Zef whips his head around hard. He knows he didn't mishear, but he still says, "Hang on. Kill her?"

"Yep."

"Dead. Murdered."

"You got it."

Zef fumbles through his words. "You destroyed her data fort. She can't control you anymore. Just run."

"You think she can't build another? Won't quit hunting me? I'm the worst case of sunk-cost fallacy for her. She invested in me, and she wants a better return. Naw. I need her straight off that plane into my trap, before she comes up with a counter attack. I need her dead."

Zef has absolutely no love to lose for Rylan, but— "Gray, maybe that's easy for you, but don't involve me. I don't— I can't just help you kill her."

"Keep your kit in its caboodle, I'm not asking you to pull the trigger." With a sardonic twist to his mouth, he says, "Hell, you couldn't pay me to let someone else do the honours."

Zef's skin crawls. Maybe Gray killed remorselessly when those hunters came looking for him, but this is different. He looks eager.

"Gray, please. Let me out," Zef pleads. "I promise, you won't see hide nor hair of me again. Just don't make me a part of this."

A muscle in Gray's jaw flexes. Maybe Zef imagines the crack in his cold exterior because there's no warmth when he says, "Too late for that."

Zef aches. He thought he understood Gray a bit more after tonight. But this he doesn't get. Running into danger instead of running away from it. "I can't convince you there's another way?"

"No, 'cause there's not."

Gray's lips form a thin line, nearly swallowed between his teeth. Zef kissed those lips hours ago. He remembers the way Gray's voice sounded, low in the dark as he said things Zef wasn't meant to hear. Ain't no happily ever after for us.

Vulnerably unspoken and implied, but I wish there could be.

How could that Gray and this one be the same? It's a question Zef asked himself so many times as they got to know one another, and he feels like he's closing in on an answer, but too late for it to make a difference.

Gray is eerily silent the rest of the way. The rain turns torrential. The Vitali parts deep puddles like the Biblical red sea. Zef goes over his escape options and comes up with a handful of uselessly risky gambits that will invariably leave him maimed or dead. Anxiety makes his chest rattle like he's a maraca. He can't distract himself. All he can do is feel.

Hurt consumes him like a hungry animal.

It felt real. I wish it was real.

To Zef, it had been.

The night had opened up a world of possibility in which joy and freedom could be found. For Gray, had it really only been the closing act? A stolen bit of fun before curtain call?

The abandoned industrial quarter's familiar wreckage replaces the sprawling metropolis of the city proper. Gray parks in a lot peppered with the husks of cars rusting in obsolescence. Next to them, the Vitali looks like a princess forced to mingle with the peasantry.

"Why are we here?" Zef murmurs, only half expecting a direct answer.

"Need you to go ahead with the plan you had and tell Rylan you got me. Send her proof. Only way to get her guard down is if she thinks I'm good as got. You had a plan, right?" He reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out the EMP grenades. Tosses one to Zef. "These, the Net blocker, that cage thing in there." He gestures out the window to the husk of Nanosoft's warehouse. "All part of your plan, right?"

Zef swallows. "Yeah."

"How much of it does Rylan know about?"

"Net blocker part. Didn't trust her not to fire me once I'd stopped being useful, so I kept the rest to myself."

Gray smiles ruefully. "Good."

He kills the engine and reaches across Zef to open the glove compartment. He takes out a gun. More like a hand canon. The tall barrel contains towers of bullets. It sings a high-pitched whine when Gray takes the safety off—the sound proximity mines make a second before they explode. He reaches into the collar of his shirt and pulls the necklace out. The one with the bullet on a chain.

He tosses it to Zef. "Take that off, would you?"

Zef's fingers shake, but the bullet isn't secured with a ring and hole drilled through it. It's attached to the chain with a magnetic clasp. As he pulls it off, he catches sight of words scratched in the side.

Not words. A name. His fingers shake harder as he hands the bullet back to Gray. Feels like an out of body experience watching him open the chamber on the gun and slide the bullet inside.

"This is more than defending yourself," Zef says. "This is revenge. It's personal."

