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The parties by the docks have died down by the time the boat pulls back into the harbor. For now, the water lies quiet, the orange lights from the pier dancing gently on its surface like fireflies.

“It’s all gone fucking wrong,” says Anna Smith disgustedly, and takes a drag from her cigarette.

“Rodman meant well, I’m sure,” says Todorov placidly, but there’s an undercurrent of agreement in his voice.

She grunts. “I don’t even mean Rodman—although if the idiot were still alive, I’d have a word or two with him in private. But if Jenkins hadn’t fucked up, we wouldn’t have to head back to the mansion to finish what he started in the first place.”

“If it helps,” says Todorov, “I have a great deal more faith in your abilities than in Jenkins’.”

“Thanks,” she says. “Means a lot to me.”

He knows the line of tension in her shoulders, though he hasn’t seen it in years. He almost frowns, opens his mouth, feels an answering catch in his own throat and closes it again. There’s nothing he can say to allay her doubts.

She’s right. They had plans. Clearly laid out, not a single detail overlooked, a flawless plan of attack drawn up. If everything had gone the way they’d wanted it to, Kane would have been dead before anyone even realized the presidential mansion’s defenses had been breached.

As it is, Rodman’s spilled half their secrets in a well-meant but poorly-executed attempt to help some nebulous cause he doesn’t even know exists. That means changes in security. Lockdowns on openings they’d planned to exploit from the start. Certainly no way to go through with a poisoning, now that Kane knows they know his suppliers. And with the number of Tributes dwindling in the Arena by the day, not enough time to formulate new strategies.

It isn’t often either of them thinks of the possibility of failure as anything more than another contingency to plan for. They do now.

“Still, there are worse ways to go out,” says Anna, and flicks her cigarette butt into the water below.

Todorov presses her hand once, firmly, and withdraws it. “I’ll see you on the other side.”

---

In the morning she meets Duval behind a gardener’s shed at the edge of the presidential grounds—the only security blind spot left available to them after the leaks—and they set up in careful, precise silence. There is little to say.

Not for the first time, she feels the weight of what they’re about to do like a boulder pressing down on her chest, threatening to crush her ribcage. She knows it isn’t fear of death as much as it is fear of the unknown—fear of all their carefully laid traps springing too early or too late—but it translates into a certain slowness as she assembles her equipment. If Duval notices, he doesn’t say, and the closed-off look in his eyes tells her he’s feeling the same thing.

But it does them no good to doubt this early in the game. She crouches and taps her earpiece twice.

“You’re clear,” says Shahri’s voice in her ear. “Good luck.”

Anna closes her eyes, cracks her neck, breathes in. Packs her momentary doubt away as carefully as she has secured her weapons about her person. Beside her, Duval straightens. Then, with a short nod, he ducks around the side of the shed and is gone.

An evening of unexplained absence is easy enough to explain for a Peacekeeper like Duval. A man who only answers to Nichol Bellasseau—who in turn answers to nobody short of Kane himself—can open more doors than a lockpick in the same amount of time. Speed is of the essence now, rather than subtlety. Only a fool would fail to notice this many doors opening, this many security breaches—but it is all they have to go on.

It seems like hours before she hears one soft tap in her own earpiece, though her watch tells her it’s only been twenty minutes. The all-clear. Duval has hacked into security. Cameras on the grounds have been silenced, their feeds are broadcasting looped footage, and she has five minutes to get into the building before someone notices.

It’s easier said than done. The grounds are crawling with Peacekeepers now, and as easy as it would be to dismiss them all as brainless mooks, she knows perfectly well she can’t. The Rook’s already made a mockery of them once. The idea that they’ve somehow forgotten in the last few days is a little too much to hope for. There was a time she could have put on a Peacekeeper uniform of her own and slipped into the building without so much as a by-your-leave, but now it’s all she can do to sneak past them, making full use of the weakness of the morning light.

She hasn’t done this in years. Not since the war. With luck, she’ll never have to do it again.

The doors are wide open when Anna reaches them at last, with no sign of the Peacekeepers who should be guarding them. Duval’s work. Two taps on her earpiece, and she slips through without looking back.

The presidential mansion is a curious blend of the practical and the ostentatious. The rest of the building is as covered in metalwork and statues as the ballroom, but all of it serves only as that—gilt. The structure of the mansion itself is almost utilitarian, and the gold leaf only hides the cold stone underneath it. Kane, for all his faults, is sensible at heart in the way only a man who rose through the ranks during wartime can be. He will be confident but not enough so to be cocky, and Anna knows that he will have recalled his personal Peacekeepers to the mansion and cut off communications the moment Rodman’s blog post aired.

Goddamn inconvenient of him.

At least the floorplans haven’t changed. They haven’t had the time to do that in a matter of hours. And it’s easy to tell where Duval has been, to note the small charcoal marks on the walls at knee height where nobody would think to look. The signs are easy to read if you know how: Peacekeeper patrol route this way; take a left that way. It isn’t ideal, not by a long shot, but using Duval as a scout is all they can do at this point.

It’s too much to assume Kane would be somewhere easy to find, and it’s doubtful all but his most trusted Peacekeepers would know where he is. Duval’s marks grow scratchier and more frustrated as Anna continues to follow them. The hallway she’s in is clearly residential now. Busts and portraits still line the walls, but the doors open into bedrooms and the floor is lined with plush carpet.

It’s the carpet that’s to blame for what happens next. She’d have been able to hear the other man’s footsteps otherwise. As it is, it’s only a finely-tuned sixth sense that saves her from death.

A prickle at the base of her scalp is all the warning she gets. A split second later, one of the busts beside her explodes into marble dust as she dives for cover—what little there is in a hallway like this one. Her hand finds a doorknob and she forces her way into the empty bedroom without further ado.

