C-2
The elevator didn't take long, but every second it felt like an hour. Jack Williams gripped the rail with palms that didn't stop shaking until the doors sighed open. Rafael Rios's grip on his elbow was iron, efficient — the kind of grip that steadied you whether you liked it or not.
"Breathe," Rafael said, low and businesslike. "Listen to me. You ever watched a storm up close? It doesn't ask permission before it breaks. You'll react. Don't let it decide for you."
Jack blinked and tried to make his lungs obedient. The fluorescent hallway outside the elevator smelled of recycled air and hot plastic. Guards moved with quiet purpose, faces set like flint. The lockdown lights outside cut the world in slices—red, then white, then green—until his head swam.
"You're not a trainee tonight," Rafael continued. "You decrypted something dangerous. That puts a target on your back. We either sit and wait for them to come knocking or we go meet them. Astra's choosing the second option, so focus."
Jack wanted to ask a dozen questions. What was Helix? Who were they? Why him? He swallowed them all down; words would slow him when silence was currency.
The mission briefing had been a blur: a covert insertion to intercept a courier in downtown Baltimore who'd been flagged by the same strange packet signature. Minimal team. High risk. No press. Rafael's tighten-on-the-fly plan had one simple goal: intercept the courier and extract a data drive before the courier met a buyer rumored to have ties to Black Reign.
"You'll be a comm node," Rafael said. "Keep your head down. Observe. You see something, you say it. You move when I tell you to move. You don't improvise unless I say improvise. Understood?"
"Understood," Jack lied and meant it at the same time.
They drove through the predawn like ghosts. The city passed in washed streaks of orange street lamps, and every block seemed to hold its breath. Rafael didn't speak much; when he did, it was to point out safe lanes, choke points, and cameras. Jack tried to memorize the geometry like it mattered. He replayed the packet line in his head — HELIX//PHI-001: STAGE 3ACTIVATED — and felt the words scrape under his skin.
They arrived at a low-slung cafe a block off the meeting point. Rafael slid him into a corner booth, his back to the wall. Two other agents in plain black settled along the table, eyes steady on the windows. Their names were terse. They weren't friendly. They were machine-quiet.
"We get one shot at this," Rafael said, eyes on Jack. "No heroics. No curiosity runs. Just watch and tell."
Jack nodded. He'd processed traffic, coded scripts, and stayed up nights doing pattern recognition that ate sleep. He had never run with a team like this.
"Also," Rafael added, "if anyone asks, you're with me. Don't say your real role."
The courier arrived on time, a man in his thirties, gray hoodie under a coat, sunglasses despite the hour. He moved like someone used to being noticed. He looked at the cafe window once, twice, and then walked into the crosswalk where two men in suits waited with an umbrella — the kind of messy, casual cover Rafael had warned about.
Jack's comm earpiece buzzed. Rafael's voice was calm as the bottom of a well.
"Two targets to your left," he murmured.
"Third will show up in ninety seconds. Keep visual."
Jack watched the human chessboard. The courier exchanged a small envelope for a metallic case. His fingers brushed, and the world rearranged. That case — the courier's hand on it — was the axis of the night.
A figure detached from the crowd: slight, all black, longhair tucked into a tactical hood. Jack's throat closed for a moment. He had seen File Photos, tactical specs burned into his skull during basics.
But nothing prepared him for a person who moved as if gravity was negotiable. She swept in like a wind that knew the layout of the room. The first thing Jack noticed — incongruous beneath the cold precision — was the way she carried herself: compact, muscular, but with a dancer's grace.
Her eyes scanned like someone cataloging threats and exits and yet also reading the human hearts in the room.
"Agent Maya Rios," Rafael said softly right in Jack's ear, like he'd read Jack's sudden recognition.
"The blade."
Maya moved slower now, a predator choosing distance to close. She didn't look like an assassin to Jack; she looked like a person who'd been given a thousand bad reasons to never trust the world again — and had chosen not to.
The handoff happened the way Rafael predicted: quick, mechanical. But then an unanticipated element crashed the plan — a second courier, a different group, a flash of movement by the side street. A bark of a gunshot split the morning like a clean cut.
Chaos is uglier than any simulation. People slump, sprint, yell. Tables go over. Rain spatters across the open air. Jack found his body doing things he hadn't told it to. He stood. He ducked. His heart pounded like a drum in a parade.
"Now!" Rafael snapped.
Maya exploded into motion. No wasted breath, no hesitation. She lunged, snatched the metallic case with one motion, and pivoted toward an alley.
Someone tried to block her; she spun, struck with the flat of her knife, and a man doubled, blood and surprise painting his face.
Rafael and the others surged, and Jack, on some strange biological wiring learned from watching too many tutorials, followed. His mind ticked off observations like a running commentary.
— Maya's left knee bent slightly when she turned; she uses it to generate torque.
— Her breath is steady; she's trained to even respiration in chaos.
— She doesn't look at the case she's carrying; her eyes flick to exits and engine noise.
They reached the alley as a black SUV peeled out of the road, bumpers glinting. Two figures bolted from the vehicle, faces covered.
The courier, or one of his men, had an AR raised. Rafael cursed and shoved Jack behind a dumpster without breaking stride.
"Stay put!" Rafael hissed into his ear.
