Chapter 3

  Metro Enforcement Division headquarters squatted in Mid-City like a concrete tumor, all brutalist architecture and razor wire, a monument to the philosophy that law enforcement buildings should intimidate rather than welcome. Twenty stories of bureaucratic inertia wrapped around overworked cops trying to keep a dying city from eating itself, from tearing apart at the seams and drowning in its own violence. The building had been designed in the 2040s during the Corporate Wars, when architectural aggression was fashionable and everyone was afraid of everything. Guy had worked here for six years, walking through those doors almost every day. It had never felt welcoming, never felt like anything other than a prison where he happened to have a key.

  The exterior was poured concrete, stained with decades of acid rain and tagged with gang symbols that the cleaning crews never quite managed to remove. Surveillance cameras covered every angle—or at least, they had until budget cuts meant half of them were just empty housings, security theater that fooled no one. Reinforced doors. Ballistic glass. Guard posts staffed by officers who'd been injured in the line of duty and could no longer work the streets. The building said: We are at war. We are losing.

  He badged through security at 0600, the reader taking two tries to recognize his credentials, the system lagging like everything else in MED. Nodded to the guards he recognized—Torres and Chen, both good cops who'd caught bullets and now caught doors—and made for the stairs. The elevator had been broken for three months. Budget cuts, they said. Meanwhile, HeliosCorp was building their third orbital station, shipping the wealthy off-world while the rest of humanity drowned in the ruins of Earth. Priorities.

  The stairs smelled like disinfectant and despair. Guy climbed them two at a time, his legs burning by the fourth floor, reaching the ninth floor slightly winded and resenting every cigarette he'd ever smoked. Homicide Division occupied the ninth and tenth floors—not enough space for the caseload, but more than most divisions got. Dead bodies, at least, still rated resources. Sometimes.

  The bullpen was half-empty at this hour, the shift change not quite complete. A few night-shift detectives finishing reports, their eyes red-rimmed and vacant, sustained by coffee and stubbornness. A cleaning drone humming between desks, following its programmed route with mechanical precision, avoiding the coffee stains it had been programmed to ignore because the cleaning solution budget had run out in August. Guy's workspace was in the corner—a scarred metal desk that had probably seen service since the building opened, two monitors that flickered occasionally but mostly worked, and a chair held together with duct tape in three different colors marking three different repair attempts. He'd been offered better accommodations when he made detective. Declined them. Didn't plan to stay long enough to make the move worthwhile.

  That had been six years ago.

  Captain Reyes's office light was on, visible through the frosted glass that separated her space from the bullpen. The light was always on. Guy wondered if she slept in there, if she had a cot hidden behind the filing cabinets, if she ever actually went home to whatever life she pretended to have outside these walls.

  He logged into his terminal, the system taking its time to authenticate, spinning up databases and loading his case board. Pulled up the case file from last night's callout, the one he'd ignored while drinking bourbon and having his worldview systematically dismantled. Male victim, mid-30s, found in a recycling compactor in Sector 8. No ID. Dental records had been scrubbed—not knocked out, but carefully removed, each tooth extracted post-mortem with surgical precision. Fingerprints burned off with acid, the concentration suggesting industrial-grade stuff, not the amateur-hour drain cleaner most killers used. Professional hit. Someone who knew how to make a body anonymous, how to erase identity and turn a person into just meat.

  Standard for The Sinks. Depressing how standard it had become.

  Guy skimmed the autopsy notes, the medical examiner's dry prose describing horror in clinical terms. Cause of death: exsanguination. The victim had been bled out, carefully, methodically, over hours. Multiple IV sites, suggesting the blood had been drained deliberately, collected, not just spilled. Not mob work—they killed fast and moved on, efficiency over theater. This was ritual, or theater, or both. This was someone who took their time, who enjoyed the process, who had a reason beyond simple murder.

  He flagged the file, added it to his personal case board—a digital murder wall no one else could access, encrypted with keys even MED's IT department couldn't crack without him noticing. Three other bodies in the past month, same MO. All in The Sinks, all unidentified despite his best efforts, all ignored by MED brass as "gang-related" despite clearly not being gang-related. All bled out. All teeth removed. All fingerprints burned away.

