If there was one certainty in Jack’s life, it was that Sam Holley was the deadliest person he’d ever met, and the only person he trusted to have his back. So, after Phalanx sent the green light (via an unknown number, Jack noted, an obvious fake), Jack went and sat down across from Sam as she ate dinner. She glanced at him.

  “No,” she said.

  Jack stared at her. “What?”

  She forked some grilled chicken into her mouth and spoke, mouth full: “No.”

  But he hadn’t said anything yet.

  “But I haven’t said anything yet.”

  Sam swallowed. “We don’t exactly eat together, Jack, and you don’t even have a plate. You want something, and my answer is no.”

  “You didn’t even hear me out.”

  “I know that look on your face. It’s the first time I’ve seen it since we ended up here. Whatever you’re thinking about doing, kid—don’t.”

  “You don’t care that all those people died?”

  Sam sighed and polished off the last of her meal, leaning back in her chair. “I’m pretty sure I’ve killed close to that many people, kid. Just not all at once. But fine, give me the quick take.”

  So, he did. Sam sat and listened, and her eyes narrowed.

  “Phalanx?” she asked.

  “That’s what he said. And it seems like he knew you, Corporal.”

  “Yeah, him and half the guys in the embassy,” Sam replied. “But I fought with him during the war. The fuck is he doing here?”

  “You didn’t reach out to him? When I went missing?”

  “I asked around at the bar,” Sam said. “Must’ve got back to him.”

  “So,” Elias said, “he’s got people there.”

  “Right,” Jack replied. “Do you trust him?”

  Sam nodded, but slowly. “With my life, kid.”

  “Then, you’ll have my back on this.”

  “Your back on what, exactly?”

  “We know who was behind the bombing. I’m going to put a bullet in him. Tonight.”

  “Nope,” she said. “I haven’t seen Phalanx in about a decade, and he had a different name then. If he’s here, then you really shouldn’t be getting involved. Just stop doing things, Jack. He’s sucked you in with the exact same shit Hawthorne liked to talk about, and ten bucks says it’ll end the exact same way.”

  Jack frowned. Was that true? Reflected in the glass, Elias shrugged.

  “He didn’t suck me in,” Jack said. “I got the impression I couldn’t say no. Which is fine by me, by the way. Because if this Kortanaer guy is doing what Elias only dreamed of, then I—we—have to stop it before it begins.”

  “You, uh, got a time travel device I don’t know about?”

  “I mean, stop it before it goes any further.” He checked his phone. “Sam, I’m running out of time—are you in or out?”

  “If you don’t have time to discuss it any more than this, then I think that’s a pretty good sign you should be punching out.”

  “I can’t. I won’t. Not if I can stop it.”

  Not before I figure out why.

  “Christ,” Sam said, standing up and policing her plate. “Of course you go and develop a hero complex as soon as we get a good thing going. Listen, Jack, you can do what you want, but I’ve got a bad feeling about this one. You remember Reynolds?”

  “Your pal from the bar?”

  “Yeah. He and his team are in town for a mission even he won’t tell me about, and we go way back. If there’s no connection here, then I’ll eat my fucking hat. Leave this to the police or the Helvetican Guard. Go out with the waffle girl you’re always making puppy dog eyes at. Just anything but this.”

  His face flushed. “I can’t.”

  “I mean it, Jack. If things go bad, I’m not bailing you out. Look, you’ve been through a lot—I get it, really. You shoot your best friend and then, a few months later, almost get blown up on a milk run. That’d rattle anyone.”

  “I’m not rattled,” Jack said, and wasn’t sure if he was lying.

  “Yeah, yeah, the tough guy thing,” Sam replied. “Listen, out of respect for all that, I’m not going to throw your stuff outside and change the locks for this shit. If you feel like you have to do it, then do it. But if you come back to this apartment, then that’s the end of it.”

  “Okay,” Jack said. “If I come back, that’s the end of it.” But he wasn’t so sure.

  Back before everything with Elias had fallen apart, Jack had thought he’d seen something in Sam. He had, at the time, misplaced his ambivalence towards Elias. He had thought that Sam had been on the verge of open mutiny, only to realize—too late—that he’d gotten it wrong.

  He understood the mistake he’d made then. Elias had been his blind spot. Now, looking at Sam, he knew one more thing about her: that she knew more than she was letting on, and that she was lying about it.

