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The sun was setting over Golem City, washing the room in gold, as Adam stepped through the doors of Talos Rucker’s office. The man himself stood behind his desk, unarmed and unguarded. He was entirely alone, a tired slump to his shoulders and one hand resting on a bottle of some expensive liquor.
Adam let go of the Tesla charge he’d been building, knuckles sliding flat against the planes of his hands. If Rucker was willing to talk, he’d return the favor.
"Talos Rucker," he said, stepping forward. "Interpol would like to have a conversation with you."
He held his hands out at his sides, fingers splayed. I’m unarmed, he was saying, though of course they both knew enough about augmentations to know what a ruse that was. The only things that would actually disarm Adam were an industrial-strength EMP blast or cutting his arms off.
Rucker took the gesture in the spirit it was meant, though, if the small bitter twist of a smile at the corner of his mouth was any indication. "I think you have me at a disadvantage, Mr…"
"Adam Jensen."
"Adam Jensen." Rucker frowned a moment, glancing up and down his body. "We've met before, haven't we?"
Adam blinked behind his glasses. He hadn’t expected…
"Thought doctors were supposed to be absentminded," he said. Then, when Rucker kept staring at him, he added, "Once, briefly. May of 2026."
"May 2026… you were Sarif’s head of security." Rucker’s eyes flicked briefly to Adam’s hands. "I see you went for brand loyalty."
Adam grit his teeth. He didn’t owe anyone an explanation for his body, let alone this man.
"I was injured," he said coldly. "In a terrorist attack." And that wasn’t the whole truth of it, wasn’t even close, but instinct told him it was the tack to take with Rucker. "Or does your love for augmentation only count when it’s your followers?"
The head of ARC was a self-proclaimed pacifist, and yet TF29 had found Ivan Berk’s body buried in the rubble of the Růžička station along with the hundred people he’d killed.
The CASIE was a presence in Adam's mind, like an idea on the tip of his tongue. Ready to be used at a moment’s notice. He kept it quiet now, though—he’d activate it if he needed to, but he wanted to meet Rucker without it first. Wanted to see for himself whether he believed in the angel Golem City worshiped or the monster Prague feared.
Rucker flinched, fingers tensing, and for a moment Adam thought he might rise to the bait of Adam’s angrily tossed-out words, but instead he just sighed. There was something that could almost be regret in his eyes. "I did not mean—no. Make no mistake, I do not love augmentation any more than I love antibiotics or organ transplants. I simply recognize it for what it is: a tool to save lives, not a boogeyman to be feared at all costs."
"You see augmentation as the future."
Rucker gave Adam a wry smile. It stretched oddly across his face, the plate embedded into the skin on the right side of his mouth too stiff and unyielding to move with the rest of his expression.
"Please, Mr. Jensen, did you really come all the way out here to debate augmentation with me?"
"Wasn’t exactly my assignment," Adam conceded, "but I’m curious what you have to say. Especially when your words aren’t matching up with the things I’ve seen done in your name out on the streets of Prague."
Chikane was probably getting antsy right now, with his vertibird stuck hovering somewhere outside Golem City’s walls. Hell, Adam wasn’t feeling so comfortable himself. He kept having to resist the urge to slide one of his nanoblades from its sheath or turn so his back wasn’t to the door. He'd been counting and recounting the possible exits since the moment walked in here: door behind him, another to his left, a window straight ahead. If things went sour, he'd be left with few options but to run.
"Then, please, let me ask you a question in return. Are you here to kill me?"
Rucker didn’t sound angry. He didn’t act like he was using the question as a rhetorical tactic, either. He just looked exhausted, his eyes bloodshot and his shoulders slumped.
"I’m not," Adam said. "I promise. I only want you to come in and answer some questions. Anything I can do to protect you, I will."
He wondered, suddenly, just how long Rucker had been turning that question over in his head. Had he been waiting here all along, expecting to to be killed? Alone and unarmed so that none of his people would have to die with him?
"I… do believe you. Maybe I shouldn’t, but—the man I remember seemed an honest person." Rucker shook his head, and Adam was left wondering exactly what he’d done that night in May to make such an impression. "It’s the ones you work for I worry about. Hiding in the shadows, sending an Aug to hunt another Aug down in the name of peace..."
