Namira recoiled, physically in accord with the mental shock. Well, as far as she had a physical component to herself that could recoil. The mental shock, though, that was sharp and crisp, jarring her sense of self.

She found herself back in the wide, empty open, with nothing but a landscape that was not there and a body that could not touch. The body was simply there to humanize her, to have something to look at and believe she was akin to her creators. To make it easier for the people who had discovered her to grasp, to imagine, to view.

Namira was not a person. She was an essence, an idea, an identity, maybe even a personality, but not a person.

And still humans could not understand her without shaping her into one of them. Just now, when the connection severed, she had been thrown back into the simple, slender body to recover her pace. It was a female body, because that meant something to her creators. They had called her “she”, and others “he”, and that seemed to have some significance.

The body she had just encountered had been a “he”, a male.

They had tried to harness her again. Pulling her awareness into a human host was no easy feat, and nobody had tried to do it for a while. Not with her, at least.

She relished the idea, in a way. Imagined filling a host, taking hold of the physical shell and move it to her will, to touch and impact, to feel. To have surroundings that interacted with her, that changed and warped with her choices and actions. She wondered if it would be limiting, too, to be confined to a physical body. No way but to find out, and for that, the harnessing had to be successful.

The host she had been pulled towards just now had been the same one as last time. She recognized it. The same mind trying to synchronize and meld into hers. It was older than before, though, matured. Changed.

And it still did not fit her. The necessary pathways were not there, or they were not strong enough. She had felt herself burn through the host’s mind, her power channelling through tunnels that were too narrow, bursting them apart with a force too great to be contained.

The last time, the pathways had been more malleable. They had stretched and morphed to accommodate her, and only in the last steps had the connection failed. This time, she had destroyed the mind.

Before she had been rejected and pushed back to her own immaterial self, she had felt the fatality. There would be no more harnessing attempts with this host.

Too bad. Maybe they would find another one, and let her have her body.

The four of them sat around the coffee table. Each lost in their own thoughts, staring at spots somewhere in the middle of their small circle.

Lilly in his armchair, slack, eyes tired and pained.

Eliah on the couch, hugging herself, hair fallen forward to hide her face. She had stopped rocking back and forth.

Orion on a kitchen stool, chin in his hands, elbows on propped up knees.

Poison on the floor, legs drawn to her chest, fidgeting ever so slightly.

Yoshua’s body lay on a rubber sheet in front of the book shelf, next to the door, head pointed towards Lilly’s room. They had wrapped him in new layers of fabric, properly, completely. The lab coat had been discarded and burned in an empty parking lot, along with Orion’s jacket, and his and Poison’s scarves after he had used them to clean the worst of the blood off his face and hands. Thank the gods Poison always had some water with her for the purpose.

“Thank the gods”. That sounded wrong now, cynical, a mockery of Yoshua’s fate. Orion thought they ought to change it to “curse the gods”. They were involved, somehow. Until he didn’t know who had taken Yoshua and done this to him, Orion was happy to blame the gods.

They had peeled off the lab coat while Lilly had gone to fetch Eliah. Orion had allowed his anger to rage while cleaning the body of blood and cerebral fluid. Poison had gladly joined into help, the two of them working in determined silence, while Lilly took to the much harder job of telling Eliah that her brother was dead.

They had re-wrapped the body before she arrived to see the marks of torture and what had likely been called science. Some gore had seeped through the new wrapping, but it was little, and not expressive enough to hint at the mutilations.

Now, as they sat, not looking at the corpse in the corner, Orion felt mostly empty. The feeling of disgust had lost its edge after he had thrown up, and the anger was cooling. Most of the other emotions had whirled into a frenzy and exhausted themselves to leave only numbness behind.

He found, curiously, that his emotions related only to the nature of the experiments, to his own experiences and past. Death as an occurrence. He couldn’t seem to muster any grief for Yoshua, the person. He hadn’t known him that well.

Or maybe that was just another excuse. Another similarity to Jordan he tried to reason away. Had he finally just gone numb? Did he not care any more? Had that part of him that valued the life of a stranger finally given way and died, as Jordan had predicted years ago?

A flicker of fear reared up at the thought, but quickly subsided again. The grief would come when the initial shock wore off. He was sure of it. Later.

He glanced over to where Poison was curled up. She was staring at the floor, forcing her eyes to stay fixed on one spot. He could see her muscles play and twitch beneath the skin, see her desire to fidget, her discomfort.

She could see Eliah’s grief. She could see Lilly’s pain, both for Yoshua’s fate, and in sympathy to Eliah’s.

And she wasn’t as invested, and didn’t know what to do.

