Chapter Text
EPOCH
Chapter One
Pretender
The industrial estate hadn't seen a working line of streetlamps in years, despite lining the cracked roads, sitting dutiful but useless these days. All except one anyhow, which stubbornly clung to life at the far end of the block, flickering in a painfully dying stutter that made the shadows twitch.
Nature had reclaimed most of the estate: weeds through concrete, ivy swallowing chain-link and walls, the low hum of night insects filling in where man-made noise used to inhabit. Which was exactly what M.E.C.H liked about it. Dead places made good midpoints.
Zelda lay stretched out across a rooftop within the middle of the estate, giving her a sight line of every inch she could need. Her sole companions were a sniper rifle settled into the place and a toothpick rolling lazily between her lips.
To anyone watching, she might have looked bored—eyes half-lidded, weight loose, and in no hurry whatsoever. It was a good look on her. It also happened to be true, until it wasn't.
Her helmet sat beside her because while night vision would've been nice, the helmet itself would just distort her sight through the scope and turn every shot into a guess, and Zelda didn't deal in guesses when it came to jobs like these.
The road wasn't empty anymore.
With rumbling engines that broke the night's ambience, two vehicles turned into the estate. The sound was low in the heavy quiet, late-night wildlife hushing around them like the whole block was suddenly holding its breath.
Zelda breathed out slowly through her nose, patient and unhurried, as the cars rolled to a stop and idled there, windows black as ink. Nobody got out.
She waited. It was what she was good at.
A minute in, maybe two, and headlights swept the road again as two more vehicles eased in from the opposite direction. Doors opened, and people stepped out into the dark.
Zelda's mouth curved, slow and pleased, toothpick tilting up at the corner of her smile.
Showtime.
She eased into position, breathing evened out, watching through the scope and sweeping across the gathering figures below until she found the one that mattered.
«Kestrel,» she murmured into the comm strapped to her wrist, voice barely more than breath. «Get into position. Cargo's about to appear.»
Somewhere above, unseen, the drone banked silently into the dark—a sleek, V-winged shape built more like a bird of prey than a piece of hardware, which was the point of its design.
The devices she'd planted earlier that night picked up the conversation cleanly and fed it straight into her earpiece. Two parties. One exchange. On one side, M.E.C.H operatives, cold and clipped, all business. On the other, men in nicer coats than their line of work should have afforded them—rogue employees peeling off from whatever government sector employed them, looking to turn a stolen high-tech battery into a very large paycheck. The kind of battery that, in the wrong hands, made weapons a great deal more dangerous than they had any right to be.
Zelda's finger found the camera trigger built into her scope housing, and she took her snaps—clean, crisp images of faces that would end up in front of people with the authority to put men like these away. Assuming, of course, they lived long enough to be arrested.
Below, the case came out of a car boot, black and reinforced, carried easily enough by one man that it clearly wasn't as heavy as its security suggested. He set it down in front of the M.E.C.H delegation. The lead rogue crouched, popped the latches, and opened it just enough to let them see inside.
Zelda watched his mouth move through the scope—something about instructions tucked safely inside—and then the lid closed again.
She exhaled, finding the lead M.E.C.H agent in her sights, tracked him as he shifted, waited for the half-second where he stood clean and still and squeezed the trigger.
The muted shot cracked out across the estate, and everything below detonated into chaos as the M.E.C.H operative collapsed dead.
The rogue sellers scattered immediately, bolting for their cars—not her problem anymore—while the surviving M.E.C.H agents snapped into formation, weapons up, scanning the rooftops with nothing but guesswork to go on. Zelda didn't give them time to guess right. She found a second target and fired again, then thumbed the comm.
«Kestrel, fetch.»
Down in the mess, the M.E.C.H agents were diving for the cars, others ducking behind crumbling half-walls, all of them hunting for a shooter they couldn't see. In the middle of that scramble, Kestrel dropped from the dark like something out of a nightmare, talons snapping around the case's handle, wings and thrusters driving hard as it hauled the cargo skyward.
Someone below saw it. Shouting erupted, sharp and panicked, and gunfire chased the drone up into the night, wild and aimed at nothing yet everything, in hopes of downing Kestrel.
But Zelda was putting rounds close enough to keep heads down, stopping them from aiming properly. Kestrel banked hard, cleared the rooftops, and vanished toward the rendezvous point, untouched.
«You've done enough.» Corvus's voice slid into her ear, calm as ever, watching everything through Kestrel's camera feed from somewhere far safer than this rooftop. «Fall back.»
Zelda's jaw tightened around the toothpick. Below, the M.E.C.H agents were on high alert, still standing, still armed, still very much alive.
«We're not even close to done,» she muttered.
«Fall back, Scorpio,» Taurus ordered.
