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Chapter Text

Chapter Text

O’Leary fled from Malik’s ribbing down a nearby Tube entrance, pleading weekend chores, and ordered them again to enjoy the downtime. Malik reassured her that Jensen was going to do some relaxing if she had to beat it into him. Over his halfhearted protests, she dragged him down the same steep stairway to the opposite platform, inbound to the City.

“I thought we were in London,” he said querulously.

“We are! But the City of London is the historic region where all the super-old-fashioned stuff is. You’ve never seen it, right? The Palace, the Gardens, the Bridges—”

“Bridges plural?”

“Yeah, London Bridge is the one in the poem, but the famous silhouette is actually Tower Bridge. Over by the Tower of London, the old prison where they kept everyone locked up back in the day before shortening them by a head.”

Jensen caught her glance at his wrist and winced. “Charming.”

It must have been unconscious; she didn’t react. “Some of them, anyway. Others just got left to rot for a decade or three. Some fascinating political history—makes ours look positively healthy. Although we both ended up with a Corporate Sovereignty Act, so maybe there’s not much to choose between. Anyway, I figured you’d enjoy the Tower. It oozes brooding, melancholy atmosphere, and I thought you could exchange fashion tips with the residents.”

“What residents? They still use it?”

“No,” she laughed, and plucked at the sleeve of his black coat, “there’s a flock of ravens that live there—people feed them and everything.”

“Hey. I resemble that remark.”

“You even sound like one, when you’re yelling at Pritchard.”

“We sure aren’t birds of a feather—c’mon, you set me up for that.”

The Palace was impressive, steeped in history, although Jensen found himself rolling his eyes at the earnest signage explaining the origins of the Foot Guards’ cockades. No judge of horses, he watched Malik’s face instead while she waxed rhapsodic over the matching black steeds of the Blues and Royals. Her breath steamed in the cold like that of the animals, and her eyes shone as she expostulated on the training and finesse needed to keep so many people and horses synchronized in front of a crowd of tourists. The Destrier tucked against his left ribs was much more his speed, but her enjoyment warmed him as much as his augs did.

The armory in the White Tower, on the other hand, proved positively riveting. As it were. Hermann’s words on the train rang in his head—“men such as you and I, who live our armor and our blades”—and he scrutinized the articulated plates of steel with a complicated tangle of emotion jammed up somewhere behind his reinforced breastbone.

While some part of the Tower was probably always under renovation, they were graciously permitted out onto one section of the walls. The wind had picked up, and when Malik stood to gaze out over the grounds, he leaned on a merlon upwind. A clot of tourists moved away, chattering about famous beheadings, and she spoke without turning her head.

“Feel like leveling with me? Or evading like you usually do?”

He twitched, flooded with abrupt panic. She knows, she figured out how I feel, and she’s about to let me down extremely gently and I can’t even throw myself off the damn battlements without my Icarus kicking in… “About what?”

“Where your head’s at. You saved a bunch of people and shut down the HRA—not single-handedly, I know—but you also lost your boss. Which you’re probably still beating yourself up over, no matter how unfair it is. What’s it like in there?”

Jensen sighed with relief and hoped she read it as reluctance. “Been better. Been worse. I respected Miller a hell of a lot, liked him, but I didn’t know him the way a bunch of the others did. Argento was hit bad. MacReady will be, once he gets out from under doing two jobs at once. He’s worse than me, though. Doubt he’ll let on.”

“Know thyself, huh?”

“I try. It’s… hmm. I’m waiting for the next one, like I said. Wondering what else is out there. Thinking about how to go on offense.” He looked out over the city, spotting the Apex Center where it rose above even the church spires, reassuringly remote. Someday, he might have the psychological distance to forgive himself for Miller’s death. “This is nice, though. Today.”

Malik turned inside the crenel, looking stern. “You’ve earned it. Vega was right—you said so yourself. You’ve been under too long. You need a break.”

“This double-agent stuff is rough.” He shook his head. “It’s for a good cause, and I really haven’t had to do anything, y’know, concrete to undermine the Task Force. But I’m not cut out for it.”

“I’d be worried if you thought you were. I’m not saying you’re not a little messed up, but you gotta be really messed up for undercover.”

“Yeah.” He fell silent, thinking of Vince Black and Oscar Mejia… or was it Hector Guerrero? He’d forgotten which one was the name, and which the cover.

Malik broke in on his thoughts. “Any more, uh, brain anomalies?”

“You mean like suddenly remembering something?”

“Or suddenly forgetting, yeah.”

“Not that I remember.”

She smacked him lightly on the arm. “Be serious—this is your brain we’re talking about. What about a neurologist, you pin one down? Hear back from what’s-her-face?”

“Doctor Markovic? Yeah. She had a couple of suggestions Stateside. No one in Europe.”

“You follow up?”

“Not yet. Been a little busy.”

Malik sighed. “Yeah, I know. Don’t mean to bug you about it. But I worry.”

“I know. Sorry to worry you.”

“Don’t be. I just…” She leaned her crossed arms on the wall. He leaned down beside her, almost shoulder-to-shoulder, close enough to put an arm around her. But any putative Jensen swagger proved unequal to his certainty that she’d jerk away from the executioner’s sword inside.

“Just what?”

“Ugh. I hate apologies. I was a little harsh with you on the way back from the Alps.”

“Too concussed to remember. Think nothing of it.”

He got another glare for that, a real one. “Come on, Adam, I’m trying to—”

“Sorry. Go ahead.”

“What you’re doing is important. You’re saving, like, hundreds of lives—when you’re not saving millions. You know I saw a documentary on Panchaea? Did a little back-of-the-envelope math: by the time anyone got troops on-site, and it would’ve been SEALs about four hours after you splashed down, the death toll would probably have been another fifteen million all told. And that’s assuming they could’ve talked that code out of Darrow, if he was even still alive by then. So.”

“… oh.”

“I know the double-agent thing is rough on you, especially with that pilot and the psychologist ready with the knives. You need someone you can trust. Like, really trust, to have your back. What I mean is—and I can’t believe I’m saying this—you know I don’t do half-measures. I gotta be in, or out. And I want in.”

He shut his mouth, opened his shades, and stared at her, blinking in the wind. To have someone he trusted in on the ops would make a world of difference, and seeing more of Malik was its own reward—but he’d have to hide her presence from the Task Force, and it would jeopardize her safety even more. His mind raced. “When you say ‘in’…”

“Like when we were both with Sarif. In contact, in the air, in the field. In my bird, which has stealth and armor and a nose cannon. You may be pleased to know I’m hardening her against EMPs, too. Your Task Force pilot sold you out to get killed. You need me.”

“What, you don’t trust me to handle myself?”

“I trust you with my life—hell, I trust you with my bird. I trust you to do the right thing. But to handle yourself?” She made a face. “I mean, look at your track record.”

“You just tried to convince me I saved fifteen million lives and stopped the HRA.” And that Miller’s death wasn’t on his hands. “What’s wrong with my track record?”

“Aside from dying twice? You're surrounded by traitors, you can’t tie your own shoelaces, and your brain is haunted.”

“Ouch.” Jensen stared out over the medieval masonry and tried to be objective. “First of all, you know it’d help a hell of a lot, even just knowing you were there. But I’ve managed so far, and I don’t want to put you in danger. You were right about that.”

“And it’s my choice, and I’ve decided it’s worth it. Plus, you can help me out with something, too, if it makes you feel better.” He hummed inquiry, and she shifted around to lean her back on the ancient, moss-covered stone. The wind whipped strands of her hair from her temples, streaming them out like miniature pennants. “I’m stepping up the Very-Overground-Railroad activities for Quinn. Even though the HRA failed, things are still a mess all over. The Czech Republic sure isn’t relaxing its laws just because the UN declined to go full Nineteen-Eighty-Four—hell, Mexico’s trying to pass an HRA-lite, and they’re talking about closing the border unless the US gets with the program. People need out of places like that, and the ones who can’t leave need Neuropozyne smuggled in. You’re terrifying and sneaky, and some of these drop-offs and pick-ups have been a little hairy. We’d have to finesse the scheduling, but I could use you for backup on the iffy ones.”

“Done. If you’d told me you were—”

“You’re not the only one who can get stubborn about going it alone.” She nudged his elbow with hers. “Speaking of which, promise me something, okay? The shit with your brain, it happened because of Panchaea, right?”

“Sure.”

“Because the people who picked you out of the water were shady Illuminati types who wanted to experiment on you.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Instead of me, in the Bumblebee.”

“Malik. That’s nuts. You told me the Navy had a no-fly zone over the whole area, right?”

Her lips tightened, and she shrugged. “For a while, yeah. If I’d waited around until they cleared out, like the bad guys did—”

“They’d have shot you.”

“Maybe.” She discarded a couple of things before saying them out loud—his CASIE might have been able to transcribe them, from the tiny movements of lip and throat, but he could recognize the signs. “Just promise me you’ll let me help, okay? Don’t do your lone-wolf thing and try to fix it yourself—I don’t want to find out you had Koller jam some homemade shit on top of whatever that whackjob Orlov did to you. Or that you decided to ignore it and hope it goes away.”

She looked angry, probably at herself. He decided to attack the logical fallacies later. “Okay. If it makes you happy, I promise. You’ll be in the loop.”

“And I want you to teach me how to fight, and shoot.”

