The woman in the fog didn't move.
She just watched them, her expression a perfect, unreadable mask of professional detachment.
It was Chloe.
It had to be.
No DGC agent would be this calm. No assassin would announce themselves so cleanly. This was the confident, controlled presence of the ghost on their radio.
Jinx, however, was not in a trusting mood.
Her pistol was out now, held low but ready, the muzzle pointed at the damp wooden planks of the pier.
"You the ghost on the radio?" she growled, her voice a low, threatening rasp that cut through the foggy silence.
Chloe didn't even blink.
Her gaze flickered from Jinx's pistol to Michael, her assessment quick, clinical, and utterly dismissive of the threat.
"I am," she said. Her voice was just as it was on the comms—clean, crisp, and devoid of any discernible emotion. It was the voice of a machine that had learned to perfectly mimic human speech.
"And you," she added, her eyes locking onto Jinx, "are the scrapper. Your performance was adequate, if a little reckless."
Jinx's jaw tightened. "Adequate?"
"I don't work for you, lady," she snarled. "I don't know who the hell you are, but you hacked my comms, you led us on a merry chase across Brooklyn, and you almost got us killed. So you're going to start talking. Fast."
Chloe's lips twitched, a minuscule, almost imperceptible movement that might have been the ghost of a smile, or just a facial tic.
"Your comms channel was secured with a sub-standard, open-source encryption algorithm. A child could have bypassed it," she stated flatly, as if discussing the weather. "And I did not almost get you killed. I saved you. Twice."
"Your plan to escape the storage facility had a success probability of approximately twelve percent. My intervention increased those odds to seventy-eight percent. You're welcome."
The sheer, condescending confidence of her words left Jinx speechless for a moment, her anger momentarily short-circuited by the woman's unshakable, analytical arrogance.
Michael decided it was his turn to try. Jinx's approach of "pissed-off badger" didn't seem to be working.
He stepped forward, placing a calming hand on Jinx's arm.
"What do you want?" he asked, his voice steady. He was the asset. The prize. That gave him a sliver of leverage. "You didn't go to all this trouble just to save a couple of strays."
Chloe's gaze shifted to him.
Her eyes were a cold, piercing gray, the color of a winter sky. They weren't just looking at him; they were scanning him, dissecting him, cataloging every weakness, every strength.
"Correct," she said. "I have no interest in strays."
"I have an interest in results."
She took a slow step closer, the fog swirling around her ankles.
"I have spent the last three years of my life meticulously gathering data on a cancer within the DGC. A black-ops division known as Project Chimera, run by a man named General Gideon."
The name hung in the air between them, a shared curse, a binding agent.
"He is untouchable," Chloe continued, her voice a low, intense monotone. "Protected by layers of political influence, corporate funding, and military secrecy. He is a ghost in the system."
"My partner got too close. He discovered a link between Gideon and the Ever-Gate disaster. A name."
She looked directly at Michael.
"Arcana."
"Gideon had him killed," she said, the words as hard and cold as diamonds. For the first time, a flicker of something raw and hot broke through her icy composure. It was there for only a second, a flash of pure, unadulterated hatred, before it was locked away again behind her professional mask.
"He buried the investigation. Sanitized the records. He made my partner a ghost, too."
She stopped, her point made. The board was set. The players were in position.
"I have the intelligence," she said. "I have the resources. I have the strategy to burn his entire operation to the ground."
"What I lacked," she said, her gray eyes narrowing, "was a weapon."
"A tool sharp enough to cut through his layers of protection. A key that could unlock the doors he has sealed."
She took another step, her gaze so intense it felt like a physical weight.
"Then you fell out of the sky."
"An unregistered anomaly. A boy who can punch holes in reality and walk away from a Ghost ambush. A boy with the Arcana bloodline."
Her voice dropped, becoming a chilling, absolute statement of fact.
"You, Echo-01, are that tool."
The words hit Michael like a slap.
Echo-01.
Asset.
Tool.
Weapon.
He wasn't a person to her. He was a solution to a problem. A variable in an equation.
Okay, so she's not just a scary robot lady, his inner monologue quipped, a cold knot of dread tightening in his stomach. She's the scary robot lady who wrote the instruction manual.
Jinx finally found her voice again, a low, venomous hiss.
"We're not your tools. We're not your damn assets."
Chloe turned her head slightly, her gaze dismissing Jinx once more.
"Aren't you?" she asked coolly.
"You are a fugitive with a price on your head. Your face is probably being plastered across every DGC terminal in the city as we speak."
She turned back to Michael.
"You are a walking, talking violation of every law of physics and DGC protocol in existence. You cannot run. You cannot hide. Your only path forward is through Gideon."
She let the reality of their situation sink in, a cold, crushing weight.
"My path is the only path that leads there."
It was a perfect, inescapable trap, woven not from energy grids and sensor nets, but from logic and desperation.
"So, here is the arrangement," she said, her voice dropping back into its default, transactional tone.
"I will provide you with a safe house. I will provide logistics, intelligence, and a clear path to our target."
"In return, you will give me the Legacy Drive. And you will do exactly as I say, when I say it."
She looked from Michael to Jinx, her face unreadable.
"This is not an alliance of friends. This is not a partnership of equals."
"This is a mutually beneficial, short-term contract, established for the sole purpose of achieving a shared objective."
"Are we clear?"
Michael looked at Jinx.
Jinx looked at Michael.
They were out of options. Out of time. Out of hope.
Chloe was their only move left on the board.
Jinx let out a long, slow breath, a white plume of frustrated air in the cold night. She holstered her pistol, the motion a quiet, bitter surrender.
"Fine," she bit out, the word tasting like defeat. "We'll play it your way, ghost."
"For now."
"Excellent," Chloe said, without a hint of actual pleasure.
She reached into a pouch on her tactical vest and pulled out a small, sleek, military-grade medkit. It was a far cry from Jinx's jar of glowing green goop.
She tossed it to Jinx.
Jinx caught it with a surprised grunt.
"Patch yourself up, scrapper," Chloe said, her tone utterly dismissive. "You're bleeding on my pier. It's unprofessional."
She then turned her full, undivided, analytical attention back to Michael.
A faint, almost cruel smile touched the corner of her lips.
"As for you," she said, her voice a low, chilling whisper that promised pain and discovery in equal measure.
"We need to see just how broken my new weapon really is."