hung up and stepped into the bar. It was a dive, poorly lit and more than half-empty. He ordered a whiskey and settled into a booth along the back wall where he could keep an eye on the bar’s only door and the handful of patrons while he waited.

Victor had pocketed a battered paperback from the center console of the ambulance—now he dug it out, along with a black felt pen, and let the broken spine fall open under his hand.

Old habits. The pen cut a steady path, blacking out the first line, and then the second. He felt his pulse slow with each erasure, each measure of text reduced to a solid black streak. The first word was always the hardest to find. Now and then, he searched for a specific one, and then erased the text around it, but most of the time, though Victor was loath to admit it, even to himself, the practice felt less like a physical act than a metaphysical one.

He let the pen skate across the page, waiting for a word to stop its path. He cut through pride, fall, change, before finally coming to a stop at the word find. His pen skipped over a solo a two lines later, then continued down the page until it found way.

Victor was running out of time, and out of leads, but he wasn’t giving up.

Sydney, Mitch, Dominic—they all behaved as though surrender were a risk, an option. But it wasn’t. Some fractional part of Victor wished he could stop trying, stop fighting, but it simply wasn’t in him. That same stubborn will to survive, the very trait that first made him into an EO, now prevented him from acquiescing. From admitting defeat.

Whatever’s happened to you, however you’re hurt, you’ve done it to yourself.

That’s what Campbell had said. And the EO was right. Victor had always been the master of his fate. He had climbed onto that steel table.

He had coerced Angie into flipping the switch. He had goaded Eli into killing him five years before, knowing Sydney would bring him back.

Every action had been his own design, every step his own making.

If there was a way out of this, he would find it.

If there wasn’t, he would make one himself.

The bar’s only door swung open, and a few moments later Victor heard a voice, the words lost in the crowd, but the accent unmistakable.

He looked up.