3423rd cycle after the Ascension.

Forty days after the imperial ambassador’s murder.

Macreen crouched by the ledge of an unfinished floor, where the skyscraper’s skeletal framework was still exposed. Holding onto a metal beam, she observed the heart of North Island: The Gambling House.

It was a behemoth of opulence ensconced inside a circle fence of grey buildings, whose facades bore colourful billboards and dancing holograms. However, neither their vibrancy nor their brightness could match the massive casino.

Beams of gold and blue light shot skyward from its body, slicing through the air in a dazzling display. The oblique shape of the building glittered with gold, while some jutting parts stood encased in iridescent crystal. The fixed lights dotting the exterior turned on and off in ever-changing patterns.

Armoured vehicles lined the wide street which ringed the massive building.

Peering through her binoculars, Macreen counted them and said, “Forty-seven.” She turned towards Raid and Bale, who crouched on her right. “And that’s just in the immediate area.”

“Doesn’t look like it’s just mercs.” Raid squinted as he stared through his own binoculars. “Been a while, but I don’t recall gangs and fixers teaming up like this.”

“They don’t.”

“What’s this then?”

She looked down at the street bustling with heavily armed activity. “An unwelcome change.” The different Islands might have their individual quirks, but the ways of the undersurface were constant. Something big was brewing here.

Raid directed his gaze at Bale. “You got any good news for us?”

The other man kept his eyes closed, deep in concentration. He slowly parted his eyelids, following with a deep exhalation. “Too soon to tell, but I think I can crack it.”

Macreen blinked in surprise. She’d expected a dismal expression, not a promise of success. Did wards not require a lot of power to break? Bale was weaker than her, she’d have known if that weren’t the case, but, apparently, that wasn’t a factor in this field.

Despite her talent as an adept, wards were a completely foreign topic to her. They required theoretical knowledge and principles that could only be imparted by a teacher. How Bale had gotten one was beyond her, but it didn’t matter. I’ll have to wait and see.

“How long will it take?” she asked.

He took a few moments to consider. “Forty to fifty minutes.”

“Don’t think we’ll have that long,” Raid said. His eyes narrowed as he stared at something.

Following his gaze, Macreen spotted a scattered swarm of black dots: patrol drones. While this building was two streets away from the centre of activity, no doubt, they would be found sooner rather than later.

Bale said, “There’s a second option. It’s much faster but that carries its own risk.”

“How much faster?” she asked.

“Ten to fifteen minutes.”

She raised a brow. “And the risk?”

“I’ll be probing the ward directly. Any mistake will alert them to what I’m doing.”

“It’s worth a shot,” Raid said. “You’re the expert here.”

Macreen nodded and shuffled away from the ledge. “Better than praying they don’t find us.”

Bale turned his attention to the Gambling House and closed his eyes.

He was channelling, she could tell from his stillness and the furrowed brow of intense focus, but nothing else gave it away. No icy waves emitting from him and there was no spillage of excess power for her to sense. She frowned. He’s better than I thought.

She glanced at Raid, who had made his way into the room behind them and was pacing. I should focus on him. Surveying the Gambling House was only half her job, after all. Zyke had wanted information about Raid’s group as a requirement for solving her problem with Sun, and this was the best chance she’d get for that.

Obtaining anything from Bale would be nigh impossible given the man’s sensitivity to the Gift; she’d observed as much back at Zyke’s bar. Despite the subtlety of her spells, she wasn’t willing to risk it.

Raid, on the other hand, was a good target.

She waited a while before taking a few steps into the room and leaning against a wall. The concrete was cold and wet, and the musty smell was worse here. Her face scrunched up with disgust, but she had more important things to worry about. First, to lower his guard.

Raid paced the room with slow, measured steps, his arms crossed, and eyes locked on the floor.

Seeing him remain resolutely quiet despite her minute-long staring, she said, “I thought you were done with Radaar for good.”

He stopped a few meters away from her. “You’ve been digging.”

“It wasn’t hard. You’re pretty famous around here.”

“That was a long time ago. Another life.”

“Heard you were working with Zyke. Made a lot of credits, too; why run?”

“You never thought of leaving?”

She opened her mouth but didn’t answer straight away. Her eyes drifted down in thought. “No.”

He snorted. “At least make the lie more convincing.”

