So, I told him. About Violin. About the Red Knight in my hotel room. About the dead men whose pain seemed to scream through the air around me. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but Church cut right through my words.

“Are you injured?” he demanded. “Do you need immediate medical attention?”

I paused. “No. No, I’m good.”

“Are you in shock?”

“I—” I began and then stopped, realizing why he was asking that. My mind replayed the last few things I’d said and there was a rising hysterical note to my voice. The room was too bright, the colors too vivid. And the smell …

I took a long, deep breath and let it out slowly.

“I’m good,” I assured him. “Been a bad day.”

“For all of us, Captain.”

We gave that a moment.

“You are going to need to get out of that location,” he said.

“I know.”

“Don’t go to another Barrier safe house. The Company has one close to you.”

“Soon as we’re done I’m out of here,” I assured him.

“The woman,” Church said, shifting back to my report. “Violin. Give me a read on her.”

“Hard to say exactly. She’s a voice on the phone and she’s probably lying to me.”

“Then give me guesswork and suppositions.”

I thought about it. “She sounds young. Late twenties. Her base accent is Italian, though she could be any nationality or race with an accent picked up by familiarity. She’s a trained sniper. She’s for hire. The people who hired her are connected to Vox, which is how Rasouli hired her. No idea whose side she’s on, though she doesn’t seem to like Rasouli. And she’s tied up with someone or something called Arklight.”

“Arklight,” he said, repeating the name slowly, seeming to appreciate it. “Interesting.”

“You’ve heard of it?”

“Yes. Did she confirm that she was part of Arklight?”

“No, when I asked her about it she hung up on me. Why? What’s Arklight?”

He didn’t answer.

“Yo! How about a little help for the guy standing in a room full of dead people?”

“Captain,” said Church, “to tell you anything useful about Arklight would mean betraying a confidence.”

“I don’t care.”

“It could also put you in danger.” He paused. “And, yes, I know how absurd that sounds, given the circumstances.”

“You think?”

“I need to make a call about this. In the short term, I have had dealings with Arklight in the past. Most of the time those dealings were harmonious. Working together against a shared threat, that sort of thing. But they are not allies. There are no standing nonaggression agreements between us.”

“Can you try to vague that up a bit more? I almost understood it.”