  Guy's augmented eye highlighted patterns automatically, drawing connections his conscious mind was still processing: locations clustered around old industrial zones in The Sinks' eastern sector, victims all approximately the same age and build—male, thirties, athletic—time of death always between midnight and 0300. Someone was hunting in Neo-Shanghai, selecting specific prey according to some criteria Guy couldn't determine, and no one gave a shit because the bodies weren't corporate. Because they were probably poor, probably augmented, probably "asking for it" according to the unspoken calculus that decided whose death mattered.

  He opened a search query, routing it through his personal deck rather than MED's compromised systems: *Nicholas Flamel + murder + blood ritual.*

  Results: zero.

  Tried again: *Flamel + immortal + alchemist.*

  This time, hits. But all historical—encyclopedia entries from open-source archives, academic papers behind paywalls, conspiracy theory forums where people with too much time and too little evidence spun fantasies. The 14th-century alchemist who claimed to have created the Philosopher's Stone, the legendary substance that could turn lead into gold and grant eternal life. Supposedly died in 1418, leaving behind texts that read like fever dreams and a legacy of people trying to recreate his work.

  Except the data chip said otherwise. Except Guy had photos spanning centuries, and video, and documentation that couldn't be faked without resources that exceeded most national budgets.

  "Bendel."

  Guy minimized the screen with a thought, his augmented eye controlling the interface faster than hands could move, and turned. Captain Elena Reyes stood behind him, coffee in hand—black, no sugar, in a chipped mug that said WORLD'S OKAYEST BOSS—exhaustion carved into her face like someone had taken a chisel to her features. She was fifty-something, though augmentation made age harder to judge, ex-military with the posture and paranoia that never quite left people who'd seen combat. Cybernetic replacements for both knees, destroyed by shrapnel in the Corporate Wars. Right arm from the elbow down, torn off by an anti-personnel mine. Survivor of the Corporate Wars when "survivor" meant you'd watched friends die and somehow kept walking. She'd seen more blood than most of her detectives combined, had authorized things Guy didn't want to think about, had made decisions that kept her awake at night decades later.

  "Captain."

  "You didn't respond to the callout last night." Statement, not question. She already knew the answer, was just giving him the chance to lie.

  "Personal emergency." The lie came easily. Too easily.

  Reyes's eyes—one biological brown, one cybernetic silver—scanned him. The cybernetic one was older model, limited functionality, the kind soldiers got when cost mattered more than capability. But it worked well enough to see through bullshit. "You look like shit, Guy. When's the last time you slept? And I mean actual sleep, not passing out at your desk."

  "When's the last time you did?"

  She almost smiled, the corner of her mouth twitching in what might have been humor in a different life. "Touché. Come to my office. We need to talk."

  Warning bells. Captains didn't summon you to their office for friendly chats. Guy followed her through the bullpen, past cubicles and filing cabinets that should have been digitized decades ago, their contents uploaded to the cloud and the physical space reclaimed. But MED was analog by necessity—too many hacks, too many leaks, too many cases compromised by digital intrusion. Paper trails were harder to erase, harder to alter without leaving traces. The old ways persisted because the new ways had betrayed them too many times.

  Reyes's office was organized chaos: case files stacked on every surface, some of them yellowed with age, going back to her first year as captain. Commendations on the walls gathering dust—medals and certificates that meant she'd done her job well in a system designed to prevent exactly that. A holographic city map flickering on the far wall, showing real-time crime data: murder markers clustered in The Sinks like a rash, property crimes scattered across Mid-City, corporate district showing almost nothing because crime there was handled privately, internally, without MED involvement. She closed the door behind them, which was never a good sign. Closed doors meant either promotion or termination, and Guy wasn't due for promotion.

  "Sit."

  Guy sat in the chair across from her desk, the same chair where he'd sat six years ago when she'd told him about Marcus. The chair where every detective eventually sat to hear bad news.

  Reyes leaned against her desk, arms crossed, studying him with the intensity of someone trying to decide how much truth to tell. "You've been running unsanctioned searches. Multiple databases, historical archives, facial recognition against pre-digital records." She held up a hand before he could respond, forestalling the denial already forming. "Don't bother denying it. IT flagged your terminal two hours ago. They called me at home."

  Shit. He'd been careful, or thought he had been. Apparently not careful enough. "It's related to a case."

  "Which case?"

  "The Sector 8 murders. The exsanguination victim from last night fits a pattern—"

  "Bullshit." Reyes's voice cut like glass, sharp and brittle. "You're looking into someone named Nicholas Flamel. Who is he?"

