I sent a quick message to Lisa as I set off back towards the metro station, letting her know that I’d managed to reach an acceptable compromise with Calvert. I could have called her, but I was far too exhausted to field a conversation. Besides, as Knight Errant completed their perimeter around the campus they’d have deckers of their own looking for suspicious signals. I didn’t want them to realise there was a technomancer snooping around.
I wasn’t at all surprised to find the streets closer to the campus’ official entrances still packed with students. Genesis had run for the hills and Neith and Trickster had left the campus as the two insect spirits tracked Theo, but for all I knew Sundancer and Ballistic were still in there, trying to escape the ever-tightening net Knight Errant had laid down for them.
Most of the students were hanging around in stunned groups, as friends spotted friends and huddled together for support, while others had their heads buried in their commlinks as they tried to call home. Together, the sheer volume of comm traffic was enough to overwhelm the local matrix, each transmission slowing to a crawl as it jostled for bandwidth.
They were shaken, even panicked, and I couldn’t blame them. It was one thing to evacuate individual buildings for a pre-planned fire drill, but the total evacuation of the entire campus for a very real threat was something else entirely. Even if they hadn’t seen any of the actual fighting, the distant sounds of spellfire and gunshots was probably more than what they were used to, while rumours spread throughout the crowd in a great game of Chinese whispers as the attack grew in scale with every mouth it touched.
One lone woman – even if she was an eight foot tall troll – didn’t merit much attention among that crowd. I was the right age, dressed the right way, and I was far from the only one whose outfit was a little torn and ragged from a frantic flight. Some of the Knight Errant officers keeping watch over the crowd spared me a glance or two, but from what I could see they had more than enough on their plate.
They had more mages than you’d normally expect, if you didn’t know they’d be treating this as a bug outbreak. No doubt they were looking over the crowd with eyes turned to the astral plane, looking for the misshapen souls of hidden infiltrators. They’d have enough to know that this was the work of the world’s most fucked-up Shadowrunner team, not some organic cult that had sprung from the student population, but they wouldn’t be taking any chances.
It was slow going, picking my way around a lot of students who’d decided that they might as well sit in the middle of the road while waiting to see if they could get back to their on-campus accommodation by the end of the day. I was joined in that march by the off-campus students, most of whom seemed to have decided to go home rather than stick around this close to a shootout. I was surprised Knight Errant were letting them leave, but I supposed they’d want to avoid a public panic.
Still, we all had to stagger to one side as an immense mobile command centre pushed its way through the crowd; a great two-part vehicle that looked like a camper van towing a second, larger camper van, all done up in black and yellow. As it passed me, a pair of hatches slid open at the base of the larger compartment, releasing a quartet of Roto-Drones that took flight and began a search pattern.
It wasn’t my fight anymore; Calvert’s second team could do whatever they wanted now that Theo was out of their hands. I continued on past more Knight Errant mages standing on the roofs of armoured personnel carriers as they scanned the crowd for threats only they could see. The press of people finally started to lighten as I reached the limit of the evacuated group, where a line of overworked traffic officers had set up a barrier of holographic tape as they tried to keep out a gaggle of media.
Inevitably, the journalists were trying to snag students on their way out, pestering them with questions as they sought marketable soundbites, with plenty of camera drones, commlinks and auto-recording cybernetic eyes ready to film and sell anything that seemed even slightly broadcast-worthy. I shrank down into my hood a little, shoving my hands into my pockets as I pushed my way through the press of press.
I needn’t have bothered; with this many students around they could afford to filter for photogenic, which I very much wasn’t.
It had taken me twenty minutes to push my way through the crowd, but I wasn’t concerned. I could barely move anyway, and I believed the worst was over. That illusion of security lasted even when Labyrinth suddenly materialised in front of me, her persona more ethereal than usual and clad in the illusion of a robe formed from layers of black feathers.
“Faultline needs to talk to you,” she said. “Immediately.”
