This isn’t the first time I’ve stood before the remains of a house Mars Mons built.
Midmorning in the University district, a heavy gray billows through the streets as I emerge from the rear doors of a sleek black autocar, showering me with snowflurries as I look upon Mars’ fabled gym. Behind me, the driverless vehicle hums back off towards the Electric Town. I glance over my shoulder just as it reaches the next intersection, shift a class to Innovator, and fire off a memory purge to clear the trip from its data logger before returning my focus to the front.
Not so long ago, this gym was a proud warehouse that once kept its doors open at all hours of the day and night; the unofficial second home of the university league’s top warriors. Now its carcass curls above of the district’s brick roads like the burned-out chest cavity of a fallen giant. Blackened ribs of support pillars claw up at a caved-in roof. Small avalanches of brick and mortar pour into the surrounding alleys. Snapped lumber juts out like broken teeth. Woodsmoke clings to the air. And that’s just the recent damage. Time has left her corrosive presence on the place as well. Grime-coated windows, faded and vanished paint, warped wood.
Bereft the man who built it, the empty building’s purpose is painfully clear. It was a place to bring people together. Unimportant compared to the bodies that filled it. Now the lights are off. The magic dimmed. A neglected mirror of the city that surrounds it.
Seeing this place again, I’m stung like I’m standing over the grave of the man I killed all over again. I let the feeling exist. But I do not let it own me. Conviction, not emotion, is the hand that guides the bow.
This is my handiwork, too. Another wrong to right.
I take in a cold breath. Purging my doubts, sharpening my awareness to the smallest details of my surroundings. Let the ice of the morning fill my lungs, then scatter the idyll snowflakes that flutter near my face.
No more dallying. There’s work to be done.
Passing the gym’s shuttered front doors, I enter instead through a gaping, blackened hole that looks right out onto the sidewalk. A shiver crosses the back of my neck as I duck through. My danger sense triggering. It warns right as I come through the hole, microseconds before a massive log swings towards my head.
I smoothly duck under the lumber, the movement as natural as my stride. The densely muscled Martial Artist carrying it doesn’t even notice my entrance. I glance over the rest of the main floor, noting first the extent of the carnage, then the surprising number of university students working on repairs or carrying more raw material. I vaguely recognize a few from the lower ranks. Most are fistfighters, but there’s a scattering of other classes as well.
Closest to me is a straw-haired boy kneeling beside the stump of a fallen support pillar. He ignores the small red-furred fox that stirs from its nap at his side just to growl up at me. He’s palming over the shredded wood with his eyes closed. Brow furrowed in concentration. Sweat on his forehead despite the winter chill in the air. Sawdust and plaster dot his half-up hairstyle. Calm as a surgeon, he reaches one hand towards a piece of wood another uni fighter left nearby and places the other on the stump that remains of the pillar.
As I watch, the lumber roils and melts like liquid, slithering across the floor in a serpentine stream. It pools into the pillar’s base and grows vertically, solidifying to form a perfect replica of the aging support. Four long planks all vanish in the same way to finish off the repair.
“Apologies for Bastia’s rudeness,” he says without looking, pausing to scratch the fox behind its ears. “She’s usually fond enough of strangers. And you’re not even that, Thane. She should know better than to growl.” He bops the fox on its tiny snout. “What brings you out of the M?”
“Looking for Aurix. I haven’t seen him since the beginning of the semester.” I crane my head up, searching the open space for one worker in particular. “He’s usually hounding me about training with the team. I take it something silenced him?”
“Muzzled him, more like. Though if you ask me, I think the break will do him good.” Felix Fang, jade-eyed grandchild of one of the Section’s older warrior families, rises and brushes the sawdust from his knees. “He’s been intransigent as of late. Ever since he got shown up a few weeks ago by some drifter from the coast. That and forced bedrest have had him up the wall. I’m surprised you didn’t hear his brooding from the street.”
Past Felix, I finally spot my quarry near the way to the dusty front lobby, speaking in low tones with a willowy younger woman who’s as out of place here as I am. Minor league second rank, the archangel tech-sniper Sasha. Streaks of crimson and fall colors weave through the pro fighter’s brown hair, high ponytail reined in by a tattered red bandana. Late twenties, dented gold armor packed into a duffel bag, forearm gauntlets the only outward accoutrement of her Innovator class.
She’s the first of the two to feel my gaze. Those Metro Blockhouse instincts. It’s just a quick check in the corner of her eye, the mutual glance of a passing battleship that doesn’t want to spark a fight this early in the morning. Nearly nine years her junior, Aurix only senses my presence through her, making a far more obvious look my way.
“Sasha’s here,” I note.
Felix nods. “She’s been here every day. Not for long, but she’s one of the few pros who came to help fix up the gym when the news broke.”
“Very noble of her.”
“I think so too.”
Sasha gives Aurix a commiserating pat on the shoulder and departs, deer-thin limbs carrying her quickly outside. I catch Aurix’s eye through the milling workers and nod up at the roof. He silently agrees and heads for one of the rear exits. I part ways with Felix after a final quip and a question about his family’s health, then find my way out the western alley exit, shift a class to Air Elemental, and easily surge up the ten-meter jump.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
Aurix is already doing the exact same thing, shooting out of the eastern alley half a second slower and far less gracefully than I do. The flames that launched him airborne flicker and fade from his hands. Landing at a jog, he looks out over the district in the general direction of the Electric Town and the Metro Blockhouse. Mist blocks the view.
