THE GIRL REACTED before he could.

Still in the post-reversion fog, Caswell watched the woman across from him lurch up and into the two figures in the hallway with surprising speed. Whoever she was, she was damned quick.

The soldiers in the hall were dressed like none he’d ever seen. But then he was dressed in a completely bizarre outfit, too. It looked like someone from a hundred years earlier had tried to imagine what a business suit would look like in the year 2100, and failed miserably.

Get it together, Cas. He reached out to his implant and willed a dose of elhydrine, ignoring for the moment that virtually every chembank was nearly empty. One thing at a time. There was danger here, and the post-reversion haze left him little to no chance of fighting it. The gland responded. Time seemed to slow down externally while remaining normal within his mind. Chemical reactions in his brain would trigger faster, much faster, now. The downside was heat. He’d get maybe thirty seconds of realtime advantage and then it would stop or he’d cook himself.

The woman flung herself toward the door, one balled fist arching toward the jaw of the uniformed man standing there. Who was she again? Melni? A strange name. She looked like no one he’d ever seen, pale skin and blond hair cut almost mannishly short. Her eyes were a luminous, unearthly purple. Contact lenses, surely. She wore a dress that matched her eye color.

Most important, she knew his mnemonic. Whoever she was, he trusted her. Or, at least, he needed her. Maybe he’d given her something for safekeeping, something too important to lose along with his memory. Something Archon needed?

What Caswell needed was space. To gather his wits, find out just what the hell had led him here, then make contact with Monique and report.

He forced himself into motion. With his brain firing at six times the normal rate it felt like slow dancing in a vat of heavy syrup. The woman’s fist was just reaching the first guard’s chin. The man was holding a completely bizarre-looking gun with tubing along the sides and some sort of pressurized canister extending well back above the wrist, but there was no mistaking the business end and it was coming up. Caswell adjusted his motion to lift his lower back away from the bench seat and, just as he suspected, the tip of the weapon suddenly unleashed a bright flame and then a bullet. The round sailed across the gap like a gently thrown dart, slapping into the cushion where Caswell’s rear end had been a second earlier. A split second from the guard’s perspective, unless he had an implant, too. His eyes did not move in the telltale hyperactive way elhydrine causes, though. Perhaps just a local soldier? The uniform was as bizarre as the suit Caswell wore.

He kept himself in motion, and reviewed the last few minutes of his life before…this. He’d been aboard the Venturi, watching the crew of the Pawn Takes Bishop work to free the black box from that doomed, long-dead station. He’d sent off a report to Monique that one crew member was missing. Alice Vale.

“You were sent here to kill a woman named Alice Vale.”

Monique had forced him into an IA-protocol mission. A sudden request, no time to get his acceptance much less his ritual, spurned because the captain of that salvage crew had accessed the Venturi’s computers against orders. Then his implant had kicked in and everything between that moment and when he “awoke” on this train was now forcibly deleted. Forever. Whatever it had been, wherever they’d sent him to do it, he’d obviously failed to complete the objective and return to London, or at least a safe place, in time.

He had to contact Monique. Find out what the fuck was going on. Find out if he should abort. Go to ground or return home.

Or finish the job he’d been sent to do. Kill Alice Vale. Perhaps that was why he’d trusted the girl with his lyric. How the hell else would she have known his mission goal?

A strangely muffled thud caught his attention: the woman’s fist smashing into the guard’s jaw. A tooth glided away like a leaf knocked from a branch. The man’s knees were going, his eyes rolling sickly up.

The other man, though—shit. Caswell hadn’t noticed before but saw it now; the butt of the man’s gun was driving in hard toward Melni’s stomach. No time to do anything about that. He could think fast but his movements were still constrained by human capability and real-world physics. Caswell pushed his body into a leap, stretched himself out, hands extended. He aimed straight for the woman’s head knowing she would double over from the blow to her abdomen before he reached her. Sure enough she started to bend forward, an elongated grunt whooshing out of her lips. Caswell brushed the top of her head as he sailed past, his hands perfectly grasping the neck of the man who had struck her. Caswell caught a brief glimpse of snow-dappled trees blurring past outside. No landmarks to guide him. Planetside, clearly, but where? Russia? Canada? Some goddamned theme park for rich weirdos who liked to ride steam trains? Impossible to tell, and not the time to figure it out.

Not the time because, despite everything else assaulting his mind, one fact stood out: He’d trusted the woman Melni. Trusted her enough to tell him his mnemonic, had to trust her because above all else he apparently thought his mission was important enough to continue beyond the expiration timer. Monique wouldn’t like that. IA-rated missions were not given unless a strict and carefully considered time frame had been agreed upon.