“Right,” I said, mentally preparing to defend myself for subverting my client’s orders. It seemed remarkably petty of Calvert to shop me to the closest thing I had to a boss, but I still ducked into a doorway and accepted the open channel Labyrinth offered me.
“Spider,” Faultline began, with all the sternness I was expecting, “you need to get your team to safety, now.”
“What?” I asked, dumbfounded.
“There’s been a massive data-dump,” Faultline said. “Law enforcement, local and national news, Ares Macrotechnology and sixteen different social media sites have all received a package of data detailing Medhall’s complicity in the New Revolution and Max Anders’ personal connections to Alamos 20,000.”
Panic welled up in my chest and for a moment I felt like I was going to collapse, before I forced myself back under control.
“I knew this was coming,” I said. “It’s part of our client’s plan. He’ll probably have orders for-”
“Taylor,” Faultline snapped, “the leak was signed. There’s a goddamn manifesto attached, claiming this is an attack aimed at ‘freeing the city from the grip of the fascist Anders dynasty.’ That they kidnapped Kayden and Aster, tried to kill Theo at NBU and that they’re demanding the people rise up and do the same to Max.”
“No,” I gasped, struggling for breath. “No, he can’t be…”
“The group responsible identifies themselves as the Undersiders, saying they’re the underclass rising up to strike down their oppressors. They’re you, Spider. The author signs her name as Taylor Hebert.”
“My team!” I shouted, frantically reaching out in the matrix as I tried to call everyone simultaneously, only to be greeted by one dead signal after another. One of them might be away from their comm, but all of them…
“You have to help me!” I shouted – begged, even – the words spilling out of my mouth as the matrix and meatspace started to blur together. “Calvert’s fucked us over! You can’t let him!”
There was the slightest pause, as if Faultline needed to consider anything right then.
“Fucking help!” I tried again. “You’re our fixer, damnit!”
“And if this was just a client betraying one of my teams, I’d scramble every other gun I have to find the bastard and kill them,” Faultline said. “Hell, I’d come out of retirement and do it myself. But I’ve got camera footage of you fucking him over at NBU, and I’ve got your name on the leak.”
“So what, you’re hanging us out to dry?”
“I have other clients as well, Taylor. The bare minimum they expect is that my teams will deliver what they want, so I can’t go to war for you. But I can do everything short of that.”
I fought down the urge to shout that it wasn’t enough, that she needed to drag herself up to the roof of her bar and launch a missile into Calvert’s command centre. I knew it wouldn’t go anywhere. Instead, I took a deep breath and made sure to think hard about what I thought she’d be willing to give.
“There’s a house in the suburbs,” I said. “We were using it as a safehouse for Kayden and Aster. I need you to go there and check… check if my people are still there. I can’t reach them.”
“I’ll send a recon drone,” Faultline said, “and one of my couriers to investigate inside. One I trust with my life.”
It still sounded like so little, but I could do nothing without information.
“Thank you. I’m still by NBU, but I’ll head there myself and link up with your agent.”
“Be careful, Spider,” she said, and she sounded genuine. “The streets are about to get very dangerous.”
Just like Calvert wanted, I thought. His own personal war, so that he can slip his team through Max’s defences.
Except his team were currently divided, down a rigger and maybe down two insect spirits as well. Would the Shadowrunners make it back to him, would he find a new team on short notice or would he have to send his own forces, all but announcing that Evo was involved?
I didn’t know. I didn’t care. All that mattered was finding the others and getting them out. I turned to say something to Labyrinth, but she was already gone. She’d have her own work to do, preparing Faultline’s network for a massive increase in use as the information broker scrambled to keep on top of a situation that felt like it could explode at any second.
I saw the first signs of it in my frantic rush to the metro station; trideo sets in the windows of electronics stores were being taken over one by one as each local news station caught up on the data, while even some of the national stations had a little note in their ticker-tape warning of some kind of incident in New Hampshire.
