Chapter 97 Terms & Quotas

It had been several days since I’d signed on with the Nth Contract. Tenfold Keep felt less like a hideout and more like an office where the employees happened to be homicidal. I kept busy, wood, paint, screws, and sweat. I ripped up warped floorboards, sanded and stained new planks until my palms ached, dragged in a couch that smelled new, and hung a threadbare rug over a stain I didn’t want to look at. I stole a pickup because walking a truckload of salvage across the compound was stupid and slow; theft was faster when you accepted you had to be a little less proud. The towns I’d hit for parts were getting jumpy with faces watching me longer, the same pair of eyes following me out of a market, so I had to push farther afield and learn new routes. The irony didn’t escape me: I used to call myself Courier, and now I stole trucks for a living.

Onyx popped up with a pleased snarl. “So, Eclipse is back?”

Silver blinked, cheeks flushed, and then attempted to defend me like some anxious cheerleader. “Honestly, the name sounds corny. Courier sounded more… awesome. B-But Eclipse is fine too!”

Rather than defend me, she instead unleashed a friendly fire upon me. Ouch.

“Ugh,” I said. “It’s fine… I regretted every day, using ‘Eclipse’ as my name of all things, but it just fits perfectly back then, you know? Killer of the sun, Eclipse?”

The rustle of the suit hit me, a newly pressed jacket, a tie tucked, and a fedora on my head. I’d dropped the porcelain mask. Masks were theatre; I needed something that fit like a second skin and came off when it had to. I kept the fedora, though. Practical was still my favorite kind of style. If I wanted, I could phase a tiny charge or two into its lining with careful and selective intangibility so the hardware didn’t burn my hair, but that was a plan for later, once I found a reliable supplier.

Silver, embarrassingly sincere, mumbled, “I… didn’t mean it. Y-you look very… cool. Handsome.” Her voice stuttered out like a kid who’d been given sugar. Onyx laughed, delighted, and struck a pose that made me want to hit something or hug her, I wasn’t sure which.

Clothes had been an exercise in reinvention. I imagined the suit as armor with clean lines to hide seams where I’d phase things in. The tie could be more than a decoration. I toyed with the idea of a woven nanofiber, thin and rigid at will, that could slice when pulled tight. A sword-tie was gimmicky, but when combined with my intangibility, it might be practical: make it intangible, loop it, snap it solid through a throat. Beads, though, that was where I placed my money. Small, hard projectiles, pockets full of them; phase them through flesh at weird angles. Laced with chemicals from Flak’s stash, such as corrosives and poisons, you could make someone’s insides surrender without much fuss. Cards would stay in my arsenal; they flew true, covered area, distracted, and tore when they landed against vulnerable angles. I’d use cards for misdirection and beads for real work.

Onyx’s idea voice floated, puckish. “Use the fedora as a stash. A little C4 would be poetic. Or maybe a claymore? Does a Claymore fit into a fedora? Hmmm…” I shrugged away a grin. The thought of explosives inside my hat was deliciously reckless. I would only phase anything that volatile if I absolutely had to, since phasing explosives back into solidity had an ugly habit of going sideways.

In fact, the pocket nuke back in Markend had been a very close call.

The practical part of me catalogued needed upgrades: better beads, stealth coatings, a supplier for more stuff, and a discreet ammo source that wouldn’t trigger Ning’s attention logs. Hmmm… I’d need a trump card if I have a sudden urge to turn against the Ten. Bunnyblade hummed in the corner like an impatient librarian, eager for hardware I couldn’t yet afford. My super bike also needed its upgrades.

I was elbow-deep in thinking about my gear when the speaker by the door chirped, soft, feminine tone, cultured and deliberate, like a woman reading a very private menu. It paged my name.

“Nicholas Caldwell, Eclipse, Mrs. Mind requests your presence in her office. Now.”

Bunnyblade’s voice crackled from the couch speaker, flat but laced with a faint concern. “Be careful out there, okay? Also, remember to hide your girlfriends in front of telepaths or empaths. They might not be able to see them, but they’ll know something’s off around you. Empathic flux like that tends to spook people. We can’t be too careful, after all. We still don’t know if your girlfriends are a byproduct of your empathy... or just hallucinations.”

The bike’s new cameras adjusted on the TV like eyes, tracking the flicker of color across the screen. He looked absurdly domestic, parked behind the sofa like a mechanical guard dog. For a walking armory, he had a real knack for playing couch potato.

