This story originally appeared in the Grendel Press anthology The Devil Who Loves Me.
The charming little deli just off Palm Springs’ main strip was transplanted directly from the 1960s: white stucco embellished in shades of mint and candyfloss. Not at all the kind of place one would expect to hire a mercenary. Even under the shade of the patio awning, the air was so hot it seared Victor Keane’s lungs.
“Is the idea to lay low and blend in?” Corinne dropped into a plastic patio chair across from him. “Because I’m pretty sure you’re the only guy within ten miles under the age of a hundred.”
“This is where people go to retire,” Victor replied. “I’m retired.”
“You’re thirty-four. Men your age don’t retire. They’re just unemployed.”
Corinne didn’t order anything; after years of observation, Victor had determined she subsisted entirely on mineral water, air, and spite. She drew a tablet from her shoulder bag and stabbed at its screen with fingers like spiders’ legs. “What do you know about Cameron Spalding?”
“Not much.”
Corinne slid the tablet across the table. She’d always possessed a sense of the theatric that lent itself well to manila folders and grainy photo printouts, severely undercut by the relentless march of technology. On the screen was a photo of a middle-aged man with an air of carefully cultivated dishevelment: Cameron Spalding, American citizen, 47 years old. Net worth somewhere in the billions.
“Tech guy?” Victor guessed.
“On the financial side. Brought his trust fund in on a few ventures that paid off big.” Corinne propped her elbows on the table and leaned forward. “Spalding’s getting weird. Last year, he bought an acreage out in the Rockies and started hiring armed guards. Stayed pretty quiet until recently.”
She was waiting for Victor to ask what happened. He didn’t, just to annoy her.
Corinne huffed, and continued: “A van full of civilians on a camping trip went missing a few weeks ago. Once someone got around to tracking the GPS, it turned up at the edge of Spalding’s little mountain fortress.”
“Why are you talking to me about it?”
“Spalding has friends in D.C.,” Corinne said. “Those friends are pretty reluctant to call the cops on their nice, wealthy, all-American pal Cameron Spalding. Meanwhile, it turns out one of the missing civilians is Skylar Cantrell.”
“As in Cantrell Energy?”
“Yep. Emmett Cantrell is very motivated to get his granddaughter back.”
Victor shoved the tablet back across the table. “I’m not getting involved in a fight between rich lunatics.”
“Of course not. You have a functioning brain. Which is why Cantrell is offering an absurd amount of money to change your mind.” Corinne settled back in her seat, too relaxed for Victor’s liking. “Phaedra Hill is onboard.”
Victor glared at her.
Corinne’s face was the picture of innocence. “You’ve worked with her before, right?”
“That’s cheap,” Victor said. “Even for you, that’s cheap.”
Corinne shrugged.
“Fine,” Victor said.
“Good.” The tablet went back into Corinne’s bag.
As she stood, Victor asked, “Why me?”
Corinne shrugged again. “This is a messy job. Home ground, civilian opponent. Situations like that, soldiers get confused. They hesitate. You won’t.”
As instructed, Victor reported to the airfield at 0800. There was a tiltrotor waiting: an overpriced consumer model of a VTOL aircraft originally designed for the military, which had a long and distinguished record of crashing at every available opportunity.
Corinne waited in the shelter of the hangar, with three other mercenaries.
“You already know Hill,” she said. “She’ll be your medic.”
Phaedra Hill had the build of a rugby player and the general demeanor of a kindergarten teacher. Phaedra had left the service to transition; when the civilian sector proved nearly as unfriendly as the military, mercenary work had been the only option left.
She wasn’t happy about it.
Corinne indicated the other two, equally broad and ripped with a near-identical assortment of questionable tattoos. “This is Mike Lenox and Simon Brandt. Lenox, Brandt, meet Victor Keane.”
Brandt grinned. “The crazy one?”
Victor shrugged.
“Heard you were an army ranger,” Lenox said.
“Got the tab,” Victor replied. “Never served with a unit. You?”
“Navy SEALs.”
Victor suppressed a grimace. Even among special forces, SEALs had a reputation. Phaedra’s look of dismay matched Victor’s own.
“Keane is team leader,” Corinne said. “You all report to him.”
Brandt and Lenox groaned. Phaedra’s expression froze into a blank mask.
