Lyla Michaels pressed her palms against her eyes, blotting out the world. It was easier this way. Easier when she couldn’t see the world, when it all just went away.
A.R.G.U.S. Advanced Research Group United Support. One of the most secretive and powerful organizations in the country. All hers. Being director of A.R.G.U.S. had been a dream fulfilled, but the funny thing about dreams was this: All you had to do was turn the wrong corner in your dream-world, and you’d find yourself in a nightmare.
She had responsibilities that most people could not fathom. Under her watch was an organization devoted to wrangling the uncontrollable, comprehending the impenetrable, and deflecting the unstoppable. She’d dealt with time travelers, mystics, aliens, mad scientists, and just plain lunatics. And that was just on the weekends.
Her husband, John Diggle, had told her that there was a serial bomber in the city but that she needn’t worry about it, because Green Arrow was on the case. And she had gratefully allowed her mind not to wander in that direction, focusing instead on the hard work of A.R.G.U.S.
But now there seemed to be a connection. She had a readout on her desk that told her someone had broken into an A.R.G.U.S. lab that very night, stealing something very dangerous.
No one was supposed to know where that lab was. No one was supposed to know that the lab even existed in the first place.
And yet . . .
With a heavy, reluctant sigh, she pulled her hands away from her face. Light danced into her eyes, her vision clearing. She ran a hand through her short hair. Right at this moment, she wanted nothing more than to go home, tell the babysitter to take the rest of the night off, and cuddle her daughter, Sara. Hold her close and safe.
But she had a job to do. She didn’t get to shirk her duty just because it was tough sometimes.
She tapped one immaculately manicured finger on the sheet of paper on her desk. It was titled “INCIDENT REPORT: MISSING ITEMS.” What followed was a lot of jargon and technical mumbo jumbo, but only three words actually mattered.
Those three words were Bug-Eyed Bandit.
There is a part of Star City where the tourists never go, unless they get lost, take a wrong turn at Grell Park, and wind up ambling down a dark alley, turning left, then walking up a decrepit block of crumbling brownstones and broken macadam.
The only people who live here are the forgotten. The forsaken. The ones Star City would rather pretend don’t exist. Some of them are here because they made mistakes. Some because they made bad choices. Some because they just had bad luck.
And one of them was here because it was exactly where he wanted to be.
In a dimly lit room in an old town house, the man some called Ambush sat at a desk. The desk had been retrieved from a garbage dumpster. It was made of steel, one leg dinged and bent, the surface pitted and scarred. There was a single lamp burning, an old clip-on sort, attached to the desktop, aimed precisely so that it formed an almost-perfect, sharp circle of white light on the desk’s surface.
Ambush sat at the desk in a green T-shirt, his chair a similar dumpster-dive treasure, one wheel frozen in place. He wore a set of magnifying goggles, and with a pair of tweezers, he probed at the thing before him, the thing pinned down in that circle of white light.
It was a bug.
A tiny, mechanical insect. Such a faithful reproduction of real life that anyone looking at it would have thought it to be real. But it wasn’t made of flesh and keratin and blood. It was manufactured out of bits of alloy and plastic and woven metallic fibers. It was a wondrous thing, a clone of nature, a perfection of the imperfect.
Ambush probed at its innards. He liked what he saw. He grinned broadly. “Oh, yes. This will be . . . advantageous.”