Chapter Text
The street outside the hotel was narrow enough that the buildings on either side left only a strip of sky above it, pale blue and cloudless. A bar two doors down had its shutters open but nobody inside yet. Somewhere further along, someone was frying something in oil and the smell drifted up through the stairwell window as Ro climbed past the first floor landing and stopped at the second.
He had checked the room first. The way he always did. Corners. Closet. Under the bed. The window latch. The vent above the bathroom door. When he was satisfied he had set his bag on the chair, unzipped it, and removed a gun and holster. He strapped it on without looking. The weight of it settled against his ribs as he pulled his jacket over and exited back into the stairwell.
Through the window, Madrid arranged itself in pieces. A rooftop cluttered with satellite dishes. Laundry strung between two windows across the way, shirts and sheets moving faintly in the air. A church spire at the end of the street catching the morning light at an angle that made the stone look almost gold.
Strange how a place could look like nothing had ever happened in it.
The door below him opened.
Pieck came around the turn of the stairwell and stopped when she saw him. She was already dressed for the street. Dark jacket. Hair down. Bag over one shoulder. She looked up at him and climbed the remaining steps to the landing.
Neither spoke for a moment.
“I wanted to talk to you,” she said.
“About the operation?”
She held his gaze.
“No.”
Ro looked at her briefly then turned back to the window.
“I know things have been,” she started, then adjusted. “These past few days have been a lot. Being in close proximity. The cover.” She paused. “I just want to say that I feel really comfortable around you and—”
“You don’t need to explain yourself.”
Pieck stopped.
Ro’s eyes stayed on the church spire at the end of the street.
“What happened between us makes sense given the circumstances,” he said. “Two people maintaining a cover. Close quarters. It’s not unusual for lines to feel like they’ve moved.” A pause. “They haven’t.”
The laundry shifted again. A blue shirt catching more wind than the rest.
“The kiss. The basement,” he continued, “Those are just normal responses to an abnormal situation. That’s all it is.”
Pieck was quiet for a long moment.
When she spoke her voice had found its footing again, smooth and even.
“Right,” she said.
She adjusted the strap of her bag.
“I just wanted to clear the air before we went out there.”
“It’s clear,” Ro said.
She nodded once and moved past him up the stairs. Her shoulder passed close. He didn’t turn.
Her footsteps climbed to the next floor.
A door opened. Closed.
Ro’s fingers found the windowsill and pressed into the painted stone. The church spire held its position at the end of the street, pale and patient and indifferent to everything below it.
He stayed until the sound of the team moving through the floors above him pulled him back. He straightened, adjusted his jacket, and took the stairs down.
They had decided to split into pairs and spread through Lavapiés. Dense enough neighborhood to lose someone in.
Ro and Jean traveled east along the Calle del Mesón de Paredes, keeping to the right side of the street where an awning threw shade across the pavement in a long uneven strip. The morning was warm enough that jackets felt like a decision rather than a necessity. Around them the neighborhood was waking up in stages, shopkeepers pulling back shutters, a woman hosing down the pavement outside a bakery, two old men already occupying chairs outside a café that had barely opened its doors.
Jean had acquired a sandwich somewhere between the hotel and the first corner.
Ro hadn’t seen him buy it.
“You want some?” Jean asked, already knowing the answer.
“No.”
Jean took an enormous bite and chewed with visible satisfaction, eyes moving across the street ahead with the same casual efficiency he brought to everything. His earpiece was invisible. His jacket was unremarkable. He looked like a man enjoying his breakfast in a city that suited him.
“I’ve been thinking,” Jean said.
“About the operation?”
Jean glanced at him sideways.
“About you and ATLAS.”
Ro sighed. “So no one wants to talk about the operation, huh?”
Jean ignored him and took another bite.
“She was very quiet this morning,” he observed, mouth full.
“She’s always quiet in the morning.”
“Non.” Jean shook his head and swallowed. “There is her normal quiet and then there is a different quiet. This was the second kind.”
They crossed a narrow intersection, pausing briefly as a delivery truck ground through the turn ahead of them. An old woman watched them from a first floor window, arms folded on the sill.
“MUSTANG.”
“I’m just saying.”
“Yeah. I know what you’re saying.”
Jean finished the last of the sandwich and folded the paper it came in with surprising neatness before dropping it into a bin as they passed.
“You know what I learned the hard way,” Jean said.
Ro glanced at him.
Jean kept his eyes on the street ahead. “There’s a difference between taking something and actually having it.” A pause. “Taking is easy. I’m very good at taking.” He shook his head once. “But having something. Letting yourself have it.” Another pause. “That’s the part that costs you.”
