One day later

  Manhattan

  Bernadette watched the sunrise from her 40th-floor apartment balcony overlooking the Hudson River. Fall was her favorite time of the year. The brisk air reminded Bernadette that her job wasn’t finished, and that she would complete it as her life depended on the outcome. The latest intel report gave her a pang of hope, revealing that Hiroto was holed up in his Upper West Side apartment. She needed to secure a suitable vantage point. Since Hiroto lived in an apartment that faced the Hudson River, Bernadette had a slight advantage in setting up a hunter’s hide in one of the larger trees.

  Time to do some recon, she thought as she got dressed.

  She left the building after sunrise, disguised as a tired city maintenance worker, hair tucked under a Mets cap, face scrubbed of all but the most basic makeup—enough to look like someone barely holding it together, nothing like herself. The city, as always, hummed with a low-grade anarchy. Wall Street types elbowed through Union Square, joggers dodged delivery bicyclists, and the wind off the river carried the tang of salt and subway steam. Bernadette kept her strides casual but purposeful, her eyes flicking to check sightlines and surveillance cameras painted like barnacles on every streetlight.

  She bought coffee from a cart and walked the perimeter of Hiroto’s building twice. It was new-money architecture: tinted windows, a doorman whose jaw squared up like a boxer, and a bank of elevators that responded only to biometrically keyed residents. The best vantage was from the park side, across Riverside Drive, but the leaves had yet to entirely fall, and the canopy would only hide her for so long. Then, there was building 303, a fifteen-story monolith directly opposite Hiroto’s, its roof littered with HVAC units, satellite dishes, and raptor nests for the city’s latest bird-of-prey rewilding project.

  Bernadette performed reconnaissance on the service entrance from afar using state-of-the-art surveillance equipment, noting the keypad configuration. She logged the guards’ rotation and the cleaner whose bum leg was always five minutes late. She timed her entry to the second, blending in with a group of repairmen called to fix an elevator outage. The keycard she’d lifted three days ago from a drunken tech was still valid. She moved silently and swiftly, taking the stairs two at a time.

  This contract will be the death of me!

  Soon, she was on the roof, surveying the city’s landscape that opened beneath her like an origami map. She lay flat against the tarpaper, binoculars trained on the samurai’s window. She felt the familiar buzz—anticipation, not nerves—and waited for the lights to shift in Hiroto’s apartment, the flutter of a curtain, the snap of a shade. Her phone vibrated against her hip.

  It was a message from Whitmore:

  Do not miss again.

  Bernadette cursed Malcolm for getting her into this mess. She’d rather be pulling teeth instead of working for that man. Usually, the thought of her first profession would have comforted her, but this mission had her on edge. It wasn’t the difficulty of the assignment. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but something was off.

  Bernadette’s lip curled. She’d never missed a target in her career. She’d made a name on the bodies of men who never saw her coming, and she hated how the AI and its contingencies had obscured her path, how it complicated the clean mathematics of a job well done. Still, she respected an adversary who could put her on her back foot—a rival worthy of the old days in Zagreb and Kyiv. The city was a thousand puzzles stacked together, and she could solve any of them, given time. But this… felt like a test. The kind she relished.

  Hiroto finally appeared, his silhouette a paper cutout moving through the blue dawn. He poured water into a kettle, backlit, the flat of his hand brushing hair from his brow. Bernadette tracked the movement, micro-adjusting the scope, her cheek welded to the stock, her body stretched long and patient on the cold roof. The shot would be through triple-pane glass; she ran the numbers, calculated for refraction and sound lag, and recorded it in her pad. The potential scene unfolded before her. When people asked about her job, she said it felt like being totally focused and absorbed in what she was doing. Of course, they were usually asking about her day job as an oral surgeon.

  She almost missed the second figure in the apartment—a woman, maybe seventeen years of age, ducking into the kitchen with an energy that made Bernadette think of wind-up toys and the way they never stopped moving until their spring snapped. The woman’s face appeared for a moment, laughing up at Hiroto, and for an instant, Bernadette wondered what it would be like to experience those everyday feelings, to be a different person. One who watched the world through a window rather than the crosshairs. The moment passed.

  Pull it together, Birney.

  A shadow flickered in her peripheral vision—a kestrel, maybe, or one of the city’s new falcons. She ignored it, focusing on her breathing, the disciplined tempo that had made her Whitmore’s first pick for this assignment. She worked the bolt, chambered a round, and felt the tickle of sweat trickle between her shoulder blades despite the fall chill.

