The rumble of applause and the flashes of cameras seemed to follow Yuls down the courthouse hallway, a dull noise that couldn't drown out Miller's voice in her head. She stopped a few feet from the exit, leaning against the cold wall.
Now, alone, the building's air conditioning gave her goosebumps. The folder's weight felt disproportionate. She looked at the label, its typewritten letters faded with time. "Industrial Incident. Metroville Steel Foundry. Victim: Murdoch, Alistair."
The name meant nothing to her, but Miller's look had been a warning.
The ride back to the hotel was a blur. The city streets, alive and noisy, passed by the taxi window without her really seeing them. She thought about Jack's smile when the judge, stammering, had granted his request. It wasn't the smile of a man who wins a case; it was a gambler's, one who knows he's just changed the rules of the game forever. And she had dealt him the cards.
In the impersonal hotel room, she dropped the folder on the dark wood desk. The sound was final, an end point to the day's euphoria. For a long time, she didn't move. She poured a glass of water from the pitcher on the small table, drank slowly, and walked to the window. The city lights spread out in a vast network of luminous dots, a brilliant and indifferent pattern.
"I won," she whispered to herself, but the word sounded hollow.
Jack was in a maximum-security cell, but from there he had dismantled the government's authority with a few well-chosen phrases. He had made them look incompetent, arrogant, and worst of all, scared. And she had been his voice, his perfect instrument. Why didn't it feel like a victory?
With a sigh that carried all the day's exhaustion, she turned around. The folder was still there, waiting. She sat down, turned on the desk lamp, and opened it. The report was brief, the typewriter ink almost gray.
PRELIMINARY REPORT - INCIDENT 88-B17 DATE: October 12, five years ago. REPORTING OFFICER: F. Miller, Badge #714 LOCATION: Metroville Steel Foundry, Electric Arc Furnace #4. NATURE OF INCIDENT: Catastrophic equipment failure. Workplace death.
Yuls read every word with the precision of a lawyer looking for a loophole. The description was clinical, distant. An explosion of indeterminate origin at the furnace's control panel. A body, identified as the shift supervisor, Alistair Murdoch, found ten feet from the epicenter. Cause of death: exposure to extreme heat and electrical energy. A single witness, a young night shift worker named John Simmons, was found unconscious by the emergency crew. He was suffering from minor burns and a severe state of shock.
The official report was a masterpiece of evasion. It concluded that the most probable cause was a tragic accident. Faulty wiring, perhaps. An unpredictable power surge. Case closed.
But Miller had added something. Stapled to the end, almost as an afterthought, was a page from his notepad. The handwriting was younger, more impatient. That of a detective who still believed he could solve everything.
Coroner's autopsy is strange. Murdoch's burns aren't consistent with a standard electrical arc. The report says he looks... dissolved in some parts. The tissue necrosis is internal, moving outward. What the hell does that?
The "witness," Simmons, has no arc burns. His are more like radiation burns. Minor, but they're there. He says he doesn't remember anything. Not convincing. He was scared, but not just of the explosion. It was something else.
The company's technicians can't find any mechanical failure to justify the explosion. They say the power just... went out of control. No short circuit. No clear point of origin. It's like the energy just appeared out of nowhere.
Something here doesn't add up. This was no accident.
Yuls slammed the folder shut. The sharp sound broke the room's silence. John Simmons. Jack. The story fit, the one he had told her about a violent, lonely awakening. But he had omitted a crucial detail. He hadn't told her that someone had died. That his birth as "Gamma Jack" had been another man's death sentence.
She stood up and began to pace, crossing her arms in a useless gesture to contain the flood of questions fighting to get out. It wasn't the death that disturbed her. It was the secret. The omission.
Miles away, in the gloom of an abandoned warehouse on the docks, Thorne was drinking coffee. In front of him, an entire wall was covered with city maps, crime scene photographs, and newspaper clippings. Red strings connected faces, places, and dates, forming a complex web of violence.