“No arguments,” Corinne snapped. “If you have a problem, back out now.”
The groans settled into low grumbles, then silence.
“Rules of engagement?” Phaedra asked.
Lenox snorted a laugh; Brandt rolled his eyes.
“You’re cleared for lethal force. Try and stick to self-defense.”
“‘Try,’” Brandt muttered under his breath. Lenox choked back another laugh.
“One last thing,” Corinne said. “You may be tempted to take a shot at Spalding. Don’t. There are many things the authorities are willing to ignore about this situation. A dead American billionaire will not be one of them.”
Cameron Spalding’s alpine mansion was at the far end of a long and heavily-patrolled access road, so the tiltrotor dropped Victor and his team twenty miles into the dense woodland of Spalding’s backyard. The forest had lain untouched until the invasion of the luxury home industry; the stuff of postcards and wildlife documentaries.
As the staggering downdraft from the tiltrotor’s takeoff faded, Phaedra said, “Victor. I need a minute.”
Lenox let out the quiet “ooh” of a schoolboy whose classmate was in trouble. Victor motioned for him and Brandt to move along. “What’s the problem?”
Phaedra wouldn’t look at him. “Fucking everything, Vic. Last I heard, you had a psychotic breakdown.”
“That was just the defense my dad’s lawyers came up with.”
“So you were perfectly sane when you shot your best friend in the face?”
Her knuckles were white around the strap of her medical bag.
“I’m fine, Phaedra.”
He didn’t tell her he took this job to watch her back. She wouldn’t thank him.
“You really are fine, aren’t you?” Phaedra said. “It doesn’t bother you at all. What you did.”
“I’m not going to shoot you in the back, if that’s what you’re worried about. I’m not a sociopath. Or psychopath, or whatever you’re supposed to call it.”
“I know you’re not. So what are you?”
“Hey!” Brandt shouted, startling them both. “You ladies coming?”
Victor aimed a middle finger in Brandt’s general direction. To Phaedra, he said, “Are you going to be okay?”
“Probably not.”
Unfortunately, Emmett Cantrell had spared no expense. Instead of paper maps, the team had a tablet loaded with satellite maps of the area. Even with its steel frame and rugged rubber case, the thing felt like it was about to snap in Victor’s hands.
The maps showed a small, isolated building about halfway between the drop point and Spalding’s mansion. Closer observation from a ridge overlooking the site revealed it was an old, two-story cabin—built in the 70s as someone’s wilderness getaway, then left intact when developers bought the land. There was a brand-new pickup truck parked next to a partially overgrown dirt track that wound away into the woods; a generator hummed from a shed nearby.
The team’s loadout also included a DSLR camera with a telephoto lens so massive it required its own carrying handle. Through the camera’s viewfinder, Victor counted two sentries. Movement in the windows suggested at least two more people inside.
“Might be where they’re holding the asset,” Lenox said.
Phaedra looked dubious. “Wouldn’t Spalding keep the hostages close?”
“We’re here anyway,” Brandt pointed out. “And there must be something important in there.”
Victor hummed an agreement. They’d need to eliminate the sentries first, and quietly.
He glanced at Phaedra; her eyes were fixed on the house, every muscle wired with tension.
No, not tension. Dread.
“Brandt,” Victor said. “You and I will handle the sentries. Lenox, Hill, hold this position.”
Phaedra’s shoulders slumped in relief.
The sentry paced in a rough square around his post, unaware or uncaring that the noise might cover the footsteps of someone else.
Victor approached from the direction of the house. The sentry clearly expected trouble to come from the outside in; it wouldn’t occur to him that something might get past him and double back. Victor’s knife came out of its sheath with a bare whisper of sound.
The knife went into the sentry’s lower back in one smooth thrust, slipping easily into his kidney. The sentry’s body seized in blinding, paralyzing pain; his mouth opened in a silent scream. Victor stood and caught the sentry as he toppled, gently lowering him to the ground.
For a moment, the sentry almost looked betrayed. Then his face went slack.
Victor wiped his knife clean on the body’s pant leg and sheathed it again.
From the other side of the house came a panicked shout that cut off into a choked, gurgling noise.
Shit.
