Chapter 2: Sunset (Sunrise) Vol 1. Issue 2.

Drawing of Hannah, Gareth, and Reeve bickering over french fries. The Sunset logo across the top. [https://64.media.tumblr.com/1327cc2de04310e6ffe9c639a544698b/d58136ec8ce6a755-1b/s640x960/7bac2f29139a8638f523180fbe541858613cba3d.pnj]

LAHQ. Terre Department. Present day.

Darwin felt like he was handling the news about Venus pretty well. He was also fairly sure that was due to denial.

It really only sunk in late in the morning when he got an email that everyone on the Student Care team (and that included him) would be required at a meeting that afternoon to discuss their role in what was quickly coming to be known as “the Venus Twenty-Five.” Because he was going to have a role in it. Him. Darwin del Sol. It was about then that Darwin began to quietly hyperventilate. Sure, he was technically a Terre Guidance Counselor, but he had only just graduated from his internship program and this was more intimidating than anything they’d ever trained for.

The rest of his day went by in a rapid blur, which was terrible, since it brought the meeting closer. He ran back to his place in the company quarters wing to put on something a little nicer than his usual cardigan and jeans, and then spilled coffee on it as he walked out the door and had to go back and change. Cardigan it was, after all. Darwin was young, turning twenty next week, in fact, and his face still showed his youth. He had a round belly and soft cheeks, and his straight, black hair had a dark reddish tinge and was in the awkward process of growing out. Despite all of this, he carried it well and had a handsome, boyish charm about him that he was entirely unaware of.

It ate at him that these kids had just existed without them knowing. Darwin was a nat-born, born in China and found by Sol at only two days old. His own parents didn’t know that Darwin still existed anymore, Neptune’s Cleanup telepaths had made sure of that, but Darwin had been brought to a loving place where someone with his type of knack could be cared for and not seen as strange. Not abandoned. It was different.

He was already kicking himself when he showed up to the meeting just barely on time, but at least in clothes without a big splotch of coffee down the front. He grabbed a seat and laced his fingers together in his lap to keep them from fidgeting too obviously. The rest of the people he worked with daily were there, and he was relieved to see that they all looked about how he felt to varying degrees. His boss—Terre’s Third, Whitney, was there, and he took a couple of deep breaths, thinking about how he’d just started to feel less freaked out meeting with a Third.

At three o’clock on the dot, Uranus’ Second came into the conference room pushing a cart holding two file boxes. Darwin had heard that he had been promoted from running a whole department branch. He’d also heard other things. He suddenly noticed the Second was looking right at him so he swallowed and stared down at the woodgrain of the table, wishing he’d taken a seat closer to the back of the room.

“Cute ears.”

Darwin’s head shot up and he clapped his hands on the top of his head and felt, with a pang of dread, the soft fur of his ears. His face flushed hot and he reverted them back to his normal human ears.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” the Second said, seeing Darwin’s reaction. “I just thought they were cute.”

Darwin attempted an awkward smile. He willed himself to say something and failed. He knew they tended to slip out when he was nervous and he kicked himself again, this time for not wearing a hat. Having a shifter knack could be a real asset to field work, but only if the animal you shifted into was useful for that kind of thing. Darwin, however, was a red panda, which is why Darwin had an office job—well, that and every other single thing about his personality. When Darwin wasn’t a person in the form of a red panda, he was a pair of thick glasses in the shape of a person. Ironically, Darwin didn’t need glasses.

“Alright,” the Second started, raising his hand to the rest of the room with a wave. “Hi, everyone. I’m Marek del Sol and we’ve got a pretty serious job on our hands, so I’m going to get right to it.” He sat down. His Chicago accent was surprisingly heavy and Darwin guessed that he had probably grown up in Chicago’s Academy and stayed there for work to pick up that kind of tone. Darwin heard him clear his throat. “We should have Terre’s Student Wellbeing and Foster Liaison here?”

Whitney, sitting just a few chairs down, lifted her hand. “That’d be me.”

“Great. Hi, Whitney. Sorry we haven’t really met yet, but you and I are about to become best friends to get through this. Okay.” He opened a file box, but turned back to them without taking anything out. “Everyone knows by now that there are twenty-five unauthorized gens out in the world when they should be with us. I know the rumor mill has been hard at work, so I’m not sure what you’ve heard, but I’m here to tell you that when we bring these kids in, they’re being sent to foster teams. They aren’t being placed in Academies.”

A murmur ran down the table like a wave. Normally, when a knacked person was brought in from outside the company, they were brought through Neptune so they could go through Integration to be sure they weren’t a threat to others and ensure their loyalty. Darwin gulped and put the thought out of his mind. The only reason Darwin hadn’t gone through Integration when he was brought to the company was that he was only an infant at the time, so there was nothing to undo. Young enough that they just gave him the company name. His time in Reintegration had come later.

“I know, that’s not standard but this is what Pluto, Terre, and Mercury have agreed is best. I understand that one of the things you all do is vet teams to become fosters and check up on the wellbeing of current foster students. Well, we’re about to need a whole lot of foster teams and it’s our job to find them. Thirty of them.”

“Excuse me, sir?” Oliver piped up from the other side of the table. Ollie had transferred in from the Philadelphia office less than a year ago, and even though he only had two years more experience, Ollie looked about ten times more capable on first glance, or at least that’s what Darwin had always thought. He had light, mousy brown hair that curled just over his ears, and was about as tall and slender as Darwin was soft and round. Ollie had a sense of cool, level-headedness that sometimes made Darwin wonder why he liked to hang out with someone as awkward as himself.