“That’s a long-term project. Two, actually.” Where was this coming from? Maybe when she’d gotten shot down, in Hengsha. He’d certainly felt useless enough while she was trying to shake the missile.

“Not going anywhere. Guess you better not die before you teach me your ninja skills.”

“It’s karate,” he said before he could stop himself. “Ninja mostly poisoned people, or garroted them, and they actually didn’t wear a lot of black.”

“See? I’m learning already. And one last thing.”

“Shoot.”

“Lean on Pritchard more. Hey, now, hear me out.” She turned to face him as he shoved off the wall in disbelief. “If you’re dead-set on unearthing Janus, you need someone with hacking chops outside the Collective. And if you tell him your reasons, you know he’ll help. C’mon, Adam—for me?”

Malik looked up at him with shameless puppy-dog eyes, her lower lip trembling. To mask the effect it had on him, he raised his eyebrows and stared her down until she snickered. “Okay, yeah, I didn’t think that would work. But that’s the deal, Pritchard and all.”

“God. Fine. Have it your way.” A Warden, or Yeoman—someone in an old-timey uniform and a funny hat—appeared on the wall to chivvy them along, and they headed down its length toward the exit.

Malik tugged her peacoat tighter around her neck, looking smug. “I usually do. Eventually.”

They wandered on across Tower Bridge. Jensen paused in his infolink research to gaze down through the glass floor and along the length of the Thames cutting its winding path through the heart of Old London. His eyes roamed inexorably once more to the quincunx of the Apex Center poking above the skyline to the west-northwest. He stood and stared for a long minute before Malik nudged him onwards.

“Don’t suppose you feel like joining Interpol,” he said as they clattered down the stairs on the south bank. “We have a nice range in the office, and Argento is actually qualified as a firearms instructor. Benefits package is good, too.”

“Jeez. Being on the team with your Illuminati pilot as my boss or something? Thanks, but no thanks. I don’t have the temperament.”

“Well, there may not be anywhere else near Prague that’ll put guns in the hands of a couple of Augs. And there’s not a lot of public ranges in England at all—you know how they are.” But the Zap’s stingers had no penetration. Hell, he could probably put a target in the apartment. It’d beat trying to coach a beginner from downrange, using himself as the target.

“Not… really?”

“No Second Amendment, no NRA, no frontier culture. They’ve always had strict laws and enforcement. Sure, you get the occasional hunting rifle incident, but it’s not like Detroit, where every gang kid has a piece and there’s an all-out firefight once a week.”

“You sound like you approve.”

“Yes and no. I like to think I’m more nuanced than Lazarus, at least. When I was a cop, I never saw a situation made better by someone with a gun. Other than us, I mean. Sometimes. When we weren’t fucking things up ourselves.” He shook his head slowly, replaying Mexicantown in his head for the millionth time. “Anyway, one thing’s for sure: you could kit out every American with body armor and an M7, and it wouldn’t be more than a speed bump for the Army if it ever got used against them—us, I mean. And since they got the Posse Comitatus Clause indefinitely suspended a few years back, that’s a real possibility. Picus was in on that, by the way: that Nicolette DuClare lady. Put her on the list, I guess.”

Jensen paused as they worked their way through the crowded lobby and onto the street. Once the crowd thinned, he said, “More to the point, I doubt it matters much to Page and Everett and whoever how many guns are floating around.”

“Uh-huh. They’re going for media control, and if they move on that internment plan with the FEMA camps, I figure they’re kicking down people’s doors at night. Unless you sleep with a gun under your pillow…”

“You think people don’t? But not all of them, and imagine they send in someone like me on point. Couple of rounds from a suburban dad with a handgun and delusions of tactical grandeur, woken up in the dead of night, is basically a massage. I guarantee a Gold Mask, or just a cop in full armor, is gonna shrug it off the same.”

“Or a soldier, God forbid.” Malik looked thoughtful. “You think this whole ‘Aug rehab facility’ thing is a trial run for that operation? What did they call it?”

“Hmmm.” Jensen racked his memory and found it still patchy. But his link held all the emails and messages he’d copied over—he dug up the relevant missive. “REX-Eighty-Four Charlie. Version three. And yeah, I figure you’re right. Stress-test for the main event.”

They walked on in grim silence for a few short London blocks, past Potter’s Field and over a switchyard. Jensen found plans online for a throwing knife target that should stand up to stinger rounds, but he didn’t have the space for a carpentry workshop. He bought one pre-made, and the knives that came with it. If nothing else, it would be interesting to see whether his HUD could adapt.

His augs tingled as he crossed the maglev rails, even at a height of thirty feet or so, and a fleeting feeling of plaid in his fingertips took him back to the glitches that had presaged the Incident. Mind still buried in shopping websites, he stumbled, and Malik caught his elbow.

“Oof. You’re heavy. You okay?”

“Yeah. Just the rails.” She gave him a quizzical look, and he jerked his head at the rails below. “The field gets strong when there’s more than a few lines side-by-side. You don’t have a problem with them?”

“Never noticed. Maybe it’s just limbs.”

Or maybe it was quantity of metal. “Anyway. Prague’s a better bet for a range, but good luck finding one that takes Augs. Hand-to-hand should be easier. I’ll see where Argento trains, and of course you can do a lot anywhere you have a little open space.”

“Don’t stress—I know I’m not going to turn into a ninja overnight.”

“I told you, that’s not—ha.” Malik waggled an eyebrow, and he gave her an exasperated look. “Having fun?”

“I am, actually.” She hummed in thought. “You’ve been less… I dunno, bleak maybe, since you moved to Prague. Maybe you’re just getting used to the augs more, maybe it’s being out from under Sarif, but it suits you. The way you were after you came back from sick leave, I couldn’t imagine you hitting a bar or going to brunch and hanging out with some friends. Like, when I asked you whether you had a death wish, on the way back from the Alps—you remember?”

“Afraid so.”

“Well, it was even worse back then. I thought you were trying to burn yourself out, go out in a blaze of glory, or spite, or—no, righteous fury, I think. That about the shape of it?”

It was. The raw nerve endings of his psyche stung as they were laid bare, and he hunched his shoulders and walked on wordlessly with his hands in his pockets.

“Anyway,” she continued after a moment, “you’re better now. Or, you seem better. No more death wishes.”

He shook his head and hoped she’d take it for agreement. It had never really been anything so dramatic as a death wish, anyway, just acceptance. He was built for battle, and not much else, and the Illuminati would keep him in business for the foreseeable future. He’d never be able to back down when there were innocent lives on the line, or to leave his friends in the lurch. One of these days, in one of these fights, the odds would finally let him down.

And the next fight would be coming soon, the normalcy snatched away again—he knew it like he knew his own dark moods, whenever he was left at loose ends. He needed not to let himself get complacent. Who knew what the Illuminati would try next, or where, or when? If he was lucky, they’d come at him directly; if he was unlucky, they’d strike at his friends, Malik or Pritchard or maybe Vega. The hairs on the back of his neck rose, and he darted a look around.

The busy street bustled innocuously with a cheerful throng. No suspicious looks or motions drew his eye. Smart vision showed a couple of augmentations in the crowd—a hand here, a foot there, a neural and an eyeball on a window-shopper—but nothing military-grade. Certainly no one hiding under an optical cloak. He took a deep breath, squeezed his left arm against the Destrier, and tried to relax.

“Ooh!” Malik broke left without a warning. He growled a curse under his breath and dogged her heels as she wove through gaps too small for him, using his physical presence ruthlessly to open a path. He’d honed it as a cop, the aura of purpose in motion with a hint of danger, and used it often as Sarif’s Chief of Security: people made way without even seeing him, pushed aside by an atavistic social bow shock. He posted up behind Malik at the edge of a clear section of pavement, abruptly back in bodyguard mode, and scanned the area again. His wrist plates flexed in time with his breath. So much for relaxing.

The clearing surrounded a duo in heavy leather aprons and gloves in front of a furnace whose heat Jensen could feel from twenty feet away. A man bent over a workbench, facing the crowd, and bent and twisted a length of particolored glass between gouts of flame from a hand-held torch. A woman turned from the furnace, sweating in a tee-shirt despite the weather, holding a tube with a glowing blob at the end. She rolled the blob on her own section of workbench, touched the other end of the tube to her lips, and blew.

Jensen zoomed his eyes. A small bubble appeared in the middle of the molten glass, lengthening the blob and giving it some width. The glassblower rolled it on the bench again, shaping it with a metal paddle, and returned it to the furnace. She extracted it after a few seconds and rolled it through a tray of something. Then, with a look of intense concentration, she blew once more. The blob grew, like a miniature sun as it glowed bright orange, and took on form. It stretched with a kind of inevitability, achingly slow, but never contracting the way rubber would have. Larger and larger it became, burgeoning with the glassblower’s breath, fire and air turned to solid light. Jensen stared, enthralled, and realized he was exhaling in time with her.

Malik whispered over her shoulder, “Is that a pumpkin?”

Sure enough, subtle ridges running down the sides of the globe grew starker and more visible as it cooled and took on colors other than those of molten silicate: red and green with flecks of white, Christmas colors. The glassblower drew a stem out of another gobbet of ridged glass as they watched. It lengthened and stretched under her firm but careful hands before she wrapped it quickly around a rod to give it shape. She snipped it off, joined it to the flattened ovoid of the gourd’s body, and set the piece aside with a flourish just as her counterpart stood up to reveal the tiny glass reindeer on his end of the bench.

