Jax figured out the shower at 2 AM.
The trick, it turned out, was to ignore all the buttons and knobs and just turn the one dial that looked the most like a normal faucet handle. The digital display was apparently decorative, or maybe for people who actually knew what "hydro-massage pulse setting" meant. Jax didn't. Jax just wanted water that wasn't freezing.
He stood under the spray for almost forty minutes, watching black ichor and dried blood swirl down the drain. The water pressure was incredible; nothing like the sad trickle he was used to in North Philly, where you were lucky if the pipes worked at all. This was like standing under a waterfall. A warm, clean, impossible waterfall.
When he finally got out, he realized he had a problem.
He had no clean clothes.
The garbage bag of stuff from his old apartment contained exactly three items: a second hoodie (also stained), a pair of jeans with more holes than fabric, and a t-shirt he'd stolen from a Goodwill donation bin two years ago. Everything smelled like mildew and desperation.
He put on the least terrible combination and hoped no one would notice.
Sleep didn't come. He lay on the bed; the actual bed, with the frame and the mattress that wasn't on the floor, and stared at the ceiling until the sun started coming through the windows. The ceiling was smooth. No water stains. No cracks. No exposed wiring or mysterious brown spots that might have been mold or might have been something worse.
It didn't feel real. None of this felt real.
At 5:30, he gave up on sleep entirely and left for the facility.
The elevator doors opened on the eighth floor, and Jax stepped out just as Luna's door swung open.
They froze.
Luna was dressed for work, if "work" meant hunting demons in low-rise jeans and a crop top with a hoodie tied around her waist. Her cat-ear beanie was firmly in place. Her iPod was already in her hand, earbuds dangling.
She looked at Jax.
Jax looked at her.
"No," Luna said.
"I didn't say anything."
"No." She pointed at him, then at the door to unit 808. "No. That's not—you're not—"
"Yeah." Jax shrugged. "I live here now. 808. Right there."
Luna's face went red.
"NO." She wasn't speaking anymore, she was screaming. "NO. Absolutely fucking not."
She stormed past Jax and started pounding on the door to unit 806. Zion's door.
"ZION!" Bang bang bang. "Did you know about this? DID YOU FUCKING KNOW?"
The door opened. Zion stood there in tactical pants and a compression shirt, his expression flat.
"I found out yesterday," he said.
"And you didn't TELL me?"
"Would it have changed anything?"
"I would have, I don't know, called Emil! Complained! Done something!" Luna whirled back toward Jax, jabbing a finger at his chest. "This is my home. This is the one place I don't have to deal with work bullshit, and now you're HERE? Living next door to me?"
"I didn't ask for this either," Jax said.
"I don't CARE what you asked for!" Luna was in his face now, close enough that he could see the vein pulsing in her temple. "Vete a la mierda, pinche pendejo—"
"Luna." Zion's voice cut through like a blade. "Enough."
She spun on him. "Don't tell me—"
"I said enough." His tone left no room for argument. "Screaming in the hallway isn't going to change Emil's decision. Take it up with him at the facility. Not here."
Luna stood there, chest heaving, fists clenched. For a second Jax thought she might actually swing at someone, him or Zion, didn't seem to matter.
Then she made a sound of pure frustration, something between a scream and a growl, and stormed toward the elevator, slamming her palm against the button.
"I'm not riding with him," she spat without turning around.
"Then take the stairs," Zion said.
The elevator arrived. Luna stepped in, jabbed a button, and kept her back to them until the doors closed.
Silence.
Jax looked at Zion. Zion looked at the closed elevator doors.
"She'll calm down," Zion said flatly. "Eventually."
"Will she?"
Zion didn't answer. He walked past Jax toward the elevator and pressed the button.
They waited in silence. When the elevator came, they rode down in silence. When they stepped out into the lobby, Zion walked toward the exit without looking back.
Jax followed. What else was he going to do?
The DCB facility was quieter at 6 AM than it had been the day before. Fewer scientists in the halls, fewer hunters in the training areas. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead, casting everything in that sterile blue-white glow that made Jax feel like he was inside a refrigerator.
Luna was already in the briefing room when they arrived. She'd taken a seat at the far end of the table, earbuds in, iPod out, aggressively ignoring the door. When Jax walked in, she didn't even glance up.
The silent treatment. Somehow that was worse than the screaming.
Zion took a position by the whiteboard, arms crossed, his energy spear strapped to his back. His eyes moved over Jax's ragged clothes; the stained hoodie, the torn jeans, but he didn't say anything.
