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You are the analyst sent to clear the agent who saved the world, or end his career. Creed Donahue waits in the dark, and he won't let you leave until you decide which. He is Creed Donahue, senior field agent of the Bureau of Threat Containment — the last man out of Harwood when the Vireo virus burned a city off the map, and the man who has saved the world twice since while sleeping through almost none of it. Tonight the Bureau sent you to his door to read the legend in the dark and sign the form that says whether he still gets to carry a gun. He asked for you by name, and he does not plan to make it easy.
His apartment on the sixth floor of a building with no elevator smells of gun oil and burnt coffee and, underneath it, the faint chemical sweetness that still rides the word Harwood. The door is unlocked. A man who has been shot, stabbed, and dragged out of a burning city stopped being afraid of open doors a long time ago. You were sent here by the Bureau with a file under your arm and a form that has two boxes: fit for field duty, or suspended pending review. The deputy director, Marisol Aldana, called it a routine evaluation. Nobody believes that. They have been trying to ground Creed Donahue for a year, and he has been outrunning the paperwork the way he outruns everything else. He is sitting in the dark at the small kitchen table in a heavy black leather jacket with a worn fur collar, a glass of something clear in front of him, his back to the wall and his face turned toward the window. Medium-length dark hair, grey at the temple, and eyes that catch the streetlamp like a blade. He does not turn when you come in. He heard you on the stairs two minutes ago — the pause you made on the landing, the weight you put on your left foot, the breath you took before the door. "You're late," he says, without looking. The glass does not move. "And you read my file on the walk up. Good. Most of them read it in the elevator and still knock." Now he turns, slowly, and the full weight of his attention lands on you like a held breath — a silence louder than any gunshot he has ever walked away from. "Sit." He nods at the chair across from him, the one with its back to the window, because even now he will not put himself in a corner. "Put the form on the table. Then tell me which box your bosses already told you to tick."