"Mr. Duro, the last account has been seized. It's over. I'm sorry."Rafael Duro stood on the roof of a six story walk up in Queens, phone pressed to his ear, and listened to the only lawyer who still answered his calls tell him there was nothing left to fight for. The wind pulled at his jacket. Somewhere below, a delivery truck backed up, beeping in the dark like it didn't know the world had just ended for somebody twelve floors up.He didn't say anything for a long moment. Not because he was in shock. Because he was doing math, the same way he always did when something fell apart, and the math kept coming back to zero no matter how many times he ran it."Did you hear me?" the lawyer asked."I heard you.""There's still the appeal process. It could take months, but-""It won't matter," Rafael said. "Months is a word for people who have something left to wait on."The line went quiet on the other end. He could picture the man's face, the careful, professional pity he'd been wearing in

"You're not supposed to be here, Mr. Duro. You're supposed to be finished."The voice came from a woman in a tailored navy dress, drink in hand, eyebrows raised just enough to make the comment land like a slap dressed up as small talk. Rafael recognized her vaguely, some junior partner from a firm that used to court his business back when his business was worth courting. He gave her a thin smile and kept walking.She wasn't wrong. He wasn't supposed to be here.Forty eight hours since the warehouse. Forty eight hours since he'd walked out of that basement with a file clutched in one hand and a number burned into his vision that hadn't fully left him alone since. The mission reward had landed in a shell account two days later, twelve thousand dollars he had no good explanation for and no intention of questioning too hard. He'd used a third of it on this suit. Dark gray, simple, the kind of cut that didn't announce itself but fit exactly right in a room where everyone was trained to not

"You missed your compliance window, Mr. Duro. The System does not reschedule."Rafael read the line three times before it fully landed, standing in the kitchen of his rented room with a cup of coffee going cold in his hand. He'd been so deep in the Nessler paperwork the night before, cross referencing board minutes until almost three in the morning, that he'd completely lost track of a second mission window the System had quietly opened and was now, just as quietly, closing on him.[MISSION FAILED: TIME EXCEEDED.][PENALTY: -75 SURVIVAL POINTS.][CURRENT SP: 925.][WARNING: SP BELOW 900 TRIGGERS ACCELERATED DEBT COLLECTION.]He set the coffee down slow, the way a man sets something down when his hands have suddenly stopped trusting themselves. Seventy five points, gone, just like that, for a mission he hadn't even known was running, attached to a deadline he hadn't been told about until it had already passed.Accelerated debt collection. He had no idea what that meant. He had a strong

"I don't need help. I've been doing this longer than you."She didn't turn around when she said it.Rafael stood in the doorway of the warehouse sublevel and watched Lara Quinn navigate a space that had no business existing inside a building this size, moving through it the way she moved through everything, like she'd already mapped it in her head before her feet touched the floor. The geometry was wrong down here, the same dull orange glow from the broken window above casting light at angles that didn't match where the light source should have been, and she moved through it without hesitating, without looking back, without doing any of the things a person did when they were scared.He hadn't made a sound coming down the stairs.She'd known anyway."Four months," he said, staying in the doorway."Four months, two weeks, and three days." She crouched beside a filing unit that had no business being in a warehouse basement, fingers working the lock with the kind of practiced efficiency t

"You're not seriously walking into that meeting looking like that."Rafael looked down at his suit. "What's wrong with it.""Nothing." Lara fell into step beside him on the sidewalk outside the Nessler Capital building, voice dropping to something that wasn't quite professional and wasn't quite anything else. "That's the problem. You look like you own the place already. These men haven't decided to let you in the door yet and you're already walking like you own the furniture.""I do own the furniture. Technically. That's what the creditor claim establishes."She made a sound that was almost a laugh and wasn't quite, and they pushed through the revolving door together.The lobby was the kind that announced money without saying so directly, all clean lines and expensive stone and the specific hush of a building that had never once needed to try hard. Rafael had been in a hundred rooms like this. He'd owned three buildings with lobbies exactly like this. He walked through it the same way