She grumbled something uncharitable under her breath, but she was already moving. The rifle was slung over a shoulder, toothpick discarded, and her helmet was shoved onto her head as she remained crouched, boots near-silent as she crossed the rooftop's length toward the unlit road on the warehouse's far side. Her bike was exactly where she'd left it.
Behind her, the estate had turned into a cacophony of shouting voices and slamming doors, engines gunning as M.E.C.H scrambled to give chase to nothing at all.
She swung a leg over the bike, kicked it to life, and peeled out into the dark just as the nearest M.E.C.H car surged onto the road behind her. She cut across their path deliberately, close enough to see the driver flinch, and threw up a middle finger over her shoulder as she carved past them into the night.
A window cracked down, and gunfire chased her down the road—two shots, three—and one bit close enough to graze her right arm, a hot burst of pain that faded after a moment, but it was nothing serious. Nothing that would slow her down.
She dropped the throttle and let the darkness of the road and woodland swallow her whole, the sound of engines and shouting fading fast behind her, until there was nothing left but the wind and the low, satisfied thrum of a job done.
Cities are loud in ways that Zelda enjoyed and found comfort in—car horns, distant sirens, passersby, someone's music drifting down from an open window—and Zelda found she didn't mind it nearly as much as she probably should have, given the line of work she was in.
She shifted the strap of her bag higher on her shoulder, grocery bag knocking against her knee with every step, and let herself enjoy the mundane feel of a concrete jungle and the long walk from the bus stop.
Her building came into view at the end of the block, familiar in the absent way a place only became after you'd been gone from it too long. Two months, this time.
She glanced up at the window that was hers, dark and waiting, and thought—not for the first time—that it barely felt like an apartment so much as a place to kick her feet up for a week before the next job inevitably pulled her somewhere else. But it was hers, legally speaking, with a kind of ordinary that a person like her didn't get to keep much of. She liked it precisely because nothing about it needed explaining.
She was still thinking about the coffee she wanted when she nearly walked straight into someone coming the other way toward the lobby doors.
"Whoa—sorry, I—" She caught herself, hand coming up instinctively to catch her bag when it slipped off her shoulder, and recognition slid into place a half-second later. "Elijah?"
He looked entirely unbothered by the near collision, a faint, easy smile already forming. "Zelda." Her name came out warmly. "It’s been a while."
It had. Two months, as she'd spent her last evening before heading out last time with him. Zelda didn't spend much time thinking about her absence, or what it did for what might be her only friend outside of work.
Elijah lived a floor below her—had brought his place almost at the exact same time as her—and in the gaps between jobs he'd become something of a fixed point in a life that didn't have many of those.
Dark hair brushing his shoulders in a careless wavy mullet that shouldn't have worked as flawlessly as it did for him, framing pieces falling around his face. Red-tinted glasses caught the early evening light and hid his eyes, which were blue underneath, she knew, from the handful of times she'd seen him without them. He was dressed as casually as always with grey jeans, a white collared shirt, and a blue sweater despite it being summer.
She'd thought about it once or twice in idle moments she didn't let herself examine too closely. Whatever this could have been, if she were a different kind of person with a different kind of life. But trusting herself with someone wasn't really on the table, not with what she did, not with who she reported to. Some doors were better left shut.
"Work," she said, before he could even ask, an old habit by now. "You know how it is. I'm getting dragged from country to country on my employer's whim."
"Don't expect any different," he said, and there was something fond in it rather than mocking or exasperated.
He never pushed past that. Never demanded answers or where she went or what her time in other places were like. He never had. She appreciated it more than she probably let on.
"Something like that." She hefted the grocery bag pointedly. "I'm just dropping this off. You want to walk with me?"
It wasn't lost on her, the ease of it. How neatly he never pushed, how he always seemed to be around when she was, how little of himself he ever actually offered up in return, just like herself. Though, Zelda wondered if perhaps he was merely matching her secrecy with his own.
In her line of work, that kind of pattern was supposed to set off alarms. She'd been trained to notice exactly this sort of thing: the too-convenient timing, the gaps in a person's story, the small oddities that didn't quite add up to a full picture. Anyone else, she'd have already run a background check twice over.
But it never felt like that with him.
She was aware, distantly, that this was probably its own kind of dangerous—that safe wasn't a feeling she trusted easily, precisely because trusting it was how people like her ended up dead or worse. But she'd turned it over enough times to file it away rather than chase it. Maybe she'd just seen too much these past years to ever fully believe in something as simple as a good neighbour. Maybe that was on her, not him.
"Lead the way."
He fell into step beside her toward the elevator, easy and unhurried as always, and the apartment, when she let them both in, was exactly as stale and undisturbed as she'd expected it to be.
Zelda would need to get a good dusting session in before heading out, if only to save her nose.
She tossed down her travel bag in the hallway to move later and put the groceries away before rolling her shoulders out with a small, satisfied groan.
