The seat next to me was occupied by a man who could have blocked out the sun.
Not metaphorically. He was simply built that way — shoulders that required their own zip code, a neck that didn't really do the thing necks were supposed to do, which was bend. There was another one on my other side, similarly constructed, and across the aisle two more, and somewhere behind me I suspected an entire row of them, all wearing the specific bland civilian clothing of men who had been told to look ordinary and had taken the instruction as a personal insult.
This was not a private jet.
This was a public airplane, economy seating, recycled air, the small bag of pretzels that airlines gave you as an apology for everything else about the experience. I was squeezed between two men built like cargo containers, on a commercial flight, with my actual face on every news broadcast in the country as a confirmed threat to international security.
I felt this was worth commenting on.
The plane hit turbulence somewhere over the water. A reasonable jolt. The kind that made overhead bins rattle and a baby two rows up start crying with real conviction.
None of the men around me moved. Not a flinch. Not a glance at each other.
"You guys are so quiet," I said, to no one in particular, to all of them at once. "Scared of heights?"
Nothing.
Not even the practiced unimpressed silence people gave bad jokes. Just complete, structural nonresponse, the kind you got from furniture.
I looked at the seatback screen in front of me, which had quietly switched from the flight map to a news feed, because apparently that was a feature now, and the world had decided this was the moment to demonstrate it.
My face.
Not a photo from before. A composite, built from hospital security footage and farmland CCTV, the kind of image that made you look like a threat even when all you'd done in the source material was kiss the ground twice out of pure happiness to be alive. Beneath it: SUPPORT AGENT A3003 — CONFIRMED NEW HUMAN OPERATIVE — DETAIN ON SIGHT.
I stared at it.
Then I looked at the man beside me.
"If there's a bounty on me," I said, slowly, working through it out loud because that was how I worked through things, "why am I on a plane with two hundred people who could, theoretically, recognize my face from the screen they're all currently looking at?"
The man on my left turned his head exactly enough to make eye contact.
"Everyone on this plane works for AXILE," he said. Quietly. Just for me. "We're here to protect you and to make this look like an ordinary flight." He turned back to face forward. "The government won't attack a mass civilian aircraft. It's simple as that."
I sat with that.
"That's either very reassuring," I said, "or the single most insane plan I've heard since I started fighting beetles for survival."
He didn't respond to that either.
I got up and went to the restroom.
The mirror was small and the lighting was the specific unflattering fluorescent that airplane bathrooms specialized in, and I looked at myself in it for a moment and didn't entirely recognize the face looking back, which was becoming a theme.
"Why China," I said, to the mirror, because apparently I was a person who talked to mirrors now. "Why there. I don't even speak Chinese." I ran the tap. "Winston wants to protect me. Fine. I get that. But protect me by sending me somewhere I have no language, no contacts, no idea what I'm walking into?"
The mirror didn't answer.
It hadn't answered the question on the cave wall either. I was noticing a pattern.
I poured water over my face. Let it run for a second longer than it needed to.
Everything that had happened in the last however many days replayed itself in no particular order — the cemetery, the dock, the elevator full of people, Goldsmith's gold floor, the conference I hadn't watched but could feel the shape of from the way the men on this plane had stopped making eye contact with me somewhere over the last hour. The Gadgets had changed. Not slowly. All at once, the way everything in my life seemed to happen now — abrupt, total, no transition period.
I checked the bandage on my side.
It was healing. The doctors at the lab had done good work, whatever else was happening in the rest of my life. I peeled back the edge, checked the skin underneath, reached into my jacket pocket for the small tube of ointment they'd given me and applied it carefully, the way you applied something when the motion itself had become familiar enough to be automatic.
I'd done this exact thing before.
A long time ago.
The ointment smelled the same. That was the thing that did it — not the injury, not the mirror, just the specific medicinal smell of something I hadn't smelled in seventeen years, and the bathroom door blurred slightly at the edges and the fluorescent light did something it shouldn't have done, and then I wasn't on a plane anymore.
The locker room smelled like that ointment and old sweat and the specific industrial cleaning product the government used on every surface in every facility, which I would come to learn was the same cleaning product used in roughly every government building in the country, possibly because someone had signed a very large contract a very long time ago.
"Don't push on it that hard," I said.
Chang-Ho was sitting on the bench, shirt off, working ointment into a bruise across his ribs that had come from a sparring session that had gone slightly further than sparring usually went. He grunted, adjusted his grip, kept going anyway, because that was Chang-Ho.
"We need to be ready," I said. "More ready than we've ever been. For you to beat Kim."
He looked at me.
"Thanks," he said. "For all of this. I mean it." He set the ointment down. "But breaking into a government training facility every other night to help me is going to get you caught eventually. You know that."
"We're identical twins," I said. "Unidentical, technically, but close enough that nobody's looking that hard. The cameras don't know. The people running them don't know. As long as we're careful—"
"Commander Elizabeth knows."
I stopped.
"She doesn't have proof," he said. "But she knows something's off. I've seen her watching." He pulled his shirt back on, wincing slightly. "We get too close to her, get too visible, and everything we've built falls apart. The whole arrangement."
The arrangement, as it existed, was simple and completely insane: Chang-Ho had FuryForce. I didn't. The entrance exam required both a written component and a physical one, and Chang-Ho was a disaster at the written component in the specific way that people with genuine raw power sometimes were, because nobody had ever required him to study anything, the power had always been enough.
I had failed the written exam four times under my own name before we worked out the alternative.
I sat it for him.
He did the physical trials for me.
