The first thing Bond felt was cold.

Not the romantic kind, no poetic rain, no moonlit reflection. This was institutional cold, the kind poured into concrete corridors and steel tables to make men feel small and compliant. 
It crept into his bones and stayed there, long after the adrenaline burned off.
He woke chained to a chair.
Wrists cuffed behind him. Ankles locked. Head pounding with the sour throb of sedatives administered by someone who knew exactly how much was too much. His vision came back in layers, light first, then edges, then faces.
Three of them.
Black uniforms. No insignia. No names. Their presence alone told him the truth.
He hadn’t been captured by enemies.
He’d been recovered.
“You’re late,” Bond rasped.
One of them smiled. He was young. Too young to have earned the smile.
“You fell off the map,” the man said. “We’re here to bring you back.”

Bond tested the cuffs. Reinforced. Magnetic locks. Not meant for prisoners, meant for assets who might remember how to fight.
“Back to what?” Bond asked.
“To usefulness.”

The first punch came without warning.

It wasn’t rage-driven. It was instructional, placed perfectly across the jaw, snapping his head sideways, splitting skin. Bond tasted blood immediately. Copper and something deeper. The second punch followed before his muscles could react, a blow to the ribs that lit up nerves already damaged from Prague.
The young man leaned in close.
“You embarrassed people,” he said quietly. “People who don’t get embarrassed twice.”
Bond smiled, red dripping down his chin.
“Then you brought the wrong team.”
The lights went out.
Not darkness, blackout. Emergency systems failing all at once. Somewhere deeper in the structure, something detonated with a dull, internal thud.
The facility shook.
Bond ripped his wrists forward as the magnetic locks stuttered. He wrenched one hand free, bones screaming, skin tearing. He drove the loose cuff into the nearest man’s throat hard enough to crush cartilage. The man collapsed, gurgling wetly.
The second guard reached for his weapon.
Bond kicked backward, chair legs smashing into the man’s knees. He went down screaming. Bond twisted, snapped the remaining cuff against the edge of the table, and tore free as alarms began to wail.
The young one, the smiling one, backed away, gun shaking now.
“You don’t get to...” he started.
Bond crossed the room in three strides and took the gun from him. He didn’t shoot.
He slammed the man’s head into the wall until the smile stopped being recognizable.
Bond stood there breathing hard, soaked in sweat and blood that wasn’t all his.
He was done being recovered.
The facility burned behind him as he stole a vehicle and disappeared into the industrial sprawl.
Someone had wanted him alive.
That meant they still needed him, or needed to understand him well enough to replace him.
That thought sat heavier than the bruises.
By dawn, Bond was bleeding again.
This time it was honest work.
The city was Eastern European, grey, concrete, unforgiving. A place where new money wore old violence like cologne. Bond tracked the signal to a rail yard turned black-site depot. Private security. Military hardware. Men who moved like they’d been told they were already dead.
Bond didn’t go in quietly.
He hit the first guard with the car.
The impact folded the man over the hood, bones snapping audibly. Bond didn’t slow, he swerved, clipped a second, sent him spinning into a stack of steel beams. Gunfire erupted immediately.
Bond bailed from the vehicle as bullets shredded metal. He rolled behind cover, grabbed a fallen rifle, and returned fire with ruthless economy. No wasted rounds. Each shot found meat.
One man took a round through the pelvis and collapsed screaming, hands clawing uselessly at his legs. Bond stepped over him and fired again, ending it. Mercy was inefficient.

He moved through the yard like something unchained.

Close quarters turned savage. He broke a man’s arm at the elbow, then used the jagged break to stab him in the throat. Another rushed him with a knife, Bond took the blade in his forearm, ignored the pain, and drove his head into the man’s face until teeth shattered and the knife clattered uselessly to the ground.
Blood slicked the concrete. Steam rose in the cold air.
Inside the depot, he found what he feared.

A room of screens.
On them, footage. Missions. Kill rooms. Faces obscured, movements familiar.
Too familiar.

Men shaped like him. Moving like him. Killing like him.
Prototypes.
“You can’t outrun iteration,” a voice said behind him.
Bond turned.
The man was older. Calm. Clean suit. No fear.
“We studied you,” the man continued. “Every flaw. Every success. You weren’t unique. You were a draft.”

Bond shot him twice.
Once in the stomach. Once in the face.

The body collapsed backward into the console, screens shattering. Sparks rained down.
Bond stood there shaking, not from fear, not from exhaustion, but from something close to rage.
They hadn’t just replaced him.
They’d improved the cruelty.
The chase began at noon.
Bond took the car because it was fast and familiar, because some instincts don’t die. The city bled into countryside as sirens howled and unmarked vehicles joined the pursuit.
They didn’t care who saw.
They cared that he didn’t escape again.
The road narrowed. The terrain turned wild. Forests gave way to cliffs and altitude.
Bond pushed the car until the engine screamed.
Gunfire punched through doors, glass, flesh. A round tore into his shoulder, burning hot. He didn’t slow. Pain was data now, nothing more.
He clipped one vehicle on a turn, sent it rolling. Another tried to ram him, Bond braked hard, let it overshoot, then accelerated as it slammed into a rock face and exploded.
Ahead, color.
A valley celebration. Hot air balloons rising again, like fate mocking him with repetition. Crowds. Music. No escape without collateral.
Bond drove straight through.
Chaos bloomed instantly. Screams. Panic. Vehicles scattering.
He felt the hit before he heard it.
The car was struck from the side, metal folding inward. Bond slammed against the door, vision flashing white. He fought the wheel, crashed through barriers, and skidded to a halt beneath towering fabric and flame.
He climbed out on instinct.
Someone tackled him immediately.
They hit the ground hard. Bond felt ribs crack as the man drove an elbow into his chest. This one was stronger. Faster. Younger.
A replacement.
They traded blows in the dirt, vicious and silent. The man smashed Bond’s head against the ground. Bond bit down hard on the man’s ear and tore it free. The scream was raw and animal.
Bond used it.
He drove fingers into the man’s eye socket, felt it rupture, then snapped the man’s neck with a twist born of muscle memory and fury.
The balloon above them groaned.
Fire caught fabric.
Bond staggered away as it lifted, burning, beautiful, obscene. He watched it climb, then collapse, raining flame and wreckage down the mountainside.
The crowd fled.
The sirens faded.
Bond dropped to one knee, breathing hard, blood soaking his coat.
He laughed once. It surprised him.
That night, he stood alone by the river.
London again. Always London in the end.
The city didn’t care what he’d done or what he’d stopped. It breathed. It moved. It endured.
Bond checked his wounds with detached precision. He would survive. He always did.
The question was what he would become next.
Somewhere, the machine was recalculating, building something new, something cleaner, something without his doubts or scars.
Bond stared at his reflection in the black water.

“They’ll come,” he said softly.
The river said nothing.
Bond turned away from it and disappeared into the city, already moving toward the next shadow, the next fire, the next place where the system believed it was safe.

It wasn’t.
Not anymore.