A CHILDHOOD OF STEALING from gangsters to put food on the table teaches you two very important skills: how to walk silently, and how to hide in plain sight. A JOY can give you the first, if you pick the right affinity. But the second can only be learned through painful trial and error. Beatings and broken bones were my teachers in youth. I thought they were the worst the world had in store, so I’ve played this game my share of times. Unfortunately, the world tends to save its most lethal reminders for last. And there won’t be any second chances if I’m caught this time.
Lain and I wait between the gaps in the unfinished walls of the darkest halls of the twelfth floor. Crouched low to the ground, shuffling forward on knees, heads bowed, classes activated, weapons primed, hardly breathing, never breathing, dreading every tiny sound I make. Cracked plaster and rotting metal flanking on both sides. Despite the flames and the groaning of the superstructure, a graveyard would be louder than this place.
We wait because we’re surrounded; our only advantage that our enemies don’t even know we’re here. I can hear them out in the shadows. Climbing up the empty lift shaft, easing their way up the groaning stairwell one step at a time. Drifting through the maze of empty cubicles and offices. So silent you can never be sure if they’re actually out there until you suddenly hear a foot crunch in the debris twelve inches away; feel the weight in the air as someone drifts past without even realizing they missed you.
Going danger close is an adrenaline rush worse than any drug. More terrifying than anything you’ll see on a stream. Insane paranoia is just the baseline. One noise will give everything away. One shot will kickstart this tower into hell. We’re playing a game of hide-and-seek with supernatural powers that can kill faster than you can blink. Measures and countermeasures from various classes all networking together to give their users the slightest advantage. We’ve pruned most in our favor. Krey obliterated Dynasty’s last ki fighter with his shot- if he hadn’t, that man could sense our heartbeats from a hundred feet away through total darkness. Matthias shields us all from the wandering touch of the Psis among Dynasty’s forces, who could detect us just as fast. Lain slows our pulses. Our core temperatures are no different from the ember-choked air. As near as we can tell, the enemy are as blind to us as we are to them.
All that matters is who gets the first drop.
My clothes are soaked with perspiration from hiding in such a tight space for such a long time. Lain crouches behind me, tailbone pressed against mine. Through cracks in the walls, we watch and listen as the enforcers slowly filter their way into the rest of the floor, like the greedy fingers of some massive hand. They sidle past in ones and twos. Checking every door, clearing every corner. Fighters of innumerable combinations of powers, all unified by the black and orange they wear. I still don’t know if I’m ready. I only just escaped the syndicate’s clutches. Will I freeze like I did last time? Run?
I still when Lain’s hand brushes against my leg, tapping for my attention. Something heavy touches the wall to my right. Hostile breathing, inches away, loud in my ears as my entire body tenses up. Knees creak as an enforcer stands. Claws scrape against the carpet. The floor bows fractionally as another body comes to a stop mere feet away. Then another, and another. Lain taps four times against my thigh. Rapidly.
In my mind’s eye, I can almost see them on the other side of the wall, searching the darkness for the slightest tip-off. Soundlessly, I shift my thumb over the stream cam function of my JOY. The tiniest glimmer of cyan trickles through cracks in the plaster as the flash warms up. Their only possible warning. Someone makes a confused noise when they glance down and see the light. Boots shift to look. An intake of breath to shout in warning. Too late.
Smashing my elbow through the wall, I hit the flash and catapult the silence into hell.
A stream cam flash and a gunpowder clap shunt the world straight into daytime. Explosive light blinds optic nerves and infrared augments into stream static. Then I’m smashing through the plaster straight into the side of a black-armored enforcer, haloed by a buckshot blast of debris. He slams into one of his allies on the other side of the corridor and takes her tumbling into the next wall over, leaving a crumbling hole in their wake. Two more stagger blinded by the improvised flashbang. One left and one right. Sheer momentum propels me between them. My head whips from side to side. To the left, a woman with sharp claws on her hands and grisly fangs poking out of her mouth, two crimson sprays erupting out of her stomach when I squeeze twice on the trigger. As I start to fall, I whip my body through a one-eighty twist and kneecap a thickset gunner who’s pawing at his eyes, then flatten into a slide and zip through the newly created hole across the hall.
