It was time.

Arsenal, Mod, and Athena rode the eight o’clock bus to Gnosis.

To Clara, it felt like she was wearing layers of disguises. To the other riders on the bus, she looked like a normal business woman—one that had just woken up and was hiding behind an oversized pair of sunglasses. But beneath her nanite disguise she was clad in high-tech armor. Clara could feel the thinsuit breathing for her, helping her manage the anxiety that was threatening to boil through her skin. And she could feel the prototype pieces—the gauntlets flexing around her hands.

And beneath the disguise and the armor, she was nervous. Clara was doing everything she could to control her breathing and her heart rate.

Athena and Mod sat on either side of her. Despite having her own magic outfit, Athena also wore a nanite disguise. Athena’s arms were folded across her chest, and her foot bounced idly. Three suitcases sat at their feet.

Meanwhile, Mod was as cool and still as a machine.

~

The group got off the bus and walked the rest of the block to their destination. At some point, their disguises switched to business attire. All three had opted for well-tailored black suits.

The Belport Gnosis headquarters looked more like a military compound than a pharmaceutical company. The buildings were pristine white and barren of anything except the Gnosis logo—a white square with a simple, blurry face staring back. And the entire perimeter was ringed with razor wire and guards armed with rifles and military body armor.

Mod, Arsenal, and Athena walked down the sidewalk and filed into the stream of Gnosis employees. Mod led the way, followed closely by Clara and Athena. Each carried a suitcase. All the while, TINA directed them.

Clara glanced across the street to the parking garage. Biomechs and drones buzzed around it, and Ava Savanus’s massive ship still hung cloaked in the air above it. It was the shape of a figure-eight, sleek and alien, and it glowed like an ominous blue sun in Clara’s UV vision—

Over her home.

To her left, the Binary Brotherhood hung triumphant. Biomechs and drones buzzed like insects over a hive. They’d hollowed out Clara’s home, usurped her father, and turned it into their lair.

To her right, the vampires of Gnosis continued thousands of years of hiding in plain sight. Of feeding on humanity’s blood and strength.

Clara had never felt smaller than she did in that moment, walking the street outside her childhood home, sandwiched between two of the most oppressive forces in the word—

The monsters of new and old.

Clara had to force herself to stand up straight and not to cower. She followed Mod’s lead. His shoulders were relaxed, and he looked like he was out for a leisurely stroll. Like a Class 4 super that didn’t have a care in the world.

Clara heard Athena’s footsteps behind her. Steady. Heavy. A warrior who’d been alive as long as the oldest vampires and was probably deadlier than any of them.

Clara may have been flanked on either side by Gnosis and the Brotherhood, but she walked with monsters of her own.

She felt the metal cocoon of the thinsuit. Felt her power breathing through it. The power of the sun swelled in her chest.

And Arsenal remembered that she was a monster too.

~

There were two checkpoints to get into Gnosis—one outside the building and another inside the building. Outside, there were separate checkpoints for cars and pedestrians. They followed the stream of employees down the sidewalk to the turnstiles.

One by one, each employee scanned their ID badge and was buzzed through by the system.

Step-by-step, Arsenal marched to the turnstile.

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“Just breathe,” TINA said in their earpieces. “I’ll take care of the rest.”

Over the past week, TINA had made them each an identification card and added fake employees to Gnosis’s system.

Mod scanned his fake ID, then went through the turnstile. Then Arsenal. Then Athena. One by one, they all went through.

“Clear,” TINA replied.

“Are you in?” Mod asked.

“Yes. By the time you get inside, their systems will be mine.”

The group followed the flow of pedestrians until they got to the main doors. They stopped short and took an abrupt right turn and followed the outer wall of the building.

They had ways around everything, answers for everything—

Except metal detectors.

Even with all the upgrades and progress that TINA and Emmett had made since the war, they still didn’t have a reliable way to shield their supersuits or Emmett’s body from detection. Their nanite disguises could fool people and cameras, but couldn’t hide the metal beneath.

So instead of trying to find a way through the detectors, they found a way around.

There was a maintenance door on the second floor roof. There were enough maintenance personnel walking around the outside of the building that no one paid them any mind, but also few enough that they could find a moment to leap up to the roof without being seen by other people.

Cameras were another story. There weren’t any blind spots around the headquarters and there were even fewer blind spots inside. But that was what TINA was for.

While the rest of them had been training and making new suits, TINA was finding ways to access Gnosis’s security system, turn off cameras, loop video, and create visual artifacts. If she really flexed her processing muscles, she could probably render them completely invisible on camera.

The real limiting factor was Gnosis’s own systems. If TINA flexed too hard, she could slow the entire system down. Then someone was bound to notice the intrusion. So TINA kept her touch as light as possible.

Even though TINA had explained exactly how she could pull off such a feat, it still boggled Clara’s mind. Right now, TINA was scrubbing the three of them from at least four outside cameras.

“You’re cleared for roof access.” TINA’s voice shook Clara out of her thoughts.

Mod, Arsenal, and Athena approached the back of the compound, and when they were around a corner, they leapt up to the second story. The three landed on the gravel, then quickly continued to the maintenance door.

Arsenal expected Mod to snap the lock, but he surprised her by filling the lock with nanites. A second later, the door unlocked, and the three slipped inside.

Clara felt a pang of jealousy from watching TINA and Mod. It felt like she was along for the ride.

They passed through a short maintenance hallway and out into the headquarters proper. TINA and Mod led them into the main foyer. The second floor consisted of a small walkway that wrapped around the outer wall. There were a handful of rooms off of this floor, which Clara assumed were offices.

Their spot on the walkway was secluded—a good spot to wait while TINA started the next part of their plan.

“Set your suitcases down and pause here for a minute,” TINA said.

They followed TINA’s direction and stayed in place. Arsenal resisted the urge to gawk at the room around them.

The main entryway of Gnosis was almost three stories of an open air foyer. Mod, Arsenal, and Athena looked down on white marble floors and ornate columns that stretched all the way to the ceiling. In between sat pieces of deep red furniture. It was beautiful, and slightly morbid… From up on the second floor, Clara couldn’t help but think of the furniture as blood splatters.

It was a stark contrast to the workers that streamed through the room. Most were clad in suits, but there was nothing outwardly marking some as vampires and others as human. TINA assured them that she could differentiate them via skin temperature, but that was only within several feet. Workers streamed through the room. Others milled about, conversing with colleagues.

It looked disturbingly normal.

Mod, Arsenal, and Athena faced each other and acted as casual as possible while looking over each other’s shoulders for security.

Arsenal glanced at the paintings along the wall. All of them were swirling masses of red, set in a portrait frame. At first, she assumed they were some kind of abstract art for vampires, but the longer she stared, the more Arsenal became convinced that they weren’t random. Even though each was clearly different from the last, there was a pattern in the swirls and smears.

Like a bloody fingerprint.

When they were making preparations, they’d wondered briefly if a vampire would be able to smell that anything was off with their group. Thankfully, Emmett’s skin completely enclosed his mods and prosthetics, so there was little chance of him being discovered. Arsenal’s real worry had been her armor, but both her armor and the nanites were almost completely chemically inert, so they didn’t have a smell.

TINA reassured them that their disguise would hold. Smells needed time to build up in the air before they were detectable. Vampires had a better sense of smell than humans, but even they had a minimum threshold. TINA assured them that they would be safe, so long as Clara didn’t let a powerful vampire get too close.

And then they’d be in biting distance.

TINA’s joke had fallen flat. But Clara trusted her.

~ ~ ~