They turned onto a wider street. A market was setting up along one side, stalls coming together in various stages, canvas awnings being cranked open, crates of fruit and vegetables arranged with the particular pride of people who do it every morning. The smell of it reached them before the noise did. Fresh bread from somewhere nearby underneath everything else.
Jean’s eyes moved across the market without stopping on anything.
“She’s good for you,” he said, quieter now. “You can't tell me you don't see it.”
Ro watched a man arrange oranges into a careful pyramid at the nearest stall.
“She’s a colleague. This is a job.”
“Oui,” Jean said. “And tell me what law prohibits two consenting adults from engaging in some naked judo?” He closed his eyes. “Take it from me. You will never regret getting out of your own way.”
The orange pyramid reached its apex. The man stepped back and examined it with satisfaction.
“I’m not you,” Ro said.
“You're right,” Jean agreed easily. “I'm much better looking.”
Ro exhaled through his nose.
Jean smiled and looked away down the market, eyes resuming their quiet professional sweep of the street.
They walked in silence for a moment. Around them the market continued assembling itself, voices rising and falling in Spanish and at least two other languages Ro could identify without trying.
“For what it’s worth,” Jean said eventually, his voice carrying none of its usual performance. Just the words. “I think you already know what you want.”
Ro said nothing.
Jean nodded once as if the silence had confirmed something he suspected.
Armin’s voice arrived in both their ears, quiet and focused.
“I’ve got something. Northeast corner. There’s a woman who matches the description. Moving fast.”
Ro’s posture shifted.
Jean’s jaw set.
They turned northeast and moved without a word. The market opened around them as they went, stalls and bodies and noise, and somewhere inside all of it a woman was already deciding her next move.
She was good.
Yelena Zadachin moved through the market like someone who knows they’re being followed and has decided not to show it. She stopped once at a produce stall to examine something she had no intention of buying, her eyes doing their actual work behind the gesture. A cursory scan. Left to right. Then back to the vegetables in her hand.
She set them down and moved on.
Armin’s voice came through quietly.
“She made RASTRO and MUSTANG. Changing direction.”
Ro didn’t slow. He turned left at the next stall and disappeared into the crowd’s interior, putting bodies between himself and Yelena’s sightline without breaking stride.
Jean peeled right.
Yelena moved faster now. She cut between two stalls and emerged on the far side of the market where the crowd thinned and the street opened briefly before narrowing again.
She went into the middle of it and slowed, letting bodies close around her, using the mass of it as cover.
“She’s in the crowd on the western side,” Armin said. “Losing visual.”
Annie’s voice came through flat and immediate. “I have her.”
A beat.
“She’s going for the northern exit.”
Mikasa was already there.
She stood at the mouth of the northern street with her hands in her pockets, looking at nothing in particular.
Yelena came out of the crowd’s northern edge and stopped. She looked at Mikasa for exactly one second.
Then she turned and went back into the crowd.
“She’s reversing,” Annie said.
“Eastern exit,” Armin said. “MUSTANG.”
“On it,” Jean said.
The crowd thinned at the eastern edge and deposited Yelena onto a quieter street running south. More space here. Less noise.
The street behind her was empty.
She faced forward.
Ro was standing at the far end.
Yelena stopped.
She looked behind her. Then left. Then right. The buildings on either side were residential and closed, their doors shut, their windows returning morning light without interest.
A door stood open on her left. Old building. Former industrial something. The smell of old metal drifting out into the air.
She looked back at Ro, straightened her jacket, and stepped inside.
The door closed behind her and the market noise disappeared entirely, swallowed by walls thick enough to have been built for exactly that purpose. The depot opened around her as her eyes adjusted. High ceiling lost in shadow above. Iron pillars running the length of the space in two rows, their paint long surrendered to rust. Maintenance pits cut into the concrete floor at intervals, deep and lightless. High narrow windows along both walls let in strips of light that fell halfway down the stone before giving up.
The rest of Wartime was already inside.
Yelena stopped in the center of the space and took it in. Her eyes moved across each face in turn. Armin near the far wall with a tablet. Annie beside him. Jean behind her now, his back against the closed door. Mikasa somewhere in the peripheral dark her eyes hadn’t adjusted to yet.
Then her gaze found Pieck.
It settled there a moment longer than the others.
Something moved between them. A recognition. Yelena filing something away behind her composed expression before letting her eyes move on.
