Chapter 20
I needed a cigarette. I didn't have one because Diego had confiscated the pack an hour ago with some bullshit about enclosed spaces and everyone's lungs.
The van already smelled like gun oil and sweat and three men sitting in the dark working through their nerves, so one cigarette wouldn't have tipped it into unbreathable.
"Mr. Nobody's in position," Vihaan said. The blue light from his screens turned his face corpse-pale. "Main hall. Patroklos just sat down."
I checked the katana again. The blade caught the glow from Vihaan's monitors and threw it back clean, the same as the last two times I'd checked. My hands needed work that didn't involve cigarettes I didn't have or running through all the ways this extraction could go sideways.
Beside me, Rhadamanthys chambered another round. The metallic click filled the van. He'd already loaded both revolvers twice. We burned time with useless weapon checks because sitting still before a job made my skin crawl.
Diego sat behind the wheel with the engine idling low, a purr that came up through the floorboards. He kept his hands loose on the wheel but locked his gaze on the side mirror, tracking headlights that had sat half a kilometer back for the past five minutes.
"We got a tail?" I asked.
"Maybe." His thumb tapped the steering wheel once, then stopped. "Could be someone heading in the same direction."
"For five minutes. Same exact distance."
"Yeah."
When Diego's thumb went still, he'd already made his decision. I filed the tell and turned back to the compound lights burning in the distance.
The audio feed crackled. Throat singing poured through the van's cheap speakers, two notes at once from one throat, harmonizing in ways that shouldn't be physically possible. The sound crawled up my spine and made my molars ache.
"What the fuck is that?" Diego said.
"Mongolian throat singing." Vihaan's fingers kept flying across his keyboard. "Traditional art form. Very difficult to master."
"Sounds like someone's getting strangled."
"That's kind of the aesthetic."
My babushka would've crossed herself and spat three times over her left shoulder. I called it useful for covering the sound of boots on concrete and tried to ignore how the bass note made my ribcage vibrate.
Vihaan cracked open another energy drink and added the empty to the graveyard at his feet.
He'd been running three feeds, two maps, and a guard rotation algorithm for the past hour, and the cans were the only evidence he was human and not an extension of the hardware.
"Twelve-minute window," he said. "North gap opens in thirty seconds.
Second shift's clocking out, third shift's getting coffee. "
I slid the katana back into its sheath. The weight settled against my spine, the same fit I'd carried since Moscow.
My babushka used to say you could tell everything about a man by what he brought to a fight.
Weapons meant he was practical. Prayers meant he was desperate.
Empty hands meant he was dead before sunrise.
I'd never shown up empty-handed to anything in my life.
"Gap's open," Vihaan said. "You're clear to move."
Rhadamanthys popped his door open . I followed him out into the night air that hit cold after the van's stale heat.
The compound sat maybe a hundred meters ahead through scrub grass and what passed for a graveyard of industrial neglect: rusted drums, collapsed chain-link, concrete rubble.
The main building was rust-streaked concrete wrapped in a newer fence topped with razor wire.
Someone had tried to build a fortress out of the factory it used to be.
Diego's voice came through the comm as we crossed open ground. "Be safe."
I found purchase in loose gravel and focused on staying quiet. The north gap was exactly where Nevada's intel had put it: a service entrance with no guard post, cameras pointed at empty air.
Rhadamanthys tried the door. It opened.
Inside smelled like incense working overtime to cover gun oil.
The Hoppes cut through all that sandalwood and hit the back of my throat with the chemical burn I'd been tasting in safe houses since I was sixteen.
Every safe house smelled the same underneath whatever they burned to disguise it.
The Pantheon could dress up their buildings however they liked, but the bones always reeked of the same thing.
"Straight ahead twenty meters," Vihaan said in my ear. "Left at the junction."
The throat singing echoed off the corridor walls somewhere ahead, muffled but loud enough to swallow our footsteps.
Rhadamanthys stayed three steps behind me with both revolvers up, covering every angle I left exposed.
I'd trust him at my back in a burning building, and I didn't say that about many people.
