Kin woke with his hand already reaching for a sword that was not there.
The room was white. Ceiling, walls, the sheet over his legs, all of it white and lit by a lamp that hummed somewhere behind his head. He did not know the room. He did not know how long he had been in it. For a moment he did not know his own name, only the pictures still running behind his eyes, the ones that had been playing when he woke.
***
He had been there. In the dream he had been there, standing at the back of the crowd in the national stadium, close enough to see Diallo's face on the platform, close enough to hear the words. He had tried to move. He had tried to push through the bodies in front of him. But his legs had refused, and the katana in his hand had turned to water, and the crowd had surged forward with a sound like the sea coming over a wall.
***
He had walked through the streets after it happened. He had not chosen to walk. The dream had carried him. In the alleys he had seen what the crowd had done once the words were in them. Bodies on top of bodies. Some of them had been burned. Some of them had been cut. Some of them had been used before they were killed, and the ones who had used them were still there when Kin arrived, standing over the wreckage with their hands wet, looking at him with no particular fear.
He had watched a woman try to cover her daughter with her own body. He had watched a boy of maybe eleven crawl out from under two corpses and look for his mother. He had watched a man laugh.
There had been nothing he could do. Not in the dream. Not in the room where he woke up.
He lay still for a while and listened to the lamp hum.
System.
[Yes.]
Was that you.
[Clarify.]
The dream. The stadium. The streets after. Did you send that.
[No.]
Are you sure.
[I am sure. I do not send images of events that have not happened, unless fabricated and for motivation purposes. My function is assessment, correction, and enforcement. I do not deal in premonition.]
But I saw it. All of it. The bodies. The boy looking for his mother.
[Describe it again. Slowly. Every detail you can hold.]
He described it. The stadium, the platform, the angle of the light. The streets, the smell, the sound the crowd made when it turned. The woman and her daughter. The boy's face. The man who laughed. He gave the System everything, and the System did not interrupt, and when he finished there was a silence in his skull that lasted long enough for him to hear his own pulse.
Then the blue screen opened in his vision.
[Assessment: Unverified but credible. Your account contains internal consistencies that I did not supply. Geographic detail, architectural arrangement, timeline cadence. These are not elements I have transmitted to you.]
So what does that mean.
[It means something has opened. Stand by.]
A new panel appeared. Kin had seen a hundred notifications in the month since the bar, but he had never seen one formatted this way. It was thinner, older, drawn in a script he did not recognize at the edges and translated into characters he could read.
[LEGACY SUBSECT DETECTED: PROPHECY.]
[Status: Latent. Partial access only. This is not a System. It is a subsect, a branch grown from the trunk of the Covenant at some point in its history. It does not function independently. It cannot be directed. It cannot be summoned on request. It can only be received.]
[Trigger: Voluntary risk to preserve allies at cost to self. This trigger has been satisfied.]
[Note: Prophecy subsects have appeared in fewer than nine hosts across twelve hundred years. They are considered unreliable. They are also considered valuable.]
Kin read it twice.
It's a system like you.
[No. It is a fragment. You will not be able to call on it, bargain with it, or command it. You will only be able to receive what it chooses to give. Some hosts have received nothing for years. Some have received everything in a single night and then never again.]
What does it give.
[Forewarning. Sometimes. Not always accurate. Not always in time. The subsects that survived this long are the ones that were careful, and careful things do not speak clearly.]
Kin looked at the ceiling for a while.
It came because I ran into the fire.
[It came because you chose the risk with your eyes open. The System does not reward recklessness. It recognizes sacrifice.]
He flexed his leg under the sheet. It moved. He flexed the other. It moved too. There was a stiffness in his ribs when he breathed, but no knife, no tearing. His arms felt like his arms again.
He sat up.
[Movement observed. Recovery ahead of schedule. Estimated remaining weakness: ten days to fourteen. You will function, but not at your previous output.]
Good enough.
[Do not assume it is good enough. The output you used in the street has a cost that will follow you for weeks. Do not attempt it again.]
I wasn't planning to.
He swung his legs off the bed and put his feet on the floor. The tile was cold. The stiffness in his ribs settled when he stood. He was wearing a white gown that belonged to the hospital, and somewhere on a chair beside the bed was a bag that he had not packed and had not seen before.
He did not have time to open it.
The door clicked and Baros's assistant came in.
She was the same as she had been on the street. Small, grey at the temples, flat-eyed, carrying a folder under one arm and a cup of something hot in the other hand. She looked at him standing and did not look surprised.
"You're awake early," she said.
"I had a dream."
