The ceiling had cracks in it.

  Darrel had been staring at them long enough to memorize each one, the long diagonal one that ran from the light fixture to the corner, the cluster of smaller ones near the window that looked almost like a map of somewhere that didn't exist. He lay flat on his back, arms at his sides, fully awake, mind running and running and going absolutely nowhere.

  He hadn't slept. Not really. He'd drifted in and out of something that wasn't rest, tossing and turning as if his body was trying to shake something loose that his mind refused to let go of. At some point he'd given up entirely and just lay still, staring at those cracks like they might rearrange themselves into an answer.

  He sat up.

  The room was quiet in the way that only early morning could manage, not peaceful, just empty. That particular silence that didn't comfort you, it just reminded you that no one was there. He sat on the edge of the bed with his elbows on his knees and stared at the wall across from him. The wallpaper was yellow. That awful, stomach turning yellow, the kind that had probably once been white but had given up over the years and settled into something sickly. He hated it immediately, and then immediately felt stupid for hating it, and then didn't feel much of anything at all.

  That was the thing. That was the part that gnawed at him the hardest.

  He didn't feel.

  Not even twenty-four hours had passed since Gabriel died. Since Raphael. Since Uriel and Michael. Since the four of them, the brothers he'd bled beside, the ones he'd laughed with and argued with and shared whatever food they could find, were killed. Killed by the man Darrel had chosen to work for. Chosen. As if he'd walked into some store and pointed at the Governor from a shelf. I'll take that one. That one looks like a good idea.

  And for what?

  Answers, he thought. He'd done it for answers. About his family. About what happened in Lockwood. And now here he was, full of answers he didn't understand yet, completely empty of the people he'd wanted to share them with. He turned the word over in his head like a stone. Answers. It felt hollow now. It felt like a thing a younger, stupider version of himself had decided mattered before he understood what it cost.

  He lay back down.

  The ceiling again. Those same cracks.

  He thought about what Deqavious had said back in the jail cell, the agency showing up, and then not even a week later they had thousands of soldiers. That didn't make sense on its own. Unless. Unless magic had something to do with it. Unless magic had something to do with all of it. With Lockwood. With everything. He'd watched Dorian teleport like it was nothing, like breathing, like it was the most natural thing in the world. If that was possible, if space itself could just be folded and stepped through, what else was possible? What had he been walking through this whole time without knowing it?

  The questions spiraled. He let them. He had nothing else to do with himself.

  He cried at some point. Silent, useless tears that rolled sideways off his face and were absorbed by the pillow. Tears that felt like they belonged to someone else, like his body was going through the motions of grief while the part of him that was supposed to actually feel it had gone somewhere quiet and shut the door. He didn't know if that scared him or relieved him. Probably both. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes until he saw shapes, and then he took his hands away, and he stared at that awful yellow wallpaper, and he waited.

  He waited for something to make sense.

  Nothing did.

  The knock came like a stone through glass.

  KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK.

  Darrel stood slowly, his body registering the weight of having not slept in the way bodies do, heavy in the joints, slow in the limbs. He walked to the door and opened it, and there was Dorian. Blue suit this time. Sharp, bright, completely out of place in front of a man who looked like he'd been dragged backward through the night. Dorian's face carried that easy, warm quality it always seemed to, like the world was a thing to be smiled at, not survived.

  "Your training begins in thirty minutes, Mister Roanshaw!" he said. "I'll walk you down to where the Wild District's operation room is. Follow me."

  Darrel followed. He didn't have the energy to do anything else.

  Outside, the sun was wrong.

  That was the only way Darrel could think to describe it. It pressed down on the city with the kind of heat that belonged to deep summer, not fall, and the air sat heavy and still like it had forgotten how to move. He felt it on the back of his neck as he walked beside Dorian through the streets, that thick, unreasonable warmth that made no sense for the season.

  Why is it so hot? he thought. A small thought, maybe, compared to everything else inside him, but somehow it bothered him. One more thing that didn't fit.

  Dorian walked ahead with purpose and pace, and Darrel kept stride without speaking. The Wild District opened up around them as they entered it, buildings wider and lower than the tower complex, the streets more lived-in, more frayed at the edges. Eventually Dorian led him into a large building, inside which stood at least thirty other recruits.