As quietly as possible, Victor sprinted toward the source of the noise. His rifle swung up into firing position at the sight of a figure standing there, but it was only Brandt with a dead sentry at his feet.
There were two slashes in the sentry’s throat: a shallow aborted slice, and a longer, deeper stroke that had cut off his scream and, shortly afterward, everything else.
Brandt’s hand was bleeding, and there was something dazed and brittle in his expression when he said, “My hand slipped.”
Victor lowered the rifle. “Should’ve gone for the kidney.”
Brandt blinked. “I don’t do that.”
“The fuck does that mean?”
Indignation rose up behind the cracked glass of Brandt’s eyes. “It means fuck you, I don’t do that!”
Hurried footsteps crunched through the undergrowth toward them. Victor spun, raising his rifle again, as Phaedra and Lenox emerged from the woods.
Phaedra froze; her face went white.
Victor lowered his weapon. “You heard it too?”
“The whole fucking county heard it.” Phaedra studied the scene, then looked to Victor. “Do we back off?”
“No,” Victor replied. “Move in.”
They closed on the cabin from both sides; Phaedra and Lenox covered the front door while Victor and Brandt approached from the back.
The locks had been changed recently; there was still a pale void on the back door where the old lock had been. No keyhole—just a chip reader and what was likely a formidable deadbolt.
The door’s frame, on the other hand, hadn’t been replaced since the cabin was built.
Victor’s radio hissed. “Smart lock on the front door,” Phaedra reported.
“Same on this side,” Victor answered. “They already know we’re here. Kick it in.”
“Hell yeah,” Brandt crowed, and put his boot to the lock. The frame splintered. The door swung open.
The wood-paneled interior of the cabin was empty, with nail holes in the walls where pictures had once hung. The only furniture of note was in the den, where books and papers lay scattered across a cheap folding table next to an open laptop.
Behind the table was a metal folding chair, toppled onto its side.
Victor and Brandt met Phaedra and Lenox in the kitchen—littered with empty plastic bags and frozen dinner trays—and confirmed via signals that the first floor was clear.
From upstairs came low voices, and a muffled thump.
Victor signaled for the rest of the team to stay put and made for the stairs.
There were two doors at the top: one hung open, revealing an empty bedroom, while the other was nearly closed. Rifle at the ready, Victor nudged the second door open.
A lone guard stood at the center of the room: young, maybe early 20s, with a pistol trained on the doorway and Victor. His other arm was wrapped around the throat of a civilian roughly Victor’s age, with a soft face and large dark eyes.
“Easy,” Victor said to both of them at once. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
“Back off,” the guard snarled. The gun shook in his hand.
“It’s okay,” Victor said. “What’s your name?”
“Fuck you.” The guard took a shuddering breath. “Casey.”
“Casey,” Victor repeated. “You’re not a soldier, are you?”
“Fuck you.”
“It’s okay,” Victor said. “That’s a good thing. You’ve never killed anyone, have you?”
“… No.”
“Tell you what.” Victor unslung his rifle. “I’ll put my gun down, and you can put yours down, and nobody has to shoot anybody.”
Casey didn’t reply, but Victor held his rifle out to the side.
Slowly, mirroring Victor’s motions, Casey swung his own gun away, then down.
Victor knelt; Casey did too, as far as he was able. Both guns hit the floor with a startling clatter.
Then the hostage dropped to the floor, pure dead weight. Casey swore and stumbled under the sudden burden.
Victor was on him in a second. The back of his hand, loosely curled, came down on the top of Casey’s head with a crack, right at the seam between three skull plates.
Casey collapsed; the hostage scrambled out of the way. Victor knelt and checked Casey’s pulse.
The hostage had put the bed between himself and Victor and now hid behind it. Victor circled around, hands empty and held out at his sides.
“You okay?” he asked.
The hostage shook his head, and an unruly lock of hair fell into his eyes. Victor resisted the urge to brush it away.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said.
The hostage risked a quick glance at the body, then back at Victor.
“He’d have called his boss the moment we left.” Victor crouched until he was eye-to-eye with the hostage. “I’m Victor.”
The hostage swallowed. “Adrian.” His shirt wasn’t buttoned all the way, and sweat had pooled in the hollow of his throat. “I’m Adrian Yates.”
Victor held out a hand to him, palm up. “Would you come downstairs with me, Adrian?”
