Back in the lobby, D was waiting. He didn’t congratulate Leo. He just nodded once, slow, and handed him a fresh black suit.

The practice room smelled of rosin and silence. Leo knelt by the hole. He didn’t touch it. He just watched the way the dust motes avoided it, curling around the perimeter like water around a hot stone.

The older agent—Agent D, a relic from the ’90s who’d never quite adapted to the new neural-implant database—took Leo to the armory. It was a cavernous space filled with things that should not exist: a pistol that fired small, contained singularities; a tube of lipstick that was actually a molecular destabilizer; and the Neuralyzer—a small red flashbulb on a stem.

“She didn’t fall,” Leo said. “She was pulled. Something targeted her specifically.”