"So I heard." She set the cup on the table and opened the folder. "I have a plan. It is short, it is ugly, and you are not going to like it."
"Go."
She laid out three sheets of paper on the bed. Each one had a photograph, a name, a career history, and a set of credentials. The faces were different, but the build was the same. Young, male, unremarkable.
"This is the security detail that surrounds General Tchoumi at all times," she said. "Twelve men. Two of them rotate out every eight hours. One of the two who rotates out tonight has a mother in the hospital in the eastern quarter. He has requested leave. His request is still pending."
Kin looked at the second sheet. The face on it could have been his, if his jaw were a little wider and his eyes set a little closer together.
"You want me to take his place."
"I have already taken the liberty of flagging the request for approval. It will be granted within the hour. The credentialing process is handled by a clerk who has been in my employment for six years. You will walk into the compound as a corporal named Adeyemi Okoro. You will carry his papers, his sidearm, and his schedule. You will spend the day within arm's reach of the general."
"And then."
"And then you take his head, and you walk out."
Kin picked up the photograph and studied it.
"That is a one-way street."
"It is." She said it without apology. "The general is not the hard part. The hard part is the building. Four hundred men, all of them trained, all of them alert to the possibility of exactly this. The corridors are monitored. The elevators require two separate verifications. There is one stairwell that is not watched, and I have the access code, and that is the only kindness I can give you. If you fail, there is no extraction. If you are caught, no one will come for you. If you are killed, your body will be disposed of in a manner I will not describe to you."
Kin set the photograph down.
"What about after. The warlord."
"Diallo is a separate problem, and he will be in the same building for the speech preparations. If you kill the general, the warlord becomes a man without a hand. He will not know what to do with himself. That is when he is easiest."
Kin said nothing.
She watched him for a moment, then spoke again, quieter.
"There is one other option. I have held it back until now. I can gather twelve hundred men inside a day. Veterans. Men who have reason to hate Diallo. We can put a cordon around the stadium and take it apart from the outside. We can bring the whole thing down."
"How many die."
"A few hundred. Maybe more. The warlord's men will fight. Ours will fight back. Civilians will be caught in the middle, because there is no version of this where they are not."
Kin shook his head.
"Twelve hundred men is twelve hundred bodies. I did sixty-two yesterday. I am not doing twelve hundred today." He stood up. "I take the general. I take the warlord. That's it."
She closed the folder.
"You understand there is no second attempt."
"I understand."
"Then I will confirm the leave request."
She left. The door clicked shut. Kin stood alone in the white room for a moment and then went to the chair where the bag was waiting.
***
The suit was better than the last one.
It was the same color, black, but the material had changed. Where the first suit had been thick, almost rubbery, this one moved like cloth and weighed almost nothing. The System had refined it after Nhamo, after the university, after the street. It fitted at the wrists and ankles and left the neck open. There were no straps, no visible plates, no sign that it was armor at all. It looked like ordinary clothing, and it was not.
[Field Suit Mark Two. Thermal regulation standard. Projectile resistance improved by forty percent. Self-cleaning. Impact dispersal layered at the chest and shoulders. No visible signature from scanners.]
He dressed.
The weapons were laid out on a tray beside the bag, and the katana was not the one he remembered. It was the same length, the same grip, the same weight in the hand, but the spine was thicker. The blade was wider from edge to back, and the back of it was heavy, almost blunt, while the cutting edge stayed thin and bright. He turned it over twice and could not work out what the added mass was for.
System. Why is it heavier.
[You will see.]
That's not an answer.
[It is the only one you are getting. Continue with the rest.]
The handgun was new as well. The old one had been a revolver, a heavy thing that had sat in his palm like a small cannon and given him six shots before he had to think about reloading. This one was a semi-automatic, and it was bigger than the revolver in every dimension. The barrel was long. The grip was wide. The magazine in his hand held nine rounds the size of a man's thumb.
[Kinetic sidearm. Caliber .50. Round is proprietary, produced in the armory. It will penetrate body armor at two hundred meters and stop a vehicle engine at fifty. Recoil is substantial. Your wrist can handle it. Your aim may not.]
Charming.
[Practice is available. There is a range in the basement of this building.]
Later.
He finished dressing. He put the handgun into the holster under his jacket and the katana on his back, and he pulled the jacket over both, and when he looked at himself in the mirror on the far wall of the room he could not see a weapon anywhere on his body. Just a young man in a plain dark suit, going to work.
The door opened again.
Baros's assistant stood in the doorway with a set of car keys in her hand.
"Corporal Okoro," she said. "Your leave is approved. You report at noon."
Kin took the keys.