An angry pulseblast from an energy rifle warbles down the corridor close enough to singe the hair on the back of my neck before I’m through. Groaning enemies in the blackened office, both underneath me. I cycle to electrolytic rounds and send both of them into a weeklong coma. Flip back up, rip an explosive off of one of their belts, yank the pin with my teeth. A backhand throw sends it bouncing out the office’s empty doorframe, where it rolls off into the west wing and erupts with an eardrum-shattering blast of light.
There’s no telling how many it blinds, but the reaction is as immediate and as chaotic as I wanted. The graveyard quiet erupts into a mosh pit of explosives, bullets, and elemental energy. Enforcers fire in every direction, even at their own allies, chewing through the walls and churning the air into a superheated rave. I dive to the floor as a beam of ki energy saws straight through the office I’m in, cutting it in half at the waist. So they did have another.
The roof bows and collapses above me, but I’m moving again, tumbling through an unfinished doorframe. Arm straight, arm locked as I search for the ki fighter. He’s glowing like an idiot, lit up by an aura of golden life energy, lit up like a target at the range. I short-circuit his next blast with a pull of the trigger. Pivot hard, braid flapping and poncho flourishing. From the shadows, a short cinder block of a woman silently darts at me from behind, long-handled glaive already swinging in both hands. Black robes, orange dragon on the back, scars crisscrossing her face, one eye milky white. My eyes narrow; trigger pulls. She jukes left and my first shot thuds into a wall instead of meat. She closes in range to swing. But before she can open up my stomach, two hands smash through the plaster beside her, garrote cable flashing between as they snag her neck like a noose.
Lain’s wire rips out the woman’s throat with a single twist. She falls gurgling on her own blood, already forgotten as the thief lunges over the body and flattens against the wall beside me.
We’re in one of the thin corridors connecting the west wing to the lift core. Deafened by gunfire and elemental onslaughts. Boots pounding closer from the lifts, hell erupting in the main office space to our left. Tiny hunter-killer pets and drones patter in the rafters. Everyone in the tower is coming for us. Not what I planned, but I can use it.
Before I can even catch my breath, another enforcer rounds the corner right beside me, arms wreathed in hungry flames. Elemental. We’re both stunned as he runs into me. I’m faster. Incinerating light blooms in his palm. Smashing the elbow joint, I grab his arm and aim it like a fire hose as he releases, bisecting the cubicle farms with a ten-foot-high curtain of roaring fire. Surprised yells follow. Silhouettes falling back, enamored by the flames, belatedly tracing it back to its origin. Lain and I are already twenty paces in the other direction, hunched over and sprinting into the south wing. Enforcers dash past in parallel halls, headed the opposite way, responding to calls for support. Fuck, there’s a lot of them. Dynasty really did send an army. But the Armiger hasn’t showed his head yet. If he’s not here, then where is he?
Another shout zeroes in on us from the right, deeper in the cubicles. Someone sees my hair. A tuft gets cut by a bullet, drifting like hay over my nose the moment before it’s gone. Spotlights flash to life like miniature suns. Blindingly bright, stabbing through the drywall and rotten wood, hunting me though the gaps. Breathless, I tap Lain on the shoulder and send her running towards the unfinished stairwell waiting around the next corner. The moment she’s gone, a hailstorm of projectiles chew the air into a debris-choked minefield as they zero in on the spotlight’s center, and me inside it.
Sizzling heat rips behind my ankles. Arrows and bullets slash through my poncho. All missing by the narrowest margins as I take the attention fully on myself and put all Sarah’s training to use, kickflipping off a cubicle while hurling another stolen flashbang backwards between my legs. When an explosion rips through the office to my left, I jump into the kinetic shockwave and let it throw me down a straightaway between cubicles, right into a smokecloud blocking my view of the stairwell. Gunslinging instincts kick into overdrive as I hit the darkness at fifty miles an hour. Unable to see an inch ahead, I twist feet-first in a corkscrew and slam my boots against the floor hard enough to start a flash fire, then skip forward into a frame-perfect bullet jump twelve inches from the ground.
I flash out of the smoke like an arrow, beaming right between the two enforcers securing the top of the stairwell. They have two milliseconds to react, and they use them to drop their jaws. I’m too low, too fast, spinning too violently for them to even see as more than a blink of fire as I clip their legs out from beneath them. Two no-look shots over the shoulder put them down for certain. Then I’m in the stairwell and catapulting my momentum straight into the curving steel railing, surfing down to the next floor, the cadence of Lain’s footsteps chasing my wake as she dashes after.
