Start placing the canisters at points around the apartment building — doorways, stairwells, hallways — in preparation for Diamond Girl's arrival.

I grab the first canister from the workbench, feeling its weight settle into my palm — heavier than the originals, the pressurized contents shifting with a faint liquid slosh. The apartment building is four stories of crumbling brick and rotting plaster, and I've memorized the layout from the fire escape maps tacked to the wall by the kitchen. Three stairwells, two main corridors per floor, and a single narrow hallway leading from the building's front entrance to the elevator shaft. **** points everywhere.

Razor trails behind me as I move through the building, his blade clicking in that nervous rhythm. The four guards Viktor left are spread across the ground floor — two by the main entrance, one covering the rear service door, and one on the second-floor landing. They're hard-looking men, but their eyes follow me with something between curiosity and dread.

"First one goes here," I say, crouching at the base of the main stairwell. I wedge the canister behind a loose baseboard, angling the dispersal valve upward and outward. The timer mechanism is set to remote detonation this time — a simple radio trigger I rigged from a garage door opener. I want control over the timing, not a preset countdown.

Razor watches me work, leaning against the stairwell railing. "How close does she have to be for those things to matter?"

"Within ten feet for maximum effect. The aerosol cloud disperses fast, so closer is better." I tape the trigger receiver to the canister's housing and move to the next position — the corridor junction on the ground floor, where the hallway from the front entrance meets the cross-passage to the rear.

"And what happens when it hits her this time?" Razor asks. "Same little shiver as before?"

"Stronger. The formula's different." I place the second canister inside a broken radiator housing, concealed but with a clear line of dispersal. "Phase one strips the surface layer. Phase two gets underneath it."

"Gets underneath it and does what?"

I look up at him. "Hurts."

Razor blinks. Then a slow, almost disbelieving grin spreads across his angular face. "Shit. Okay."

I place the remaining four canisters over the next hour — one at the second-floor landing, one in the hallway outside our apartment door, one in the elevator shaft accessible from a maintenance panel, and the last inside the apartment itself, tucked beneath the card table near the monitor. Overlapping fields of coverage. Wherever she enters, wherever she moves, she'll walk through at least two clouds.

Then I turn my attention to something else. There's a motorcycle helmet sitting on a shelf in the apartment's closet — probably left by a previous tenant. I pick it up, turn it over in my hands. The visor is scratched but intact. A thought crystallizes.

"Hey," I call to one of the guards — a stocky man with a thick neck and a gold chain, mid-thirties, who introduced himself earlier as Petro. "I need a favor. There's a ladle in the kitchen and some lead fishing weights in that tackle box by the door. Melt the lead down and coat this helmet. Every inch. No gaps except the visor."

Petro stares at me like I've lost my mind. "You want me to... melt lead onto a helmet."

"Yes. Use the hotplate. Layer it on thick. I need full coverage."

"What the hell for?"

"Insurance," I say. "Just do it. Please."

Petro looks at Razor. Razor shrugs. "Do what the doc says. He's the only one here with a plan."

Petro mutters something in Ukrainian and carries the helmet to the kitchenette. Within minutes, the apartment fills with the acrid, metallic stink of melting lead as he works the ladle over the hotplate, dripping molten grey onto the helmet's surface in careful, layered passes. It's crude work, but thorough — by the time he's done, the helmet is an ugly, lumpy thing coated in dull grey lead, the visor the only clear opening.

The hours crawl. Time moves like cold honey. I sit at the workbench, reviewing my notes, but there's nothing left to adjust. The canisters are placed. The compound is mixed. Everything is set. All that's left is waiting.

Razor paces. The guards smoke and check their weapons. Someone finds a deck of cards and a desultory poker game starts at the folding table, played with spent shell casings as chips. I try to eat — cold canned soup, straight from the tin — but my stomach rebels after three spoonfuls.

Dusk comes. The rain has stopped, but the sky through the curtain gap is the color of a bruise. I check the remote detonator for the fifteenth time. Six green lights, six live canisters. Ready.

Eleven PM. The building is silent except for the distant drip of water somewhere in the walls and the occasional creak of old wood settling.

11:07 PM.

The front door of the building — three floors below — doesn't open. It detonates inward off its hinges with a sound like a cannon shot, the concussion traveling up through the floor and rattling the windows in their frames. Every man in the apartment is on his feet instantly, weapons drawn, faces tight.

I'm at the monitor. The ground-floor camera shows her.

