Beardy Beardingsson climbed the mossy steps to his hidden observatory. Inside, failed glass eyes watched him from a shelf. He set to work on a new one, hoping this lens would finally see through every lie. A scratching sound stopped his hammer. He turned and found a bloodstained rag pinned to his door. A grinning rat was painted on it. His good eye narrowed. Someone knew. He stepped outside and scanned the slope. On a distant ridge, a polished orb sat mounted on a stand, catching the moonlight. It was aimed straight at his dome. A spy's window. Beardy crossed the stones and smashed the orb with his hammer. Glass scattered like cold rain. Whoever watched him now saw only darkness. He pocketed the largest shard. Back inside, he burned the bloody rag in his forge. The grinning rat curled and blackened. He worked faster now, fitting the stolen shard into his newest prototype lens. The rival had shown their hand too early. Beardy had a piece of their tool, and a warning he would not forget. Tomorrow, the hunt for the watcher began.

At dawn Beardy climbed the ridge where the orb had stood. He knelt in the dirt and squinted with his one good eye. The watcher's boot prints faded into stone. Tracking by sight alone would get him killed. He returned to his forge and pulled an old metal box from a crate. Dials, a green glass screen, a rugged casing. He pried it open and fit the orb shard inside, wiring it to the needle. The screen flickered. He carried it back to the ridge and swept it slow across the rocks. The needle jumped. A faint trail of the rival's strange residue glowed on the glass, leading down the slope. Beardy grinned for the first time in days. He could not see the spy, but now he could follow them.

Beardy followed the glowing trail down the slope, screen humming in his palm. Then the lens cracked with a sharp pop. The needle went wild. The trail blurred into smears of light. He cursed and shook the box, but the glass was split clean through. Without a steadier housing, the shard would burn out before he saw a thing. A wet slither stopped him. Three snails crawled from the rocks, each shell wide as a shield, each bearing the painted face of a pop singer he'd glimpsed in a traveling poster. They sang in awful harmony, mouths leaking acid that hissed on stone. Beardy swung the cracked box like a hammer. He smashed one shell, then another. The third lunged. He drove his boot down hard. Slime burst across his leg, but in the wreckage of the third shell sat a smooth iron ring — a perfect housing, sent by the enemy as a trap, now his by right. He fit the shard inside. The screen steadied. The trail glowed bright again, and led straight toward whoever had sent the singing snails.