2020: Freedom City, 10:42 p.m.

The darkened room is tastefully furnished, understated with an overall air of money. It looks more like an expensive penthouse living room than the executive's office that it is – couches, bookshelves, unobtrusive wet bar tucked into the corner, all overlooking a panoramic view of the city from the sprawling full-length window that spans the entire width of one wall. Those unfamiliar with the room's sole occupant – currently lounging, feet up on the coffee table, cocktail in one hand, clove cigarette in the other – might be surprised at the apparent utter lack of technology beyond that of track lighting.

Those familiar know better.

By the time the phone begins to ring, circuits have already traced the call, verified both the caller and that he is on the relatively short list of calls which do not go straight to message, confirmed that the occupant is, in fact, in the room, and encrypted the signal just to be on the safe side. Since she is alone in the room, the system has decided to route it to the speakers hidden in the ceiling rather than her headset. The fact that it audibly rings at all is simply a sign of the occupant's occasional affectation for obsolete technology.

It picks up on the third ring, enough time for the occupant to sit up slightly, sip her drink, and take a final drag off her clove before stubbing it out. "Yes?"

The light tenor rolls richly out of the speakers, so clear the voice's owner might have been standing in the room himself: "I need a favor."

"Gee, hello, Envoy. Good to talk to you to. How am I? Oh, doing fine, thanks for asking. And you? Doing well? Good to hear. What have you been up to lately? I do hope the weather isn't unseasonably –"

"Cut the crap, Onyx. I see no reason to waste either of our time on meaningless social niceties. We both know that you undoubtedly not only know how I am doing, but what I have been up to lately, where I slept last night, and that I was going to be calling you tonight." (On this point, Envoy is exaggerating; her programs do track the movements of certain people to the maximum extent possible, but Envoy regularly changes his patterns to confound her – and anyone else who might be tracking. But her programs labor to calculate likelihoods for her, which is how she knew that there was a 84% likelihood, based on current activities and past behavior, that he would be calling her tonight.)

"You have a funny way of trying to get help, then – especially since I'm not inclined to give you any right now."

An audible sigh. "You're not still mad about London, are you?"

"No, I love having people show up bleeding on my carpet at four in the freaking morning with a squad of goons close behind." Sip.

"Hey, it wasn't exactly my idea of a fun time, either." She can almost hear the shrug of his shoulders, the slight sneer in the curves of his mouth. As it is, her speakers are good enough to pick up the crinkle of his leather jacket, the flick of his lighter, and then his slight puff in and exhale of smoke from his cigarette. "Besides, I had your carpet cleaned, didn't I?"

"Actually, I burned the carpet." Abruptly, she stands up, moves over to the bar, abandons the cocktail in favor of a bottle of water.

"What? Why?" He is surprised enough to forget to hide his irritation.

"You know I don't do 'clean' in half-measures. Every time I looked at the rug, I could still see the bloodstains. Made me nauseous. I mean, I suppose I could have hypnotized myself into forgetting the blood, but deep down I would still have known. Besides, they might have missed some of it. Easier just to buy a new carpet. Much more sanitary."

"It was just a freaking rug, Onyx." Tshch – that Russian sound of frustration he always makes. "Ugly, too."

"I loved that rug." She sits back down on the couch, staring absent-mindedly out the window at the darkened city. The moon is bright in the sky, shining – well, refracting – enough to cloak the nearby stars with its light.

"Christ, fine, I'll buy you a new one. I'll buy you three news ones. Okay? Can I get your help now or should I just give up?" He's serious, she thinks. Whoever it is he's tracking has to be someone big for him to give up the sparring so easily.

Curiosity wins out over obstinacy. "Promise that this help will in no way, shape or form involve you coming here bleeding again?"

"Okay, sure. Fine. I'll bleed on your neighbor's carpet instead if I have to."

"And no goons?"

"I'll leave them at home."

"As long as that's understood." Time to go to work. She sends the command that locks the door, waves her hand at the window, blanking out the stars.

"It's really not healthy, you know, this obsession with germs you've developed."

She's already caped-up, has been so since before the call even came in. Nikolai rarely calls for anything these days, it's always Envoy, so it's a safe bet for her to already be Onyx when he does. "I'm sorry, I thought you called to ask me for help, not question my sanity."

"Whatever, I don't really care. You're right. It's not my business, and it's not my problem." The tone in his voice says otherwise – he may be dropping the subject for now, but that particular conversation is far from over.

"Damn straight it's not." The window shimmers. Various computer processes begin to scroll across different panes as her system starts up. "So what do you need me to do?"

* * *

Just as her alarm begins to beep, the intercom chimes in and Envoy's voice whispers out again.

"Okay, I'm in."