“That’s… huh. That’s pretty cool,” Jensen whispered back, reluctant to disturb the atmosphere of quiet respect that the onlookers had fallen into. An instant later, though, they began to applaud as the two glassworkers took a bow. He felt momentarily foolish, but Malik turned her head to be heard over the noise, and he forgot about everything else as he registered how close her face was to his own. His body swayed from its accustomed stillness, subconscious torn between leaning away to give himself space and leaning forward the little it would take to take her in his arms. He swallowed and felt himself flush.

“You mind if we go in?” she asked over the brief hubbub. “My mom would love one of those.”

“Uh. Yeah. Sure.” He followed her around the edge of the crowd toward the shop behind the glassworkers and blinked as he collected himself. “Not Christmas colors, I assume.”

“She wouldn’t care, but no, probably not. There’s no such thing as ‘Ramadan colors,’ but she likes yellow.”

“And you?” He winced behind his shades—he hadn’t really meant to voice the question in his head.

“What, my favorite color? Black, like my heart.” Her smile was enigmatic. He couldn’t tell whether she was joking, and if so, whether he was supposed to be in on it, or the butt.

He shrugged and twitched his lapel at her. “Good taste.”

Several minutes later, they alit from the shop, Malik holding a bag with a suitably yellow-and-blue pumpkin wrapped carefully in brown paper. The two glassworkers continued their performance out front, and Jensen watched them over his shoulder until the crowd hid them from view. Here, maybe, was a skill his augmentations suited him for, the heat-proof hands and the high-capacity lungs, that produced art instead of death. Something to think about.

He opened his mouth to ask Where to next?, but a buzz in his skull preëmpted him. Malik turned to see why he’d paused, and he tapped his temple in explanation before picking up.

“Jensen! Where are you?”

“MacReady,” he responded aloud. “I’m south of the Thames, near Tower Bridge. To what do I owe the pleasure?” He rolled his eyes at his own phrasing—Pritchard was rubbing off on him.

“Gotta talk to you. In person, for opsec reasons, and over beer, for sanity reasons.”

Jensen blinked in surprise and checked his clock: later than he’d realized, almost thirteen-hundred, but not what he’d call late enough for drinks. He supposed the English and the Scottish both had a reputation for starting early, though, and he’d noticed a lot of ciders and weaker beers in the pubs thus far. “Sure. ASAP? Location?”

“I’ve been stuck at the fucking Apex with Cholmondely—meet me at the Pair of Dukes. No need to leap from rooftop to rooftop like an Augmented gazelle, just head over.”

“Roger.” He searched up the address. “Half an hour, little less.”

“Right.” MacReady vanished with a decisive click.

Malik was watching him. “Sorry,” he said. “Gotta talk to MacReady. Apparently something other than me has driven him to drink: we’re meeting at a pub.”

“Good sign?”

“Not bad, at least.”

“That’s something.” She shrugged one shoulder, and they set off for the nearby Tube station. “I’ll head home, then. Drop this off, get some laundry going. Let me know when you’re done.”

“Sure. Good chance I’m getting rounded up and sent back to work, although I don’t know if Chikane is still around.”

“Ugh, I hope not. Couch is yours for however long you need it.” A sly look crossed her face. “If you’re sticking around another day or two, you should come climbing with me. We can bring Maggie. And Nils.”

Jensen chuckled. “Good plan. I’m game.”

“Maybe Maggie’ll stop trying to set me up, too, if she’s busy fighting Nils’ thick, crunchy shell of obliviousness. You know how guys are.” He grunted noncommittally, and she rolled her eyes. “It’ll be more fun than a pair of wet socks asking me about my major and my honest-to-God star sign. Should’ve saved us both the trouble and just given him my CV. The Nils and Maggie show will be much more entertaining.”

He chuckled. “I’ll bring the popcorn.” Waving a vague salute in the general direction of his temple, he peeled away toward his platform.

On the subway, the novelty of mingling freely with Naturals was undercut by the whirlwind of thoughts in his head. What, precisely, had Malik meant: that she didn’t want to be set up with anyone, or just that O’Leary was hopeless at it? How was he supposed to find a range where he could teach her, or rope Argento into it, and how was he supposed to impart the basics of unarmed combat without blowing a psychological gasket? He’d trained with people he was into before, taught them even, and found it easy enough to maintain a professional detachment. Sure, he hadn’t suffered in the process, but neither had it been a struggle to stay on task.

But this was different. He knew he had it bad, and the impossibility of doing anything about it only made things worse. For once, the insensitivity of his synthetic hands might actually help. Maybe if he got her in a gi, the combination of its relative shapelessness and its associations with self-discipline and mindful training would help.

He shook his head. He’d manage. Just another thing that needed compartmentalizing. And that reminded him: he really was going to have to talk to one of those neurologists. The expression on Miller’s face as he lay dying on the floor of the Apex kitchen, concern not for himself but for Jensen and his battered brain, still haunted him. What had they even been talking about? There’d been a name, he remembered, that he should have known but couldn’t dredge up. Nor could he remember now. He shoved it aside for later—although not much later. This was rapidly becoming urgent. Should he take sick leave? The thought of explaining his “Aug issues” to MacReady galled him, but he’d have to do something. Presumably, the Task Force would bench him again as a post-op measure, which would give him a chance to see someone on the sly. He resolved to act as soon as MacReady gave him a sense for the status quo.

The Pair of Dukes turned out to be a fascinating establishment born of two older pubs. Both had been named the “Arms,” of two different noblemen, and eventually they’d merged. The new sign depicted the two dukes stripped to the waist and squaring off in boxing gloves. Jensen spared it an amused glance on the way in. The floor levels of the two progenitor bars didn’t quite match, or the decor, two different shades of dark wood in subtle juxtaposition. Dust motes swam through air colored by stained-glass windows along each wall in the two sets of heraldic colors. It was a homey place, the mismatch making it feel comfortable and lived-in. He’d have to come back and give it a shot without work on the brain.

A sustained hum of happy conversation permeated the conjoined space, adding to the congenial atmosphere. On a Saturday, there were plenty of folks out for a cider with lunch, and it took him a moment to spot MacReady waving from a booth toward the back. He had already taken the top quarter off a pint of something dark; Jensen ordered a red and slid into the bench across.

“So,” he asked, “how’s the circus?”

MacReady laughed darkly and stared into his beer. “Three-ring at least. Cholmondely knows his stuff, thank Christ, and he’s dealing with the local chaps. But that leaves me to wrangle Lyon.” He glanced around at the empty tables nearby and lowered his voice. “And I’m off to a brilliant goddamn start, losing Marchenko the minute I let him out of my sight.”

So that was what this was about. Jensen matched MacReady’s volume. “They know anything yet?”

“Looks like an aneurysm. Not the same Orchid shit that did for Rucker, but I will eat my left boot if it was natural. Still waiting on autopsy results, though. Whatever it was, it was quicker than he deserved.” MacReady made a face as though something had died in his beer. “And after you brought him in alive, too.”

“Yeah, well…” Jensen sat on his first impulse, to rub it in. Even a backhanded and evasive apology was more than he’d expected. He could be petty and twist the knife, or he could give MacReady a warning that might save him from Miller’s fate. “Who knows what he had in his skull, right? Could’ve been like a cyanide tooth. You saw what I found at that place in the Alps.”

“The ‘Sword of Damocles’? Haven’t seen what the brain trust makes of it, but if it was a signal… But Marchenko would have been in EM isolation. It’s standard for Augmented prisoners.”

Jensen shifted in his seat and leaned in. “Out of curiosity, did you tell Chikane to take that run, or did he volunteer?”

“He volunteered. Why?”

“You get into Miller’s email yet? See anything about him in there?”

“Yes, and no. Should I have?”

“Well, there’s an IA referral. Found a real shady email on a computer in GARM from someone called ‘Elanus Caeruleus,’ giving Marchenko my ETA. It’s the black-winged kite, before you ask.”

MacReady scoffed. “The man hates Augs, sure, and you in particular—but setting you up to get murdered in the mountains? Not bloody likely.”

“I’ve got reason to believe he’s on the take. Guy’s bleeding money. Brother’s in a long-term care facility.” He met MacReady’s skeptical gaze and took a deliberate sip of beer. “Miller believed it, enough to send in a report.”

“He believed Chikane had been bribed? And he let him fly us all to London?”

“Most of us aren’t Augs. Hell, if the thing that killed Marchenko was an audio signal that triggered something in his hub, he wouldn’t even have to’ve known what it would do. Just some credits to say a phrase over cabin speakers. Anyway, Miller didn’t want to tip him off that anyone was looking.”

MacReady grunted noncommittally. “I’ll take another pass through the emails. The last thing we need is another hole in the roster. You did this shit for a while, didn’t you?” He looked up, a subtle sneer on his lips, but the CASIE read it as a smokescreen. “Ran a SWAT team, and then Sarif’s rent-a-cop brigade?”

“I did.” Jensen bit down on a retort on behalf of his old team. They didn’t care what some Interpol spook thought of them, and by comparison to MacReady’s résumé, they really were small-timers.

“I’m probably not taking whatever passes for your advice.” MacReady took a swig of beer and cleared his throat. “But it sounds like Lyon is liable to give me the Directorship. If they do, who’s your pick for CT?”