“Little trouble here, Duval,” she snaps into the earpiece, and is rewarded with a burst of static.

“Holed up with some trouble of my own,” Duval’s voice crackles. “Do you think you can hold them off?”

“We’ll see. Guess Kane’s awake by now.”

There’s silence from the other end of the hall: enough time for her to lean out and return fire. She catches a glimpse of long, dirty blond hair and a flash of red before there’s another crack and half the doorframe splinters into pieces, sending bits of wood flying in her face. What the hell does Kane outfit his bodyguards with, cannons?

“Listen,” she calls, “I’d love to stay and chat, but I’m running on a tight schedule here.”

She’s not actually expecting a response, but she gets one anyway.

“I was thinking the same thing, actually,” says the Peacekeeper. “Honestly, it might be easier for both of us if you just surrender and save me the time.”

She’s never actually been one for witty repartee. There’s not much point to thinking up comebacks in the middle of a firefight. But if it’ll draw the other guy out, she figures she might as well. Besides, he sounds friendly, and there’s nothing more annoying than a friendly target. Friendliness implies confidence, which is a quality Anna despises in anyone who isn’t on her side.

There’s another open door across the hall from the doorway she’s currently occupying, and she dives for it, which has the intended effect: another crack of the gun, another shattered work of art as the bullet misses.

“You break it, you buy it,” she calls back, and there’s a short laugh. It’s enough to pinpoint his location—another bedroom door, it figures—and she lets off a few rounds that keep him from replying right away and give her a couple of seconds to reload her pistol.

She thinks: about twenty-five yards separate her from the Peacekeeper. That’s three or four bedroom doors’ worth of cover. Those guns of his are relatively slow to fire but their stopping power is phenomenal. Getting in close is a bad idea, but so is sitting here and waiting for him to dismantle the mansion around her ears.

“I’m done here,” says Duval’s voice in her ear, and he sounds breathless but unharmed. “Need a hand?”

“Negative,” she says shortly, prompting another burst of gunfire from down the hall. “Priority is our target.”

Duval doesn’t even hesitate, which is one of the things she likes about working with him. All these years in Intelligence have taught him the importance of priorities. “Right. See you there.”

Silence falls at the other end of the hall. She takes the opportunity to duck into the next doorway, a few yards closer to her opponent. This time the Peacekeeper does not fire.

“Your target,” he says.

She doesn’t respond, focuses on the feel of the gun in her hands and the distance between them.

“I want you to know,” says the Peacekeeper—and he’s a chatty one, isn’t he? It’s starting to annoy her—“that I’ve already called for reinforcements. You might as well surrender.”

“You said that already,” she says at last.

“I mean it. I don’t want to kill anyone, but I will if I have to.”

“Then you’re an idiot.” What is he playing at? It’s hard to imagine a Peacekeeper meaning any of what he’s saying, but it’s even harder to imagine a Peacekeeper lying through his teeth like this, thinking she’ll fall for it. If he’s trying to take refuge in audacity, she isn’t buying it.

“I’m—” he says, and then she glimpses long hair and a red coat again as he stiffens, half-out of cover, at the sound of a door opening further down the hall behind him. She fires instinctively, and his sudden, abrupt flinch is oddly satisfying on some gut level. It’s probably grazed his arm from the looks of it. Not lethal—not enough to do anything but inconvenience him.

“Uncle Kar—” says a distant voice, abruptly cut off as someone pulls the speaker back into the room and slams the door shut again.

“Get back!” shouts the Peacekeeper, turning back to face Anna, but she’s already in motion, unsheathing her knife with her free hand as she runs. By the time he manages to bring his guns to bear, she’s practically on top of him.

She slams her hands against his wrists as he fires and the shots go wide, though the sound of them going off so close to her head almost stuns her as much as the shots themselves would have done. Her knife sinks into his right wrist and and he drops one gun—she kicks it away—but he still has both a second gun and a good eight inches on her in terms of height, and she’s not so stupid as to believe she can overpower him with sheer strength.

This close, with both hands occupied, there isn’t much she can do but drop the knife, grab a fistful of his hair, and drag his head down to meet her knee with bruising force. The Peacekeeper doubles over, blood rushing from his nose, but recovers faster than she expects, taking advantage of his position to headbutt her in the stomach. She stumbles back, the breath rushing out of her lungs, and as he brings the second gun up, she fires her own.

The zip of the bullet through flesh is unmistakable, and his shot goes wide as his body jerks back against the doorframe. She doesn’t give him time to line up another shot; he looks up, she meets his eyes, and she fires into his chest again.

It’s a fatal wound. He knows it as surely as she does. He isn’t bleeding much, but they’ve both fought too recently in a war to be able to dismiss it as superficial. That’s the thing about gunshot wounds, the thing that makes them simultaneously less and more frightening than knives. It’s simple enough to stop fighting when a blade lays your body open and spills your blood with frightening ease, though a skilled surgeon can close you up again with minimal fuss. It’s harder to accept that the hard pluck of a bullet is the one that will kill you in the end.

It’s why she understands when, after a moment, a small, resigned smile crosses his face, replacing the initial expression of shock. It’s why she understands when he sinks to his knees and carefully, deliberately, lets his second gun fall to the ground.

There was a part of this man who never wanted to fight in the first place. She sees that now. She doesn’t know what it is, what could possibly make him hold nothing back until the moment he realized he was going to die. As lethal as his own injuries are, he still has time to shoot her at point-blank range, but instead he only sags against the doorframe and and lets his eyes drift half-closed.

“Well,” he murmurs, “I suppose that’s that. I suppose now is a good time to mention that I didn’t actually call for reinforcements.”