Caswell’s momentum through the heavy clear molasses of thin-fucking-air took him and his victim straight across the narrow hall of the train car and into the wall beyond. He lowered his head as they flew, slow as a considerate nod from his perspective, aiming for the man’s jaw and succeeding.

Caswell twisted with the impact, allowing his body to roll sideways into the wall and drop him to the floor on all fours. He took the impact easily, graced so with the luxury to ponder every motion, every angle. The man he’d hit was sliding down the wall, knees splaying. In realtime Caswell might have snagged his foot on the man’s knee while trying to stick his landing, but in this slowed frame of reference he managed to hook his foot out and around. As he did so he glanced back.

The woman Melni was falling, limp as a mannequin. More guards were rushing up from her end of the hall, frantically trying to ready movie-prop weapons. Only they were real, Caswell thought. No one made props with that kind of detail just for a damned simkit fantasy.

The guard Melni had punched was falling, too, one hand pressed across his face, a weirdly deep scream beginning to hiss out of him like a slow leak of air. He spun as he fell, one arm flailing out to brace the impact. It made the men rushing up behind him begin to slow or leap to one side. That was useful. Caswell came up in a sprint for the other end of the train, running crouched, feeling like he was at the bottom of a pool. Suddenly he noticed the weight at his breast. As he ran he lifted one hand and slipped it into the strange, diagonally breasted coat he wore, where the grip of a pistol waited. He yanked the weapon free and considered his options. Turn and empty the clip? He had no idea what this weapon was, much less how big a cartridge it held, but he thought it reasonable to assume it had four shots and thus enough for the immediate problem. He could turn and drop the four guards in as many squeezes of the trigger, taking leisurely aim for each.

But he’d never killed anyone before, not that he remembered at least. And he certainly didn’t know this gun. It could be empty, though he doubted he would have been carrying it if that was the case. Hell, glancing at it he began to wonder how to even fire the bloody thing, or which end was which. It was longer behind the grip than in front, and had a weird brace or something at the back. Caswell gripped the handle and found it all made a sudden sense. The brace rested on his forearm. The weapon’s weight seemed evenly distributed instead of in front of his trigger finger like a typical pistol, but this he thought he could compensate for with one or two practice shots.

Caswell raised the weapon and fired it at a rounded window at the far end of the train car. The glass shattered and fell in splinters, like it would have a hundred years ago before aligned-hybrid glass became commonly used, or even the basic tempered stuff from half a century ago. This window spidered rather beautifully and then sucked inward, propelled by the forces of the wind outside. He saw the shards coming for him and knew he needed to dodge. The men behind him would be thinking he was going to leap through the broken pane. A suicide move he had no intention of making. He did leap, but aimed himself slightly off to one side. He started to bring his left leg up and began to twist himself bodily. The glass missed him by mere millimeters. His foot caught the sidewall and he pushed off, accelerating himself diagonally toward the dogleg corner of the hall beside the broken window. Cool air gently buffeted him. He rolled in midair, took aim behind.

His first bullet took the guard standing over Melni just above his left eye. Brains splattered out the other side. Some part of Caswell knew this moment for what it was: the first kill he would actually remember. No Sapporo for you, mate. Sorry. This death he would keep, forever scarred onto his memory. It changed everything. With that one bullet a man died, and Caswell’s own life may well have ended, too. His career, his far-flung adventures between contracts. All of it suddenly felt like a house of cards, built on the simple idea that he carried no baggage. Until now. This stranger. This cop in a bizarre uniform, falling, brains spraying into the hallway of a steam train, of all things.

Caswell shifted his aim and fired once more, even as the corner of the hall obscured his vision. He thought the shot true. Two down, then. Two kills in as many seconds.

Despite this the girl collapsed. Dead, alive, he didn’t know. Leaving her there felt like a mistake but he saw no way around it. For all he knew she could have been a random stranger he’d forced to learn his lyric so that he could reacquire his mission goal. Nothing to be done about it now. If she was important, he’d deal with finding her again on his own terms. Adapt and improvise.

