have already burned out by now..." Uncle Kai murmured.

"And the fourth?" Chaisi asked.

Kai Luonan was quiet for a few seconds.

"All I have on it is a rumor," he said quietly. "...It is a rumor about something that makes rumors."

Chaisi forgot to chew. He let the piece of egg just sit there on his tongue for a moment.

When he finally caught up with himself and swallowed, he pressed for clarification: "Uncle Kai — you’re saying the Illusion itself exists as a ’rumor,’ its function is to ’create rumors’... and all of that is itself just a rumor you’ve heard?"

Kai Luonan nodded. "That’s right. Goes round and round — enough to keep you thinking for a while."

Why would Westley want a rumor that made rumors?

And besides — how were you supposed to find a rumor?

Then again, when it came to the Nest and its Illusions, no matter how bizarre or impossible something seemed, you couldn’t simply assume it didn’t exist.

If what he was looking for was a "rumor" — something you couldn’t see or touch — then at the very least, it ought to have a sound, right?

And if a Hunter had once been able to bring it back to the waking world, there was no reason Chaisi couldn’t find it.

He stood in the carriage and tilted his head, listening — gradually sorting the ambient noise and filing it away: the screech of wheels on rail, the hiss of air from the vents, the clatter of the car’s mechanical parts. Not a single sound anywhere close to a human voice.

No faint whispers drifting through the carriage like something out of a haunting. Did that mean the fourth Illusion wasn’t here?

He hadn’t really expected to find an Illusion right out of the gate, anyway...

Chaisi exhaled and, for the first time, cursed his own height.

He folded himself down onto the floor like a giant spider trying to tuck in its legs, and peered under the row of seats, taking in every inch of the floor beneath them in one sweep: a forgotten shopping bag, a single earbud, a fire extinguisher, stains, and — of all things — a lone shoe. Whoever owned it might well have hopped off the train with one bare foot.

Sounded like a lot, but under most of the seats there was nothing at all. One glance was enough to rule them out. Still — even a piece of chewing gum wasn’t something Chaisi could afford to overlook.

He pulled a short black rod from the back of his waistband, snapped it open with a few sharp flicks, and extended it to arm’s length — solid and weighted, with a T-shaped iron head at one end and a textured grip at the other.

Blackmoor State law banned civilians from carrying firearms in public, which meant a gun sometimes caused more trouble than it was worth. He’d never imagined that this trusty, always-on-hand weapon of his would come in handy today for an entirely different purpose.

He was a patient man — but as Chaisi crouched there nudging trash around under the seats with his beloved weapon, hooking the stinking shoe aside, poking at a wad of gum, then straightening up to run his eyes along the carriage ads, he couldn’t quite shake the feeling that this was exactly the kind of work you were supposed to hand off to a low-ranking new recruit.

But no one else could have done it as fast and as thoroughly as he could. In a few minutes, he’d swept the entire carriage clean.

Chaisi stopped and glanced out the window.

The train had not, as he’d expected, looped back around to the departure platform. Instead it had slowed further and further, and finally stopped altogether.

Outside, the tunnel was dim, washed in a dull yellow glow that barely lit the open space — a vast, cavern-like expanse with multiple tracks running parallel and crisscrossing beneath a high vaulted ceiling, like a compressed aerial view of a highway interchange.

This was clearly not a place meant for passengers. Where exactly had the train brought him?

As he moved on to search the next carriage, he heard footsteps approaching from the other end.

Whoever it was had a set of keys jangling at their hip, and was humming tunelessly — the same fragment, over and over: *baby please don’t go*. Apparently that was the only part they knew.

Chaisi straightened up, T-bar in hand, and stood still in the middle of the carriage, waiting.

A man in a subway worker’s uniform walked in — and froze the moment he stepped into the second carriage. It was the driver from earlier, the one who’d shouted at him on the platform.

"When did you get on?" His face went rigid, though the confusion and the low undercurrent of fear were harder to hide. "What do you think you’re doing up here? This train is being taken out of service. You need to get off. Now."

Out of service meant no passengers for a good while.

At his current pace, another forty minutes and he’d have searched the entire train. Not going back into service actually suited him fine. The only problem was, staying on board would go a lot more smoothly with this man’s cooperation.

Chaisi had his T-bar. He also had a wallet full of cash — in an age of cards and digital payments, carrying physical money around served basically one purpose.

He was weighing which approach to use when the driver looked at his face, then at the T-bar, and something shifted. The fear the man had been working to suppress started bleeding through.

"You — you’re not..." He stumbled backward two steps, voice faltering. "I’ve got a family. Kids. Please... I’m begging you..."

Who does he think I am?

Chaisi was genuinely taken aback. He was careful about these things — outside Hunter circles, almost no one knew who he was. He’d just run a car chase through a few city blocks and apparently already had a reputation?

Wait. A *reputation*?

Something flashed through Chaisi’s mind like lightning splitting open a bank of heavy cloud — not entirely clear, not fully illuminated, but enough to seize on what mattered.

Then the driver whispered, voice shaking: "You — you’re really him? The subway serial killer they’ve been talking about?"

Chaisi slowly ran his tongue across his lips.

...He’d found the Illusion.