  Guy kept his expression neutral, falling back on interrogation training. When caught lying, shift to partial truth. "A lead. Connected to the murders, possibly. Name came up in witness interviews." Another lie, but plausible.

  "Really. Because according to IT, Flamel doesn't exist. No records, no footprint, no presence in any database we can access. So either you're chasing a ghost, or..." She studied him, and Guy saw the moment she put it together. "Or you met someone last night. Someone who spooked you enough to blow off a callout and spend all night digging through historical databases looking for answers to questions you won't share."

  She was good. Too good. That's why she was captain, why she'd survived the Wars and the political purges and the endless grind of command. She saw patterns, read people, understood what they weren't saying as well as what they were.

  "He approached me at Chen's Bar," Guy admitted, giving her enough truth to stop the questions. "Gave me information. Said his name was Nicholas Flamel. I'm vetting it."

  "What kind of information?"

  "The kind that sounds insane but checks out." Guy met her eyes. "The kind that makes me think the Sector 8 murders might be part of something bigger than gang violence."

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  Reyes was silent for a long moment. Outside her window, the city woke up—mag-lev trains screaming past on elevated rails, their passage shaking the building slightly. Holographic advertisements blossoming into the smog layer, fifty stories tall, hawking products no one in The Sinks could afford. Neon and rain and concrete, forever. The city that never stopped, never slept, never gave anyone a moment's peace.

  "Let it go, Guy."

  He blinked. "What?"

  "Whatever this Flamel told you, whoever he is, whatever he showed you—let it go." Reyes pushed off the desk, moved to the window, her cybernetic arm catching the light and throwing it back in chrome reflections. "You're a good detective. One of my best. Smart, persistent, you actually give a shit about the victims. But you've got a habit of digging into things that don't want to be found, of asking questions that people with power would prefer stayed unasked. Marcus—"

  "Don't." The name came out harder than Guy intended, sharp enough to cut. "Don't bring Marcus into this."

  "He went down a rabbit hole too. Started asking questions about black-market genetics, corporate shell companies funneling money to offshore labs. Started building a case about illegal human experimentation in The Sinks. And then he was dead. Shot six times in his apartment, ruled a home invasion despite nothing being stolen." Reyes turned to face him, and Guy saw something he'd never seen in her face before: regret. "I don't want to lose another detective."

  "Marcus was murdered. By corporate goons we both know exist, enforcing rules we both know are broken." Guy stood, his chair scraping back. "And you buried the investigation. Ruled it closed, case unsolved, probable robbery. You buried him."

  "I did what I had to do to keep the rest of you alive." Her voice was steel wrapped in exhaustion. "MED doesn't have the power to go after the corporations, Guy. We barely have the power to keep The Sinks from burning down, to maintain the illusion of law enforcement in a city that's already lost. So yes, I buried Marcus's case. Because the alternative was watching his entire team get gunned down in retaliation, was watching HeliosCorp or one of the other megacorps make an example that would chill every cop in this building. I traded one life for twenty. Do you understand that? Do you understand what it costs to make that choice?"

  The admission hung between them like smoke, heavy and poisonous. They'd never talked about it explicitly, had maintained the polite fiction that Marcus's death was random violence. Now it was out, raw and ugly and true.

  "Is that what you're doing with the Sector 8 murders?" Guy asked quietly, dangerously. "Burying them? Trading lives you deem less valuable for some greater good I'm not cleared to understand?"

  "Those victims were nobodies. Street trash. Augmented junkies, black-market organ donors, people who fell through the cracks and kept falling." Her voice was flat, reciting justifications she'd given herself a thousand times. "We don't have the resources to investigate every murder in The Sinks. We triage. We pick battles we can win."

  "They were people." Guy's voice was soft, but the words hit like punches. "They had names. Lives. Families maybe. They existed."

  "They were statistics. Numbers on a board I can't clear because the numbers keep growing faster than we can count them." Reyes rubbed her face with her cybernetic hand, the servos whining softly. The gesture looked wrong, mechanical precision where human weariness should be. "Look, I get it. You want justice. You want the world to make sense, for good to triumph and evil to get punished. But justice is a luxury we can't afford. We save who we can. We make pragmatic choices. And we don't poke dragons."

  "What if the dragon needs poking?"

