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Gabriel floats again into consciousness.
White ceiling. Yes, he remembers that. There’s a voice too staticky for him to understand, but it comes through a second later with a piercing electronic twang. “…are you feeling?”
His eyes are gritty when he slides them to his left, as if the nanites haven’t quite finished building the outside layers yet. Dr. Ziegler stands beside the bed smiling. Behind her there’s a small table with a computer and four coffee cups. Gabriel tries to say something but can’t remember how to speak, all of his languages lost to him. Then they bloom into his mind once more, as a machine dark with disuse glows to life again. “I feel—all right.”
It’s an automatic response. He hasn’t thought about it yet. It can’t be worse than the first time the nanites invaded him—when he felt as if he was being strained through a fine mesh and reconstituted with some hostile alien material, when afterwards during the recovery he could sense parts of his body disintegrating as the nanites conducted their investigations. It’s normal, Dr. Ziegler had told him. They’re supposed to be doing that.
He doesn’t feel like he’s disintegrating right now. That’s a good sign. On the wall the clock ticks over, the serene blue numbers displaying 20:23. Gabriel stares. “I’ve been here for—twelve hours?”
“Oh! Yes, I apologize. I had some updates prepared, but when I got a better look at your code—once I had all of you here—then I found even more ways to optimize you! I’m sure you’ll be pleased…”
She’s still talking but Gabriel isn’t listening anymore, having discovered that there’s—something stuck to his skin, a liquid coating in black. He claws at it with one hand, tries to push himself upright with the other—
“Gabriel, it’s all right!” Dr. Ziegler, grasping his arm gently. “It’s just clothing. Our engineers coded it, it interfaces with your machines. Now when you wish to lose form, your clothes will come with you! Much better for combat missions now that you won’t have to worry about running around in the nude, wouldn’t you agree?” She chuckles.
Gabriel tries to calm himself down. Clothes. It’s just clothes. It’s not going to flow over him and suffocate him or anything of the kind.
“Go ahead and try it! I’d love to see.” Dr. Ziegler steps away.
Gabriel sits up and looks down at himself.
It’s form-fitting but not skintight and extends to his wrists and even over his feet, giving him something like boots. How is he supposed to use it? Dr. Ziegler is still watching him expectantly, so he obeys her and lets his body dissipate into smoke.
The first thing he notices is that it’s much smoother—almost effortless as he rises off the table in a cloud of nanites. The clothing comes with him too, he can feel that, because it’s also made of machines and hangs at the fringes. All right, so it works. He supposes that’s good. Then he drifts off the bed, hanging over the floor, and goes to rebuild himself, hoping Dr. Ziegler won’t mind waiting a few moments for the process to—
In less than five seconds his body is whole again. And clothed.
Dr. Ziegler claps her hands. “Oh, that was perfect! I’m so glad it worked. The old coding was much less efficient than it could have been—technology has just advanced so far since you were first integrated. I cleaned it up and added some new algorithms to make the process of dissolution much easier for you. I hope now it will be useful in the field.”
Gabriel stares down at his hands. He doesn’t want it to be easier. “I thought you were just going to…”
He trails off, not wanting to sound ungrateful. “Tighten up your security?” Dr. Ziegler says. “Yes, I did do that, but while I was there…oh. Hm.”
Gabriel looks up. “What?”
She’s frowning. “I couldn’t find the source of the reconstruction mistakes in your code, but I was hoping with the updates they wouldn’t happen again…it seems I was wrong. I can look again, if you like.”
“Mistakes?” he asks.
“Yes. The, er…the red color of your eyes, and…”
He raises a hand to his mouth and traces the points of his teeth. Still gnarled, the points sharp against his fingertips. “Huh,” he murmurs.
“Would you like me to take another look?”
“No, it’s fine.” At least that isn’t different.
“Well, I think you should take a few days to familiarize yourself with your new body.” She sits down again in front of the computer with a little sigh. “And of course, if you find any glitches, do not hesitate to let me know.”
———
“Is this a joke?” Fareeha asks sharply.
Jack rubs his forehead. “No. This mission is important and we need to get it done as quickly as possible.”
“If it’s important, he shouldn’t be coming.” She jabs her finger at Gabriel. “We can’t trust him.”
Jack glares at her. “Yes, we can. I told you, he’s on our side.”
“He wasn’t three weeks ago!”
“God damnit, Fareeha, if you can’t trust him then trust me,” Jack growls. “I’d go if I could, but I can’t hold off the UN any longer. Either I negotiate now or they shut us down by force.”
Gabriel snorts. “Better not tell them about me then.”
“You’re not helping,” Jesse mutters, crossing one leg over the other.
“Are we gonna have a problem?” Jack asks Fareeha. “Because if we are, you need to tell me now so I can assign someone else.”
Fareeha folds her arms, still fuming. “No.”
“Good.” Jack turns to the holotable, dragging up a blueprint and spinning it. “Here’s the Talon base.”
Gabriel slouches, slinging an arm over the padded back of the bench. Fareeha is all the way on the other end, her eyes still blazing with anger in the dim light of the holotable. Jesse sits between them in a rumpled flannel shirt Gabriel thinks he recognizes from all the way back in their Blackwatch days, over ten years ago before Jesse fled. It wouldn’t surprise him if it were the same one, knowing the kid.
Not a kid anymore, he supposes. And neither is Fareeha. She hasn’t been for a long time.
“The vault is here, in the sub-basement.” Jack points to a small room marked in red. “Magnetic locks, so you’re gonna need to kill the main power and the auxiliary power. Main power is here—“ he indicates a room in the basement, “—but auxiliary is up on the roof. So you should go cut that one first and then make your way down.”
“No,” Gabriel says. “I can get up to the roof in a fraction of the time it’ll take to climb up. Let me cut the auxiliary and pull the soldiers there up to the roof. Fareeha and Jesse can go straight to the main power, set a charge, and be at the vault by the time it blows and alerts anyone.”
There’s a second of silence. Gabriel shifts, his eyes flicking down. Insubordination probably isn’t a good habit to be showing off right now. But Jack nods. “Yeah, okay. Let’s do that.”
“You gonna be all right up there all by yourself?” Jesse murmurs.
“Yeah,” Gabriel says. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll keep them distracted for you.”
Jesse grunts in affirmation.
“I’ve sent you the information you need. You leave at twenty hundred hours. Just—“ Jack sighs. “Try not to get yourselves killed out there.”
Fareeha is up and stalking towards the door. Jesse rises and ambles after her without a word. Jack watches them go, the corner of his mouth pulled down in irritation; but then he comes over to the bench and his face softens. “They’ll come around.”
Gabriel stands and stretches. “Can’t blame ‘em. Especially Fareeha. She…” He sighs. “I know she used to look up to me.”
“You came back. That should speak for itself.”
Gabriel cackles. “Yeah, after what Talon did to me, I didn’t exactly have a lot of choices. You know they’d hunt me down if I weren’t here. Jesse and Fareeha know that.”
“Hey.” Jack catches his eye. “Do you want to do good? Yes or no?”
Gabriel can’t hold his bright gaze and looks away. “Yeah,” he mutters.
“Right. So let them see that. Then they’ll understand.”
Gabriel snorts. “I barely fucking understand, Jack.”
Jack cups his face with one calloused palm. “So let yourself see it too. You’ll get there, Gabe.”
Gabriel wants to pull away but forces himself to stay a moment longer; then he steps back. “I’m gonna go get a better look at those blueprints.”
———
The night is cool and dark, humid with the bellies of clouds that bunch up against the mountain peaks to the west. Gabriel finds his breath misting in the air. Odd. Dr. Ziegler must have pumped up his basal metabolic rate. He’s warm now.
Beneath the bowed fir branches Jesse crouches next to him, Fareeha beyond.
The flight was chilly at best. Fareeha and Jesse discussed mission details with each other but not with him, so he eavesdropped instead. It should go all right. Fareeha’s obviously been well-trained in the Egyptian army since he last saw her twenty years ago, and Jesse’s laconic drawl is back, but Gabriel’s lessons are still there. Despite Jesse’s refusal to acknowledge him; he doesn’t maintain two meters of distance between them at all times like Fareeha, but neither does he meet Gabriel’s eye, at least not on purpose.
It’s fine. He gets it. As long as the mission goes well, it doesn’t matter.
The base is a hundred yards across a field, bright white floodlights illuminating the tall grass. There are two pairs of guards making lazy patrols around the walls. As the second pair rounds the corner into view Jesse murmurs, “A hundred and twenty-six seconds.”
Gabriel grins to himself. Kid’s still got it. The floodlights don’t extend very far across the grass so they can get a little closer, give themselves less distance to cross in the two-minute window before the next pair appears. Gabriel slips out from behind the treeline, dissolving.
There’s little time so he moves quickly, flowing through the knee-high grass. As soon as he hits the edge of the floodlights he rises, drifting up as a plume of black smoke.