"In" is a relative term. At this particular moment, Envoy is using it as shorthand for those codes you gave me got me past the first two checkpoints, I neutralized the guards in-between, you probably don't want to know how, but now I've run out of information and need your help again. It's the call Onyx has been waiting on for about 20 minutes now, since the last checkpoint before radio silence.

"Alright... where are you now? Looks like, hmm, the south tower, 23rd floor. All the way at the top." Onyx shifts that camera into focus with a thought, and pulls up the security logs she accessed earlier. "They check the stairways every half hour, you should be fine where you are for the moment. The door you want has a standard card slot, 2015 model – that's a little weird, given the rest of the tech around here, but it should be a piece of cake for you. The camera over the door, though... hold on a moment. Yeah, that's definitely non-standard; if it's what I think it is, it'll see through your suit. Better not take any chances. I'm going to – eh – get the camera looped in here... okay, go, the hall is clear and the cameras won't catch you. You've got 30 seconds to get to the door and open it, starting... now."

"Can't you just leave it looping?"

"No dice, it's one of the Korean models with multiple redundancies, I'll trip an alarm if I try," and then, a little cranky that he's second-guessing her at all, "Twenty-eight seconds now, stop wasting time."

10 seconds. The air outside the doorway blurs slightly.

15 seconds. A muffled Russian curse.

20 seconds. The door clicks open.

21 seconds, and the hallway is clear again.

She smiles. It's good to be working with Envoy again – not that she'd ever tell him that, he'd only stay away longer next time.

Meanwhile, inside the office he's placed her small observer mount on the desk and begins to examine the room methodically, checking the cabinets, drawers and shelves. The suit is still active, but her camera can see him – easier for her to monitor everything that way.

"The picture," she prompts, but he's already a step ahead of her. The oil painting – some unknown 20th century artist with pretensions to Rembrandt, it looks like – slides up to reveal a safe. Unlike the door, the safe has a much more secure lock. This is Envoy's area of expertise, although she's never been sure exactly how he learned to do this sort of thing. It's what he enjoys, too – he's got his back to her, but she knows that he's smiling as he pulls out a few strange metal objects, assembles them, and goes to work.

Five seconds, ten, thirty, a minute. She swivels the mount around the room while she waits, but there's nothing unusual to see – just your standard office, as provided to someone with a big title, a fat paycheck and very few actual responsibilities to earn. Few personal effects, either, just a picture on the wall - of himself, how egotistical.

Five minutes, and just as she's getting concerned, Envoy chuckles, and the safe swings open. There's not much inside, from what she can see with her flexible but admittedly limited view. Just a few envelopes – stocks and financial documents, it looks like... and a small black day planner.

Envoy settles back down in the seat and flips through it. She can see press clippings stapled throughout the book – charity auctions, plant openings, press conferences, every one of the stories accompanied by a smiling photograph of Hodges Industries Vice President Ryson Hodges Jr., with a string of beautiful women on his arm.

It's a little obsessively ordered, she thinks. Maybe just the sign of a very vain mind, but highly unlikely.

"I don't get it, all the dates match, the places match, even the psych profile, but he's got photo proof of him for all those evenings - back through 2016 at least, I haven't had time to look further, but I'm betting it's the same."

Onyx chews slightly on her lip. "Fifty bucks says the clippings in that book match up exactly, date for date, with the murders. That book's his alibi."

Envoy snorts. "There's a reason I don't take your bets, Onyx. You're right too often."

"I'm always right," she says flippantly. "But so are you this time. It can't be a coincidence, so if it's not him it must be –"

"–someone in his entourage," Envoy agrees. Then he cocks his head and walks back over to the safe, leaning in to reach all the way to the back. His voice echoes a little as it bounces off the safe's walls. "But that's weird, though. He's got the sociopathy down point for point for that kind of –"

Oh, she thinks, duh, they got so caught up in the similarities that they'd missed the obvious. "That's what you forgot, Envoy. The demon, it wouldn't like that kind of thing as much, would it? It's attracted most to people –"

"– the innocent, the kind, the good-natured ones –" he catches on the moment the idea is out of her mouth.

"– the ones who would be the most devastated to find out what has been done through their hands." As always, that little thrill of satisfaction, of knowing she's figured a piece the puzzle out, zips through her with a warm glow. "Don't berate yourself too much, Envoy. There's a high likelihood he did kill the first bunch himself. Track back the point where he started researching the occult, add six months to a year, that's the point where he stopped being so hands-on."

There's a muffled thump from inside the safe, and then Envoy chuckles. "Bingo." He leans back out of the safe, holding a small black book with a password lock on the front. "You wanna break this or shall I?"

