--XV--

I stared at the ground far below me for a moment longer, then turned to enter the building's top floor.

I was in the air, spinning with previously-mastered trajectory towards the rooftop door when my cell phone rang. I tucked my body, rotated forward, and met the ground with my feet to answer.

"Hey!" I said in my most cheery tone. "You've reached Midnight on this absolutely beautiful Saturday night. Can I help you?"

"Chris." James's voice.

"Yes, hi."

"Belinda wants to take you off the assignment."

"What?"

"She just thinks you're unsafe."

"I can literally jump from a sewer and onto a plane. I think I'm good."

"Sit this one out, Chris. You can help others."

"I'm helping others by letting someone evil run loose? I'm sick of these people, James. It's disgusting. Something or someone is going to stop them; it may as well be me."

James said nothing for a moment.

"I'm staying on this case," I said.

"Tell you what," he replied. "Tomorrow morning, after you do your church thing, or whatever it is that you Catholics like to do-"

"Don't categorize me."

"Oh, sorry. Should I have said Protestant?"

"What are we doing tomorrow?"

He laughed because it was SO funny. "Srazhenye." He sounded affable. Amused, entertained. "Let's see who goes down. If you win, you get to stay- work the murder case."

"The same murder case."

"Yes. If you win, you get to investigate further. If you lose, you're off the case."

Srazhenye- or SRA as we called it in the agency- was a physical fight between two or more parties in a simulated environment, typically done in one of the training rooms or gyms. Very common training, and mandatory. Twice a week if you had to do work that may involve combat. I'd been in plenty of them; I lost, mostly.

"Who am I up against?"

"You and Webb, versus Klein and Shafer."

I paused.

"You're aware that I hate fighting," I said.

"That's why I'm making you do it," James said. He made a swallowing noise; probably a pill or something. "And before you speak, I read your mind and yes- this is your only way of staying on this case."

I took a deep breath. I cleared my throat, closing my eyes for just a moment. I opened them, and there were no monsters before me.

"Great," I said.

"11 AM tomorrow. Coliseum. Don't be late."

--

I stared at my phone with the happiest expression on my face long after James disconnected.

Just kidding.

A yell tore out of my body of its own volition when I threw the phone at the wall beside me and sat down. I wondered what Marie would have told me. She fought one of the mutated-experiment-creations of the US, during Nightingale, thinking that she had to.

It was a test and she was wrong. You weren't supposed to fight them. And maybe, I would have made the same mistake myself. If they didn't end her life in front of me for one wrong move.

She was one of the last to die in the three-month experiment. She only made one wrong move.

Inertia demands that I keep going, for her.

I got up, brushed the gray-and-white specks of dust off my black jeans and picked up the cell phone. Not even a crack, but I guessed that was how technology was when it was made by the Union of Stars. I walked down the sixty flights of creaky wooden stairs while watching footage of previous SRAs, uploaded to the agency's server for all agents to see. Whatever I was going to do in the Coliseum, it was going to be for the fourteen-year-old victim, the one whose name I didn't know; the one I never met.

Malcolm greeted me at the border between Vicinity Five and the Port. It was Sunday, 1 AM, and he brought Skittles and Crayon- our Siberian husky and Alaskan Malamute. I gave Marcus a hug and gave the dogs even bigger hugs and let Crayon lick my face. I was a dog person.

"Shouldn't you be sleeping?" I said.

Malcolm raised his eyebrows at me. "Shouldn't you be home?" he replied.

"Emergency meeting," I said. "James called. Like always."

The Port streets were empty and silent, save for the subtle sound of waves on nearby shores. Amber-colored lights and fireflies flickered above us as I smelled the salt from the ocean.

"Kaylee and her brother dropped by earlier with Bollito Misto," said Malcolm. "And pot roast. Said you told 'em to say 'I love you' for ya."

"I can confirm," I said.

He smiled. "I love you, too, little buddy."

"You sure I shouldn't get you a bigger house if I can?"

"Hey." He put his hands up in front of him. "It's your money."

"How long did you wait for me? I mean, you didn't know how long until I was coming home. Or if I was even coming home today at all."

"Doesn't matter."

We walked in silence for a few moments, Skittles panting and wagging his fluffy curled tail. Then Crayon stood motionless. He turned to face one of the alleyways beside the street; he started growling.

"What's wrong, Crayon?" I said. Crayon was the very perceptive one, and the very protective one. His white fur looked like it was bristling. "Is someone there?"

Crayon kept growling.

My tone shifted from its usual silvery and mellow to something else.

"Stay here," I said to Malcolm.

"Chris, what's going on?"

I spoke in a hushed tone, but a furious one. "Just stay here. Where the light is." I surveyed the area around us. Nothing conspicuous. "Stay here, don't make any sound."