Gray's lip curls. "Of course it's fucking personal." The soft tone in his apology goes up in furious smoke. "What's impersonal about telling me I'm going under the knife for transition and waking me up full of tech she controls? You still ain't getting it, though, 'cause it's all three. It's personal. It's revenge. It's defending myself, too. 'Cause I ain't never gonna be free so long as she's out there holding that leash." He licks his teeth. "Thanks for that metaphor, by the way. Fitting. I am a dog, and she trained me up good. Made me into a vicious maneater. Only now I'm off leash, and god help her. She hit me one too many times."

Zef doesn't feel like he does get it. He's unqualified to get it. He's in over his head so far, too shaken and emotionally compromised to make good decisions.

Gray opens the door and slams it behind him.

Zef follows him into the rain, soaked through in seconds. He only contemplates running for a second before giving it up. He can't outrun Gray. They walk through the abandoned warehouse. The sound of water dripping from their clothes echoes up up up through the stairwell, until they reach the floor with the Faraday cage.

Gray says, "So. Tell me how this plan of yours works."

Zef considers not telling him. Pushing him to abandon the plan. He's made countless pleas today, all of which Gray ignored. He'll have to find a compelling argument if he wants to turn the tide.

Resigned, he says, "There's a few pieces to it. The net blocker's self-explanatory. Stops your implants using net connectivity to hack anybody else's. I was going to cut the power as an extra precaution—you can't open an electric door if it's off grid. Grenades were just in case of emergency. I saw how they temporarily blew out your implants that night outside Prancer's."

Gray gestures to the cage. "And this?"

"It blocks all electrical impulses, so you couldn't use short-range radio waves to interface with other tech, either. Would have to hook it up to a generator if we put this place in a blackout, but any tech inside it won't work on anything outside it, and vice versa. Basically prevents you from using your implants at all."

Gray tilts his head, giving the cage a black look. "What you're saying is, in there, I'm just a man."

"More or less."

Gray rolls his shoulders. "Then let's get started."

"If you just want to trick her into thinking you've been captured, we don't need to turn the Faraday cage on. Just pretend it is."

"You said if I'm in there, my implants are as good as French toast?"

"Yeah."

"Then it could come in handy the other way 'round."

Zef hadn't considered that. In there, Rylan couldn't call for back-up or use her own implants.

"Okay. One problem," Zef says. There are a lot of problems, but he's focusing on this one for now. "I don't have the net blocker on me. Or a generator."

Gray says, "I know. Gonna have to borrow 'em from Dee."

He heads for the door, confident Zef will follow, and since running is fruitless, the confidence is well-founded.

Zef falls into step behind him. "So, Dee's involved in your plan?"

Gray shakes his head. "She only knows as much as she's figured out for herself. Don't you go telling her anymore, neither. We get the gadgets and go."

"Right," Zef says, his anxiety ratcheting up further. Somehow, it would have been a comfort if Gray entrusted anyone with tonight's hairbrained scheme aside from himself.

Dee's ramshackle hole in the wall pawnshop sits empty aside from the piles of ancient tech. Dee herself is nowhere to be seen. Gray knocks on a bit of crumbling mortar, taps an electronic bell on the desk that makes no sound, and leans against the wall to wait. As he does, he shakes the rain out of his hair and lights a cigarette. He doesn't speak or even look at Zef.

Unmoored and moving mechanically, Zef sits on a stool amidst the chaotic piles of archaic tech. He tries to categorise the way he feels, the panic ebbing in this weird lul, but he only feels a sort of blankness. Detached. Out of body. It's not totally unlike dysphoria. A sense of unrealness. A severing of his senses.

"What if Dee's not here?" He whispers, but it sounds loud with the rain pattering outside and the quiet of the pawn shop.

"She'll come," Gray says.

The question is just filler. Chewing gum for Zef's brain so he doesn't have to taste the bitterness of a different, more important question. Now the scene is set, Gray's plan in motion, he can't avoid it any longer.

"So," Zef says, "you pretend to be caught, I tell Rylan, lure her here. Then you kill her. That's...that's the plan."

"Yep."

Fear turns the words wobbly with barely restrained emotion. "And then what happens to me?"

The knuckles of Gray's hands stand out like the serrated edge of a knife, tense fingers making the ember of his cigarette tremble. He chews on the inside of his cheek. Still not looking at Zef. Looking out the shattered hole in the wall at the rain.

"Then we go our separate ways," he says.