Onyx crossed her arms and pouted, clearly insulted by being called imaginary. “Wow, Bunny, rude much? Hallucination? Really?”

Silver, ever the gentle one, sighed and brushed imaginary dust off her dress. “Let’s go, Onyx. Also, Nick… behave during the lunch meeting, okay? Don’t make a scene.”

Onyx groaned. “Yes, Mom, we hear you.” Then, quick as a flicker, she rushed up and planted a kiss on my cheek, a sly grin tugging at her lips.

Silver gasped. “No fair!” She followed immediately, leaning in to kiss my other cheek before vanishing in a shimmer of static light.

I couldn’t help it. My mouth twitched into a grin. It was ridiculous, I knew. They weren’t real, at least not in the traditional sense, but damn if they didn’t feel that way sometimes.

Women competing for my attention really tickled my brain in the wrong ways.

Bunnyblade’s speakers snapped sharply. “What are you grinning for, idiot? Go. Your lady boss is waiting for you.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I muttered, pulling my jacket straight.

I walked into the elevator, pressed the elevator button, and when the doors slid open with a low hiss, I stepped inside and hit the tenth floor.

The elevator jolted slightly and stopped on the ninth floor. The doors hissed open, and chaos greeted me.

The floor was a sprawling lab of clutter and motion with wires hanging like tangled vines, screens flickering with data, and the air thick with ozone and machine oil. Young men in lab coats zipped from one contraption to another, juggling tools and muttering numbers under their breath. Every single one of them had white hair. Not bleached, but white, like snow and ash.

I stepped one foot out, peering into the mayhem.

From what I’d heard, this building wasn’t ordinary. It was tinker-tech, ancient, self-repairing, and with internal systems capable of teleportation and invisibility. The founders of the Nth Contract had repurposed it decades ago. There were no stairs, only this elevator, reprogrammed to access floors directly tied to their owners.

Meaning, every time I stopped, I was walking into someone’s kingdom.

A young man approached me, arms stacked high with folders. He looked about my age, with sharp eyes, pale skin, and that unbothered academic calm you only saw in the terminally sleep-deprived. Except, he wasn’t exactly my age. He was probably older than me by a few centuries.

Dr. Clint “Sequence” Windsor. Alias: Dr. Sequence.

Not as notorious as Ning or Dullahan, but his name came up in whispers through old SRC records. A Replicator-5 and Researcher-9. That “9” alone made him a monster in his own right. A genius. The kind of genius who could design a weapon that could end a city-state, or accidentally destroy it trying.

He shifted his papers and grinned like a man who’d just crawled out of a week-long caffeine bender. “Greetings! You must be Eclipse! I believe we haven’t met yet.” He raised one elbow to balance his folders and waved. “Nice to meet you. I’m often stuck in this hellhole of progress, slaving tirelessly for our tyrant overlord! So forgive me, if I hadn’t given you my salutations!”

Without missing a beat, he flipped off a ceiling camera.

I blinked. “Nice to meet you too. Though, uh, I don’t think it’s wise to call our boss a tyrant overlord.” And for the record, he was actually the first member of the Ten I met, with the exception of Ning and Dullahan.

Dr. Sequence scoffed, half-laughing. “That’s because you haven’t experienced yet how demanding she gets when it comes to work! I once got an entire week’s worth of ‘suggestions’ about how I could improve the efficiency of my sleep schedule!”

He dropped a stack of folders on a nearby table and muttered, “I haven’t slept in four days. So yeah, tyrant overlord fits.”

Inside my head, I felt a familiar hum of Onyx’s voice, sly and amused. “Ask him if he’s a bad person. If he says yes, punch him. Easy moral clarity.”

“Onyx! You can’t just, he seems nice!”

“Seems is the keyword, darling. White hair, creepy lab, self-proclaimed servant of a tyrant—classic villain material!”

I rubbed my temple, exhaling slowly. “You two need to shut it before I have a headache.”

Dr. Sequence glanced at me oddly, probably noticing I’d muttered to myself, then shrugged and returned to minding his business. “Can you please, uuh… give me more space? I hate physical contact. And can we please keep going? I am on time… Or do you not want me to wait for you?”

I stepped back into the elevator and pressed the tenth floor button a second time and third time as if spamming ten would somehow magically make it faster..

Finally, we reached the tenth floor.

