"The fish fork is the small one with three tines, Damir. Unless you intend to harpoon the sea bass like a dockhand." Katarina’s smile remained fixed. Around the mahogany banquet table, ten cousins, board members, and parasitic relatives chuckled on cue. Damir set down the heavy silver implement. It clattered against the porcelain plate with an abrasive snap. "In my old neighborhood, we used whatever wasn't rusted. Keeps the immune system sharp." "Charming," Katarina purred, patting her lips with a linen napkin. Her dress was spun from raw emerald silk, cut low enough to emphasize diamond pendants worth more than every apartment building Damir had ever inhabited. "A romantic view of absolute squalor. Tell me, cousin, while you were preserving your immune system behind dumpster enclosures, did you ever happen to study the Treaty of Belomir?" Silence fell across the vaulted dining hall. The only sound was the low drone of the estate’s hidden air scrubbers. Damir stared at her. "Can't say it came up between bar shifts and editing wedding photos." "A pity," Katarina said, resting her chin on linked fingers. "Considering it governs sixty percent of our maritime shipping rights through the Zoryan strait. It was negotiated by our great-grandfather in 1948. Surely you recall the five codicils regarding neutral waters? The ones that keep thirty thousand families employed and our sovereign wealth fund liquid?" Beside Damir, Niko shifted uncomfortably, clutching his bread knife like a shank. "Hey, man, nobody knows that kind of nerd shit outside of trivia night." Katarina never even looked at Niko. She merely arched a painted brow toward an older man seated across the table—Uncle Bogdan, a man with jowls like a bloodhound and eyes deadened by decades of inherited wealth. "You see, Bogdan? We are to be led by an archivist of drunken brides, who brought along an organ grinder's monkey for foreign counsel." A ripple of snickers passed down the table. Bogdan offered a hollow, contemptuous grunt into his soup. Damir felt the prickling heat rise beneath his collar. Then, involuntarily, his field of vision shifted. The room went cold and grey. Superimposed across Katarina’s polished façade, faint stress lines spread across the mahogany directly beneath her elbows. A hairline fissure traced down the stem of her crystal wine glass—a microscopic manufacturing flaw in the lead-blown rim, humming with structural stress. If she tapped it with her diamond ring one more time... He wanted to watch it shatter into her lap. He wanted to will the fissure to split open and drown her silk in vintage red. The hunger inside him pulled toward the flaw like a magnetic north. A heavy hand settled on his shoulder. Anja Novak stood behind his chair, black-suited, immaculate, and utterly still. Her grip was tight enough to bruise the bone. "The Grand Duke’s physician has concluded the preliminary post-mortem briefings," Anja announced, her flat, military cadence cutting through the table's snickering. "Damir’s presence is required in the lower tactical sector for security clearance registration. Excuse us." "Security?" Katarina mocked lightly. "Don't exhaust the poor boy, Novak. He looks fragile." Damir pushed his chair back hard enough to scrape the parquet floor. "Enjoy the fish, Katarina. Mind the bones. They have a habit of getting stuck in the throat." *** Ten minutes later, the air smelled of ozone, gun oil, and ionized floor wax. The sub-level testing bunker was a hemisphere of white ballistic polymer, stripped of any royal opulence. In the center hovered a target drone—a matte-black sphere the size of a human torso, humming softly on four counter-rotating micro-rotors. Twin tracking cameras glowed amber in its nose. "Focus," Anja commanded. She stood five paces behind him, arms crossed over her chest, clipboard set aside. "I'm focused on the fact that you pulled me out of there looking like an illiterate stray," Damir snapped, rubbing his aching temples. The headache had settled in the back of his eyes, a steady, rhythmic throb that tasted like iron shavings on his tongue. "You were about to lose control of your Gaze in front of twelve people who would pay millions to see you committed to a sanatorium," she said, her tone level and devoid of warmth. "Look at the chassis. Stop projecting rage. Observe the stress point." "It’s not an app on my phone, Anja. It just happens. Things break around me." "Things do not break around