"You're leaving again, aren't you," Elijah said, not quite a question.
"Give me twenty minutes and a coffee first before you start counting down my visit," she complained lightly.
He huffed something like a laugh and let her herd him back out the door.
The walk was easy in the way their walks always were—no particular direction, no particular hurry, just the two of them cutting through streets going gold as the evening settled in.
Zelda ducked into a corner coffee shop and came back out with a cup that steamed faintly, and Elijah, as ever, didn't get anything.
"You gonna eat something one of these days?" she asked, nudging his shoulder with hers.
"Already ate," he said, easy as anything, the same answer he always gave, in one form or another.
She'd stopped keeping track of the excuses somewhere around the second year—just had something, not hungry, ate before I left—and she noticed, the way she noticed most things, that none of them ever quite lined up if she pressed too hard. But she just never pressed. It sat in the same drawer as the rest of it: odd, and somehow never once threatening. She'd long since decided it wasn't worth the energy to chase.
"One day I'm gonna catch you eating something," she said instead, sipping her coffee. "Big day for both of us."
"I eagerly look forward to it."
They walked in comfortable quiet for a stretch before she asked, "How are Luke and Liam?"
"They are good. Out of the city for work right now, actually. Will be back in a short while," he said easily enough, and Zelda didn't chase a longer explanation. She didn't know them, and she hadn't spent much time in their company to think much of it either way.
"Tell them I said hey the next time you speak to them," she said instead.
"Will do." He looked at her. "How long are you in town for"
"Not long." She turned her cup slowly between her hands. "Heading out to see family soon. Tranquillity."
Something in him paused—a half-second hitch in the easy rhythm of the conversation, there and then gone, smoothed back over before she could really name it. She caught it, though.
"Tranquillity," he repeated. "That's your mother's side, right? Your uncle—"
"Ron," she filled in. It wasn't the first time he'd known more about her life than she remembered handing over, because she had to have—she had memories of mentioning family distantly and in passing—and it wasn't the first time she'd let Elijah's insightfulness pass without comment either. "And his wife, my aunt Judy. And my cousin Sam."
"Right." Something settled back into place in his voice, easy again. She logged the hitch anyway, filed under odd, never under wrong. "What's the occasion?"
"Sam's finishing his school year, last day's coming up. Ron promised if he hits the grades they agreed on, he'll match whatever Sam's saved up so far and put it toward a first car." She allowed herself a small smile around the rim of her cup. "I said I'd come help him look. Figured between the two of us we can find something that won't fall apart on him in six months."
Elijah's mouth curved upward. "You, evaluating cars. What a surprise."
"Hey," she began with playful offence, poking his shoulder. "Someone's got to make sure Sam doesn't get talked into some rust bucket with a paint job because my uncle is a cheapskate," she added dryly. "I glance it over, tell them what actually needs fixing, and haggle the price down to something reasonable. It's not glamorous, but it's satisfying."
"Sounds like a good trip," Elijah said, and meant it, in the particular quiet way he said things that seemed to matter to him. "Family, and a break from work."
"No work," she agreed, and for a moment, walking beside him with her coffee cooling in her hand, she almost believed it could really be that simple. "If only."
Elijah raised a brow. "No relaxing?"
"I'm never able to actually relax," Zelda said dryly. "I'm one phonecall away from an annoying day that can come at any time."
He scoffed something of agreement. "I am familiar with such."
Zelda laughed into her cup.
The apartment still smelled as it had when she'd entered hours earlier—that particular staleness of a place sealed up too long.
Zelda shrugged off her jacket and hung it on the back of the front door. She dropped her glove onto the unit next to it, alongside her keys and wallet.
For a moment, Zelda stood there in the silence, ears listening to the nothingness that filled the room. Then she crossed to the lounge windows and threw the first one open with a shove that took more effort than it should have, the frame swollen from disuse. Cool evening air pushed in, carrying the hum of the city, and she moved to the second window, then the bedroom, until the whole place had the chance to breathe.
Her speaker was where she'd left it, tucked on the counter beside the toaster, and she thumbed it on. The last used CD, Amy Winehouse's Back to Black, was still in there from Zelda's previous visit. She debated for only a moment on whether to change it out but closed the lid and clicked play. It filled the flat with sound, warm and familiar, the kind of familiar that didn't ask anything of her.
Then she got to work.
The dust had settled everywhere in her absence, a fine grey film over the counters, the windowsills, the four picture frames on the sideboard. She carefully wiped those down first, more out of habit than sentiment—one of her and her team, everyone squinting against the sun; one older, her parents and newborn Zelda and Aria sleeping peacefully in their arms; one of her and Adan when they were twelve; one of just Zelda and Aria not long after she had returned to work.
She set them back exactly where they'd been and kept moving without my thought.
