After everything had been said between Rachel, Lucy, and me, I left them to it and made my way to the hotel, to find Christopher.

Sixth floor. His room. The stairs felt longer than usual.

He was laid out on the bed when I came in, propped up just enough to not look completely horizontal, one arm resting across his stomach near where the bandaging sat underneath his shirt. He didn’t look like a man who had just taken a hit from a Symbiotic, which was either a good sign or a proof to how well he hid things. When Rachel had told me he’d been hurt trying to intervene, my mind had immediately gone somewhere worse. A Symbiotic attack wasn’t like getting clipped by a regular person. The damage those things could do, the way Penny had been moving when she was fully gone, I’d braced for something serious. A deep puncture, torn muscle, something that would take weeks and real medical attention to come back from.

But looking at him now, pale and annoyed and alive, the wound apparently shallow enough to count as lucky, I let myself exhale.

The others were hovering just enough to make their concern obvious, which Christopher was tolerating with approximately zero grace.

"You’re all treating me like I lost a limb," he said, not for the first time by the sound of it, staring up at the ceiling with the expression of a man being smothered by kindness. He exhaled. "I’m fine."

"Thankfully," I said, pulling a chair over and sitting down, giving him a look that I hoped communicated both relief and a reasonable amount of irritation. "And let’s try to keep it that way."

"Come on." He shifted slightly, wincing just enough to undercut the casual delivery. "Sydney was struggling with her, you saw and fight Penny when she was fully gone. Someone had to step in. And we still need Lucy in one piece to get Mei back, so." He spread his hands as if the math was self-evident. "What was I supposed to do, watch?"

I leaned back in the chair, tipping it onto its rear legs, and looked at the wall.

"It’s my fault," I said.

Christopher closed his eyes briefly. "Here we go."

"I’m not saying it to be dramatic about it."

"No, you never do, that’s what makes it worse," he replied, opening his eyes and looking at me tired. "The real suffering here would be listening to you take personal credit for every bad thing that happens within a fifty-meter radius. It’s exhausting."

"I’m being serious," I said. "I spent time alone with Penny, hours, just the two of us and she didn’t go for me. She was calm. Controlled. So I convinced myself she was stable enough, that whatever was happening inside her was manageable. That was the assumption I made." I shook my head. "I should have known better. I should have considered that she might be stable with me because someone was keeping her that way. That she could be triggered from a distance, pointed at a target like a weapon. I didn’t think it through far enough."

"You had no idea she could be controlled like that," Christopher said. "None of us did. That’s not a failure of observation, that’s just not having information you couldn’t have had."

"I should have predicted the possibility."

"With what? You’re not omniscient, Ryan." He pushed himself up slightly against the headboard, more careful about it this time. "You already told us she’d gone after you before and lost control. If we’re distributing blame, it lands on all of us. Every person in this group who knew she was unstable and didn’t account for the full range of what that could mean. You don’t get to claim sole ownership of that."

I looked at him for a moment.

Then I let out a short laugh. "You’re surprisingly good with words for someone lying in a sick bed."

"Studied at Lexington," he said, the scoff carrying just enough pride to be funny. "What did you expect?"

"Was that always the plan? Lexington?"

He was quiet for a second, something shifting behind his eyes. "My parents’ plan," he said eventually before pausing a bit, thinking. "They were good people. Just, busy. Always busy. The kind of busy where you’re in the same house as someone and still feel the distance." He paused. "Lexington was their idea of giving me something. I think they meant it genuinely."

"I’m sorry," I said.

"Don’t be." He said it simply, without deflection. "I grieved them. Took the time to actually do it properly, which I think most of us either can’t or won’t. But if you don’t grieve, you just carry it around and it gets heavier." He glanced at me sideways. "Hope is the cruelest thing going right now. Best fuel there is and the most likely thing to gut you if you let it run without a leash."

"Can’t argue with that," I said quietly.

The room settled around us. Outside, somewhere down in the hotel, something was moving, footsteps, maybe voices caught my enhanced earrings.

Christopher then spoke looking at my complicated face.

"Rachel filled me in," he said. "About Lucy. About Gaspar and the threat against her brother." He let the words sit for a second. "Twisted doesn’t quite cover it."

"No," I agreed. "It doesn’t."

"She wasn’t wrong, you known, what she said about the two of them. Callighan and Gaspar, they are different despite being together. More partners than companions."

"Yeah." I looked at my hands. "Partners. I think that’s more accurate than anything I would have come up with."

Christopher watched me for another moment.

"So what are you thinking?" he asked.

"About what?"

"About Lucy." He gave me the wry half-smile, the one that meant he already had a guess and was checking it against the real answer. "Because I know you. And you’re not the kind of person who sends someone back into a threat without a second thought just because the math happens to work out in your favor. Not even for Mei."

I was quiet.

"I’m probably the worst kind of leader," I said after a moment.

"Ryan—"

"No, let me finish." I cut him off gently but clearly. "I mean it. Objectively. If you look at the situation, Mei is one of ours, she’s being held, and I have the leverage to get her back. The logical thing, the thing any competent leader would do without losing sleep over it, is use that leverage. Send Lucy back regardless of what Gaspar threatened. Accept that you can’t protect everyone from every consequence and get your person home." I paused. "I can’t do that. I’m sitting here trying to find a way around it instead of just making the call, and that hesitation could cost us."

