Time-Spanning Bad News (Part 1)
One sentence, and my mind reeled.
"What if they're from the future?" Nolan Kane said, as casually as if he were discussing the weather.
I stole a glance at Cassian Vance. His face was perfectly calm—not a flicker of shock or surprise.
Did that mean... he'd already considered this possibility?
I said, "Don't be ridiculous. This is way too outlandish."
Nolan Kane replied, "You can accept that the Prophet's department foresees everything, but you won't flip the perspective?"
"I—" I lowered my voice. "It just seems too impossible. What do you think?"
I looked at Cassian Vance for support. Without missing a beat, he unbuttoned his shirt, shed it, and started eating bare-chested, draping the shirt over my shoulders with practiced nonchalance.
"I think Kane's theory has considerable merit," he said flatly.
I sank into thought for a moment, then said, "What evidence do you have?"
Cassian Vance picked up a napkin and laid it across my lap as if I were a child who couldn't be trusted to keep myself clean, then said offhandedly, "The occasional inaccuracy in intelligence reports is the evidence. If the Prophet could truly foresee everything, why would the intelligence sometimes be wrong? There's only one logical explanation. The Prophet provides information from the future, but as we alter events, the future itself shifts—so the intelligence occasionally requires updating."
Hmm.
That actually made a lot of sense.
I pushed his shirt off my shoulders. "It's hot."
"Put it back on. It's unseemly."
"This is a halter top. It's very fashionable right now."
"Unseemly! Your navel is showing."
"Say 'unseemly' one more time. I dare you."
I yanked the shirt away and dropped it on the chair beside me. "I have a good figure. I earned it. After the baby, I did rehab exercises every single day—do you think I did that for my health? And you're the one who told me to dress up!"
"But it's cold outside..."
"I don't care if I'm freezing. I look good, and I wore this for you. So just look and keep your mouth shut, okay?"
"My thighs—"
"Are my thighs nice?"
"...Yes."
"Then look at them. They're on display for you. Close your mouth already."
Nolan Kane, who'd been sitting there looking increasingly awkward, finally cleared his throat. "You two seem... quite close. We're here to discuss business. Could you not make me feel like a third wheel?"
I nodded. "You're right. Please continue, Mr. Kane. Just ignore him—he's being unreasonable."
Nolan Kane took a breath and continued. "Dandelion, from what you've observed, the Fourth Lord position is completely cut off from the other three divisions, correct?"
"Right."
"That's not entirely accurate. Among the four divisions, the Sin Hunters are mine—they're the ones I've built and maintained. The Enforcers are also mine. And the Dedicators have always cooperated closely with us. Three out of four divisions work together. Only the Prophet's department stands apart. Have you ever thought about what makes them different?"
I didn't hesitate. "The Prophet can create us. The other three divisions can't function without the Prophet's intelligence."
"Exactly. That's the crux of the problem. For the Prophet, the other three divisions are expendable. He can rebuild Judgment Tower and The Badlands from scratch if he has to. We're just pieces on his board."
"Mr. Kane, I still don't understand why you're telling me this."
"We need to seize power."
The words hit me like a physical blow.
What did he mean?
Nolan Kane picked up his chopsticks and placed a piece of meat in my bowl. His voice dropped low. "When we created The Badlands, my philosophical disagreements with the Prophet occasionally led to conflict. One day, he looked at me and said, point-blank, 'I can build you up, and I can tear you down.' That was when it clicked for me. Yes—with his help, I know which companies to invest in, which stocks to buy, which industries will boom. But if he ever decided to cut me off? I'd be walking on thin ice. And it's not just me—all of us are in that position!"
Cassian Vance, without changing expression, reached over with his chopsticks, picked up the piece of meat from my bowl, and deposited it directly into the trash. His voice was ice: "Without the Prophet's intelligence, Sin Hunters and Enforcers would be running blind. We're just fighters—we survive on information. Honestly, I refuse to leave everyone's lives in someone else's hands. Wouldn't you agree?"
