Check out the makeshift workbench and equipment they've set up, look through the security camera recordings of destroyed hideouts ..and take stock of what tools and materials I have to work with...

The workbench is a sad affair. Three folding tables pushed together against the far wall of the platform, near what used to be a maintenance closet. I run my hands over the equipment they've scavenged — a centrifuge that looks like it was stolen from a high school biology lab, a hotplate, a rack of glass beakers and Erlenmeyer flasks, some rubber tubing, a digital scale that's seen better days. There are boxes of chemicals underneath, most of them common reagents — sulfuric acid, potassium permanganate, sodium hydroxide, acetone, glycerin. Basic stuff. But not useless.

I crouch down, reading labels. My fingers find a bottle of chloroform tucked behind some others, and a sealed container of diethyl ether. Interesting. There are also several bags of ammonium nitrate — fertilizer grade, the kind you can buy at a garden center. Whoever raided that university supply room grabbed things at random, but there's enough here to work with if I'm creative.

"Where are the camera recordings?" I call out without turning around.

Razor's boots scrape on the tile behind me. "Why? You wanna jerk off to the footage of our guys getting wasted?"

I straighten up and face him. "I need to see exactly what happens when different weapons are used against her. The way she moves, the way she reacts. If there's any flinch, any hesitation — anything at all — I need to catch it."

Razor stares at me with those narrow grey eyes, his jaw working like he's chewing on something bitter. Then he jerks his chin toward one of the folding tables where a battered laptop sits. "Knock yourself out, lab rat."

I pull up a metal chair and open the laptop. The files are organized by date — two folders, one for each destroyed hideout. The first is the 14th Avenue Warehouse. The footage is grainy, captured by a single ceiling-mounted security camera. I watch a wall explode inward — not blown, but punched through — and she steps through the rubble like she's walking through a doorway. The diamond form is even more striking on video than in the clips they showed me earlier. Her body catches the harsh overhead lighting and refracts it into scattered prismatic flares across the walls. She's tall in this form, taller than I expected, with a figure that's almost absurdly voluptuous — heavy breasts straining against what looks like a crystalline bodysuit that's actually her skin. Every inch of her gleams.

Four men open fire immediately. I watch the muzzle flashes strobe across the frame. The bullets hit her and ricochet — I can actually see the sparks, tiny bright flickers dancing off her torso, her arms, her face. She doesn't flinch. Doesn't even slow down. She raises one hand toward the nearest shooter and he drops. Just drops. The camera angle is poor, but I can see something dark running from his nose as he hits the ground.

The second man's head comes apart. It's not an explosion exactly — it's more like a balloon overfilled from the inside. The skull fragments outward in a wet spray that paints the wall behind him. I feel my stomach lurch but I keep watching.

I rewind. Play it again. Frame by frame this time.

The third man throws a grenade. It detonates against her midsection. Smoke and shrapnel. When it clears, she's standing in exactly the same spot, not a mark on her. But — I lean closer to the screen — there's something. Her eyes. For a single frame, maybe two, her crystalline eyelids narrow. Not pain. Not damage. But a reaction. Something about the concussive blast, the chemical discharge, the smoke — something registered.

I switch to the textile mill footage. Better cameras, multiple angles. Same story. Gunfire worthless, blades shatter, an RPG does nothing. But I find it again — when a smoke canister goes off near her face, there's a micro-hesitation. A fractional tilt of her head. She's not breathing it in, clearly, because she walks right through it. But the chemical irritants in the smoke... they touched her surface. And she noticed.

"Viktor," I say, pushing back from the laptop. The older man is across the platform, talking in low tones with another thug. He looks over. "I need to talk to you."

Viktor walks over, cigarette dangling from his lip. "You got something already?"

"Maybe. She's not affected by conventional smoke or gas — that's obvious. She doesn't breathe in that form. But I noticed a reaction to chemical irritants on contact with her surface. It's tiny — barely visible — but it's there." I tap the laptop screen. "Standard CS gas and smoke grenades provoke a micro-response. That tells me her diamond skin isn't completely chemically inert. There's some kind of surface sensitivity."