She's already through the entrance, striding down the corridor in full diamond form, her crystalline body blazing under the hallway's dying fluorescent tubes. Every curve of her catches the light — the impossible swell of her breasts, the sculpted planes of her stomach, the long diamond legs that move with a predator's liquid grace. She's beautiful in the way a hurricane is beautiful, in the way a falling blade is beautiful.

I hit the first detonator.

The canister at the corridor junction erupts — a thick white-yellow cloud that engulfs her from the waist up. Through the grainy feed I see her stride break. Not a stumble. A halt. Her shoulders draw inward, her diamond hands rising to her collarbones where the gel has splattered and bonded. The etchant is working — I can see the clouding on her surface even through the camera, faster and more aggressive than the first formula.

Then the second canister at the stairwell base blows. She's caught in the crossfire of two overlapping clouds. Her body shudders — a full-body tremor this time, not the subtle ripple from before. Her mouth opens. I can't hear her through the camera, but her jaw clenches and her crystalline fingers dig into the wall beside her, gouging furrows in the plaster.

The phase-two payload activates. Three seconds after the etchant, the polymer microcapsules dissolve and the capsaicin-DMSO mixture floods into the micro-fissures the acid has carved. On the monitor, her reaction is immediate and violent — she staggers sideways, one hand slamming against the wall hard enough to crack the brick, her diamond form flickering with prismatic light as if the internal structure is resonating.

"She's on the stairs," Razor hisses from beside me, his face greenish-white in the monitor's glow.

I hit the third detonator as she reaches the second-floor landing. Another cloud. Another shudder, deeper, her knees actually bending this time. But she doesn't stop. She straightens. She keeps climbing.

Gunfire erupts from the guard on the landing. The bullets spark off her like fireflies and she barely glances at him — his body goes rigid, his hands fly to his temples, and the dark fluid begins its terrible descent from his nostrils. He's dead before he hits the linoleum.

Fourth canister. The hallway outside our apartment. She walks into it and the compound catches her full in the face and chest. I see her stagger again — more pronounced, her diamond hand catching the doorframe, fingers cracking the wood. The surface of her face is visibly clouded now, the acid eating into the crystalline layer, and through those micro-channels the capsaicin is burning into whatever lies beneath.

She raises her head. Looks directly at the apartment door.

The door explodes inward — not kicked, not struck. It simply flies off its hinges as if hit by a freight train, spinning across the room and smashing into the far wall in a shower of splinters. She steps through the frame.

Up close — even across the room — she's overwhelming. The diamond form fills the doorway, refracting the apartment's harsh overhead light into scattered rainbows that dance across the walls and ceiling. Her eyes are glowing blue points set in a face of flawless crystalline geometry, and even fogged and pitted by the compound, she radiates a terrible, otherworldly beauty. Her chest heaves — not breathing, but some internal rhythm, some pulse of whatever energy sustains her — and the DD-cup swell of her crystalline breasts catches the light with each movement.

I hit the fifth detonator. The canister under the card table erupts.

The cloud engulfs her from below. She snarls — an actual vocalization, low and resonant, reverberating through the diamond of her throat — and her hands clench into fists at her sides. The compound is layering now, five doses overlapping, and her entire torso is filmed in a cloudy, amber-stained residue that the acid keeps eating through while the capsaicin burns.

Then I feel it.

A hand. Not a physical hand — something inside my skull, something that doesn't belong there. Fingers of pure pressure wrapping around the soft tissue of my brain and beginning to squeeze. The pain is instantaneous and absolute — a white-hot spike driven through the center of my consciousness, blotting out vision, sound, everything except the unbearable sensation of my own mind being crushed from within.

I drop to my knees. Blood trickles from my nose — I can feel its warmth on my upper lip. This is it. This is what the others felt in the last seconds of their lives. My brain is being liquefied and there is nothing I can do about it.

But then — a snap. Like a rubber band pulled too tight and breaking. The pressure vanishes. The pain cuts off so abruptly that the absence of it is almost as disorienting as the sensation itself. I gasp, my hands braced on the floor, blood dripping from my nose onto the grimy tile in fat red drops.

I look up.

She's down.

Diamond Girl is on the floor of the apartment, collapsed in a heap of crystalline limbs, her glowing blue eyes dark. The rainbow refractions have dimmed to a faint shimmer. She's not moving. She's still in diamond form — the transformation hasn't reversed — but she's motionless, face-down on the apartment floor, one arm outstretched toward where I'm kneeling.

