We walked out to the aircraft hangar at the only airport on the island. It was 3pm Tulanto time before we actually were ready to leave.

  Tulanto International didn’t look like much—just a single runway stretching into blue ocean and a few sleek terminals tucked into palm-heavy landscaping. From the sky, it probably looked like a luxury eco-retreat. From the tarmac, it felt like a research outpost masquerading as a vacation brochure.

  The air was thick with salt and jet fuel. Tall mana batteries lined the far fence like lazy sentinels, a haze rising from their coolant exhaust in the morning heat.

  A small cluster of transport aircraft sat baking in the sun, matte and quiet, their tails marked with Tulanto’s symbol in faint, iridescent ink—only visible when the light caught it just right.

  Ey was waiting near the hangar doors when I arrived, standing with that patient expression she wore when pretending not to be worried. She walked with me toward the aircraft like she was seeing off a lover.

  Well I guess technically, she was now.

  Mai walked passed us and up the metal stairs into the small private jet plane. Matte black with their own identifier without the same livery logo of the limited public commercial planes.

  Those were used by citizens to go on and off island at a premium price. Few tourist showed up to our island, after applying for and obtaining the rare tourist visa. Given that preference was always given to our neighbor Tuvalu, which used boat traffic instead, left the commercial mana fueled planes only for international use by Tulanto citizen's business mostly.

  Sure we are a isolationist nation, but unlike the hermit kingdom, our citizens were free to come and go as they pleased, and openly accepted our version of the social contract.

  Also we were now starting to extend olive branches and work more internationally-- making my new job many times tougher.

  On the way over I just signed off for a more visible, version of the peacemaker class Interceptor. Human friendly for future tourist interaction.

  "Are you ready Kay?" Ey asked me looking up at me with a small smile on her face. I ducked down and kissed her pert lips. Lightly but enough force to last.

  "I am now." I said stretching my left shoulder, which my new shirt was making feel tighter than usual.

  Something in the musculature hadn’t synced right—maybe from hauling the Interceptor unit out of the SUV with Danny that morning. I could’ve flagged it for recalibration, but we were wheels-up in twenty. I’d deal with it in the field.

  “You’ll feel it most around the jawline,” TAI said, hands playing with the solid priest like collar of this suit -- one she of course picked out for me to match the American dress style we were to impersonate. “Voice modulation hasn’t settled. Might stutter under stress.” Talking about the bio metric suite that was installed waiting for initialization.

  My eyes were currently a filmy white until we were able to scan the targets eye scan and implement it, where then my eyes would look exactly like his. Same with my fingerprints, currently encased in a special set of gloves. The infiltration team should get us those scans in flight, and meet us somewhere en-route for the network hack portion of this mission.

  “Great. So if I choke, I’ll sound like a warbling kettle.”

  “Or a blues singer mid-seizure.”

  I snorted. "And you'd like that? A crooner whispering sweet nothings in your ear?" She smiled. It reached her eyes in a way it never did. Something only reserved for me it seemed. I liked it.

  “You have a full memory backup locked,” she continued. “If anything happens—"

  “You roll me back and I wake up a half-second stupider. I know.”

  Her lips thinned. “Think about Frank, Kay. It's time locked true and most ops come back fine.” She said, letting the end hang in a pregnant pause.

  “But... it's not the same. I know Ey.”

  She didn’t answer.

  We stood under the fluorescent wash of the hangar lights, the air thick with turbine heat and unspoken math. Tulanto could replace me. Had replaced me, technically—just not the me that was standing here. The backups kept the lights on, but every restore shaved off something from the original due to the way an androids Neural Network embedded and evolved persona.

  Those final seconds—traumatic or missing—could unravel everything. A thought. A twitch. A reflex I didn’t know I had until it was gone -- or added. One just didn't know what the changes could be. Worse off was, when you were changed, you knew what you lost -- in some cases who. Maybe it was worse than death—you had to live with it afterward.

  “You sure you don’t want to come?” I asked.

  She tilted her head, amused. “You’re on the ground. I’m everywhere else. That’s the deal.”

