It takes a lot of planning to disappear. A lot of planning.
He thinks back to the Games. How he start pulling money from his accounts in small, incremental amounts. How he packed his most important possessions into a duffel bag hidden in his safe. How he started wiping and then systematically destroying all of his spare drives.
How he wiped his entire rig and left without a word in the middle of the night.
It hadn’t been easy. It’s never easy to disappear. But, for some reason, this time is harder.
Maybe because when he’d run from the Syndicate the first time, he’d done so believing Mila was dead.
This time, he’d left behind people who had become so important to him, despite his worst intentions. Natalie, mainly, and...
He can’t bring himself to think their name.
The streets of Malta are slick and shiny with rain. The neon lights hanging off of buildings and in shop windows glow brightly, casting swaths of color across the ground. Crypto walks with his hood up, hands shoved into his pockets, a simple cloth mask obscuring the lower half of his face from view.
Disappearing was the hard part. Now he’s just going through a checklist of things to do to protect himself.
New identity? Check.
Forged documents? Check.
Temporary hideout? Check.
Facial alteration surgery? That one’s still on the list. It’d been a real pain to do it the first time, which means, yeah, he’s kind of sort of putting another surgery off. But he knows it’s a necessity, knows that he’ll be grateful to have done it once it’s over.
He stops at a vending machine and uses a few rumpled bills to get some protein bars and a bottle of water.
And the hair on the back of his neck prickles.
Like he’s being watched.
He glances around, surreptitiously, while vehicles pass on the street behind him. Nothing stands out as obviously dangerous. A few apartment windows overhead are lit warmly from within; a few dark figures stand smoking in alleyways or on street corners, but they’re passerbys. Faceless people on the street who care about him as much as he cares about them.
But that feeling of being watched doesn’t go away. He shoves the vending machine fare into his bag, hunches his shoulders against the rain, and hurries along.
closed for @honorrwolf (bloodhound).
