Chapter Text
Adam Jensen woke with a start from a dream of drowning. He flailed at empty air, punching a hole in the darkness with one black alloy blade. As he surged upright in bed, something heavy struck him perilously close to his crotch, then thunked to the floor. He gasped for breath, the sound echoed by a disapproving yowl.
Awareness of his surroundings filtered back into his brain. The darkness around him was the wrong size, the wrong shape, for his apartment. It smelled wrong, too, like old books and older carpet. And the mattress sucked.
The tiny motors in his eyes whirred. The darkness dissolved. He wasn’t in bed at all, but on Malik’s couch, in London. Alone, fortunately—no one to see the twenty inches of death protruding from his wrist.
Or almost alone. Abashed, he turned to look at the floor. His Grace, the Duke of Hork, stared back at him with an expression of mild disdain. The cat’s fluffy bulk cast a faint shadow in the light from the microwave clock. 0547. Jensen’s blade slid back into his arm as he lay back down and tugged the blanket over himself once more.
After a cautious moment, the Duke leapt ponderously onto the cushion at his feet and curled up in the crook of his ankles. Even though his artificial legs couldn’t feel the pressure of the cat’s body, or the warmth, his titanium bones conducted the rumbling purr. Fervently glad he hadn’t impaled the poor beast, he let the vibrations lull him back into a doze.
A door and footsteps woke him again a little while later. Both were hushed, but his ears and reflexes responded all the same. He lay still, not so much feigning sleep as… cozy, he realized, and reluctant to stir. He hadn’t had an animal warming his feet since the last time he’d had Kubrick at his place. And while the Duke lacked the big dog’s size and solidity, he did rather resemble one of those decorative pillows people loved to put on couches. He’d never understood why people liked filling up their space with useless clutter, but maybe they just wished they had cats. The uncomfortable beadwork on the edges even stood in for the claws.
The footsteps paused at the end of the couch, then resumed, and the rush of water and the click of the electric kettle carried from the kitchen. Not that that narrowed it down. What was the etiquette on occupying the living room couch when your host’s roommate was up and about? O’Leary wouldn’t ask, if it was her—he ought to free up the valuable real estate. Working his feet out from under the cat, who glared at him for his lèse-majesté, he stood and stretched.
Water pattered into ceramic in the kitchen, and the scent of tannins and herbs spread through the small apartment. The fridge opened and shut. Malik padded barefoot into the living room swathed in a fuzzy robe, hunched over her steaming mug.
“Morning, Spy-boy,” she whispered. “You sleep okay?”
“Yeah, slept great until this guy curled up on my chest. But we worked it out.”
She huffed a laugh and sipped her tea. “Nice to wake up to the HRA being yesterday’s news.”
“Sure is.” He left the presumable series of shoes yet to drop for another day, or at least for after her tea. “Shower free, or will it wake up Maggie?”
“Nah, go ahead.” Malik slid onto the couch and pulled the blanket around herself before ruthlessly scooping the cat into her lap. He accepted his relocation with quiet dignity and nuzzled fur onto her sweatshirt. “Thanks for warming up the couch.”
Despite the lack of urgency—no billionaires to meet, no plots to stymie—Jensen showered quickly. The cluttered bathroom made him claustrophobic, full of plastic bottles of various unguents and masks for things that he didn’t know could be masked, and it smelled too strongly of too many chemicals masquerading as plants. It must have been impassable with four people’s clutter. He still hadn’t met the third roommate, Sarah, who technically owned the cat… although he seemed to be community property, really, or perhaps their joint overlord.
O’Leary was up by the time he was out and dressed, cradling her own mug of tea. He made mediocre coffee he didn’t really need while he waited on the others’ ablutions. They turned up their noses when he offered to brew more—he hadn’t known O’Leary’s attitude toward coffee, but it seemed the polite thing. As they lounged on the couch in a growing rectangle of sunlight, nursing their drinks with the Duke stretched lengthwise to occupy all three laps, he sighed in contentment.
Malik made an inquiring noise, and he shrugged. He was stood down until MacReady said otherwise. No office to hurry to, no case to work, no insidious Illuminati scheme to sabotage. Just his coffee, the sun, the cat, and the prospect of a day to spend hanging out with a couple of people whose company he actually enjoyed. He didn’t even have his shades closed, he was so relaxed. Hell, he hadn’t felt this normal since probably before he and Megan Reed had started their drift apart—not that he felt like bringing her up. He dug the fingers of his free hand into the Duke’s ruff, eliciting a louder purr. “Just enjoying the downtime.”