The nanomachines spot the two soldiers coming around the corner, magnifying them so he can see the pointing and squinting. Then they start to approach. Good. The nanomachines look also behind him—a strange eyes-in-the-back-of-his-head sensation that’s even more pronounced now than it was before Dr. Ziegler’s updates, but his integration of both views is better, he finds. Jesse and Fareeha kneel hidden inside the trees, stun pistols raised. Gabriel retreats a few yards, obscuring himself in the dark, drawing the guards into it. In the automatic underpinnings of his electronic mind the seconds tick by. Forty-five. Forty-six. Forty-seven.
Jesse will be counting too. Gabriel made him learn it in Blackwatch, left him alone for twenty minutes at a time to count the seconds, and if he was too far off he’d have to do as many pushups as his count was off. If he was good enough Gabriel would pull him some gourmet rations. (Would generally do it either way, if he’s honest with himself—pushups are tiring, he remembers them well from the military.) Of course, after all that harping on it, Gabriel hasn’t needed to use the skill in many years, ever since he learned how to get the machines to do it.
Forty-eight. Forty-nine. Fifty. The guards near the edge of the dark. One lifts his rifle, a beam of light piercing the night from the bulb on the barrel. Shit. Gabriel lingers, the light illuminating his scattered body, he like a swirl of dust motes in the rays of the afternoon sun—or perhaps a bit more sinister than that. The man’s hand goes for his earpiece. They’re going to call it in. Jesse and Fareeha had better—
The man lets out a choked noise and collapses. His partner does the same almost in tandem. Cut it close there. Gabriel resolves, crouches, grabs each guard by the front of his uniform and drags them back. Fifty-eight. Fifty-nine. Sixty. It’s fine. They’re fine. The floodlights recede. By the time the next pair of guards round the corner (one hundred and thirty-two seconds), Jesse and Fareeha are already stripping off their own uniforms while Gabriel works on the guards. Fareeha’s uniform will be too baggy and Jesse’s too short at the ankles, but they only need to pass for a few minutes. As they dress Gabriel stares down at the two unclothed guards.
Fareeha’s the one who asks because Jesse probably knows already. “What? What is it?”
“We should kill them,” Gabriel replies.
Fareeha is silent. She’s unused to killing helpless captives. That was the preferred method in Blackwatch, of course. Jesse laces his boots, saying nothing. He didn’t do much killing back in the day, not when they were together in the field; Gabriel tried to take on most of it himself.
“So why aren’t you?” Fareeha asks, challenging.
She wants him to supply her with some cold, pitiless answer so that things stay how they are, uncomplicated—she hating him, he killing without regret and only here in the first place because Talon wants him dead. But he can’t give her what she wants because it wouldn’t be true. He tells her, “Because I don’t want to.”
Fareeha eyes him for a moment, then heaves a sigh and digs in her cast-off uniform, coming up with a pair of white patches. She peels off the backs and sticks one on each man’s neck. “There. That’ll keep them from interfering until we’re done.”
Gabriel rubs his forehead. “Thank you.”
Jesse pulls the electronic fob out from the retractable clip at his chest. “Hope these’ll get us in.”
“Come on, Jesse.” Gabriel rises. “I taught you how to improvise.”
Jesse groans. “Yeah, but it’d be nice if things were easy for once.”
Gabriel cracks a smile. “I’ll cut the auxiliary power in five minutes.”
He dissolves and flows through the grass.
Behind him Fareeha and Jesse sprint across the field in their new uniforms. The base is big enough so that he doesn’t think they’ll be out of place, at least not in the brief period they need to stay under the radar. And if they are…well. He and Jesse have gotten out of worse with less (he remembers an incident involving two matches, several hornet’s nests, and fifteen hundred pounds of dried cow manure, and he would smile if he weren’t smoke).
The wall of the base is smooth crystalcrete; he snakes up it, avoiding the windows. The seconds tick by, and Gabriel reaches the top, peers over the edge of the roof. No guards, but there’s the auxiliary generator, a dirty green, chest-high machine over by the far edge. He pools on the ground and solidifies, organic components swelling into place. Damn, that’s fast. Dr. Ziegler was right—it’ll be a lot more useful for combat now. Over to the genny, and the back panel swings open easy. The sickly sweet scent of synthetic fuel hits his nose. There’s the tank, nearly full. It’s held in place by braces and other components—not supposed to be removed, but humans aren’t supposed to turn into black mist either and here he is. The clock in his head is still ticking down so he sits and waits. Two hundred and one. Two hundred and two. Two hundred and three. With the machines taking care of the counting, his mind wanders.
Fareeha is very serious these days.
She wasn’t a serious child. Precocious, yes, and easily frustrated, but she was full of mischief that took even him and Jack by surprise. Of course, he entered Blackwatch when she was still a child and never saw her after that, and he’s certainly changed a fucking lot in twenty years so it’s no surprise she has too.
He hasn’t seen her smile once, her eyes dark and cool now, as the dull glimmer of charcoal after a fire goes out. Maybe that’s the mere fact of his presence. He hopes it’s just that.
The clock in his head ticks over to two hundred ninety-five. He reaches into the genny, the nanites splitting effortlessly around machine parts, and hauls the tank out. It topples over, clear fuel spilling onto the roof and spreading over the sealed crystalcrete. Sweet-smelling fumes fill the air. A red light flicks on in the control panel and the genny starts beeping.
Good. Gabriel disassembles, floating over to the elevator, hears the cables moving through the door—drifts into the moon-shadow of the crystalcrete hub and waits.
He’s expecting them to send an engineer first, but instead when the doors slide open three armed soldiers emerge cautiously, rifles raised. In his head Gabriel swears for a few long seconds, lingering there in the shadow. Not because he’s in danger. He isn’t in danger. One of the soldiers goes around the side of the elevator; he eddies around her boots as she swings her rifle, sweeping the rooftop with the light on the barrel.
Gabriel isn’t used to using the machines in combat, doesn’t know for sure what they can and can’t do. But there’s an instinct in the back of his mind, perhaps a few lines of code Dr. Ziegler wrote for him, one more of her helpful additions.
He rises up the soldier’s body, grasping at her eyes.
He feels the wet surface against his amebic limb. She shouts but another hand-shaped limb has already clamped over hers on the rifle, and he wraps around her and pivots, spraying bullets.
He gets off a good burst that puts one soldier on the ground with his face a mess of blood. The second soldier is shouting but not firing—the woman is yelling at him don’t shoot, don’t shoot as she struggles against Gabriel. His insubstantial body gives—there’s only so much force he can generate with the electromagnetic field. Yeah, he thought that might happen. The soldier he didn’t manage to put down is speaking rapidly into his radio. All according to the original plan, not that it’ll do any fucking good now. But he should thin the herd anyway.
He rushes forward, ghosting over the roof towards the genny. Bullets follow him, throwing up sparks as they strike the crystalcrete. Gabriel would roll his eyes if he had them. Surely these idiots must have smelled the fumes. But he was leaning on Talon’s lackluster stock.
One more spray of sparks and the roof bursts into flame.
The nanites don’t like the fire, so he rises above, mixing with the oily smoke. A pair of surprised shouts. They search for him in the blaze, rifles sweeping back and forth, so he snakes out to the corpse with the bullet-ridden face and coats its arms in black, lifts the rifle it still clutches—the machines adjusting minutely to compensate for wind—and shoots.
The woman falls. The man spins, firing, Gabriel feels some of the nanites destroyed as the bullets punch through them, but only a few. He twists the corpse’s rifle and puts the other soldier down.
More will be coming. This form isn’t what he needs right now so he condenses, grimacing and coughing as the smoke blows over him from the blaze. Talon combat gear usually comes with…there it is, the capsule grenades, one at each corpse’s belt. Little canisters smaller than his palm, packed with explosives. As he scavenges them the machines pick up the hum of the elevator motor, the friction rub of the metal box on its tracks, so he waits a moment, then cracks a grenade and tosses it.
It explodes just as the doors slide open. Swearing, motion as the soldiers try to wave away the smoke. Gabriel cracks the last two and tosses them into the car just as the first bullets rip into him—fuck, that hurts, what the hell did Dr. Ziegler do? But he disperses as the two explosions go off, one right after the other.
This is new. Dissolving has always been easy, but it was a one-way street in combat, the reconstitution requiring several minutes to go to completion. Now he can vanish and return seconds later. A battlefield ghost.
He shouldn’t be able to do that. No one should.
The elevator doors remain open, the sensors waiting patiently for the splayed bodies in the threshold to withdraw. There’s movement still among the pile of soldiers, so Gabriel reforms—the scent of burned flesh hitting his nostrils, and he huffs out a breath—wades into the elevator. Bodies crumpled, stacked up knee-high. Ten or twelve of them. He plucks a few cap grenades from the burned uniforms, soot smearing on his hands; then he digs up a rifle, straightens, and fires at the fallen squad until everything is still.
The act tugs on something, a silvery thread of recognition, the sense of mismatch like a gentle error message. He and Fareeha inside the treeline, her sticking the sleep patches on those two soldiers’ necks when he displayed reluctance to kill them.
