The moon was out.

  Darrel hadn't moved.

  He lay exactly where he'd fallen, in the rain, in the ruins, with the dead city stretching endlessly around him and the sky above him doing what it always did, existing, vast and indifferent, lit by something so far away it couldn't possibly know or care what was happening beneath it. The rain came down soft and steady, filling the cracks in the concrete, running in thin rivers along the gutters of a street that hadn't known traffic in a decade.

  He thought about his life.

  Not in any particular order. Not with any particular purpose. He just let it come, the way things come when there's nothing left to hold them back, fragments and images and the ghosts of feelings that had once lived inside him and might have moved on to somewhere else entirely.

  He had wanted to be so many things when he was small. He remembered that. A businessman, maybe, he'd liked the idea of wearing a suit and deciding things, the comfortable fiction of importance. A professional athlete, back when his body was young enough that the distance between who he was and who he might become seemed traversable by will alone. A doctor. He'd gone through a phase of wanting to be a doctor, drawn to the idea of being the person in the room who made things better instead of worse.

  He had become none of those things.

  He had become this. A man lying in the rain in a dead city with six soldiers on his conscience and a Governor's orders in his pocket and absolutely nothing to return to.

  Nothing.

  He said the word inside his head and let it echo. Not with self-pity, he was past the stage where self-pity had any texture to it. He said it like a diagnosis. Like something a doctor would write at the bottom of a chart and underline.

  His mind drifted back to Lockwood. It always came back to Lockwood, the way a tongue returns to a sore tooth, not because you want to, but because the pull is too strong to ignore. He saw it the way it had been that night. The smoke and the sound of it, the way the whole town had seemed to tilt on its axis. And above all of it, the thing in the clouds. That shape. That presence, hovering above the carnage with something that looked, impossibly, like a smile. He'd seen it. He'd seen it.

  Or had he.

  Was he seeing things. Was he in a coma. Was this, all of it, the Governor and the magic and Gabriel dying and the Outlaw eating a rabbit in an abandoned city, some long, elaborate construction of a broken mind that had found an exit and taken it?

  Was any of this real?

  Was this really his life now?

  Was this where he wanted to be?

  The silence that followed those questions was different from ordinary silence. It had weight. It filled his chest the way water fills a room, slowly, from the bottom up, and then all at once.

  He was broken.

  He understood that now, lying here. He'd been carrying it for so long and moving fast enough that he hadn't had to look at it directly. But here, alone, with nothing to do and nowhere to be and no one to perform okayness for, here it was true and visible. He was broken in the specific way that happens when you lose too much too quickly and your mind decides, in its quiet, efficient way, that the most reasonable response is to simply stop registering loss as loss. To go numb. To function on the surface while something underneath grinds to a halt.

  He had nothing left to fight for. Not really. He had the answers to what happened in Lockwood, or the possibility of answers, the direction of answers, and that was it. That was the whole inventory.

  But he'd thought about this too: what happened after the answers? If he found out what destroyed his town and took his family, what then? Revenge, maybe. He turned the word over. Revenge felt like something. It had a shape, a direction, an endpoint you could aim yourself at. But beyond that endpoint, what? What did a man do after revenge? What did a man with nothing become once the one remaining reason was gone?

  He couldn't leave the agency. That wasn't naive, it was just arithmetic. They had thousands of soldiers and magic and a Governor who threatened to kill men without changing expression. If he ran, they'd find him and kill him without ceremony, the way you swat a thing that buzzes too close.

  He didn't want to fight.

  He didn't want to kill.

  He wanted, and this want sat at the center of him like something tender and embarrassing and absolutely true, he wanted to live. To live with people he cared about. To sit somewhere and eat food and hear familiar voices and not wonder whether the person next to him was going to be alive by morning.

  But the Outlaw had been right. He hadn't wanted to admit it while the man was standing over him with a gun, but lying here in the dark with no performance required, he could let the truth in.

  The world is brutal.

  He thought about it more carefully than he usually let himself. There was a difference, he decided, between brutal and unfair. Unfair was subjective. He'd spent a long time believing the world was unfair, stacking his losses against some imaginary scale that was supposed to be balanced and finding it tilted against him at every turn. But that assumed a neutral baseline. That assumed the world owed anyone anything. The Governor didn't walk through life thinking the world was unfair, the Governor walked through life thinking the world was exactly as it should be, because for him it was. For him it worked perfectly.

  Brutality was different. Brutality was objective. The world killed people who hadn't finished becoming who they were going to be. It burned towns. It separated families. It sent soldiers into dead cities and called them replaceable. That wasn't unfair, unfair implied the possibility of fair. Brutality just was. The natural state of a thing that didn't care.