“Yeah, I told you you needed it.”
O’Leary nodded from the other end of the couch. “Aye, you’re due for a bit of a break after all that craziness the other night, and no mistake.”
“The Apex was just the endgame.” Jensen sipped his coffee. “Been a rough couple of months.”
“All the more reason to kick back properly now! I don’t suppose a spa day is really your style, though. Can’t see you doing a mani—” She broke off abruptly and flushed scarlet. “Sorry.”
Malik sipped contemplatively at her tea. “Hey, just because he doesn’t have nails doesn’t mean we can’t paint him. Don’t even have to stop at the fingertips! What do you say, Jensen? Ever wanted to be fire-engine red?”
“Sure. Match ’em to her hair, or her face?” he asked with a chuckle. “Don’t worry about it. Remember, I’m used to Malik’s idea of humor.”
“Ooh, we should introduce her to Frank sometime.” Malik grinned. “Think you can drag him out of Detroit?”
“Can’t even get him out of his lab, half the time. I wouldn’t bet on overseas.”
“Well, since we’re not all about to get tagged and tracked like endangered orcas, we can always drop in on him—he’d love that.”
Jensen leaned back into the couch, remembering Pritchard’s distinct lack of hospitality. But maybe that had been the stolen pizza. Or the gun to the head. “Would he?”
“He likes me.” Malik smiled at him. He saw her fingers brush his amidst the fur—even if he couldn’t feel them, the contact sent an electric jolt down his spine, but she didn’t seem to notice. “You been to the US, Maggie? More than crashing between flights, I mean.”
“Uh… yeah, yeah I have. Ages ago. Visited some friends in New York, flight attendants I met while I was snowed in at LaGuardia one time.” O’Leary visibly swallowed the remnants of her chagrin along with the last of her tea. “They’re very into brunch over there—or at least my friends were. I’m sure there’s more to the States than bottomless mimosas, but they made an impression.”
“Now there’s a thought.” Malik stroked her chin. “You got a grudge against any of the local establishments? Pretty sure the Amazing Metabolic Man over here can put any place with a bottomless anything out of business.”
Jensen sighed. “Malik. I grew up on the North Side of Detroit, and I’ve been a cop most of my life. If you seriously expect me to pay fifteen credits for the same eggs and toast I can get for three-fifty in any diner in any city in the US—except maybe NYC or San Fran—you got another think coming.”
O’Leary leaned forward to give him a mocking scowl. “I should’ve known you Yanks were all barbarians! You’re paying for the ambiance, of course. And the Hollandaise sauce.”
“Hollandaise? Not my thing, thanks. Had a bad run-in with a Dutchman this one time.” Malik snorted, and he fended off an elbow. “And champagne’s just gonna remind me of the Apex. Besides, British people have some weird ideas about breakfast food. I’m a cereal guy.”
“That’s only because you’ve never had a full Irish.” O’Leary closed her eyes and smiled. “Soda bread, black pudding, mushrooms, bubble and squeak—”
“Bubble and what now?” Malik laughed incredulously.
“Bubble and squeak! That’s the English for it—we call it colcannon, mostly, back home. Faridah, you’ve been over here months. How haven’t you had a full Irish?”
Malik shrugged. “I don’t like anything heavy before lunch. Weighs me down. But I wasn’t planning on doing anything today anyway. I’ll give it a shot, sure.”
Jensen eyed O’Leary from underneath a dubious eyebrow. “There’s no way either of those is a real word for anything.”
“Except maybe,” said Malik, “what the Duke does when someone’s been slipping him scraps.”
O’Leary wilted under the accusatory glare. “It’s that face he makes—I don’t know how you have the heart. Anyway, it’s just leftover potatoes and whatever other veggies you’ve got, mashed and fried up in sort of pancake things.”
It sounded like a hash, or a country-diner latke. “Sounds safe enough,” he said, “but they gotta work on the branding.”
“Could be worse, you know. I heard the Scots call it ‘rumbledethumps’ or something mental like that.”
The Americans traded a look. “You absolutely are fucking with us,” declared Malik, and Jensen nodded.
“Am not! There’s a pub, like, four Tube stops away that does it right. C’mon, I’ll prove it.”
