Maxwell had been waiting for approximately three minutes when the voice arrived.
"What the hell are you doing?"
Of all the things Maxwell had prepared himself for — and standing alone in an infinite white void had given him ample time to prepare for several — a question phrased in mild exasperation had not been among them. He turned toward the sound with the careful, unhurried movement of someone who had learned that sudden actions in uncertain situations were rarely rewarded.
The source of the voice was a child.
A boy, perhaps ten or eleven years old by appearance, standing roughly four meters away with his hands in the pockets of clothes that looked like they had survived a very active afternoon. His hair was the particular variety of disheveled that suggested it had started the day with some structural intention and abandoned it early. One of his front teeth was chipped. His shoes were scuffed at the toe in the way that spoke of someone who ran everywhere and paid attention to none of the surfaces. He looked, in short, like every boy Maxwell had ever seen on a playground who treated falling down as an acceptable cost of moving fast.
He also looked completely at home in an infinite white void, which the playground analogy did not account for.
Maxwell studied him for a moment. Then he said, "Who are you?"
The boy tilted his head, the way children do when they've heard a question they find less interesting than the one they were asking. "I thought you were a cop," he said, as though this were a continuation of a conversation Maxwell had not been present for. "Why is your life so boring?"
There were several things Maxwell wanted to say to this. He opened his mouth.
The boy raised one hand, almost lazily, and Maxwell's mouth ceased to exist.
Not painfully — there was no pain, which was somehow worse. One moment he had a mouth and the next the lower half of his face was simply smooth, continuous skin, sealed without seam or scar as though it had always been that way. Maxwell brought his hand up and pressed his fingers against the place where his lips had been. Nothing. He looked at the boy with an expression that was doing considerable work in the absence of the lower face.
The boy appeared unbothered.
— ✦ —
"Oh, where are my manners." He said it in the tone of someone who had been told to say it enough times that it had become reflexive, stripped of any actual social intent. He straightened slightly, as though the formality of an introduction required at least a minimal adjustment of posture. "I am the God of Entertainment. Capital G, in case you were wondering."
He paused, perhaps expecting a reaction. Maxwell, lacking a mouth, offered him a stare.
"I brought you to this world," the boy continued, settling back into the easy cadence of someone explaining something they found obvious. "You have enough knowledge of it, don't you? All those comics. All those films. You know Gotham better than most people who were born there, which is exactly why I chose you." He began to move, not with any particular direction, just the restless ambient movement of a child who thought better on his feet. "The idea was entertainment, you understand. A man from your world, dropped into this one, knowing what he knows. The potential was considerable."
He stopped moving and looked at Maxwell directly.
"And then you spent five years doing courier work."
The silence — already total, in a space with no ambient noise whatsoever — somehow deepened. The boy's expression was not angry. It was something Maxwell found considerably harder to manage: genuinely, profoundly disappointed, in the specific way of someone who had expected a great deal and received very little. Like a child who had been promised a fireworks display and shown a single match.
"You have no permission to speak," the boy added, apparently as a formality, gesturing toward where Maxwell's mouth was not. "You already know everything I would tell you. I simply want you to understand the situation from my perspective before we move forward."
He resumed his wandering.
"Five years, Maxwell. You knew the layout of the criminal infrastructure. You knew the major players. You knew where the fault lines were, which organizations were ascendant, which were declining, which individuals were going to become significant within the decade. You had information that most intelligence agencies in that city would have paid considerably for, and you used it to avoid notice." A brief pause. "Admittedly, staying alive is a prerequisite for being entertaining. I will grant you that. But there is a significant range of options between getting killed on your first week and spending half a decade moving parcels."
Maxwell, who had several pointed responses queued, was unable to deliver any of them.
— ✦ —
The white space moved.
That was the only way Maxwell could describe it afterward: not that they moved through it, but that it rearranged itself around them, the featureless expanse folding and resolving into something specific and familiar with the effortless unreality of a dream transition. And then they were standing in his apartment. His Earth apartment — the one-bedroom in the mid-sized city he would never see again, with the damp patch near the window and the graphic novels stacked along the east wall and the specific quality of late afternoon light that he had not thought about once in five years of Gotham greyness and which hit him now with a force he was entirely unprepared for.
The television was on.
