The worst part was that he had been right about the division.
Wanda knew it before the first minute was over and hated him for giving her useful ground to stand on inside the irritation.
Take the truck.
He talks.
It was the correct split. Clean. Efficient. The kind of battlefield answer a person gave when they had already decided the room was made of moving parts rather than people. She should have respected it. On some private level she did. That was almost more offensive than if he had simply been wrong.
Rain slid off the side of the produce truck in thin dirty lines as she reached the rear compartment and looked properly at what Hydra had been moving.
The larger casing sat inside the truck frame under torn tarp and broken mounting braces, black-dark and wrong in the exact same way the warehouse chamber casing had been wrong. The channels across its surface were clearer now under open street light, running in narrow interrupted lines that looked too deliberate to be art and too alien to be engineering as she knew it. The smaller dropped component on the pavement beside the truck answered it in shape if not scale, like a key made from the same language as a lock no one human should have had access to.
Her power reacted before thought did.
Red gathered around her right hand in a low ugly pulse, not at full force, but enough that the rain hissing through it turned to steam.
Good.
Better to let the body tell truth first.
She stepped to the rear of the truck and reached for the smaller component.
The instant her fingers touched it, the red around her hand sharpened painfully and the whole thing jerked in her grip like something waking in a bad mood. Not alive. She would have preferred alive. Life had categories. This was more insulting than life. Structure with no soul in it and still enough wrongness to make her magic recoil and lean in at the same time.
Behind her, the man Erikar had pinned to the wall started speaking too quickly.
Hydra nonsense first. Threats. Half-truths. The usual terrified bureaucratic instinct to make mystery sound like rank.
Wanda ignored him.
Sirens were rising fast now from the south line. Not police. The pitch was wrong. Private response or internal security. Hydra cleaning its own wound.
She lifted the smaller component and looked into the truck again.
The larger casing responded.
Not with light. With pressure. The channels along one side darkened and then briefly flushed with that same dead-red pulse that had torn through the street when the bullet hit the mount frame. It was weaker now, but no less wrong. The two pieces recognized each other.
Interesting.
Useful.
And very, very bad.
She should have grabbed the smaller piece and run.
That was what Pietro would have done if he had been here. Fast answer. Living answer. Leave the rest for later and make later survive the first mistake.
Instead she looked once toward Erikar.
He still had the runner pinned to the wall near the alley mouth, one hand on the man's shoulder like pressure and gravity had reached some private agreement through him. No strain visible. No movement wasted. Rain silvered his coat and dark hair. The city lights caught the hard line of his face and gave nothing back from it except shape.
He looked over at exactly the same time.
Not by accident.
Their eyes met across wet pavement and broken operation and something in the field shifted again, not romantically, not cleanly, only with the dangerous clarity of repeated contact becoming pattern.
Then Hydra's response vehicle hit the corner too fast and took the curb wrong.
The black van slewed into the loading street with one rear wheel half off the pavement before the driver corrected, doors already unlocking while it was still moving. Four men in dark gear jumped out with rifles held too high and too eager for city work.
Wanda swore in Sokovian and dropped low beside the truck.
Gunfire cracked across the loading court at once.
Not warning shots. Not discipline either. Hydra's local recovery teams had all the confidence of men taught to mistake heavier weapons for competence and the city's density for protection. Bullets chewed through the truck's side panels and shattered the warehouse front glass before the shooters properly understood their targets.
Erikar moved first.
Of course he did.
He used the pinned runner as cover for one heartbeat, then flung him hard into the nearest shooter's line. The man with the rifle corrected too late and shot his own asset in the shoulder. Good. Erikar crossed the remaining distance before the others had finished the error, hit the first rifle aside, turned the second downward into the concrete, and drove the third Hydra man backward into the van door hard enough to ring metal through the whole court.
Too fast.
Too controlled.
Not human in any way her mind wanted to file politely.
Wanda rose with red force already gathered and threw it not at the men, but at the van.
Always change the field first.
