Chapter 3: Sunset (Sunrise) Vol 1. Issue 3.

Issue 3 cover for Sunset: Hannah and Gareth laying on the deck with empty beer bottles [https://64.media.tumblr.com/9cc5f43f63f53235d6d70e81432526c4/ddd8543b3d79c286-c3/s1280x1920/d5d6029e4ebaf8c9e9f53a7c381ff4f8cc64784b.pnj]

LAHQ. Neptune Department. Present Day.

Casper cleared his throat as he gently tapped his stack of papers against the table. He and Temple sat across from each other in the small interrogation room in the Investigation wing and he took his time arranging the documents in front of him into neat piles, uncapping his pen, and placing it carefully on top of a pile. He found that being visibly methodical when he was conducting interviews gave him a little more gravitas, even though outside of work, he had to admit, he was a bit more laid back than a lot of Neptune agents.

Casper was a telekinetic, a tall man in his late 40s, but prematurely fully grey. This should have given him the presence one expected of Neptune’s Fourth, in charge of Internal Investigations, but he kept his hair long enough to fall just past his ears and he was covered in tattoos. And besides that, everyone knew he had started his career in Mars as an MP, and while his stern posture (and tattoos) reflected his military background, Mars agents also had a bit of a party-life reputation off the clock. He’d been all but poached by Neptune when he’d shown a talent for investigation, and truth be told, he felt much more at home in Neptune than he had in Mars.

Temple shifted in her seat. She was a petite woman in her early thirties, with dark skin and darker eyes. Her natural hair was pulled back into a round bun low on her head. He knew she was a biological manipulator, like the former head of Venus. It was a common knack in that department. She was young for her position, though, and it was showing.

Casper squinted at her, trying not to think about how this was supposed to be his vacation week and all the plans that had been swiftly canceled. He sniffed. “So,” he began, “What is your name?”

“Casper,” she said, “You know who I am.”

He felt for her. This whole mess was outrageous and he couldn’t imagine how she must be feeling. But he pushed aside the kinship all upper ranked agents had with each other. “This is for the record. Please state your name.”

She nodded, stiffening her posture. “Temple del Sol.”

“And you are aware that this conversation is being recorded.”

“Yes.”

“Good. Let’s begin. How long were you Venus’ Second?”

She narrowed her eyes slightly and gazed from him to the file under his folded hands. “Approximately eleven months. I’m sure you have the exact date. Previously, I was running the Venus department in the Philadelphia office.”

“When did you first alert Mercury to unethical activities?”

“Three days ago,” she said with a frustrated sigh. She’d been under surveillance for the past few days while the preliminary investigation was underway. It’s not like she was in some holding cell during the process—she’d been given an unused, bare bones unit in Neptune living quarters in which to wait between meetings while Neptune investigators had methodically combed through her flat, labs, and office.

After the full investigation was resolved, she’d either be allowed to go home or be erased like her former superior. It might yet be a little while, though. Casper cringed internally, thinking about how big a department Venus was, how much surveillance there was to go through, and how many people were on the former Venus’ personal staff. They’d been making a good dent in it—his people were all hands on deck, and they’d been all but putting in 24 hour work days since the news first came across Rich’s desk. But they had a long way to go and this wasn’t likely going to be her first interview. She had to have known that. He could understand her frustration.

“And when did you first uncover 83A’s activities?” he asked.

Temple flinched a little at the Icarus number, which Casper could understand. His name was gone now, along with the rest of him, and they’d worked closely together. Still, he made a note on the legal pad in front of him.

“That morning,” Temple replied, pursing her lips and eyeing his notepad and pen.

“How?”

She sighed and closed her eyes. “We were due to establish a new set of gens in a few days. It’s kind of a production, so I wanted to go over past records to ensure we had a proper spread of knacks. The system was running slow and I got impatient and went for the physical records that Col—” She swallowed the second half of his name and stiffened. “The former Venus—”

“83A,” Casper corrected.

Temple squinted at him, clearly annoyed. He made another note. “83A wasn’t in the office that day to ask, so I went through the files in his office. He had never expressed that there were files I wasn’t allowed to see in there, and that’s where I found those particular documents.”

“What did the documents show, specifically?”

“There was a map marking the original locations and confirmed deaths as well as a spreadsheet in the standard format that was used at the time, which isn’t as detailed as what we use now. It listed things like the knack he was targeting, the secondary backup knack for each gen, assuming the probability manipulation failed, and their names.”

“He named them.” It almost made it worse.

“Sol’s algorithm named them. Like all gens.”

