Danton read the look on Jude's face — the particular blend of genuine concern and barely concealed curiosity — and made a quick decision.
Why pull him into this? If Jude didn't approve of what was about to happen, Danton could hardly hold a gun to his head. And if Jude did approve, dragging a civilian along only added risk.
He thought of Elizabeth, briefly. She'd been house-bound for months — no walks, no exercise, most of her old habits quietly surrendered to the illness. Her diet had simplified to almost nothing. But she still asked him to bring back Jude's pastries. She said they weren't too heavy, that the flavors were right, that they were the one thing she could eat without it feeling like a compromise. She'd told him once, during a good week, that when she got better she wanted to learn a recipe or two. Just something small to make for herself.
When she got better.
"Some things have come up," Danton said. "I haven't been sleeping well. Late nights."
"Are you short on money?" Jude asked it with the directness of someone who'd spent enough time broke to know it was usually the real answer. "You've been picking up shifts at the gun shop — if you need a loan, just say so."
Danton smiled, and it was a tired smile. If it were only money.
"I'm managing. Really." He took the bag from the counter. "Go do your rounds. I'll be back next time."
"Alright. Call me if anything changes — and say hello to Elizabeth."
He watched Jude turn and leave. The door clicked shut.
No need to silence him, Danton thought. If the police ask Jude anything at all, his story checks out instantly. The gun shop owner is a different matter, but at this point killing him accomplishes nothing.
The door clicked open again.
"Oh — Danton. One more thing."
Danton stopped himself from sighing visibly.
"Sorry." Jude stepped back in, reading the faint impatience correctly. He held out a small parcel. "Yomogi mochi. For Elizabeth — you mentioned she likes them. Consider it a regular customer's perk."
He set it on the counter, gave a small wave, and left. The door clicked shut a second time.
Danton stood with the parcel in his hand.
Jude is not someone to be moved, he thought. That man is simply a good person.
He checked his watch. Almost no time left.
He moved into the warehouse.
And then, with the focused concentration of someone triggering a process that hurt, his body began.
The duplication wasn't graceful — it was rapid and cellular, a splitting that happened faster than the eye should have been able to track, each copy emerging with perfect fidelity: same black jacket, same hollowed face, same gait. But the copies had a quality that the original didn't. A vacancy behind the eyes. They didn't look at him. They moved with the efficiency of something that had been given exactly one task and had optimized entirely for that task.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
Six Dantons in the warehouse, which was starting to feel crowded.
Each one took a bag and began loading — methodically, by weight, keeping every pack under twenty kilograms because above that threshold their movement would suffer. Twelve pistols between them. Twenty-four magazines.
At the warehouse entrance, in stealth mode and completely invisible, Jude watched all of this with the expression of a man revising his plans in real time.
"Good news," he said quietly into the earpiece. "Danton isn't going after the shop owner."
"And the bad news?"
"I didn't think he'd be the villain of the second act." He kept his voice low. "I was going to knock him out quietly and move him — but six of him is a different logistical problem. Moving six bodies through a public street is not a subtle operation."
"I could use the semi-trailer."
Satsuki had previously made her feelings about the truck form abundantly clear. The fact that she was volunteering it now said something about her commitment to the mission. Jude was briefly touched.
He rejected it anyway. "Too conspicuous. A semi-trailer appearing twice in one week starts to constitute a pattern."
"Then what?"
"We let him fail first. If he walks out of here with all of this, he becomes an actual criminal. We need him to fail before he gets that far."
Sirens rose outside — distant, but not distant enough.
All six Dantons had their bags. They moved for the door.
The first bag to exit made a sound like a zipper giving up on life. The base seam split cleanly, and two dozen rounds of ammunition hit the warehouse floor in a bright metallic cascade, followed by a pistol and a rifle that clattered separately and slid in different directions.
Danton — the original — stared at the empty bag.
He stood there for three full seconds.
Then he slapped himself across the face, squatted down, grabbed two pistols off the floor, stuffed two magazines into his jacket pocket, and ran.
The six of them filed through the door, took what the surviving bags still held, piled into the van, and were gone.
Jude stepped out of stealth, went to the warehouse, and spent two minutes at the owner's coat and the cash register.
"Sorry," he said to the empty room. "This should cover what was lost."
He left approximately $2,800 in the coat pocket and the same in the register, then walked out and mounted the motorcycle before the first patrol car had turned onto the block.
"Three minutes," Jude noted, watching the police cars pull up in the mirror as he rode away. "Danton walked in, duplicated five times, loaded twelve firearms, failed, and escaped — and Central City PD is on scene in three minutes. Gordon would weep with envy."
"Danton's vehicle is heading east," Satsuki reported. "Do you want a tail?"
"Not yet. If he makes us, the whole situation changes." He turned north instead. "What's Elizabeth's status? Did you pull her records?"
"She's at Central City Hospital. Intensive care unit." A pause. "Degenerative valvular heart disease. The condition began to deteriorate within months of the accelerator explosion and has progressed to an advanced stage. Whether the two are related is unconfirmed."
"Intensive care." He said it flatly. "Why didn't he say that. How long does she have?"
"Based on the hospital's case history and her current readings — her survival thus far is already statistically unusual. The doctors have not given a formal prognosis, but the trajectory is clear."
Jude rode for a moment without speaking.
"I'm going to the hospital."
"I should remind you," Satsuki said, "that the healing compound's restorative effect operates on blood volume and cellular repair. Structural organ malformation of this kind is likely outside its parameters. You probably cannot fix this with what you currently have."
"I know what I have." He opened the throttle. "And I know what I'm going to find out when I get there."
"Are you implying you have something else in mind?"
He didn't answer, which was its own kind of answer.
Back at the gun shop, Mr. Patton had finished staring at his warehouse floor and was attempting to reconstruct the timeline of what had just happened to him.
"Strange," he told the responding officer. "Doesn't feel like they took much."
"You filed a robbery report," the officer said, notepad out. "What exactly was stolen?"
Patton reached into his coat pocket reflexively, the way people do when they're thinking, and felt paper.
He pulled it out. A thick fold of bills. Crisp, counted, organized.
He turned it over in his hands for a moment. Checked the cash register. More there.
"Mr. Patton?"
"I'm starting to wonder," he said slowly, "if this was someone's idea of a very strange joke."