Chapter Text
Nine days before the launch of the Hail Mary, a catastrophic miscommunication at the Russian research facility resulted in an explosion the equivalent of a localized tactical nuke, instantly killing Dr. Martin DuBois and Dr. Annie Shapiro, the primary and secondary Science Specialists for the mission to save humanity.
Inside a heavily secured boardroom of a commandeered Southern California aerospace facility, Eva Stratt folded her hands neatly on the matte-black conference table.
“Well,” Stratt said. “This is certainly inconvenient.”
At the far end of the table, sweating profusely through a slightly oversized knit sweater, Ryland Grace stopped polishing his glasses. He stared at her, his jaw practically unhinging.
“Inconvenient?!” Grace shrieked. He pointed a trembling finger at the casualty report on the monitor. “They’re dead, Stratt! DuBois and Shapiro are dead!”
“I am aware of their vital status,” Stratt replied, unfazed by his outburst. Beside her, Commander Yao pinched the bridge of his nose, while Olesya Ilyukhina only observed with her arms crossed. Stratt didn’t look at either of the astronauts. Stratt kept her gaze locked entirely on the panicked science teacher. “With Dr. DuBois and Dr. Shapiro gone, we are left with no choice.”
Grace froze. The air conditioning of the briefing room suddenly felt freezing cold against his damp skin. “What does that even mean?”
“We launch in less than three weeks. We do not have the time to find, vet, and train someone who possesses both a PhD in the relevant sciences and the coma-resistant gene. Fortunately, the man who discovered how Astrophage breeds happens to possess that exact genetic anomaly.”
Stratt leaned forward, resting her hands flat on the table. “Dr. Grace, I need you onboard the Hail Mary.”
Grace’s brain, usually capable of processing complex molecular biology at blinding speeds, ground to a complete and utter halt. He looked at Stratt completely dumbfounded.
“What do you mean— what?!”
“It is the only solution,” Stratt said.
At that moment, the only thing Grace could really do was stare. He closed his eyes and took a very, very deep, shuddering breath. “I,” he began, “am a middle school science teacher.”
He pushed his chair back and stood up on legs that felt like overcooked noodles. He backed away, and his hands came up in a frantic, trembling gesture of surrender. “I am not an astronaut,” he stammered, visibly shaking in his shoes as he practically hyperventilated. “I get nauseous on commercial flights. I... I’m the lab guy, Stratt.” He spun around, finding the commander. “Tell her, Yao!”
Yao did not tell her. The commander simply looked at him and offered a very small and utterly unhelpful shrug.
“The survival of the human race is currently taking precedence over your motion sickness.”
“I can’t go! It’s a suicide mission!” Grace looked desperately at Yao and Ilyukhina, but the two actual astronauts just stared at him with varying expressions of grim realization. They had already accepted it. He hadn’t. “You’re sending people to die in the dark!”
“I am sending people to save the Earth,” Stratt corrected him.
“I don’t —” he trembled. “I don’t want to die.” The raw honesty tore out of his throat. He was just a man terrified of the dark.
Stratt sighed. She walked around the edge of the table, closing the distance until she was standing just a few feet away from him.
“You can’t force me. None of you can force me.”
“I have unilateral authority over every military and civilian agency on the planet,” she reminded him. She tilted her head, analyzing him. “Besides, what are you staying for? Look at your file, Dr. Grace. You have no spouse. No children. You don’t even have a dog. There is absolutely nothing tethering you to this Earth. Your life is entirely dispensable in the grand calculus of our survival.”
The words hit him like a physical blow. You have no family.
For a fraction of a second, everything else dissolved. Ryland’s memories of his childhood were fragmented, but the feelings were still there baked right into his bones.
He remembered the grounding weight of an older brother’s calloused hand on his shoulder. Courtland, always quiet, always stepping up to take the brunt of the responsibility. I’ve got it handled, Ry. Don’t worry about it. And he remembered a mop of messy blonde hair and the frantic, protective energy of his other brother throwing an arm around him. Colt, his twin, always chaotic, always making sure Ryland was safe before himself. Don’t let them mess with you again, okay, Ry?
He had family, his brothers. He was about to say it, to prove to Stratt that he wasn’t the lonely, isolated pawn she thought he was. He opened his mouth and the words I have brothers sat right on the tip of his tongue. Then he just snapped his jaw shut.