Casper flipped to a page in his folder. “Surveillance shows you called 83A before reporting to Mercury, and my agents tell me you spent a significant amount of time in your own office afterward.”

He watched as Temple looked down. “I was giving Venus the benefit of the doubt. I was sure I had to be reading the file wrong. I couldn’t believe he would have done this.” Temple straightened her shoulders, but Casper could see she was fighting a wave of emotions—sadness, anger, fear. “I’m sure you also found that I wasn’t able to reach him, thank god.” A touch of indignation. “I haven’t been sleeping much—I keep tossing and turning with thoughts that all this might not have been uncovered if he’d taken my call and that would have been my fault.”

Casper’s face remained impartial as he made notes. “And what about the time you spent alone after that call?” he asked, before looking up.

More emotions passed over Temple’s face—not quite frustration anymore and not quite offense, but something in the middle. And a hint of embarrassment, maybe. None of these were the same as guilt, but he had more questions yet. “Oh, like you wouldn’t need a minute if your boss did something like this,” she said, a little sharply.

Casper gave her an annoyed glance before catching himself and course-correcting, schooling his face again. He began to respond when a knock at the door made them both look up. Casper’s face twisted in disbelief as the door opened and a nervous Neptune agent looked in.

“What about this meeting makes you think this is one to interrupt?” Casper snapped, exasperated.

“I’m sorry, sir,” the agent cringed. “Venus agents won’t allow ours into one of the research sectors, saying they don’t have clearance and their IDs won’t unlock the door.”

“I’m sorry?”

“We can’t proceed with the investigation until we can get in,” the agent said.

Casper worked not to raise his voice. “Our people don’t need to be let in. We have universal keys,” he said. It sounded ridiculous having to state the obvious.

The agent shook his head and shrugged, mouth slightly open, and stammered, “I thought you’d want to know before Sara and her team lose their tempers.”

“For the love of—” Casper muttered and gave Temple a despairing look despite himself.

Temple was rubbing her eyes. “I know where they are.”

Casper sat back, raising his eyebrows. “Well, would you care to share with the class?”

She shook her head, returning his despairing look tenfold. “I know this looks bad, but I can’t.”

“You’re right,” Casper said, “It looks real fucking bad, Temple.” The agent in the door shifted uncomfortably. Casper didn’t care.

Temple lifted her chin, though, and said with as much confidence as she could muster, “I don’t have clearance to disclose this information without an express, direct order from Neptune or Mercury himself. I’m sorry.” Her eyes seemed sincere.

Casper clicked the cap back on his pen and let it drop on the table with a careless clatter. He sat back, thinking about the beach he should be sitting on today. He fished his phone out of his pocket, eyes drifting to the ceiling and sighing. As he waited for Neptune’s PA to pick up, he said to the agent, “You’re dismissed,” with more harshness than he’d intended. The agent balked and backed out the door, nodding. Casper looked at Temple, “You’d better have a damn good reason for—” The PA picked up, so he shifted gears, giving Temple a look he hoped completed the sentence with enough emphasis. “Yes, hello. This is Casper. I need Neptune down here in investigation room two. ASAP. This has to do with Temple del Sol. It’s urgent, so I don’t care if you have to rip him out of a meeting with Mercury himself or pull him naked out of the damn shower. ASAP.” He hung up before the PA could say anything.

He sighed, looking at Temple’s stunned silence. “That… doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you can just demand of Neptune,” she stammered.

Casper slumped and put his head on the table. Fuck it. Gravitas out the window. Whatever. “I should be sipping a Mai Tai right now,” he said.

Temple didn’t say anything.

“Well,” Casper said, lifting his head and straightening his posture again. He cleared his throat and picked his pen back up. “Shall we resume? I’m guessing we’ll have some time to kill, and for some reason, all of the sudden, I’ve got a lot more questions coming to mind.”

Temple sighed and sat back in her chair, deflated.

Casper looked at his notes and skipped to the part of her story that didn’t sit right with him. “So,” he continued. “What did you do with the documents after you found them?”

Her brow furrowed. “I put them in the locked filing cabinet in Gen Incubation.”

This was the part he didn’t quite understand. “Why?” They had security records of her entering incubation, leaving, and then returning with Mercury.

She shrugged and her eyes flicked to the corner of the room for a split second. She was overthinking her answer. “It was the safest place I could think of and no one would know they were there but me.”

“But why not just carry them with you to Mercury?” he pressed.

Temple kept her body still but her eyelids fluttered and her chest rose and fell. If he had to say, she didn't want to answer but she wasn't trying to dissemble.

“It’s a long walk. I didn’t know who I might run into in the hallway. If Colin could do this...”