Dr. Sequence strutted out the moment the elevator doors opened, his lab coat flaring behind him like a cape. I followed at a slower pace, my boots clicking against the sleek metal floor. The corridor stretched ahead, lined with tinted glass walls that hid rooms I didn’t want to see. I could’ve phased through the floors and gone straight to Mrs. Mind’s office, but walking felt… safer. Less like I was prying into her secrets.

Besides, whatever Mrs. Mind kept behind those sealed doors, I didn’t want to risk witnessing it. I’d seen enough horrors in this building already, like the brains in jars and the darn sex dungeon.

Dr. Sequence led the way, muttering about forms, funding, and something about “psychic tyranny.” His voice carried just loud enough to annoy every security camera on the ceiling. When we reached the end of the hallway, a set of translucent glass doors slid open with a hiss. The room beyond was too quiet.

Before I could even take another step, Dr. Sequence stormed in like a man possessed and dropped a thick stack of papers and folders on her desk. The sound echoed through the room like a gunshot.

“These are the requisitions I require!” he declared, voice cracking halfway between exhaustion and pride. “Sign them, and I will continue with my duties—”

Mrs. Mind didn’t even blink. Her eyes were cold, silver mirrors that reflected the light… and him. “You’re already in the red with me, Windsor. You’d better not waste my time. Do your job properly—”

“I am doing my job!” he snapped, tone rising like a child talking back to a parent. “Just tell me when’s the next assignment.”

Mrs. Mind exhaled through her nose, more annoyed than impressed.

Dr. Sequence turned to me suddenly, his expression brightening as if we were old friends. “As for you, Eclipse,” he said, wagging a finger, “I’ll give you a fifteen percent discount on my services for the next three months! Take advantage of it… and no, don’t try to cheat me like the last time Pervert colluded with Thirdhand, thinking I wouldn’t notice they funneled their orders through him!”

I blinked. “I… didn’t even—”

But before I could finish, Dr. Sequence flickered, his form scattering like light hitting glass, and vanished entirely. Not teleported. Not cloaked. Just gone, as though he’d never been there. Replicator ability. The one I was talking to was probably a clone or something.

I turned to Mrs. Mind. “What do you want with me?” I asked finally.

She didn’t look up. “A chore.”

“Explain,” I said flatly.

Mrs. Mind leaned back in her chair, her eyes glinting with amusement that didn’t reach her face. The glow from her desk display painted her cheekbones in eerie blue light. “You have three required missions as your quota for the year,” she said. “There’s a way to fulfill that without taking the usual contracts, by performing chores.”

“Chores,” I repeated, frowning. “Like cleaning?”

She smiled faintly, though it was the kind of smile people wore when they were done humoring someone. “For Ning, it’s security management. For Dullahan, it’s cape research. Both are only required to complete two missions a year because of their respective chores. You, however, will have to complete three, unless you take a chore that offsets the workload.”

I tilted my head. “And I’m guessing you already have something in mind.”

“Of course.”

She swiped a finger across the surface of her desk, and a map flickered into view, a series of routes spreading across the lawless regions. Her tone remained clinical and detached. “Courier work. It fits your profile, doesn’t it?”

I raised a brow. “Courier work?”

“Or, more precisely, escort duty,” she clarified. “We have subcontractors supplying us with materials, equipment, groceries, and occasionally personnel. I need someone to ensure those shipments arrive safely.”

I chuckled under my breath. “So, bodyguarding boxes?”

“Among other things,” she said coolly. “This chore offers benefits you’ll find useful. You’ll build connections with our suppliers, purchase from them directly, and even negotiate prices. It’s a flexible role… and a dangerous one. But I assume that won’t deter you.”

She was right. It didn’t.

Mrs. Mind folded her hands together. “You won’t be alone. You’re free to pick anyone you need, though compensation will be your responsibility, marks or favors. How you convince them to join is up to you. You may even hire local capes if you wish, but the mission’s success is non-negotiable. Our supplies must come through.”

I studied the holographic map from lines of trade and hidden routes through the badlands and ghost towns. My old instincts stirred, the part of me that once lived for the thrill of moving unseen between borders.

“How often would the job be?” I asked.

“Every quarter of the year,” she replied. “Four times, if you survive the first three.”

There was no trace of humor in her voice, yet she smirked as if she enjoyed the implication.

I took a slow breath, considering the risk, the freedom, the potential profit.

Then I nodded once. “I’m in.”

Mrs. Mind smiled faintly, as though she’d expected nothing less.