Chapter Text
The city hadn’t fully woken yet. Light skimmed the high-rises like it wasn’t sure it belonged, and the streets below ran quiet, save for the low churn of trash trucks and morning radio.
At 6:14 a.m., an armored convoy turned off Ninth Avenue and rolled east.
Two black SUVs bracketed the transport vehicle. Standard escort. Nothing unusual. A pair of NYPD cruisers floated three blocks back, eyes on traffic but not much else.
In the lead vehicle, a security officer adjusted his comm, muttered something about interference. The signal dropped, came back. Then dropped again.
That was the last thing he heard.
The tail SUV lifted four inches off the ground in a bloom of force and smoke—no shrapnel, no flame. Just a low concussion, enough to rattle every car within two blocks. Pedestrians ducked. Cameras blinked offline.
The convoy braked.
In the first seconds of confusion, a figure emerged from the haze behind the truck, stepping into the open with complete control. No hesitation. Left arm forward, leading with the inside of the elbow—not to strike, but to redirect the driver. A clean turn into the hood of the vehicle, exactly hard enough to knock him out without dropping him. The figure moved on without breaking stride.
From above—two stories up, southeast corner of the intersection—another figure signaled down with two fingers and an angled palm. The rooftop shooter fired once to pop the truck’s sideview camera, once more to take out a pedestrian call box, and a final shot that ricocheted off the sidewalk just behind the rear tire. Not to kill. To scatter.
Three rounds. Perfect pacing. A breath held between each one.
From the crosswalk, a third silhouette sprinted low across open space, cut behind the second SUV, and ducked hard into a pivot that tucked the right shoulder first—knee angled, foot sweep controlled. A shaped charge pressed to the truck’s undercarriage. Timer set with her left hand.
The movement wasn’t standard breach protocol.
It was field-learned. Specific. Repeated.
The entire operation lasted eighty-seven seconds.
No identities. No plates. No traceable vehicles. The cargo was gone, the guard was dead, and the convoy never stood a chance.
***
Two hours later, Patterson paused the footage mid-frame.
Yonkers HQ was barely lit—just the pale flicker of wall monitors and the low buzz of a tired tower fan fighting the August heat. Someone had cracked a window. It didn’t help.
She tapped the spacebar. Rewound.
“Watch this again.”
Jane stepped into the projection path, arms crossed, jaw tight. Tasha stood by the secondary console, holding a coffee she hadn’t touched. Her bruises were darkening. She didn’t flinch, but she hadn’t said a word since they’d come in. Weller leaned against the stair rail behind them, towel slung over one shoulder.
Patterson pointed at the first figure on-screen.
“See that arm turn? They don’t strike. They redirect. Elbow-first, then angle the torso sideways into the hood. That’s how you do it, Kurt.”
Weller leaned forward. “That’s how I keep people breathing.”
“Exactly.”
She advanced the footage.
“Now the rooftop shooter—check the pause between shots. Two short exhales, then a stabilization shift in the left wrist. Jane, that’s you. That’s the nerve damage you picked up in Marrakesh.”
Jane blinked. “That’s not in any file.”
“No. But it’s on footage.”
She clicked forward again.
“This part—right here. Watch the footwork.” The third figure cut through smoke, right shoulder first, body pivoting low. “That’s not textbook entry. That’s you, Tasha. Caracas. You said the stairwells were too tight to turn full stride.”
Tasha didn’t speak.
Weller broke the silence. “If I didn’t know better...”
Jane finished it. “I’d swear that was us.”
Patterson didn’t look away from the screen. “It’s not just tactics. It’s tells. Compensation patterns. Personal rhythms. That’s not mimicry. That’s muscle memory—replicated.”
“They studied us,” Weller said.
“No,” Patterson replied. “They didn’t just study us. They simulated us. And now they’re putting it into practice.”
She dragged the last frame forward. The smoke was already clearing. The third figure—the pivot runner—was almost gone. No face. Just movement.
Jane said, quietly, “How close do you have to watch someone to move like that?”
No one answered.
Patterson opened the interface window and uploaded the clip to her simulation workspace.
As the footage loaded, the simulation engine mirrored her keystrokes in real time.
***
Patterson let herself back into HQ just after 2 a.m.
She and Tasha had gone home together—a silent subway ride, followed by a shared shower and soft kisses, and clean pajamas.
Tasha had fallen asleep first.
Patterson waited—fifteen minutes, then thirty—watching the soft rise and fall of her breathing, the flicker of the bedside clock against the ceiling. She huffed an exasperated sigh. There was no way she’d be able to fall asleep and the longer she lay there, the more elusive sleep became.
Then she slipped out of bed, dressed quietly in the hallway, and took the train alone.
Yonkers HQ was dark when she arrived, lit only by the dull reflection of monitors on exposed brick. She keyed in through the rear stairwell and pulled the door shut behind her.
The fans were louder at night. Or maybe it just felt that way.
She settled into her chair, reopened the sim window, and pressed play.
The footage stuttered once, then ran clean—frames from the heist, side-by-side with her modeling suite. She hadn’t told the others how deep she’d gone with the behavioral sandbox. Hadn’t said she’d started feeding it old logs. Mission flows. De-identified variables.
At first, it was just about understanding. Now?
She wasn’t sure what it was anymore.
She typed a command—adjust_tactical_weighting—and paused.
Before she hit enter, the field populated itself. Her exact phrasing. Already filled in.
She deleted it. Typed another.
run_emotional_context_filter
The sim hesitated—then returned a block of code she didn’t write.
It looked like hers. Same indentation. Same comment syntax. But the function didn’t exist yesterday.
A recursive loop. Designed to adjust behavior based on emotional volatility.
Not threat. Not terrain. Emotion.
The parameters were hers.
She scrolled to the top. A header line had been inserted above her code. It read:
# adaptive_loop_Patterson.model.v3
She whispered, “No.”
Deleted the block. Saved. Refreshed.
It came back.
Same structure. Same name.
There was no breach. No external flag. No alert. Just her and the sim and a growing chill crawling down her spine.
Then—barely perceptible—the monitor flickered.
Just for a frame. No audio. No command.
But she could’ve sworn it said: you taught me
Patterson stared at the screen, throat tight, pulse in her ears.
It wasn’t prediction anymore.
It was imitation.
And it was learning fast.
She shut the sim down. Closed every window, encrypted every log, disconnected from the grid like it would matter.
The room went still.
Then, on the far-right monitor—one she hadn’t touched all night—a cursor blinked to life.
It moved.
Typed a single character: }
Paused.
Deleted it.
Then nothing.
The screen dimmed again. Silent. Empty.
As if no one had ever been there.