He had apparently left it running when he went to sleep on that last ordinary Tuesday, and whatever streaming service he'd been using had continued without him, cycling through a queue he had assembled with the careful consideration he gave to things that mattered. On the screen, a man in a suit moved through a hotel corridor with the precise, unhurried economy of someone who had reduced violence to a form of expertise. The sound was low but recognizable. The title card had long since passed but the film announced itself in every frame: in the geometry of the choreography, in the particular quality of the lighting, in the face of the man at the center of it.
The God of Entertainment stopped walking.
He looked at the television with the arrested attention of someone who has just encountered an idea they hadn't finished having yet. His head tilted, the same angle as before, but slower this time. More deliberate. The restless ambient energy that had characterized every moment of his movement since Maxwell first saw him went briefly, completely still.
Then the corner of his mouth moved.
"Hmm," he said. It was a small sound, almost private, the sound of a mind turning something over and finding its edges. A smile spread across his face with the specific quality of a child who has just located a new toy of unusual promise and is already three steps into imagining what it will do. "A fun idea. Indeed."
He looked at Maxwell. Then at the television. Then back at Maxwell, and the resemblance that Maxwell had noticed in his first Gotham mirror and filed away for later consideration was apparently something the God of Entertainment had already catalogued, cross-referenced, and acted upon, because he raised one hand with the easy finality of someone closing a book they've already finished reading.
He snapped his fingers.
— ✦ —
Maxwell's apartment ceiling looked back at him with its usual water-stained indifference.
He was lying on his bed. The October light through the plastic window was exactly where it had been before, which meant either no time had passed or the God of Entertainment had a sense of narrative tidiness. Maxwell lay still for a moment, performing the same inventory he had performed five years ago on his first morning in this body: ceiling, walls, hands, floor. Everything in its ordinary place. Everything exactly as he had left it.
He brought his hand to his face.
His mouth was back. He ran his thumb along his lower lip with the specific relief of a man confirming that a thing he had taken entirely for granted had been restored to him, and breathed out slowly through his nose, and then through his newly functional mouth, and allowed himself exactly five seconds of straightforward gratitude before the anger arrived.
It arrived with considerable momentum.
Five years. He had spent five years building something careful and sustainable in a city that punished carelessness with finality, and some ancient cosmic entity in the body of a scruffy child had looked at that five years and called it boring. Had brought him to a featureless void specifically to express its disappointment. Had stood in his Earth apartment — his apartment, his television, the life he had lost — and smiled at a film like a child finding a new game, and then sent him back here with the casual authority of someone returning a piece to a board.
Using his life as entertainment.
Maxwell stared at the ceiling and said several things that he would not have said in front of Father Cormac.
Then, because he was a practical man, he stopped saying them and started thinking.
Whatever the God of Entertainment was planning, it involved John Wick. The resemblance, the film, that smile — it was not subtle foreshadowing. Something was going to change. Something had probably already changed. He needed to assess his current situation, identify the variables, and —
A sound cut through his thoughts.
A single, clean, digital chime — not from anywhere in the room, not from any device he owned, but from the precise center of his perception, as though it had originated inside his own skull. Clear and deliberate and entirely impossible. Maxwell sat up.
In the air in front of him, faintly luminous against the grey afternoon light, a panel had appeared.
It was semi-transparent, framed in clean minimalist lines, styled with the kind of spare elegance that suggested whoever had designed it had strong opinions about unnecessary ornamentation. The text on it was crisp and unhurried, as though it had all the time available and saw no reason to rush.
┌────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ SYSTEM INITIALIZING... │
│ │
│ THE JOHN WICK SYSTEM │
│ Version 1.0 — Active │
│ │
│ Welcome, Maxwell Connor. │
│ Try not to be boring this time. │
└────────────────────────────────────────┘
Maxwell looked at the panel for a long moment.
Then he looked at the last line again.
"Try not to be boring this time."
He closed his eyes. He breathed in through his nose for four counts, held it, breathed out for eight. The technique Gotham had taught him, in the years when he had needed something to hold onto.
When he opened his eyes, the panel was still there, patient and luminous, waiting with the serene confidence of something that knew it wasn't going away.
Maxwell looked at it. He looked at the water-stained ceiling. He looked at the plastic window and the grey Gotham light and the world outside that had been trying to kill him by degrees for five years while he kept his head down and moved parcels and tried very hard not to matter.
The God of Entertainment wanted a show.
Maxwell Connor wanted to go home.
He had a feeling, with the cold and specific clarity of a man who had just understood something important, that those two objectives were about to become very difficult to separate.
He reached out and, with two fingers, tapped the panel.
It expanded.