People were checking their comms as the notifications came in, scrolling quickly through the summary before turning to their friends and urgently showing them the message. A Knight Errant on foot patrol stopped dead in her tracks as word filtered down through their comms, the lone officer stiffening while her domesticated panther K9 sat down at her feet, its ears pricked up in recognition of its mistress’ tension.
By the time I got to the metro station, there was a steady flow of people moving up into the station, most of them looking like they’d dropped everything in order to get back home as fast as possible. The tension in the air was like static building power, ready to discharge at the first opportunity.
It was the data-leak, of course, but it wasn’t just the leak. It was a ghost six years buried that had been dug up and shoved back into the light, bringing with it the spectre of soldiers on the streets, militia building barricades in the roads and gangs rampaging through whole city blocks while the fires from burning buildings lit the bodies swinging from lampposts.
It was the collective nightmare of an entire nation, and I’d brought it through into the waking world.
Almost in a haze, I paid for my ticket and pushed through the station, shoving through the crowd with the ease that came from being taller and more solid than most of them. There were shouts and exclamations from the people I pushed aside, but I was too far gone to make out any words as we all spilled out onto the platform and piled into the first train that showed up. It wasn’t until we were underway that I realised I’d instinctively taken the line to the west, back towards the North End and away from where I wanted to go.
I didn’t even have it in me to be angry at myself. Instead I just stood hunched over in the carriage as more and more people squeezed in at every station, following the line towards a terminal where I could catch a train that would take me through the city centre to the suburbs. It would be faster than trying to change lines and go back the way I came.
After four stops I began shoving my way through the tightly-packed carriage as I tried to get close to the doors. The train was decelerating as it neared my changeover, the buildings beyond the windows gradually slowing before they finally gave way to the elevated platform.
Someone screamed. Everyone screamed. The crowd heaved, forcing even me back as everyone tried to get away from the doors, crushing the people around me with the sheer force of bodies packed into such a small space. Crushing them against me. I scrambled, elbowing back a young man in a suit as I tried to free enough space to reach my submachine gun.
The platform was packed from end to end with people – two or perhaps three hundred in all. They wore biker leathers, tracksuits, body armour, overalls and many had jackets from military uniforms for half a dozen different corps and countries. Every single one of them was human and every single one of them was armed. Chosen stood among them like cyborg lieutenants, watching over their charges in semi-professional silence as the mob screamed obscenities at the train.
There was a gunshot near the front as one of them shot the driver, before a Chosen rigger ran out of the crowd and smashed the rest of the glass in the window to their compartment. I didn’t see him clamber in, but the leader of the Chosen – a vicious looking woman with clawed hands, whose cybernetic legs ended in points rather than feet – stepped forward, holding up a hand for silence as the doors slid the train.
“Make some room!” she shouted, before the mob rushed forwards.
Hands grasped into the compartments, hauling people out and back into the baying mob, who screamed guttural insults that blended into each other to the point where all I could hear was a single hateful roar. The passengers pressed themselves back, some of them slipping and falling beneath the crush of legs, while others flung themselves at the Chosen in hopes of escaping the crush by going quickly through the crowd, only to be thrown to the ground and beaten as a reward for their cooperation.
I don’t know where the first shot came from, but it opened the floodgates. The gangers started firing pot shots through the windows, laughing as they sprayed bullets into the crowd. Some people in the train returned fire, their shots impacting their fellow passengers as often as the mob outside, but each frantic burst of fire was met by a concentrated barrage from outside.
I had to duck as a biker ganger spotted me in the crowd and raised a wide-bore revolver, kneeling down and trusting my physiology to protect me from the worst of the crushing forces around me even as people continued to die by the dozen. In desperation I reached out in the matrix, taking hold of the train and fighting the Chosen rigger on her own turf for control.
