Bryce dipped just as the first shooter opened fire.

Glass sprayed as bullets broke apart the wine and glass bottles arrayed on the shelves behind the bartender. Pearl ducked and did not scream. Bryce rolled and found cover behind a support pillar.

He heard them shout. “Bryce! Get Bryce!”

The bar counter erupted in gun fire. Someone grunted and fell. Someone else fell into Bryce and he thought it was Pearl. He didn’t know if she was alive or not.

Bryce shed his jacket and drew up the EMP-AUG. It unfolded as he raised it and aimed it. He saw someone holding a gun and didn’t ask questions. The barrel switcher was a lever about the size of a thumbnail. He flicked it and fired.

The gun hardly made a sound. The AUG’s muzzle splashed the room with pink and purple neon. Dozens of darts shot out from the weapon and drove themselves into the shooters.

Five bodies fell to the floor. At least five. Shit. Bryce kept counting and found seven of them. Men and women, all armed, all still on the ground as if they had chosen to take a nap.

Just like that, the shootout was over.

“Is everyone alright?” Bryce yelled.

He knew they weren’t. He looked at his feet, expecting to find Pearl, and instead found the bartender sprawled out. Something wet collected at Bryce’s feet. He tasted metal.

The paramedics arrived minutes later, pushing themselves into the Destitution and followed by their med drones. The machines scanned Bryce before thinking to themselves and moving on. Likely, they had picked up his field agent credentials.

Only after Bryce told them what happened did he find Pearl huddling behind an overturned table. The woman, however, didn’t shiver—she only peered over the table’s edge while scanning the ruined club. Men and women held each other close when the PNP came and escorted them out. Pearl, however, didn’t seem perturbed at all.

Bryce took her hand and pulled her up, but just as he did, a few forensics officers arrived and started checking the bodies. In their lab coats and glasses, they knelt, studying the unconscious forms.

Bryce handed one of them a dart. “Metamatics field security tech,” he said, before explaining the Black Fire dart’s functionality.

He may as well have been preaching to the choir for the stone-faced visage he received in return. That is, until a familiar face popped its head into existence.

“Tricky Bryce,” said Gabriel Marcello. “Tricky, tricky Bryce Desmond. Always getting himself wound up in shit.”

“Pleasure to see you too, Chief.” Bryce tipped his hat at the PNP chief. The last time he had seen him, the man had been laying on his chair with his hand mouth open as he experienced a Black Fire hallucination in front of a board room of Metamatics higher-ups. Bryce had embarrassed him, and he thought the police chief had never let him down for it.

“Always a survivor.” Gabriel Marcello studied one of the bodies as a forensics officer pulled it away atop a drone-assisted stretcher. The tiny worker drones struggled to hold the man up. “I would say I’m surprised to see you here, but I would be lying.”

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Gabriel probably still harbored some ill feelings towards Bryce, but Bryce shrugged it off. He was better company than the Heads of Operations.

Bryce sifted through his pocket and found one of the darts, explaining that the targets were trapped in a high.

Gabriel took one. “Huh. What are they watching?”

“Dunno. Don’t care. I just wanna know who they are.”

“Now, now, Bryce. Forensics is a wall, as always.”

That stupid governmental wall of information he couldn’t cross. The same thing had happened at Shaw Boulevard station, and it was happening now. He needed to know who these people were so they could lead him to the albularyo. He guessed they were affiliated with the AI, but that was a stretch as well.

His wearable flashed with a message notification, which triggered a thought.

His scanner app still sat unmolested since the last time he’d used it. He pulled it out now, and followed one of the forensics agents, standing close. One of the officers eyed him, but Gabriel Marcello nodded them down, as if he could instill some sort of authority against these government officials.

Bryce repaid the favor and shared his open augment with Gabriel. Together, they watched.

----------------------------------------

“Did you get him?”

“I don’t know what happened. I ended up here.”

Bryce felt he was watching a midnight meeting, peering into the mouth of an alley. The knocked-out man was there, speaking to Her.

“The fact that you are here, then, suggests that you did not get him,” said the albularyo. “So, you failed.”

“Oh.”

An awkward silence settled between the two. Even from the sidelines, Bryce could tell it held volumes. The albularyo seemed like a queen staring down a failing consort. The man must have been in his 30s, and seeing him bow down to this woman put her in the position of an aged grandmother.

Or a tyrant.

“I am so sorry,” he said to her.

He did not give her a title, but the respect was clear. The albularyo was an AI, but in that place, did the man have anything to fear?

“Apologies do not change the world,” said the albularyo. “They only attempt to dim our failures. Yet, they are still failures. You know this?”

What was she getting at?

The man was shivering. Shivering. Bryce saw his jittering frame like a cloth-made doll dangling in the wind. Bryce tried not to yell out at the man and tell him everything was fine, and the albularyo couldn’t hurt him here.

At least, that’s what Bryce thought.

“I want to believe your intentions are pure,” the albularyo intoned. “I honestly do. Yet, a pattern has formed. Failure after failure. I can only consider the possibility that your devotion is lacking. Or worse.”

The man looked up. “Worse?”

In the span of time it would have taken Bryce to raise his fingers and flick it, the albularyo just did that. She raised her fingers to her face and stared at them as if they were five different wands a magician would wield. She flicked them.

The man disappeared.

The sympathizer convulsed. That was the only way Bryce could describe it. One moment he had been laying on a stretcher, the second, his spine curled to a hunchback angle as his chest shot up toward the ceiling. A paramedic rushed to the man, assessing. He checked the sympathizer’s pulse, and turned to a forensics officer.

“Holy shit,” Gabriel Marcello said, stepping away. “Did she just…?”

“Yeah.” Bryce swallowed. “Yeah she did.”

The club suddenly felt very small. A capture drone hovered above the scene, looking down at Bryce and Gabriel. Bryce held one hand on the butt of his AUG, still concealed his jacket. The world slumped in. He was ready to whip it out and shoot the drone down. He’d look crazy, but it never made more sense until now.

The paramedic pushed man in the stretcher away from the others. Bryce’s stare lingered.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?” asked Pearl. She wouldn’t have seen Bryce’s private augment, but it was enough.

He didn’t say anything.

“Be on your way,” Gabriel told her.

“Yeah?” Pearl asked. “You’d like that. Instead, you can tell me what the fuck just happened.”

She spoke with the fervor of a woman twenty years younger. Bryce guessed Pearl was five or so years older than him, which wasn’t much. More importantly, she must have seen things.

“Let me handle this,” Bryce said, leading Pearl away.

Gabriel moved on, speaking to some of his officers.

“What the hell was all that?” Pearl said. “Why was he dead?”

Bryce stared at her. “You wouldn’t be asking that stuff if you didn’t know.”

She breathed hard, and that’s when Bryce knew.

“God. You’ve seen it before, haven’t you?”

Pearl wiped her forehead, blinking up to the sight of the capture drone. “Give me a minute,” she said, panting, “and I’ll tell you.”