That angle hadn’t occurred to him and it should have. He really did need that vacation. If she’d hidden the files in a room with higher security because she was scared of what 83A would do to her if he caught her with them on her way up to Mercury, that could go a long way to convincing him she could be trusted.

“If you’d met 83A in the hallway, what did you think would happen?” Casper asked, but was interrupted by another knock on the door. “What is it now?” he demanded loudly as he turned.

The door opened and Neptune walked in. Casper’s muscles locked in place and he wished he could swallow his own tongue.

There was a hint of his characteristic smirk on his otherwise deadly serious face. “I didn’t realize I’d be intruding since you called me. And I hope you're not too disappointed that I’m not naked and fresh from the shower.”

“Sir,” Casper stammered. “I apologize. I lost my temper.”

“It’s fine. We’re all running on diesel today. What’s the emergency?”

“Yes, sir. My agents are being prevented from searching one of the smaller research wings in Venus. Temple says I don’t have clearance and won’t answer my questions about it.”

Neptune’s expression didn't budge. “She’s right. You don’t have clearance.”

Casper couldn’t hold in an exasperated breath. “I can’t do my job if I don’t have all the information.”

“You can do your job just fine without this. I’ll send your agents back here and do a walkthrough of the area myself just to be thorough. Temple, you want to take me through it?”

She nodded, sparing him a glance. “Of course, sir.”

Casper blinked. His boss had just ended his interrogation. He stood up, along with Temple, as his annoyance turned to profound unease. He hadn’t missed what Temple had said earlier—that there were two people who could give her approval to discuss this. Mercury he understood, but not Neptune. Casper’s plan for the day had fallen apart and now that ball of chaos was imploding as well, and his emotions got the better of him.

“What the hell sort of classified research reports to Neptune?” As it left his lips, he knew he shouldn’t have said it.

Rich gave him a look devoid of all amusement. “Agent.”

Casper shut his mouth and ground his jaw. “Yes, sir.” He watched them walk out, leaving Casper alone in his interrogation room. He sighed heavily. He was supposed to be on a beach worrying about getting a sunburn.

---

LAHQ. Saturn Department. Present day.

Mackenzie couldn’t help but smile when she walked into her Third’s office. Grace was typing on her computer and holding the phone to her ear with her shoulder with the most perturbed look on her face.

“I’m on hold,” Grace told her. Her long, pin-straight, dark hair was threatening to fall into her face and, with no free hands to fix it, Grace had taken to glaring at it out of the corner of her eye.

“But are you okay?” she asked without trying to hide her amused tone.

“Yeah, I just hate dealing with the Mozambique postal system. Oh—” Her expression jumped as whoever she was on hold with came back on and she began to politely reason with whoever was on the line in a dialect of Portuguese Mackenzie didn’t fully understand. Mackenzie spoke more than her fair share of languages but Grace was omnilingual and spoke every language on the planet like it was her native tongue. When her knack had activated as a toddler in Puerto Rico, her parents had thought she was a messenger from God, and that kind of fanfare made it easy for Sol to become aware of her quickly.

Mackenzie took a seat and waited for Grace to finish. She’d taken to her new position as Saturn’s Third like it was second nature, she thought to herself smugly. Mackenzie’s former Second, Paul, had been vocally critical years back when she decided to promote Grace to a position in LA and began grooming her to become a ranked officer eventually. Paul argued that she didn’t fit the “Saturn mold” and expressed concern she couldn't handle their level of field work.

Grace was short, but not overly so, and underneath her usually impeccable makeup and flare for glamor, she had an unassuming face, round middle, and soft-looking arms and legs. Mackenzie supposed that if one considered Louis’ practically overly-athletic build as the standard for Saturn, Paul would have been right that she didn’t fit—but that would be a mistake.

In the end, she had asked Paul if an old woman like herself fit this “Saturn mold” and watched the fear flash behind his eyes. Mackenzie often wished she’d asked Paul to retire sooner.

“Okay,” Grace said, hanging up the phone and switching back to a West-coast American accent. “Sorry about that, what’s up?”

“I have good news and bad news.”

“Okay.” Grace looked at her with concern.

Mackenzie quirked her mouth in a smile. “You know that assignment in Tokyo you’ve been dreading because you have no appreciation for culture?”

Grace narrowed her eyes at the playful teasing. “I like culture just fine—it’s just too friggin’ hot in Tokyo this time of year. Send me someplace cold and I’ll just add layers with zero complaints, but it’s not like I can remove my skin.”

“Well, it’s been canceled.”

“Oh.” She sat back and cringed. “What’s the bad news?”

“I’m going to need you to step up and take on a higher workload after I go under.”