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I wasn’t able to start the engine, but by driving a feinted resonance spike into it I was able to distract her for long enough to wrench control of the doors on the other side of the train, flinging them open with enough force to blow fuses and burn out motors.
The response was immediate, the crowd surging for the new openings more through fluid dynamics than any conscious awareness of another way out. I got to my feet, smashing through the window beside me with my horns and clambering out onto the tracks even as people started to spill out behind me.
Even that escape proved disastrous for some; I saw five people collapse as they stumbled and touched the electrified third rail on the next line over. One of them was close enough that I could reach down and drag him off, gritting my teeth at the sudden shock of current, but the others were too far for me to reach through the crowd.
When a shot barely missed me, instead striking a young student in the back, I turned and sprayed gunfire into the carriage, where some of the new passengers had been firing out of the shattered windows. The people around me scattered as five or six gang members fell to automatic fire, before I turned my back on them and ran as fast as I could towards the edge of the track.
I leapt up onto the opposite platform, bullets whipping at my heels, then carried on straight towards the short railing that was the only barrier between the elevated station and a four-storey drop down to the street below. Going left or right to the stairs would just get me shot, but some animal part of my mind had spotted a low rooftop on the next building over.
I kicked off the platform, planting a foot on the railing as I leapt out into open space. There was only two metres between the platform and the building, but I was entirely convinced I was going to fall until my foot landed on the rooftop, immediately catching on some anti-climb spikes that had been put up there to stop someone from doing exactly what I’d just done.
My ankle twisted as I fell forwards onto the uncomfortable spikes, my own momentum carrying me off them in an ungainly roll before I cautiously staggered to my feet as the commandeered metro sped off towards the city centre with its cargo of gangland footsoldiers, leaving a scene of pure devastation on the platform. My lungs were heaving, my heart pounding in my chest while my mind was frozen in a kind of mute horror as I stared at the numb and bloody crowd of the living, dead and wounded, wondering at how completely things could change in a matter of minutes.
It was too much for the metahuman mind to deal with. My brain began to run on automatic, guiding my arms as I mechanically ejected the spent magazine and replaced it with one of my last fresh ones before driving my boot three times into a roof access hatch until it broke. It was like I’d sectioned away my mind as Rachel had done, my body piloting itself as I stormed down a staircase to ground level, raising my gun at every open doorway.
Before I was even consciously aware of it, I’d emerged out onto the street, only to be shocked back into focus by the sound of a lone siren arriving far too late for the massacre on the platform. I hurriedly tucked my gun back into my hoodie, then watched with growing concern as a single Knight Errant patrol car sped past with its light and sirens blaring, the vehicle recklessly swerving into the opposite lane in order to overtake the slow-moving traffic.
It was only when the doppler effect of its sirens had passed me by that I heard the roaring engines of the vehicles pursuing it. There were perhaps a dozen of them in all, tearing down the road like a street race. Most of them were cars daubed with Chosen tags – cyborg skulls or snarling metal wolves – and there were four similarly-painted vans bringing up the rear. Three of the vehicles, however, were great slab-sided armoured personnel carriers with thick tyres and metal grilles over their optic arrays, their faded olive green paint still bearing old-world American flags and big white stars straight out of ancient world war documentaries.
They must have sat quietly in Medhall warehouses these last six years, slowly mouldering as trusted ideologues turned the engines over once a week in case they were ever needed again. I didn’t know if they’d been embezzled from the New Hampshire national guard or smuggled back to their homeland from some half-century old Euro War boneyard, but Max Anders had called them back into service for the sake of his own ambitions.
The lead APC had a turret mounted near the front, with a long-barrelled assault cannon jutting out the front like a spear. I wondered how well its mechanisms had been maintained over the past half-decade, or whether its ammunition was still in-date. I wondered who they were going to use it on.
The convoy left panic in its wake. Drivers had hauled their cars up onto the sidewalk to avoid being crushed, and now that the convoy had passed they were all jostling with each other in a race to turn around and head north as fast as they could, making for the part of the city with an active gang war in order to avoid the firepower moving south.