Adrian’s hand was soft and gripped Victor’s so tightly it hurt.
As Victor helped him to his feet, Adrian’s eyes strayed to the body on the floor.
Victor moved to block his view. “Don’t look.”
On their way out, Victor paused only to pick up his rifle.
“One hostile,” Victor reported upon his return to the kitchen, Adrian in tow. “Dead.”
Brandt paused in the process of sifting through a pile of empty pill bottles. “That’s not Skylar Cantrell.”
Adrian took a half-step back. “What do you want with my TA?”
“This is Adrian Yates.” To Adrian, Victor said, “We were hired to find Skylar.”
“You’re not with the military.” Adrian’s attention darted rapidly between the four of them. “Mercenaries?”
“Yeah.” Phaedra offered him a rueful smile. “Sorry.”
“Shit.” A short laugh, tinged with hysteria, burst from Adrian’s mouth. “Goddamn it.”
“Do you know where Skylar is?” Lenox asked.
“Probably in the main house,” Adrian said. “With the others.”
Brandt crossed his arms. “Why aren’t you with them?”
“I was planning to escape,” Adrian said. “Spalding found out. Took it personally. He couldn’t get rid of me, so instead, he banished me out here to do my research.”
“Research?” Victor asked. “On what?”
“Entheogens,” Adrian said. “Psychedelics used for spiritual or religious—”
Lenox caught on first, and laughed. “Drugs?”
Adrian rolled his eyes. “Yeah. Drugs. I’m an anthropologist. I study ancient divination practices.”
“Spalding wanted you,” Victor realized.
“He read my thesis,” Adrian said. “I’m not sure he understood much of it, but now he thinks he can transcend the physical. Ascend to a higher plane of existence.”
“With drugs,” Victor said. “How’s that going?”
“Not good. He’s, uh … frustrated.” Adrian touched a healing cut over his cheekbone; his eyes went hazy. “He backhanded me once. Not that hard, but his ring caught me on the cheek. I keep waiting for him to do it again.” He blinked. “Sorry. I don’t know why I said all that.”
Upstairs, a phone began to ring.
With Adrian in tow, the team only managed to put a few miles between themselves and the house before they lost too much light to continue. Their loadout included night vision goggles, but Victor preferred not to use them; they rendered the world as an indiscriminate green smear that was barely an improvement over pitch darkness.
They didn’t dare risk a fire. Victor took first watch and sat on a fallen log with his back to the camp, methodically cataloging noises and shapes in the darkness.
Nothing changed until the end of his shift, when a faint rustle disturbed the leaf litter behind him. Victor spun at the waist, drawing his sidearm in the same movement.
Adrian stood at the other end of Victor’s gun, frozen, hands half-raised. “Sorry.”
“Don’t sneak up on guys with guns.” Victor lowered his sidearm and holstered it again. “You should be sleeping.”
“Can’t.” Adrian had a silver emergency blanket slung over his shoulders; he pulled it tighter around himself, as if to hide inside. “Can I sit here?”
Victor shrugged, and Adrian carefully perched on the log next to Victor, warm all along his side. Adrian had two healed-over piercings in his left ear. Victor found himself wanting to run his thumb over them.
He looked up instead. There were parts of the desert where one could see the sky as it really was: no clouds, no light pollution, just vast shapes in a darkness so endless that staring up at it felt like falling. It wasn’t the same, here. But it was close.
“I heard some tech company wants to put billboards up there,” Adrian said. “Sell ad space.”
Victor’s stomach churned. “Are they all as crazy as Spalding?”
“Half the richest guys on Earth are trying to crack immortality. The other half want to go to space. I guess Spalding couldn’t decide and split the difference.”
“With drugs.”
“You keep saying that,” Adrian said, annoyed. “Humans have used entheogens since before we were technically human. Priests and shamans all over the world eat magic mushrooms or drink psychedelic teas. The Oracle of Delphi was huffing volcano fumes.”
“Why?”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out.” Adrian huddled deeper into the blanket. “… I had strict parents. Once I got to college, I tried everything. So one night, my roommate offered me some mushrooms he got from a guy on the internet. Ended up in the middle of a field, crying. Also naked. I was convinced something was looking at me.” He paused, then continued, as if reciting something he’d written down: “If there’s such a thing as the divine, then only in a state of delirium can the human mind truly reach for it.”
