Chapter 167

  An alert pulled Alexander from sleep.

  He opened his eyes to darkness. For a moment, he didn’t recognize where he was.

  Then the details came back. The premium corner suite. Thirty-first floor. Manhattan.

  One in the morning.

  Right.

  After nineteen hours of flying, walking, and driving all over New York, even a superhuman needed rest.

  He’d returned to the Melnick Grand just after seven the previous evening, following the payload upload to Jasmine’s tablet and the scrambling of existing audio recordings. The whole process had only taken a few minutes, standing on the sidewalk because Jasmine was still in her office, working.

  But he’d only allowed himself a nap. He needed to be awake when the results came in. Whoever was monitoring Jasmine’s surveillance wouldn’t be listening to hours of audio themselves. That’s what audio analysis software and automated systems were for. It would probably create a transcript, flag specific keywords and anomalies. Process everything and deliver a simple report.

  Then whoever was hacking Grimnir’s hopefully-lawyer would review the results, and only follow up if there was something worth investigating.

  At least, that’s how Alexander would handle it.

  The midnight transmission would have gone through an hour ago. Any automated processing should have activated the payload by now, which meant he should have some results.

  Alexander cycled Electrokinesis into his Core, then throughout his body, letting the energy burn away the lingering fatigue. Six hours of sleep wasn’t enough, but it would do.

  He pulled up his messages through the System interface. One from Talia waited in his inbox. He opened it to find routing information. Pages of it.

  Alexander skimmed through the data. The connection had bounced across multiple nodes before reaching the target’s network. Inside, it pinged between several devices, hopping from one to another based on the logged traffic patterns. IP geolocation placed everything within the city limits.

  Not useful. He’d already suspected that.

  He kept reading.

  Then he found it.

  The payload had pivoted across the network, spreading to connected devices. Including an old cell phone. The kind people kept in drawers and forgot about. The kind that had GPS.

  Alexander pulled up the coordinates and committed them to memory.

  He scanned through the technical details again. Device telemetry. Operating systems. Network topologies. The specific vulnerabilities Talia’s payload had exploited to spread between systems. Impressive work for eight hours. Once she had a quantum supercomputer and proper servers backing her up, she’d be able to do some proper work.

  Alexander reached out with Metallokinesis. His backpack flew from the sofa into his waiting hand.

  He pulled out his armor. The black metal breastplate. His remaining gauntlet. A second suit, black and wrinkled from the bag. He laid everything across the bed and dressed.

  “Wake up,” he said to the drone pile on the floor. “Time to earn your keep.”

  The drones stirred, then rose one after the other until they all hovered nearby.

  Alexander fastened the last clasp on his breastplate and grabbed his gauntlet.

  He walked over to the window and stood beside Droney. He looked out over Manhattan, then spread his senses as wide as he could across the city.

  Gravimax had made him. Might even be out looking for him.

  Alexander didn’t intend to make it easy. As his senses stretched and began reaching their limits, he pushed. Just a bit further. Enough to feel the strain deep inside.

  The range of his senses, when pushed uncomfortably, was over half a mile now. More than a few city blocks.

  He found only humans.

  Alexander flicked his finger. The window unlatched and swung open. The drones rose from the desk in a coordinated wave, arcing around him one after another before streaming out into the night. They formed a wide net. Some climbed high into the darkness above. Others dropped toward street level.

  Droney beeped.

  Alexander glanced at the little guy. “Yeah, I’ll move slow. Full spectrum scanning, but focus them outward and upward. I’m only worried about being spotted by fliers.”

  Droney beeped again, then zipped out the window ahead of him.

  Alexander stared at the opening for a moment. No matter how he looked at it, there was no way to go out that window with his dignity intact.

  He sighed.

  Then he lifted off the carpet, rotated horizontal with his feet toward the window, and slipped through the gap. The window closed behind him with a quiet click.

  Alexander took off across the city.

  He kept his speed slow, letting the drones stay ahead of him. Their sensors swept the route forward, thermal and motion detection painting a real-time map of the airspace. The city stretched below, lights glittering in every direction.

  It wasn’t far.

  The coordinates placed the target disturbingly close to the AEGIS New York Headquarters. Not adjacent, but close enough to make this risky. Close enough that patrols might be heavier. Close enough that reinforcements could arrive in minutes.

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  Not close enough to deter him, though.

  Alexander wove between the buildings, keeping low. The towers rose around him like canyon walls, their upper floors lost in darkness. He stayed below the skyline, using the structures as cover.

  A hover car lifted off from a parking platform ahead without warning.

  Alexander banked hard, missing it by inches. The vehicle climbed toward the sky lanes above, following the registered routes reserved for those who could afford the privilege. Its taillights disappeared into the traffic overhead.

  He refocused and continued forward.

  Minutes later, the drones flagged the building. A tall residential tower rose ahead, one of the many unoriginal apartment blocks that dotted Manhattan. Dozens of floors stacked on top of each other, units lining long central hallways. Lights glowed in scattered windows. People going about their evening routines.

  Alexander circled the structure slowly, spreading his senses through the walls.

  He found what he expected. Televisions. Computers. Tablets. Phones. Refrigerators humming with power. Normal homes. Normal families. Normal lives.

  Then, on the fourteenth floor, he sensed something different.

  A room packed full of hardware. Dozens of devices clustered together, their signatures dense and overlapping. A complex server farm. And beneath that electronic noise, something else.

  Something odd.

  Alexander pushed his senses harder, uncertain at first, but with an idea slowly forming.

  He recognized it.