The pedestrians scrambled out of the way of the vehicles, disappearing into shop windows shouting about terrorism or insurrection or the end of the world. As I stood in stunned silence, I was jostled by a flow of people running the other way, the crowd spilling out onto the road as they parted around me. A middle aged woman reached out to touch my shoulder with a surprisingly gentle hand, only to be carried away by the flow as I took my first step in the opposite direction.
I wasn’t sure if I was still determined to find some route to the suburbs, or if I just had to see with my own eyes what Calvert had unleashed on the city in my name. It was still too immense to comprehend; there was a chasm in my soul like all possibility of safety had been stripped away from me, leaving me bare and vulnerable in the eyes of a malicious world.
For two years I’d lived in self-imposed exile from society, enjoying the complete anonymity my nature could provide. I was a ghost, only barely touching the world as an anonymous username on forums, taking petty payment to fix failing matrix systems, crack the copy protection of media files or lift the anti-theft countermeasures from stolen items.
In a way, I’d left Taylor Hebert behind when I first went out as Bug. Being a Shadowrunner provided a level of professional anonymity that had rarely been breached, and even then only because my SIN was still on CrashCart’s systems. In a real sense, Taylor had stayed home. It was Bug who’d flourished into Spider, connecting with her team through the experiences we’d shared together, rather than anything Taylor had achieved.
But now my name was plastered across the news feeds being beamed throughout the matrix, and I could see my face on a trideo set mounted behind the counter in a ground floor café that was packed full of people desperately trying to figure out what had happened and where, if anywhere, was safe.
The picture was old, cropped from group photo for the graduating class of Winslow High School, twenty sixty-eight. I looked sullen, with bags around my eyes and a weariness in my face that didn’t match the forced blankness of my expression. The photo had still been taken before dad was killed and everything went worse. It didn’t just feel like another lifetime; it was like the last age of an old world had died with him.
Not a good world, perhaps, but one I understood. I knew what that world was made of, and how I fit into it. I’d had more than my share of problems, but they all seemed so insignificant now.
Now I had nothing to fall back on. No plan, no team, no real idea of where I was going except that if I could just make it through the city to the safehouse then maybe I could figure out what had happened to the others, beyond the obvious. I was driven by the same all-consuming need to fix my own problems that had led me to save Theo in the first place.
All the while I was cursing Calvert; his pettiness and unwillingness to see sense. I’d given him everything he’d been sent here to obtain, with a far more cooperative puppet than Kayden ever could be. He was supposed to be a businessman, surely that meant recognising a decent bargain when it’s dropped in your lap?
Angry at the world, I let physical reality fade somewhat as I turned my focus on the matrix. Even from this distance I could see the angry haze that had descended over the city centre as building after building went into lockdown, blaring out assertions of each megacorp’s extraterritoriality as their hosts closed like clamshells or the portcullises of castle gates.
Between it all, GridLink blared with angry red lines as Knight Errant executed emergency powers to mark down whole swathes of the district as not safe for travel, which would redirect every vehicle on the system and bring up big angry augmented reality warnings for any drivers who were running on manual control.
Medhall’s own network was behaving oddly. Their main hosts were sealing up like all the other corps, but their private comms network was visibly growing into a web that was far from as widespread as Knight Errant’s city-wide network, but more than made up for it in density. I began to suspect I was seeing battlelines forming.
I started to jog, passing down rapidly-emptying streets as a city-wide emergency alert was sent out, warning people to shelter in place without giving a reason why. I didn’t see any more Knight Errant vehicles – or Chosen ones – until I finally reached the heavily-urbanised bank of the river separating midtown from the historic city centre, with the skyscrapers of downtown towering like an artificial mountain range behind the preserved relics of an old world skyline.
