Sam gasped as he started awake.

“Sleeping on the job?” Ann asked, nudging Sam in the ribs with her elbow. The three of them rode in the back of a SWAT truck, rumbling down the street toward their objective. “I thought you were supposed to lead by example.”

“I am,” Sam said, wiping the sand from his eyes. “Sleep while you can, because sooner or later an assistant district attorney is going to have a crush on you, and you can say goodbye to your free time. I slept on a couch outside her office last night.”

“So you were still there.” Tom said with a smirk.

“Me and Tom were betting on how far you went when you failed to show after that deposition last night. Tom bet you only got to second base, But I think you went all the way. She’s gotta know you’re firing blanks, right?”

“I’m going to once again lead by example, and refrain from gossiping in a way unbefitting a gentleman and an officer of the law. Besides, you guys know anything you see or hear is admissible as evidence, right?” Sam said.

Sam wondered if there was a base for what they did last night. He wasn’t fully up on baseball sexual equivalencies, so maybe fifth base. Was there a fifth base? It wasn’t important, and Sam didn’t feel the need to brag about it, especially when it could bite him or the DA in the ass. More importantly, they were probably going to hit their destination soon, so Sam checked the time stamp on his implant.

“We’ve got less than five minutes to the destination,” Sam said, turning his attention to his team. “We’re clearing out an enclave of Others, sources say they’ve got Tyrmore Fendalin, a high value target who was wounded leading an attack on the east coast last week. First priority is the safety of the local human population. Ann and I will sweep the area clean from the side entrance while Tom will be a stone wall to runners.”

“Got it,” The two said as one.

They checked each other’s gear in final preparation for the assault, before the truck came to a halt in front of an abandoned steel mill, a great rusting hulk squatting in the center of the unpaved parking lot. Sam settled his helmet on, strapped in and checked Ann and Tom’s, while Ann tapped his helmet.

“Orders are no prisoners,” Sam said, glancing at the two of them as he stood beside the door of the truck. “This Tymore guy has some serious magical juice, and is beyond our power to capture.”

Ann and Tom nodded again. Sam opened the door and the three of them jumped out of the black SWAT truck. Sam and Ann stacked up beside the solid steel walls of the mill, while Tom took up a position outside the front door, his shotgun leveled at the entrance.

Sam placed the Can Opener on the wall, and popped the trigger on the side of the machine. There was a concussive wave of air that beat against Sam’s chest as the wall burst inwards, shrapnel and light bathing the occupants. Sam jumped through the new opening and ducked aside, getting out of Ann’s way as he searched the room for threats.

The old office of the steel mill was weathered and sun-bleached where the sun panned through the window. Filing cabinets sat empty and gaping along the far wall, papers were strewn about, decomposing slowly in the dry atmosphere.

In the center of the room was a body, an elderly Other missing a left arm, bandages covering one eye, and blood seeping from his chest. That was the target. Around him was a convoluted scrawl in their language, written with spray paint that seemed to pulse with light. Beyond that were five Others, sitting around Tymore in a circle. They had been knocked onto their sides, and most of them were bleeding from the ears. The one closest to their improvised door was still, but the others moaned and tried to rise in various states of confusion. Maybe this would be a quick job.

The Others sitting around Tymore were young. As young as could be expected for them at least, probably in the low hundreds.

Sam leveled his gun on Tymore, intent on finishing as soon as possible, when a snarled incantation from the apprentice farthest from the entrance flung Sam across the room. Sam had not been informed of more than one spell slinger, but it figured.

Ann, through the door a fraction of a second after Sam, blew the kid away, and took out another for good measure. Sam got back to his feet and aimed at the three remaining ones, who had begun to flee toward the door.

“Hold, monster,” a weathered voice called from the center of the room, and Sam turned to see the wounded man in the center of the room in motion, raising his remaining hand from a supine position. Without any word from the old man, the rusted metal sheeting that the building had once prided itself on ripped loose from the floors and walls to create a wall blocking Sam’s line of sight to the three remaining apprentices. It also locked the Other in with Sam. That seemed suicidal.

