I need to get away.

The first steps out of the alley are excruciating, made worse by the grime and smoggy cold that eats at my exposed body. I don’t know where I am, where I’m going, or what I’m going to do. I just need to escape. I need something. Anything. Ghosts of the past haunt me, lurking behind my shoulders, clawing at the cracks in my brain. I want to scream at them and make them go away. I almost do. But they’re not so patient as Cal was.

I wrap my arms across my chest and push on across the concrete bridges and walkways, losing myself in the undercity crowds. Shiveringly conscious of how exposed I am in my gala clothes compared to the grey cloaks, acidproof tarps, and filter-masked faces that surround me. Hoods raised, masks veiling all but the eyes, protecting their owners from the ever-present trickles of corrosive runoff dripping down from the surface districts. The assault on my senses never relents. Sickeningly fake meat sizzles nauseous scents in towerside stall-carts. Yelling, shouting, shattering bottles, blaring stream screens blare on every corner. Drunken voices reach out at me as I limp past a grungy bar with blown-out walls.

“Little sister, you’re too far from the Orange to be wearing all that skin!”

“Pretty thing too. Where you coming from with that limp?”

“Slut’s a Duelist clearly,” another says. “Hey! Come practice with my blade sometime!”

More laughter. A Gunslinger five drinks too deep slurs his pistol out of its holster and fires a drunken shot well over my head. I flinch and stagger on. “Scram on back to your masters, slave!” he yells at my back. “Tell Dynasty we don’t want their scraps polluting our streets!”

Some sleazebag Mecha with an oily black frame jogs up beside me, tarp cloak flapping. He unrolls his wrist gauntlet to reveal a small armory of needles filled with a rainbow of glowing liquids. “You want stims, sister? I got stims.”

“Fuck off,” I growl.

“You want Shatter? I can getcha Shatter.”

“I said fuck off!” I scream. Black ki erupts from my body in a roiling aura of dark fire, scaring the Mecha off faster than a rat. Voices murmur. Eyes and hands start drifting towards JOYs and holstered weapons. People stare at me like fresh meat or veer carefully away. So many people. Too many. Everyone’s looking. Pressure adding in my head. It’s all so much. Too much. I hate it. I hate it all and I need to get away and I can’t get away from the things in my head or the things that aren’t in there because there’s no end to them, there’s never going to be an end because I’m all alone and I’m always alone and there’s no more footsteps coming through the door, no more arms to hold me safe, no voice telling me it’s alright and it’ll all be okay, nothing, there’s nothing, no Dad, no future, no hope, no point, nothing to go back to, just hate and anger and clinging to the things I lost as if hate could ever bring them back. As if I could ever fix these ashes my life became.

My eyes actually start tearing up. Salt and wetness drips down my face before I can stop it. Hands clamping around my skull, I shove through the crowds and stumble out onto a wide concrete bridge that spans the thirty-meter gap between two undercity blocks, fleeing the dark spiral of my thoughts again. I can never walk fast enough.

Why isn’t Dad here when I need him the most?

He doesn’t answer, not even in memory. He never answers. He never, ever answers. It strikes me to staggering, making me lean over the bridge’s railing just to take a breath in the fetid wind. Staring the yawning darkness in its open mouth. Begging for some escape. Some sign. Some end to it all.

There’s no end to the suffering but the one staring back at me.

It’d be so easy. So easy to make it stop.

Then someone bumps into me. I jerk away from the suicidal plunge to the Abyss with tears streaming down my cheeks. Can’t wipe them all away. Pawing at the wetness and smearing it in with the dried blood, I fall into the closest alley after the bridge, push past a stack of rotting plastic crates, and slump down in the darkness behind them, letting it all spill out where no one in the world can see.

“I need you,” I cry, bunching up angry fistfuls of salt-matted hair in my hands. “I can’t keep going like this, Dad.”

Choking gasps rattle my shoulders. Quietly sobbing. Elbows resting on tattered knees while my head hangs in between, fingers running through my hair, trying and failing to keep the pieces of my skull together. Tears drip and melt into the concrete. There’s no hand on my arm, no warmth thrown over my shoulders. No one coming to chase me down and make sure I’m fine.

Because when it matters most, I’m alone.

When I was little, I always thought I wanted to be strong. Now, nineteen and too old for my age, the only thing I want is a moment to be weak. Even now I can’t have it.

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No one can survive for me. There is no reprieve from this burden I carry. And I doubt there will be until the day I die. Because even if I survive, even if I somehow escape this city and someday escape Gami’s reach, someone must take on the fight Dad started. Someone has to break the cycle. Someone has to stop Gami. Else there will always be more monsters; more people being butchered like that girl in the laboratory. And I’ll spend every night of the rest of my short life wondering if it’ll be my last, just like I have these last three years.

Catching my breath in waves of hitching, I slowly start collecting the broken pieces of myself and shoving them as deep down in my heart as they’ll go. I move mechanically on the outside, autonomous instinct. Tears and snot are wiped away and forgotten. I suck in the fullest breath my wrecked body can handle. Sniffle loudly. Clench my fingers, unclench, clench again. Rake another handful of carbon fiber fingers through my hair. Sniff again, look up.

Bottle it, Tets. You can get up again. You’ve gotten up from worse.