“Just Marek is fine,” he said casually.

Oliver’s eyes bugged and Darwin was sure that his did too. He would have bet a million dollars that Oliver wasn’t about to use his name.

“Uh, I was going to ask,” he stammered. “I thought there were twenty-five gens.”

“Yes,” he replied, suddenly somber. “There were twenty-five knacked people who were gen’ed and dumped out to fend for themselves. And that’s indefensible on its own. But more so because, from what we understand, there are now only twenty-one still alive.”

Darwin’s heart dropped into his shoes. He’d already been feeling sick over it, but he’d managed to keep a narrative in his head that they could track all these kids down and help them. It had not included kids dying. Kids that were their responsibility.

“But we are going to track down the rest,” the Second said, looking around the room at each and every one of them, trying to convey a sense of finality and confidence in the task. He continued, “Mercury himself has asked that we find thirty foster team options—he said some will fall through. He’s also instructed that these teams need to be in the western third of the US so they’ll be in the catchment of LAHQ.”

More murmuring, this time louder.

Whitney cleared her throat. “We have to identify thirty active Sol teams, based in a small band of the world, that haven’t already been tapped to foster students?”

“Yup.” He said it with a hard ‘p’ at the end and a smile that clearly said, Yes, I also think this is insane.

“I know it’s a lot,” he said instead, “and it’s going to mean a lot of travel and evaluations, but we’re going to need to do it fast. Uranus is actively searching these kids down and Mercury has asked that we have a list of approved teams in a week.”

The Second stood before anyone could pick up their jaws to argue. “Now, I know I said ‘we,’ but I haven’t been trained to make those kinds of determinations, so I understand that most of that is going to fall on you all. I figured I could at least try to save you some time.”

He lifted the boxes onto the table. “So these are the Uranus files of the teams in the area we’re looking at, and I’ve gone ahead and color-coded them.”

He thumbed through one box. “The red tabs are teams with a history of multiple reprimands or violent offenses, so we probably want to skip all of those right off that bat.” He pulled out a hefty stack of files with orange tabs sticking out. “Orange are the otherwise eligible teams that you’ve already evaluated to be fosters and ruled out for one reason or another. Might be worth a second look?”

Whitney nodded as the rest of the room exchanged looks. There were a lot of serious reasons a team could be ruled out of the fostering pool.

“Now’s where it gets weird,” he said, pulling out a small stack of files. “I know foster teams are typically only the non-specialized teams that fall under Uranus, but sometimes Neptune and Mars take on kids who are on a track for those departments for the last couple of years of their schooling. So my thought was, why not let these teams take them a little sooner? These yellow tabs are possible Neptune teams or Mars units stationed in the catchment. Their work isn’t as conducive to training fosters new to Sol, but there are probably some good fits in there if you ignore the department.”

This was all getting to be a lot to take in. Darwin badly needed a glass of water. And possibly a vacation.

With a grunt, the Second plopped down a stack of files with blue tabs, which started to slide and tip over. He swore and broke it into two more steady piles. “Blue tabs are teams that simply don’t meet the baseline standards to be eligible for fostering consideration right now due to factors like being stationed in too rural of an area, being too young or too close to retiring, lower level discipline history, volatile knacks, or too few gens on the team. I also included teams that we, as their Uranus handlers in regular communication with them, simply wouldn’t recommend because they’re unresponsive, always do their paperwork wrong, or are otherwise just kind of jerks.”

Finally, he placed what appeared to be a painfully small pile of folders with green tabs. “Which means the green tabs are folks who seem pretty good to go on paper from what I can tell by holding their files up to your foster standards document, but I understand that’s where your expertise lies, so please check my work and override me.”

No murmurs this time. Just silence.

Whitney asked what they were all thinking. “How many green tabs are there?”

“Sixteen.”

“Sixteen,” she repeated incredulously.

"Yup. So if you like all sixteen, you’ll have to find fourteen suitable teams among the other color tabs to make thirty. Like I said, this is going to suck—Did I say that? I might not have started with that, so I’m sorry if I gave you false hope. This is going to be hard and put a strain on you personally and professionally. I took the liberty of tucking in a few little morale boosters to take the edge off, but with everything going on, that might not be possible. Everything about this goes through my desk but that’s only so I can make your life easier. I’ll make sure your travel is approved ASAP, or I’m happy to teleport you to and from wherever you’ve got to go. If you need something, email me, call me, just drop by my office if you need to.”

Darwin caught Ollie’s eye across the way and saw him mouth fuck to him as subtly as he could. Darwin focused on his breathing in response, which he knew Ollie would take as an agreement.

“Okay,” Uranus’ Second continued. “I’m going to let you all dig into these. Ping me as soon as you’ve done your first cull, just so I know where we’re at and I can refile the rejects. And I’m emailing you all my personal cell if you have an emergency and can’t get me any other way. For now I have to run—good luck!”

Then he was gone and they were all looking at Whitney. Darwin spared a moment of pity for her and also one of thankfulness that he didn’t have her job, or anything close to it.

Whitney stood up, lines forming around her mouth. “Everyone take a stack and start parsing through. If you find a team that you think is worth considering, throw it in the middle of the table.”