Rucker sank into the chair behind his desk with a tired huff. He circled one plastic, flesh-toned finger around the rim of the decanter in front of him, then asked, "Would you like a drink?"
It was a horrible idea. Miller would have his head if he knew Adam was even considering trying to talk ARC’s leader down over a couple of drinks. Hell, if Chikane found out why Adam was keeping him waiting, Miller wouldn’t even get a chance to kill him.
"Sure," Adam said, stepping forward to take the seat opposite Rucker. "But I think you know what I want to talk about."
This time, Rucker’s crooked smile only looked halfway miserable.
Adam had told himself, time and again, that he was being naive, but part of him had always hoped that Talos Rucker might turn out not to be their man after all. His speeches felt sermonlike, his followers were fanatics, but even still… the augmented of Prague believed in him. Even after the Růžička station bombing, with evidence stacking up against ARC’s grand leader, some small part of Adam wanted to believe too.
And if he was really willing to talk, then maybe—
Adam took his first sip of the whiskey and gagged. Warnings lit up in his HUD, bright red and overlapping, flashing desperately as his systems began to flicker in and out.
WARNING. FOREIGN CONTAMINENT. BIOLOGICAL HAZARD.
"What," Adam said, staring blankly into nothing—and then, realizing, he snarled across the desk at Rucker, "What did you do?"
Tesla, Tesla or nanoblade, anything to keep Rucker from escaping, but when Adam tried to move his arms only twitched and spasmed. His fingers flexed and contracted as pain lanced through flesh and artificial muscle alike, his eyeshields snapped open and back into place and open again—
—and it was agony, worse than drowning, worse than surgery, worse than being shot and thrown through a plate glass window and left for dead—
—and he tried to stand but instead slid to the floor as his shell of a body seized and shook and sent fire burning through him, staring suddenly up at the pale frightened face of Talos Rucker.
"You," Adam snarled around a tongue that refused to work. He tried to grab Rucker’s throat—he couldn’t die here, like this, he couldn’t—but the attempt only sent shards of glass stabbing through veins he no longer had.
"Lie still," Rucker said, "Please, just—"
A moment’s silence, the world gone to nothing around him, and then he was on his side and Rucker was kneeling beside him with two fingers pressing down on his throat. Adam gagged, tasting bile on his tongue, too weak even to pull his head away.
Why? Adam thought, desperately trying to piece together a puzzle where the pieces suddenly didn’t fit. His eyes, burning in their sockets, flicked to Rucker’s face, then up to the desk where he could just barely make out the now-blurry shapes of Adam’s tipped-over glass, the decanter beside it… along with Rucker’s own glass, still full.
He’d been about to drink, Adam remembered. He would have noticed Rucker avoiding his glass. And the bottle had been sitting on his desk, clearly not meant for a stranger Rucker couldn’t have known would be willing to sit and talk…
Adam pushed back against Rucker’s fingers with a new urgency, freeing his mouth long enough to slur out, "Run."
"What?" Rucker asked. He wasn’t looking at Adam anymore.
Heavy footsteps echoed across the floor as Adam's world dissolved around him once again.
—
Waking hurt. He ached everywhere, down into muscle and bone and circuit alike. It was—bearable, though. Agony, still, but no longer overwhelming.
Adam blinked, clearing superimposed diagnostics away, as his HUD sluggishly began a reboot. The tips of his fingers twitched when he tried to move his hand. Function was slowly returning to his body.
He shifted his head slightly, trying to get his bearings back—then sucked in a breath as it hit him just what he was looking at.
There against the far wall, pressed up against the windows of his own office, Talos Rucker was about to be murdered.
Viktor Marchenko towered over Rucker, keeping him caged against the glass with sheer force of presence—and, Adam noticed, an augmentation that was now more gun than arm pointed casually at his chest. Rucker was staring up at Marchenko with an expression of pure, vicious hatred.
Adam couldn’t see Marchenko’s face, but he could imagine the smile he must be wearing. He’d succeeded, after all, hadn’t he? Kill the government Aug, kill Rucker, frame one for the other—this had to be what he’d hoped for. And Adam had dismissed him as nothing more than Rucker’s crony.