"It's not random," he muttered, his voice hoarse from lack of sleep. "It's never random."
The faces of the alley victims stared back at him from the photos. The mummified face of the dealer they found in the industrial freezer. Each one was a data point, a piece of the puzzle. He picked up the field spectrometer from the table and looked at the readings he had taken from the last body.
"The first attack was a chaotic burst of power," he said to himself, typing notes into an old computer terminal. "Pure hunger. The second… it was precise. Controlled."
He leaned back in his chair, which groaned in protest. "It's learning. It's getting more efficient."
He opened a secure data line he had hacked from the agency's servers. He began cross-referencing the victims' names with criminal records. Petty drug dealing. Extortion. Armed robbery. All low-level criminals. People whose disappearance wouldn't trigger a massive federal investigation, just a collective shrug.
"Smart," Thorne admitted grudgingly. Cain wasn't hunting blind. He was choosing his menu carefully. Prey no one would miss.
A new thought, cold and precise, cut through the fog of his exhaustion. Cain wasn't just learning to use his power. He wasn't just hunting to survive.
"You're practicing," Thorne whispered, looking at the photo of the latest victim. "You're training. And every meal makes you stronger. For what?"
He stood and walked to the wall, tracing the red strings with his finger. "You're not hiding. You're preparing for a war."
The next morning, the courthouse conference room buzzed with the energy of victory. The tension and euphoria from the previous day still hung in the air. Jack, dressed in an impeccable suit, drank a coffee with the calm of a man who knows he's in control.
"Judge Thompson spent half the night consulting with his clerks," Jack said with an amused smile as he stirred his sugar. "I can just picture him sweating, looking for legal precedents where there are none. Davies, the prosecutor, probably didn't sleep. They'll be irritable today, tired. It's the perfect time to apply pressure."
Yuls didn't answer. She had been up all night, Miller's report open on the table. She held it in her hand now, a cold, thin presence. She stood by the window, watching the reporters who were already starting to gather at the entrance.
Jack noticed her silence. He was a man who prided himself on reading people, and Yuls's silence was impossible to ignore. He set his coffee cup on the table. The slight clink of porcelain seemed to break the spell.
"What is it?" he asked, his tone shifting from confidence to caution. "Don't tell me you're still thinking about Miller. It was a desperate move from a desperate man, nothing more."
"He gave me something," she said, her voice flat. She turned to face him. Her eyes searched his for any sign of deception. "A souvenir from his detective days."
She walked to the table and slid the folder across the polished surface. It stopped right next to Jack's coffee cup. "I think you should see it."
Jack looked at her first, trying to read her expression. Then his gaze dropped to the folder. His face didn't change, but a stillness came over him. He opened the file. His eyes scanned the typewritten pages, pausing for a mere instant, then fixed on Miller's handwritten notes.
Yuls watched every micro-expression, every blink, searching for a crack in his facade of absolute control. She found none. His face betrayed no emotion.
When he finished, he didn't slam the folder shut. He closed it with a deliberate, almost reverent softness. He placed both hands on top of it and looked up.
"Alistair Murdoch," Yuls said, her voice a tense whisper. The name seemed to fill the room. "Why didn't you tell me, Jack?"
Jack didn't look away. There was no guilt in his eyes, none of the defensiveness she expected. There was something deeper, something she hadn't seen before. An old, settled sadness.
"Because I'm ashamed," he said. The simplicity of the confession disarmed her completely.
"Ashamed of what? That he's dead?" Yuls retorted, feeling frustration begin to boil.
"No," he said, and this time there was a hint of hardness in his voice. "He was a horrible man. A bully with a little bit of power who enjoyed making life miserable for those beneath him. If he died a thousand times, the world would be a thousand times better. I'm not ashamed that he's dead." He paused, and his gaze softened again. "I'm ashamed of how it happened."
He leaned back in his chair, lacing his hands together on the table, adopting the posture of a client confessing to his lawyer, his confidante.
