Evan’s first focus was the knife.
Darting down at him like a shiv stab, all blade, nothing to grab.
Laid out on the carpet as if he were a corpse, he swept the bar of his forearm protectively across his chest, hammering the girl’s slender wrist and knocking the knife off course just before it broke skin. The tip skimmed his shirt above the ribs, slicing fabric.
His second focus was her fist.
Which she’d cocked and deployed even while her knife hand had still been in motion. He had a split-second to admire the technique—knuckles following blade with double-tap timing—before she broke his nose.
He rolled his head with the punch, tumbled gracelessly up onto his feet. She grabbed the back of his shirt, but the magnetic buttons gave way—click-click-click—and he spun right out of it. His eyes watered from the blow to the nose, but the escape bought him a much-needed second to blink his way back to some version of clarity. She flung the shirt aside and launched a barrage of kicks.
He parried, parried, parried, bruising his forearms and knuckles, holding his attention mostly on the knife.
She came at him again, a jailhouse lunge, but now he was ready for it. His hands moved in blurry unison, a bong sau/lop sau trap that simultaneously blocked and grabbed her arm. He clenched hard, slid his fist up the length of her forearm, and hit the bump of her wrist with enough force that her fingers released and the knife shot free.
They were nose-to-nose, her mouth forming an O of perfect shock. He had a wide-open lane to her windpipe—one elbow strike and she’d be over—but Jack’s Eighth Commandment sailed in and tapped the back of his brain: Never kill a kid.
He barreled her over and pinned her with a cross-face cradle, a grappling move that left her locked up, her knee smashed to her cheek, arms flailing uselessly to the sides.
“Get off me!” she shouted. “I will kill you! I will fucking—”
He pressed his forehead to her temple, immobilizing her head and shielding his eyes. “Breathe,” he said.
She inhaled sharply.
“Again.”
She obeyed.
“Where is the package?” he asked.
“What?”
“What’d you do with the package?”
“The hell are you talking about?”
“You saw the message. You beat me here.”
“Can you get your knee out of my ribs?”
Evan eased off the pressure. “What’d you do with it?”
She gave no answer. Each breath rasped through her contorted throat.
Blood was trickling from Evan’s nose, tickling his cheek. “I’m gonna let you go, and we’re gonna try this again, okay?”
Her answer came strained. “Okay.”
“I’d prefer not to have to kill you.”
“I’d like to say the same, but I haven’t decided yet.”
He released her, and they stood. They kept their palms raised, halfway to an open-hand guard. She drew in deep lungfuls, her cheeks flushed. She was expertly trained but still green.
He got his first clear look at her. Her hair fell to her shoulders, thick and dark and lush. The right side had been shaved short, but it was mostly hidden by the tumbling length of her locks, a surprisingly subtle effect. She was lean and fit, her deltoids pronounced enough to show notches in the muscle.
“I’m gonna put my shirt back on,” he said. “If you come at me, it won’t go well for you.”
Keeping his gaze on her, he backed up and put on his shirt. Next to the rucksack, a ragged flannel rested on the carpet. He tossed it to her.
She tugged it on.
Keeping a bit of distance, they stared at each other. A wisp of agitated piano reached them from outside, the concerto hitting the third movement.
“Let’s cut to it,” Evan said. “I see how you move. I know you’re an Orphan. I know who sent you.”
“You don’t know anything.”
“What’s the package?”
She answered him with a glare.
He risked a fleeting look at her rucksack. “Is it in there?”
“No.”
He crouched over the rucksack.
“Don’t touch my stuff.”
He rooted around in it, sneaking quick glances down. Clothes, a few toiletries, a shoe box filled with what looked like personal letters.
“Put those down.”
“Is there some kind of code in these papers?”
“No.”
He armed blood off his upper lip. “Is the package something on the laptop?”
“No.”
“If you’re lying, I can hack into it.”
Her mouth firmed into something more aggressive than a smirk. “Good luck.”
As he started to reach for the laptop, it suddenly alerted with a ping, the screen saver vanishing.
Four surveillance feeds came up, tiling the screen. It took a moment for Evan to register that they were streaming different angles of the outside of the apartment complex.
The bottom-left feed showed two SUVs blocking the horseshoe of the parking lot. Teams of geared-up operators charged for the front gate.
“Your backup’s here,” the girl said. “What—you couldn’t handle me yourself?” Her voice stayed tough, but her chest heaved with the words. She was scared, and this time he knew she wasn’t faking it.
Evan stared at the screen. The operators displayed a similar military precision to that of the men in the Black Hawk. Evan counted six of them.
Seventeen rounds. Six men.
Just don’t put all the holes in the same place.
On-screen the lead operator kicked the front gate, and it clanged open. Evan heard it in stereo, registered the vibration in the floor.
He and the girl watched as the men poured into the ground-floor corridor.
He said, “They’re not with me.”