She grabbed a handful of files and handed them to the person next to her, who passed them on. Darwin watched the stacks travel down the line, coming closer and closer to him. He tried to estimate what color he’d be getting and decide what colors he wanted and which he didn't want to deal with—except he didn’t want any of them. In the end, a mixed stack of blue and yellow tabbed files landed in his hands. He plopped them down on the table and started to look through them.

Darwin held his lips between his teeth as he paged through. His foot was tapping beneath the table and he made an effort to stop when he noticed it, but it just kept starting back up when he wasn’t paying attention. He read over a Neptune team based in Sacramento. Just walking past a Neptune team in the hallway when they were in their black tactical gear, masks, and restraints clipped to their belt, ready to grab on a moment’s notice, was enough to give Darwin chills—that didn’t seem very kid-friendly. On top of that, it was a Retrieval team, meaning their job was to hunt down Sol agents who had gone rogue and become Icarus. Darwin was sweating. Their mission history had taken them all across the country and down into Mexico and central America. That seemed like too much travel for a foster. Plus the whole Retrieval thing felt like a lot for a new kid to handle. Having to bring in captive Icarus sounded traumatic, but not as much as erasing them. He tossed it aside.

Just as he began to hear murmurs and, as unlikely as it may have been, even a few giggles around the table, the next file he opened contained a printout photo of a little tan and white hamster wearing a mini cowboy hat, sitting beside Marek’s desk nameplate. "Baguette Says You Got This!" was printed in large, colorful letters across the top.

"What is happening right now?" someone half-laughed beside him. Darwin looked up to see that everyone had a similarly confused expression staring down at their files. Across the table, Ollie was holding up a photo of Marek with the same hamster sitting on his shoulder that read, "Baguette Update: You're Baguette's Hero!" The hamster was wearing a bright red little superhero cape.

"Let's keep on task," Whitney called, even as she herself was shaking her head at whatever photo she was holding.

Giving it one last glance, Darwin set the hamster printout down and got back into it. He had to admit, it had lightened the mood in the room a bit.

Refocusing, he nixed two Mars units because, while they do sometimes finish up a student’s training if that student was bound for Mars, the barracks and party atmosphere seemed like a terrible introduction to Sol for someone new. He advanced a file on a Neptune Clean Up team in San Francisco, since their work was largely non-violent and involved making sure the civilians didn’t become aware of knacked people. Erasing memories, physically cleaning up the fallout from other missions or the damage caused from knack misfires. Things like that. Still scary—there was a reason everyone stepped to the side for Neptune agents—but not as not terrible.

Then he opened a file that stopped him in his tracks. A name and face that he nearly recognized. It pulled at the foggy space in his mind where a chunk of his schooling sat. Darwin shook his head and decided to ignore it and evaluate as though it wasn’t someone he knew. It was a Uranus Moon, so a non-specialized team, which was a better start. They were stationed in a town he didn’t recognize in Nevada. Three people: a telepath team leader, a healer, and invisibility knack with secondary empathy. Two gens and one natural-born, but they’d only been in the field for seven months, so that wasn’t ideal—though, nothing they were looking at was.

He looked closer. The healer had defected from Entropy. Darwin didn’t like to think about that opposing organization of knacked people—but he had defected so that’s something. The woman with invisibility had an uneventful file, other than she had been assigned to Mars but didn't make the grade. It made sense that she’d be transferred to a non-specialized Moon.

He couldn't avoid it any longer so, feeling shaky, he scanned through the telepath’s file and skipped to his discipline history. Darwin felt himself begin to sweat again. Reeve del Sol. The same Reeve del Sol that had been in his class in the Academy. His memories from that time were blurred by a sort of smoke screen, but he felt like his memories of Reeve were fairly positive. Beyond the same disciplinary history—the same offense that he shared with Darwin—everything else about Reeve looked great on paper. He tossed the file into the center of the table.

---

LAHQ. Neptune Department. Present day.

It was late, past midnight, when Josh Marchand was let through the secured doors to the Neptune Reintegration wing on the lowest level of the building. He’d only ever been to this area once before, years back, and he wasn’t keen on returning, but Colin had made a right mess of his entire...everything. Josh’s days had been a complete disaster of meetings with people across all departments, but mainly he’d been hunkered down with Temple, the new head of Venus, Colin’s former Second; Rich, the head of Neptune; and Neptune’s Fourth, Casper, who was in charge of the internal investigations branch of the department. The meetings were an attempt to map out exactly the extent of the damage and how it was done, but it felt to Josh like it was raising more questions than answers.

The Reintegration wing was a more open-concept office than the Neptune floors above, with dozens of desks spread across the large open space. There was one enclosed office behind transparent glass walls, reserved for Fredericka, Neptune’s Second, in charge of the Reintegration division of Neptune department. Reintegration was among the harder to swallow branches of Neptune, but it was also an indispensable part of Sol’s truest purpose—to protect knacked people and keep them safe from the outside world. And, unfortunately, sometimes from each other. Josh could see that Fredericka was there at her desk, so he let himself in and she stood as he entered.

Fredericka was tall, in her thirties, on the pale side (a side effect of no windows this far underground, no doubt), with a narrow nose, pointed chin, and big, dark brown eyes. She kept her pin-straight, platinum blonde hair tied back in a neat ponytail and had sharp, short bangs that fell in the middle of her forehead. Unless there was some special work function, she tended to dress for comfort in Neptune-branded t-shirts or long-sleeve shirts and black leggings, as though she could jump into action anytime. Josh liked Freddie from the interactions they’d had. She was outspoken, absurdly competent, and on-task. She came across as cold and intimidating to most people, but so did Josh.

