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During a lull in the conversation, Lyra found herself contemplating the implications of the fact that the signal they'd traced had led them here. She didn't like it. She wasn't sure she wanted to pursue that thought to its end, but...

Maybe it wasn't a Mal at all. Maybe something perfectly human was what had gotten to their Oracle.

Lyra had to repress a shudder. Suddenly, her winter jacket and scarf didn't feel quite warm enough. Gods and angels, weren't the monsters enough?

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It was easier when it was just the monsters. Lyra hadn't really thought about that before. But the Mals, even the complicated ones who planned and gave them headaches, were pretty straightforward about what they wanted to do to people. At least death by Mal was a death, even if it wasn't always quick or clean.

And even if it had been a Mal, they'd been pretty sure that their Oracle was a woman, and one who lived alone. Just the thought that she'd been living here was creepy enough.

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Besides that, everything she'd sent them had always been heavily encrypted, as though she were nervous about something. Lyra didn't know a lot about it, but Luke had filled her in when he and Bastien had first explained to her about the concept of the Oracle to begin with. That was why the signal they had was so dodgy to begin with. She'd been pretty good at hiding her tracks.

What had she been afraid of? Her powers let her see the future, right? What had she seen that had spooked her so bad?

[crow]

With any luck, for better or for worse, that was what they were going to find out today. Lyra tried to quell the sense of restless nausea in her gut. They were counting on her for this, and it wasn't like being nervous was going to do her any good.

In the back of her mind, she could feel the spirits shifting around, settling and resettling, some one or the other jostling against the rest. They could sense her unease too, and some of them weren't happy about it.

[crow]

Others, if anything, were a little too keen, spoiling for some action. She didn't know if that was better or worse. It was a good thing that none of their voices were very distinct, or else it might have been even harder to focus than it already was.

Well, most of them weren't, anyway. She could feel Jericho's presence too, with that same strange clarity that he'd always had, that the other spirits didn't, when she'd met them. But Jericho was quiet today, as if he was waiting for something too.

[Wild Pet Found]

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She wasn't sure what to make of that. Sure, Jericho had been with her... a long time, so she ought to know him pretty well. But he'd been asleep a lot of that time too, or hiding from her, or whatever it was that he had done when he hadn't shown up for a few years...

And all this stuff, with the Mals and spirits and fighting, that was new. In the context of all of it together, sometimes Jericho felt new too, like someone she didn't know.

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Curiously, she reached out with her mind, just a little, to brush up against his presence in the back of it. There was a query in that contact. What do you know? What was it he was anticipating?

But the response she received was less illuminating than she would have hoped for. He merely acknowledged her, and gave a wordless warning to be careful. She sighed; she could have figured out that much herself, so it really wasn't all that helpful, as far as advice went.

[crow]

And even if she hadn't, Bastien would probably be happy to tell her as much. Okay, 'happy' was a strong word for it, but all the same... Bastien seemed to think she needed worrying about, which was sweet of him, maybe, but also kind of unnecessary sometimes too.

She supposed she wasn't going to get any answers that way. But then, that made sense too. Lyra certainly wasn't an Oracle. Honestly, if she had been, that would have been a bit too much.

[crow]

The other Contacts already looked at her like she had three heads or something just because she was able to sustain multiple pacts with spirits at a time. She hadn't known that most people were limited to one, or at best two; switching between several in the midst of combat was a pipe dream until she had showed up.

But then, what she didn't know about this whole Contact business could probably fill an encyclopedia and then some, if you could put it into a book.

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Up until a few months ago, she hadn't even known what any of it was called. Strange things had just kept happening, and it was all she could do to ride out wave after wave of it, and hope she didn't get pulled under and... die, probably.

She hadn't really been trying to put words to what she'd been feeling at the time, but in retrospect she recognized that some part of her probably expected to die. It wasn't one of her more comfortable revelations.

[crow]

Maybe that was why she was so unsettled by all of this going on right now. That same sense of pervasive doom had stayed with her, only now she was feeling it for someone else. Someone she barely knew, but still. Somehow it was worse when it wasn't your head on the chopping block.

A silent buzz against her hand alerted her to something on the app, and she glanced at the phone she was holding. "We're coming up to it," she said quietly.

[crow]

Bastien and Luke both looked her way, and Luke gave a resolute nod. Speaking of someone spoiling for battle. Lyra rather thought that Luke would get along better with some of her spirits than she did.

They proceeded more slowly from that point on, and Lyra left her thoughts behind in favor of focusing on the screen. The signal was still irregular, and it wasn't live, but for some reason, it felt as if... It was like as they approached, the signal itself solidified and got stronger.

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Was there some kind of resonance to it? Or maybe it was just triangulating the location, now that it had narrowed down its options? Could technology do that? She wasn't a tech whiz herself.

But even if regular technology didn't have the capacity to do stuff like that, this was a device that she had been given by the Contact network. Maybe they'd managed to fiddle with it, give it some extra magic... Maybe it was even coming from the Oracle's end.

[crow]

She made a mental note to ask about it when she got back, if what she found here didn't address that question. Whether she'd remember it when this was all over was anyone's guess though.

But it was just as well that the signal was stabilizing. She didn't know what they would have done if it had stayed erratic like it had been this entire time so far. In the back of her mind, she had probably been hoping that something like this would happen anyway.

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But it wasn't really the type of hope you placed any stock in. Just wishful thinking, and all that. She hadn't expected it to actually happen, so it was still a surprise when it did.

She wasn't about to turn up her nose at a little good fortune though. It saved them from... what, knocking on all the doors or something? Breaking into multiple buildings? Whatever it was, it probably would have been a lot of work, and probably at least a little danger.