Paper Shields
Kieran took the long way home.
He left Holcomb by side streets, not the main road. Straight lines made clean diagrams. Clean diagrams got pinned to briefing boards.
Rain slicked the pavement and filled the shallow dips in broken concrete. He walked without hurrying, hands in his pockets, collar up, just another late-night ghost in a city full of them.
"Silent/402, confirm exfil in progress," Control's voice said in his ear.
"Ground clear," Kieran replied. "No pursuit. No civilians in the alley when I left."
"Drives?" Control asked.
He touched the inside pocket of his jacket, feeling the hard edges there.
"Secured," he said.
There was a pause, the sound of someone updating a status field.
"Overwatch, status?" Control asked.
"Roof clear," Jonas said. His breathing had leveled out again. "No second teams, no blue lights, no one trying to climb up and shoot me in the back. I'll peel off west."
"You will both report to debrief in the morning cycle," Control said. "Handler Morrow has been notified. Silent/402, you are required to present for medical evaluation as well."
"Understood," Kieran said.
"Telemetry terminated," the voice said.
The faint buzz in his ear died. The city sounded bigger without the Order's whisper.
"Still alive," Jonas said. Different channel. Closer, somehow. "That went…complicated."
Kieran stepped around a puddle, the reflected streetlight shattering as his boot skimmed the surface.
"You've had cleaner nights," he said.
"Some," Jonas replied. "Some worse. I haven't had many where I told Internal no to their face, though."
"You weren't in their face," Kieran said.
"It felt like it," Jonas said. "They're going to chew on tonight for a while."
Kieran turned down an alley that cut behind two rows of old tenements. Someone had strung a wire overhead and hung sheets from it, flapping like tired flags in the damp wind.
"Why'd you stay on me?" Kieran asked.
"For purely selfish reasons," Jonas said. "If they burn you, they start wondering why I didn't take the shot. I like my job. I like not training children in knife disarms until my hands shake."
"You could have said your angle was bad and left it there," Kieran said.
"It was bad," Jonas said. "But if they'd pushed long enough, I could have forced a shot. Might have hit you. Might have hit a wall. Might have hit nothing but air."
"Risk," Kieran said.
"Exactly," Jonas said. "I'm not risking you to make Krell feel decisive."
A small silence.
"You shouldn't have spared her," Jonas added, more quietly. "From their point of view."
"I know," Kieran said.
"But?" Jonas said.
"But I did," he said.
Another silence, longer this time. The only sound was the soft hiss of tires on wet roads somewhere beyond the buildings.
"Debrief's at nine," Jonas said eventually. "You'll want to sleep. Or whatever it is you do instead."
"Later," Kieran said.
He cut the connection.
Sleep didn't come easy on nights like this. Not because of the dead, but because of the living.
He reached his building, the familiar sag in the steps up to the second floor, the message board by the entrance with old flyers pinned at crooked angles: live music; cheap tutoring; missing cat, black with one torn ear.
Lena's bar sat on the ground floor, its narrow windows throwing rectangles of yellow into the damp. At this hour it was quieter. Weeknight crowds, not weekend chaos.
He paused by the door without thinking about why.
Through the glass, he saw her.
Lena was behind the bar, one hand on the tap, the other gesturing as she spoke to a man hunched over a beer. Her hair was pulled back, a few curls escaping around her face. There was a crease between her brows that deepened when she laughed, which she did now, brief and sharp.
He stood in the shadows, just outside the cone of light, where his reflection blurred into the street.
She turned away from the customer to grab a bottle from the shelf. For a heartbeat, her gaze slid instinctively to the window, checking the outside world.
Her eyes skimmed past the glass.
They didn't catch on him. His hood and the dark did their work.
He could go in. Order something. Sit on a stool and listen to her talk about the landlord's new stunt or the neighborhood council's useless meeting. Let the noise of ordinary irritation wash over the alley still in his ears.
Inside his jacket, Ruiz's drives tapped once against his ribs when he shifted. A small reminder.
