"Exalibar."
He pulled the pillow tighter over his head.
"Exalibar."
The voice was coming from his gauntlet, propped on the nightstand. He knew that. He chose to ignore it.
"Exalibar, wake up."
"No," he said, his voice muffled by several layers of pillow and genuine grievance.
"There's a job."
"Give it to Ethan."
A pause. The particular kind of pause that meant whoever was on the other end was deciding how much patience they had left.
"It wasn't Ethan," Aisha said, "who let a man walk out of a secure facility wearing a high-powered military exoskeleton, now was it?"
Silence.
"...That suit isn't making it back," Exalibar said flatly. "Just so you know."
He was already sitting up.
The city at two in the morning was not quiet exactly, but emptied out, the noise reduced to the hum of streetlights and the occasional distant siren. Exalibar moved through it like a rumour. One moment he was pulling his suit on in the dark of his bedroom, the next he was across the city entirely, the holographic display flickering to life from his gauntlet as he landed on a rooftop across from the First National.
A single location pin pulsed over the building's lower levels. Vault level.
He rolled his neck once, dropped off the roof's edge, and went in through the service entrance. The security system didn't stop him. It tried. He didn't give it long enough to finish trying.
The vault corridor was reinforced steel and humming fluorescents, making everything look vaguely criminal regardless of intent. He rounded the last corner and stopped in the doorway.
The man inside was enormous , six and a half feet of military-grade exoskeleton, matte grey plates layered over hydraulic joints, the whole assembly worth more than most buildings. He was halfway through the vault's secondary wall, his augmented arms elbow-deep in the breach, safety deposit boxes scattered across the floor like shed teeth.
He heard Exalibar a half-second too late.
He started to turn.
Exalibar was already moving. He closed the distance before the suit's servos could finish rotating, grabbed the man's arm at the joint — the one weak point in any exoskeleton, the articulation gap where the plates had to flex — and used the leverage of it to run him headfirst into the reinforced door of the largest safe in the room.
The clang was enormous. The fluorescents flickered.
The man slid down the safe's face and came to rest in a seated slump against it, the exoskeleton's systems throwing error signals across the visor display, his head lolling like someone operating on approximately forty percent of normal brain function.
Exalibar crouched beside him.
"Next time," he said conversationally, "make sure you remove all the trackers from whatever you steal." He tilted his head. "Though I doubt you can hear me right now."
The man's eyes moved. Not much. Enough.
"Oh," Exalibar said. "You're still up."
He grabbed him by the collar, stood him up against the safe, and started introducing his head to the floor in a series of short, methodically rapid movements that suggested this was less anger and more housekeeping. The exoskeleton's structural integrity groaned in protest each time. The floor was doing less well.
He stopped.
Not because he was done. Because the air in the room had shifted in a way he recognised the atmospheric change of someone else's mana presence entering the space behind him.
He looked up.
Ethan was hovering in the vault doorway, one shoulder against the frame, arms loosely crossed. His white hair was slightly dishevelled, which was as close to undone as Ethan ever got. He was looking at the scene in front of him with the expression of someone arriving at a dinner party to find the host has already eaten the table.
"That," Ethan said, "wasn't very heroic."
Exalibar stood up and, in one fluid motion, kicked the semi-conscious man across the vault floor toward him. Ethan reached out and caught him by the back of the exoskeleton with one hand, effortlessly, a disc of golden energy solidifying under the man's weight.
"I'm not the hero remember," Exalibar said. "I just get the job done." He was already moving toward the corridor. "Lock him up. Or don't. I genuinely don't care." He paused at the doorway, not turning around. "But bring me that suit when you're finished with him."
"You know," Ethan said, looking down at the dazed man suspended in his energy field, "most people say please."
Exalibar was already gone.
His apartment was on the fourteenth floor of a building that had no record of him as a tenant, which was how he preferred it. He'd moved out of the Maxford estate a year ago, told his parents it was about independence, which was partially true, and said nothing about the operational security benefits, which was the rest of it.
