Chapter 93 SRC Recruitment [Amelia Morose]

“Formerly known as Tigress, Amelia Morose, twenty years old. Member of the Markend Watch. Did I get that right?” said the interviewer, a balding man in his 30s. “Hmmm… You are awfully young to think of applying for SRC Operations. We’ll make it work.”

I sat straighter in the hard plastic chair and tried not to let my knees show how fast they were shaking. The fluorescent light made the interviewer’s eyes look cheap and patient. “I need the job,” I said plainly. “A-And yes, you got that right…”

“You are applying for this Eclipse hunt, is that right? And what makes you think you are qualified for the job when your team already failed to capture him? As for you? You failed to do it twice.”

Heat ran up my neck. I tasted iron on the back of my tongue, equal parts shame and anger. “We only had two encounters,” I snapped. “He’s a slippery bastard. It doesn’t mean I won’t catch him the third time.”

Saying that out loud steadied me a little. It was the truth and a promise at the same time. The reason I applied wasn’t glory. It wasn’t ideology. Windbreaker had his vengeance, Leverage had her press-ready sob story, and a daddy who could buy her a reputation. I had nothing like that. My team had been disbanded. Watch kids like me were being shunted out onto the pavement, some of us back to college, some looking for temp work, some doing things you didn’t put on a resume.

Me? I’d chosen the SRC slot because it was a paycheck and a direction. If they wanted brains and noses and stubbornness, I had it. I’d been Tigress for a long time before the marker took the rest of my patrol away. I knew how to hunt the kind of prey that didn’t want to be found.

“The Council of City-States has a wealth of Shifter-class capes. Why do we have to choose you, specifically?”

I folded my hands in my lap. I’d prepared for this a dozen ways in the last week, but answers feel different in your head than when they have to escape your mouth. I started with the simple things first.

“I have a very good nose,” I said. “Better than most canines.” I watched him wait for a flourish, and I didn’t give him one. I had paperwork from certificates, records, and training logs, but the man in front of me tapped a pen and waved them away.

“No need. Just answer the question.”

So I did. “If you know tigers, we don’t use scent as our primary tool.” I let the image fill the quiet. “I’m built different. I can smell colors… sounds strange until you’ve tracked a hive of brutes by the copper tang of fear on a summer wind. I have a sixth sense that edges into the supernatural. I’ve honed my detective skills under my father from years of watching and learning how people lie to fill holes in their stories. Most important: I’ve encountered Eclipse twice, and I lived. Surviving him twice is not a failure. That insight, my insight, could be useful in ways your standard trackers aren’t.”

The room held its breath like it had time to waste. I could feel the weight of the building through the chair: the SRC’s patience, the city’s memory, the files on a hundred other capes who’d come through this exact room and left either promoted or paraded out.

Finally, the interviewer tapped his folder closed and looked at me like he’d been given what he needed. “You can go to the next room,” he said. “Congratulations and good luck, welcome to Operations.”

The next room smelled faintly of stale coffee and floor wax, and my first instinct was to scan for threats. Habit. My eyes landed on someone who wasn’t a stranger.

“Amelia!” A voice chirped, too warm for this grim setting. “You passed!”

It was Leverage.

Her brunette hair was done up neat, her cardigan crisp, and her posture perfect. She carried herself like she belonged here. Next to her, I felt like a kid caught sneaking into a grown-up’s party, me in my old sweater, scuffed shoes, and the faint smell of bus rides still clinging to my clothes. I hated admitting it, but she had that kind of presence that made me feel… smaller. Which was ironic, considering I was supposed to be two years older than her.

I gave a half-nod. “So, Windbreaker didn’t make the cut?”

I glanced around while asking. Only four of us in the room, four chairs spaced just so. No more, no less. Open positions, filled.

One man wore sunglasses indoors and leaned on a cane like it was an extension of his body. Another sat with a Rubik’s cube, his bowler hat tilted low. I knew the bowler. Wormhole. Dad mentioned him once in late-night conversations he thought I didn’t hear. Wormhole had been in the Malufan. That was the mission where two Vanguard capes died. Eclipse had been there, too, if the rumors held any weight.

Patterns were forming, ugly ones. Me, Leverage, Wormhole. All of us had crossed Eclipse at some point. I couldn’t shake the suspicion sunglasses had, too.

Leverage tilted her head, cardigan swaying slightly as she turned back to me. “Yeah. Windbreaker didn’t make it… Something about his history, probably…”

I shrugged, but my voice carried more edge than I meant. “Must suck to be him.”

I didn’t care for Windbreaker, not really. He was arrogant, a prick who thought the world bent under his gusts. But his life had been gutted. His dad, the truth, all of it rotting from the inside out. Even I couldn’t ignore how that must have felt. What would it do to me if I learned Dad had been a murderer, a conspirator with gangs?

