The tent was white, blinding, a bubble of light in the dark woods. Bryce Hogan opened his eyes to the scream of a heart monitor and the smell of antiseptic failure.

He moved before he thought. His hand shot out, caught the wrist of the man leaning over him, sent him sprawling. Syringe and all. The crash of the instrument tray was satisfying. The silence that followed was better.

"Sir-" someone started.

Bryce sat up. The world tilted, then steadied. He was on a gurney, strapped down, the kind with leather restraints they'd used when he was twelve and the fever first hit. He hated leather restraints. He hated being touched.

He looked at his left wrist.

There was a bandage. No-not a bandage. A strip of fabric, dark, fraying, tied in a knot that looked like it had been pulled from a garbage bag. It smelled. It smelled like cheap detergent and discount stores and everything he'd spent thirty years avoiding.

Bryce's stomach heaved. He ripped the fabric off with two fingers, pinching hard, and threw it on the ground. He wanted to burn it. He wanted to burn his own hand for touching it.

Underneath, a scar. Fresh, pink, already healing. A clean line, surgical precision, crossing his vein.

Memory flooded back. The woods. The cold. Hands holding him down, a blade, the invasion of his body. And then-heat. Unbearable heat, like being submerged in lava, like every frozen cell in his body suddenly remembering fire.

He looked at the scar again. Someone had cut him open. Someone had put something in his blood.

"Cash."

His voice was gravel. His throat was dry. He didn't care.

The tent flap opened. Cash Palmer walked in, six-four, built like a linebacker, wearing the expression he always wore when Bryce had done something violent. Concern, masked as professionalism.

"Sir. You're stable. The doctors-"

"Fired. All of them." Bryce swung his legs off the gurney. He was naked under the hospital gown, gooseflesh rising on his arms. He ignored it. "The toxin?"

"Gone, sir. Completely. The medical team is calling it-"

"I don't care what they're calling it." Bryce stood. The room spun. He waited for it to stop. "Someone was here. In the woods. A woman."

He closed his eyes. He tried to see her. But his memory was fragments: pressure, heat, the smell of vanilla underneath the chemical stink. And a shape. A hood. A pattern on the back, white on black, something that looked like-

"A skull," he said. "A skull on her jacket. Hood up. Find her."

Cash didn't argue. He never argued. He pulled out his phone and started typing.

Bryce walked to the medical tray. He found the alcohol wipes, the good ones, individually wrapped. He tore open six of them and scrubbed his wrist until the skin turned red, then pink, then raw. He could still feel the ghost of her fingers. He could still smell the detergent.

"Sir, we should get you to the hospital. Full workup. Your condition-"

"My condition is why I need her." Bryce dropped the wipes in the biohazard bin. He found his clothes, folded on a chair, his coat ruined, his shirt stained. He dressed anyway, his fingers shaking slightly as he worked the buttons. "She did something. To my blood. I felt it. The cold... it feels different. Find her. I need to know why."

He looked at Cash. Cash looked back, expression unchanged.

"She's a variable," Bryce said. "Variables get eliminated or contained. I want her contained."

"Yes, sir."

Bryce stepped out of the tent. The night air hit him, cold and clean. Above, three drones hummed, thermal cameras sweeping the tree line. Beyond them, the sound of more helicopters, his own, arriving from the city.

Fifty men in tactical gear stood at attention. SUVs lined the dirt road, engines running, headlights cutting through the dark.

Bryce walked to the nearest vehicle. He didn't look back at the tent, at the strip of fabric still lying in the mud. He would have it burned later. He would have the ground sterilized.

He got in the back seat. Leather. Clean. Cold.

"Sir?" Cash stood at the door.

"Lock down all major roads out of Silver Creek. Contact our assets at every bus station and regional airport within a hundred miles. I want all surveillance footage from the last three hours pulled. Get the drone team airborne and have them run thermal scans along the forest perimeter. I want every heat signature that doesn't belong."

"And if we find her?"

Bryce looked out the window. The woods were dark. She was in there somewhere, or she'd already run. The woman with the skull on her back and the hands that could burn.

"Bring her to me," he said. "Alive. I want to know what she put in my blood."

The door closed. The SUV pulled onto the road, and the convoy followed, a black snake winding through the trees.

The safe house was an apartment on the fourth floor of a building scheduled for demolition. Jessie climbed the fire escape, the chill of the Las Vegas night a welcome relief after two days on a bus. She'd walked for an hour from the station, doubling back, changing direction, making sure she wasn't followed.

The window was unlocked, like she'd left it. She climbed through, closed it, pulled the blackout curtains. Then she let herself fall onto the mattress on the floor.

She lay there, breathing, counting. When she reached sixty, she sat up. When she reached one-twenty, she stood. When she reached one-eighty, she started moving.

