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If things came in threes, then Maus was due one more surprise in the shape of this particular name looking out at him from an unexpected place.

The first, of course, had been scrawled beneath that bathroom sink. But he'd more or less given up hope of ever finding that old tag - Fix - scratched or splashed up anywhere else. More than ten years was a long time, especially for a childish scrawl that had no artistic merit. If any of them existed in the city now they'd be under four more layers of paint.

Or so he'd thought. He'd gone into this place - in the guise of Maus, for his own safety, and with the medallion to make him a less attractive target in case he got interrupted - looking for nothing more than the usual joy of poking around somewhere he wasn't supposed to be and taking the strange, painful pleasure he always took in seeing the way that once-busy places fell to forgotten ruin, forsaken even by the rats.

Instead he stood, now, with the beam of a flashlight aimed at a wall. It had remained untouched, probably because at some point an aborted attempt was made to bring life back to this neglected parcel of land, and skids of cinder blocks had been stacked here. But those had for whatever reason fallen into disarray - perhaps someone was indulging in the guilt-free theft of DIY supplies that had been abandoned anyway - and were largely carted off, exposing, again, the old surface behind, and therefore the names on it.

He did not recognize any of them, but felt that he should have. Except the one, of course, which he now had a hand pressed to as he blankly and without any of the expected emotion considered whether he would cover it, as he'd always intended to do, in the improbable event of finding one of his own signatures lurking around. It was big - ugly - unskilled and lazy and obnoxious, splashed up boldly and taking up too much room for the merit that it had.

Made sense, given who'd left it there.

He didn't have enough stickers to just bomb the place, like he'd always vaguely planned for. He'd have to cover it properly - black it out - bad etiquette, most of the time, but he knew things that others didn't. It would make a nice blank canvas for someone else to come along and improve. A big one. His gloved hand, pressed to the wall, was only a quarter high on the trailing X.

He had not moved, however, aware for some time that he was not alone. The lingering part of him that fed on paranoia almost wondered if this was some beautifully-baited trap, as implausible as that was. But no - Destiny City, true to its name, was a place of many coincidences.

Maus, with his face shadowed beneath his hood, with his cloak drawn around his shoulder, suddenly bathed in that saintly aura that made an Earth knight impossible to ambush, turned with quiet alertness towards the only entrance to the ramshackle room he was in, primed to make a decision about fighting or fleeing or finagling, but unaware of just how much of a coincidence was about to befall him.

Such tells were lost on Maus, who had seen too much of the murkiness of rank divisions even since re-awakening to identify more than what he already knew - that the Negaverse's invisible tailors were very, very good.

There was no familiarity in this agent. There was no familiarity in any of them. When he spoke it was not with any real intention of getting useful information, although a strange and queasy hope was there. It was, rather, a simple deflection.

"A friend?" He gestured at the tag, his shadow dark and exaggerated in the beam of the flashlight that was resting on its stack of debris, enfolding him within its circle. "Wouldn't call him a friend. He's one of yours, isn't he?"

He felt sick. Engelbart, nestled hidden in his collar, trembled a little in answer to a tremble of his own, and he was grateful that no one else could have known that movement of weakness but her, shrouded as he was. His voice, however, remained steady.

"He cheated on my sister," he said, lying as easily as he always had. "That was before we knew what he was. Gave me plenty of reasons to hate his ******** guts. Didn't think it was like you guys to lose track of your recruits. Maybe he ******** died," he added, in a tone of vindictive pleasure. It took a force of effort stronger than anything he'd yet had to do to continue. He almost didn't manage it. "No more than he deserved, probably. How many murders did he line up and do for you guys before someone gave him what was coming to him?"

Please. Say one. Just one.

Or say none, said some wretched hope that persisted, despite being baseless. The bad habit of lying even to himself was getting harder to resist.

It should not have been possible for grief and relief to coexist in such enormous quantities. Until that instant he had not known how much he had wished for this all to be some mistake, and how much he had dreaded that it was worse than he knew. The turmoil made him reckless; made it easier to try and dig for information he wasn't sure he wanted.

"They're all personal for me," he said. "And none of them personal for you. Right? I never could figure that out - whether you pick people off at random to save your conscience or if you get the ones close to you for convenience. He's a lazy ********, though, isn't he? He'd do whatever's easier." And then, with an air of nonchalant cruelty: "Friend of yours? Or maybe you hate him as much as I do. Did he give you a reason to hate him?"