Grace’s eyes widened. “Ma'am, I’m sure I could figure out a way to remove my skin if you give me like fifteen minutes.”

Mackenzie laughed. “Do you want to go over it with me?” Grace had been stationed in LA for a few years, but it would be the first time Mackenzie had used her knack with Grace as her Third.

“No, Ma'am,” she began, making Mackenzie cock her head in surprise, “I went over everything top to bottom when I was promoted. You’ve got enough on your plate. The point is for us to support you, not the other way around.”

Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

“Alright. Let me know if you change your mind. Go cancel your flight.”

“With pleasure, Ma’am.”

---

Five months ago. Beatty, NV.

In the morning when her head had cleared and she’d washed down her cottonmouth with a gallon of water, Hannah would collect and count the beer bottles, dumping out any that hadn’t evaporated overnight (probably none), and go for a walk. There was a section of desert she liked to call Ouch Foot Flats where, early in the morning, she’d take them, mindful of her own feet, and chuck each bottle as far and as randomly as she could. Then she’d set up her rifle in a niche in a rocky outcropping about eight-hundred meters from Ouch Foot Flats, and try to find and break every one of those bottles.

But it was still nighttime. The moon had set and Hannah and Gareth, having abandoned their patio chairs an hour ago, lay on the sun-warmed wood of the porch looking at the sky. Reeve was inside, filling out their post-mission paperwork because he couldn’t stand to let it wait until morning. It seemed to her like he was always hunched over his laptop researching god knows what.

Gareth propped himself up on an elbow. “You seriously would’ve drank like this last night, right before an assignment?”

“Yeah, if you would have drank with me. But doing it alone sort of misses the point. That’s not relaxing, just sad.”

“Wouldn’t you just be hung over as shit?”

“Probably a little.”

He shook his head. “Nope.”

Hannah gave a small shrug. “I just hate the waiting. Night before we head out somewhere? My nerves get all…jangly.”

“Well, my nerves would be jangly if our sniper was on a rooftop somewhere sleeping off a headache instead of shooting people.”

She flipped him off but she didn’t think he noticed. “Do you know what they call people who need to get drunk after a mission in Mars? Gone soggy. Because they’ve been in too long and they should probably retire from the field.”

He flicked a bottle cap off the edge of the porch. “Mars is crazy. You know that, right? They’ve got a weird-ass little culture of their own.”

“All the departments do.” Hannah sat up to open another bottle. Gareth was impossible to keep up with and she didn’t try, since with his healing knack he’d be metabolizing every other beer he drank like it was water. The night wind was chilly on her bare skin and the stars reeled as she lifted her head to drink.

Gareth tapped the bottom of an empty on the wood. “Where I came from, people just did whatever you had to do to get by. You drank too much, you screwed whoever, you avoided work when you could.”

“That sounds like Mars.” Hannah offered, plucking the empty from his hand and putting her open beer in its place.

“It’s not.” The words were flat and final.

She opened another for herself. “Well, it does though. It sounds similar to the unit I fostered with. They do the job and when they aren’t doing that they drink, get laid, make sure they live the hell out of their lives, because not every Mars mission is one they expect you to come back from.”

“Together.” Gareth tilted the bottle, watching the porch light shine through. “There aren’t teams or units in Entropy. You take out a target on your own and then you’re on your own to deal with it. Sometimes there are other agents around, but you just don’t. It’s better to keep to yourself, keep your head down.”

She scooched to lay down beside him with her head by his feet. Gareth never talked about his time in Entropy. It was a wound that hadn’t even begun to close and, with her knack, she could feel it eating through him.

“You just don’t know unless you’ve been there,” he sighed.

She looked up. It was rare for him to offer anything up after a gap in conversation.

“So tell me.”

“I’m not nearly drunk enough for that.”

“So drink!” She poked the side of his head with one callused toe. He lifted his head to glare at her but she looked up at the sky and pretended to not see. He was restless beside her and his tension felt like static electricity. Hannah may have only known Gareth for a couple months, but she knew him well enough to know you couldn’t push him. Not hard anyway. She’d wait.

There were just so many stars here. Where she grew up in the city, the night sky was a flat, black plane that held the moon and some pinpricks of light, like holes poked through a black piece of paper held up to a lamp. But out here where it was so much darker, the sky was full of stars in a way that made her feel dizzy and small. Like the sky was closing in on them. Even though it was darker, it wasn’t black, somehow. It had all these hazy edges of the Milky Way that made it look rumpled and textured.

“They’re insane,” he said after a long silence. “And I mean like madhouse, terrifying crazy. The people are bad enough with their brutal chain of command, but the Elders...”

