“Once again, Bryce, you’re a survivor.” Francesca Thaddius Reed folded her legs. Her white rain boots reached up to her ankles. “What is with you and worming your way out of things?”

He wished he could have answered that. Hannah had saved him from the Tondo Tussle, which meant she had been involved in the TURTLE M2 hijacking from the start. Not only that, but her foray into Black Fire had led her here. It would be foolish to believe she was involved with the attempt on Bryce’s life. So, if it wasn’t her, then who?

Ms. Reed, projected before Bryce, sniffed from the comfort of her Makati office. “If the capture drones didn’t follow you before, they will now. It won’t be hard to infer that you’re the same field agent who survived the Tondo Tussle. Especially with that Rappler piece.” Ms. Reed flicked over a news article that opened automatically. “They got your good side.”

There he was, on Balagtas street with his EMP-Glock raised, indistinguishable from the officers save for his lack of uniform and the wearable over his eyes that glowed blue while the PNP’s radiated violet. Rappler must have mixed one of its drones among the Q-95s.

The EV stopped next to the curb, and Bryce exited to face a trio of capture drones a meter before him. The drones hovered over the heads of curious onlookers forming behind the caution tape dome. Ms. Reed followed him in augmented reality as he took the escalator to Shaw Boulevard station.

“By the way,” Ms. Reed urged, “did your security detail make it to you yet?”

As soon as she said it, a swarm of black shapes flooded down the street. One branched off, but two came to rest just behind him. The drones were as large as microwaves, just as boxy but with two Taser guns on each side. One glowed green and the other yellow.

“Lime and Lemon,” Bryce assigned them. “Since when did TAZ-2s follow security agents?”

“Since terrorists targeted those security agents,” uttered Ms. Reed.

“How do you know they were terrorists?”

“I don’t, but we’ll act like they are.”

Bryce had only seen the TAZ-2s in the field during his early days at Metamatics. They were only decorations hovering around the Chicago office's glass tower back then. He thought they were prototypes, seeing as the only attempts on the headquarters were bomb scares or protests.

“Aren’t there only a few for our Makati office?” Bryce asked.

“Bryce, you are the Makati office.”

She meant that in hyperbole as encouragement but delivered it at the best time, bracing him for what was to come.

It was Domingo again, seemingly following Bryce around like one of the capture drones. This time, however, Bryce welcomed his presence more than ever.

“I’m sorry, buddy.” Domingo reached a hand.

Bryce hadn’t known Carlo Carbrera very long, but he was a field agent and a reminder that, in this line of work, Bryce was not invincible.

Rain hammered on the station’s steel roof when Bryce and Domingo crossed the holographic caution tape line that fended off hordes of curious student journalists and mall-goers risking the noon’s heat.

The city had diverted all traffic from the Boni and Ortigas Avenue stations, isolating the Shaw Boulevard platform to hold the singular MRT train car that had held six bodies the night before. Domingo flicked over temporary credentials to access the augmented scene the crime scene investigators had set up. When Bryce turned it on, he saw recreations of the bodies from earlier that morning. He searched and couldn’t find Carlo Carbrera until he looked down and saw the man’s face plastered against the floor, his chest crushed from where a Q-96 model had sat on him.

“Shoot,” said Domingo, seeing the same augment in his wearable.

Bryce’s stomach heaved. He swallowed, resisting the urge to lose his breakfast all over the MRT car floor. He couldn’t help coughing anyway, so Domingo patted him on the back.

“Easy, big man,” said Domingo, as if it helped. “If it makes you feel better, it looks like a batibat did this.”

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

Bryce’s wearable detected the foreign term and pulled up a projected window displaying an enormous and obese female demon.

“It comes out of the walls and sits on you until you suffocate,” said Domingo, seeing the wearable’s interpretation hovering between them. “Weird, eh?”

“You watch too much TV,” Bryce uttered. He closed the window, hoping the image wouldn’t stick.

The wounds on the other agents were much the same: concussions, impacts, and broken bones from where the drones smashed into them at full speed. With all the open space in the cars, the drones had enough room to gain speed and ram into the agents before they could even pull their weapons out. But six at once?

