The jog from Sam's apartment complex to Rowan's place took Eden just under fifteen minutes at a pace that would have left her old, pre-Nexus self gasping for breath. Now, thanks to her enhanced physique, she arrived only slightly winded—though she suspected she looked considerably more disheveled than she felt. Strands of her dark hair had escaped its ponytail, and she was acutely aware that she'd been awake since well before dawn and had spent the intervening hours at various stages of crisis.

  Rowan's place was a small ADU tucked into the lush garden backyard of a larger single-family home on a quiet residential street off of Redwood Road. A gravel path wound through raised beds overflowing with tomatoes, squash, and herbs before terminating at a modest structure that looked like it had begun its existence as a pair of shipping containers. The exterior was painted a cheerful sage green, and window boxes spilled over with trailing flowers that Eden couldn't identify but suspected Rowan could name in Latin.

  She'd expected to have to knock, maybe wake him up. Instead, she found Rowan on the small patio beside the front door, seated in lotus position on a woven meditation cushion. Early morning sunlight caught his face in a warm glow, gilding the shadow of stubble along his jaw and the strong line of his cheekbones. His eyes were closed, his expression peaceful, his hands resting palm-up on his knees.

  He looked, Eden thought with a pang of envy, like he'd slept for a full eight hours and then had a spa day. By contrast, after the morning she’d already had, Eden felt like she'd been dragged backward through a hedge.

  Knowing the sort of danger she might be dragging him into, Eden found herself hesitant to intrude upon this tranquil moment—the quiet garden, the golden light, Rowan's stillness. The air smelled of warm earth and green growing things, richer than it had any right to be in mid-October. As Eden stood there, she noticed something strange: the plants nearest to Rowan seemed to be...thriving. Not dramatically—nothing was sprouting before her eyes or bursting into sudden blooms—but there was a vitality spreading outward from him like ripples in a pond. A tomato plant that should have been yellowing this late in the season looked lush and heavy with fruit. The herbs in the nearby raised bed stood taller, greener, more vibrant than their neighbors just a few feet away.

  If she hadn't known about Rowan's powers, Eden might have dismissed it as particularly fertile soil or attentive gardening. Knowing what she did, and watching the quiet miracle unfold—unconscious, effortless, an extension of Rowan's very presence—made something flutter in her chest that she chose not to examine too closely.

  She was reluctant to shatter the moment with news of a mutating friend who might be losing himself to a monstrous hunger. However, eventually—perhaps inevitably—duty won out over sentiment. Eden stepped closer and gently cleared her throat.

  Rowan's eyes opened warm and alert, finding hers immediately. A smile blossomed across his face. Through her new empathic awareness, Eden felt a wash of genuine pleasure radiate from him— delight at her presence that made her stomach do a surprising little somersault.

  "Eden. This is a surprise."

  "Sorry to interrupt. You looked like you were pretty deep in it."

  "I was trying to be." Rowan unfolded himself from the cushion with an ease that spoke to either natural flexibility or Nexus enhancement—likely both. "I've always wanted to be a morning meditator, you know? Read all the books, downloaded the apps, set the alarms. But I could never actually drag myself out of bed early enough to make it happen."

  "What changed?" Eden asked, although she was already pretty sure of the answer.

  "Honestly? I woke up about two hours ago feeling completely rested after maybe four hours of sleep." He shrugged. "Figured I'd finally give it a real shot."

  "Well, you looked like a natural."

  "Felt like one too. First time for everything, I guess." He gestured toward the door. "Come on in. I've got coffee."

  "God, yes."

  The interior of the ADU was small but thoughtfully arranged. A small kitchen occupied one corner, separated from the main living space by a breakfast bar. A comfortable-looking couch faced a modest television, and bookshelves lined most of the available wall space—filled not with the pristine spines of decorative volumes, but with well-worn paperbacks and hardcovers that had clearly been read and re-read. Eden spotted titles on botany, ecology, and sustainable agriculture alongside fantasy novels and what looked like a complete collection of Calvin and Hobbes.