Where did that reluctance go? Maybe it only shows up when he’s supposed to be proving himself. Hard as he searches, there’s no hesitance now, no regret. Gabriel shoves the two splayed corpses back inside the metal box, then reaches in, hits the ground-floor button, and withdraws. The doors slide sedately shut.
That should piss them off. They’ll be sending up recon in about half a minute, so he’s quick with the cap grenades, flicking on the mine setting and planting them around the rooftop. The flames are dying now, but they’ve burnt out the genny. Good enough. Gabriel disperses and slips under the door to the stairwell. Hears footsteps pounding up, so he lingers there, drifting near the ceiling, posing as smoke from the blaze. Close to a dozen soldiers appear below him. The leader pauses, checking the heat filter. Useless with the fire. When he shoves open the door the first cap mine goes off and the blast chars him and hurls him into the rest of the squad. Gabriel chuckles in the back of his mind and descends. It’s tempting to stay and finish them off, but he can’t afford the time. There’s a reason they send three armed guards to fix a broken genny, and it’s because they already knew there was trouble.
Jesse and Fareeha have been compromised. Gabriel has to find them and get them out. If only the base weren’t so goddamn big. If only he weren’t alone.
But they’re in trouble. So he has to help. It isn’t that he thought of them often during his absence—Fareeha, yes, at the start of his Blackwatch days, but when the blood gathered too thick on his hands he put her out of his mind, glad he didn’t have to face her anymore. Didn’t have to hear her ask him, Uncle Gabe, how are you, with her inquisitive eyes locked on his. She was twelve then, growing a little bit wiser every day. He couldn’t have hidden it from her.
Jesse’s flight came as a relief. It was 2063 and Gabriel returned from Siberia to learn that Jesse had been killed on a solo mission—that was hard to take until the ploy fell apart and Blackwatch discovered he’d simply run instead. As it should have been. Jesse never fit in with Blackwatch, even after seven years. Never found the killing calm that Gabriel assumed with a sort of relief early on. So he was glad for that too. Knew logically on his return that they were right to hate him, that he deserved it. (Jack and his senseless optimism would disagree, of course.)
But he wishes, selfishly, that they wouldn’t. It’s a stupid, impossible wish, he knows, a misplaced desire for things to be like they were before. They’ll never be. That’s his own fault for letting Blackwatch puppet him, turn him into a war criminal, a murderer. Nothing he does will ever make that up.
But they can do better. He just has to save their lives first. As he drifts downward he retrieves the blueprint file from his electronic memory. There’s no way of knowing how far they got—all the way to the vault or barely past the door, or somewhere in between. And he’s one man (relatively) against an entire military base. Needs to be smart about it.
The basement level. He checks for a welcoming party in the heat filter (none) and slips under the door, ghosting into the shadows. This form is good for hiding but it’s not invisible. The heat filter is still up—not as good as the hardware they gave him in Blackwatch, the machines aren’t built for that. Too far to see the detention cells from here so he heads in that direction.
Not many people in the halls but he goes slowly anyway. They may have put together by now who or what he is; he worked with a number of Talon branches over the years, and there are in fact way to cripple or kill him, despite Dr. Ziegler’s best efforts. Like the cap grenades they all carry. And with his defection from Talon a couple of weeks ago, it’s possible they’ve been warned. So he uses caution. If they get him, Jesse and Fareeha are fucked.
They might be dead already, of course. Gabriel can only hope Talon is smarter than that. Enemy operatives are always more useful alive than dead.
“What the fuck happened?”
A tinny echo down a long hallway, picked up by the machines. A second voice. “Overwatch is here. They were trying to sneak in but Bratton recognized one of ‘em. Used to run in the same gang.”
Fuck. Fucking Deadlock. Even dismantled they’re still making problems for him. Gabriel lingers, listening. “They’ve got one more who was killing our guys on the roof, so keep your eyes open. Report said twelve dead.”
“Fuck.”
No more conversation. Gabriel advances, creeping along the edges of hallways, ducking into an alcove when a soldier goes sprinting by. There, finally. A sign with DETENTION printed on it in big block letters. Through the wall the heat filter shows two shapes—one lounging on a bench or chair, probably a guard, and the other curled on the floor, short and skinny.
They’re not there. Gabriel backs up and hides in a side passage to gather his thoughts. Not in the detention cells. What does that mean? Dead already? No, not necessarily—could have been taken somewhere else. The way Jesse was discovered, that sounds personal. And with that kind of grudge—
That’s a cue for his machine-run cognition to play back what happened to him when Talon took his own betrayal personally. All of a sudden his body is solidifying, and he finds himself on his knees and elbows, plants a hand on the floor, presses his forehead to the cool metal. What’s wrong, Reyes? His cognition rushes messily over from the machines to his new brain, and his head is filled with the slick feeling of sweat on his palms, the harsh sound of his breath, the nausea curdled in his stomach. What’s wrong, Reyes? He opens his mouth and sucks in air, his chest expanding. Stop. Don’t think about it. What’s wrong, Reyes? Stop—You not enjoying yourself?
Don’t think about it. Slick palm sliding on the metal floor. Since when does he sweat? What’s—
Don’t think about it.
He swallows, the memory receding for now. His forehead is still pressed to the ground. This is a bad idea. Shouldn’t let himself be seen. With reluctance he disperses again. The machines’ idea of integrating information. Real helpful. It’s not relevant, Gabriel tells himself. He needs to find Jesse regardless of what they’ve done with him.
Don’t think about it.
Fareeha, too. She’s Ana Amari’s daughter, she’ll show up on facial rec. Get her. Get Jesse. Get out. How does he do that? He’s one man.
Level the playing field a little. He drifts down the hall.
Main power is back toward the stairwell again. The seconds continue to tick by as he advances. Too slow. They could be—don’t think about it. Has to go slow. He’ll only get one shot. Bootsteps approaching, and Gabriel collects in a shadowed doorway as a soldier sprints past. Then he continues on.
Only three shapes show up in the filter, guarding the door the power room with rifles raised. The others must be allocated elsewhere at important targets. The vault, for one. And wherever Jesse and Fareeha are. Gabriel flows around the corner, climbing up over the nearest soldier. The man screams, swiping at the air. Gabriel coats his trigger hand and squeezes—badly aimed, and he manages to tear up another soldier’s arm but that’s it before his grip is broken by the man’s flailing. So he focuses on finishing the job, his machines diving down the man’s esophagus, eating through the smooth muscle and connective tissue to find the aorta right there, tearing up the elastic wall until blood is fountaining through—
“Get back! We can’t shoot it!”
The click of a grenade being cracked. Gabriel waits until it’s in the air and then rushes past it, toward the two remaining soldiers. The flames eat up some of the nanites, but not enough to slow him down. Next the uninjured one. More screaming. Someone might hear that, but he doesn’t care all that much; they’d know he was here in a minute anyway. The last babbles into her radio before she cracks her own grenade—too close, so she cooks it while backing away. This might hurt. She holds it too long and he flees away from her, so when the nanites die in the burst of fire he senses twenty-one percent loss, non-critical. Good. He reverses direction and pursues.
She isn’t faster than him, especially not holding her wounded arm. He wraps her up.
When she’s dead he returns immediately to the door. They may be sending reinforcements; no time to recoup his losses. It’s sealed with the base on lockdown. No sneaking under the crack this time. Fingerprint scanner to the right, probably requires a heartbeat. He rebuilds, the machines compensating for the loss of mass—some non-vital organs forgone, his frame and stature diminished. Grabbing the wrist of the nearest corpse, he lets the nanites take a cast of the man’s index finger and build it onto his own, lifts his hand—
Wait. What’s to say this grunt had access to the power room? Gabriel pauses, his fingers dissolving into smoke. Instead the machines scour the glass pane of the scanner, find a different print pressed there in dead skin cells and oily residue. That’s the one he uses when he touches the smooth surface.
The door slides open. Gabriel crouches to pluck the cap grenade from his first victim before he slips inside.
There’s the main genny, huge and humming, taking up most of the room. Can’t depend on one grenade to take the whole reactor out. Instead he goes to the control panel and shuts the thing off. With a low noise the room goes pitch-black.
His eyes adjust instantly. Perfect. He cracks the grenade and leaves it on the control panel as he exits the room. Three seconds later there’s an explosion.
They might figure out how to restart the genny another way, but hopefully he’ll be out of here by then. With Fareeha and Jesse. Footsteps coming toward him, so he disperses in the dark and departs.
Now where were they taken?
If he uses his own punishment as a model—don’t think about it—which is reasonable, because Talon is packed to the brim with narcissistic sadists who take everything fucking personally, then they may have been brought somewhere central to be displayed while they’re hurt. The blueprint in his head lights up with options. The briefing room on the first floor is closest, so he’ll start there. Back to the stairwell through corridors steeped in darkness. Light slices through now and then to either side, high-intensity beams from the muzzles of rifles. Gabriel takes care to stay away. Up the stairs. Long minutes have passed since he killed those soldiers on the rooftop. But caution is paramount.