I considered this for a long moment. "You're right. The three of us—the people in this room—we've all killed. We know what it costs. Every person we've taken down, no matter how terrible, had someone who loved them. A mother who watched them take their first steps. A father who carried them on his back. A woman waiting for a ring. If it's not a blood feud, who would want to kill a stranger for only one side of their story?"
"So that's exactly why we need to act," Nolan Kane said. "He's never participated. He's never bled. He's never watched a person die. To him, eliminating targets is just a number on a screen. He doesn't understand the weight of a life. I've thought about this for years. I'm going to find him, expose him, and take our fate into our own hands. That was the conviction that brought Hemlock and me together."
"Your so-called collaboration," I said to Cassian Vance. "Your missions that were full of deception."
Nolan Kane frowned and turned to Cassian Vance. "How does she know about your missions? Is she investigating you?"
"Sage has been helping her look into things," Cassian Vance said mildly. "They thought they were being discreet, but Du Zhong spotted them ages ago. He asked if I wanted them eliminated, and I said to let it slide."
I blinked. He'd known all along?
"You knew from the start?"
"Ever since Quentin Vance entered the factory. I just let it slide because the person doing the investigating was you."
"Wait—I'm sorry about that. I was just too curious... But does this have something to do with your deceptive missions?"
Nolan Kane cut in. "Those missions were deceptive, yes, but they weren't part of Hemlock's collaboration with me. They were part of his arrangement with the mysterious phone calls—the Prophet."
I looked at Cassian Vance in surprise. "You can communicate directly with the Prophet?"
"Because in one key respect, our philosophies aligned," Cassian Vance said.
"What aspect?"
Nolan Kane explained.
The Prophet's view on dealing with evildoers, he said, was absolute: eliminate them. It was a philosophy inherited directly from the original Sin Hunter, Rafe Morrow. No compromises. Kill the wicked.
But Nolan Kane disagreed. He argued that mistakes were inevitable. If you killed someone based on intelligence that turned out to be wrong, there was no taking it back. An irreversible error.
Their disagreement had nearly split them apart. In the end, both men compromised, and together they'd built the system that now governed The Badlands—exile rather than execution.
Nolan Kane's belief was that the proper punishment for evil was forcing the guilty to spend their lives benefiting society. The Prophet, however, had never abandoned his conviction that for those whose guilt was beyond dispute, there was only one acceptable penalty: death.
Helping Cassian Vance avenge his family was perfectly aligned with the Prophet's beliefs. And as Cassian Vance executed mission after mission with ruthless efficiency, their alliance grew stronger. Over time, the Prophet had even bestowed upon Cassian Vance a title: "the man closest to Rafe Morrow."
I frowned deeply. "Why is the Prophet so obsessed with killing?"
"Because he's never been in the field," Nolan Kane said. "He's never witnessed a death. He's never held someone as the light left their eyes. To him, eliminating a target is just a statistic—cold, clean, abstract. He doesn't see what a life actually costs."
"I don't think I fully understand."
"When you read a news story about a villain dying, do you feel satisfied?"
"I do."
"But when that villain is actually lying in front of you—gasping, bleeding, with his organs still twitching through the wound and the despair slowly draining from his eyes as the life leaves him—do you still feel satisfaction then? Even as a Sin Hunter, you can feel it. That's a real person's life being extinguished. Everyone we've killed had a mother who watched them babble their first words, a father who carried them home on his shoulders, a girl waiting for a ring on her finger. Unless it's personal—unless it's blood feud—who would choose to end a stranger's life for only one side of their story?"
I nodded, understanding slowly dawning.
The Prophet had never been inside Judgment Tower. He'd never been to The Badlands. He'd never seen the consequences of the orders he gave. He was a brain in a jar, dispatching death from a distance, untouchable and unaccountable.
"Still," I pressed, "if Hemlock's cooperating so well with the Prophet, why does he want to rebel?"