"It wasn't an accident, Yuls. Not like the report describes. It was the first time. The first time I… felt what I really am. He was cornering me against a control panel, screaming in my face for a mistake I hadn't made." Jack scowled, as if the memory still made him sick. "He pushed me. And I… I felt something inside me break. A restraint shattered in my head. Then there was just light and a sharp, metallic noise. When I woke up, the silence was total. He was… like that. And I was alone. And terrified."
The story was exactly what she had pieced together, but hearing it from his lips, with those details, gave it a new dimension. That of a personal tragedy, not a crime.
"Why hide it from me? Why not tell me from the beginning?" Yuls asked, her voice a little softer now. Frustration mixed with a relief she didn't want to admit. "Jack, did you think I wouldn't understand?"
"I didn't hide it. I just… buried it," Jack answered, his voice low, intimate. "That day, in that foundry, Gamma Jack was born. But John Simmons nearly died. He curled up in a corner of my mind and hasn't come out since. I didn't want you to see that part of me. The weak, scared part. The kid who lost control and killed someone by accident. I wanted you to see who I became because of it. The man who controls the power. The man who can use you, yes, but also protect you."
He stood, his movement fluid and silent. He walked around the table and approached her, stopping a step away.
"Miller gave you that to make you doubt me," Jack said, his gaze intense, locked on hers. "To make you believe I'm a monster hiding his past. And he's right. I am. But not for the reasons he thinks."
He moved a little closer. Yuls didn't step back.
"My monstrosity isn't killing a bully in a panic attack," he continued, his voice dropping to a persuasive whisper. "It's that once the fear was gone, once I understood what had happened, a part of me was relieved that he was dead. And that's the truth that neither Miller nor Thorne could ever understand. Sometimes, to fix things, you have to remove the broken pieces."
Yuls looked at him, and for the first time she saw both halves of him. The scared kid he described and the calculating predator she had always known him to be, fused into a single being.
"The world is full of men like Murdoch, Yuls," he said, his voice vibrating with conviction. "Men who take advantage of their little power to do harm. What happened in that foundry taught me the most important lesson of my life. Power without control is a disaster. But controlled power… can change the world. It can cleanse it."
She nodded slowly. The words connected with the part of her that was tired of watching the guilty get away with it. She wanted to believe him. She needed him to be the man he claimed to be. The necessary evil. The flawed savior.
"Alright, Jack," she said, her voice regaining its firmness. "Alright."
A flicker of relief crossed Jack's eyes, so fast she almost missed it. She realized that for all his confidence, her opinion mattered to him. It truly mattered.
He noticed her scrutiny. He saw the last trace of uncertainty in her eyes. Slowly, careful not to startle her, he raised a hand and caressed her cheek with the back of his fingers. His touch was surprisingly gentle.
"Miller wanted you to see a monster," he whispered. "And maybe I am. But not to you." He paused, his gaze searching hers. "Of all the people in this world, of all the allies and enemies… you're the only one I truly trust, Yuls."
The final wall of her defenses crumbled. The confession was so simple, so direct, it couldn't be a lie. It was the missing piece.
Yuls took the final step that separated them and hugged him, burying her face in his chest. She felt his arms wrap around her, strong but not aggressive. It was a protective embrace. One of his hands moved up to the nape of her neck, his fingers beginning to gently play with her hair.
The simple gesture calmed her completely. All her doubts, those planted by Miller and those that had grown on their own, dissipated. In their place, she felt a pang of shame for having doubted him, even for a moment. He had trusted her with his life, his freedom, and she had let an old file make her waver.
She stayed like that for a moment, feeling safe, comfortable in his touch. He said nothing more, just held her.
Finally, he rested his chin on the top of her head. "Good," he said, and the shadow of sadness in his eyes had been replaced by the familiar gleam of victory. His voice, however, was softer. "Now let's finish what we started. Today, we're not just going to question the government. We're going to bring it to its knees."
Yuls pulled back just enough to look him in the eye. "Yes," she said, and this time, the victory felt like hers, too. "Let's do it."