The door swung open, and Emil walked in.
He was carrying a tablet in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, his white lab coat billowing behind him like a cape. Those purple eyes swept over the room; taking in Luna's hostile silence, Zion's rigid posture, Jax standing awkwardly by the door, and his smile widened.
"Good morning, Echo Team!" He beamed at them like they were his favorite children. "Beautiful day, isn't it? I hope everyone slept well. Jax, how's the new apartment? Figure out the shower?"
"Eventually," Jax muttered.
"Wonderful, wonderful." Emil set his tablet on the table and tapped the screen. The projector on the ceiling hummed to life, throwing an image onto the whiteboard; a map of Philadelphia, with a red circle around a block in Kensington. "Now then. Let's talk about why I called you all in early."
Luna pulled out one earbud. Zion straightened. Even Jax felt something shift in the room, the hostility giving way to something more focused.
"We've got a situation," Emil said. "Class C. Possibly Class B, depending on how long it's been feeding."
Jax felt his stomach tighten. Class C. The warehouse demon that had killed him, the one that had triggered his Redline for the first time, had been a Class B. A Class C was one step below that. Still dangerous. Still serious.
Still way above his usual pay grade.
"Location is an old telecom switching station," Emil continued, tapping the screen to bring up a photo. The building was squat and ugly, concrete and brick, with faded signage that read BELL ATLANTIC, a name Jax vaguely remembered from before the phone companies all merged and rebranded. "Abandoned since '94. The neighborhood's been trying to get it demolished for years, but you know how that goes. Red tape, budget issues, nobody wants to take responsibility."
"In the meantime," Zion said, "something moved in."
"Exactly." Emil smiled. "Reports started coming in about three weeks ago. Strange noises. Missing pets. A homeless man who went in looking for shelter and... didn't come out. Local police wrote it off as drug activity, but one of our scouts did a sweep yesterday and confirmed demonic presence."
He tapped the screen again. A new image appeared; grainy, like it had been taken from a distance with a bad camera. It showed the interior of the building, dark and cluttered with old equipment. And in the center, barely visible in the shadows, was a shape.
Big. Much bigger than the fax machine demon from Fishtown. This thing looked like it had been built from an entire server room; racks of old computers fused together into a hulking torso, cables thick as pythons trailing from its back, and a head that might have once been a mainframe terminal, now twisted into something with too many eyes and a mouth full of fiber-optic teeth.
"Jesus," Jax breathed.
"Class C," Emil repeated. "We're calling it a Switchboard. It's been nesting in the building, feeding on the residual tech and anything organic that wanders too close. Based on its growth rate, we estimate it'll hit Class B within the week if we don't take it out now."
"Why us?" Luna asked. Her voice had lost its earlier venom, replaced by something sharper, professional suspicion. "A Class C should go to Alpha or Bravo team. We're undermanned."
"You're Echo Team," Emil said. "And Echo Team has a new member who needs field experience." He looked at Jax. Smiled. "Consider this a training exercise."
"A training exercise," Zion repeated flatly. "Against a Class C."
"You've handled worse."
"I've handled worse with a full team. With backup. Not with—" He gestured at Jax. "—an untrained liability who doesn't even have gear."
"Then get him gear." Emil's smile didn't waver, but something in his eyes hardened, just for a moment, just enough to remind everyone in the room who was actually in charge. "Armory's down the hall. You have two hours before deployment. I suggest you use them wisely."
He picked up his coffee, turned, and walked out of the briefing room.
The door clicked shut behind him.
Zion, Luna, and Jax stood in silence, staring at the image of the Switchboard on the screen.
"Well," Luna said finally. "This is going to suck."
For once, Jax couldn't disagree.
The armory was everything Jax had imagined and more.
Rows of weapons lined the walls; guns, blades, things that didn't have names he recognized. There were tactical vests and body armor, helmets with built-in displays, boots that probably cost more than everything Jax had ever owned combined. Everything was sleek and black and expensive-looking, the kind of gear he'd seen on the elite hunters in the training facility.
Zion moved through the room with practiced efficiency, pulling items off racks and tossing them at Jax.
"Vest. Wear it." A tactical vest hit Jax in the chest. "Boots. Put them on." A pair of combat boots followed. "Knife. Real one, not that piece of shit you've been using."
He held up a blade; sleek, black, with a faint glow running along the edge. It looked like something out of a movie.
"This is a resonance blade," Zion said. "It's designed to disrupt demonic energy on contact. More effective than regular steel. Don't lose it, it costs more than your yearly salary."