Viktor removes his cigarette and studies me. "So what? We throw spicy air at her and she sneezes?"

"No. I'm saying I can engineer something stronger. Much stronger. Not a gas she needs to inhale — a chemical compound that reacts on contact with crystalline surfaces. I'll need some things."

I write a list on the back of an ammunition invoice: capsaicin extract, industrial-grade hydrofluoric acid, a specific fluoropolymer binding agent, and pressurized canisters. Viktor reads it, his scarred face unreadable.

"Hydrofluoric acid," he repeats flatly. "You know what that does to people?"

"Dissolves glass. Etches crystal. It's one of the few chemicals that attacks silicate bonds — and diamond is a crystalline structure. I'm not saying it'll melt her. But combined with a capsaicin-polymer adhesive that bonds on contact, deployed as an aerosol burst..." I meet his eyes. "It might hurt. Even if it just distracts her for a few seconds, that's more than anything else has done."

Viktor chews on this for a long moment. Then he pulls out a phone and makes a call. The conversation is terse, in a language I don't understand — Serbian, maybe. When he hangs up, he nods. "You'll have your materials by morning."

The materials arrive at six AM — a thug I haven't seen before carries in two heavy duffel bags and drops them at my workbench without a word. I don't sleep. I work through the night and into the next day, hunched over the hotplate and the glassware, mixing, testing concentrations on small glass slides, adjusting the polymer binding ratio until the adhesive component clings to crystalline surfaces on contact and doesn't slide off.

By Thursday afternoon, I have four improvised chemical canisters — each one roughly the size of a soda can, rigged with simple timer-based ignition fuses. The mixture inside is a viscous paste that aerosolizes on detonation: hydrofluoric acid microparticles suspended in a capsaicin-polymer gel. On contact with a crystalline surface, it bonds instantly and begins etching. On organic skin, it would cause devastating chemical burns. On diamond... I don't know exactly. But the glass slides I tested it on fogged, pitted, and cracked within seconds.

"These go where she'll walk," I tell Viktor, holding up one of the canisters. "**** points. Doorways. Stairwells. Wherever she has to pass through. Timed detonation, not triggered by her — she might be able to sense a tripwire somehow, given what else she can do. Set them on sixty-second intervals after an alarm trigger."

Viktor turns the canister over in his thick hands, studying it. "And this will stop her?"

"No," I say honestly. "Probably not. But it might slow her down. And if it does — if there's any visible effect at all — then I know the principle works, and I can make something stronger next time."

He gives me a long, hard look. Then, unexpectedly, the corner of his mouth twitches. Almost a smile. "Honest. I like that better than promises." He pockets the canister. "We're moving you tonight. Red Brick Apartment, East End. She'll hit this place next — probably tomorrow, maybe the day after. I want you somewhere safe when she does."

"I want to watch," I say.

Viktor raises an eyebrow.

"Live feed. Camera. Whatever you have. I need to see what happens when those canisters go off against her. The reaction, the duration, everything. Otherwise I'm working blind."

He considers, then nods. "Fine. We've got a camera link. You can watch from the apartment."

That night, the hood goes back on. Another van ride, shorter this time — maybe twenty minutes. When the hood comes off, I'm standing in a cramped, dingy apartment. Peeling wallpaper the color of nicotine stains. A single window with heavy blackout curtains. A mattress on the floor in one corner, a kitchenette with a hotplate and a mini-fridge in the other. Razor is already here, leaning against the wall, flipping his namesake blade open and closed with an idle, repetitive click.

A small monitor sits on a card table in the center of the room, connected to what looks like a cellular video receiver. The feed shows four angles of the subway station — the platform, the stairwell entrance, the ticket booth area, and the tunnel approach. I can see the thugs left behind as a skeleton crew, eight or nine of them, positioned behind makeshift barricades with rifles and shotguns. My canisters are barely visible — small silver shapes tucked into the shadows at three **** points along the platform, plus one at the base of the stairwell.