He moved on.
Upstairs, his apartment unlocked with one flat beep. He stepped inside, shut the door behind him, and locked it out of habit, not hope.
The room was functional: bed, chair, small table, kitchenette, a wardrobe that held more weapons than clothes. The window looked down on the street and across to a wall of older brick, graffiti layered in years of paint.
He stripped in the bathroom.
The jacket went in a plastic garment bag. He turned it inside out first and checked it under the harsh light, scanning seams and folds for any stray smear of red. The rain had done some of the cleaning for him. The rest would be handled by a service that never asked questions and didn't have a listed number.
Shirt, pants, socks: all checked, all bagged. Gloves went into the sink. He turned the water on hot, watched the thin ribbons of diluted brown swirl down the drain, then peeled the gloves off and dropped them into the trash.
His skin looked the same as it always did. Pale where clothes usually covered it, tanned on the back of his hands and neck from all the miles walked in the open.
He examined his face in the mirror.
The same.
Dark hair, short enough to be forgettable. Eyes a color that changed in different lights; nothing unusual enough to lodge in memory. Nose broken and set right again years ago. A faint white line along his jaw from a fight in a hallway in a building that no longer existed.
Nothing in that face betrayed that he'd killed a man an hour ago and let another walk away carrying the shape of a word like Forge in her head.
He turned off the light.
On the table in the main room, he laid out the drives.
Two small rectangles of plastic and metal. Ordinary, unremarkable.
He considered them for a moment. If he plugged them into his own terminal, he could see what Ruiz had been so afraid of. What Amelia had risked her life to drag out into the light.
He didn't reach for the port.
The Order didn't like their blades hoarding secrets. And some doors, once opened, didn't close.
He put both drives into a plain, unmarked envelope instead, sealed it, and wrote nothing on the outside.
They'd be collected in the morning. Logged, copied, dissected. Fed to whatever machine Krell used to turn data into leverage.
He lay down on the bed without undressing further, one arm under his head, staring at the ceiling.
The city hummed through the walls.
After a while, he closed his eyes.
Sleep came, eventually. When it did, it came without dreams he could remember.
---
Morning found the city gray and sullen.
He woke to the alarm without the jolt of surprise that meant he'd gone deep. A shower stripped the last clinging damp from his muscles. Fresh clothes, neutral and forgettable, went on in layers.
The envelope with the drives went into an inner pocket.
He stepped past Lena's bar on his way out. The shutters were half-down, the sign dark. A "Closed" placard hung crookedly in the window. She didn't keep early hours. Nights were where the money lived.
The transport hub where the Order liked to meet assets was disguised as a co-working space.
Glass, steel, potted plants. Shared desks and coffee machines. Freelancers with headphones hunched over screens, moving code and words and designs from one nowhere to another. Bland artwork on the walls. A receptionist with practiced smile and a tablet.
He walked in, went past the sign-in kiosk without touching it, and took the stairs instead of the elevator. The receptionist didn't look up.
Third floor, last door on the right: a conference room that never showed as "booked" on the public calendar.
He knocked once and entered.
Elena Morrow sat at the table with a tablet and a folder in front of her. Beside her, in a second chair, sat Dr. Mara Ilyin, in a dark blazer and with a thermal mug cupped between her hands. A cart in the corner held a basic medical kit: blood pressure cuff, scanner, bandages.
The blinds were half-closed against the soft daylight. The room smelled faintly of stale coffee and cleaning solution.
"You're on time," Elena said. "Again. You're going to ruin your reputation."
She looked as tired as the weather—lines deeper around her mouth, hair twisted back in a knot that had been neat once and had since been pushed through with impatient fingers.
He set the envelope on the table.
"Drives," he said.
"We'll get to those," she replied. "Sit."
He sat opposite them, chair angled slightly so he could see both the door and the window. Habit, not thought.
"Medical first," Elena said. "Mara?"
Dr. Ilyin set her mug down, picked up her scanner, and moved around the table.
"Any new injuries I should know about?" she asked.