Cassian Vance looked at me with those steady, unreadable eyes of his. "Because I'd rather trust my life to myself. Or to you."
My heart skipped a beat.
Did he have to say things like that so casually?
I mumbled, "It's a nice thought, but how could we possibly pull this off? If the Prophet really is from the future, like you're saying, how could ordinary people like us even—"
"In point of fact, we've already made progress." Cassian Vance handed me a file folder. "Originally, this information wasn't meant for your eyes, but since you're now a Fourth Lord, there's no reason to keep it from you."
"What if I hadn't become a Fourth Lord?"
"Then you'd never know. If this only concerned me, I'd tell you everything. But other people's trusts are on the line here. I won't betray their confidence."
He was... impossibly reliable. It was one of the qualities that made him so infuriating and so magnetic in equal measure.
Cassian Vance's voice was cool and clinical as he explained. "If the Prophet is human, he has weaknesses. If he's genuinely from the future, he'll have used that advantage to profit. We've conducted a thorough analysis of every target the Prophet has assigned through Judgment Tower, and we found a pattern."
"What pattern?"
"Every single target's crimes were covered by one of exactly three media outlets: Metropolitan Daily, Metropolitan Evening News, or Yingying Gazette. Or they appeared in police records. We also checked other local media outlets—criminals exclusively covered by those sources never became Prophet targets."
"Why would that be?"
"If the Prophet is from the future, it means only those three news organizations' archives will survive into his era. Every other outlet will have shut down or lost its records."
I nodded. It was a solid line of reasoning.
Nolan Kane leaned forward. "I discovered something even more interesting. The Prophet tells me which companies to invest in, right? Well, one of them is Yingying Gazette—the least profitable investment in my entire portfolio. But the Prophet keeps insisting I pump money into it. So I dug into it. The owner of Yingying Gazette is a woman named Tu Lingying. And she has deep, tangled connections to the original Sin Hunter, Rafe Morrow."
"What kind of connections?"
"Rafe Morrow had no family when he died—no wife, no children. But according to my research, he left his entire estate to this Tu Lingying."
"She's the Prophet!" I declared, my mind racing ahead of itself. "Or—no—the future version of Tu Lingying is the Prophet! She invests in herself from the future, feeds us news intelligence from future archives, and she's connected to the original Sin Hunter. It's obvious! She's the Prophet! Case closed—we kidnap Tu Lingying, mission accomplished!"
Cassian Vance said mildly, "No. She's not the Prophet."
"On what grounds?" I was almost indignant. "The logic is airtight! Or are you telling me you can't follow a simple deductive—"
"You remember what we said about the paradox?" Cassian Vance replied. "As we change events, the future changes too. If Tu Lingying is the Prophet, then right now she's just a small-time media studio owner. If our investment in her company alters her future trajectory, she might never become the Prophet. And if she never becomes the Prophet, she can't guide my investments from the future, which means we'd never invest in her company in the first place. The whole chain collapses. It's riddled with contradictions."
I was silent for a long moment, then said, with as much dignity as I could muster, "I was obviously testing you. I wanted to see if you could spot the logical flaw. You've exceeded my expectations."
Nolan Kane didn't miss a beat. "Tu Lingying is still the key. Even if she isn't the Prophet, she's almost certainly connected. So we investigated everyone around her—family, friends, colleagues—and we've identified the most likely suspect."
"Who?"
Nolan Kane placed a photograph on the table in front of me.
It showed a young woman. Quiet-looking. Unremarkable, really—the kind of face you'd pass on the street without a second glance.
"Her name is Chen Xiaojiu," Nolan Kane said. "Before Tu Lingying founded her studio, they were colleagues—close ones. In college, Tu Lingying was the senior who constantly looked out for her. They were as close as sisters. But here's the critical piece."
He leaned forward.
"Chen Xiaojiu had a heart transplant. Do you know whose heart she received?"