  Rowan poured her a cup of coffee from a French press that was still warm. "Cream? Sugar?"

  "Just black is fine." Eden wrapped her hands around the mug and inhaled the steam. For a moment, the simple comfort of it almost made her forget why she was there.

  Almost.

  "So," Rowan said, leaning against the counter with his own mug. "I'm guessing this isn't a social call."

  "It's Sam." Eden took a fortifying sip. "He...something happened. His condition deteriorated a lot faster than Delta predicted. He transformed, attacked his neighbor, and we had to extract him from his apartment before emergency services arrived."

  Rowan's expression shifted from curiosity to concern, and Eden felt the change echo through her Empathy—a darkening, like clouds passing over the sun. Worry, sharp and immediate, but not for himself.

  "Is he okay? Is the neighbor okay?"

  "The neighbor will be fine—I was able to heal the worst of her injuries before the EMTs took over. Sam..." Eden hesitated. "Honestly, I don't know. He's contained for now, but he's not...he's not really Sam anymore. Not entirely."

  "What do you mean?"

  "He turned into a recliner, Rowan. With teeth. And then he tried to eat us."

  Rowan stared at her for a long moment. Then he set down his coffee mug. "Give me two minutes to get dressed."

  He disappeared into the bedroom, leaving the door half-open behind him. Eden kept her eyes fixed firmly on her coffee, but the gap in the door was right in her peripheral vision, and she couldn't help but catch a glimpse of Rowan's bare back as he pulled on a shirt—lean muscle shifting beneath smooth skin, and the thin straps of a compression bra crossed his shoulder blades.

  Her cheeks burned and her heart suddenly hammered within her chest. Eden forced herself to look away, studying the spines of his book collection without really seeing them. She didn't often think about that aspect of Rowan. Between the stubble she'd noticed earlier and the way he dressed, he passed easily as a cis man—and her brain had simply...filed him in that category and moved on. She'd always considered herself a staunch ally, and had never hesitated to affirm that trans men were men. However, in that moment she realized that had been an intellectual position, words on a sign at a Pride march.

  Now, with her pulse still jackhammering from a glimpse of bare skin she absolutely should not have been glimpsing, the statement felt viscerally true in a way it never had before. Rowan was a man. A man she found attractive. The fact that his anatomy was more complicated than most didn't change either of those facts for her. Did it?

  What it did change—or at least complicate—was Eden's understanding of herself. She'd always identified as straight without much examination. Men were attractive; women weren't; end of story. Or at least, that had been the end of the story for her until that point. But if she was attracted to Rowan, and Rowan was a man, then...she was still straight, wasn't she?

  Does it even matter? she thought, a little exasperated with herself. He's a person. You like him. Why does everything need a label?

  It was a surprisingly liberating thought. Eden filed it away to examine later—much later, when she wasn't running on fumes and caffeine and the adrenaline of a crisis—and refocused on the sound of Rowan moving around in the bedroom.

  "So what do you need from me?" Rowan's voice came from the bedroom, mercifully oblivious to her momentary lapse.

  "We need someone to keep an eye on Sam while the rest of us head into the city. There's another threat we have to deal with—the Medusa that Warren's been tracking. We can't put that off, but we also can't leave Sam unmonitored."

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  "And you want me because...?"

  “Want you?” Eden’s voice cracked as she reflexively stumbled over the phrasing.

  “I’ve had these powers for only a few hours. Why do you guys want me to help, specifically?"

  "Because of your body." Eden winced at how that sounded.

  “Uh…what?”

  Damn it! Keep it together. Eden mentally shouted at herself as she hurried to assemble a more coherent sentence.

  "I mean—Delta can monitor him, but if something goes wrong, if Sam breaks containment, Delta can't actually do anything in his current condition. Our alien space probe mentor has been mostly busted ever since we found him. We’d like someone on-site, and to be honest you and Sam are the first two people beyond the team to actually learn what’s going on."

