Chapter Text
Cover art drawn and kindly gifted by @wildehopps.official on instagram
The airport intercom of Zootopia International crackled with the last boarding call, a clipped, impersonal female voice repeating the flight number bound for the capital of the Jagrovian Federation, as if it were just another destination, a business trip, a badly planned vacation. Nick crossed the gate without hurry, his paws tucked into the pockets of a light jacket that wasn't his, the passport held between two fingers with the same indifference any commuter might show a tram ticket.
«Welcome aboard, Mr...» The flight attendant lowered her eyes to the passport the fox handed her, an otter with glossy fur and a professional smile sewn into place. «Rick Wilde. Seat 14C, aisle side on your right.»
«Thanks,» he replied, and the smile he gave her was the real one, the kind he'd trained for years until it was indistinguishable from an authentic one.
The plane's aisle smelled of new plastic and burnt coffee. Nick reached his seat without looking around too much, the kind of walk he'd learned to cultivate, loose, almost lazy, the gait of someone who has nothing to hide because he has nothing to fear. He dropped into the window seat, stowed the jacket in the overhead bin above his head with a mechanical motion, and only then, as he settled in, did his paws slip discreetly beneath the waistband of his trousers, checking for the umpteenth time what he was carrying.
Not much. Never much, when flying.
A burner phone, registered and encrypted, switched off, the SIM already scrubbed of any trace that could link it to a real name. A lighter that wasn't really a lighter, its inner mechanism replaced with something far more interesting than a flame, designed to get past metal detectors precisely because no one ever really checked a lighter. A pen that wrote when writing was needed, and did other things when other things were needed. Nothing excessive. Nothing a bored eye at security could hold onto for more than two seconds. Unit Zero never provided more than necessary, and Nick had long since learned that survival, real survival, depended more often on what you could do with empty paws than on what you managed to bring with you.
The plane filled calmly, one passenger at a time, the kind of slowness typical of half-empty flights, the ones where no one crowds for a better window seat because there are plenty of seats to spare. Nick watched the thinning line along the aisle with the distracted attention of someone expecting nothing, his training working in the background regardless, more habit than choice, cataloguing species, apparent age, gait, without any conscious thought lingering on it. A deer with a crooked tie and the face of someone who'd already missed a connection. A pair of raccoons bickering under their breath about who had forgotten the boarding passes. A massive buffalo wedged between two armrests that hadn't been designed for him.
A few rows ahead, a pair of gray ears popped up for a moment above a headrest, twitched slightly, and vanished again. Nick noted them the way he noted everything else, one detail among many, nothing worth a second glance. He turned back to the window, the runway sliding slowly past the glass, and closed his eyes.
The takeoff was ordinary. The roar of the engines building, the thrust pressing him back into his seat, the city of Zootopia tilting and shrinking beneath the wing until it became a grid of lights, ever smaller, then nothing, only low clouds and a sky opening gray above them.
Twenty minutes after that same takeoff, while the plane settled into its cruising route for a flight that would still demand another twelve hours and more, in a windowless room one time zones away, an agent shot up from his station so abruptly that his chair rolled back and slammed into the metal cabinet behind him.
«I need you to come see this. Now.»
The section chief looked up from his own screen with the calculated slowness of someone who had heard that phrase too many times from people who'd panicked over nothing, but something in the agent's tone, a thin thread of real urgency beneath the haste, convinced him to get up anyway. He crossed the operations room in a few strides, leaned over his subordinate's shoulder, and followed the finger scrolling down a list of names projected on the screen.
«Passenger list for the flight,» the agent said, his voice trembling slightly. «Forty-four animals aboard out of a hundred and twelve, crew excluded. With flight staff, that's fifty in total. I cross-referenced it against every database available. Civil registry, tax records, driver's licenses, everything.»
«And?»
«Of at least twenty-four I've checked, not a single one exists.» The agent swallowed, claws drumming against the edge of the desk. «Twenty-four passengers, twenty-four false identities, and I haven't even finished checking the rest. None of these names match a real animal. They're all built with the same care, the same level of detail as our own operational covers.»
The section chief fell silent for a moment that seemed longer than it was, his eyes scanning the list from top to bottom as if repeating the act might change its content.
«Chances are most of the passengers aren't civilians,» the agent went on, «they're cover identities. Which means all those passengers, in all likelihood, are hostile agents. We don't know who they're working for, or under what orders. But if someone found out about the operation in advance and managed to place this many agents on the same flight, then this isn't an infiltration mission anymore.»
«It's a trap.»
«Wilde is the only passenger we know for certain the identity of. Everyone else is an unknown variable, and there are too many for this to be a coincidence.» The agent shook his head. «If there's a leak at this level, we have to warn him before someone makes the first move.»
The section chief straightened slowly, jaw clenched, eyes still fixed on the screen for a long moment before he spoke.
«Send the alert. Now.»
