The dream always started the same way.
Not with the bank. Not with the masks or the cold or the sound of boots on marble. It started earlier than that — with the hallway of the Cartez estate in Marseille, and the particular quality of silence that filled a house after something that hadn't been an argument, just a pronouncement delivered to someone too young and too small to push back against it effectively.
I was fifteen in the dream, though it hadn't happened at fifteen. Seventeen. But dreams do what they want with time.
My father's study. Dark wood, like the King's. Every man with enough power seemed to furnish his authority in the same material.
Lucian graduated at nineteen. My father's voice, unhurried, the kind of voice that didn't need to be loud. Your sister ran her first operation at sixteen. What exactly have you produced that warrants the name you're carrying?
I stood in front of the desk and didn't answer, because there wasn't an answer he would have accepted.
Coding, he said, and the word came out the way other people said disappointment.You sit in a room and type things. While your brother takes cities apart and your sister puts them back together her way, you sit in a room and type.
Lucian Cartez. Twenty-two in the dream, already running territories in Lyon and Nice that most men twice his age wouldn't have touched. Built like our father, moved like him too — the particular ease of someone who had never once wondered if he belonged in a room.
Vivienne Cartez. Nineteen. Colder than both of us, smarter than any of us, with the kind of beauty that people noticed half a second before they noticed she was already several steps ahead of them. She'd been running the information networks since she was sixteen, filtering intelligence through channels our father hadn't even known existed until she showed him.
And then me. Who could get into any system in the world and had used that skill, at fifteen, to help a charity redirect funds that had been misdirected by administrative error, and had written about it in my notebook like it was something to be proud of.
I left the study without saying anything.
And walked until the estate was behind me and the city was around me and the particular suffocation of the Cartez name had thinned enough to breathe.
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The crew found me, or I found them — the distinction had blurred in the retelling I'd done in my own head so many times the original was worn smooth.
Five of them, plus me. All older. Rémy, who was twenty-three and led by consensus rather than declaration, which meant everyone debated and then did what Rémy had suggested in the first place. Dex and Soren, inseparable, the kind of friends who'd known each other long enough to operate as a single unit. Bastian, thirty and the oldest, who had a quietness about him that everyone had misread as wisdom and which had turned out to be something else entirely.
And Jade.
Jade Laurent was twenty-five when I was seventeen, which meant she was technically the second oldest and practically the gravitational centre of every room she walked into. She was tall in the way that some women are tall — not imposing, just simply present at a height that meant you noticed her before you'd decided to. Her hair was pale blonde, almost silver in certain light, cut to the jaw with the effortless precision of someone who didn't think about it. Her eyes were green, the particular green of old glass, and they had the quality of catching light from unusual angles.
She was French on her mother's side, Dutch on her father's, and had grown up somewhere between the two in a way that left her with no particular allegiance to either and a fluency in reading rooms that most people spent their whole lives trying to develop.
She was the only person in that circle who looked at me and saw me.
Not the Cartez name. Not the crew's convenient technical asset. Just the boy who was too young and too angry and too good at things that didn't fit the categories anyone had prepared for him.
She'd started it simply, the way she did everything. You're smarter than you're letting them see, she'd said once, early on, when I'd fixed a problem with the scanner equipment in under four minutes while the others were still arguing about it. That's not a compliment. That's a warning.
I hadn't understood what she meant until later.
I had a crush on her that I managed with the graceless determination of someone who knew it was impossible and had decided that knowing it was impossible was sufficient to keep it from being a problem. It mostly worked. She treated me like a younger brother — not dismissively, genuinely, with the particular warmth of someone who had made a decision about a person and stuck to it. She checked on me. She made sure I ate when jobs ran long. She told me when my plans had gaps before the others could use the gaps against me.
I loved her, the way seventeen-year-olds love the first person who makes them feel like they might be worth taking seriously. I never said it. She probably knew and had been kind enough not to make it awkward.
The bank heist had been my idea, which in hindsight I should have recognised as the first problem.
Not the target — the target was Rémy's. But the approach, the timing, the technology that would eliminate the need for a separate hacker by having the systems pre-compromised three days before we entered, the masks I'd spent two weeks designing and constructing in my bedroom at three in the morning while the rest of the city slept.
I wanted to prove something. Specifically that I wasn't background. Not infrastructure. Not the eyes — Rémy's term for my role, which had always sat wrong because eyes don't lead and don't decide and don't matter after you've seen what they saw.
I trained for it. Actually trained — running routes, memorising floor plans, timing guard rotations until I could predict them within a thirty-second margin. I built two devices that could loop security feeds remotely without needing physical access to the network hardware. I calculated four exit routes in order of preference and two contingencies.
I felt ready.