  Darrel stopped just inside the door and looked at them.

  Thirty people. Thirty men and women, all standing in loose rows, all here for the same reason, all vying for the same position. General. He'd thought, and he couldn't have told you why, hadn't even realized he'd thought it, that he was the only one. That the Governor had come to him specifically, deliberately, for some reason that mattered. Looking at the thirty bodies in front of him, that idea quietly died.

  He couldn't place the feeling exactly. It wasn't wounded pride, not quite. It was smaller than that and somehow more unsettling. Like finding out the thing you thought was yours had always belonged to everyone.

  He fell into line with the others.

  The lights dimmed. Dorian slipped out as the Governor arrived.

  He didn't walk onto the podium so much as occupy it, that was how it felt, watching him. There was something in the way the man moved that suggested the space around him was his by default, not by title. He wore a tactical version of his usual sheriff's attire, something more stripped-down and utilitarian, but it didn't make him look smaller. He stepped up to the microphone and looked out at the room, and there was a moment before he began speaking where Darrel registered something in his face that he hadn't been able to name the first time he'd seen it. Something behind the authority, behind the coolness.

  Obsession.

  "Good morning," the Governor said. "All of you today have been chosen, or have chosen, to take part in the Wild District's general training program."

  He reached into his pocket and produced a cigar. Lit it with the particular unhurried care of a man who does not worry about the people watching him. Took one long, deep draw and exhaled slowly before continuing.

  "Now, do not get your position confused. You hold no power here. You are nothing compared to a man like me. Your sole reason for existing is to serve my purpose. My vision."

  His eyes moved across the rows of recruits, and when they found Darrel, they stayed.

  "And that vision, currently," the Governor said, "is finding the last remaining Outlaw. And bringing him to me. Alive."

  He set the cigar down on the podium's edge and leaned forward slightly, the way a man does when he wants you to understand that the next thing he says is not a suggestion.

  "I must warn you. You are replacements. The majority of my lesser squads, good soldiers, trained soldiers, have been killed. All of them, by him. The Outlaw." Something crossed his face then, something quick and sharp. "Courtesy to Dorian and King, for not supplying me with the more... advanced weapons for the hunt."

  He straightened. The cruelty in his expression didn't announce itself loudly, it was quiet, settled in, like it had always lived there.

  "You will bring him to me. Alive. After your brief training today, you will be sent on scouting missions to known locations where the Outlaw has been spotted. You will command a team of eight men beneath you. These men are your lifeline. Treat them accordingly." He paused. "If all of your men die on your mission, and you somehow survive..."

  He raised his hand. Shaped it into a gun. Pointed it at no one in particular and everything in general.

  "You die. And when you die, you will simply be replaced. It's that simple."

  He dropped his hand back to his side.

  "Now. You may be wondering what your training is." He let the pause breathe. "This is it. My explanation to you. At the Wild District, we operate on primal instinct. And if you have none..." his gaze swept the room, "then I should just shoot you now."

  A higher-ranking officer moved through the recruits, distributing packets. The Governor was already stepping back from the podium, already done with them, already thinking about something else.

  "If you return today, alive, with at least one of your men still standing, you will be knighted as general officially. Some of you may encounter other rebel groups who will attempt to kill you. Kill them back. They mean nothing to me." He paused at the edge of the stage, and his voice dropped half a register, not softer, just more direct, the way a blade is more direct than a blunt object.

  "Your only job is to find me the Outlaw."

  He smiled. It didn't reach his eyes.

  "Good luck."

  Outside, eight soldiers stood waiting for him.

  They were already in formation, already armed, standing with the practiced stillness of people who had learned that stillness was safer than motion. They wore green and black, a uniform Darrel didn't recognize from the banners he'd seen around the city. On the shoulder patch, instead of the usual insignia, was a single eye. Green, glowing, unsettling in its simplicity.

  Darrel looked at them and felt the folder in his hands.

  "Uhm," he said. "Hello. I'm Darrel."

  The eight soldiers saluted in perfect unison. Said nothing.

  He opened the folder. Inside were photos, his men, along with coordinates and a briefing document. He flipped through it, eyes moving across photographs of crumbling towers and abandoned streets, and then stopped at the location description.

