( updated) 18: Chapter 18: Gali’s Instinct.
( updated) Kane was a professional killer, and more specifically, a gang’s leashed hound.
His boss Frank ran drugs up the West Coast at industrial volume, with a sideline in selling children, and men like that kept men like Kane on retainer, as other executives kept lawyers.
Four days ago, a member of the organization holding a genuinely important post had gone missing, and the search party that found him found residue.
By the time word came down, police had the scene sealed, which slowed the organization not at all; what kind of crime lord failed to keep hooks in his local police?
A little money moved, and the camera footage moved with it.
It wasn’t much.
America, so precious about its privacy, ran thin on street cameras, and only a single distant lens had caught anything at all: traces, a figure, nothing a court would touch.
The street saw plenty of foot traffic besides.
The police could hardly arrest everyone who’d walked past.
The organization had been preparing to swallow that bitter fruit whole when somebody reviewing the carnival coverage sat up straight.
There, in the footage every network was looping: a familiar figure.
The same one the distant lens had caught near the alley.
And this figure had kicked a live bomb out of the air.
That, in their assessment, was force.
Force enough, perhaps, to be the killer of their man.
And having produced a suspect, the underworld ran its own procedure, which skipped the courtroom entirely: send Kane, kill him.
If he turned out innocent, well.
A wrong kill cost nothing.
Frank had the file assembled before the order went out.
Parents dead in a crash.
Heir to one small company.
Recently took in a little girl.
Ran close with the Osborn heir, which on paper read as connections, except Oscorp could barely save itself this week; that thread cut easily.
“Boss.
I’m in position near the target’s residence.” Kane stood folded into a side lane in black casual wear, a baseball cap pulled down over his face, voice pitched respectful into the phone.
“Move when the opening comes.
Leave no traces.” The voice on the other end came through cold enough to frost the speaker.
“Yes.” “One more thing.
The little girl comes back alive.
She’ll fetch a good price.” “Yes.
Noted.” Kane hung up, squared his jacket, and settled in to wait, and the wait lasted all of two minutes before opportunity drove up on an electric scooter.
A delivery rider, by the uniform.
The man puttered right past Kane’s lane without the faintest awareness of him, stopped in front of the target’s townhouse, and reached for the bag, and Kane’s mind lit up.
Heaven-sent.
He crossed the distance as a blur, dropped the rider with one hand-blade to the neck, and dragged him into the lane before the scooter’s kickstand finished settling.
A check of the slip on the bag: the address matched.
He arranged the unconscious man against the wall with something like care.
Killing him would have been sloppier.
A dead courier left a body at the scene, and a body at the scene, next to a vanished homeowner, gave police a thread to pull, and this particular homeowner had some kind of line to the chief of the NYPD himself, a man famously unable to tolerate sand in his eyes.
No.
Cleanest outcome: the wrong man dies in a botched robbery, the courier wakes up never having seen a face, and nothing anywhere carries a fingerprint.
Kane tugged the cap lower, mounted the scooter, and slung the delivery bag over his shoulder.
A private thought warmed him as he rolled up to the door: after the work, the meal.
This target really wasn’t bad.
He rang the bell.
“Ding-dong.
Your delivery’s here.” His better-than-human hearing tracked the footsteps coming up the hall.
Here he came.
The door began to swing, and Kane caught the target’s lazy ribbing about slow service, and raised his head with the killing intent already sliding out cold across his face.
“Apologies, sir.
There is no delivery.” His right hand came up on trained instinct, alloy dagger reversed along the forearm, tip carrying a wet gleam, and drew the line across the target’s throat.
He had drilled this stroke past counting.
Fifty-plus confirmed with this exact cut, throat opened, done, no exceptions in his entire career, and no exception today: the target hadn’t so much as twitched, the window for dodging was gone, the man was already dead.
Kane’s certainty ran so total that some back room of his mind had moved on to wondering what flavor the takeout was.
Then the next second arrived, and his face froze on its bones.
CLANG.
Metal, meeting something of very high hardness, rang out crisp and bright.
Kane’s pupils shrank to pinpoints.
“Fuck!” What was he looking at?
In fairness, what Kane was looking at was two perfectly ordinary things.
Trist’s neck.
A knife tip.
It was the combination that crawled up his scalp: the tip sat pressed hard against the side of the target’s throat, his own arm behind it straining until it shook, and the edge would not pass.
The fountain his training promised him refused to exist.
This dagger was rare alloy.
It had opened more people than he could name, held an edge you could shave a shadow with, ran two blood grooves down the flat.
Brush this thing in passing and it broke skin.
That was not an opinion.
That was its record.
How thick was this skin?!
A mutant?!
It was the only shelf his mind had.
Courtesy of Magneto and a presidential motorcade decades back, “mutant” was now the whole country’s first guess at anything abnormal; half the internet said it about the carnival’s Spider-Man and Goblin both.
“No delivery,” Trist said, “and this much attitude on top of it.” His face had gone dark enough to wring water from.
Anyone’s mood suffered when answering the door earned them a dagger to the throat, and now it made sense: that was why Gali hadn’t moved off the sofa.
She’d known from the first ring that the hands outside held no food.
Not a courier, then.
A killer.
The killing intent came up in Trist’s eyes like a tide.
His left hand closed over the dagger, plucked it out of Kane’s grip without ceremony, and, while the man’s face was still catching up, applied force.
Crack.
The alloy snapped.
The pieces hit the floor.
Then Trist took hold of him and lifted, and an onlooker might honestly have laughed at the picture: Kane stood a burly meter-ninety of white muscle, Trist a lean near-meter-eighty, and physics said the lifting should run the other direction.
Physics had been overruled.
“Who are you?” Trist asked, flat.
Kane produced exactly one thing through his teeth.
“…Damned mutant!” “Not talking.
Then die.” There was no percentage in working on a man like this; his type didn’t open short of hypnosis, and Trist owned no hypnosis and less patience.
A hum built in the air.
The Lv2 Light Ball condensed out of nothing, a shade larger than its little brother, and Trist drove it into the killer’s body.
“Gali.” “AAAGH…” Veins stood out across Kane’s contorting face, and the scream had just found its pitch when his body burst.
Blood and worse sprayed outward from the center, and met a waiting screen of purple, and the whole scatter of him reversed course, drawing inward, compressing, until what remained was a small, neat sphere of dark red hanging in the air.
It dropped into Gali’s palm.
She brought it to her nose and sniffed.
“You’re going to eat that?” Trist asked.
“Mm.” She looked up at him, and her voice came out soft.
“Do you not like me doing this?” “I don’t usually eat these.
It’s just…
he seemed very bad.” Living with her these weeks, Trist had watched the instinct in her clarify by degrees.
She could eat anything, raw or worse, and she stayed genuinely warm toward certain humans without ever once assuming humans were good.
Discrimination, not innocence.
Honestly, it reassured him.
“As long as you like it.” He rubbed her small head.
Killers got killed.
That was the oldest rule there was, and eaten or shot came to the same thing.
He was no superhero, and less than that a guardian of anyone’s morals.
Maybe, when it was all tallied up someday, he’d be counted a villain.
Fine.
“Trist.” Gali licked a fleck off her thumb.
“Dig out his phone.
I’ll find whoever’s behind him for you.” “You can do that?” “Obviously.
Back then, our people were the most advanced civilization in the entire universe.” “Back then,” Trist said.
“And then what?” Gali opened her mouth.
Then she closed it again.