“Sir,” she said, as she came to a halt in front of him.

“Did I beat Rich here?” he asked.

“I’m afraid so, sir. Are you here for 83A?” She didn’t even stammer on the Icarus number.

His brow tensed, taken aback. “That’s his number?”

“Yes, sir.” Josh recognized that she looked nervous. “I thought Neptune would have spoken to you to get clearance for the ‘A’ designation?”

If you were found to be a danger to the company and its people, you were labeled Icarus along with a number (1 to 99) and a leatter designation—either A, B, or C. Once you were rehabilitated through Reintegration, assuming that was an option, your name was returned to you and the number was recycled. An A designation meant immediate erasure—there would be no chance given for rehabilitation, and protocol said that Neptune must personally run each one by Mercury first. The letter B signified that they were worth trying to save, but if the Icarus became a threat to Neptune agents’ lives, they could make a call to erase them if they had to. SolCorp preferred to go the Reintegration route whenever possible, but sometimes it just wasn’t in the cards. C designated Icarus were to be brought back to Sol alive and unharmed, at any cost. It all depended on the threat-level and gravity of the transgression.

“He did,” Josh confirmed, thinking back to that first late night. He’d been holed up with Rich and the others for most of the day and had confirmed to Rich what he’d known from the start: Colin couldn’t live out the week for what he’d done. But somehow, Josh had thought of his reply to Rich as a preliminary comment with a more formal pronouncement to come later. “Sorry,” he said, as though coming out of a daze. “I don’t know why I was surprised.” It was all just so unreal that something so dire would have been committed by someone in their upper ranks.

“We’re all surprised right now, sir,” she offered, voice softer.

It was true. A shock was running through the building like an electric current, disrupting everything, seizing people with the same gutted, confused expression.

“You’re right.” He glanced around the empty room. “What I don’t understand is how he managed it. Your telepaths have worked on him?”

“Yes, but this all happened back when I was still in the Academy. Regulations and record keeping were more lax back then. Simple as that. He couldn’t have done this today.”

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

Josh sighed. It was poor comfort. “He acted alone? How did he get babies out of the building?” That had been driving him mad. Sol had several layers of security to keep the public out and agents (specifically students) in. Sol’s children weren't allowed to leave the premises under any circumstances until either they graduated from the Academy or were assigned a foster team after being deemed a low enough exposure risk. Security was high. Venus was the only department that had a public entrance, since it handled the pharma business, but even still. The only way he could imagine it working was with a telepath accomplice to get him through checkpoints.

He saw her jaw clench. “It seems he spaced them out a few at a time over a year or so, not all at once. Easier to hide among the others before they had Achieved Breathe.”

That was Sol’s term for when gens transitioned from fetus to infant. They weren’t exactly born, as there was no womb involved in the equation, only thick plastic sacs full of an artificial amniotic fluid. He’d been to see Gen Incubation once. It was unsettling.

“And then?” he pressed.

The tension disappeared from Freddie’s face as she took on the inscrutable expression Neptune agents wore on duty. “He heavily sedated them and carried them out in a bag. According to him, this is also likely why several didn’t make it.”

“He…” Josh wouldn’t have believed that he was capable of feeling a deeper level of anger than what he’d already been feeling since Temple came to him with her discovery of this transgression. He was wrong. Clearing his throat, he needed to change the subject. “So how does this work? Is it you or Retrieval who does it?”

The erasing of Icarus was normally done in the field by Retrieval teams—Neptune agents tasked with finding Icarus on the run. It wasn’t the kind of thing normally done in a holding cell. It wasn’t unheard of for the Reintegration of an Icarus to fail, leading them to be erased, but it was rare and it had become even rarer since Freddie began running Neptune’s Reintegration branch. People across Sol may be frightened by Reintegration agents, but in truth, they just wanted to save every single Icarus out there. Killing someone meant failure. And what had happened with Colin was a symptom of a deep failure.

It had been a while since they’d had to erase an Icarus on-site in LAHQ. Josh had looked it up. The last time, they'd brought in a Retrieval agent to do the actual execution, but this was high profile. He wondered if it would be Freddie. Reintegration agents were trained to save lives, not end them, but he knew she’d begun her career in Retrieval before being transferred.

She took longer to answer this time. “Neptune hasn’t told me, sir.”

And Rich, thankfully, chose that moment to walk through the doors. He was older, in his late sixties, with a shock of iron-grey hair and heavily lined face. His expression was normally easy to smile but not recently.

He gestured dismissively. “My apologies, I had to get on Will about something.”

Josh nodded. Will was Neptune’s Third, head of Retrieval. He was a bit younger than Rich but nowhere near as competent as his boss.

“I was just asking Fredericka how this works. Who…”

“I am,” Rich said with a flat tone. The job did normally fall to a telepath and he fit the bill there. Rich had worked with Colin in some capacity for decades. Venus and Neptune had more overlap than one would think, and he wondered how wise it was for Rich to have to bear this. Or maybe it would be worse not to. Josh felt into his question to see if his knack would see fit to give him any guidance, but when it didn’t, he decided to just trust Rich on this.

