The jet touched down at a private airstrip somewhere in the dry hills north of the capital, and Kin stepped out into air so hot it felt like a hand pressed over his mouth. The sun was high and white. Dust hung in the air, settling on his clothes, on his skin, on the inside of his lungs. Somewhere in the distance, a city hummed—cars, voices, generators, the sound of a million people who had no idea what was coming.
A man was waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs. Not a servant. Not a soldier. Something in between.
He was short and broad, with the shoulders of someone who had once been very strong and the eyes of someone who had never stopped being dangerous. He wore a plain grey shirt and desert trousers, and there was a long knife on his belt that he made no effort to hide.
"You're the Decapitator," the man said. It wasn't a question.
"I am."
"I'm Baros. I run logistics for this operation." He turned without waiting for a reply and walked toward a battered pickup truck parked at the edge of the tarmac. "The others are already at the safe house. We have sixteen hours before the speech. Don't waste any of them."
Kin followed him.
The safe house was a low concrete building on the outskirts of a market district, wedged between a mechanic's shop and a warehouse that smelled of diesel and rotting grain. Inside, the windows were covered with black plastic, and a single bulb hung from the ceiling, casting everything in a yellow half-light.
Four people were waiting for him.
The first was a woman. She was tall and lean, with skin the colour of dark honey and close-cropped hair that showed the pale line of an old scar above her left ear. She wore a black tactical vest over a long-sleeved shirt, and she was cleaning a rifle with the unhurried patience of someone who had cleaned a thousand rifles before this one.
"The Decapitator," she said, without looking up. "You're younger than I expected."
"How old did you expect?"
"Old enough to be dead." She set the rifle down and finally met his eyes. "I'm Selah. I'm the eye. I see the target before anyone else does."
The second was a man, and there was something wrong with him in a way Kin couldn't immediately name. He was sitting perfectly still, hands folded in his lap, and there was no sweat on his face in a room that felt like an oven. His eyes were pale and flat, like coins left in the sun.
"The Gravedigger," he said.
"Excuse me?"
"That's what they call me. I bury what we leave behind." He smiled with only his mouth. "Bodies. Evidence. Witnesses, when necessary. I don't kill. I only clean."
Kin looked at Selah. She shrugged.
"He's useful," she said. "Don't think about him too much. It gives him ideas."
The third man stood in the corner, and Kin knew him before he was introduced. He was enormous—easily two metres, with shoulders that seemed to take up more space than the room allowed. His head was shaved, and a thin scar ran from his left temple down to his jaw. He was doing push-ups against the wall, one arm at a time, and he didn't stop when Kin entered.
"You," Kin said.
The big man paused mid-repetition and looked over. His face split into a slow, wide grin.
"Seventy-three lives," he said. "Amateur."
Kin almost laughed. "The Strongman. From Nhamo."
"I don't have a name you'd recognise. I don't bother with them anymore. I'm on my hundred and fourteenth now." He pushed off the wall and stood, and the floor creaked under him. "Goran was my predecessor. He died well. I heard you were the one who finished the job that night."
"I didn't choose to."
"Nobody chooses." The Strongman cracked his neck. "Doesn't matter. The village lived. That's the only scoreboard."
The fourth was the strangest of them all, and Kin noticed her last because she was sitting on a stool in the far corner, perfectly still, and he had somehow looked past her twice already without seeing her. She was small—barely taller than a child—with wiry arms and a shaved head and eyes that moved constantly, tracking everything in the room at once.
"You're fast," she said.
Kin frowned. "How do you know?"
"I heard you come in. I heard your heart. It beats faster than a normal man's when he's standing still." She hopped off the stool and crossed the room, and she did it so quickly that Kin didn't see the steps between. One moment she was in the corner. The next she was standing directly in front of him, close enough to touch. "I'm Nia. They call me the Rabbit. I run. That's all I do. I run faster than anyone and I don't get tired."
"How fast?"
"Faster than you." She smiled, and it was the smile of someone who had won a lot of bets. "Faster than a car. Faster than a train. Not faster than a bullet, but close. Close enough that most people miss."
Baros handed Kin a folded map and a set of keys. "You'll be driving one of the SUVs. The Strongman takes the other. Nia goes on foot—she's too small to handle a vehicle, and she's faster without one anyway."
"The motorcade?"
Selah stood and unrolled a larger map across the floor. It was a diagram of the city's main avenue, marked with numbers and arrows in red grease pencil.
"Diallo doesn't travel alone," she said. "Fifty SUVs. Twenty-seven motorbikes. Twelve minivans. Five armoured trucks. They move in one formation, tight and disciplined. Every vehicle is identical in make and colour. Every window is tinted. There is no lead car, no chase car, no way to know which vehicle he's actually inside."
Kin crouched over the map. "So we don't know where he is."
"We don't know where he is," Selah agreed. "But he doesn't know where we are either. That's the only advantage we have, and we're going to spend it tonight."
The Gravedigger spoke from his corner without moving. "They rotate the formation at every intersection. The motorcade changes shape like water taking the shape of a jar. It is beautiful to watch."
