The next morning, the apartment was a mausoleum of whispered resentments. Drake sat at the flimsy kitchen table, pointedly cleaning a gun that was already immaculate. Every metallic click was an accusation. Across from him, Hikaru stared into a cup of cooling tea, her face a mask of exhausted grief. Every few minutes, her hand would flutter as if to gesture, her body remembering an invisibility she no longer possessed. She’d flinch when the gesture did nothing.
Jacob hadn’t left his room. Zach had left a plate of toast by his door an hour ago. It was still there.
Only Brielle’s corner of the living room showed any sign of life. Wires snaked from her laptop to a jury-rigged breadboard where the module she’d salvaged sat under the glare of a desk lamp. The air smelled of hot plastic and ozone.
“Anything?” Zach asked, his voice low. He kept it low for Hikaru, for the ghost of Jacob behind his door.
Brielle shook her head, not looking up. Strands of dark hair had escaped her messy bun, framing a face pinched with concentration. “It’s a damn brick. The casing is some kind of polymer fused with… I don’t know. Ceramic? Quartz? It’s designed to be unreadable. But the robber’s pistol it was attached to… that I can work with.”
Zach waited. He leaned against the wall, folding his arms. The tremor was back in his hands, a low hum of failure. He’d tried it again in the shower, tried to push his will into the water droplets on the tile, to make them move. Nothing. It was like shouting into a vacuum.
“There are micro-fractures in the gun’s frame,” Brielle said, pointing a screwdriver at her screen. A magnified image showed a spiderweb of tiny cracks around the screw holes where the module had been mounted. “From the energy discharge. They radiate from the point of contact, but they’re not random.” She typed a few commands, and the image changed. Lines of colored light overlaid the cracks. “They form a pattern. A circuit.”
“A circuit for what?” Drake grunted from the table, not looking up from his gun.
“That’s the thing,” Brielle murmured, leaning closer to her monitor. “It’s not an electrical circuit. There’s no logical path for current. It’s nonsense. It’s… writing.”
She zoomed in on a nexus of glowing lines. The pattern resolved into something sharp, geometric, and utterly alien. A starburst of intersecting lines and nested circles. It was elegant, intricate, and made Zach’s teeth ache just looking at it.
“What is that?” Zach asked, pushing off the wall.
“I don’t know,” Brielle admitted, her voice tight with frustration. “It’s not a language. It’s not engineering. It’s just… there. I think it was etched on the inside of the module, and the energy blast that hit Hikaru burned its impression into the gun’s frame. A photographic negative, made of force.”
Zach stared at the symbol. It felt ancient. Wrong. The clean, predictable world of technology and superpowers suddenly felt thin, stretched over something dark and primal. His government training had no file for this.
He needed someone who did.
“Keep working,” he said, pulling his phone from his pocket. “See if you can isolate any other patterns.”
He walked into his own small room, the one he shared with Jacob, and closed the door. He scrolled through his contacts, past Sullivan and the unit’s numbers, to a single, unlabelled entry. He pressed call.
It rang three times before a voice answered, rough with sleep. “This better be good, Bennet.”
“Hawke. I need you.”
A sigh. “The world ending again or did you just run out of sugar for your coffee?”
“Something a little more my problem than yours, but I think you’ve seen it before. I’m sending you a picture.” Zach texted Brielle’s image to the number. “Meet me. The usual place. One hour.”
He didn’t wait for a reply. He hung up, his heart hammering a little faster. Reaching out to Hawke was a risk. A huge one. Sullivan would burn him alive if he knew. But Sullivan had the original module and was telling them nothing. That was a bigger risk.
The ‘usual place’ was the roof of a derelict textile warehouse in the industrial district, a place that smelled of rust and pigeon shit. Hawke was already there when Zach arrived, leaning against a graffiti-covered ventilation unit, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. He was older than Zach, maybe early twenties, with a lean, rangy build and tired eyes that had seen too much. He wore a patched-up Carhartt jacket that had probably been cool a decade ago.
“You look like hell,” Hawke observed, taking a drag from his cigarette. Ash snowed onto his boots.
“You’re one to talk,” Zach shot back, walking to the edge of the roof. The city sprawled below, a grid of indifferent lights. “Did you look at the picture?”
“I did.” Hawke pushed off the wall and joined him, his gaze fixed on the skyline. “Where did you get it?”
“Bank job. Some low-lifes had tech we’ve never seen. One of them tagged my teammate with it. Her powers are… gone.” Saying it out loud made it real. The words were stones in his mouth.
Hawke was silent for a long moment, just smoking. “It’s a sigil,” he said finally. “A mark of binding and transference. Old magic. Nasty stuff.”
Zach’s blood chilled. “Magic?”
“You say that like you’ve never seen it.” Hawke gave him a sideways look. “Kid, what do you think you *are*? Your little mind-whammy, the girl who walks through walls, the boy who plays with fire… it’s all just magic with a different name. The universe is full of it. Some people are born with a leaky faucet. Others have to build the plumbing themselves.”
Hawke flicked his cigarette butt over the edge of the roof. It spun, a tiny orange comet arcing into the darkness.
“This sigil,” he continued, his voice dropping, “is part of the plumbing. It’s a keyhole. It’s designed to siphon a specific kind of energy—in your case, your friend’s gift—and channel it somewhere else. Or to someone else.”