He exits on the first floor, proceeding slowly toward the briefing room. His guess was right. Even from here his heat filter is full of people; as he closes he can make out some more details. The machines pick out the individual shapes, searching…
A couple of bodies missing an arm, but only one missing the left. Upright in an awkward position near the front of the room. The dimensions match up with Jesse. He scans for Fareeha and finds one shape within the margin of error for her height and frame, but the woman is leaning against the wall with arms crossed. Probably not her, then. Goddamnit. Looks like it’ll be one at a time.
The machines tell him there are sixteen soldiers in the room. No, fourteen inside and two outside. And Gabriel weaponless. But they have weapons. And he has an idea. It’s risky, that’s all. But of course he would risk himself for them. It’s the very least he can do.
A beam of light stabs out from the end of the hall. Gabriel rushes into it. Gunfire. Twenty-two percent loss. He swarms over the shooter. Would be nice if he had time to pick her over, recoup his losses. Not now. Her partner shoots at him, frantic. Bullets thud into the woman. Twenty-three percent loss. Fine.
Without power the door is unsealed. Gabriel releases the corpse and slips into the briefing room.
Their lights expose him, drawn to the door from the sounds of battle outside. The machines pick up a “What the fuck?!” A small twinge of satisfaction. They don’t know what he is, haven’t bothered to learn in the weeks since Talon let him slip from its grasp. He’ll kill them for their carelessness. They’re retreating, shooting at him again. Low-ranking chaff. He slithers over the floor, away from Jesse to keep him out of the crossfire, surges up the closest soldier’s body. More bullets. Come on, Gabriel thinks. That won’t do it. Guns won’t do it.
His sensors are primed for it so he picks up the grenade click, immediately abandons his victim and flows toward the sound. The sensors pick up the reflections in the air, the end-over-end tumbling of the capsule grenade. In his head the timer races down. 2.06 seconds. His electromagnetic field grabs the grenade in midair. The soldiers struggle to follow him with their rifle lights. 1.63 seconds. He carries the grenade back the way it came and deposits it inside the cluster of soldiers from which it originated. In the dark they don’t see until it’s too late. 0.28 seconds.
Not enough time to get away and in the explosion his machines die, their organic components charred down to nothing. Thirty-eight percent loss. More grenades. They’re throwing at their own allies. That’s how frightened they are. Gabriel avoids the first, nudges the second in the right direction. Catches another three or four in the explosion. Forty-seven percent loss.
He feels it now. The machines are strained for processing power so some of the bells and whistles fall away. Jesse at the front of the room becomes not a man he failed, a man in need of rescue, but simply an objective to be shielded from damage. In a way it’s a relief. The smoke begins to interfere with his sensors. He’s late with the next grenade. Fifty-nine percent loss. Only manages to catch one with it. They aren’t fleeing yet. They must flee. He can’t kill them all. Attacks another, scavenging for resources—fifty-seven percent—catches the grenade click. Where is it? There. 1.89 seconds. Not enough time. But there’s a good target, a half-dozen soldiers colliding with each other in the confusion, rifle lights scything through the dark in a chaotic, useless display he’d chew them out for if he were still a CO. He brings them their recompense. 0.39 seconds. Not enough time.
The grenade explodes. Well-placed, the burst of flame searing into them. His mass percentage plummets. Seventy-eight percent loss. Critical damage. Hasn’t been this bad in a very long time. He hears the click but can’t find the grenade in the smoke so he simply flees upwards. The explosion eats away his lower edges. Eighty-four percent loss. Critical damage. The color drops from the image his sensors feed him. HIs processing slows such that he can glimpse each plan as it passes by and is analyzed for a success/failure odds ratio. Movement beneath him under the smoke. Not the lifting of a rifle muzzle. Not the spinning of a cap grenade. Beams of light swing toward one point on the wall, shorten, and disappear.
They’re fleeing.
Bodies on the floor. Critical damage. He needs to replace the lost machines. Some are dead, no faint rise-and-fall of breathing under the uniform. But some are still alive, moaning or trying weakly to crawl away. Gabriel dives like a bird of prey.
The relief as he strips material, endocytoses it for digestion and processing, is primitive, almost animal in its simplicity. A simple binary flip. Dying to not dying. The machines are starving for components. Eager, he thinks. Assignation of an emotional descriptor. That means the processing power is coming back. The fraction of power devoted to environmental awareness notices the door sliding firmly shut.
Rifle beams cross the dark room haphazardly, unmoving, lain to rest with their owners. His mass percentage ticks up quickly. Twenty-nine percent of optimal mass. Thirty-two. Thirty-four. What used to be a vile, drawn-out process is now much faster, though the efficiency is little improved. A single body nets him twenty-five to thirty-five percent of the resources he needs. He races over to a second body, provoking a gurgled scream as he lyses and anabolizes an additional thirty-three percent. In ten seconds that one is drained. Just one more should do it. There, a man unconscious but just rousing. He doesn’t need to choose living targets but it kills two birds with one stone. Gabriel descends, a shaft of artificial light piercing through his particulate body as the machines go to work.
One hundred percent optimal mass. No other signs of life in the dark room. At last he allows himself to relax a little, his body condensing from the air as whole as it’s ever been. The smell of burned flesh is acrid and immediate, and he wrinkles his nose. Time to go help—
—Jesse.
The worry rushes in all at once with a backwash of guilt—how could I have ignored him? How could I not have been afraid for him? But he realizes it wasn’t his fault, only the loss of processing power, the machines prioritizing what needed to be kept and what had to go. He picks up a rifle and points it toward the front of the room, aims the beam low so Jesse’s not blinded.
There’s a rappelling rope wrapped around his neck. It’s slung over one of the rafters, the other end bound to his right wrist, his arm yanked upward. Too short—Jesse’s face is red with lack of air, his shoulder strained as the joint takes most of his weight. His boots barely scrape the ground. The prosthetic arm is gone somewhere, the metal socket showing on the contracted stump. His eyes are shining, his lips parted as he struggles for air.
“Jesse,” Gabriel breathes, crossing the field of corpses, laying the rifle down on the holotable. Jesse’s shirt is gone and there’s a fine coating of black soot on his ribs from the explosions and a few red blotches that’ll turn into bruises later, but no blood. On the floor Gabriel spots a discarded electric baton. He works at Jesse’s neck first, the machines parsing the knot instantly with one glance and guiding his fingers in untying it.
Jesse falls free and staggers. Gabriel is ready and catches him. “Hey, kid.”
Jesse holds onto him for a moment with his one remaining arm. “Not a kid anymore,” he murmurs, voice hoarse from the choking. He turns his head and coughs.
Yeah. That’s right. “Sorry. How you doing?”
A lopsided grin. “Few zaps ain’t enough to stop me.”
Gabriel nods at the empty socket. “You’re missing an arm. You see what they did with it?”
Jesse’s shoulders sag a little, and he jerks his head to the right of the holotable. “Wrecked it,” he mumbles.
The arm lies there on the floor, illuminated by a fallen rifle. The sturdy plates look all right, but the delicate elbow joint is torn up, the fingers smashed, the socket-end destroyed. “Fuck,” Gabriel sighs. “I’m sorry, Jesse.”
“Yeah, well.” He shrugs. “Least they didn’t get my shootin’ arm.”
Gabriel finds his uniform shirt next to the broken prosthetic; Jesse holds out his wrist with the rope still tied around it. “Hey, uh…” He peers past Gabriel to the carpet of corpses behind him. “Do you…do that a lot?”
Gabriel glances over his shoulder.
The lights of fallen rifles slice the dark at a dozen different angles, illuminating faces mottled with blood and char. And silhouetted, the thin, contracted hands of the bodies he sucked dry for raw material, their paper-thin skin drawn tight over their skulls. “I…I don’t know. Depends on how bad I get hurt.” He shakes himself a little, finishes with the knot, tosses the line down. “Do you know what happened to Fareeha?”
Jesse grimaces, picking up the shirt. “Maybe. They recognized her once that weaselly little fuck made me. Said something about asking the captain what to do with her.”
Captain Hartwick heads up this base, according to the intel. Gabriel knows her. Unfortunately. “She wasn’t in the holding cells, might be in the office upstairs. Here, you want help?”
Jesse slides his arm through the sleeve. “Thanks, boss, I got it.”
Gabriel smiles to himself as Jesse gets the shirt over his shoulders. “I’m not your boss anymore.”
Jesse snorts at that. “Well, what the hell else am I supposed to call you? I’m not using your damn callsign.”
Reaper. That’s the one they gave him in Blackwatch. It stuck despite his distaste. He shrugs. “Whatever you want. I’m not picky.”
“Okay then.” Jesse lets out a breath. “Think a rifle might be a bit much, but get me a sidearm or two and I’m good to go.”
Gabriel gazes at him for a moment, cycling the decision in his head. But the choice is made. “Jesse, you need to stay here.”
