Luke stood over the body for three seconds.

Then the Bureau agent in him took over.

Not the transmigrator. Not the man who had read a novel and woken up in someone else's skin. What moved now was older than all of that — training laid down over years, carved into muscle and nerve until it ran ahead of conscious thought.

His eyes swept the alley from end to end.

Short fight. Violent, but contained. The damage was mostly ice — frost webbing the walls, the ground frozen in uneven patches, a cracked section of brick near the midpoint, and the shattered remains of the ice wall by the far exit. Blood had pooled beneath the body and was already beginning to freeze into the snow.

The dropped handgun lay where he'd tossed it.

The alley was narrow, tucked between two old apartment blocks. Both walls were solid brick — no windows facing in from either building, only a few rusted pipes and a single dead fire escape above. The light at the far end flickered weakly. The snow was coming down hard enough to reduce visibility to a few metres in any direction.

No witnesses. A single shot in a space this enclosed, in weather this loud, would never reach anyone's window. Good. But good wasn't enough.

He needed clean.

Evidence first, body second — the rule was simple. A body could wait in the cold. A scene could not. Every second that passed was another second for someone to walk through this alley and find ice on the walls, blood on the ground, and claw marks in the brick.

Luke raised his hand and pulled back.

All of it.

The frost on the walls answered immediately. The ice sheets across the ground released without resistance. The clamps that had locked the assassin's boots to the concrete cracked and dissolved. The shattered remains of the ice wall broke apart into vapour. Everything his power had made during the fight came apart at his call — mist rising briefly into the falling snow and disappearing, leaving bare, damp brick behind it.

Thirty seconds. The walls were clear.

Damp stone in winter drew no second looks. The one exception was a cracked section of brick where an ice spike had struck too hard during the fight and split the surface. He couldn't repair brick with ice power, but he pressed a thin layer of frost into the crack, packed it tight, then scraped loose grit from the ground and set it into the frozen surface. From any distance, the damage read as ordinary weather wear on an old wall. Close enough.

The bullet scar on the opposite wall was shallow — the round had passed through the assassin's robe, spent most of its energy against the defensive weave beneath, and struck the brickwork at a reduced angle. In an alley this old, one more chip of damaged brick was indistinguishable from the rest.

Now the blood.

Forensic awakeners on the Bureau's staff could read residual energy from biological material — not just presence, but sequence, identity, cause. Even a small stain left behind was a story left behind.

Luke crouched beside the main pool, where the ice blade had opened the throat. The blood had already started to freeze against the ground, thickening into a dark sheet that clung to both snow and concrete.

He pressed both hands flat to the ground near the edge and pushed.

Cold spread outward from his palms — not the broad chill of a frost field, but something precise and concentrated. He drove the temperature of the surface down sharply, far below what the winter alone was managing. The blood locked solid — not just the surface layer, but every drop, every splash, every thin trail that had found its way into the cracks between the stones.

Then he reversed direction and pulled upward.

The frozen blood responded to his power the way water responds to a current, separating from the concrete in thin, brittle sheets. The deep freeze had prevented it from soaking too far into the stone; it peeled away cleanly, rising in dark flat pieces that he gathered into a compressed mass about the size of two fists. He checked the ground where the stain had been.

Nothing. Damp concrete, cold, but no colour. No dark patches. No trace.

He worked the rest of the alley the same way — the bleeds from the shoulder and leg wounds, the scattered drops, the smeared streaks where a wounded limb had dragged. Some were barely visible against the snow. He found them all, treated them all, and added everything to the mass in his hand until it was dense and cold and dark. He wrapped it in a piece of plastic torn from near a drainpipe and put it in his grocery bag.

He'd dispose of it somewhere far from here.

Luke stood and scanned the alley one last time.

The ice was gone. The blood was gone. The visible damage was concealed or minor enough to ignore. The snow was already filling in the disturbed ground, layering fresh white over footprints and scuff marks. The overhead light flickered its same dim yellow, unchanged from before the fight.

Clean.

He picked up the handgun first — wiped the grip, confirmed the chamber, slid it into his coat. Then he crouched beside the body.

The mask came off first.

Ordinary features, deliberately so: no tattoos, no intentional scarring, nothing pierced or branded or marked. Pale skin, naturally so. Short dark hair. A lean, low-mass build. Late twenties, maybe thirty. The kind of face that moved through a crowd and left no impression on anyone.

He searched methodically — every pocket, every seam, every fold of fabric, the mask's inner lining, the straps of the claw mechanism, the soles of the boots.

Nothing.

Professionally empty. The body had been prepared for this outcome as carefully as for any other — nothing that traced back to a sender, no middle ground between clean success and clean failure. Whoever had funded this operation had expected either outcome and planned for both.

Luke looked at the three artifacts.

The robe. The claws. The mask.

All high-quality. Three items like this on one operative was serious money — not a desperate rival or a contract thrown together quickly, but investment, access, and planning. The robe's inner lining had stopped a direct round. The claws were purpose-built for the work. The mask he turned over in his hands, checking the inner surface and the markings along the rim: an energy-signature suppressor, designed to keep a user's power from registering on active scanners. He'd processed similar pieces during his Bureau years. Common enough among professionals who needed to move undetected; expensive enough to confirm the picture the rest of the scene was already painting.

Leaving any of it behind wasn't an option. Artifacts could be examined, traced, and read by the right people. He stripped the robe from the body — heavier than it looked, the defensive weave adding density — folded it tight, and twisted the claws free of their glove mechanism. He wrapped the mask and claws inside the robe into a single bundle and set it beside the body.

He needed a destination.

The original Luke had kept a field cache two blocks from here: a maintenance room in the basement of a condemned service building, locked up and fenced off after an awakener incident had compromised the structure years ago, sitting on a demolition schedule that had never actually been acted on. The kind of place every large city quietly produced — officially forgotten, structurally sound enough to be useful, left unwatched by anyone with better things to do. Field agents developed a habit of places like it. He had the address from the original's memories, along with the entrance, the lock, and the layout.

It would hold the body and the artifacts until he could make better arrangements.

Luke got the body over one shoulder and tucked the bundle under his other arm. Light — consistent with a speed-type build, lean and compact, not an ounce carried that didn't serve velocity.

One last look.

The alley was bare and dark, fresh snow settling steadily over the ground where the fight had been. The overhead light kept its weak rhythm against the cold.

Nothing left to find.