Dyantyi’s leg bounced against the booth he was sitting in. Grainy black coffee sat untouched before him, long since lukewarm. Outside the diner, Lennox was still asleep in the car, completely drained after their latest operation: an Apostle that had flatly refused to die, an ambush job that should have taken five minutes but had stretched into an hours-long onslaught that had cost them one of their own elite.

  He stared at the phone before him like it was a bomb. Dyantyi had been this close to actual bombs before, had been in situations where his death or torture were more than just scant possibilities, but his nerves hadn’t been this shot in years.

  He had news to deliver. Bad news.

  God, he hoped Maldonado wasn’t there when Rai called him. Hopefully she was out and busy wiretapping retirees or stalking teenagers or whatever it was she was always up to. God, even just the thought of her insufferable smirk as he delivered maybe the most humiliating field report he’d ever been unfortunate enough to give, it made him want to-

  The phone buzzed. He answered after the first chime.

  “Morning,” Rai said, flat voice flattened further by the burner phone’s cheap speakers. “How many did we get?”

  Dyantyi’s answer caught in his throat. He wrestled with angles, ways to portray the news without coming across as totally incompetent.

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  “Dyantyi,” she warned. “Out with it. Your men miss a few?”

  “We got none.”

  A silence like a stab in the gut.

  “Explain.”

  “None of our operatives were successful. Not totally-”

  “Meaning?”

  Dyantyi rubbed his face. He hadn’t slept in well over 24 hours. “Maldonado’s intel was good. We couldn’t quite track down the invisible one, but we found her house. We had locations and angles all ready by five AM. All four direct assaults happened between five and eight, with the bomb we set going off around noon.”

  “But none of your Murderers pulled it off?”

  “No, they did.” Dyantyi fiddled with a salt shaker. His hands were shaking. With rage or anxiety, he couldn’t quite tell. “They did. They killed all five.”

  “Then what’s the issue?”

  Dyantyi looked back out the window, toward the truck Lennox was visibly snoring in the passenger seat of. There was a dent on the front bumper, where Dyantyi had run down and pinned an Apostle to a wall. Lennox had finished the quarry off by throwing a parking meter through the man’s head.

  The world he was living in was insane. He felt unmoored.

  “Dyantyi? Answer me.”

  “They died. All five,” he said. “But they didn’t stay dead.”