Ryland swallowed the lump in his throat. He looked past Stratt to the heavy steel door of the briefing room. Two armed military guards stood on the other side of the glass partition.
“I…” Grace stammered, his mind racing. He needed time. He needed to get out of this room. “I need to pee.”
Stratt stared at him. “...You need to pee.”
“Yes,” Grace said, clutching his stomach and shifting from foot to foot, injecting as much pathetic urgency into his body language as possible. He didn’t have to fake the tremor in his hands. “I’ve been drinking coffee all morning. My bladder is completely full. And the explosion... hearing about DuBois and Shapiro... it really, you know, activated my fight or flight. And right now, it’s mostly flight in the, uh… urinary tract department. Just a natural biological response to extreme stress.”
Yao looked resolutely at the ceiling. “Please, Dr. Grace. I am begging you to spare us a biological thesis on your bodily functions.”
Ilyukhina scoffed loudly, throwing her hands up in exasperation. “Just let him go pee, Stratt, before he makes puddle on your nice floor.”
Stratt pinched the bridge of her nose. “Fine. Corporal,” she called out to the guard outside the glass. The man opened the door and stepped in. “Escort Dr. Grace to the restroom. Do not let him out of your sight. We prep him for transport to the training facility in ten minutes.”
“Thank you,” Grace muttered, scurrying out of the briefing room.
The men’s restroom was three doors down the sterile, fluorescent-lit corridor. It wasn’t a multi-stall setup. It was a single, large, tiled room with just one toilet and a sink. Grace reached for the heavy wooden handle, pushing the door open. He stepped over the threshold, ready to close it behind him, but the corporal immediately followed him right inside the room.
“Wait, inside?” Grace squeaked, shrinking back against the paper towel dispenser. “Come on, man. I’m a grown adult. I need some privacy. Unless you want to hold it for me while I go? Because that feels like a violation of several HR policies, even with Stratt’s unilateral authority.”
The corporal simply stared down at him from behind his tactical visor, entirely unamused. However, common decency (or perhaps the sheer overwhelming awkwardness of the proposition) eventually won out. The massive guard took a single step backward into the hallway and assumed a stoic, statuesque position right outside.
“Make it quick, Doctor,” the guard grunted.
“You bet,” Grace nodded frantically.
The heavy wooden door clicked shut. The very second the latch engaged, he moved with a frantic and terrified speed. He didn’t go to the urinal. He went straight to the frosted glass window at the back of the room. It was locked, designed only to tilt open a few inches for ventilation.
Ryland Grace was not an action hero. He had never even been in a fight in his life. He pulled off his belt, wrapped the heavy metal buckle around his fist, and swung it at the locking mechanism. It was a purely desperate and irrational reflex. He knew it wasn’t going to work, because why would it? This was a highly classified aerospace facility run by a woman with unlimited global authority, the hardware on these windows had to be military-grade, heavily reinforced steel designed to completely withstand—
SNAP!
Grace blinked, lowering his fist. He stared at the shattered metal lying on the sill. Oh. It was just a cheap institutional latch. It broke.
He stood there for a second. Then a weird, highly specific spike of indignation hit him. Stratt was throwing around trillions of dollars, bypassing the Geneva Convention, and she had secured a top-secret, humanity-saving aerospace facility with a five-dollar piece of die-cast zinc from a wholesale hardware catalog?
It was, frankly, insulting.
Shoving his outrage over their appallingly bad procurement practices aside, he pushed the window open. It was a tight squeeze, and based on the layout of the facility, he knew he was on the second floor facing the rear alleyway.
Gravity is an acceleration of 9.8 meters per second squared, his brain supplied unhelpfully as he hoisted himself onto the windowsill. Assuming a fall of approximately fifteen feet to the concrete below, my velocity upon impact will be…
“Shut up, brain, the answer is broken legs,” he hissed to himself.
He squeezed his shoulders through the frame, blindly kicking his legs out. He scraped his stomach raw on the aluminum track, hanging by his fingertips for one terrifying second before letting go. He hit the ground like a sack of wet cement.
A sickening CRACK echoed in the alleyway, followed immediately by a muffled, agonizing scream. Searing pain exploded in his left side. He rolled onto his back amongst the gravel and discarded pallets, gasping like a beached fish. Ribs. Definitely broken ribs. At least two, maybe three.