Typical. Of all the Peacekeepers in the building, she has to run into the honorable one. Not that she’s complaining. Besting one of these types in single combat always nets you something.

She opens her mouth to speak, but he forestalls her. She figures he has the right; he’s got less breath left in his body than she does. Instead she closes her mouth and flicks on the earpiece so Duval can hear.

“I know you’re after Kane,” he says. “I know where he is. There’s no love lost between me and the miserable bastard.” He inhales slowly. “I can tell you how to get there. But you have to promise me one thing.”

“Anything,” she says easily. There’s only one way to talk to a dying man.

“My nieces,” he says, and gestures down the hall with a bloodied arm. “Get them out of here. Somewhere safe. They’ll only be at risk if your people succeed.”

As if she has time to play babysitter with Kane still in the building. But suddenly things are falling into place: the hesitation, the easy surrender. Were they brought here for their own protection, or as hostages? Either way, it’s a shit way to ensure employee loyalty.

“Of course,” she says, clasping his hand.

He’s quiet for a moment before he speaks again, and when he does his voice has a growing wetness to it, like he’s speaking through liquid. “Front pocket. Identification card. Will get you through…” He pauses, breathes. “Through to the saferoom. Not far from here. Hidden passage…”

“Found it,” says Duval in her ear. “I’ll need you over here to open the lock, though.”

And the Peacekeeper must have heard him, because his smile widens for a moment, red and white and a little crooked. “’S funny,” he says.

She looks at him, prompting him to continue.

He says, “Seems death…can come in a beautiful form after all,” and dies.

Anna prides herself on having the decency to not shoot his corpse for that remark, and also to wait a few more seconds before she relieves said corpse of the ID card and the gun that isn’t slippery with blood. Working for a cause is one thing, but to pretend honor factors into it is never going to turn out well.

She’s halfway down the hall when a hoarse voice says, “Stay put,” and the door that had cracked open before swings open again. A young man steps out, an axe in his hand, and shuts the door behind him.

“He’s dead, isn’t he,” he says, and his voice stumbles over the words like he’s forgotten how to use them.

“You’re chatty for an Avox,” returns Anna, glancing at his clothes.

He ignores the comment. “He saved my life.”

“Funny,” says Anna, “he didn’t look all that keen on saving mine.”

The kid frowns. “Don’t know what you want, but—” a pause as he clears his throat— “if you’re planning anything—”

“Stay put, and nothing will happen to you,” says Anna. “I mean it. I’m not wasting my ammo on anyone else. It’s his nieces in there, right?”

The young man nods.

“I don’t know who you are and I don’t really give a damn. If you want to kill them, go right ahead. If you want to save them, you can do that too. Just don’t get in our way.”

He looks scandalized for a moment before he takes a step back and puts a protective hand on the doorknob. Good. Whatever. Anna eyes him for a moment longer before she turns and heads off down the hall.

Fucking distractions.

---

Aras isn’t sure why the Peacekeeper Anna was fighting didn’t seem to have raised an alarm. He only wishes the Peacekeepers who ambushed him in the ballroom would have done him the same courtesy. As it is, it seems like ages before he can make an escape, leaving four corpses behind him.

His only hope now is that none of them caught a glimpse of him, and that anyone he runs into now will think he’s looking for the same intruder they are. A Peacekeeper uniform and a determined look go a long way, even in the presidential mansion.

In the end it’s another Peacekeeper who leads him straight to the saferoom. The other man gives him a suspicious look at first—understandable, considering the plaster dust in his hair and his rumpled uniform—but a casual mention of Bellasseau is all it takes for the Peacekeeper’s eyes to widen and his back to straighten. Getting in the way of his protegé is no doubt asking for a quick demotion.

So it is that Aras finds himself at last in front of a hidden access panel in the depths of the mansion. Here his luck finally gives out—the other man doesn’t have a keycard, only the code for the intercom, which is no use at all. Aras thanks him, snaps his neck with quiet efficiency, alerts Anna, and settles down, facing the panel, to wait.

A hidden door in the wall behind him slides open. Aras has just enough time to turn and knock away the initial blow of the sword with the barrel of his rifle before he comes face-to-face with Dativo Kane himself.

The President doesn’t even look shocked to find him standing here—disappointed, perhaps, and a little annoyed, but far from surprised. He is dressed as immaculately as he was at the ball, not a hair out of place, a simple rapier held lightly but firmly in one gloved hand.

“It’s Duval, isn’t it?” he muses, eyes narrowing slightly in amusement. “Bellasseau’s lapdog! To think that all this time…”

Aras says nothing. The hallway is too narrow, the distance between them too close to use his rifle effectively. The handgun at his side is still in its holster, its safety still off—not enough time. Not with that rapier so close.

“Well,” says Kane, “I suppose I’ll have to amend my hiring process in the future.” His expression is still mild, his voice still pleasant. Slowly, he brings the tip of the rapier up mere inches away from Aras’s throat. “You’ve been busy these past few days, haven’t you? Running errands for Bellasseau and playing host for your friends from the Districts. No wonder you look so tired.”

He’s not tired, he thinks. He’s more awake now than he has been all week. Of course, it could be the coffee talking.

“Maybe you should close your eyes for a moment,” says Kane, and that is when several things all happen in quick succession.

First—and this is the item that is of most pressing concern to Aras at the moment—Kane stabs the rapier upward at his unprotected throat. Second—the unmistakable figure of Anna Smith appears at the end of the hallway and shouts, “Hey, asswipe!” Third—the tip of the rapier jerks, just a little, and it’s enough to prompt Aras to twist as hard to the left as he can, swinging the butt of his rifle wildly at Kane.

Kane makes a faint huffing noise as the rifle butt slams into his side. The rapier blade takes a short detour, carving a thin red line across the side of Aras’s neck, and buries itself into the wall beside his right ear. Aras draws in a shaky breath and tries not to think about how relieved he is to find his carotid still intact.