"You killed him," Rucker snarled.
Marchenko’s answering shrug was lazy and self-satisfied, a cat toying with a mouse.
"Ah, my brother. Only one man had to die today. And yet you've already taken an innocent down with you." His false cheer crumbled as he talked, giving over to a tone as sharp as broken glass. "Is he going to be the only one, or are you going to force our family downstairs to die with you too?"
Adam froze. He forced his fingers to still, his breathing to slow, his eyes to fall half-shut.
Marchenko thought he was dead. He should be dead. Adam wasn’t sure what had saved him, or even if he really was saved at all—for all he knew, this could be one last burst of energy before his body finally gave up—but no matter the cause, he couldn’t waste this opportunity.
More of his augmentations were coming back online. He blinked away prompts for the Icarus, the Tesla, his nanoblades. A tank like Marchenko wouldn’t go down easy, but if Rucker kept him talking then Adam could take advantage.
"They trust me, thanks to you," continued Marchenko.
Rucker flinched at the words, pressing further against the window.
"How many do you think will die before they realize that you’ve let them down? And how many more do you think will die trying to kill me? There’ll be panic, and once it spreads… the police won’t bother to find out the cause of the chaos. They’ll shoot any of our people who move. Men, women, children. Golem will run red with ARC’s dying blood."
Rucker snarled at him, an animal noise of pure hatred that came from somewhere deep in his throat. His eyes were wide, his breathing shallow; for a moment Adam thought he might try to leap at Marchenko and strangle him himself.
"They are not," he said, his voice full of ice-cold rage, "our people."
Marchenko shrugged. "True enough. Tonight they will be mine, or they will be dead." He gestured lazily back towards Rucker’s desk with one hand. "Which is it, Talos? Are you proud enough to let thousands be slaughtered so that you can die telling yourself you never surrendered?"
Rucker was quiet a moment longer, staring at Marchenko, and then all at once his head dropped and the tension fled from his body like a puppet with its strings cut.
"What are you planning for ARC?" he asked, his voice barely a whisper.
"Ah, my old friend." Marchenko took a step away from Rucker, turning towards the desk—but Rucker didn’t try to escape, didn’t so much as move. "That’s none of your concern anymore."
Rucker’s desk was covered with papers and knick-knacks: documents of all kinds, audio tapes, shot glasses, even some elaborate statue. But Marchenko didn’t reach toward any of those things. Instead his fingers closed around an elegant crystal decanter, still mostly full.
The bottom dropped out from Adam’s stomach as realization hit. Marchenko's plan had derailed when the wrong person drank. Now he was going to make sure it went back on track. And Rucker was going to let it happen, because he was a man who’d accept an excruciating death for the slightest chance to protect the people he led no matter how useless his sacrifice might turn out to be.
There was no time for strategizing, no time for anything but pure base instinct. Adam threw all his systems back to full at once—ignoring the pain, ignoring the screaming warnings in his head—and brought himself from lying down to a readied crouch.
Light burst in a dizzying golden array around him as the Icarus came crackling to life. Marchenko turned with a growl of shock and rage, grabbing desperately for Adam, but Adam wasn’t on the floor anymore. He was throwing himself forward with all of the Icarus Dash’s speed, too quick for Marchenko to stop, too quick to react—
He threw his hands up around Rucker, guarding his head, his spine, and let the force of his charge push them both straight through the window.
—
Down they fell, a dizzying count of one two three, and Adam had just enough time to worry he’d bled his energy reserves bone dry when the Icarus’s golden glow surrounded him once more and brought himself and Rucker to a tumbling halt on one of Golem’s lower levels.
Soil against his palms, under his knees; for a moment he was disoriented, trying to figure just where he’d landed. He blinked away the lingering haze of pain and realized he’d managed to hit a makeshift vegetable garden set into the terraced roof.
Rucker had one hand around his shoulder and the other clutching at the front of his tacvest. He shook his head, looking dazed—and then refocused, his sharp gaze falling on Adam.
"Let’s go, before he finds another way down," Adam said, pulling him to his feet.