Her lips pursed as annoyance flitted across her face. She had indeed thought of leaving many times before she’d discovered the Gift, when she was younger and still living with her father. Closing her eyes, she chased away his spectral visage, a sickening repulsion rising inside her just from the memory.

She unclenched the fists she’d unconsciously made and saw Raid looking at her. “What?”

“Nothing.” He turned his head towards the opening, staring out into the city. “We all got a past we want to keep buried. So don’t pry into mine.”

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Now or never. Carefully, she wove the simplest of the mental spells – surface thought reading – and nestled it inside her torso, where it would be the most difficult to sense. Stretching her power towards Raid, she read only white noise; the man was surprisingly good at shielding his mind. However, for a moment, something broke through the defensive screen of frenetic activity.

Her brows rose slightly in surprise. He hadn’t been looking at the city but at Bale. Questions sprouted in her head, but she quickly cast her curiosity away. The job came first.

“Fine, we’ll leave the past behind,” she said, “but you owe me some explaining. I wanna know why I’m risking my head here.”

A grainy image appeared in his mind. She locked onto it, gaining an awareness of several links that connected to other thoughts. If she found even one of them, she could make the main image clearer.

“Not your business,” he said.

“It wouldn’t be my business in the first place if you weren’t so desperate for Zyke’s help.”

Raid remained silent.

She continued, “You could have gone to any of the smaller guilds, or even Sun, and gotten a deal for credits alone. Void, even I would take a search job.”

He sighed.

“You get a kick out of throwing yourself into danger, is that it?”

“No.”

She snorted. “Yet here you are. And I got dragged into it, too. Now we’re sitting out here, praying the drones don’t spot us. Even if you’ve got a death wish, take care it doesn’t take your companion as well,” she said, pointing at Bale with her thumb.

It was slight, barely perceptible, but his arms twitched and his body stiffened despite his effort to keep still. One of the mental links flared. A connecting thought flashed into partial clarity: Rescue – gratitude – debt – task. Although the original meaning was lost in the jumbled thoughts, a fragment remained. Bale had recently saved Raid from danger.

Her eyes widened slightly, but she kept the rest of her expression impassive. Using that linked thought, she sharpened the main image. Though the details were still too fuzzy to discern the identity of the person, it was clearly a woman.

Waiting a few moments, she said, “Giving me the silent treatment now?”

“I told you already not to pry.”

She rolled her eyes. “I’ll find out anyway since Zyke will saddle me with that job.” She gave him a considering gaze, tilting her head, and placing a finger on her chin. “Is this something related to Bale?”

No change.

“Maybe an old client?”

No change.

“Ah, given your current job – a passenger?”

The details of the main image snapped into place, then, a fraction of a second later, they scattered into obscurity. It had been too fast for her to catch, but she’d managed to read another disjointed, unprotected thought. Among the passengers that Raid had smuggled to Radaar were two boys. Zyke’ll find them quickly.

“You know, it’s not that amusing to talk by yourself—” she began.

Bale shot up from his crouch. “Shit!” He turned to face Macreen and Raid. “We’ve been found! Run!”

Through the large opening in the wall, she saw the swarm of drones wheeling above the casino stop, hover in place, then all at once descend towards this building. She took one staggering step back, eyes darting between Bale and Raid. Then they bolted.

Darting to the other side of the room, away from the opening, she careened between beams of metal that rose from the floor. Time was of the essence; every step would have to count.

She grabbed the left side of the doorframe and pushed away from it, angling her dash to the right. Another ledge was fast approaching. The floor ended sharply, with only a single metal beam protruding towards the empty air from underneath the wooden boards.

Before she reached the edge, she jumped and twisted her body to face the building. Gripping the ledge and using it as a pivot, she landed on the lower floor with a shoulder roll. She sprung up from her crouch and sprinted to the left, where a ladder stood.

Two thuds behind her reported that Raid and Bale were right on her tail.

She slid down the ladder that led to a scaffolding, counting the seconds before the drones would reach them. When she reached the metal floor, she dashed towards the stairs, then vaulted over the railing – again and again, until she descended five stories.

The adjacent building was close enough now.

She hoisted herself onto the outer railing of the scaffolding and leapt off it towards the roof. Lunging from the roll, she made her way across and jumped onto the closest lower building. She threw a glance behind her, searching the sky for any drones. None had appeared yet.