She's about to respond when the screen flickers. Just once, but it's enough for her to recognize – counterint has taken a notice of her. Her headset hums slightly, too. His as well, she can see him shake his head and tap it.

"Just take it and get out, Envoy." Probably nothing she can't handle, but she sends out four programs to track down the source of the flicker and spoof it.

He's bending over the book, rotating the letter wheels of the lock. "Hah, you're getting slow, Onyx. I've already got it. He used the name of his first victim as the code – Sarah. Time for a little bedtime reading."

Sarah, she thinks, and her memory pulls up an obituary – a thin blonde girl, 16, gone missing after having a fight with her boyfriend after his prom, found dead two weeks later a county and a half away. Luckily, the coroner said, she'd been long dead before any of the things that had been done to her took place. She'd wanted to be an astronaut, her parents had said.

The screen flickers, twice, and one of her programs stops working. "Envoy, I'm serious. Stop dicking around. Just take it and go – you can look at it later."

He's ignoring her, sitting down in the desk chair, flipping through the book. After the first three pages, his smile falters slightly, the corners of his mouth tightening into something closer to a grimace. He flips to the middle of the book, and the smile gets even more tight-lipped. She's seen that look before – it's the face he makes when he's locking down his reactions. Whatever is in the book is something she probably doesn't want to see.

Again, curiosity gets the better of her. He's not holding the book at quite at the right angle – most likely on purpose – for her to get a good glimpse inside with the camera. She rotates the lens, extends it all the way… there's a picture of a woman in the corner – well, most of her, anyway, it looks like a few important bits are missing – and below that, something that could be a lock of hair taped onto the page.

A second program fails. "Look, you want my help, you fucking listen to me. Pull out, now."

The third stalls.

"Goddamn it, Envoy, we're blown. Get the hell out, now!"

The fourth ware comes screaming back to her only to die before her eyes. She can almost see the hand that killed it, clearly not just counterint – someone live in the system. There aren't that many console jockeys out there who could take her programs down; Marlene had gone over every line, laid in subroutines and redundancies to make them even stronger.

Of all the times to be ignoring her, she thinks. He's so fucking stubborn sometimes it's a wonder Marlene didn't cave his head in long ago.

Either that, or – damn. It's been so long since someone's even tried to jam their commlinks, she hadn't noticed.

It only takes a few seconds for Onyx to clear the jam, swearing at herself all the way, but that's time enough for the first three security cams to blur and then... just... wink out.

Communications pops back on line. "Envoy! Pack up shop now!" She doesn't realize she's shouting until he almost drops the book.

He grabs it before it falls, slams the cover shut and is on his feet. "Who's coming?" The book disappears into his backpack, the safe closes and locks, the painting slides back down, and he is wiping down all the surfaces he might have touched.

Another camera shuts down, and another. They're clearly blown, it doesn't matter if she's obvious now – she sets the next one to telescope in the direction of the blackouts, locks out the building's security shutdown on it.

"No intel yet. But someone knows we're here, they've got a live guy in the system, and he's good. I hope you found what you were looking for."

"I found –" his voice is flat, bleak. "I found what I needed to know." He pauses, hand on the door. "Ready when you are."

She sets the locked-down camera to the top right corner of the screen. In it, she can see two figures heading down the corridor – Hodges and his bodyguard? It's a pretty safe bet. Too far away yet to confirm. Whoever it is, they're not walking like they've got something to protect or hide. They're taking their time.

"I've got a bad feeling, Envoy. I think they knew you'd be here." Almost absently, she loops the camera in front of the door. "Okay, the door's clear, get moving."

10 seconds and he's in the stairwell, headed down. "Da, it's a set-up, I'm sure of it. I stupidly fell right into it."

Reverting to Russian is a bad sign, Marlene once told her. He only does it when he's worried. He'd be running if he could, but the suit won't hide him properly if he goes too fast, so instead it's an agonizing crawl.

"He knew you were coming?" It's been long enough for her to get a good shot of the two men as they pass under the 15th floor camera.

"There was a moment, a few weeks ago – a close call, I thought I'd been spotted... but nothing happened, so I wrote it off. Guess I was wrong."

They stop there, under the camera, and in unison look up at her. It's definitely Hodges, smiling and holding something – a gun? The other guy's his bodyguard all right, but there's something different about his face, something about his eyes...

"The demon's in his bodyguard, isn't it?" It's an educated guess, but she's almost positive of it. If she could see him with the observer-mount currently stuffed into Envoy's pocket, she could get confirmation – but that would be a lot too close for Envoy's safety.

"Da, znaio." He looks annoyed at his lapse, and launches back into English. "Hodges put it there – summoned it, controls it, I saw the pictures."