"I saw you die," Rucker said. "How..?"
Adam was acutely aware of his heart humming in his chest, and just as acutely aware of the fact that he had no answer.
"I’m tough to kill," he said. "Come on."
He set off on a staggered path, one that would keep them out of the direct line of fire as much as possible. Marchenko would have trouble fitting through the window in Rucker’s office, but with that cannon he’d unveiled he could easily take out a wall to go after them. Their best hope was in the way Marchenko had spoken to Rucker: in the office, he'd seemed reluctant to break his cover where the rest of ARC could see. If that was true, he might not chase them openly.
Just as Adam was daring to hope, alarms blared to life all around them; the ARC compound came to starling, cacophonous life in an overwhelming wave of sound. Bright red lights flashed in distant hallways and, as if on cue, armed and augmented people began swarming the hive of the complex like a panicked mass of ants. It was pure, disorganized chaos, but even so it was only a matter of time before a force that size would manage to start hunting him and Rucker down.
Adam slammed himself and Rucker back against the nearest wall, peering over the edge at the distant figures.
"What’s his plan?" he hissed. "These are supposed to be your people, aren’t they?"
"If I had to guess," Rucker said grimly, "I’d say he’s planning to tell them all about the government agent who just grabbed me and jumped out a window."
Damn it. Adam should have seen that coming.
"And once they find us..."
"The evil Interpol agent will strike me down with his dying breath, I’m sure, while Marchenko tries desperately to save me."
Adam snorted. Rucker wasn’t half as naive as he came off as in his televised speeches. Adam glanced at him just in time to catch the dry smile he sent Adam’s way.
It was… oddly genuine, for a man who was calmly predicting his own death. And warm, too, warmer than he would’ve expected from someone who’d just lost everything.
He gripped Rucker’s shoulder briefly, hoping the gesture would feel reassuring. "So, same plan as before. Don’t be found."
There was one advantage to this; the ARC members closest to their hiding place were the ones out working in the makeshift fields. As Adam watched, they'd thrown down their tools to begin a desperate race back towards the central building
"Chikane," Adam subvocalized, ignoring the low-energy warnings that peppered his vision as he threw his Infolink back on.
"Jensen. What the hell. The whole compound’s lit up with activity." Chikane's voice was full of quiet, barely-constrained rage.
"I know. Things got hairy."
As he spoke, Adam gestured Rucker forward once more. The two of them crept further away from the compound, tucked slow to the ground and moving as fast as Adam dared go, past the empty rows of half-grown vegetables and discarded tools.
"Hairy."
"That is what I said."
Even over the line, Adam could hear the way Chikane’s teeth ground together. "Huh. My hearing must be going bad. When they stuck us with you, I thought they said it was because you’d be good at your job."
"I’ve got Rucker, and he’s coming willingly." He debated for a moment, trying to weigh how much he’d be willing to explain over the commlink, and finally settled on, "He shouldn’t be treated like a prisoner. The situation has… changed."
"Changed. Fucking changed." That anger wasn’t so constrained anymore. "Jensen, you’re talking about a man who bombed a station—"
"I was there when it happened, Chikane. I don’t need your lecture." Adam sucked in a deep breath, noticeably enough that Rucker gave him a worried look.
This wasn’t the time. Adam still needed to focus on making sure Rucker survived this nightmare. "Look, just—where can you land? I’m coming your way, we’re going to need an extraction ASAP."
From the other end of the line came a heavy sigh. Apparently Chikane had come to the same conclusion as Adam, though probably not for the same reasons.
He read Adam a string of coordinates—thankfully, they corresponded to the same landing pad Adam had set his sights on while scouting out the compound earlier. There was a pause on Chikane’s end, and then he added, as an afterthought that was too casual to truly be an afterthought, "Just be careful, Jensen. Don’t get sucked up into whatever big dreams they’re selling over there."
Big dreams like fresh food and water and a place to live that wouldn’t end up a grave within the year. Adam shot Rucker a glance, eyes safely hidden behind his lenses, and thought—well, maybe he had been sucked in a little.
"Don’t worry. I’m always careful." He cut the line before Chikane could get in a retort.