Victor was too caught up in his own thoughts to answer.
Adrian noticed. “What are you thinking about?”
“Ranger school.”
“That isn’t as cute as it sounds, is it?”
“Nope,” Victor said. “They drop you into the wilderness to run exercises with minimal rations and four hours of sleep every night. For two weeks at a time.”
“Jesus.”
“I started hallucinating,” Victor said. “Everybody does.”
Adrian slid down off the log, rolling up onto his knees in the dirt and shuffling until he and Victor were face to face. “What did you see?”
Victor didn’t have the words to describe it. How the impact of every raindrop on his skin shattered into mesmerizing fractals. How the world around him flattened into shapes and colors that lost all meaning. How the air in front of him seemed to open, and he understood, all at once and down to every atom of his being, that something so infinitely huge it shouldn’t have even been aware of his existence had, for one brief moment, taken notice of him.
“I reached out for something,” he said, “and it reached back.”
Adrian leaned in until he and Victor were only a few inches apart, gazing into his eyes as if the answer to all his questions lay somewhere behind them.
Victor wanted to kiss him.
His watch started beeping.
Victor stood, so abruptly that Adrian lurched back onto his heels. “Shift change.”
Adrian blinked and couldn’t seem to move.
“Get some sleep,” Victor said, and went to kick Brandt awake.
“What kind of security do they have up at the house?”
They kept Adrian between them as they walked. Spalding’s mansion was only a few miles away, but it was slow going through the wood and they didn’t dare follow the road.
“A lot of guards,” Adrian said. “I think Spalding recruited most of them online.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know.”
A disturbance in the trees drew Victor’s attention.
“Great,” Brandt groaned. “We should have left him in the—”
“Shut up,” Victor hissed.
Brandt’s mouth snapped shut.
In the dead silence that followed came the crack of a gunshot.
Victor shoved Adrian down behind a tree stump, then ducked to join him. Phaedra, Brandt, and Lenox all dove for cover.
There were silhouettes in the forest—roughly half a dozen, all of them firing as they fanned out to encircle Victor’s team. Victor signaled for the others to break cover and fall back, herding Adrian behind him. If Adrian was right, these were automatic weapons in the hands of amateurs—they’d make a lot of noise, fire blindly into the brush, but shy away from direct fire at human targets.
Mostly. From somewhere off to Victor’s left, Lenox screamed.
Victor didn’t look, his attention fixed on the rifle in his hands and the targets ahead; he dropped one, then another.
The team retreated faster than their opponents could advance. By the time they’d exhausted their rifle ammunition and backed into a rocky overhang, nearly ten minutes later, Victor was fairly sure they were clear.
Lenox slumped against the rock, bleeding from the socket of his right arm, which hung useless at his side.
Phaedra rushed over and began to strap a tourniquet around Lenox’s shoulder. At such an awkward angle, it would only slow the bleeding; once the tourniquet was in place, Phaedra clamped her hands over Lenox’s shoulder, front and back.
If Lenox hadn’t passed out yet, he wasn’t far from it.
“We need a medevac,” Brandt said.
“This isn’t a government job,” Victor fired back. “There’s no medevac.”
“Extraction point’s a few hours away,” Phaedra said. “We might make it.”
“So let’s fucking extract!” Brandt snapped. “Fuck this job!”
Still dazed, Adrian said, “What about the hostages?”
“Vic.” Phaedra’s forearms flexed as she bore down on Lenox’s shoulder. “I don’t think I can stop the bleeding.”
Victor keyed his radio. “Control, this is Echo One.”
Over the radio, Corinne answered: “Copy, Echo One. Mission status?”
“Echo Four is critically injured. We need extraction.”
“Do you have the asset?”
“Negative.”
“Extraction isn’t possible until the asset is secured.”
Phaedra didn’t dare take her hands off Lenox; instead, she shouted, loud enough to be heard over Victor’s radio: “Lenox is bleeding out! Get us out of here!”
The only answer was static.
There was a scuffle behind Victor, and a quiet, surprised gasp from Adrian.
Both of Adrian’s hands scrabbled at the arm Brandt had across his throat. Brandt stood behind him, pressing a knife into Adrian’s side.