Neither of us had a single power that overlapped with what the other was doing, which meant on paper it should have been impossible, except that the people grading the papers had never once looked closely enough at two boys who happened to share a face.
"They wouldn't know the difference," I said again, mostly because I needed to hear it said out loud one more time before the trial against Kim.
"Elizabeth would," Chang-Ho said. "Eventually."
I didn't have an answer for that, so I didn't give one.
Kim was good.
I watched from the observation deck because I wasn't allowed on the floor for this part — this was Chang-Ho's portion, the physical trial, the part that actually mattered to the people deciding who got to wear the uniform. Kim came in fast, confident, the kind of confidence that came from a power that had never been seriously tested.
Chang-Ho took him apart in under two minutes.
Not cruelly. Efficiently. The crowd — students, officials, the specific mixed energy of a room watching something it hadn't expected — went very quiet and then very loud at almost the same moment, the way crowds did when something exceeded what they'd been told to expect.
I watched from the deck with my hands in my pockets and felt something complicated that I didn't examine too closely.
Commander Elizabeth watched from the opposite side of the floor.
She didn't applaud.
She watched Chang-Ho with the specific focused attention of someone doing arithmetic that wasn't adding up cleanly, and when the trial ended and the room broke into the noise rooms broke into when something memorable had just happened, she remained still, arms crossed, eyes on him the way you looked at a puzzle you intended to solve eventually, on your own schedule.
Chang-Ho was an official government agent within the hour.
We were leaving the facility separately, on his insistence — "I'll go first, give it ten minutes, then you come out, we're not walking out together looking like the same person twice in one day" — and I waited in the locker room with my phone in my hand until the message came through.
Clear. Come out.
I came out.
The training floor wasn't empty. Two figures were still on it, mid-spar, moving in a rhythm that had clearly been going for some time already. Commander Elizabeth and a girl I didn't recognize — younger than the Commander by a wide margin, fast, using something that sounded before it struck, a kind of compressed air pulse that came off her in short, controlled bursts.
I stood at the edge of the floor and watched without meaning to stay long.
Elizabeth noticed.
She always noticed everything; this was not a surprise.
"You," she said, without turning fully. "Chang-Ho."
I didn't correct her, because correcting her was not an option that existed in any version of this plan.
"Come spar," she said. "Help her find an opening against me."
I felt my stomach do something specific and unpleasant.
"I'm exhausted," I said, which was true, and also a lie, because the actual reason was considerably more practical: I had no FuryForce, Elizabeth was the single most dangerous person I had ever personally witnessed in combat, and stepping onto that floor under my brother's name and immediately losing in a way that didn't match anything Chang-Ho had just done against Kim was a very fast way to end the entire arrangement.
The girl came over while Elizabeth was distracted resetting something on the mat.
"It's not wise to reject your superior," she said quietly, "when you just got the job."
"I tried leaving earlier," she added, with a small, tired half-smile. "Didn't work. I can't afford to lose this position either."
I looked at her properly for the first time.
She had a presence that didn't announce itself the way most powered agents' did — no obvious tell, no visible charge gathering, nothing that told you what she was capable of until she'd already done it.
I swallowed something in my throat that had nothing to do with fear of Elizabeth, which was a separate and considerably more inconvenient problem to be having at this exact moment.
I picked up a bow staff from the rack beside the mat.
Elizabeth turned back, saw it, and something that was almost a smile crossed her face — sharp, assessing, entirely without warmth.
"And when," she said, "did the king of close combat and unlimited energy decide he needed a weapon."
I didn't have a good answer for that either.
Before either of us could throw anything, another officer crossed the floor and waved both of them off.
"Elizabeth," he said, with the specific weary patience of someone who had had this exact conversation before. "Enough. They've had a long day. This isn't training, this is you proving a point. Let them go home."
Elizabeth looked at him.
Then at me.
Then, slowly, she stepped back.
My legs were already shaking, which I attributed afterward to adrenaline and was honest enough with myself, even then, to know wasn't entirely true. I had watched her spar for less than two minutes and understood completely why she was the number one agent in the building — pure strength, pure precision, the kind of control that came from someone who had never once needed to rely on anyone else and had built her entire approach to combat around that fact.
No wonder she'd been the one to notice the stance Chang-Ho used against Kim.
It hadn't been his stance. It had been mine. Years of forge work and broken swords and a teacher who broke things with her bare hands until you understood what they were actually for — that showed up in the body whether you meant it to or not, and Elizabeth, watching from across the room, had clearly seen something that didn't add up.
Whether Chang-Ho had simply been holding back against Kim, or whether the stance belonged to someone else entirely, was a question she hadn't asked out loud yet.
But she was going to.
I came back to myself in the airplane bathroom with the tap still running and my face wet and the ointment half-rubbed into my side, and for a second I didn't know which version of the room I was actually standing in.
The seventeen-year-old who'd swallowed his throat over a girl with no obvious power until she sparred. The eighteen-year-old standing in a recycled-air bathroom on a flight to a country whose language he didn't speak, with his own face on every screen in the cabin behind him, marked as a threat by the very government that boy had once forged sixteen swords to one day work for.
I turned off the tap.
Dried my face with the rough paper towel that airplane bathrooms always had, the kind that did more abrading than drying.
I looked at myself one more time.
"Right," I said, to nobody.
I went back to my seat.
The man on my left didn't move. The man on my right didn't move. Somewhere below us, the plane began its slow descent, and somewhere ahead of us, in a country I had never been to, Winston had already decided something I didn't yet know the shape of.
I looked out the window.
China was coming up fast.