(And now Chikane was going to be calling Miller, Adam was sure, warning him that their only Aug agent had just gone and gotten himself radicalized while out on a mission. He could deal with that issue later.)
"Our ride’s coming," he murmured to Rucker.
Only a few hundred meters more towards freedom. They’d almost made it.
Rucker’s answer was a sigh, and a spike of fear that Adam didn’t need the CASIE to read off of him. "Out of one trap and into another."
Adam wanted to reassure him, but—there wasn’t much he could guarantee. Could he promise him that Miller wasn’t a plant? That Marchenko didn’t have friends inside Interpol? That the poison meant to take his life hadn’t come from someone higher up than either of them could possibly guess at? There were no certainties in Adam’s life anymore, and for Rucker it had to be much the same.
There was one thing he could promise, though. "No one’s going to kill you unless they kill me first. And you saw how well that worked for Marchenko."
That actually got a laugh, small and tired, out of Rucker. "My cockroach savior, hm? But… I don’t want anyone dying on my behalf. Least of all you."
There was a strange sort of intensity in his eyes. Not anger, and not the fervor he wore like a mask when talking on TV, either. Face to face, Talos Rucker was somehow much less and much more than the man he appeared to be in the propaganda.
"I’ll try to stay alive if you do, Rucker."
"I think you’ve more than earned the right to use my first name by now."
"Talos, then." He hesitated. "And—I’m Adam."
"I do remember," Talos said, but he looked pleased. "Adam. Thank you."
Adam didn’t know what to say to that. He turned away, concentrating instead on getting them that last little distance to safety.
The landing pad was lit all around by scrapped-together strings of light hooked up to just-as-scrapped-together generators. Empty, for the time being, but the moment Chikane descended all of their cover would be blown.
In the distance, he could hear a vertibird’s motor. It was getting closer.
"Get ready," Adam murmured.
He pressed them both against a nearby wall, as close as they could get to that circle of light without stepping into it. Adam was tensed and ready, fighting through the ache in his systems; at his side, Talos’s face was drawn in an expression of complete focus.
The motor’s roar was loud enough to be heard even by unenhanced ears now. Adam stood, grabbing Talos’s hand—
—and there was another sound, now, this one coming from behind him. Footsteps on dirt, angry shouts: a crowd of people headed their way.
"Interpol!" Marchenko’s roar cut across the field, loader even than the vertibird’s engines. "You traitor, you think ARC will let you get away with taking him?"
Traitor. To the Augmented, Adam assumed, stealing their last hope away and delivering him into the hands of their enemies.
Adam pressed his mouth into a firm line. Marchenko wanted a response. He wouldn’t give him one.
Talos, though, whipped his head around to try and find Marchenko in the dark.
"Don’t," hissed Adam.
Talos looked wild-eyed and as angry as Adam had ever seen him. More furious, even, than he'd been with Marchenko's hand around his neck.
"He wants to cause a riot. If he can't do it by killing me, he'll do it some other way instead."
"And if he manages to kill you here, you won't be able to do a thing to stop him."
"Interpol!" Marchenko called out again. His footsteps were closer already; his size belied his quickness. "You think I don't see you, Interpol? Come out before I flush you out."
Adam swore under his breath. Marchenko's augmentations looked scavenged, but after the cutting-edge cannon he’d revealed in Talos’s office it shouldn’t have been a surprise he might have thermal sensors too. If they kept hiding, Marchenko would hunt them down. If Talos tried to tell his people the truth, Marchenko would shoot him and twist into Interpol’s fault.
If only he had a biocell, things might be different, but Adam’s body was already bleeding dry. Even his internal organs’ most basic functions were beginning to throw low-battery warnings at him.
Where the hell are you, Chikane?
Before he could decide whether to risk opening his Infolink again, a motion in the corner of his vision caught his attention. Adam turned just in time to see Talos stand.
No, no, fuck, he couldn't—
Adam reached out, a second too late, watching helplessly as Talos stepped into the line of fire. A hush fell over the crowd at his appearance; Adam could feel the desperate tension that was suddenly in the air.
They were all waiting to see, Adam realized, whether their leader’s mysterious captor would gun him down where he stood.