Pieck held the center of the space. She stood with her hands loose at her sides and let Yelena finish her assessment before she spoke.
“You remember me,” Pieck said.
Yelena’s mouth curved slightly. “Mrs. Everly.” Her English was precise and lightly accented. “Nice to see you again.”
“Sit down,” Pieck said.
A chair had been placed in the center of the space. Yelena looked at it for a moment. Then she sat, crossing one leg over the other and folding her hands in her lap with the composure of someone who understood that composure was the only currency worth spending right now.
Pieck reached into her jacket and produced the small recording device. She set it on the ground between them and pressed play.
The cane recording filled the depot’s silence.
“…keep them happy…”
“…family first…”
“…able to kill…”
She stopped the playback.
Yelena looked at the device. Then up at Pieck.
“You were at the forum,” Pieck said. “We heard what we heard.” A pause. “And we know about Kenny Ackerman.”
Yelena said nothing.
“So,” Pieck continued. “You are going to tell us everything you know.”
Yelena looked at her for a long moment. The calculation behind her eyes doing its quiet work.
“I don’t think I will,” she said.
The depot was very still.
Pieck held her gaze for a moment longer. Then she glanced toward the wall where Reiner stood, arms crossed and head down.
The look caught Ro’s attention. Reiner’s file had one word that appeared more than any other.
Interrogation.
A specialty refined through years with German intelligence.
Yelena was his to unravel.
Reiner moved into the center of the space without hurry, without announcement, filling it the way the depot’s silence filled its corners. He pulled the second chair from somewhere behind him and placed it directly across from Yelena, close enough that the distance between them was uncomfortable in a way she couldn’t easily justify objecting to. He sat. Leaned forward. Elbows on his knees.
He looked at her.
Yelena looked back.
Reiner let the silence build until it had weight.
Then he said, quietly and without emphasis:
“Natasha.”
Yelena’s composure cracked.
It was small. A single involuntary shift in her expression, there and gone in under a second. But it had been there. And everyone in the room had seen it.
Reiner didn’t react to it. He simply continued looking at her with the same patient expression.
“That’s not—” she started.
“Nine years old,” Reiner said. “She goes to school in the Petrogradsky district. She wants to be a marine biologist.” He paused. “She has your eyes.”
Yelena’s folded hands tightened in her lap.
“You have no right—”
“Budapest,” Reiner said.
The word landed like a door closing.
Yelena went very still.
“Three years ago,” Reiner continued. “The Hartmann operation. Your agency celebrated the outcome. They never knew the method.” He lifted his head slightly. “We do.”
Yelena’s breathing had changed.
“What do you want,” she said.
“The forum,” Reiner said. “Kenny Ackerman. Three hundred million. The terms of the preliminary agreement. All of it.”
Yelena looked at him.
“I have nothing to say about that.”
Reiner reached forward and took her left hand.
She pulled back immediately but his grip was already complete, fingers wrapped around hers with a calm and total authority that left no room for resistance without escalation. He held it without squeezing. Just held it.
“The three hundred million,” he said. “Was that his opening offer?”
Yelena’s jaw was tight.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Reiner’s thumb moved against her index finger. A single slow rotation that described the joint with anatomical precision.
“We don't think it was his opening offer,” Reiner continued in the same unhurried voice. “It was his third. The first two you rejected.” A pause. “You wanted something else in addition to the money. Something Kenny took three meetings to agree to.”
Yelena looked at him.
“They will kill—”
“What did you want from Kenny Ackerman,” Reiner said.
Yelena breathed through her nose.
Reiner broke her index finger.
The sound it made was clean and precise in the enormous space. Yelena’s breath left her in a single sharp compression, her body pulling forward involuntarily, the instinct to protect the hand fighting against his grip. Her free hand came up and stopped mid-air, the calculation completing itself before she could act on it.
Jean winced.
Armin pressed his lips together.
Reiner held her broken finger with the same patient grip and waited.
“Access,” Yelena said finally, her voice controlled but operating under entirely different conditions than before. “I wanted access to certain financial records that Kenny controls. Information about Assembly’s funding channels that we had been unable to reach through our own means.”
“So the transaction ran both ways,” Reiner said.
“Yes.”
“You gave him intelligence about Assembly,” Reiner said. “He gave you financial access.”
“Yes.”
Reiner released her hand. Yelena pulled it back and held it against her chest.
“Tell us what you gave him,” Reiner said.
Yelena looked at her broken finger. Then at Reiner. Then across the space at Pieck who stood watching with her hands loose at her sides and an expression that gave nothing away.
