"So here's how I see it," Mr. Nothing says, flipping the screwdriver again. Driver. Handle. Casual. "You've been working your way up. Started with the goons. Dealers, corner boys, the kind of people nobody misses. That's fine. That's the ecosystem functioning as designed. Predator eats prey, prey gets replaced, everybody stays in their lane."

  The train rocks through a curve. I feel the lateral force push me slightly toward him and correct immediately, pressing my shoulder into the wall. Keep the distance. Keep the gap.

  "Then you started going after infrastructure. That warehouse with Soot - I'm not stupid, I bet that was you. It's in the neighborhood. That tracker you put on Garbage Day - yeah, we know about that. Smart move, by the way. Cheap, effective, low-tech. I respected that." He nods, like he's giving a performance review. "You played two organizations against each other and let the feds clean up the mess. That's chess. That's real chess. And I thought, okay, this kid's got some brains. Maybe she'll figure out where the line is and stay on the right side of it."

  "And where's the line?" I ask, because the only play I have right now is keeping him talking.

  "The line is where you stop being a nuisance and start being a problem." He stops flipping the screwdriver. Holds it loosely in his right hand, tip down, resting against his thigh. "Nuisances are tolerable. Nuisances are cost of doing business. I've been a nuisance to people. People have been a nuisance to me. You deal with it, you move on. But problems..." He tilts his head. "Problems require solutions. And solutions are expensive. For everyone."

  "Is that a threat?"

  "Yeah, it is. What are you gonna do about it?" he asks, before moving right along smoothly. "In any well-stocked jungle, there's an arms race. Predators and prey. The prey get harder to kill, so the predators get smarter. The prey get smarter to survive, and the predators get more lethal to punish the failures. It's a pleasant cycle. Everyone settles into their niche eventually. You've been finding your niche. Street-level heroics, community work, the kind of thing that makes for a nice puff piece in the Inquirer. And we've been adapting to you. Building better mousetraps. Adjusting the ecosystem."

  "Mousetraps," I repeat. The word hits differently now than it did when I was the one using it.

  "You make us better," he says, and there's something almost warm in his voice. "I mean that. You force us to improvise. Innovate. The tracker thing? We've completely redesigned our evidence disposal protocols because of you. That's genuinely useful, in a fucked up way. You're like a quality assurance tester. You find the bugs and we patch them."

  "You're welcome."

  He smiles. It's the first warm expression I've seen on him I think in my collective three hours of knowing him. The first expression at all, really.

  "But here's the part where the ecology lesson gets uncomfortable." He leans slightly closer. I can smell his cologne - something clean, expensive, understated. A professional's cologne. "When prey starts punching above its weight class - when a rabbit decides it's going to take on the wolves - the ecosystem doesn't just correct. It overcorrects. The response isn't proportional. It can't be. Because if one rabbit gets away with it, every rabbit thinks they can try."

  "I'm not a rabbit, and I don't think this analogy works correctly," I point out.

  "No, you're not." He meets my eyes directly for the first time. "You're something new. Something the ecosystem hasn't figured out yet. And that's interesting, and it's dangerous, and it's the reason I'm sitting here having a polite conversation instead of - well." He taps the screwdriver against his thigh once. Twice. "Let's just say there were other proposals."

  The implication settles like cold water down my back. Other proposals. Plans that weren't "sit on a subway and talk." Plans that involved the screwdriver being used for something other than fidgeting.

  "If I grabbed your neck right now," he says, conversationally, like he's discussing weather, "and put this in your eye - just one shot, with the regeneration off - how long do you think it would take to do permanent damage? A second? Five seconds? Would I need to hold you, thrashing and screaming, for just long enough for your template to break? Or do I just need to have you for that split second, and then you're missing an eye for the rest of your natural life? If you could enlighten me as to what you know, that can help us decide how messy this has to get."

  I don't answer. I don't know the answer. And he doesn't know the answer, and that's his coin flip. My regeneration lets me take a lot of risks. A lot of stupid risks. But I think if someone puts my eye out - for real - that'll... No. This is exactly what he wants me to do. He wants me to start thinking about the rest of my life without an eye. He wants me to start thinking, oh, that'll effect my EMT job, my sports, my superhero career, my SATs, whether other girls think I'm fuckable or not. I must be visibly scrunching, though, because he waves his free hand like he's trying to calm me back down.

  "Relax," he says, for the third time. "I'm making a point, not a plan. The point is that there are people in my organization who think about things like that. Who do the math on how to permanently neutralize a teenager with regeneration powers. And I've been the one arguing - successfully, so far - that it's not worth the heat. That you're more useful as a manageable nuisance than as a martyr." He pockets the screwdriver. "So maybe appreciate that I'm the one sitting here instead of them."

  Stolen story; please report.

  The train is approaching Race-Vine. Two stops from City Hall. I feel the deceleration and my body wants to move, wants to bolt for the doors, but he's still between me and the aisle and the math hasn't changed. I see the pistol sitting holstered across from me, on his opposite hip.

  This is smart. Damnit, this is smart. The one fucking guy whose threats I can't laugh off. I have to respect the danger level.

  "What do you want?" I ask. Flat. Direct. Done with the lecture.

  "I want you to get off at the next station with me. Take a little walk. Have the rest of this conversation somewhere less..." He glances at the other passengers. "Populated."

  "No."

  "Hear me out. We get off at City Hall, we walk, we talk. I'll even walk you in the direction of wherever you're going. You'll be a little late, that's all. You can reschedule."