“Will you walk us back?” Josh asked Freddie, who nodded and began to lead them toward the hallway at the back of the room. There was a conversation Josh was hoping to avoid with Rich, so the less time they were alone, the better.

The hallways in Reintegration were wide, like the ones in the Pluto hospital wing, but bare of any sort of decoration to warm the place. It was purposefully kept cold and clean, with intimidating, shining white walls and floors. And with all the sound-proofing, it was eerily quiet. Fitting on a day like today.

After a couple of turns, they ended up at Icarus Containment, another secure chrome door with another guard in full Neptune Blacks—the all-black SWAT-like gear that was standard issue for all Neptune agents. Most agents in Reintegration wore dove grey lab coats and scrubs, but when there was the possibility of any kind of combat situation or threat of physical altercations, Neptune Blacks came out.

Icarus Containment was one long, U-shaped hallway—more of the same stark white walls, bright overhead lights, and chrome doors. There were offices along the outer wall, and cells lining the inside of the U, so that they were positioned back to back with no cell doors sitting across from each other. Each cell was lined heavily with sound-proofing and Venus’ knack-dampening tech, so it was best to keep the cells clustered together. That way it wouldn’t affect the Neptune agents who worked there—they needed their knacks in reliable working order.

The cells doors were simple chrome with a narrow vertical window in each one, and a file holder that identified the Icarus inside. A few of the agents who worked in Containment poked their heads out of their offices situated across the hall, then drew back.

Rich stopped in front of a cell door and looked to Freddie. “Will you please get 83A settled into room one?”

Freddie beckoned to another agent in one of the offices and they left together. Rich and Josh waited in the quiet hallway.

“I noticed,” Rich muttered beside him, “that you canceled our meeting for tomorrow.”

Here we go. “I’m not dealing with that until after this crisis is over,” he replied as firmly as he could. That tone of voice tended to end a conversation, but Rich didn’t feel the same sense of deferment that others did. Neptune was maybe the one department head that was more intimidating than Mercury, and Rich had held the position for a long time.

“It seems a little unreasonable to not reschedule meetings until all this is settled. It could be months.”

Josh could feel a headache building. Not knack-related. Just a good ol’ fashioned tension headache.

“I meant your retirement and you know it. That’s what your meeting is about isn’t it?”

Rich didn’t look at him. “I’ve put in my years.” One of the benefits of being a department head was having leave to retire off-base if they weren’t an exposure risk. A chance to live a quiet life. There were simply too many people in Sol to extend that to everyone.

“Put in a few months more. Does she know?” he asked, meaning Freddie.

“Not yet.”

“Good. Keep it between us for the time being.” Josh had already had strong visions about Rich leaving and he wasn’t ready to get into it because it was going to cause conflict and now was not the time.

Rich gave him a confused look but just then, Freddie and the other agent brought out Colin. He looked strange, wearing the plain, loose, stark, Icarus-white standard-issue shirt and pants. Josh couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen Colin in anything but a suit. His hands were bound in front of him and he had wearable knack dampening devices on each limb. A rogue bio-manip like him could do a lot of damage in very little time. Cancer, destroy your blood’s ability to clot, disrupt critical neurotransmitters, and worse things that Josh assumed he’d never have been able to think of.

Colin’s eyes were blank and sunken. His bald head looked small and his face looked strange without his normal glasses. Colin saw them but didn’t react. Josh and Rich let them get a headstart, then followed them around the bend into one of the rooms dedicated to questioning Icarus. There was a steel table with a metal ring embedded in the center and a chair on either side. Fredericka attached Collins’ wrist restraints to the ring, and the other agent carefully got him sitting in the chair. The agent bent to affix his ankles to the chair legs, but Josh held up a hand.

“That’s enough.”

The agent nodded and left the room.

Freddie stood there, awaiting orders. Rich must have dismissed her using telepathy because she dipped her head at them before leaving and shutting the door.

Josh was finally in the room with the man he’d spent so many hours talking about and would likely be dealing with the effects of his actions for years to come. He tried to rein in his anger at the sight of him. “What were you thinking?” he demanded. "Why?"

The Icarus didn't respond.

Taking a breath, he thought better of his approach. Josh had dealt with Venus scientists enough that he knew if he was going to get a Venus agent to explain anything, it would be a theory.

"Why probability manipulation then?"

Colin did raise his eyes then, squinting without his glasses. "Because Rich can alter your mind and I can alter your body, but probability manipulators could alter the world itself. They could warp reality, creating connections, rending them..."

Josh swallowed. "Make the impossible possible."

"No," he corrected. "Make the improbable probable."

“You won’t even tell us where they are?” Days ago, he was neutral toward this man. Now, a fierce hatred of him swelled up.

“I don’t know where they are.” Colin leaned his elbows on the table.

Josh felt a rising, burning heat inside himself. He didn’t know how his skin could possibly hold it. He was shaking. “I don’t accept that.”

Colin turned his head to look at him, slow and pitying. “I’ve said all I’m going to say.”

"Colin," he barked, heedless of Rich's rebuking look.

“Josh, he’s done,” Rich told him with an uncomfortable finality. “If he had information about where they were, my telepaths would have found it.” He put a hand on Josh’s arm. “He’s done.”

Josh stepped back, watching as Rich pulled out the metal chair across from Colin and sat.