He would try to open up more distance between himself and the president, get out of range so his rifle won’t be a useless piece of metal, but Kane wrenches his blade free and lunges with the speed of a snake. The rifle flies from Aras’s stunned hands and he stumbles back, fumbling for the handgun at his side as Kane presses his advantage. It should be comparatively easy, he thinks, to parry a rapier this close up, but the sword’s edges, blunt as they are, leave welts across his arms and leave his sleeves in tattered shreds.

Anna is closing in now, knife flashing, but Kane is ready. A swift punch to the side of Aras’s head with the rapier pommel, stars explode in his vision as he reels back, and Kane doesn’t even miss a beat as he turns to face his other assailant.

Aras thinks he can feel blood flowing down the side of his face: a bit of metalwork may have cut the side of his head. It probably feels worse than it is. Most cuts are. When his vision clears, the two combatants are still only a matter of yards away. Anna seems to have met her match—Kane is an experienced duelist, and he knows these halls better than she does. For every step she advances, he retreats, keeping her skillfully at bay, blade weaving like lightning through her limited defenses.

Slowly, he pulls his handgun from its holster at last and levels it at Kane.

Or he tries to. His hands are shaking, there’s blood in his eyes, and Anna’s in the way, her back to him. He knows, on some intellectual level, that neither he nor Anna really expected to get out of this one alive, especially not once the plans had changed, but he still can’t bring himself to pull the trigger. He has to wait, he tells himself, has to stay patient, and Kane looks up for a moment, as if he knows, and the sudden predatory smile that flashes across the president’s face sends chills down Aras’s spine.

A quick, brutal thrust of the blade: Anna hisses, drawing back and clutching at her injured arm. She’s falling back now, deliberately trying to stay out of range where before she was struggling to close on Kane, and that’s a worrying sign.

Or is it? Aras pauses. With every step back she takes, she draws herself and Kane a few feet closer to him. Kane doesn’t seem to have noticed yet, intent as he is on cutting her down.

A few more steps, and Aras sees his chance. As the rapier withdraws from another thrust, he lunges, barrelling past Anna and tackling the older man to the ground. Kane brings his sword arm up again, but Anna is there, a heavy boot pinning his wrist down and keeping it there.

Aras keeps his knee pressed on Kane’s chest, but there is only a cold disdain in the president’s expression.

“You disgrace your uniform, Duval,” he says. There’s a feral edge to his voice now that Aras has never heard before. The man doesn’t even sound out of breath. “You’ve made a mockery of everything we’ve worked so hard to create. How long do you think Panem will stand if we are not there to hold it up? Do you think your mentor will be proud of you for what you’ve done, boy?”

Aras keeps his mouth shut. There is something about the words that makes him uneasy, something that shakes him to the core despite their source. Bellasseau meant well, he thinks. Bellasseau worked for stability. Bellasseau saw young Aras Duval as more of a son than a student and taught him everything he knew. Bellasseau believed in the Capitol in the same way he is sure some hidden-away part of Kane still does. For men like them it is as much about belief as it is about power. Sometimes even more. It is what makes them dangerous.

Yes, he thinks. But belief is what makes us dangerous, too.

He levels his pistol between Kane’s eyes, but a hand at his shoulder stops him and the grip of an ornate weapon that is more cannon than handgun descends into his field of view.

“Better use this instead,” says Anna.

Aras looks up, but Anna’s expression is strangely unreadable.

“Melchior wouldn’t have given that up without a fight,” says Kane.

“No,” says Anna placidly.

“I suppose you think this is terribly clever.”

“Not really,” says Anna. “Just practical. Make sure you stay dead.”

“Very wise of you,” says Kane.

There is something he’s missing here, thinks Aras, and Kane’s cold smile confirms it. Not that it matters. Anna may be enjoying herself thoroughly, but both of them know they don’t have much time before the Peacekeepers pick up their scent again. He has not gone this long in Intelligence without developing a low tolerance for witty one-liners.

Aras Duval sets his teeth, and assassinates the President.

---

Before he can think about what he’s done, Anna has dragged him to his feet and into Kane’s saferoom. It’s a spartan affair: a desk, a bed, a small bathroom. But there’s another passage leading out of it—an escape route, perhaps. Evidently Kane was confident enough to attempt confronting his assassins instead of running. Perhaps he thought Aras was the only one who’d entered the mansion.

“You could’ve just opened fire on us in the first place,” says Aras as Anna shuts the door behind them and locks it to slow any pursuers. “Would’ve gone a lot faster.”

Anna is already going through Kane’s desk drawers. “And risk shooting the new secretary of intelligence? Are you kidding? Shahri would have been taking it out of my paycheck for weeks.”

“I didn’t know we were getting paid for this,” says Aras. He knows it’s the adrenaline, but he can feel a laugh bubbling up.

“Take it up with Shahri. Think fast,” says Anna, and tosses a small bag of something at him. Actual coffee beans, imported from god knows where. Now he really does have the ridiculous urge to laugh. In fact, he would if a crackle of static in their earpieces doesn’t interrupt them both.

“We have a situation in the city,” says Ergo’s voice. “Duval, you are needed back at the IIB building. Smith, you will rendezvous with Todorov at the docks.”

“The hell?” Anna demands of the ceiling. “We have an hour yet before phase two. What’s going on, Shahri?”

“I will provide details once both of you are in position,” says Ergo, and cuts the feed.

Aras glances at the door, then over at his partner. “I guess we don’t have much of a choice.”

“I know we don’t,” says Anna, stuffing a box of cigars in her pocket and slamming the drawer shut. “Come on. Let’s move. We’re still on the job.”

