Chapter 6 Occupational Hazard

The jacket was off before the car door even closed all the way.

Leo folded it over his knee and pulled out his phone, and to anyone watching it probably looked like he was checking emails, which was a reasonable thing to assume about a man in a three-thousand-dollar suit sitting in the back of a car at midday.

He wasn't checking emails. He was looking at the Godzillionaire interface's mission map, which had opened on its own the second he'd settled into the seat, because the system had absolutely no respect for downtime.

The map was mostly white dots scattered across the city like someone had spilled salt on a dark table. White meant dormant. White meant not his problem right now.

The yellow cluster in the Meatpacking District was his problem right now.

Eleven dots, tight together, sitting around a block he recognized without even needing to think about it. Club district. Made sense.

Things liked to cluster near tears, and a concentration like that usually meant there was one nearby — small, probably, but there. He zoomed in on the cluster and the interface gave him the breakdown without being asked. Eleven C-grade anomaly signatures. One micro-tear detected, southeastern quadrant of the area.

He closed the interface and looked out the window for a second.

"Take me somewhere downtown first," he said. "I've got an errand."

The driver, who had been with him long enough to understand that errand could mean approximately anything, just nodded and changed lanes.

★

From the outside the club looked like every other club on the block.

Neon sign doing its job. Velvet rope. A line of people who had been standing there long enough to look slightly less excited than when they'd first arrived. Leo told the driver to wait, got out, and walked straight to the front.

The bouncer at the door started to say something — opened his mouth, got as far as drawing breath — and then looked at Leo's face and made the quiet, intelligent decision to step aside instead.

The inside of the club was normal for about four seconds.

Then the anomaly layer bled in, the way it always did, like a second image developing over the first, and the club became something else. The walls stretched.

Corridors appeared that had no business existing in a building this size, spiraling off into a dark that had depth to it, the kind of dark that went somewhere.

The ceiling climbed to a height that didn't match the floor plan. The music from upstairs was still audible — faintly, somewhere above all of it — which was almost more unsettling than if it had disappeared entirely.

The interface popped up immediately, bright and unbothered in the corner of his vision.

Eleven C-grade signatures confirmed. One micro-tear detected, southeastern quadrant.

Leo looked at the first corridor for a moment and then looked down at his shirt, which he liked, and then back up at the corridor.

He rolled up his sleeves, unsheathed the blade — it was silver, had no name, no ceremony, no interesting backstory he'd ever bothered to invent for it — and started walking.

His internal state was, genuinely, very calm about all of this. C-grades on a weekday afternoon in a club basement that had turned into a labyrinth. Normal. Perfectly fine. This was just what Tuesday looked like sometimes.

★

The thing about C-grades was that they weren't D-grades.

D-grades were slow and they hit like they were sorry for it. C-grades were faster, hit with something behind it, and a handful of them had picked up enough to do basic reality manipulation — walls shifting mid-step, gravity going briefly sideways, the kind of thing that was annoying more than it was actually dangerous if you knew it was coming. Leo knew it was coming.

He handled the first three before they finished orienting to him, which was the ideal outcome.

The next two came at him together and he let them, because the space was tight and tight spaces were easier to work with than open ones, and he activated Dead Touch on the blade — the silver lit up quiet and cold — and that was the end of that. No regeneration on contact. Clean kills. The cores started dissolving before they hit the ground.

He was midway through the seventh when the system interrupted him.

SKILL UNLOCKED — IRON MEMBRANE. PASSIVE. ANY CONTACT WITH SKIN REGISTERS AS IRON TO ORGANIC ANOMALIES.

He read it while sidestepping a claw that came from his left, and his first genuine thought was that this information would have been genuinely useful about six anomalies ago, and his second thought was that he probably shouldn't be reading system notifications mid-fight, and then the seventh one lunged and he stopped thinking about it and finished the job.

The remaining four went down with something he'd charitably describe as efficiency and something he'd more honestly describe as tired professionalism, and then the labyrinth was quiet and he was standing in it with blood on his shirt and eleven cores dissolving slowly into nothing around his feet.

He found the tear in the southeastern corner. It was about the size of a door, edges fraying the way they did when they'd been open a while, the space behind it doing that thing where it wasn't quite dark and wasn't quite light.

He took the cores one by one and pressed them in and watched the tear pull itself closed, slowly, and then the labyrinth did its thing — folded back, walls retreating, corridors compressing, ceiling dropping — until it was just a club again, bass thumping from upstairs, a few lights on the floor, a back room that looked like it had never been anything other than a back room.

He stood there for a second.

"Cool," he said, to nobody.

★

He got back in the car and the driver's eyes went to the shirt in the rearview mirror, registered it, and without a word reached back and opened the compartment behind the passenger seat.

Spare shirt, folded. Like this was a standard item to keep on hand, which, for this particular job, it had become.

Leo changed in the back seat without ceremony, balled up the old shirt, and checked the interface. Mission completion notification was already up — reward processed, funds transferred, mission closed — and he closed it and leaned back and let his eyes shut for exactly one moment.

His phone buzzed.

FaceTime. Jamie. The contact photo was from three years ago at Oxford and Jamie had been meaning to change it since graduation and clearly still hadn't. Leo looked at the screen, looked at the timestamp, did the math on the time difference, and accepted the call.

Jamie was in what looked like a kitchen and the lighting suggested it was very late wherever he was. He started talking before Leo had finished lifting the phone to eye level, which was standard.

"Okay so I need your opinion on something and I need it right now because I've been sitting with this for three hours and Callum just told me to go to sleep which is not helpful advice for this situation — "

"Jamie."

" — because the situation is not a sleep-on-it situation, the situation is a what-do-I-do-right-now situation, and you're the only person I trust to give me an actual — "

"Jamie."

Jamie stopped.

Leo looked at him through the screen, sitting in his kitchen at what was probably two in the morning, clearly in the middle of something that felt very large and urgent from where he was standing.

"I just killed eleven things," Leo said, "and sealed a hole in reality."

There was silence for a second.

"Your girl situation is going to have to wait."

Jamie was one of Leo's not-so-many friends who knew everything about Leo. And by everything, it includes Leo's system and whatnot.

Poor Jamie stared at him. Blinked once, slowly, the way someone blinks when they're recalibrating. Looked off to the side for a second like he was consulting something, then looked back.

"So," Jamie said, "is that a no?”

Ugh, Leo groaned within, so stupid.