The DCB transport van pulled up to a print shop on Girard Avenue, and Jax climbed out of the back like a dog being released from a kennel.
"Finally," he muttered, stretching his legs. "Thought I was gonna suffocate back there."
Luna had made him ride in the cargo area. Not the back seat; the cargo area, with the equipment cases and the spare tire, because apparently his "smell" and his "face" were both too offensive for the passenger cabin. She'd sat up front with the driver, a bored-looking DCB agent named Reeves who hadn't said more than three words the entire ride.
Fishtown looked different from the neighborhoods Jax usually worked. Cleaner. More gentrified. The kind of area where young professionals were starting to move in, buying up row homes and opening coffee shops and pretending they'd discovered something new. But underneath the fresh paint and the artisanal bakeries, there was still that Philadelphia grit; the cracked sidewalks, the graffiti tags on the corners, the faint smell of the Delaware River when the wind blew wrong.
The print shop was called KELLERMAN'S COPIES & MORE, according to the faded sign above the door. It looked like it had been there since the seventies; one of those businesses that survived on regulars and stubbornness, refusing to die even as the neighborhood changed around it.
Luna was already walking toward the entrance, earbuds in, not looking back.
"Hey," Jax called, jogging to catch up. "Hey, wait up."
She didn't wait up.
"Luna. Hey. Luna."
Nothing. She pushed through the front door of the print shop without breaking stride.
"Are you seriously just gonna—" Jax followed her inside. "Luna. Luna."
The shop's interior was cramped and cluttered; rows of copy machines, shelves stacked with paper supplies, a counter with a cash register that looked older than Jax. An old man stood behind it, wringing his hands, his face pale and sweaty.
"You're the DCB?" he asked, his voice cracking. "Thank God. It's in the back. The storage room. I heard it moving around last night, and this morning one of my machines, the big Xerox, the industrial one, it was just... gone. Like something ate it."
Luna finally took out one earbud. "Storage room. Got it. Stay out here, don't come back there, we'll handle it."
"Is it—is it dangerous? Should I evacuate the—"
"It's a Class D." Luna was already walking toward the back of the shop. "Basically a roach. We'll be done in ten minutes."
Jax followed her past the rows of machines, through a doorway marked EMPLOYEES ONLY, and into a narrow hallway that led to the back of the building. The lights were flickering here; not dramatically, just enough to be annoying. The air smelled like toner and dust and something else, something metallic and wrong.
"So what's the plan?" Jax asked. "You want me to flank it, or—"
Luna kept walking.
"Luna. Hey. I'm talking to you."
Nothing.
"Are you just gonna ignore me the whole time? Is that the plan? Real professional."
She didn't even turn around.
"Fucking bitch," Jax muttered under his breath.
Luna stopped.
She turned around slowly, pulling both earbuds out this time, and the look on her face made Jax take an involuntary step back.
"What did you just say?"
"I said—"
"No, no, I heard what you said, pendejo." She stepped toward him, and there was nothing bored or disinterested about her now. Her eyes were sharp, dangerous. "You want to run that back for me? Say it to my face this time?"
Jax's jaw tightened. "I said you're being a bitch. Because you are. I've been trying to talk to you for twenty minutes and you've been acting like I don't exist."
"Oh, I'm so sorry." Luna's voice dripped with sarcasm. "Did the stray from North Philly expect me to roll out the red carpet? Hold his hand? Teach him how to do his fucking job?"
"I expect you to act like a goddamn teammate—"
"Teammate?" She laughed, sharp, ugly. "Teammate? You're not my teammate, güey. You're a charity case Emil dragged in off the street because he saw something shiny. You're a project. An experiment. And I don't have time to babysit you while I'm trying to do my actual job."
"I've been killing demons since I was fifteen—"
"Killing roaches in basements for pocket change isn't the same thing, and you know it." Luna stepped closer, jabbing a finger at his chest. "Shut the fuck up and let me do my job. I don't give a shit what hole you crawled out of. I don't give a shit why Emil has a hard-on for you. You want to know what I think? I think I should walk out of here right now and let the demon eat you, because honestly? It would be more beneficial to society than whatever you're contributing."
Jax felt something hot flare in his chest. Anger. Real anger, the kind he usually kept tamped down because it didn't help, because getting mad didn't pay rent or put food in his stomach.
