Dominic had been waiting on the curb, watched as a man in street clothes climbed out and opened the back doors. Dom forced himself forward. His steps were slow, a body operating against drag.

He didn’t want to do this. Every self-preserving nerve in his body was saying no. He didn’t know what Victor was thinking, or how many steps ahead he was thinking it. In Dom’s head, Victor went around acting like the world was one big game of chess. Tapping people and saying, “You’re a pawn, you’re a knight, you’re a rook.”

Dom chafed a little at the thought, but then, he’d learned not to ask questions in the army. To trust the orders as they came down, knowing that he couldn’t see the whole scope. War needed both kinds of people —those who played the long game and those who played the short one.

Victor was the former.

Dominic was the latter.

That didn’t make him a pawn.

It made him a good soldier.

He willed his body toward the van. But before he could climb in, the man held out a ziplock bag. “Phone, watch, anything that transmits data and isn’t hardwired to your body.”

Dominic had been careful—there were only a handful of numbers in his phone, and none of them named; Victor was boss man, Mitch was big man, Syd was tiny terror—but he still felt a nervous prickle as the bag disappeared and he was ushered into the van.

It wasn’t empty.

Four other people—three men and one woman—were already sitting inside, their backs against the windowless metal walls. Dom took a seat as the doors slammed and the van pulled away. No one spoke, but he could tell the others were military—or ex-military—by the set of their shoulders, their close-cropped or tightly wound hair, the steady blankness in their faces. One had a prosthetic arm—an elaborate piece of biotech from the elbow down—and Dom watched the man’s mechanical fingers tap absently on his leg.

There was one more pickup—a young black woman—and then the ground changed under the tires, the world outside drowned out by the engine as the van gained speed.

Dom had spent half his career in convoys like this, being transported from one base to another.

One of the men went to check his watch before remembering it had been confiscated. Dominic didn’t mind—he could wait.

* * *

TIME moved strangely for Dom.

Or at least, he moved strangely in time.

On paper he was only thirty-three, but he felt like he’d been alive for longer—and he guessed that, in a way, he had. Dom could step out of the flow of time, into the shadows, where the whole world became a painting in shades of gray, a dark between, a nowhere, where he was the only thing that moved.