  "Then the dragon burns us down and no one is saved." She met his eyes, and Guy saw fear there. Actual fear. "Drop the Flamel search. That's an order."

  Guy held her gaze. Reyes was scared, and that was terrifying because Reyes didn't scare. She'd walked through fire, survived ambushes, stared down corporate death squads. If she was scared of Flamel, or whoever Flamel represented, then this was bigger than a murder investigation. This was the kind of thing that got people disappeared.

  *They're watching you already.*

  "Understood, Captain." Guy turned to leave, giving her the compliance she needed to report to whoever was asking.

  "Guy."

  He paused at the door, hand on the frame.

  "Whatever you're thinking of doing—don't. Some mysteries stay buried for a reason. Some truths cost more than they're worth knowing." Her voice was almost gentle, almost caring beneath the steel. "Go home. Get some sleep. Come back tomorrow and work cases you can solve. Live your life. Forget about Flamel."

  He didn't respond. Just left, closing the door behind him with a soft click that sounded too final.

  Back at his desk, Guy stared at his terminal, the screen blank and waiting. Reyes was right about one thing: someone was watching. IT had flagged his searches, which meant someone higher up knew he was asking questions about Flamel. Someone with enough authority to get IT to track detective terminal activity, to report to the captain, to create pressure.

  How high did it go? And what the hell was Flamel involved in that MED would protect him, would issue stand-down orders, would bury investigations before they started?

  Guy pulled out his personal deck—a military-grade data slate he'd bought off a black-market dealer in The Sinks three years ago, military surplus from the Corporate Wars, encrypted with algorithms that predated current corporate surveillance. Untraceable, unconnected, unhackable without physical access. He transferred the data chip's contents carefully, watching for any signs of monitoring, then wiped his terminal's search history using tools that rewrote sectors multiple times. Logged out, cleared cache, made himself a ghost.

  If they wanted to watch, let them watch nothing.

  He was halfway to the stairwell, already planning his next move, when his augmented eye pinged: facial recognition hit. The security feed from Chen's Bar had been accessed by an external server. Someone outside MED, someone with resources and authority, had pulled the footage from last night.

  And they'd isolated every frame of Guy talking to Flamel. Downloaded them. Analyzed them. Knew exactly what Guy looked like, how he moved, how to find him.

  "Fuck."

  Guy took the stairs three at a time, his earlier exhaustion forgotten in the spike of adrenaline, hit the ground floor at a run, and pushed through the lobby into the rain. His instincts—the ones developed through two years of staying alive in The Sinks—screamed at him to move, go dark, disappear into the city's endless warrens and become unfindable. But that was running. And Guy didn't run from problems. He ran toward them, because running away just meant they caught you from behind.

  He needed to talk to Flamel. Now. Not in three days—now. Before whoever was watching made their move, before this spiraled into something he couldn't control.

  But Flamel said he'd find Guy. How the hell was Guy supposed to—

  His augmented eye flickered. Incoming message, sender unknown, encryption level military-grade, routed through so many proxies his eye couldn't track the origin:

  **You're being followed. Two operatives, north side of MED plaza. Don't engage—they're better equipped than you. Meet me at the coordinates below. One hour. Come alone.**

  Below the message: GPS coordinates. Guy's eye overlaid them on his visual field—an alley in Sector 5, industrial district. Abandoned zone, no surveillance, no corporate presence. Perfect place for an ambush.

  Or a conversation.

  Guy scanned the plaza with enhanced vision, filtering through the crowds of people heading to work, the auto-cabs cruising in their designated lanes, the drones overhead monitoring traffic patterns. And there—two figures in gray coats that cost too much for this district, standing too still, watching the MED entrance with the focused intensity of predators tracking prey. Corporate security build, augmented posture, bulges under their coats that suggested serious hardware. Professionals.

  They clocked him the moment he looked. Training recognized training.

  Guy ran.

  ---

  Sector 5 was a graveyard of the old economy, a monument to a world that had died when automation and off-world production made human labor obsolete. Factories that used to employ thousands now stood hollow, windows shattered by vandals or time, machinery rusting in the rain that never stopped, never gave the metal a chance to dry. The corporations had moved production off-world or to automated facilities, chasing efficiency and profit margins. The workers had moved to The Sinks, chasing survival. The buildings just waited to die, waited for someone to decide whether demolition or decay would claim them first.