Don’t slow. Don’t look back at her. Not till we’re out of this.
A comet’s tail of sparks sprays out behind the metal heels of my boots as I grind the rail all the way to the eleventh floor. Big door waiting at the bottom, real big. I see it coming seconds away. Pray my busted-up body can survive another hit. And throw my momentum into my shoulder right as I hit the bottom of the rail, lunging at the door hard enough to blow it off its hinges.
Something wrenches horribly in my shoulder. Ricocheting off the door, I go tumbling into the burnt husk of a break room filled with grime-covered plastic furniture. The door collapses in the opposite direction, flatlining an enforcer who was about to bash my head in with a jet-powered hammer.
I process the next room in single-digit frames while my body cartwheels uncontrollably towards the floor. Two hollow black corridors splitting off deeper into the tower. Rows of trashed tables and heavy countertops. Busted caf machines and ripped-open foil fluttering like soggy tissue. Shattered windows at the far end; burning city in the broken glass. Two more Dynasty duelists surging towards me, black-faceplate armor and lit up vibroblades in hand.
One of the enforcers is already leaping to intercept me before I can touch the ground. Exoskeletal Mecha augments in his legs turn a three-foot jump into a near-instantaneous lunge so fast he’s just a blur of black color. I just barely get my revolver up in time, batting his blade to the side even as it shears a chunk off the ammo cylinder and takes the top off a knuckle. The collision sends us spinning in opposite directions. I’m quicker to recover. Finish the spin, shatter his faceplate with a single shot, and instinctively throw a hand out backwards to meet the countertop I’m about to hit, somehow managing a handspring that sends me arcing over the slower Duelist.
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My heels hit solid ground. Gun out and raised, zeroed on where the next enforcer is still slowly finishing his turn.
“Don’t take another step, fucker.” I snarl and prime the 6-Teba’s hammer. “Want to end up like your pal?”
But there’s something wrong. He doesn’t stop turning. And he’s too casual about it. Too unconcerned with the revolver I have aimed right at his chest as he finishes the turn and stares at me, hollow and empty, no face but a slate of black glass. Dark plastform armor, a simple ragged cape floating near his calves. All in black. I’ve never seen the guy before, but something in my head recognizes him. No, not him- his silhouette. Thin.
Steel-toe boots crunch through the burnt plastic underfoot as he takes a single step towards me. My finger twitches and the 6-Teba barks, blasting the vibroblade out of his hand like he was barely holding onto it.
“Wrong choice,” I say.
The Duelist continues to move towards me, drifting forward. Too graceful for a mook. Too fast for an enforcer as I jump back and pull again, sending a bullet zinging towards him. He dives to the side and slashes forward in a gunmetal blur. The bullet strikes a gas line and a plume of flames erupt in a firewall around us, sealing off the break room.
Too late, I realize he wears no orange. I only see why when his cape shifts to the side; Sarah’s Sixer dangling from the back of his belt. Then he’s onto me. Disguised in the armor of a common enforcer. The Armiger. Dynasty’s faceless killer swivels his hips and drives a heel into my sternum hard enough to crack the bone, hurtling me through a table halfway across the cafeteria.
Mundane fighter. Right. Martial Artist, Duelist, Gunslinger. Lesson learned as I plow into the debris. Embers wash over the room. Groaning, I try to roll out of the broken pile of plastic beneath me. 6-Teba wobbling back into firing position.
“No mercy… for a kid…?” I cough blood and finally roll free, shoving up to my feet. He just watches.
Fuck. He’s letting me get up.
If there’s such a thing as a good sign in my world, a syndicate butcher breaking your ribcage like he’s solving two plus two then letting you get up is not on the fucking list.
The Armiger’s helmet doesn’t even move. “Put down the gun.”
“Surrender to Dynasty? To you?” I laugh, wipe the back of a wrist across my mouth. The firewall roars around us, washing out the rest of the room. Humid heat presses against my cheeks, drying the sweat into salty stains. “You’re wearing Sarah’s Sixer. If you think I’m not going to take it back over your dead body, you’re more deluded than your master.”
“Sarah Morninghawk’s death was a contractual necessity.” The Armiger waves a hand, and one of Dynasty’s Elementals rips a hole through my firewall to enter alongside a slender woman. Pale skin, silky blonde hair, she has the perfectly manicured appearance of a high-fashion model even in this burning city block. The wall seals back up behind her. “Put the gun down and shut off your JOY.”
