Toys barely heard Harry’s comment. He was busy defending a group of church lady types from a juiced-up Fixer, and that was proving to be much harder than he’d thought.

Harry saw Joe Ledger edging around the far side of the crowd, and that made him frown. Was Joe leaving? And … why had he stopped to change his clothes? Some kind of disguise?

He ran across the room, calling Ledger’s name. Joe finally heard him when Harry was a dozen paces away. He turned.

And that quickly, the man stopped being Joe Ledger.

He was the same height, build, color, even down to the eyes.

The man smiled. “Hey,” he said, “are you a friend of Joe’s?”

“Yeah,” said Harry. “Are you with the RTI?”

“Not exactly,” said Michael Augustus Stafford as he raised his pistol and shot Harry Bolt twice in the chest.

Toys shot the Fixer in the eye with the Snellig. Twice. Once in each red eye. The man reeled back, screaming, clawing at his face even as his knees buckled. He lingered there, blood and mess running down his cheeks. Toys shifted his weight and balance and kicked the Fixer in the Adam’s apple.

He turned away from the dying man just in time to see Harry Bolt get shot.

And he immediately recognized who it was who’d fired those shots. The anti-Ledger. Stafford. The world’s most sought-after assassin.

Toys glanced around for Violin, but she was in the thick of it.

“Bloody hell,” he growled and went running, making maximum use of cover behind the flailing, fighting people.

Stafford did not see him coming, because he was looking for a different face in all that madness. Toys came up directly behind a burly Latino who was trying to load a pistol but kept fumbling the magazine. Toys gave him a sharp push that crashed him into Stafford. The Latino’s gun and Stafford’s went flying.

Toys brought up his Snellig, but Stafford was cat quick, and he blocked Toys’s gun hand and hit him twice—sternum and high in the chest. It had been an attempt to stall with one punch and crush the throat with the other—a technique Toys himself liked. But it was the kind of thing one did with the great unwashed. Not with another professional.

Toys turned his head and dipped, forcing the punch to land on his cheekbone. It hurt, but he knew it would hurt Stafford a good deal more.

The killer snatched back his hand but wasted no time complaining about the pain; instead, he snapped out a very fast toe kick that, had it landed, would have done terrible damage to Toys’s crotch.

Toys took that on the hip and whipped out with a snapping backfist that knocked blood from Stafford’s nose.