  Guy ducked through a chain-link fence, the wire singing as he pushed through the cut section that dozens of homeless and scavengers had used before him, Glock drawn, senses on high alert. The coordinates led him deep into the industrial maze—past cargo containers stacked like monuments to global trade that no longer existed, through alleys slick with oil and rainwater, the ground treacherous with debris and broken glass. His augmented eye mapped the terrain automatically, marking cover positions, calculating sight lines, identifying choke points and escape routes.

  He felt them before he saw them: the two operatives, closing in from behind. Fast, trained, moving with the coordinated precision of military operators. Guy's tactical software tagged them as threats, overlay showing approach vectors and estimated arrival time.

  Guy spun, raised his weapon, fell into the shooting stance that two years in The Sinks had burned into muscle memory. "Metro Enforcement. Stop where you are. Hands where I can see them."

  They didn't stop. They moved with inhuman speed—augmented, definitely, possibly full-borg conversions. High-end military-grade stuff, reaction times that exceeded human norms. Guy fired twice, center mass, both rounds, the Glock's recoil familiar and manageable. The lead operative staggered but didn't drop. Subdermal armor, probably ceramic composite sandwiched between synthetic skin layers. Expensive. Corporate money.

  "Shit."

  They drew weapons—sleek, corporate-made, the kind of hardware that technically didn't exist because international treaties banned it. Plasma projectors, probably Yamazaki Industrial or HeliosCorp's military division. Definitely illegal as hell. Guy dove behind a dumpster as plasma bolts seared the air where he'd been standing, the heat washing over him like opening an oven. The dumpster began melting, metal running like wax, the plastic superheating and giving off toxic fumes.

  Not good. Plasma would cut through his cover in seconds.

  Guy blind-fired around the corner, forcing them to cover, not expecting to hit but needing to buy time, then ran. His augmented eye mapped escape routes, calculated odds: two on one, both augmented, better armed, better funded. He needed an advantage, needed terrain or surprise or divine intervention.

  A voice cut through the rain, calm and impossibly close: "Get down."

  Guy dropped, instinct overriding thought. A figure blurred past him—Nicholas Flamel, moving like water, like a dancer, like something that didn't obey physics. He had no weapon visible. He didn't need one.

  Flamel closed the distance to the first operative in a heartbeat, covering ten meters faster than augmented reflexes should allow, grabbed the man's wrist before he could adjust his aim, twisted. Something snapped—not the weapon, but bone. The operative screamed, a sound that cut through the rain, weapon clattering to the wet pavement. Flamel struck once—palm to the chest, casual and precise—and the man flew backward, crashing into a wall hard enough to crack concrete, hard enough that the impact was visible even through the rain.

  The second operative adjusted, trained reflexes overriding shock, fired at Flamel. The plasma bolt hit him square in the shoulder, burning through coat and flesh, the smell of burned meat mixing with ozone. Flamel staggered but didn't fall, didn't scream, didn't react the way anyone shot with a plasma weapon should react.

  And the wound began closing. Right there, in the rain, while Guy watched. Charred skin knitting itself together in seconds, muscle regenerating, cells multiplying at a rate that violated biology.

  Flamel looked down at his ruined coat with an expression of mild annoyance, the kind of irritation you'd show at a stain or a tear. "I liked this coat."

  The second operative hesitated, his training suddenly inadequate for what he was witnessing. Fatal mistake. Flamel moved again, inhumanly fast, a blur of motion that Guy's augmented eye could barely track, and caught the man by the throat. Lifted him off the ground one-handed like he weighed nothing, cybernetic enhancements and all.

  "Who sent you?" Flamel's voice was still calm, still patient, but edged with something ancient and cold, something that suggested consequences beyond death.

  The operative choked, cybernetic enhancements whining as he struggled, servos screaming as they tried to break Flamel's grip and failed. "Vane... Cassius Vane... he knows... knows you're back..."

  Flamel's expression darkened, something like resignation crossing his features. "Of course. Of course he knows." He released the operative, who collapsed gasping, cybernetic systems rebooting, clutching his throat with both hands. "Tell your master this: I'm not running anymore. Not hiding. If he wants me, he can come himself instead of sending children with toys."

  He turned his back on the operatives, walked to Guy, who was still crouched behind the melting dumpster, who was still trying to process what he'd just witnessed. Behind Flamel, the two operatives scrambled away, dragging themselves and each other, leaving weapons and pride behind. Smart. They'd learned something about fear.