The flat didn't take long to clean, mostly because there wasn't much in it to clean. One bedroom, sparse enough that a stranger walking through might've assumed no one actually lived here—a bed, a half-empty wardrobe, a vanity unit and a single chair by the window she almost never used.
Similarly, the open-plan kitchen lounge had no television, a single three-person settee for nights she never made it to bed, a coffee table and a small shelf of books she'd liked enough to keep permanently for a future reread.
There was no clutter of hobbies or half-finished projects sprawled about, a single contrasting throw blanket, no art beyond a set of framed prints she couldn't even remember picking out (she was pretty sure it had been Mia). It looked, if she was honest, a little like a show flat. Staged to look lived-in without actually being lived in. She'd never seen the problem in that. Things weren't something she collected; Zelda had learned a long time ago not to get attached to what could be taken, lost, or left behind on short notice.
By the time she'd worked her way through the flat, her stomach made its opinion known, so she abandoned the equipment on the counter and turned to the groceries instead. She got a pan going, threw in what she'd picked up, and let it come together into something simple and warm while the music carried on behind her.
While it cooked, she found wine—one bottle tucked at the back of a practically empty cupboard—and poured herself a glass. She didn't drink often, but tonight counted as a night off. She leaned against the counter, watching the pan as she nursed her drink.
The apartment felt different with the windows open and the music going, less like a place she stored herself between jobs and more like something almost resembling a home. Keyword in that being almost, Zelda wasn't going to fool herself into believing this flat was anything close to long-term functional. Even some minimalists might baulk at it. She turned that thought over without much weight behind it.
Dinner came together quickly, plated without ceremony, and she carried it and her wine to the small table, sitting with her back to the window so the last light fell across the room instead of in her eyes.
She ate slowly, in no hurry, the music filling the silence a conversation might have otherwise occupied. It wasn't much of an evening, by average standards. But it was hers, and it was quiet, and for a few hours nothing in the world was asking anything of her.
She finished the glass before she finished the plate, poured herself another, and sat a while longer once the food was gone, listening to the CD play for a second time, watching the light fade properly to dark outside her open windows.
In the three days before her flight to Tranquillity, Zelda spent only one evening with Elijah. Which was the one before she left for Tranquillity. He'd brought over his custom blue-and-white, classic-style boombox that played both CDs and cassette tapes, and forced her to dance with him.
And by force, she meant lightly encourage, because Zelda was used to Elijah invading her personal space and making an evening of it. After dinner, of course, seeing that he never ate around her.
Still, Zelda enjoyed it—had been taught dance because dance could be randomly important to her type of work—and she'd always enjoyed the freedom it could provide. It wasn't hard to fall in a rhythm with Elijah leading, who mixed up the styles on a whim, most of them she could keep up with.
But she didn't see him the morning she left—too early, well before the city had properly woken, as she slipped out toward the airport to catch her flight. But he'd left something behind for her anyway: a small goody bag of snacks tucked by her door, filled with all her favourites. Bless him and his thoughtfulness.
She had stood there a moment longer than the bag really warranted, turning it over once in her hands before tucking it into her carry-on. It was, she thought, exactly like him—a quiet attentiveness, showing up in forms that didn't need words.
The journey to the airport and through the building itself was easy after that, sliding through the traffic of bodies a skill honed over many years. Once her bags were checked in, she used a private entrance to avoid public security, since her not-so-flesh arm would probably set off every alarm they had. A bonus of flashing her badge was that it got her through to the business lounge that much faster.
She fell into conversation with an elderly couple off to see their first grandchildren, flying out to help their daughter and son-in-law with newborn twins who'd just come home after a month in the NICU.
It gave Zelda joy to tell them the shenanigans she and her own twin sister, Aria, used to get up to as children.
It was always nice when Zelda got moments like that. She so rarely had the chance to just talk with people—work was a near-constant pull in her life. She was always sent wherever she was needed, always somewhere between one job and the next with barely a breath in the middle. There was little room left over for anything as simple as socialising, for engaging with the wider world outside of it. She had her flat, when she remembered to use it. She had Elijah, on the rare stretch of days their schedules happened to line up. Everything else tended to blur past her.
So when the chance did come to live in the moment like that, it stood out sharply against everything else. It let her feel normal and steady in a way she rarely got to feel.
The talk went on even longer when their flight picked up an unexpected hour's delay, and carried on right onto the plane, their business seats beside each other across the aisle.
When the plane landed four hours later and she stepped out of the airport, eyes scanning for Ron's car, Nevada's heat washed over her, dry and sharp after DC's humid air. She absently adjusted the cuff of her glove out of habit and sauntered along the pickup lane, looking for a deep green Austin-Healey BJ8—Ron's pride and joy, unmistakable even from a distance.
When she found it, Ron spotted her at the exact same moment and raised his hand; Zelda smiled.