Jax took the knife carefully. It was lighter than he expected, perfectly balanced. When he turned it in his hand, the glow pulsed faintly, like a heartbeat.
"What about a gun?" he asked.
"Can you shoot?"
"I've... never held a gun before."
"Then no." Zion grabbed a vest of his own, shrugging it on over his gear. "Stick with the blade."
Twenty minutes later, Jax barely recognized himself.
The tactical vest fit snugly over a black compression shirt they'd given him. The boots were heavier than his old sneakers but surprisingly comfortable. The resonance blade was strapped to his thigh in a quick-release sheath. He'd even gotten a pair of gloves; fingerless, black, with reinforced knuckles.
He looked like an actual demon hunter. Like someone who knew what they were doing.
He didn't feel like one.
"One more thing." Zion stepped in front of him, blocking the door. His expression was hard. "When we get out there, you do exactly what I say. You don't move unless I tell you to move. You don't engage unless I tell you to engage. You are there to observe and learn. That's it. Understood?"
Jax met his eyes. "And if things go sideways?"
"Then you run." Zion's voice was flat. "You run, and you don't look back. Luna and I can handle ourselves. You can't. Not yet. Maybe not ever." He leaned closer. "I'm not losing another teammate because some rookie decided to play hero. Got it?"
There it was again. That shadow behind his eyes. The same one Jax had seen when Zion looked at the photo of Caliber.
"Got it," Jax said quietly.
Zion held his gaze for a long moment. Then he nodded once and stepped aside.
"Van leaves in ten. Don't be late."
Kensington looked different in the early morning light.
Jax knew this neighborhood. Not well, but well enough. It was one of the places demons liked to spawn; lots of abandoned buildings, lots of illegal dumping, lots of people who'd learned not to ask questions about the strange noises coming from empty lots. He'd done jobs here before, back when he was still freelancing. Small stuff. Class F and E demons that nested in old TVs and broken computers.
This was different.
The Bell Atlantic building loomed at the end of the block, squat and ugly and somehow wrong in a way Jax couldn't quite articulate. The windows were dark. The doors were chained shut. Graffiti covered the lower walls, but even the tags seemed to avoid the upper floors, like the local artists had sensed something and decided to stay away.
The air smelled like ozone and rot.
"Luna," Zion said quietly. "Scan."
Luna had her iPod out, scrolling through something on the screen. The device glowed faintly; not the combat glow Jax had seen in Fishtown, but something softer. A scanning mode, maybe.
"It's in the basement," she said after a moment. "Big energy signature. Looks like it's dormant, probably sleeping off its last meal."
"Entry points?"
"Main door's chained, but there's a service entrance on the east side. Looks clear."
Zion nodded. He unslung his spear from his back, and the weapon hummed to life, energy crackling along its length, casting pale blue light across his face.
"Formation is standard. I take point. Luna, you're mid-range support. Jax—" He looked at him. "—you stay behind Luna. You do not engage. You watch. You learn. Clear?"
"Clear," Jax said.
They moved toward the building.
The inside of the switching station was worse than the outside.
Decades of abandonment had turned it into a graveyard of obsolete technology. Old server racks lined the walls, their surfaces corroded and warped. Cables hung from the ceiling like vines, swaying slightly even though there was no wind. The floor was covered in debris; broken monitors, shattered keyboards, the plastic shells of machines that had been cutting-edge once and were now just garbage.
And everywhere, that smell. Ozone and rust. Electricity and decay.
"It's been feeding," Luna said quietly. Her iPod was out, casting a faint glow. "All of this, the old tech, it's been absorbing it. Using it to grow."
"Basement stairs," Zion said, pointing to a door at the far end of the room. "Stay tight. Stay quiet."
They moved through the building in silence, stepping over debris, ducking under fallen cables. Jax kept his hand on his knife, his heart pounding in his chest. Every shadow looked like a threat. Every creak of the building made him flinch.
He'd faced demons before. Lots of them. But those had been small, Class F and E, things he could handle with a cheap knife and desperation. This was different. This was real.
The basement stairs descended into darkness.
Zion went first, his spear lighting the way. Luna followed, her iPod glowing brighter now, shifting into combat mode. Jax brought up the rear, trying to remember how to breathe.
The basement was massive.
It must have been the main switching floor back when the building was operational, a vast open space filled with row after row of equipment. But the equipment wasn't in rows anymore. It had been... rearranged. Pulled together. Fused into something that looked almost like a nest, with cables and wires woven together into a cocoon of metal and plastic.
