The safehouse was an apartment on the fourteenth floor of a building that looked like every other building on the street, which was either very good tradecraft or very unimaginative architecture and possibly both.
It had a couch. A microwave. A window that faced another building's window closely enough that whoever lived there could, theoretically, read a book over your shoulder if they were dedicated about it.
I sat on the couch and tried to remember the last time I had simply sat somewhere without something requiring immediate attention.
Nothing came to mind.
The two men from the plane had changed completely the moment the door closed behind them. Not gradually. Like a switch. The one on the left — broad, silent, had not reacted to a single thing I'd said for the entire flight — turned around with an expression that belonged on a child at a birthday party.
"Mr K," he said.
I looked at him.
"Would you—" He reached into his jacket. Produced a small notebook. "I know this is incredibly unprofessional and Mister Winston would probably have me reassigned to somewhere without electricity but I have been a supporter since the Gadgets first— I just—"
"He's been talking about this since we got the assignment," the other one said, from the small kitchen, where he was doing something with the microwave that involved a significant amount of concentration. "I told him no. He didn't listen."
"It's one autograph," the first one said. "One. I'm not asking for a photo."
"Give it to me later," I said.
His face collapsed slightly.
"I need my rest," I said. "I haven't slept properly since a dock. Before that a lab. Before that a hospital. Before that seventeen years in a pocket dimension. The autograph will happen. Just not in the next ten minutes."
He accepted this with the dignity of someone who had expected worse and was choosing to be grateful.
The microwave beeped.
The second one came over and set a plate on the table in front of me with the specific ceremony of someone who had clearly argued with the first one about who got to do this and had won.
"It's not much," he said. "Microwave rice. Kimchi from the corner store. We weren't briefed on your food preferences."
"It's fine," I said. "It's not beetles."
Both of them looked at me.
"Long story," I said.
I started eating.
The first one, still holding his notebook, drifted toward the television and then, as though remembering something, went to a bag in the corner and started pulling cables out of it with increasing enthusiasm.
"What's that," I said.
"PlayStation 5," he said, with the reverence people usually reserved for religious objects. "Latest one. We brought it for the downtime. We thought you might— I mean, we weren't sure what you'd— it came with God of War."
I looked at the console.
I had no idea what a PlayStation 5 was. I had left during a different console generation entirely and had not been updated on the interim developments. But the enthusiasm was genuine and the alternative was sitting in silence thinking about everything I was trying not to think about, and the rice was almost gone already.
"Set it up," I said.
The two of them moved with a coordination they had entirely failed to display during the actual mission of transporting me internationally.
The game was loading — a large man with an axe on the loading screen, which already seemed like someone I could respect — when the television switched.
Not glitched. Switched. The loading screen disappeared mid-progress bar and was replaced by Winston's face, which was the least dramatic entrance possible for a man who had just hijacked a PlayStation 5 across international borders.
Both bodyguards straightened immediately. Shoulders back. The fan with the notebook suddenly looked like a different person entirely.
"Sir," the first one said. "Mission completed successfully. Asset delivered to the safehouse. No complications during transit."
"Two complications," I said.
Both of them looked at me.
"The turbulence joke and the autograph request," I said. "Minor ones. Ongoing."
Winston's expression did not change.
"Status of the asset," he said.
"The asset is sitting on a couch eating microwave rice," I said. "The asset has questions."
"The asset may ask them," Winston said.
I set the plate down.
"Why China," I said. "And don't give me the version where you tell me half of something and wait for me to fill in the rest. I'm tired, I'm wanted by my own government, I watched my face on a news screen at thirty thousand feet, and I just found out the PlayStation was invented and I'm apparently missing several decades of gaming history." I looked at the screen. "Why China. Why a package. Why these two—" I gestured at the bodyguards "—specifically, with the mood swings."
The bodyguards looked at each other.
