The train to Melbourne took ten hours.

  Rex did not mind. He had always been comfortable with waiting. It was one of the few things the years of having nothing had actually given him, the ability to sit with time and not flinch at how slow it moved.

  He had a window seat. Outside, Sydney dissolved into highway and then into the long flat stretches of countryside that existed between cities, the parts of Australia that did not make it into postcards. He watched it go without really seeing it.

  The red power sat inside him the way it always sat. Low and present. A fire that had learned to bank itself without going out.

  He had been hearing a voice lately.

  Not external. Nothing that would have made the people around him edge away in their seats. Something interior, a pressure at the back of his thoughts that arrived in the shape of urges rather than words. Get stronger. Move. Find the next thing. Push past whatever ceiling you just hit because there is another one above it and another one above that and stopping is the only real failure.

  Rex had decided it was his own ambition finally having room to breathe.

  He had spent most of his life in a box. Quirkless in a world built around quirks, which was its own particular kind of invisible. Not the dramatic disadvantage people wrote articles about. Just the daily accumulation of doors that did not open, tables you were not invited to sit at, the particular way people's eyes moved past you when the conversation turned to what you could do.

  He had learned to be useful in other ways. Smart. Observant. Willing to do the work that people with quirks considered beneath them. That willingness had eventually led him to Melbourne and to the organization and to the worst time of his life.

  He leaned his head against the window and let the memory come. He had stopped fighting it a long time ago.

  He had been twenty one. Broke in the specific way that meant counting coins for the bus and eating once a day and telling himself it was temporary with less conviction every week.

  Someone had found him. That was how it always started with organizations like that. They found you when you were low enough to be grateful for the finding.

  The man's name was Creed. Medium height, forgettable face, the kind of person whose quirk was apparently the ability to seem reasonable. He had bought Rex a meal, which was the most effective recruitment tool in the world for someone who had been eating once a day, and explained the opportunity.

  Simple work. Carrying. Delivering. Running messages between people who did not want to be seen communicating directly. Nothing that would bring attention. Nothing that required a quirk. Just reliability and discretion, both of which Rex had in abundance.

  The pay was modest but it was real and it arrived on time and for eight months Rex had told himself this was temporary, just until something better appeared, just until he had enough saved to move somewhere and start something legitimate.

  He had been good at the work. Too good.

  Good enough that they started giving him more of it. More responsibility. More access. More knowledge of the operation than someone at his level was supposed to have.

  He understood too late what that meant.

  The night it ended he had been summoned to a meeting he thought was about a promotion. Instead there were four of them waiting in a back room of a warehouse in a Melbourne suburb and Creed was not among them, which told Rex everything he needed to know approximately three seconds too late to do anything useful with the information.

  They did not use their quirks. That was the part that had stayed with him. They had beaten him with their hands, methodically and without particular anger, the way you performed a necessary task. He had fought back. He was not small and he had learned early how to take care of himself in a physical confrontation. It had not mattered.

  When it was over he was on the floor of the warehouse and one of them crouched down and told him in a conversational tone that he had seen too much, that the money he was owed was forfeit as a severance arrangement, and that if he was seen in Melbourne again the next conversation would be shorter and end differently.

  Then they left.

  He had lain on that floor for a long time.

  Not because he could not move. Because he needed a moment to decide what kind of person he was going to be after this. Whether this was the thing that broke him or the thing that changed him.

  He had decided it was the second one.

  It had taken years. Years of Sydney and rebuilding from nothing and swallowing the memory every time it surfaced because he had no power to do anything with it yet.

  Yet.

  The countryside outside the window had given way to the outer edges of Melbourne, the sprawl of suburbs that preceded every large city like an announcement.

  Rex straightened in his seat.

  The voice at the back of his mind was louder now. Not words. Just pressure. A current running through him that felt like anticipation, like something being aimed.

  He had the thought, briefly, that the feeling was almost too convenient. That it had appeared exactly when he needed direction and pointed him exactly where he already wanted to go.

  He dismissed the thought.

  Of course it felt convenient. That was what it felt like when your circumstances finally aligned with your intentions. That was what it felt like when you stopped being powerless.

  The train began to slow.

  Rex picked up the small bag at his feet and stood and felt the red power settle through him like something finding its footing.

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  He had waited long enough.

