Orion dragged himself up the stairs. He stopped two steps below the final landing and breathed.

Shitty day, shitty night, loads of trouble. He had gotten out of the bar, and shaken off his pursuers, and gotten back home without being followed. Jordan had disappeared and not emerged from the chaos again. Well, they wouldn’t have to worry about being watched in the close future, until Rivers sent someone else.

The thought tasted bitter even without passing Orion’s lips. True, Jordan was dangerous, and an ass, but they were still… what, friends? Acquaintances? Orion didn’t doubt Jordan would kill him without second thought if Rivers were to give the order.

What kept him attached, then? Familiarity? Fear? The thought that if Jordan killed him, at least he wouldn’t enjoy it?

He climbed another step. One down, one two go.

How would Rivers react to news of the shootout? The people he employed kept to themselves, and so did their associates. Numbers didn’t frequent places like the Stove. The attack on the bar had to have been directed specifically at Rivers. Or at those who would do business with him. Either way, directly or indirectly, he had been the target.

Had the attack been just another dispute between rivals or a planned raid? What had been the objective? Did it have anything to do with Michael or Yoshua? Was it maybe directed at Orion himself, at Hounds? Had somebody already found out about their involvement, and their, if involuntary, work for Rivers?

Orion shook his head. He was growing paranoid. Starting to see conspiracies everywhere. Might as well start wearing tinfoil hats.

But hells, he was tired. And with the amount of secrets and betrayals and secret operations he had encountered over the last few months, it was hard to tell which sections of paranoia were justified, and which were plain stupid fear.

The door to the apartment opened. Poison stared at him, one arm already in her jacket.

‘I was about to go looking for you.’

‘You found me.’

‘You’re one step below the landing.’

He smiled weakly.

Poison’s expression softened. ‘All right, come on. Let’s go.’

She took his arm and led him inside.

Jordan woke slowly. His senses came gradually into focus, one after another.

A few dull sounds reached his ears first. Steps on rubber floor. Muffled conversation. Metal and hard plastic meeting in pointed slaps of noise.

Smells joined in shortly after that. More rubber, sweat, cheap detergents. Something sharp and soapy. Something sour.

Jordan tensed slightly, flexing and shifting his muscles just enough to feel what was around him. Fabric pressed against his skin, giving little way and shifting with his skin when he relaxed.

He was on his back. A mattress underneath him. A flat pillow beneath his back, rather than his head. Must have slid down. A thin blanket, tucked around him, but leaving his arms free. Tight bandages on his left hand and around his waist.

A less yielding pressure on both of his wrists. One, hard against the bandage, the other a kiss of cool metal on skin. Cuffs.

Two seconds into consciousness, he came to a conclusion. Hospital. Shit.

He took a deep breath and opened his eyes. Turned his head a little. The room was what he’d expected. To the left of the bed, a narrow gap away, was a wall without a window. A narrow metal arm reached out from the headboard and overhead, with an IV drip dripping clear fluid into a tube. It ran all the way to his hand and disappeared beneath the bandage.

Jordan couldn’t feel the needle in his hand, distributing the liquid into his blood, and he was glad for that. Would have been a queer, icky feeling.

His side had started throbbing dully when he’d tensed his muscles, flaring a little in time with each heartbeat and breath. The pain steadily grew a bit more pointed, a bit more sore.

How had he gotten here? He remembered going to the bar. With Orion. Then… an attack. A shootout. They memory returned crisp and sharp, like it always did when he’d taken Suxing.

And he had, it seemed. That meant he’d taken Shuìzhe, too. He did remember shooting up in Felix’ back room.

Shit. Someone had attacked the bar. Not good. Especially not while he was out of it. The place was supposed to be safe, dammit!

He must have taken the Suxing afterwards, to be able to fight. Not enough, from how quickly the sharp memories cut off again into a fuzzy blur.

What else had happened? Orion had hidden. At least Jordan had told him to. He’d probably gotten away later, maybe been caught, maybe died. Jordan had gone out and started killing. One thing he was good enough at.