I barely notice what he’s saying. The moment the woman appeared, the moment our eyes met for the tiniest moment, all the molten heat and aching pains of my body began melting away, replaced by an unsteady tipsiness in the root of my brain. And her eyes, they’re beautiful. Crystalline pink with a catlike core, like masterwork gemstones.
She’s an Iros, I belatedly realize.
It doesn’t bother me like last time, when I thought Matthias was one of them. Dynasty’s elite Psis. This one’s pretty- no, she’s fucking hot. And my feet are getting wobbly just looking at her. I can’t tear my eyes away. Can’t do much more than totter back and forth and slowly watch my gun lower against everything I was feeling moments before. The understanding of what’s happening to my body hits me in the third-person. She’s wreaking havoc on my mind, amping up old sensations from drunken nights until my body thinks it’s experiencing them all over again. Tearing down my resistance brick by brick. But it’s not so bad.
I’m exhausted, aren’t I? Tired of running. Tired in the fingers from shooting cramps. Tired in the ears from the bang-slam-bang of gunpowder. How long have I been up? How much horror have I survived since the last time I was able to close my eyes? Wouldn’t it be better to let her take those memories? I won’t need my gun when I go with her. The Armiger can have it,
…and he’ll give it back as soon as you want…
No. Hell no. My gun is my life.
I’d like to say the 6-Teba swings back up and I gave the Armiger a lead infusion to the forehead, but it just sticks where it’s at, pointed at the Armiger’s boots, neither raising nor lowering. My tongue feels swollen in my mouth, heavy as lead. Can’t talk. Panting, shaking under the mental onslaught, it’s all I can do to stay upright.
“She’s resisting,” the woman is saying. “You’re sure she’s not a Psi?”
“Gunslinger, Martial Artist. Innovators ripped her data from Morninghawk’s JOY.” The Armiger’s helmet swivels back towards the rest of the tower. “How long?”
She reaches up to massage her forehead. “Soon.”
“Finish it.” His gloved hand curls around the grip of Sarah’s Sixer, not quite unclipping it. “We’re on the clock.”
And even if I don’t want to help him, the building is burning down around me. I need to leave soon. If not with Dynasty, then who? Going with them wouldn’t be so bad. If the Armiger is telling the truth, maybe they’ll let me go. Maybe they’ll let me go back to Ulysses.
The name jumps into my head like a bolt of chain lightning, and some other force beyond me snags onto it with all the tenacity it can manage. Ulysses. Didn’t I tell him I’d find my way back? I did-
-but it’s not so important to go back to him, not yet-
-but he’s waiting for me-
-there’s smoke in my lungs, violently coughing-
-I need to call him, let him know I’m okay-
It’s like two different people who aren’t me are tugging my brain in every direction simultaneously. Each trying to take control with more and more mental pressure until I finally buckle and collapse to my knees, nails gouging the plastic tile.
Across the room, the Iros sags against the Armiger, teeth grit from strain. “There’s another hidden in the building. Missed him somehow. He’s in her head too, holding me off. I’m trying to track him back through the mental link….” Her pink eyes snap wide open a moment later. “…Matthias?”
The second pressure in my head, the encouraging one, the ghost yelling for me to stand and draw, seizes full control the moment the Iros’ concentration wavers. My eyes drift up to Armiger, the Iros, and the elemental.
Higher, Mori.
The firewall. All that voice in my head wants is for me to look up, so I do. A little hole in the rippling flames, half an inch and ten mils wide. Through it, all the way across the tower, the tiniest glimmer of reflected light on the polished lens of a telescopic sight as Krey, exiting through the eastern stairwell, brings the Malice to bear.
The weight of the Malice’s sights pass from me to the Iros and the Elemental, stacked right on top of each other. Somehow, the Armiger feels it too. His helmet perks up. Boots shifting in a quarter circle rotation, unconsciously responding to combat instincts that have been sharpened to a degree I can’t even imagine. Completely unaware of the flash from the Malice’s barrel as Krey unloads its supersonic payload almost fifty meters away, the Armiger clips the Iros’ ankles with a sweep of his foot and lets himself fall over her body the frame before a bullet the size of my neck does a hole-puncher to their Elemental’s torso.