Union Bridge loomed over me; an ancient span of wrought metal built almost two centuries ago, its superstructure supporting four lanes of traffic and two metro lines that had been re-added to the long-since motorised bridge as part of Richard Anders’ attempt to engineer a utopian city on all fronts, from its roads to its demographics.
The more militant side of his vision were trying to force their way across the river, picking up right where they’d left off six years ago. The relentless chatter of gunfire echoed off the water below, while the struts of the bridge were lit by intermittent flashes and the red glow of flares. Even the pedestrian walkways bolted to the sides of the bridge were hosting pitched battles of their own.
Looking up at the bridge from below, I was only able to catch the barest flashes of what was going on up there; brief glimpses of figures leaning against the railings of the walkway, or the roar of an engine as something pushed forward on the road. So I ignored my eyes, reaching out in the matrix and stripping back the encryption on the traffic management cameras mounted on the arch.
Once I was through, I was greeted by a sight that could have come from an old war documentary. The Chosen were pushing down the bridge with two scrapyard tacticals; converted and up-armoured heavy goods vehicles that followed the same general pattern as the one that had chased us after our hit on the dopadrine shipment.
One of them was another converted city garbage truck; a GMC Commercial G-series with great armour panels bolted to the front in place of the scoop, completely covering the drivers compartment where the glass windshield had been replaced by metal plates and an elaborate sensor suite. The drone racks had been stripped of their loader bots and replaced with bipedal Ares Duelists, though the blade-wielding robots hadn’t been deployed yet.
The other tactical looked like it had begun life as a city bus, and still had patches of scuffed and faded paint visible beneath the armour plates that had been welded onto it. Two machine guns had been bolted onto the top, presumably controlled by a rigger inside the vehicle, and a rear entry hatch had been cut into the back above the engine.
Behind the vehicles, two columns of gangers were sheltering from the barrage of small arms fire that was being thrown their way by the Knight Errant blockade near the other end of the bridge. Only a few of them were visibly augmented Chosen, while the rest were more bodies grabbed up from the network of gangs that relied on the cyborgs for support. Every now and then, one of the latter would drift a little out of the line and catch a bullet. Sometimes one of their buddies would try and drag them back into the column only to be forced onwards by the Chosen, leaving the wounded man to bleed out on the bridge.
Switching to a camera on the other end of the arch gave me a clear picture of the opposition – so clear that the camera started automatically logging the licence plates of the Knight Errant cars that had been positioned in a line across the whole bridge. They were woefully underarmoured against the machine guns mounted on top of the bus; just patrol cars and a couple of vans whose lightly-armoured sides were suited for ticketing uninsured drivers or scooping up drunks, not urban warfare.
The officers knew it, too; there was a desperation to their movements as they fired round after round at the advancing tacticals. They’d clearly been hastily routed in from different parts of the city; a third of them were the familiar kind of Pawns I was used to in the North End, with rifles and concealing taksuits, while the rest were uniformed officers from the south. Half of them only had sidearms, while the rest had taken the one emergency rifle they kept in their patrol cars.
They couldn’t have been there long; the armoured convoy I’d seen earlier would have blown right through them. This was Knight Errant panicking, falling back along familiar lines as they tried to use policing tactics against an insurgency. Blocking the bridges didn’t matter if you didn’t have the force to hold them.
As I watched, a wave of visible terror passed through the officers. The source had come from something they’d heard, rather than seen; information relayed to them by the presence that had taken over the camera directly above their position, looking down the span of the bridge to the advancing Chosen. They were starting to organise; utilising their access to the municipal CCTV network in order to gather intelligence.
What they’d seen was another group of insurgents, hundreds strong and all on foot, marching on the bridge like they were taking part in a parade. I was astonished at how deep Max Anders’ hold on this city was, at how much power a single family could build up over generations when they abandoned all sense of decency and focused all their efforts on gaining control.