Jade stayed with me the night before.
Not romantically — she'd pulled a sleeping bag into my workspace when the preparations ran past midnight and the winter cold had come through the gaps in the building we used as a base. She sat with her back against the wall, reading something on her phone, present in the particular way she was present — not hovering, not demanding anything, just there, which was the thing that mattered.
You sure about tomorrow? she asked, somewhere around two in the morning.
Yes.
Not about the job. About you.
I didn't know what to say to that, so I went back to my soldering and she went back to her reading, and somewhere between three and four I fell asleep at the workbench and woke up to find she'd covered me with the sleeping bag and taken a chair instead.
D-day.
The pre-compromised systems worked exactly as planned. We moved through the building with the efficiency of people who had rehearsed enough times that the actions had become instinct. Rémy led. Dex and Soren on the vault. Bastian at the exterior communications junction. Me on the network, monitoring, maintaining the feed loops, watching the guard positions on the HUD of the improvised system I'd built and worn like an early version of contacts that didn't quite sit right in my eyes.
Jade stayed close to me.
The first sign that something was wrong arrived as a sound — not from inside the building, from outside it. The particular quality of vehicle engines that don't announce themselves but don't bother to hide either. Then radio chatter that the building's communications block should have suppressed but wasn't suppressing, which meant someone had given our frequencies in advance.
I looked at Bastian across the vault room.
Bastian looked back.
And the thing about his quietness — the thing that everyone had mistaken for wisdom — was that it wasn't guilt he was carrying. It was calculation. The expression of someone who had made a decision and was watching it execute.
The swat team hit the main exit first.
Rémy identified the secondary exit. We moved, all of us, in the controlled chaos of a plan collapsing into its contingencies. And then Bastian stopped at the centre of the room, in the direct sightline of the cameras I'd looped, which were now looping nothing because the system had been overridden from outside.
I'm the one who called them, Bastian said. Flat. Explanatory, almost, like he was filing a report. Nothing personal. They offered something better.
Dex said something in the half-second before it became pointless to say anything.
Then we fractured — Dex and Soren holding the rear, covering Jade and me toward the emergency exit we'd argued about including in the plan and Rémy had wanted to cut for time.
We made it to the alley.
Jade didn't make it all the way.
She was two steps ahead of me when the shot came — not from the police, from the rooftop, which meant Bastian's arrangement had been more comprehensive than a simple tip-off. She went down on one knee, hand going to her leg, and the expression on her face was the particular expression of someone who had already run the numbers and arrived at the answer before I'd understood the question.
Go, she said.
I'm not—
Marx. My name, in her voice, with exactly the right weight. Not a request. Not a plea. The decision she'd made for both of us, delivered without room for revision. Go. I'll be fine. They won't kill me, I'm more useful alive. She pushed my hand off her shoulder. Don't make what Dex and Soren just did mean nothing.
I ran.
I ran and didn't look back because looking back would have stopped me, and stopping would have made Dex and Soren's deaths — which I understood, in the numb way of someone absorbing something too large to feel yet — meaningless.
I ran until my lungs gave out in a car park three streets away, and then I sat against a concrete pillar in the dark and shook for a long time while the city moved overhead, indifferent and complete.
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Jade.
I heard my own voice before I was fully awake — rough, wrong-sounding, the particular vocal quality of someone who has been somewhere else entirely.
I sat up.
My face was wet.
The apartment was dark, the city doing its ambient nighttime thing through the window, and I sat on the edge of my bed for a long time with my forearms on my knees and my breathing gradually returning to the pace of someone who was present rather than somewhere in Marseille in winter being seventeen and too slow and not enough.
I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes.
Jade.
I'd found out, later, from a source I'd never been able to identify with certainty, that she'd been transferred to a facility outside the city and eventually released. That she'd walked away. That she was somewhere, doing something, alive.
I'd never confirmed it with anything more reliable than that.
I still thought about it more often than was useful.
I sat in the dark for a long time, not sleeping, not quite present, somewhere in the specific geography of old wounds that hadn't finished healing and probably wouldn't. Eventually the city outside began its tentative shift toward morning — that thin grey light that arrived before the sun, the city taking a breath before remembering itself.
I got up. Made coffee.
And stood at the window drinking it, watching the city wake up, thinking about Dex and Soren and what it had cost them to cover a door. About Bastian and what it looked like when someone calculated something personal into nothing. About Rémy, who I never saw again after that night and whose silence in the years since could have meant anything — arrested, relocated, something worse, or simply gone in the way people go when a life falls apart cleanly enough that they decide not to reassemble it in the same place. About Jade's hand on my shoulder and the way she'd said my name.
About what it meant to carry people you couldn't check on.
The coffee went cold before I remembered to finish it.