THE REPAYMENT CURSE

Dr. Finch stood on the corner of 72nd Street for two full minutes, his heart hammering violently against his ribs.

He looked down at the fifty thousand dollars in his hand. He looked into the heavy paper bag, which contained expensive organic vegetables, a wheel of French brie, and a bottle of 1982 Château Margaux.

"Insane," Finch muttered to himself, his breathing ragged. "The compound broke his mind completely. He’s suffering from a compensatory grandiosity complex. He thinks paying me back frees him from the debt."

Finch adjusted his brown coat, tucked the stack of bills into his inner pocket, gripped his grocery bag tightly, and began walking briskly toward his safehouse three blocks away.

He needed to report this to The Sovereign command center immediately. Subject 409 was active, highly liquid, and mentally unstable. He would need to be terminated before he compromised the broader Phobos-9 field trial.

As Finch reached the steps of his limestone apartment building, he felt a strange, familiar sensation in his left palm—the palm that had held the paper bag Julian handed him.

It was a slight prickling feeling. Like he had brushed his skin against a patch of stinging nettle.

Finch stopped on the second step, his key hovering an inch from the brass lock of his front door.

He dropped the grocery bag. It hit the stone steps with a loud thud.

Slowly, Finch brought his left hand up to his eyes. In the center of his palm, right where the rough recycled paper of the grocery bag had pressed against his skin, was a microscopic red ring of inflamed pores.

A sudden, violent surge of heat exploded in his palm, rushing up his arm like liquid fire straight into his axillary lymph nodes.

"No..." Finch gasped, dropping his cane. It clattered down the stone steps onto the sidewalk. "No, no, no!"

He fumbled desperately with his coat pocket, trying to reach his keys, but his fingers suddenly lost all motor control. They curled into rigid, painful claws. His vision began to vibrate, the peaceful brownstone street twisting into a horrifying, contorted nightmare of screaming colors and stretched shadows.

Julian hadn't used Phobos-9.

Julian was a chief research chemist. He knew compounds Finch hadn't even dreamed of.

The paper bag had been impregnated with a transdermal contact agent—a hyper-concentrated neuro-toxin known as Thanatos-3. It was designed to absorb through the skin, bypass the blood-brain barrier within sixty seconds, and trigger a cascading, irreversible shutdown of the autonomic nervous system.

Finch collapsed onto the stone steps, his back arching wildly as his lungs locked in a permanent, agonized spasm.

His phone began to ring inside his pocket. A soft, electronic chime that echoed endlessly in his dying ears.

Through the haze of his failing optic nerves, Finch saw a shadow step over his twitching legs.

Julian Vance knelt beside the dying old man, just as Finch had knelt beside Julian fourteen months ago. Julian reached out, took the stack of fifty thousand dollars back from Finch’s inner pocket, and leaned down close to his ear.