Chapter 10: Neighborhood Watch

(True-but-unseen account)

If you are searching for a story about a boy who breaks into a villain’s house at midnight, cracks the safe, and walks out with the treasure, close this book now. Dear Reader, Arthur Specter had a much cheaper plan than that, and it started with a girl knocking on a door and saying one sentence out loud.

"You have my coins," Hadjer said. "I’m taking them back before the month ends."

She’d rehearsed it on the bus ride over, word for word, no extra syllables. Arthur had written the script himself and checked it three times for anything that even smelled like the Game, so the mark had nothing to grab.

It still made her flinch. Small, private, a hand drifting toward her throat and stopping halfway.

The door had opened four inches. Lyra’s face filled the gap, quick-eyed and smiling a half-second early, the way it always did. Then the smile arrived, and the door shut hard enough to rattle the mail slot.

Hadjer walked back across the street without looking behind her. Arthur was waiting for her there, and this was the part of the plan that cost money.

The apartment sat directly across from Lyra’s house, second floor, and it was Hadjer’s idea and Hadjer’s money.

A family credit card, a landlord who cared more about the deposit than the age of his tenants, and a phone call in which Hadjer did an excellent impression of her father’s assistant. The Academy had been handled the same way Lyra had handled it: two "sick" notes sent from their mothers’ accounts. Arthur’s parents were now officially suffering from a stomach flu that would have killed a horse.

From the window, Lyra’s house was a postcard. Blue shutters, a lawn somebody mowed on a schedule and nobody sat on. Her parents worked long shifts, so the place stayed empty from breakfast to midnight, except for one girl and one upstairs curtain.

The apartment smelled like old radiator and lemon cleaner. On the windowsill sat a leftover houseplant in a chipped clay pot, its green leaves curling upward like the landlord’s one attempt at making the place feel homey.

By the end of the first day, the leaves had gone brown and crisp at the edges. Hadjer noticed before Arthur did, and she apologized to the pot under her breath, the way she apologized for everything her passive touched.

"It’s fine," Arthur said. "It was already looking at us funny."

She almost laughed. He counted that as a win.

They took shifts at the window. Binoculars on a tripod, two cheap cameras taped behind the blinds, a notebook he filled the way he’d once filled a dead phone’s storage. Every time Lyra’s curtain twitched, somebody was staring back. Sometimes it was Arthur, chin on his fist. Sometimes it was Hadjer, a pale face in a dark glass. Never blinking first.

He tried to appraise Lyra on the first day. The window in his vision just sat there, blank and patient. Out of range. A street and a curtain didn’t count, apparently.

Fine. Old-fashioned way, then.

By day three, the notebook had turned into a schedule.

At 3:40 every afternoon, a battered yellow shuttle rolled down the street, the Academy’s ride for cadets with no way home. It stopped at Lyra’s corner and honked twice. Every afternoon, same two honks, and every afternoon, nobody climbed aboard.

At 4:10, a man in a gray delivery vest walked the block. No packages. He stopped at Lyra’s mailbox, dropped in a small white card, and moved on.

Then, two minutes later, he did the same thing across the street. He came up the apartment stairs, slid a card under their door, and left before Hadjer could reach the handle.

"He knew where I was," she said quietly. "I didn’t tell anyone."

"The mark," Arthur said, working it out as he spoke. "It probably comes with a basic tracker. Wherever you go, they know."

The card was plain, no logo. Just numbers in clean black print.

DAYS REMAINING: 24

LYRA — 2,000 COINS

HADJER — 0 COINS

Hadjer read it twice. Then she folded it very small and put it in her pocket, like a bill she couldn’t afford to lose.

"You’re not losing," Arthur said. "You just haven’t gotten your coins back yet."

"That’s what losing is."

She went back to the couch and didn’t say anything else for an hour. Arthur wrote Game employee in the notebook, underlined it twice, and added, smaller: Same time. Every day. Both houses.

Meanwhile, across the street, Lyra was coming apart in tidy increments.

Day one, she checked the window twice an hour. Day two, she checked the locks. By day four, she’d dragged her mattress against the door, then dragged it back, then stood in the middle of her room for ten full minutes with her arms wrapped around a satchel, staring at the ceiling like the plaster might confess.

Once she looked straight at their window and mouthed something. Arthur waved.

She yanked the curtain shut so fast it rippled.