Aboard the flight to Kesvengrad, Nick wasn't expecting any message, and certainly not on the phone he'd been told was for emergency use only, or for sending intelligence.
Twenty minutes had passed since takeoff, the plane now steady at cruising altitude, the constant drone of the engines settled into background presence more than actual sound, when the burner phone buzzed once against his thigh, a short, sharp pulse any other passenger would have mistaken for a muscle cramp.
He drew it out calmly, the gesture of someone checking the time rather than someone expecting news, and the screen lit up with a bare text, no header, no signature.
FLIGHT COMPROMISED. HOSTILES ABOARD, NUMBER UNKNOWN. SURVIVE HOWEVER YOU CAN.
His paws tightened around the phone with sudden firmness, his eyes rereading the three lines a second time, then a third, as if reading them again might somehow alter their meaning. Around him the plane carried on indifferently along its route, the drone of the engines identical to a moment before, a flight attendant pushing the drinks cart down the aisle with a professional smile fixed on her face, the deer with the crooked tie finally asleep against the window.
Nick lifted his gaze, slowly, and for the first time since boarding he truly looked at the faces around him.
He wasn't looking for a name. He was looking for an inconsistency, a detail out of place in an otherwise perfect picture, and it was precisely the perfect pictures he'd been taught to distrust the most. The deer with the crooked tie was still snoring against the window, mouth slightly open, a trace of drool sliding down his chin, no one fakes the surrender of sleep that well. The raccoons had stopped arguing over the documents and were now flipping through a travel magazine with the bored air of someone who'd already read it three times, as genuine as boredom itself. But two rows further back, a lean wolf in a light-colored raincoat sat with both paws resting on the armrests, motionless, fingers not drumming, not moving, betraying nothing, and it was precisely that absence of movement that felt as unnatural as a nervous tic. No civilian stayed that still for that long. Civilians constantly shifted, scratched themselves, checked their phones, hunted for a more comfortable position. That wolf sat like someone waiting for an order.
Good, Nick thought, and there was no fear in the thought, only the same clinical coldness with which he'd once counted down the seconds before a raid. Let's start with you.
He got up calmly, a lazy movement, almost half-hearted, the perfect justification already written on his face before he even moved, that of someone who simply needed to stretch his legs during an endless flight. He walked down the aisle without hurry, passed two rows, and dropped into the empty seat beside the wolf with the ease of someone just looking for company to kill the boredom.
«Long flights like this drive you crazy,» Nick said, his tone light, almost confiding, as he fastened his seatbelt calmly. The wolf turned his head slightly, his eyes taking Nick's measure for a fraction of a second, a quick, silent calculation Nick recognized all too well because it was the same one he himself was making. «Serious question, though. Do all of you undercover types shop at the same store? Because the raincoat, the way you sit, even the crease of your trousers, come on, you're all practically identical.»
For an instant, less than a second, something cracked in the wolf's expression. Not fear, not yet, but that spark of pure shock that crosses the face of someone who discovers he's been seen exactly at the moment he believed himself invisible, his eyes widening slightly, his mouth opening, maybe to answer, maybe to call for help, Nick would never know because he didn't give him time to choose.
The punch came low and tight, a short flick of the wrist that snapped upward to strike the wolf's jaw at a sharp angle, from below, exactly the point where a well-placed hit extinguishes consciousness before the pain even has time to register. The wolf's head snapped sideways, his eyes rolling back for an instant before closing, his body slumping against the window without offering any more resistance. Nick straightened him with an almost fatherly gesture, settling his head against the glass in the position of innocent sleep, pulling the onboard blanket up over his shoulders. From three rows away he'd look like just another passenger who'd given in to the fatigue of the flight.
He stood, stretched with a small theatrical sigh, exactly the gesture any passenger would make after sitting uncomfortably too long, but instead of going back to his own seat he continued down the aisle toward the tail of the plane, his pace still unhurried, his eyes drifting distractedly over the rows he passed. One wasn't enough. If the wolf was only the first variable in an equation he still didn't know in full, he needed a quiet spot to think, a mirror, a door that could be shut, and the bathroom at the back of the cabin was the only corner of the plane where no one would find it strange to see him linger a few minutes longer than necessary.
Judy hated this part of the job more than any other. Not the confrontation, not the weeks spent waiting undercover, not even the risk. She hated not knowing, the void they'd left her with in place of a face, a name, a single detail to hold onto. A high-value foreign agent, dangerous, do not underestimate him. Good phrases for a report, useless for someone who actually had to find him among thirty bodies sealed in a metal tube for the next twelve hours.
She did have a method, though, and the method almost never failed: don't look for whoever seemed suspicious, look for whoever was trying too hard not to seem suspicious. The difference was subtle, nearly invisible to anyone who hadn't spent years training to spot it, but it was always there, a microsecond too long before smiling at a flight attendant, a paw settling on an armrest with studied control instead of the natural looseness of fatigue.