“83A, if there is anything you want to say, now’s the time.” Rich spoke loud and clear, likely for the cameras in the corners of the room, and with an air of cool formality. The two of them were of a similar age and Josh wondered suddenly if they’d grown up together, gone to Academy in the same Sol office. Classes were smaller back then and it was possible they’d have known each other even if they were a few years apart. He hadn’t thought to check.

“No,” was all Colin said.

It hit Josh suddenly what was about to happen, and his blood turned to ice. He found his hand had strayed up to the hair by his temple and began to fidget with it, feeling the strands rolling back and forth between his thumb and forefinger over and over again. He kept his hair short to try to curb the habit he’d had since he was a child, but it always came back.

Barely seconds after he’d spoken, Colin went slack, face down on the table. There was no hint of pain, no sound or twitch to suggest he’d felt anything. Whatever Rich had telepathically done to his mind had ended his life faster than he could blink.

Josh wanted that to bring a shred of comfort, but it didn’t. At an early age, Josh’s knack had been deemed too valuable to risk in the field. He wasn’t accustomed to seeing people die. As Rich checked for a pulse, he left the room, fearing he’d be sick.

Fredericka was there, face hard. She didn’t ask him anything. He assumed his face was fairly readable.

“What happens now?” he asked her.

“One of our sublimators will turn his body into gasses to be vented,” she explained with a measured dispassionate tone. “There won’t be anything left of him.”

He knew that, but hearing it was still hard. His hand was back at his hair again, but Freddie pretended not to notice. A question hit him, regretfully belated, and he asked the only person he could just then. “What do you think he thought would happen if it had worked as planned and he brought these kids back? That we’d have been fine with it? That this exact thing wouldn’t have happened?”

She looked to the side before answering. It seemed it was something she’d already thought about, which made sense. It was Neptune’s job to think like an Icarus when they had to. “I think he was counting on Sol’s Comets finding the kids when their knacks appeared. He was probably watching academy rosters for probability manipulators. There aren’t any probability manips in Sol,” she added quickly. “I checked.”

“And if Sol never found them, or if, god forbid, Entropy had found them first?”

“I think he would have simply written off the project as a failure and scrapped them,” she said. “Sir, I think he already had.”

“Yeah.” He didn’t feel better. With an effort, he set his hands at his sides. “Get some sleep, if you can,” he told her. “The real work starts now.”

They’d find them. He could feel it.

---

Six months ago. Beatty, NV.

Hannah was sitting on the porch railing, keeping Gareth company while he was grilling dinner, when Reeve’s voice rang out from inside the house.

“Hey, we’ve got mission orders.”

Hannah’s face shot up and she pushed herself off the railing. “Thank god,” she breathed and opened up the door. Gareth was still standing at the grill, turning to look back at her. “Just leave it,” she told him and then went inside to find Reeve. She didn’t close the door behind her to make sure he followed because she knew letting the AC out really annoyed the crap out of Gareth.

Reeve was bent over his laptop on the coffee table in the living room, looking grim.

“You serious? Our first mission?” she asked.

“That would be a strange prank,” he muttered, staring at the screen. He was sunburnt; he and she both were, though she was doing her best to tough it out and get acclimated.

Hannah had been convinced she was going to lose her mind watching daytime television in rural Nevada for the rest of her life. The first week or two, she had been all kinds of pleased to just kick back and do jackshit for a while, but it quickly got old and she began to itch for any kind of action. She’d convinced Gareth to spar with her a little bit, but he was still getting over the whole naked thing so it was too easy to out-grapple him when he hesitated to put hands on her.

“When?” she asked, trying to keep her energy in check. “Where?”

He cocked an eyebrow at her.

“Sorry, I’m just so fucking bored.” She sat across from him. “They don’t tell you when you’re being trained for combat day in and day out that you pretty much get to do none of it.”

He waited for her to stop. “It’s in Vegas.”

She looked up as Gareth finally came inside, carrying a platter of grilled veggies, brats, and veggie brats. He dropped it on the table and came to stand by Reeve. “So tonight?” he said grimly.

“I thought we might want to strategize and go tomorrow,” Reeve said, turning the laptop so they could all see the aerial map. “I pulled up some satellite imagery of the surrounding area. According to the complex’s website, it looks like his apartment number would place him on the north side. If you give me a second, I can look up prevailing winds and we can figure out a good spot for you if you want to be sniper backup.”

Hannah looked at Gareth and waited for him to notice her and acknowledge that they were both feeling the same thing. He flashed his eyes in her direction briefly and didn’t react, but she could sense his mild amusement as a pleasant glow.

“I don’t know, man,” Gareth said mildly. “I think we can go tonight. This is already way more planning than any mission I was ever sent on.”

“Well, this isn’t Entropy.” Reeve’s voice had taken on an edge to it. Oh boy.

Hannah leaned over to study the map. “So his window will be on this side?”

“Fourth floor.”

“Okay,” she continued gently. “So the roof of this parking garage here,” she pointed, “should be perfect and I can adjust for wind by feel when I get there. I’d have to recalculate anyway. There, set, and anyway I’ll probably just be chilling out, since I’m only subtle until I’m really not.”

Reeve’s brow furrowed, “Yeah, if I can get a visual and a lock on him I can facilitate something quieter that’s less likely to raise suspicion.”

Gareth snorted.

Reeve glared at him. “What.”

Gareth shook his head and pursed his lips. “Nothing, I’ve just never heard scrambling someone’s brains referred to in such fancy language.”