Dense and powerfully muscled, Aurix is a panther of a Martial Artist with a body built for slingshotting potential energy into kinetic violence. A messy mane of orange and red colors rages to the middle of his broad back. The width of his arms is obvious even beneath an overlarge sweater. He moves like a magazine being loaded. Each step emphatic. A wrecking ball that doesn’t tend to stop for interruptions to the path gravity would pull him down; face sharpened by a prominent, narrowed brow and lips that seem only capable of frowns.
In so many ways, he’s a color-shifted shadow of the faded pictures down in the lobby. A little shorter, certainly moodier, but just as capable of charisma; when he bothers to leverage it. And he has the natural athleticism and tenacity of a born warrior. Fighting is in his blood.
If only it weren’t paired with a temper like his.
“I thought I heard the sound of your ego coming down to rejoin the plebians,” Aurix says. He shoots me a corner-of-the-eye look when I come up beside him. “Take it you didn’t come here to help with the work.”
“Not today, no. I’ve more pressing matters.”
“Always keeping to your schedules.”
I stifle a noise of disagreement. “Unlike you, who skips classes just to pick fights in electroclubs?”
“Lot of good those classes are doing you,” Aurix counters. “You’ve been stuck at tenth on the boards since last year.”
Our school’s internal ranking, he means. For the starving wolves trying to springboard from university fighting to the Metro Blockhouse minor leagues, the leaderboards are everything. Aurix places even higher than I do on them, despite being my junior by over a year. But he isn’t the apprentice of the Champion. And despite my rank being the absolute minimum cutoff for Concordia’s league team, despite the fact that I’ve never once fought for said rank, not a single person has ever challenged me for that tenth-place spot. They gave it to me the day I registered for university, and it hasn’t been contested since.
“I’ll never understand why you don’t want to move up,” he says. “You could easily beat most of the top five if you tried.”
I could beat them all if they fought me five against one, but I don’t tell him that.
“There’s more important things that require my attention right now,” I say, pulling out my JOY. A crisp holoimage springs to life in the air in front of us. “Things like this.”
Aurix bristles. “You too?”
“You know her?”
“She was here, right before the semester started. Me and a couple of the guys came to check out an alarm on a broken window. We found her. Got into a fight. She’s the one who burned this place down.” His face darkens. “What do you want with her?”
“She’s a wanted target and a skilled fighter believed to be working with Dynasty. I’ve been hunting her, but I can’t cover the whole city on my own,” I lie through my teeth.
“Why not ask Valance for help?”
“It’s need-to-know.”
“Need to know? She’s your girlfriend.”
“We’re bedmates, nothing more. And I don’t make a habit of pillow talk.” I wave a dismissive hand. “She already has a full plate of her own duties, regardless.”
Aurix snorts. “Sure. Whatever. But you forget that I’m a martial artist. I don’t track down criminals like some bounty hunter from your undercity. I’m not even from this city. And even if I was, how would you propose finding a single person here? There’s what, fifteen million people living-”
“-Sixteen million,” I correct, curtly beheading his misinformation. “The search has already been significantly narrowed. I have it on good information that this girl is currently working out of the Vents. She’s aware that she’s being hunted, and she’s tried to assassinate me before, so I have no doubt that she’ll be trying to improve her abilities before trying again.”
He looks at the picture again. “Fastest way to tick that box is…”
“The underground fighting circuit, yes.”
Aurix nods as he grasps the next pieces. He can be quick when he feels like it. All it takes is a mention of brawling or powerful opponents to make him shut up and listen.
“She’ll be on the lookout for you, but she wouldn’t be looking for me. And neither will anyone else,” he mutters. “Only problem is that I already fought her a tournament in a gym uptown.”
I feign dismissive interest, already knowing the answer. “How did you do?”
“Eh. She’s good, I’ll give her that,” he grunts. Understatement of the year, if Tay wreaked this much havoc even at a fraction of her old strength. “I’ll see what I can do. Poke around the undergrounds a bit, try and figure out where she’ll be. Going to give that long-legged bitch plenty more too, the next time I see her.”
“There’ll be time for that after we find her,” I say. “For now, I’ll need to introduce you to Valance and a few of the Gami's other trusted servants so they’re aware you’ll be working with me. I want you to bring Felix, too- we’ll need the extra help. We can do it at the party at the penthouse tomorrow. If anyone asks, this girl doesn’t even exist. Officially, you’ll both just be joining the Shadows as a trial run.”
“Felix, sure. But why the secrecy?” He looks over the image again. “Is she something important to you?”
“To you as well, though not for the reason you think.”
Putting the view behind me, I send Aurix a collection of identifying photos and pocket my JOY. Winter wind kicks over the rooftops. I blink against the cold and start toward the roof’s edge. Behind, I hear the electric click-shiver of Aurix’s JOY activating; a projector screen forming. The first picture in the album wavers to life. A family portrait from Tay’s fifteenth birthday, taken during the fall equinox festival.
Like that, the final piece falls into place. Aurix’s eyes widen, then flash with fury. His fingers tighten around his JOY’s shell till his knuckles turn white.
“She is the secret, adopted child of Mars. His bastard daughter.”