Chapter One: The Stain
The coffee hit Dev's face at 11:47 PM. Not real Dev—the watercolor Dev. The one I painted last Tuesday from memory: crooked glasses, crescent scar above his left eyebrow, shoulders slumped like the whole bodega balanced on them. The coffee was mine. Old. Cold. I knocked it over reaching for a stolen Wi-Fi signal. Now a brown Rorschach bleeds across his forehead. "Shit. Shit, shit." I grab a dry brush. No water. I lick the bristles—turpentine aftertaste, dumb move—and touch the stain's edge. Push the pigment. Pull it. The brown lifts into his skin tone. Wrong. Too warm. I mix in a scrap of cerulean. Correction. The paper warms under my finger. Dev's painted eye twitches. I freeze. Basement air—mildew, old pizza, fixative spray—stops moving. The single bulb above my desk hums. Then flickers. His other eye opens. "Why's my back cold?" Watercolor-Dev blinks at my ceiling. Water damage blooms above him like a second stain. "Oh. That's why." I drop the painting. Face-up on the floor. Canvas-Dev sits up—sits up inside the frame, two-dimensional but moving, his painted hand pressing against the paper's edge like glass. "You're not Dev." My voice cracks. "I'm a Dev." He looks at his fingers. Brown and blue. "Thinner than I remember. Also wet." Outside, a car backfires. I flinch. He doesn't. My phone vibrates against the desk. Unknown number. Two photos load. First photo: Real Dev. Behind his counter. Same crooked glasses. Same tired face. A red laser dot on his chest. Second photo: My signature. Bottom-right corner of a painting I sold eighteen months ago. The painting of Paladin. My jawline. My color choices. My guilt. Text beneath both: We know what you painted. Bring the rest by sunrise or we empty his real lungs. The Gallery sends its regards. Canvas-Dev reads upside down. "That seems bad." "You're not supposed to talk." "You painted my mouth." My first instinct isn't to run. My first instinct is to paint. I grab the largest brush on the rack—a two-inch flat, still wet from yesterday's session—and spin toward the blank canvas on my second easel. If I can paint fast enough, paint something that can hold a door closed, paint a barrier between this basement and whatever's coming down that street— A shadow cuts across my basement window. Blue and gold. Moving too fast for a car. Too human-shaped for anything human. Paladin lands on the fire escape. The metal groans. He's taller than I painted him. Jaw wider. And his eyes—I gave him gentle eyes, the kind that forgive—are flat. Cold. A machine wearing my best work. He punches through the window before I can touch the blank canvas. Glass sprays my worktable. Sliced sketches flutter down like bleeding birds. The brush flies out of my hand. My chance gone. Not yet. Not ever again. "Soul-thief." His voice is mine—every cadence I wrote, stripped of warmth. "Where are the others?" I grab my bag. Keys. Wallet under the mattress with the rest of my shame. My fingers find the safe's combination by touch. 18-19-03. The year I painted my first living thing. The year I should have stopped. The lock clicks. Behind me, canvas-Dev says, "Are you going to answer him?" "I'm going to come back for all of you," I say. "That's different from running." "Is it?" "Ask me after sunrise." Paladin's fist comes through the glass. Not toward me—toward the safe.