“Yes, I may die, but each of those seeds may grow to become the next world-tree that we will build our hope upon.”

“Really?” Sam asked with a raised brow. Moments later the sound of shotgun blasts rang through the twisted sheet metal as Tom took care of the runners. One, two… Three four fivesixseven. Tom’s gunfire devolved into a wild frenzy, and it didn’t sound good.

Sam’s head raised in alarm, and he motioned to Ann, who ran back out the door.

“Really.” Tymore said, folding his hand across his lap, still laying flat on the ground, the pulsing symbols around him began to grow dim. “Try to stamp us out if you will, the Wizards who guard the identity of our people, it matters not. Kill one and we all grow stronger.”

“Okay buddy,” Sam said, standing above the old man, his black pistol a comforting weight in his hand.

“Aren’t you going to stop me?” Sam asked, glancing at the old man past his sights.

Tymore shook his head. “Doesn’t matter now.”

Sam shrugged and squeezed the trigger, putting a bullet between the old man’s eyes. The remaining glow in the spray painted symbol went out like Sam had turned off a light. Sam turned and jogged back outside, his stomach uneasy at the extra shots Tom had taken.

Tom was nowhere to be seen, and Ann lay unconscious in the courtyard, a single Other bent over her, unlatching her knife from its sheath, hyperventilating. The young Other was covered in a fine sheen of blood, and Sam’s eyes darted to the two dead ones just outside the doorway.

“Hey!” Sam shouted, aiming his pistol at the Other, the young man’s eyes widened in panic, and he grabbed Ann’s shoulder and rolled her in front of Sam’s line of sight, covering himself.

Sam cursed and broke into a sprint. The little bastard was still going for the knife. Others had learned by now that Human guns, especially those used by Response Teams were locked behind biometric scanners.

Sam heard the sickly sound of a knife being rammed home into flesh, and The Other darted out from behind Ann, Sam shot him six times before he realized it was an illusion, and the apprentice was heading the other direction. Sam swung the pistol around and fired after the Other as he dove behind a concrete divider.

Sam knelt, spotted Ann’s panicked eyes darting around above the knife that had severed her jugular. There was no way she would live. In a fit of rage, sam jumped to his feet and sprinted after the kid, spotting Tom dead behind the divider, having swallowed the barrel of his own gun. Sam heard footsteps sprinting through the tall grass outside the mill, and he emptied the rest of his magazine toward it.

“I’ll fucking hunt you down, you rat!” Sam shouted, his vision narrowing to a pinprick. Sam just barely resisted the urge to give chase, instead calling in the cavalry to pick up Tom and Ann and take them back to a Facility, where their valuable implants would be wiped and reused, their bodies chemically rendered into soup.

This was infuriating. Every single one of those rats had been a threat level seven or higher, and they had seen fit to send a single team, when they should have sent three. When Sam demanded an explanation, all he got were platitudes about how stretched resources were, and how chaotic everything was. After Sam got out of the debriefing, he just wanted to go back to the barracks and lie down, he was exhausted, he had a pounding headache, and everything felt cold to the touch.

Is this what being sick feels like? Sam wondered to himself as he lay in the quiet room in his cot, shivering and sweating.

The next morning, Sam was called in for a follow-up to his debrief. He walked into the room, a sterile white box with a single plastic table. On the table was a black laptop, and behind that, a young technician with wide glasses. More of a fashion statement than anything else, the Technician could have had corrective therapy since he was young.

“Good morning, S4MCA 03148.”

“Just Sam is fine, There’s only one of me in here.” Sam said, taking a seat across from the technician.

“Makes sense,” The Technician said, folding his hands together and looking away from the computer screen to eye Sam directly. “So Sam, do you know why you’re here?”

“I assume it’s about last night. You want to download the video from the assault and put an APB out on the one that got away.”

“Yes, the computer’s already interfaced with your implant. We’re taking video and sound samples, and we’ll have a profile for the Other in question built in a few minutes. The reason you’re here in person is that we wanted to ask some follow up questions about the night before.”

“By all means.” Sam said.