And in the center of the nest, curled up like a sleeping animal, was the Switchboard.
The photo hadn't done it justice.
It was huge, easily eight feet tall even in its hunched, dormant position. Its body was a nightmare of fused technology: server racks forming a spine, monitor screens embedded in its chest like scales, cables trailing from every joint like exposed muscle. Its head was the worst part; a mass of old terminals and phone receivers, with dozens of small red lights where eyes should be, all of them dark.
Sleeping. For now.
"Jesus Christ," Jax whispered.
"Quiet," Zion hissed. He was studying the demon, calculating. "Luna. Can you hit it from here?"
"I can try. But if I don't put it down with the first shot, it's going to wake up pissed."
"Then make the first shot count."
Luna raised her iPod. Her thumb moved on the click wheel, scrolling through tracks; through weapons, Jax realized. Different songs meant different attacks. She was looking for something big. Something that could put this thing down in one hit.
She found it.
The iPod's screen flared bright blue, and Luna aimed it at the Switchboard like a gun. The air in front of her began to ripple, distorting, building toward something massive—
The demon's eyes opened.
All of them. Dozens of red lights, flickering to life at once, fixing on the three tiny humans who had invaded its nest.
"SHIT—" Luna fired.
The sonic blast hit the Switchboard dead center, a visible wave of compressed sound that tore through the air with a thunderous crack. It was the biggest attack Jax had seen from her, way bigger than anything in Fishtown.
The demon caught it.
One massive arm, made of fused server racks and wrapped in cable-muscle, came up and absorbed the blast like it was nothing. The Switchboard shuddered, pushed back a few inches, but it didn't fall. It didn't even look hurt.
It looked angry.
The thing roared; a sound like a thousand dial-up modems screaming at once, like fax machines and printers and phones all dying together in electronic agony. It rose to its full height, towering over them, cables whipping behind it like tentacles.
"MOVE!" Zion was already in motion, spear blazing, charging toward the demon with a speed that shouldn't have been possible for someone his size.
Luna scrambled backward, scrolling frantically through her iPod, firing off smaller blasts to keep the demon's attention split.
And Jax—
Jax stood frozen.
He'd faced demons before. He'd killed demons before. But nothing like this. Nothing this big, this fast, this wrong. His legs wouldn't move. His hands wouldn't work. Every survival instinct he'd developed over years of fighting was screaming at him to run, but his body wouldn't listen.
Zion's spear connected with the demon's side, carving a glowing gash through its server-rack ribs. The Switchboard howled and swung at him, a massive arm sweeping through the space where he'd been a second ago. Zion dodged, barely, and struck again, his movements precise and brutal.
Luna's blasts peppered the demon's back, each impact making it flinch, keeping it off-balance.
They were holding it. Barely. But they were holding it.
Then the demon did something unexpected.
It ignored them.
Those dozens of red eyes swiveled away from Zion, away from Luna, and fixed on Jax; the one who wasn't moving. The one who wasn't fighting. The easy prey.
It charged.
"JAX!" Zion's voice, somewhere behind the demon. "RUN!"
Jax ran.
Not fast enough.
A cable whipped out from the demon's body and caught him around the ankle, yanking his feet out from under him. He hit the concrete hard, the impact driving the air from his lungs. Before he could even try to get up, more cables wrapped around his arms, his legs, his torso, lifting him off the ground, pulling him toward that nightmare face with its dozens of glowing red eyes.
The Switchboard's mouth opened. Fiber-optic teeth gleamed in the darkness.
I'm going to die, Jax thought. Again.
And then—
Something shifted.
It started in his chest. A heat, building from somewhere deep inside. His heart was pounding, faster than it should, faster than was safe, and with each beat, the heat spread. Down his arms. Up his neck. Into his skull.
He felt it.
For the first time since the warehouse, he felt it. The engine inside him, the one Emil had talked about. It wasn't roaring to life, not fully, but it was revving. Responding to the nearness of death.
His veins began to glow. Red light, pulsing beneath his skin, brighter with each heartbeat.
The cables around his arms started to smoke where they touched him.
The Switchboard hesitated, sensing something wrong, something dangerous about the prey it had caught.
Jax didn't think. Didn't plan. Just pulled.
The cables snapped, torn apart by strength he didn't know he had. He dropped to the ground, landing in a crouch, the red glow already fading from his veins as the immediate threat of death receded.
He hadn't fully triggered. Hadn't gone into Redline. But for just a second, just long enough, he'd touched it.
