The worst thing had happened.
The law he'd trusted. The system he'd defended. The authority he'd believed in, even when Sheu doubted it, even when Snake and Lilly and Byron all tried to tell him otherwise. He had stood in the middle of their arguments and held the line for it.
It had led him here. It had put his friends in chains.
There was only one place left to go. Not for safety — for direction. For someone to tell him he hadn't ruined everything. That there was a plan, and this was part of it, and the plan still held.
So when he saw the figure on the road — firelight trailing from his heels, embers marking the dirt with each step — relief crashed through him before he could question it.
"Master G!" Moto stumbled forward, the words already tumbling out. "Thank the skies — you have no idea what just happened. Everything went wrong. The rebels, the arrests — Lilly—"
Gwen stood calmly.
Moto kept talking. The desperation was in his voice before he noticed it there. "I didn't mean for this to happen. I thought I was helping. I thought the law would protect them. We just need to go back — report this — find Douglas and fix it—"
Behind his back, Gwen's right hand slowly cupped.
Fire condensed into it — dense, heavy, perfectly controlled.
"Fire sport," Gwen said quietly.
"What?"
"Shot put."
Moto looked up just in time to see it leave Gwen's hand.
He jerked his head aside on reflex. The fireball hit the road behind him and the explosion lifted him off his feet, heat slamming his back, blowing his hair forward. He hit the ground and skidded, then found his footing and turned.
Gwen was smiling. Not the usual smirk. Something colder underneath it. Something that had been waiting.
"That could have killed me," Moto said. His voice shook on the last word.
"I'm following orders," Gwen replied. "Though I'll admit—" his head tilted slightly, "—I'm going to enjoy this one."
Moto stepped back. "Whose orders?"
Gwen looked at him with the patience of someone who has already decided the other person already knows.
"No," Moto said immediately. "No — Douglas sent me on this mission. He trusted me."
"Oh, he trusted you," Gwen said. "That's exactly why he chose you."
The sentence sat in the air.
"Back in Nyika," Gwen continued, "Douglas saw an orphan. Loyal. Devoted. No family structure to create complications. Someone who wouldn't hesitate — and if he did, no one would come looking." He paused. "A disposable spy. Clean and simple."
Moto's breath stopped.
"Sheu's father was one of them," Gwen added.
Something cracked.
Smoke began seeping from Moto's skin — thin at first, then thicker, curling off him in dark spreading waves until Gwen could no longer see the road behind him.
Gwen exhaled through his nose. "This again."
He flicked his wrist. A dense fire sphere tore through the smoke and detonated.
The blast threw Moto backward. He hit the ground without a sound. Didn't cry out. Didn't flinch. He lay on his back staring at the sky while the smoke drifted.
Blind trust. Orders. Authority.
All of it.
He thought of Snake, who had helped without proof of anything. Tanaka's voice: you're too trusting. Sheu's quiet doubt after her father died, the specific quiet of someone who already knows and is waiting for you to catch up.
And then — Amber.
His sister, in Nyika, under Douglas's protection. Under Douglas's reach.
Run, his mother's voice said, from wherever voices like that live.
Run.
But where? Asher was gone. His crew was in chains. Every time he ran, something was left behind. Someone.
"Run... run... ru—"
"No," Moto whispered.
Gwen frowned. "What?"
Moto pushed himself up.
His eyes were different. Not wild, not cracked open with betrayal. Focused. The way eyes get when something that was complicated becomes simple.
"Never again," he said.
The asphalt began to sizzle.
He breathed out. The smoke billowed from him in a dense, expanding wave, swallowing the road.
Gwen's voice cut through the grey. "You haven't learned anything, have you, kid?"
Orange light flared inside the fog.
BOOM.
The shockwave tore the smoke apart and found Moto with his arms crossed over his chest, feet carving grooves into the road as he absorbed it. He didn't make a sound. He exhaled again when the blast finished. More smoke. Thicker.
"Boring," Gwen muttered. He snapped his fingers. Another sphere — fast, heavy — into the new cloud.
BOOM.
Debris rained. Moto tumbled shoulder-first into the dirt, picked himself up, stood with dust on his clothes and blood on his lip.
"How long?" Gwen stepped forward, irritated now. "Are you going to keep hiding in the fog until I turn you to ash? Go out like a man."
Moto said nothing. Another wave of smoke rolled from his skin.
Gwen scoffed and stopped pretending to be patient. He raised his hand above his head and poured energy into the construct, the air warping around it as the fireball grew — dense, humming, heavy enough to strip the ground clean.
Inside the smoke, Moto watched the gathering light. The stance. The wind-up. The weight distribution.
Got it.
"Hm?" Gwen frowned.
He threw it.
The fireball hit the smoke bank like a dropped building. KABOOM. The road disintegrated to bedrock. The smoke annihilated. Gwen shielded his eyes, certain.
The crater was empty.
He blinked.
Ten metres to his left, standing in the clear air outside the blast zone: Moto. Still upright. Brushing a speck of ash off his shoulder. Not panting. Not bleeding.
Watching.
"What—" Gwen's grin broke. "How did you move that fast?"
Moto let the smoke roll off him again and said nothing.
The irritation became anger. Gwen fired — rapid, dense volleys of heat. Moto dissolved into smoke, the blasts found nothing, the smoke cleared. Moto was closer. Gwen fired again. Same result. Closer.
"Stop mocking me!"
He clapped both hands together and pulled them apart. The fire between them elongated, spiralling into a dense aerodynamic oval. He could feel the mass of it in his grip.
"Fire Sport: Rugby Bullet!"
He planted his feet. Twisted his whole body into the wind-up, every degree of torque loaded into the throw. His chest was open. His eyes locked on the centre of the smoke cloud.
He wound up.
The smoke parted.
Not at range. Here. Inside his guard. The cloud wasn't where he'd been firing — it had been moving, steadily, through each explosion, closing the distance while his eyes were on the detonations.
Moto was already in the space between his arm and his body.
"Dash Step," Moto said.
His elbow drove into Gwen's solar plexus with the full weight of a sprint behind it.
CRACK.
The air left Gwen in a strangled wheeze. The fire rugby ball dissolved into harmless sparks as every thought in his head collapsed down to one point of pain. His eyes went wide. His feet left the ground.
He folded over Moto's arm and hung there for a moment, suspended by the force of the impact, looking at the road beneath them from an unusual angle.
He had underestimated him.
That was the thought, arriving late and useless, as the ground came up.