"You've watched it before?"
"I watch everything before I do it." He blinked slowly. "I watched for eleven days. That is why I know the general."
"What general?"
Selah drew a circle on the map with her thumb. "There's a man called General Tchoumi. He rides in the fifth armoured truck. He's the one who designed the formation. He's also the one who trains the foreign contractors—the international men you were warned about. He has an instinct for patterns. If anyone in that convoy notices us, it will be him."
Kin looked at her for a long moment. "I thought this was child's play."
"I didn't say that yet." She almost smiled. "I'll say it when it becomes true."
The Strongman crossed his arms and leaned against the wall, and the concrete groaned faintly under his weight. "If it goes wrong, I'll make a door. Nia will get you through it. That's the plan. Everything else is details."
Nia, from the doorway, added, "And if the details go wrong, I'll be somewhere else before anyone knows I was there."
Kin looked around the room at all of them—at Baros with his knife, at Selah with her rifle, at the Gravedigger with his flat coin-eyes, at the Strongman with his hundred and fourteen lives, at Nia with her impossible stillness.
He had never worked with a team before. Not really. Not since the System had chosen him.
"All right," he said. "Let's go."
***
The evening came fast in Giniya, the sun dropping like a stone.
They left the safe house at dusk in two identical SUVs and slipped into the river of traffic on the main avenue. Kin drove the first, with Selah beside him and Baros in the back. The Strongman drove the second, alone, keeping one lane over and three car lengths back. Nia had vanished before they even pulled out of the warehouse—she was on the rooftops, or in the alleys, or somewhere else entirely, and the only proof she existed was the occasional whisper in their earpieces.
For forty minutes, nothing happened. The two SUVs drifted through the traffic, never close enough to be noticed, never far enough to lose sight.
Then the motorcade began to assemble.
Kin saw it first in his rear-view mirror: a wall of dark vehicles pouring out of a government compound, taking the avenue in unison, shutting down lanes without any visible signal or effort. Pedestrians scattered. Street vendors pulled their carts out of the road. Traffic on the other side of the median slowed and stopped, and every driver in the city bowed their head as if a storm had passed over them.
Fifty SUVs. Twenty-seven motorbikes weaving between them like flies. Twelve minivans moving as one body. Five armoured trucks spaced evenly through the column, grey and heavy and utterly silent.
Then the entire formation changed shape at the first intersection—spreading, widening, re-forming into a new pattern—and Kin understood what the Gravedigger meant. The motorcade did not drive. It flowed.
"The fifth truck," Selah said over the radio. "That's Tchoumi. Watch it."
They followed.
For an hour, it went perfectly. Kin stayed three cars behind a sedan driven by Baros, and the Strongman's SUV slid through the traffic like a fish in a current, never closing, never falling back. The motorcade turned east. They turned east. It slowed at a checkpoint, and they slowed with it, in the next lane, indistinguishable from a hundred other vehicles going about their evening business.
Kin's hands were steady on the wheel. His breathing was even. He was doing this. He was actually doing this.
Then the radio cracked.
"Kin," Selah said, and her voice had changed. "Fall back."
"What?"
"Fall back now. The fifth truck."
He glanced at the mirror.
One of the armoured trucks had slowed. Not much. Just enough to let the two SUVs ahead of it pass, and then the two SUVs beside it pass, and then it was sitting squarely behind Kin, and two minivans had closed on his flanks, and another minivan had pulled up alongside his window, so close he could see the man in the passenger seat turn his head and look directly at him.
Six minivans. One armoured truck. They had been singled out—not by accident, but by design.
"God," Kin whispered.
The minivans began to slow.
The armoured truck braked behind him, and the minivan beside him matched his speed, trapping him between them, and a second armoured truck appeared in his rear-view mirror, cutting off any chance of reversing out. Behind him, the Strongman's SUV was boxed in by four more minivans.
The convoy ahead—the other forty-eight SUVs, the other twenty-six bikes, the other four trucks—did not slow down at all. It simply continued down the avenue without them, the tail lights shrinking into the dark, until Kin and the Strongman were alone in the middle of a road in a foreign country with enemies on every side.
The minivans stopped.
The armoured trucks stopped.
The doors opened.
Kin reached for the katana, and his hands were shaking, and he hated himself for it.
Then a hand closed over his, hard, and squeezed.
Selah was in the passenger seat. He hadn't heard her get in. He didn't know when she'd slipped through the door.
"Look at me," she said.
He looked at her.
"Compared to what I've witnessed," she said quietly, "this is merely child's play. They don't know who you are. They think you're a spy with a false plate. That's all. Breathe. And do not move until I tell you to move."
Over the radio, the Strongman's voice came low and calm. "I can make a door whenever you say."
And from somewhere outside, from the darkness between the buildings, from a place Kin could not see, Nia's voice whispered through the earpiece.
"I'm already behind them."
Outside, boots hit the pavement. Not running—marching. Heavy, deliberate, measured. Lots of them. More than six vehicles' worth. More than twenty men. The sound rolled around the empty street like a drumbeat.
And then, one after another, the guns were cocked.