Lukas yawned. He blinked, eyes crossing from exhaustion before refocusing into a single image. White lines zipped past. The van sped down the highway, cutting between mountain peaks.
High peaks screened the moon from view, stealing its last hours of brilliance. The transmission whined as the van climbed another hill, hemmed in by a ravine on the left and an ink-black mountain lake on the right. His head throbbed. His lungs ached. Lukas jammed his finger against a switch, lowering the driver's side window, then the passenger's. Chilled air rushed in, sharp against his face, keeping him awake.
Another yawn. He fought it down, jaw clamped tight. On his right, an empty pulloff appeared along a stone wall and tree-lined slope. Pull over. Rest.
No.
Not until he reached Albany. Not until he had answers.
Ahead, a light flashed. Lukas's hands tensed on the wheel. Another car? No, a series of road signs, illuminated by his own headlights.
Adirondack Northway junction, ? mile
End scenic byway, high peaks
US highway 87, south
South to Albany.
His next stop.
The van merged onto the highway, leaving the scenic route behind. Traffic was sparse at this hour—just him and a lonely semi wearing Canadian plates. Anonymous. Perfect.
Lukas's mind churned through a single problem like a belt fed through a machine gun. Who was H. Caine? Not the usual customer, that much was clear. Johansen had been right about everything—except taking the damned job in the first place. The scrub who'd sent his men to their deaths was an amateur. No idea what sort of game he was playing. All that shielded him for now was obscurity.
Lukas sighed. There must be hundreds of people who shared that combination of initial and surname. Maybe thousands. Bad signal-to-noise ratio. You could search for a long time without knowing where to turn—unless you found someone who did.
Which was Lukas's burning hope.
Albany wasn't just New York's capital. It was also a hub where legitimate business and less legitimate enterprises overlapped. Not just for international travelers needing transport and equipment, but for anyone who needed things done quietly. The kind of place where information had value, where the right introduction could open doors that official channels kept locked.
The Albany mafia.
Horus Overwatch operated in shadows that occasionally intersected with theirs. Lukas had dealt with organized crime before, though never with this particular famiglia. They shared certain pragmatic principles: discretion, efficiency, and the understanding that some problems required solutions the law couldn't provide.
If anyone could locate his prey, they could.
But he'd need an in, some way to earn their trust and procure their services.
How much money would that take?
Too much. Each team member carried five grand in United States currency inside their body armor on missions like this—cash, supposed to be enough to buy one's way out of anywhere in the world should things go south.
Great in theory. Unless you died. Like his eight comrades back in Sanguine Springs.
Lukas gritted his teeth. Forty thousand in cash just lying scattered around that hellhole. He was no vulture, no battlefield scavenger—yet it still burned him. A waste, in every possible way.
He heard voices echoing in the empty van's quietude. Memories of the cries as his men fell to unexpected fire, resistance from all quarters.
Then another voice drowned out the rest. A brash challenger, his baritone coming through clearly even through the Overwatch radio headsets.
"Tell Matilda this is what happens when you cross Sweet Tony Dalotto!"
Lukas's lips curved into something that wasn't quite a smile. The gunman thought he was the target. He had pinned Lukas's men down cold, until Ma Deuce spoke her piece. Not the work of an amateur.
A pro. Wonder who he's hiding from. Someone in Albany? It was the closest territory for organized crime.
Maybe the name and location were worth something to someone in the familia. Someone named Matilda. Someone who might have the resources to find a Tetherly employee named H. Caine.
The pieces were falling into place.
He didn't need to find Caine directly. He just needed to find someone who could. And if that meant trading information—letting slip that a certain missing mafioso was hiding in a soon-to-be-infamous town in the Adirondacks—well, that was the cost of doing business.
The highway stretched ahead, lit by his headlights and occasional streetlamps. Albany was two hours south. Maybe less, the way he was driving.
Lukas pressed harder on the accelerator. The van's engine whined in protest but obeyed.
He had work to do.
Sanguine Springs
Matthias shivered.
He lay beneath an alpaca wool afghan on a leather couch, his bum leg sticking out into the fire-warmed living room. Head against a pillow, he stared up at the ceiling—an unknown ceiling—stared up at the pattern in the half-light, seeing only faces of people he knew in the textured surface.
Lukas. Johansen. The old woman.
Always the old woman.
He'd gone home, changed his clothes, prepared to sleep there one last night. Then, he thought otherwise. Despite his desires for comfort, for quiet, and for familiarity, the others congregated at Jael's house pulled him back.
