Chapter 9 Same blood with different weapons
Ethan spoke first.
"What's your name?"
The man looked at him. Something moved across his face. Not a surprise exactly. The particular expression of someone who had been asked a question they had stopped expecting. As the question belonged to a version of his life that existed before whatever had been done to him, and hearing it now was like finding something in a coat pocket he had forgotten he owned.
"Kane," he said.
Just that. One word. No last name offered. No last name available, the way Ethan read it.
"Kane," Ethan said.
"Yes."
They looked at each other across the destroyed doorframe for one more second.
Then Kane moved.
---
It was nothing like the street. Nothing like the office.
Those had been fast and clean and completely without cost because the distance between Ethan and a normal human being was too large to generate anything worth calling a fight. Twelve men. Eight men. Numbers that had meant nothing because numbers assumed equivalence, and there was no equivalence.
Kane was different.
Ethan felt it in the first exchange. Kane's fist connected with his forearm in a block, and the impact traveled up through his shoulder and into his back and moved him sideways two full steps in a way that had not happened to him in four years. He processed the information immediately. Kane hit harder than anything the program had prepared him to absorb. Not faster. Harder. Raw power that had been built into him the way speed had been built into Ethan. Different outcomes from the same science applied to different bodies.
He adjusted.
Faster was the answer. Not stronger. He could not match Kane's power, and matching it would be the wrong instinct. He needed to be somewhere else before the power arrived.
The table went first. Kane threw it without throwing it. Just moved through it the way water moves through paper, and it came apart against the wall. Ethan was already on the other side of the room. Kane turned and found him and moved again, and Ethan moved again, and the chair that had been between them became pieces in the space where Ethan had been half a second earlier.
The window went next.
Ethan went through it deliberately. Fourth floor onto a ledge. Narrow. He caught the frame and swung and came back in through the same window from a different angle before Kane had finished processing where he had gone. The impact from behind sent Kane into the remaining wall hard enough to crack the plaster in a spiderweb pattern that spread two meters in each direction.
Kane turned around.
He was smiling.
Not the smile from before. Something different. The smile of someone who was genuinely enjoying something for the first time in longer than they could remember.
He came off the wall and hit Ethan with something that connected with his ribs on the left side, and Ethan felt three of them go in quick succession like snapping branches. He hit the opposite wall and slid down it, and was back on his feet before Kane crossed the room, but only barely. The ribs were already moving, but slowly. Too much damage is arriving too fast for the healing to keep pace with it.
He hit Kane twice in the next four seconds. Once in the throat. Once behind the left ear. Both landed. Kane's head moved with each impact, and his steps stuttered, and for two seconds, he was off his rhythm.
Two seconds were enough.
Ethan moved inside his guard and hit him low, and Kane went down to one knee.
They both stopped.
Both were breathing harder than they had been. Ethan has three ribs knitting themselves back together on the left side. Kane, with his hand on the floor, steadied himself and his head down.
The room was destroyed around them. Table. Chairs. Window frame. A section of wall. The door was still across the room where it had landed when Kane removed it from its frame.
Ethan looked at him on one knee.
"You know what was done to us," he said.
Kane looked up.
"Diana built us," Ethan said. "And when she was finished with the building, she discarded everything she didn't want. You. Me. Everyone else who didn't survive the process." He looked at him steadily. "The woman behind the mask is using what Diana built. Using you. You are not a weapon, Kane. You are a person who was turned into one without being asked."
The room was very quiet.
Kane looked at him from the floor with an expression that had no clean name. Not anger. No agreement. Something that was happening underneath both of those things in a place the enhancement process had altered but not reached completely.
Nobody had said that to him before.
He could not have explained how he knew that. He just knew it the way you know things that live in the body rather than the mind. Nobody had looked at him and said person in longer than he had a clear memory of.
He said nothing.
But he stayed on one knee and did not get up and did not move, and the fight was over in the specific way that fights end when one participant stops seeing the point of continuing.
---
They came in through the door that was already on the floor.
Six of them. Tactical. Black. Moving with the tight efficiency of people who had been told the room would contain two damaged enhanced subjects and had prepared accordingly. Tranquilizer rifles. Not standard weapons. Specific. This collection had been planned before the fight started.
She had always intended to take them both.
Ethan processed all of it in under a second.
Six collectors. Two damaged subjects. His ribs at sixty percent. His speed is intact, but his power output is compromised by the structural damage underneath it. Kane is still on one knee with his hand on the floor.
He looked at Kane.
One second.
Kane looked back at him.
Something flickered. A hesitation that lasted exactly as long as it took for Ethan's words to move through whatever was left of the person underneath the programming and arrive somewhere and create a moment of confusion between what Kane had been told to do and something else that didn't have a name yet.
One second.
Ethan moved.
Not toward the collectors. Toward the window frame. The gap where the window had been. He went through it and grabbed the exterior and moved along the ledge with three broken ribs, and the collectors were still processing his direction when he dropped to the third floor, and then the second, and then the street.
He hit the pavement and kept moving.
He did not look back.
Behind him in the room, Kane was still on one knee when the programming snapped back into place. Clean. Decisive. The hesitation closed over like water closing over a stone. He stood up, and the collectors moved around him with the practiced ease of people handling something familiar, and he went with them because going with them was what he was built to do.
---
She was watching the feed when Kane came back.
She had watched all of it. The fight. The conversation. The one second of hesitation before Ethan went through the window. She had watched Kane's face during that one second with the focused attention of someone seeing a result they had not predicted and were not sure yet what to do with.
Kane stood in front of her in the room with no windows.
She looked at him for a moment.
"What did he say to you?" she said.
Kane told her. Exactly. Word for word. The way he remembered everything. Precisely and completely and without interpretation.
She sat with it.
The room was very quiet around her.
Then she said one word.
"Interesting."
She looked at the monitor showing the empty, destroyed room in the private members' club. The broken table. The cracked wall. The window frame has nothing in it.
She picked up the mask from the table beside her and turned it over in her hands slowly.
One enhanced subject had just fought another enhanced subject to a genuine standstill and walked away with three broken ribs, and said something in the process that created a hesitation in a brainwashed weapon that she had believed was beyond hesitation.
She set the mask down.
"Bring me Diana's complete files on the Cole subject," she said to the person standing behind her. "Everything. Not the summary. The raw data."
The person left.
She looked at the monitor.
Ethan Cole was somewhere in this city right now with a hard drive full of his father's findings and three ribs that were almost certainly already healed and a brain that was running stranger than anything Diana had fully documented.
She had sent Kane to test his ceiling.
She still hadn't found it.