“Cantrell is our ticket out,” Brandt said. “Spalding wants Yates. We can trade him.”
Victor reached for his sidearm.
“Careful,” Brandt warned. “You want Spalding’s guys to hear a gunshot out here?”
Brandt took a step back; Adrian stumbled along with him.
“Victor,” Adrian called, voice trembling.
Victor couldn’t follow. Lenox was going nowhere fast, and Phaedra wouldn’t leave him.
“I’ll find you,” Victor called back. “I promise.”
Brandt backed away, step by careful step, until the forest swallowed them.
A few minutes past nightfall, Lenox’s breathing rattled to a halt.
Phaedra noticed the moment Victor did. He kept his back turned as she gasped and cursed through her attempts to revive him; she wouldn’t want him to see her cry.
It was nearly an hour before Phaedra said, in a voice gone hoarse, “He’s gone.”
Victor sat next to her, shoulders pressed together, as Lenox’s body cooled.
Finally, Phaedra took a long, shaky breath and said, “Brandt’s not coming back.”
The mansion was a monstrosity of glass and marble; a French chateau designed by an American who didn’t understand the appeal. The bulk of the house’s security had assembled in the central courtyard to inspect the steady procession of expensive cars making their way up the road.
Cameron Spalding was having a party.
The house sat at the top of a rise. Further down the hill was an access door to the basement, with only a token security presence.
Victor and Phaedra remained under cover of the treeline, studying the guard patrols through the long lens of the camera. As shifts changed and guards came and went, each one paused at the basement door and leaned toward a panel mounted next to it. Moments later, the door would open.
Phaedra handed the camera to Victor and said, with relief, “Facial recognition lock.”
Victor swept the camera from one guard to the other until he found one facing the treeline and snapped a photo.
They had to take the case off the tablet to get the camera’s memory card into it.
Sneaking past the guard patrols was easy enough, but the real challenge was getting the tablet into the door camera’s field of view. Neither of them dared approach it head-on, in case it was programmed to report any unrecognized faces.
Back pressed against the wall next to the door, Victor pulled up the guard’s face on the tablet and stretched until it sidled into the camera’s line of sight.
The lock beeped, and Phaedra ducked past to yank the door open.
Ahead of them was a long, cinderblock hallway lit from above by harsh fluorescent lights. Doors lined both sides, which Victor tested as they went. Most were locked; one opened into a full but untouched wine cellar. Another, near the end, opened to reveal a zippered plastic medical barrier—the kind usually found in disease wards.
“Hold here,” he whispered to Phaedra.
She nodded and put her back to him, swiveling to watch both ends of the hall. Victor stepped over the threshold and closed the door behind him.
Beyond the barrier was a makeshift infirmary, the space along the far wall divided into curtained alcoves. From within one alcove came the sound of someone struggling against restraints.
Victor twitched the curtain aside to reveal Simon Brandt, strapped to a gurney.
Stark terror swept over Brandt’s face. He seized in his bonds, no longer struggling to break free but instead scrambling to get as far away from Victor as possible. “Keane—”
“Easy, Brandt. I’ll kick your ass later.” Victor holstered his gun and moved to undo Brandt’s restraints. “Where’s Yates?”
From the next alcove came a hoarse, “Here.”
Victor finished freeing one of Brandt’s arms and ripped the curtain aside to reveal Adrian, strapped down just as Brandt had been.
“Oh my god.” Adrian smiled: a slow, besotted grin. “You’re beautiful.”
“Thanks.”
“I couldn’t see it before,” Adrian continued, slow and dreamy, as Victor unstrapped him. “I do now. I can see all of you.”
Victor pried one of Adrian’s eyes open. Fully dilated. “They drugged you.”
“Both of us,” Adrian said.
Victor sensed movement behind him, a moment too late to stop Brandt from grabbing his sidearm.
Whirling to face him, Victor put himself between the gun and Adrian. Brandt was trembling, the gun’s barrel wavering in Victor’s face, his pupils blown wide.
“I see you.” Brandt had a strange buoyancy to him, as if he’d been laboring under a burden now gone. “What you really are. Like mold, cobwebs, all tangled up inside your head—”
“Brandt.” Victor raised his hands to Brandt’s line of sight, empty and open. “You’re not making any sense.”