First, the hoodie. The white skull on the back was a liability, a beacon. She pulled it off, the cheap cotton smelling of rain and fear. She carried it to the metal barrel in the corner, the one she'd prepared weeks ago for exactly this moment. She dropped it in. She lit a match.

The skull burned. The cheap cotton caught fast, the white pattern blackening, curling, disappearing. She watched until there was nothing but ash, then stirred the ash with a stick until it was unrecognizable.

She turned to the mirror. Her face was pale, drawn, her eyes too bright. She needed to disappear.

She opened the closet.

The clothes inside were another life. Baggy jeans with holes in the knees. T-shirts three sizes too large, stained with coffee, with grease, with the careful application of makeup that looked like dirt. She dressed in them, layer by layer, transforming.

She found the scissors. She looked at her hair in the mirror-long, dark, distinctive, the way it had been since she was sixteen. She grabbed a handful and cut. The sound was loud in the empty room. The hair fell around her feet, a dark halo.

She cut again. And again. Until what was left was choppy, uneven, falling across her face in a way that hid her eyes, her cheekbones, everything that might be remembered.

She added the glasses. Thick black frames, no prescription, bought from a costume shop. She added the makeup, the special clay that created freckles, the powder that dulled her skin to gray.

She stood straight, then deliberately slumped. She let her shoulders roll forward, her spine curve, her chin drop. She practiced breathing through her mouth, short and shallow, the way asthmatics did, the way victims did.

The mirror showed a stranger. A girl who'd given up. A girl who'd never fought back, never held a knife, never cut a man's wrist in the dark woods and watched him live.

Jessie nodded at her reflection. She took a deep breath. Now, she could move. The last pill was gone. She needed more, and she knew where to get it.

The abandoned subway entrance was three blocks north of her safe house, behind a condemned casino. She found it by smell first-stale water, rust, something rotting sweet underneath. Then she saw the fence, the plywood, the spray paint that said KEEP OUT in letters that had faded to pink.

Jessie stopped at the metal door. It was new, industrial, with a biometric scanner that looked expensive and out of place. She didn't touch it.

"Invitation," a voice said.

She looked up. Two men stood in the shadows beside the door. Suits, cheap, stretched over muscle that came from prison yards, not gyms. The one who'd spoken was bald, with a scar that bisected his eyebrow. Spike. She knew the type. They were the same everywhere.

"Lost my invitation," she said, her voice small, reedy, nothing like her own. She kept her eyes on the ground.

"Then you're lost, period." He stepped closer, into the light, trying to use his size. He was six-two, maybe two-forty. She catalogued him automatically: slow, left-heavy, probably carried a gun in his waistband that he'd never use fast enough. "Beat it, kid. This ain't no place for street trash."

Jessie looked up, just for a second, letting the single bare bulb overhead glint off her glasses. She let her hand tremble as she reached into her pocket. "The Jackal sent me," she whispered, the code phrase old, almost out of use. "He said to ask for Finch. He said Finch owed him."

Spike froze. He exchanged a look with the other guard. The name still had power.

"Wait here." He spoke into a wrist comm, his voice low.

A minute later, the door opened.

A man squeezed through, sweating, his shirt untucked, his face the color of uncooked dough. Mortimer Finch. Jessie knew him from a file she'd read in another life, another name. He ran the western territories. He was careful, greedy, and absolutely terrified of the right people.

He saw her slumped posture, her cheap clothes, her bad haircut. Disgust warred with caution on his face. "You mentioned the Jackal?"

Jessie nodded, not speaking. She held out her right hand, palm up. In the center of her palm, just below the thumb, was a small, faded tattoo, barely visible. A stylized scorpion, its tail a single, sharp line. A marker from a dead network, one only a handful of people would recognize.

Mortimer's eyes widened. He licked his lips. "My apologies. Please, come inside. What can I do for a friend of... an old friend?"

Jessie walked through the door. The air changed immediately, from desert dry to underground damp, from desperation to dangerous opulence. The tunnel opened into a cavern, lights strung like stars, stalls selling everything from weapons to identities to things she didn't want to identify.

People turned to look. They saw Mortimer's posture, the way he scurried beside her, the way his hand kept fluttering toward her elbow without quite touching. They looked away. Fast.

The VIP suite was a shipping container, refurbished, soundproofed. Jessie sat on the leather couch.

"I need a metabolic inhibitor," she said, her voice back to its normal flat tone now that they were alone. "Medical grade. Stasis-7 or equivalent. Not the street trash you sell to addicts. The real thing."

"Yes, yes, of course. I have a new shipment, just arrived, top shelf-"

"And privacy."

"Absolutely. The VIP suite. No one will disturb you."

Mortimer returned with a case, aluminum, medical. He opened it on the table and stepped back, hands raised, not wanting to see what she did with the contents.

Jessie didn't look at him. She was already loading the syringe, finding the vein, pushing the plunger with practiced efficiency.

The cool spread through her arm, into her chest, damping the fire. She closed her eyes and breathed.

For now, she was safe.