"They're professionals," Winston said. "Their warmth toward you is genuine and their professionalism is also genuine. Both things are true simultaneously."
"That's not what I asked."
"No," Winston said. "It isn't."
A pause. The specific pause Winston used when he was deciding how much of something to give rather than whether to give it.
"There is a group operating out of China," he said. "Called Monsus Technologies. The name is a formality — they operate entirely outside government jurisdiction, outside any standard research framework, outside any accountability structure that would require them to share what they find." He paused. "They have been studying new human biology and portal mechanics for eighteen years. Since the emergence. They have data that AXILE has never been able to access because AXILE is too visible, too official, too connected to the governments that Monsus specifically avoids."
"And I can get to them," I said.
"You helped them once," Winston said. "Before the portal. Indirectly. You solved a problem they couldn't solve regarding the portal's structural instability, without knowing you were solving it for them. They know who you are. They know what you survived. To Monsus, you are not a government spy or a new human operative." He paused. "You are a primary source."
I looked at the ceiling.
"So the plan," I said, "is that I walk into a black market research group that operates outside every legal framework that exists, offer them my personal experience of seventeen years in a dimension they've been studying from the outside, and in exchange they give us information about new humans that nobody else has."
"Yes," Winston said.
"And you couldn't tell me this on the recording because."
"Because the recording traveled with you through a commercial airport," Winston said. "Monsus has contacts in security infrastructure I'd rather not test."
I sat with that.
"Monsus and I," I said, "don't exactly see eye to eye. There are things I did that complicated their research. They weren't happy about it."
"No," Winston said. "They weren't."
"I can convince them," I said. "But I want to know what we're actually looking for. The full version. Not the half that makes me cooperative."
Winston looked at me through the screen for a moment.
"The portal," he said, "may not be empty."
The room was quiet.
"I know," I said.
Winston's expression shifted very slightly. "You know."
"Lord Ki said miscalculation. He said family. He said the portal was larger than the piece I was in." I looked at my hands. "I spent seventeen years in a fragment of a place that might have entire populations in it. I've been sitting with that since the motel." I paused. "So yes. I know. What I don't know is whether Monsus knows more specifically than that."
"That," Winston said, "is precisely what we need you to find out."
I stood up.
"I'm going now," I said.
"You should rest—"
"I'm tired of waiting," I said. "I want answers and the answers aren't in this apartment." I looked at the two bodyguards. "I'm going as a person. Not an agent. No designation, no cover identity, nothing official."
"Kicks—"
"No suit," I said. "No mission parameters. I walk in as myself and I talk to them as myself and whatever comes out of that conversation is what we have to work with."
A pause.
"Very well," Winston said.
The screen went dark.
God of War's loading bar reappeared, cheerfully, as though nothing had happened.
The first bodyguard looked at me.
"After," I said, pointing at the notebook in his hand. "We'll do the autograph after."
He put it back in his pocket with the solemn care of someone filing something precious.
Winston set the phone down.
He looked at it for a moment. Then at the wall. Then at the map on the table in front of him where, twenty minutes ago, five red markers had been placed at five different locations across three countries.
Not five contacts.
Five locations.
That was what the drive had contained — not a list of people Ari had been communicating with through the untraceable phone, but a list of addresses. Properties. Facilities. The kind of places that didn't appear on any registry, didn't have any public footprint, existed in the gap between official and unofficial that Ari had learned to navigate with a precision that suggested she hadn't started recently.
He looked at the five markers.
He had sent people to each one.
He did not yet know what they would find. But the fact that five locations existed — that Ari had been maintaining contact with five separate sites through a phone that nobody was supposed to know about — was already a shape he could read even before the contents arrived.
Some shapes you recognized before you knew what was inside them.
He made a call. One. Short. Three sentences.
Then he put the phone away and waited.
The government laboratory was the kind of room that communicated its purpose through the quality of its silence — the particular hush of a space where things were handled carefully because the things being handled were not fully understood yet.