The side panel crumpled inward with a shriek and trapped one gunman halfway through his attempt to clear the rear door. The fourth shooter pivoted toward her and fired.
She caught the line late.
Too late to stop all of it. One round grazed her coat at the upper arm. Another she turned aside with a flare of red hard enough to make the air between them scream. The redirected shot blew out the warehouse floodlight and dropped the court into alternating darkness and muzzle flash.
Good.
Better.
Darkness belonged more naturally to frightened men than to her.
She hit the shooter with a hex burst aimed at the knees.
On anyone else, the strike would have folded balance, nerves, certainty, probably memory if she pushed harder. On this man it did exactly what it should and he collapsed into the wet concrete with a sound that suggested at least one joint had chosen a new career.
The problem was not him.
The problem was Erikar.
He was already in the center of the court now, one rifleman disarmed, another face-down across the hood of the van, the wounded runner trying to crawl toward the alley with all the dignity of a bureaucrat discovering pavement through blood loss. One Hydra shooter still stood, backing away from Erikar with weapon half-raised and the absolute desperation of a man who had finally understood that categories had failed him.
Wanda hit that man too.
Not because Erikar needed it.
Because leaving threats alive on instinct was how operatives died.
Red force snapped from her hand in a narrow controlled line and struck the Hydra gunman across the torso.
He flew backward into the warehouse rolling gate and hit hard enough to stay there.
And Erikar flinched.
Small.
Barely visible.
But real.
Wanda went still.
The red at her hand guttered, then rose again in confused answer to her own confusion.
No.
That was impossible.
Her strike had not touched him. It had crossed the line of his body by more than enough distance. The blast had hit the Hydra man exactly where aimed. The field distortion around the target should have dissipated out before his position unless he had been carrying some kind of energy bleed or shield or interference system she had not seen.
Interesting.
Very interesting.
Also terrifying in exactly the way that made her angrier instead of cautious.
Erikar straightened fully before the reaction on his face could become anything another person might have named. He looked at her once, sharply, across the court.
There.
He had felt that.
He was hiding that.
And now she knew it.
The sirens were closer.
Too close.
More Hydra response or actual police now, which only made the field dirtier. The loading street was becoming unsustainable by the second.
The runner at the alley mouth had made it halfway to the corner. Still bleeding. Still moving. Stupid or loyal or both.
Wanda saw him and moved.
Erikar saw him and moved at the same time.
Of course.
They reached the runner together.
Her red force caught the man's coat and jerked him backward just as Erikar's hand caught his arm. The combined pull ripped the runner off balance entirely and sent him crashing into a stack of empty produce crates by the alley wall. Wood shattered. Fruit rolled loose across the wet pavement from some earlier delivery with the humiliating indifference of physics continuing to exist around bad decisions.
The runner screamed once and went limp.
Alive.
For now.
Wanda looked at Erikar.
He looked back.
Rain cut between them.
Gunfire sounded again from the far corner. Wild now. Less aimed. Someone in the next arriving Hydra vehicle had chosen panic over sight lines.
She said, "You are in my way."
His answer came immediately. "You altered the line."
"I improved it."
"You hit me."
The words entered the alley like another weapon.
Wanda stared at him.
What little room the city had left inside her mind for surprise had already been occupied by the impossible absence of his thoughts, the casing's answer to her magic, the field pulse from the truck. And still that sentence cut through all of it.
Not because he accused dramatically. Because he said it as fact.
She said, "No."
"Yes."
"That is not how my power works."
He looked at her with the maddening calm of a man who had already measured pain, sorted it, and decided it could wait until after the room had stopped trying to kill him.
"It is tonight."
The alley narrowed around the line.
Wanda's first instinct was to call him a liar again.
The second, more dangerous one, was to believe him.
Because she had seen the flinch. Tiny. Controlled. Real. Because the pulse in the truck had done something to both of them. Because the casing's channels and the object language and Hydra's desperation had all begun arranging themselves around one unpleasant possibility:
whatever these things were, they changed the rules of contact.
She hated that he had gotten to say it first.