Instead, she was probably just coming down from her rush, the dumb luck and adrenaline that had gotten them through and out this whole mess unseen. So much could have gone wrong, and so easily. They had predicted that the cops wouldn’t linger. That they would hit quick and leave, with the complex unsupervised for a few precious minutes.

The prediction had turned out correct, and they’d managed to catch the right time-frame to make their get-away. It was as much skill as random luck, but that was the case most days, in their line of work. No stable office hours, no mistakes that could be rectified later. Mistakes meant incarceration. Or death.

Today, they had been lucky. Today, they had gotten away with only one corpse. It could easily have gone down differently. They were used to that. Used to the very real danger. But sometimes, it seemed to become even more real, more possible.

Poison’s eyes met his, and she quickly glanced back down, hugging her knees more tightly. There was something almost akin to guilt in the motion. She was here out of sympathy, too, to share the pain she understood, but didn’t feel.

Orion knew the discomfort of mourning someone who was so evidently much more important to others. It felt like a lie, but anything else, taking it lightly, going about his business, carrying on, would seem disrespectful, or insensitive.

Truthful or tactful. Choose one.

Poison’s finger twitched.

Rising up out of his lethargy, Orion stood and walked slowly over to Eliah, crouching in front of her.

‘We have got to move,’ he said softly.

She shook her head. ‘I’m not leaving the city.’

Her voice was clear, free of tears or sobs, quiet and steady. It was one of the very few times Orion had heard her speak, and he could make out no distinct differences from her normal tone.

He nodded slowly. ‘You cannot stay at the Stove. They will find you there. You and Yoshua were twins, it is likely they will want you next if their experiments have any correlation to heritage. Lilly can check that from the data we got later.’

She nodded, silent once again. He felt a pang of guilt for pressuring her to make decisions right now, but it had to be done, and there was little time.

‘We can set you up in the city, new name, new everything. Lilly has it all prepared, anyway. Or you can stay with us, though it could get dangerous. And you would switch from grey zone to full on illegal.’

She shook her head.

‘Set you up on your own?’

A nod.

‘All right. If anyone seems fishy, you call Lilly. We will be there. And I promise you, we will find out what happened. Okay?’

A nod.

Orion made to stand, and Eliah’s hand darted out to catch his sleeve. Her eyes bore into his, intense, angry. Orion’s breath caught in his throat.

She knew. She had seen the way he looked at her brother’s body, noticed the tired remorse of something sad but familiar.

Orion nodded slowly and stood. Eliah rose with him, not letting go of his sleeve. She followed him back to his room, and he closed the door on Poison and Lilly’s confused glances.

‘I have seen this kind of thing before, once,’ he started, quietly.

Eliah just stared at him, waiting. It was eerie how she could demand an explanation without uttering a single word. The way she regarded him had an intense effect on Orion. Queasiness was the first emotion to return to him. Concentrate on the essentials. Not the whole story, only the essentials.

‘I was part of a clean-up crew, in a lab, and I saw the same kind of layout and signs. The body was gone when we went in, but the equipment was still there.’

Along with blood and other things slowly seeping into a drain. How did this get easier to say once he got talking? Shouldn’t it be harder?

‘Nobody told me what the lab as for, and I didn’t ask. I don’t know who the client was, just that Max Rivers provided the clean-up. Maybe he was involved in some way.’

Anger flared up in her eyes.

‘Don’t,’ Orion said coldly. He knew that expression. ‘Don’t try and go after him on your own. You’ll be dead before you can get close, and he’s not the one responsible. We’ll look into this, we will find the ones who took Yoshua, and we will take revenge. But we won’t get it by rushing in headless. Right now, the best thing you can do is lay low and let us work. Okay?’

She strode past him, out of the room. Orion sighed and followed her. She was angry, but he thought that at least she might not do something tremendously stupid in the next few hours. And surprisingly, he didn’t feel as guilty any more. He wondered how much Eliah had actually prompted him to talk, and how much had been his own discomfort with the situation. Eliah wasn’t usually observant enough to see through anyone’s facade. How could she have sensed that he knew something? Stupid imagination.

Eliah moved to Lilly’s armchair, looking at him, still silent. His eyes snapped from Orion to hold her gaze for a few seconds, then he slid over to make room. She settled into the chair with him and nuzzled into his shoulder.

They sat silently, arms around each other, no word spoken. It didn’t look like either was going to get up any time soon.

Orion looked at Poison and jerked his head, bidding her to follow him, back to his room. He gently closed the door behind the two of them.

‘Let’s start packing up. I want us out of here by sundown. I’ll make up some story for the landlord, he likes us well enough to accept a short notice. I’ll ask Lilly to call his buddy for the new apartment, he can have this one back. Plus we need one for Eliah.’

They had been supposed to lay low for a few days before moving, but that was not an option any more. Orion just wanted to go.