Down to the 22nd floor, 21st, and her gut instincts hit her, hard. "Envoy, stop."

Intuition tells her: If you let him go downstairs, he's going to die. But why? There has to be something else –

"I only knew about thirty, Onyx, but he's got seventy-three in that book, eight of them supers – he's been doing this for years," Envoy says bitterly. She can hear the note of anguished failure in his words. It doesn't matter to him that he's only been tracking Hodges for a matter of months – he takes these things personally. A little out of character for a guy who professes not to care about anyone or anything, she thinks wryly. Some of the others had bought his act, written him off, but she knew better.

She wouldn't let just anyone come in and bleed on her carpet.

The two men are still looking up at her. Hodges has brought the gun into full view – no, not a gun, she realizes, but a little black box with a silver OT in the lower left corner. He tosses a friendly wave to the camera, and then presses a series of buttons on the box.

The screen flickers, and a small black hole suddenly appears in the lower left side of the screen. She slams back into the couch, cursing. OT – that's OtakuTech. None of the profiles had mentioned Hodges working with them.

She pulls another half-dozen programs online, surrounds them around her in a half-circle. This is going to get ugly.

Goddamn Envoy and his fucking love life, she thinks, scrambling to block the incoming code. If he'd just called Marlene in on this, she'd have been able to handle this at least five times faster. Two programs dive in front of a probe that comes from out of nowhere, wink out of existence.

Anything but OtakuTech, Onyx could counter with her eyes shut, but this – and he was clearly expecting her.

Another attempt to frag the signal blasts at her, but this time she's ready for it. "They're jamming me, Envoy." Another three programs go up in smoke.

The small black hole in her screen has become a large gaping vortex, gnawing away the floor plans she's got on screen.

Gritting her teeth, Onyx sets the last ware around her on alert, relaunches another two programs, and then finds her hands too full to do more than parry the code that's incoming.

She's still got Envoy in the lower left corner, and the two men standing, just idly in front of the camera, in the upper right. There's some picture slowly fading into view on the blacked-out areas of her screen, not yet visible... There!

The tracer program its opening, goes into stealth mode, and Onyx launches a full-scale system attack in hopes of distracting her opponent from its course.

For a moment, all the security cameras come to life. In every window, she can see the guards Envoy has knocked out beginning to revive. And she wonders...

Onyx's intuition is a funny thing. Sometimes her mind works so fast, her gut figures things out before her brain has followed all the twists in the logic. Envoy trusts that instinct without question; it's the only reason he's alive now three times over, and it's one of the top reasons he asked her along tonight. So when she suddenly yells, "Envoy, go back up – now – back to the room! Run!" he turns and begins to speed up the stairs like the devil is behind him. Tonight, it most likely is.

"The window in there, you can take it to –" The static comes back, and she doesn't bother wasting time countering it. She's not sure how much of the last message got through, but he knows the room's layout, he'll jump to the right conclusion.

Another thread of thought clamors for attention. If she's being jammed, then... instinctively, she sends out the SOS command to his hovercycle for the helipad above the fire escape, keyed to his signal.

Something's wrong with the guards. They move jerkily, like maybe they're drugged. Or maybe it's something else...

One moment of distraction is all her opponent needs, however. She dodges, feints, sends a swirl of binary out, but he cuts straight through it.

A blinking message appears in the middle of her screen: Security override activated. Please log out of all systems. Lockdown will occur in 30 seconds.

She's lost sight of her tiny little agent program. Only about 25 seconds left, but that's enough time to unlock the window to the fire escape. And to pray, just for a moment.

The bodyguard has opened his coat, and she can see the row of knives that hangs from the inside of his jacket like shark's teeth. In another camera window, one of the guards looks up at her with soulless black eyes that are filling with blood.

And then, all the other security cameras blink off. The only thing visible in her screen now is the window with the two men, still looking up at her, and the image forming out of the blackness. It's a devil's head, and it's laughing at her.

The bodyguard grins a smile impossibly wide, his own bloody eyes somehow staring directly through her. Beside him, Hodges waves, a cheerful goodbye gesture, and mouths a message to her and her alone.

"We'll see you soon."

Then he presses a button, and that last camera blacks out, leaving the devil's head behind.

"Fuck you, Otaku." She waves away the screen, severing the connection, and lights another clove. She's not worried about being tracked; if he'd been capable of breaking the protections she and Marlene set up, he'd have done it a long time ago.

Her window returns to normal, showing the darkened city once again. It's late at night now, and the moon isn't so bright now – in fact, there's a shadow over it.

Onyx looks at the sky for a moment and comes to a decision. Fuck Envoy and his hang-ups, too, she thinks, and tells the phone to dial a number.

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