Back-up had arrived swiftly; for the other side. He’d been shot and had to flee as his senses muddled from the drugs and his feeling of immediate danger flattened into indifference. His feet had carried him somewhere, on their own, as his mind had clouded over. After that it was pieces.

Jordan remembered a window, a gun, and – a bathtub?

Something moved to his right. Jordan turned his head and immediately turned it away again to stare at the ceiling.

Daniel stepped up next to the bed to regard him. ‘Morning.’

Jordan didn’t answer. This was bad. He’d gone to see Daniel last night. Had it been last night? No matter. The last one he could remember, in any way. He’d gone there and then… passed out? Been knocked unconscious? His head throbbed as he tried to remember and he grimaced.

Daniel sighed. ‘Gods dammit, Jordan. How long are you going to keep this up? ‘till it kills you?’

Probably.

‘Is that concern in your voice? You’re going all sentimental on me, how sweet.’ His voice was steady, but it sounded strange to his own ears. When he spoke, Jordan felt heat rising in the sides of his nose. Unusual. He must have fallen on his face. But he could still smell, and his voice wasn’t completely nasal, so nothing should be broken. His nose might be a mess, though. He wondered what he looked like.

Daniel sat in the single chair next to the bed and stared for a while. He didn’t say anything, just looked and frowned. Jordan stared right back. He was better at playing this game.

An assassin’s job was always thought of as a quick, slick, silent thing. In, kill, out. In reality, it was much more time-consuming and complicated.

There was staking out the location. Tailing the target. Preparations. Looking up any possible hindrances and checking up on lovers, bodyguards, or visitors. Very rarely, he had to work around children. Extended family was rare among the people Max Rivers wanted dead, so Jordan had to deal with them less often.

After preparations and dozens of checks came the waiting. Crouching on a rooftop with a sniper rifle. Hiding in an apartment. Lurking on a street corner.

Once, Jordan had spent almost a full day in a target’s utility closet before he’d finally left. If a target was that late, there was no use in staying and waiting. He’d later found out the target had died earlier that same day, an hour before she was supposed to return home. It hadn’t even been anything fancy, just a food allergy. Anaphylactic shock, with the ambulance arriving just a tad too late.

It hadn’t been a rival job. No third parties involved. Jordan had made sure. A genuine accident, and bad luck.

But normally, after hours of waiting in silence, without moving, keeping his breaths shallow, came the killing. All stiffened muscles springing into action at once, and he had to be faster, stronger, better than the target to finish the job, to survive.

When the killing was done, and the most immediate part of the job had been finished in just a few seconds after hours of prearrangement, then came the clean-up.

Sometimes the targets were meant to be found in gory messes, with fingers or ears missing, things like that. Jordan didn’t do torture. Too loud, too risky overall. He just killed and then arranged.

Most cases, though, the target was supposed to simply disappear. That meant taking the body, cleaning up whatever mess had sunk into the carpet, and putting knocked over lamps back in place. Get out without being seen, lose the body, scrub off the blood, get rid of stained clothing.

Killing well was hours of work, most of them unmoving, even more of them silent. A small staring contest, a bit of waiting, wouldn’t hurt him. He could shift around, he could breathe as loudly as he wanted to. This was no challenge.

It took a whole total of ten minutes for Daniel to break. Whatever he had seen in Jordan’s eyes shouldn’t have bothered him. But years of police work and whatever else he had been doing had softened him, made him susceptible, impatient, twitchy. A lousy ten minutes, and he started to fidget and finally sighed.

‘You’re still using,’ he observed.

Jordan raised and eyebrow. That much was obvious. It was a stupid question, and not worth a response.

Daniel waited for one, still. As if he had any right to an answer. He knew nothing. He had left. Sure, they saw each other every now and then, but Daniel was out of the game. They pretended to be at easy around each other, but they didn’t talk about anything important. Neither trusted the other. And that clearly had been the right decision, since Daniel clearly had different loyalties now.

