Cape Crossed

Chapter Twelve

"That's really all you saw?" Miya asked the security officer standing by the wall. The bank was surprisingly slow but that worked out well. It was hard enough to get information out of people so soon after a robbery, an audience only made them clam up more.

"Sorry, ma'am," the officer said. He'd been unbelievably patient with Miya's questions and willing to talk. Even so, there hadn't been much to tell according to him.

Miya held out her hand for a handshake. "Thanks for your help." She gripped his hand, letting the touch between them linger. When she dropped his hand she turned immediately to Hannah and nodded her head towards the door. Miya's eyes flashed silver for a second before returning to their normal dark brown.

"Can you read people?" Hannah asked. The wind whipped her hair around her face, stinging her eyes. It was just an hour or two before sunset and already she could feel the chill coming from the lakes up north starting to sap the heat left behind from the sun. She thought of Claudia back at her apartment tucked onto her couch. Jealousy welled up inside her but it was her own fault for needing answers.

It wasn't until they were around the corner from the bank that Miya answered her. "People are difficult to read, but not impossible. I couldn't make out much more than he had already told me but I did catch a glimpse of Harbinger." She pulled out a notebook from her pocket and scribbled down notes in a hurried chicken scratch list. "Did you grab the pen?"

Hannah dug into her pocket and pulled out one of the pens normally attached to the counters along the teller windows. The small chain that had secured it was still dangling from the end. It had been too easy for Hannah to pull it free.

"Perfect," Miya sighed. She gripped the pen between her palms and her eyes glowed silver. "Harbinger, a bag... with a money symbol on it? How cliche and weirdly adorable. Is that a tiara?" Her eyebrows scrunched together. "The bag is full of jewelry, but he's picked up the tiara three times. The emerald..." The glow faded and she swayed on her feet a little. "That's all I can get. It's harder when the images are a few days old."

Most supers built their jobs around their hero careers, but Miya had managed to force the heroes of The Aerie to bend to her will. The ability to see glimpses of a person's past by touching items they'd touched had put them in the palm of her hand. It only took her hand on someone's ID and a vision of them dressed as their alter ego to have plenty to blackmail them with. A lot of them were lucky she seemed to be an entirely good person.

The only reason she'd been found and recruited at all had been after her work as a private investigator had become so well known it had begun to raise suspicion. Sebastian Diaz had been the one to bring her in. He'd encountered her as Crimson Sword during one of her investigations and noticed the way she handled random objects while ignoring the evidence completely. A short stint of telepathy and Moon Fox was born.

"Harbinger stealing valuables isn't exactly out of character for him, even if they are an odd assortment," Hannah huffed. She jammed her hands into her pockets, looking for her phone before remembering she had left it behind.

"It was the way he was looking at it all, as if he was going over a list," Miya mused. The pen still rested in her hand and she tapped it against her chin thoughtfully. "He went after the university next, which really is out of character for him. Besides, if he was after jewelry, why didn't he hit the jeweler instead of Criss Cross?"

"Maybe they're working together?" Hannah said.

"When have you ever known the two of them to work together?" Miya asked. They moved back to the main road, looking side to side before running across the street. The University was out of the question for that day, they'd have to be there within the next twenty minutes to look around before it was closed and there was no way they could compete with the traffic of people rushing home. Anything Miya could have gleaned information from had most likely been touched dozens of times since then anyway and would be contaminated with irrelevant images.