"Please," Rucker said into the silence. His hands were held high, his face tilted upwards. "My friends. Listen to me."
In the nighttime gloom and without his Smart Vision, Adam couldn’t manage a headcount. He could only guess that there were at least a dozen ARC members here with Marchenko. All of them were perfectly, impossibly silent, straining for Talos’s next words every bit as much as Adam was.
"Talos." Marchenko sighed, disgustingly relieved. "Thank god. Where is the man who attacked you?"
Talos’s eyes narrowed. Probably only Adam was close enough to read the hatred in them.
"Everyone," he said, ignoring Marchenko’s words entirely. "I’m afraid my captor has been—not accommodating."
A frightened murmur swept over the crowd. "Fuck," one woman snapped; near her, a man began muttering something that sounded like a prayer.
Understanding hit Adam alongside grudging (terrified) admiration. They couldn’t win by avoiding Marchenko, and they couldn’t win by contradicting him, so Talos was taking the one path that might catch Marchenko wrong-footed: playing along. If Talos was Adam’s reluctant but calm captive, rather than a panicking man or a savior-turned-traitor, Marchenko would have no excuse for ‘accidentally’ killing him.
"But please, stay strong. Our enemies want you to be swept up in violence, to take the fight into the streets. No matter how frightened you may be—"
"Talos," Marchenko said. A warning disguised as a plea.
"—Don’t give in. I will see you all again. I promise." His voice rose to a shout as a sleek grey vertibird crested the tops of the building, whipping a frenzied wind around them all.
Finally. Their ride was here.
Chikane didn’t even bother to try a landing. The rear door of the vertibird began to raise as he hovered above the tarmac.
Adam lingered a moment in the shadows, planning how best to get Talos into the vertibird without opening himself up to a bullet from an angry ARC member.
An odd glint, the lights of the tarmac reflecting off of something in the shadows, caught his eye. It could have been nothing. A discarded gardening tool, a cable, a generator tipped over—but a sudden twist of fear caught in his chest, and he looked towards it just in time to see the cannon in Marchenko’s hand gleam as it engaged once more. The flesh toned paneling of his right arm slid back and away, leaving only the weapon in its place.
No, Adam thought.
Marchenko lifted his hand, lining Talos up in its sights.
He couldn’t. There were witnesses. A dozen of them.
But what witnesses couldn’t be taken care of if every person here was expendable? Marchenko wouldn’t mind. A dozen dead Augs—died defending their leader, no doubt, with him as the only survivor—would only make things easier for him.
Adam had miscalculated. Badly.
And now, for the second time tonight, he was throwing plans aside, running blindly towards Talos as streaks of electricity sparked into life around his body.
He didn’t have the energy left for this.
His systems were screaming at him, louder than he'd ever heard before.
It would work. It had to.
Adam disengaged every failsafe in a desperate last-ditch panic as he wrapped an arm around Talos and leaped across the gap from ground to sky, caught the lip of the vertibird in his one free hand, hauled them both up as the light show died around him and screams of rage and panic burst from the crowd below.
The crack of a rifle, then another and another, echoed from beneath them, followed moments later by harsh metal ricochets as the bullets hit the vertibird’s bulk. The people below were scattering, trying to get a better angle on Adam. Would a bit of distance be enough to protect them from Marchenko? He didn’t know, and there was no time left anyway. The vertibird’s door was closing. The sounds of Golem receded below them as Chikane kicked his machine into gear.
Flat on the floor, dark spots swimming in front of his eyes, Adam panted for breath.
"Adam?" Talos asked, The calm in his voice was a contrast to the shaking fingers that pressed against his pulse.
Talos. Alive. Away from Marchenko. At least for a moment, Adam could stop worrying.
"Jensen!" Chikane yelled from the pilot’s seat. "For fuck’s sake, get Rucker secured!"
Adam wasn’t going to be able to manage that. He crawled to his hands and knees, then clumsily fell flat once more as his joints refused to lock.