Adrian said, “Something reached back.”
Victor couldn’t risk looking back at him. “What?”
“Ranger school,” Adrian explained. “You said something reached back. You brought it home with you.”
“Shut up!” Brandt screamed. His trigger finger twitched.
Victor slapped the gun down, jamming the web of his thumb under the hammer. Brandt pulled the trigger, but the hammer struck flesh instead of the firing pin. Victor’s free hand darted to his belt.
The knife went up under Brandt’s jaw, into his brain.
Brandt struggled to speak for several seconds. There were tears in his eyes. Then Victor pulled the knife free, and Brandt fell.
Victor knelt just outside the widening pool of blood, pried his gun out of Brandt’s still-twitching hand, and holstered it. Adrian was leaning over the edge of the gurney, watching him.
“Does it make you do it?” he wondered. “Or does it just make it easier?”
“Where’s Brandt?” Phaedra asked, when Victor returned with Adrian in tow.
Adrian wobbled; Victor steadied him and said, “KIA.”
Phaedra handed Adrian her canteen; he drank in huge, greedy gulps. She said, “Is he gonna be okay?”
“M’fine.” Adrian handed the canteen back.
Victor said, “We’re not leaving him here.”
Phaedra didn’t argue any further.
The door at the end of the hall opened into a narrow stairway. The stairway, in turn, led to a massive kitchen that had never been used. The interior of the mansion was like a museum: pristine, monochrome, and cavernously empty. Music and muffled voices echoed distantly from across the house.
Victor and Phaedra started for the door, but Adrian—more lucid than he’d been a few minutes ago—nudged them toward a winding staircase instead.
There was a landing on the second floor that overlooked the mansion’s great room; assembled below were easily two dozen of Spalding’s guests.
Victor recognized a few of them from television or the news—usually reports on some scandal or another. The rest were, no doubt, friends or colleagues of Spalding’s. There was, judging by the guests’ behavior, a plethora of drugs on offer.
The man himself held court near the tall picture windows overlooking the courtyard.
“Thank you!” Cameron Spalding shouted, just slightly too loud. “It’s so awesome you could all make it here today!”
There was a manic charisma to him; he commanded attention, if only out of concern that he was moments away from biting someone’s face off.
“You’re all here because you’re the best and brightest humanity has to offer,” Spalding continued, in the tones of someone high on attention and also several different stimulants. “You’ve conquered everything this world can throw at you. Aren’t you tired? Aren’t you bored?”
A cheer went up among the guests.
“It’s time for the next step! We’re meant for something greater! We are disrupting human evolution, folks!” Spalding slammed the considerable remainder of his drink. “Let’s move fast and break things! Fuck yeah!”
At the edge of the room huddled a small knot of four people. One of them was Skylar Cantrell.
The guard assigned to the hostages was bored and inattentive. As one of the party’s guests passed, Skylar darted past the guard to grab her by the wrist.
“Please,” she said, just barely audible over the music. “Please, you have to help—”
Disgusted, the woman wrenched her arm out of Skylar’s grip.
A bellow of “Skylar!” resounded across the room.
Spalding strode toward the hostages, pausing only to offer a quick apology to the guest who’d been “disturbed.”
“This is unacceptable behavior,” he snarled, rounding on Skylar. “If you keep harassing my guests, I’ll have all of you put downstairs. Do you want that?”
Skylar shook her head, frantic.
Crouched next to Victor behind the landing’s banister, Adrian started to shake. Victor found Adrian’s hand with his own and squeezed.
“We can’t just go in shooting,” Phaedra said. “We’ll get the hostages killed.”
Adrian nudged Victor, then pointed to a wall-mounted touchscreen at the base of the stairs below them. “It’s a smart home,” he said. “Some of the controls don’t need a password.”
“Which controls?”
“Temperature. Music. Lights. When I was trying to escape, I planned on cutting the lights for cover.”
“Already pretty dark in here,” Victor noted. “Cutting the lights won’t do much.”
“Not necessarily,” Phaedra said. “Ever open a fridge in the middle of the night?”
Victor moved into position near the edge of the room, watching as Phaedra did the same from the other side.
Adrian waited next to the smart home terminal; at Victor’s signal, he nodded, and Victor closed his eyes.