“Did they not even ask why the drones were in the cars in the first place?” Bryce ventured.

“Maybe it got to their heads,” said Ms. Reed, looking off to a screen that probably contained the POV from Bryce’s wearable. “By the way, Bryce, can you confirm you have a sharpshooter?”

Bryce peered around the station, searching for a person. “No?”

“There should be a third.”

He exited the car and found Lime and Lemon hovering outside the door like two ghostly shoe boxes wielding Tasers. It would take a while to get used to their presence.

He was about to ask them what Ms. Reed was talking about when a new user connected to their open augment’s voice channel. “Hello?” said a scraggly female Filipino voice. Her accent was as thick as a provincial forest in Bacolod, the ones that surrounded Bryce’s house of his youth. “You’re out of line of sight, Mr. Desmond.”

“That sounds too real,” said Ms. Reed.

Bryce scanned Manila’s neon skyline and the clusters of drone fleets that, from this distance, looked like flies.

“To the west a bit,” said the voice. “Ten degrees.”

Bryce pivoted a little, walking back the way he came. He wasn’t sure how far ten degrees was. “Better?” he asked.

A targeting reticle manifested in his private augment, scrunching to overlay a drone sitting atop an apartment complex across the street. It was an SD-1 and held little resemblance to its TAZ-2 counterparts. Bryce had only seen the SD-1s in prototype teasers from Metamatics’s R&D divisions, with their low-profile rectangular frame housing weapons, electronics, and ammunition. They were closer to the monoliths in 2001: A Space Odyssey than to drones.

“Perfect,” said the SD-1.

It occurred to Bryce just after the drone spoke. “How did you get approval for lethal weapons on a drone?”

“It was a little easier to get Malacañang’s endorsement after I reminded them the city’s well-being is at stake,” said Ms. Reed.

“Just keep your augment open at all times so I can hear where you’re going,” the SD-1 continued.

Bryce shook his head, ridding his mind of intrusive thoughts. “Isn’t that distracting?”

“Your movements are distracting.”

“Right.” Bryce tried not to think of why he even needed perpetual sniper cover.

When Bryce returned to the MRT car, he found Domingo speaking to the lead crime scene investigator, who was, surprisingly, almost as tall as Bryce.

“Oh, great,” said the woman. “Just what we need. More interference.”

“I’ll be out of here in a bit,” said Bryce. There wasn’t much he could gleam from the scene that he couldn’t find through a video or a 3D reconstruction that the PNP could send him later. This all could have been done through an e-mail. Maybe then Carbrera’s death wouldn’t have hit as hard.

Plus, in person, he could see the scene for itself. The place did hold some clues. The drones did not break glass coming in, which meant they must have entered the station the usual way. There were no reports of suspicious drone behavior before the incident, meaning they must have blended in before launching at the agents.

“Well,” continued the investigator, “if that’s all you need…”

Bryce thought he should ask since he came all this way. “Can I see the bodies?”

“Not up to me, but I doubt it.”

That was the closest answer that Bryce was going to get. He wasn’t law enforcement, and Philippine forensics was a stone fort no one could access without proper authorization, even the PNP. Ever since the Convergence began, the country had been doing its best to combat corruption, erecting a fortress wall around forensics. This sometimes had the opposite effect of closing an already hard-to-reach domain off from law enforcement and, even more so, the Giants.

Bryce had to remind himself he wasn’t a detective but a field agent. The next time he would see Carlo Carbrera’s body would be in a casket.

Bryce could tell by her silence that the lead crime scene investigator’s temper was ending. He phoned up Ms. Reed, only to realize she hadn’t left the call. “I need to see them,” he said.

“She just told you that you can’t, Bryce,” said Ms. Reed. “You think they would be just a little more helpful.” Bryce thought Ms. Reed uttered “ignorant bitch” under her breath before tilting her head back and staring at her ceiling. She waited in thought. “Ah. That’s what you meant.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, alright.” Ms. Reed flicked something in her augment. She smiled. “They won’t let us see the bodies, so we won’t let them see our drones.”