His lenses slid back into their grooves with a mechanical whir, his HUD went cold and dead. Even the warning messages were disappearing now; there just wasn’t enough energy left in his body to power them. Over time, his systems would turn his natural biorhythms into usable electricity… but he had a feeling he wouldn’t get to see that happen this time, if the way his pulse sounded suddenly strangely quiet in his ears was any indication. He’d gone far past the limits of what his augmentations could do, and now there wasn’t even enough left over to power his body’s most basic functions.
The world spun dizzyingly around him as he was rolled onto his back, and—again, for the second time today, what had this mission become—he found himself staring unguarded into Talos Rucker’s eyes as his heart gave out on him.
He’d survived some bizarre poison only to die of this. There was a joke somewhere in that, he was sure, but when he tried to speak his tongue was a cold weight in his mouth. Every part of him felt strangely loose and free.
"Adam," Talos said from far away. "Adam."
Cool hands on his chest, pressing down, and then another voice from even farther away, snarling, "What did you do?"
"Nothing, this—"
"Bullshit it isn’t—"
"—the first aid kid, get—"
Adam’s hearing kept fading in and out. His vision was going dark around the corners. He laid his head back against the vertibird’s cold metal floor, letting his eyes fall half shut.
The last thing he saw was a spark of golden light, as bright as the Icarus but close—and then every system in his body was screaming awake, too much too fast for his body to process.
Adam’s view went finally, blissfully black.
—
When he woke, he woke in a hospital bed.
Memories overwhelmed him—laid out in a LIMB Clinic, arms encased by metal that wouldn’t come off, staring at a stranger’s face through a shattered mirror—and he was throwing the thin sheet off and nearly on the floor before reality could reimpose itself.
"Adam!"
Cool, augmented hands at his shoulder, and a voice that wasn’t David’s urging to stop, calm down, everything’s fine. Adam took a deep breath, then another, and finally the knot of frantic tension in his chest began to loosen.
He remembered the mission, now. And he remembered the person he needed to protect. Not Megan this time, but—
"Talos," he rasped out.
His throat felt raw. Just speaking made it ache.
"I’m here," Talos said, stroking a hand down his back. "You’re okay. Here, let me—"
He let Talos guide him back into bed until he was sitting upright and not about to topple over onto the floor. He was too preoccupied to even try and resist, stuck staring at the lines of information across his HUD that told him, in no uncertain terms, that he was still alive.
Heart pounding, Adam looked around the room. Camera in the corner, door set into the wall, and—Adam switched on his Smart Vision for a moment—people just through the door, on computers or talking to each other. This had to be TF29’s infirmary. He’d always managed to avoid ending up here before.
And Talos was perched awkwardly on the corner of Adam’s infirmary bed, staring at him with open concern on his face.
The bags under his eyes looked, if anything, heavier, but there was a lightness to his posture that Adam hadn’t seen before. He seemed freer than he had in his office. (Despite, Adam noticed, a heavy tracker attached to a band that had been locked tight around his wrist in three separate places, as if whoever’d put it on was afraid he might detach his hand to escape it. Not quite a guest, then, but not exactly a prisoner either if he was allowed to sit here at Adam’s side.)
(Something about the light looked strange too. It took Adam a moment to realize that his eyeshields were still retracted. For a moment he considered deploying them, but—there was nothing to his eyes that Talos hadn’t seen by now, was there?)
"How..?" Adam asked. A flash of memory hit him then: that last spark of light, in the moment before he’d shut down completely. "You saved me, didn’t you?"
Talos shrugged, looking embarrassed. "I’ve seen those symptoms before—you’re not the first Aug to drain his systems, though I’ll admit you managed to drain yours more thoroughly than most."
Biocells weren’t carried standard in TF29 first-aid packs. Whatever Talos had done, it must have involved jury-rigging something together out of the scant supplies he had. A few minutes more and Chikane would have been delivering a corpse back to TF29 headquarters.
"You saved my life." This time it wasn’t a question. "Thank you."
"I was a doctor, once. You remember."
The event they’d met at felt almost impossibly long ago. He’d been nothing more than David Sarif’s head of security, his body his own and his future clear. And Talos—charming, larger than life, fresh off his work with Doctors Without Borders and touring with LIMB—had been nothing more than another industry guest for him to look after. He tried to think back, but the whole of the night was a vague blur; he'd guarded the conference room, coordinated security patrols, kept the protesters outside from crowding the guests. Nothing out of the ordinary.