An incredulous stare. “I need—boss, there’s gotta be at least two dozen of ‘em still alive. You need help.”
“Maybe not two dozen. You didn’t see how many I killed on the roof.” As he’s speaking the calculations ratchet down, the machines extracting every death he witnessed but might not have truly seen, subtracting from the personnel total they got in their briefing. Some uncertainty from those reinforcements he left on the roof, but…a half-grin. “Might not even be twenty left, actually. And a bunch of them will be downstairs guarding the vault.”
Jesse’s eyes narrow. “Just ‘cause I only got one arm don’t mean I—“
“I know, Jesse, I trained you after you lost that arm, I know how dangerous you are without it. But you’re also more vulnerable and I can do this by myself.” Gabriel is calm as he always was in Blackwatch when Jesse (in his earliest days, mostly, fresh out of Deadlock and still spitting and snarling like a tomcat at anyone who looked at him funny) would refuse to obey orders, would talk back and taunt him recklessly and Gabriel would try to put off the punishment as long as he could by coaxing him instead. There’s no punishment here, of course. But he needs obedience. Even though Jesse’s not a kid anymore, even though Gabriel’s not his boss. It’s dangerous. “I can sneak in without their heat filters catching me. You can’t. Just wait for me here.”
And just like that it’s twenty years ago and Jesse is scrawny and sullen in a uniform so out of place on him it seems more probable he stole it, and Gabriel hasn’t tortured very many people yet and still thinks he can do some good with the rest of his time here. The same tension stretched over the raw openness beneath, covering it over but not hiding it.
Too much. Gabriel’s breath catches tight in his throat. He can’t lose Jesse. Not again.
“Fine,” Jesse mumbles. “Whatever. Just go.”
Thank God. “I’ll be back,” Gabriel tells him, and starts to—
“Hey—“
Gabriel pauses, reconstituting.
Jesse rubs the back of his neck. “Listen…thanks for coming to get me.”
Gabriel blinks. “Uh—yeah. Don’t worry about it.”
Then he dissolves.
Out the door. No soldiers outside, no sound echoing off the metal walls. He moves quickly, flowing through the pitch-black corridors to the stairwell. Can’t waste any time. Fareeha is still captive.
We can’t trust him!
He knows why she said that. But he wants to show her that she can. In the back of his mind he feels a little bit like an absent father, especially with Ana away on missions for months at a time. Jack was hardly there either. She had to raise herself, Jack told him. Overwatch paid for her room and board, but she went to school on her own. Cooked her own meals. Up until she joined the military on her 18th birthday.
The bravest damn kid he’s ever known. She deserves better.
Up the stairs. Second floor, third floor. Fourth. In his heat filter three red-orange shapes glow in the corridor outside. There goes the element of surprise. He pours out from under the door and wraps up the nearest. At optimal mass now, so the machines simply tear at the woman’s flesh, lysing cells, letting the contents float freely. Sharp radio chatter from his right and then a spray of bullets that pierce his insubstantial form. Beneath him the woman is still screaming. A grenade click and he flees away from her as the metal canister rolls toward him, dives instead on the bombardier. Footsteps retreating as the third abandons his comrades. That’s fine. Gabriel focuses his efforts, going for the delicate nervous tissue at the brainstem.
The man goes limp.
The woman is still in the process of dying. Gabriel condenses and takes her grenade. Only one here; it’ll have to do. He ratchets down his body temperature set point, the machines taking over cognition from his sluggish brain. Can only cool himself off so much—he hopes Talon didn’t bother supplying their grunts with the high-end shit. But this should keep him hidden from their heat filters for just a little big longer. His own filter shows a hazy focus of warmth on the north side of the floor.
The commander’s office. Bunch of guards posted, from the size of the red-orange mass. Then that’s probably where Fareeha is. Their valuable assets protected. The vault below, and up here their hostage with a head full of juicy intel. He walks down the hall, footsteps silent in the nanite cloth, rolling the grenade in his hand. The fallen rifle lights fade against his back as he retreats.
The office is at the end of a long hall, and beams of light stab out from the opening to his right as he nears it. They’ll be ready for him. His fingers close around the canister, the machines picking out human shapes in his heat filter. Four, five, six.
They start shooting as soon as he turns the corner. He’s calculated the timing and the angle, throws the grenade as the bullet-wounds sear into him and then evaporates, his body turning to smoke. An explosion. The hall dead-ends at the office door so they won’t have anywhere to go, but it’s not as enclosed as the elevator and one grenade isn’t enough to kill them. Instead he rushes forward, reforming as he goes. Too fast, and the machines don’t like moving while they do it; there’s something wrong with his insides, a strange tightness in his gut. It doesn’t bother him. The first soldier rises and Gabriel is on him, wrapping an arm around his neck, rotating—hears the shuffle behind him and disperses as the bullets thud instead into his victim. Next to the shooter—he swarms the man, the light slicing through him, hears the shout to “back away—“
The glint of the metal capsule. He surges toward it, catching it up in the electromagnetic field and bearing it toward the retreating group. Not enough room in this damn hallway. When it blows it catches the four remaining soldiers, but the machines melt away in the white-hot burst of fire. Thirty-two percent loss, he thinks calmly. Not enough processing power left to handle whatever agitation might otherwise be affecting him. He descends on the bodies, seeking out those still living to finish them off.
Movement from up the hall, the door sliding open. A cap grenade tumbles through a shaft of white light. Gabriel tries to disengage, to withdraw down the corridor. The blast bites into him. Forty-six percent loss. Survival strategies flick past in his mind. Flee. No, they might take Fareeha and run. Stay and fight. They know the grenades hurt him, so he has to make grenades unfeasible. He flows backward, slithering through the door.
The office isn’t cramped but it’s small, small enough so they won’t risk explosives. He dives on the first soldier. Clean, absolute relief. His mass percentage rises. Fifty-eight percent optimal mass. Sixty. Sixty-three. Someone’s shouting. Sixty-five. Sixty-eight. Seventy. So fast now. The machines survey his surroundings and put a picture together for him. A soldier with rifle raised, the light illuminating his feast, and the commander—familiar, that’s Hartwick, pointing a handgun. The audio comes through. “—hear me? I will kill her!”
At her feet, Fareeha, wrists bound. Her face is bruised and bleeding.
Gabriel stops. Seventy-three percent. Good enough. He solidifies—diminished some with the loss of mass, a shorter and narrower frame. Fareeha gazes up at him, her eyes blackened and puffy. Still low on processing power but the anger kindles to life anyway. How dare they do that to her?
Hartwick snorts. “I knew it. You’ve fallen back in with your old buddies, huh? Reyes?”
“Yeah,” Gabriel murmurs.
“You were always a pain in my ass.” She raises her handgun. “Good fuckin’ riddance.”
She shoots him in the head.
He collapses to the floor. His cognition had just started to flow into his soft organic brain but now it flows right back out. His brain, ironically, is the least vital organ for him now; it has a backup in the machines’ closed network, in the millions of processes they shuttle around to each other every second. The first choice is that he must feign death, so he slows and stops his heart. His retinal tissues begin to lose oxygenation so he lets a small fraction of the machines trickle from the hole in his head, curling upward into the air. They’ll be his eyes. The image is grainy and without color. There, the shrunken corpse he just consumed. The walls paneled in fake wood.
His own body, eyes blank and staring. A good approximation of dead. Poor quality, but the few machines with sensors up process the compressions of air, translate them into sound. The image rotates. Fareeha is shouting. “Gabriel!” Her blackened eyes shine. Afraid. He can hardly remember the last time he saw her afraid. The Finnish base assault, twenty-five years ago. “Gabriel!” she shouts again, searching his dead face for a reaction.
Would that he could reassure her. But it’s not possible, not now. “Did that kill him?” the soldier mutters.
Hartwick some over and kicks his body. The machines abort any leftover reflexes, and he doesn’t even twitch. She presses two fingers two his neck and, finding no heartbeat, stands. “Think so. Keep an eye on him.”
Still not a good situation. He can’t take more than one at a time as he is now—at least not with any degree of certainty that he could keep them from shooting Fareeha as a revenge kill. Hartwick jerks her head at the open door. “Check if anyone’s still alive out there.”
The soldier goes to investigate. Fareeha is still staring the pulseless body lying across from her. “Gabriel,” she whispers.
“Shut up,” Hartwick snarls, kicking her in the chest. Fareeha grunts and curls.
Gabriel wants to put Hartwick down right now, but the other asshole is coming back, shaking his head. “Sorry, ma’am. No survivors.”
“Shit.” Hartwick rubs her forehead. “We can’t afford to pull any from the vault, Overwatch might have some more rats hiding in the walls. Grab Amari, we’re getting in a heli. If this place falls I’m not going with it.”
Fuck. He can’t just let them leave. Hartwick steps outside, waiting. The soldier grabs Fareeha by the back of her shirt and drags her toward the door.