He returned fifteen minutes later in smart, casual clothing, asking if there was somewhere he could stay. Jael had looked at him for one long beat before nodding and opening the door wider. He came in, depositing the only weapon he had against the wall as he entered.
Jael took one look at the axe and chuckled. "We have better stuff than that here, you know."
"I wanted to contribute," Matthias said.
"Let me show you somewhere you can rest."
But she had shown him the couch. That was an hour and a half ago.
It was hard to sleep in the presence of three other men after a year on his own. Tony sprawled out in the armchair across the room, his snores all but rattling the window panes. Brad, upright in a recliner, ribs wrapped beneath his open shirt. Matthias felt a twinge of grief; the older man had earned a deep bruise to the ribs while rushing to his aid that night. He glanced over at the prisoner, lying on the ground, hands still bound behind his back. Johansen. Was he the one whose shot shattered Brad's armor?
Matthias stared, as if his unblinking gaze could pull the answers from his sleeping former teammate. All he saw was the silent, steady rise and fall of Johansen's chest.
Were they really taking him along? He wasn't sure if that was a good idea, but leaving him here meant either slow starvation or telling the authorities where they had gone and what they had done.
Matthias wasn't sure which was worse, and he hated himself for that.
He looked again at the ceiling, at the pattern of grays cast on the textured surface. The light from the now-dying fire in Jael's fireplace cast shadows on the popcorn texture—gray speckles stretching across like a pointillist painting done in ash and ember.
Shades of gray, he thought. Always shades of gray.
Maybe Lukas was right, seeing the world split neatly between good and evil. No nuance, no regrets. Matthias saw shades of gray. He always had. But now, each seemed darker than the last.
He'd spent years thinking himself a hero, only to discover he'd been a lie. Not a hero. Just a thug. A patsy. A cat's paw for some unknown agenda. How much of the blood he'd shed was innocent? If Horus could be deployed against Allison under false circumstances, how many of his missions—even the clean kills—were truly justified? He didn't know. He couldn't know.
He felt sick to his stomach.
He inhaled, feeling the pain in his abdomen as his diaphragm expanded. Tasted the scent of woodsmoke and sweat. He exhaled, repeating the pattern three times, forcing himself to unclench. Willing his body to relax. The dawn was not far off, and there was travel ahead.
Kansas.
He'd seen The Wizard of Oz as a boy. Matthias assumed it really was antiquated and sepia-toned. Older, he realized that was just a pastiche, the 1930s Hollywood view of an even earlier rural state. Still, it was flyover country. Probably filled with tumbleweeds, cattle and yokels.
Brad has a lot of faith in this Kansan contact. I hope he's right, because I'm not sure about anything anymore.
Across the room, Johansen shifted in his sleep, the zip-ties on his wrists scraping the slender tenons of a caneback chair. A mere nod towards captivity. Any man could have snapped the tapered maple dowels and escaped, if they so desired. Yet Johansen remained.
As a prisoner, Johansen had been surprisingly cooperative since Matthias awoke. Answering questions. Almost eager to help, as if unburdening himself might somehow lighten the weight of what they'd done. Maybe he was calmed, to be back in Matthias's orbit. Or maybe he just recognized defeat when it stared him in the face.
Matthias closed his eyes, but sleep wouldn't come. His mind kept circling back to Lukas. Where had he gone? Did he really think Matthias and the rest were terrorists? What would happen when they crossed paths again?
This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.
They'd always been different, the Martel brothers. Matthias saw complexity, contingencies, the thousand shades between right and wrong. Lukas saw only the mission. The target. The contract.
Black and white.
It had made Lukas an efficient operator. Ruthlessly efficient. Unburdened by doubt.
It had also made him dangerous.
Matthias opened his eyes again, staring at the dying embers in the fireplace. Orange light pulsed and faded, pulsed and faded, like a heartbeat slowly weakening.
Like the red light on Allison's prosthesis.
Another piece of the puzzle. Why her? What made a young woman with a robotic hand worth a fortune in blood money?
A noise like a waterlogged motor broke his concentration. Tony, snoring away across the room. Matthias smiled, glad the old Pizon was still here. Alive, by his own account, thanks to Allison. The precise shots. The mechanical efficiency of her mechanical arm.
I wish I could have seen it. Not just the prosthesis. Something more.
To see her come alive.
Hell of a woman, he thought. And one whom I still owe an apology.
With those troubled thoughts, he drifted into sleep. In his mind's eye, shades of gray dissolved into dark fog, pierced only by the crimson pulse of a beacon in the darkness.