“That’s what Entropy calls the Anthropophagi?”

Everyone in Sol knew the basics about Entropy, but those basics weren’t much. They didn’t seem to have any clear goals besides causing mayhem, and were made up of mostly knacked folks and some Anthropophagi—and on the unstated list of things that were taboo to talk about in Sol, the Phagi were at the very top. She had never seen one of them herself, or even known anyone who had, until she met Gareth. Most of what she knew came from their short entry in the handbook, where they were compared to humans being infected with something like rabies that had beneficial physical effects and negative mental ones.

Gareth snorted at her question. “Anthropo—Leave it to Sol to find a word even more pretentious than Elders.”

He was getting off course, deflecting. She scolded herself for asking the question. She needed to not throw him off once he started.

“They’re worse than the people?” she hazarded.

“Well, yeah.” Gareth took a long pull of his beer. “If the people got bored of you, they’d either go find someone else or try to kill you. When an Elder got bored of you, they’d just eat you.”

“That’s for real?” Hannah had heard her fosters talk about the Phagi being cannibals, but only in conversations that were hushed when she came into the room.

“Like a chicken wing. Listen, I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I know.”

“Okay.”

Hannah nursed her beer, it was something to do with her hands, a motion to focus on, something to look at besides Gareth’s shoes. It had gone warm but it was a feeling to focus on that wasn’t the way his energy jumped and hummed.

“I had a whole different problem. Because of my healing, they could hurt me if they wanted and not put me out of commission for too long. He called a lot of it training.” He chuckled, but it didn’t really sound like laughing.

Hannah waited as long as she could before asking, “He?” testing the waters, hoping it would lead to more and not make his ability to talk run dry.

“Marcus Adler. He’d become the second in command by the time I left and he's completely insane. He’s like a sick kid sitting over an anthill with a magnifying glass.”

“He was a Phage?”

Gareth shook his head then turned his head to take a slow drink without spilling it everywhere. It was still early enough in the night for him to care.

“He’s a telepath.”

Hannah felt his muscles seize up, the emotion that flowed around him that had become so familiar to her stagnated and was starting to sting near her calf where it touched his arm.

She shifted his focus. “What were your missions like? Were they anything like ours?”

He was quiet so long that Hannah didn’t think he was going to answer. That they’d drink and she’d try to distract him from his post-mission drops until one of them fell asleep and then it was up to the other to get them both inside and into something like a bed. It was their little drunk game of chicken.

“I killed a lot of people,” he said finally. “We kill people now when it’s called for, but we get profiles about the assignments, we get reasons they are targeted. We do it as clean as we can. In Entropy, it’s slaughter. I’d get a name, sometimes a photo, and then they expected me to get the job done. Sometimes,” he swallowed, “Sometimes I’d get a location and a designated time. A warehouse, a home. You were supposed to clear it. Kill everyone inside. Everything. Adults, kids. Pets. We never knew why. Agents didn’t get to know much about plans or motives or what anyone else was doing. And anybody who didn’t carry out orders, well, coming up with interesting punishments was one of Adler’s favorite games.”

Hannah shifted her weight, rolling slightly to one side, resting her body close to his. She wondered if Reeve knew what it had been like for him, if these memories that surfaced after missions were loud enough that Reeve heard them without wanting to. If he did, he hadn’t let on. It was hard for her to imagine Gareth in a place like that. He was a grump and an asshole sometimes, but he wasn’t cruel. Once, when she had taken a knock to the head during a mission, he had carried her to the car. She had been dizzy and nauseous, but she could remember how gently he had picked her up, careful to keep her from jouncing. He sat in the backseat with her on the long ride home, stroking her fingers lightly.

Closing her eyes, she tried to think clearly, but the drink was taking over. His energy was getting worse. She had to shift it again. “This is probably a shit thing to ask but, why’d you join up?”

Gareth tossed his empty bottle down the steps onto the dirt. “I was living on the streets when they recruited me. My knack showed up when I was thirteen, so instead of having my family treat me like a freak, I took off. Entropy gave me a place to stay and food and said they’d train me to work for them. That they were like me. I had no idea how fucked up Entropy was. They were the name on my pack of playing cards growing up for Christ’s sake. But even if they ordered you to do something you wouldn’t want to, you wanted to do it by the time Adler got done screwing around in your head.”

Gareth reached down with a blind hand and found her fingers. She gave his hand a squeeze.

“But you left.”

“Yeah, some days I still can’t figure out how I did it. Everyone has a limit I guess.”

“What happened that—”

“Nope. Still not drunk enough.”