“Oh God, aren’t I just doing grand today,” O’Leary said, burying her face in her hands.
Malik cast skeptical eyes on the plate full of pork products in front of her. “At least the mushrooms are good. And the bread.”
“And the bacon.” Jensen poached hers from her plate, which she’d chocked up on one edge with a napkin so the grease stayed contained to the other side. “Thick and crispy at the same time is tough to pull off. Excuse me—any chance you have turkey bacon? No? What about chicken sausage? Or beef?”
The waiter came back, with a side plate of chicken sausage that met Malik’s approval, while Jensen was poking at the mysterious patty on his plate. He waited until the guy left before asking O’Leary, “Is this black pudding? What the hell’s in it?”
“Yeah, it’s a sausage made with blood.”
Malik’s eyes went wide. “Pork sausage? Made with pork blood?”
O’Leary groaned and put her face in her hands again. “Yep.”
“Look,” Jensen said, “at least there’s no grease. Totally contained. Just a giant slice of solid pig blood.”
Malik wadded up another napkin and threw it across the table at him. “It’s not like I’m grossed out by it… much. But I think this may be the single most ḥaraam thing I’ve ever encountered in my entire life. Hah! I gotta tell Rasheed—he’ll flip.”
Jensen chuckled and batted the napkin away. “Diplomatic as usual.”
“So, you trying it or what?” Malik gave him a challenging smile. “You liked the oysters.”
That he had. And it looked more like a hamburger patty than the gelid monstrosity the words blood sausage conjured up. He took a tentative bite. There was oatmeal or something in it, which accounted for its texture, and it had clearly been griddled. Mostly, it tasted of spices, with the same sweet savoriness he knew from American breakfast sausages. But the metallic undertone, that was new. It reminded him of Vande’s blood, and Thorne’s, and that of the Belltower spec-ops, and a little of his own, oozing gluey on his face and into his overlong hair and beard…
He gagged and dropped his fork. The coffee scalded his tongue, but he didn’t care. He squeezed his eyes shut and focused on his breathing. Ichi, ni, san… at ni-jū, he felt a nudge in his arm and then fingers on his trapezius. He opened his eyes. Malik had her hand on his shoulder and a look of concern on her face. His CASIE started mapping the furrows in her brow and the divot where her teeth trapped her lower lip, and he blinked twice and forced his shades open. “… sorry, I…”
“My fault—shouldn’t have pushed you,” Malik said.
“No, it’s—I didn’t even think…” He rolled his shoulders to loosen them. “I just… it’s the blood, you know?”
“Yeah. Or, I can guess.” She shared a glance with O’Leary and shook her head, barely more than a twitch, then let go of him to beckon the waiter to refill his coffee. He doctored it to khaki and raised the mug to her in grateful salute.
They watched the rugby match on the screen in the opposite corner, small and unobtrusive by American sports-bar standards, in uncomfortable silence for a minute. Ireland was handing the US team its collective ass, much to the enjoyment of the other patrons. Jensen distracted himself by trying to decipher what counted as a foul, but it didn’t seem like anything did—what had Augmented League rugby looked like, before the Incident? Then an image of Viktor Marchenko flashed across the screen.
“Hey, look, it’s—oh.” The tabletop creaked in his grip. The chyron read, Augmented terrorist Viktor Marchenko drops dead in police custody—details still to come.
“They got to him,” Malik whispered. “Already.”
“Yeah. Wonder how.” He dug out his phone. “There’s video. It looks like they were flying him to The Hague in… hell. In an Interpol VTOL.”
Malik stared at him, eyes wide. “Chikane?”
“Chikane.” He nodded grimly, rewinding the footage to show the other two. “Can’t find audio. If you look at Marchenko and the Blue Helmets guarding him, though, it looks like they’re all listening to something on the cabin speakers. Then he tenses up, goes totally rigid, and his eye rolls back. Looks like a seizure, not that I’m a doctor or anything, and… there he goes.”
“Goodnight, sweet prince. Now cracks a fucked-up brain.”
Jensen pinched his temples. “MacReady will be ripshit. Not like they’d’ve let him execute the guy himself, but I think he was hoping Marchenko would break out, and he’d get to be the one to bring him down.”
O’Leary flinched. Jensen bit his tongue. The awkward silence threatened to descend once more. Malik pushed her plate away and cleared her throat. “So, uh… what did you and Nils get up to the other night, after you split?”