Tetherly Campus, Los Angeles
3:47 AM
Chris Cratowski rubbed his eyes and took another sip of cold coffee. He grimaced, then swigged the rest, barely noticing the floating ball of styrofoam among the oil-slicked brew. Bitter, with hints of battery acid and regret. Not ideal, but it kept him awake. That's all that mattered.
He sat in a sterile room, seven floors beneath the parking lot of the main Tetherly campus. Few employees knew about Level Seven. Fewer still had been there. The subterranean depths hid the development of Thomas Newton's blackest of black book projects. No cell service, no windows, and burnt coffee all-nighters.
It was the stuff Cratowski had dreamed of.
Around him, the testing facility hummed with the white noise of ventilation systems and server farms. Banks of monitors displayed telemetry data, biometric feeds, and 8K security footage of the night's test site from multiple camera angles.
The test site—a recently bought-out gas station on a back road to Nevada—sat empty now, its counters, shelves, and floor scrubbed clean of evidence.
Well. Mostly clean.
On the monitor, he could still see a few dark streaks on the linoleum by the beer coolers. A small matter. The test site was already scheduled for an accidental fire later that morning. By the time any responders arrived, all traces of the final PUP test would be erased.
Once more, he watched the footage of tonight's test, noting the timestamps of various events for his report.
Subject deposited in test site at 23:47.
A male, late thirties, powerfully built. Former military, with combat experience. A local firearms instructor and wannabe podcast guest. Chris rolled his eyes. A real hero. Just one of the many trying to leverage the call of duty for booty calls and clout. A combination of toxic and masculine, cretin and competent. Soldiers… The sort of men Chris despised; the sort of man he would never be.
The subject regained consciousness at 23:56.
He wandered the store, unfazed by his sudden appearance in an empty, fully stocked gas station. Subject helped himself to a hotdog and can of beer before trying the doors, unsuccessfully, at 00:02.
Pursuit Unit Proxy systems active at 00:03.
The canine-shaped robot located the locked door to its own smaller area of confinement.
PUP defeated containment at 00:04.
The hound studied the door, its algorithmic brain calculating how best to breach the barrier. Articulated titanium claws? Diamond carbide teeth? Or a solid tackle, muzzle lowered, with the cerami-steel dome of its skull?
In the end, it didn't matter. Powered by a breakthrough in micro-actuator technology—first born out of Tetherly's humanitarian prosthetics program—the door stood no chance against either attack. The undersized machinery represented a quantum leap in robotics. Chris smiled at the irony. He knew that technology's pedigree. Within a week, the whole world would as well. Newton planned to announce it in a matter of days. Tetherly, King of social media and Maven of the Internet of Things, was about to claim a new title: Tetherly the benevolent, offering bleeding-edge prosthetics to the world. An order of magnitude more powerful than anything else on the market, for a fraction of the price.
PUP located test subject at 00:05.
The test subject managed to fire half a cylinder of .44 magnum from his chrome-plated revolver. The Pursuit Unit shrugged off all three rounds before closing and executing the subject.
Test subject neutralized at 00:06.
A short pursuit. A shorter struggle. A foregone conclusion.
Two minutes from release to completion. Excellent time.
He stopped the video and pulled up the post-engagement analysis. Bite force: optimal. Cervical displacement: confirmed. Blood loss: significant but expected. Time to cessation of movement: forty-three seconds.
Pursuit Unit Proxy. A ridiculous corporate-speak acronym, cooked up by a manchild who really, really wanted a dog-themed name. Newton needn't have bothered—most of the team referred to the units as Hounds. So did Chris, when not compiling official reports. Whatever you called it, the hound had performed flawlessly. Thermal tracking, obstacle navigation, target identification, pursuit, and neutralization. All within acceptable parameters.
Better than acceptable, really. This latest iteration had shaved two full minutes off the previous model's time.
All green across the board.
He leaned back in his chair, staring at the rows of data. Three months of testing. Twelve successful field trials in controlled environments. Zero malfunctions. Zero escapes.
The PUP was ready.
More than ready.
He took a breath, steadying his nerves, then opened his Tetherly email program.
Ignoring his inbox, Chris Cratowski started a new message with the highest possible encryption.
TO: Thomas Newton, CEO Tetherly Inc.
FROM: Christopher Cratowski, Lead Engineer, PUP Development
RE: Pursuit Unit Proxy - Field Deployment Recommendation
Sir,
I am pleased to report that tonight's controlled test of the Pursuit Unit Protocol exceeded all expectations. The PUP platform has demonstrated consistent reliability across twelve separate trials, with zero system failures and a 100% target neutralization rate.