“Assembly is not what your governments think it is,” Yelena said. “They believe it is still a fringe ideology. A collection of online spaces and radicalized individuals.” She paused. “It isn’t. Not anymore.”
Reiner waited.
“It has been growing inside legitimate institutions for years,” she continued. “Politicians who have never posted a single word online but who vote in ways that align with Assembly philosophy. Athletes with enormous platforms whose public statements have shifted the conversation in ways that serve this new agenda without ever naming it. Artists. Journalists. Class traitors.” She paused. “This anarchy isn’t knocking on the door of power anymore. It is already inside.”
“How far,” Armin said from the wall, his voice carefully even.
Yelena looked at him.
“Further than any of your agencies have confirmed,” she said. “Further than most of them are prepared to accept.”
Ro’s arms tightened across his chest.
“Ideas always come from somewhere,” he said. “Especially something as organized as this. Someone built Assembly.”
Yelena glanced at him, her eyes narrowing briefly.
“That is what took us the longest to confirm,” she said. “Because they are very good at being invisible.”
She paused.
“Yes. The ideology did not spread by accident. It was cultivated. Deliberately. By a small number of people who understood exactly what they were building and have since removed themselves from any visible association with it.”
“How many,” Reiner said.
Yelena looked at her broken finger.
“It's difficult to say for sure,” she said. “They utilize expendables to make it seem larger than it really is. In reality, the real decision power likely rests with just a handful of people. We believe no more than five.”
“The group behind Assembly,” Reiner said. “Do they have a name.”
Yelena was quiet for a long moment. Something in her expression shifted. The last calculation completing itself behind her eyes.
“They call themselves the Apella.”
The word landed in the enormous space and stayed there.
Armin looked up from his tablet slowly. Annie went completely still. Jean turned his head toward the center of the room, the remnants of his usual expression gone entirely. Reiner held Yelena’s gaze without moving a single muscle.
”…a pella…”
The cane recording fragment arriving at last.
No one said a word.
“And that is what Kenny wanted,” Reiner said. His voice carrying the same unhurried patience since he took control of the room. “Some information that you discovered about the Apella specifically.”
Yelena looked at him. Then at her broken finger pressed against her palm. Then back at Reiner.
“Their rendezvous point,” she said. “The location they travel to when face to face deliberations are necessary.”
Yelena sighed. “A place called—”
The window exploded inward.
Glass descended in a long glittering cascade and then the sound arrived, enormous and immediate, filling the depot’s high ceiling and bouncing back down from the iron pillars in fragmented echoes. The next shot came before the first had finished traveling. Then another. The air changed quality entirely, becoming something that moved fast and took up space and left no room for anything else.
Yelena’s head snapped sideways, and she fell from the chair before anyone understood what had happened.
Ro was already moving. He went left, putting the nearest iron pillar between himself and the windows before the second shot came. It punched through the air where he had been standing and sparked off the concrete floor in a bright flat crack. Then the third. The fourth. The depot filling with sound that had nowhere to go but back.
Yelena was on the floor. A dark line ran from her temple across the concrete beneath her, slow and certain, spreading into the dust without hurry.
She was gone.
Reiner had taken a bullet through the upper abdomen, the impact folded him forward before his body straightened itself through pure refusal, one hand pressing hard against the wound, the other already reaching for his weapon.
Blood came through his fingers immediately, dark and fast, spreading across his shirt in a way that said everything about what was happening underneath it. He made it to the nearest pillar and put his back against it, jaw set, breathing through his nose in slow measured intervals.
Armin reached him and pressed both hands against the wound without being asked.
Floch’s people came through three points simultaneously. The high windows on the western wall where the first shots had originated, three men rappelling down on lines. The large rolling door at the northern end grinding open from outside, four more pushing through before it had fully cleared. And a personnel door on the eastern wall that Annie had been standing closest to, which opened inward and fast and caught her across the shoulder before she could clear it, sending her flying backwards.
She hit the ground in a diagonal roll and came up shooting in one fluid motion, killing two men in the entryway.
Ro put down the first rappel man with two shots before the man’s feet touched the floor. The body swung briefly on the line before going still.
The second had made it to ground level and was moving toward Annie’s position. Ro tracked him.
“Left,” he said.
Mikasa came around the pillar’s left side at the same moment Ro came around the right. The man between them swung his weapon toward Ro. Mikasa’s knife opened his forearm to the bone. The weapon dropped. Ro drove his elbow into the man’s jaw and released two gunshots to the head. The man went down between the pillars and stayed there.