Description
The parties by the docks have died down by the time the boat pulls back into the harbor. For now, the water lies quiet, the orange lights from the pier dancing gently on its surface like fireflies.

“It’s all gone fucking wrong,” says Anna Smith disgustedly, and takes a drag from her cigarette.

“Rodman meant well, I’m sure,” says Todorov placidly, but there’s an undercurrent of agreement in his voice.

She grunts. “I don’t even mean Rodman—although if the idiot were still alive, I’d have a word or two with him in private. But if Jenkins hadn’t fucked up, we wouldn’t have to head back to the mansion to finish what he started in the first place.”

“If it helps,” says Todorov, “I have a great deal more faith in your abilities than in Jenkins’.”

“Thanks,” she says. “Means a lot to me.”

He knows the line of tension in her shoulders, though he hasn’t seen it in years. He almost frowns, opens his mouth, feels an answering catch in his own throat and closes it again. There’s nothing he can say to allay her doubts.

She’s right. They had plans. Clearly laid out, not a single detail overlooked, a flawless plan of attack drawn up. If everything had gone the way they’d wanted it to, Kane would have been dead before anyone even realized the presidential mansion’s defenses had been breached.

As it is, Rodman’s spilled half their secrets in a well-meant but poorly-executed attempt to help some nebulous cause he doesn’t even know exists. That means changes in security. Lockdowns on openings they’d planned to exploit from the start. Certainly no way to go through with a poisoning, now that Kane knows they know his suppliers. And with the number of Tributes dwindling in the Arena by the day, not enough time to formulate new strategies.

It isn’t often either of them thinks of the possibility of failure as anything more than another contingency to plan for. They do now.

“Still, there are worse ways to go out,” says Anna, and flicks her cigarette butt into the water below.

Todorov presses her hand once, firmly, and withdraws it. “I’ll see you on the other side.”

---

In the morning she meets Duval behind a gardener’s shed at the edge of the presidential grounds—the only security blind spot left available to them after the leaks—and they set up in careful, precise silence. There is little to say.

Not for the first time, she feels the weight of what they’re about to do like a boulder pressing down on her chest, threatening to crush her ribcage. She knows it isn’t fear of death as much as it is fear of the unknown—fear of all their carefully laid traps springing too early or too late—but it translates into a certain slowness as she assembles her equipment. If Duval notices, he doesn’t say, and the closed-off look in his eyes tells her he’s feeling the same thing.

But it does them no good to doubt this early in the game. She crouches and taps her earpiece twice.

“You’re clear,” says Shahri’s voice in her ear. “Good luck.”

Anna closes her eyes, cracks her neck, breathes in. Packs her momentary doubt away as carefully as she has secured her weapons about her person. Beside her, Duval straightens. Then, with a short nod, he ducks around the side of the shed and is gone.

An evening of unexplained absence is easy enough to explain for a Peacekeeper like Duval. A man who only answers to Nichol Bellasseau—who in turn answers to nobody short of Kane himself—can open more doors than a lockpick in the same amount of time. Speed is of the essence now, rather than subtlety. Only a fool would fail to notice this many doors opening, this many security breaches—but it is all they have to go on.

It seems like hours before she hears one soft tap in her own earpiece, though her watch tells her it’s only been twenty minutes. The all-clear. Duval has hacked into security. Cameras on the grounds have been silenced, their feeds are broadcasting looped footage, and she has five minutes to get into the building before someone notices.

It’s easier said than done. The grounds are crawling with Peacekeepers now, and as easy as it would be to dismiss them all as brainless mooks, she knows perfectly well she can’t. The Rook’s already made a mockery of them once. The idea that they’ve somehow forgotten in the last few days is a little too much to hope for. There was a time she could have put on a Peacekeeper uniform of her own and slipped into the building without so much as a by-your-leave, but now it’s all she can do to sneak past them, making full use of the weakness of the morning light.

She hasn’t done this in years. Not since the war. With luck, she’ll never have to do it again.

The doors are wide open when Anna reaches them at last, with no sign of the Peacekeepers who should be guarding them. Duval’s work. Two taps on her earpiece, and she slips through without looking back.

The presidential mansion is a curious blend of the practical and the ostentatious. The rest of the building is as covered in metalwork and statues as the ballroom, but all of it serves only as that—gilt. The structure of the mansion itself is almost utilitarian, and the gold leaf only hides the cold stone underneath it. Kane, for all his faults, is sensible at heart in the way only a man who rose through the ranks during wartime can be. He will be confident but not enough so to be cocky, and Anna knows that he will have recalled his personal Peacekeepers to the mansion and cut off communications the moment Rodman’s blog post aired.

Goddamn inconvenient of him.

At least the floorplans haven’t changed. They haven’t had the time to do that in a matter of hours. And it’s easy to tell where Duval has been, to note the small charcoal marks on the walls at knee height where nobody would think to look. The signs are easy to read if you know how: Peacekeeper patrol route this way; take a left that way. It isn’t ideal, not by a long shot, but using Duval as a scout is all they can do at this point.

It’s too much to assume Kane would be somewhere easy to find, and it’s doubtful all but his most trusted Peacekeepers would know where he is. Duval’s marks grow scratchier and more frustrated as Anna continues to follow them. The hallway she’s in is clearly residential now. Busts and portraits still line the walls, but the doors open into bedrooms and the floor is lined with plush carpet.

It’s the carpet that’s to blame for what happens next. She’d have been able to hear the other man’s footsteps otherwise. As it is, it’s only a finely-tuned sixth sense that saves her from death.

A prickle at the base of her scalp is all the warning she gets. A split second later, one of the busts beside her explodes into marble dust as she dives for cover—what little there is in a hallway like this one. Her hand finds a doorknob and she forces her way into the empty bedroom without further ado.

