Drefleck paused and cast a languid look at the three men still bristling in front of him. “You know,” he said, “I’ve taken some beatings in my time. Occupational hazard, as I’m sure you’ll appreciate. But I don’t think I’ve ever been pummelled quite so enthusiastically by someone who genuinely believed it would do any good.”

  Latham made another angry sound, but Drefleck held up a hand.

  “No, no. I’m not looking to start anything. It was just an observation. I do so love a committed professional.” He gestured vaguely to himself. “You know, when all is said and done, we’re not so different, you and me.”

  “Fuck you!” Lowe said.

  Drefleck briefly took on Arebella’s shape. “If you think that would make things better?” Then he switched back to his nondescript form. “But no more of that, let’s get to the part where I tell you something useful and, perhaps, we reach a bit more of an understanding of our negotiating positions. You’re not going to like what I have to say, mind, but that’s not really my problem.”

  He stretched out his fingers, watching them shift and settle back into their preferred shape.

  “As I’m sure you’ve realised, my boys and I are an OOB. Not exactly one of the household names, but in certain circles, we’d built ourselves a decent reputation. A reputation for being able to pull off some pretty fucking specialist work.

  “You see, when most OOBs are hired, you’ll be getting a group of people who do one job very well. Maybe they kill someone for you. Maybe a whole host of someones. Maybe they steal something that can’t be stolen. Maybe they rough up a few sorry bastards to send a message. Different strokes for different folks, and you can usually find a squad that’ll scratch what itches you. But my lot?” He grinned. “We’re all Shimmerskins. It’s our USP. We aren’t assassins. Well, we’re not just assassins. We’re complete replacements.”

  He let that word sit in the air for a moment. Watching it curdle.

  “More often than not, when people reach for the old OOB directory, they’re looking for a government sponsored hit squad. Shoot first, ask questions later, you get me? It’s actually pretty rare for someone to need an entire operation turned inside out, with thirty-odd people swapped for ringers, but when they do—well, that’s when me and my boys get the call.”

  Rook frowned at that. “You’re saying people paid you to just—what? Walk in, take someone’s face, and pretend nothing has changed?”

  “I mean, sure. You’re making it sound pretty facile. But yes. It’s exactly that. That’s what we specialise in,” Drefleck said. “Why kill off a whole organisation when you can just become it for a time and put it to use? That takes a fuckton of prep work, mind. You can’t just swap out the front desk and expect everything to tick along nicely without everyone being exceptionally well briefed so noone suspects a thing. When we’re required to move in, we committed to the piece.

  “Take the Sable Accord down Nellington way. Nasty little operation, built its fortune on off-the-books Mercenary contracts and the occasional act of enthusiastic piracy. Now, the client—who shall remain nameless, but let’s just say they had a vested interest in seeing less of that particular enterprise—decided a scorched-earth approach would be pretty inefficient. You know the saying, you cut one dick off a thousand others grow in its place. So instead of calling in a hit squad to level the organisation, we were paid to take over and remodel it.

  "Three months. That’s all it took. One by one, key players were removed and replaced. The Administrators. The Enforcers. The Handlers. When my boys were done, the whole damn thing was still standing, still signing contracts, still running jobs—only now, it was working for the people who paid us instead of its original owners. An no one was any the wiser.”

  “That’s insane,” Lowe said.

  “Oh, undoubtedly it is,” Drefleck agreed. “It’s also exceptionally lucrative. The kind of thing only the wealthiest, most paranoid of governments ever commission. And, don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t happen often. Far too expensive and labour intensive for most people to countenance. Usually, people just want one target replaced—a Noble, a Merchant, a Commander. But for the full works?” He whistled. “That’s reserved for when you really need to hit the reset button on an institution.

  “There was another job. Back in Arvenstadt. The Crown Prince, no less, thought his inner circle might not be so inner anymore, if you catch my drift. Foreign interests. Political rivals. He didn’t trust anyone. But—and here’s the funny bit—he didn’t want to get rid of them. That would make too much noise. He just wanted them . . . better.”

  He spread his hands.

  “So, in we went. Seven of us. Just seven. Over the course of six weeks, we picked them off one by one. We learned their patterns, their quirks. We became them. And at the end of it? The Prince had the same advisors, the same confidants—only now, they were all working in his best interests.” He grinned. “I hear the country’s doing very well these days.”

  “And how many times have you pulled this shit in Soar?” Rook said.

  “Never. Not once. Far too much like hard work. For one thing, the political scene here is a goddamn knife fight in a burning alley. And I don’t know about you, but I prefer my investments to last longer than it takes a fucking god to take an interest. Besides, Soar’s got its own style of corruption. I imagine hiring us to move in would be admitting they weren’t good enough at betraying each other the old-fashioned way.”

  “So what changed?” Lowe said. “Why are you running around here now?”

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  “Well, it’s hard to keep you head about such things when Soar Sovereign Fucking Bank gets in touch.”

  ***

  The way Drefleck told it, it was actually all pretty simple.

  The Warden of the Reserve had something in the Vault he’d suddenly become very worried someone was after. Despite its reputation for being impregnable, he had reason to think his own security might not be up to the task. So, via various intermediaries, he reached out to an OOB squad he thought might be just the ticket.

  “A bank,” Lowe said. “You just . . . stopped being assassin and started, what, working in a fucking bank?”

