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The first time I met Moriarty face-to-face was also the first time in years that anyone even glanced my way and didn’t look straight through me.
“Oh! Hello!” she said, head tilted slightly, the dark lenses of her goggles fixed on my face. “I didn’t expect you to come visit so soon, Phantom.”
I was so startled that I slipped straight back into physicality and visibility.
“Ah!” She straightened her head and grinned. “That’s easier.”
I was on a mission given to me by Radiant, my hero-mentor and temporary guardian. I was supposed to be creeping through Moriarty’s lair, unseen and unheard. I was supposed to slip in and out, undetected, and bring him back all my intel like I always did.
I was not supposed to fraternize with the enemy—and I’d never even been tempted to before—but Moriarty was looking at me. So I stood there frozen instead of fading away again, wondering if I should speak at all and scrambling for any words to say if I did want to talk.
Moriarty spoke again before I could claw anything from the pathetic recesses of my mind. “You’ve never visited me before,” she said. “What brings the great Phantom to my humble lair?”
I snorted before I could stop myself or consider if it was a tactically appropriate reaction. Her humble lair may have looked mundane from the outside, but inside it was a riot of color and texture, sprawling through a maze of rooms that probably would have been hellish to navigate if I hadn’t been able to walk straight through the walls. The room in the center, where we both were standing, was painted in green and gold, and Moriarty herself was curled like a cat on a sumptuous, eye-watering magenta chair (it clashed horribly with her frilly pink-and-red dress) in front of a bank of monitors. “You call this humble?” I said, before I could think better of it.
She dipped her head to the side and back, like maybe she’d winked behind her goggles, and said, “Well, it’s certainly got nothing on Centurion’s lair, I can tell you that much.”
My mouth twisted into half a grimace and I shook my head. I’d infiltrated Centurion’s base too, and she was certainly right about that. If I never saw a roll of gold-edged toilet paper again it would be too soon.
Her mouth was still smiling that wide, easy smile, but her eyes were hidden behind those dark lenses, inscrutable to me, studying me. She twirled the end of one lilac pigtail around her finger, then tossed it back over her shoulder and stood up, brushing off her skirts. “I suppose I should ask,” she said, raising her hands above her head in a languid, careless stretch, “what it is that Radiant wants with me, not you.”
That was enough to startle me out of my stupor, and I faded out again, falling deeper into the veil than I liked to go—deeper than I had been when I arrived—rather than continue such an ill-advised conversation.
“Damn,” Moriarty mumbled, staring straight at me for a moment before scanning across the room and fiddling with her goggles but not locking her gaze to mine as she had before. “Scared her off.” She rapped her knuckles against her temple, shook her head, and brightened up. “Phantom,” she said, louder this time, “if you’re still here—sorry! I know I can come off a bit strong! If you want to visit me, you can just knock next time.”
I was supposed to stay in Moriarty’s base most of the night. I was supposed to gather as much intel as I could. I was supposed to keep my own thoughts at a distance, and be a professional about things.
I was nestled so deep into the veil that I could almost see the stars that drifted in the void, and the nuances of the material plane were shrouded from my gaze. I was off-base and unsettled, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to focus enough to gather anything more than I already had in this state.
I stepped sideways through the veil and out of Moriarty’s lair, then stepped twice more before I was far enough away to feel comfortable letting myself return to the edge of the material plane.
Shaken and dizzy from the adrenaline and falling so far into the veil both, I went home.