The squad car smelled like coffee and old upholstery.
Locke sat in the back, watching Brooklyn scroll past the window, and let the evening decompress around him. Minor lacerations. Totaled car. Mystery explosion. George Stacy now viewing him with something that wasn't quite suspicion anymore, which was either progress or a complication depending on how things developed.
He was working through the next steps when the System chimed.
[Mission Complete: Every Debt Has Its Debtor]
[Reward: Achievement Points ×1,000 / Potential Points ×1,000 / 1× Treasure Refresh Voucher]
He sat up slightly.
That resolved fast. He hadn't done anything, the mission had apparently closed itself out, which meant the first half was tied to the explosion event rather than to any action he needed to take. Someone had tried to kill him or someone near him, the System had registered it as a completed grievance, and now the second half of the debt was presumably waiting on him to collect.
He filed that away.
Then the second notification came.
[New Mission Generated]
[Mission: My Fate Is Mine to Command]
[Reward: Achievement Points ×2,000 / Potential Points ×2,000 / 1× Treasure Refresh Voucher]
[Mission Description: There exists in this world an ancient loom. For a thousand years, a brotherhood of assassins has read the names woven into its fabric and acted on them — killing one to prevent the deaths of ten, a hundred, a thousand. The code is simple: if your name appears, you die. What happens when your name appears?]
[Note: You are a Player. If destiny exists in this world, destiny does not get to judge you.]
Locke read it twice.
Then he read it a third time.
The Fraternity.
He knew exactly what this was. The Fraternity, ancient order, textile mill in Chicago, the Loom of Fate, the whole architecture. He'd seen the movie. He'd filed it under *future asset* the moment he'd arrived in this world, specifically because of one thing: the bullet-curving technique. Whatever you called it, the Gun-Flicking Technique, bending bullets it was the Fraternity's signature skill, and it was genuinely extraordinary. The kind of thing that would make him significantly harder to kill long before he got anywhere near the bloodlines he was saving for.
He had been planning to find a way into their orbit once he was settled enough not to attract the wrong kind of attention.
He had not been planning to be on their target list before he'd even unpacked.
How is my name in the Loom?
He turned it over carefully, the way he did with problems that didn't have an obvious entry point. The Loom was real, that much he was confident about. The Wanted narrative made it clear that the Loom had been genuinely operational before Sloane's crisis of faith. The names it produced weren't random. They were people whose continued existence would, according to whatever mechanism the loom ran on, lead to significant future harm.
Which meant, if the Loom had spat out his name legitimately, the Loom had looked forward and decided that Locke Broughton was going to cause serious damage to something or someone.
That tracks, he thought, without any particular emotion about it. He was an assassin with a System designed to push him toward becoming effectively omnipotent. From the perspective of a thousand-year-old fate-weaving mechanism, that probably registered as a flag.
But Sloane complicated things.
Because Sloane, once he'd found his own name in the Loom, had started forging additional targets to protect himself and profit in the process. Which meant that any given name the Fraternity was currently acting on might be a genuine Loom output or might be something Sloane had manufactured.
So: was Locke's name really in the Loom?
Or had Sloane decided Locke was inconvenient for some other reason?
The squad car crossed into Manhattan. The lights of the city organized themselves into their familiar grid.
He leaned his head back against the seat and stared at the ceiling.
He'd arrived in New York three days ago. In that time he'd completed one assassination contract, purchased and lost an apartment's worth of furniture plus one very expensive car, had dinner with a cop who was actively hunting him, and apparently gotten himself marked for death by a secret society of ancient assassins operating out of a Chicago textile mill.
The System note said: If destiny exists in this world, destiny does not get to judge you.
Which was easy for the System to say. The System didn't have to deal with the practical problem of a Fraternity kill team.
Locke thought about the bullet-curving technique again. The irony was almost elegant, the organization that wanted him dead was also the organization whose primary skill he most wanted to acquire. That was either a problem or an opportunity, and he hadn't decided which yet.
Both, probably.
The squad car pulled up outside Starlight Tower.
"Here you go." The officer at the wheel turned around. "You sure you're alright? That was a lot for one evening."
"Fine." Locke opened the door. "Thank you for the ride."
He rode the elevator up to the twenty-eighth floor and stood for a moment at his floor-to-ceiling windows, looking out at the park and the lights and the distant silhouette of Stark Tower against the sky.
Three days.
One car totaled. Finances critical. A two-part revenge mission sitting in his queue with the first half already cleared. A new mission with a 2,000-point reward attached to surviving whatever the Fraternity was planning to do about his name. And somewhere in Chicago, an ancient loom was weaving fabric that had apparently decided he was a problem worth solving.
He pulled up his banking app. The balance made him wince.
He needed another contract. Soon.
He opened the Continental's encrypted interface on his laptop and started scrolling the active listings for New York.
Destiny, he thought, as he read through the available targets with the focused patience of someone doing grocery shopping, is going to have to get in line.