A watched door starts to breathe like a cage...

the mind builds bars once fear sets the stage.

On Thursday, at 2:15 in the afternoon, it felt like a stair that wasn’t there.

His foot came down and found one more step than expected. Something warm and sour rolled into him, from no direction at all, and settled under his ribs like swallowed static. He nearly dropped the binoculars.

[EMOTION ABSORBED: FEAR — INTENSITY 2.]

[GHOST LEVEL 2.]

[+1 STR · AGI · DEX · INT · VIG · WIL.]

Boophone waited a moment, then added, with what Arthur could only describe as smugness:

STR 7 · AGI 7 · DEX 7 · INT 13 · VIG 9 · WIL 21

HP: 208/208 · MP: 180/180

"Yes," he hissed, punching the air. It was the first level he’d earned by scaring someone, and he was appalled at how good it felt.

"What?" Hadjer looked up from the couch.

"I leveled up. Her fear, it..." He caught himself grinning and made his face stop. "Sorry. Terrible thing to be happy about. Not like you even understand what that means." He thought that explaining to her that he had a ghost side that absorbs emotions as EXP to level up was a bad idea anyway.

Hadjer didn’t smile. She was staring at the folded card in her hand, and when she spoke it sounded like she’d been holding the question for days.

"Is this even working? She has Vault. She can carry those coins anywhere. She could walk out her front door and it wouldn’t matter how scared she is."

"She doesn’t have Vault."

Hadjer stared at him.

"Think about it." Arthur set the binoculars down. "If you could fold space and hide two thousand coins where no one could touch them, would you spend a week in your bedroom hugging a bag? You’d go to class. You’d buy a sandwich."

"She’s sick. She sent a note."

"From her mother’s account. Same as us." He tapped the notebook. "The shuttle honks every day and she never even looks. She isn’t sick. She’s guarding something, and it’s in that room."

"Then why lie about Vault?"

"Because she needed you to believe the coins were somewhere you couldn’t reach. Vault was a story, and you brought her the ending." He rubbed his eyes. "But she does have a real Talent, something small, something that does one trick. And you said it yourself, pets are tied to Talents."

Hadjer went still. "The serpent. It kept changing color."

"Changing color, glittering, and I wish to point out the fact you mention about her being poor." He looked at her room. "Look at her room."

She took the binoculars.

The room was pretty in a magazine kind of way. A curved silver lamp, a wall screen thin as paper, a glass vase with something blooming in it. Across the window hung a sheer curtain the color of moonlight, the kind that cost more than Arthur’s family paid in rent.

"I’m poor," Arthur said, quietly. "I know what the newest version of anything costs, and I know I’ve never owned it. She hasn’t either. Nobody’s ever that lucky with a lamp."

The curtain, when Hadjer looked again, was thinning.

She saw it first at the hem, a faint shimmer along the edge, like heat over a road. Then a corner went soft and see-through. A stripe of the real window showed underneath: cheap plastic blinds, stained yellow with age.

"It’s fading," she whispered.

"It’s been fading for two days." Arthur felt tired and a little sick about it. "She has a limit. Everything in that room is a bill she can’t afford to keep paying."

Lyra sat on the edge of her bed. Her head drooped, jerked up, drooped again. She rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand and dragged the satchel closer, and the curtain lost another inch of color.

Hadjer lowered the binoculars. When she spoke, her voice had changed, hard-edged and clear.

"She’s been sitting on my coins the whole time. Right there."

"Right there."

Wishes woven thin fade in the light...

the cheapest fakes are dressed too bright.

That night, Arthur added a line to the notebook and stared at it for a while.

Coins are physical. In her room. She can’t leave. She can’t sleep.

Not a bad haul for a week. The only thing missing was the ending.

The next afternoon, he glanced at the clock. 4:10, right on the second.

The gray vest turned the corner as always, eyes forward, empty hands unless you counted the cards. He dropped one in Lyra’s box. Then he stopped walking.

He didn’t look at Lyra’s house. He turned, slowly, and looked straight up at the apartment window, straight at the gap in the blinds where a binocular lens caught the light. His face didn’t change. He lifted one hand and tapped two fingers against his wrist, where a watch would be.

Then he walked on, ten minutes early, for the first time in six days.

The tracker was on Hadjer. It had never been on Arthur.

Someone, Arthur thought, just noticed I’m helping her. We’re being watched too.

TO BE CONTINUED...