  I nodded once. No kiss. No lingering glance. Just a soft shoulder tap before she turned and walked away, like she was closing a case file.

  It was the most romantic thing she’d ever done.

  The hum of mana turbines blended into the quiet cabin like static under glass. No flight staff were around to take drink orders or meals. This was strictly a self-serve flight.

  Mai sat across from me, one leg crossed over the other, tablet balanced on the work table between us. Her finger flicked through feed footage, but her expression didn’t move. Not yet.

  We hadn’t spoken since takeoff. She hadn’t even looked at me. Not in the usual sharp way she had—no dry quip, no sidelong glance. Just pure focus.

  The footage she was watching was Jane’s original infiltration into the Japanese compound where she found Provost—Yasoba Shinya. Mai’s fiancé. It wasn’t edited—no highlights, no mission summary. Just raw, unfiltered data.

  Jane climbing up the canal-side warehouse. Slipping past guards. Entering the ship-like hatch that led to the hold where they were torturing Yasoba... all from the infiltrator's point of view.

  “You’re watching her. How she moves, her thinking process. You don't trust her do you?”

  Mai didn’t answer.

  “Not for analysis, Mai. You’re watching her.” I said stressing the last bit.

  She tapped to rewind a segment. Jane slipping through a light field like it wasn’t even there.

  “She’s... efficient,” Mai said finally.

  “Cold, you mean. Someone who could put a fist through his back on command. Is that what you're afraid of Mai? That TAI would give a kill order to her like the Americans did when their team was compromised?”

  “She doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t hesitate. No tells. Even I had tells. No Emotion.”

  I leaned back, letting the straps press into my shoulders. “She’s a prototype, Mai. Built different. From my files on her, she's got more emotion than most androids.”

  “That's worse, Kay.”

  Silence again. The kind that wasn’t uncomfortable, just heavy.

  I watched her face instead of the feed. The smallest tightening around her mouth. That thing she did with her jaw when she was trying not to show something.

  “Does he know?” I asked.

  Her eyes flicked toward me—fast and sharp.

  “Yasoba,” I added. “Does he know you’re alive?”

  She looked back at the screen. “No. And I intend to keep it that way until after he’s cleared. Alistair’s right—”

  “The King,” I cut in. “He’s the King, Mai. You’re way too comfortable throwing his first name around.”

  “Right. The King. Alistair. Whatever.” She waved me off. “He’s right, Kay. We don’t know what they did to Yasoba. What he was promised. If they bent him.”

  She paused. “I say never. But it’s not my call anymore, is it?”

  “What would bend him, Mai? In such a short time—what do you think could?”

  She looked me in the eye. And for the first time since takeoff, she winced.

  “Me,” she whispered. “If he thought he could safeguard me.”

  Then, quieter, bringing her hands to her face “But again… it’s not my call. The only way I can help him now is proving he’s solid—and exposing him if he’s not.”

  I nodded. “Yeah. No, guess not.”

  I shifted in my seat, let the silence thicken for a beat.

  “Just… don’t let it break you in the process. So, gorilla in the room—

  You think that’ll hold once we’re boots-down?”

  “I'll manage it. He’s out of comms range. Walls in the auction house block everything. If this goes right, he’ll never know. Also I always have this.” She said pulling up a hoody from her bag that covered the top half of her face.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  "High tech Mai. Very high tech."

  I let that sit a moment. She was onto the last mission with both of them after the American handler. “Must be weird—watching the same woman who saved him almost get him killed on the next job.”

  Mai looked up. “She didn’t almost get him killed. He did. She's a semi trained field agent. He depended on her too much and didn't keep track of his own situation.”

  Then she turned off the tablet. Just black screen now. Her own reflection looking back at her.

  “Their intercept mission’s in twenty. You ready?”

  “Aren't I always?”

  She didn’t answer.

  Soon enough a soft chime pinged overhead as the system connected us to the mission feed.

  “Intercept in progress,” came the automated voice. “Visuals encrypted. Audio only.”

  Mai leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes.

  I didn’t.