His leap took him around the little corner at the end of the hall. There was a door, as he’d hoped, and he crumpled into it, taking full advantage of his slowed reference frame to absorb the impact with minimal pain. Behind him came the muffled, drawn-out sounds of alarm, followed by gunfire. Three rounds slapped into the thin wall beside the door. Caswell ignored them and reached to open—

What the hell is this? he thought. The handle was in the middle, somewhat phallic, and linked via a metal bar to a little lever at shin height. Nothing was right about this place. The acceptance of this obvious truth caused a seed of fear to suddenly sprout within his mind. He reached for dihazalon to counter the sensation and felt a mild sting as his implant declined. Reservoir empty. The fear spread and flowered. Any second now he’d lose his advantage of slowed time, too, and he’d be left with a potentially deadly fever. Caswell gripped the handle and twisted. Nothing. He lifted it up and the bar moved, clicked. He felt the door loosen in the frame and pushed outward. The rush of air outside sounded in his slowed perspective like water running through pipes.

Through the window on the car behind he saw more guards or police or whatever the hell they were running toward him. The train was moving too fast for him to jump off. He glanced up, saw a handle of some sort, and leapt for it. His fingers brushed the bar and curled around it. That he held on to the slim length of metal was nothing short of a miracle. Impossible without the implant. His body lashed sideways and slammed into the hard corner of the train car. Vortexes of wind whipped at his clothing. Grunting with effort, Caswell hauled himself back to a more or less upright position and climbed onto the roof of the car. Police or soldiers or whatever the hell they were poured out from the two opposing doors below him.

A concert of wailing sounds began to fill the air around him, then the press of wind against him began to slowly abate. The train was slowing. He looked forward and saw an old city. It looked medieval: gray stonework and small windows, narrow spires, tiered steepled roofs. Only everything was slightly off. The steeples were at offset angles. The windows had rounded tops. The stones were inlaid in triangular chunks rather than square. He took all this in and, most of all, noticed how dead the place was. Save for a few distant buildings in what he assumed was the town center, everything else was black. Broken and shuttered. Vines and weeds dominated the streets instead of people. How old was this place? What had happened here?

Immediately ahead a large, long building loomed. It looked different from the rest. Simple flat walls, no windows. Utilitarian, and built recently. As it grew closer he saw it for what it was: a train depot, of sorts. There were platforms to either side, but only the one on the left had people standing on it. They carried lanterns, of all things, and some appeared to be armed. The other side, to Caswell’s right, was very dark and empty. He started to run forward along the top of the train car. From the back of his head came a subtle tingling sensation. A warning that his reserve of elhydrine had been used. His advantage would only last a few more seconds.

Caswell scanned the dark platform as the train lumbered into the station. It was easy to fool oneself while on elhydrine. Confuse slow movement for safe. The mind’s natural calculations of risk and ability could not be trusted. Every instinct told him to just jump, to land and roll and dash into the shadows. Only his training kept him from doing so. The car seemed to be moving about ten kilometers per hour, which meant sixty in reality. Still too fast to jump. Caswell forced himself to keep moving ahead. He ran to the end of the car and slowed only when he saw the top of someone’s head emerging over the lip. Caswell jumped the gap, kicking as he went, a solid connection right to the eye socket of some poor, uniformed woman. Her head began to recoil backward as he sailed past. Caswell landed easily on the next car, rolled, came up in a jog. A bullet whistled past his head, very wide. A deliberate miss? He filed that, too risky to rely on that assumption just yet.

There was a pile of debris in the shadows on the empty platform. A mass of leaves and long, knobby reeds. Gardening waste. It was his best hope. Caswell took one last step and launched himself toward the heap of dead vegetation.

In that instant his world sped up, physically, visually, audibly. The neurons and synapses in his brain began to process signals slower and slower until, just as his knees hit the pile, everything became human-normal again. It felt like sinking toward the bottom of a pool only to have all the water suddenly, instantly, vanish. He managed to fling his arms up around his face as he slammed into the dead leaves. Cut lengths of vine and weed lashed at him. The pile smelled of soil and cut grass. Fresh, not brittle. It cushioned him and then sprang back. Caswell practically bounced off. He fell on his ass to the hard, gravelly floor of the old platform. Cries of alarm went up from the train and beyond. English words, but the accent he couldn’t place.

Caswell forced himself to stand. He loped off into the shadows, the sounds of soldiers and a slowing train filling the space behind him.

—

Melni lay on a vibrating metal floor, dimly aware of a throbbing pain emanating from her guts. She tried to lift her head and heard a wet tearing sound for the effort. The smell hit her then. Her own vomit, in a pool around her face.

“She is awake,” someone said.

Blurred shapes swam into focus.

Melni tried to move, only to find herself bound at the wrists and ankles with strips of rubber.

