Page 17 of Antihero

That pink streak on her incisor once more throws static into his system.

The young women are not merely fantasy. They are real.

He is training to become a killer. And yet Jack has tasked him with remaining human. All his other training focuses on the former. This insists on the latter.

For him to become an Orphan worthy of Jack’s training, he has to contain all this inside him—how to feel pleasure while not becoming enslaved to it, how to relate interpersonally while maintaining distance, how to protect others in all their idiosyncratic messiness while sustaining operational perfection.

Cassie kisses his sternum and then the top of his stomach and then his internal obliques and Morgan is leaning over his face, lips moving against his mouth, and she is murmuring, “You can handle it. You can handle all this and not lose your mind,” and he is trying not to gasp and—

—the singing bowl pitch vibrated through the musculature of his lower back and—there, there—put a wobble into the snarl of muscle fiber, loosening it. At last the knot unstitched against the ridge of hip bone, letting go and sending a sparkler streak of fire down to the pinkie toe of his left foot. His shoulders flattened dead smooth across the mat and his neck twinged and he exhaled and kept exhaling longer than made sense until his back cracked from stem to stern. Rolling off the block, he sagged into the fetal position and lay and breathed and breathed some more.

After a time, awash in endorphins and serotonin, he pulled himself to his feet and stood, swaying slightly, finding his bearings. Shirtless, shoeless, dripping with sweat—he felt feral.

One hour and seventeen minutes to wheels-up.

Walking to his master suite, he felt no twinge in his back. Entering the bathroom, he nudged aside the frosted-glass shower door, which retracted silently into the wall on hidden tracks. He showered in chilly water to dampen inflammation.

Drying off, he moved past his floating bed to the bureau. Each drawer held stacks of identical precision-folded apparel—dark jeans, discreet-tactical cargo pants, gray V-necked T-shirts, black sweatshirts. A dozen tactical shirts with magnetic buttons and machine-vision-thwarting patterns hung in the closet, spaced with precise two-inch gaps.

As he dressed, the recollection of his training with Cassie and Morgan lingered. Though it seemed impossible, he was older now than they were then. Like his other instructors, they had taught him control, discipline, restraint. And—it struck him now—something more. Of all his teachers, they were the only ones who demanded that he see them in their totality.

An hour twelve minutes to departure.

A package resting on the middle shelf in the closet caught his gaze. Wrapped in brown paper and adorned with customs stamps, it had arrived a few days ago from Northampton, England, forwarded through several mailing address. He hadn’t opened it yet.

He reached for it, hesitated, hesitated some more, and then took it off the shelf and tore it open. With reverence he lifted the lid off the box inside. A flap of blue polishing cloth bore the coat of arms of the UK’s royal warrant. He peeled back the fabric. Nestled toe-to-shin in the cardboard box, they gleamed inside.

A month ago, they’d beckoned to him from the window of Jermyn Street a few blocks off Savile Row. He’d been strolling back to the Savoy after an Alessandro Palazzi free-poured martini at Dukes, the zest of Amalfi lemon lingering on his lips. For a good twenty minutes, he’d stood on the pavement outside the shop, marveling at the camo brogue boots. For as long as he could remember he selected his gear for maximum efficiency and performance. But never had he acquired something simply because it caught his fancy.

He’d gone inside. And ordered a bespoke pair.

And now here they were. The finest Northampton leather, tanned with oak bark from the surrounding countryside and finished with a camouflage design. The generational tradition of excellence that had given rise to them reached back to eight years before Victoria ascended to the throne. Indeed they were functionally perfect—every stitch of the welt, every dot in the brogue pattern, every perforation of the wing tip. Soles bunked, heels buffed, leather hand-burnished to a near-reflective patina.

Each pair of boots had to pass nearly three hundred individual operations and checkpoints before leaving the factory. Base material alchemized into an embodiment of human excellence. Like him, but beautiful.

He peered down into the box, beholding them.

They looked so out of place here in his penthouse with its poured-concrete surfaces and stainless-steel edges. They were decadent, distinctive, noticeable—everything he was not and could never be. Staring at them now he felt— What did he feel? Guilt? Pride? Unworthiness?

He closed the lid and put the box away again.

Then he donned his Original S.W.A.T.s, which blended into inconsequentiality beneath the cuffs of his cargo pants. He regarded himself in the mirror on the inside of the closet door.

He looked utterly forgettable. Average size, average build, just a normal guy, not too handsome.

Much better. Now he was ready.

The doorbell rang.

Could that possibly be Joey, uncharacteristically early by a full ten minutes? And ringing the doorbell rather than just breaking in with the duplicate key she’d made behind his back?

He moved to the front door and opened it. He expected the usual—Joey in torn jeans, oversize flannel, muscle undershirt, Big Gulp in hand.

But he scarcely recognized the young woman standing before him in a tailored light gray suit. The contrast-stitched blazer sported notched lapels, and her slim-fit poplin blouse had a stand-up collar, revealing a slender dagger of flesh at the throat. Trousers tight at the waist but flared at the cuffs. Her lush brown-black hair was pulled up out of her face, swept loosely into an elegant topknot as big as a sunflower, her undercut even at both sides and understated. Her usual rucksack had been replaced by a sleek leather portfolio briefcase large enough to accommodate her laptop and the usual half dozen items of hacker hardware she kept on her person at all times.

Evan was relieved to spot a few traces of Recognizable Joey—dimple in her right cheek, Doc Martens with embroidered roses, an emerald nose stud accenting her eyes.

He blinked a few times. “Did you get eaten by a fashion magazine?”