The ambiance of the nearby streets give me the anchor I need to haul myself up. Tonight, I have to be all numb momentum. Bouncing is the only way I can get up, falling like I did. And it’ll mean hitting off something hard.

I cough out a laugh as I limp to the mouth of the alley, leaning hard on a dumpster.

“Gotten up from worse?” I shake my head. “Thane didn’t… used to be… that good.”

It’s said that the more powerful a ki fighter becomes, the less they are physical creatures as they are spiritual. Food isn’t so necessary, as they sustain themselves more on the spiritual energy of the world. Injuries, too, are more a reflection of a soul’s will being battered down than an actual physical detriment. Used to be that I’d be walking off even grievous injuries within a couple of days. Drove Aunt Jolie crazy, that I’d never rest long in bed. But the me who could shrug off Thane’s current handiwork after a couple nights’ sleep is long faded. I can barely touch my ki, for one. And even though the earlier trauma ripped my soul open and left it pulsing inside me like a glowing candle core, it’s an aching pulse, an open and raw wound that my mind shies away from touching.

So I’m stuck in the physical. That means being hurt, hungry, and in very real danger of getting picked off in a random street fight at any given moment. For now, dealing with Thane and the greater problems of my situation has to wait. As does Aunt Jolie. I don’t just have myself to think about now- Cal is back there, somewhere. A fact my guilty conscience does not fail to remind me of that as I work my way back out into the Vents.

I scan over the businesses in the nearby streets and across the gap to the next tower over in search of an easy mark for quick credits. Nothing sticks out. Smog chokes the light from the air. My stomach roils sickly as my sixth sense for life energy continues to stir. I can’t shut it down. The aura of the undercity is polluted with suspicion and worry and exhaustion, a downcast and defeated miasma that pours against me like a dam broken. Hopelessness. Desperation. Misery. The crushing, invisible lament of a forgotten people who have never seen the sun.

There’s too many of them down here. An entire diaspora compressed into a space far smaller than they need, and now they’re spilling out of apartments with four bodies to a room. Disrepair crawls through it all like invisible vines. Empty dirt-lot parks with dimmed lights, entire towers crumbling or burnt to husks; no one bothering to fix or protect or fight back against the corrosion. Discarded cans rattle across discarded streets. A tattered, decade-old poster advertising some Venter Relocation Program sponsored by the Metro Blockhouse flaps lifelessly beneath thick layers of graffiti. Once, the printed vistas of faraway Section K must have been eyecatching greens and blues and yellows; the colors of promise and new life. Promise not kept, clearly.

I find my target just two streets away from one of the massive intra-city lifts, thick in the brighter sectors of the Vents where overcity tourists wander in unwary herds. The underground fight club looks like it’s changed owners and designs every time one of the walls was smashed down from the inside out. Half of it is the sloppy remains of some derelict electroclub that used to be called the Rock-something. The jury-rigged rest of the arena looks like it was welded on a decade later and spills into the free lots between a mom-and-pop takeout store and a five-floor deephouse club. Wide stairs descend right into the open mouth of the arena, funneling bettors and tourists straight into the bloody, dubiously legal action. Not so different from the M, really. Just grimier, slimier, and filled with so many more ways to lose money.

In other words, the kind of place no one’s going to look twice at a scuffed ID scan.

A din of rumbling music and distant roars washes out of the tunnel, drowned out regularly by jeers and cheers of voracious undercity spectators. I skip it for the moment and head past towards a crowded loan shark stand where credits shuffle fast and loose. Hugging my arms closer, feeling the cold grime already sheening over my shredded body as I push through the people watching the action outside on stream screens and JOY projections.

The whole crowd groans at some nasty trickshot on stream right as I get to the shark. Typical greedy type, fat and glint-eyed, hairy skin and a bushy mustache. A square cap for a sun I’m sure he never sees covers his thinning hair. Not much he can do about the gut.

I see where those eyes go first. The state of my ripped apart clothing. My prosthetic arm. Then the rashes, the lacerations, the deep and mottled bruises of a cracked and breaking body, the dried blood and busted knuckles and bitter gaze. They settle on the rest of me as he leans back in a yellowed plastic chair that’s about to snap under his weight, raising an empty palm in warning. I beat him to the punch, voice snapping like ice.

“I need five thousand.”

“Aren’t you a little young to be gambling, chica?”

“I’ll come back with six after I fight.”

He huffs and pulls out a cigar.

“The money, shark.”

“You look desperate. I don’t deal to desperate.”

My mouth twists. “Don’t give me that. Your kind deal to anything.”

The shark puffs a ring of smoke up towards my face. I don’t flinch.

“Kids like you don’t make my money back when they get fleeced by the house,” he grunts.

“Cash me out. I’ll pay.”

“You talk like you will, but I ain’t believing.” Heavyset eyes look me up and down again. A dour, world-worn look that sees a little too far past the façade. “Plenty of ways you could work if off in the Orange for being an idiot tonight, though. Getting’ stuffed day in and out breaks every one of ‘em. Even the hard ones like you. Maybe you should go take a look. Walk away and don’t come back.”

I stare down at the man, saying nothing. Another second of silence passes before he finally relents and rolls out a stack of credits the size of my forearm. Five thousand, clean.

“Go ahead and think about what cage you want,” he says. “I play poker with the Executor’s runt; I can put in a good word for you.”

I snatch up the credits and descend into the chaos.