Jordan didn’t know what had driven him to seek this man out in the state he had been in, just that it had landed him in a load of trouble.

Suddenly, there was something like anger in Daniel’s eyes. A sudden fury at something that Jordan couldn’t quite place. It was surprising, and interesting, and even curious.

‘You had a seizure while you were out cold,’ Daniel growled.

There it was. Jordan felt cold settle over the excitement that had started bubbling up inside him. Daniel knew, then. Not a good idea. At all. No wonder he was all jittery.

‘They checked your brain activity after that. Do you know what’s happening to you?

‘Of course I do,’ Jordan snapped back, suddenly angry. Why was he angry? He’d known.

Of course he’d known. How could he not know that his brain was giving up, slowly burning out and dismantling itself? How could he not know that ever more often, he blacked out, or his muscles cramped up, or he had fits of rage and sudden despair that came and then went more quickly than he could follow?

So far, it had never happened on a job, but it was a matter of time. He knew what was happening, and now he had an idea of how far it had progressed. He’d had a lot of time to think about this. It wasn’t news.

So why should he be angry?

‘You’re dying, Jordan.’

‘We all do, I’m just a bit faster along.’ Much faster than expected, but expected it had been.

Daniel’s anger seeped into something that looked sad. Something compassionate, something that cared. Jordan almost scoffed at what he saw. It was weakness, the kind he never allowed himself because it meant death; well, even more immediate death, in his case.

‘How long?’

Daniel’s voice held mostly sadness now, premature grief, just a trace of anger at nothing in particular. And even a hint of guilt.

Jordan didn’t answer. No need to spill everything. He wasn’t sure himself. His calculations had been awry. The time-frame had changed. Now, it should be a few weeks, maybe less. If he got out of this place to live them out.

Daniel shook his head. ‘I’ll be outside if you want to talk.’ He walked towards the door, muttering under his breath, ‘so for no reason at all.’

The door closed.

Jordan sighed and tried to wiggle the pillow back up under his head, but only succeeded at coaxing a sharp twinge from his side. Right. The bullet. Pesky little thing. It had still been in his side when he’d lost consciousness. They’d probably taken it out while he was under. After all, why wait for him to wake up on his own, just to drug him again?

Later, when he was gone and in a safe place, he’d have to check for any trackers. Damn surgical implants. He didn’t have to worry about that when he used one of Max’ medics, he knew they implanted the stuff, among other things.

Capsules with poison or acid that opened on wireless signal, small explosives, listening devices closer beneath the skin. Likely a hundred other little toys. Max wasn’t stupid enough to trust anyone, not even to keep their mouths shut. If one of his was caught and anybody tried to remove the trackers, the self-destruct would activate and kill the idiot who had managed to get themselves captured.

Come to think of it, Max had only gotten around to using the implants after Daniel’s defection. It was the first time the measures would have been useful, and Max wasn’t about to let another chance like that go by, to take a risk of comparable size.

Daniel had taken information with him when he’d left, insights into Max’ business. As a precaution, a large part of the ongoing operations had had to be changed, organisation done over, locations moved. It had been a lot of work.

Since then, a handful of implants had become standard for participants of the Number project. A few others had been included, too.

With every of Jordan’s injuries that he got treated by the Number’s medics, he was at their mercy again, and every time, he grew a little more dependent on Max’ good graces.

Not that it made much of a difference any more. He’d simply been at this for too long. Even without the dozens of kill switches in his body, Jordan had long since lost his back door out.

A single knock, and the door opened. Jordan’s expression flattened, expecting Daniel, but an unfamiliar killer in a nurse’s clothing entered.

Jordan was reasonably sure it was not an actual nurse. He’d worn a lot of disguises over the years himself, and he knew a fellow killer by their eyes and gait and even their posture when he saw them.

The would-be nurse slipped on a pair of medical gloves and went to check Jordan’s bandages.

‘Got yourself in quite a pickle, huh.’

