Motion just beyond the patio light pulled him back to ground, footsteps he’d have heard sooner, movement he’d have caught faster if he’d been focused on the job itself rather than the person. His senses dropped into the space between life and death.

Sound slivered and light fractured.

His hand moved from table to jacket, reaching for the firepower that would put an end to threat before it began.

A male voice off the side of the patio said, “I’m unarmed, Chris.”

Strategic thinking somersaulted head over heels.

The voice’s body stepped into the light, all five feet, ten inches, in nineties denim and a warm winter coat, hands up, palms open, fingers waving hello.

Holden exhaled, part guffaw, part exasperation.

He was half tempted to pull the trigger anyway. “Jesus, man,” he said.

Jack moved in closer, cheeks too large and cheekbones too wide, nose and jaw too low, eyes too puffy, and—unless the light was playing tricks—skin tone a full four shades darker. That last feature, Holden knew, was specifically for facial recognition software.

Algorithms and deep learning systems were only as strong as the data sets used to train them, and facial recognition, like so much of technology, was plagued by bias and inherently prone to err with darker skin. He’d made use of the same technique for the same reasons, though this was the first he’d seen it used by someone else.

Jack clamped a brotherly hand on Holden’s shoulder and slipped behind him for the opposite seat. “Miserable night to be out alone,” he said. “Figured you could use the company.”

Holden watched him settle, waited until reciprocal silence bordered on rudeness and, stretching one word out into two long syllables, said, “Bullshit.”

Jack laughed, and with the laugh, the facade cracked and familiarity seeped through. Brother and sister. Same damn twisted sense of humor.

Jack nodded toward the svaák. “That stuff any good?”

“It’s warm.”

“Coffee is warm. Tea is warm.”

“Yeah, well, this is warm in all the right places.”

Jack tipped the chair back until its front legs came off the ground, and he studied the sky. “My sister does have that effect on people,” he said. “Stick around her long enough and even heroin will seem like a reasonable way to cope.”

There was humor in the sibling jab and camaraderie in its delivery, and it felt as if they were old friends with years of common history, instead of recent enemies who’d been bent on killing each other and almost had.

But this wasn’t a friendly visit, no matter how friendly it might be.

That wasn’t how things worked in this world.

Jack, still staring at the sky, said, “Picked you up coming off the plane in Frankfurt. In case you were wondering.”