Attached you will find comprehensive data from tonight's test, including:
- Thermal tracking accuracy (99.7%)
- Obstacle navigation efficiency (99.1%)
- Target identification speed (0.3 seconds)
- Engagement time (2 minutes, 4 seconds)
- Neutralization confirmation (cervical displacement, verified)
All systems performed within or above expected parameters. In my opinion, the Unit is ready for rapid deployment.
His fingers hovered over the keyboard.
Something clicked in his mind. Tonight may have been the last test. His report advocated exactly that.
But if the testing was over, then what came next?
Reassignment. Potential loss of clearance. Loss of prominence within the secret inner circle. And loss of these reports—his one direct line to Thomas Newton.
Cratowski idolized Newton. Had for years, even before joining the Tetherly ranks. In his heart of hearts, he thrilled that the world's most powerful man was reading his reports. Even the most banal words composed by RSI-plagued fingers would pass through Newton's eyes, their meaning absorbed directly into the CEO's consciousness.
He shivered, chilled at the thought of losing his proximity to greatness.
Not just yet.
Cratowski held down the backspace key with deliberate pressure. He watched the letters wink out of existence, one by one, their former meaning soon to be effaced from even his own memory. Then he tweaked the data, subtly reducing the PUP's performance. Not enough to raise alarm bells or damn the project, but enough to guarantee one more test.
Attached you will find comprehensive data from tonight's test, including:
- Thermal tracking accuracy (96.7%)
- Obstacle navigation efficiency (95.1%)
- Target identification speed (1.2 seconds)
- Engagement time (3 minutes, 42 seconds)
- Neutralization confirmation (partial cervical displacement, verified)
While these results are promising, I recommend additional testing, with an eye towards pushing the outer boundaries of what our asset is capable of. Propose procurement of another subject for our Van Nuys test site, unless an immediate live field deployment is preferred.
He smirked. By offering the Van Nuys site along with an unlikely, long-shot second option, he'd all but guaranteed a test at his favorite kill site while still looking like a team player. Useful skills when trying to retain status within a corporate hierarchy, no matter how clandestine.
I have confidence in this project, and propose an armed, multi-subject engagement for the next stage of testing.
I believe the platform is close to ready. A winner. Let's take it across the finish line.
Awaiting your authorization to proceed.
Respectfully,
Christopher Cratowski, Lead Engineer, Advanced Robotics Division
He read through the message twice, making minor adjustments to the language. Professional. Detached. Confident but not cocky.
No wheedling. No begging. Nothing that hinted at his fear of being discarded and ignored.
He attached the data files, encrypted them with Newton's personal key, and hovered the cursor over the SEND button.
His hand trembled slightly.
He thought about Newton's vision—a world where human assets could be phased out entirely. No more messy emotions. No more operators going dark because they couldn't handle the moral weight.
Just clean, efficient machines doing what they were built to do.
No conscience. No hesitation.
No shades of gray.
He clicked SEND.
The email disappeared into the encrypted network, routing through a dozen proxy servers before landing in Newton's private inbox. Somewhere out in the desert, the barefoot billionaire slept, unaware of the good news he would read when he woke.
Cratowski closed the laptop and stood, joints popping from too many hours in the chair. Marco and Van had already left, headed to whatever bar would still serve them at four in the morning.
He should go home. Sleep. Maybe his wife would be there, this time.
Maybe.
Instead, he leaned over his still-warm keyboard like a vulture over carrion. A few keystrokes resurrected the media player, still paused on the camera's final frame. The Hound's rear chassis, exiting stage left, leaving only a shadowy form and a line of dark streaks leading toward the beer cooler.
Or was it leading away?
He stared at the screen.
Human asset teams have always existed. The dirty secret of the corporate world. Soldiers and mercenaries. Fallible humans, men and women destined to fall before the onslaught of the next generation. We're just making them more efficient. The next evolution. More reliable.
This is better.
This is progress.
He almost believed it.
Cratowski straightened. He'd done enough for one night. He killed the lights, stepped into the hallway, and shut the door. It locked automatically behind him.
He yawned and headed down the hallway toward the elevator, alone with his thoughts.
Outside, high above, the sky was beginning to lighten—not dawn, but that predawn gray that promised morning was coming, whether you were ready or not. A world waiting for the sunrise.
While down below, on the seventh level beneath the ground, a single screen glowed in a darkened room, its pixels still showing the new stage of robotic evolution—alongside streaks of drying blood.