The past week had been a flurry of quick, allegedly high-stakes and often uncomfortably visible assassinations. Sparrow’s team was given photographs and shuttled to locations with tight time constraints and little direction. Half of the time, they had to resort to a sniper shot that decapitated the target and killed a bystander too, on a public sidewalk. They had not yet failed to eliminate a target, but at this rate it was an inevitability.
The accipiters were forbidden from communicating with the other teams, or anyone outside of themselves and Kuiper, their handler. Nor did they need to ask to know that they were being carefully supervised. Sparrow could speculate all he wanted privately, and he was sure Robin and Dove did the same, but they couldn’t compare suspicions.
In the automated jet on the way to reach a target in Beirut, Sparrow worked on tuning the rifle. It was a precision instrument, not intended to be fired more than once before being taken back to the armory and repaired. The woman in Beirut would be its third discharge in a row. The field kit for recalibrating its components and grinding away microscopic warping in its barrel could only do so much good: if the shot missed, it wouldn’t be Sparrow’s fault.
“She’s another zoan,” Robin said, from across the cargo bay, where she was studying footage of the target.
“That doesn’t matter,” Dove reminded them.
“No, it doesn’t,” Sparrow and Robin agreed almost in unison.
But it was curious. Very few of their targets, for elimination, intelligence gathering, or acquisition, were zoan. It made sense: the total zoan population was almost negligible to that of humans. And even if they were trusted by organizations in which they might earn clout, their species hadn’t existed long enough for many to reach those positions. There had been some, and the number had certainly increased with time, but whatever urgent contract they were operating under, targets had been almost a third zoan.
It was a coverup for something, Sparrow was convinced. Based on their wildly different social classes, and the rapidity with which they had to be eliminated, the targets were not politicians, executives, the developers of technologies competing with the client’s, or any of the usual categories with which the team dealt. They had to be people possessed of certain knowledge. Witnesses, planners, hired hands, their families.
Sparrow hated working in the dark. And he hated not being able to do the job right. He thought he might hate killing zoans. He hated a lot of things, lately.
The jet brought them to a private airstrip outside the city, where an aircar waited to bring them to their target. From that point they were silent. They communicated through subvocalization broadcast into each other’s earpieces, artificially reconstructed in their voices. Sparrow handled the rifle, Robin spotted, and Dove kept them undetected.
The aircar stabilized itself eleven kilometers from the target’s position in the Beirut Central District. She was predicted to exit a building at four thirteen in the afternoon and take a seat at an open-air restaurant nearby.
“That was probably arranged for us,” Robin noted.
Sparrow slid the aircar’s door open, rifle slung across his back, and climbed out. three hundred meters above the city, to the roof. The broad and flat roof was just long enough for him to mount the rifle and flatten himself out, stock braced in his shoulder.
Robin was doing most of the work of aiming. The rifle triangulated with feeds from cameras all along the path its bullet would take, and made microscopic adjustments beyond Sparrow’s already precise movements, accounting for wind, air pressure, air quality, the rotation of the earth, and a hundred other factors. The view in the eyepiece—which was molded specifically for an avian head—was a high-definition reconstruction that no simple lens could provide at this distance, superimposed with a rendered prediction of what the view would show in about twenty seconds. The cervid zoan exited the building only a few seconds later than she was expected to, checked a wristband computer nervously, and headed for the restaurant. She carried a briefcase, which she clutched tightly. When she sat it was with good posture, a stiff neck, legs crossed and briefcase held in her lap. Whether she had a real meeting, or another Stuyron operative had set her up to expect one, was irrelevant. She was there, and few other heads crossed the scope in front of hers.
Sparrow placed the crosshair on her head, in the thick of her jaw muscles. However much of the work was done by computer, it still ultimately relied on his steady hands and controlled breath. He made sure of both, and squeezed the trigger.
The future view froze as soon as the bullet left the chamber. Sparrow held his breath for twenty long seconds, as people passed in front of the target as predicted, and the cervid repeated slight moments he had just seen her make.
