Rex crossed the hallway.

  Creed backed up until the wall stopped him, and he tried to hide his gun behind him.

  But he suddenly felt something hitting his hand, and the gun fell.

  Creed looked at Rex, asking himself how Rex got a quirk.

  The first thing Rex did was quiet and deliberate, and Creed made a sound that was not a word. Rex waited for it to finish.

  "Eight years," Rex said. "I have been thinking about this conversation for eight years. So we are going to take our time with it."

  "Please," Creed said. "Just listen to me, just let me explain, what happened that night was not..."

  "Not your fault," Rex said. "I know. That is what you were going to say."

  Creed said nothing.

  "Say it anyway," Rex said. "I want to hear it."

  "It wasn't my fault." Creed's voice was thin now. "The decision came from above me. I had no authority to override it. You have to understand how the organization worked. I was not in a position to..."

  "You recruited me," Rex said.

  "Yes."

  "You sat across from me and bought me a meal and told me I had potential. You remember that?"

  "I remember."

  "You looked me in the eye and told me there was an opportunity." Rex tilted his head slightly. "Was that true? Was there ever an opportunity, or was I just useful for a while?"

  Creed opened his mouth.

  Rex did not let him use it.

  When Creed could speak again his voice had changed entirely. The professional steadiness was completely gone. What was left underneath it was smaller and more honest.

  "You were useful," Creed said. "That is the truth. I am sorry but that is the truth. You were good at the work and you were quirkless which meant you were grateful and grateful people do not ask questions. That is why they recruited quirkless. Not because they respected you. Because you were easier to manage."

  Rex looked at him.

  "Thank you," Rex said. "For being honest."

  Creed blinked. Something like hope moved through his face.

  Rex removed it.

  "Now," Rex said, when Creed had stopped making sounds again. "The organization. What do they call themselves?"

  "The Hollow Chain," Creed said immediately. No hesitation this time. The calculation had shifted entirely. "That is what they call themselves now. The Hollow Chain."

  "They are still operating in Melbourne."

  "Yes. Bigger now. Much bigger than when you were with us. Distribution, protection, quirk contracting. They expanded into three more cities in the last four years."

  "Who runs it now?"

  "A man named Vorel. I have never met him directly. Nobody at my level has. Everything comes down through intermediaries."

  "But you have locations," Rex said. "Bases. Operations. You know where they work."

  Creed hesitated.

  Rex waited.

  "Yes," Creed said. "I know where they work."

  "All of them?"

  "Most of them. The ones in Melbourne. I don't have information on the other cities."

  "Melbourne is enough for tonight," Rex said. "Give them to me."

  "If I give you that information and they find out I..."

  "Creed." Rex crouched down in front of him so they were level. The red light moved between them, slow and patient. "Look at me. Look at what is in this room with you right now. And then tell me which possibility frightens you more."

  Creed looked at him for a long moment.

  Then he gave Rex everything he had.

  Every location. Every operation. The shift schedules he knew, the contact names, the nature of each base, what they stored there, and who ran it. He talked for eleven minutes without stopping, and Rex listened to all of it and remembered all of it because the red power had done something to his memory along with everything else, and nothing left him anymore.

  When Creed finished, he was breathing hard, the way people breathed when they had just put down something very heavy.

  "Are you going to kill me?" he asked.

  Rex stood up.

  "Not yet," he said. "You are going to come with me and greet our old buddies".

  Rex looked at Creed for a moment after he finished talking.

  Then he broke his legs.

  Not both at once. One first. Then the other. Creed screamed and Rex waited for it to settle into sobbing before he crouched down again.

  "Please," Creed said. He was crying properly now, the way men cried when all the professionalism had been stripped away and there was nothing left but the animal underneath. "Please, I told you everything. I gave you everything I have. Please just let me go. I have a family. I have children, Rex, I have two children, please."

  Rex looked at him.

  "I had nothing," Rex said. "When your people left me on that floor I had nothing. You remember that?"

  Creed sobbed.

  "I'm sorry," he said. "I am sorry. I swear to you I am sorry."

  Rex stood up.

  "I know," he said.

  The car in the garage was a Bentley Continental GT. Midnight blue. The kind of car that announced its owner's wealth without shouting about it, understated in the way that only very expensive things managed to be understated.

  Rex looked at it for a moment.

  Then he took the keys from Creed's robe pocket.

  He put Creed in the boot first. Creed was still crying, quieter now, the big heaving sobs settling into something smaller and more exhausted. Rex closed the boot without ceremony and walked around to the driver's side.

  The leather seat adjusted to him automatically. The engine started with the particular quiet of something that did not need to prove itself with noise. The dashboard glowed with soft instrumentation in the dark of the garage.

  Rex sat with both hands on the wheel and thought about a twenty one year old eating once a day and counting coins for the bus.

  He put the car in reverse and backed out of the garage.

  The Hollow Chain had a base in Northcote. Twenty minutes from here. Ground level operation. A large hardware store that had been there long enough to become part of the neighborhood, familiar enough that nobody looked at it twice. Families bought paint there. Old men argued about timber grades on Saturday mornings.

  Underground it was something else entirely.

  Rex drove through the Melbourne night in a dead man's car toward the address Creed had given him and felt the red power settle through him like something arriving home.

  He parked two streets away and walked.

  It was past midnight and the street was quiet. He went around to the back through the service lane that ran behind the row of shops and found the rear entrance. A steel door, reinforced. One guard.