“Oh! We came here, actually,” O’Leary said. “There’s a couple Irish pubs closer to the flat, but this one’s the most like home—he was asking. Plus it has pool tables in the back. We had a few more, shot a couple frames, hung out a bit. I don’t think I’d actually spent any time with him without you around.”
“Really.” Jensen needed no CASIE to see the corner of Malik’s mouth quirk up.
“Yeah, he was telling me how you guys met. It all sounded very dramatic.”
Jensen looked between them, pushing aside thoughts of the Illuminati. Freaking out at Malik’s roommate wouldn’t bring Marchenko back, or Miller. “I haven’t heard this one. Obviously, you did something crazy in the air, right?”
“Ouch,” Malik said. “But yeah, pretty much. We were co-piloting a heavy cargo chopper on a freelance gig. Somebody went past us in what I swear was an honest-to-God World War One biplane, a Sopwith Camel maybe, and… I might’ve spun us around to ogle it.”
O’Leary raised a finger. “Without changing course or speed, I heard.”
“Yeah, whatever. Anyway, it came back past us, close, while we were coming in to land—had some engine trouble or something, so we had to get out of the way—and there could perhaps have been a tiny bit of showing-off involved.”
“He said he thought he was going to die!”
“It was a steep autorotation, that’s all.”
“I don’t do helicopters, but he told me it was ‘steep’ for a stunt chopper—not a heavy lifter stuffed to the gills with cargo. Pretty sure the phrase he used was ‘express elevator to Hell.’”
Malik looked a little abashed for all of five seconds. “I checked the hub assemblies myself during the preflight. They were solid. We were fine. Besides, he barely twitched at the time—I was kind of impressed with how cool he was.”
“That’s just him being, what d’ye call it…”
“Phlegmatic?” Jensen offered.
“Yeah, that’s it. He’s very… well, unflappable. Swedish. Male.”
Malik waggled an eyebrow. “I’d noticed.”
“Oh come off it!” O’Leary flushed. “We got on well, whatever. It was one evening at a bar.”
“Uh-huh. What do you think, Jensen? Can you see it?”
Jensen smiled and stroked his beard, glad to be on safer and less personal ground. “Don’t really know him that well yet. But I like him fine—seems nice enough. Why not?”
Malik leaned toward him and affected a loud, would-be conspiratorial whisper. “Problem is, he’s the oblivious type. Gonna have to hit him over the head with it. You think you could, y’know…”
Jensen raised an eyebrow. O’Leary shook her head hopelessly.
Malik winked. “… bro-municate?”
“You should be ashamed, but I know you’re incapable. Do you want me to?” he asked O’Leary.
“I… ugh. ’Ridah, you’re impossible. I don’t know how anyone puts up with you.”
“Outstanding piloting and a matchless personality!” She beamed. “And I didn’t hear a ‘no.’”
“Matchless is right. One is more than enough,” Jensen muttered, and felt a lurch in his shin. “Ow.”
“You—fine,” O’Leary groaned. “Fine. If you’re determined to play matchmaker… don’t discourage him. If it comes up.”
“Roger that,” Jensen said, and discovered his appetite had come back. He munched the rest of his toast and listened contentedly to Malik heckling someone other than him for a change.
As they nursed the ends of their drinks, Jensen noticed a couple of guys staring at them from across the pub and looking hastily away when he glanced back. At first, he assumed they were checking out Malik or O’Leary, or wondering about his augs—the shields were more prominent than most of what people got bolted to their faces. But when one of them was slow to break eye contact, he caught a glimpse of active hostility. He tested his hypothesis by shifting in his seat as though he was about to stand. Both men tensed up.
He rose with a deliberate lack of haste and dropped credits on the table. “I’m gonna wait outside. Get some sun, have a smoke.” Get the danger and death that dogged his heels away from his friends. “Don’t rush.”
Malik made a face. “Point downwind, would you?”
“Whatever you say, Captain.” To O’Leary, he stage-whispered, “And I thought she was a pain before she got her own VTOL.”
O’Leary snickered at his back as he walked out, his peripheral vision trained on the two problems in the corner. They eyed him back, but stayed seated. There was too much metal in the tables for smart vision to rule out knives, but neither had a gun. He almost wished they’d have followed him—the Quicksilver would have let him put them down with minimal fuss, and he’d always wanted an excuse to flip a bartender a credit chit and say Sorry about the mess.