Jensen thought about it. Most of their agents were in Counter-terrorism already—there were plenty of qualified options. “Montañez is okay. So’s Riley, but I’d give him Organized Crime over CT. He knows the players pretty well, from what I’ve seen. And we’re going to need someone who knows their stuff for when we move on Nikoladze and Botkoveli. After this, after what they did to help Marchenko, they’ve gotta go down.”

“Overdue for it is what they are, the bastards. Montañez, not Argento?” MacReady cocked an eyebrow.

Loyalty put up a short-lived fight to candor. “She’s been in the field all of once. With the Task Force, I mean. We both know she could swing it, but people need to see her work more, first. And I’d want a look at her Marine Corps personnel file, too, since we can.”

“I can. Your input is noted.” MacReady sat back in the booth. “And I agree. Those are my recs to Lyon, if they ask. But they’ll probably sit on their thumbs for a month and then announce it’s going to some rookie from Station Muscat.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me. They do that? Shuffle people around?”

“It happens. The Task Force is still too new to have anything set in stone, you know. They’re even talking about changing the name—already!”

“And here we have all these business cards. Why? To what?”

“Member-nations pissing and moaning about being left out of the hot new game in town. They want to get rid of the ‘Twenty-Nine,’ that’s fine with me. No skin off my ass. But it’s just going to confuse everyone if they make some huge, sweeping change. Whatever. Not ours to reason why, right?”

“Just to do and die, yeah.” Jensen bowed his head. “What a goddamn waste.”

MacReady was silent a moment; when he spoke, Jensen caught a bit of thickness to his voice. “Goddamn waste is right. Hell of a loss. Hell of a man.”

“Here’s to Miller. Died as he lived: doing the right thing.” They raised their glasses and quaffed deeply.

MacReady shut his eyes and sank his chin on his chest for long enough Jensen wondered whether he’d fallen asleep after all the bureaucratic wrangling, but he shook himself and said, “Speaking of Lyon and their cack-handedness, you’re on leave again post that clusterfuck of an op. Standard procedure—don’t go thinking you’re special.”

It was no more than he’d expected. “How long?”

“Two weeks, because of… because there was a fatality, and you have to sit down with the doc again before you go back. Get nice and decompressed. She’s gotta fluff those metal brains of yours like a steel-wool pillow, apparently.” MacReady shrugged. “Of course, right when we need everyone to manage the transition, half the team gets pulled out. Fuck me, right?”

Not a punishment, not really, but only because no one knew his role in Miller’s death. He wondered how much he’d managed to screw up the division’s readiness. “Is it just me, or the Peacekeepers and everyone, too?”

“Nah, not everyone. Basically those of us who fired or took it. You, me, Aria, Carmen, Georgie, some of the grunts who tripped over Gold Masks while we were mopping up. Still leaves the team holding its collective dick until they figure out who’s at least acting while I’m out.”

Better than he’d feared; worse than he’d hoped. Jensen decided he was relieved. “So you gonna book yourself in for a yoga retreat?” He tossed back the end of his beer while MacReady sputtered indignantly.

“Get out of here,” MacReady said in defeated tones. “Take a break. Get your metal shined up, or whatever. Try not to do anything stupid, and if you do, keep it out of the fucking news, right?”

“Sure thing. Watch yourself, MacReady. It’s not just Chikane—there’s more where Marchenko came from.”

He felt MacReady’s eyes on his back as he left the pub. He’d need to find a way to share a few things with him, or whomever took over as Director. Miller had been too close to the dangers of the Illuminati for his ignorance of the risks.

A problem for another day. Hell, another week. He was sidelined again, with nothing to do but bum around London or Prague. At least he could get started on Malik’s training regimen instead of moping around his apartment and trying to outdrink his Sentinel. He shot her a text to give her the good news and got back on the Tube. Naturals rubbed elbows with him, mostly ignoring his metal, although a few shuffled away to look at ads they showed no real interest in, or to get closer to the door without getting off at the next stop.

The famous voice called out the famous stations and the famous lines: “Mind the gap. This is Piccadilly Circus. This is a Bakerloo Line train to Elephant and Castle.” Jensen chuckled. Count on the English to come up with the oddest names imaginable. His paranoia had subsided enough to enjoy people-watching—a woman tried to wrangle three toddlers, mostly without success, while two men holding hands looked on tolerantly. An older man held what looked to be a bag of birdseed along with his newspaper and cane, and Jensen had to stop himself whistling “Tuppence A Bag.” Three girls around high-school age bantered and joked in an impenetrable version of what was ostensibly his own language, rattling away at a mile a minute and packed tight with slang. “Please stand clear of the doors.”

The train pulled away, swaying gently. The toddlers shrieked and clutched at the woman’s shins. One of the men dropped his partner’s hand and grabbed the old man’s elbow as he stumbled. And O’Leary lit up his link.

That was odd. They were still sufficiently friends of friends that he figured she’d go through Malik. Not that he minded, of course, but it raised a diminutive flag.

Her panicked voice turned the flag into a klaxon. “Adam! They took her! They took ’Ridah—she’s gone!”

Chapter Text

Jensen froze in the crowded car. “What?”

“She’s gone! They came in here and they took her! There was a whole crowd of them, and they came right in through the door, and—”

“Maggie. Stop. Listen to me.” He waited until he heard only ragged breathing, clamping down hard on the tide of his own panic. If it weren’t Malik, what would he do? His professionalism slipped from his mental grasp, momentarily as clumsy as his physical hands. “Did they… did they hurt her, that you saw?”

“Not really, they only—”

“One thing at a time.” He blew out a breath of relief. “Did they hurt you?”

“No, I’m okay, they just pushed me out of the way. One of them kicked His Nibs, but he’s fine, just hiding and yelling.”

“Great. Okay. When did this happen? Where are you now?”

“The apartment. Can you—”

“When?”

“They’ve just gone now. A minute ago? Should I have dialed nine-nine-nine?”

“No, calling me first was smart. I’m on my way already. Hold on a minute—I’m getting reinforcements, I hope.”

A call to Pritchard that he marked “urgent” in the link, and thank god the man picked up. “Jensen? To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Someone snatched Malik. I’m on the phone with her roommate, maybe ten out from the apartment. Loop you in?”

“Good God. Of course. Whatever you need.”

“Maggie, you still there? Meet Frank Pritchard, hacker extraordinaire. Malik mentioned him, I’m sure.”

“She did. Thank you for helping,” O’Leary said with a sniffle.

“Pleasantries later. Describe them.” Pritchard was on form—the familiarity was calming.

“Um. Grey uniforms with no markings, mostly. Six of them. Helmets covering their faces.”

“The helmets, were they gold?” Jensen asked.

“Huh? No, grey, like the uniforms.”

“Mm. Guns?”

“Big ones—I don’t know what kind, but they were pointing them at us. And yelling, lots of yelling. They grabbed ’Ridah and put her in some kind of cuffs. She fought them, and they hit her a few times—not too hard, I think. She had a bloody lip, but she was still cursing up a storm when they dragged her out.”

“You said ‘mostly.’ Someone was wearing something else?”

“The big one. He was in this dusty tan armor with little squares all over it, and his helmet had a ribbon on top.”

The description sparked a memory. “Pritchard—those Chinese mercs. Malik mentioned them. Immortals or something, they call themselves.”

“Got it.” Pritchard dropped a photo into the link, of an Immortal Legion soldier in combat armor. “Like this?”

“Yes!” Maggie said. “Or… almost. His was bulkier.”

A sick feeling climbed down into the pit of Jensen’s stomach and made itself at home. “Did you hear him? His voice?”

“I did. Sounded British, but not. Finishing-school accent, yeah? Like he’s from overseas but had British teachers.”

“Fuck. It’s Kahn,” Jensen said with bitter conviction. “That means it’s personal. He’ll remember. At least he’ll take his time with her. Gives us a window.” O’Leary gasped, but he was relieved to find he could still think tactically.

Pritchard asked her, “Was the door locked?”

“I… I think so?” She paused. “It’s unlocked now.”

“I’ll start running trace on Tarvos and Shaanxi communications, see if I can find an overlap. Jensen, call me when you get there, and I’ll dig what I can out of that lock.” He hung up abruptly.

“Don’t go anywhere,” Jensen told O’Leary. “I’ll be there in five.” Then he hung up as well. Mostly to make himself feel better, he tried calling Malik, but it just got him the automated infolink not in service message he’d expected. He sat and jittered and kept trying anyway, willing the subway to go faster.

To his surprise, O’Leary threw her arms around him when he showed up at the door, shaking as she sniffled into his coat. He returned the embrace cautiously, patting her on the back. “We’ll get her back. Don’t worry,” he said, then extricated himself and turned to the digital lock, feeding his capture software’s interface into his link. “Pritchard—I’m in.”

“Good. Wait,” Pritchard answered at once, but after less than a minute, he made a disgusted sound. “Nothing. They forced it, but all I can tell you is the software was off-the-shelf. I’m collecting video and trying to put together a trail. But you know they’re headed back to Shanghai, right?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to go haring off and miss her. I want to be moving, for sure, but that’s how you fuck up.”

“Fair enough, but—you have a pilot? Just in case.”

“I will. Let me know what you find.”

After a quick circuit of the apartment, assisted by smart vision, failed to turn up any clues to where they’d taken Malik, Jensen started on the pilot problem. He rang Vega—no answer. He rang Quinn—no answer. Gritting his teeth, he texted them both:

Tarvos and Shaanxi grabbed Malik. I need wings ASAP. If the Collective can’t get me airborne in time to find her, you can lose my number for good.

