Eight police cars ringed the D’Amico tower.
Cordon tape went up line by line, and Chief George Stacy stepped out of his own car to lead the scene in person, tipping his head back at the building.
Smoke still crawled off the upper floors in thick ropes.
Worse than the reports, then, and the reports had not been gentle.
Under ordinary circumstances he wouldn’t have set foot on this block.
This was Frank’s ground, the drug lord’s ground, a stain of a place that turned his stomach on principle, and the only errand worth the trip would have been arrest warrants.
Today ran different: the neighborhood had heard sustained gunfire and flooded the switchboard, and George, reading it as a gang war, had taken his time, gathered every combat asset the department owned, and rolled out planning to let the crabs finish fighting and net whatever survived.
He’d netted air.
The blood started outside, in pooled patches on the pavement that chilled the walk in.
Inside the tower it stopped being patches.
The place was a butcher’s hell, floor after floor, and not one living mouth in all of it.
Gunshot wounds.
Blade wounds.
And on the fourth floor, scattered everywhere, severed limbs with the signature of high-explosive ordnance, except that the sweep turned up no shrapnel of any kind.
The fighting mapped strangely, too: it had lived inside the floors, never the stairwells, and the pattern said the tower’s mid and upper strength had all run down toward the fight, into it, and died there to a man.
At the top, at the end of it, lay the gang’s supreme leader himself.
Frank, face-down, eyes emptied out, and the expression death had fixed on him testified to a final few minutes of truly enormous emotional range.
“Chief.
The surveillance system’s a total loss.
Not one frame of footage anywhere.” A technician came over to report, then pointed.
“And Chief, look at this.” George crouched where the man indicated.
A patch of floor, webbed with cracks.
“Which is what?” “Same crack pattern showed up on four.
Identical type.
The strange part is the spread: nothing extends outward from it, which means the point of force wasn’t the floor itself.” “What if somebody punched the air?” A young officer had drifted over, and the idea came out of him bright and fast.
“Bare-handed.
Blew the air up, and the shockwave hit the floor.” It had arrived in a flash of inspiration, and its foundations were not exactly forensic; the kid was a devoted Saitama reader, and in his heart of hearts believed strength at that grade could simply do this.
“Don’t confuse fantasy with reality.” The technician emptied a bucket of cold water over the one guess in the building that happened to be correct, and moved on.
“Also, some of these wounds are secondary.
Added after.
Whoever this was killed Frank, then went body to body and finished every survivor, one by one.
No witnesses to a face, nothing.
And the attacking party was small.” George had stopped at one of the red-clad corpses, brow folding down as he looked it over.
“Some of these aren’t gang men at all.
Is this…
a ninja?” And there the case changed its nature under his feet.
He’d walked in expecting a turf war.
What he was standing in now smelled like foreign armed forces operating on American soil, and that was not a thing you filed quietly; that was international-incident material.
“Chief!” An officer leaned in from the perimeter.
“There’s, uh.
An agent asking for you.” George’s face pulled down a full inch.
His mood, already poor, finished rotting.
Several men in black came through, unhurried, eyes doing calm circuits of the scene as they crossed it.
The one leading stood fairly tall and wore a genuinely amiable face under a hairline in strategic retreat, every remaining hair combed to regulation.
“Chief Stacy.
I’m an agent with the CIA, Central Intelligence Agency.” He produced credentials and held them out with a friendly smile.
“My identification.” “Heh.
No need.” George didn’t take them.
“I saw you at noon, actually.
You were showing credentials to my captains at the carnival.
FBI, those said.
Coulson.” The chief chuckled as he said it, and the air on the floor changed state.
Coulson’s expression moved not one millimeter.
Around the room, without any visible signal, a dozen police hands came to rest on belt holsters, and behind Coulson his agents’ eyes went narrow.
George let it hang a moment, then waved it off.
“Whether you’re FBI or CIA, I know the badges are real.
So what is it.
Taking this case too?” He knew perfectly well the man was genuine.
Saying it out loud, in front of this many people, was the point: a receipt for the noon carnival case, lifted out of his hands the same way.
That was the job now.
Between the vigilantes working nights for free and the alphabet departments collecting cases like stamps, the New York police were being squeezed down toward glorified traffic duty, and it was infuriating.
“Yes.
And we’d genuinely appreciate all materials related to this incident.” Coulson took the unmasking without one ripple.
The credentials were real; that was the entire bedrock of his calm.
And George, who was, in the end, only a police chief, understood a deep pool when he stood at the edge of one.
The more a man knew about water like this, the worse for the man.
He gave a single acknowledging grunt, turned, and walked out.
Before long the police presence drained from the tower entirely, replaced by broad-shouldered agents in black.
Coulson stood flipping through the department’s files and shook his head with a small, wry smile.
“Send all of this up to the Director first.
New York really doesn’t do quiet.” — Gali lay draped over the sofa eating pizza, wearing the face of an unimpressed critic, and rolled her eyes at the ceiling.
“Trist.
I’m starting to think you’re kind of useless.” “I’m back,” said the front door.
Trist came in on the turn of his key, took in the scene, the sofa, the girl, the spread of open takeout, and his face went dark on the spot.
“I’m out there fighting for my life, and you’re behind my back sneak-eating?” A beat, and the second grievance landed.
“And why does this order have three portions in it?” “Tch.” Gali didn’t even sit up.
“Who do you think handled the cameras?
This is my payment.” Ah.
…She didn’t have to say the true part out loud.
So she’d been watching the whole evening through the building’s own lenses, which explained both the professional-grade blackout and the review of his performance.
Trist sat down on the sofa in mild defeat and entered negotiations over the remaining takeout, and while they fought over boxes, the back of his mind wandered off to business.
Should he draw Terminator?
Skynet was a world-conquering artificial intelligence with genuine self-awareness, a thing that had crossed the line into intelligent life outright.
Against a heavyweight like that, Tony’s JARVIS rated as scrap; the open question was how it stacked against Ultron.
And setting the AI aside, the later models of Terminator carried real force in their own right.
More than enough to bodyguard ordinary people.
Postable at the company.
And, best of all, mass-producible.
The more he turned it, the better it looked.
He finished his share of the takeout, retreated to the study, and set the pencil scratching.
Out in the living room, Gali flipped channels until the evening news caught her.
“…an explosion at a military laboratory.
Witnesses claim that through the rolling smoke, they saw an enormous green creature…”