“You get how stupid it is to be sarcastic at a telepath about telepathy right?”

“I thought you weren’t supposed to be reading my thoughts.”

She rolled her eyes at Gareth. “Dude, we all know what you’re thinking. Three-toothed Dan who runs the gas station knows what you’re thinking.” She stood and stretched her neck. “Let’s just eat a little lighter than normal and then do this thing.”

“What am I doing in this plan?” Gareth asked.

“You’re backup on the ground. You go with Reeve and punch anyone he can’t brain explode.”

“Sounds fun.”

Reeve shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Don’t you want to read the file on the target?”

Hannah shrugged. “I’ll give their picture a look before we go.”

“You don’t want to know why Sol made him a target?”

Hannah folded her hands. “Do you want to tell us why?” Reeve ignored her. Maybe they taught things differently when you were going to be a team leader but coming off a Mars track, when she was told to do something, she just did it.

By moonrise, they were making their way up to the top of the parking garage. Hannah’s skin was pricked with nerves in the night air as they pulled to a stop. They got out and Hannah, already invisible, opened up the trunk.

“Do you have a scope?” Reeve asked her.

One huge benefit to being invisible is that she didn’t need to school her face when someone said something as absolutely stupid as that. “Are you asking if the sniper has a scope?”

“I mean a spotting scope.”

“Does the sniper have a—whatever, yes, here.” She handed it off. She started to get her rifle out but thought better of it and went over to make sure Reeve didn’t break it. “To your right,” she said, squatting down next to him.

“Yeah I know.” Telepaths were handy that way. “Shit,” he swore and leaned back, waving her in.

Gareth sniffed. “What is it?”

If Reeve had lined it up right, and he’d studied the schematics all through dinner so that seemed likely, the windows were a lovely shade of light blue. “Blackout curtains. Lights are on though.” Hannah sighed and sat back. “Can you make him open them?”

“I’d have to find him first. The file doesn’t exactly give me a lot of info to work with.”

“So we go in.” Gareth sounded partly relieved.

Reeve furrowed his brow. “Just go knock?” He clearly didn’t like straying from their plan.

“Do you need to put some clothes on?” Gareth asked. “You can’t bring a weapon like that."

She smiled, even though she knew they couldn’t see it. “I got it covered.” She went through her clothes in a pile on the backseat and pulled out a small box of single edge razor blades. She held one up, turning it to catch the light, and then fit it in her mouth between her teeth and cheek. Once it was in her mouth it would be invisible like the rest of her.

“I’m not gonna lie,” Gareth sighed, “that’s gonna stress me out.”

“It's fine, you think we don’t train for this?” They flinched at her voice and she shook her head.

“Let’s go.”

They entered the building and knocked on the target’s door like total nerds and nothing happened.

“Alright,” Reeve said, kneading his temples. “Just give me a minute. I’m going to try to comb through the building and locate him.”

“Are you just searching for a guy whose inner monologue is like, 'My name is, fuck, uh, Steve?'”

“I’m just going to go off of the intel, and it will be easier if you stop talking to me.”

Hannah put her hands up, not that he could see her. They waited. Time dragged on. She couldn’t say how much because she’d never worn a watch in her life. Reeve was getting frustrated and she was beginning to think that maybe this guy had just left his lights on. She rubbed her arm and found them covered in goosebumps. The building was significantly over-air-conditioned.

She got a little closer to Gareth. “Hey, do you want to go see if this place has a gym or pool or something? If he’s not there, I say we stake the place out tomorrow.”

Once Gareth had gotten over his mini heart attack because he didn’t realize she had moved, he nodded. “Yeah, no point just standing here.”

Reeve turned his bent head in their direction, eyes still shut. “I don’t think we should split up when we don’t have a set plan.”

Gareth rolled his eyes. “You just heard the set plan. We’re going to check to see if there’s a fucking gym. You stay here and give yourself a headache.” He took off down the hall and Hannah followed him.

Stay in touch if you need me, came Reeve’s voice in her head.

You too, she thought back.

Back down the elevator. She could feel Gareth’s nervous energy, not knowing where to look since he couldn’t see her—not that he strictly knew where to look when she was visible either.

“What are the chances he’s here and Reeve just can’t find him, do you think?” she muttered, mindful of her volume for some reason.

Gareth shrugged. “I would think he could find him if he were here, but my scale for telepaths is way fucked.”

“How so?” The doors opened into the lobby and they walked out. Gareth was tight-lipped, not wanting to talk to himself, though the tension in his body made her think he’d just taken that as an out. He’d been entirely too avoidant about where he’d come from and it was driving her a little up the walls.

They went down the hallway in the opposite direction from the front door and spotted a sign for a gym, which they followed, and that led them to a door with an RFID lock.

Gareth knelt to untie then slowly re-tie his shoe and hissed, “If I start peering through doors, someone’s going to call the cops, so how about you do that?”

She was already on her way to pressing her face against the narrow slit of vertical glass. Inside was a medium sized apartment gym with maybe fifteen different stations and a wall of weights. There were two men inside working out. One of them was their guy. She projected the thought to Reeve and hoped he got it.

“Yup, but he’s not alone,” she told Gareth.

“So we wait.”