She'd already ruled out half the cabin in the first twenty minutes, not through certainty but through elimination, a slow, frustrating process closer to scooping sand out of a bucket with a teaspoon than to a flash of insight. Still too many possible names remained, too many bodies behaving almost well enough to seem innocent, and that almost kept her more awake than caffeine ever could.
A little earlier, for a fraction of a second, she'd thought she'd spotted something farther down the aisle, a movement too fluid, a passenger who'd stood up and then sat elsewhere for no apparent reason. But by the time she tried to fix on him, the moment had already passed, the face lost among the others, and all that remained was the dull irritation of someone who knows she's seen something without being able to say what.
Maybe he's there, she thought, her eyes returning to sweep slowly across the row of heads beyond the seatback in front of her. Or maybe I'm just chasing shadows because I'm afraid of coming up empty-pawed.
She still didn't have a name. And the longer the flight went on, the more that void began to feel not like an absence of clues, but like a warning.
The bathroom reeked of cheap disinfectant and that particular kind of stale air you only breathed at ten thousand meters. Nick studied himself in the mirror a moment longer than necessary, not out of vanity, but for the old satisfaction of putting his face back together before returning to the stage, a habit he'd carried with him since before Unit Zero even existed. He rinsed his paws, dried them with a rough paper towel, and opened the door with the snap-latch typical of onboard bathrooms.
The small service corridor that opened right beyond the threshold, that narrow space where the flight attendants kept carts and supplies out of the passengers' sight, was separated from the rest of the cabin by a heavy curtain, drawn to give a minimum of privacy to whoever was waiting their turn. Waiting there, standing in that cramped space, with the forced patience of someone holding it in for too long, was a dark-furred lynx, his light jacket buttoned up to the collar despite the dry heat of the cabin. Nick gave him a brief, apologetic nod, the kind of automatic gesture strangers exchange over a plane bathroom, and stepped aside to let him pass.
The lynx didn't move.
He stayed there, motionless, his eyes fixed on him with an attentiveness no physical need could ever justify, and only then did Nick notice what he should have noticed a second sooner, the lynx's paws too relaxed, no real urgency in that posture, no one who's genuinely waiting for the bathroom stands that still.
The curtain separating the small service corridor from the rest of the cabin slid shut behind him with a sharp rustle, pulled with a slow, deliberate motion, the exact same gesture with which you close a door on something that must not get out again.
«No fox is with us,» the lynx said, his voice low, his accent breaking the words in a way that betrayed another language beneath that language, his eyes having gone suddenly hard, stripped of any remaining pretense.
Nick didn't have time to answer.
The punch came straight at his face, turning in an instant, a sharp right that would have broken his nose had Nick not shifted his head a centimeter at the last moment, just enough for the knuckles to skid along his cheekbone instead of catching him square. The pain exploded anyway, white and immediate, his vision doubling at the edges for a moment.
Good. Let's dance.
Nick answered without thinking, his body moving before his mind had even finished processing what had happened, an elbow thrown forward that caught the lynx in the solar plexus, the air leaving his lungs in a stifled grunt. But the lynx didn't back off the way a civilian would have, he absorbed the blow and answered immediately, a knee driven sharply toward Nick's groin that he managed to deflect by twisting his hips slightly, still catching a glancing hit on the thigh.
The space was tiny. The narrow corridor in front of the bathroom left no margin for real dodging, every blow landed at close range, every movement forced against metal walls that rang with each impact.
Nick grabbed the lynx's wrist before he could throw a second punch, twisting it outward with a sharp wrench, feeling the tendon strain under his grip, but the lynx rolled with the movement instead of resisting it, using his natural flexibility to break free with a sideways roll that caught Nick off guard.
As agile as a real predator, Nick thought, and for the first time since setting foot on that plane he felt the cold, familiar surge of real adrenaline, the kind that left no room for jokes or distraction.
The lynx came back on the attack with a series of low, fast blows, punches thrown with the full weight of his body, aimed at the ribs, the liver, points where pain accumulated instead of dissipating. Nick took two of them, his breath catching in his throat with each impact, before managing to intercept the third by blocking it with his forearm and answering with a straight strike to the throat.
He didn't land it clean. The lynx pulled his chin back just in time, the blow skidding along his jaw instead of crushing his windpipe, but it was enough to make him stagger for a moment, his eyes clouding with involuntary tears.
Nick took advantage of that half second.
He was on him, an arm wrapping around his neck from behind, the grip tightening as he pulled him against his chest, the kind of chokehold he'd practiced a thousand times on a dummy before ever practicing it on a living body. The lynx thrashed, his paws clawing at Nick's forearm and leaving red furrows in the fur, his feet searching for purchase on the floor to gain leverage, but Nick had the advantage of height and angle, and he squeezed harder, the muscles of his arm trembling with the effort.