“Little trouble here, Duval,” she snaps into the earpiece, and is rewarded with a burst of static.

“Holed up with some trouble of my own,” Duval’s voice crackles. “Do you think you can hold them off?”

“We’ll see. Guess Kane’s awake by now.”

There’s silence from the other end of the hall: enough time for her to lean out and return fire. She catches a glimpse of long, dirty blond hair and a flash of red before there’s another crack and half the doorframe splinters into pieces, sending bits of wood flying in her face. What the hell does Kane outfit his bodyguards with, cannons?

“Listen,” she calls, “I’d love to stay and chat, but I’m running on a tight schedule here.”

She’s not actually expecting a response, but she gets one anyway.

“I was thinking the same thing, actually,” says the Peacekeeper. “Honestly, it might be easier for both of us if you just surrender and save me the time.”

She’s never actually been one for witty repartee. There’s not much point to thinking up comebacks in the middle of a firefight. But if it’ll draw the other guy out, she figures she might as well. Besides, he sounds friendly, and there’s nothing more annoying than a friendly target. Friendliness implies confidence, which is a quality Anna despises in anyone who isn’t on her side.

There’s another open door across the hall from the doorway she’s currently occupying, and she dives for it, which has the intended effect: another crack of the gun, another shattered work of art as the bullet misses.

“You break it, you buy it,” she calls back, and there’s a short laugh. It’s enough to pinpoint his location—another bedroom door, it figures—and she lets off a few rounds that keep him from replying right away and give her a couple of seconds to reload her pistol.

She thinks: about twenty-five yards separate her from the Peacekeeper. That’s three or four bedroom doors’ worth of cover. Those guns of his are relatively slow to fire but their stopping power is phenomenal. Getting in close is a bad idea, but so is sitting here and waiting for him to dismantle the mansion around her ears.

“I’m done here,” says Duval’s voice in her ear, and he sounds breathless but unharmed. “Need a hand?”

“Negative,” she says shortly, prompting another burst of gunfire from down the hall. “Priority is our target.”

Duval doesn’t even hesitate, which is one of the things she likes about working with him. All these years in Intelligence have taught him the importance of priorities. “Right. See you there.”

Silence falls at the other end of the hall. She takes the opportunity to duck into the next doorway, a few yards closer to her opponent. This time the Peacekeeper does not fire.

“Your target,” he says.

She doesn’t respond, focuses on the feel of the gun in her hands and the distance between them.

“I want you to know,” says the Peacekeeper—and he’s a chatty one, isn’t he? It’s starting to annoy her—“that I’ve already called for reinforcements. You might as well surrender.”

“You said that already,” she says at last.

“I mean it. I don’t want to kill anyone, but I will if I have to.”

“Then you’re an idiot.” What is he playing at? It’s hard to imagine a Peacekeeper meaning any of what he’s saying, but it’s even harder to imagine a Peacekeeper lying through his teeth like this, thinking she’ll fall for it. If he’s trying to take refuge in audacity, she isn’t buying it.

“I’m—” he says, and then she glimpses long hair and a red coat again as he stiffens, half-out of cover, at the sound of a door opening further down the hall behind him. She fires instinctively, and his sudden, abrupt flinch is oddly satisfying on some gut level. It’s probably grazed his arm from the looks of it. Not lethal—not enough to do anything but inconvenience him.

“Uncle Kar—” says a distant voice, abruptly cut off as someone pulls the speaker back into the room and slams the door shut again.

“Get back!” shouts the Peacekeeper, turning back to face Anna, but she’s already in motion, unsheathing her knife with her free hand as she runs. By the time he manages to bring his guns to bear, she’s practically on top of him.

She slams her hands against his wrists as he fires and the shots go wide, though the sound of them going off so close to her head almost stuns her as much as the shots themselves would have done. Her knife sinks into his right wrist and and he drops one gun—she kicks it away—but he still has both a second gun and a good eight inches on her in terms of height, and she’s not so stupid as to believe she can overpower him with sheer strength.

This close, with both hands occupied, there isn’t much she can do but drop the knife, grab a fistful of his hair, and drag his head down to meet her knee with bruising force. The Peacekeeper doubles over, blood rushing from his nose, but recovers faster than she expects, taking advantage of his position to headbutt her in the stomach. She stumbles back, the breath rushing out of her lungs, and as he brings the second gun up, she fires her own.

The zip of the bullet through flesh is unmistakable, and his shot goes wide as his body jerks back against the doorframe. She doesn’t give him time to line up another shot; he looks up, she meets his eyes, and she fires into his chest again.

It’s a fatal wound. He knows it as surely as she does. He isn’t bleeding much, but they’ve both fought too recently in a war to be able to dismiss it as superficial. That’s the thing about gunshot wounds, the thing that makes them simultaneously less and more frightening than knives. It’s simple enough to stop fighting when a blade lays your body open and spills your blood with frightening ease, though a skilled surgeon can close you up again with minimal fuss. It’s harder to accept that the hard pluck of a bullet is the one that will kill you in the end.

It’s why she understands when, after a moment, a small, resigned smile crosses his face, replacing the initial expression of shock. It’s why she understands when he sinks to his knees and carefully, deliberately, lets his second gun fall to the ground.

There was a part of this man who never wanted to fight in the first place. She sees that now. She doesn’t know what it is, what could possibly make him hold nothing back until the moment he realized he was going to die. As lethal as his own injuries are, he still has time to shoot her at point-blank range, but instead he only sags against the doorframe and and lets his eyes drift half-closed.

“Well,” he murmurs, “I suppose that’s that. I suppose now is a good time to mention that I didn’t actually call for reinforcements.”

