She waited a week before she knocked on his door. She didn't hear anything from David or Athene in that time, and it left her alone with her thoughts. Vera spent a few shifts at LIMB, setting appointments and putting things in motion for her departure in several months. It wasn't fear exactly that kept her from visiting Jensen, but she wanted herself in order before she spoke to the man she'd brought back.

When she knocked on Adam's door, it slid open of its own wherewithal. Like it was an extension of his nervous system.

"Come in."

Adam sat unmoving on the couch, head turned to the right to watch the sun as it neared the horizon. Orange light scattered and diffracted into through the framed barriers of the skyscrapers caught in the way. He turned as she entered.

"Hey Doc. I'd get up but walking's still difficult."

"Please don't concern yourself, Mr Jensen." She walked down the stairs into his living room and settled herself opposite to him. Adam looked back at her, expressionless even with his lenses retracted.

"How have you been?"

Jensen shrugged, and although the movement was jerky in places Vera thought she caught sardonic humor behind it. "Hanging in there, I guess."

Vera sat down on the couch opposite to him. She tried to contain the building tension inside her and keep it out of her voice; it felt as if she was being held together with steel cables on the verge of snapping.

"Are you...satisfied," she said carefully, "with the outcome of the operation?"

Adam Jensen watched her with all the apparent cold detachment of a man carved out of steel. "Hard question, doc."

His head rotated away from her smoothly to watch the sunset. Eventually, Jensen said, "I'm not dead. That's something."

She waited, unsure of whether Jensen would keep talking.

"I wanted to thank you, though, Doctor Marcovic. For what you did for me. The way I heard it, everybody else had packed it in. Everybody but you."

"I." Hell. What has David told him? Did he mention our deal? Does Jensen know the real reason why his augmentations aren't active or not? Reflexively, she looked away, towards the ground."I...Whatever I did, I did in the name of my profession, Mister Jensen..."

"I'm talking about that trick with the defibrillator, doc. Back when they first brought me in?"

"That?" She looked up. Jensen's expression reminded her of a poker player. He was watching her very carefully.

She was suddenly filled with embarrassment and irritation at her own lack of sense. She'd come in here treating Adam like some kind of wounded bird, and now she was being interrogated. Idiot! This man used to be a detective, even SWAT. Suspicion and sleuthing are his job. You know too much to be having this conversation!

If she'd visibly lost her composure, she hoped feebly that Jensen hadn't noticed. She built up an expression of quizzical calm.

"Of all the things I have done... Mister Jensen, that must surely be the least useful thing I ever did. It wasn't even physically possible for me to restart your heart in that way. It was an act of sheer desperation."

"I've been in combat, Vera." Jensen leaned back, his gaze slanted away from her. Maybe his HUD had an eidetic mechanism, maybe he just remembered things the traditional way. "I've seen acts of desperation before. Acts of bravery, too. Most of them didn't do much good in a concrete way. But some of them held the team together. You didn't give up. Maybe you can't. But that's what held the others together, I think. Thank you."

That hit her. She met Jensen's eyes and nodded thanks, but felt her facial expression begin to slide away from her control.

"Thank you, Adam. My apologies. Do you have a sink?"

Adam motioned subtly with a jerk of his head.

After she'd locked the bathroom door, she had to take a minute to just stand there with her head in her hands. Idiot. Fucking stupid.

If she lost her composure here any more than she already had, if she gave Jensen enough of a hint to keep digging... Well, what would happen that hadn't already? But maybe that lack of trust was something Adam didn't need right now. Or maybe she wasn't the one who should be making that decision anyway. When did I start making decisions on this man's behalf? Withholding information, playing sides? This might be one of those situations where doctors were told to make their own decisions about informing patients, usually reserved for terminal illness. She didn't know how much of a company man Adam was, either. If David was right about him, he'd probably resent the interference. I can leave an account of the operation where he can find it later, if I wish.

Vera supposed that was the closest thing she could get to fairness of any kind. Damn you, Sarif. Damn all of this.

She washed water over her face and straightened. She found herself looking into a fractal pattern of edges and shards rather than a mirror.

"What happened to your mirror, Adam?" Vera asked, once she'd walked out and closed the door behind her.

Adam just looked at her. "Couple hours after I'd just got home. Saw myself in the mirror."

"You... oh. Did you hurt your hand?"

Jensen stared at her like her statement wouldn't load properly. Then he raised his right hand and waggled the fingers experimentally at her.