“Oh God,” he wheezed, tears springing to his eyes as his chest seized. He forced himself to roll over, biting his lip so hard it bled to keep from screaming again. He couldn’t stay here. The corporal would check on him any minute.
Clutching his side, his neatly pressed slacks now covered in dumpster grime, dirt, and alleyway grit, Grace staggered to his feet. He leaned heavily against the brick wall for a second and attempted to fight off a wave of intense nausea. Then, driven by pure terror, he began to run toward the blinding Southern California sun.
Exactly three minutes later, the massive corporal standing outside the heavy wooden door rapped his knuckles against the wood.
“Dr. Grace. Wrap it up,” the corporal grunted.
Silence.
The corporal frowned. “Doctor?” He twisted the handle, but it didn’t budge. “Dr. Grace, open this door!”
When the silence persisted, the corporal took a half-step back, raised his combat boot, and drove it squarely beneath the handle. The wood splintered with a violent crack, and the door flew open, slamming against the tiled wall. The bathroom was completely empty.
The cool Southern California breeze was fluttering the paper towels by the sink, blowing in from the wide-open, frosted glass window. A piece of shattered metal lay on the sill.
“Oh shit,” the corporal breathed, immediately keying the radio at his shoulder. “Command, this is holding unit. The asset is gone.”
Less than a minute later, Eva Stratt stood in the doorway. She stared at the empty room and the broken locking mechanism on the windowsill.
“He is a middle school science teacher,” Stratt said. “How did he breach a secured window?”
The corporal stepped over to the window, examining the sheared metal. He looked completely baffled. “I… I have no idea, ma’m.”
Stratt closed her eyes, seeking patience from a universe she was currently trying to save. She opened them.
“Lock down the facility,” she ordered. “Deploy the perimeter teams. I want a five-mile radius cordoned off. He is terrified, uncoordinated, and likely concussed. He cannot have gone far.”
The alarms, which had only been tested an hour prior, began to shriek anew.
✧✧✧
8 kilometers away, on the barricaded streets of downtown Los Angeles, Colt Seavers was having a pretty decent Tuesday.
The production had shut down four city blocks to film a massive, explosive car chase for Jody Moreno’s new movie. Colt was currently sitting in a canvas director’s chair near the craft services table, nursing a lukewarm black coffee and a powdered donut. He was wearing a weathered leather jacket, a distressed henley that showed off an impressive array of fake, bruised makeup (and a few real bruises he hadn’t bothered to ice), and a pair of tinted aviators.
He had his phone pressed to his ear, listening to Jody’s voice on the other end of the line.
“I’m just saying, Colt,” Jody was saying, the background noise of the director’s tent buzzing behind her, “if you brace a millisecond later on the roll, it’ll look more visceral on camera. You’re anticipating the crash, the audience can feel the setup.”
“Jody, babe, I’m anticipating the crash because if I don’t, the steering column is going to forcefully become one with my sternum,” Colt laughed, taking a bite of the donut. Powdered sugar dusted his leather jacket like snow. “But for you? I’ll take a steering wheel to the chest. I’ll make it look visceral. Anything for the art.”
“You’re an idiot,” she said fondly. “Be on set in ten.”
“Copy that, boss—”
Colt stopped talking.
Three unmarked, matte-black SUVs had just violently jumped the curb of the production set, completely ignoring the screaming production assistants and the bright orange safety barricades. The vehicles slammed to a halt in a synchronized, aggressive V-formation directly in front of the craft services table, kicking up a cloud of Los Angeles dust.
Before the tires even stopped smoking, the doors blew open. A dozen men in full tactical gear, carrying suppressed submachine guns, poured out. They didn’t shout “LAPD,” didn’t flash badges, and formed a perfect perimeter around Colt’s director’s chair.
Colt froze, the powdered donut halfway to his mouth. He looked left. He looked right. The red laser sights of at least four weapons were currently painting his chest.
“Uh, Jody?” Colt said slowly into the phone. “I think the studio sent the union reps. They look really pissed about the overtime.”
“What?” Jody asked.
“Put the phone down, Dr. Grace,” the lead operative commanded. His voice was entirely devoid of emotion, filtered through a tactical mask. “Keep your hands where we can see them.”