Something wet and warm slaps off my face as it flies past. I stagger back to my feet, suddenly freed of the Iros’ mental control. Behind my back, a woman’s half-exploded arm, blown off her shoulder at the socket.
Dead ahead, the Armiger springs back on his feet faster than the Malice’s signature report can reach our ears, stealing a knife from the Iros’ belt as he rises. Fresh clarity surges through my head, and I hear Matthias’ voice somewhere behind my ears.
I understand the desire for privacy, but this is an emergency, he says. You’ll feel some tingling behind your eyes. I’m syncing your vision to Krey. Keep looking through the firewall. When I say-
The Armiger twists to the side and another massive bullet blows through the flames two fingers away from his chest, destroying a swath of countertops before blasting out the other side of the room unslowed. Matthias whistles a high-low tone in my head.
Nevermind. Your friend is… uh, very good. Lain will be there any second. Start moving to the-
“Fuck that,” I snarl.
The 6-Teba spins into my hand like a gambling chip. My hands swap in a fresh ammo cylinder like clockwork. Pivoting around another shot from Krey that strikes from a completely different angle, the Armiger uses the twisting of his cape to cover an offhand flick in my direction. My gun snaps up. Squeeze the trigger, deflecting the knife he threw mid-flight, it clips a chunk off my ear as it flies past my face. Dive forward just as Krey tumbles into the circle from the other side. Rubble crashes down from the rafters as a third body enters the fray from above, garrote flashing. And the Armiger. Does. Not. Care.
Krey, Lain and I dive at him from three directions simultaneously. The Armiger steps once. Perfectly positioned between Krey and I, forcing the Malice to pause lest Krey accidentally miss and shoot me instead, Krey’s finger stalling on the trigger. Steps twice. Ducking the diamond-sharp wire that lassoes just barely wide of his helmet, still close enough to scrape the paint. Lain hits the Armiger’s back and rolls awkwardly off the armor there. Sarah’s Sixer flashes out from beneath his cape. Two behind-the-back shots hammer into my eardrums. Lain screams as she hits the floor. Then Krey’s on him. I don’t even try to aim with my gun, just try to ram the Armiger with my body, anything to throw off his balance.
A full-metal fist meets my face a step before I finish closing the distance. No emotion to it, not like the other enforcers, not like Carto Bask. Something cracks under my eye as I fall sideways. Krey tries to use the Malice’s stock as a club, but the Armiger ducks, traps his arm in a one-handed martial grip, and breaks the elbow with an effortless flex. My gun comes up flashing the next moment, taking a lock of hair off Krey’s head when the Armiger pivots and throws him into the wall. An armored knee slams into my stomach and another roundhouse kick snaps into my head hard enough to turn my vision into the wrong end of a pinata. His boots crush the tile as he steps forward to finish the job.
Another clap of gunpowder thunder stops him in his tracks. I look up. A thin trail of smoke drifts up from Krey, one arm broken, standing awkwardly with the 6-Teba in hand. The Armiger stands frozen between us with a fresh patch of red blossoming beneath his chestplate. Just a graze. His gloves fingers pad at the blood like he’s never seen it before.
Krey’s eyes jump to meet mine. “Mori!”
He slings the 6-Teba into my hand with a flick of his wrist as I dive into a roll, arm extended. Perfect aim. Familiar gunmetal fills my palm. Three shots left, I can feel it in the weight of the gun. I send two of them right at the Armiger’s knees while he’s still distracted. His boot slashes callously across the floor in reply, like he’s kicking at an errant pebble. Two slivers of white tile flash through the air too fast to see. Like daggers, punching to the hilt.
The impact kicks me into the floor like a back-alley brawler. Breath locked tight in my chest. But there’s something heavy in there with it. Icily painful, worming into my torso. A bloody noise escapes me before I can help it. Matthias starts panicking in my head and I can’t shut him the fuck up. Two pieces of tile lodged in my chest, I crawl backwards as Krey grabs Lain and buys me one more second with the last shot in the Malice’s magazine.
I look up to see the Sixer pointed straight at me. The Armiger almost untouched, one hand to the side of his helmet, thumb on the hammer. In his faceplate’s heat-wave reflection, a panting girl with a half-broken gun in hand, tears of sweat and makeup of soot, those Venter eyes burning with hate. She’d raise that gun if she could.
But I, I run.