  “Pretty much,” Drefleck said. “Nice work if you can get it. Especially at our rates. And, when it comes to ways to earn money, it beats impersonating members of the fucking criminal underworld, I’ll tell you that for free. Although, to be honest, at least initially, we weren’t too keen. I massively over-quoted for the job, never expecting to hear anything else. But then matey boy-” Drefleck looked at the cooling body on the floor- “replied to say ‘how about we stick 50% on that and get the fuck on with it.’ There wasn’t much else to say after that. We took a few weeks getting up to speed before the insertion itself took place. My boys were all given files, we studied them, learned our roles, and then when they turned up on the first morning of the job . . . well, space had been made for them to slip into.”

  “And that doesn’t bother you?” Latham asked. “Do you ever ask what happens to the people you’re ‘replacing’?”

  Drefleck shrugged, that lazy, unsettling motion that wasn’t so much a shift of his shoulders as a slow redistribution of mass. “Eggs. Omelettes You know how that goes. Literally, actually. The Warden said the bodies were stored away in some fucking farmfood warehouse he’d acquired.” He pointed at Lowe and shared a coordinate. “They’re all in there if it means anything to you.”

  Lowe filed the address away for another time. He thought about all he had read of the lives of those who had worked in the Vault. Of Whitlow, in that memory Nuroon had showed him, doing his job to the very best of his ability. None of those that had been so casually ‘removed’ had been important in the way that Soar measured things. But all of them had been living life the way Lowe thought it was supposed to be lived.

  He felt unaccountably sad. He hadn’t realised he’d actually been holding out hope that they’d all still turn up. Hearing Drefleck speak to casually about their final resting place was a gut punch he had not been expected. That they had been so easily discarded by their superiors . . .

  Lowe’s eyes moved to the dead body of Morholt on the floor. Karma, whilst a bitch, got it pretty spot on some times, didn’t she?

  “We insist that all that sort of thing is taken care of before we arrive,” Drefleck continued, as if that somehow absolved him. “We weren’t in the business of killing any fucking civilians. Well below our paygrade for one thing. Our job was to take over from them and run the Vault as if nothing had changed. And to make sure that, when shit went down, we were the ones one the spot to handle it.”

  “So?” Rook prompted

  “So it would appear that we were clearly in over our fucking heads. One moment, it was the dullest, most well-paid job in the world. And I mean that sincerely. If we’d seen out the full term of the hire, we’d have been able to retire on an island somewhere. And the next I was getting panicked Sending Stone messages from a quickly dwindling number my people. About an attack. About people’s heads exploding. And then some of the eeriest fucking laughing I’d ever heard.

  “Me and all the others who weren’t on shift that night got down there as fast as we could—just in time to see you waltzing in like you’d booked a tour. Next thing I know, Cuckoo House is all over the case and the whole place is locked down tight. No one in, no one out. No new information coming or going. Even then, we were tempted to hang around and see what happened - I even had Syncler put undercover here to keep an eye on Morholt and make sure he wasn’t going to try and short us - but then a little birdie told me someone was pulling our files back at HQ and all sorts of questions presented themselves.”

  Lowe felt something settle cold in his gut. Lant. He has asked the Deathcaller to find out who the bodies in the Vault were. It had been that probing which had alerted the Shimmerskins something was going down.

  “You thought Lowe was on your trail,” Rook said.

  “Bingo.”

  “So you what?” Lowe asked, “Just decided to kill me and all my friends?”

  “Oh, don’t be stupid,” Drefleck said, as if offended at the very idea. “We don’t do anything for free! No, we were still figuring out how to extricate what was left of the squad out of Soar,” he said. “We’d discussed cutting our losses, maybe reinventing ourselves somewhere else. Then, lo and behold, just when we were planning to leave, we get offered another fucking massive contract. And let me tell you,” Drefleck continued, “this one looked easy. Beautifully simple. How hard could it be, after all? Killing a Classless Inspector and his little gang of nobodies?” He grinned. “Turns out? Plenty fucking hard.”

  Lowe didn’t return the smile. He was too busy trying to put everything together. Something wasn’t clicking. The Vault. The slaughter. The hit contract. Something didn’t add up. “Hang on. Who gave you that contract? Was it Morholt?”

  Drefleck shook his head.

  “The Mayor?” Latham said

  Another lazy shrug. “Nah. It was some wanker calling himself the Black Knight.” There was a beat during which Drefleck obviously enjoyed the impact of those words on Lowe. “Which brings me to what I assume is the more pressing issue for all you fine people. The whereabouts of all the rest of your friends.”

  The tension in the room ramped up fairly considerably at that.

  “So, full disclosure time,” Drefleck said. “I need out. You Soar types play far too rough for me and I’m happy to leave you to it. I came here today to see what I could get out of matey boy,” he nodded down at Morholt, “but someone else had obviously decided he needed to go permanently quiet. The way I figure it, whoever did that must now know about me. I sense we’re moving to the Finding Out stage of proceedings and I need to make myself scarce.”

  “So what, you’re going to tell me where you’ve squirrelled away my friends in return for . . . what? Safe passage out of Soar?”

  “Kind of. But you see, I think you might have grasped the wrong end of the stick here. Sure I know where the rest of the group is is, but it’s not us that took them off the board.”

  This revelation, doubtless, would have been a very fruitful area for discussion—one that might have led to revelations, accusations, and no small amount of self-congratulatory gloating from Drefleck—had it not been rather abruptly forestalled.

  Specifically, by the explosion that came screaming through the bank window.

  And, even more specifically, by the subsequent and immediate disappearance of Drefleck’s head.