He’d stood there a second, two, maybe three, brain numb, limbs immobile, committing the unforgivable of unforgivable sins, while his heart raced and his stomach lurched and his mind spiraled in a grasp for any single point in time to which he could anchor reality. Training had smacked him upside the head, forcing him to move and blend and be, and he’d recovered from a failure that would have been fatal had he been up against more hardened opponents.

He’d retreated the way he’d come, and he’d left the terminal on an employee shuttle with a crew changing shifts, his body functioning on habit while his mind rewound and replayed every explosion, every bullet, and every conversation that filled the past two weeks, rewriting what he thought he knew into a different version of the same story, one in which Clare, the master puppeteer, pulled all the strings.

But he hadn’t been able to make the performance work.

Not all the characters anyway, and so the pressure had eased and reality had shifted back to the way it had been, but the hate and disgust and rebellion had remained.

He blamed Clare.

Even if this wasn’t her doing, she’d still put him here, all those years of fucking with his head, of never letting his mind shut down, of turning every location and every encounter into a potential threat to be outmaneuvered when, really, the only threat had ever come from her. This was her legacy, this life of lies, in which up was never up and down never down and every action and every word existed in two or more states at once.

Her paranoid delusions had spawned his own.

Now he saw her hand in everything.

That kind of mind-fuckery would be what got him killed in the end.

He shoved his hands into his pockets, pushed her as far out of his head as he could get her, and rounded toward Savignyplatz, a rectangle of prewar buildings and quaint high-end stores and restaurants that formed a town square of sorts around a small park, and he followed past awning-covered tables and waitstaff wiping off the last of the passing rain, observing the clientele, absorbing the ambience, and eavesdropping on conversations. These were his markers, the sounds, sights, and smells he’d need to replicate when the time came to vanish again. And he moved north, to Kantstrasse, the thoroughfare that divided the park where he traded euros with a street vendor for an umbrella, and followed Stilwerk, a furniture mall, around the corner.