Rex was getting stronger every day.

  He could feel it. Not just in his fists. In everything.

  On Wednesday he found a hero. Or maybe she found him. Either way it ended the same.

  He had been moving through the parts of Sydney that didn't make it into any guidebook, the back streets, the late-night corners, the places where people minded their own business because minding someone else's got you hurt. Five days. Three fights. Two were nothing, thugs who looked at him wrong or stood where he needed to walk. The third was a police officer who had come alone, which was a mistake the officer would remember for a while but survive.

  Rex hadn't wanted the attention.

  But the red power didn't care what he wanted. It sat inside him like a fire that needed feeding, low and constant, and the only thing that fed it was conflict.

  Her name was Vantage.

  She came off a rooftop clean, landed in the narrow street in front of him, dark practical costume, no theatrics. The kind of hero who had stopped trying to impress anyone a long time ago and just did the work.

  "You've been busy," she said.

  Rex looked at her. The red power shifted, quiet and interested.

  "Just walking," he said.

  "Two assault reports in four days. Both descriptions match you."

  "Lot of people look like me."

  Her eyes were steady. The eyes of someone who had been doing this long enough to know exactly what she was looking at and was not happy about it.

  "Come with me," she said. "Willingly is better for both of us."

  Rex smiled. It was not a good smile.

  "You came alone," he said.

  "Backup is two minutes out."

  "Two minutes," Rex said, "is a long time."

  He moved.

  She was good. Better than the thugs, better than the officer. Brass knuckles, fast reflexes, the clean controlled movement of someone who trained seriously. She read his first move before it arrived. His second. Dodged both correctly.

  But the red power was watching her.

  That was the part she didn't know about. It wasn't just making him faster or stronger. It was learning her. Every exchange, her timing, the small shifts in her feet before she moved, the way her shoulder dropped just before she threw. It fed everything to Rex in real time and Rex used it, and by the sixth exchange he wasn't reacting to her anymore. He was already inside her next move before she made it.

  She felt it. He saw it in her eyes, the exact moment focused became alarmed.

  Too late.

  He hit her once. Enough to put her against the wall and keep her there. She slid down and sat in the narrow street, breathing carefully, her comms already active.

  Rex crouched in front of her.

  The red light moved under his skin, slow and heavy.

  "Tell your people," he said quietly. "Something new is in this city."

  He stood and walked away before the backup arrived.

  Behind him Vantage sat against the wall and looked at the space where he had been.

  She had some broken ribs. It's been seven years, seven years she had been doing this job. Seven years of villains and fights and things that had scared her.

  Nothing had felt like that.

  The reports had been wrong about him. Completely wrong.

  Rex turned a corner and slowed to a walk, rolling his neck, feeling the place where her knuckles had connected on his third exchange. It would bruise. He didn't mind. He had always healed fast and the red power made it even faster.

  He looked at his hand in the dark. The faint red glow was already fading back under his skin, settling down, satisfied for now.

  He thought about what she had said. Backup two minutes out.

  They would find her. They would take her report. And by morning whatever organization she worked for would be asking questions about a man who had walked away from Vantage without a scratch.

  Good, he thought. Let them ask.

  He put his hands in his pockets and kept walking. The city stretched around him, loud and indifferent, and Rex moved through it like something that had not yet decided how large it was going to get.

  Johnny went into the laptop on Thursday night.

  He had been patient about it. He waited until the house was fully quiet, checked that Hector wasn't home, and then moved in slowly, carefully, the way you approached something you didn't want to startle.

  The ONYX files were extensive. Years of it. Surveillance photographs, financial records, incident reports all cross-referenced and marked in Hector's neat handwriting. A whole criminal geography built from fragments by a man who had never stopped looking.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  "How did Grandpa get all of this?" Johnny thought.

  He moved through it carefully. Reading without disturbing. Leaving nothing behind.

  He was three layers deep when he felt it.

  Not a folder. Not a document. Something that had no business being there.

  He went still inside the laptop the way you went still when you reached into something familiar and felt the wrong texture. He didn't move toward it. He held himself at the edge of it and read the shape of it first before touching anything.

  It was buried deep. Below the operating system, below the security layer, in the space between processes where standard detection software never thought to look.

  Small. Patient. Silent.

  A program. Not one Hector had put there.

  The architecture was too precise. Too specifically fitted to this machine and this user. Someone had written this for Hector's laptop alone. Someone whose relationship with technology went beyond training, beyond expertise. Someone with a quirk.

  Not like Johnny's. Something more aggressive. Where Johnny understood machines, this person had hollowed one out and hidden something inside it.

  He looked at what the program was doing.

  It was watching.

  Every file Hector opened. Every search. Every message. All of it copied quietly and sent outward along a path disguised as normal system traffic. Invisible to anything not specifically looking for it.

  Onyx hadn't put a person in this house.

  He had put eyes in it.

  Johnny checked the timestamps carefully.

  Eight months ago.

  Before the investigation started. Before the assessment. Before Johnny had arrived.

  Onyx hadn't placed this in response to Hector starting to look. He had placed it because he knew Hector would start looking eventually. He had been ready and waiting.

  That wasn't a criminal managing a threat.

  That was someone who had been planning for a long time and was patient about it.

  Johnny pulled back from the program slowly. Left everything exactly as he found it. The program still running. Still watching. Still sending its quiet stream outward to wherever Onyx had pointed it.

  He left it on.

  He lay in the dark and thought.

  The green light moved under his skin, slow and steady.

  Onyx had a hacker. Someone with a quirk powerful enough to build something that precise and careful enough to hide it where nothing standard would ever find it. And it meant Onyx had seen everything. Every lead Hector followed in eight months. Every contact. Every step of the investigation, watched in real time as it happened.

  Hector wasn't hunting a man in hiding.

  He was hunting a man who had been reading his map as he drew it.

  Johnny thought about Hector asleep down the hall. Moving carefully toward a man who had seen every move coming.

  He thought about Devon and Amara.

  He thought about the photograph on the desk. The two of them laughing at something outside the frame, shoulders touching, easy and unselfconscious, not yet knowing what was coming.

  He thought about the garden wall that afternoon, and Hector staring at the patch of grass where Devon used to sit, and the way Hector's face had looked when he said he never found the heart to change it.

  Four years. The man had been carrying this for four years, and it hadn't made him bitter or broken. It had just made him quieter. More deliberate. The kind of grief that didn't announce itself but lived in every room of the house.

  Johnny wasn't going to let Onyx add to that.

  He made his decision.

  He wasn't disabling the program. Not yet. Disabling it told Onyx someone had found it, and that changed things in ways Johnny couldn't predict. Better to leave it running. Let Onyx watch what Hector wanted him to see. While Johnny built what came next.

  He could already feel the shape of it. A counter-surveillance system sitting in the same hidden layer as Onyx's program, watching it watching Hector, sending everything it gathered back to Johnny instead.

  Fighting fire with fire.

  Or in this case, a hacker up against someone who understood machines all the way down to the logic underneath the logic.

  Not tonight. He didn't have the control yet.

  But tomorrow he would start.

  He closed his eyes.

  This time, he slept.