  The guard was a big man and his skin was the problem. Chalk deposits ran across his arms and neck and the left side of his face, cracked and uneven, the texture of something that had dried badly and never recovered. He straightened when he saw Rex coming and did not ask questions first.

  If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  He threw the first punch.

  Rex walked through it and hit him once.

  The chalk cracked across his jaw like a plate dropping. The man went down and did not get up.

  Rex looked at his fist. Then he took the guard's keycard and opened the door.

  He went in with Creed over his shoulder.

  The room underground was wide and lit by fluorescent strips. Industrial shelving along the walls. A long table in the center with open crates on it, being sorted by men in dark clothing who moved with the particular efficiency of people used to working at night.

  Seven of them.

  They heard him on the stairs and turned.

  The first thing they saw was the red light moving under his skin. The second thing they saw was Creed, draped over Rex's shoulder, still crying quietly into the back of Rex's jacket.

  Nobody moved for a moment.

  "What the..." one of them started.

  Then they saw Creed's broken legs hanging at the wrong angles and the calculation changed very fast.

  They came at him all at once.

  The first one was built like a wall, a hardening quirk pulling his skin grey and dense as concrete as he charged, and he hit Rex square in the chest with everything he had. Rex rocked back a step. Just one. He looked down at the point of impact and then looked up at the man.

  "Okay," Rex said.

  He grabbed him by the collar and threw him into the shelving unit. Metal buckled. Crates scattered across the floor. The man landed badly and got up anyway, which Rex noted.

  The second had heat in his hands, the air warping around his fingers as he swung. Rex let the first two land, felt the burn across his forearm, and stepped back giving ground like a man who was not sure of himself.

  "He's not that strong," someone said. "Get him."

  They believed it. That was the problem with giving people hope. They grabbed onto it.

  Three of them hit him from different angles at once. One had a reinforcement type, his body moving faster than it should. Another had something with his arms, extending them, wrapping around Rex's torso and pulling. The third just hit hard, the simple uncomplicated power of a body built for damage.

  Rex let himself be pushed back into the wall.

  He let them feel it. The resistance. The effort it seemed to cost him. He grunted when the extended arms tightened around him and the man with the heat quirk drove a burning palm toward his face and Rex turned away from it just in time, or what looked like just in time.

  "He's struggling," one of them said.

  "Finish it," said another.

  Rex stopped performing.

  The red power came off him like a pressure front.

  It did not announce itself. It did not build to something. It was simply there, suddenly and completely, filling the room with a light that had no warmth in it and a weight that pressed against every chest in the space simultaneously.

  The man with the extended arms felt his grip fail before he understood why.

  Rex straightened up from the wall and rolled his neck once and looked at the room.

  "Your turn," he said.

  What came next was not a fight. A fight implied two sides with a reasonable chance between them. This was something else. Rex moved through them the way a current moved through a space too small to contain it, finding each resistance and removing it with the minimum necessary force except when he decided more was warranted, which was often. The hardening quirk man came back for a second attempt and Rex hit him three times and the third one ended the conversation permanently. The heat quirk found his hands weren't generating anything useful against skin that had stopped caring about temperature. The fast one discovered that speed only mattered if the thing you were faster than couldn't read where you were going before you got there.

  The crates went first. Then the table. A section of shelving came down when one of them went through it and stayed down. The fluorescent lights swung overhead from the concussion of bodies hitting walls and walls losing the argument.

  "What is he," someone said from the floor. It wasn't a question. It was the sound of a man updating his understanding of the world.

  One of them tried to run for the stairs. Rex was already at the bottom of them.

  The man stopped. Looked at him. Looked at the red light. Made a sound in the back of his throat.

  "Sit down," Rex said.

  He sat down.

  When it was over Rex stood in the middle of the wreckage and breathed.

  Six of them were finished.

  The seventh was against the far wall. A thin man with a scar across his chin, trying to make himself smaller. Rex had not thought about that scar in eight years. He had not forgotten it for a single day.

  He remembered the warehouse. He remembered this man's face above him while he was on the floor, calm and methodical, doing a job.

  Rex set Creed down against the wall beside the thin man.

  Creed looked at the thin man and then looked at Rex and went completely still.

  "You," Rex said to the thin man.

  The thin man said nothing.

  "Do you remember me?" Rex asked.

  "No," the thin man said.

  Rex looked at him for a moment.

  "Yes you do," Rex said.

  Rex worked methodically.

  He broke what needed breaking. He did not rush. When either of them asked him to stop he acknowledged that he had heard them and continued. When Creed said he was sorry Rex said he believed him. When the thin man said he had only been following orders Rex said he understood.

  "Please," Creed said at one point. Just the one word. Over and over.

  "Please," the thin man said. "Please, I have done worse things since then, take them, take whatever you want, I will give you names, I will give you everything."

  "I already have everything," Rex said.

  He took his time.

  Somewhere in the middle of it a feeling moved through him that he recognized as satisfaction. Deep and clean and very patient, the kind that came from a debt finally being settled after years of compound interest.

  He thought it was his.

  He did not think about the warmth at the back of his mind that had grown quieter and quieter as the night went on, the presence that did not need to say anything because it was getting exactly what it wanted. It had learned that the best way to get what it wanted from Rex was to make Rex think he wanted it first.

  Rex had come to Melbourne for justice.

  That was what he told himself.

  That was what he believed.