  The feed was grainy, the kind of low-res compression used when satellites were bouncing off their black-matte aircraft. Still, I could hear the breathing.

  "Target's approaching. Go."

  Not Jane’s—hers was controlled, mechanical. But the others.

  One of the Americans was trying to reason. “We’re cool here, you don’t need to—”

  Then a wet sound. Sharp. A blade, maybe. Then coughing. Then silence.

  “Primary down,” Jane’s voice came through, flat. Not cold—just empty. Like stating the weather.

  Another shuffle. A grunt. The second agent fought back—poorly. Judging by the speed of the next sequence and the sound of rustling, it was over in five seconds.

  Then quiet.

  “Scans secured,” Jane said. “Biometric full sweep uploading now.”

  A progress bar lit up on our wall terminal.

  [EYE]

  [FINGERPRINT]

  [VASCULAR / GAIT / HEAT]

  [CREDENTIAL CHIP]

  I exhaled, long and slow.

  “You good?” I asked without looking at Mai.

  “She’s efficient,” she said again. This time with zero inflection.

  I glanced her way. “You keep saying that like it’s a good thing.”

  “It is not. And--same time... yea, it's not. Depends on perspective.We just executed two people doing their jobs. For a face. For a login. It's really not a good thing Kay."

  Silence again.

  The feed cut with a soft ping.

  A single line of text blinked across the screen:

  DATA DOWNLOAD: 47 MINUTES.

  “So,” I said, flexing my shoulder against the armrest. “We’re the decoys now. You ready to shoot some ducks?”

  “Technically,” Mai said, eyes still closed, “we’re the headcount.”

  “That's us. Love me that... for us.”

  I sighed and looked out the window to the clouds below. Somewhere beneath them, bodies were cooling in an alley.

  The sky looked clean from up here. Deceptive, like everything else.

  Twenty hours after the plane lifted off, it didn’t land.

  It hovered low over Lake Starnberg, quiet in the midnight air. Mana-powered. Harrier-lift inspired.

  Tulanto didn’t invent everything—we just perfected the parts that mattered.

  We dropped with a raft kit, maybe twenty meters out, and paddled toward the northern bank.

  Any late night local fishermen probably thought we were smugglers.

  In a sense they weren’t wrong. Maybe rat catchers to be more accurate.

  The infiltration team was already in place.

  Cleanup crew had scrubbed the alley—no bodies, no prints, nothing to trace.

  I had already activated the scans in the plane, syncing my biometric overlays with the new profile, tightening like wet gloves.

  Eye color adjusted.

  Gait calibration settled.

  Fingerprints cloned.

  My voice mod finally stabilized.

  “You sound like a discount ambassador,” Mai had said.

  “That’s the goal,” I said. “Subtle grift. Mid-level power. Forgettable.”

  I leaned down into the bio-metric mold—a bowl-shaped cradle—waited for the seal.

  When I came back up, I had a new face.

  “Now for the pièce de résistance. Gotta really sell it after all" I said.

  The new me. For now.

  She didn’t say anything. Just stared out the window like I wasn’t there. Well two could play that game - I could make that silence beautiful too.

  “That’s so disturbing.” she finally said.

  Well, a guy can dream I guess.

  The intel car recovered us off the coast dropped us two blocks from the venue—unmarked gallery, short lease, no paper trail. No words were spoken. The agents, dressed as a driver simply picked us up, dropped us off, and then drove away. Professional.

  From the outside, it looked like a place you’d buy abstract suffering or starve an artist at.

  Inside, it was dead quiet.

  Lights flicked on in sequence as we entered—low, indirect, deliberately theatrical.

  Nothing but soft ambient glow tracing a narrow path ahead. The walls were bare. Not a single painting, not even a price tag. Off-white walls, nearly grey, stared back at us—sterile and unmarked.

  Just a hall that led to a glass door with no visible locking mechanism.

  TAI’s voice slid into my left ear.

  “Press the card to the reader then hold the door open wide for at least four-point-three seconds, Kay. Open the door. Don’t look behind you. Let Mai in then follow. Once inside all comms will go out. Proceed with plan.”

  I glanced at Mai.

