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A lifetime of waiting for a chance to serve his people, his heritage, and now — perhaps — his moment had finally come.

He just hoped no one would get hurt.

DUTY

Sitting on the couch in her living room, Margaret felt newly aware of how much she had fallen apart.

Clarence sat on her left, as he if were really still by her side. That made him a liar. She wanted to hate him. He’d tightened the tie, dabbed the forehead, and once again looked like he’d just stepped out of the pages of Government Agent Quarterly.

In a chair across from them sat Murray Longworth, director of the Department of Special Threats. Or, as people in the know tended to call it, the second-most-powerful agency you’ve never heard of.

A black cane lay across Murray’s lap, the handle atop it a twisted, bra.s.s double helix shape of DNA. Murray Longworth hadn’t aged well. He looked frail, as if somehow he’d bathed in Detroit’s nuclear glow and was slowly melting like a candle left sitting on a heater. His dark-gray suit was a little too big; Margaret guessed it had been tailored for him several years ago, several pounds ago.

A thick man in a black suit — a suit so indiscernible from Clarence’s the two men might as well have been wearing matching uniforms — stood behind Murray’s chair. A flesh-colored coil ran from a tiny, hidden earpiece to somewhere behind his neck. The man stared straight ahead, seeing everything and looking at nothing.

Three men in suits. She hadn’t bothered changing. Her sweatpants had two small holes in the left knee and an avocado stain on the right thigh. She hadn’t showered in three days. Margaret wondered if she smelled.

Murray forced a smile, his old, wrinkled face cracking like a winds.h.i.+eld hit by a brick.

“h.e.l.lo, Margaret,” he said. “You look like a bag of a.s.sholes.”

The man’s penchant for pleasantries hadn’t changed.

“And you look like an ad for a convalescent home,” Margaret said. “Isn’t there a mandatory retirement age in government work?”

Another smile, this one genuine. “I wish I could retire. My wrinkled old a.s.s should be in a fis.h.i.+ng boat in Florida, catching redfish and croakers.” The smile faded. “Not everybody gets that choice.”

Margaret felt a wave of guilt. Murray Longworth was over seventy, possibly even seventy-five. He worked ridiculous hours for a department that barely existed on paper, a department tasked with antic.i.p.ating and defeating the country’s next biological nightmare. He was right: he should be retired, and yet he served every day while she sat on her behind and hid from the world.