  Melbourne was going to remember him.

  Melbourne hit him the moment he stepped off the train.

  Not the city itself. The feeling of it. Eight years had passed and the streets had changed and the faces were all different but something underneath all of that had not moved at all, the particular weight of a place where something bad had happened to you, sitting in the air like a smell you had forgotten you remembered.

  The rage came with it. Old and quiet and very patient.

  Rex walked through the station with his bag over one shoulder and his hands in his pockets and let the feeling settle through him without fighting it. He had carried it for eight years. He knew its shape by now.

  He took a cheap room in a hostel near the city center, paid cash, and spent the first night sitting on the edge of the bed with the red light moving slowly under his skin while Melbourne went about its evening outside the window.

  In the morning he started looking for Creed.

  Three days.

  That was how long it took, which told Rex something useful. Creed was not hiding. A man who was hiding did not leave a trail that took three days to find. He left a trail that took three weeks or three months or no trail at all. Three days meant Creed felt safe. Meant he had been comfortable long enough to stop being careful.

  Rex worked methodically. The neighborhoods he remembered. The bars and restaurants where the organization had conducted its visible business. The people who existed on the edges of that world and noticed things and could be persuaded to share what they noticed with the right combination of patience and implied consequence.

  On the fourth day a name came up attached to an address in a suburb that Rex remembered as modest and had apparently become something else in the intervening years.

  He took a bus. Sat in the back. Watched the neighborhood change around him as they moved further from the center, the buildings getting larger and further apart, the cars parked on the streets shifting from practical to expensive.

  Creed got out of a restaurant as Rex's bus passed the intersection.

  Rex saw him through the window.

  Eight years. Creed had put on weight in the way comfortable men put on weight, not sloppiness but substance, the physical evidence of regular meals and no serious stress. He was wearing a suit that cost more than Rex's first three months of wages at the organization combined. He was laughing at something his companion had said with the easy laugh of a man who had not thought about that Melbourne warehouse in a very long time.

  Rex watched him get into a car and did not move.

  He noted the direction.

  He got off at the next stop.

  The house was in a neighborhood where the properties had names instead of numbers and the hedges were trimmed by people paid specifically to trim them. A large gate. Security cameras at the corners. Two guards visible from the street and the architectural suggestion of more inside.

  Rex stood across the road in the shadow of a tree and looked at it for a while.

  The red power moved through him, reading the layout the way it read everything now, the sight lines, the timing of the patrol pattern, the specific placement of the cameras and the gaps between them.

  It took effort. More than he would have preferred. The security was professional in a way that suggested Creed had paid for advice from someone who knew what they were doing.

  Rex went in anyway.

  The first guard did not make a sound. The second had time to reach for his radio before Rex was already past him. The two inside the house went quickly, the red power making each movement precise and final, enough force to end the problem without ending the man.

  He left them breathing.

  He moved through the house without turning on lights. It was a good house. The kind that had been decorated by someone with taste and a significant budget. Original art on the walls. Furniture that had been chosen rather than bought. The accumulated evidence of a man who had decided he deserved beautiful things and had acquired them without apparent difficulty.

  Rex wondered how many warehouses it had taken.

  Creed was in the bathroom when he felt it.

  He could not have said what it was exactly. Not a sound. Not a movement. Something else, the particular prickling unease of a house that had changed its quality around you without announcing the change.

  He got out of the bath fast. Grabbed a robe. Crossed to the door and opened it and called for his guards with the sharp authority of a man accustomed to being answered immediately.

  Silence answered him instead.

  The kind of silence that had a shape to it.

  Creed was not a foolish man. He had not reached his current position by ignoring the moments when something felt wrong. He moved toward the bedroom, toward the safe inside the wardrobe, toward the weapon inside the safe.

  He made it as far as the hallway.

  The living room door opened.

  The man standing in it was large and very still and wrapped in a red light that moved across his skin like something alive. The light threw strange shadows across the hallway walls, shifting and restless.

  Creed did not recognize him.

  "Who are you?" he said. His voice was steady. He had practiced steady for a long time.

  "You bought me a meal," Rex said. "Eight years ago. You told me it was an opportunity."

  The steadiness left Creed's voice.

  It did not leave all at once. It drained, the way color drained from a face, gradually and then completely.

  "Rex," he said.