Typical. Of all the Peacekeepers in the building, she has to run into the honorable one. Not that she’s complaining. Besting one of these types in single combat always nets you something.

She opens her mouth to speak, but he forestalls her. She figures he has the right; he’s got less breath left in his body than she does. Instead she closes her mouth and flicks on the earpiece so Duval can hear.

“I know you’re after Kane,” he says. “I know where he is. There’s no love lost between me and the miserable bastard.” He inhales slowly. “I can tell you how to get there. But you have to promise me one thing.”

“Anything,” she says easily. There’s only one way to talk to a dying man.

“My nieces,” he says, and gestures down the hall with a bloodied arm. “Get them out of here. Somewhere safe. They’ll only be at risk if your people succeed.”

As if she has time to play babysitter with Kane still in the building. But suddenly things are falling into place: the hesitation, the easy surrender. Were they brought here for their own protection, or as hostages? Either way, it’s a shit way to ensure employee loyalty.

“Of course,” she says, clasping his hand.

He’s quiet for a moment before he speaks again, and when he does his voice has a growing wetness to it, like he’s speaking through liquid. “Front pocket. Identification card. Will get you through…” He pauses, breathes. “Through to the saferoom. Not far from here. Hidden passage…”

“Found it,” says Duval in her ear. “I’ll need you over here to open the lock, though.”

And the Peacekeeper must have heard him, because his smile widens for a moment, red and white and a little crooked. “’S funny,” he says.

She looks at him, prompting him to continue.

He says, “Seems death…can come in a beautiful form after all,” and dies.

Anna prides herself on having the decency to not shoot his corpse for that remark, and also to wait a few more seconds before she relieves said corpse of the ID card and the gun that isn’t slippery with blood. Working for a cause is one thing, but to pretend honor factors into it is never going to turn out well.

She’s halfway down the hall when a hoarse voice says, “Stay put,” and the door that had cracked open before swings open again. A young man steps out, an axe in his hand, and shuts the door behind him.

“He’s dead, isn’t he,” he says, and his voice stumbles over the words like he’s forgotten how to use them.

“You’re chatty for an Avox,” returns Anna, glancing at his clothes.

He ignores the comment. “He saved my life.”

“Funny,” says Anna, “he didn’t look all that keen on saving mine.”

The kid frowns. “Don’t know what you want, but—” a pause as he clears his throat— “if you’re planning anything—”

“Stay put, and nothing will happen to you,” says Anna. “I mean it. I’m not wasting my ammo on anyone else. It’s his nieces in there, right?”

The young man nods.

“I don’t know who you are and I don’t really give a damn. If you want to kill them, go right ahead. If you want to save them, you can do that too. Just don’t get in our way.”

He looks scandalized for a moment before he takes a step back and puts a protective hand on the doorknob. Good. Whatever. Anna eyes him for a moment longer before she turns and heads off down the hall.

Fucking distractions.

---

Aras isn’t sure why the Peacekeeper Anna was fighting didn’t seem to have raised an alarm. He only wishes the Peacekeepers who ambushed him in the ballroom would have done him the same courtesy. As it is, it seems like ages before he can make an escape, leaving four corpses behind him.

His only hope now is that none of them caught a glimpse of him, and that anyone he runs into now will think he’s looking for the same intruder they are. A Peacekeeper uniform and a determined look go a long way, even in the presidential mansion.

In the end it’s another Peacekeeper who leads him straight to the saferoom. The other man gives him a suspicious look at first—understandable, considering the plaster dust in his hair and his rumpled uniform—but a casual mention of Bellasseau is all it takes for the Peacekeeper’s eyes to widen and his back to straighten. Getting in the way of his protegé is no doubt asking for a quick demotion.

So it is that Aras finds himself at last in front of a hidden access panel in the depths of the mansion. Here his luck finally gives out—the other man doesn’t have a keycard, only the code for the intercom, which is no use at all. Aras thanks him, snaps his neck with quiet efficiency, alerts Anna, and settles down, facing the panel, to wait.

A hidden door in the wall behind him slides open. Aras has just enough time to turn and knock away the initial blow of the sword with the barrel of his rifle before he comes face-to-face with Dativo Kane himself.

The President doesn’t even look shocked to find him standing here—disappointed, perhaps, and a little annoyed, but far from surprised. He is dressed as immaculately as he was at the ball, not a hair out of place, a simple rapier held lightly but firmly in one gloved hand.

“It’s Duval, isn’t it?” he muses, eyes narrowing slightly in amusement. “Bellasseau’s lapdog! To think that all this time…”

Aras says nothing. The hallway is too narrow, the distance between them too close to use his rifle effectively. The handgun at his side is still in its holster, its safety still off—not enough time. Not with that rapier so close.

“Well,” says Kane, “I suppose I’ll have to amend my hiring process in the future.” His expression is still mild, his voice still pleasant. Slowly, he brings the tip of the rapier up mere inches away from Aras’s throat. “You’ve been busy these past few days, haven’t you? Running errands for Bellasseau and playing host for your friends from the Districts. No wonder you look so tired.”

He’s not tired, he thinks. He’s more awake now than he has been all week. Of course, it could be the coffee talking.

“Maybe you should close your eyes for a moment,” says Kane, and that is when several things all happen in quick succession.

First—and this is the item that is of most pressing concern to Aras at the moment—Kane stabs the rapier upward at his unprotected throat. Second—the unmistakable figure of Anna Smith appears at the end of the hallway and shouts, “Hey, asswipe!” Third—the tip of the rapier jerks, just a little, and it’s enough to prompt Aras to twist as hard to the left as he can, swinging the butt of his rifle wildly at Kane.

Kane makes a faint huffing noise as the rifle butt slams into his side. The rapier blade takes a short detour, carving a thin red line across the side of Aras’s neck, and buries itself into the wall beside his right ear. Aras draws in a shaky breath and tries not to think about how relieved he is to find his carotid still intact.