That was as diplomatic as he could bring himself to be. He paced the apartment, pausing to accept a mug of tea from O’Leary as she reverted to reflex under stress. He sipped without tasting it. Distantly, he noticed it burning his tongue. His arm plates flexed open and shut over his blades to the rhythm of his ragged breath.

“Bratán!” It was Quinn, finally.

“Don’t fuck around, Quinn. Where’s my ride?”

Quinn, for a wonder, took the hint. “I have someone en route. Not Vega, she’s not close enough, but she’ll catch you up when she can. Registry attached.”

“ETA?”

“Half an hour to Heathrow. I couldn’t get a VTOL—it’s fixed-wing for you until Vega makes it over.”

“I’ll make it work. Quinn—there’s a guy from Shanghai wrapped up in this who’s got a grudge. Someone caught her on that delivery run, at least a trace. If they kill her…”

“Don’t borrow trouble, Jensen. Want me working the leads?”

That wasn’t what he’d meant, but threatening retribution for the Collective’s intel leak wouldn’t get Malik back any faster. “I’ve got Pritchard on it, but sure. If you can stay off his toes.”

“Different methods, bratán. I’ll stay clear, update you when I have something.”

Jensen sipped his tea again. He winced and put it down, then filled O’Leary in on the conversation. They sat in mutual tense misery until a thought struck Jensen. He found an executive air taxi service and booked a trip from the apartment to Heathrow’s private aviation terminal, soonest. He could always cancel if Pritchard ran the kidnappers to ground in London, or reroute to wherever they were. It was pricey, but he’d barely spent a credit since buying that suit. And he would have mortgaged his augs in a heartbeat to get her back.

Pritchard called, and he jerked as he took it. “What do you have?”

“They’re taking off now! I got the aircraft. No flight plan, of course, but it’s a VTOL, lifting off from west of the city. Farther than Heathrow, even—out past Reading. Here’s a couple of shots and the registration.”

“Thanks, Pritchard,” he said, already standing.

“Anything for Faridah.”

He bade O’Leary a hasty farewell and warned her that she might be safer staying somewhere else for a few days. Not that he expected anyone to come back, but better safe than sorry. She agreed and went to round up the cat and some overnight things. He did his own version of packing: he grabbed his Sanction from his bag and hefted his vest, but the disheartening rattle of fractured ceramic convinced him to leave it behind. But Kahn had been a tough customer last time—he threw two speedloaders of armor-piercing in his pockets and headed for the stairs.

His taxi was a tiny quadcopter with no pilot, just enough room for two in the passenger compartment. It hovered a foot above the rooftop, swaying ominously as he jumped up into the open door and scanned the card he’d used to book, but its pedestrian flying got him to Heathrow’s general aviation field fast enough. He ditched it on a helipad and jogged over toward the parking ramp. There was his pilot, standing in the open hatch of a small, streamlined twin-engine Lear and looking around. Jensen picked up the pace.

The pilot turned out to be a diminutive Frenchman in a beret and slightly incongruous aviators, with a Mediterranean complexion and a neat handlebar mustache. “Good afternoon! I suppose you are my fare?” he asked as Jensen approached. The voice went with the hat.

“Pretty sure that’s me, bratán.”

The pilot laughed. “Climb in—engines are still running. Where are we headed?”

“East,” he answered, and hoped Pritchard would have more soon.

He kept hoping as they took off over London proper, and as they passed the widening ribbon of the Thames, and as they soared out over the Channel. That was as far as his nerve could take him before it broke. “Pritchard,” he subvocalized. “Please. Tell me you have something.”

“As soon as I do, Jensen, I promise—wait! Aha. Danish air traffic control just had a chat with our friends.”

“Denmark,” Jensen snapped to the pilot. The man gave a Gallic shrug and banked them, wide and easy, and nudged the throttle up a little further. “You have a range?” he asked Pritchard, speaking aloud for the pilot’s benefit.

“They’re over the North Sea. It sounds like they’re half an hour out from the peninsula, but I don’t know their airspeed.”

Jensen had already looked up the kidnappers’ airframe and run the numbers. “Unless they did something aftermarket, they should be cruising around four-fifty.”

“Ma belle is comfortable up to point-nine,” chimed in the pilot. “I have us cruising at just over one thousand kay. Call it six hundred knots.”

“So we should be gaining on them at something like a hundred fifty knots. If we’re lucky, we might pick them up around… Stockholm, assuming they’re flying straight to Shanghai. Hell, maybe they’ll put down there and refuel, and we can jump them on the ground.”

“And if not?” asked the pilot. “I do not have stealth systems, of any kind. And I do not want to find out they have guns on their craft.”

“Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that. Is there a rear door on this thing?” The pilot nodded, expression dubious. “So if we catch them in the air, you dive on them fast, I jump out the back, and then you go for distance. Someone else is supposed to be coming to back us up in a VTOL.”

“This is a bad idea, I think, but I will do it if you insist,” the pilot said.

Pritchard was less tactful. “You’re insane. One chance, and if you miss? What if you’re over water?”

“Great, thanks for the vote of confidence, Pritchard.” Jensen carefully avoided thinking of salt spray cresting the lip of Panchaea. “My HUD and I will get the vector right.”

“Unless they dodge!”

“Unless they dodge, yeah. Huh. Hey, think you can stay high instead? Get far enough ahead I can drop on them? Diving, I won’t show up on radar even if they’re looking for planes.”

The pilot gave him an eloquent look. “Yes. But still, if you miss…”

“Well, we’re short on options. If I miss, it’s someone else’s shot while I catch up. But I don’t think there is someone else, and I don’t think we get another shot, and I don’t have a better plan.”

As they neared Stockholm, Jensen set aside his litany of worries—for one, he really could have used some body armor—and turned a hopeful eye on the radar. But the VTOL declined to make an appearance, although Swedish ATC provided them with another fix. Knowing it was coming let Pritchard triangulate the signal, as well, putting their quarry out over the Kattegat. The conversation lasted long enough he even got them an airspeed thanks to some elementary trigonometry.

“Bad news, I’m afraid. They must have done something to their engines after all. They’re doing closer to five hundred.”

“Damn. Well, we’re still faster, and we have more range. Right?” The pilot nodded. Jensen thought he looked a little morose at being drafted for such an open-ended assignment, but then, that was the job. Too much of a live wire for subtlety, Jensen said, “Listen, Quinn knows how to contact you, yeah? You pull this off and I’ll buy you… a case of wine? Fuel? Whatever you want.”

“I do not need a bribe to do my duty to the Collective.”

“I know. You’re doing it already. But as much as this is Quinn’s fu—I mean, Collective business, it’s also personal for me.”

Eventually, the pilot fiddled with his mustache and asked, “If Quinn called you and said, there is this pilot you don’t know, in trouble somewhere, and we need you to pull him out of the fire at once, what would you say?”

“If I wasn’t neck-deep in an op already, yeah, I’d drop everything and go.”

“That is enough for me, then.” But he added, “I am very fond of a good bourbon.”

“I’ll make it happen.” Jensen stared out the windscreen as Sweden crawled by underneath them. Then he ran wind resistance figures through his HUD and tried to envision how he would pull off hitting a moving target in midair. The trick would be getting far enough ahead of the target that he wouldn’t be left behind once he started slowing down. It looked as though sixty miles per hour was the best he could expect for lateral flight, and assuming he was doing around a hundred twenty downwards at the time, that meant he needed to be at least a half-mile ahead for every mile higher they would be when he jumped. More would be better—he could always slow his descent with the Icarus, down to zero if need be. He shared his thoughts with the pilot, who saw no issue with the math. But he suggested Jensen mention the bourbon to Quinn before he jumped.

Somewhere around Helsinki, the pilot turned off his transponder. “Now he will have to look straight at us to see us,” he explained. “Pilots do not generally point their radar up at the sky when we fly—we rely on the airport to tell us where not to be. A kilometer above him, he will not think to look.

“However, you will see I have a very good camera underneath the nose, where our friend may just have a gun. Voilà.” And he flipped it on. The picture was crystal-clear, the camera responsive; Jensen drove it forward as much as he could. He saw nothing, but it gave him a sense of control he had been sorely lacking, and he quartered the sky with an optimism he knew was foolish.

“Jensen!” It was Pritchard. “Another fix for you. They’re talking to Russia now. Here.” And he threw up coordinates that Jensen passed to their pilot.

“Merde,” the man said, and pulled on the yoke. Their vector began climbing gently. “Saint Petersburg will pick us up if we are not careful. Then our friends will hear them talking to us, and—”

“Wait. Is that them?” Jensen asked, heart in his throat.

The pilot scowled at the camera screen. “It could be. Yes, it is more likely than not.”

Jensen focused in. One VTOL looked much like another to him, but it was the right airframe. As he tweaked the settings, the registration painted on its ventral surface crystallized out of the blurry image. Afternoon sun threw shadows over its back from its twin rudders, but the stenciled numbers were legible enough. “Yeah. That’s the one.”

“Keep them in sight, and I will put us on this suicidal intercept of yours.”

