IT TAKES a stuttered second of concussed lag before my brain processes that the docks are on fire and flipping upside down and my stomach is lurching in freefall nausea. A kinetic force like a giant’s kick snaps the transport in half and flings both pieces into the air with explosive velocity. I’m swept off my feet like a ragdoll. Raw fire blooming hot and close. Vision spinning. End over end. Eardrums blown, shattered glass bottles slicing my skin into a mosaic pattern. Blood and alcohol splattering the air.

I smash off the transport’s walls and am ripped right out the blown-open doors by rotational force. Sarah disappears in the chaos. Ten meters from the floor of the hangar, I’m whiplashed head over heels, lights and steel and flames pinwheeling through my vision. Completely out of control. Vision splintering into a single frame per second. Ceiling, walls, floor, ceiling, walls, floor, walls, floor, walls-

Then darkness. Groaning, and blinding pain. A concussive bang that rattles from my skull to my toes as I’m brained against the hard metal wall of the bay and fall fifteen feet into a lifeless pile of curled-up limbs in some unseen corner. My optic nerves reboot themselves one neuron at a time. Hearing returns in spastic rushes of pressure pops and underwater noises. Slowly, internal organs battered into slush, I inch my eyes open to a scene of hellfire and horror.

I’m lying prone behind a cargo lifter and plasteel crates of designer drugs in a corner of the hangar. The force of the explosion toppled several of the crates, spilling out hypodermic vials filled with a shimmering, rainbow-hued liquid. Roaring flames smear the cavernous space around me with a backdrop of burning debris.

Walled in on three sides, the fourth side of the hangar open to the rest of the Vents, where another block’s neon lights continue to gleam unabated across the gap between the towers. Girders and catwalks and ladders to maintenance shafts for the tower superstructure crisscross the ceiling high above. Smoke curls and chokes the air. But it’s the scene at the burning husk of the hovertransport that draws my focus.

A cabal of Dynasty enforcers draped in black and orange surround the transport, which continues to vomit fuel-burning flames out of its innards. Weapons primed and aimed at the collapsed gunslinger in front of it. Sarah. Prone in a spreading puddle of oil, soaked in her own blood, Sarah tries to force herself onto her knees, but can’t get more than an elbow down.

I bite down on a shock of full-body pain as I try to uncurl. But I can’t even move. Can’t even breathe. Something’s wrong inside of me. Probably a lot of somethings. But the needles are right there. The stims, Shatter. The drug goes by a couple names, and makes half the people who take it go completely off their rocker. Dynasty has been hooking the streets on the stuff. If I can just reach…

My fingers twitch and limp towards the closest vial. It takes every drop of willpower to wrap my hand around it and stab it through a tear in my pants, straight into the bloody meat of my thigh. The stim triggers automatically. Nothing happens at first. But then my heart rips a three-sixty inside my chest and a surge of insane stimulation blasts every particle of pain in my body into blissful nonexistence, so present and clear I almost kickflip up to my feet right then and there. My eyes jolt wide open. I swear I suddenly start seeing new colors. Shudders wrack my entire frame. And my heart keeps going faster, faster, faster. Going to blow. Oh fuck fuck fuck. Everything’s hot and why am I sweating but I’m not sweating, and my heart’s not beating fast, but there’s a vice grip tightening around it and fuck I’m going to die I’m going to die.

Somehow, my gun stayed in its holster even after I was catapulted out of the transport. Teeth chattering like mad, I start working at the latch while the stim gut-punches me with an entire week’s worth of energy compressed into ten milliliters of hypodermically injected pandemonium. My existence spasms into a contradiction. So cold now. Whole body vibrating with tremors, but I’m not even moving on the outside, I’m still stuck right where I injected the Shatter.

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Across the deck, Sarah tries to crawl towards where her Sixer landed, only for one of the Dynasty fighters to scoop it up in agraceful motion. He’s not a brute like the others. Dressed in an entirely different style, too. Unassuming high-collared tunic, cream-colored poncho, a steel helmet shaped like a jackal’s head. Not a single inch of his skin is exposed, no weapons on his person. Yet Sarah’s gun fills his hand like it was made for it. Casually, he opens the cylinder, shucks out the electrolytic rounds, and kneels to pluck a lethal caliber from Sarah’s belt.

Sarah sneers up at him. Blood splutters from her lips as she says something I can’t hear. But I recognize the shape of one word. Executor.

The thin man’s soft voice is as calm as a mountain pool as he responds. “I am afraid not, Miss Morninghawk. You’re too early to be catching the Executor. But it seems we were in time to greet you.”

“Fuck you,” Sarah replies.

A fat-fingered brute in a black-and-orange suit shifts out of the mass of enforcers. Carto Bask. Purple blotches spattered over his bulldog neck, one arm in a gelcast, meat-cleaving katana in the other. “She’s got a little rat that follows her around,” he growls. “The punk bitch who shot up my ops on the Kriss block. They’re never far apart.”

The gunslinger says nothing at first, just turns his helmet to the side. Can’t see his face, just a thin strip of tinted black glass where his eyes would be, under the jackal’s snout. Then he waves Sarah’s gun towards the other enforcers. “Strip mine her JOY and have an Innovator run a trace on the girl. All others spread out and start searching. The Executor will decide what to do with her.”

My fingers, now working, rip the 6-Teba out of its restraints. Hand trembling like a jackhammer as I try to ease it from the holster. Slowly, the irons drift towards the helmeted man. I can barely line up a straight shot. But I don’t pull the trigger yet. I’m searching the view to the next tower over. Waiting, waiting for the familiar flash of Krey’s rifle to bloom in the darkness and blow the man’s brains into modern art. Krey should have seen the first explosion. He’s had plenty of time to line up a shot. Why hasn’t he taken it?

A noose of dread slips around my heart as I wait a second, and still a second longer.

The shot never comes.

Sarah snarls up at the gunslinger. “Leave her out of it, you bastard. She’s not a part of this! She’s just a kid.”

“That decision is beyond my control. The Executor may have uses for her yet.”

Panicked now, Sarah’s eyes roam the docks, searching for me. My heart hammers in my chest. Finger bouncing against the trigger, knowing exactly how quickly I’ll die if I pull it. Lungs expanding and contracting at a horrified pace. The Dynasty gunman rises back to his feet. Chambering that single round in the Sixer. I know the sound of the cylinder spinning into place better than any other. I can’t run from it.

“No! She’s just a kid! You mother fucker! I’ll fucking kill you if you touch a hair on her head!”

Somehow, she sees me where I fell in the corner. Her eyes white with fear now. Blood smeared over half her face. That icy hair drowned in crimson. All her proud nobility shattered under the curtains of fire and smoke. A legend of the undercity brought to heel by a simple bomb. Her lips tremble open in a pained moan. She sees the gun I raise and shakes her head at me, just once.

There’s no regret in her final moment. Only the hope of a wayward mother, that I won’t drown with her too.

No, no, she silently begs me. Run.

I force myself up to my knees. Right arm limp, burns across my neck, glass shards jammed in my legs. Biting back the horror with gritted teeth. Tears silently streaming as the smoke stings my eyes. I force myself to watch. As long as I can, I will hold her gaze so she’s not alone at the end. But she shakes her head again, smiling now, brave once more.

Go.

The gunman’s finger tightens on the trigger. Her smile turns to a fearless snarl.

Then I’m running, fleeing into a maintenance corridor choked by pipes and steam, crying no more, covering my mouth so I do not scream as a single clap of thunder shatters the roaring flames.