  He just couldn’t confront her about it.

  Not yet.

  But when he came back, that was the end of it.

  Leopard may have died beneath the Caucasus, and Jack Harper may have vanished between there and Geneva, but the same couldn’t be said for his gear. Dragging the footlocker out from under his bed felt like he was about to open a casket.

  Tiger and Leopard. That’d been their names—their only names—for so many years. For six months, they’d laid undisturbed, a contingency never utilized. But they had only given the weapons up, hadn’t destroyed them. Was he honestly set on this life of normalcy, or had he known on some level that he’d relapse? Or was he just thinking what he thought he should think? Or, another question: was this really what he was going to keep doing, just keep fighting until someone was finally smart enough to put a bullet in him?

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  “Maybe,” Jack muttered. “But after this, it’s done.”

  He opened it. Inside, there was his handgun and his rifle, stripped to their components and wrapped in plastic. The weapons and their magazines sat atop a matte black bed that was probably more valuable than anything else in the entire premises—a black armorweave suit, neatly folded. The Golden Age miraclewear that turned even a middling empowered into a superhero. The only thing missing was his helmet, because he’d left that in the underworld.

  Piece by piece, Jack reassembled his weapons with all the ease of riding a bicycle. The irony being that he had never learned how to ride a bicycle. Elias had taught him so many others things, though—things that helped him survive. The most important of those skills had been the care of firearms—the procedure of turning the pieces into a weapon: piston, rail, pins. Bolt, handle, combine.

  Then, the armorweave. He stepped into it, then pressed a button at his wrist to draw the material against his body. A dull sense of cold, and then warmth as it matched his body temperature. He pulled his old ballistic vest out of the back of his wardrobe and strapped it on, because even armorweave could only do so much against physics.

  None of it would help against a telepath, though. Elias had a few rules about fighting the empowered, but the first and most important of his rules was simple: you don’t. But if you had to, then you aimed for the head, and double-tapped.

  That was the real problem. It wasn’t that he was fighting.

  It was that he wasn’t finishing the job.

  The waiting was the worst part, always had been. Without Sam, his mind returned to the job: the goal, the strategy, the gaps in the latter he’d have to jump. He would’ve liked a longer time to plan. Had Elias been alive, he would have pushed for it. Even a single snag could be enough to get you caught. Phalanx may have come through with the address and the details of the security system, but that didn’t mean Jack trusted him: they just both wanted Kortanaer dead. And Jack had made worse allies of convenience.

  If something went wrong, if Phalanx’s intel was bad, if this was a trap, then Jack didn’t know how much time he’d have. The Animals had never operated within the Functioning World, much less Western Europe, much less Geneva. The rule of law had never collapsed here. It’d taken Jack about thirty minutes to drive out to the Alpine foothills, and he wasn’t familiar with the terrain. If the authorities came rolling in, all he could count on was that he’d have considerably less time to get clear.

  “So, confession time,” Elias said, “I don’t like this, Spots.”

  “Shut up,” Jack muttered, and climbed out of the car.

  He left it hidden behind a copse of trees. It was stolen, of course. Not hotwired, because electric cars had rendered that set of skills defunct. He’d gone back to basics: someone made the mistake of being at just the wrong red light, and Jack had put his gun in their face. Between the fact it’d happened in Geneva, and Jack had said he’d give it back in perfect condition if the driver didn’t go to the cops, he’d seemingly avoided any snags.

  So far.

  The manor was three stories tall, all steel and glass and stone. The fence was black iron, at a height that Jack could’ve hurdled without issue. A fence that demarcated land more than it provided security because, in this case, the manor was protected by the best money could buy. Arguably too much for Switzerland, but Phalanx had said Kortanaer was paranoid, and Elias had once said that—

  “A paranoid is someone who knows a bit of what’s going on,” Elias murmured, peering toward the mansion proper. “I wonder what he knows.”

  Past the fence was a garden of clipped hedges and well-kept trees. A few statues here and there, a decorative fountain. A small lawnmower robot trundled back and forth across the lawn. Jack wondered if it was tied into the watchdog network—probably not, but maybe. Being rumbled by a lawnmower would be a first.

  The mansion was dark, lit only by the moon and the garden lights. Jack watched it for any signs of movement, saw nothing. It wasn’t impenetrable, but it was locked down better than just about anything he’d hit in the past.