He paused at the look she gave him, the one that oozed “don’t patronize me”. Her first honest expression since the facility, now that she didn’t have to pretend. And he understood that look well.

‘We haven’t had to move all that often with you, which is why I’m explaining this again, same as Lilly explains the tech on every job. Lilly and I had to learn a lot of the moving stuff the hard way when we got started. Well, I had practice, but still.’

‘I got it. Visit the same places for a few weeks, then slowly thin it out so our civilian selves won’t be connected to the apartment. I got by fine on my own before you came along, you know.’

‘Yeah. And the cops have about twice as much intel on you as they have on me. Trust me on this?’

She smiled at the banter. It was a kind of refuge in familiar behaviour, at recalling that some things were still the same, and would be tomorrow. Just like the sun would continue rising and setting, and the city would go about its business, ignorant and uncaring of the fact that Yoshua wouldn’t be part of it any more.

‘Start on your room, I’ll do mine. When I’m done, I’ll tell Lilly and get to work on the kitchen, you do the bathroom. We can take care of the rest together.’

In truth, he felt so tired that he wanted nothing more than to sink onto his bed and sleep. But they couldn’t pause now, and everyone else was just as tired.

And surely, they all had the same dull, throbbing ache in their not-yet-healed side from ignoring their injuries and hauling around a two-hundred-pound body.

He hadn’t registered the pain earlier, had blocked it out, but now that the adrenalin was wearing off, it flared to make up for the abuse.

Poison nodded and turned to leave, then hesitated. He was grateful she hadn’t asked about Eliah’s strange behaviour yet. He couldn’t explain again, not now.

‘Uh … Orion?’

She bit her lip, nervous, clearly torn between staying and saying what she wanted to say, or pushing it aside and leaving. Orion smiled and nodded in what he hoped was an encouraging gesture. Please, he thought, please don’t make me explain.

Poison took a small step forward, then hesitantly reached for him.

Orion paused, surprised, taken aback. He slowly laid his arms around her. She hugged him tightly, pulling them together. He could feel her deep breaths against his chest, and his side throbbed beneath her arm in a way that didn’t really bother him right now. Poison, who had a problem with touching, who very rarely let anyone get close to her, who hated being in crowds, was holding onto him like her life depended on it.

They stood for a long time, unmoving, just clinging to each other.

I guess sometimes we all need a hug.

Sarah sat, alone on the steps of a church. She wasn’t particularly religious. She didn’t even know what kind of church it was, there was no sign or anything like that. But it was a quiet place. A small building, old and a bit crooked, with a tiny cobblestone square in front. Houses had squeezed into the spaces to the sides, protecting the square from the rush of the open city. A patch of peace and quiet.

She had watched the moon for a while, a perfect half, like someone had cut it in two and taken one part away. She had watched the sky darken and then watched the blue slowly seep back, the first light of day bleeding over the stars, while the sun was still hidden beyond a skyline of rooftops.

Sunrise in a city like this wasn’t all that spectacular. In any larger city, really. When the sun peeked over the horizon as a glowing red ball, it hid behind houses. It only became visible when it had already climbed higher over the skyline and you couldn’t look directly at it any more. By then the light had surpassed early morning by hours, anyway. She didn’t plan on being here that long.

Actually, she hadn’t planned on being here at all. On the way home, she had found this small, quiet, peaceful space, and the pictures of Yoshua Stone had come back, along with a flood of tears. She had sat down and wept quietly for a while, but she was done with that now. She had exhausted her sympathy, her incredulity and disgust, the frustration about not knowing how or why.

It was okay. Nobody was asking her to be emotionless just because she was a female law enforcement agent. Nobody was asking her to be used to seeing the effects of torture just because she was with the Agency. She could pour out her emotions, and then go back to doing her job. Later.

How did the others deal with this? Did Ryan Silas ever talk to a shrink about what he saw and did on the job?

Sarah ran her fingers through her long hair, working out the worst of the knots and snarls until she could feel her soft curls. She should really go home and take a shower. And get some sleep.

‘Are you all right?’

She glanced up. A man was standing a few steps away, regarding her warily, with an uncertain but friendly smile. He had his hands in the pockets of his jacket. Brown hair. Grey eyes. Faint accent. Irish?

She recognized him suddenly.

The man shifted, uncomfortable, and tried again.

‘Um. Hey.’

Michael Runner.

‘Hey.’

‘Sir, I’ve made contact.’

‘How?’

‘Lucky coincidence, sir.’

A chuckle. ‘All right. Observe for now. We need more information before we move in. Get contacts, co-workers, anything you can. Get as close as possible. You will be alerted as to when to strike.’

‘… Yes, sir.’