He shrugged off the pessimism and continued tracking the VTOL as they climbed. They soared over some massive lake, skimming its northern shore, and he clenched his jaw in dismay. But the map said their path would cut a chord across it of only eighty miles at most. Of course, there was another lake ahead…

Resolve and panic warred in his mind. He had no reservations about his Icarus, although going down beneath the waves again was a prospect that chilled him to the bone. But he wasn’t about to lose Malik. He shook off the memories. He would jump, and deal with the consequences if he missed.

The pilot read his concern. “Are you sure this is what you want to do?”

“I’m sure it isn’t. But I still don’t have a better idea.”

“Neither do I.” The pilot threw a switch and typed some commands into a console before easing back the throttle. “Oxygen alerts disabled now, and pressure. We are one-and-a-half kilometers above them, and the same ahead.”

“Alright. Good flying. Get away safe.” Jensen emptied his lungs and sucked in the deepest breath he could.

“Try not to miss.” The pilot donned an oxygen mask and opened the tail hatch.

The cabin throbbed with sound and pressure as six hundred knots of wind blew across its open end, a soda bottle played by an invisible giant with him inside. Jensen squeezed between luxurious seats to the open hatch and zoomed his vision until he could see the VTOL. Then he fed wind speed data into his HUD until it gave him a vector. He hoped he could match it. For a moment, he considered leaving his coat, then he buttoned it up instead. At the lip of the hatch, he balanced on his toes and faced forward in the plane. He counted in his head, wavered, and stepped backwards into nothing.

Wind grabbed and tore at him. His coat flailed at his legs. He leveled out his body and rocketed ahead as he found equilibrium with the air. Fifty-five miles per hour, plenty fast, then sixty, then sixty-five. The coat flattened and cupped air down his sides and between his knees, a sort of poor man’s wingsuit. Adam Jensen, the Amazing Robotic Flying Squirrel, in town today only…

Range to the VTOL spooled down in the corner of his eye. He flexed his toes and tilted a few degrees downwards, trading vertical speed for horizontal, until he was on target with six seconds to go. He nodded with satisfaction as he slid squarely onto the vector—he wouldn’t even need his Icarus. His blades slid out at his slightly-bent elbows and shredded the wind with a quavering tone of their own, like the world’s most lethal clarinet. He bared his teeth and smiled. God help him, this was actually fun.

Then he hit the VTOL and thought he’d died.

His target was doing four hundred knots or so, relative, as it came up from behind him, and he fell on it at a hundred vertical. His ribs flexed and flattened almost to his spine. His sternum hammered his artificial heart, and he thought his Sentinel would take his whole lumbar region out his back with it. Should’ve used the goddamn Icarus after all, he thought through a haze of pain. But his blades were embedded deep into the fuselage, and even though he’d flattened his nose against his reinforced cheekbone and smashed his lips into his loosened teeth, he hadn’t done anything permanent. His Sentinel, having not exited via his vertebrae after all, flashed an array of unhappy HUD alerts and got to work on fixing him up.

The VTOL steadied beneath him. A voice vibrated up his blades, blurred but intelligible—he hadn’t realized the alloy was such a good sound conductor, although he’d never driven tested it like this before. In a sharp British accent, someone snapped, “What the—Possible hostile. Identify.” Not Kahn.

Malik’s answering laugh almost knocked him off the VTOL with relief. She was alive! Alive to say, “I’d identify that as about a hundred kilos of karma. You poor, doomed bastards.”

He heard the ringing slap that followed, too, albeit muffled by its passage through aluminum. “I should have known you wouldn’t hold your tongue. If you were capable of following instructions, we’d never have been here. But you’re not getting away this time.” That one was Kahn, his cultured tones filled with an anger that Jensen could picture twisting his face. He hadn’t even brought gas grenades: priority one was to rescue Malik, priority two to survive himself, but he thought putting Kahn down for good was a valid priority three, at this point.

So he needed in. And unlike when he’d hitched a ride on Sheppard’s plane, back in Lansing, he’d be making his own door. At least he knew his blades could cut aircraft aluminum.

Even on a VTOL, with the wings and engines mounted up high, there was no reason to run fuel lines across the top of the fuselage… was there? He wished he’d paid more attention to Malik’s conversations with the maintenance techs at SI. But he didn’t have a lot of options. He checked that his left blade was safely lodged in the aircraft’s body. Then, in one quick move, he whipped his right blade out, sank it back in, and cut a wicked gash across the fuselage.

Sparks flew and gases hissed, but the VTOL’s engines roared on undisturbed. It seemed he hadn’t doomed them all. Anchoring himself again in an unmarred spot of fuselage, he repeated the process with the left blade, leaving him with a V-shaped cut. He pulled up his feet, myomer straining against the rush of air, and kicked down.

The aluminum creaked and bent, but held. He kicked again, hearing panicked voices, and once more. Then he shoved his feet into the gap he’d made and retracted his blades. Sharp metal and jagged plastic tugged at his coat before the wind popped him into the cabin like a watermelon seed.

As he stood, Quicksilver already ramping up, he took in the terrain. The VTOL’s interior was fancier than that of the Frenchman’s plane, with a conference table surrounded by overstuffed leather seats and what looked like a wet bar along one wall. Two more seats, only a little less cushy, faced sideways along a narrow aisle leading towards the tail. One held a Tarvos merc wearing an expression of incredulous shock. He held his pistol loosely on the arm between the chairs, pointed at the other occupant: Malik, with her hands behind her back. She ignored the gun and met Jensen’s gaze, sporting a black eye and a savage grin.

On his opposite flank, Kahn popped through the cockpit door, bulky in his terracotta armor but without his helmet. His features were twisted in rage, not the surprise of the two Tarvos soldiers fumbling under the conference table. Kahn must have had a reflex booster, too, if not a Quicksilver: a pistol the size of a sawed-off shotgun rose in his hand at almost normal speed.

Jensen blurred into motion. He tackled the merc next to Malik, fouling his weapon and snapping a blade through his chest. The pistol went off, twice, trapped between their bodies, as the merc’s finger spasmed on the trigger.

The lunge put him in front of Malik, too, shielding her with his body. Just in time: a stutter of machine pistol fire walked up his ribs and bounced off his shades and titanium-plated skull before climbing over his head. He flung himself toward the conference table and vaulted the back of the crushed-leather seats. Too late, he thought to kick at the machine pistol, but he was already practically on top of its owner. He knocked the gun aside with an elbow block, then decapitated the man with a brutal stroke.

The severed head hit Narhari Kahn in the chest of his armor, or maybe it was a man-sized exo-suit. The aircraft lurched. The head rolled away, still gouting blood. Kahn’s huge repeating rifle toppled out of a corner, useless anyway in the VTOL’s close confines, as he fired his pistol. A round hammered Jensen’s shoulder.

The damn thing was bigger than the Destrier. Jensen staggered, rallied, and swept it aside. Kahn stepped backwards and lined up another shot, but he lunged and drove a blade through its action. Alloy grated on Kahn’s armored gauntlet. The pistol misfired, and the big man cursed and tossed it aside. He dove for Jensen, taking him to the cabin floor with his bulk and what felt like augmented strength.

Jensen’s head clipped the conference table hard enough to daze him. He bounced off the seats and hit the deck hard, breath whooshing from his lungs. Still, he carved a chunk from Kahn’s scalp with a wild swing. Kahn hollered and put his hands on Jensen’s neck.

He seized the big man’s wrists, straining to protect his throat, and they scrabbled and wrenched at one another. Jensen tried to bridge, but it was like wrestling a tank—one that knew how to grapple. Kahn bore his armored weight down and slid Jensen’s shoulders along the luxurious carpet until he was flat again. Together, they inched and slid towards the back of the lurching VTOL. Then they stopped dead with a scrape of ceramic on wood.

Kahn’s armor had to have jammed against the sides of the narrow aisle. Jensen got a foot planted and levered himself partway out from under his adversary, probing with his other to try to get it over. His ass slid on expensive wood, up into a sort of side plank. Kahn rolled with him, but at least he could see: there was still one bad guy, by his count.

Sure enough, the last hostile was over by the conference table, aiming down a carbine. Not at Jensen, mostly concealed underneath Kahn’s bulk, but at Malik. He let go of one wrist and squinted. His arm plates shifted, and he launched a tungsten carbide dart straight through the Tarvos merc’s chest, pinning him to the bulkhead.

With the pressure off, Kahn moved quickly, flipping him over in some wrestling move he didn’t recognize and trapping one arm under his body. Then he put a knee in Jensen’s back and another on his free arm and bore down.

Which left Kahn at least one hand to play with. A shadow descended over Jensen’s face, and gloved fingers jammed into his eye sockets. They pressed the metal orbs of his eyeballs back into his skull. He jerked and twisted his head, instinctively trying to escape the pressure, although it was more uncomfortable than agonizing.

Kahn realized his mistake after a moment. Metal hissed on leather somewhere behind him, and Malik screamed, “No!” Then a lance of pain took him in the neck.

He bucked and struggled underneath the big man’s armored bulk, but it was the goddamn exo-suit all over again: between the weight and the whining servos in Kahn’s armor, his myomer couldn’t overcome his lack of leverage. The spike of cold-hot torment shifted and dug in, through his dermal armor, and he yelled. Metal lurched and leapt inside his throat, horrible and foreign. The yell became a bubbling wheeze.