Jack crouched, adrenaline and cold rain mixing into a sharp clarity. Gunfire hammered the alley like a drumroll. Bullets pinged off metal, ricocheted from the dumpster. The world shrank to the smell of wet stone and oil.
Then the impossible happened: Maya flattened against the far wall and, in the same breath, lunged sideways, stunning one shooter with an elbow strike and sweeping the second with a low, spinning kick that dislocated his knee. She moved like someone who'd been carved by conflict and honed by discipline.
She saw Jack then — a pale newcomer with fear written allover his face — and for a moment the motion in her body slowed. She didn't smile. She didn't even blink in surprise.
She simply assessed him with a glance that could have been kindness or a blade checking metal.
"You with us?" she asked, voice low and sharp — not a reprimand, merely a query.
Jack realized his lungs were on auto: the answer came out as a rasp. "Yes."
Good enough. She gave him a quick order for cover, a point to aim, and a hand signal to move. Rafael's nod told Jack he'd been accepted for the span of a heartbeat.
They moved as practiced units. Rafael took the left flank. Maya cut across the center. The other agents folded into the right. Jack's job— observe, feed data through code, and relay — was suddenly useless when shots ricocheted and life shuffled into survival.
Instead he became a human sensor, shouting positions and shouting numbers and, finally, watching Maya with a ridiculous, human astonishment: she didn't hesitate before she rescued civilians; she moved around them like a small hurricane, pulling them to safety as if each life was a thing she promised not to break.
They secured the case after a messy exchange in which Maya ducked under a swing and gamely wrestled a man twice her size into a choke.
A small ceramic drive nested inside like a seed inside a shell. Rafael popped it open and skimmed the data on a secure pad.
His jaw didn't move. He didn't need to explain to Jack. "Helix signature," he said finally, and the words sounded hollow in Jack's ears.
Jack felt a vibration in his comm. Ward's voice seeped through his earpiece — colder than the rain, but a thread of something like relief underneath.
"Secure the asset. Evacuate north alley. No transmissions for five minutes."
They did. Bodies moved like one organism, breathing in the quiet after the storm.
Sirens wailed in the distance, but the alley was theirs in the small map of the world unseen by cameras.
Jack was so uncomfortably alive that he could feel each beat like a fist.
Maya sat on a curb, the drive between her palms, rain sliding across her cheekbones. Up close, the scar across her shoulder looked small, like a punctuation on a sentence. Her breath fogged the air. She didn't lookup; she let the rain be for a moment.
Rafael had left for a perimeter sweep. One of the black-clad agents made coffee on a small, illegal camp stove. Jack felt sideways as if he'd been tilted by his own life.
"Not bad for a desk jockey," Maya said finally, not unkind. She studied him like someone who read the small tells of people — the curling of a thumb, the blink, an absent memory — and then gave him the smallest smile, almost imperceptible.
"You froze at first," she added. "Then you watched. That's better than most."
"Why did you—" Jack began. "Why did you come in like that? Why risk—"
She cut him off with a flat gesture. "Because it was my job. Because sometimes you have to be the blade that takes the first cut so others don't lose everything. Now are you going to keep watching, or are you going to be useful?"
Jack wanted to be useful with the kind of warmth that comes from competence, not cowardice. He forced himself to stand and offered the kind of smile he'd practiced in mirrors for interviews. "I'll be useful."
She looked at him for a long second and then tucked the drive into a mesh pouch and slid it into her sleeve. "Good. We may need more than useful."
There it was — an invitation, and a warning. Jack felt the shift in his gut: this woman was not going to coddle him. She was not going to be his savior. She would be the mirror that showed him what he needed to be, and it would hurt to look.
They moved as the team retreated into the damp streets toward the extraction. As they left, the alley swallowed their footsteps and closed the scene into its own small memory box.
The world would continue in its sleepy, rain-softened way, but for Jack the edge had already been cut.
Behind them, somewhere in the dark geometry of finances and laboratories and men who thought in ways that smelled of metal and ambition, someone watched the feeds.
A slow, patient hand traced the contour of a face on a bright screen: Jack Williams, pale and untested, blinking at rain.
Plans, like storms, continued to assemble.
And in an even colder place, a file labeled with his new name blinked in a queue waiting for retrieval:
Prototype Alpha — Jack Williams (COLE legacy).
He had been Jack Williams for twelve hours and a life time. His desk scripts and midnight code were now a single data point on a map of tides.
Maya walked beside him, silent and dangerous and somehow, absurdly, human.
Jack clenched his hands in his pockets and let the rain wash the city clean, for now. The mission had gone about as well as it could have. For every success, there would be a cost. That cost, he suspected, would be paid over years.
"Ready for the next one?" Rafael's voice popped into his earpiece.
Jack stared into the rain-silvered street and felt his voice steady. "Yeah."
Maya glanced at him, then forward at the city waking up around them, and a ghost of something like approval flickered across her face.
"Good," she said simply. "We'll teach you how to survive it."
Jack swallowed the words and a new, strange kind of determination settled in his chest. He'd been pulled into the breach; there was no going back. He would learn to move with storms. He would learn to be the blade. For now, he would be the student taking the first bruise.
And somewhere in the quiet, the name Helix shifted its position on every map that mattered.