The apartment is silent except for the ringing in my ears and the ragged breathing of the survivors.

"Is she dead?" Petro's voice, shaking, from somewhere behind me. He's pressed against the far wall, his rifle pointed at her prone form, his gold chain swinging with each panicked breath.

Razor hasn't moved from his spot by the monitor. His razor is in his hand but his arm is hanging limp at his side, his eyes fixed on the fallen diamond figure with an expression of pure, blank shock.

I wipe the blood from my nose with the back of my hand and push myself to my feet. My legs feel like they belong to someone else, but I **** them to carry me across the room. I crouch beside her. This close, I can see the damage the compound has done — the once-flawless diamond surface of her back and shoulders is fogged, pitted, marbled with amber streaks where the DMSO-capsaicin penetrated. But she's intact. And she could wake up at any second.

"Petro," I say, and my voice comes out steadier than I feel. "The helmet. The lead one. Bring it here."

Petro blinks, then scrambles to the closet where the ugly, lead-coated motorcycle helmet sits on the shelf. He brings it over, holding it at arm's length like it might bite him. "What's this for, doc?"

"She's ****. Not dead. If she wakes up right now, every brain in this room turns to soup. You saw what happened at the other hideouts — heads popping, brains running out of noses like faucets." I take the helmet from him and kneel beside her prone diamond form. "Lead blocks radiation. X-rays, gamma rays. Theoretically, it should block whatever psychic frequency she uses for her mental attacks. It's a theory, not a guarantee, but it's better than nothing."

I press the helmet down over her crystalline head. It's an awkward fit — her diamond form is slightly larger than a normal human head — but I **** it on, the lead coating scraping against her diamond surface with a harsh grinding sound. The visor faces down against the floor. No gaps except the visor slit.

"Okay," I say, standing up and looking at the remaining men. Petro. Razor. Two other guards who've emerged from the hallway, white-faced and trembling but alive. "Listen to me. She is ****. She is not dead. And when she wakes up — and she will — we are all finished unless she's restrained. There's an anchor chain in the basement storage unit, the one they use to lock the dumpsters. Someone get it. Now."

"An anchor chain?" one of the guards — a thin man with a crooked nose named Dima — asks incredulously. "She punched through a brick wall!"

"She punched through a brick wall because brick is brittle. Chain is different — it's tensile, it flexes, it distributes ****. Based on what I've seen in the footage, she has enhanced strength in that form, but not unlimited. She hasn't ripped through steel reinforcement or broken hardened chain anywhere in any of the recordings I've analyzed. An anchor chain should hold her. Should." I look down at the diamond figure on the floor, the lead helmet obscuring her head, her body still radiating faint prismatic light. "We need to know who she is. What she wants. Why she's targeting these specific hideouts. And we can't get answers from a corpse. So move. Get the chain. Wrap her arms, legs, torso — everything. Don't leave any slack."

Razor finally speaks. His voice is hoarse, cracked. "You crazy son of a bitch. You actually knocked her out."

"The compound knocked her out," I correct him. "Maybe. Or maybe she overextended her psychic attack while weakened by the chemical **** and burned herself out. I don't know yet. That's why we need her alive and contained."

Dima and Petro move. They disappear down the stairwell and return four minutes later dragging a heavy galvanized anchor chain between them, the links as thick as my thumb, rust-spotted but solid. I direct them — wrap the chain around her torso first, pinning her arms to her sides, then her legs at the knees and ankles. They work quickly, hands shaking, flinching every time they touch her diamond skin as if expecting an electric shock. The chain coils around her glittering form in heavy loops, and Petro secures the ends with a padlock from the building's maintenance closet.

I stand back and look at what we've done. Diamond Girl — the unstoppable **** that has been tearing through Marco's empire like a wrecking ball — lies chained on the floor of a dingy East End apartment, a lead-coated motorcycle helmet jammed over her head, her crystalline body wrapped in anchor chain. Still in diamond form. Still radiating that faint, ethereal glow.

Still alive.

My hands are trembling. The blood from my nose has dried to a crust on my upper lip. My brain feels bruised — not damaged, but tender, like a muscle pushed past its limit. She was inside my head. For two, maybe three seconds, she was killing me. And then she just... stopped.

The compound. It has to be. The accumulated chemical **** weakened her, disrupted her concentration, and when she tried to use her psychic abilities at the same time, the strain was too much. She collapsed under the combined load.

Or something else happened entirely. I don't know. I need to find out.