My mouth tastes like blood and antiseptic.
My arm feels like it’s full of lava.
The pressure in my chest simmers low and confused and angry and very much not resolved.
“Okay,” I whisper. “Then here is the reality we are both stuck in.”
He waits.
“The Nine tried to kill me,” I say. “They will try again. I am injured, broke, homeless, and apparently now a walking supernatural trigger event for a traumatized super-soldier with bone knives in his arms.”
He winces faintly at that description.
“And you,” I continue, “are the only reason I am not dead in a pile of burning falafel right now.”
Silence stretches between us again.
Brittle.
Necessary.
“So,” I say quietly. “We are going to work together, because we don’t really have another option.”
He nods once.
Slow.
Controlled.
“Yes.”
I close my eyes for half a second and then open them again, because unconsciousness feels like a bad strategic choice right now.
“Great,” I mutter. “This is the worst alliance I’ve ever agreed to.”
CHAPTER 6
TUR
Iturn the safehouse into a fortress in forty-seven minutes.
Not because I’m rushing.
Because my hands need something to do that isn’t shaking.
The concrete room Kimberly is sleeping in sits at the center of a warren of derelict service corridors and half-collapsed utility tunnels that haven’t been on a public map in decades, which makes it an ideal place to hide someone bleeding out from a mob firebombing and an equally ideal place for me to lose my mind in slow motion while pretending I’m still a functional tactical asset.
I start with surveillance.
Micro-drones no larger than insects slip out of my kit and vanish into ventilation shafts, cracks in the concrete, and hairline fractures in the ceiling, their feeds layering into my cracked terminal in silent, overlapping grids. Motion sensors bloom invisibly across corridors. Acoustic pickups ghost into place behind walls. Thermal tripwires settle into doorframes and ceiling corners like sleeping spiders.
The data lattice assembles itself in my peripheral vision, a three-dimensional map of every approach vector, every blindcorner, every place a human body could hide long enough to ambush someone who wasn’t paying attention.
I am always paying attention.
I map kill corridors next, projecting intersecting lines of fire that converge on the three narrow access points into the safehouse, then cross-mapping those lines against structural weaknesses and fallback positions in case I need to collapse a ceiling or drop a section of floor out from under someone without bringing the whole building down on our heads.
Failsafes hum softly inside the walls as I splice into dormant municipal power lines and reroute energy into sealed Reaper-era capacitors I swore I would never touch again.
