Chapter Text
There's something meditative about tuning holocircuits. Most engineers find cloaking-rig maintenance tedious, a boring chore, but Tony Xu begs to differ. Sure, if he's trying to multitask, it's as dull as anyone says; if he lets himself fall into it properly, though, the iterative process of adjusting each microcircuit relative to all its neighbors can pull him into a remarkably deep flow state. A full tune-up for a complex rig like Decker's may eat up a solid day's work, but he always comes out of it oddly refreshed and satisfied.
(Not that he'll ever tell Decker that. It'd go straight to his head.)
Interruptions halfway through the process, therefore, are not only annoying but physically jarring. He's gotten actual palpitations from sheer startlement. The Invisible greenhorn who tried clapping her hands an inch from his face — well, she did succeed at snapping him out of it, but she also got herself chased out of HQ's workshop with a hot soldering iron.
So when a deafening crash splits the quiet buzz of the workshop and levitates Tony a good ten centimeters out of his seat, he's expecting to give some idiot the chewing-out of a lifetime. He whips around to face the door, one hand on Agent Bierstadt's half-tuned rig and the other on his rabbiting heart, mouth half-open to demand explanations.
Imagine his surprise when what meets him instead is a volley of plasma fire.
Only well-honed reflex saves him: before he can even fully register the armed, masked men who've just broken down the workshop door, he's already diving under his bench and behind a steel tool chest. One of the plasma rounds still shatters his headset. Another one skims his shoulderblade, searing hot.
Not all his colleagues were as lucky. Sanders hits the deck at the same instant he does, but she lands limp and staring, with a charred absence sliced out of her throat. Behind her, Valdes topples slowly, trailing smoke. Maria—!
Xu compartmentalizes. This is no time to go into shock. Morano, Ayari, and Koller are still alive, and if he's very quick and very lucky, all four of them might just get to stay that way.
So he slings the cloaking rig around his waist and hits the switch. Silver light wraps him in holographic obscurity. He probably got far enough through the tune-up to eliminate the telltale shivery outline that nearly got Bierstadt killed on her last run, but as of now there's only one way to find out.
Morano and Ayari are hiding behind the shelving unit where they keep the nanofab feedstock. Xu catches a glimpse of Morano's dark eyes, gigantic in his ashen face, and the hand he's clutched over his mouth. He's not a field agent — will not be able to defend himself. Ayari might, but she's even greener than Xu was at her stage of training. Koller's a little farther along, so —
Of course, no sooner has he started forming that thought than Koller's leaning out from hiding with his DART raised, straight into an answering rain of plasma. He crumples, half his face gone.
That's that decision made, then. Xu dashes for the shelves across from Ayari's.
He's not fast enough. A gray blur sweeps out ahead of him, and he barely even has time to dodge before Ayari is falling, too, and then Morano's being slung around with a forearm at his throat and a gun at his forehead. Xu freezes.
"Drop the cloak and your weapons," the enforcer demands, glancing around the entire room. He doesn't know where Xu is. Good. Maybe —
"Five," he continues. "Four." His pistol's plasma charge sizzles as it builds. "Three." Morano shrinks back as best he can from the heat of it, biting back a terrified whine. Xu's grazed shoulder burns.
Shit.
"Two."
"All right," Xu says, as calmly as he can manage. He raises his hands and lowers the cloak. "I'm unarmed —"
"Oh, good," says the enforcer, and shoots him instead.
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Time stumbles by in scattered, fractured flashes. Dreams? Xu hopes so. He really does.
Because if they aren't dreams, then there's something —
— dull draining nanite heat, cold machine grip around his wrists and shoulders and head, silver flash of halogens on metal —
— pressure slides into his eye socket, buried impossibly deep and somehow moving — waves of nerve-static — stab after blinding stab of light-that-is-not-light —
There's… there's something.
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