  "Are you hurt?"

  Guy stared at him. At the shoulder that should have been a ruin of burned meat and exposed bone, now whole beneath the burned coat. At the man who'd just taken a plasma bolt—something that could cut through starship hull plating—and shrugged it off like a bee sting. At the casual display of strength that shouldn't be possible without full-body augmentation, and Flamel showed no signs of augmentation.

  "You're... you're actually..."

  "Yes." Flamel offered his hand, the gesture strangely formal in the rain-soaked alley. "Now come on. We need to leave before reinforcements arrive. Vane won't send just two." Guy took the hand, let Flamel pull him up. The grip was strong but not crushing, warm and human despite everything. "Who the fuck is Cassius Vane?" Guy demanded.

  "Someone like me. Immortal, ancient, powerful." Flamel started walking, coat billowing behind him despite the ruined shoulder. "But worse. Much worse. Where I've tried to help humanity, to guide and preserve, Cassius has exploited it. Used it. Treated mortal life as a resource to be consumed."

  "And now he knows you've made contact with me."

  "Which means you're in danger, Detective. Real danger, not the kind your badge protects against." Flamel led them through the maze of containers and buildings, moving with confidence that suggested he'd mapped this route in advance.

  "I'm a cop. Danger's part of the job."

  Flamel stopped, turned, and for the first time, Guy saw real concern in those ancient eyes. Worry that looked genuine. "Not this kind of danger. Cassius doesn't play by your rules, doesn't acknowledge your laws. He'll kill everyone you know just to send a message. Your captain, your colleagues, anyone you've ever cared about—they're all targets now. Leverage to use against you, or examples to make me suffer."

  "Then I need to stop him."

  "You can't. Not as you are now." Flamel studied him, measuring him the way you'd measure someone for a suit or a coffin. "You're good, Guy. Skilled, smart, determined. But you're human. Fragile. Mortal. Cassius could kill you without effort, could erase you from existence and sleep soundly after. But I can teach you. If you're willing to listen. Willing to believe."

  The rain hammered down. Neon flickered on distant buildings, colors bleeding through the water. Somewhere, sirens wailed—probably MED responding to reports of plasma fire, officers heading into danger they wouldn't understand. Guy's world, his reality, his understanding of what was possible—all of it was cracking apart like glass under pressure.

  He thought of the data chip. The photos spanning centuries. The evidence that couldn't be faked without resources that exceeded most nations.

  He thought of the wound healing in seconds. Biology rewriting itself.

  And he thought of Captain Reyes, telling him to let it go. To bury the truth like Marcus's murder. To be a good cop and accept the limits of what he could know.

  "Three days," Guy said, his voice steady despite everything. "You wanted to meet in three days. Why not now?"

  "Because you need time to process this. To decide if you're ready to accept what I'm offering, what it costs." Flamel started walking again, leading them toward the edge of the industrial district. "But Cassius accelerated the timeline. He always does—patience isn't among his virtues. So now you choose: walk away, go back to MED, pretend this never happened. File a report, tell Reyes you were mistaken, go back to your normal life. Or—"

  "Or what?"

  Flamel looked back over his shoulder, and his expression was grave. "Or come with me. Learn the truth. Accept training that will change you fundamentally. And acknowledge that your life will never be normal again. You'll never be able to unknow what I teach you, undo what you become. Choose carefully."

  Guy should have said no. Should have arrested Flamel, called for backup, filed a report that would land him in psychiatric evaluation but at least keep him within the world he understood. Should have been a good cop who followed orders and respected boundaries and didn't ask questions that made captains nervous.

  Instead, he holstered his Glock and followed Nicholas Flamel into the rain.

  Behind them, the city continued its endless dance. Neon and smoke and blood. Rain that washed nothing clean. People living and dying and never knowing what walked among them.

  And somewhere in a tower made of glass and money and the accumulated wealth of centuries, Cassius Vane watched drone footage of the encounter and smiled.

  "Good," he murmured to the empty room, his voice cultured and cruel. "Let the cycle break. Let's see what happens when the hunter becomes the hunted, when the predator becomes prey. This should be entertaining."

  He poured himself wine from a bottle that had been cellared in 1789, that had survived the French Revolution and two world wars, that cost more than a house in The Sinks. Raised it to the screen in a toast.

  The game, finally, was beginning.