Colt blinked behind his aviators. He lowered the phone slowly, letting it hang by his side. “Dr. Grace? Buddy, I think you’ve got the wrong call sheet. I’m Seavers. No ‘Dr.’ in front of it. Stunt double, by the way. You guys look great, though. Wardrobe really nailed the, uh, ‘oppressive paramilitary’ vibe. Very authentic. Is this for the B-unit?”
“I said put the phone down, Doctor. Now.” The operative took a step forward, raising the muzzle of his rifle an inch.
Colt’s easygoing smile faltered just a bit. He’d spent a lifetime reading body language, from drunk guys in bars trying to start fights, to angry directors, to… well, to worse things in his childhood living room. These guys weren’t actors. The safety on that rifle was off.
“Okay, okay, easy,” Colt said, tossing the phone onto the craft services table next to a plate of stale croissants. He raised both his hands, palms open, flashing his most disarming, charismatic smile. It was the exact same smile he used after walking away from a burning car wreck to let the crew know he was fine. “Hands are up. Totally compliant. I’m a lover, not a fighter, guys.”
Two operatives closed the distance instantly. One grabbed his right arm, twisting it behind his back with practiced brutality.
“Whoa, hey! Watch the shoulder!” Colt yelped, wincing as the joint popped uncomfortably. “I need that for the barrel roll at four o’clock!”
They didn’t listen. A heavy zip-tie was ratcheted tightly around his wrists. Before Colt could fully process the sheer absurdity of what was happening, a black canvas bag was violently shoved over his head, plunging him into darkness and tasting faintly of canvas and dust.
“Target secured,” a muffled voice called out over a radio. “We have Dr. Grace. Returning to base.”
Colt was shoved roughly into the back of an SUV. His head cracked against the doorframe, and he let out a highly creative string of curses.
“I am literally going to miss my mark!” Colt yelled into the darkness of the hood as the SUV peeled out, tires screeching on the asphalt. “And I don’t know what kind of doctor this Grace guy is, but I already passed the concussion protocol on set! I know what day it is! It’s… it’s Wednesday!”
When the hood was finally yanked off, Colt blinked aggressively against the harsh fluorescent lights.
He was sitting in a metal chair bolted to the floor of a completely featureless, gray interrogation room. The zip-ties on his wrists had been cut, leaving angry red welts, but two massive guards stood on either side of the heavy steel door.
Sitting across the metal table from him was a woman in a perfectly tailored suit. She was looking at him with an expression of intense analytical scrutiny.
Colt rolled his shoulders, rubbing his wrists to get the blood flowing. He leaned back in the chair, stretching his long legs out and casually crossing his boots at the ankles. If he was going to be kidnapped by a black-ops hit squad, he decided he might as well stick with the charm offensive.
“So,” Colt said, offering her a crooked grin. “Is this about the parking tickets? Because I swear, the sign was hidden behind a tree. Also, you could have just sent an email. The black bag was a bit theatrical, don’t you think?”
Eva Stratt did not smile. She simply stared at him.
She had read Ryland Grace’s file extensively. She had spent the last few months interacting with the man in briefing rooms and laboratories. She knew his nervous tics, his propensity for rambling when anxious, and the way he constantly looked over his glasses when evaluating data.
The man sitting in front of her was physically identical. The exact same blonde hair, the exact same facial structure, the same slightly crooked slope of the nose. It was Ryland Grace but at the same time… not? The “wrongness” was immediate and overwhelming. Not to mention he was wearing entirely different clothes...
Dr. Ryland Grace was a man who lived entirely in his head. This man lived entirely in his body. Grace slouched to make himself smaller, a subconscious defense mechanism. But this man sprawled in the bolted chair as if he owned the room, completely comfortable in his own physical space. Grace’s hands were soft, stained occasionally by ink or chemical dyes. Stratt looked at the hands resting on the table now. They were battered. Thick calluses lined the palms, the knuckles were permanently scarred, and there was a faint sheen of grease and blood under his fingernails.
And then there were the eyes. Grace’s eyes were expressive, easily telegraphing terror or intellectual excitement. The eyes looking back at Stratt as he lowered the tinted aviators were trying desperately to project cool defiance. But the rapid, involuntary blinking and the way his gaze kept darting toward the soldiers’ sidearms told the real story: his fight-or-flight response was kicking in, and he was heavily leaning toward flight.
