The forge was loud in the way silence couldn't be.
The hammer came down. Again. Again. The metal was orange-pale, the colour of something that hadn't decided what it was yet. Kicks worked it with the focus of someone who had been told to do this and had not yet been told why, which was becoming a pattern with her.
Steam rose when he moved it to the cooling trough.
He watched the water settle.
"Why am I doing this anyway," he said. Not really a question. More the kind of thing you said out loud when you wanted the room to answer and didn't actually expect it to.
Lizzy was sitting on the bench behind him in the way she sat on everything, like furniture had been designed for her specifically. She didn't look up from the blade she was examining. She turned it slowly in her hands. Ran her thumb along the edge.
Then she snapped it.
Clean. No effort. Like it had wanted to break and she had simply agreed with it.
"Start again," she said.
Kicks looked at her.
She set the two pieces down beside her.
He started again.
By the fifteenth, he had stopped counting out loud and started counting in his head, which was worse because it meant he could hear himself. The forge had its own rhythm by now, hammer and heat and water, and somewhere inside that rhythm he had started to believe, against all evidence, that this one would be different.
Lizzy picked it up.
She broke it with her hands. Same as the others. Bare hands, wrong direction, the metal giving like it had never had a choice.
"Start—"
"I'm leaving."
The word landed in the forge-heat and sat there.
Kicks set the hammer down. He was not calm about it. He set it down carefully because he knew if he wasn't careful it would go through the wall.
"Sixteen," he said. "Sixteen swords. You break every single one. Bare hands. Every time. What is the point of this. What are you actually testing for because it can't be whether or not you can break it because you can always break it, you could break mine, you could probably break the building—"
"A good sword," Lizzy said, "is defined by its intended purpose."
Her voice was the same as it always was. Even. Not bored, exactly. Something that had passed through boredom a long time ago and found something quieter on the other side.
"What you are doing," she said, "is making the sword to pass the breaking test." She looked at him. "I broke them because you were expecting that. You made swords designed to survive me breaking them. You never thought about balance. You never thought about flexibility." She paused. "You never thought about function."
He didn't say anything.
"A sword is not a sword because it is hard," she said. "A sword is a sword because of what it does when it is in the hand it was made for. What it does under the weight it was built to carry." She set the pieces of the sixteenth on the bench. "If you think about that, maybe I won't just break your sword. Maybe I'll actually test it."
She looked at him.
"Just because your sword and mine are indestructible doesn't mean every sword should be built like yours."
The forge crackled.
Kicks stood there for a moment with his hands at his sides.
He picked up the hammer.
The light changed before he noticed it changing.
The forge was still there but the walls weren't. The floor was something that used to be ground and had decided to stop pretending. The sky through the gap where the ceiling had been was red the way nothing natural was red, dark and low, like it was resting on top of everything.
Breaking Land.
He knew it the way you knew bad news. In the chest before the brain.
He turned.
Lizzy was standing where she had been standing.
But her neck was wrong.
It was angled in a direction necks did not angle, tilted past the point of possibility, and she was looking at him from that impossible angle with a smile that did not belong to her face. It fit the shape of her mouth perfectly and had nothing to do with her.
He couldn't move.
Her hand came up.
Her fingers closed around his throat.
The air stopped.
The heart breaks, she said, in a voice that wore her voice like a coat over something older and much colder underneath.
Sword breaks.
Her grip tightened.
Day breaks.
He couldn't breathe. He couldn't move. He could only look, and what he looked at was a window that had appeared in the red-dark air to his left, bright against the darkness, and through it he could see a room he recognised. High ceilings. Warm light. People he knew standing together, laughing at something someone had said, reaching past each other for drinks, existing in the comfortable, careless way people existed when they believed they were safe.
The Gadgets.
All of them.
He watched.
He watched because he couldn't do anything else and because some part of him that was still working wanted to hold onto it, that image, that room, that specific quality of noise people made when they were happy and didn't know they were being watched.
Then one of them was gone.
Not leaving. Gone. Between one second and the next, like a signal dropping.
Then another.
Then another.
The room didn't change. The light didn't change. The laughter continued for one second past the people making it and then that stopped too, and the room through the window was a room with furniture and glasses and the memory of warmth, and nothing else.