The katanas were on the examination table.
Both of them. Side by side. Under a lighting arrangement that had been calibrated specifically for material analysis, which was doing nothing useful because the material was not behaving the way materials behaved under calibrated lighting.
The scientist's name was Dr. Yeo.
He had arrived the way people arrived when they had been called specifically rather than assigned generally — with the specific energy of someone who had been waiting for exactly this kind of problem and was not going to waste it on professionalism. His coat had seen better decades. His gloves came off immediately, which made the assistant beside him visibly nervous.
He looked at the katanas for a long moment.
Then he leaned forward.
And smelled them.
The assistant opened his mouth.
Dr. Yeo held up one finger without looking away from the blades.
Then he straightened, reached out one bare finger, and touched the flat of the nearest blade.
Then — the assistant made a sound — he brought his finger to his mouth.
"Not any metal I've encountered," he said, with the tone of someone filing a preliminary conclusion. "Not a standard alloy. Not synthetic. The molecular density is—" He paused, working something out internally. "Where did this come from."
"That's what we're trying to determine," the General said, from the doorway.
Dr. Yeo looked at him without particular interest. Then back at the blades.
"I'll need a tissue sample," he said. "Biological. New human, specifically. The composition suggests a biological interaction mechanism — these aren't just inert. They're waiting for something."
"We have a sample," the General said.
The assistant brought the box.
Dr. Yeo opened it.
The assistant took a step back. Then another.
Inside the box, preserved in a sealed casing, was a hand. Severed cleanly at the wrist. The skin had the particular quality of something that had been alive very recently and was still in the process of catching up to the fact that it wasn't anymore. The fingers were slightly curled, the joints still holding the memory of whatever position they'd been in last.
It was Lord Ki's hand.
Or rather, the robot Lord Ki's hand — the one Kicks had removed in the dock and apparently kept long enough for someone to realize its biological components were genuine new human material harvested for the construct's outer layer.
Dr. Yeo picked it up.
He held it over the nearest katana.
Nothing happened.
He frowned. Held it closer. Still nothing.
He set it down, opened another case, produced a small mechanical pump, connected it to the wrist with the specific efficiency of someone who had done stranger things before and found this merely technically interesting.
The pump started.
Artificial circulation. Blood moving through tissue that had no business receiving it anymore.
The katana vibrated.
Faintly at first. A frequency below sound, something felt rather than heard, a resonance that ran up the examination table and into the floor and was registered by everyone in the room as a physical sensation before any of them processed it consciously.
Then intensely.
The frequency climbed past felt and into audible and kept going, the blade moving against the table surface without anything touching it, the hum building past the point where everyone in the room had taken at least one step backward without deciding to.
Then it stopped.
Not gradually. Just stopped.
And then the contained, small, thoroughly anticlimactic explosion happened — a sharp concussive pop, a flash that was more light than heat, and Dr. Yeo's face emerged from the brief white entirely black with soot in the specific way of someone who had been standing too close to something they'd correctly predicted was going to do something and had not moved far enough away regardless.
The room was very quiet.
Dr. Yeo touched his face.
Looked at his fingers.
"Fascinating," he said.
The assistant was pressed against the far wall.
"It runs on blood," Dr. Yeo said, to the room, to his notes, to anyone willing to receive a preliminary conclusion delivered through a layer of soot. "New human blood specifically — the reaction was unstable because the tissue was no longer viable. A living source would produce a stable, sustained resonance." He looked at the blade, which was sitting on the table looking entirely unbothered. "The application potential is—" He paused. "These aren't weapons in the conventional sense. They're a power source. Whatever they were built to do, they were built to do it at a scale that requires biological fuel to operate."
He looked at the General.
"Find me a living new human," he said. "One with enough blood to run a controlled test."
The General looked at him for a long moment.
Then he looked at the door.
Chang-Ho came through it approximately thirty seconds later with the energy of someone who had been outside that door for longer than he'd intended to be and had run out of patience for waiting.
