The meet and greet was supposed to be the anchor.
That was how his manager had framed it when she'd put it on the schedule — something real, something grounded, people who actually love you. The Fighter had nodded and said nothing and told himself she was probably right, because the alternative was staying inside with the article and his own hands and the particular silence of a room that had too many screens in it.
So he went outside.
The line stretched down the sidewalk and around the corner, which on any other day would have meant something good. He worked through it the way he always did — present, deliberate, making each person feel like the only person, because that was the one performance he had never had to fake. He was good with people one at a time. He had always been good with people one at a time.
He was halfway down the line when he saw him.
The air in his chest stopped moving.
The man was standing ten feet away, and the first thing the Fighter registered was not the face — not yet — but the posture. The specific set of the shoulders. The angle of the chin. The way the weight shifted to the left when standing still. The Fighter knew these things the way you know your own reflection, because they were his reflection, or something that had been built to approximate one with a precision that went well past coincidence and into something that had no clean name.
By the time the man reached the front of the line, the Fighter had catalogued the rest of it. The same long brown hair. The nose: his nose, but slightly off, the way a copy is always slightly off, the proportions almost right in a way that was worse than being obviously wrong. The skin around the cheekbones looked tight, slightly waxy, the particular texture of something that had been worked on more than once.
The man gripped his hand with both of his, and his palms were sweating.
The Fighter stood very still and let the photo be taken. He was aware of the crowd, aware of his own face doing the things faces are supposed to do. The man's phone screen was cracked. His teeth were very white.
And then he was gone, leaving cheap cologne and a trail of wrongness that the Fighter couldn't have articulated if asked.
Back in the salon, he paced, his hands buried in his hair.
Elena and Raul watched him from the couch, the easy warmth of the Damon Albarn conversation completely gone, replaced by the particular attentiveness of people who understood that this was not the moment for jokes.
Elena looked uneasy, her tablet forgotten.
The profile photo was taken in low light, but it was enough — the same cut, the same chin, a still image from what appeared to be a stream breakdown of one of the Fighter's recent bouts. Same training kit.
Elena leaned in, her eyes moving across the screen.
The words sat in the room for a moment.
Raul scrolled further.
He paused.
He stood and walked to the mirror. Touched his jaw. The same jaw the Phantom had paid thousands to approximate, not to steal but to inhabit — to wear the way you wear a dead person's coat because you liked the cut of it.
He turned back to them.
He stopped.
Elena's eyes had drifted back to the tablet. Her expression shifted.
A beat.
The Fighter didn't look. He didn't need to. He already knew the feeling — the same feeling from the line outside, that specific wrongness, that sense of something that was supposed to be impossible standing ten feet away and sweating on your hand.
The silence that followed was still there when the knock came.
Sharp, rhythmic, at the salon door.
Raul answered it. A delivery courier, no uniform, holding a small cardboard box. No return address. No packing slip. Just a name written on the top in a handwriting that was elegant and aggressive in equal measure.
Raul took the box, his eyes darting to the Fighter, who hadn't moved from his spot on the velvet sofa. With a pocketknife, Raul sliced the tape. Inside, resting on a bed of black tissue paper, was a beaded necklace. It was a perfect, vintage-style choker of colorful beads; an exact replica of the one Damon Albarn wore in the 1994 photo Elena had been obsessing over just minutes ago.
The Fighter stared at it.
Elena's hand went to her mouth.
The Fighter's head came up slowly. His eyes moved across the crown molding, the recessed lighting, the decorative porcelain bust on the shelf in the corner — its painted eyes forward, its expression neutral, the way expressions are neutral when they are not expressions at all.
Not a question.
A few blocks away, Viktor climbed into the driver's seat of the blacked-out sedan, his lungs burning. His hand still felt the vibration of the door he'd just knocked on. He felt like he had just planted a bomb.
He looked at the tablet on his dashboard. The night-vision feed flickered to life, showing the interior of the salon. He watched the Fighter pick up the beads. He watched the man's hands shake.
His phone buzzed. No caller ID.
He answered because he had learned, in the time since Delaney had brought him into this, that not answering was its own kind of answer.
Victor looked at the screen. The Fighter had picked up the necklace. He was holding it in his fist like something he wanted to destroy and couldn't quite bring himself to.
The line went dead.
Victor sat in the back seat and watched the screen. He watched the Fighter's mouth moving, saying something to the empty room, and he realized after a moment that there was no audio on this part of the feed, that the words were lost, that he was watching a man scream at a camera he couldn't find in complete silence.
He felt sick in the specific way you feel sick when you understand your own position in something clearly for the first time. Way too clearly.
He looked at the monitor one last time. On the screen, the Fighter threw the necklace. The beads hit the floor and scattered like small broken teeth across the marble. And then the Fighter sank to his knees in the center of the room, in the center of his own home, and the camera watched him the way cameras always watch; without judgment, without mercy, without the basic human grace of looking away.
Victor set the tablet face-down on the seat beside him.
He sat in the dark, leaned his forehead against the steering wheel and listened to the city outside the window and tried to remember the last time he had made a decision that was entirely his own.
He couldn't.
He was Delaney's hands, and his hands wouldn't stop shaking.