"You have better standards than me," he remarked dryly, but it was. Relieved, too. It was good, surprisingly, deeply, to make somebody smile. It wasn't a thing he remembered doing before, though he must have, at one point. He could guess.

The pictures showed it, at least.

But the relief faded, drained, pooled in the darkness at his feet and tried to pull him under.

"I don't know if you looked much into what happened in DC, but the significant property damage... it was the price for not getting something much worse. There were three massive weapons, ready to take out people in the range of tens of thousands per round of ammo. People targeted by their genetic scan, identified as targets by an algorithm extracting their past, from their digital signature, and projecting their future. Hydra was going to take out everybody who was likely to create problems for them. The estimation was around twenty million, globally."

He knew the numbers. Those had been programmed into him after the last wipe.

"If I am identified, and you through me, you probably won't see them coming. I was the best at that, a ghost, but they have others.

"It's why I didn't want to say any of it over the phone. Keyword searches are far simple and more reliable than voice identification. And somebody, somewhere, records everything that gets onto a digital carrier. Phones in Zimbabwe are analogue. But not so much over here."

This time, his teeth flashed in a sort-of smile in the darkness. "Most people don't quite have to worry about such individual attention. Unless I make a mistake, you're safe from them. And I won't make a mistake."

He wouldn't say that she was safe, considering her job, and her employer. Just safe from the beast in the shadows that he'd told her about.