The lynx stopped thrashing wildly and switched to something more targeted, an elbow thrown backward with surgical precision that found Nick's lower ribs, not once but twice, a sharp pain that momentarily broke his focus on the hold. That was enough. The lynx slipped his chin under his forearm, gained a sliver of air, and with a violent twist of his torso broke free, rolling away and getting back up against the bathroom door.
He was bleeding from the nose, a dark trickle running down over his upper lip, but his eyes hadn't lost any of their hardness.
He lunged forward again, and this time he brought with him something that flashed for an instant under the cabin's cold light.
A short ceramic blade, maybe ten centimeters, drawn from an ankle sheath in a motion Nick didn't manage to intercept in time.
Shit.
The cut came low, horizontal, aimed at his side. Nick bent backward in a desperate contortion, feeling the tip of the blade graze the fabric of his shirt without finding the flesh beneath, a margin of a few millimeters between staying whole and not.
He had no time for a second breath of relief. The lynx lunged again, a thrust aimed at his stomach that Nick blocked by grabbing his armed wrist with both paws, the blade trembling a few centimeters from his belly as the two bodies pushed against each other in a pure stalemate of force, Nick's muscles burning with the effort of keeping that point away from himself.
The lynx's teeth bared in a grimace, a low growl rising from his chest, and for an instant, just one instant, the blade gained half a centimeter toward Nick's flesh.
Not enough.
With a strangled shout through clenched teeth, Nick wrenched the angle of his wrist outward with every ounce of strength he had left, feeling something give under his grip, a small, sharp snap lost in the roar of the engines. The lynx screamed, the knife slipping from his fingers and bouncing off the floor, and Nick didn't give him time to recover.
His knee drove straight into his stomach, then another, and another still, the lynx folding in half with each impact, his breath coming shorter and more strangled, until Nick hooked both paws around the back of his neck and dragged him downward, into his knee rising with all the strength left in his legs.
The impact against his muzzle was sharp, final.
The lynx collapsed to the floor without offering any more resistance, his body slumping against the bathroom wall with the same lack of grace with which dead things fall, though his chest still rose, slow, irregular, still alive.
Nick stayed bent forward for a long moment, his paws braced on his knees, his breath burning in his throat with every inhale, blood running down his cheekbone where the first punch had caught him. His side throbbed where the blade had grazed it, his lower ribs protesting with every deep breath.
He forced himself upright.
He dragged the lynx's unconscious body into the tiny bathroom with an effort that tore a grunt of pain from him, shut him inside with the snap-latch, and stood for a moment leaning against the metal wall, eyes closed, trying to put his face back together and clean it up one last time before returning among the passengers.
He had no idea how much time he had left before someone else noticed the silence.
Nick set off again down the aisle with his legs still weak, his breath burning at the back of his throat with every breath, his side pulsing with every step like a second heartbeat placed in the wrong spot. He walked with his eyes down, focused on the simple act of putting one paw in front of the other without swaying, when he saw them.
The pair of raccoons, the same two who'd been bored over a travel magazine a little earlier, weren't sitting anymore. They were bent over the knocked-out wolf against the window, one of them shaking his shoulder with a paw, the other checking his pulse with two fingers pressed against the fur of his neck, gestures too precise, too professional for someone simply worried about a fellow traveler, they were checking he wasn't dead.
Nick stopped mid-step.
The raccoon checking the pulse snapped his head up, his eyes sweeping the aisle with the speed of someone who knew exactly what he was looking for. The second one mirrored him an instant later, and for a handful of seconds that stretch of cabin froze, suspended, while four eyes combed every remaining face.
Only he was left standing, at the end of the aisle, his shirt straightened as best he could but still bearing dark stains along the side, the blood he'd wiped off his muzzle but not entirely off his knuckles.
The two raccoons' gazes landed on him in the same exact instant.
Nick took a step back, then another, the smile still stuck to his muzzle out of pure inertia, and reached a paw behind him until he found the edge of the service curtain. He pulled it shut with a quick motion, closing it between himself and the rest of the cabin, and for a moment, one single, ridiculous moment, let himself hope it would be enough.
It wasn't.
He heard footsteps rushing closer from the other side of the fabric, light and synchronized as if they belonged to a single body split in two, and the curtain was ripped from its track in one sharp motion.
The two raccoons burst into the small service corridor without hesitation, without a single word wasted between them, the kind of coordination built only through years of joint training, two bodies moving like the two halves of a single will.
Nick had no time to put together a plan. He grabbed the first thing within paw's reach, a metal tray stacked among the drink cart's supplies, and raised it in front of his chest an instant before the first raccoon was on him, a punch that crashed against the metal with a dull clang instead of against his ribs.
The recoil made his paws vibrate all the way to the elbow, but Nick had no time to complain about it. The second raccoon dropped on him from a side angle, low, fast, a body exploiting its short stature to slip under his guard instead of over it, a punch aimed at his solar plexus that caught him full-on before he could react.