  The first obstacle was the infrared security system that ran along the perimeter of the property—three sets of three laser beams, to eliminate false readings. While that was up, his mission was stalled at the fence.

  But the system drew power, and so Phalanx had some of his people about ten minutes from putting the nearest electrical substation out of action. Just a hiccup, but enough. Even if Kortanaer had accounted for that, and he likely had, it would take time for the back-up generators to spin up—just a few seconds, perhaps. But that would be just enough time to bypass the security system.

  Beyond that, the system didn’t have much depth to it, which was because it was being monitored by a Cerberus IFF watchdog AI. Not unexpected, but a nuisance. It may not have been smart enough to hold a conversation, but it was designed to sniff out trouble and ill-intent—gunshots, breaking glass, incorrect passcodes—and then sound an alarm.

  That was what Jack had to avoid. If the AI started barking, someone would hear. The first responders would be the on-site security detail: six Gardien security robots within the house itself, slaved to an air-gapped server in the basement. Not killing machines, but built to handle armed trespassers, and six-on-one was six on one. To say nothing of any aftermarket upgrades.

  The system was entirely automated—no people. There was irony there, Jack supposed: a telepath was exactly the sort of person who’d understand how any given person could be compromised. So, Kortanaer had trusted in technology. And, if not for the electrical substation and door codes, his trust would have been well-placed.

  Of course, Jack knew, even if he made it past the security without issue, there was still the problem of Kortanaer himself. A black ops operator who could make him put his gun to his head and pull the trigger with nothing but a glance and a moment’s thought. If his target laid eyes on him, it was all over. Despite that thought, Jack’s heartbeat remained steady. It was simple—Kortanaer simply wouldn’t get the opportunity. Aim for the head, and finish the job.

  Jack’s phone buzzed, and that was the signal. He leapt the fence, landed, waited. His breathing was slow, steady, frosting before him. Jack slung his rifle into his hands. The lawnmower bot continued on its course. The house stayed dark. A few errant snowflakes drifted through the air. It was too goddamn cold.

  Jack moved. The only thing he could do was assume he tripped the alarm. He crossed the garden, heading for the back door. A metal keypad sat by the handle of glass pane door. Jack entered Phalanx’s code, and guided the door open silently. Part of him, the part of him that wasn’t scoping out the room beyond, wondered just how Phalanx had gotten the code.

  The back door led to a dining area and a kitchen. It was all Jack knew of the internal layout. Jack moved through the ground floor and found no bedrooms, no sign of Kortanaer. He moved up to the next floor, checked behind each door, and still found nothing. Just rooms. He wasn’t even sure what half of them were for beyond just having them. What did anyone need beyond a bedroom, a bathroom, and a room for everything else?

  A dim light flickered at the end of the hall. Jack crept toward it, and guided the door open with the barrel of his rifle. The illumination came from the dim light of a hardlight display. Kortanaer, it had to be him, sat at his desk, typing.

  “I know you’re there,” he said.

  “Don’t move,” Jack replied. “If you turn around, I will kill you.”

  He stopped typing. “All I have to do is shout for help.”

  “It won’t save you.”

  “Fine. What do you want—money?”

  “I don’t want anything. Ulysses Kortanaer. Trapdoor. I know who you are, what you are, and what you’ve done.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Blew up a train station. Killed eighty-three people. Almost killed me.”

  Kortanaer’s only movement was to drum his fingers against his keyboard.

  “Ah,” he said. “And you are?”

  “Call me Leopard.”

  “You have a very curious psyche, Mister Leopard. But I’m afraid you’ve been set up.”

  “Good to know,” Jack said, and squeezed the trigger. Kortanaer fell against his desk, half his head blown away. Jack crossed the room, turned the corpse over, so he could take a photo, shot him in the chest to make sure, and dragged the sleeve of Kortanaer’s shirt up to expose what he knew he’d find on his bicep: V4T.

  “Got you, you son of a—”

  Something slammed Jack to the left, as if the bedroom wall had tackled him, hard enough that he lost his grip on his rifle and the air woofed out of his lungs even through his vest and armorweave. And that didn’t matter, because an armored hand pinned him there by the neck, crushing his throat. Three colored stripes—black, white, red—led back to a bright green pauldron.

  A memory. Those colors. But it couldn’t be.

  Sabra?