  Rowan emerged from the bedroom, dressed in jeans and a henley that fit him rather well. Like a gentle pulse against her empathy, she felt Rowan’s own reaction as his gaze swept over her standing there in his living room. Uncomplicated desire tinged by only a hint of uncertainty.

  “So, what you’re saying is, I’m your only hope?”

  “Help me, Ro-Wan Kenobi. You’re my only hope.”

  "I'm in," he said simply. "Let me grab my keys."

  ***

  The lock on Agent Murphy's hotel room door was a standard electronic keycard model—the kind found in mid-range hotels across America. It took Pablo only a second of concentration to coax the metal bolt of the primary lock to slide open for him.

  He slipped inside and closed the door behind him, pausing to let his eyes adjust to the dim interior. The curtains were drawn, blocking out the morning sun, but enough light leaked around the edges to reveal a room in mild disarray. The bed was unmade, clothes were draped over a chair, and a laptop sat open on the desk—though the screen was dark.

  "I'm in," Pablo murmured, barely above a whisper. The earbud nestled in his ear connected him to Delta.

  "I still don't understand why this is a worthwhile endeavor," Delta said with an exasperated sigh.

  "Because you often have trouble understanding us meat sacks of mostly water."

  “It’s not my fault that your primitive brains are distressingly difficult to model,” Delta grumbled.

  "I'm sure you've downloaded every scrap of digital information about Agent Murphy, from her laptop to her cellphone to her FBI file and beyond."

  “Perhaps if you just asked me for what you wanted to know, I could have saved you this trip."

  "Exactly my point. I don’t exactly know what I’m looking for." Pablo moved through the room carefully, cataloging its contents without yet touching anything.

  “Then what in the Abyss are you doing there?” Delta demanded.

  "First of all, context matters almost as much as the information itself. Your perspective is inherently alien. In sifting through that mountain of data you've collected, you might disregard something critical due to lack of context. So I'm here to gather information with my mark-one eyeballs and my squishy brain." Pablo paused beside the desk, examining the scattered papers without picking them up. “I might not know what it is we need until I see it for myself.”

  "Your reply implies that there's at least one more reason."

  "It's related to the reason I wanted Eden to bring Rowan in to watch Sam." Pablo moved toward the closet, his Metal Sense having already detected something interesting on the other side of the door—thumbtacks, by the feel of them, dozens of them arranged in a pattern too deliberate to be random. "You don't have a body, and you can mostly only interact with the world digitally. Sometimes, the important details are still analog."

  He opened the closet door and smiled.

  Inside, Murphy had hung a corkboard that took up most of the back wall. Tacked to it were printed surveillance photos of Pablo and each of his friends—candid shots taken from a distance, probably with a telephoto lens. There were handwritten notes in a cramped, precise script. Several maps: one of Napa, one of greater California, one of the area around Middle Velma Lake with certain locations circled in red. And in the center, a timeline of events stretching back to the night of the meteor strike that had started everything. Pablo pulled out his phone and began snapping pictures, careful to capture every note, every connection, every scribbled annotation in the margins.

  "This isn't really anything new," Delta pointed out, having been able to see through his phone’s camera. "We knew you and the other Paladins were the focal point of her investigation."

  "Sure. But it's still helpful for me to see not just what she knows, but how she thinks."

  "I could compose for you an in-depth analysis of the agent's psychological profile."

  "Again, that's only so helpful because of your inherently alien perspective." Pablo finished photographing the corkboard and moved on to the rest of the room. "Just trust me, okay? Some things require us to experience and understand for ourselves."

  It was clear that Murphy hadn't taken time to pack before rushing out in pursuit of their falsified GPS data. She hadn't done much more than grab the essentials—keys, phone, wallet, gun and badge. Everything else had been left behind, including...

  Pablo paused at the dresser. Among the scattered personal items was a bundle of mail—letters and cards, still in tucked into their open envelopes, held together with a rubber band. He picked up the bundle carefully and began flipping through it.

  Condolence cards. Dozens of them, from friends and family, all expressing sympathy for Harold's death. Some were generic Hallmark sentiments. Others were more personal, filled with handwritten memories and expressions of grief.