The air left his lungs in one sharp burst. Nick staggered against the supply shelf, feeling something fall and roll to the floor behind him, and raised the tray just in time to deflect a second blow from the first raccoon, the metal ringing like a bell under the impact.
He couldn't keep both of them in view at once, one always vanished into his blind spot while the other attacked head-on, a studied rhythm, rehearsed, perfected across who knew how many previous missions. Nick dropped the now-dented tray and grabbed instead a narrow-necked glass bottle, the only thing within reach with any real weight, and hurled it sideways into the nearer raccoon's face.
The glass shattered with a sharp sound, liquid spraying everywhere along with tiny shards, and the raccoon reeled back with a stifled cry, one paw pressed against his eye.
But the second one gave him no respite. He was on Nick with a series of low blows, aimed at the legs, the hips, points Nick couldn't protect while his paws were busy with the other opponent. A kick buckled his knee, another caught the same rib already cracked from the previous fight, and Nick felt a pain so sharp his vision blurred at the edges for an instant.
With a strangled growl through his teeth, he reached a paw behind him without looking, groping blindly among the scattered objects on the shelf, until his fingers closed around something long and rigid, the metal rod of a garment rack hastily knocked loose from its mount. He swung it like a club, a wide, desperate arc that caught the wounded raccoon just as he reopened his good eye, a blow to the temple that dropped him without a sound.
The second raccoon, seeing his partner fall, changed expression for the first time since the fight began, something resembling real anger instead of the simple professional detachment he'd shown until then. He lunged at Nick with a low growl, his claws digging into Nick's forearm when Nick raised his arm to protect his face, deep furrows immediately filling with blood.
Nick felt a shout rise in his throat and choked it down at once, turning it into a low, fierce growl through his teeth, he couldn't afford noise, not yet, but he didn't let go of the metal rod. He used it to block the next attack, crossing it against the raccoon's armed wrist, then twisted his whole body, using the leverage to slam him against the metal wall of the shelf. The impact shook the entire service corridor, bottles and containers crashing to the floor together in a din Nick silently prayed no one outside had heard.
The raccoon didn't give up. He lunged again at once, low, trying to grab Nick's legs to bring him down, and for an instant Nick felt the floor slip out from under him, his balance dangerously wavering. He fell to his knees, the metal rod slipping from his grip and rolling out of reach.
The raccoon was on him in a flash, paws closing around his throat with a force disproportionate to his size, his thumb pressing against the windpipe with clear, final intent. Nick felt the air cut off, the edges of his vision darkening, and in that moment of pure instinct his fingers found something on the floor, cold, hard, sharp.
A shard of the broken bottle.
He gripped it without thinking and drove it into the raccoon's side with every ounce of strength he had left.
The scream that came out was harrowing, sharp, the grip around Nick's throat suddenly loosening as the raccoon twisted backward, both paws pressed to the wound from which blood was already welling thick between his fingers. Nick spat, gasped, air flooding back into his lungs in one painful wave, but that scream had been too loud, too risky, he couldn't afford anyone hearing it from the other side of the curtain.
He was on him before he'd even truly caught his breath. He grabbed his head with both paws, one under the jaw, the other behind the neck, and wrenched it with a sharp, violent twist, his entire weight thrown into that single motion. The crack was clean, final, and the scream cut off at once, the raccoon's body going limp between his paws without offering any more resistance.
Silence.
Nick stayed bent forward, his paws braced on his knees, blood running down his forearm from the claw marks, his side throbbing as if someone were still hitting it even now that everything had stopped. The small service corridor looked like the wreckage of a hurricane, shattered bottles, dented trays, the two raccoons sprawled among the debris in positions no natural sleep could ever produce.
He gave himself a few seconds, enough time to breathe without every inhale being a stab of pain, before dragging both bodies into a corner behind the cart, hidden from the sight of anyone giving only a distracted glance inside. He picked up the torn curtain and put it back in place as best he could, hoping it would be enough to discourage curious eyes for at least a few minutes.
Then he pulled himself together as best he could, wiped a sleeve across his muzzle to clean it up, and walked back down the main aisle with the steadiest pace he could manage, every fiber of his body protesting with each movement.
That was when he saw her.
A gray rabbit, sitting composed in her seat, wide, frightened eyes fixed on him the moment she noticed him approaching. «Excuse me,» she said, her voice trembling slightly, one paw gripping the armrest, «did you hear that too? That noise, a moment ago, it sounded like something broke...»
Nick forced himself to stop, forcing back the heavy breathing behind a smile he'd pulled back together as best he could, his eyes meeting hers only for an instant before looking away with the feigned nonchalance of someone with nothing to hide.
«It's nothing,» he said, his voice rougher than he would have liked. «A bit of turbulence, I think. The flight attendants must have lost their balance with the cart, it's all sorted now.»
The rabbit nodded, not entirely convinced judging by the look that lingered on him a second longer than necessary, but she didn't add anything else.