He slid through the front door without turning on any lights. The bedroom was dark, the city's ambient glow coming in at the edges of the curtains. He shed the outer layer of the suit and moved quietly toward the bed.
Not quietly enough.
"What's going on?" Chloe's voice, low and unhurried, from the pillow.
"Late night snack," he said. "Go back to sleep."
A pause in which he could tell she was deciding whether to pursue this.
She turned over, reached for him in the dark, and pulled him down. He let himself be pulled. She tucked her head against his chest with the ease of long practice, and he rested his chin on top of her hair, and she was asleep again in minutes, her breathing slowing to that deep, specific rhythm.
He lay awake a while longer, his hand moving slowly through her hair, staring at the ceiling.
The city hummed fourteen floors below him. Somewhere across town, Ethan was dealing with the paperwork that came with an exoskeleton theft and a bank robbery and a suspect who would wake up tomorrow with no clear memory of how he came to be in the condition he was in.
Exalibar closed his eyes.
He woke up to the smell of butter and cinnamon and something that was almost certainly going to make the next eight hours of his life better than anything that came after it.
He followed the smell to the kitchen.
Chloe was at the stove in one of his shirts, the sleeves pushed to her elbows, a pan of french toast on one burner and sausage links on the other. The morning light came in through the kitchen window at an angle that made the whole scene look, he thought, like something a person might reasonably want to hold onto.
"I swear," he said, coming up behind her and wrapping his arms around her from behind, his chin finding her shoulder, "moving out was the best decision I have ever made in my life."
"You couldn't keep sneaking me through your bedroom window indefinitely," she said, turning the toast without displacing him. "Eventually your father would have noticed."
"I could have kept it going," he said. "I was very strategic about it. I had a system..."
His gauntlet, on the kitchen counter, buzzed once. Then again. Then a third time in quick succession, the rhythm of someone who had already decided that patience was not a tool they were using today.
He closed his eyes briefly.
"Ugh." He released her and picked it up. "What?"
"I need backup." Sky's voice, which had the strained quality of someone who was managing something actively. "Town square. Right now. And bring Chloe."
Exalibar leaned against the counter. "After breakfast."
"If you don't get here in the next five minutes," Sky said, "I will personally ensure that this is the last breakfast you ever eat."
The line went dead.
Exalibar set the gauntlet down. Looked at the french toast. Looked at the door. Picked up his jacket from the back of the kitchen chair.
"I'll be back before the tea gets cold," he said.
Chloe turned from the stove. "Don't you need me?"
"Two of us is plenty." He pulled the jacket on, already running the numbers — town square, Sky calling in backup, whatever was large enough that his brother's first instinct was to escalate. He'd have a picture by the time he got there.
Chloe crossed the kitchen. She put one hand against his jaw, tilting his face toward hers, and looked at him in the straightforward, particular way she had that still, three years in, made him feel like she was reading something he hadn't written down.
"Stay safe," she said. "And try to act like a hero this time."
He almost said something. He thought better of it.
He kissed her once, quick and certain, and was out the door.
The first thing he saw when he cleared the roofline above town square was the shadow.
It didn't belong to any of the buildings. It was too large, too irregular, thrown at the wrong angle for the morning sun. It moved.
He landed on the edge of the nearest roof and looked down.
Sky was in the square below, his silver hair catching the light, holding a perimeter around a cordoned section of the plaza with the practiced calm of someone who had been doing this for three years and had learned exactly how much energy to spend before the real work started.
In the centre of the square, taking up roughly the footprint of a mid-sized house, was the source of the shadow.
Exalibar stood on the rooftop, hands in his jacket pockets, and looked at it for a long moment.
Sky's voice came through the comm in his ear. "You're looking at it."
"I'm looking at it," Exalibar confirmed.
"And?"
Exalibar tilted his head slightly.
"That," he said, "is a very large spider."