Hannah let go of his hand and stood up. On his back, Gareth lifted an arm without looking, reaching out a hand to take a fresh beer from her but she ignored him, going inside instead. She heard a tired, sad grunt from Gareth as she closed the door. When she reemerged a minute later with a bottle of tequila he had bought but barely touched, he laughed.

“You’re not going to let this go, huh?”

She opened the bottle and took a swig, making a face. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“You’re trying to take advantage of me.”

She dropped to sit down on the steps and handed him the bottle. He sighed, then sat up and took it from her.

“Tequila is gross,” she said as he settled in next to her.

“Don’t drink it.”

“Hey, I walked all the way into the house for this.” She slowed herself down to stop from slurring. “And if you have one of those I-hate-myself hangovers in the morning from mixing beer and liquor and I don’t, you won’t be my friend anymore.”

“Good point,” he smiled, drinking. ”Except I don’t get hangovers.” He nudged her playfully with his shoulder and she leaned into it to keep her dubious balance.

“How do you do it?” he asked. “I get Reeve. He’s straight down the company line: atheist, Academy kid, kind of a cold, calculating asshole. His whole life has been getting him ready for this. But they sent you to some public school, right? How do you shoot someone four hours ago and you’re only getting drunk with me because I asked you to?”

That was fair, she thought. There had to be some give and take. She propped her elbow up on his shoulder, resting her head against her arm. She caught him looking down at her naked torso. Hannah rolled her eyes but didn’t say anything. He was mostly over it, but he still had his moments.

“You were raised Christian, I’m guessing?”

He squinted into the desert. “Sure, but it never really took.”

“I had a couple of civilian friends who were Buddhist and I was really curious about it, you know? They have a very different concept of sin. It’s less like a sin and more an unskilled act.”

“So you think you’re no good at Buddhism and that works for you?”

She smooshed her mouth to one side. “There’s an old fable one parent told me about a Buddhist ferry boat captain with five hundred passengers. He discovers that one man on board is thinking about murdering everyone on his boat and stealing their cargo. He is left with a choice: Does the captain do nothing, trusting the man will choose right but risking everyone’s lives? Or does he warn the passengers, knowing that their reaction may be violent against this man?”

“What does he do?”

“Tell me why you left.”

“You’re such an ass.”

“Drink.”

He did. Hannah stared at her feet, spreading her toes wide, giving him time.

“I did something,” he started. “It’s hazy. I had gotten into a fist fight with Adler. Or I tried to, but you don’t get far like that. He was messing with one of the people they kept to feed to the Elders or Phagi or whatever. He’s so sick, he got off on playing with people’s heads. Jesus, and I used to babysit his fucking kid. Really sweet little kid. I still feel so awful for leaving him.” Gareth rubbed at the short hair coming in on his shaved head. “Anyway, he was harassing this girl and I snapped and tried to stop him. Then it got...muffled. He backseated me.”

She wanted to ask, but held her tongue. He glanced her way and saw it in her face. “I had no control over my mind or my body,” he explained. Gareth nudged an empty bottle lying in the dirt with the toe of his shoe once and then again. She watched, waiting for him to kick it, but he didn’t. Turning back to her, his eyes were tired, empty of the sadness she had expected. They were angry. He breathed out and shifted to sit away from her.

“When I woke up, I was lying next to this thing. That was my first thought. ‘Oh god, what is that thing?’” He took a breath before continuing. “It was making this sucking, squeaky noise and I could smell shit. I jumped up to get away from it and I saw I was covered in blood and I realized the thing was a person. There was nothing but meat where a face should be, but I recognized her clothes. She was a friend. And that sound, it was the sound of her trying to breathe. He used my body to do that and then let me wake up…” She heard him swallow. The energy flowing through his shoulder, past her face, felt like ice water. “I shot her and left. Adler was used to letting me run a bit because I always came back. There was nowhere he couldn’t find me. But I went as far and as fast as I could. I went straight to Sol.”

“Where he couldn’t touch you.”

“Yeah.”

She bit her lip and regretted being as drunk as she was and not able to find the right words. “It wasn’t—”

“I know all that. I know it wasn’t me. Not really. But that’s why I left. I’m done.” He kicked a stone at the bottom of the stairs.

“How did you get Sol to let you in?” She knew most of the story through Reeve, but there was no point in telling him that.

He groaned, rubbing at one eye with the heel of his palm. “Hannah, I’m tired.”

“It’s just that they could have killed you,” she shrugged.

Gareth dropped his hands. “I broke in.” He looked up and gave a pitiful laugh. “They should have killed me. I half expected them to.”