“Take the sunglasses off,” Stratt ordered.
Colt swallowed hard, his fingers fumbling slightly as he pulled his aviators off. He hooked them onto the collar of his distressed henley, aiming for nonchalant but landing somewhere closer to terrified. “Look, if you wanted to look at my eyes, you just had to ask. I’m Colt, by the way. And you are?”
“You are not Dr. Grace,” Stratt stated flatly.
Colt let out a breathless, slightly hysterical laugh, throwing his hands up in relief. “Thank you! Jesus. I’ve been telling your stormtroopers that for the entire terrifying ride. Do I look like a ‘Grace’ to you? Never mind a doctor!” He pointed aggressively at his own chest. “I barely passed high school physics!”
Stratt’s mind worked furiously, discarding impossibilities. A decoy? A surgically altered body double deployed by a foreign intelligence agency to sabotage the Hail Mary? No, that made no sense. Grace was a last-minute addition to the mission. No one outside of that briefing room knew he was essential until three hours ago.
“Who are you?” Stratt demanded.
“Colt Seavers,” he said simply. He leaned forward, tapping the metal table with a scarred finger. “I’m a stuntman. We were shooting three blocks from wherever your guys grabbed me. Look, check my pockets. My wallet is in my back left. I’ve got my SAG card in there. You can literally pull out your phone, go to IMDb, and search my name. I’m the guy who falls off buildings so Tom Ryder looks good on posters.”
Stratt didn’t move. She just stared at him, “Check his wallet,” she ordered the guard to her right.
The guard stepped forward, roughly patting Colt down and extracting a worn, brown leather wallet. He flipped it open, examining the California driver’s license and the Screen Actors Guild card. The guard stepped back and handed it to Stratt.
She looked at the plastic ID. Colt Seavers. The face matched. The height matched. The birthdate… Stratt’s eyes narrowed imperceptibly. The birthdate was the exact same day, month, and year as Ryland Grace’s.
“Are you aware of an individual named Ryland Grace?” Stratt asked.
The first name hit Colt hard, and the carefully constructed Hollywood facade completely crumbled. Colt fought the sudden, desperate spike of adrenaline in his chest— the irrational, impossible thought that it could somehow be his brother.
But no, the last name was wrong. Grace. It wasn’t him, how could it be? His brothers were gone, and they’ve been gone for over a decade.
Colt blinked hard, swallowing the lump in his throat and forcing the ghosts back down. He snapped back to the cold reality of the interrogation room, the nervous humor finally draining from his face to leave behind a raw, exhausted frown.
“Never heard of him,” Colt said, his voice a little rougher than before. “Look, lady, I don’t know what kind of secret agent Men In Black stuff you have going on here, but I really need to get back to set. My director is going to kill me, and honestly I am a lot more scared of her than of you, and she doesn’t even have guns.”
Stratt studied him for another long, agonizing minute. He wasn’t lying. The biometric scanners hidden in the ceiling and the table would have alerted her if his heart rate, pupil dilation, or galvanic skin response indicated deception. He genuinely didn’t know who Dr. Grace was.
Stratt closed the wallet and tossed it back across the table. It slid to a halt near Colt’s hands.
“Release him,” Stratt said, standing up and smoothing her blazer.
“Ma’am?” the guard asked, hesitating.
“He is not our asset. He is a civilian with an unfortunate genetic resemblance. Drive him back to his film set. I have actual problems to solve.”
She didn’f wait for Colt’s sarcastic parting comment. She turned on her heel and walked out of the interrogation room. The steel door shut behind her with a definitive thud. As she marched down the hallway, Stratt pulled her secure satellite phone from her pocket. The file she had on Ryland Grace explicitly stated the man had no living family. He was an orphan. His adoptive parents were deceased.
Yet, sitting in her interrogation room had been a perfect genetic duplicate. A man with the exact same face and birth date. It was a fascinating anomaly, but Stratt didn’t have the luxury of intellectual curiosity right now. Dr. Grace was out there, terrified, injured, and hiding. Every hour he remained off the grid jeopardized the launch window of the Hail Mary. Her tactical teams were already sweeping the perimeter, but waiting for conventional grunts to comb through a city of nearly four million people would waste far too much time. She needed immediate results. She needed a bloodhound, a ghost.