  He thought about the people who had lived in this city. Twenty million of them, gone, vanished, the buildings left behind like a shed skin. He thought about the soldiers who'd followed him today, the ones who'd died in the first thirty seconds of contact, the ones who'd trusted the weight of their lives to a man who'd had the job for six hours. He thought about Gabriel laying in the grass dead.

  He thought about all of it, over and over, turning it in his mind until it wore smooth and then started cutting again, and then he stopped thinking in words and sentences and just lay in the full weight of it, the cumulative unbearable weight of a life that had become something he didn't recognize.

  Why, he thought.

  Just that. Just the question without the rest of it.

  He turned his head.

  The grenade was there. He hadn't noticed it before, or maybe he had and hadn't let himself acknowledge it, hadn't been ready. It lay in the rubble a few feet away, untouched by the fighting, wet from the rain, ordinary-looking in the way that the most dangerous things always were.

  He reached out his hand.

  The metal was cold. Wet. Heavier than it looked, the way things always were when they actually mattered. He brought it to his chest and closed his fingers around it and lay there for a moment, just holding it, with his eyes closed and the rain on his face.

  His thumb found the pin.

  He pulled it.

  One.

  He was eight years old and running down a street in Lockwood that didn't exist anymore. His father was behind him, laughing, that laugh, that specific and ridiculous laugh, too loud for the situation, belonging to a man who found more things funny than he probably should have. The birds were making noise. Lockwood birds made a sound different from anywhere else, or maybe they didn't and he'd just been small enough that everything local seemed singular. The sun was the way it is in memory, warmer and more golden than it ever was in real life, lit from inside.

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  He would give anything. Any remaining thing he had, which was not much.

  Two.

  His mother's arms. He could still feel the specific quality of them, the way she held on a second longer than necessary, the way her embrace communicated something that words would have made smaller. Coming home from a bad day and not having to explain anything, just being absorbed back into warmth and fed something that took time and care to make, and then resisting sleep because sleeping meant the day was over and he wanted it to last. He'd always wanted it to last and hadn't known to say so while it was happening.

  He wanted to go back.

  He wanted to be with them again.

  Three.

  He was not a religious man. He had said so to Dorian's face, had said it plainly and meant it, the idea of a god powerful enough to have built all of this watching all of this happen didn't compute for him, had never computed. It implied a kind of indifference so vast it became its own kind of cruelty.

  But lying here with the pin pulled and his chest full of something that felt almost like peace, he prayed anyway.

  Not to anyone specific. Not with any theology behind it. Just outward, into whatever might be listening, please let there be something. Please let there be somewhere. Let there be a place where the people I have lost are, and let it be possible to go there and find them.

  He thought about Gabriel's laugh. About Raphael's hands. About Michael always needing the last word and Uriel's quiet, steadying presence.

  He thought about his parents.

  He was smiling. He hadn't noticed it happening, but there it was, something had come loose in him, some grip had released, and underneath the grief was this strange and unexpected lightness, like a door opening onto a room he hadn't known was there.

  He would see them again.

  That was the thought. Simple and whole and requiring nothing else to support it.

  Four.

  BOOM.

  The explosion came from two feet to his left.

  Darrel's eyes opened.

  His smile was gone. The tears on his face were still there, still falling, but whatever had been living behind them a second ago had vanished, and in its place was something raw and stinging and absolutely empty. He lay there blinking at the rain for a moment, trying to locate himself.

  "That," said a voice above him, "takes a significant amount of guts."

  The Governor stood over him.

  He was enormous against the sky, his silhouette solid and unhurried, like a man who had arrived exactly when he intended to. Behind him, twenty-five soldiers, fully armed, standing in formation with their faces blank. And beside him, Dorian, holding an umbrella as if they were on a pleasant evening walk through a dead city in the rain.

  Darrel looked to his right. There had been a wall there moments ago.

  The Governor had taken the grenade from his hand before it could do what he'd intended it to do. Had done it with the kind of casual precision that suggested he'd done similar things before, or that he simply moved through the world with the confidence of a man who believed nothing could touch him unless he permitted it.

  Darrel sat up slowly.

  "Why," he said. The word came out flat and small.

  "You're a valuable asset," the Governor said. "Couldn't let you go to waste."

  Dorian stepped forward, his expression doing something complicated. "You're suicidal?"

  Darrel looked at him. "What gave it away, you insensitive fuck."