Kahn grunted in pain. The weight on his back lessened abruptly. Jensen seized the opportunity: he wrestled his arm out from under his body and flailed backwards. His fingers met resistance, and he grabbed something soft and thin—his fingertip proprioceptors were maybe a millimeter apart, and the nerves read two out of five on pressure. An ear. He triggered his blade.

The length of alloy speared through bone with a crunch and a shower of blood that pattered on his back. The biting agony subsided. The smothering weight fell upon him like a load of bricks, but limp now, robbed of vitality.

His blade was still stuck, tangled up somewhere over his head. He withdrew it, and the armored bulk on top of him spasmed with a ceramic rattle. A combat knife dropped to the plush carpet, where the viscous coating of blood on its thick-spined blade merged with a spreading crimson stain.

Jensen dragged himself laboriously sideways, struggling against sudden weakness in his engineered limbs, and Kahn slid off his back. The merc’s head thudded to the cushioned deck, mouth locked in an impotent snarl. Two neat wounds, one on either side of his blocky skull, wept blood and clear fluid. He convulsed once more and lay still.

The sudden victory cut Jensen’s strings as well. Exhaustion descended on him like Kahn’s corpse, bearing him inexorably down to the deck alongside the fallen giant. He sprawled across the expensive, ruined carpet and let his mind go blank.

Chapter Text

The VTOL’s engines faltered, and it staggered through the air. Jensen’s head bounced off the wood paneling, jolting him from his stupor. He looked around frantically for Malik. She was still in the leather seat, but oddly, only one of her ankles was zip-tied to the metal frame underneath. He sliced it off, heedless of the chunk he took out of the frame, and clambered to his feet with a great deal of help from the wall.

“Adam?” she said, eyes wide in a face gone green. A spray of blood stained her sweater and drew a line across her face. She’d been hit after all.

And it was his fault, like always, and now she was going to die in front of him because he’d been too late. Too late finding her, too late getting in the air, too late cutting his way through Kahn and his troops. If he was going to be a walking weapon, why couldn’t he at least be good at it?

He reached out toward the bloody splotch on her side. “Sorry,” he said, but it came out as a horrid, gurgling wheeze. Blood sprayed from somewhere, dappling her face like freckles. Sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry…

“I think he got you in the neck—you okay? Get my hands so I can have a look.”

Jensen pointed mutely at her face. She swiped at it with her sleeve, smearing blood across her cheek, and followed the gory line down to her sweater. “Oh—that’s not mine. C’mon, cut me loose.” She turned to present her zip-tied wrists.

It took him a second to process the relief, like shaking off another blow to the head. And his was indeed feeling lighter and foggier by the second, the rushing in his ears threatening to drown out the wail of wind across the hole in the roof. He slid out his blade, the one without any grey matter on it, just halfway. It ghosted against the zip ties with the inhuman steadiness of aug limbs. The monomolecular edge parted the tough plastic like gossamer. Then he sat down, hard.

He couldn’t get a proper breath, not enough to fill his capacious lungs, and the world was going dark and blurry around the edges. Dimly, he realized the spreading pool of blood on the VTOL’s deck was coming from him as much as from Kahn. He patted at his throat, but his fingers weren’t sensitive enough to pick up on what was wrong. His hand came away a gory mess.

Then Malik’s face appeared in the tunnel of vision front of him. “Adam! Adam, are you okay? Oh goddammit your throat’s… oh jeez. I was hoping that was Kahn’s, too. What the fuck am I supposed to do with this? Son of a bitch, I knew I should’ve taken more first-aid classes. Shit. Can you breathe?”

He tried to speak, but emitted only another wheeze and a mist of blood. And he was starting to precess. So he braced the bloody hand on the deck and wobbled the cleaner one back and forth, kinda-sorta, feeling his brain cells punch out.

“Oh fuck. Okay, okay, I got this. Bleeding—gotta stop the bleed.” She eyed his neck and held up one hand, uncertain, muttering, “I got this, I got this, this is fine, it’s all gonna be fine. But I can’t put pressure on—Gloves, I need some fucking… Is it okay if this isn’t sanitized?”

He nodded again and mouthed, Sentinel.

“Well, thank Christ for that one.” She bit her lip and eased her fingers into his throat. He twitched and tried to keep still while she rooted around inside the tissues of his neck. It was a deeply disconcerting sensation; Malik’s expression said she felt the same, and he hoped she wouldn’t puke in his face. But then she pressed something, frowned, and shoved harder. “Aha! Got it!”

Her finger felt like a rock lodged in his trachea, or maybe a hot poker. The urge to cough was overwhelming, but he bit his tongue and only gave her a quavering thumbs-up. The VTOL sideslipped, and she swayed. He swayed with her, trying not to move his head away from her hand. Some part of his idiot brain pointed out that she was very close indeed.

Irritably, he forced himself to focus as best he could. There were higher priorities: his airway, for example. Or—the VTOL shuddered in the air again—his increasing certainty that they were falling out of the sky.

Even thinking of speaking tugged at his throat. He felt membranes slide against Malik’s fingers, slick and unnatural, and his breath whistled in and out past her fingers. He tapped her on the shoulder and mouthed, Fucked? His eyebrows made it a question as he pointed at the front of the VTOL.

She turned away, holding her hand in place, and looked up towards the cockpit. “Eugh. Yep,” she said, over the air screaming past the slit in the roof and a pair of beeping alarms. Another one joined in a moment later, out of phase. “Pilot fell out of his seat—looks pretty dead. That’s the fuel leak alarm, too. I bet the idiot with the machine gun managed to hole one of the lines. Autopilot’s doing its best to keep us in the sky, but they were already talking about setting down somewhere close to refuel and hand me over to the rest of Kahn’s team. So… I think we’re going down. No chutes in here, either.”

He glanced around, careful not to dislodge her grip, and spotted the first Tarvos merc he’d killed, Malik’s erstwhile guard. The fingers of his unbloodied hand extended twice their length, and he dragged the man over by the sleeve. The body left a bloody trail in the deep pile of the carpeted deck. His phalanges returned to their normal dimensions to paw at the black cases riding on the merc’s belt. The third one held a first-aid kit—it looked a lot like the IFAK he’d carried on Detroit SWAT.

Malik eyed him dubiously. “Dunno if I’m stitching you up one-handed in a crashing VTOL, Spy-boy.”

He ignored her and ripped it open, fumbling through band-aids and NSAIDs and gauze until he found what he was looking for. He held up the package of Quik-Stat and jabbed a finger at the instructions on the back.

“Oh, shit—good stuff!” Malik tore the foil, dragged out a sponge, and jammed it into his neck. She massaged it roughly into place while he gnawed on his lip to keep from yelling through the throat wound. After a moment’s contemplation, she followed the sponge with a second. “This might actually work. I think it’s the vein he got, or else there’d be even more blood. Here, let me wrap it up.”

She squinted, made a face, and shut her eyes to concentrate on his innards. Even more than the pain, he struggled not to twitch at the bizarre sensation of her fingers inside the column of his neck. It was a damn good thing she was so dexterous—aircraft maintenance probably did involve a lot of fiddly, delicate work in tight spaces without much of a view. Once she had the sponges situated, a few pieces of gauze and half a roll of medical tape made for a decent bandage over his throat. The wad of cloth pressed hard against the skin over the sponges, adding a dull ache to the ongoing sharp pain.

“Better,” he said, testing the seal. His voice was weak and thready, air leaking through the wound, but the Sentinel had enough to work with. He chuckled wetly and regretted it.

Malik paused, arrested by the bubbling, gruesome sound. “What the hell about this situation is funny to you?”

“Czech tongue-twister. Learn… consonants. Strč prst skrz krk.” He rolled the Rs with practiced ease, now—they tweaked the hole in his neck less than the Ks. “Stick… your finger… through your throat.”

Malik had leaned closer to hear him over the wailing wind. She looked up at him, appalled, then laughed quietly herself. “Famous last words?”

Oh. She thought they were fucked, too. He shook his head and thought back to the endless midair moment they’d shared over London. “Who needs… chute? Open… the pod… bay doors.”

“What? Oh… Oh! Will it hold us both?”

There was only one way to find out for sure, but he’d checked the figures obsessively before the first time he’d jumped out of a perfectly good airplane. Electromagnetic force in opposition to the Earth’s field was the limiting factor. Malik couldn’t weigh anything close to what he did, especially with all his metal bones, but it made for a safe assumption: provided a serious margin of error and simplified the math. Two-and-a-half Gs of decel meant a hundred fifty meters should be all they needed. Not that he intended to cut it close.

But no way was he explaining all of that with a throat wound while they drew ever nearer to digging themselves a grave at the bottom of a smoking crater. He coughed and managed, “Did math. Trust me?”

“For aeronautics? I usually like to check it myself—but yeah. I do.” Malik rolled her eyes. “Besides, you might let yourself get killed pushing your augs, but not when someone else’s life is on the line. Let’s do it.”

She scrambled over the bodies into the cockpit and messed with the controls. The tail hatch groaned open and sliced through the air to add its roar to the shriek of the gap in the roof. One engine coughed and sputtered, and the VTOL started to slalom through the air. “This thing’s definitely going down—jumping looks better every second. Only thing is, we’re kinda high up. Not much oxygen up here. I might black out on you.”

It sounded better than a fiery impact with the ground at several hundred miles per hour. He struggled to his feet, stuffing the first aid kit into a pocket. Then he held out his hand and said, “Count.”