"Now we wait," Viktor says from behind me. He drops into a folding chair and lights a cigarette.

We don't wait long.

It's just past eleven PM Thursday when the stairwell camera flickers. Not static — something passes in front of it too fast to track. Then the feed stabilizes and she's there. Standing at the bottom of the stairs, her diamond form blazing under the emergency lighting like a chandelier given human shape. The crystalline curves of her body catch every photon and throw it back in fractured rainbows. She's magnificent and terrifying in equal measure.

The first gunshots ring out, tinny through the monitor's small speakers. Muzzle flashes strobe across camera two. Bullets spark off her shoulders, her chest, her face — each impact a tiny starburst of light that leaves no mark whatsoever. She walks forward. Not running. Walking. The confidence of it is worse than speed would be.

A man steps out from behind a pillar and fires a shotgun at point-blank range into her torso. The buckshot sprays off her like water off marble. She turns her head toward him — a slow, almost languid motion — and he crumples. The camera catches it clearly this time: his body goes rigid, his hands fly to his temples, and then dark fluid begins pouring from his nostrils in two thick streams. He's dead before he hits the ground, his brain running out of his face like oil from a cracked engine block.

"Jesus Christ," Razor whispers. His blade has stopped clicking.

She moves onto the platform. Camera three picks her up. Two more men die — one the same way, brain liquefied and draining; the other violently, his skull detonating outward in a spray of bone and grey matter that paints the tiled wall in a Rorschach pattern of gore. I **** myself to watch. To study.

Then the first canister detonates.

The burst is visible as a sudden white-yellow cloud that erupts from behind a pillar she's just passed. The aerosolized compound catches her full in the back and shoulders. And — my heart hammers — she shudders.

It's small. A visible tremor that runs through her crystalline frame, starting at the point of contact and rippling outward. Her stride breaks for half a second. Her hand comes up — not to her face, but to her shoulder, where the polymer gel has bonded to the diamond surface in a cloudy film. She turns, looking at the canister's remains with what might be curiosity. Or irritation.

The second canister blows. This one catches her from the front — chest and neck. Another shudder, more pronounced this time. Her jaw tightens. Through the grainy feed, I can see the faintest discoloration on her diamond skin where the compound has adhered. Fogging. The acid is working, microscopically, eating into the crystalline surface.

But she doesn't stop.

The third canister goes off at her feet. She walks through the cloud without breaking stride this time, though I catch a third tremor — her left hand clenches into a fist. It's bothering her. It's genuinely bothering her. But it's not enough.

She kills the remaining men in under thirty seconds. The final one tries to run down the tunnel and she drops him from forty feet away — his head snaps back and the dark fluid begins its terrible descent from his nostrils before he's even finished falling. Then she stands alone on the platform, surrounded by bodies, and looks directly into camera three.

The feed cuts to static.

"Fuck," Razor says, very quietly.

Viktor's cigarette has burned down to the filter in his motionless fingers. He stares at the dead screen. Then he looks at me.

"It worked," I say. My voice sounds strange to my own ears — hoarse, shaking slightly. "The compound affected her. Three visible shudder responses. Surface degradation on contact. It's not enough to stop her, not even close. But the principle is sound. The diamond surface is **** to fluoride-based chemical attack. If I can increase the concentration, improve the delivery mechanism, find a way to sustain contact longer—"

"Can you?" Viktor interrupts.

"I need more materials. Better equipment. And time."

Viktor drops the spent cigarette and grinds it under his heel. His face is grey, drawn tight with something I recognize as barely-controlled terror. "I'll get you whatever you need. She just learned this address is done. Next she'll find the trail to the Red Brick place." He pauses. "We've got maybe two, three days before she comes here. Make them count."

Razor hasn't moved from the wall. His straight razor hangs loose in his hand, forgotten. His face is pale, his eyes wide and fixed on the dead monitor. For the first time since I've met him, he has nothing to say.