No wonder Windbreaker hated Eclipse. Maybe more than anyone.

I sank into the chair, sweater rough against my skin, pretending I didn’t care. The door opened, followed by the heavy thump of his boots.

A man older than the others by at least two decades, maybe early fifties, walked in front of us. A trench coat hung off him like a permanent shadow. His jaw was sharp, lines etched deep across his face, the kind that told you he’d seen more than one kind of war. His eyes scanned the four of us with appraisal. He didn’t waste time.

“Name’s John Wolfe,” he said, voice clipped, cold, and professional. “I’m your acting leader in the duration of the job. Nice to meet you.”

I heard my father praise the man before I ever met him. Over beer and cigarettes he’d talk about John Wolfe like, a kind of killer the SRC used when polite methods ran out. Sitting in the same room as him felt like breathing close to a blade. I didn’t know whether to be honored or terrified. Then I remembered what we were here for: a murderer hunts a murderer better than a group of idealists ever could.

John didn’t waste time with airs. “You will meet the rest of your team some other time,” he said. “I sent them on an errand. But first, introductions. No given names. Just your cape aliases. As for me, I don’t have any, so just call me John. Let’s start with you, kitty cat.”

I straightened in my seat, heat rising. “I am no—” I swallowed a snarl and tried again with something steadier. “Don’t call me that. I used to go by Tigress in the Watch. I’m a Tiger Shifter with a powerful olfactory sense. I’ve had two run-ins with Eclipse. I’m useful because I know his tangles and where his scent flattens. Nice to meet you.”

Leverage smiled the kind of smile practiced in magazines. “Hello! I’m Leverage. I worked with Tigress in the Watch, and I also encountered Eclipse.”

A man with sunglasses and an old cane pushed himself up, the light catching the lenses so they threw reflections like broken glass. He spoke with a smug tilt. “Call me Guesswork. I’m blind, but I’m good at patterns… really good. Humble brag. I, too, have had an encounter with Eclipse, or at least with his new alias, the Courier.”

Courier. The name landed like a cold drop. Eclipse had rebranded. He’d slipped a new skin on himself and maybe, if Guesswork was right, a new range. Another City-State. The Lawless. I tried to picture him, Nicholas Caldwell or something, just as edgy as Eclipse or whatever titles men like that took, and felt the old knot of anger at the back of my throat.

Wormhole muttered in disdain. “Great. So we’ve got two little girls, a blind man, and outdated intel. Is this really worth it?”

John’s voice cut through the murmur like a blade. “Introductions.”

Wormhole snorted, rolling his Rubik’s cube with slow contempt. “Bah. Fine. Call me Wormhole. I was in the Malufan when I first ran into Eclipse. He slaughtered my team. I’m the only one who came out of that alive.” He didn’t look for sympathy. He didn’t want it.

John steepled his fingers, eyes on everyone in the room. “Good. See? It’s not that hard.”

“Now talk to us, John… why us?” asked Wormhole.

John’s answer was short and ruthless. “Recent confrontations showed Eclipse has grown stronger. He killed half my team, including the last task leader, Paperbag.”

A cold surge went through me. Paperbag, dead. Of course, I knew the name. She was a rockstar among SRC capes, considering how precious psychics were to the point they avoided sending them to the field. But Paperbag had been the exception.

“No way,” I said before I could stop myself. “Isn’t that too much?”

John didn’t blink. “I chose all of you with care. Your prior runs against him were useful, but not the only reason. In our last engagement, we found a lot of success using long-range weaponry. I plan to equip you, Leverage, with a sniper rifle and nullifier-rated rounds. Do you have experience with them?”

“Yes,” answered Leverage. “I know how to shoot a sniper rifle.”

John glanced at the man with the sunglasses. “Guesswork isn’t an SRC agent, officially, but his connections are useful. He brings access I don’t have.”

My skin prickled. Guesswork. I didn’t like the way those dark lenses caught the light and turned it away. I hoped I wasn’t looking too much into it, but there was something bizarre with Guesswork, and I just couldn’t pinpoint it.

John turned to Wormhole. “You’ll provide mobility. Our teleporter just died. You’re highly rated, too valuable to waste, so please don’t die on me, Wormhole.”

“Whatever,” Wormhole muttered. “Just don’t give me orders that could get me killed.”

“And Tigress,” John said finally, looking at me with an odd, measured intensity. “You’re important because you do something no one else does. See, Eclipse doesn’t sweat. That’s not just trivia. It made tracking him impossible in Markend post-incident. The SRC sent every Shifter we had into that city… combs, forensics, the lot… and they barely reconstructed his path. You’re the only recorded Shifter able to keep pace with and track his scent. If we had someone like you last time we confronted him, we might have pinned him down and made sure he couldn’t disappear.”

I never expected to be burdened with such expectations, but I would strive to meet them.