"I'm sorry." What for exactly, she wasn't completely sure any more.

"Don't worry about it. Why'd you come here? You can read my progress off the microprocessors if you need to."

"Sometimes more... human... communication is necessary. And I wanted to give you something."

She sat back down in front of him and pulled the package out of her purse almost sheepishly. Adam took it from her with care, and unwrapped it clumsily. There was an ebook inside, and a few tools. He started up the ebook first.

"'The Automata of Al-Jazari'," Adam read. "What is it?"

"It's a book about... a sort of a clock, among other things," said Vera, sheepishly. "Years ago, when I was still working in Europe, I took an interest in clock making. But that was a very long time ago. I only remembered I even owned it very recently. I last read it years ago..."

"It's difficult," said Jensen, as if they'd implanted a telepathy aug on top of everything else. "Time consuming. Dextrous." He nodded. "That's everything I needed right now, doc. Thanks."

"You will need to do a great deal of research on the subject if you wish to get anywhere," said Vera. "It is an old translation, and at times the writing becomes rather... thick."

"Thank you. I appreciate it. I'll need the practice. I'm going to need to be ready, and as quickly as I can be."

"Do you still intend to pursue the mercenaries who attacked Sarif?" asked Vera. She couldn't help feeling rather ambiguously about the idea.

"Do you think this is about Megan?" Jensen asked, without heat. "Or Sarif? I'm a cop, Vera. I left after I knew the government I served wasn't paying me to be a cop anymore. Somebody has to make the hard choices on the behalf of others. I went where I thought I could make the biggest impact."

"And now, here you are."

Jensen looked down at his mechanical hands, and they closed into fists. "This is bigger than Sarif. Or Megan, or me. This was the opening salvo in a corporate war, Vera. Maybe the first one on American soil. End of an era. The government's not the only people who reserve the right to force anymore."

"They haven't been able to do that for some time. In some ways, never."

"Anarchy and a new kind of order are different things, Doctor Marcovic. I've seen both, I know."

"What will you do, Adam?"

Adam looked around at his apartment. "I came back here full of rage and grief at what I lost. But eventually I realized how much the people around me had lost instead. How much we could still lose. And I decided this entire conflict is larger than I am. Than Sarif or his whole company is, really. Call it detective's intuition, I think this is going to affect a lot of people. Maybe everyone. I'm getting to the bottom of it. I don't know if I have the right to speak for everyone, but I'm the one who's going to have to."

Vera raised an eyebrow. He seemed sincere, but after everything she'd seen she couldn't be certain it was an act of some kind or another. "I am not entirely convinced yet that this cause of yours is worth your life, Mister Jensen."

"Cut me some slack. My CASIE aug isn't running yet."

She laughed, out of surprise more than anything else. But Vera could see it now, the path Jensen was describing laid out in front of her like blueprints. The people he'd change irrevocably, the lives he'd save, the lives he'd take. David's control only extended so far: she and he and Yan had taken control when they'd rebuilt him but in mere months he'd be turned loose and there would be nothing she or anyone else could do about it. God, what has David created? What have I created? A one-man army, terrible in scope and stature yet driven by nothing more than mere humanity at its heart. In her mind's eye, she could see Jensen staggering down a hill beneath a midnight sky, arms upraised. Villagers scuttling away from him like ants.

The transhuman is coming! RUN!

"You alright, doc?"

Vera had had to put her hand over her mouth to stop her hysterical snickering. It took her several seconds to find her control.

"My apologies, Mister Jensen." She leaned back, and found that Adam was watching her with his head tilted very slightly in an ironic display of confusion. One corner of his mouth was knotted into the beginnings of a smile. Maybe it was a grimace. With him she couldn't be sure.

Vera had never met Adam Jensen before the attack; the first time she'd seen him had been when he'd been wheeled in one a stretcher with his blood soaking through the coarse layers of fabric onto the metal beneath. She was beginning to wonder exactly how much the attack had affected him after all. Whether his cold composure was based in violent trauma or was instead a hardened weary callous at the injustice in the world that he'd seen. But when she stood up and shook his hand before she left, there was something irrevocably human in his grip, cyborg hand or not. Something in the pattern of little movements and tensions that said person to her. Underneath the machinery, it seemed, Jensen's heart still beat.

That was enough for her.

Vera Marcovic smiled at him. "Mister Jensen, for the sake of those who brought you back... please try to keep yourself alive."

"I'll try."