Hannah took the bottle from him, hoping it would distract from her tipsy attempt at feigned surprise. “You broke into LAHQ?”

“I was desperate, and Entropy's training is intense—but mostly, I was lucky. The pharma side of Sol happened to be hosting a conference, and if it wasn't for the crowd of normie people, I never would have been able to slip past the Neptune telepaths to get inside the building at all. Once I left the conference area that was open to the public, I set off a shit-ton of alarms. Knocked out a few agents, took a Neptune ID badge to override elevator floor restrictions, and went straight to the top. They weren’t expecting anyone to get that far or even know where to go, so security once I got that far was almost non-existent. I walked right into Mercury’s office. Got a one-on-one meeting.”

That part, she hadn’t heard. Her jaw hung open and she gave his arm a slap. “They should’ve killed you!” The porch light was getting to be too bright and she leaned against his arm again to steady herself. She could see his smug expression and she hid a smile against his shoulder.

“Well, I proved how valuable I could be. It probably helped that Mercury’s a precog. Trust me, I didn’t get off easy—the Integration process to join Sol was hell.”

Hannah sat up and glared at him. “That was suicidal levels of cocky!”

He shrugged and brushed an ant off her leg. “I was a stupid kid.” Gareth put the cap back on the tequila. “So what happened? With the ship captain?”

She scowled at him and sighed. “He kills the murderer quietly.” Gareth turned to look at her, his face blank but open. Listening. Hannah took a deep breath. “If he did nothing and the man killed them all, the captain knew that the murderer would live the rest of his life in immeasurable suffering for what he had done. And if he told the passengers, the karma of five hundred people would be at risk as they violently defended themselves. So he sacrificed his own karma to save them all.”

“So you think you’re a boat captain?”

“Not really.”

“You just live with having shitty karma.”

“Oh, very shitty.”

Gareth slowly lowered his head to rest his forehead on her shoulder. “Hannah,” he breathed. “I’m drunk.”

“Good.”

“It doesn’t feel good.”

---

LAHQ. Mercury Department. Present day.

Josh was grateful that Rich had given him at least a few days before barging into his office unannounced. Shane’s voice came over the intercom saying, “Sir, I’m sorry, Neptune is here and—” just as Rich walked through the door, calling over his shoulder, “It’s fine, Shane! I’m sure he’ll put it all together himself.” He flashed a smile at Josh. “I hope you don’t mind I didn’t call ahead, but I checked your calendar and I figured you wouldn’t mind setting aside your paperwork to chat with an old friend.”

Josh rolled his eyes. “We don’t have a meeting scheduled, Rich.”

“We did, though. You canceled it. This is me rescheduling.” Rich pulled up a chair and leaned forward, elbows resting on the edge of the desk opposite Josh. “I’m retiring. I’m not willing to keep putting this off.”

There were ten unfinished documents open on Josh’s computer. Ten. He looked longingly at them. “You have to reschedule through Shane,” he said, looking up and meeting Rich’s eyes.

“I’ll take care of that after we’re done talking.”

Josh sat back and rubbed at his temples.

“This time next month, I want to be on vacation in New Orleans, gorging myself on beignets to celebrate officially being Old,” Rich said. “So why do you keep pushing this meeting off? I get that this Venus 25 mess is just that—a fucking mess. But Fredericka is already working with the Reintegration team to figure out their capacity for the influx once the search is underway, Casper is wrapping up his investigation and things are looking tidy, and Penn has his Cleanup teams ready to manage any fallout as we start bringing in these kids. There are many, many, extremely competent people handling this crisis. You don’t need me. Freddie is more than capable.”

“You can’t offer this to Freddie.” Josh really didn’t want to be having this conversation right now.

“I can and I will. I’ve been prepping her for this—giving her more and more responsibilities over the last year, which she’s taken on with grace and ruthless efficiency. She’ll improve this department tenfold, so much so that she’ll bring great shame upon my house, but I’ll take that bullet so I can lounge around on some cheesy New Orleans jazz cruise sipping overpriced cocktails.”

“Take a vacation, then.”

“What is your problem?” Rich asked, shaking his head. “I get that it’s not ideal, but you can’t just put this off until it’s a good time. There’s not going to be a good time. You knew this was coming.”

Josh sighed, “I know.” He paused, taking a breath. Rich’s gaze held his eyes, patiently. He continued, “It can’t be Freddie, though. Over five years from now, she is still Second.”

Rich’s eye contact didn’t waver, the line of his mouth gone grim. “You had a premonition.”

Several, but he simply answered, “Yes.”

“How fixed is it? Sometimes these things are mutable.”

“This one isn’t,” Josh said, trying to impart a sense of finality to the conversation.