He would try to open up more distance between himself and the president, get out of range so his rifle won’t be a useless piece of metal, but Kane wrenches his blade free and lunges with the speed of a snake. The rifle flies from Aras’s stunned hands and he stumbles back, fumbling for the handgun at his side as Kane presses his advantage. It should be comparatively easy, he thinks, to parry a rapier this close up, but the sword’s edges, blunt as they are, leave welts across his arms and leave his sleeves in tattered shreds.

Anna is closing in now, knife flashing, but Kane is ready. A swift punch to the side of Aras’s head with the rapier pommel, stars explode in his vision as he reels back, and Kane doesn’t even miss a beat as he turns to face his other assailant.

Aras thinks he can feel blood flowing down the side of his face: a bit of metalwork may have cut the side of his head. It probably feels worse than it is. Most cuts are. When his vision clears, the two combatants are still only a matter of yards away. Anna seems to have met her match—Kane is an experienced duelist, and he knows these halls better than she does. For every step she advances, he retreats, keeping her skillfully at bay, blade weaving like lightning through her limited defenses.

Slowly, he pulls his handgun from its holster at last and levels it at Kane.

Or he tries to. His hands are shaking, there’s blood in his eyes, and Anna’s in the way, her back to him. He knows, on some intellectual level, that neither he nor Anna really expected to get out of this one alive, especially not once the plans had changed, but he still can’t bring himself to pull the trigger. He has to wait, he tells himself, has to stay patient, and Kane looks up for a moment, as if he knows, and the sudden predatory smile that flashes across the president’s face sends chills down Aras’s spine.

A quick, brutal thrust of the blade: Anna hisses, drawing back and clutching at her injured arm. She’s falling back now, deliberately trying to stay out of range where before she was struggling to close on Kane, and that’s a worrying sign.

Or is it? Aras pauses. With every step back she takes, she draws herself and Kane a few feet closer to him. Kane doesn’t seem to have noticed yet, intent as he is on cutting her down.

A few more steps, and Aras sees his chance. As the rapier withdraws from another thrust, he lunges, barrelling past Anna and tackling the older man to the ground. Kane brings his sword arm up again, but Anna is there, a heavy boot pinning his wrist down and keeping it there.

Aras keeps his knee pressed on Kane’s chest, but there is only a cold disdain in the president’s expression.

“You disgrace your uniform, Duval,” he says. There’s a feral edge to his voice now that Aras has never heard before. The man doesn’t even sound out of breath. “You’ve made a mockery of everything we’ve worked so hard to create. How long do you think Panem will stand if we are not there to hold it up? Do you think your mentor will be proud of you for what you’ve done, boy?”

Aras keeps his mouth shut. There is something about the words that makes him uneasy, something that shakes him to the core despite their source. Bellasseau meant well, he thinks. Bellasseau worked for stability. Bellasseau saw young Aras Duval as more of a son than a student and taught him everything he knew. Bellasseau believed in the Capitol in the same way he is sure some hidden-away part of Kane still does. For men like them it is as much about belief as it is about power. Sometimes even more. It is what makes them dangerous.

Yes, he thinks. But belief is what makes us dangerous, too.

He levels his pistol between Kane’s eyes, but a hand at his shoulder stops him and the grip of an ornate weapon that is more cannon than handgun descends into his field of view.

“Better use this instead,” says Anna.

Aras looks up, but Anna’s expression is strangely unreadable.

“Melchior wouldn’t have given that up without a fight,” says Kane.

“No,” says Anna placidly.

“I suppose you think this is terribly clever.”

“Not really,” says Anna. “Just practical. Make sure you stay dead.”

“Very wise of you,” says Kane.

There is something he’s missing here, thinks Aras, and Kane’s cold smile confirms it. Not that it matters. Anna may be enjoying herself thoroughly, but both of them know they don’t have much time before the Peacekeepers pick up their scent again. He has not gone this long in Intelligence without developing a low tolerance for witty one-liners.

Aras Duval sets his teeth, and assassinates the President.

---

Before he can think about what he’s done, Anna has dragged him to his feet and into Kane’s saferoom. It’s a spartan affair: a desk, a bed, a small bathroom. But there’s another passage leading out of it—an escape route, perhaps. Evidently Kane was confident enough to attempt confronting his assassins instead of running. Perhaps he thought Aras was the only one who’d entered the mansion.

“You could’ve just opened fire on us in the first place,” says Aras as Anna shuts the door behind them and locks it to slow any pursuers. “Would’ve gone a lot faster.”

Anna is already going through Kane’s desk drawers. “And risk shooting the new secretary of intelligence? Are you kidding? Shahri would have been taking it out of my paycheck for weeks.”

“I didn’t know we were getting paid for this,” says Aras. He knows it’s the adrenaline, but he can feel a laugh bubbling up.

“Take it up with Shahri. Think fast,” says Anna, and tosses a small bag of something at him. Actual coffee beans, imported from god knows where. Now he really does have the ridiculous urge to laugh. In fact, he would if a crackle of static in their earpieces doesn’t interrupt them both.

“We have a situation in the city,” says Ergo’s voice. “Duval, you are needed back at the IIB building. Smith, you will rendezvous with Todorov at the docks.”

“The hell?” Anna demands of the ceiling. “We have an hour yet before phase two. What’s going on, Shahri?”

“I will provide details once both of you are in position,” says Ergo, and cuts the feed.

Aras glances at the door, then over at his partner. “I guess we don’t have much of a choice.”

“I know we don’t,” says Anna, stuffing a box of cigars in her pocket and slamming the drawer shut. “Come on. Let’s move. We’re still on the job.”