And so, she dialed a heavily encrypted number and it rang precisely twice before it was answered.
“Eva Stratt,” the refined, slightly weary voice of Donald Fitzroy came through the speaker. “To what do I owe the pleasure? I assumed you were entirely consumed with saving the world.”
“I am currently trying to, Fitzroy,” Stratt said briskly, bypassing pleasantries. “But my primary asset has developed a sudden and severe case of cold feet. He has absconded from a secure facility in Southern California. I need him back.”
“A runaway scientist? Send the FBI, Stratt. That’s hardly my department.”
“The FBI is too bureaucratic and leaves too much paperwork. I don’t want this on a police scanner, and I don’t want him panicked into doing something stupid. I need someone who can track and acquire the target without a single witness, and deliver him back to me intact. ASAP.” Stratt paused. “I need your absolute best, Fitzroy.”
A heavy sigh echoed over the line. “My operatives are currently deployed on high-risk, black-book assignments. You’re asking me to pull a scalpel off a surgery to go catch a butterfly.”
“The butterfly in question is the only thing standing between humanity and complete extinction. I am not asking. I am exercising my authority. You will reassign your top asset immediately, and if you do not, I will have the military seize your agency’s funding before the hour is out.”
Silence stretched on the line for three long seconds. Fitzroy knew Stratt wasn’t bluffing. Eva Stratt would never bluff.
“Fine,” Fitzroy said, his voice completely devoid of its former warmth. “I will send you Sierra Six. But you owe me for this, Stratt.”
“I am saving your life along with the rest of the planet. We’ll call it even. I am transmitting the target’s dossier to your secure server now. Tell your ‘Sierra Six’ he needs to move immediately.”
Stratt hung up the phone. She had her hunter. Two thousand miles away, in a stark, dimly lit hotel room in Prague, a secure laptop beeped softly.
Courtland Gentry, Sierra Six, sat at a small desk near the window. The room was devoid of any personal effects or signs of habitation. A disassembled Glock 19 lay on a microfiber cloth in front of him smelling of gun oil and cordite. He had been in the middle of a routine maintenance check after neutralizing a rogue arms dealer an hour ago.
Six put down the slide of the pistol and turned to the encrypted laptop. The notification icon pulsed a steady, urgent red. A priority alpha transmission from Fitzroy. He clicked the icon, entering a forty-character alphanumeric decryption key from memory. The file began to unpack.
Six leaned back in his chair with a completely blank expression, ready to review his next target. He expected a Russian oligarch, a rogue general, maybe a cartel boss hiding in a fortified compound. Then the dossier opened.
TARGET: DR. RYLAND GRACE. STATUS: PRIORITY ONE RECOVERY.
Six’s eyes scanned the text, his brain processing the information. Then when the accompanying high-resolution photograph loaded onto the screen, he stopped breathing. The world around him seemed to violently drop away.
Staring back at him from the screen was a face he hadn’t seen in over two decades. The man in the photograph was older, wearing glasses and a tweed jacket, but the fundamental structure was exactly the same. Court would recognize that face anywhere. Even aged up by twenty years and stamped onto a highly classified dossier, there was absolutely zero doubt in his mind: It was one of the twins, his little brother.
Ryland.
Six stared at the screen, his usually steady hands beginning to tremble imperceptibly. The perfectly trained assassin dissolved, and all that was left was Courtland Gentry, a terrified older brother.
He leaned in, pulling the monitor closer. “No,” Court murmured. “Ry…”
He grabbed the dossier and downloaded it directly to his secure mobile device. He didn’t finish cleaning the Glock. He slammed the slide onto the frame, chambered a round, and shoved it into his shoulder holster.
To the task force, this was just another off-the-books retrieval. Stratt assumed she was just hiring an untraceable operative to fix a simple problem as fast as possible; a faceless mercenary for a faceless job. None of them knew they had just pointed an assassin straight at his little brother.
Courtland Gentry grabbed his jacket and walked out the door. Prague to Southern California was a twelve-hour flight for civilians, but with Stratt clearing a classified hypersonic scramjet for takeoff, he'd be touching down in three. He had a flight to catch.