  "Vultury Megacity. Population: formerly 20 million.

  Current population: zero.

  Citizens' disappearance: approximately ten years prior.

  Atmosphere: volatile. Infrastructure: severely deteriorated. Reported as a location of rumor and fear.

  Average civilian avoidance: total."

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  The last photograph in the folder was a man.

  You couldn't see his face. A bandana covered everything from the nose down, and the angle of the shot was just wrong enough that nothing above it was clear either. What you could see were his eyes. They smoked. That was the only word for it, they held something inside them like gunpowder that hadn't gone off yet, like pressure waiting for a valve. Beneath the photograph, the briefing noted that the Outlaw was known to frequent abandoned places. Places the average person would never willingly enter.

  Vultury was one of those places.

  Darrel closed the folder.

  "Let's move."

  Two hours of riding brought them to the edge of the megacity as the sky turned grey and the rain came in quiet and steady, the kind of rain that didn't announce itself, just arrived and stayed.

  Darrel pulled his horse around to face his soldiers, and for a moment he just looked at them. Eight people. Eight human beings in green and black with rifles across their backs and grenades at their belts, looking back at him with faces that had learned to stay neutral. The city loomed behind him, enormous and hollow, its skyline jagged with buildings that had slowly been reclaimed by moss and time.

  He opened his mouth to give a tactical briefing. That was what he was supposed to do. That was what the folder implied he should do.

  Instead, something else came out.

  "I'm not sure how to say this if I'm being honest," he said. "My entire world has flipped on its head these past few days."

  None of the soldiers moved. They watched him.

  "They see you as expendable." He said it plainly, the way you say something that hurts more when it's plain. "That's why they don't want me to know your names. They know that attachment makes you do things regardless of the mission. That caring about people makes you reckless." He paused. "I just can't help but look at all of you. See who you are. Not knowing where you came from, what you're carrying, what you want from your life." His throat tightened. "After all, we're marching into a possible battlefield."

  He thought about Uriel. About Gabriel's laugh, and the way Michael always had to have the last word, and the particular way Raphael held his gun like he was apologizing to it.

  "I just want you to know that I'm not like them," he said. "I care. I really do."

  His eyes were wet. He didn't try to hide it and didn't lean into it either. He just let it be there, the way grief was, present and unhelpful and completely unavoidable.

  Then he turned away.

  "Let's go."

  The city swallowed them whole.

  It was enormous in a way that photographs hadn't prepared him for, the sheer volume of it, the way it stacked upward and stretched outward in every direction with the quiet confidence of something built to last and then left to die. Moss crept up the faces of towers. Grass split through concrete in the wide, empty boulevards. Birds moved in the upper stories of buildings that had no glass left in their windows, just open frames like hollow eyes. The air smelled like rain and rust and something older underneath, the specific scent of a place that had been full of people and then wasn't.

  Something was wrong with the atmosphere. Not wrong in a way Darrel could define, just wrong in the way the back of your neck knows before the rest of you does, a pressure, a density, a sense that the space around you was holding its breath.

  The shot came without warning.

  BANG.

  "COVER NOW!"

  They moved. All nine of them dropped and scrambled behind the overturned cars that lined what had once been a main thoroughfare, guns up, breathing hard. Darrel pressed himself against cold metal and peered over the hood.

  And then he saw him.

  The man walked like he belonged here. That was the first thing, the absolute, unbothered ease of his movement through the dead city's streets, as if the ruins were familiar furniture. He held a colt-42 in one hand and was eating a rabbit in the other, the animal freshly killed, methodically consumed. The bandana covered his mouth and nose.

  His eyes moved like gunpowder.

  "THERE, THERE HE IS!" Darrel's voice tore out of him. "SHOOT HIM! DON'T KILL HIM, DON'T KILL HIM!"

  The group opened fire. The shots landed. The sound filled the ruined boulevard and then died, and the smoke drifted, and for a moment Darrel thought, he let himself think, that it was over. That they'd done it. That this was how it ended, and it was almost anticlimactic, and wasn't that how it usually was?

  "GRENADE!"

  BOOM.

