My eyes widen. Aurix looks to his JOY. Back to me. A pleasant bell for an incoming stop punctures the standoff silence as Valance’s call clicks off. Passengers further ahead are shouting as they flee the fight.

A heartbeat passes.

And he runs.

Channeling his fire into an explosive burst, Aurix blows open a breach in the side of the train and leaps out the jagged hole into the winter atmosphere, gone in the blink of an eye. The city roars outside the breach. Wind shrieks and pours through the open wound.

Cal snags my arm just before I can lunge after him, fighting me to a halt. I jerk out of her grip.

“Valance knows the plan, Cal. She’s after Jolie. We have to stop her. We have to-”

Cal snatches my collar and pulls me down to her height. My lips part in surprise as her lips push into mine. My heart skips a beat and my skin pulses brighter as her fingers slide further and firm inside my glowing hair.

“Calm down. We’re going to get her,” Cal says, pulling back.

My panicked heartbeat slows. Silhouetted before the breadth of the snow-covered capital, we linger for only a moment longer before her grip releases. Her eyes search mine as she slides back down, parting like a long-distance lover. Trailing two fingers down my bruised neck like her knife did so long ago. Then the human moment melts away.

“Thane?” I hesitantly ask.

She grimaces and shakes her head. My heart sinks. Real fingers curling into a fist as I turn back to the city. Warning lights throb through the cabin as a horn bellows from the front of the metro.

“If he’s made his choice… we have to make ours,” I say with reluctant certainty, eyes narrowing on Aurix’s distant halo of fire. “We’ll deal with Thane next. We have to peel the Shadows off Jolie first; buy her the time to make it out of the city. Valance already pulled the entire route from my head. Her escort won’t know what hit them unless I get to them first.”

Cal slips a jangling set of oldTech keys from her skinsuit’s shoulder slit. “You’re faster alone. I’ll get the bike and link up on the freeway.” She sends me on my way with a slap on the ass. “Go get ‘em, farmgirl.”

A hesitant, hopeful smile flickers between us. I turn away from her and lean out the molten hole, into the cold. Aurix’s familiar anger burns in the distance like a beacon in my kinetic sense. I can catch him. I know it.

Sweeping a hand through the flood of golden ki pouring from my body, I take two steps back and blast the hole even wider. Electric Town rooftops roar beyond the breach. My aura redoubles around me, responding to the sudden adrenaline surging through my veins.

I nod at Cal. She nods back, breaking for the back of the train. Before I can lose my nerve, I center myself on the hole, spring back to plant my feet against the opposite wall of the train, then burst forward and smash through the dripping metal wall like a golden bullet, launching over the Electric Town in a foot-first corkscrew. Molten globs of steel blast outwards like a nebula. Individual beads give chase in meteoric droplets. Twisting through the star shower, I look out over the city as it spins through my vision upside-down, a city of neon and hope oppressed beneath the looming night.

Then the view rotates. My knees swing into view as I plummet from the metro's raised rails and land on a terrace of the adjoining building. Shocked faces scatter and gape as I smash down into a table of bacon and eggs and coffee, ricocheting onward before they can blink. Ki surges into my legs. I flash after Aurix like a human javelin, zigzagging through the highrises of the Electric Town in strings of light as I fire from balcony to rooftop to the brick roof of that gym where I made the best mistake of my life, feet touching solid surfaces for the single frames it takes to redirect.

A meteoric shockwave cracks the gym’s roof as I break my fall with a roll. Dead ahead, the prideful boy with the face of my father whips around mid-stride, shock scrawled on his brutal features. And I hold back no longer.

I shove so much aura into my legs that I catapult forward fast enough to sear a trail of pure energy into the air. Aurix reaches the edge of the building bare steps ahead of me and leaps off just as the huge, blocky silhouette of a Mecha titan roars up from an adjacent alley, lending a mechanical handhold for his outstretched hand before burning twisting in an evasive corkscrew and diving into a seam in the city’s crust.

My toes touch the edge and I launch off a half-second later, adding an acrobatic twist. Ki kicks out from my body and I slash down after them. Diving fearlessly towards street level. The seam in the city’s surface swallows me whole. Golden light illuminates the crust of the city as it blurs past. Familiar smog and sickly neon bloom in my vision. Rather than cut my speed, I push my ki even harder and spear out the bottom of the crust at suicidal velocity, carving between the first layers of Venter bridges like an arrow of sunlight.

The bulky Mecha, shaped like a tucked-up angular humanoid with twin ion engines burning blue-hot on its back, rockets ahead of me through the interwoven lattice of the Vents right in the middle of the morning commute, bowling right past other flying classes and hovertransports. Aurix hangs from its armored shoulder like a tagalong cicada. His hair billows in a shimmering gradient of fiery colors as he twists to look back. Our eyes meet. He roars something to the Mecha and a crack of thunder splits the air as the pilot cranks up the engines.

I chase them like chain lightning. Hitting a block of midlayer streets in a rough roll, I throw myself into a ki-fueled sprint before launching diagonally upwards to snag a ride on the rattling side of an undercity metro. Humid, smoggy air whistles past. My hair cracks like a whip. Someone inside the viewport shouts it’s the Ghost! and heads snap up, but I’m already gone.

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A wild exertion of my arms flips me up to the roof where I slide in with the free riders, right between an overall-wearing girl with dark-feathered wings sprouting from beneath her acidproof cloak and another ki fighter boy with pale blue hair. His jaw drops at the flood of aura pouring from me while I focus on the blocks above, lining up my path to catch the Mecha. A thump-thump heartbeat shoots through the metro as it skips over a gap in the rails, and I’m off.