Gabriel surges off the floor, exquisitely aware of how corporeal he is, and slams into the soldier, capturing him in the threshold—grabs his rifle arm and tilts it up, away from Fareeha, as he hears Hartwick’s “What the fuck?!”
Her handgun clatters out a salvo of shots that thud into his back and side, splintering his ribs, piercing his lungs and stomach. He feels the bullets shredding muscle and organs, feels his gut grow heavy with blood. An explosion of pain, as if he is being torn open from the inside. It hurts like nothing he’s felt in years and years. But he stays where he is, keeping the struggling soldier in his grasp, standing firmly in the threshold between Hartwick’s pistol and Fareeha on the ground.
The rifle sprays bullets into the wall, and he tightens his grip on the man’s wrist, trying to rotate him, to point that rifle at Hartwick. It’s a long shot. He’s only at seventy-three percent mass right now, certainly smaller than the guy he’s trying to grapple with. But he has to try. He already abandoned Fareeha once, when she was twelve with no father, a mother gone overseas for long months at a time. And he left her anyway. Not again. The soldier is too strong. The pain consumes his whole being. The click of the pistol being reloaded. The man slams him back into the door jamb. Gabriel gasps, sick with the pain, pins and needles rushing to his fingertips and down to his toes as blood gushes out from the bullet holes. But his grip stays closed, his feet stay under him. He has to try.
A gunshot and a guttural “huh” from his right. A second shot and the soldier goes limp in his arms.
Gabriel collapses.
The corpse crumples on top of his legs. He clutches his middle, thoughts scattered in the agony of the wounds. A wave of nausea, and blood and bile rise in his throat; he coughs, the thick, salty mixture spilling out the corner of his mouth. Someone is saying something.
“Gabriel!”
Fareeha.
Motion, a fleeting shadow crossing one of the beams of light that split the hall. “Boss—“ Jesse, crashing to his knees at Gabriel’s side. “Come on, boss, this ain’t you, this ain’t gonna kill you. Come on.”
That’s right. Bullets won’t do it. He isn’t a person anymore.
He dissolves.
The pain disappears, the negative space left in its absence a bright flash of relief bordering on euphoria. He isn’t a person. He’s a cloud of smoke, he’s a machine ghost. Can’t be killed with simple bullets.
But he doesn’t need that now. Right now he needs to be Gabriel Reyes, because Jesse and Fareeha are hurt and this isn’t over yet, he still needs to get them out.
Solid again. Resting a hand on his stomach, he finds no bullet holes in the new flesh. That easy, huh? he thinks. Jesse lets out a breath. “God damn. Wasn’t sure you were comin’ back.”
“Sorry,” Gabriel murmurs. “I’m…just give me a minute.”
Seventy-three percent optimal mass. He’s insubstantial again, scavenging the corpse that fell on top of him. Seventy-five. Seventy-eight. Eighty. Jesse is pulling the knife from his belt, working at the tape around Fareeha’s wrists. They exchange words. Gabriel’s attention is elsewhere. Eighty-three. Eighty-five.
When he solidifies again—one hundred percent—Jesse holds out the knife, faintly embarrassed. “Hey, you mind doing this? Not so easy with one hand.”
Gabriel takes it. “Thought I told you to stay downstairs.”
Jesse snorts. “Been a while since you saw me last. Got sick of following orders a long time ago.”
“Should’ve guessed you wouldn’t listen. Seems like all you ever did in Blackwatch was roll your eyes and complain.” He slides the blade under the tape and starts cutting carefully.
“You gave me orders worth obeying, maybe you wouldn’t have had to listen to me whining about ‘em.”
Gabriel stops, the silver tape pulled taut over the knife-edge. “Never really got any worth obeying,” he mutters.
“Then why’d you fuckin’ stay?” Jesse replies coolly.
Gabriel yanks the knife back, and the tape parts. He unwraps it and tosses it away. “If you’re expecting answers from me, you’re going to be disappointed. I don’t have anything for you, Jesse. Sorry.”
Fareeha is sitting up, rubbing her wrists. “How did you survive that?” she asks, breathless.
Gabriel hands the knife back. “Remember the nanomachine program they put me in before Blackwatch? I can survive a lot.”
She presses a hand to her ribs, wincing. “Thank you. For coming to get me.”
Gabriel chuckles. “Kind of fucked it up. Jesse’s the one you should be thanking.”
She smiles at the floor. “Even though he was supposed to stay downstairs?”
“Yeah, well. Credit where it’s due.”
“Thank you, Jesse.” She reaches out and grasps his knee. “And I’m sorry about your arm.”
“Ah, don’t worry about it,” Jesse says, nonchalant. “Engineering’ll make me another.”
Gabriel gazes at the pile of corpses in the hall and sighs. “Okay, you two go call the plane. I’ll head down to the vault.”
Fareeha and Jesse both begin to argue at the same time, Jesse putting in an I can still shoot in case you hadn’t noticed, although Fareeha’s clutching her ankle and even in the dark Gabriel can see how swollen it is already. “Hey. Hey.” He raises his hands to quiet them. “I know, I know. But I’m not planning to shoot anyone.”
“You gonna sneak in?” Jesse asks acidly. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but clouds of smoke can’t carry hard drives.”
“Not sneaking in either,” Gabriel replies. “I know Talon. I have an idea.”
Jesse rolls his eyes (don’t pull that shit with me, kid, Gabriel would used to say—with a grin at first, not so much later on). “You wanna share with the rest of us?”
Gabriel runs a hand over his shorn hair. “Well, I guess I can show you.”
——
He descends the stairs.
Not his best idea to let them see. Fareeha in particular looked on with a sort of muted horror as his machines ravaged the bodies, leaving them shrunken, diminished, grotesque. And then after. Jesse hardly looked at all, just tapped his lips like he was wishing for a cigarette. This way I won’t have to kill them, Gabriel said, pleading his case. There it was again. The desire to avoid more death. We’ll meet you at the plane, Jesse replied, and helped Fareeha down the hall.
That’s fine. Didn’t expect much else. It’s certainly not pretty.
The sub-basement. Gabriel pushes the door open and drags his burden through. The hallway is dark as night, but far off there’s the dim glow of light. That’ll be where they’re guarding the vault. He trudges toward it, his footsteps heavy, shoulders hunched down lest his head hit the ceiling. This might go south if he doesn’t play it well enough. Then…he doesn’t know what’ll happen. This is uncharted territory. The machines are more responsive than ever—as evidenced by the plan he’s currently carrying out—but he suspects there’ll be a lot of guards. And the heat filter confirms it, picking out the individual forms as he draws closer. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen, clustered all together around the corner, minute shifts he recognizes as rifles being readied. They must hear him, the solid thud of his footsteps, the rustle of his passenger dragged behind him.
He rounds the corner.
Rifle lights plaster his front and bullets follow a split-second after, punching through him liquidly. In his head the mass percentage trickles down. Two hundred seventy-one. Two hundred sixty-nine. Two hundred sixty-eight. He waits a second for the volley to stutter in shock, then opens his mouth to tell them, “That’s not going to do you any good.”
Inside the dense, homogenous matter of his new body he has constructed a lung-like pump to move air and a pair of vocal cords to use it, and above a tongue and lips and sharp, messy teeth in gleaming white with which to form words. They come out blunt and low, but he makes them boom to be heard over the gunfire. Then he swings his clawed hand forward.
Hartwick’s body lands on the floor face-up so they can see it’s her. He did his best to obscure the gunshot wound in her head, bloodying the area around it; then he sliced her belly and arms, leaving long tears in her uniform like she was attacked by some kind of wild animal. The lights tilt down to illuminate her. Then the whispers. “Jesus, that’s the captain.” “Oh, fuck.”
The shooting trickles off at last. Gabriel stands perfectly still, their lights panning over him again. He does not blink his red eyes, two columns of three each—straightens a little to his full height, close to eight feet, the top of his head brushing the low ceiling. His body is a glittering black, his flesh shifting slowly in lazy, viscous eddies, humanoid in shape but otherwise featureless save the pointed tips of his fingers.
They know of him—have heard the name Reaper during the years he’s collaborated with their group and others to kill and steal and otherwise destabilize the very organizations he himself helped build in Blackwatch. And they must also have heard whispers of the bodies left in his wake, drawn and withered, husks of skin tight over aspirated bone. They may know of the red eyes, or of his penchant for being shot full of bullets, dissipating into smoke, and showing up later in a stolen uniform none the worse for wear.
They’ve never seen this before. Gabriel hopes it’ll be the last straw in a pile of murky, impossible rumors. To see a true monster before them in the slowly-shifting flesh. His mouth works, ejecting distorted words. “Your commander is dead. I’ve killed everyone else in the base. If you leave now I’ll let you live.” He steps aside to allow them room to pass, should they choose.
They hesitate. Because Talon is military in its structure, and disobedience is met with harsh retribution—don’t think about it. He isn’t just a body anymore. He’s not even a person. He’s a creature without reference. A whisper, a formless fear given shape.
