Chapter 23: The Bank Job — Part 1
The glass doors opened without resistance.
I stepped through behind Brian, his darkness already spilling into the lobby like ink spreading through water. The customers at the teller stations went rigid—some screaming, some frozen, all of them swallowed by the sensory deprivation that was Brian's power.
"Nobody moves, nobody gets hurt." Alec's voice carried through the darkness, pitched for maximum theatrical impact. "This is a robbery. Standard operating procedure. Sit down, hands where we can see them, and this will all be over in fifteen minutes."
The crowd complied. Fear made people predictable.
Rachel's dogs held the entrance—Angelica and Brutus blocking the doors, their enhanced forms filling the space with muscle and teeth. Judas waited outside with the extraction vehicle.
Lisa moved through the darkness toward the manager's office, her power guiding her to the person with vault access. I heard her voice, calm and professional, explaining exactly what would happen if he didn't cooperate.
I reached the windows.
The spatial awareness fragment mapped the street outside without me needing to see through the glass. Parked cars at regular intervals. Pedestrians who'd stopped to stare at the dark windows. A delivery truck halfway down the block.
No PRT vehicles. Not yet.
"Revenant," Brian's voice came through the comms. "Status?"
"Street clear. No response yet."
"Copy. Tattletale, progress?"
"Moving to the vault. Manager is cooperative." Lisa's voice was steady. "Sixty seconds to first lock."
I kept my attention on the street, tracking the geometry of the approach routes. The Wards would come from the south—that's where the PRT building was located. They'd establish a perimeter before attempting entry. Standard containment protocol.
In the source material, they'd arrived at eight minutes. Coil's intel suggested twelve.
The truth was probably somewhere in between.
Eleven minutes.
The PRT van turned onto the street at exactly the eleven-minute mark.
One minute early, I noted. Meta-knowledge drift continuing.
"Contact," I said into the comms. "PRT van, southern approach. Four occupants—" I tracked the shapes through the van's metal frame, the sense-fragment reading the bodies inside "—deploying now."
The van stopped a hundred feet from the bank entrance. Doors opened. Figures in costume emerged.
Clockblocker. White costume, digital clock face. Vista. Small, spatial manipulation. Gallant. Armored, emotion projection. Aegis. Flying, adaptive biology.
Four Wards. Standard response team.
But only four.
"Shadow Stalker?" Brian asked.
I scanned the rooftops, the alleys, the windows of surrounding buildings. My spatial awareness reached its fifteen-meter limit and found nothing.
"Not with them. Repeat: Shadow Stalker is not present."
"She's supposed to be on shift today," Lisa said. "I confirmed it with Coil's intel."
"Well, she's not here now."
The missing Ward was a variable I couldn't track. In the source material, Shadow Stalker had been aggressive, independent, prone to solo action. If she wasn't with the team—
She's coming separately.
The thought hit me like cold water.
"Revenant." Brian's voice was sharp. "Can you locate her?"
"Negative. She's not in my range." I forced my voice steady through the modulator. "Recommend treating her as an unknown variable. Expect her from any direction."
"Understood. Everyone, double awareness. We're missing a player."
Outside, the Wards were establishing their perimeter. Clockblocker and Vista covered the main entrance while Gallant and Aegis circled toward the side exits.
Then Gallant raised his arm.
The emotion blast came through the window—a projectile of pure feeling that phased through glass without breaking it. Standard Ward protocol: emotional disruption to reduce resistance.
It hit me square in the chest.
Despair.
The word was inadequate. This was despair distilled, concentrated, artificial—a weight that pressed down on every thought and turned hope into ash.
My knees buckled. The spatial awareness fragment flickered, struggling to maintain coherence against the tide of manufactured grief.
This isn't real, I told myself. It's a power. It's an attack. It will pass.
But underneath the artificial emotion, something else surfaced. Something the blast had amplified rather than created.
Four deaths. Four times dying, remembering, carrying the knowledge of what it felt like to stop existing. The memory of fire, explosion, bullets, blades—each one preserved perfectly, never fading.
And underneath all of it: homesickness so deep it felt like drowning. A world I'd left behind, a life I'd never return to, a self that existed only in the gaps between one death and the next.
The despair found those wounds and pressed.
Focus.
[ADAPTIVE RESURRECTION: PSYCHIC/NEURAL EXPOSURE LOGGED]
The system notification cut through the fog—cold, clinical, a reminder that I was more than my emotions now. The power was cataloguing the attack, filing it for future resistance.
Four seconds.
I forced my legs to straighten. Forced my awareness to expand again. Forced the fragments back into alignment.
The despair was still there—but muted now, manageable. Like pain that had been acknowledged and set aside.
Outside, Gallant was signaling to his team. Something about my recovery had registered—faster than expected, more resistant than a normal target should be.
He'd report it. Another data point in a file that was getting longer by the day.
But that was a problem for later.
"Revenant," Brian's voice crackled. "Status?"
"Functional." My voice came out steady through the modulator. "Emotion attack. Recovered."
"Good. Tattletale's at the vault. Sixty seconds."
I returned my attention to the windows, tracking the Wards' positions and the empty spaces where Shadow Stalker should have been.
Then I saw it.
A shimmer across the street—geometry that didn't quite match, like a building with edges that shifted when you weren't looking directly at them.
Phasing.
She'd gone through the wall.
"Shadow Stalker," I said. "Inside the building across the street. She's coming through the walls."
Brian's response was immediate. "Everyone, brace. We have a phase-capable hostile incoming. Revenant, can you track her?"
I focused, pushing the spatial awareness to its limit. The fragment wasn't designed for phased targets—it mapped solid geometry, not things that moved between states.
But I could see where the geometry changed. Where solid walls became permeable for a moment before returning to normal.
"I can see her passage. Not her position."
"That's something. Call it when she enters."
I watched the shimmer move through the building across the street, tracking the distortions in the fabric of reality.
She was fast. Faster than I'd expected.
And she was heading directly for the bank.
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