  "I said no."

  "That's a shame. Here's door number two. Maybe sort of a door number one and a half. You try to fight me. You might even win. I might not even get any good hits off. You get to keep your eye. And when I don't phone home, a lot of innocent rowhomes in Northeast Philadelphia explode about an hour from now. You like door number two?" He asks.

  I can't help my face scrunching up. "Fuck you,"

  "Door number three," he says, and his voice doesn't change at all, "is that this conversation happens differently. I have a friend in the car behind us. Her name's Mrs. Q, I think you've met her once or twice. She's not from around here. She's got something in a violin case that she'd prefer not to use in an enclosed space, but she will if the situation calls for it. I've got another friend in the car ahead who can do something very unpleasant to the coupling joint between these two cars. And there's a gentleman with the conductor right now who can make this train do things that SEPTA didn't design it to do. You can't stall me forever."

  He's listing them. One by one. Closing every door.

  "So the way I see it," he continues, "you can get off with me at City Hall and we have a civilized conversation between two professionals. Or you can make a scene, and then we have to make a scene, and a lot of people on this train have a really bad Monday. And I don't want that. You don't want that. Nobody wants that." He spreads his hands. "This is me being reasonable, Sam. This is me giving you the easy way."

  I'm gripping the community center folder so hard the cardboard is bending. My teeth ache. My blood sense is screaming at me - forty-eight heartbeats per minute to my left, calm calm calm. I see someone's vascular system bloom into life behind me, in a subway car adjacent. A single lancet to the fingertip. Letting me know she means fucking business.

  Mrs. Quiet.

  "You know what the worst part is?" he says, quieter now. "I don't even disagree with you. Some of the shit the people I work with do - I'm not going to pretend it's noble. It's business. Ugly business. And you're out here trying to make your neighborhood better and I can respect that. I can. I'm not a fucking monster."

  He pauses. Something flickers across his face - not guilt, exactly. Something adjacent.

  "But I have a team. And you have your team. And my team has been doing this for a long time, and your team is a bunch of teenagers and a couple of adults who don't know what they've gotten themselves into. And when I look at the trajectory - yours, specifically - I see a kid who's about three moves away from getting herself killed. Not by me. I don't want that on my ledger. But by the situation. By the escalation. By the math."

  "The math," I repeat.

  "If I knew three years ago you were going to be this much of a pain in the ass," he says, and there's a weariness in it that sounds real, "I would've capped you then and ate the demotion myself. For the good of the team. But I didn't, because you were fourteen and you and Jordan were just witnesses, not problems, and that's not how I do things, and now here we are." He shrugs. "So. City Hall?"

  The train is slowing. The PA crackles: City Hall Station. Transfer to the Market-Frankford Line.

  Mr. Nothing stands. Smooth, unhurried. He buttons his jacket. The screwdriver is in the pocket. The gun is on the other side - I can see the faint impression now, the weight pulling the fabric. He looks down at me with an expression that's almost paternal.

  "Come on," he says. "Don't make this a thing."

  Fuck. Door number one. Door number one and a half. I can surrender today and make another meeting with Maya. I'll find her eventually. She can't duck me forever. The reason she needs this is because she can't fight me in public, and I can't fight her. And she doesn't want a meeting in neutral ground.

  I stand up. My legs are steady, which surprises me. The community center folder is crumpled at one corner where I was gripping it. I straighten it as best I can. Smooth the sweater. Touch my backpack strap. These small gestures of normality that feel absurd and necessary at the same time.

  We step off the train together. The platform is narrow - white tile walls with the red and gold accent lines, fluorescent lights casting everything in that flat, institutional glow. It's not crowded but it's not empty. Commuters, a couple of kids, a guy with a saxophone case. The train pulls away behind us and the tunnel exhales warm, stale air. Mr. Nothing is rummaging around in his pocket for something. I resist the fighter's impulse to jump him.

  "Good choice. We're rejecting door number three. That's good. I didn't want to have to do that either. We've got a regular Monty Hall professional over here."

  Mr. Nothing puts his hand on my upper back - not grabbing, just guiding, the way a parent steers a kid through a crowd, and I hear a stitch pop. His fingerpads make contact with the slightest sliver of my shoulderblades, and instantly, it's all dark. My blood sense goes dark. My teeth stop aching. The ambient heartbeats I've been tracking since I got on the train vanish, all at once, like someone turned off a radio. I'm baseline. I'm just a girl.

  He steers me toward the south exit. Away from the stairs that lead up to City Hall. Away from my appointment. Toward the Market-Frankford transfer corridor.

  "This way," he says. "Nice and easy."

  I'm walking. I'm letting him walk me. Every step is a step further from where I need to be and closer to somewhere I don't want to go. My brain is screaming but my body is moving because the alternative is making a scene in a subway station with a man who has a gun and a screwdriver and three friends on a train that just left.

  Then I see him.

  End of the platform. Standing by the stairwell that leads up to Broad Street. Arms crossed. Argus Corps tactical vest over a compression shirt, the insignia visible from fifty feet away. Built like someone designed a human being for the sole purpose of blocking doorways.

  Patriot.

  He's not looking at us yet. He's scanning the platform the way he always does - methodical, left to right, cataloging faces and positions. Professional habit. Soldier's habit.

  And then his eyes land on me.

  And then they move to the man whose hand is on my back.

  And then they stop.