After Oren left, the apartment settled into quiet.
Locke stood at the edge of the living room, looking at the view he'd just spent his entire life savings on, and decided he was fine with it. Money was a renewable resource. The right location, the right position in the right city at the right time, that was the actual asset. The cash was just the entry fee.
He turned around.
Gwen was still standing in the middle of the room with the expression of someone who had just watched a magic trick and couldn't figure out where the rabbit went. She blinked when she caught him looking.
"Hey," Locke said. "Thanks, Gwen."
That snapped her back. "For what? I didn't actually do anything." She gestured vaguely at the room around them. "You kind of... handled it."
"You came," he said simply. "First day in a new city, that means something."
She opened her mouth, closed it, and then gave a small laugh that sounded like she'd lost an argument she hadn't expected to have. "You're weird, you know that?"
"So I've been told."
He watched her look around the apartment one more time, taking in the terrace, the smart home panel, the way the late afternoon light moved across the floor and he could see her recalibrating. She'd come here expecting to help a new classmate navigate Craigslist listings, and instead she was standing in a Fifth Avenue duplex.
She's wondering if the orphan story was a cover, he thought. Fair.
"It was my parents' money," he said, unprompted. "The inheritance. Buying this basically cleaned me out, but-" he glanced at the window, at the park, at the city, "I needed a base. This is the right one."
Something in Gwen's expression softened slightly. "You don't have to explain yourself."
"I know." He reached for his jacket. "Come on. Dinner's on me."
She tried to decline twice. He waited both times without arguing, and both times she ran out of reasons.
The restaurant was a few blocks south on Fifth, he'd clocked it from the cab window coming in, tucked between a hotel entrance and a dry cleaner, the kind of place with no sign visible from the street but warm light spilling through the window and a chalkboard menu that changed daily. The kind of place that had been there for thirty years and planned to be there for thirty more.
They got a corner table. Gwen ordered the salmon. Locke got a steak and, out of habit, scanned the drinks menu before remembering he was sixteen in this life, not the other one.
He set the menu down.
Two more years. Minor inconvenience.
"Okay," Gwen said, after the food arrived and she'd taken her first bite of a small pastry the kitchen had sent out. Her eyes went wide. "Okay, this place is really good."
"We can come back," Locke said.
She looked up with a grin that had a little challenge in it. "Would that be a date, Locke?"
He met her eyes without hesitation. "Whatever works."
Gwen stared at him.
"...That's not an answer."
"Sure it is."
She pointed her fork at him. "You are a deeply strange person." But she was smiling when she said it, so he counted it as a win.
They were out on the sidewalk heading toward the nearest subway entrance when the police cruiser rolled past, slowed, and reversed.
Locke watched it with mild interest.
The passenger window came down. A man in his forties leaned out, broad-shouldered, still carrying the posture of someone used to being the most authoritative person in any room and his gaze moved from Gwen to Locke and back to Gwen with the particular economy of a trained observer who had just noticed something he wasn't sure how to categorize.
"Dad?" Gwen said.
Captain George Stacy stepped out of the car.
Locke clocked the rank insignia, clocked the careful expression, clocked the half-second pause before the handshake. He extended his hand anyway.
"Sir. Locke Broughton."
George looked at the hand, then shook it. Firm grip, measured pressure, the grip of a man deciding something. "George Stacy." His eyes were already doing the work: age, posture, the restaurant they'd clearly just come from, the fact that his daughter was relaxed in a way she wouldn't be if anything were wrong.
"Dad, this is Locke," Gwen said, with the practiced patience of someone who had navigated this exact dynamic before. "He transferred in today. I helped him look for an apartment, he said thanks by buying dinner. That's it."
George's expression didn't change much. "Uh-huh."
Locke let the silence sit. He had nothing to prove here.
A minute later, Gwen climbed into the cruiser, gave Locke a small wave, and they were gone.
At the Stacy house, dinner was already on the table.
Helen looked up from the kitchen as the door opened. "You're back. Go wash up, food's getting cold."
"Your daughter already ate," George said, dropping his keys on the counter.
Gwen stopped on the stairs and turned around slowly. "Dad."
"What? It's true."
Helen looked between them with the calm attention of someone who had long since learned to read the subtext. "What happened?"
"Ask her where her new classmate found an apartment."
Gwen exhaled. "Mom. It was dinner. He's a transfer student, I helped him look at a place, he said thank you. Nothing happened."
Helen raised an eyebrow. "Where's the apartment?"
A beat.
"Starlight Tower," Gwen said.
Helen looked at George.
George looked at Helen.
"He's an orphan," Gwen continued, with the tone of someone dismantling an argument before it formed. "The money was from his parents. I know how it sounds. But that's what it is." She turned back toward the stairs. "I'm going to do homework. Goodnight."
Her door closed upstairs.
Helen walked back toward the kitchen. "You made assumptions."
"I made observations," George said.
"You upset her."
He touched the back of his neck. "...Is there hot cocoa?"
"You know where the mugs are."
He did. He also knew that one cup usually worked, and that he should probably bring two just in case.
Starlight Tower. 11:14 PM.
The package had been waiting at the concierge desk, no return address, no label beyond his name, routed through a forwarding service he'd set up three months ago. He brought it upstairs, set it on the kitchen island, and opened it.
Inside the foam-padded case: two neat stacks of gold coins, a hundred total, each one stamped with the Continental's sigil. Not legal tender. Not traceable. The currency of a particular shadow economy that operated beneath the surface of the world most people lived in, one Locke had studied carefully and planned to navigate.
The second item was a laptop. No brand markings. Modified hardware, military-grade encryption baked into the firmware. Not something you could find in any store.
He carried both upstairs to the study, locked the coins in the safe, and sat down at the desk.
The laptop took ninety seconds to boot. When it finished, a single prompt appeared on an otherwise black screen.
VERIFY IDENTITY.
Locke typed one word.
PEERLESS.
IDENTITY CONFIRMED. WELCOME BACK.
A file tree populated. He navigated to the top item, a new assignment, flagged urgent, timestamped four hours ago. A name, a photograph, a location grid, and a dossier of behavioral patterns.
He read through it without expression.
His right hand rested on the desk beside the Colt M1911 he'd already unboxed and set within arm's reach, suppressor threaded, chamber checked, safety on.
Outside the window, Manhattan hummed with ten million lives going about their business, none of them knowing that on the twenty-eighth floor of Starlight Tower, the new kid from Texas was reading a contract killing.
The cursor blinked.
Locke leaned back in his chair and thought.