  Hiroto stepped toward the window, mug in hand, eyes searching the skyline like a general on a battlefield. It was almost too easy. She steadied herself, exhaled, and squeezed—

  A sharp, insistent vibration trembled through the roof beneath her. One of the HVAC fans had kicked on, not scheduled for another hour. The timing was suspect, but she trusted her luck: no one had seen her.

  The slug of metal shattered the triple-glazed window, glass crystals blooming into the cold river air. Hiroto vanished instantly, replaced by the wild whine of an alarm and frantic movement within the apartment. Bernadette held her position, calculating the next most probable angle of escape. The girl—now visible in the chaos, scrambling for cover—dragged Hiroto away from the window, as if she’d rehearsed the maneuver in a thousand dreams. The two figures disappeared behind a reinforced concrete support pillar, out of view.

  She rolled onto her back, working rapid calculations. The shot was clean, but not fatal. The AI’s signature was all over the failed attempt—she recognized the preemptive fan activation and the delayed response from the building’s security systems. This was not improvisation; it was a defense protocol, tailored to counter her. Her skin flushed with anger, but she suppressed it. There would be a next time, and she would not miss.

  She packed up, moving low and fast. She’d left nothing on the roof but a faint indentation in the tar and a single casing, which she pocketed on her way out. The repairmen’s smoke break covered her exit. Two blocks away, she ducked into a shuttered café, changed her hat, wiped her face, and became a person so unremarkable that the security cameras ignored her even as she passed.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  She ordered tea at the counter, paid in cash, and sat by the window with the posture of someone who had nowhere to go. She forced her breathing to slow, timed her sips to the lazy motion of the morning crowd. Every muscle ached for the job left unfinished, the clean finality that had always been her gift. She replayed the shot in her mind, digit by digit, cataloging the variables. The barely perceptible fan vibration had thrown her scope by a quarter inch, enough to miss the brainstem and leave the old man alive, but conscious? That was the problem with sentient adversaries: they learned, they adapted, they fought back.

  She looked down at her phone. A message from Operator 47:

  Next window: 17:00. If you fail, Whitmore pulls the contract and puts one on you. Don’t disappoint him again.

  Bernadette sneered. Whitmore’s threats worked only on the desperate or the vain. She was neither. Her reputation was her currency, but her soul flourished on the challenge. Hiroto’s AI would expect another rooftop attempt, and the girl would have Hiroto trussed in kevlar and paranoia. But people in hiding always made mistakes.

  They clung to their routines like religion, never realizing that ritual could make you predictable, that even a cornered animal circled the same ground. Bernadette studied the blueprints and the delivery logs—condos always had a private garbage chute, a service tunnel, a panic button that only worked if you had faith in the cops. She didn’t believe in faith.

  Later

  She watched from the street as the building’s trash collectors worked their route, their orange uniforms garish in the city gloom. The schedule was as tight as an execution. At 16:45, she tailed a work crew inside, feigning a limp and a trash bag full of “evidence”—shredded printouts from the last gig, doused in bleach and coffee grounds. She kept her head down, but her eyes mapped every blind spot, every momentary overlap in the building’s security shadow. At the service elevator, she jammed the sensor with a blade of plastic cut to mimic a repair tag. The door closed on her, and an air of silence fell. She could feel the pulse throbbing in her throat.

  Seventeen stories up, she ducked into the empty refuse staging room three floors below Hiroto’s. The walls stank of detergent and old onions, and the floor was slick under her boots.

  She crouched behind a stack of blue recycling totes, palming the compact in her jacket: a matte-black Glock with a custom suppressor, the one she reserved for indoor work. She listened. The elevator cables hummed every few minutes. The wall clock ticked with the artificial regularity of a hospital monitor. Above her, faint through the layers of pipe and insulation, she heard the metallic thud of someone moving furniture. He was prepping. Maybe even barricading. But he didn’t know she’d already breached the perimeter.

  She waited. At 16:57, the service elevator shuddered and opened on her floor. A janitor—an Asian man in his early fifties, with a bucket and a mop stepped out, muttering under his breath.

  “Who are you?” the old man asked, startled.

  Bernadette removed her tranquilizer gun from her inner vest pocket and shot the man in the neck. The man collapsed with a thudding sound that was louder than she was comfortable with.

  She looked both ways down the narrow hallway; no one was in sight.

  Lucky for me that people are still at work, but not for long. Hurry Birney!

  She dragged the man to a closet at the end of the hallway. It was locked, but she found the key and then locked him inside.

