The tears cut clean lines through the grime on Lieutenant Hangrove's face. Behind him, he could feel them — soldiers, DARC agents, men with guns and training and the kind of resolve that gets hammered into a person through years of service. None of it mattered. He could see it in the man's eyes. Whatever calculations those eyes were running, they weren't the kind that factored in odds.
He could see Terry in the distance. Hide skin fractured along the shoulder and jaw, the cracks glowing faintly like cooling magma, but the man was moving — closing ground with the kind of desperate velocity that only happens when someone is genuinely terrified of being too late.
Would he make it?
The hand found his throat before the question could settle. Cold. That was the thing Hangrove hadn't expected — how cold the grip was. Cold and deliberate, like a door handle in winter. The reek of blood hit him a half-second later, thick and copper-sweet, the smell of a man who had been bathed in other people. Head to toe. Nothing dry left on him.
Hangrove shut his eyes.
Across the city, in a third-floor apartment that smelled of instant noodles and second-guessing, Kade sat on the edge of his bed and stared at his hands.
The car had come out of nowhere — a delivery truck actually, running a light it had no business running — and Kade had jumped. That was the only word for it. Not stumbled backward. Not dived sideways. He had jumped, the way a person jumps when the ground no longer has full jurisdiction over them, and he'd cleared the hood by a clean two meters and come down on the other side of the street like he'd stepped off a curb.
Now he sat with his phone in his hand, turning it over and over, the DARC public number already pulled up on screen. He'd typed it in, deleted it, typed it in again. Three times. The fourth time he let it sit.
I'm probably not the first person to call them thinking they have powers and just be some guy who got lucky with an adrenaline jump.
He pressed call.
It rang twice. Then a recorded message. Of course. He almost hung up — almost — but the beep came before he could pull the phone away, and once the beep came there was nothing left to hide behind.
"Yeah — hi. I don't know if anyone checks these, but —" He exhaled. Rubbed the back of his neck. "I'm the guy. From the gate incident. There was a report about someone who flatlined on the day it happened and came back — that was me. I know there were others but I think — I think I'm starting to — something's happening to me. I jumped over a moving vehicle today and I landed like it was nothing. I didn't even think about it, it just —"
He stopped. Swallowed.
"Anyway. My name is Kade. I'll leave my number. I just — I figured you should know."
He left the number. Ended the call. Sat in the silence for a long moment before setting the phone face-down on the mattress like he could distance himself from what he'd just done.
Snap.
The sound arrived before the understanding did.
Hangrove's eyes stayed shut. He was counting the things he could hear instead of looking — screaming, first, the sharp involuntary kind that comes before a person even knows they're screaming, and then gunshots in ugly, uncoordinated clusters, not the controlled double-taps of trained shooters but the panicked full-magazine spray of men who couldn't see a clean target and fired anyway.
He opened his eyes.
The man was behind him.
He'd moved so fast that Hangrove hadn't felt him leave, hadn't registered the release of pressure on his throat until the sound of the dying had already started. Three agents down in the time it took Hangrove's eyes to adjust. The man moved through them like a rumor — there, then not, then there again at the edge of a different scream.
Terry hit Hangrove in the shoulder — not a punch, a controlled shove, shoulder-to-chest, get out of the way — and then he was past him and in it, diving into the collapsing formation, hide skin catching the ambient light as the fractures spread further across his arms.
Some of the soldiers tried. That had to be said. They tried — tight formations, controlled bursts, one team trying to draw attention while another flanked. But the man didn't fight like someone who had learned how to fight. He fought like someone who had stopped treating the human body as a meaningful obstacle, and the bodies of the fallen became his architecture, stacked and positioned with chilling speed, walls of the dead between him and Terry every time Terry got close enough to matter.
Some soldiers broke. No one would record their names next to that decision — they just disappeared into the side streets, running low, not looking back, and Hangrove couldn't blame a single one of them.
The ones who didn't have that option —
He looked away.
Above it all, cutting low over the rooftops from the east, came the helicopter. A news crew. Camera already leaning out the side. Live, the little red indicator would be saying back at the studio. Live. Live. Live.
Sir Ferguson watched it on the monitor on his desk.
He'd been watching for forty-three seconds and the fury had already moved past the hot stage and into the cold, quiet stage, which was the stage his staff feared most. His jaw was set. His hands were flat on the desk surface. The volume was low but the footage needed no audio — a high aerial shot of what had been, twenty minutes ago, a deployment of trained DARC field personnel, now a debris field of human wreckage and gunsmoke, with two figures still moving at its center.
And a news helicopter. Circling. Broadcasting.
He knew the calculus. He knew what the legal team would say — public airspace, first amendment protections, nothing actionable, sir — and he knew they were right, and he hated them for being right. Because what that camera was capturing wasn't just a failed interdiction. It was a proof of concept. Proof that shift anomalies were escalating beyond DARC's public-facing narrative. Proof that the gap between what his agency told the public and what his agency could actually contain was widening in real time.
And now it was on television.
He reached out and turned the monitor off.
Not because the situation had changed. Because there was nothing useful in watching it any further, and Ferguson had never been a man who spent energy on what he couldn't alter.
He pressed the intercom.
"Get me everything we have on that anomaly. And get me someone who can tell me why that helicopter knew where to be."