Chapter 10 : THE DISTANCE BETWEEN
The loan shark's building was a converted auto body shop on the east side of the industrial district — roll-up garage doors replaced with steel sheeting, windows blacked out, a hand-painted sign reading Eastside Financial Solutions that fooled exactly nobody. Two cameras on the front, one on the back, a blind spot on the north wall where the adjacent building threw a permanent shadow.
I'd been watching for ninety minutes from a loading dock across the street, phone to my ear for cover, cataloguing the foot traffic. Three customers in, three customers out, each one walking in with tense shoulders and walking out with worse. The System's Glades Intelligence mission tracked my observations with periodic progress ticks:
[GLADES INTELLIGENCE: 24% COMPLETE]
The loan shark — a man named Vasquez, according to the mail slot and the court records I'd pulled at the public library — ran a clean-looking operation from the street. No obvious muscle at the door. No product visible through the blacked-out windows. Just a steady stream of desperate people feeding cash into a machine that would eat them alive if they missed a payment.
The plan was simple: photograph the customer flow, map the camera coverage, identify Vasquez's schedule, and report the data to the System. Intelligence, not intervention. I wasn't ready for intervention. CQC Basic and a crowbar didn't qualify as intervention against a man who, according to the Starling City criminal database I'd accessed through the public terminal, had two aggravated assault charges and an acquittal on a weapons possession charge that the prosecutor had called "procedurally compromised."
Vasquez was dangerous. But he wasn't the thing that nearly killed me.
The Hood was.
---
The first sign was the lights. At 11:23 PM, the building directly behind Vasquez's shop — a decommissioned machine works that had been dark every night I'd watched — lit up from inside. Not electric light. Muzzle flash.
Two shots. Three. A window on the second floor shattered outward and a man came through it in a spray of glass and hit the ground one story below with a sound like a bag of wet sand. He didn't get up.
I dropped flat behind the loading dock railing. My heart slammed into overdrive, PER 10 flooding the senses with data — the direction of the gunfire, the spacing between shots, the absence of screaming from inside the building, which meant the occupants were being neutralized too fast to react.
Through a grimy window on the machine works' ground floor, visible from my elevated position, a figure moved. Green hood. Bow. The silhouette was unmistakable even in motion — compact, deliberate, the economy of someone who'd eliminated wasted movement the way surgeons eliminated unnecessary incisions.
Oliver Queen was hunting in the building next door.
The figure — the Hood, the Arrow, the man I'd watched on a television screen in another life — crossed the ground floor in three strides and put an arrow through a man's thigh. The target dropped. Oliver was on him before he hit the floor, wrenching the gun from his hand and driving an elbow into the temple. The target went limp.
Eleven seconds. Four men. I'd counted four silhouettes through the windows before the lights died, and in eleven seconds every one of them was on the ground — shot, struck, or unconscious. No killing tonight. Oliver was in his non-lethal phase for this particular target, which meant this was an interrogation, not an execution.
I pressed my forehead against the cold metal railing and tried to match what I'd just watched against anything in my training. Marcus, the best fighter I'd ever met in person, would have taken thirty seconds minimum against four armed opponents and probably caught a bullet in the process. Oliver had done it in the time it took me to exhale.
That was the standard. That was what operated at the top of this city's food chain — a man with Master-tier combat skills, peak human physiology, and five years of training that included the League of Assassins, the Bratva, and a survival crucible that made the Eternal Crucible look like a board game.
I was three weeks into my gym membership. My best sparring round had lasted forty-five seconds against a teenager.
The gap between where I stood and where Oliver operated wasn't a distance. It was a geological era.
---
The Hood left through the roof. I watched the shadow ascend, silhouetted briefly against the ambient city glow, then vanish over the roofline in a movement so fluid it barely registered as climbing. Gone. Like he'd never been there.
I waited five minutes. The building went quiet. Someone inside groaned — one of the targets regaining consciousness, probably the one Oliver had arrow-shot in the thigh.
Then the back door of the machine works burst open and two men stumbled out.
They weren't the ones Oliver had put down. They were different — coming from a side room I hadn't had a sightline on, moving fast, moving scared. One had a pistol in his right hand. The other was bleeding from a cut on his forehead and clutching a duffel bag to his chest.
They ran straight toward the alley between the machine works and Vasquez's building. The alley I was overlooking from the loading dock. The alley that put them twenty feet from my position.
The one with the gun looked up.
PER 10 read the draw before his arm finished rising — the shoulder rotating, the elbow extending, the barrel tracking upward toward the figure on the loading dock who was suddenly and catastrophically visible against the ambient light of the street behind him.
I threw myself sideways. The shot cracked the air where my head had been, the sound splitting the night into before and after. My body hit the loading dock floor, rolled, found the railing, went over it. Eight-foot drop to the alley below. My ankles screamed on impact — AGI 7 turned what should have been a smooth landing into a controlled stumble — but I kept my feet and ran.
The second shot caught my jacket. Left shoulder, the outside edge, close enough to feel the heat and hear the fabric tear. The round grazed skin — a bright line of fire from the shoulder blade to the upper arm that turned my left side into a screaming argument against continuing to run.
I ran anyway. Stealth Basic kicked in — corner, shadow, break the sightline, change direction — and I cut left behind a row of industrial bins, then right through a gap in a chain-link fence, then down a side street where the streetlights actually worked and the darkness couldn't follow.
Six blocks. My lungs burned. The shoulder throbbed. My left arm was warm and wet where the graze was doing what grazes do, which was bleed more than the injury warranted and hurt more than the blood suggested.
I stopped in the shadow of a closed pawn shop and pressed my jacket against the wound. The flannel soaked through in thirty seconds. Not arterial — the blood was dark, not bright, and the flow was steady, not pulsing. A graze. A groove cut through skin and the thin muscle underneath, shallow enough to survive and deep enough to remind me that bullets didn't care about stat points.
Through the adrenaline and the pain, one image played on loop: Oliver Queen dismantling four armed men in eleven seconds while I ran from two.
The standard. The impossible, unreachable, years-away standard that I had to close if I wanted to survive this city long enough to matter.
I walked home pressing a ruined flannel against a wound that needed cleaning, and the walk took forty minutes, and every step reminded me that the distance between Charles Weston and Oliver Queen was measured in bodies and years and a kind of suffering I hadn't begun to understand.
---
The apartment bathroom had vodka under the sink — cheap, half-empty, left behind by the host body or a previous tenant. I poured it over the graze and bit down on a washcloth to keep from screaming. The wound was four inches long, shallow, already clotting at the edges. It needed gauze and tape, both of which I had from the first-aid section of the corner store.
My hands were steadier than the first time I'd come home bleeding. The night the knife had opened my side at 4th and Rackham, my hands had shaken for hours. Tonight they trembled for five minutes, then settled. The body was learning. Or the mind was adapting. Or the gap between dying and not-dying was becoming familiar enough that the nervous system stopped treating every injury like the end of the world.
I taped the gauze in place, changed shirts, and sat on the bed with the map. The loan shark mission was stalled — I'd been driven from the observation point before completing the camera map. I'd need to go back. Different angle, different night, wider buffer zone between my position and the Hood's operating area.
"Five-block minimum," I wrote on the edge of the map. "Minimum."
The bullet graze ached under the gauze. I pressed my palm against it — a habit now, touching the hurt to confirm it was real and manageable, the same way I'd touched the phantom wound after the stabbing.
The shoulder would heal in a week. The gap wouldn't.
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