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Seven months earlier, had he been sitting where he was now, Jarek Slater wouldn’t have been worrying about much more than how he’d sate his rumbling belly that night, or where he’d find shelter. If anything, he would have been entertaining some grand daydream about how the survivors of the Catastrophe and the long winter were someday going to come together to rebuild a world that was good and just and maybe even worthwhile.

But now, sitting there dangling his legs over the crumbling concrete lip of the rooftop and staring out at the ruined city, all Jarek could see was an ugly night in an ugly world.

And it was about to get uglier.

“Okay,” Jarek said, breaking the silence for the first time in the twenty minutes since he’d settled there. “You can say it. You told me so.”

“It’s not my function to shame you for past wrongs,” Al said, the light trace of his English accent coming through Fela’s earpieces with crystal clarity. Jarek arched an eyebrow, waiting…

“But I did bloody tell you, sir.”

“I swear to god, Al,” Jarek said. “If eBay were still a thing…”—he swept an open hand through the air—“gone! Just like that.”

Al sniffed. “You’d miss me.”

Fela’s sensors informed him of the low rumbling of an approaching vehicle off in the distance well before Jarek could have hoped to pick it up with his own ears. Just the old gas-guzzler he was looking for, by the sound of it. 

“Hopefully you won’t be missing me ten minutes from now,” Jarek said.

He still had a few minutes, but he decided to stand anyway. Didn’t want to be stiff when the fireworks started, after all. Jarek clenched his jaw and just managed to keep from crying out as the movement sent waves of sickly hot pain cascading out from his still-fresh bullet wounds—the through-and-through in his left thigh and its more superficial cousin in his mid-back.

He waited, watching. He wasn’t exactly sure how he knew it—maybe it was some nearly subsonic fluctuation on the other end of the line—but he could tell that Al was thinking about what he’d said.

“If it comes to that, sir,” Al finally said, “I’m not so sure that I would stick around.”

“Jesus, man… no pressure, right? Didn’t they dub you the next frontier of human achievement or something? I think you and Fela would have plenty to offer the world once I was gone.”

“Possibly,” Al said, “but it seems far too likely that we’d fall into the wrong hands, and then it would be little but pain and destruction that we’d offer anyone.” After a quiet moment, Al added, softly, “I don’t want that, sir.”

Jarek nodded as the rumbling of the archaic gas engine grew louder and the shine of headlights rounded into view a few blocks away. He reached back, clumsily searching until he found the hilt of the sword slung over his right shoulder but thought better of it and drew the pistol from the holster at his right thigh instead. 

“Well,” Jarek said, “guess we better make sure I don’t die here then.”

If Al had possessed a head, Jarek imagined that the artificial intelligence construct would have given him a solemn nod. “I’m with you no matter what, sir.”

Jarek grinned. Al’s hardware was physically housed within the sturdy confines of his exosuit, Fela, so the AI was with Jarek wherever he went, provided Jarek went there in the suit. And given what had happened earlier that night, Jarek didn’t think he’d make the mistake of leaving Fela’s protection again anytime soon.

The truck, an old semi with a short trailer in tow, rumbled closer. A second later, Jarek spotted the headlights of a second vehicle, then a third—the truck’s guard detail. It had been a bit of a gamble, expecting that they’d come up this way to catch I-280, but it had paid off, and now it was time to do what he’d come here to do. 

A swirling storm of fear and anxiety began the climb from his stomach to his throat. Jarek took a deep breath and blew it out, trying to focus on the task at hand.

“Alright,” he said, his mouth feeling suddenly dry as the truck drew near. “Time to kill the bossman.”

How the hell had he gotten here?