One of the soldiers takes a stuttered step forward.
Gabriel doesn’t react, only waits. With the ranks broken the rest follow quickly, beams of light bobbing before them as they flee down the corridor. The echo of bootsteps on metal fades as they turn the corner.
Darkness.
The machines assemble an image for him. Vault door. Powered down, no one standing guard. It’s right there.
Gabriel steps up and grasps the handle.
——
When he gets outside again, his mass percentage is back down to a hundred—the code no longer straining to wrangle two and a half times more machines than it was meant for. The hard drive is the size of a cereal box (he and Jack in the barracks during the enhancement program, scarfing down contraband Fruity-O’s as soon as the drugs wore off and they could taste again—)
Gabriel shakes his head. Focus. It’s not over ’til it’s over. The hard drive is the size of a cereal box, clasped in one hand. The plane is hovering near the treeline, the wing lights blinking. The sound of a heli fading into the sky. That’ll be the soldiers he sent packing.
The night is dark, the base silent behind him, floodlights dead. The only light comes from the half-moon above, setting the dewy grass gleaming. It’s cool under his feet. Gabriel breathes in and exhales, his breath misting a little with the cold and humidity. Strange. Right now, with the night air close on his skin, the edges of the hard drive digging into his fingers, he feels almost human.
The cabin door yawns open and Gabriel hauls himself up, sits on the bench that lines the near wall. Jesse glances back from the pilot’s seat. “How’d it go?”
“Scared ‘em off. Didn’t have to kill anyone.” He stows the hard drive in overhead storage. “Got what we came for.”
“Huh. That’s good.” Jesse flicks a couple of switches and grasps the control wheel.
Gabriel lifts an eyebrow. “You sure you’re okay up there?”
“Come on, boss.” The plane starts to rise. “I can fly this thing with one hand tied behind my back.”
Gabriel holds back a groan. “Just holler if you need help.”
Fareeha, on the opposite bench, has some napkins and a water bottle on her lap.
She’s wiping at her face—not daubing but scrubbing the sticky blood from her nose and lips, from the hair at her temples. Not doing a very good job—smearing it around more than cleaning it off. Gabriel sighs, digging the first aid kit out from under the seat. “Fareeha. Let me do it.”
She hesitates, staring at her knees. Then she nods.
Gabriel kneels in front of her. He’s methodical, wiping the blood off, spreading her skin gently with the pads of his fingers to clean the flecks of dirt from the wounds. It’s not the first time he’s done this. Just the first time in over twenty years. Ana’s gonna be pissed, Jack would say. And Fareeha would tell him, it’s okay! It’s just a cut, let’s go sledding again tomorrow. He smears on some antibiotic cream, adds butterfly strips or squares of gauze. Then he gives her some pain pills and she tips the water bottle back and swallows them. “Thank you,” she says.
Gabriel sits back. “Yeah, don’t wor—“
“For saving me. I saw you blocking that woman’s shots.”
Gabriel pauses. Then he smiles a little. “I wasn’t going to just let her shoot you.”
“Why did you change?” Fareeha asks quietly.
He stares at her, not knowing what to say.
“You were so brave before. You did so much good. And then—“ She rests her fingers over the gauze pad on her cheek. “You changed.”
“Did I?” Gabriel mumbles. His behavior, yes. But he didn’t change—there’s no event he remembers, no moment he can pinpoint where his resolve wavered, where his inner strength began to crumble. Because it was never as impressive as everyone else seemed to think. It broke under stress as it was always going to.
“I don’t know,” Fareeha murmurs. “Maybe you didn’t.”
“Goddamnit.” Jesse looks over his shoulder. “I saw you after my arm got blown off. You fuckin’ closed off, you would barely even talk to me anymore. You turned into a yes-man. You really telling me you didn’t change?”
Gabriel presses himself back against the wall, arms folded over his chest. “I don’t know.”
No reply. Fareeha turns, leans her forehead against the window. Jesse shakes his head and taps something on the control panel.
“Did it hurt?” Fareeha asks.
Gabriel blinks. “Hm?”
“When that woman shot you.”
“Oh. Yeah, I mean, whatever Dr. Ziegler did—yeah, it hurt. I’m fine, though.”
“Hm.”
The cabin is silent. He gazes out the window at the forest below, a moonlit river winding through it, a glimmering thread stretching back to a horizon lost in the dark.
——
Gabriel floats again into consciousness.
“Good afternoon.” Dr. Ziegler smiles at him, radiant. “You should see the change in your code, it’s incredible.”
“Great,” he mutters, sitting up and planting his feet on the floor. His clothes are on the chair. “Then why does everything hurt so goddamn much?”
“Ah, yes. The nanites were flagging noxious stimuli—both internal and external, for example, both fear and physical pain—to be screened out of active processes, but, to be blunt, it wasn’t working. Those processes would simply continue running in the background, taking up energy and sometimes intruding when they weren’t properly managed. So I deprioritized that function.”
Gabriel heaves a sigh. “Fine. Anything else wrong?”
“No, but—you must tell me, all this new code for supra-optimal mass—“
“Another time, doc.” He pulls his pants up, slips the long-sleeved shirt over his head. “Is Fareeha still here?”
“Er—yes.” Dr. Ziegler leans and points. “Room three, down the hall.”
Gabriel jams his feet into his boots and goes out the door, colliding with Jesse.
Jesse stumbles, reaches out and grabs Gabriel’s arm to arrest his fall. “Whoa there.”
“Sorry.” Gabriel raises his hands. “Didn’t see you.”
“ ’S okay.” He straightens, letting go. “She ready for me?”
Gabriel frowns. “You all right?”
“Yeah, she’s just gotta take a look at this.” He lifts the empty socket. “Engineering needs clearance before they fix it.”
“Oh.”
There’s a beat of silence. Gabriel wants to say something. I’m sorry for everything that happened. I don’t have any excuses for it. I should have done better by you. Should have helped you when you needed it.
“So you’re back, huh?”
He blinks. “Uh—yeah.”
The faint rush of air through the vents. Jesse watches him. “Are you really back?”
Gabriel nods. “Yeah. Yeah, I am.”
Jesse shifts, exhales, rubs his eyes. “Look, boss, I’m sorry. Jack told me what they did.”
Gabriel freezes. Cold dread trickles down the back of his throat and pools in his stomach—
“You know, the setup with my arm and all that shit.” Jesse waves his hand. Oh. Gabriel relaxes. “So I’m sorry for getting pissed,” Jesse continues. “I know it’s not helping.”
“Hey, it’s all right.” He smiles. “I can take it.”
“Yeah, well. I still shouldn’t do it.” Jesse sighs. “Listen, I’ll see you later, all right?”
“All right.”
Gabriel steps aside and Jesse heads into the room. That went…better than expected. He goes down the hall and knocks. Hears the answering, “Come in.” So he opens the door.
Fareeha is lying gowned in the hospital bed. Her eyes widen a little—was probably expecting someone else; he should have announced himself. But she doesn’t demand that he leave, only watches him with wary eyes. “What is it?”
He shuts the door. “Just wanted to see how you’re doing.”
She shrugs. “Fine.”
Gabriel can’t help but snort at that. Her face is still bruised, which means she refused nanite treatment. And her ankle is wrapped in a teal-blue gel cast. “Tough guy, huh?”
Her arms wrapped around his waist, heel hooking in his knee. He lets it buckle, lets her swing him to the ground and clamber on top of him for a pin—only to escape at the last second, scrambling out from under, the two of them circling each other around the edges of the carpet. “So, you think you’re a tough guy, huh?” he says, and she grins as always, bearing the nickname with pride.
He shouldn’t have said that. But her split lips soften in something approaching a smile. “Angela didn’t bother asking if I wanted nanite shots. I always say no.”
He nods. “How’s the ankle?”
Fareeha glances down at the cast. “Surgery went well. I’m still a little tired from the anesthesia. I’m not supposed to put any weight on it.”
“Hm. I hear crutches are fun.”
She rolls her eyes. “Yes, especially with broken ribs.”
Shit. Yeah, that wouldn’t be fun. Broken ribs plus the ankle and all those bruises. And Jesse’s arm destroyed. Meanwhile Gabriel is as strong as he’s ever been.
“Do you think—would you help me back to my room?” Fareeha asks. “I hate being here.”
“Oh. Yeah, sure.” He approaches.
Fareeha sits up and stiffly turns, letting her feet down on the floor. A hiss of pain as Gabriel lifts her arm and slides it around his shoulders. Her face is drawn but determined as she pushes herself upright, tugging the gown down so it covers her knees. On her feet—foot, Gabriel taking her weight with every other step to keep it off the bad ankle. “You’re heavier than you used to be,” he mutters.
“I was twelve the last time I saw you,” she says shortly.
“Yeah, I remember.” Gangly and losing a little of her childhood boldness but still sharp as a tack and a bit too curious for her own good.
He should have tried harder.