"Maybe," Christopher said. "Or maybe you’re right to hesitate. Because think about itk say you send Lucy back, Gaspar follows through on his threat, her brother gets hurt or worse. Mei comes home." He looked at me. "You think Mei’s going to be okay with that? You think she’s going to settle back in knowing someone paid that price for her return? She may look like selfish and arrogant but her real self showed itself when she chose to intervene for Rebecca. And honestly?" He shifted slightly. "It’s not like you either. You’d wreck yourself over it too, you’d just do it quietly."

The laugh that came out of me had no humor in it. "That’s the problem. It’s not like me. That’s the exact problem."

"Then stop wearing it like a character flaw and start working the problem," Christopher said, with a faint exasperation. "You’ve got a mind. Use it. Find another angle."

"You’re right." I leaned my head back against the chair and stared up at the ceiling, letting the lines of it go soft while I thought. The water stains, the cracks, the texture of a ceiling in a building that had seen better years.

"We could try to move on her during the exchange meeting itself. Sydney’s fast, if anyone could pull it off cleanly—"

"Too risky," I said, before he’d even finished the sentence, because I’d already been there. "They’ll have people ready for exactly that. They know someone with Symbiote capabilities is coming. They’ll have contingencies. We push during the exchange and someone gets hurt, or worse, we lose Mei in the chaos."

Christopher nodded slowly, chewing on it. "So we need something they’re not prepared for."

"Actually," I said, "I don’t think we go to the meeting to do the exchange at all. I don’t think we go there to do anything."

Christopher stared at me. "...What?"

"I’ve been turning it over." I straightened in the chair, elbows coming forward onto my knees, and looked at him properly. "The problem isn’t Callighan. Callighan is manageable, he’s calculating, he wants things, which means you can negotiate with him. You can find the angle. But Gaspar is a different problem entirely. He’s a wild variable and a dangerous one, and the moment he’s anywhere near the equation, the whole thing becomes unpredictable." I shook my head. "Even if we go in clean, even if we hand Lucy over exactly as agreed and Callighan holds up his end, Gaspar is still there. And Gaspar doesn’t think like a man trying to maintain order. He thinks like someone who wants specific outcomes, and right now I don’t trust what his outcomes are."

Christopher’s expression had shifted, the easy wryness replaced with something more focused. "You think he’d actually hurt Mei? Even after an exchange?"

"He already came for me directly, Christopher," I said. "He didn’t send someone. He didn’t wait for an opportunity. He targeted me, which means he’s already decided I’m a problem that needs to be removed. And now he knows Mei is one of ours, he understands what she means to this group, then she’s not just a bargaining chip to him. She’s leverage he’s not going to want to give up easily." I paused, letting it sit for a second. "And at worst? Even if we deliver Lucy without a single thing going wrong on our end, on top of whatever he’s already threatened against her brother, I think there’s a real possibility he’s already planning to do something to Mei regardless. Something that sends a message."

Christopher fell thoughtful as he nodded at me.

"So negotiating through Callighan for Mei’s release," he said slowly, "is essentially useless."

"Essentially, yeah," I said. "Whatever Callighan agrees to, Gaspar can undercut. And I don’t think Callighan has the kind of control over him that would make those agreements stick when it counts."

I sat back, pulling in a long breath.

"We have to get Mei out ourselves. Quietly, from Brigantine, without Gaspar knowing anything is happening until it’s already done."

Christopher was quiet for a moment. Then a small smile pulled at the corner of his mouth.

"Ryan, that is insane," he said.

"I know."

"Like, impressively insane."

"I know," I said again, and I could feel the faint smirk pulling at my face despite everything. "But it’s also the only play that gets Mei home without Gaspar having any opportunity to move against her in the window between us agreeing to terms and us actually getting her back. If we do this right, he never sees it coming. No negotiation table, no exchange window, no moment where she’s in transit and vulnerable. We go in, we take her, we’re out."

Christopher tilted his head, the smile fading slightly. "That’s a good idea in principle. It’s a great idea in principle. But you’re talking about moving on Brigantine, a location we know almost nothing about. The layout, the security, how many people, where they’re keeping her—" He spread his hands. "We’re working blind."

"We’re not," I said. "Lucy knows that place."

He paused. "Lucy already shut that door. She wasn’t interested in giving us anything."

"That was before Gaspar put a death threat over her brother’s head," I said, meeting his eyes. "Before she understood that staying quiet doesn’t protect him, it just leaves him sitting inside Brigantine with a man who has already decided he’s disposable collateral. You think she still wants her brother in that place? You think she’s still willing to protect Callighan’s operation knowing what Gaspar is?"

Christopher held my gaze for a beat, then nodded, slow and certain. "Right."

"So," I said, narrowing my eyes. "We offer her a way out. Not just information, not just cooperation, we offer to pull her brother out of Brigantine when we go in for Mei. She helps us understand the place, and in exchange, neither of them has to spend another night under Gaspar’s reach."

The smile that spread across Christopher’s face this time was the full version.

"Now that’s unexpected from you but..." he said, smirking. "I love that plan."