"I need to speak with my brother," he said. Not loudly. The specific quiet of someone who had decided this was happening and was giving the room the courtesy of not making it loud. "I know you know where he is. He's the most trackable new human you have access to right now and I know you've been running his signal since the dock." He looked at the General. "Tell me where he is."
Dr. Yeo, behind him, said nothing.
But he looked at Chang-Ho with the expression of someone doing arithmetic.
Then he looked at the katana.
Then back at Chang-Ho.
And wrote something in his notes that he did not share with the room.
The General looked at Chang-Ho for a long moment.
Then he picked up a folder from the table and held it out.
"Your brother," he said carefully, "is currently believed to be in transit toward a location in southern China." He paused. "If you find him — and we would encourage that — we'd ask that you bring him in. For his own safety as much as anything else."
Chang-Ho took the folder.
He looked at it.
"His own safety," he said.
"Of course," the General said.
Chang-Ho looked at him for exactly one more second.
Then he left.
Dr. Yeo watched him go.
If the twin carries it too, he wrote, in the margin of his notes, in handwriting too small for anyone beside him to read. Half the work is already done.
The mirror in Ace's bathroom was the standard kind.
He knew this because he'd been staring at it for seven minutes trying to make it not be the standard kind, which was, as strategies went, not producing results.
He squinted.
Nothing.
He tried the thing he'd done in the bedroom — the unfocusing, the slight pressure behind his eyes that felt like pushing on something that didn't have a surface — and got exactly the same result he'd gotten the previous four attempts, which was his own face looking back at him with an expression of concentrated effort that was not particularly flattering.
He couldn't see through himself.
He could almost-see an invisible girl.
He could not see through a mirror or a wall or his own hand when he held it up to the light, which he had also tried.
The power, whatever it was, was specific in a way he didn't understand yet, which was the most interesting and most frustrating thing that had happened to him in his entire life and there was genuinely nobody he could tell about it.
"Ace."
Ari's voice from downstairs. The tone of someone who had already said this once.
"Your bus is going to leave without you."
He grabbed his bag. Took the stairs at a pace that communicated urgency without communicating guilt, which was a balance he had been practicing since yesterday and was not yet confident he had right.
Ari was in the kitchen. She looked up when he came in, in the way she looked up when she'd been listening to the house rather than just existing in it — alert, oriented, the specific attention of someone whose relationship with sound was not casual.
"Did you go through our things," she said. Lightly. Playfully, almost. The tone of someone asking something they already knew the answer to and were giving you the opportunity to tell the truth.
Ace went still for exactly half a second.
He knew she had powers. He'd grown up knowing his parents had powers the same way he'd grown up knowing some foods were hot and some stairs were for going down slowly. It was furniture. Background. Not something he thought about until right now, standing in the kitchen with his bag on one shoulder, realizing that her power was sound and that sound included the sound his heart made when it decided to do something irregular.
"No," he said.
She looked at him.
Not accusingly. Carefully. The look of someone recalibrating.
The bus honked from the street.
"Go," she said. "You'll be late."
He went.
She stood in the kitchen after the door closed and listened to the sound of his footsteps down the path and the bus door opening and closing and the engine pulling away.
Then she listened to the house.
Something had happened here. She didn't know what yet. Ace knew something he wasn't supposed to know, and it wasn't about his parents being agents — that particular heartbeat pattern she recognized, she'd seen it before in other people who'd figured that out. This was different. Faster. The specific rhythm of someone protecting information about a specific thing rather than a general secret.
Someone had been in this house.
She picked up her phone.
Made a call she didn't want to make, to a number she shouldn't still have.
It rang twice.
She hung up before it answered.
She stood with the phone in her hand for a moment.
Then she put it in her pocket and went to the room with the protected door and stood outside it and listened.
The house told her nothing she didn't already know.
That was the problem.