"None," he said.
"Bullet grazes? Broken ribs? Emotional trauma?" she said.
"No," he said.
"Pity," she said lightly. "You're very boring when you're fine."
She applied the scanner to his neck briefly, then his wrists, checking for hidden swelling or hairline fractures. It hummed quietly, lights flickering as it read tissue density and temperature.
His vitals scrolled across her handheld.
"Blood pressure elevated but not by much," she said. "Resting heart rate slightly above your baseline. Nothing alarming. No sign of shock or delayed reaction. Adrenal response within expected range for your job description."
She went through the ritual: flashlight in the eyes, pulse at his wrist, the usual questions.
"How do you feel?" she asked.
"Fine," he said.
"Any dizziness? Nausea? Difficulty sleeping?" she said.
"No," he repeated.
She watched him for a second.
"You do understand feelings aren't a test you pass by failing to have them," she said.
"I understand we're short on time," he said.
She smiled, briefly.
"Medically," she said, turning back to Elena, "he's cleared."
"Thank you," Elena said.
Dr. Ilyin picked up her mug and returned to her chair, leaning back with her ankles crossed.
Elena tapped the folder with a forefinger.
"Silent/402," she said. "Walk me through it, in your own words. I have Control's log and Rhee's report. I want yours."
"Target left the Caldera around nineteen hundred," he said. "He chose the club over the bar. Went inside alone. I followed. Buyer arrived twelve minutes later. Older than him, female, controlled movements. They spoke, decided the club was too public for a data handoff, moved to the rear alley."
He described it without embellishment.
The laptop. The drive. The first shot.
"The recommendation was headshots," Elena said when he reached that point. "Not hardware damage."
"The recommendation was also minimal collateral," he said. "If I killed him first, the drive left in her pocket with a full or partial data set. If I killed her first, his laptop still held everything he was afraid of. Destroying the laptop before completion gave me the chance to keep both from leaving intact."
"You gambled," she said.
"Yes," he said. "On my own aim. It's a good bet."
"And then you talked," she said. "For quite a while."
Dr. Ilyin's eyes flicked between them, resting on his face.
"You extracted server locations and confirmation about other copies," Kieran said. "That wasn't idle conversation."
"I'm not saying it was useless," Elena said. "I'm saying it wasn't in the brief."
He met her gaze without flinching.
"I had an alley, two assets, and no backup," he said. "Control wanted immediate termination. Internal wanted a clean graph. Krell wanted data. There was only one person in that alley whose job it was to decide what happened in the next thirty seconds. It was mine."
"Control disagrees," she said.
"Control wasn't standing there," he replied.
She pinched the bridge of her nose briefly.
"You understand how this looks from their end," she said. "First Dorrance, now Ruiz. Two missions in a row with significant deviations from operational recommendations."
"Both missions ended with the target dead and the client protected," he said. "The Order recovered more than they expected last night."
"And less than they wanted," Elena said.
"They rarely get everything," he said.
"Some of them believe that's your fault," she said.
He did not shrug. The impulse flickered and died before it could reach his shoulders.
"Rhee's report?" he asked.
"Protective," she said. "He confirms your shot on the laptop prevented an immediate data transfer. He emphasizes the recovered drives. He also notes, in polite language, that shooting you in the back on Internal's command is not part of his job description."
"Internal must have enjoyed that," Dr. Ilyin said.
"They've recommended disciplinary review," Elena said. "Krell declined."
"Personally?" Kieran asked.
She nodded.
"He overrode them," she said. "He wants to keep you in the field. For now."
"For now," Dr. Ilyin echoed. "Lovely phrase."
"Krell spoke to you directly at the end," Elena added. "That doesn't happen often."
"He wanted to know why I shot the laptop first," Kieran said.
"And you told him…what, exactly?" she asked.
"That it was the geometrically efficient choice," he said. "Minimal blast radius, maximum data retention, no loud bodies at the mouth of the alley."
"Did you mention Amelia?" Elena asked.