  He stood up. It took more effort than it should have, his body registering everything the last several hours had put it through, but he got there. And standing, the thing that had been building in his chest since before he'd reached for the grenade, since before the Outlaw, since before the soldiers, since before all of it, finally had somewhere to go.

  "YOU PEOPLE KILLED MY FRIENDS."

  Dorian opened his mouth.

  "NO. No, you don't get to talk right now." Darrel's voice came out cracked and enormous, too big for his body, filling the wet air of the ruined street. "I have lost everything. Do you understand that? Everything. My family. My town. The people I found afterward who became the only thing I had left." His hands were shaking. He didn't try to stop them. "MY ENTIRE LIFE I HAVE WANTED MORE, because everything I had was taken from me. Burned away. Gone before I could even properly hold onto it."

  The soldiers didn't move. Dorian had stepped back. The Governor watched.

  "I will not be your slave anymore. I will not run your missions and watch more people die because you need something found. I will not be another thing you own and use and discard." He was breathing hard. "I don't care if you shoot me. I will not continue."

  A beat.

  "I won't."

  The last two words came out quiet. Spent.

  The Governor smiled.

  It was not a small smile, not a polite one. It spread across his face the way something spreads when it's been waiting, deep and full and crawling with a satisfaction that looked almost like it hurt him to contain. Like it wanted to leak out the edges.

  "Then go," he said.

  Darrel blinked. "W- what?"

  "Then go."

  The Governor rolled his shoulders slightly, adjusting his coat. His voice was even and calm, the voice of a man discussing the weather or the time.

  "When you leave, you'll realize something. That out there, beyond these walls, beyond this organization, you will continue to be nothing."

  He raised one hand and snapped his fingers.

  The Twenty five soldiers dropped to the ground in front of him as if the air had been cut from beneath them. They hit their knees in unison, blindfolded, hands behind their backs, kneeling in the rain with the mechanical precision of a demonstration. Not a sound from any of them.

  "But with me," the Governor said, "with the agency, you can be everything you've ever wanted."

  He clapped his hands together.

  The guillotine came from nowhere. It was just there, appearing out of nothing, and then it came down and the sound it made was the sound of finality, clean and absolute. Twenty five heads. Twenty bodies folding forward into the pooling rain.

  Darrel stumbled backward. He couldn't take his eyes off it. The blood spread outward across the cracked concrete, dark and immediate, carried by the rain in thin rivers between the stones.

  "You..." he started.

  "Killed them?" The Governor shrugged with his face, a minimal movement of a man who found the observation unremarkable. "They meant nothing to me."

  "So why keep me alive?"

  The Governor looked at him for a long moment. Something moved in his expression, not warmth, not exactly, but something that functioned in the space where warmth would be in a different kind of person.

  "Because you do mean something to me," he said. "You just wouldn't understand yet."

  He turned toward the horses. Dorian followed, umbrella still raised, expression unreadable.

  "You can go," the Governor said without turning back. "I'll let you. The gates of the agency will always be open for you to return."

  "I would never."

  "You say that now." The Governor mounted his horse with the ease of a man who had been doing it all his life. He picked up a radio from the saddlebag and raised it to his mouth, already moving on, already thinking about the next thing. "But people do reckless things when they're desperate."

  He looked back at Darrel one last time. Just for a second.

  "And something tells me you're the desperate type, Mister Roanshaw."

  He spoke into the radio as the horses moved: "Search around Vultury for the Outlaw. He moves on foot. Couldn't have gotten far."

  And then they were gone, the sound of hooves fading into the rain, and Darrel was alone again. Standing in the middle of a dead city street with twenty headless bodies arranged at his feet and blood running outward in every direction and the rain still coming down the way it had been coming down for hours, steady and absolute and completely indifferent.

  He stood there.

  Thinking.

  Not about many things this time. About one specific thing. A question that had been building toward him for days, maybe longer, maybe since Lockwood, and had finally arrived and was standing in front of him and waiting.

  What will you choose?

  He looked down.

  The blood from the bodies moved to his west, carried by the subtle grade of the road, running in dark thin streams between the cracked stones toward whatever low point the earth had decided was down.

  He looked up.

  A flock of geese crossed the sky above the ruins, moving in their loose, instinctive formation, not ordered, not commanded, just moving together in the direction they knew to go. They crossed from east to west. They crossed to the east.

  Darrel stood in the middle of it, between the blood running right and the birds flying left, between the Governor's open gates and the Outlaw disappearing around a corner, between nothing and nothing, between one version of himself and another.

  He moved.

  West.