“Last time,” Nobody said, kneeling to pick up the fallen pistol. He ejected the magazine, cleared the chamber, and set the pieces neatly apart. “The man. Where?”

Some patches don’t hold. And somewhere in the code, a quiet error had been logged: Emotion detected. Response: justified.

Goatee froze. “Who the hell—”

He looked at the blood on Goatee’s hand. He thought of his brother’s face, split open and swollen.

“The turnaround,” he said softly, “is that you don’t get to walk away from this feeling like you won.”

The retinal display glitched. For one heartbeat, the static cleared.

Gold Tooth turned back. “Clear.”

The smaller one, twitchy with a gold tooth, scanned the garage. His gaze passed over Nobody’s pillar twice. That was the trick. Nobody wasn't hiding. He was just forgettable . Average height. Gray hoodie. Face that belonged on a DMV photo from 2011. You looked at him, and your brain filed him under “not a threat.”

“You a cop?” Gold Tooth laughed nervously. “You don’t look like—”

Gold Tooth went for a piece tucked in his waistband. Nobody’s hand shot out, fingers pressing a precise cluster of nerves just below the collarbone. Gold Tooth’s arm went numb. The gun clattered to the concrete.

“Nobody” — a ghost of a man known only by that whispered moniker — pressed his back against a cold pillar. Across the dimly lit level, two silhouettes hunched over the trunk of a sedan, counting stacks of unmarked bills. The money wasn't his. The deal wasn't his. But the man they'd beaten to get it? That was his brother.

“The money,” Nobody said. His voice was flat, a tool more than a tone. “Where’s the man you took it from?”

Nobody stood there for a long second. The rain drummed on the roof above. Inside his head, flickered — a warning, a leash. Do not engage emotionally. Do not personalize. Extract, exfiltrate, erase.

Until tonight.