He heard a voice. Far away. Coming from somewhere that wasn't this.
Don't move. Just open your eyes.
He opened his eyes.
The bugs were already there.
He felt them before he saw them, the weight and the wrongness of them, enormous and methodical, and he screamed because that was the only available response to what was happening to his body, and the scream came out of him like something that had been stored for a long time under pressure.
The monitors agreed with him loudly.
The room came back in pieces.
Ceiling. Light. The particular quality of air that had been filtered and temperature-controlled. The sound of machines recalibrating, numbers climbing back toward ranges that meant something acceptable.
Chang-Ho was there.
He was standing at the side of the bed with an expression he was not successfully keeping off his face. He had the look of someone who had spent four minutes moving very fast and had arrived and found something that required him to be still, which was harder.
The doctors moved around Kicks with the efficiency of people who had prepared for exactly this, checking and adjusting and saying things to each other in the shorthand of their work. One of them turned after a moment.
"The brain spiked hard," she said. "Dream activity, or something close to it. Whatever he was processing, it escalated." She looked at the readouts. "The acute event is stabilising, but he needs something to anchor to. Auditory, familiar, low-stimulation." She paused. "Is there a song he responds to? Something from before. Something his system already associates with something safe. That, and physical contact if he'll tolerate it. Hold his hand. Let him feel that the immediate environment is real."
Chang-Ho looked at Kicks.
Then he looked at Soo-min.
"Ari came," Soo-min said. His voice was not warm about it.
Chang-Ho went still in a different way.
"She came to the cemetery," Soo-min said. "She said something. Then this happened."
The stillness lasted two more seconds.
"She could have waited," Chang-Ho said. His voice was controlled and even and underneath the control was something with an edge to it. "She could have waited a little bit longer."
He didn't say anything else about it. He looked back at Kicks on the bed and something moved across his face that he also did not say anything about.
Then:
"Where is his sword."
Soo-min looked at him.
"With your organisation," he said.
The cold in his voice was not about Chang-Ho.
Chang-Ho received it anyway.
He pulled the chair to the side of the bed and sat down. He reached over and took his brother's hand in both of his, carefully, the way you held something you had not been sure you would get to hold again.
He leaned forward slightly.
And he started to sing.
It was a low song. Old. The kind of song that didn't announce itself, that started quietly and stayed that way, built for small rooms and late hours. His voice was not a performance. It was just his voice, doing what it knew how to do.
Halfway through the second verse he stopped.
He sat with his hands around his brother's hand and he looked at the wall across the room and he was quiet for a moment.
"He didn't have a favourite song," he said.
Not to anyone specifically. To the room.
"He only knew these ones because I sang them to him." He paused. The memory was doing something to his face that he wasn't fighting. "He'd fall asleep and I'd think he wasn't listening. He was always listening."
He started again from the beginning. Quieter this time. Like it was only for the two of them.
Soo-min stood behind him.
He watched Chang-Ho at the bedside with an expression that had not warmed since Chang-Ho arrived and was not warming now. There was history in it. The kind that didn't need to be explained in rooms like this because it was already in the air, already settled into the furniture. He looked at the back of Chang-Ho's head and said nothing and the nothing had a shape to it.
The machines kept their steady count.
The rooftop was cold and they had been on it for eleven minutes.
Three men. Ski masks. Gear that was not the kind of gear you bought anywhere that asked questions. They stood at the edge and watched the street below with the patience of people who had been told to wait and were used to waiting.
The command came through the earpiece.
They moved.
The jewelry store was the kind of place that trusted its own reputation to protect it. Glass cases. Indirect lighting. The particular silence of rooms where expensive things lived. The three men moved through it quickly and without conversation, which meant they had done this before or something very much like it.
The haul was specific. Not random. They knew what they were looking for and where it was, which was its own kind of information.
Then one of them caught the edge of a sensor.
The alarm started.
He turned to the others with his hands up, an apology forming.
The command came through: Good. Set them all off.
The others looked at each other for half a second. Then they did.
The sound filled the building. The street. The block.
The security guard came in fast with his weapon up, which was the correct response to the situation as he understood it. He did not understand the situation.