  One envelope made Pablo stop.

  The return address was a congressional office in Washington, D.C. The sender was listed simply as "John Bailey." Inside was a card with a handwritten message:

  Jilly-bean—

  There are no words adequate to this moment. Harold was a good man, and he loved you more than anything. If there's anything I can do—anything at all—you know I'm only a phone call away.

  Love, Uncle John

  Pablo stared at the signature for a long moment.

  "Delta. Is Agent Murphy actually John Bailey's niece?"

  "Yes, on her mother's side."

  "You didn't think that was a pertinent detail to mention?"

  "They have very little communication, and he's entirely unaware of Agent Murphy's current activity."

  "This is exactly the sort of thing I was talking about." Pablo carefully replaced the card in its envelope and returned the bundle to its original position. Hopefully, if Murphy noticed anything out of place, she'd chalk it up to housekeeping.

  "I still don't see how that's relevant," Delta said. "Agent Murphy has made deliberate efforts not to publicly associate herself with her uncle. Even now, when she's being pressured by her superiors to return to work, she hasn't contacted him to exert influence. He's irrelevant to her current activity."

  "He’s the Speaker of the House. The man is second in line to the presidency and one of the most influential political figures in the country."

  "I still don't see how any of that is relevant to the threat of Murphy's investigation."

  "It isn't."

  "Then what are you so worked up about?"

  Pablo moved toward the door, giving the room one final scan to ensure everything was back in its place. "I need you to dive deep on John Bailey. Look for any possible signs that he's Corrupt."

  "Ugh. He's a human politician. I won't have to look very deep."

  "I mean capital-C Corrupt. We need to know if he's just a mundane politician or a puppet."

  "I still don't understand why this matters."

  Pablo paused with his hand on the door handle. "Because we have more concerns than the immediate emergencies. If we're going to prepare Earth for a non-cataclysmic integration with the Nexus, we need access to un-Corrupted leaders."

  There was a beat of silence. Then: "Ohhhhh. How did I not see that before?"

  "Because you're not a primitive meat sack of mostly water."

  Pablo slipped out of the room, pulling the door closed behind him until the electronic lock clicked softly into place. The hallway was empty. He walked toward the elevator at an unhurried pace, just another hotel guest going about his morning. Inside, though, his mind was already racing ahead to the next crisis. The Medusa, Sam's deteriorating condition, and somewhere out there, enemies they hadn't even identified yet. They had no idea who had planted the booby-trapped dungeon core behind the clinic.

  One problem at a time, Pablo reminded himself. Even if the problems were starting to pile up faster than they could solve them.

  Exiting the hotel and striding away down the sidewalk, he began speaking to Delta again.

  “How’re things going back at base?”

  “Paladin Eden has arrived with Rowan. He’s prepared to assist in overseeing Sam’s containment. Perhaps now would be a good time to again discuss formalizing Rowan’s relationship with the team.”

  “I’m still not prepared to offer him the Oath. I know that at your processing speeds, this must seem like we’re taking ages, but for us it’s only been a few hours.”

  “As talon leader it’s your responsibility—”

  “How many times have you complained to me about being stuck with us five because we were your only options within range?”

  “And look at how you all have thrived under my expert tutelage!”

  “No one’s stopping you from tutelageing Rowan.” Without Razor in his hand, it took effort from Pablo not to raise his voice in frustration.

  “Ugh, tutelageing is not a word. The correct form would be tutoring.” Delta sounded sulky over the line. “And of course I will offer Rowan the considerable breadth of my knowledge base.”

  “You understood what I meant,” Pablo said with a sigh. “For better or worse, Rowan is part of our world now. Whether he becomes a Paladin or not is a decision that doesn’t need to be made right now.”

  “Very well,” Delta replied, although from his tone it was clear that the AI hadn’t actually relented.

  “The clock is ticking on Murphy figuring out we haven’t made a run for the border. We need to get a handle on this Medusa situation in the city while we have the chance to operate unobserved. Patch me into the rest of the team.”