"What is your problem?" he demanded. "I didn't do anything to you. I showed up, I followed the rules, I'm trying to figure out how shit works around here, and you've been treating me like garbage since the second I walked in."
"My problem?" Luna's eyes narrowed. "My problem is that I'm trying to get my fucking paycheck without having to drag around dead weight. My problem is that Emil keeps bringing in strays like you and expecting the rest of us to clean up the mess when they get themselves killed. My problem is that you're a Wired who didn't even know he was Wired, qué chiste es ese? You're supposed to be Caliber's replacement? You couldn't replace a fucking doorstop."
She turned and started walking again, shoving her earbuds back in.
"Do yourself a favor," she called back over her shoulder. "Stay out of my way. Because if the demons don't kill you first, Zion will. And honestly? I might beat him to it."
She disappeared around a corner.
Jax stood in the hallway, fists clenched, breathing hard.
What the fuck have these past twelve hours been, he thought. What the actual fuck.
Yesterday he'd been scraping for bus fare and praying for a job that paid more than ten bucks. Now he was standing in the back of a print shop in Fishtown, getting screamed at by a girl with a cat-ear beanie who apparently hated his guts for reasons he didn't fully understand.
Life came at you fast.
He followed Luna around the corner.
The storage room was dark except for the emergency lights, red LEDs casting everything in a hellish glow. Shelves lined the walls, stacked with boxes of paper and toner cartridges. In the center of the room, surrounded by the scattered remains of what used to be a Xerox machine, was the demon.
It was smaller than the thing in the warehouse; maybe four feet tall, hunched on legs that bent the wrong way. Its body was mostly fax machine: plastic casing warped and melted around something organic, cables trailing from its back like a tail, a paper tray fused to its chest that opened and closed like a mouth. Its head was a mess of phone receivers and exposed circuitry, and where eyes should have been, there were just two blinking red lights.
Class D. Low-grade. The kind of thing that spawned from a single piece of abandoned tech and never got the chance to feed enough to become something bigger.
Jax had killed dozens of these. They were quick and mean, but fragile, one good hit to the core and they went down.
He pulled the knife from his ankle sheath.
"Stay out of my way," Luna said. She'd taken a position near the door, her iPod in her hand. "I mean it. Now."
"Fuck no." Jax shifted his grip on the knife. "Kiss my ass."
He charged.
The demon's head snapped toward him, those red lights tracking his movement. Its paper-tray mouth opened, revealing rows of metal teeth that looked like they'd been made from staples and paper clips. It shrieked, a sound like a fax machine connecting, that awful electronic screaming, and lunged.
Jax was faster. He ducked under its first swipe, came up inside its guard, brought the knife around toward its throat—
Something hit him from behind.
Not the demon. The demon was in front of him, still recovering from its missed attack. This was something else; a wave of force that slammed into his back like a truck, lifting him off his feet and hurling him across the room.
He hit the wall hard enough to crack the drywall, sliding down into a heap of collapsed boxes. Blood filled his mouth, he'd bitten his tongue on impact. His vision swam.
"What the—" He coughed, spitting red. "What the fuck—"
Luna stood where he'd been a second ago, her iPod raised in front of her like a weapon. The screen was glowing, not the normal white of the display, but a deep, pulsing blue that cast strange shadows across her face. Her thumb was hovering over the click wheel.
She was Wired.
Of course she was Wired. Everyone in this fucking organization was Wired, apparently, except Jax had been too stupid to realize it until she'd literally blasted him across the room.
Her thumb moved on the click wheel, scrolling through something, selecting something, and the iPod pulsed brighter. The air in front of her rippled, and then a wave of visible sound erupted from the device, a shockwave that hit the demon like a battering ram and sent it tumbling backward into a shelf.
Sonic blasts. Her iPod fired sonic blasts. The songs, or whatever she selected on that wheel, translated into different frequencies, different intensities of concentrated sound.
"I said," Luna spoke through gritted teeth, "stay out of my fucking way."
"And I said—" Jax pushed himself up, ignoring the pain screaming through his back. "—fuck. No."
He lunged toward the demon again.
Luna's thumb moved on the wheel. Another blast caught him in the side, spinning him around, but he kept his feet this time, planted them, absorbed the impact, kept moving.