Rich nodded. “What did you see? She at least deserves to know why.”

Josh shook his head. “I’d rather not even tell you,” Josh said. "Can you just trust me?"

"No." He said it automatically, offended. "On anything else, sure. On Fredericka not taking over for me?" Rich huffed a sound of disapproval. "No."

Josh sighed. He figured as much. “I’m still trying to parse what it all means. You know these premonitions don’t always come through crystal clear. But what I can tell you is, it’s important."

"Josh," he snapped, his anger getting the better of him, before rocking back on his heels. “Sir. Don’t you think this seems like the kind of thing that bears communicating if it’s that dire? Without something, anything, I don't know how to live with doing this to her."

He’d thought about it himself plenty of times these past weeks. It was a weight to bear. Over the years, he’d learned that trying to intervene with the most painful of visions could make them worse. Was there a possibility that placing Fredericka at Neptune’s helm would avert the crisis? Sure, anything could happen. But he couldn’t risk it when he knew that this configuration could make a difference. Normally, he would ask Mackenzie to help him sort it out, once she'd finished locating the missing kids of course, but he'd already seen the incomprehensible, impossible-to-unravel knot of dark and bright futures that threatened if he got Mackenzie involved. Better that he kept her out of it.

"I'm trusting you." Josh hesitated, then pushed forward. "I can't say when, but in the coming years, Neptune will bring in two Icarus and they will be the most important captures of any of our lifetimes. Reintegration will be dealing with the two of them at the same time and you know how she pushes Icarus far harder and longer than the textbooks say, holding out hope. If Fredericka isn’t there to manage them…” He shook his head trying to find the right combination of words to express what he needed.

Rich wouldn't wait for him and squinted one eye, unimpressed. “The Icarus die?”

Josh’s sight jumped as if he were blinking but he wasn’t. The precognition hit fast and felt like a nail being driven through his temple. The glimpse was brief, likely brought on by how hard he’d been thinking about all this. The non-visual information permeated him and he stood there for a moment feeling it and then humming softly to himself as he reminded his mouth that he knew how to speak.

He opened his eyes to find Rich watching him with grave concern. “No,” Josh answered, absorbing this new knowledge. “She’ll give orders to have one of the Icarus killed, but that’s just as important.”

Rich scoffed in disbelief and smoothed at his hair, though it wasn’t out of place. “What in the hell—”

Josh cut him off. “It’s difficult to explain.” He shook himself out of the tangle while his ears rang with pain. “It’s not the Icarus I’m trying to keep from dying,” he explained. “If Fredericka isn’t in Reintegration with these specific Icarus, the company may die.”

The man’s face blanched and the wrinkles of his face deepened. “What does that even mean?”

“I don’t know. I just know that without her there, it will be truly catastrophic for all of us."

Restless energy was radiating off of Rich as if he wanted to pace the room but didn’t. "So she's just supposed to stay in Reintegration forever? Because if she prevents some sort of crisis, then we would never know it to say, 'Outstanding job, here's your overdue promotion.'"

"It will be very clear."

"That doesn't make sense,” he argued, voice rising. “Why can’t you just flag the Icarus when they come in? Mateo is fully qualified to run Reintegration.”

“I don’t know who they are,” he shot back, but he also would have liked to have the answer to that—why he couldn’t get a clear picture to identify them and why there was an instinctual sense that Josh wouldn’t be able to intervene on their behalf when the time came. "That's how it goes with this sort of thing. You’ll just have to pick someone else. You’ll figure out how to break it to her, but you can’t tell her it’s my precognition. My grasp on this one is too tenuous and telling someone can sometimes be enough to throw things off kilter. This conversation itself is a big enough risk. You'll just have to settle for another choice. Or,” he added, hopefully, “you could always put off your retirement a little longer.”

Rich’s face fell. “You’re really serious right now.”

“Deadly.”

He stood, nodding thoughtfully, his fingertips grazing Josh’s desk. “Then you’re going to tell Jupiter to give her a raise, at least. She’s not going to like this.”

“Done.” Josh wouldn’t usually have stood for someone telling him what to do like that—ordering Mercury around simply wasn’t something that was done. But this time, he figured it was fair. "But, Rich, if you breathe a word of this to her or anyone, you won't get the chance to retire.”

Josh wasn’t a man to make threats, at least not of this weight. He hoped, if nothing else, that would convey to Rich how significant this all was.

Rich rapped his knuckles on the desk twice in quick succession, a decisive motion. It would have had a playful flair to it if his face weren’t so dour. “Then I guess I’d better get to vetting some agents for the job.”

***