If the bullet didn’t hit its mark, there would be no use in firing again. There would be chaos in the BCD, and the target would be long gone by the time a second bullet hit. But the rifle held two rounds, and Sparrow was prepared to pull the trigger a second time, if it needed to happen.
But it didn’t. The bullet hit the target just above the heart, about thirty centimeters lower than Sparrow had aimed. She erupted.
The force of the bullet knocked her chair backwards by a meter, cut a table in half behind her, and buried itself another meter deep in the concrete, spraying debris into the air almost with the force of a bomb. She was in a cloud of dust by the time the ripples from the impact tore her open and left her in more than one piece.
Sparrow had the rifle back over his shoulder and swung down into the aircar within five seconds of the impact. The door closed and the vehicle peeled away from its stable position to return to the airstrip. They were in the former Lebanon for twenty-eight minutes, and were then off for the next target.
“It didn’t hit where I aimed,” Sparrow complained when they were underway. “We’re ruining it the way we’re using it.”
“Then use a garrote on the next one,” Dove said.
Sparrow was quiet. Something had him uneasy, that he couldn’t pinpoint. He settled on the recklessness of it. That wasn’t like Stuyron Security Solutions. The Fixing and Espionage division was meticulous. That was a hard fact that had been drilled into all fifteen of the accipiter zoans it had bought from the factory. It bothered Sparrow that they would accept a contract like this, that necessitated sloppy work. That was it. That was what made his stomach tremble, so slightly.
He wanted to voice the thought to the others, but he knew he couldn’t. It had been years since any of them had taken punishment; Sparrow didn’t know what the company would do to an insubordinate adult. He opened the tuning kit again and set back to work.

***

“My readout says you don’t have any money,” Cranberry said when he got to Geir at the Ironclad, early in the evening.
“I guess I’m not leaving here buzzed,” Geir smiled. He tipped his glasses.
“You should’ve been more than buzzed last night.”
“Vultures have strong stomachs.”
Cranberry laughed through his nose.
“Did you check it out?”
“I did.”
“Not exactly a revolutionary planning event, I know, but plenty of connected characters hang out there.”
“Names I found myself, that you didn’t give me.”
“That’s it, honey.”
“So it’s no risk for you to tell me what you know about Mr. Grouch.”
The wolf shifted his feet, elbows against the bar.
“Now that’s not the angle of approach I would’ve expected,” he whistled.
“I like to be subtle.”
Cranberry chewed thoughtfully on a lollipop.
“Grouch is a muscle-for-hire guy,” he said. “At least, that’s what you hear about. All of those guys have fingers in lots of pies. He’s got his two big zos, they do shakedowns and guard stuff. Then he bets on them in the fights and doubles his income.”
“They always win?”
“I’ve never heard of one losing.”
“And people let them keep fighting?”
“Who’s gonna stop them? Everyone likes to watch them win, anyway. Except the anti-zos, but they like it anyway because they’re taking orders from a human.”
“What do you know about the zoans?”
Shrug. “They’re big. Grouch calls them ‘Left’ and ‘Right,’ and they keep their mouths shut. And neither drinks.”
Geir chewed on that for a while. Cranberry didn’t have any other information for him, about Grouch’s affiliations or history. A few other faces Geir had picked out were small-time mobsters, known police informants, or had ties to other revolutionary groups. No one in the ZF’s official structure was showing their face these days.
“—and if anybody calls themself ZF to your face, don’t believe them,” Cranberry added. “There’ve been a couple attacks in the last few days that they supposedly took credit for, but they were obvious mob hits.”
“Could be real,” Geir suggested. “They have to get funding from somewhere.”
“Yeah. You know,” Cranberry said before he had to attend to other patrons. “I was thinking I’d buy you a drink—but if you’re poking at Grouch, I’m not sure I can put myself in the crosshairs like that.”
Geir smiled apologetically.
“How it goes,” he said.
“Yeah. Good luck, babe.”