“The symbolism around the terrorist, Tymore. You only got a quick look at it, and the video doesn’t tell us much. Did you have any ideas as to its function?”

Sam shrugged. “I know what it wasn’t, it wasn’t a trap, nor was it a reconstructive spell. in the amount of time that the Others had, they could have restored a significant portion of his functionality.”

“If you had to guess?”

“I would guess it was some method of giving something of his to his apprentices,” Sam said. “The way he spoke before he died leads me to believe that might be the case.”

“That was our assumption as well.” The technician said, writing a quick note in the laptop.

“The video and what you perceive isn’t always the same, for example we can see you shooting six rounds into a target that doesn’t exist. Did you experience any other magical attacks that the implant was unable to record?”

“Not that I’m aware, no.”

“Nothing? There are magical attacks that can make people sick hours after the fact. Headaches, fever, that sort of thing.”

Okay, this was getting oddly specific. The technician was digging, and he was showing signs of nerves; sweat on his brow, pupils dialated. The technician’s hand was obscured behind the monitor of the laptop, but Sam would bet it was shaking, possibly hovering over the Failsafe button that would detonate the explosives in his brain.

“No, nothing like that.” Sam lied, heartbeat rock steady.

“In the recording you turn in two hours early, and wrap yourself in a blanket on your cot,” The Technician said, glancing back to the monitor. “Are you sure you weren’t affected?”

“It would be a lie to say I was unaffected,” Sam said, watching the technician’s breath catch in his lungs. “I turned in early that night because of emotional exhaustion. Those two are the closest thing to family I have, now I’m just looking forward to tracking down that rat and putting a bullet between his eyes.”

The technician breathed a sigh of relief he didn’t think Sam would catch; Ergo fever and headaches were bad, bad enough to make the technician nervous. If it made the technician nervous, he believed Sam would inflict bodily harm on him for whatever the technician would be forced to do in response to aforementioned fever.

S4M units had fairly high tolerances. It wasn’t like Sam had a salary or the politics of the corporate ladder to worry about, the only thing that would compel Sam to hurt the Technician would be self-defence.

So what were the reasons why the Facility would feel justified to engage the Failsafe and detonate the bomb in his head? It all boiled down to a lack of control. The fever signified that the Facility was losing control of Sam, somehow. Did that mean Sam was under the control of the old wizard? Sam did a quick scan of himself and his behavior over the last twelve hours.

He couldn’t find anything that pointed to the wizard pulling his strings, but he did notice a marginal decrease in the amount of time he spent getting dressed this morning. Every day, Sam would place his gear beside his bed and every morning he would rise when his alarm went off, getting dressed in the exact same routine.

Sam quickly used his implant to index all his morning rituals and discovered he’d shaved the total time down by roughly five percent across the board, which was fairly astonishing given how regimented and efficient it already was. This bore more investigation.

The implant could only record video and audio for the Technicians, it couldn’t capture his thoughts, so he would have to test this subtly.

“Alright, Sam, you’ve been cleared for duty,” The technician said, giving him a faint smile. “However your request for replacements has been denied by command. They’re rolling out a new model of S4M units, and so your team will be replaced with a completely new squad. However, all the shiny upgrades on a newer model can’t replace real-world experience, so you’re being reassigned to the FBI to work on a national level.”

Sam sighed. Maybe he could hang out with other clones in his time off. Sam and Tom got along famously with themselves, but Ann’s could get a bit standoffish with each other.

“Sorry, I know you’re used to working in a group, but Command doesn’t have the resources for special orders. Your first assignment will be the Other who got away. You’ve been given the rank of Special Agent, and given authority to cross state lines in the course of your duties. Your new gear is waiting for you outside, it has the contact information for your new boss and all the information you’ll need to get started.”

Sam stood at the Technician’s dismissal. Now he had two pressing matters, Why Command was willing to have him killed, and where was the rat that turned his life upside down so he could put a bullet in him. He walked into the elevator, keeping his heartbeat and breathing stable with long, relaxed breaths. It was a lot like when people were shooting at him: same shit, different day.

The floors lit up, and Sam glanced down at them. Ground floor.

Sam hit the button.