There. A tone of voice that was far too cold to be a civilian’s. Had anyone else been in the room, they would have caught on by now, at the latest.

But there was nobody else there, so Jordan didn’t pretend and didn’t play around. He simply raised an eyebrow. ‘You gonna get me out of it?’

The nurse grinned. ‘Oh, no. No, no. I’m in a valuable position. Comfortable, too. Not going to risk it with a botched escape. From the rumours I’ve heard, you should manage on your own.’

Jordan tensed as the last layer of gauze peeled away from his side.

‘How long have I been out?’

‘Less than a day.’

‘And how long do I have to leave this place?’

The nurse met his eyes. ‘Eighteen hours.’

Huh. More than most got. He liked his odds with this one. Max seemed to value him as a tool. Not enough to bail him out, or to not detonate the lethal explosives in his body if he ended up not making the deadline, but still. More than most got.

‘Seems fair,’ he answered.

The nurse-re-wrapped his wound and checked the IV drip, fiddling with something on the drip. Changing a dressing was one thing, but medication was a whole different story.

‘You sure you should be messing around with that?’

He got a snort in response. ‘Do you think my cover would be any good if I had no training at all?’ A sigh. ‘I’ve got a few minutes. I’m curious. How’d you get started?’

Jordan blinked. ‘As a contract killer? Well, that’s a perfectly normal question.’

‘I mean, I was recruited out of med school. You start out wanting to help people and you end up not caring. Plus, loans are a bitch. Being a nurse makes it easier to go unnoticed than being a doctor, less curious eyes or potential lawsuits at a sudden death.’

‘Why in the hells are you telling me this?’

The nurse’s smile grew cold. ‘Cause Nine is standing outside the door, and you don’t want Max to find out, now do you? After the hunt he’s been on for over a decade? This is just idle conversation. I tell you a bit, you tell me a bit.’

Jordan groaned. ‘I don’t care. You don’t care. Why do you even want to know how I got the job?’

The nurse shrugged and sat on the windowsill, legs dangling. ‘I’m curious.’

Note to self: all killers are fucked up in the head.

It seemed there were simply different kinds of fucked up. He might as well play along.

‘Oh, I’m curious myself. I tell you how I got started, you tell me how you spotted Nine.’

The nurse lifted an eyebrow, but nodded.

Jordan wiggled a bit. ‘Would you be a darling and pull that pillow up a bit?’

He got a glare and grinned, then settled in to tell his story.

‘So. Long, long ago. Uh… some fifteen years back. A few guys walk into a pub...’

He laughed at the nurse’s glare.

‘No, really. I went out with a couple of friends, one of them brought a guy, who knew some people at the pub, that sorta thing. Nine was still working for Max then, and he didn’t want me following in his footsteps, taking hits and stuff. He made some kinda deal with Max. I disagreed. Shoulda listened. Anyway, I got talking with one of the friend’s guy’s people.’

Jordan giggled. Friend’s guy’s people. He wondered how many words he could string together until it stopped making sense.

‘She offered a job for fun, a thousand bucks for whoever got rid of her annoying neighbour. I did it. Stupid, really. Way too little moneys. Got away clean, though.’

He remembered being so nervous that he’d almost missed his shot. Against an old fart who needed a cane. Unofficial job. He’d been lucky to have been paid at all.

‘Max decided to utilise an’ stuff. Nine got mad an’ left. I stayed. End o’ story.’

The room started fuzzing. He blinked, but the fuzz stayed. ‘You drug’ me?’

The nurse smiled faintly. ‘Just a little something to get you talkative. It’ll wear off in a few minutes.’

The face in front of him wobbled in a curious way. Jordan suppressed another giggle.

‘Wha-’ His tongue felt numb and kind of pelty. ‘Wha’ ‘bout you?’

‘Huh?’ The nurse paused halfway to the door.

‘How’d ya re’o’nise Nine?’

A smile. ‘Easy. You got the same scowl.’

And Jordan was alone again.

