Page 15 of Vasily the Hammer

Everything is perfect on that plate, but she’s sitting there with her hands in her lap, frowning down at it until she realizes I’m watching her.

I don’t have anger issues. I kill the causes of my anger issues, and then I’m not angry anymore. It’s a system that’s served me well— and led to rumors I killed the formerpakhan,but honestly, I liked the guy and would have enjoyed a couple more years of focusing solely on my projects before taking over the Southwest. But there’s nothing for me to kill now, and I seem to have forgotten how to manage it in any other way because I bark out at her, “What, you gotta trash my kitchen, and then you don’t even like the food you made?”

Her eyes go too wide. Her lips curl. Ana had a funny way of fighting, forever casting herself out and reeling herself in as she negotiated her idea of me with who I really am, a man who okay, yes, has a temper, but would never do anything except yell for a second to blow off steam before remembering myself.

She’ll tell me to piss off or point out that it’s her kitchen too and I pay plenty of money to someone else to clean any mess that’smade. I’m already feeling better. She’ll yell back, and then we can talk it out.

Only, no. Tears spring from her eyes as she lowers her attention back to the plate in front of her. “I don’t know!” she warbles. “I don’t know if I like the food, and I don’t know why I trashed the kitchen, and I don’t know where I am or what I’m supposed to do or anything!”

She takes flight then, standing so quickly the chair topples behind her as she sprints toward her room. But she has to run by me, and I jut out my arm to snag her by the waist and reel her into me.

It scratches some part of my brain that needed... not to break her, but needed her to break. Broken things rebuild. This is to help her.

She sobs against my bare chest, and I rub her back, making soothing sounds like this is what I’m meant to do. I don’t know, I’m never a comfort to anyone, only a thorn in everyone’s sides. I guess this is my chance to try something new.

I hold her for a long time. Eventually, her sobs subside and her breathing evens out. The hand she rests on my chest squeezes and then relaxes but remains anchored there. A quietude falls over her, and I could fall asleep on my feet, but I think she’s about to fall asleep here, too. Only when she takes a big, raw sigh does she finally shift her weight from me.

“I should clean the kitchen,” she says softly.

My instincts— and the fact that sheismy wife, whether that’s real or not— take over, and I kiss the top of her head before I loosen my hold on her waist. “You need to eat.”

“But the kitch—”

“The cleaners will be here tomorrow. They’ll take care of it.”

The look she shoots me is genuine horror. “I can’t leave it until tomorrow!”

She attempts to squirm fully out of my hold, no doubt to start the dishes, so I use my foot to correct her chair and plop her down into it.“Eat.I will clean the kitchen.”

It works.

For thirty seconds.

And then I spin away from the sink I’ve just filled with pots, and there’s Ana, adding more food to one of the plates.

She grins up at me, her face still tear-streaked and blotchy but her eyes all for me. “For you. You must be hungry.”

She’s going to fuck up my heart all over again.

“You see here, how this surface has a ridge here?” Slug asks, pointing to one monitor before pointing to a second with a nearly identical image on it. “And on this receiver, there’s this lip? I printed these in Flagstaff. This is from one of the older printers, but that’s from the one we just set up last month. And neither of these will work. Now check out this baby I printed here this morning. Eh? Eh?”

I nod despite not seeing much of a difference when the monitors are showing images taken by microscopes and so zoomed in I may as well be looking at glittering rose gold molecules. This isn’t my area of expertise. When the idea of ghost guns first popped up, I had no idea what they were or how they could possibly be legal. I held eighty percent of a gun in my hand, and the thing had no registration number on it, and there was no way this was something I could just casually carry around in my hand while strolling through the local grocery store, but it was.

It’s all about the lower receiver, what’s currently under the microscope and on the screen. Thanks to the Second Amendment and all the mediocre white men who think they’re entitled to literally every single thing in the world however they can get it, the US government says this thing being churned out layer by layer is the only thing that really makes a gun. And it’s manufactured from filament we buy off Amazon.

Well, that’s how we started. But those guns don’t last long, and the machined parts, the eighty percent of the gun that isn’t actually a gun because it’s missing this one thing and the two holes needed to attach it, cost a shit ton of money. So now we make our own. We sell them for the same price that those mail-order kits go for, but ours are every bit as durable as a Glock. The only problem, the one we’re dealing with now, is that to make them that durable, we needed to up the game on those lower registers— sold separately through a completely different company— and that’s required better 3D printers than the ones available online. That’s how Benedetti strolled into my life.

“So we can shift all operations here, then?”

Kostya and Slug both turn on me, Kostya disappointed but Slug simply confused. “You mean... all operations of the Ghostest Ghost?”

Kostya side-eyes him. “Don’t call it that.”

I will never approve that name for the nearly invisible gun, undetectable under clothes and in TSA scanners, but I’ve secretly also started calling it the Ghostest Ghost.

Slug tries again. “All operations of the XQ19 semi-automatic?”

“No, I mean all operations.Alloperations. Shut down Flagstaff.”

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