  The explosion erased three of his soldiers before the sound even fully registered. The Outlaw came out of the smoke already moving, already clinical, two more soldiers dropped with shots to the chest, one after another, even as he wrapped fresh bandages around his own wounds without breaking stride, without slowing, as if tending to himself was just another item on a list.

  Darrel grabbed one of the remaining soldiers by the arm and pulled him behind cover, repositioning. He looked over the rubble. The Outlaw had one of his men by the throat now and was pressing a blade home. The other remaining soldier charged, and the Outlaw simply put the knife away and met him with his hands, and there was something in that that was almost contemptuous, the choice to not use the weapon, to be more dangerous with nothing in his hands than most men were fully armed.

  Darrel watched, and the rifle in his hands grew heavy, and he didn't shoot.

  He couldn't have explained why. He tried to tell himself it was strategy, they needed the Outlaw alive. But that wasn't it. That wasn't all of it.

  Something was growing inside him, watching this. Something that had been building since the car flipped, since Gabriel fell, since he stood in a room with the Governor and smiled and nodded and signed himself over to a man who killed his friends. The fear that had lived in his chest since Lockwood, that familiar, hollowing fear, was turning into something else now. It was the way metal feels when heat gets to it, that moment before it becomes something new.

  It was rage.

  Maybe not only for what was happening now. For everything.

  "YOU... WHAT'S YOUR NAME?"

  The soldier next to him flinched. "RICK!"

  "ALRIGHT. LOOK AT ME, RICK." Darrel grabbed him by the shoulders, looked him in the eye. "YOU'RE GOING TO RUN. You're going to run west until you get back to the agency. Don't stop. Don't look back. Run."

  "WHAT??"

  "I SAID RUN."

  Rick ran. He was on his horse and gone before the sound of the Outlaw finishing the last soldier had fully faded. Darrel reached into his jacket for the pager, the device that would call backup, that would bring more people into this city where people were dying at a rate that was becoming impossible to look at directly...

  The Outlaw landed behind the rubble.

  The pager spun out of Darrel's hand, struck away before he could press the button. He barely registered it happening. A knife was already swinging, and he threw himself sideways, hitting the ground hard, and his hand found a chunk of concrete. He came up with it and drove it into the Outlaw's knee, hard, desperate, committed.

  It scraped. Barely left a mark.

  Darrel looked up into those eyes, and up close they were something else entirely. The brutality in them wasn't rage, wasn't even cruelty in the way he'd expected, it was just absence. An accounting. A ledger. He moved through violence the way a river moves through stone, not with anger, just with inevitability.

  The knife came again. Darrel managed to lean back, but a fist followed immediately, and both landed, the slash across his forearm burning bright and immediate, the punch snapping his head sideways.

  He tasted blood.

  "So," the Outlaw said. His voice was unhurried. "You're their general."

  Darrel picked himself up, backed up a step, raised his fists.

  "Yet you have no badge."

  Darrel said nothing. He waited. Watched for the next attack.

  It didn't come. The Outlaw stood still, and for the first time, he was studying him. Not hunting, not closing the distance, reading him, the way you read something you weren't expecting to find interesting.

  "You're angry," the Outlaw said. "I can see it from here. And it's got nothing to do with those soldiers, not really. It's older than that. Deeper than that."

  Something cracked open in Darrel's chest.

  He threw himself forward, grabbed the Outlaw around the midsection, and drove him backward into the car hood. For a half-second he had him, and then the Outlaw landed on his feet like he'd been expecting it, had planned for it, had perhaps even invited it.

  "THOSE SOLIDERS WERE PEOPLE!"

  The Outlaw looked at him.

  Not with contempt. Not with dismissal. He just looked, and the quality of the silence afterward was different from what Darrel expected.

  "People," the Outlaw said slowly, "who follow the allegiance of a man who has killed billions." He let that settle. "I don't like killing. I want you to know that. But it makes it a whole lot easier when they serve someone like him." He tilted his head slightly. "And for what it's worth, for a new general, you're surprisingly sharp. Sending that man away was the only smart play available to you. You made sure at least one person survives to report back, so the agency doesn't assume you're dead and stop looking."

  The words landed harder than the punch had.

  Because he was right. And because it hadn't been purely tactical, and they both knew it, and that was the thing Darrel couldn't look at directly, that he'd sent Rick away to protect him, yes, but also to give himself permission to be here without a witness. To do whatever came next outside the frame of duty and order and a Governor's instructions.