The receiver. Waiting for a signal. Brielle’s words echoed in Zach’s head. It wasn’t a radio signal. It was a summons.
“These weren’t sorcerers, Hawke. They were thugs with guns.”
“A wrench isn’t a mechanic,” Hawke countered. “Someone gave them the tools. Someone who knows how to craft these things. This isn’t something you cook up in a garage. The geometry is too precise. It looks like the work of a coven, or maybe a demonic hedge-mage.”
Zach felt a wave of dizziness. Covens. Demons. He ran a team of super-powered teenagers for a covert government agency. He was supposed to be dealing with rogue states and terrorists, not something out of a pulp horror novel.
“So how do we fix it?” Zach asked. “How do I get her power back?”
Hawke’s face softened with something that looked unnervingly like pity. “That’s the million-dollar question. If the siphoning circuit is still active, you break the connection. Find the caster, find whatever is holding the stolen power, and destroy it. But if the transfer is complete… I don’t know. It’s like trying to un-burn a photograph. Some things can’t be undone.”
The weight on Zach’s chest grew heavier. He looked down at his own hands, the hands that used to be able to make a man put down his gun with a single sentence. Useless.
“There’s something else,” Zach said, the confession scraping his throat raw. “My own gift. It’s been… fading. For weeks. At the bank, I tried to use it. There was nothing there.”
He expected mockery. Disbelief. A lecture.
Instead, Hawke just nodded slowly. He looked back out at the city lights. “You’re the leader. The shield. You hold them all together. That takes a toll, Zach. More than you know. Your kind of power, it’s tied to will, to focus. You’re spreading yourself too thin. Holding a scared kid at night, worrying about your invisible girl, watching your back for your handler… you’re leaking. Burning your own fuel just to keep the others warm.”
His words hit Zach harder than a physical blow. It was the truth. The absolute, damning truth. He wasn't a pillar of strength. He was a fraying rope.
“So I’m broken, too,” Zach said, the words flat.
“No.” Hawke met his gaze, his eyes clear and serious in the gloom. “You’re running on empty. There’s a difference. You need to find the source of the drain and plug it. Or you need to find a new source of fuel.” He clapped a hand on Zach’s shoulder, a rare gesture of physical comfort. “This sigil mess… it’s a symptom. Your problem, my problem, it’s all the same problem. Someone is weaponizing our world. Turning magic into ammunition.”
Zach’s phone buzzed in his pocket. The screen lit up with a name that made his stomach clench. CHIEF SULLIVAN.
“Speak of the devil,” Zach muttered, pulling the phone out. He answered. “Sir.”
“*Bennet. I’m five minutes from your building,*” Sullivan’s voice was clipped, business-like. “*I have an update for you and your team. Be ready.*” The line went dead.
Panic, cold and sharp, lanced through him. “I have to go. Sullivan’s on his way to the apartment.”
Hawke’s expression hardened. “Does he know about me?”
“No. And he can’t.”
“Keep it that way,” Hawke warned. “Your boss is either dangerously ignorant or he’s part of the problem. A man like that, he doesn’t like variables he can’t control. And guys like me, we’re nothing but variables.” He started backing away towards the fire escape. “The sigil. Look for more of them. On the robbers, their gear, their hideout. It’s a signature. A calling card. Find enough pieces, you find who left it.”
Zach gave a tight nod and turned, sprinting for the door that led back inside, leaving Hawke to melt into the shadows.
He made it back to the apartment with less than a minute to spare, his heart pounding from the run. He burst through the door, breathless.
“Sullivan’s coming,” he announced. The effect was immediate. Drake put his gun away. Hikaru sat up straighter. Brielle quickly shut down her laptop, hiding the screen with the sigil from view. The fractured unit snapped back into a semblance of formation. For a terrifying moment, Zach saw them not as his friends, his family, but as child soldiers preparing for inspection.
Chief Sullivan let himself in without knocking. He was a man built of sharp angles and disapproval, his suit immaculate, his gaze sweeping the room and finding it wanting.
“Report,” he said without preamble.
“Hikaru’s condition is unchanged, sir,” Zach said, his voice a perfect replica of military calm. “Brielle has been analyzing the schematics of the weapon, but the module itself appears to be a dead end.” It wasn’t a lie. Not exactly.
Sullivan’s eyes narrowed. “The module is a Department of Defense concern now. You will cease all analysis of it. Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir,” Brielle said, her own voice tight.
“Good.” Sullivan paced into the center of the room, a predator in their den. “Our intelligence suggests the bank robbers were a splinter cell. Mercenaries. Not their own leadership. They were hired guns.”
“Hired by who?” Drake asked, his tone bordering on insubordinate.
Sullivan ignored him, his cold eyes landing on Zach. “That’s what we’re going to find out. But this incident has exposed a critical vulnerability in this unit. One of your core members was disabled by unknown means.” His gaze flickered to Hikaru, who flinched. “And your own effectiveness is in question.”
He looked directly at Zach. It wasn’t a question. It was a spade, digging at the grave of Zach’s secret.
Zach held his gaze, his face a granite mask. He could feel Hawke’s words echoing in his mind. *Weaponizing our world.* Sullivan wasn’t giving him information. He was reminding him of his failures, reasserting dominance. He was putting the leash back on.
And for the first time, Zach felt the cold, hard metal of it chafe against his neck. He wasn’t just their handler. He was a wall. A wall between them and the truth.
And Zach was on the wrong side of it.