Danton said goodnight to Freeman on the front steps and drove home through the quiet streets, the city's noise settling into the particular hush it found after ten.
He had his key out before he reached the door.
Something stopped him on the front step.
He stood there for a moment, not sure what he was responding to — not a sound, not a movement, just a shift in the quality of the air, the kind of wrongness that lives below conscious thought.
The lights.
The living room window was lit. A soft, steady glow through the curtains. Elizabeth's schedule had been rigid since her discharge — meals, medication, lights out by nine, no exceptions. The routine existed precisely because her body needed the consistency. She would not have left the living room lamp on.
The warning from the phone surfaced immediately.
Someone is coming to find you.
His pulse didn't spike — it went very quiet, which was worse, the thing his body did when it was getting serious. He kept his face neutral and raised his voice to a tone that landed somewhere between casual and domestic.
"Elizabeth? You still up?"
Nothing.
He walked through the entrance corridor into the living room at a normal pace, eyes doing something other than looking at the room — scanning corners, measuring shadows, tracking the space behind furniture and doorframes.
Empty. Every corner, empty.
The lamp threw its steady circle of light across the floor. Nothing else was on. Danton stood in the center of the room and listened.
He called again, softer. No answer.
Then red lightning split the air directly in front of him.
It was there and gone in the same instant — a crack of crimson across his vision, there long enough to register, gone before his eyes could track it. His hand was already at his waist. He drew the pistol — not the one from the gun shop robbery, not the stolen magazines, all of that had been dealt with weeks ago through channels he hadn't asked about — but his own, registered, licensed, thoroughly legal firearm.
He held it on an empty room.
"Looking for me?"
The voice came from directly behind his right ear.
It had the texture of a broken transmission — mechanical static layered under something that might have been human speech, the gender and age indeterminate, the tone carrying a flatness that was somehow worse than menace. Danton had no time to process any of this. Pure reflex swung the butt of the pistol backward.
It connected with nothing.
Red lightning crossed the room again, and the figure was simply there — behind him, having moved between one frame and the next without occupying the space in between. A hand closed around his throat.
His feet left the floor.
The grip was absolute. He couldn't speak, couldn't draw a full breath, could only produce a wet, involuntary sound deep in his throat as his hands came up to grab at the arm holding him. He looked up.
What he saw was a humanoid shape in yellow — not quite solid, blurred at every edge, like a double-exposure photograph or a 3D rendering with the resolution turned down. He couldn't make out a face, couldn't identify features. The only concrete thing about the figure was the hand around his neck, which was very real and entirely willing to keep squeezing.
"Danton Black." The broken static-voice. "I have a question. Answer it, or die."
He blinked rapidly, the only communication available to him. The hand opened.
He dropped to the floor.
It took him several seconds to stop coughing. The figure didn't wait. It simply stood there, regarding him with the specific patience of something that doesn't worry about time.
"Did you organize the joint appeal?" it asked. "The hundred plaintiffs against Stagg — was that you?"
Danton's expression shifted before he could stop it.
There it is. The mysterious phone call, the warning, the fabricated evidence diary — all of it pointing toward this moment, this room, this question.
He raised the pistol.
"Go to hell."
Red lightning.
The figure was behind him again. He didn't hear it move. The hand came through his back — through it, passing his skin and muscle like they were vapor — and closed around something internal.
Danton's vision went white.
The pain was not like anything in his vocabulary. It was precise and enormous at the same time, a sensation like being cut open from the inside by something that knew exactly where to press. He opened his mouth to scream.
A single finger from the figure's left hand rose to where a mouth would be.
Shh.
"Quietly, Mr. Black." The voice was softer now, and that was somehow the most frightening thing yet. "Don't wake Elizabeth."
He clamped his hand over his own mouth. He understood the threat completely and immediately — Elizabeth drawn downstairs, Elizabeth seeing this, Elizabeth becoming a loose end in a room with something that described killing as a condition of answering a question. He bit down on the sound and made himself breathe through his nose in short, shallow pulls.
The hand withdrew from his back. He crumpled to the floor, shaking.
"You handled that better than I expected," the yellow figure said, moving to stand in front of him. "Cooperation earlier would have spared you that. Now." It crouched, bringing itself to his level with an unhurried precision. "The awards ceremony — you were there, you had a plan, and you left without doing anything. Then you chose the legal route instead. Someone pointed you there. The evidence you submitted — where did it come from, and where is it stored?"
A pause.
"And the person who helped you. Who is it?"
Every nerve in Danton's body was screaming different things at different volumes. But underneath the pain and the fear, one voice was louder than the rest — the flat, processed, synthetic voice on his phone, delivering its warning with the certainty of something that had already seen how this ended.
You're going to die, Mr. Black. The only way to survive is to be prepared for it.
He looked up at the yellow figure through watering eyes.
He'd made his decision before the hand had even left his back.