A red sports car came out of the factory gate.
Locke watched it from the rooftop, thermal scope tracking the vehicle as it accelerated onto the street. His brow went up slightly.
Interesting timing.
The System chimed.
[Mission Generating...]
[New Mission: Uninvited Guest]
[Reward: Achievement Points ×1,000 / Potential Points ×1,000]
[Note: "Nothing good ever happens when someone follows you home at night."]
Locke looked at the notification for a moment.
So the factory visit hadn't been just reconnaissance on their end. They'd clocked him coming back from New Jersey, and now someone from the Textile Factory was planning a house call. He was supposed to be asleep in his apartment on the twenty-eighth floor, unaware and accessible.
You wrecked my car, he thought, watching the red car's tail lights disappear around the corner, and now you want to wreck my apartment.
He packed up the rifle efficiently, was off the roof in three minutes, and was in the R8 and moving four minutes after that.
The factory could wait until Monday when the staff were fully back. This particular problem, however, was not waiting until Monday.
Manhattan. Fifth Avenue.
Fox pulled the red Maserati to the curb half a block from Starlight Tower and cut the engine. The building's upper floors caught the ambient glow of the city, twenty-eighth floor dark, as it should be at this hour.
Wesley looked up at it from the passenger seat. "He's an orphan and he lives here?"
"Family trust fund." Fox kept her eyes on the building. "His parents left him money. Think of him less as an orphan and more as a wealthy minor with no immediate family to ask inconvenient questions."
Wesley processed this. "I didn't even know trust funds worked like that."
"They don't usually. His parents were apparently quite specific about the provisions."
She'd read the file twice on the drive over. There was something in it that kept snagging on her — not the cell signal alibi, which the Repairman was right about as a practical matter, but something less quantifiable. The photo. The file was straightforward on paper: sixteen, transfer student, Texas background, conventional financials. But the photograph had the quality of someone who'd been watching the room rather than being photographed in it.
She was probably reading too much into a DMV image.
"There he is."
Wesley's voice brought her back. She looked up.
The silver R8 was rolling out of the tower's parking structure.
Fox turned the key.
Locke saw them in the rearview mirror the moment he cleared the exit ramp, a red Maserati, engine already running, pulling out behind him at a distance that was professional without being obvious. Someone who knew what they were doing, giving him space, running parallel rather than directly behind.
The corners of his mouth moved slightly.
Hello.
He made a right, and the Maserati made the same right thirty seconds later. He took a route that added two unnecessary turns and gave him clear sightlines on two of them, and the Maserati was there for all of it.
He was not going to lead them back to Starlight Tower. He was not going to lead them anywhere near George Stacy's neighborhood. And he was not going to let whoever was in that car think they had the initiative.
He reached into the glovebox.
Then he pulled up the System.
[Driving — upgrade to Advanced: 2,000 Potential Points. Confirm?]
He had 4,300 PP. He'd planned to bank against the Gun-Flicking upgrade.
This is also a necessary investment.
"Confirm."
[Upgrade successful. Driving: Advanced.]
The knowledge settled differently from the academic upgrades, not information but calibration, the kind of deep physical adjustment that only made sense once you were already moving. His read of the car changed. His sense of the road surface, the weight distribution at speed, the gap between what the vehicle could do and what most people asked it to do all of it sharpened.
He put on his sunglasses.
Right then.
He floored it.
The R8 surged forward and he took the next alley entrance at eighty miles an hour without braking, threading the gap between a dumpster and a fire escape support column with maybe eighteen inches of clearance on each side.
In the Maserati behind him, Fox said "Hold on" in a tone that contained no particular emotion, yanked the handbrake, let the rear step out, and went through the alley entrance at sixty-five.
Wesley had both hands on the grab handle above the door and was demonstrating the Fraternity's adrenaline ability entirely by accident.
Locke came out the far end of the alley and banked left, checking the mirror. The Maserati was still there, maybe two seconds back. Whoever was driving knew what they were doing matching his lines, not trying to close the gap, just staying with him.
Fox. Had to be. She was the only one in that building who drove like that.
He ran the calculation fast. If it was Fox in the Maserati, then whoever was in the passenger seat was probably Wesley, which meant they'd sent the entire current operational capacity of the Fraternity's New York presence after a sixteen-year-old they thought was an unarmed orphan.
He filed that away under useful to know.
Fox pulled alongside at a stoplight, not enough to be level, just enough to close angle and her window was already down. Locke saw the motion in his peripheral.
He jerked the wheel.
The shot came an instant later, a curved ball of a bullet, not a straight line, the trajectory bending fractionally as it passed the point of his rearview mirror. It grazed the door panel and dropped spent onto the asphalt. Gun-Flicking technique. Intermediate or better.
Good shot, Locke thought. Wrong angle.
He drifted the R8 through a U-turn at the next intersection, brought it back to parallel, and extended his right arm out the window with the M1911 already in hand.
"Get down!" Fox said.
Bang.
Bang.
The Maserati's windshield starred from two impacts, safety glass, it held and Fox took the car hard right down a side street. Locke followed the line, keeping pressure.
He wasn't trying to end this here. Too exposed, too many potential witnesses at this hour even on these streets, and he genuinely didn't know yet how this was going to resolve. The Fraternity had sent Fox and Wesley to check on a sixteen-year-old they thought was an unrelated civilian. They were getting something considerably different.
That was fine.
Let them recalibrate.
He let the Maserati take distance, watching its tail lights pull away to the south, and then slowed down to something approaching legal.
The System updated quietly.
[Mission: Uninvited Guest — In Progress]
Not done yet, he noted. But enough for tonight.
He took a long route back to Starlight Tower, checked his mirrors thoroughly for ten blocks before the final approach, and rode the elevator up to the twenty-eighth floor with the particular, clean exhaustion of someone who'd just done something precise and hadn't made a mistake.
He poured two fingers of bourbon.
Monday, he thought. The factory, full staff, proper conditions.
The mission math was still the same.
He just needed to get there in one piece first.
Plz Drop Some Power Stones.