Another Hydra shooter appeared at the alley mouth.
Not one of the original team. Reinforcement from the second vehicle. He saw the two of them, the downed runner, the wrecked court, and made the rational decision to choose the easier target.
Wanda.
The rifle came up.
Erikar moved in front of the shot before she could.
Not dramatically. Not nobly. Simply because his body had already solved the angle and gone where the answer lived. The bullet hit him in the shoulder and flattened with a metallic crack against bone or something under bone that no human body should have offered in return. He turned through the impact and hit the shooter once, open-handed, across the face. The man spun and stayed down.
Wanda stared.
Erikar looked at the flattened bullet on the wet pavement, then at her, then away again with the deep visible irritation of someone who had just had the inconvenience of truth made public.
She said, "That is also not how bodies work."
He picked up the wounded runner by the front of the coat as if the argument had merely become less useful with weather and blood in it.
"No," he said. "It isn't."
Hydra's next response horn sounded from the avenue.
Too many now. Too loud. The district was seconds away from becoming a sealed perimeter full of men with cameras and radios and idiotic confidence.
The truck still sat open in the court behind them. The larger casing still inside. The smaller component still lost somewhere under the rear wheel track where it had fallen after the pulse.
Wanda made the decision first.
Not because she trusted him.
Because she trusted time less.
She stepped back toward the court, red light gathering hard around both hands.
"Take him."
Erikar's gaze cut to her.
"And you."
"I break the truck."
Interesting answer.
Not steal. Break.
He understood it too.
If they could not take the casing tonight, they could deny Hydra the clean transfer. Make them start over. Make them move in fear.
Good.
He said only, "Quickly."
Wanda almost laughed from sheer irritation.
Then she turned and unleashed enough force into the transport's suspension frame to tear the rear mount free from the axle housing and drive the whole casing assembly sideways through the interior wall. Steel screamed. The larger casing slammed into the truck's side panel. One of the channels along its surface lit dead-red for a half second and then went dark again as the frame collapsed around it.
Good.
Better.
Behind her, Erikar had the wounded runner over one shoulder and was already moving down the alley at impossible speed made just barely plausible by the city's bad lighting and worse attention.
She followed.
Not beside him. Parallel. Rooftop by rooftop where the alley opened enough to let her catch the fire escapes and low parapets, using red force only where she had to because too much of it now felt dangerous around the casing language and around him.
He took the ground route.
She took the heights.
Neither trusted the other enough to say it out loud. Both trusted the split enough to use it instinctively.
Hydra's vehicles surged into the loading street behind them and found wreckage instead of victory.
Good.
Let them inherit the lesson.
Wanda crossed the first roofline and looked down into the alley.
Erikar moved below with the wounded runner carried as if the man's mass had entered some private agreement with his body and been reduced to argument rather than burden. He glanced up once, not to check where she was. To confirm she was still there.
Interesting.
The city opened in front of them, dark and wet and layered with routes neither of them had finished learning.
Behind them, the fight still echoed in broken metal, gunfire reports, and Hydra's increasingly angry response pattern.
Ahead, the runner groaned over Erikar's shoulder and tried to speak.
Wanda dropped from the second roof to the fire escape above the alley and matched pace enough to hear.
The man coughed blood and managed one broken line.
"You don't know what you touched."
Erikar did not look at him.
"No," he said. "But you do."
The runner laughed once. A terrible sound. "Not enough."
There.
Always the structure beneath the structure.
Wanda looked east over the alley mouth where the city widened toward older brick and darker water and knew with the cold clean certainty of a hunter finally seeing the shape of the larger beast in the brush that tonight had not been the answer.
Only the first real fight over it.
And now the field belonged to three people instead of two.
Hydra.
Erikar.
Her.
That, more than the wrecked truck or the pulse in the casing or the fact that her hexes had somehow landed on him when they should not have, was the part she would remember when dawn came.
Not the violence.
The interference.
The ugly practical truth that once the operation had gone live, neither of them had been willing to leave first.
End of Chapter 27