We have a complicated relationship. Basically, we hate each other. When I first met him, he was the personal assistant cum attack dog for Sebastian Gault, the rich pharmaceuticals mogul who was trying to game the system by creating a bioweapon so terrifying that the whole drug industry would have to go into high gear to try to create a counteragent. His company, not one of the biggest in the field, would make billions, and the relatively small size of his firm when compared to Merck, Pfizer, and the others would be useful camouflage. The problem was that the pathogen, a weaponized prion-based disease form, was actually too good. It had a 100 percent infection rate, a 100 percent kill ratio, and was highly communicable. For all intents and purposes, it was an honest-to-god practical zombie plague. Had it gotten off the leash, planet Earth would likely be Disneyland for the living dead. And it was that case that resulted in my being drafted by Mr. Church.

Then Toys and Gault resurfaced when his boss was hired to be the King of Plagues by Hugo Vox. Once again, Gault concocted a deadly pathogen—in that instance, it was an airborne version of Ebola.

And the third time, he was more or less Vox’s houseboy during a gig in Iran where a group of genetically engineered freaks were planning on detonating nukes in the Middle East oil fields.

Now, granted, during all that, Toys was gradually edging away from what Gault and Vox were doing, and he ultimately betrayed both men, but that didn’t change the fact that Toys had a lot of blood on his hands. Innocent blood, as well as that of his employers’ competitors.

But then Church surprised the hell out of all of us by offering Toys a very weird deal. One I struggle to understand to this day. He gave Toys a chance to change his life path and do measurable good in the world by giving him a massive amount of money to invest in projects and programs of a beneficial nature. Toys founded FreeTech, with the intention of taking the really nasty technologies that guys like me took away from people like his former employers and repurposing them to benefit humanity. Junie came to work for him, and although it’s true that Junie is the primary driving force behind FreeTech, it was Toys’s idea.

Also, in the years since, Toys has several times put his life on the line to protect Junie when the enemies Church and I have made tried to damage our efficiency by hurting those we love. Toys even saved the lives of Rudy and Circe and their first baby.

I told Toys a little while back—after one of those incidents—that although we’ll never be friends and that I didn’t forgive what he’d done in the past, he and I were no longer at war. However, that doesn’t mean we bonded.