but it had. That was the thing, it was amazing what you could get used to, how quickly the strange became mundane, the extraordinary normal. After leaving the army, he’d missed the camaraderie, the common ground. Hell, he’d missed the uniforms, the orders, the sense of routine.

What Dominic could never get used to were EON’s cells. Or rather, the people kept inside them.

The complex’s crisp white walls had become familiar—the obscure maze reduced to clean lines of rote muscle memory—but there would never be anything comfortable about the purpose of this place. If Dom ever found himself forgetting the building’s true design, all he had to do was look at the surveillance footage, click through the images of three dozen holding cells.

Now and then, when Dom drew rounds, he had walk those cells, deliver meals, listen to the EOs beyond the fiberglass beg for him to let them out. Sometimes, when he drew eval, he had to sit across from them—the prisoners in their cells and Dominic in his camouflage as human—and ask them about their lives, their deaths, their memories, their minds. He had to pretend he didn’t understand what they meant when they talked about those final moments, the desperate thoughts that followed them down into the dark, the ones that pulled them back out.

Across the table, Holtz and Bara were still tossing around hypothetical powers, and Rios had gone back to her book, but Dominic stared down at his food, his appetite suddenly gone.

II

III

TWO YEARS AGO

DOMINIC’S APARTMENT

HE turned the business card over in his hands, waiting for Victor to call him back.

The black ink caught the light, illuminating the three letters.

EON.

Ten minutes later, the phone finally rang.

“Take the job.”

Dominic froze. “You’re not serious.” But he could tell by the ensuing silence that Victor was. “These are the guys that hunt us. Capture us.

Kill us. And you want me to work for them?”

“You have the background, the qualifications—”

“And if they peg me as an EO?”

A short, impatient sigh. “You have the ability to step outside of time, Dominic. If you can’t avoid capture—”

“I can step out of time,” said Dominic, “but I can’t walk through walls. I can’t open locks.” Dom ran a hand through his hair. “With all due respect—”

“That saying usually precedes a no,” said Victor coolly.

“What you’re asking me to do—”

“I’m not asking.”

Victor was a hundred miles away, but still Dominic flinched at the threat. He owed Victor everything, and they both knew it.

“All right.”

Victor hung up, and Dom stared at the phone for a long time before he turned the card over, and dialed.

* * *

A black van came for him at dawn.