I was horrified that Calvert would unleash a thing like this as a mere distraction for his assault on Max, as well as a post-hoc justification for taking the man out. I wondered if Evo would say that Theo pulled the trigger himself out of shock at what his father was capable of, if Max did it himself once he realised he was cornered or – the most likely outcome – if these ‘Undersiders’ would exploit the chaos they caused and strike a blow for whatever cause we were supposed to believe in.
Back at the far end of the bridge, Knight Errant’s lines were being bolstered by an armoured personnel carrier loaded down with eight tactical officers in heavier armour. The patrol officers seemed torn between fighting harder and sagging back with relief now that reinforcements had arrived, especially when they realised one of the officers was carrying a bulky missile launcher in addition to his assault rifle.
He wasted no time in shouldering the weapon and firing a missile that immediately jerked upwards into a rapid arc that almost followed the curve of the suspension arch before slamming down through the roof of the bus. The vehicle’s armoured sides blew out in great slabs of shrapnel, scything through a swathe of Chosen behind it. A wordless cry of rage and triumph rose up from the Knight Errant line then, growing louder at the sound of rapidly-approaching rotorblades.
With my own eyes, I frantically looked around for the source of the noise, then threw myself to the ground as a blood red helicopter flew low over the river, its downwash throwing up spray that soaked through my hoodie in an instant.
As it hit the bridge, the pilot tilted the helicopter’s nose down and to the right, putting the aircraft into a wild spin that somehow brought it to a dead stop directly over the bridge, as if they’d put the handbrake on. As it carried on rotating, the assault cannon mounted beside the cockpit opened up, sending a torrent of explosive shells into the Knight Errant lines.
The fusillade was quick and effective, leaving most of the officers dead and the rest in no state to resist anybody. It was such a brief outpouring of violence, but as a statement of intent it carried the force of a nuke. The line between corporation and gang had been severed; Max Anders’ unseen empire had been brought out into the light, its banners raised and armies mustered for battle.
As the helicopter flew off towards its next target, the Chosen drove their up-armoured garbage truck through the burning wreckage of the Knight Errant blockade, clearing a path for the empire’s soldiers to march through on their way to fight a war against the world.
I watched them go through the cameras, struck dumb by the enormity of the obstacles that had been thrown across my path. I couldn’t go forward, couldn’t double back to the metro lines that the city was undoubtedly locking down. I was stood on a riverbank, watching the only people I cared about drowning amidst an impassable expanse of turbid waters.
I’d never felt so small, so helpless in the face of an inevitable end. Since becoming a Shadowrunner, there were moments when I felt like I was making a difference; like I had my fingers on the scales of the city, like I could defy all the powers of the world and impose my own will onto them. Like I mattered.
But beside that riverbank I knew that I’d been reduced to nothing more than a small part of someone else’s scheme. Just a face and a name for a cause that wasn’t my own. A cause that had moved a city to make war on itself, so that a distant and all-powerful organism could add another corporation to its bloated mass.
Every time I’d tried to solve a problem on my own, I’d failed. Or I’d succeeded in a way that had led to catastrophic failure down the line. I’d run head-first into the limits of what I was capable of; what Taylor Hebert could achieve when her whole mind and body were set upon my task.
All I had left was the faint hope of others. All I could do was hope that Faultline’s courier would be able to make it through the roads to the safehouse, that he could tell me whether I had any hope in my team being alive, or if their bodies were even now cooling among Calvert’s rented luxuries.
Even if they were alive, I had to hope that they would be strong enough to escape their captors, or even just to survive whatever interrogation they would be put through. Maybe even they could escape, or some of them could, or Rachel or Lisa could find a way to get a message to me.
If they had, if there was even the slightest chance that Faultline could gain useful intel from the safehouse, then I couldn’t do anything about it from the side of a riverbank. I’d need a safe place to dive into the matrix, a well-stocked armoury and clothes that weren’t soaked through with spray.
I needed to go home.