Sarah leant back in her chair and let her head dangle over the back rest, staring up at the ceiling. The last few weeks had been boring, slow, and uneventful, and then the last few days had been a whirlwind of activity.

She still hadn’t heard back about Michael Runner. After the arrest, he had simply disappeared into the depths of Agency protocol, and nobody would tell her what was happening with the case now. She’d been told she’d done a good job, and to keep her position within the police for now. To not tell anyone that Runner was off the streets. She was just supposed to pretend she was still looking, until she got further orders or was recalled, with the excuse of some pretend new insight into the case elsewhere.

Then, yesterday, the search had officially been ended, and she was supposed to clean up anything left to do, which she had been finished with a week ago.

So she’d lied to Ryan and pretended to work on her finished assignment. In the load of free time that offered, she had tried to find out more about current events. She’d talked to the contacts she had managed to scrounge up, and checked with old sources. Nothing.

Then she’d looked up what Alexander Rivers had told her, simulated personality. The report that had turned up had seemed familiar, and she remembered reading up on something broadly similar a few years back, a research project on behavioural patterns. She simply hadn’t made the connection earlier, and now the confrontation with Alexander brought it fresh to her mind. Maybe someone was working in that field of research again?

There had been that suspicious laboratory where Yoshua Stone had died. But it hadn’t looked like research, more like experiments. And the project she knew of had included practical tests, but with voluntary human subjects, and Yoshua Stone had obviously not been a volunteer.

Why him, anyway? What made him special as a person?

Stone’s body hadn’t been recovered from the scene, but someone had had the presence of mind to swipe a bit of blood. The sample had contained strange chemicals, similar if not identical to components that had been found in the blood-work of some of Max Rivers’ people upon arrest. What kind of messed-up connection was that?

Sarah had tried to talk to the hit-man Daniel had brought in yesterday. She’d recognised him as one of Rivers’ by the ink on his arm. He’d been unconscious, and as soon as Daniel had found out about her visit, he’d pulled an impressive amount of strings, and she hadn’t been admitted to see the hit-man again.

His medical file had been available, though, including extensive blood test, but they had largely shown what she’d expected. The same compound. After a lot of pressure and questions, Daniel had grudgingly given her a strange name.

A few hours of research later, she had understood the basics about a pair of drugs used mostly to dull emotions and enhance alertness. It had been introduced by the military as a possible stimulant, but rejected early on due to a study that showed drastic changes in the subjects’ brain chemistry. Their nervous system started to degenerate, slowly, but steadily.

The troubling observations didn’t stop there. During the short test period in which the drug had been administered. Some of the subjects had displayed a drastic change in behaviour. Their nervous system had broken down more rapidly than observed in any other subjects. No relation had been found between those catastrophe cases.

Sarah was trying to make sense of it. She had found drugs that altered behaviour, and, if you were unlucky, damaged brain structures. She had found a theory in one of the papers concerning a study with “induced personality” Sounded awfully similar to “simulated personality”. Was that a connection, or just coincidence?

She bet that if any one had had the chance to perform and autopsy on Yoshua Stone and check his brain, there would have been severe damage. It might even have been the cause of death. Maybe he had been exposed to the drugs over a long time, maybe to check the progress of nervous degeneration.

But the chemicals in his blood hadn’t been exactly the same ones as in the stimulant drugs. Maybe a variant? Or maybe she was drawing connections where there were none, because one big problem was easier to deal with than two smaller ones. Next she would include Michael Runner in her speculations, and then Hounds.

She was sure, however, that if anyone bothered to check, Daniel’s hit-man would show brain damage caused by long-term exposure. One thing she had managed to glean from his file was that the man had been using the stimulant drugs for over a decade.

Maybe the drugs had been improved, maybe he was the opposite of those extreme study cases and handled the drugs exceptionally well. But after that long, he couldn’t be healthy.

No matter. She would never know.

Sarah groaned and rubbed at her eyes. Somehow, this was all tangled up in one big mess. She could only see parts of it, and right now she was just pulling at errand strands to see if anything shook loose.