«Don't worry,» he added, already turning to move on. «Try to get some rest, the flight's still long.»
He started walking again, leaving her behind, without turning back even once.
Judy followed him with her eyes until he vanished around the bend of the aisle, her heart beating a little faster than she would have admitted, not from the fear she'd just performed, but from the real one, subtle, that had lit up inside her watching him up close. The dried blood on his knuckles that he'd tried to hide by shoving his paws into his pockets. The way he breathed, controlled but not quite enough, the breath of someone who'd just spent every last reserve of energy he had. The way his gaze had dodged hers with a second's delay, studied, not natural.
She stayed motionless in her seat a while longer, her eyes fixed on the spot where he'd vanished, with the quiet, definitive certainty of someone who has finally found what she was looking for.
Judy got up from her seat with the same calculated slowness with which anyone would rise to stretch their legs on a long flight, one gesture among the thousand anyone aboard might make without drawing the slightest suspicion. She followed the direction Nick had taken, keeping a safe distance, her pace studied to seem aimless, a fake pause in front of an occupied bathroom, a distracted glance out the window, anything to avoid betraying the real trajectory of her movements. She was looking for the right opportunity, an aisle empty enough, a moment when no civilian would find themselves caught in the middle if things went wrong.
What Judy couldn't know was that her own movements, to eyes that knew what to look for, were anything but casual. A tall wolf, dark gray fur, sitting two rows behind the point where she'd stood up, had been watching her for the past few minutes with growing attention, the way she slowed without any real destination, the studied pauses in front of an occupied bathroom, her eyes returning, with unnatural regularity, to the same point further down the aisle. No civilian kept that kind of constant control over their own trajectory.
He still didn't know who the target was that his own cell had been sent to stop, no precise description, no face, only the terse order to stay alert. But that rabbit tailing someone else with such discretion, that way of moving like someone hunting without wanting to be seen hunting, was enough for him to put two and two together. There, that's who we're looking for, he thought, the certainty lighting up inside him with the same coldness with which a logical loop is closed. He couldn't afford to wait for confirmation, not with the risk of her disappearing into the crowd again. He had to act now, before the other passengers noticed anything.
He got up in turn, silent, and moved in behind her without her noticing, without knowing that at that very same moment, in different points of the cabin, two other hunters were each chasing their own prey believing it the only one in play, none of the three suspecting that they were, in turn, being watched.
The paw closed on her shoulder with a force that left no doubt about its intent, spinning her around before Judy even had time to turn on her own. No civilian, under any circumstances, touched a stranger that way, with that immediate brutality devoid of any social hesitation, and it was precisely that violation of the unwritten rules of the civilian world that set off every one of her instincts an instant before the punch even came.
She saw it coming, straight at her face, and tilted just enough to the side that the wolf's knuckles barely grazed her ear without finding the bone beneath. She answered at once, without allowing herself a second thought, a side kick that started low and caught the wolf full in the stomach, the air leaving his lungs as he doubled over and staggered back a few steps.
Judy didn't give him a single instant to catch his breath.
She was on him again, grabbing the wrist of the paw still trembling from the blow it had taken and twisting it behind his back in a sharp, precise wrench, while her foot hooked his ankle to knock him off balance. His body fell forward with no control left, his head striking the floor with a dull thud, and the wolf lay still, unconscious.
What on earth is going on on this plane, Judy thought, her breath short, her eyes scanning the body on the floor for any clue as to who he really was. Whoever he was, he wasn't a civilian, and the fact that he'd chosen her specifically as a target opened up questions she had no time to deal with at the moment, a colleague of the fox's, maybe, sent to cover her back, or someone who'd mistaken her for a threat in turn.
She had only one pair of handcuffs on her, and she wanted to save them for her true target. But in the inner pockets of her jacket she also carried a pair of plastic zip ties, advice she'd been given years before by a superior who always told her to carry a spare set, you never know when you'll be short of real cuffs. She quickly wound them around the unconscious wolf's wrists, cinched them until they bit into his fur, and dragged him against the nearest wall, out of the main passage.
She had no time to waste. Her true target was still out there, and every second spent here risked losing his trail.
She resumed the hunt with more caution now, her eyes flicking back over her own shoulder more often, aware that whatever was happening on that plane, she was already part of it, whether she liked it or not.
She couldn't know it, but her own reaction had already lit a fuse that was now burning without any hope of being put out. Two other agents, a little further ahead in the cabin, had just discovered a comrade unconscious in a corner of the service corridor, the curtain torn from its track, traces of blood on the floor no turbulence could ever explain. The confusion was rapidly turning into real alarm, whispers exchanged hurriedly between different rows, glances growing tenser, more suspicious of anyone moving with one step too many out of place.
And in the middle of that mounting tension, two hunters were each chasing their own prey without knowing they were, in fact, both being hunted together.