  She gave me a barely perceptible nod and moved into position beside the entrance, checking angles like muscle memory.

  I palmed the access card, watched the sensor flick from red to green.

  Beep.

  The door slid open.

  I counted to two—and felt the air shift. Not a breeze. Not sound. Just… absence.

  Like something large moved fast past my periphery, too quick to see and too smooth to hear.

  I didn’t turn.

  TAI again:

  “Good. She’s in.”

  I closed the door behind me.

  No one on the outside would’ve seen her. Hell, I barely felt it.

  Mai stayed quiet, scanning the room like we were already under surveillance.

  “Think they’re watching?” I asked.

  “Always,” she muttered. “That’s the point.”

  She was right. That was the whole con—we weren’t really guests.

  We were the headcount. The reason this access point had a terminal at all.

  The ones they could track. The ones who gave Jane her window.

  We were the noise. She was the signal.

  The inside of the gallery didn’t match the cold void up front.

  Dark, vaulted ceilings. Black floors. And art.

  Modern pieces that rose and fell like 2020s NFTs—some beautiful, most a cash run lit exhibits, like suspended ghosts in curated isolation.

  Each piece floated in controlled light—single-source spots that made shadows dance away from the walls.

  No names. No titles. Just presence.

  Two figures stood near the first corner—tall, black-suited watchers, neither armed nor moving.

  When we stepped forward, they both turned at once.

  Their glasses glowed faintly.

  Facial scan.

  I expected to feel it. A sweep. Subtle tickle at the back of the sinuses. I wanted to feel it. But nothing. Just digital tracking and done.

  They turned back around. No words. No nods. Nothing.

  We’d passed.

  A lighted path flickered on beneath our feet as the only answer to our unspoken question—pale white along the floor, like a museum projection line, leading us forward.

  At the end: a private room, sealed steel door, no handle.

  It opened automatically when we stepped forward.

  Inside looked like a screening room crossed with a rich man’s panic den.

  Minimal.

  Low leather couch.

  A small hardwood table.

  A hard-wired tablet. Like something you'd find in a Cold War bunker.

  I frowned. “That's old school. I like it.”

  No signal. No TAI. No comms.

  "Your time to shine," Mai muttered.

  I stepped forward, and held the door open for Mai to walk in.

  Four-point-three seconds.

  No more, no less.

  I didn’t look behind me.

  Didn’t need to.

  I counted.

  Closed the door.

  Waited.

  I looked around the room and saw the multiple cameras and microphones through out the room. I turned and looked directly into the room’s security cam.

  Let it see my face. My body. My suit.

  My stance said radiating command.

  "We said no surveillance in the auction. We like to discuss our purposes in private."

  I looked down at my watch and hacked the peripheral devices all at once while making it seem like it was all my watch. The camera light crackled off.

  Short-circuited.

  Dead.

  “Jesus, about freaking time droid!”

  Jane unfolded from the wall behind it like a shimmer uncoiling into form.

  Cloak dissolved.

  Eyes green.

  Her frame—storm gray with glowing seams like exposed mana tendons.

  Under the hood, her red hair shimmered like wet curls plastered to her cheek. I have to admit it was an oddly specific and weird characteristic for an infiltration unit. One the Jane insisted on apparently.

  "What part of undetectable and unrecognizable don't you understand?" I asked gesturing to her face.

  She held a finger to her lips. Then she flashed her lights—that green glow bathing the whole space.

  Only then did Mai release her questioning frown. I realized at that moment, Mai must've thought I was talking to the air.

  Jane stalked forward, pulled the tablet cable taut, and drove a spike connector directly into it from her wrist.

  No drama. No lights. Just a click.

  “I’m in. AI’s countering me—or trying.”

  Her voice was calm. Cold. Focused.

  I sat on the couch, leaned forward, tapped the screen.

  Real-time bids. Catalog entries. Names that shouldn't be here.

  “You know, this interface kinda slaps,” I muttered.

  “Downloading. Forty-three seconds.”

  "Good. We play this out till end then leave same way." I replied to a nod.