Silence. Nothing except the waves.

"Malcolm," I said. "Take the dogs, right now, and go home."

"I'm not leaving you here."

"You have to." I looked at him. "Do it, now."

I heard what sounded like a footstep. I knew whoever it was tried to conceal its sound; I knew what feet on the ground sounded like, or on staircases or on a trampoline or on a ledge- walking or jumping or running. Or trying to remain undetected. Or failing to do so. Slowly, I walked toward my approximation of where the sound came from, and reached into my pocket; I needed the earpiece.

The alley was dark when I wrapped my hand around the earpiece. But the moment I pressed it into my ear, I didn't need it anymore.

--

There was a yell behind me. It was harrowed, agonized- an older adult male's yell; a sound generated by a voice that was strong, and gravelly.

Malcolm.

I whipped around with two throwing knives already in my left hand. The attacker wore all-black; not one inch of bare skin was exposed, completely eliminating my initial objective of finding a concrete and clear physical trait, to identify them later if not now.

The attacker was maybe 5'8, 5'9. Possibly male, possibly female- I had no way to really know. Average build.

Malcolm was on the ground and injured; there was a small pool of what looked like blood where he was on the street, his face contorted. The dogs- I wasn't ready for the dogs. Skittles and Crayon weren't moving.

Darts.

There were darts on them- I immediately prayed they were sedatives only, and not poison. I'd been shot with poison darts before and lived. Maybe they would be okay.

The attacker had a gun pointed at me; I recognized it at once- a projectile electric stunner. Two things perplexed me at that moment.

One: They weren't trying to kill me.

Two: How did they get one?

These fancy non-lethal guns were, as far as I knew, only accessible in mainland US, nowhere else. I'd seen them only because of previous assignments that required me to take trips to the Union of Stars' main headquarters or other mainland US locations; I had never seen one in the Overwoods.

That only scared me more- if they were a US agent or some kind of operative, for whoever, were they attempting to kidnap people for experiments? Specific people? Telepaths? Previously experimented-on telepaths? None of these things were unheard of.

That chain of thought was all I needed. If I wasn't going to kill this person, I was going to make sure someone else would.

They were standing over what to me looked like Skittles' dead body. I lunged at them, and I mean I lunged at them. It took a split second for me to position my feet, figure out the line and distance, push off for maximum flight.

I collided with the masked attacker's body and we went beyond walls and posts and broken glass windows until we slammed into a glass building beside a convenience store.

I flipped backwards twice, taking my earpiece off and also taking the can of flash spray from my jeans pocket in the process; I didn't want to hurt the attacker beyond whatever was necessary. I also had an SRA to be a part of.

"Do I say, 'it's nice to see you again?'" I said in what James called my "signature" calm-when-attacking voice. "Or do you say it to me? You wrote me a love letter, right?"

And this time, I wanted a fight. I wasn't going to let this monster leave the scene easily. I wasn't going to let them leave the scene, period.

I took two steps and a half, pushed off the ground, and spun fast in a diagonal with my left leg raised and poised near my face. The masked whoever-they-were attempted to minimize any impact from the attack by shielding with their arms. My leg came down from the spin on their torso, smashing the black generator they landed on. I was hoping they'd talk. Or groan. But all I heard was breathing, and an aulmost inaudible grunt of pain. Still no information.

"This isn't fun for either of us," I said. "Or am I wrong?"

I had to do this with speed- to go back to Malcolm and the dogs- and decided to engage quickly and make our fight a short one.

I soon learned something: this attacker wasn't planning to stay or to fight.

I was never a killer, yet I wanted this man or woman to pay. I felt ready for a war.

But the man or woman who attacked us that day had other plans.

The one time I wanted a fight, and the other party wasn't interested.

I took a red, rusty, and blotchy piece of bent metal from a pile of disorganized scrap next to us. The attacker was still on the ground, recovering the air knocked out of their lungs.

"If I'm who you want to mess with," I said, "then leave the rest of the world out of it. You do what miserable, low-down, pathetic cowards do." There was a burning in the damaged ligaments in my left hand. There was an acrimony and venom in my voice that even I didn't hear often. "You could have just gone for me!"

They clicked on a shiny silver canister from a pocket.

It took only a moment: I was in a cloud of what felt like poison, only a hundred times worse than Belinda's second-hand smoke, and I didn't have a mask on me. I was on my knees and choking and coughing and vomiting the french fries that I'd ordered earlier at Crisanto Pacifico.