His eyes met the girl’s, and he saw that she believed him.
Her voice was hammered flat with dread. “You left the gates unlocked behind you.”
Clang. The stairwell gate flew open, courtesy of Evan’s ill-spent twenty-five cents.
The men throttled up the stairwell. The girl’s eyes darted from the screen back to Evan.
“Enemy of my enemy,” he said.
She gave a nod.
He drew his ARES. “Get behind me. Pick up your knife.”
The girl moved, but not for the knife. She shot over to the mattress and lifted it, revealing a hatch cut through the floor. She looked at him, eyes wild, hair swinging. “My stuff,” she said. “Get my stuff.”
The clamor of the men reached the second floor, spilled onto the corridor.
Evan snapped the laptop shut, rammed it into the rucksack, tossed the combat knife in after. She slipped through the hatch and disappeared. The mattress fell back into place, covering the hole. He didn’t hear her land. He sprinted across the room.
As he yanked up the edge of the mattress, he heard the front door smash in. Snatching the rucksack behind him, he shoulder-rolled beneath the mattress, free-falling. A thump announced the sealing of the hatch above.
He rotated to break his fall, but a soft landing caught him off guard. His boots struck another mattress, positioned on the ground floor directly beneath the one above. He tumbled off the side onto the carpet.
He looked up.
The girl was waiting.
She wrenched the rucksack from his grip, pistoned her leg in a heel stomp directed at his throat. He caught her foot in both hands and twisted hard, flinging her aside. She bounced up off the floor like a cat, shot across the room, flung open the window.
As she leapt through, he grabbed a strap of the rucksack, halting her momentum. She jerked back and banged against the outside wall, one arm bent over the sill. She wouldn’t let go of the rucksack. They were both off balance, caught in a ridiculous tug-of-war across a windowsill.
Boots drummed the floor above. It was only a matter of time before one of the men looked under the mattress.
Evan dove through the window, collecting both the rucksack and the girl in a bear-hug embrace. They sailed past the elderly artist, their fall cushioned by the blanket covered with his paintings. The Cadillac’s radio blared away, the C-major coda galloping along in presto.
Evan hopped to his feet, broken frames falling away, the cubist pieces now cubist in three dimensions. Through the window Evan saw a beam of light appear, a golden shaft piercing the gloom of the ground-floor apartment.
The upstairs mattress, pulled back.
He looked helplessly across the street at his rental car.
Thirty yards of high visibility through traffic.
He’d never make it.
The artist rose from the sidewalk, his flat cap askew. “What kind of damn-fool nonsense is this?”
The girl thrashed free of Evan, landing on all fours. She scampered across the blanket to get away, but it bunched beneath her knees, impeding her progress.
Evan grabbed her arm, spun her up and around, and dumped her into the Cadillac’s open trunk, shattering her straight through a painting of a dissected bassoon. He slammed the trunk an instant before she started battering at it.
He snatched up the rucksack, slung it through the open rear window. “If they hear you, they’ll kill you.”
Her muffled shout came through the trunk. “How do I know you’re not gonna kill me?”
“Because I would’ve done it already.”
He hopped into the car. The keys waited in the ignition, enabling the radio and a pleasing whiff of air-conditioning.
As the concerto tinkled to a close, Evan looked out the open passenger window at the old artist. Through the window over the man’s shoulder, he saw the first shadow tumble from the ceiling.
“Sorry about your art,” Evan said, and peeled out.
He wheeled around the edge of the complex, blending into traffic, coasting past the open mouth of the horseshoe. He looked back at the building.
In the center of the parking lot, a man stood facing away, his head tilted up to take in the second floor. Waiting. He would have looked like an ordinary guy were it not for his posture; he stood with the perfect stillness of the perfectly trained.
Orphan.
One of the operators stepped out through the splintered door of 202 and gestured to the man with two fingers—He’s on the run, went down and out.
The traffic light turned red, and Evan hit the brakes, peering back transfixed as the man in the parking lot sprang into motion. He hit the front gate with his foot, vaulted up, ran four pounding steps along the high fence top, then leapt onto the outside of the stairwell cage. With a series of massive lunging leaps, he scaled the cage and then swung around onto the third-floor corridor. He jumped up, grabbed the hanging roof ledge, and spun himself onto the roof, where he stood with the command of a mountaineer claiming an apex.
He’d parkoured his way up the entire route in under six seconds. Evan allowed himself to be impressed.
The man peered down, evidently picking up the commotion on the sidewalk outside apartment #102. He began a slow rotation, pivoting like a weather vane, his eyes scanning the streets below.
Evan turned back around in the driver’s seat, cranked the sideview mirror to a severe tilt, and watched the man’s reflection. The man finished his rotation, staring down at the mass of cars at the traffic light. It seemed like he was looking directly at Evan in the Cadillac, but of course there was no way it was possible from that distance.
The light turned green, and Evan drove off.