I swallowed a helping of my much milder butter chicken. “What do you mean?”

“Throwing a harmless intern in with a bona fide serial killer? That’s insane. You two shouldn’t even be in the same building.”

“They only have one building.”

“Are you defending them?”

“God, no.”

She wiped her mouth. Her food was so spicy that her breath made my eyes burn from across the table. “Those bastards are so caught up in their control and authoritarianism that they forget they’re dealing with real people.”

That sure sounded like certain people in the MPD, namely Captain Blythe. “I guess so.”

“You guess so?” She guffawed. “I’d think someone who went through what you did would be harder on them.”

“Well, I mean, some of them are just trying to keep the peace.”

“Some of them? Like Agent Shen?” Vera gave me a scathing look. “Was she pretty? Did she smile at you all nice while manipulating you into helping arrest your friend?”

I scowled. “I suggested it, not her. The point was to get out of the precinct to escape.”

The fact I’d started to like Lienna had nothing to do with anything.

“And my point is that Shen is no better than the rest of them. She just hides it better.” Vera rammed another piece of naan bread in her mouth. “My dad used to deal with those MagiPol bastards for his job sometimes.”

“Your dad?”

“He was a community management liaison before he retired.”

That sounded … normal. Based on the tattoos and the leather and the overall attitude, I’d assumed Vera had grown up on the streets of some grungy metropolis where she had to hunt rats for her supper.

“It was his job to arbitrate between mythic communities and the MPD,” she carried on, ramming her fork into her bowl, “and all they ever did was jerk him around. Because what could he even do, right? You can’t fight the MPD. You either fall in line or you hide in the shadows.”

“Is that what you’re doing? Hiding?”

“As far as the MPD is concerned, I am a law-abiding mythic who dabbles in bounty hunting.”

“Don’t we need MagiPol, though?” I speared a piece of chicken with my fork. “I mean, what would happen without the MPD? It’d be chaos, wouldn’t it? They’re the only thing keeping the human world from knowing about us.”

“So what?” She chewed another mouthful of curry-flavored lava. “Do you think we need the MPD to keep us safe from humans?”

My mind drifted to the number of ankles I’d broken by “redecorating” a street curb, and compared to most mythics, my power was harmless. “I was more thinking the other way around. They need to keep humans safe from us.”

She scoffed. “You’re sounding an awful lot like a goddamn agent. MagiPol’s whole game is keeping magic under wraps.”

“‘Keep it secret; keep it safe,’” I quoted quietly.

“Yeah, Gandalf. Like that. The MPD doesn’t give a flying shit about keeping humans safe. They barely even care about keeping mythics safe. All they care about is keeping magic safe. You wanna know why?”

“I have a feeling you’ll tell me either way.”

“Power.” She pointed her fork at me in emphasis. “MagiPol has serious clout with all the world powers. Presidents and kings and shit. Their heaviest card is keeping magic from leaking out into the human world, because nobody in charge wants that. It would be a serious inversion of the system if all of a sudden the X-Men were running around out in the open.”

“I appreciate the reference, but we’re not mutants. Technically speaking.”

“Regimes would be toppled in no time because mythics would rule the land. So, the MPD keeps us regular mythics from screwing up their systems, and in return, the human leaders do basically whatever the MPD wants.”

I leaned back in my chair. “That’s a bleak outlook.”

“It’s not an outlook, Kit. It’s reality.” She shrugged, then wiped her nose with a sniffle. I guess she wasn’t immune to the million-degree curry after all. “The MPD won’t last forever. Instagram and selfies and surveillance cameras are gonna make it real hard for us to stay hidden indefinitely. It’s a miracle the only humans blabbing about us are wingnut conspiracy theorists who think Kubrick faked the moon landing.”

“How do you know he didn’t?”

“Trust me, he didn’t fake anything. He was a mythic, but he wasn’t a fraud.”

“Stanley Kubrick was a mythic?” I gasped. Everyone at KCQ had known I was a movie buff. How could they have universally failed to mention that one of the greatest film directors of all time had magical powers?

“Yeah. A telepath.”

“That is so awesome.”

From there, the conversation devolved into a debate about the greatest Kubrick films of all time (A Clockwork Orange versus Dr. Strangelove) and then into a debate about the greatest directors of all time (Scorsese versus Kurosawa) and then back to our plan for stealing from Faustus Trivium.

It took the better part of the afternoon, but we nailed down a strategy. The only problem was I didn’t have the skills necessary for the very first step. That skill? Making Vera invisible to every person in Faustus’s crappy diner.

The “every person” part wasn’t an issue. Targeting a bunch of individual minds gets hella tricky, but I can easily dump the same vision on everyone around me—a grenade instead of a sniper rifle. Or as I prefer to call it, a halluci-bomb. While this method requires far less focus, it saps my psychic fuel like a gas-guzzling pickup truck racing uphill. Still, I could handle it for long enough to pull off our little heist.

The real problem was the invisibility portion. I can make objects invisible no problem, and I make myself invisible whenever I do a Split Kit diversion. But just as I couldn’t make Maggie invisible to aid in our escape from the café, I couldn’t make Vera invisible. It never worked for some reason.

Now I needed to figure it out.

I gave it my first serious attempt once we were back on Vera’s boat. Targeting her mind, I tried to imitate the Split Kit hallucination, pushing beyond myself and onto her.

The result? A semi-transparent Kit and a wholly opaque Vera.

Two hours of headache-inducing effort got me no further than that. Vera ditched me to get more food, and sitting alone in the gently rocking boat, I rubbed my temples. I could make myself invisible. I could make inanimate stuff invisible. Why couldn’t I make Vera invisible?

With no new ideas, I practiced making objects on the boat vanish. It wasn’t difficult—I did it all the time with Redecorator hallucinations. What was the roadblock between Vera’s saltshaker and Vera herself?

I tried bigger objects: the microwave, the bed, the chair. I even stepped out onto the dock and made the entire damn boat disappear. I was David freaking Copperfield.

Vera returned with the sushi—beef teriyaki for me, and salmon sashimi with more wasabi than was safe for the standard human to consume for her—but my practice hadn’t helped. As we consumed our respective Japanese dishes, the best I could do was invisify—invisiblate?—Vera’s food as she brought it to her mouth.