Hellbent

Harville wouldn’t make it across the square into the warren of alleys across. He was bracing himself to turn and face when the round punched through his shoulder blade and spit specks of lung through the exit wound as it cleared his chest.

He went down onto his knees, his hands vanishing to the elbows in water. He stared dumbly at his fingers below, rippling like fish.

The voice from behind him was as easygoing as a voice could be. “Orphan J. A pleasure.”

Harville coughed blood, crimson flecks riding the froth.

“Jack Johns,” the man said. “He was your handler. Way back when.”

“I don’t know that name.” Harville was surprised that he could still form words.

“Oh. You mistook me. That wasn’t a question. We haven’t gotten to the questions yet.” The man’s tone was conversational. Good-natured even.

Harville’s arms trembled. He stared down at the eddies, the stone, his hands. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could keep his face out of the water.

At some point it had stopped raining. The air had a stunned stillness, holding its breath in case the storm decided to come back.

The man asked, “What are your current protocols when you contact Jack Johns?”

Harville wheezed with each breath. “I don’t know that name.”

The man crouched beside him. In his hand was a creased photograph. It showed Adelina nestled in Giovanna’s arms, feeding. She was still wearing her pink knit cap from the hospital.

Harville felt air leaking through the hole in his chest.

He told the man what he wanted to know.

The man rose and stood behind him.

The water stirred around Harville. He closed his eyes.

He said, “I had a dream that I was normal.”

The man said, “And it cost you everything.”

The pistol’s report lifted a flight of pigeons off the giant domes of the basilica.

As the man pocketed his pistol and forged his way through the floodwater, the hour sounded. High on the clock tower, the two bronze forms, one old, one young, struck the bell they’d been ringing across these worn stones for five centuries and counting.

Back to the Present

4

Are You Ready?

Evan was still sitting in the kitchen, the Sub-Zero numbing his bare back, the glass of vodka resting on his knee. The phone remained at his face. He felt not so much paralyzed as unwilling to move. Movement would prove that time was passing, and right now time passing meant that bad things would happen.

He reminded himself to breathe. Two-second inhale, four-second exhale.

He reached for the Fourth Commandment: Never make it personal.

Jack had taught him the Commandments and would want — no, demand—that Evan honor them now.

The Fourth wasn’t working, so he dug for the Fifth: If you don’t know what to do, do nothing.

There was no situation that could not be made worse.

The vodka glass perspired in Evan’s hand.

The phone connection was as silent as the grave.

Van Sciver said, “Did you hear me?”

Evan said, “No.”

He wanted more time, though for what, he wasn’t sure.

“I said, ‘Go fetch your digital contact lenses. I have something you want to see.’”

Two-second inhale, four-second exhale.

“Let me be perfectly clear,” Evan said. “If you do this, nothing will ever stop me from getting to you.”

“But, X,” Van Sciver said pleasantly, “you don’t even know what I have planned.”

The line cut out.

Two-second inhale, four-second exhale.

Evan rose.

He set the glass down on the poured-concrete island. He walked out of the kitchen and past the living wall, a vertical garden of herbs and vegetables. The rise of greenery gave the penthouse its sole splash of color and life, the air fragranced with chamomile and mint.

He headed across the open plain of the condo, past the heavy bag and the pull-up bar, past the freestanding central fireplace, past a cluster of couches he couldn’t remember ever having sat on. He walked down a brief hall with two empty brackets where a katana sword had once hung. He entered his bedroom with its floating Maglev bed, propelled two feet off the floor by ridiculously powerful rare-earth magnets. Only cable tethers kept it from flying up and smashing into the ceiling. Like Evan, it was designed for maximum functionality — slab, mattress, no legs, no headboard, no footboard.

He entered his bathroom, nudged the frosted-glass shower door aside on its tracks. It rolled soundlessly. Stepping into the shower, he curled his hand around the hot-water lever. Hidden sensors in the metal read his palm imprint. He turned it the wrong way, pushing through a slight resistance, and a hidden door broke free from the tile pattern of the stall and swung inward.

Evan stepped into the Vault, the nerve center of his operations as the Nowhere Man.