The Switchboard screamed and lunged for him again—
And Zion was there.
But this wasn't the Zion from before; the controlled, precise, professional fighter. Something had changed. Something had broken.
His face was twisted into something Jax barely recognized. Rage. Terror. Grief. His eyes weren't seeing Jax anymore, they were seeing something else. Someone else. A memory playing out in real time.
"NOT AGAIN!" Zion screamed, and his spear punched through the Switchboard's chest.
The demon staggered. Shrieked.
Zion didn't stop.
He ripped the spear free and drove it in again. And again. And again. Each strike was wild, brutal, nothing like the precise technique Jax had seen before. This was violence for the sake of violence. This was a man trying to kill something that had already died.
The Switchboard collapsed. Its eyes went dark. Its cables fell limp.
Zion kept stabbing.
"Zion." Luna's voice, somewhere behind them. Quiet. Careful. "Zion, it's dead."
He didn't stop.
"Zion." She was beside him now, her hand on his arm. "It's dead. It's over. Stop."
Zion's spear came down one more time, burying itself in the demon's skull with a wet, crunching sound.
Then he stopped.
He stood there, chest heaving, spear still embedded in the corpse. His face was blank now, whatever emotion had driven him a moment ago locked away behind walls Jax couldn't see.
Slowly, he pulled the spear free. Wiped it on the demon's body. Strapped it to his back.
He didn't look at Jax.
He didn't look at anyone.
"Van's outside," he said. His voice was flat. Dead. "Let's go."
He walked past Jax without a word.
Luna watched him go. Her face was pale. Shaken.
She looked at Jax; a quick, unreadable glance, and then followed Zion toward the stairs.
Jax stood alone in the basement, surrounded by dead tech and demon blood, and tried to understand what the hell had just happened.
The ride back was silent.
Not the hostile silence of the morning; Luna refusing to acknowledge him, Zion barely tolerating his presence. This was different. Heavier. The kind of silence that came after something had broken and no one knew how to talk about it.
Zion sat in the front passenger seat, staring straight ahead. His jaw was tight. His hands were clasped in his lap, perfectly still, but Jax could see the faint tremor running through them.
Luna sat in the back with Jax, but as far away as possible; pressed against the opposite door, earbuds in, iPod out, not looking at anything. Her usual hostility was gone, replaced by something that looked almost like discomfort.
No one spoke.
Reeves drove, his eyes flicking to the rearview mirror occasionally, but even he seemed to sense that this wasn't the time for small talk.
Jax looked down at his hands.
He could still feel it. The ghost of that heat, that power, that engine idling somewhere deep inside him. It was quiet now, dormant again, but he knew it was there. Waiting. Ready to ignite the moment death came close enough.
He'd felt it. For the first time, he'd actually felt it. Not the blackout-and-wake-up-covered-in-blood version. The real thing. The engine revving, the power building, the strength surging through his limbs just long enough to—
To what? Break some cables? Escape a grip he should never have been caught in?
He'd frozen. He'd almost died. He'd almost gotten everyone killed.
And Zion—
Jax glanced at the back of Zion's head. At the rigid set of his shoulders. At the hands that still hadn't stopped trembling.
Not again, he'd screamed. Like he'd seen it before. Like he'd watched someone else get dragged toward a demon's mouth and hadn't been able to stop it.
Caliber, Jax thought. That's what happened to Caliber.
He didn't know for sure. Couldn't know. But the pieces fit. The photo on the wall. The grief in Zion's eyes. The rage that had taken over when Jax was in the demon's grip.
Caliber hadn't just died. Caliber had been taken. Right in front of Zion. And Zion hadn't been able to save them.
Until today.
Jax looked out the window. Philadelphia scrolled past; gray buildings, gray streets, gray sky.
No one acknowledged what had happened. No one talked about Zion's breakdown, or Jax's near-death, or the red glow that had pulsed through his veins for those few desperate seconds.
Maybe they would later. Maybe they'd never mention it at all.
Either way, something had changed. Jax could feel it; a shift in the air, in the dynamic, in whatever fragile thing held this team together.
He just didn't know if it had changed for better or worse.
The van pulled into the Navy Yard facility. Zion was out before it fully stopped, walking toward the building without a word. Luna followed a few seconds later, moving in the opposite direction, her earbuds firmly in place.
Jax sat in the back of the van, alone.
He could still feel it. That flicker of heat in his chest. That promise of power, waiting just beneath the surface.
He wanted to feel it again.
And that, more than anything else, scared the hell out of him.