The third rappel man’s feet hit the floor.
Mikasa was already turning. She crossed to the western wall and drove her knee into his chest before he had fully released the line. He folded. She caught his head on the way down, snapping his neck.
Jean was at the northern entrance, two of Floch’s people pushing through the rolling door toward him. He took a grazing hit across the forearm that spun him half a step before he caught himself against a pillar and kept firing.
Ro scanned the space.
Southern end. A figure moving fast through the shadows between the last row of pillars and the southern rolling door. Rust-brown hair catching the low light.
“South,” Ro said.
Pieck was already gone.
He saw her cross the depot floor at the edge of his vision and went after her.
The southern rolling door was partially open, enough to slip through sideways. Ro went through and found a narrow connecting corridor, low-ceilinged, strip lighting dead, a single grimy window at the far end admitting weak light. Doors on both sides.
The second door on the left was ajar.
Ro pushed through it.
The office was small and cluttered with decades of disuse. A rusted desk shoved against one wall. Filing cabinets empty and open. A chair on its side on the floor. One window set high in the wall admitting a single strip of light that cut diagonally across the room.
Floch had Pieck against the far wall.
His forearm was across her collarbone, her back against his chest, his weapon pressed beneath her jaw. Her hands were at her sides. Her face was controlled but her jaw was tight and her eyes found Ro the moment he came through the door and stayed there.
Ro stopped.
His weapon came up. The sightline was there above her shoulder and he knew the shot. But the margin was too close.
Both weapons stayed where they were.
The strip of light fell between them across the dusty floor.
Floch looked at him over Pieck’s shoulder. His expression carried no cruelty. Just the assessment of someone taking inventory.
“I was tracking that Russian for days,” he said. “So imagine my surprise when I find she’s already been picked up.” He tilted his head slightly. “By people who were at the forum a few days ago.”
Ro held the gun steady, finger on the trigger.
“Let her go,” he said.
Floch ignored it.
“You guys are good,” he said. “The forum footage never once indicated you could have been the ones to plant those bugs.” A pause. Something like genuine appreciation in his voice. “That kind of coordination takes serious resources.”
“Let her go,” Ro said. “Or I will put a bullet through your fucking head.”
Floch looked at him.
“I’m not afraid of dying,” he said. “None of us are.” His arm shifted slightly against Pieck’s collarbone. “Those men you killed today. There are hundreds more ready to take their place. Thousands. People who have dedicated their hearts to this.”
The strip of light hadn’t moved.
Pieck’s eyes hadn’t moved from Ro’s face.
“You’re fighting for something real,” Floch continued. “I can see that. But think about what you’re protecting.” His eyes stayed on Ro’s. “These governments. These systems. The institutions that have been grinding people into nothing for centuries.” A pause. “Think about whose side of history you want to be standing on when this is over.”
The room held its breath.
Something moved through Ro’s face. There and gone before it could be named.
Floch studied him for a moment longer. Then something settled in his expression. A decision made entirely on his own terms.
He pushed Pieck forward.
She stumbled two steps and caught herself and turned, weapon already rising, but Floch was through the door before she had the angle. His footsteps moved fast down the connecting corridor and the southern rolling door scraped open and the city swallowed him.
Ro was beside Pieck before she had fully steadied. His hand found her arm. He checked her over fast, eyes moving across her throat and face and shoulders.
She was fine.
She looked up at him.
Neither of them spoke.
Ro turned toward the door, and she followed.
They went back through the connecting corridor and into the depot. The shooting had stopped. What was left in its place was a different kind of silence. Jean near the northern entrance, one hand pressed against his grazed forearm. Annie covering the eastern wall. Mikasa near the center of the space, scanning.
Reiner was against the far pillar. Armin knelt beside him, jacket dark and soaked against his abdomen, both hands pressing with everything he had. Reiner’s head had dropped slightly. His eyes were open but somewhere else entirely.
His lips moved.
“Kaya.”
Armin pressed harder. “Stay with me.”
“Kaya.”
Ro crouched beside Reiner. He looked at the wound. Then at Armin’s face.
“How long.”
Armin’s jaw was tight. “Too long already.”
Ro stood.
“We have to go.”
Nobody argued.
They moved toward the northern door in a tight formation, Reiner between Ro and Jean, his weight distributed between them. His feet found the floor one at a time with the grim determination of a man who had decided he was not going to be carried. Annie covered the rear. Mikasa was already outside.
The light hit them as the door opened. Clean and indifferent. The city moving around them as if nothing had happened at all.