John’s face hardened. “This operation will be dangerous,” he said, the warning heavy and plain. “But it’s not just Eclipse you need to worry about.”

All eyes shifted.

“It’s the Ten,” he said. “They’re a mercenary network, call them the Nth Contract if you like. They don’t refuse jobs. They’ve been quietly inserting themselves where the payoff is highest. Our intelligence indicates they have designs on recruiting Eclipse. If the Ten get him, he becomes a force multiplier for them, someone who can phase and move through defenses at range. The ideal scenario for us is to prevent that recruitment. Kill Eclipse outright if you must. If he’s eliminated, the Ten will look elsewhere, and our political fallout will be minimized. Letting him live risks him becoming a strategic asset for an organization that plays by no rules.”

John wheeled in a battered projector as he proceeded to talk without ceremony, words clipped and exact. “We underestimated Caldwell’s empathic bandwidth. He uses empathy to map intent and intangibility to make violence surgical. Our last taskforce paid for that mistake. Paperbag is dead; we lost half the team. The images you are about to see are the levels of violence Eclipse is capable of, some taken from Markend, others from the aftermath of his destruction in the lawless.”

Images flicked across the screen from photos of wreckage, burnt-out vehicles, and a house collapsed inward. Then the pictures shifted to victims: silhouettes, torn clothing, bodies piled where a fight had been. One image made my mouth go dry. It was a Shifter with his skin stripped raw, the cloth of his jacket hanging like a rag. I’d seen violence before, but this lodged somewhere deeper. Melee was my language; I read close, smelled sweat and breath and fear. To see what intangibility could do to a body unsettled something old and steady in my nerves.

John’s voice layered over it all. “Threat rating: Intangibility—nine. Empathy—six. Enhancer—five. Remember, we are dealing with a dangerous cape here, so I want you to exercise utter caution when confronting him.”

The next slide showed a map of a lawless town, streets burned like veins, and the caption read Eclipse: Wreckage Pattern. John tapped the screen. “This is the kind of aftermath you’ll be walking into. When we engaged him, long-range work gave us the best chance to survive.”

He turned to us. “Has anyone here killed before?” The question was quite sudden.

I found myself raising my hand before I could think about what it meant.

Leverage avoided my eyes. The way she shifted told me the rest that she’d done damage before, and she didn’t want me to see it. A cold twist threaded through my chest at the revelation; people I thought I knew had depths I didn’t know about.

“A-Awesome… I am the only non-murderer in the club…”

And she was supposed to be a ‘tiger’ of all things.

John’s stare focused on me. “Encountering Eclipse will be a matter of life and death,” he said plainly. “You’re free to leave now. If you stay, you must commit.”

Commit. The word drilled into me, and there was a simplicity to it that soothed as much as it scared. My father had always said there were trades a person had to make, dirt for roof, loyalty for coin, and violence for being useful. I thought of him then in more honest ways than memory usually allowed: the way he had taught me to read a room, to make deductions, and to know responsibility. This was what would make him proud. This was what would let me bring money back, real money you could pay rent with, not the kind scraped from odd jobs and orders.

“I can handle it,” I said. “I will learn.”

By the end of the briefing, my head still buzzed with the images John had forced us to look at from blood, skin, wreckage, and everything Eclipse left in his wake. When the others dispersed, John’s voice cut through the shuffle.

“Tigress. With me.”

I stood, stiff but obedient. I followed. The sound of my boots against the tiled floor echoed down the corridor. Before we reached the end, Leverage jogged after us, her tone almost eager.

“Can I come along?”

John glanced back at her, then shrugged. “I don’t mind.”

The room we entered wasn’t a standard evidence locker. It looked more like a half-finished lab with stainless steel counters, rows of sealed containers, and the faint chemical sting of preservatives in the air. A monitor hummed low in one corner.

John walked straight to a cabinet and pulled out a plastic evidence bag. He set it on the table and unsealed it. Inside was fabric. Pajamas, just the pants.

The moment he spread them on the table, my nose caught the faintest ghost of something unpleasant. Then I saw the stain near the crotch. My face twisted instinctively.

Leverage leaned forward, head tilted, eyes curious. “Wait. Did he, like, pee on it? While he was asleep?”

Her tone was almost childlike.

John didn’t even smirk. “I suspect Eclipse doesn’t sleep.”

“What’s the stain?” I asked, braving my way to danger. “It’s… ugh…”

John’s tone was coldly factual, the way one might recite the results of a blood test. “We suspect it’s ejaculate. DNA testing confirmed as much.”

I grimaced, recoiling slightly. “You want me to smell that to track him?”

John finally cracked a grin, one that didn’t quite reach his eyes. He leaned a hand against the table and looked between the two of us. “Memorize the scent, Tigress. We don’t know when we’ll need it. This is the best lead we’ve got.”

Oh, come on… Fuck!