Outside, he leaned against the storefront where he could just see if the two decided to extend their hostility to Malik and O’Leary. He flipped his collar up against a stiff breeze and rolled a cigarette with unhurried movements.
Just as he lit up, he got a buzz in his link. Caller ID identified it as the ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor.
“Agent Jensen?” said a man’s voice. “Deputy Prosecutor Rajesh Singh. You submitted a request for investigation?”
“Yes, I did, Deputy. Thank you for getting back to me so quickly.”
Singh hummed, sounding amused. “When we are not before the Court, please call me Rajesh. The life of an ICC prosecutor is formal enough as it is. Now, your request was very short on details—don’t worry, we see this often. It is a superior of yours?”
“It is, yeah.”
“Your section chief, or…?”
He reached for the name, and it scampered away again. “Higher. The Task Force’s Commissioner. He seems to be a little too involved with private interests.”
“Interesting.” Singh kept a lid on any shock he felt. “Which private interests? And how did you come across this information?”
“On the record, or off?”
“Adam—may I call you Adam?”
Jensen grimaced. “Sure.”
“If you committed a crime under international law, I’ll have to disclose it eventually. But we can always immunize you, if the situation warrants. And if it was national law, I promise you I have bigger things to worry about.”
“How about Interpol regs?”
Singh chuckled. “What, office policy? Please.”
“Well.” He’d have to take someone at their word eventually, and prosecutors at the ICC were screened for bias and leverage about as closely as anyone in the world. “I overheard a conversation on the phone, through Director Miller’s office door, that made me suspicious.”
“Eavesdropping, is it? Wretched of you.”
“So I got in his NSN chair and went through the logs.”
At that, Singh paused. “Interesting.”
Maybe that was what he said when he meant, what the fuck? Probably a good reflex in court. Jensen continued: “The Commissioner had a meeting with the regional Directors. Afterwards, they logged out, and he called up Robert Page. Of Page Industries. It sounded… well, I’d rather you hear it and judge for yourself.”
“That’s a good instinct, Adam, but I would like to know what I’m investigating. In broad strokes, at least.”
Jensen figured he might as well go for it. “It sounded like Page had asked him to order a couple of the Directors to implicate ARC in their reports of unrelated terrorism incidents. And they talked about having Talos Rucker killed—poisoned, with something called the Orchid that my team has been investigating, but that was a backup plan. They were going to have someone they called ‘the Asset’ take care of him if they could. An inside man, I figure. Thought it might be Marchenko. Who just died, mysteriously, before he could be interrogated. It hit the news this morning.”
“… Interesting.” Singh took a deep breath. “Well, I can see why you wanted to be cautious with this information. When would this call have taken place? I should be able to pull the logs administratively, without a warrant.”
He had to think about it—so much happened in just a few days. “Last Tuesday.”
“All right. Easy enough. And you accessed the NSN with, what? Director Miller’s card?”
“I did.”
“So you would have appeared as him, in the NSN. You realize the problem, yes? We’d have to prove the people you saw were actually Page and Commissioner Manderley, not just people with access to their NSN cards as well.”
“Huh. Hadn’t thought of that.” Jensen grimaced, annoyed with himself. “But Singh: someone was in the NSN talking about fu—fudging reports and assassinating Rucker. The reports got fudged. Rucker got assassinated. And then, when I told Director Miller about one or two of my suspicions, they targeted him at the Apex. So there’s something there. And you should watch your back, yourself.”
“Thank you, but it wouldn’t be the first time one of these investigations had a risky side. Commissioner of TF29 is a little higher than I’ve personally gone, so far, but my unit put away one of the Secretaries General, remember? I’ll take precautions, cover my tracks. For now, you worry about your team—I’ll be in touch when I know more. And Adam?”
“Yes?”
“Good job finding this information. Whatever comes of it, we need to keep an eye on our own people, hold ourselves to a high standard. I appreciate you making the referral.”
“Uh. Thanks. Just trying to do my job.”
“Well, keep up the good work.”
With that, the Deputy Prosecutor hung up. Jensen stared at the landscape of cigarette butts and bottle caps and chewing gum littering the sidewalk, hoping he hadn’t just fed yet another life to the ravenous conspiracy, until Malik and O’Leary came out to join him in the sunshine.