The junction came up. I went left. The corridor stretched ahead under bare bulbs, and every door we passed was a mouth that could open.
The incense thickened until the air tasted like a temple that doubled as an armory.
I kept my breathing shallow and my weight on the balls of my feet, the way my first instructor had beaten into me when I was twelve and still flinched at shadows.
"Right turn coming up," Vihaan said. "Private wing. Third door on your left." A pause. His typing stopped, which was the first time that had happened all night. "Jasper, Patroklos just left the main hall. Moving fast. He's heading in your direction."
I adjusted my grip on the katana. Behind me, Rhadamanthys shifted both revolvers to a higher ready position. Neither of us slowed down. Slowing down meant dying in a corridor that smelled like someone else's god.
The hallway changed. Concrete gave way to carpet that swallowed sound.
Bare walls gave way to art, actual paintings in actual frames.
The air shifted, too. The incense thinned, and something sharper replaced it: candle wax and bergamot, the kind of scent that came in a jar with a French name and a price tag designed to make you feel poor.
The whole wing looked like someone trying to make captivity pass for hospitality.
The carpet bothered me more than the concrete had.
At least concrete let you hear what was coming.
Patroklos stood at the end of the corridor. He'd beaten us there.
He leaned against the wall outside the third door with his arms crossed and his chin down, the posture of a man who'd been standing there for hours.
Long, dark hair hung past his shoulders.
The silver chain at his throat caught the light from the bare bulbs behind us.
He wore the same black coat I'd last seen in the back of Achilles' SUV, the one with the curved blade hidden somewhere inside it.
I stopped. Rhadamanthys stopped behind me.
Patroklos lifted his head. He took in the katana, Rhadamanthys with both revolvers raised, and the fact that we had no business being in this hallway.
His expression didn't change. He pushed off the wall and uncrossed his arms, and the curved blade appeared in his right hand like it had always been there.
He planted his feet on that expensive carpet and waited for me to come to him.
The last time I'd been this close to him, that blade had been against my throat while Achilles laughed and poured vodka. Achilles had done the talking. Achilles always did the talking, because Patroklos had cut his own tongue out for the sin of lying to the man he loved.
My babushka used to say that a man who fights for money will run when the money runs out. A man who fights for love will run through you first.
I closed the distance, and he met me halfway.
His blade came in low, hooking for my ribs.
I redirected it with the flat of the katana, and the impact shuddered up both arms. He was fast. Faster than the compound guards, faster than most Ferrymen I'd crossed steel with.
He reversed the curved blade and slashed at my throat, and I jerked back far enough that the edge kissed air instead of skin.
He pressed forward. Every strike came clean, controlled, aimed to kill but aimed well.
I understood something about Patroklos in the space between his second and third attack.
He fought like someone trained by the same school that trained me.
Pantheon classical. Footwork, distance, economy.
No showmanship. Achilles would have been talking by now, performing for an audience of one.
Patroklos fought in silence because silence was all he had left.
I parried a thrust and countered. The katana opened a line across his forearm, and he didn't flinch. Blood ran down his wrist and onto the blade, and he adjusted his grip and came again, driving me back a step, then two.
Rhadamanthys raised a revolver. Patroklos closed the distance between us before Rhadamanthys could fire without hitting me. He'd put me between himself and the gun, and now we were too close for anything but steel.
The curved blade caught my jacket and tore through the fabric into the meat of my left shoulder. Pain lit up white and immediate. I snarled and drove the pommel of the katana into his jaw. His head snapped back. He spat blood onto the carpet and came at me again before I'd reset my guard.
The alarm shrieked. Red light strobed down the corridor. Whatever noise we'd made had carried to the wrong ears, and the compound woke up screaming around us.
Patroklos stayed focused on me, dark eyes steady above the scar at his mouth. Rage burned behind them, old and swallowed and running at a temperature that had nothing to do with me or the extraction or compound security.
I blocked another strike, and the force drove me back into Rhadamanthys. "Get Nevada," I said. "I'll hold him."