  She ghosted up the stairwell, silent as a memory, and at 17:02, was outside Hiroto’s door. Her breathing exercises slowed her heartbeat, and she felt the tension fade. She rapped twice: the universal code for “building maintenance.” She heard the shuffle of feet, a burst of urgent conversation in Japanese—old habits, resurfacing under pressure—and then a hush that told her the apartment’s occupants were lined up on the far side, preparing for the worst.

  It’s a good thing that AI’s offline.

  Bernadette thumbed the safety off and traced the layout of the apartment she had memorized. The panic room was on the right, hidden behind a false wall; the kitchen ran parallel to the corridor, and the living room faced the river. The girl would try to get to the panic room, but Bernadette had studied the blueprints. It was a prefab, its walls rated for pistols, not rifles. She’d take them before they reached it. She kept her steps light, almost floating, and raised the Glock to eye level.

  Time for breach.

  Bernadette twisted the knob, found the deadbolt engaged, retrieved the bump keys from another pouch on her belt, and heard the lock disengage. The sounds of the apartment changed.

  They probably heard the latch, go!

  She worked the lock, kicked the door open, and scurried to her vantage point, a nook in the wall designed to display knick-knacks, but she could take cover in the lower half. The hallway was awash in blue dusk; burned rice and iced tea lingered in the air. After a moment of listening and surveying the situation, she moved fast, checking side rooms, then caught a blur of movement in the kitchen—

  She fired twice

  —once at the flash of long black hair and the glint of steel, again at the slow-moving shape behind. The rounds hit the microwave and a ceramic bowl, splintering both into a cloud of dust and noodles. The girl dove behind the counter, pulling Hiroto to her, a move so well-rehearsed that Bernadette almost respected it.

  This is no ordinary teenager.

  She edged forward, piecing together their positions from the shuffled breath and scrape of knees on tile. The Glock’s suppressor hissed as she sent two more rounds into the counter; wood chips and stone chips spat back at her. Return fire—a kitchen knife—clattered past her ankle, amateur hour, but she’d seen people kill with stranger things. Bernadette risked a glance, eyes narrowed, and caught the girl’s reflection in the glass-fronted oven, the trembling set of her jaw, the terror tamed to focus in her hands. There was a fragility in that face, in the way it mirrored—just for a second—her own, years ago, before killing became second nature.

  A trickle of blood crawled down Hiroto’s temple, his breathing shallow but steady. He said something in a voice too low for her to catch, and the girl’s hand tightened on the collar of her own jacket. Bernadette blurred in, clearing the kitchen threshold in a low, zigzag rush. She expected the girl to freeze, but instead, the counter tipped toward her with a clatter—classic barricade defense.

  She has superhuman strength!

  Bernadette vaulted it, the edge nicking her thigh, and rolled through the landing. Her first shot went wide, ricocheting off the fridge; the second grazed Hiroto’s shoulder, spinning him into the cabinets. He crumpled but dragged the girl with him, both of them sliding into cover behind a heavy island.

  For an instant, Bernadette held her aim steady on the space where the girl’s head would reappear, but she didn’t fire. Something in that trembling, infuriating hope on the girl’s face—something that looked less like fear and more like resolve—made her hesitate. In that nanosecond, Bernadette’s own reflection blinked back from the stainless steel fridge: the monstrous mask of focus, the coiled muscles of loss.

  The girl broke cover, pivoting with the fluidity of a gymnast, and hurled a full glass of ice water into Bernadette’s face. It was cold, shocking, and precisely the improvisation she would have chosen. The force of it made Bernadette blink; by the time her vision cleared, the girl had already closed the distance, knocking her with a force that flung her into a wall. The familiarity of a rib being cracked and the white hot sensation of pain that followed.

  Ouch! Where did that come from?

  The Glock spun under the stove, then Bernadette’s head cracked hard against the edge of a cabinet. Bernadette blinked in confusion as the girl’s arms turned into hammers. Before she had time to think, Birney threw herself toward her assailant. They tangled, all knees, claws, and terror. The girl’s fingers found Bernadette’s throat, a clumsy chokehold, but the pressure was real, visceral. Bernadette twisted, breaking the grip with an elbow to the jaw. The girl reeled, eyes watering, but didn’t retreat. She brought a knee up, catching Bernadette in the ribs, winding her.

  Hiroto, bleeding but lucid, dragged himself upright. His hand scrambled for something on the counter—a wok, maybe, or a meat cleaver—but he couldn’t reach. Bernadette disengaged, rolling clear, and in one motion palmed a paring knife from the floor. The girl mirrored her, snatching a glass bottle from the sink, clutching it like a club. They froze, eyeing each other, the hush between them suddenly dense with the smell of old blood and ammonia. Bernadette saw the calculation running behind the girl’s eyes—she was a killer.