"She walked back into the club," he said. "I said the buyer left without physical copies. That was accurate."
"That's not what I asked," she said.
He paused.
"No," he said. "I didn't mention her by name."
"Control's log notes that the 'secondary exposure vector was contained,'" Elena said. "Their word. Yours?"
"Mine," he said.
"What does 'contained' mean to you?" Dr. Ilyin asked.
"She left alive," he said. "She has partial knowledge but no hard proof. The Order will scrub the servers she named. Her outlet will come under pressure. She can still be managed."
"Managed how?" Elena asked.
"Surveillance, intimidation, legal harassment," he said. "The usual tools. None of which require a corpse in an alley behind a club where twenty people saw her walking in."
"And if she doesn't scare easily?" Dr. Ilyin asked.
"She dies later," he said. "Somewhere that doesn't lead back to me."
Dr. Ilyin studied him.
"Do you care about that distinction?" she asked.
"I care about my operational footprint," he said.
"You didn't answer her question," Elena said.
His jaw tightened by a fraction.
"I care about dead children more than dead journalists," he said. "If you're looking for a hierarchy."
"And Ruiz?" Elena asked.
"Ruiz chose to profit from the system until it scared him," he said. "He decided his fear was worth more than the people he'd already helped hurt."
"That's not an answer," she said.
"It's the only one that matters," he replied.
She leaned back in her chair.
"Internal will keep watching," she said. "They've flagged your file for 'behavioral monitoring.'…"
"I assumed," he said.
"They'll wire more telemetry if they can," she continued. "You'll get assignments with more observers than makes sense. You'll be given opportunities to make clean kills. They want to see if this is a pattern or a phase."
"It's not a phase," he said.
"Wonderful," Dr. Ilyin said under her breath.
Elena tapped the envelope with a fingertip.
"These drives," she said. "You didn't access them."
"No," he said.
"Any temptation?" Dr. Ilyin asked.
He thought of Ruiz's broken laptop, the brief rectangle of light in the dark, the way Amelia had said children listed as shipment.
"Yes," he said.
"But you didn't," Elena said.
"The last thing I need is to know more than the people who give me orders," he said. "It never ends well for assets with broader views."
"Pragmatic," she said.
He said nothing.
"Amelia," Elena said then. "You said she works for a small outlet. You got a name?"
"First name only," he said. "Kovács. She didn't volunteer more, and I didn't push. Server locations were more important than brand awareness."
Elena's fingers danced over the tablet.
"Kovács, Amelia," she murmured. "There she is. Small investigative platform. No corporate sponsorship. No government funding. I've skimmed their work before. They are…annoying."
"Annoying how?" Dr. Ilyin asked.
"They dig in places most big outlets don't bother with," Elena said. "Local corruption, municipal contracts, private security abuses. Nothing that shakes governments, but enough to keep a steady trickle of people angry who can't do anything about it."
"She'll move now," Kieran said. "She knows she's visible."
"Yes," Elena said. "And she'll be tracked. Krell's already requested a parallel analysis from Aegis."
"Of her?" Kieran asked.
"Of her, her outlet, their donors, their sources, their habits," Elena said. "Every stone she's ever kicked over will be turned on her."
"Then the problem is solved," Dr. Ilyin said dryly. "Or buried. Which is the same thing from their perspective."
Elena closed the folder.
"For now," she said again.
She looked at him.
"I need to know something," she said. "As your handler, not as their mouthpiece."
He waited.
"When you pulled the trigger on Ruiz," she said, "did you hesitate?"
"No," he said.
"Not even a fraction?" she pressed.
"Not after the decision was made," he said. "I hesitated before."
"How long?" she asked.
"In their terms," he said, "too long."
"In yours?" Dr. Ilyin asked.
"Long enough to consider the outcomes," he said.
Elena sighed. It sounded like someone letting air out of a tire slowly, hoping it wouldn't draw attention.
"If they push you into a corner," she said, "will you keep making those calculations? Or will you pick a side and stop thinking about it?"
"Are those the only options?" he asked.