you. You accelerate the inevitable conclusion of their flaws. You perceive entropy, and your intent unleashes it. Now harness it. The rotor hub. Look at the left stabilization ring." Damir exhaled through his teeth. He stared at the hovering black sphere. He forced his breathing to slow, searching for that grey, peeling layer of reality he had tried to scrub away with cheap whiskey for a decade. The world paled. The white room faded to slate. Across the carbon-fiber casing of the drone, hairline yellow fractures crawled like glowing spiderwebs. The high-speed carbon arm on the rear rotor held a minute structural seam near the pivot bearing, rattling under thirty thousand revolutions per minute. "I see it," he muttered. His skull felt as if a dull needle were boring into his sinus. "Do not force it to break," Anja ordered. "Map it. Anticipate the moment of kinetic failure. If you break it, you burn your own neural pathways. If you anticipate it, you dictate the fight." "I don't want to dictate fights!" Damir turned violently, breaking the trance. The color slammed back into the room, and with it, a nauseating spike of pain behind his retinas. "I took portraits of dentists and accountants! I lived in a five-hundred-square-foot walk-up with faulty plumbing! Now you hand me a ring, tell me my dead grandfather was a tyrant, and expect me to become an assassin with a headache?" Anja didn't blink. "Your grandfather was many things. Weak was not one of them." "Is that what you are? His loyal mastiff?" Damir stepped closer, teeth bared. "He told me not to trust you. His dying breath, Anja. He looked me in the eyes and warned me that you were a viper. So tell me—are you waiting for me to fail, or are you just going to shove me down the stairs yourself when I get too inconvenient?" The air between them went brittle. For a second, the mask slipped; her grey eyes flashed with something dark and raw, a tight twitch pulling at the corner of her mouth. She didn't retreat. She stood an inch from his chest, smelling of sandalwood and clean gun solvent. "If I wanted you dead, Damir, you would have choked on your own vomit in that alley three days ago." A sharp acoustic chirp cut through the bunker. Damir froze. The drone behind him hadn't powered down. Its tracking lenses, previously amber, had turned a vicious, strobing crimson. [WARNING: MANUAL OVERRIDE ENGAGED] [SAFETY PROTOCOLS NULLIFIED] The metallic computerized voice echoed from the bunker's intercom speakers, followed immediately by the high-pitch whine of a motorized actuator feeding a belt into an internal receiver. "Get down!" Anja roared. Damir failed to move fast enough. His instincts were those of a civilian who looked through glass, not a soldier dodging lead. The drone’s nose-mounted submachine gun spat fire. A muzzle burst tore the silence to shreds. Anja slammed her entire body weight into Damir’s ribcage, tackling him laterally across the polished polymer floor. Bullets chewed a frantic, skipping line of sparks across the concrete where his knees had been half a second prior. A spray of hot brass clattered on the floor. Damir hit the ground hard, the breath driven out of his lungs in a wheeze. Anja landed over him, one arm shoving his head flat against the cold surface while her right hand cleared her sidearm from its holster in a single fluid blur. A sickening crack echoed—not gunfire, but the sound of copper tearing meat. Anja grunted. A sharp, ragged sound escaped her throat. Damir twisted beneath her. Blood—thick, dark crimson—was already soaking through the tailored charcoal wool of her left shoulder, dripping onto the clean white floor between their faces. Without pause, she acted. Rolling onto her back, she raised her pistol with her uninjured hand and fired three rounds in deafening succession. Double-tap to the rotor assembly, one through the central processing core. The drone violently twisted in mid-air, its shredded rotor screaming, before it slammed into the wall and exploded in a shower of sparks and smoking plastic. The room went dead silent, save for the smoke alarm’s distant wail and the heavy, ragged sound of their breathing. Damir stared at her shoulder. The smell of fresh blood was metallic, hot, and undeniable. "Anja... you're shot." She clamped her bloody fingers over the tear in her suit, her face pale, teeth gritted against the tearing agony. Her pained hiss ended the silence: "Katarina doesn't waste time."

First Blood