George's expression did the thing where it didn't change but somehow communicated everything.
Helen said, "Of course," before he could regroup.
So that was settled.
Locke hadn't actually wanted to stay. The study session had served its purpose — mission triggered, lab partnership locked in, two thousand Chemistry points well spent. Extending the visit felt like scope creep. But Helen was already moving toward the kitchen and Gwen was already pulling out an extra chair, and declining at that point would have required more social friction than it was worth.
He sat down across from George.
George sat across from him.
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
Helen brought out the food — sea bass, roasted with lemon and herbs, plated with the kind of quiet competence that said this wasn't her first time making something look effortless. Gwen's two younger brothers had materialized from somewhere upstairs and were already angling for the bread.
"Thank you," Locke said, when Helen set a plate in front of him.
"You're welcome." She settled into her chair. "And don't call me ma'am — Helen's fine. You're actually the first male classmate Gwen's ever brought home."
Gwen, across the table: "Mom."
"I'm just saying."
Locke looked down at his plate. The sea bass smelled genuinely good. He'd been eating protein bars and whatever the apartment's previous owner had left in the cabinets for the past two days, so the bar wasn't high — but this cleared it by a significant margin.
George cut into his fish and went straight for it. "So. Texas."
"Yes, sir."
"How long were you there?"
"Most of my life." True enough.
George nodded slowly, working through something. "You follow the news much? Back in Texas?"
Gwen looked up with the particular wariness of someone who could see where this was going.
"Some," Locke said.
"Then you've heard of Sin Hunter."
There it was. Locke kept his expression easy, the way he always did when a question was actually a test. "Hard not to. He was pretty much all anyone talked about for the last year."
George watched him. "What do you make of him?"
Locke set down his fork, considering, not because he needed time to think, but because an answer that came too fast looked rehearsed. "Legally? He's a murderer. Doesn't matter who the targets are. You can't just decide someone deserves to die and act on it, that's not how law works."
George's expression shifted slightly. Not warmth exactly, but something that wasn't suspicion either.
"That's a pretty clear answer," he said.
"It's a pretty clear question."
Gwen exhaled almost imperceptibly across the table. Her younger brothers were oblivious, competing quietly over the last bread roll.
What Locke didn't say, what he kept entirely behind the even expression and the correct answer was the other half of the thought. The part he actually believed.
The law was a system. Systems had gaps. And in those gaps, things happened to people who had no recourse, no visibility, no one paying attention. He'd watched it. He knew exactly what it looked like when the machinery failed and kept running anyway, grinding away at people who'd already been ground down enough.
He wasn't going to perform regret about filling that gap.
But he also wasn't going to say that at George Stacy's dinner table, in front of George Stacy's family, while eating George Stacy's wife's cooking. That wasn't a conversation — it was a provocation. And provoking George here would only land on Gwen, who'd invited him in good faith.
Some opinions belonged in private. This was not the venue.
He picked his fork back up. "The sea bass is excellent."
Helen smiled. "Lemon and capers. Old recipe."
George, apparently satisfied with whatever he'd been measuring, leaned back slightly and tried a different angle. By the time Gwen mentioned Locke's exam results — offhand, like it wasn't a big deal, George's posture had lost most of its interrogation-room quality. Not entirely. But enough.
Upstairs, they finished calculating the final data set for the lab project. Locke packed up his bag efficiently, the way he did everything, no wasted motion.
"Thank you," he said.
Gwen looked at him. "You've said that about fifteen times since you got here."
"Politeness doesn't expire."
"No, but-" she tilted her head, "when you say it that often, it starts to sound like something else. Like you're keeping score."
Locke paused. Smart.
"Maybe I am," he said, which was more honest than she was probably expecting.
Gwen uncrossed her arms and tried a different angle. "Can I ask you something?"
"Sure."
"The Sin Hunter thing." She was watching him carefully. "What you said downstairs, that wasn't the whole answer, was it?"
Locke looked at her.
"I've read about the Texas cases," she said. "Some of those people he went after — the system had already decided it wasn't going to do anything about them. Multiple times." She paused. "I think what he does is more complicated than just 'murderer.'"
"Legally-"
"I know what it is legally. I'm asking what you actually think."
Locke was quiet for a moment.
"I think," he said finally, "that legally speaking, he's a murderer. And not-legally speaking, he's still not a good person." He picked up his bag. "Those things can both be true."
Gwen looked like she wanted to push further, but something in his expression, not closed exactly, just finished, told her he'd said what he was going to say.
She let it go.
He knew, and didn't say, the rest: that in a world where gods fell from the sky and alien invasions were a matter of when, not if being a good person had a survival rate he wasn't willing to bet on. He'd seen how that story ended for this family specifically. He wasn't going to pretend otherwise.
But he'd also eaten their food and sat at their table and let George Stacy spend an entire dinner deciding whether to trust him.
That meant something. He just hadn't figured out exactly what yet.
Living room. George and Helen were on the couch, something quiet on TV.
"Mr. and Mrs. Stacy." Locke stopped at the foot of the stairs. "Thank you for having me. Dinner was excellent."
Helen smiled. George made a sound that wasn't quite unfriendly.
Gwen walked him down to the street.
The evening air was cool, the block quiet. His R8 was parked at the curb where he'd left it, the only car on that side of the street. He clicked the key and the lights flashed.
"See you tomorrow," Gwen said.
"See you tomorrow." He reached for the door handle.
Then he stopped.
It was subtle — more feeling than sound. Something in the air pressure, the particular quality of silence that preceded something loud. His body registered it before his mind caught up, some combination of trained instinct and whatever Tenacity Lv.3 did to his baseline awareness when things were about to go wrong.
He turned his head toward the building on the opposite side of the street.
Third floor. Window dark. Wrong kind of dark.
"Gwen-"
He moved without finishing the sentence, one hand catching her arm, already pulling her sideways across the street in three fast steps.
Behind them-
BOOM.
The concussive force of the blast hit like a wall. Car alarms screamed to life up and down the block. Glass came down from somewhere above. The night, which had been completely ordinary four seconds ago, was suddenly full of noise and heat and the kind of silence that comes right after something very loud, when your ears are still catching up.
Locke put himself between Gwen and the street, one hand still on her arm, and looked back.
The front of the brownstone two doors down was on fire.
He stayed very still for exactly one second, long enough to scan for a second angle, confirm there wasn't one, confirm Gwen was upright and unhurt and then the adrenaline that normal people would be drowning in arranged itself into something useful, and he started thinking.
Someone just tried to blow up this block.
Or something on this block.
Or someone.