"For most people in this job," she said, "yes."
"I'm not most people," he said.
"That's what they like about you," she said. "And what they're afraid of."
A knock sounded on the conference room door.
Elena's head came up.
"Come," she said.
The door opened.
Sebastian Krell stepped in as if he'd been here all along and was only just now visible.
He wore a dark suit without a tie, the shirt collar open by one button. Hair neatly combed, face unremarkable in the way dangerous men sometimes cultivated: average height, average build, features that would disappear into a crowd.
Only his eyes betrayed anything interesting. They were sharp, bright, and slightly amused, as if everything he saw confirmed something he'd already suspected.
"Handler Morrow," he said. "Doctor. Silent/402."
"Architect Krell," Elena said. Her tone was neutral. Not warm, not cold.
"Please, don't get up," he said lightly, taking the empty chair at the far end of the table as if he'd been invited.
He glanced at the envelope.
"Those would be Mr. Ruiz's love letters?" he said.
"Drives recovered from the scene," Elena said.
"Excellent," he said. "Our tech people have been restless. They love a puzzle."
He steepled his fingers.
"I wanted to hear your account firsthand," he said to Kieran. "Without all the static."
"I already gave it," Kieran said.
"To your handler," Krell replied. "Now give it to me."
Elena shot Kieran a look that said: be careful.
He repeated the essentials. Krell listened without interrupting, head tilted slightly, like a man enjoying a piece of music he'd heard before but from a different orchestra.
When Kieran finished, Krell was quiet for a moment.
"Control thinks you're insubordinate," Krell said pleasantly. "Internal thinks you're dangerous. Your handler"—he inclined his head toward Elena—"thinks you're salvageable. Dr. Ilyin thinks you're…hm. Complicated."
"And you?" Kieran asked.
"I think you're interesting," Krell said.
"That doesn't sound like a compliment," Dr. Ilyin muttered.
"It isn't meant as one," Krell said. "Compliments are cheap. Interest is expensive."
He laced his fingers together.
"You could have followed the directive exactly," he said to Kieran. "Two bullets, two corpses, one bag. Clean, simple, unremarkable. Instead, you chose a path that gave us more information but also more…variables."
"You prefer less information?" Kieran asked.
"I prefer information I chose to risk assets for," Krell said. "Not information assets chose to risk themselves for."
He smiled faintly.
"However," he added, "I am not blind to utility. Ruiz is dead. That satisfies our clients. The drives are ours. That satisfies my curiosity. The servers Ms. Kovács named will be…addressed. That satisfies the Order."
"And the buyer?" Elena asked.
Krell tilted his head.
"The buyer is alive," he said. "That satisfies something else."
"What?" Dr. Ilyin asked.
"My ongoing experiment," he said.
He looked at Kieran.
"You are not the first blade forged in these conditions," he said. "But you are one of the few who has survived this long without becoming completely dull or completely jagged. You adapt in ways our training does not entirely account for."
"Then your training is flawed," Kieran said.
"On the contrary," Krell said. "It is working beautifully. We wanted tools with enough intelligence to make decisions but not enough self-regard to refuse the wrong ones. You are doing both."
"That sounds like a design flaw," Dr. Ilyin said.
"Or an opportunity," Krell said. "We live in an era of overlapping shadows. Our clients want deniability, but they also want adaptability. Rigid weapons break. Mindless ones miss angles."
"And your point?" Elena asked.
"My point is that Holt represents a rare category: an asset who can see further than the line in front of his sights but still moves when we tell him," Krell said. "For now."
He focused on Kieran again.
"You had a journalist in your sights," he said. "You chose not to kill her. Why?"
"I told Control," Kieran said. "Dead journalists make noise. Some outlets want martyrs more than they want stories. Leaving her alive lets you control the narrative better."
"That's the answer you gave them," Krell said. "Is it the only one?"
"It's the one that matters," Kieran said.
"Not to me," Krell said.
Silence stretched.
Kieran held his gaze.