Nick felt the boar charge from the right an instant before he saw him, the sound of his heavy hooves vibrating against the cabin floor louder than any civilian passenger would ever produce. He turned just in time, deflected the first blow with his forearm, and answered with a sharp right to the jaw followed immediately by a left that caught the exposed side of his opponent.
The boar grunted, absorbed it, and attempted a headlong charge, his tusks gleaming menacingly under the artificial cabin light. Nick sidestepped at the last instant, feeling the air stirred by the massive head passing a few centimeters from his own side, and used the opponent's loss of balance to land an uppercut that started low with the full weight of his body thrown behind the blow.
The impact lifted the boar's muzzle upward, his eyes rolling back for an instant before his front legs gave out and his massive body slumped to the floor unconscious.
Nick stayed bent forward, paws on his knees, breath burning in his throat, when a movement at the edge of his field of vision made him spin around sharply.
The rabbit from before. The frightened one. The one from the turbulence.
Shit.
She wasn't supposed to be there, wasn't supposed to have seen any of this. Nick straightened at once, his face settling into a reassuring expression almost by reflex, paws raised in a harmless gesture of surrender.
«Hey, it's okay, it’s okay,» he said, his voice as calm as possible despite his heavy breathing. «I know it looks terrible, he was a bad person, but it's already over, go back to your seat, I'll take care of everything.»
He approached with a slow, deliberate step, the kind of movement used with a frightened animal to keep it from bolting in a panic. But the moment he was close enough, Judy moved.
She sprang at him with a speed his brain didn't have time to process in advance, her legs wrapping around his right arm in a hold he'd seen only a few times in his life, always executed by real professionals, never by a terrified civilian. The leverage locked immediately against his elbow, pain exploding along the entire limb as Nick staggered backward, completely caught off guard.
What the hell.
He gritted his teeth and reacted on instinct, tensing his bicep with everything he had left to resist the twist before the joint gave out entirely. He was bigger than her, much bigger, nearly twice her size, and he exploited that raw advantage by lifting his whole arm, Judy still clinging to it, and slamming her against the back of the nearest seat.
The grip loosened from the impact. Nick threw her off with a violent wrench, her body flying a short distance before hitting the floor, but instead of staying down, Judy let her own momentum carry her into a fluid roll that brought her straight back to her feet without the slightest sign of pain or hesitation.
For a moment, the two of them looked at each other.
And Nick no longer saw the frightened rabbit from before. He saw something he'd crossed paths with many times over the years, in the eyes of real soldiers, of trained operatives, that look devoid of panic, focused, cold, that said with absolute clarity you are my target, no matter how small and harmless the creature carrying it might seem.
Judy sprang forward before he could reorganize his defense. Nick raised his paws trying to block her head-on, but she dropped at the last instant and slid literally between his legs in a lightning-fast movement, ending up behind him before Nick had finished turning to follow her with his eyes. A sharp kick struck him between the shoulder blades, driving him forward with enough force to smash his muzzle against the cabin wall.
Nick pulled himself back up, wheezing, blood running from one nostril, ready to strike, but his own body responded slower than he wanted, every muscle already wrung dry by the two previous fights. He threw a desperate punch that Judy dodged with a simple shift of her torso, and answered with a sharp, precise kick that caught him square between the legs.
The growl of pain that tore from his throat was low, animal, as he doubled over, but Judy didn't give him even a second to recover. She grabbed his nearest wrist, twisted it with a sharp rotation bringing it behind his back, and shoved him forward until he was pinned against the wall, his face pressed against the cold metal.
She pulled out the handcuffs she'd kept in reserve until then for the right occasion, and snapped one around Nick's twisted wrist with a final metallic click.
«You're under arrest for international espionage and hostile activity against a sovereign nation,» Judy said, her voice steady, professional, the tone of someone who'd recited that formula a thousand times in training.
Nick didn't hear a single word. The pain radiating from his groin upward occupied every available thought, the only question on his mind being whether he'd ever be able to have children in the future.
With one paw still firm on Nick's cuffed wrist, Judy pulled out the small radio hidden under her jacket with the other and raised it quickly to her muzzle. «This is Cabbagepatch,» she said, her voice low and urgent. «Target located and in custody, repeat, target in my possession, requesting...»
She didn't get to finish the sentence.
At least five figures came rushing out of the main aisle, some heading toward her, others toward him, each one convinced they had to stop a single, isolated target.
They all stopped at once, abruptly, their eyes darting incredulously from Judy to Nick and back, the two of them found side by side, motionless, so close to one another that, at a first hurried glance, they looked like accomplices caught in the middle of something planned in advance, none of those five close enough to notice the metallic glint of the cuff around Nick's wrist.
The calculation crossed their faces in a matter of seconds, surprise turning into cold understanding: not a single enemy agent aboard that flight, but two, and side by side no less, clearly on the same side, clearly in league with one another.
Judy felt her blood run cold as she watched the five bodies fanning out in a semicircle along the aisle, cutting off every possible escape route, while beneath her Nick, still bent over and in pain, struggled to find his footing again.