Raid and Bale flanked her.

“Hoods up!” she said, and they obeyed.

The three of them jumped and landed on the next roof. She looked back again.

The drones surfaced from behind the skyscraper, an expanding wave of scattered black dots. Some of them wheeled above the building, scanning the parts closest to the exterior; others spread out to search the nearby buildings. It was only a matter of time before they found their prey.

A blaring noise cut through the clamour of the city, a cacophonous blend of sirens and garbled music.

Macreen snapped her head in the direction the sound was coming from. Billboards, holograms, and neon signs – everything technological and light-based was malfunctioning, creating a blinding display. She couldn’t be certain, but that city block should be where her crew had gone. That must be the distraction. With some luck, the assassination was already underway.

While Raid ignored the ruckus completely, Bale was frowning at something a little more to the South, towards West Island.

“Find us cover!” she said. “They’ll be—”

Bits of the gravel roof spurted upwards a few meters to her left.

A burst of panic stole both words and thoughts. She snapped her head to the right, her left arm going up to shield her vitals. Despite her frantic search, no nearby roofs offered any cover.

Rapid-fire raps came from behind, the bullets tearing through the building’s roof.

“Here!” Bale said. He sprinted ahead and jumped off the right ledge. There was nothing but empty air there.

Macreen’s eyes widened in shock. “What?”

A second later, Raid leapt off the ledge without any hesitation.

Hearing the angry stream of bullets approach, she followed Raid’s example. In the first moment of her free fall, her heart froze in the vice of terror. Her survival instinct broke through the panic block, and she relaxed her stiff muscles. She couldn’t botch the landing. Looking down, she saw an open dumpster about a second before she felt the kick of its contents.

The trash sank beneath the force.

Her body ached, but she was alive. Vaulting over the metal edge of the dumpster, she stepped onto the street, a spike of pain shooting up her leg.

Bale and Raid were already there, standing at the centre of wide-eyed attention.

This won’t do. No matter where they ran, their trail would eventually be found. She had to buy as much time as possible.

She called for the Gift and sank her power in the minds of the bystanders. Overriding their thoughts, she embedded the command to run and scatter.

Apprehensive expressions faded, replaced by a dogged determination. The people pulled up their hoods and set off in different directions in a manic dash. The spell would fade after a while, but the chaos would provide ample distractions.

“Hurry up!” came Bale’s voice from a nearby alley.

Fighting against the pain, she rushed towards the source and found the two men bracketing an open sewer shaft. She stared at it for a moment, then looked up at them. “Well? What are you waiting for?”

They climbed down, carefully closing the shaft behind them.

***

Silence filled the minutes spent plodding through the dim sewer tunnel.

The air was thick with moisture that clung to the body like a second skin. Macreen pressed her sleeve to her face, blocking out the putrid stench. With every step through the murky and viscous water, her ankle stabbed her with pain. The many bruises covering her body throbbed with a dull ache.

When she almost stumbled on a protruding piece of the stone floor, her patience snapped. “Hey!”

The two men turned to face her.

“What in the void was that?” she asked Bale. “You said you could handle it. We almost became a bloody stain on some void-forsaken roof. If your skills aren’t up to par, then don’t bloody put us in danger.”

The infuriating man remained stoic. “Did I need to spell out that staying quiet was a requirement? I had thought an adept would understand such a basic concept.”

“Listen here, you—”

“Alright, cut it out,” Raid said.

“Do you think I’ll just—”

Raid raised his hand to forestall any further argument. “I don’t care. What’s done is done. We should focus on getting out of here.”

She clenched her fist, then relaxed it, exhaling deeply. “Fine.”

More minutes passed in silence.

Macreen kept her eyes on Raid, almost staring a hole through the back of his head. Should I give it another try? Her gaze drifted to Bale. She’d not learned as much as she’d wanted, but it was too risky to try anything now. Her condition was poor, and a mistake would be costly.

When she got back to West Island, she’d need to update Zyke on her progress. Hopefully, he’ll be satisfied with the info. The gang issues couldn’t be delayed anymore.

She turned her head to the right, towards the city block where the blaring noise and lights had come from. Hew crew members should have already finished their job. For her goal, they'd gone on that suicide mission. I'll take us all out of this pit. And I'll bring the oversurface down into the muck.

She didn’t turn her head away for a long while.