She took it. Together, they faced the tail, braced against the whiplash. “Better jump hard and aim low. Don’t want to get smacked by the wing in case it starts to spin. Ready? Okay, on my mark: three, two, one, mark!” And they leapt.

Of course they were over the goddamn lake. Jensen jerked his head north, toward the shore: he did not want to try swimming again. They spread their limbs and carved a path in the sky northwards.

Cold-looking water glinted dull pewter far beneath them. Air rushed past, filling the contours of his coat as it had before and buoying him up. Malik’s technique was better, but the flying-squirrel effect made up for it, and neither of them dragged the other down. He focused on the shoreline, willing it closer.

Malik’s warning about oxygen applied to him as well. The deep breath he’d taken on the way out of the VTOL, despite the tug of pain it had provoked in his throat, could not make up for the short supply in his bloodstream. His head swam, and the torrent of wind in his tingling ears grew distant and dim. He sucked at the thin air and double-checked his form.

To the southeast, a dull thud and a column of smoke marked the resting place of the kidnap team and their bird. The crash pulled his head around—too late, he saw a highway, but it was gone before he could bend their course to follow it. His altimeter said they were already down to two thousand feet. Time for a stress-test.

He beckoned Malik closer with his free hand. She looked at him with vague, distant eyes for a long and worrying moment. Then she tucked one arm and flipped herself upside down beneath him, the move clearly practiced but clumsier than anything he’d seen her do in England. She clung to his torso, bracing her feet against his insteps, and nodded.

Jensen stretched out his hands and grabbed magnetic flux, slowly at first lest he shake her off. Golden fire coruscated in his grip. His feet dropped lower, putting Malik’s back into the wind, and it buffeted her against him as they slowed midair.

The trees past her shoulder had gotten awfully close while he wasn’t looking. He shook his head to clear it and engaged the main module at his spine. Malik’s weight on his insteps doubled, and she started sliding down his body. He grabbed for her, lost the Icarus effect in his hands, and wobbled alarmingly. The sea of pointy-looking conifers lunged up to meet them.

Malik’s arms tightened around his ribs with a convulsive jerk, locking her in place as she straightened her legs. He seized at the magnetosphere just before they started to tumble in earnest. Together, they crashed through the canopy. Gold lightning licked at the branches and lanced into the sylvan dimness below.

They landed hard on dark stone. On instinct, he crumpled to absorb the fall. His shoulder and hip slammed down against the rock. His head bounced off his myomer biceps. A shower of pine needles drifted down from the branches overhead.

Malik panted for air. Her breath burned against his frozen cheek. “Wow,” she said, and coughed.

His head was spinning, definitely just from the hypoxia. He blinked away the shock of landing—he’d curled himself protectively around her. Flustered, he disentangled himself and sat up. “You okay?” His voice was no more than a whispery wheeze, but he could mostly speak.

“Yeah. That was a hell of a ride. I seriously need one of those things.”

“Sorry ’bout the landing.” He took a deep but careful breath, and then, when his throat stayed in one piece, another. They’d come down in a sheltered gully, not quite a ravine. He scrambled to his feet. The declivity was only maybe hip-deep, but its lip had kept the snow to a heavy dusting.

Malik held out a hand for him to help her up. “You know I’ve had worse. Whoa—still a little wobbly.”

“Air?” He let her steady herself on his shoulder while he brushed needles from his coat. The comforting scent of singed pine filled his nostrils.

“Yeah. I shouldn’t fly for a few hours, but a quick exposure like that is no worse than a couple of beers. What about you?”

“Fine.” Jensen eyed her skeptically, but the sickly green had left her face, and she seemed to be catching her breath. The CASIE threw her pulse and respiration rates up on his HUD—both elevated—but its extrapolated oxygen saturation was ticking back toward a hundred percent in real time. There was one other notable post-jump symptom, though: he whisper-wheezed, “Icarus… your hair.”

“Fucksake,” Malik said, patting at it. It had begun to settle from where the Icarus’ static discharge had puffed it out in an obsidian corona, but the effect remained. “Well, your face is a mess, too.”

He felt at it. His nose had mostly regained its shape, but his teeth still wiggled in his gums, and his upper lip was matted and sticky with drying blood. He clambered out of the gully, scooped a handful of snow, and scrubbed. It came away red. The next one turned merely pink, and the one after that stayed mostly white. After that, he moved onto his throat, wincing as the cold snow tightened the skin under the bandage.

Malik finished scrubbing her hands and bloody face. She sized him up, grabbed a handful of snow, and swiped at his cheek. “There,” she said, nodding judiciously at the results. “All pretty again. Can’t do anything about the bruises, though—you look like a raccoon.”

He raised an eyebrow but said nothing. Grabbing more snow, he moved on to his own hands, washing away mercenary blood and a few ounces of Narhari Kahn’s central nervous system. Then he moved to a fresh patch and rubbed down his coat. It had shed most of the blood, and the snow did for the remainder. There were alcohol wipes in the first aid kit, too: they shared them out, scouring skin and synthetic until both gleamed. The sharp, antiseptic odor masked the smell of pine resin even after they stuffed the used wipes in the kit’s trash bag.

Once the gore was no more than another bad memory for the collection, Jensen consulted his link. According to the maps he could access with spotty satellite coverage, they had come down in the absolute ass-end of nowhere, in broken country. Malik informed him in no uncertain terms that it would eat a VTOL alive if it tried to land, let alone an airplane. Flatter ground lay below and to their east, though, so they set out.

Jensen made a call. “Clearing this way. Hour’s walk. Vega here in ninety.”

“Huh. Guess I assumed it was her dropping you off. Oh—shit! Is Maggie okay?” Malik jittered suddenly with worry and leftover adrenaline.

He budgeted words against the tugging pain in his throat. “Maggie’s fine. Cat, too.”

“Oh thank God. I gotta call her. Wait—they did something to my link.”

Jensen checked: a bracelet like the one he’d worn in Alaska, and wasn’t that an interesting coincidence. He reached for his stun gun, then remembered he’d left it in the apartment along with his ruined vest. So he pinched the band carefully and squeezed with both augmented hands. It crunched and sparked and let go.

“Thanks.” Malik cocked her head and went silent while he took the chance to update Pritchard. When she came back to herself, some of the tension had left her shoulders. The remainder might have been due to cold: the tight blue jeans and thin sweater, both sticky with his blood, served well enough for walking around a city, but she was thoroughly underdressed for the Russian wilderness. Especially without her peacoat. “She’ll be okay. I figured they had no use for her, but Kahn is enough of a monster I was afraid he’d have shot her for kicks.”

“Was.” He unbuttoned his coat and held it out to her. “Shivering.”

She took it reluctantly. “What about you?”

He tried to laugh, but it hurt his throat too much. So he subvocalized over the link: “Warmed by the fires of righteousness. Plus the augs generate heat.”

“Fine, O Righteous One, if you insist.” She buttoned it up. It came down to her calves and swallowed her hands. “Jesus, this thing is heavy.”

Jensen shoved down a moment’s regret—the jeans looked damn good on her—and trudged beside her through the thin layer of snow. Its icy crust crunched under their boots with each step. A cold breeze ghosted between the rough, red tree trunks.

Somewhere far away, an owl hooted, low and mournful. He cleared his mental throat and pinged her link. “You doing okay?”

“Yeah, the coat helps a lot.”

“Not what I meant.”

“You’re the one full of holes.” He stared her down, and she tossed her head and looked away. “Okay, okay. Your holes are healing, and I got snatched out of my home at gunpoint. I… feel pretty decent, actually, all things considered. It sucked, and I was scared, and now it’s over. I figured you’d show up in dramatic fashion and save the day, as usual, at the cost of getting yourself beat to shit again, also as usual.”

“Ouch.”

She chuckled. “Hey, you’re reliable. Think I got the panic out of my system back on the bird, jamming my hand inside your throat. And I’m not sure tandem Icarus skydives with a side of hypoxia are the best palate-cleanser for everyone, but apparently they work on me. Plus it’s nice to know Kahn is no longer a problem.”

“I know you’re damn tough, but you’re allowed to freak out after something like that.” Malik grimaced at him, and he gave up—for the moment. “How’d he find you, anyway?”

“Who knows? I mean, it must have been Shanghai, somehow. But I thought the drop went off just fine. He even mentioned to one of the Tarvos guys that it was random chance he picked up my tail.” Malik sighed. “Relentless bastard. If I’d known he was still holding a grudge, waiting for a shot at me, I don’t know that I would have gone back there. Especially without my designated muscle.”

“Handled yourself pretty well. You get him off me?”

“Yeah. Kicked him in the face, probably broke his nose.” She eyed him sidelong, a smug smile on her lips. “The Tarvos dudes were watching me pretty closely, taking turns, but I wiggled one foot out of my boot and got it out of the zip tie while you were on the roof. They were just staring at the ceiling like extras in a horror movie. And I got the boot back on before I kicked him, so I wouldn’t break a toe. See? I pay attention when you talk about this stuff.”

Better to be the horror-movie monster than the hapless goon, he supposed. He pretended to focus on his footing. “Good. You pass Ninja 101.”

“Do I get a gold star?”

“Throwing star, maybe.”

Malik chuckled. “Listen, what about you? We just patched your trachea back together, and you’re still only talking in my head. Take your own advice.”

“Me? Told you, I’m fine. Built for it, right?” He shrugged off the look she gave him and walked onwards, downslope.