They limp down the hallway. Fareeha braces her other arm on the wall for support, grimacing. She points the way, and eventually Gabriel comes to a door with ‘FAREEHA AMARI’ printed on it in block letters. (His own door doesn’t have a nameplate.)
Inside the room is much homier than he expected. A couple of potted cactuses, some woven drapes, pictures on the wall. The lights are set to a warm orange. Gabriel helps Fareeha to the bed and sets her down with care. “Hang on,” she says, and motions at the bureau. “Would you get me some clothes? I want to visit the mess hall, I’m starving.”
“Sure.” Gabriel opens the drawers, finds underwear and a t-shirt, socks and a pair of sweatpants. He turns with the stack and finds Fareeha wincing as she unties the strings of the gown at her lower back. She gasps when it finally comes undone, holding her ribs.
“Do you need some more painkillers?” Gabriel asks. “I can go—“
“No. I don’t like how they make me feel.” She takes the clothes from him.
Gabriel turns his back, wanders over to the wall. A quartet of pictures—Fareeha in dress uniform receiving a medal, she and her squadmates standing next to a sign in Arabic. Ana’s promotion photograph from when she got her own unit. And—
Gabriel reaches out and takes the picture from the wall.
It’s him. So young there, in Overwatch uniform but it can’t be more than a couple of years beyond the organization’s founding. He’s laughing, gazing up at where he holds Fareeha like a soaring airplane, her arms outstretched, hair flying back, a wild grin on her face. She’s no more than four or five years old.
“All right. We can go.”
Gabriel turns.
She spots the picture in his hand and freezes. “I’m sorry,” Gabriel blurts out. “Fareeha, I did care about you. Even though I left. I just didn’t—I couldn’t let you see me like that.”
Fareeha hesitates. Then— “My mother was deployed,” she whispers. “Jack was too busy for me with the strike commander job. I thought that you, at least, would stay. I kept on hoping, for such a long time.” Her eyes, welling with tears, search his face, her fists balling at her sides. “I looked up to you! Even more than my mother, more than Jack! And then you started—kidnapping people! Torturing people! How could you do that?!”
“I thought it was for the greater good, Fareeha. I thought—“ He halts, lets out a sigh. No, that isn’t the reason. “I was a soldier. I followed orders. I should have fought back and I didn’t. I’m sorry. I wish I could have been the man you thought I was.”
“And what about now?” She blinks away tears, wipes her nose. “Jack says you want to help, but—Gabriel, why did you come back?”
“Because I want to make it right. I want things to be like they were supposed to be.” A shining future that blackened over time, unrecognizable, a distant memory he’d thought lost forever. But he found it again and he’s been trying to smear off the tarnish ever since he got back. He takes a step forward, desperate. “Fareeha, I loved Overwatch. All I ever wanted was to help people.”
“Are you going to stay this time?” she asks. Her shoulders are hunched, hands clasped on her lap.
“Yeah.” Gabriel sits beside her. “I’d rather be here right now than anywhere else in the world.”
She leans over and hugs him and he puts his arm around her shoulders, holding her gently so as not to aggravate her broken ribs.
In the mess hall he stays just long enough to finish a cup of coffee. Fareeha tells him what she’s been up to, her most exciting missions, the laundry list of honors she’s accrued. Reminds him of his own career, early on. The pride shines through when she talks about the lives she’s saved.
Then she bids him goodbye and he navigates out of the mess hall, heading back to his room.
Finally. He feels exhausted. Maybe whatever Dr. Ziegler did to him. A nap would be good, and then a nice big dinner. He runs a hand through his hair—longer now, thick gray-black curls covering his head. Turns the corner—
Jack is leaning up against his door and straightens. “Hey.”
Gabriel stops. “Uh—hi.”
“Heard the mission didn’t go as smooth as we hoped.” Jack approaches. “You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Tough to do any lasting damage with the machines.” He shrugs.
“Good.” Jack hesitates, then folds his arms over his chest. “Listen, Gabe...can I ask you something?"
Gabriel lifts an eyebrow. "What?"
Jack takes a deep breath. “I…I haven't really done this before. So I don't know if I—it's just when I, you know, hold your hand and...stuff like that, you haven't been…responding, really, I guess.” He rubs the back of his neck. “So I just want to know if I'm doing something wrong, or if you want me to back off, because I get it, I really do. I just need to know. I don't want you to feel like I'm pressuring you or anything."
Gabriel, listening with a sort of distant surprise, finds his nose burning and his eyes welling with tears. He covers his face. "Ah, shit."
Jack’s voice is abashed. "I—I'm sorry, is it something I said?"
Gabriel can't help choking out a laugh. "God, you're fucking bad at this."
Jack embraces him.
That's better. Gabriel hugs him back—tight, fingers curling into his shirt, face pressed into his shoulder. Tries to stifle the sob but it shudders out of him anyway.
"Hey, it's okay," Jack says softly. "I got you."
"Fuck." Gabriel sniffles and straightens. "Let's get inside before someone sees me."
His room is as bare as the day he arrived, the only adjustment to the light—a warmer shade of gold than the default white. They sit on the couch and Jack holds him, rubbing his back while he cries. Which he's doing for some fucking reason—real, full-body crying, the sobs coming from deep in his stomach and chest. He's soaking Jack's shirt. Jesus. What the fuck is wrong with him?
It goes on for way too long—at least ten minutes, maybe fifteen by the time he can breathe without wanting to start crying again. Jack’s presence is helping, warm and solid beneath him, a strong hand rubbing steady circles over his back. For a moment he just lies there, reluctant to move; it’s nice being wrapped up in Jack’s arms. But he can’t stay here forever. "Fuck," he mumbles, sitting up. "Sorry. Hang on."
There are paper towels under the sink in the bathroom, and he grabs one, blows his nose and brings the roll out, thuds it down on the table. But Jack doesn't seem bothered about the tears and snot coating his shirt. He smiles up at Gabriel.
Just the way it used to be. A lot about this is just the way it used to be—they were always close, going all the way back to their first deployment together before the enhancement program. Now the events of the past twenty years hang over them, of course; that, and they touch each other more. But otherwise it’s as if no time has passed at all. Gabriel lets out a long sigh, flopping back down on the couch. "Well, that was fucking embarrassing."
Jack chuckles. "Unexpected, maybe. I haven't seen you cry since...what, that round of drugs in the SEP when we felt like our bones were melting out of our bodies?”
Gabriel snorts. “Yeah, well, I seem to remember you managed to hold it together.”
“I’ve cried since then.” Jack settles back against the arm of the couch, stretching out his legs to tangle them with Gabriel’s. “Probably…’57 or ’58, when we were going bad and I thought it was permanent. That I lost you for good.”
Gabriel covers his face, hiding a grin. “I fucking did too. In the goddamn locker room. Jesse walked in on me, I was pissed.”
“How’s he doing, by the way? With you back, I mean.”
Yeah. About that. “Hard to tell,” Gabriel mutters. “I think it’s getting better, not worse, at least.”
“And Fareeha?”
Gabriel rests his forehead on the back of the couch. “She wants me to be the same person I was before…all this. I mean, I want that too, but it’s still not true.”
Jack shrugs one shoulder. “She’s not the same person either. She’s thirty-two, she’s a decorated officer.”
Gabriel can’t meet his eyes, instead follows the threads of the couch fabric—the criss-cross of the synthetic weave sharpening in his perfect vision. “What am I supposed to do now? How do I make it better?”
“Gabe, they both miss you like hell. I saw it when I briefed them about you being back here. They…I think they’re scared to believe it. You did kind of come out of nowhere.” He sits up. “So be there for them. Show them you mean it. I know you do.”
Gabriel folds his arms. As good advice as any. “Listen, I’m sorry for pushing you away. It’s not that I want you to back off. I don’t, actually. I’m just…really not fucking used to this.” He grimaces and rubs his eyes. “A lot to catch up on.”
“Hey, take your time. You’re here now.” Jack smiles. “You don’t have to deal with all this shit on your own anymore.”
Why did you change?
A hundred reasons. Because his body changed. Because he let himself be fooled. Because he wasn’t strong enough, because they took advantage of that. Because he walled himself off. But he isn’t a soldier anymore, doesn’t follow orders. He rearranges himself, leaning up against Jack, curling into his chest. There. That feels better.
"It's funny," Jack says, his chest rumbling under Gabriel's cheek. "This is where I always wanted to end up. Overwatch saving lives without the UN getting in our way. You and I together. Ana and Fareeha here. I mean, I was kind of hoping McCree would have moved on, but at least he's out of the snot-nosed brat phase. Finally."
"Hey," Gabriel interjects. "He was a good kid. Not his fault you're such a goddamn square."
Jack chuckles. “Whose side are you on here?"
Gabriel grins. “You’re right, though. This is where I wanted to be. Minus the last two decades.”
Jack kisses his hair. "There's a place for you here as long as you want it."
Not that there's one for him anywhere else. But he doesn’t need that. “Think I’ll be staying for a while,” he murmurs, and takes Jack’s hand in his own.