Skimming across the roof of a hovertransport like the flourish of a signature, I twist through a thicket of data cables that dangle across a street of neon-decked tech shops, rebound off the side of a concrete bridge and flash off a stim shop / underground arena / the glass window of an apartment complex’s lobby, where a little girl wearing the dirtied uniform of an overcity grade school walks herself to the metro. She gapes at my sizzling footprints.

Somehow the Mecha manages to outpace me. There’s an ace on the stick, a pilot even better than Jolie. Aurix hangs onto the machine with a death grip as they spiral through the last bridges in their way before rocketing back towards the surface without so much as a paint scratch. A ravine in the crust of the city looms above them, passing directly over a huge square pocket in the center of four undercity towers. Staccato explosions of Elemental fire snap at my heels as I leapfrog up the sides of the square in a geometric spiral. I trust my feet. Keep my eyes on Aurix as he fires from his perch. The world’s almost a blur and I’m nearly flying, shooting upwards from surface to surface in straight-line bursts. Drawing even with the Mecha just as we reach the crust again, I compress all my aura into my legs and launch at its back, snagging a handhold on a divot between its torso segments, feet kicking wildly.

The last of the Vents drops away and the overcity blooms like a field of metal grass. Dim winter sunlight clouds the pre-dawn sky in murky grey. Cold, beautifully clean air bites at my lungs and stings my eyes as we continue to rocket higher. Inline heating in my skinsuit kicks on to counter the sudden temperature drop. Wind beating at my face, I crane back and gaze over the gleaming breadth of the capital, which stretches almost to the horizon like a stippled carpet.

My golden trail and the Mecha’s ion wake burn out of a shrinking ravine that crawls through a roughened, rusty district devoid of the rest of the capital’s trademark gleam. Derelict skeletons of unfinished and abandoned skyscrapers loom around us. Our chase took us all the way to the border of the industrial zones; the outer edge of the city just inside the fifty-meter storm walls. But the zone below me is on the complete opposite side of the capital from where Jolie’s ride is supposed to be waiting- the same gunship she flew for Dad, now a museum piece being housed in Gami’s half-finished citadel.

I’d wonder why the Mecha flew so far from the city center, but just as I look down, one of the high speed bullet trains snaking through the industrial district ripples with explosions across its roof. Tiny twinkles reflect from icy growths along the wheels. Yuki must still be on his feet. I breathe a sigh of relief.

I glance back as the Mecha jerks violently beneath me, ripping to the side in a sudden evasive spiral as the pilot finally realizes my presence. My left hand slips from its groove and flies free. The fingers of my right dig in with an immovable grip. A huge metal limb with segmented joints sweeps at my skull to try and swat me off like a fly. I pull myself flush to the machine’s back just as the arm swings past. Hanging on a death grip, I raise my real hand at the nearest ion engine and unleash a full-auto deluge of ki blasts.

The Mecha bucks beneath me like a wild horse. Engines sputter as the fuel cuts. Our rocketing ascent slows. Hangs in a stomach-dropping moment of zero gravity. Then reverses like I’m holding onto a bag of rocks that’s trying its hardest to wriggle away from me.

Bracing my feet against a metal armor plate, I ride rodeo and keep firing as we tumble end over end in midair. Thirty blasts a second scorch the skin of my palm black and paint the sky in scatter-cracks of light. My face sets in grim determination. Even when the Mecha’s shell holds at first, I don’t relent. They haven’t made an armor that can stop me yet.

I double the power of the blasts. Ki cracks the air like full-auto thunder, the strain to summon the energy jerking physically at my heart. My skin glows like a nuclear fuel rod. My whole arm starts to smoke, the palm smoldering with the scent of burning flesh. The nano-edged armor dents. Buckles. And melts into slag under my assault, just as Aurix’s fiery hair ripples into view over the Mecha’s opposite shoulder.

Sliding recklessly across the machine’s back, Aurix dives at me with an orb of molten elemental power gathering red-hot in his hand. I let go and kick away right when he releases the flames in beam form, using another surge of ki to launch myself in a high arc towards the apex of an unfinished skyscraper nearby. Beneath me, the mech glides downwards in limping flight, smoke trailing from its carapace. The penthouse level of my target rushes up. Tucking into a ball, I crash through a tattered blue tarp and tumble through a scree of sawdust and naked metal. I roll back up already running towards the tower’s edge. Pulse pounding in my ears as the entirety of the capital comes into view.

I trail to a stop and pull my JOY from my hip. Forty stories down, that bullet train cuts past a derelict station at triple-digit velocity just in time for the injured Mecha to drift down and snags onto its tail. The fighting onboard has intensified near the fore of the train. I lift my JOY and patch through to Cal, starting to run towards the dropoff on the skyscraper’s opposite side.

“Good news only, Tets. I’m driving very illegally.”

“Jolie is on a highrail in the industrial zone. Shadows beat us to her.”

My light blooms through the tower’s darkened skeleton. My feet hammer down without hesitation. The current inside refusing to slow. Winter howls through the flapping tarps. Cal’s voice returns calmly in my ears, backed by the hair-raising roar of an electric engine.

“Give me the nearest freeway. I just hit the surface.”

I squint down through the cold. “EE-1. I’m intercepting.”

“The Electric Town Expressway,” she whistles. “Five by five. Let’s race a bullet train.”

Her voice clicks out. The capital gleams beyond the dropoff, a sea of lights stretching all the way to the shores of the Metro Blockhouse. My heart reaches for the nearing edge with an open hand. Singing through every molecule, spreading light like the sun. Daring me to reclaim my wings.

Forty stories up, the edge drops out beneath my feet. Gravity takes hold.

And silhouetted by daybreak, I ignite.