The man closest to him didn't move toward him. He just looked at him.
The gun got hot. Then hotter. Then the barrel bent. Then it was on the floor in two pieces and the guard's hand was empty and he was staring at the man in the ski mask who had done all of that with his eyes.
He became a hostage before he finished understanding what had happened.
The police formed a perimeter with the speed of people who had trained for this.
A negotiator got on the line.
She was calm, practiced, reasonable. She asked what they needed. She communicated availability of resources. She used the word dialogue twice, which was in the training.
The man with the laser eyes listened to all of it from inside the store.
"Are there any agents coming," he said.
The negotiator paused for exactly the length of time that meant she was checking.
"No," she said. "No agents. This is just us. We want to talk."
He looked at the police car closest to the building.
The laser took one second.
The car went up like it had been planning to.
The negotiator stopped talking.
He walked to the window and looked out at the perimeter and the people behind it and the street full of vehicles and onlookers and he began to make his way through all of it with patience and complete indifference to consequence. A lamppost. A storefront across the road. A second vehicle. The structure of the building beside the store developing, slowly, the kind of cracks that meant it was done making decisions about staying upright.
The building leaned.
It stopped.
Not because it had changed its mind.
Because someone was holding it.
Clayton stood at the base of the structure with both hands against the concrete and the concrete not going anywhere. He'd arrived in the way he arrived at things, faster than made sense, quiet until he wasn't. He set the building down like it was a conversation he was ending.
The man in the ski mask turned the lasers on him.
Clayton let them hit him.
He kept walking.
The man kept firing.
Clayton reached him, closed the distance in the last two steps at a speed that made the firing irrelevant, and pressed both thumbs over the man's eyes. Firm. Precise. Not enough to destroy. Enough to make the point clearly and permanently.
The man went down.
The third thief had not moved. He'd been watching. He was holding something small in one hand, a button, the kind of thing you held when you wanted whoever was looking at you to know that you had considered all outcomes in advance.
"The new humans," he said, through the ski mask, in the voice of someone quoting something they believed, "shall rise again."
Clayton moved.
He almost made it.
The street came apart in a single flat concussion of light and force, the sound arriving a half second after the fact, the way sound did when it was embarrassed by what it was describing. Cars lifted. Windows chose different shapes. The road surface expressed its opinion about the whole situation by redistributing itself across a wide area.
The civilians were not in it.
A shape had moved through the blast radius in the three seconds before detonation, pulling and redirecting and putting bodies behind the geometry of remaining walls, and the shape had done all of this without being asked and without making noise about it.
Blackfire landed on a piece of what used to be a car and looked at the space where the explosion had been.
Clayton walked out of the fire.
His suit had opinions about what had just happened. The rest of him did not.
Blackfire watched him emerge and tilted their head slightly.
"I didn't know the number one hero would need my help," they said. "But here I am."
Clayton looked at them for one second.
Then he jumped.
The arc was high and clean and he was gone before the dust had finished settling.
He came down on the roof of the Axile building with the control of someone who had done it a thousand times, absorbed the impact through his legs, straightened.
He noticed it immediately.
The quiet was wrong.
Not the quiet of a secure facility running at night. The quiet of a facility that had stopped running. No hum of systems. No movement visible through the glass panels. The external security post was empty in the way posts were empty when the person who'd been standing there had not chosen to leave.
The gates were open.
The doors were open.
He went through them fast.
The corridor. The observation area. The room where, four hours ago, he had sat in a chair and held his brother's hand and sung half a song while a man he didn't trust watched him from across the room.
Soo-min was on the floor.
He was breathing. Just. His hand was pressed against his side with the specific pressure of someone who knew what they were doing and was doing it on instinct because conscious thought had become unavailable.
The doctor was not breathing.
She was simply not.
Clayton stood in the doorway and looked at the room and looked at the empty bed and looked at the machines still running beside it, still counting, counting for someone who was no longer there to count for.
He crossed the room and went to Soo-min and crouched down.
Soo-min opened his eyes.
"Chang-Ho," he said.
His voice had the quality of something using its last reserves to be clear.
Chang-Ho looked at him and said nothing and waited.
The machines kept counting in the empty room.