  "I never asked for this job," Darrel said, and his voice came out raw and strange, scraped clean of the composure he'd been holding onto. "I never asked for any of this."

  "No one does," the Outlaw said. It wasn't dismissive. It sounded, impossibly, like something close to sympathy. "Nobody asks for anything in this world. It's brutal by nature. Unfair and imbalanced." He looked out at the city around them, the empty towers, the broken streets, the moss eating everything slowly. "All I'm doing is trying to balance the scales. Even by a margin."

  Darrel stared at him. Tried to see past the composure, past the ease with which he'd moved through killing six people without ceremony or hesitation. Tried to hold onto what he knew about what this man was.

  "You're a monster," he said.

  "Ah," said the Outlaw.

  And pulled his gun.

  The next thirty seconds happened the way violence always did, faster than thought, instinct ahead of intention. Darrel dove behind the car as shots rang against metal above him. He grabbed his rifle. Reached down and found three chunks of debris, and hurled them one after another behind him in quick succession, the sound of them skittering and bouncing off the ruined ground simulating movement, a body repositioning, someone running for a new angle.

  He sat perfectly still. Rifle up. Waiting.

  The Outlaw moved for the pillar.

  He came out from behind his cover, shifting toward a better position, calculating where Darrel would have gone, and in that moment, for just a moment, he was open.

  Three shots. All three landed.

  The Outlaw collapsed, going down hard, one hand going to his chest. Darrel was out from cover before the man had fully hit the ground, gun trained on his head, stepping forward with the controlled, shaking urgency of someone who had just discovered they were capable of something they didn't know they had in them.

  The Outlaw looked up at him. The rage in his eyes was cleaner now, less complicated. Just rage.

  "You serve a man," he said, his voice strained but steady, "who kills for himself and only himself. Everything he does, every promise he makes, it comes back to him. There's nothing selfless in him. Not one thing."

  He coughed. His hand pressed harder against his chest.

  "He promised to help me with something once," the Outlaw said, and something shifted in his voice, just briefly, just the edge of a wound that hadn't closed. "Always a deal with him, isn't there. Always something you need badly enough to agree."

  Darrel's gun didn't waver.

  And then the Outlaw moved.

  It happened in a fraction of a second, he surged upward, drove his fist into Darrel's jaw, and the gun was gone from his hand before he could process the sequence. He was on the ground with the Outlaw standing over him, gun reversed, barrel pointed directly between his eyes.

  He lay still.

  The Outlaw looked down at him for a long time. Long enough that Darrel could hear the rain and his own breathing and the distant movement of birds somewhere in the towers above.

  Then something in the Outlaw's expression settled.

  "I can tell by the way you carry yourself," he said quietly, "that you're not the type who wants to be doing this." He lowered the gun a degree. "You were forced into this. Backed into a corner and given a uniform and told that this was the only path forward." He glanced at the soldiers scattered across the street behind them. "Those others chose this. Signed up for it, knew what they were signing up for." He looked back at Darrel. "For that... I won't kill you."

  He stepped back. Turned away. And began walking, easy and unhurried, back into the ruins of Vultury as if he'd just concluded a conversation at a café rather than a battle in a dead city.

  Darrel lay in the rain and stared at the sky.

  "How?" he called out, because he had to know, because it was eating at him, the bandages wrapped mid-fight, the way the bullets had landed and the man had kept walking. "How are you surviving so many gunshots?"

  The Outlaw didn't stop walking. He slowed, and his voice carried back through the rain and the rubble.

  "I don't know," he said. "I've always been a little special, I guess."

  He disappeared around the corner of a collapsed building.

  "I'll be seeing you soon, runt."

  And then he was gone, and the city was quiet again, that deep, absolute quiet of a place that had forgotten what noise was, and Darrel lay on his back in the rain with his arms at his sides and his eyes on the sky, and he thought about Gabriel, and he thought about the Governor, and he thought about a man who moved through violence like water and spared him anyway, and he thought about deals and promises and what it cost to ask for things from people who only dealt in prices.

  He shut his eyes.

  Grateful yet confused, on why he's alive