"Wasteful," he repeated. Engelbart trembled against his neck, a constant shiver, now. "Because you got nothing out of it? If he'd been less of a ******** and brought you back that starseed you would have considered him a friend, then, and nothing wasted at all? What was he to you, then, if not a friend? Just an embarrassing colleague? Kept you from hitting quota?"

Some dim part of him was aware that he was growing reckless. This man stood between him and the only exit, and he knew all too well what power the other side had to make him regret his decisions, even someone whose energy signature still felt less than impressive. If he had known, maybe, exactly what he was facing down, he would have done nothing but run. But he had spiraled past reason despite this show of outward aloof contempt, rendered confused and panicked by the idea that he was speaking to someone who might be able to fill in blanks for him - what he had done, why, and who he'd been; who this man was and how he'd known him; literally anything - without having time to even decide if they were blanks he wanted filling.

There was something so profoundly awful in that turn - something so unexpected - that it took him a breath or two to recuperate enough to keep the shake out of his voice.

It was easier to believe it wasn't true. But here was a man who knew more than he'd known, and who had accurately pegged Fix - Bornite - as a liar, and who was calmly asserting that he'd ended a life for nothing better than to cover up a mistake.

A man - a boy - who'd always tried to avoid lying to himself. Well, he'd lost that habit somewhere, hadn't he? Wasn't he finding himself, every day, increasingly willing to bend his internal truth for the sake of his own comfort? And who was to say that it wasn't that day, whenever it was, ten years back, that had started him on that particular vice?

"Probably," he said, his voice as level as he could keep it as he proceeded to walk into another lie: "Who knows. I don't think you can shape someone into a killer, but maybe he had the makings of an honest murderer in there somewhere, before you guys got to him. Got to him young enough, didn't you? Or did he lie about that too?"

"That a*****e was never gonna be a hero," he said flatly, neither backing up nor stepping forward himself, but only standing his ground in the beam of the flashlight with one hand still pressed to the tag, the other having settled, beneath the cloak, on the end of his weapon. "And you're dead wrong if you think I agree with what the cats do. But you're right that we're in a war, and since one side is devouring planets it's sort of a no-brainer where everyone with any conscience ought to be lining up. But I'm not here to ******** convert you. Anyone coughing up justifications about wasteful and gainful murders isn't someone open to evangelism."

He succumbed, then, to an error of judgment which should have been past him. He forgot that he, too, was walking around shrouded in a signature too small for him, and forgot that nothing was keeping the man across from him from doing the same.

"I'm sure you're excited about the day some boss smiles on you and you get to stick your hand in some snot-nosed kid's chest and try to make a hero out of him. I'd say choose better than whoever picked up Fix, but you'd have a hard time picking worse. I'm not out here recruiting anyone to any side. Save your hypocrisy for the cats."

Although he could not remember it, his reaction, the first time this had been done to him, had been to simply shut down - to go limp and unresisting, silent in the shock of the pain and terror, even as the man reaching into his chest anticipated some desperate and sarcastic quip.

Maybe, now, this man was also anticipating some sort of teeth-gritted taunting, some flippant last-wordism - or perhaps the same catatonic stillness that so many succumbed to in this moment.

But the shock had not even lasted to the first blossoming of pain. There was no instinct to protect his life. It was subordinate to a need to protect something more important even than that, and allowed him to be reckless, fighting back with the sudden feral violence of an animal with nothing to lose and everything to gain. It wasn't often that he was evenly matched in height with someone, but it meant that if Zinkenite was close enough to stick a hand into his chest, Maus was close enough to reach his own towards the agent's throat, simultaneously making an attempt with his knee that had no hope of landing a blow and even - there was no room for dignity in this moment - trying to grab a fistful of hair and yank. If there'd been any exposed skin, it seemed likely that he'd be trying to bite.

He had only an instant, however, to thrash like a trapped creature. An almost-invisible shape shot out of his collar as his hood fell back in the struggle - some undefined bit of movement that bolted at remarkable speed down Maus's arm and up Zinkenite's. It was in an instant scrambling into his face with as much aimless, violent desperation as the knight.