«Shit,» she whispered, her voice barely audible over the drone of the engines.
Nick yanked hard on his cuffed wrist, a desperate attempt to break free now that his body had recovered a scrap of its lost strength, but the steel didn't give an inch. Judy didn't spare him so much as a glance. She had far more urgent problems to worry about, five figures arranged in a semicircle along the aisle, all convinced, judging by their expressions, that she and the fox were accomplices in the same conspiracy, and she had no idea who they really were or what they wanted, except that they were almost certainly there for the fox, maybe to protect him, maybe to free him.
She had no time to come up with a better plan.
With a quick, almost automatic gesture, she took the free cuff and snapped it around her own wrist. It wasn't a reasoned choice, there was no room to weigh the consequences, only the pure instinct of someone who doesn't want to lose her target in the middle of the chaos about to explode. She had the key in her jacket's inner pocket, she'd free herself as soon as she'd dealt with this new threat.
It all happened in under three seconds.
The five agents moved as one, paws darting toward the insides of their jackets, and an instant later five guns were leveled straight at them, shouts exploding in a language Judy didn't fully understand but needed no translation to sound anything but peaceful.
«Ni s mesta! Ruki vverh!» (Don’t move! Paws in the air!)
Judy threw herself behind the nearest seatback in a sharp dive, knowing full well how ridiculous that illusion of cover was against a bullet, but the body reacted faster than the mind in certain moments. She drew her own pistol from under her jacket, a ghost gun, almost entirely ceramic and plastic, designed specifically to get through security checks without tripping a single alarm, with the sole exception of a few indispensable steel components in the mechanism.
Nick collapsed beside her an instant later, dragged along by the shared cuff, his breath still short, his eyes taking in the gravity of the situation in a fraction of a second. «Firing guns on a plane,» he said, his voice hoarse but remarkably lucid despite everything, «is maybe the stupidest idea I've ever seen anyone have.»
Judy didn't even hear him. Her mind was already elsewhere, calculating angles, distances, escape routes that didn't exist in such a cramped space, her heart pounding against her ribs with an almost painful violence. She shifted slightly, a minimal adjustment to gain a better sightline on the targets lined up along the aisle.
It was a mistake.
For an instant, the barrel of her pistol poked past the edge of the seatback, visible to anyone looking in the right direction, and someone was looking exactly there. The shouts grew louder, rose in pitch, an order repeated twice with mounting urgency before one of the five figures, maybe out of fear, maybe out of pure operational decision, pulled the trigger.
The first shot exploded through the cabin air with a boom no civilian passenger should ever have to hear in their life.
Chaos broke loose in a single second, screams, shrieks, bodies throwing themselves to the floor between the rows farther from the line of fire. Judy grabbed the radio with her free paw and raised it to her muzzle. «This is Cabbagepatch, shots fired! repeat, shots...»
She didn't get to finish.
A second bullet buried itself in the seatback a few centimeters from her head, the blast so close it made her ears ring, fragments of stuffing exploding against her face. She closed her eyes for an instant, one deep breath held and then released, her fingers tightening around the grip of the pistol with a steadiness she didn't feel inside, and she leaned out just enough to return fire.
Nick watched the scene unfold as if in slow motion, every single frame drawn out with an unnatural slowness, Judy's eyes opening, her body tilting forward, her finger tensing toward the trigger. He understood what was about to happen an instant before it did, and lunged toward her with his free paw outstretched, desperate, trying to grab the gun before she could fire.
«Noooo!»
He didn't make it in time.
The shot fired from the barrel of Judy's gun a few centimeters from Nick's muzzle, the boom exploding against his ears with an almost physical violence, a pressure wave that stripped away every other sense for an instant.
Nick collapsed to the floor, watching the world unfold in slow motion.
His ears rang so loudly they drowned out every other sound, his breathing spiking into an uncontrollable rhythm, his eyes wide open but empty, fixed on a point that didn't exist in that airplane cabin. He wasn't there anymore. His body remained sprawled on the floor between the seats, but his mind was fighting somewhere else, in a place of dust and twisted metal, of screams that weren't those of the terrified passengers around him but those of brothers he would never stop hearing.
That single gunshot had been the spark.
The hostile agents, already at the breaking point of tension, before anyone could even try to stop them, opened fire all together, in a barrage that turned that stretch of cabin into a war scene within a matter of seconds. The words Nick had spoken a moment before had never been truer.
A deflected bullet struck one agent in the arm, his finger still pressed on the trigger from the involuntary reflex of pain, and another shot fired from his gun with no precise direction, deflected by the recoil of the impact.
That bullet found the window.
The reinforced glass absorbed the impact with a sharp, crystalline sound, a crack spreading out from the point of entry in an instant spiderweb, and before anyone aboard could grasp what was about to happen, that crack widened, widened further still, until it became a gaping breach.