They did, but they didn’t have to wait too long for the younger guy they didn’t know to come out. Hannah saw him coming and carefully got out of the way. He gave Gareth a strange look then started toward the front of the building. Hannah had turned her attention back to looking through the glass to watch the target, which is why she didn’t notice that the other guy had turned back around until she heard him call out to Gareth.

“Hey, man, you got a problem?”

Shit. Gareth had been messing with his shoelaces for a while. At this point, he probably wasn’t doing it very convincingly anymore and looked suspicious as hell. She turned to see the guy, but not fast enough and he bowled right into her, taking them both down to the floor.

He made the type of face you make when you trip over nothing and find yourself suspended on an invisible creature that you can feel, and it feels like skin. Hannah, careful of the metal in her cheek, twisted and hooked her arm around his neck to try to choke him out at the same time that Gareth gave him a good knock on the back of his head, winging Hannah’s elbow in the process and making her hiss between her teeth. He went limp on top of her and she rolled to heave him off with a groan.

Right about then, when Hannah was on her back on the scratchy hallway carpet, the door to the gym opened and the target was staring, dumbfounded, at Gareth and his face-down gym-mate. Of course.

Gareth went to charge him but slowed as the target’s face fell slack and his eyes went vacant. Hannah pushed herself up into a sitting position and stood with a mix of relief and annoyance, seeing Reeve walking toward them.

“Drag him into the gym,” Reeve ordered curtly, with a tone of voice that sounded like he had no intention of helping them. But he did, bending to help Gareth haul him through the door. The target had already backed up out of the way and was staring blankly at a wall when Hannah got into the room and shut the door. Gareth’s face was shut tight and hard. The anger coming off of both of them was tense enough to make Hannah clench her jaw.

“Okay,” Reeve said, digging the heels of his hands into his eyes, “Not exactly how I would have hoped this would have gone.”

“At least we actually found him,” Gareth fired back.

Reeve dropped his hands and glared at him before turning to address Hannah—he could track her with his telepathy and actually knew where she was. “This would normally be a situation where you call in an exposure to Neptune and have them send out a Cleanup team to wipe this civilian. I’ve got to say that’s pretty embarrassing for our first mission.”

“Are you proposing we don’t do that?” she asked, more than a little shocked.

Reeve didn’t answer right away and the longer he took to speak, the more Hannah began to panic. Reeve really didn’t seem like the type of agent to mess with protocol, but those two had their defenses up so high that the three of them didn’t actually know each other all that well yet.

“What about him?” Gareth pointed to the target.

“We’ll walk him back up to his apartment and I’ll do it there. It’s this one that’s the problem. I can’t even use my telepathy to erase his memory because he’s unconscious, and I don’t feel like waiting around for him to come to is a great idea.”

“So do we call it in?” she asked. “It was like two seconds.” She looked at Gareth but he was all locked up fury.

“Here,” Reeve said finally, “help me carry him over to this treadmill and make it look like he fell down.”

Gareth helped, which surprised Hannah a little, and even had the idea of untying one of his tennis shoes. It was an embarrassing enough situation that a toxically masculine dude would probably keep it to himself. Once they’d got him properly arranged, Reeve grabbed the guy’s keys and headed out.

“What’s that for?” she asked.

“We’re going to go make his apartment look like he had one too many, to explain why he might have fallen and dreamed up this trippy memory.”

“Jesus,” she wheezed. “That is...Why aren’t you in some elite shit like Saturn?”

“Guys,” Gareth interrupted, “he’s waking up.”

“Even better,” Reeve breathed, and she felt the panic in the room reduce by half. Whatever Reeve did, the younger guy gingerly touched the back of his head, got up, looked around—his eyes passing right over them—and left. Reeve took a deep breath. “Alright, let’s go.”

Gareth looked in the general direction her voice had been coming from with a blank face before following Reeve out the door, and she fell in line behind him. They took a leisurely pace back up to the apartment on the fourth floor and the target let them in.

Reeve turned back to look at them at the door. “You don’t have to come in.”

“Splitting up didn’t seem to work out all that well last time,” Hannah muttered. She shut the door behind her. Gareth’s energy was suddenly strung taut like a rope about to fray and break. While Reeve walked the target over to his couch and sat him down she leaned over. “You need to wait in the hall?”

“I’m fine,” he snapped. She rolled her eyes. She wondered how long he would stew and brood before he let anyone in.

The target turned on the television, then promptly slumped back, his head craning over the back of the couch with a steady flow of blood coming from his ear.

There was no sound and no pain from what Hannah could feel. The only pangs of suffering that flooded the room were echoing from Gareth and Reeve. This had probably been Reeve’s first kill and he was feeling all the aching depth of that. Gareth, she still didn't really get besides his hating telepathy in general. Hannah was feeling a measure of pain as well. She took a couple of steps forward, looking at the target. She had shadowed missions and gone on a few with her unit, so it was far from the first body she’d seen, and this was honestly the cleanest kill she'd witnessed, but it was the first she was partially responsible for.

There was something else coming from Reeve that nagged at her as he stood there in frozen silence. “What is it?” she asked gently.

Reeve shook his head and cleared his throat, as though there was something stuck in it. “I couldn't find him.”

Hannah furrowed her brow. “It’s a big building,” she offered.

“I mean.” He wasn’t looking at her. “I was looking for the stuff in the file, the stuff it said he'd done and it just wasn’t...Sorry, I’m fine. Let’s go.”

None of them felt anything like fine, and they wouldn’t for the whole silent ride home.

***