“Sit her up,” the familiar voice of Rasa Clune said.

Hands slipped under Melni’s armpits and she was hauled bodily from the sticky mess she’d made, flipped around, and slammed down again, this time on her back. The hands tugged her until her back and head rested against a solid surface. The room swayed and vibrated. Somewhere behind her came the clattering sound of an air motor. The movement made her nauseous and dizzy. A new pain manifested: a throbbing from the back of her skull.

Melni tried to focus on her surroundings. She blinked and concentrated. “How long have—” she started.

Clune cut her off with a backhanded slap that stung Melni’s cheek. The hand whipped back in the opposite direction and left an identical impression on the other.

Bright pain nearly blinded her. She could do nothing save lower her head and wince until the heat on her cheeks faded to something manageable. It took a long time. All the while the room swayed.

Not a room, Melni realized. A special roller cabin. Armored walls, floor, and ceiling. A military troop carrier.

Clune stood in front of her, one hand pressed up against the ceiling to steady herself. With slow, deliberate motion she raised her free hand and gripped Melni by the jaw, her nails digging painfully into the skin. Melni could do nothing but clench her teeth and stare into the woman’s emotionless face. The bandage across her nose should have made her seem weaker, yet somehow the dressing only added to the cold, disciplinary stare.

“What happened,” Rasa said, “to the team we sent to fetch you?”

Fetch us. What birdshit. Melni met Clune’s gaze. “Speculate,” she hissed.

Clune’s eyes narrowed. She gripped so hard the nails drew blood. Then harder still, until the pain became unbearable.

“They were not there to fetch us,” Melni managed to utter through the compressed circle her lips had become. “And they are all dead.”

Clune’s face betrayed nothing. Her grip, however, tightened. “Impossible.”

If Melni could have spat in the woman’s face she would have. The gesture came out as a bubble of drool that dripped down her chin. She gagged involuntarily as Clune’s fingers dug in even harder.

“You are the one who is going to die,” Rasa said. “Very slowly and very painfully, if you do not tell us everything you know about the man you helped escape. Talk, and I promise a quick and painless end to your miserable traitorous life.”

Melni held her head steady and tried not to gurgle under the press of sharp fingernails. The stern woman searched Melni’s eyes for a few seconds and then, abruptly, let go. She took a step back. “How did you elude the Hollow agents?”

“I told you,” Melni rasped, working her jaw to ease the pain. “They are all dead.”

Clune apparently believed it this time because her complexion, already pale, flushed to bone white. It matched her bandaged nose. “Impossible. You are not so well trained—”

“Caswell went through them like a farmer clearing boneweed,” she lied, then instantly regretted it. With Caswell painted that dangerously, Clune would probably have him killed immediately.

Except…that was not shock on the woman’s face, it was fear. “He knows you sent them,” Melni added. “And he is out there.”

All he actually knows is that he was sent here to kill Alia Valix. A man who managed to penetrate the Think Tank in his first few days on a completely alien world. Now he was in a virtually deserted city, with a million places to hide, and Alia would be out in the open. For a speech, to diplomats.

“Why have you brought so many soldiers to this event?” Melni asked, the truth slowly dawning on her.

“Simple,” Clune replied. “After you helped our only negotiating piece escape, only one option remains to us. We are going to capture Valix, or eliminate her. She will either work for us, or work for no one. There is no other outcome that will suffice. Not now. Even you must realize that.”

“Why not just hear what she has to say?”

Clune laughed. “That is exactly what we cannot do. She is far too clever to propose anything other than a scenario that will advantage her and her allies in the North. Even if she proposes sharing her genius equally, the North is already too far ahead of us. We would never catch up. No, we must get to her before she can take the tiller of this conversation. And as for your friend, well…if he really killed a whole squad of Hollow, his punishment will match the crime.” The woman came in closer, her lips just inches from Melni’s face. “The same goes for you, Sonbo.”

“I…” Melni paused, almost gagging on the director’s wretched breath. What could she say that would stay Clune’s hand? She had no way to prove the Warden’s story. Melni’s only hope was to get to Alia Valix before anyone else. Before Caswell, before Clune and her strike team. Find her and tell her that Melni and Caswell had met the Warden. Maybe if she knew she wasn’t alone with that burden of knowledge she’d change her course. And then all I’d have to do is stop everyone from trying to kill her anyway. Melni tugged at the chains holding her arms and feet. She glanced at the guards and then at their cold, disgusting leader, and she saw no path that would lead toward this goal.