  In the center of the room sat a Faraday cage. And laced throughout its structure, woven into the metal framework, was the distinct power-dampening effect of collars. Not the advanced, professional dampening he’d encountered in Dr. Miller’s laboratory. This was cruder. Improvised. But well done, given the builder clearly didn’t have access to the same technology.

  Alexander frowned.

  He could sense a bioelectric signature inside the cage. One person. But his senses scrambled when they touched the dampening field, reaching forward, then dissipating before he could get a proper read.

  Someone was in there.

  And they didn’t want to be found.

  Alexander entered through the fire escape door, disabling the alarm with a thought. Several drones, including Droney, peeled off to circle the building toward the target’s windows. The others floated silently ahead of him as he moved down the hallway.

  He stopped outside the apartment door and cocked his head.

  A thin metal wire ran along the inside of the doorframe, connected to something inside. Alexander gestured with a finger. The wire went slack, disconnecting.

  He twisted his hand. The door unlocked. The knob turned. It creaked open slowly.

  The smell hit him immediately.

  Stale food. Body odor. Air freshener. Heat from the packed servers carried the mixture out into the hallway. Alexander waited, letting himself adjust, then stepped inside.

  He passed a door on the right, a bathroom, before the apartment opened into an adjoined living room and bedroom with a connected kitchen. Server racks lined two walls, their status lights blinking irregularly. Shelves on a third wall held dozens of devices. Tablets. Phones. Hard drives. Equipment stacked haphazardly but organized after a fashion.

  And in the center sat the cage.

  A figure leaned back in the cage’s only chair, back to the door, focused on a screen. Headphones covered their ears. The sounds of combat filtered through faintly. Gunfire. Explosions. Victory announcements.

  A superhuman arena shooter. Alexander recognized it. Annie had made him play once. Kicked his ass repeatedly.

  She’d obviously cheated.

  The target hadn’t noticed him yet.

  Alexander ignored them and reached into the devices around the room. Tablets. Phones. The servers humming along the walls.

  His Technopathy spread through the network.

  And found activity. Someone else was already in there, running commands.

  He focused, tracing the signature through the systems. Determined the connection ran through Talia’s malware. She was wiping logs, cleaning traces of her intrusion from the network traffic.

  Alexander helped. He sent commands to every device, to purge access logs, delete timestamped entries. All evidence of Talia’s breach vanished as the machines obeyed. He left the malware itself untouched.

  Through the network, he sensed her watching. A microphone here. A webcam there. She was seeing this. Hearing this.

  Alexander turned his attention to the servers. Files upon files. Surveillance feeds. Audio recordings. Transcripts. Most of it tagged with AEGIS case numbers. Hundreds of targets. People’s lives cataloged and weaponized.

  He found Jasmine Sharp’s folder. Years of surveillance. Every conversation in her office. Every phone call. Every visitor.

  But it went further. Bank transactions. Schedules. Cases. Loan requests. Family. Friends. Acquaintances.

  The scope was staggering.

  Alexander took a step forward. A floorboard creaked.

  The chair spun.

  The target’s eyes went wide under a dark hoodie. Blond curls poked out from underneath.

  It was another kid. Involved in things beyond their understanding.

  A girl. Maybe eighteen. Her mouth opened to scream. Then she slapped her hand over her own mouth, cutting the sound off. She scrambled to her feet. The headphone cable caught her ankle. She stumbled, nearly fell, and the headset ripped free from her head.

  Combat sounds spilled from the headphones as they clattered across the floor.

  The girl rushed for the cage door. Her hands shook as she fumbled with the key hanging from a hook beside the frame. She jammed it into the lock. Twisted. The bolt clicked.

  She’d locked herself inside.

  The girl turned and pressed her back against the bars, staring at him. Terror written on her face.

  Alexander watched her calmly.

  She gasped, turning to look in the other direction. At a sheet nailed to the wall.

  It fluttered lightly, hiding a hole knocked into the wall. Alexander frowned. He’d swept the entire building already, finding nothing else of interest.

  The apartment beyond held another bioelectric signature. But slow. Weak. With medical equipment pulsing rhythmically.

  Alexander understood immediately. Could picture so many ways their life had unfolded into the present circumstances.

  Lying in the other room was a mother. Or a father. Perhaps a grandparent. Sick or dying.

  AEGIS offered them a way to use the one set of skills they were exceptional at to make a living. To support the person in the other apartment.

  He couldn’t even judge them.

  Not after everything he’d done. Everything he planned to do.

  Everything he would do.

  Alexander had no moral high ground to stand on. If anything, by the end, he’d probably go down in history as a monster.

  Assuming he didn’t die in obscurity first.

  She was destroying lives. Lots of them, from the number of folders, and had been for years. But could they even comprehend it, sitting in squalor and poverty, locked inside a cage and carrying responsibilities they should never have had to shoulder.

  For once, Alexander didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t even be certain he’d do anything different in their shoes.

  And he certainly didn’t know what he’d done wrong in his past life to deserve this. To keep thinking he understood just how gray the world truly was, only to be proven wrong. Again and again.

  The girl started sobbing, tears running down her face. “Please. Take whatever you want. Just don’t hurt me or grammy.”

  Alexander sighed. Then he glanced at a laptop on one of the shelves. Open. With the camera light on.

  Talia.

  She’d been AEGIS when they met. Had probably done things she regretted. Things he wouldn’t judge her on. Because she was family. And it was easy to overlook the flaws in those you cared about. Flaws that seemed so much worse in strangers.

  Alexander decided. He was here with a purpose. And he didn’t need to solve every problem alone.

  Talia could handle this one.

  After he was done.

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