  I tapped a few fake bids. Idle play. Window dressing.

  Time passed.

  No sirens.

  No reaction.

  “Got it.” Jane disconnected.

  Just as the door sealed shut.

  Steel hiss. Deadlock thud.

  No override.

  "Thats at least 4 inches of steel. Not barging through that any time soon."

  “Plan B then?” she asked, torch igniting from her palm.

  “Hold that thought, kiddo.” I stood. Walked to the far wall. Knocked twice. Felt the give of the drywall, behind concrete veneer.

  “Let me.”

  I reared back and punched through.

  Jane joined—ripping through the torn opening with brute speed.

  We slipped out into the rear hall, and saw them.

  Two Japanese enforcer droids, sleek-armored, fast.

  They stalked past us toward the sealed room.

  "Not these assholes again!" Jane whispered. "Weak backbones, but everything else is a bitch to crack."

  We waited for them to start getting into position in front of the room door. 4 armed security rushed in with full automatic rifles and body armor. The two handlers held pistols and flanked the door on each side. I counted seconds for them to breach. The door opened as quickly as it sealed, and the enforcers moved—not toward us—into the room

  We sprinted—through the dark hall, minimum objective: reach the front gallery, primary objective: get Mai out of here. She didn't have a backup.

  Dark walls. Art again. The service door way to the white hall in front of us.

  The enforcers turned. And sprinted out toward us. They were faster then they had any right to be.

  One pivoted toward me.

  The other tracked Jane.

  Showtime.

  Jane lit up green again—fully. The light was blinding, and the robots stalled as their visuals were compromised.

  I pulled my spike out of my palm and sank it into the left eye of the enforcer on me. I wanted to make sure it stayed blind.

  Bullets rained down on us and I jumped in front of Mai, using my body as a shield, bullets hammering into my chest—some even punching through my outer skin.

  I returned fire with the built in gun in my other hand. I dropped the two pistol handling handlers. The four security goons ducked behind cover, sneaking peeks with rifle butts raised.

  The enforcer followed into me trying to take my head off with it's built in sword on it's forearm, but I ducked and jammed my stiletto into its neck, piercing its spinal column jamming its neural network. Sparks flew from conventional wires at the impact point, but the machine tried to carry on nonetheless less.

  I moved Mai back toward the door. Closed.

  The robot, slowed to a crawl but still coming at us. I fired my mini cannon at its processing core—center of the back. Not easy, considering the fully armored front was charging straight at me. One, two, three, four armor penetrating bullets back to back, in same spot, finally broke through, the final bullet hitting into the processor box making it explode into chips out the back. Boom went the robot. Well, it fell down at least.

  Jane was already between the two droids, ballet and chaos, blades and dodge routines whittling down her own robot and avoiding a new blast of bullets.

  I returned fire and they hid back into their hide hole.

  I looked back at Jane to see her pulling the control unit from the machines back, as she hung upside down from her leg wrapped around its neck. And now you know why ours have mouths.

  She was the true threat now.

  I ran over to the wall and broke through again. Usually one security flaw will be found again, this case thankfully so.

  We ran into the white hall to find another security team — this one overwhelming, what was left of it — taking cover behind pillars in the hall — back to us.

  A couple of soldiers were already down. Overwatch sniper—Yasoba.

  “Damn. Good shot.” I muttered as I fired the last few rounds from my forearm rig—clean, disabling shots. Hips. Femurs. Nothing fatal. Not yet.

  Out the door we ran as we uploaded the data.

  Black Mercedes picked us up.

  Data retrieved. Mission success. Cover blown. Fallout pending.

  Rodrigo wannabe in the driver’s seat. At least we know he's an original.

  The safe house came fast. Mai pulled a case from under the front seat.

  Popped it open. Hoodie first. Then a full black face mask.

  “The hood’s not enough,” she said, slipping it on. “I don’t think I am, either.”

  “Great. Who doesn’t love masquerades.”

  “Me.” flatly said the still-glowing android. “Apparently I’m bad at team names.”

  “Great,” I muttered again. “Clap off, Jane.” I said as I clapped at our bright guest.