"Ruiz sold children for money," he said eventually. "She tried to buy guilt with risk. If one of them was going to die tonight, it was him."
Krell considered that.
"So there is a hierarchy," he said. "Even for you."
"Yes," Kieran said.
"Useful to know," Krell murmured.
He stood.
"For now," he said, "you will continue to be deployed. We will not sideline you with training duties or endless psych evaluations. Internal will complain. They are accustomed to being obeyed. They will get over it."
He picked up the envelope with the drives.
"In exchange," he said, "you will continue to deliver results. You will also, occasionally, deliver anomalies. I will decide whether those anomalies are acceptable."
"And if they're not?" Kieran asked.
"Then you will discover how many Forges there really are," Krell said, very pleasantly. "And how they treat tools they no longer trust at the sharp end."
He moved to the door.
"Ms. Kovács will be…observed," he added over his shoulder. "If she becomes a problem, she will be solved. You will not be involved. You've done your part."
He opened the door.
"One more thing, Silent/402," he said.
Kieran waited.
"The next time you decide to shoot the machine first," Krell said, "let me know beforehand. I may be inclined to build the mission around that choice. It saves everyone so much surprise."
The door shut behind him with a soft click.
Dr. Ilyin blew out a breath.
"I hate him," she said.
"You work for him," Elena said.
"I hate a lot of people I work for," Dr. Ilyin said. "You get used to it."
Elena looked at Kieran.
"You heard him," she said. "You're not benched. But you're not…trusted, either. You're being watched. Closer than before."
"They were always watching," he said.
"Now they're watching with a hypothesis," she said. "That's worse."
He stood.
"Is there anything else?" he asked.
"For now?" she said. "No. Go home. Don't start any side projects. Don't talk to strangers with notebooks."
"I rarely talk to strangers," he said.
"Good," she said. "Let's keep it that way."
Dr. Ilyin gathered her kit.
"If you start having trouble sleeping," she said, "or if you start sleeping too well, let me know."
"Why?" he asked.
"Because either one in your case is a bad sign," she said.
He left them in the conference room and went back into the co-working space, where people sat under warm lights, building harmless things and fighting harmless battles in inboxes and code.
Outside, the sky had started to clear, a patch of pale blue wrestling through the cloud.
He walked.
---
Across the city, Amelia Kovács sat at a small metal table on a balcony two floors up from a narrow street.
Her hands shook only when she wasn't using them.
She held the mug of coffee to steady them. It had gone cold an hour ago.
Her laptop sat open in front of her, a different machine from the one in the alley. This one had stickers on the lid: causes, jokes, a faded band logo from ten years ago.
The cursor on the blank document blinked patiently.
Inside the apartment, the news played on a muted screen, rolling through traffic updates, political platitudes, and a story about a corporate charity event.
No dead men in alleys, she thought.
Not yet.
Her editor had called three times.
"What happened?" he'd asked. "You went dark for two hours. Did they show?"
"They showed," she'd said.
"Did you get it?" he asked. "The big dump?"
She'd thought of the man with the calm eyes who'd shot the computer first.
"I got…enough," she'd said.
"Enough for what?" he asked.
"To know we're in deeper than we thought," she said. "To know we're not the only ones watching this now."
She hadn't told him about the drives.
She hadn't told him about the Forges by name. Not yet.
Her servers had logged intrusion attempts all night. She'd watched the alerts bloom like a rash: probes from unknown IPs, then from addresses she recognized as belonging to infrastructure companies that weren't supposed to care about small outlets like hers.
Someone had handed them a map.
She wrapped both hands tighter around the mug.
On the screen, she typed:
> The man in the alley shot the computer first.
She stared at the sentence.
Backspaced the last word.
Typed:
> …shot the machine first.
Less poetic. More precise.
She saved the document.
There would be time later to decide whether it ever saw daylight.
Below, on the street, a black car drove past slowly, then sped up.
She watched it go, then closed the laptop with careful, controlled hands.
"Not yet," she said softly to no one.
"Not yet."