"Are you insane?" Luna screamed. "I will put you through that wall, idiota—"
The demon recovered faster than either of them expected. It came off the shelf in a blur of cables and metal, lunging not at Jax but at Luna; at the glowing iPod in her hand, drawn to the energy like a moth to flame.
Luna spun, bringing the iPod up, but the demon was already inside her range, too close for a blast, too fast for her to scroll to something defensive—
Jax tackled it.
He hit the demon mid-lunge, driving his shoulder into its chest, wrapping his arms around its torso. They went down together in a tangle of limbs and cables, the demon shrieking, its staple-teeth snapping inches from Jax's face.
He didn't think. Didn't plan. Just acted.
The knife came up. Punched through the demon's throat, through plastic and meat and circuitry, and out the other side.
The demon spasmed. Made a sound like a dial-up modem dying. Then it went still, collapsing on top of Jax in a heap of cooling metal and leaking fluids.
He shoved the corpse off and sat up, breathing hard, covered in oil and demon blood.
Luna was staring at him.
"I had that," she said.
"No you didn't."
"I had that. It was a Class D. I've killed hundreds of them."
"It was about to take your face off."
"I was handling it—"
"By doing what? Scrolling through your playlist?" Jax pushed himself to his feet, wincing at the pain in his back. "Maybe pick a faster song next time."
Luna's face flushed. "Vete a la mierda—"
"I don't know what that means, but I'm gonna assume it's not a thank you."
"Thank you?" Luna stepped toward him, jabbing a finger at his chest. "You almost got us both killed! If you had just stayed out of my way like I told you—"
"If I had stayed out of your way, that thing would've eaten your iPod and then eaten you—"
"I didn't need your help!"
"You literally did!"
"I would rather die than accept help from some—some homeless gutter trash who doesn't know the difference between a Class D and a—"
"Hey!"
They both spun toward the door.
Reeves, the driver, stood in the doorway. He looked profoundly tired, like he'd seen this exact scene play out a hundred times before and had stopped finding it interesting around the fiftieth.
"Demon's dead," he said flatly. "You done?"
Luna and Jax looked at each other. Then at the demon corpse on the floor. Then back at Reeves.
"We're done," Luna said, through gritted teeth.
"Great. Van's out front. Let's go." Reeves turned and walked away without waiting for a response.
Luna shot Jax one more venomous look, then shoved past him and followed.
Jax stood there for a moment, staring down at the demon he'd killed.
His first DCB job. His first official kill as a member of the team.
Somehow, it felt less like a victory and more like the first day of a really shitty job.
He wiped the demon blood off his knife and followed them out.
The ride back was worse than the ride there.
Luna had tried to claim the front seat again, but Reeves had just looked at her with those tired eyes and said, "Both of you. Back. Now."
So now Jax was crammed into the back seat next to Luna, their shoulders almost touching, the tension between them thick enough to cut with a knife. The demon blood on Jax's clothes had started to dry, which somehow made the smell worse.
"This is your fault," Luna muttered.
"My fault? How is this my fault?"
"If you had just listened to me—"
"I saved your life!"
"You interfered with my kill—"
"Oh, I'm sorry, did you want me to let it eat your face? Would that have been more professional?"
"At least then I wouldn't have to listen to you talk—"
"Both of you," Reeves said from the front seat, not looking back, "shut up."
Silence.
For about five seconds.
"She started it," Jax said.
"I started it? You're the one who—"
"I said," Reeves reached back without looking, grabbed something from the center console, and hurled it into the back seat. It was a roll of duct tape. It bounced off Jax's chest and landed in his lap. "Shut. Up. Or I tape both your mouths closed and tell Emil you were like this the whole ride."
Luna and Jax looked at each other.
"...Fine," Luna muttered.
"Fine," Jax agreed.
They rode the rest of the way in seething, hostile silence, both of them staring out their respective windows, refusing to look at each other.
Jax's back ached from where Luna had blasted him. His mouth still tasted like blood. He was covered in demon guts, he hadn't slept in almost twenty-four hours, and the one person on his new team who'd actually spoken to him apparently wanted him dead.
Great first day.
He caught Luna glancing at him in the reflection of the window. Their eyes met for half a second before she looked away with a scoff.
Something told him this was going to be a long partnership.