When the mist cleared I was still alive, but a note written on red paper left in front of me told me why, apparently. I was still coughing; both my eyes were producing tears like waterfalls and I had to wipe them a million times to finally make out the words:

"IF YOUR TEAM COMES FOR ME

I'LL BREAK MORE THAN HIS BONES

DAVENPORT WILL DIE

-M M

PS

I LET YOU LIVE TO HAVE YOU

AGAIN"

--

I wasn't sure how long it took for me to make my way back to Malcolm. I was afraid. Afraid to see how badly he was hurt; afraid to see if Skittles and Crayon... if they were still here, still with us.

There was blood streaming through an open cut on the left side of my face; it only irritated me because it got in my eye. I hopped back toward the general direction of where Malcolm and I were walking, the note in a plastic evidence bag sealed twice with security tape, in Caleb's jacket pocket- but I wasn't going to give it to anyone. As for Caleb's jacket, I was going to have to wash it at home, wear something else for the SRA.

But I was dizzy, lightheaded, I didn't quite get my trajectory right and ended up smashing through a glass door of some building somewhere and tumbled to the floor in a heap, a heap made of pain and fear and awful, horrible memories, a heap that was bleeding and still coughing. I was moving as fast as I humanly possibly could, when finding my bearings was almost impossible. I was in so much pain that I didn't even notice it was raining until I was there, a bleeding heap on the floor, looking outside and up at the sky. I didn't assess the damage; I ignored the pain and got up and ran. I kept going for about two blocks until the stitch in my side was almost unbearable. It wasn't pain that I could ignore- but I kept moving.

I turned a corner. Malcolm used his coat to wrap around the injury- I couldn't see it; it was somewhere on his left arm, and his face was still twisted by pain, and there was blood on the coat. I immediately went to Skittles. I didn't want to do what I was about to do. I put my hands on Skittles' fur, on his side. I put both my hands on him and waited for seconds, and then a minute, and then another minute. I felt nothing.

Nothing.

That was when I began to cry, not from the toxic gas but because, yet again, I had lost another part of me; I had lost, yet again, some of the little that I still had left. I wasn't someone who ever had very much. What little I had, I treasured.

I quickly did the same with Crayon.

"Come on," I said, my voice despairing and small and broken and more raspy than it ever had been before. I felt nothing. I wiped tears and dirt and blood off my cheeks, and tried again. "I know you're in there," I said. "I know you are!" I waited another minute. I breathed whatever my lungs would allow me, choked and squeezed as they were by the poison. "You're still in there."

I started coughing hard. I felt something like thunder, but couldn't hear it. I didn't know what I was anymore. I didn't know where I was anymore. I knew where I was, but I didn't. I felt pain and yet nothing existed.

"You're still in there," I repeated. "You have to be. You're still here." My vision was going purple and gray and black at the edges; I thought positive thoughts, such as "the glass is half full." I swallowed hard, my hands still on Crayon's white fur, and cleared my throat. "COME ON!"

"Chris," Malcolm said.

I turned to look at him.

He looked back at me, and written on his face were all the words I didn't need to hear; I didn't want to hear.

I couldn't.

I covered my face with both my hands and sobbed, but I could only allow myself this indulgence for a minute. I took my phone and called an emergency service. I approached Malcolm.

"Chris," he said sternly. "Don't do this."

"I am going to do it."

"No," he said. "No, you're not!"

"Yes, I am." I coughed again, cleared my throat, and sniffed. I blinked a few times. I took his hand in both of mine, and like the usual it took only a few seconds. The pain was beyond description of words that I knew.

Fractures. I knew it instantly. Open fractures.

I knew the feeling exactly. It happened during the experiment, and it happened before the experiment, too.

In a world full of poison, of immorality: if you are stranded in a place where the only things around are evil, what do you do?

You run to the arms of the lesser evil.

You try to survive. With whatever is actually available to you.

I gritted my imperfect teeth as blood poured from the wound on my face. "Help's coming, dad." I had to breathe as deeply as I could, as calmly, slowly, and deeply as I could; this is what you do when you are in extreme pain, from a severe injury.

"Chris, let me go."

He shifted his hand, the one I was holding, only slightly. But the pain that even that small movement caused was like a flash of pure white lightning, I cried out, and if possible started to sob louder than when I knew Crayon and Skittles were gone.

"Son, let go!"

"Just don't move," I said. My eyes started to lose their color, and turned grey, the blood vessels below my eyes turning a very visible black, like black paint hurled at a wall and dripping downward. It happened whenever I took the suffering from someone and it was a lot of effort and a lot of pain. I looked up at the rain, at the sky, at the clouds that seemed to have come from nowhere. Good thing I sealed the note, said a voice in my mind.

Did I even give a shit anymore?

Maybe, I should have fought the monster; the hideous thing. Maybe Marie and I should have done it together.

Maybe from the experiment, Kaylee should have been the only survivor.