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.

The inhibitor was in her pack, wrapped in foam, hidden under a layer of textbooks she'd bought for her cover. Jessie walked through the market, keeping to the shadows, her posture slumped again. Just another desperate person looking for a way out.

She was almost to the side exit when she heard a voice that made her blood run cold.

"-authentic, I swear, my grandmother brought it from Vienna-"

Jessie stopped. She knew that whine, the bluster that couldn't hide the desperation. She turned.

It wasn't Vince. It couldn't be. Not here.

But it was. Three stalls down, he was holding her mother's doll, waving it at a man in a silk shirt who looked bored. How? How had he gotten from a trailer in Ohio to a high-end black market in Vegas? The question was a block of ice in her stomach.

She had to get the doll. It was the only thing left. But she couldn't expose herself. She watched, her mind racing, as the man in the silk shirt reached for his wallet.

Jessie's hand shot out. Not at Vince. At a stack of crates beside his stall, piled high with cheap, counterfeit electronics. A single, calculated push. The top crate tipped, teetered, and then the whole stack went over with a deafening crash of plastic and shattering glass.

Chaos. People yelled. The stall owner screamed. Vince jumped back, dropping the doll to protect his face from flying debris.

It was all the opening she needed.

In the confusion, she moved like a ghost, a stoop-shouldered girl nobody would look at twice. She scooped the doll from the floor, tucked it into her canvas bag, and kept moving, melting back into the panicked crowd.

"Hey!" Vince's voice, shrill with fury. "My doll! That girl! She took my doll! Thief!"

He pointed, but he was pointing into a sea of moving bodies. A few people glanced her way, saw a scared student clutching her bag, and looked past her, searching for a more likely culprit.

But someone else was looking. Not at her, but at the scene.

From a catwalk above the market floor, a man in a tailored suit lowered a pair of binoculars. Julian Adler. He had been scanning the crowd for hours, looking for any anomaly. The sudden, precise toppling of the crates was exactly that. It wasn't random. It was a professional-level distraction.

His eyes swept the area, and he saw her. The girl from the alley. Jessie. The one with the anomalous thermal signature. She was moving away from the chaos with a purpose that contradicted her frightened-student disguise.

He keyed his radio, his voice calm. "Target acquired. Section Gamma, moving toward exit four. She's carrying a new item, a large canvas bag. Mr. Hogan, she's here."

Below, Jessie felt a prickle on the back of her neck. The feeling of being watched. She quickened her pace, heading for the service corridors, the places Mortimer had shown her on the way in.

Behind her, she heard the subtle shift in the market's noise. The tramp of disciplined feet. They were coming.