The Wayward looked better when Vera was bleeding. Not much better. The place had its standards, and most of them had survived by staying low. But there was something useful about a room that did not ask why a woman came through the door with torn sleeves, freight dust on her coat, and a look that made strangers reconsider their need for conversation.
The regulars noticed. They always did. They just had the decency to notice sideways.
Vera took her usual stool and set the recovered papers on the bar with the care usually reserved for loaded weapons. The bartender gave the blood on her hand one look, put a clean rag beside her glass, and said nothing. That was one reason Vera came back. The Wayward knew how to let silence work.
The trainyard had left her with three useful words and a worse mood.
SPECIAL BATCH. LIQUID STOCK. FESTIVAL FINISH.
She wrote them again because writing a thing twice sometimes made it less slippery. The words did not belong together, but they had traveled together anyway. A drink category wearing a varnish label. A festival shipment routed cleanly enough to hide badly. Helvetia had received something it was not supposed to receive, and two hundred years later locals were blaming glowing masks for bringing motionless Travelers into a welcome center that had stopped welcoming anybody properly.
Vera did not have a culprit. She had a smell. Alcohol.
That was why she let the room talk. Rumors were not evidence, but they were useful in the same way smoke was useful. You did not build a case out of it. You followed it until something burned.
The first few answers were worthless. Moonshiners. Raiders. Old frat boys. New frat boys, which Vera doubted but did not dismiss out loud. Someone said the Responders used to store medical liquor near Morgantown, which sounded like a lie that had once been a misunderstanding. Someone else blamed a Nuka-Cola promotional stunt because some people could not see a glowing object without imagining a marketing department behind it.
Then an old scavenger at the end of the bar stopped laughing. He had been listening too carefully for a man pretending not to. His hands stayed around his cup, but his eyes had gone to the papers. Not the blood. Not the coat. The papers.
"Liquid stock," he said.
Vera did not turn right away. Making a witness repeat himself too quickly could scare the truth back into its hole. She dabbed the cut across her palm with the rag and waited.
The scavenger cleared his throat. "Heard that phrase before. Not from rail folk. Lab folk."
That got her attention.
"Which lab?"
He shrugged in the careful way of a man deciding how expensive his memory was. "Arktos."
The name moved through the room and made a few people find new reasons to study their drinks. Arktos Pharma had that effect. In Appalachia, some names did not need ghost stories. They had payroll records.
Vera looked at him then.
The scavenger went on because now that he had started, he seemed less comfortable stopping. Years back, he said, somebody pulled employee files out of an Arktos satellite office, or maybe a dump site near one, depending on who was telling it and how much they wanted to sound brave. One of the names in those files had become a small piece of bar trivia for people who liked their gossip with a chemical burn.
A chemist. Former student. Worked on biological luminescence, radiation response, and the old question nobody sane asked too loudly: why some ghouls glowed while others only rotted.
That was the kind of rumor that could ruin a clean evening.
Vera wrote ARKTOS beneath the trainyard words. Special batch. Liquid stock. Festival finish. A chemist interested in glow.
There it was. The neat answer. Too neat.
A chemist learns how bodies glow. A chemist makes something that glows. A chemist's work gets routed through a festival supply chain and ends up on masks. It fit the way a staged room fits after somebody has moved the chair legs to cover the blood.
The room seemed to want her to take it. People liked a clean culprit. Clean culprits let everyone else go home. Vera had never trusted gifts that arrived with bows already tied.
Still, the Arktos lead had weight. It gave the special batch a possible mind behind it. It gave the glow a profession. It gave the case a name-shaped shadow, and shadows were easier to follow than superstition.
She asked the scavenger what he remembered about the chemist. Not much, he said. Old-world. Morgantown educated. One of those university boys who thought a lab coat made him less stupid than everybody else. There had been talk of fraternity trouble before Arktos, but the scavenger waved that off like decoration.
Vera did not. Fraternity trouble was rarely decoration. It was usually motive wearing cheap shoes.
By the time the bar settled back into its old noise, Vera had drawn a new line in her notebook. Helvetia to Morgantown Trainyard. Morgantown Trainyard to liquid stock. Liquid stock to Arktos. Arktos to a chemist who had once wondered why the dead could shine.
She finished cleaning the blood from her hand and looked at the page until the answer stopped looking easy. The glowing masks had found their first suspect. That was the problem. Cases got dangerous when they started making sense too soon.