"Talos," Adam asked, "what happened when we first met?"
"A banquet. With some speeches. The usual, really."
"No, I mean—why did you remember me?"
Talos was silent. Finally, he said, "Ah. It wasn’t…I went back into activism after I was"—he gestured awkwardly at his own augmentations, arms and jaw and the constellation of metal dotting his chest—"burned. The things I saw happening, I couldn’t afford to stay silent. But LIMB warned me people might not be as receptive as I was used to."
"I can imagine."
Talos laughed humorlessly. "Getting people to actually take action was always a struggle, but back when I was speaking out about famines or natural disasters there were far fewer people telling me I was a monster for it. It was… an adjustment."
Even these days, in the speeches he gave from Golem, he seemed a little shocked by it—like he’d thought the world should be better and couldn’t understand why it wouldn’t live up to his expectations.
"I was still learning my new career. I hadn’t fully gotten used to what I ought to expect yet. I thought speaking to a crowd interested in the possibilities of augmentations rather than skeptical might help bolster my resolve."
"No better place for that than Sarif Industries."
"Exactly. When I spoke at Sarif Industries, I wasn’t a demon, but instead I found I was... a saint, of sorts. A figurehead. No more human than I’d been anywhere else." He frowned. "After the event, I snuck onto the balcony for a breath of air. I was followed. I thought I was about to be ambushed—for my life or for another explanation of my prosthetics, I wasn’t sure—but instead the man who’d trailed me out offered me a cigarette."
Oh. Huh. Maybe Adam did remember after all.
"You told me it was a terrible habit," he said.
A smile, small but genuine, pulled at Talos’s mouth. "I am a doctor."
Really, he’d followed Talos (Dr. Rucker, then, a symbol of a movement bound for greatness) to make sure he wasn’t about to fall off the balcony. The cigarette had been nothing more than a moment’s whim.
They’d talked for half an hour, or maybe forty-five minutes—about the view across the Detroit River at night, he thought, or maybe about the city’s pigeons—and then the great Dr. Rucker had been called back inside by one of the other guests. He’d straightened his tie, run a hand through his hair, and stepped out of Adam’s life.
"...Is that all?" Adam asked.
"What, is rescuing me once not enough?"
"I thought maybe there’d been an assassination attempt."
"My life can’t always be so dramatic," Talos told him, sounding almost fond. "I meant it, though. The chance to be a human being again, to step out of my own life for just a moment, was… important to me. I thought about that conversation often. And when I recognized who you were—"
He paused. He reached out, tentatively, curling both hands around one of Adam’s. His augs had a strange texture, plasticky but not unpleasant.
"I was hoping you weren’t here to kill me. I’m glad I was right."
This was—dangerous. Stupid. Adam could read the emotion in Talos’s eyes as clear as day. He could just as easily come up with a hundred reasons why this would get them both killed.
A wince or a grimace would be all it took to make Talos drop his hand. He could stop this in an instant, bring them both back to safer ground.
Adam didn’t move. He watched as Talos tugged his hand higher, watched as Talos leaned in to press a soft closed-mouth brush of lips against his gold-inset knuckles.
"I," Adam said.
Talos flinched, blinking like a man waking up from a dream. He let go of Adam’s hand—but Adam was already reaching out, grabbing onto his fingers to keep him from pulling away.
Neither of them spoke. The CASIE was blaring in Adam’s thoughts again, demanding to be used, but Adam didn’t need it. He know what a look like the one Talos was giving him meant. And, he was sure, Talos could read just as much from his expression.
"I should tell my boss I’m awake," he said finally.
The corner of Talos’s mouth quirked up. "Last I heard, your people are busy analyzing the evidence disk I gave them. And my professional opinion is that you shouldn't be up and moving again for at least another twelve hours." His expression softened as he added, "It’s okay to rest for a moment."
Adam could have argued. Should have argued.
Instead he just let himself sink back down.
He relaxed into the room’s near silence: the muffled noises of people a locked door away, Talos’s quiet presence beside him.