Behind his eyelids, the lights flared, then went dark.
For a moment, the noise in the room rose into a cacophony of confused shouts and complaints—before the party’s music ramped up to full, deafening intensity and drowned them out.
Victor opened his eyes to murky but navigable darkness. He’d preserved his night vision; everyone else in the room wasn’t so lucky.
He and Phaedra swept in on the hostages’ position. A guard loomed up out of the dark, blind and stumbling. Victor punched him in the temple and lowered him to the ground as quietly as possible.
The other guards were scattered throughout the room, just as confused as the guests, except for one that had guessed the source of the problem and begun to wade through the crowd towards the stairs.
Adrian’s position.
Fuck it.
Victor drew his sidearm and fired. A bloody hole erupted at the base of the guard’s skull, and he crumpled.
The music wasn’t enough to cover the gunshot. Somebody screamed, and the ballroom dissolved into chaos as the guests stampeded for any exit they could find.
Phaedra reached the hostages moments before Victor did; she grabbed Skylar by the arm and firmly tugged her away.
“It’s okay,” she said, nearly shouting in Skylar’s ear. “We’re here to help you.”
Blind and shaken, Skylar could only nod and let Phaedra tow her back to the landing.
Adrian wasn’t there. The dead guard’s holster was empty.
“Shit,” Phaedra said. “Where’s Yates?”
“Adrian?” Skylar’s eyes swept the darkened room, although she was surely as blind as the rest of the guests. “He’s okay?”
There was a burst of gunfire from across the room. The guards were starting to panic.
Phaedra said, “We can’t stay here.”
“Get the asset to the extraction point,” Victor told her. “I’ll find Adrian.”
As he turned to leave, Phaedra’s hand closed around Victor’s forearm.
“Vic,” she said. “Good luck.”
Her hand slipped from his arm, and Victor caught it in his. He squeezed.
“Thank you,” he said.
Phaedra nodded with a weary smile.
They parted ways. Phaedra dragged a protesting Skylar back towards the basement exit; Victor moved deeper into the house.
Someone had finally cut the music. Barely audible over the muffled chaos of the house were two voices arguing somewhere on the second floor. Victor followed them to the master bedroom.
It was the bedroom of a man who fantasized that he was above such banal indulgences as sleep: cavernous, spare, and white, with curtains drawn over what was surely a spectacular view. Adrian stood at its center, with the guard’s stolen gun pointed at Cameron Spalding.
“Adrian,” Spalding was saying, as if scolding a misbehaving pet. “I understand you have concerns about what we’re doing here, but if you put the gun down and let me explain—”
“You ran our camper off the road.” The gun rattled in Adrian’s hand. “You threatened my friends.”
“To achieve great things, we all need to make sacrifices—”
Adrian screamed, “I’m not your fucking employee!”
Victor moved into the room and immediately drew Spalding’s attention.
“Listen,” Spalding called to him, “this is all just a misunderstanding. Get the gun away from him, and whatever you’re being paid, I’ll double it.”
Victor said, “Adrian.”
The line of Adrian’s shoulders went tense. The gun didn’t waver.
Victor circled Adrian until he could see his face in profile. Tears marked long tracks down his face, his jaw clenched shut and trembling.
“Adrian,” he repeated. “Time to go.”
“He won’t stop,” Adrian replied. “He’ll just keep taking whatever he wants and using it up and throwing it away. Anybody who cares can’t stop him, and anybody who can stop him doesn’t care.” His finger twitched on the trigger.
“You don’t want to do that,” Victor said.
“You do it all the time.”
Victor stepped closer and extended his arm along Adrian’s, fingers gently wrapping around the gun.
“I’m different,” he said. “You know that.”
Adrian’s only response was a wordless sob. His grip on the gun went slack. Slowly, carefully, Victor tilted it up and out of Adrian’s hand.
Victor’s other arm went around Adrian’s shoulders, pulling him close as Adrian slumped against his chest.
Spalding’s demeanor was unchanged, without a hint of gratitude or even relief. At no point had he ever believed he was truly in danger.
Victor pressed a gentle kiss to the top of Adrian’s head. “Don’t look.”
He pointed the gun at Spalding’s face and pulled the trigger.
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