Page 21 of Lone Wolf

Jack waits with the patience of the surrounding trees.

“What’s the fucking point, Jack?”

Jack’s baseball-catcher head bobs twice, giving the question its due. It is respectful, his pause, a willingness to sit with what is. Evan can never see the gears turning in Jack’s head, his opaqueness worthy of a onetime station chief with the Agency. But nothing about him seems furtive either. He regards Evan now with his still-waters-run-deep calm.

“Maybe that is,” Jack says, “the point.”

Evan feels the fall breeze at his throat, the soft give of earth beneath his boots. Unhurried as ever, Jack watches the words work on him.

Jack scratches at his neck, one cheek bunching up. “What if there’s no one to fix anything?” he said. “Except you.”

His lips twitch knowingly and the woods fade away and—

—Evan was back in his penthouse and off the yoga blocks lying on his side, cheek resting against the meat of his biceps, the forgotten Commandment pounding in his head.

He lay there for a time and breathed.

At the edge of the kitchen, Evan stood before the drip-fed vertical garden, breathing in the rich scent of soil. The living wall rose above and around him, dwarfing him. Twined along its lower third was a passionfruit vine. He tested the ovoid offerings, fingertips brushing the wrinkled dark purple hulls until he found one with precisely the right give.

He plucked it.

Walking over to the kitchen island, he selected a teaspoon he’d pocketed at the Savoy Hotel in London and a steak knife fabricated from German stainless steel. He set the passionfruit on a wooden cutting board and sliced a quarter-inch cap of leathery rind off one end. The aperture was just wide enough for him to poke the spoon through the pith to reach the pulpy seeds.

With a minimum of scraping, he gathered the first bite, a clump of black seeds bound by sacs of juice. He brought the spoonful to his mouth, closed his eyes.

Tart and tropical, a faint acidic wash along the sides of the tongue.

He paused and set the teaspoon down on the cutting board next to the passionfruit. With his knuckle he nudged it until it was even with the knife, both parallel to the sides of the cutting board, which was in turn aligned with the edges of the island.

He chewed.

He swallowed.

How you do anything is how you do everything.

12

An Odd Bit of Black Magic

Evan could scarcely believe what he was seeing on the surveillance footage.

A smooth-edged delivery robot the size and shape of a small refrigerator trundling along the sidewalk on six rugged wheels. With its cool aquatic-blue coloring and the Solventry logo—a smiley-face daisy bobbing cheerfully on a stem—emblazoned on the side, it looked unthreatening, adorable, neotenic.

Sitting at his sheet-metal desk in the Vault, Evan observed the future of e-commerce delivery playing out on the OLED screens coating the concrete walls before him.

Life-size Joey floated on the screens to his right, MC’ing the fruits of her hacking whilst masticating her third taco from Henry’s in Studio City, an odd bit of black magic given that it was 8:00 A.M. and Henry’s didn’t open until ten. “They’re like the Solventry mascots,” she said, gesturing at the robot. “They’re named FWIPs. Cute, right?”

“Which stands for?”

“FreeWillPower.” She glugged down some White Pineapple Monster, produced another taco from the white bag, dumped hot sauce over it and most of her fingers, then lapped the side of her hand like a caribou going at a salt lick. “That’s the name of Solventry’s AI division.”

“The Orwellian wordplay boggles the mind.”

“Inferior minds are readily boggled,” Joey said, through a full mouth.

Vera III seemed to smirk at that one, her serrated leaves spread with amusement.

On the big feed covering the front wall, Evan followed the FWIP as it approached a familiar apartment building, nonplussed pedestrians and spooked dogs clearing out of its way. A trio of teenage girls paused to shoot an iPhone video of it.