The neighborhood Janni had calculated as Puce’s location wasn’t the worst in town, but it was bad enough that Samstag parked a few blocks out.

Or, considering two of the eighteen passersby glanced at the vehicle and reacted as if they recognized it as public security, maybe Samstag had another reason for having them walk the rest of the way. But why would Puce—or whomever she was tracking, if it wasn’t Puce—even think public security a threat, in this somewhen?

“Can’t be too careful,” Samstag commented. He must’ve either read her body language or been a higher grade sensate than his lack of training suggested, because he added, “If this is the same guy that we tracked down two years ago, he left a high body count when we moved in—and an even higher one in the sabotage and bombs he planted on our gear.”

A suspicion niggled at Janni. Not anything she could identify or name, not yet, but she glanced to his seared fingertips and suspected her subconscious was on the verge of piecing something together. “So we’re here to do what, precisely?”

Samstag took her hand, body casual as if they were a pair of lovers out for a stroll, though he never quite lost the poise that read as ‘I’m a public security officer.’ Eh, well. She wasn’t any form of law enforcement.

Janni was psy-positive enough to be able to apply her abilities as a merger to more than just the effects of jumping, but making her aura more noticeable or someone else’s less so wasn’t something she’d practiced. Trying now, when she was hunting a white shadow of uncertain abilities, seemed foolish. She didn’t know what kind of mod Puce was, but with how he’d neutered TamLin so effectively and promptly upon their entering the somewhen in which she usually lived, he had to be something nasty.

She hoped he wasn’t an executioner. The fiasco with Kitten’s big sister had provided electrocution enough for the week. Janni’d taken enough regen shots to heal the physical damage, but advanced executioners could disrupt more neurons than just pain receptors, and that didn’t repair so easily.

Nev had been designed to be advanced—not grade black, but well past grade yellow. Janni’s own version of her had just been unwilling to use her ability, but she’d at least started with a grade-red baseline, and training enough to avoid using it on accident had brought her up to a purple or blue, depending on how agitated she was, so she’d have been a blue or green, had she actually specialized in it.

Come to think of it, that meant Kitten’s version of Nev might well have been a grade black. Raw power wasn’t the only thing the tests checked, so someone with the intelligence and skill to maneuver to provide what the test wanted rather than pummel their way through it could still meet the classification requirements. Power just made it a hell of a lot easier.

Thus why Janni had intentionally failed classification tests for as long as she could remember.

She had the ability to be a grade-black merger—and obviously so, since she found it so easy to merge times-of-origin and universes-of-origin and bio-identities in general to match whatever she wanted. But the possibility of her being a grade-black merger had excited others to such an extreme degree that it had left a bad taste in Janni’s mouth and made her terrified of being what they wanted.

She suspected that she’d been meant to be part of others’ escape plan—and TamLin had been meant to be her jailer—but thinking about that made her angry with her parents, and that made her uncomfortable, so she didn’t let herself think about it often. It was much of why she refused to go back home, though. What if they were waiting for her with inhibitors and sedatives to get her under control to force her to get them out, too? They’d know what would work on her particular cocktail of biological modifications.

Janni consciously relaxed herself, mimicking how TamLin adjusted his own body language in these situations, and adjusted her position with Samstag so he had an arm around her shoulders and she was snuggled against his shoulder, thus helping him hide his tells. “So…why does someone decide to become a nonentity in service to their government?”

Samstag accepted their new position, but the glance he angled down at her was more evaluating than amused. “I told you my name.”

She shrugged. “The one you’re currently using, sure, but those fingerprints didn’t sear off by themselves.”

He glanced to his fingertips and gave a soft chuckle that was little more than a bit of air to tickle her ear. “Would you believe that was a cooking accident?”

“No,” Janni answered promptly, before she realized he read as ‘honest’ to her psy-sensitivity. “Okay, maybe. If you actually stated that as the cause rather than as a question meant to imply it’s the cause.”

He flashed her an outright grin. “Now, where’s the fun in that?”

And he spun to put his back to the alley they were passing, took a step back away from her, and drew her along by her hand as if he’d never had ‘public security’ tells to begin with.

Yeah, he was soooo covert ops.