The elevator was fast enough I felt it pressing up against my boots, though our weight wasn’t exactly working it hard. The platform thumped and jostled as tire-like bumpers at the edges contacted the scaffold and rolled over its joints. It didn’t follow a strictly vertical path instead jinking this way and that as the split in the cliff grew deeper around it and surrounded us with craggy gray rock on three sides. We left the light of the factory behind, the only illumination now coming from dim amber emergency lights mounted around the edge of the platform’s floor. Moha hadn’t been able to shut those off, seemed like. Lucky for us, they weren’t very noticeable compared to what was happening below.

“Shit…” Keene muttered, peering down over the rail. I decided to risk a glance as well. Already we were fifty feet or so above the factory roof, giving us a good view of the battlefield. New fires smoked all over the warehouse complex where Arc and I had first fallen. More impressively, a recently-downed VTOL blazed in a burning-metal inferno amid the open area in front of the factory. Another one hovered low to the ground nearby, maybe deploying troops. Muzzle flashes sparked all over the place, my Thayer eye trying to track lines of fire. The functional VTOL moved out of the way just before a burst of autocannon fire slashed through its previous position. A flight of missiles streaked from the aircraft’s pylons and into the AA position on the factory’s roof, wiping it out. A few shards of concrete even clinked off the scaffold nearby. After a moment’s thought, I decided there wasn’t really anything I could do if the VTOL spotted something and opened up on us. Best to forget it was there.

I exchanged a glance with Arc and Alvar, then watched our very temporary friends. No more insults from Moha or small talk from Shir, now. Every foot away from the rigged reactor was a foot closer to violence. There was no sound but the hum and rattle of the elevator, even the gunfire from below growing quieter. I ran my SKH-Thayer eye across the Macomb crew, trying to use its pattern-recognition to pick out any weapons. It struggled in the low light, and for the thousandth time I cursed Admin’s stranglehold on night optic tech. Still, my secondhand eye lived up to its bodyguard marketing.

The most obvious threat was Moha’s shotty, a chopped-down KT Bureau semi-auto. Heavy and low tech, but ten shells of double-aught buck made up for a lot. Shir looked to have a ceramic combat knife on her chest rig and what my eye thought were stun knucks in a pocket. Keene had a grip sticking out from behind his back which, according to the Thayer’s database, belonged to a twelve-inch Kayne Kinetics HF knife. And Halloran, last of all, had a porcelain pigsticker like Shir’s and what seemed to be a small pistol inside the side web of his plate carrier. Moss, luckily, didn’t seem to be armed at all. This wouldn’t be easy, but I’d be damned if I let this pack of wage-slave trigger pullers take us out after everything else we’d dealt with. I knew they were thinking the same thing about traitors and freelancers and mutant D-creatures as they watched me back. I decided it was time to get this over with, and luckily Arc had the same idea.

She made a subtle sound, barely a louf breath, really, and I glanced over as sneakily as I could. Her dark eyes directed mine further down, towards her hand. She moved it in towards her side, translating it through her jacket sleeve- and then through her. My breath caught, a bit of nausea twisting through me as she reached up through her own abdomen. Her face remained calm, though, giving no hint of the utter weirdness of what she was doing. How did that even feel? If her hand and body were both intangible, did it feel like anything at all? I bit my lip, trying to concentrate. She was going for her underarm-holstered pistol, I realized, getting ready to draw it right through her body. That was some kingsdamn dedication.

Thump. Thump. The platform bumped rhythmically against its scaffold. The dull amber emergency lights flickered, underlighting the two sides, our ragged clothes and weapons and tactical gear making us look as rough and craggy as the rock around us. Alvar was so still I could almost feel the tension radiating off him. Arc’s breath came slow and steady. I felt somewhere in between, wound tight but oddly calm. What happened, happened. All I could do was find an opportunity and move.

It came a few seconds later. We were far, far above the old factory now, but the lights were still visible below. At least with everything else dark, it was easy to forget how high up we were. Just another thing to carefully ignore. The sporadic gunfire from below suddenly picked up, multiple rifles and heavy weapons rattling away on full auto. A couple of seconds later a searing yellow-white flash sparked below, way bigger than any explosion so far. Another VTOL going up? A suitcase nuke? I had no idea, but that wasn’t important. Moha glanced down at the fireball, breaking her death-stare with me- and a moment later she nearly lost her footing as the blast wave caught up and rattled the platform like a prayer flag in the breeze.

Arc moved first. Her arm whipped out through her front with that big, shiny automatic in hand. She fired twice, aiming for Moha. The lieutenant’s lucky stumble kept her safe, but one of Arc’s shots went past her and nailed Shir through the face. She dropped with her hand still going for her knife. Moss yelped, Keene shouted “Fuck!”, Moha snarled, and I moved.

I staggered with the blast myself, but still managed to lunge right at the LT. I had to be bait, keep them off of Arc so she could keep them off of me. I had no idea what Alvar would do, so I had to assume nothing.

“Fire! Kill ‘em- ngh!” Moha tried to bring her shotgun back up, but it was too late. I managed to grab the muzzle and keep it shoved down and across her body. She yanked the trigger anyway, the gun barking and sending buckshot rattling crazily off the steel floor.

“Fuck’s sake,” I hissed through gritted teeth. I got the coilgun screwed up under her chin, watched her eyes widen an instant before I yanked the trigger and uranium needles snapped out and emptied her skull. Arc’s pistol boomed again behind me, the bullet striking metal with a shrill pinggg. I shoved Moha’s corpse off me- only for it to come flopping back with the blurring point of a huge knife winging down over its shoulder. I stumbled back, needing both hands to shove against the body’s armored weight. Keene’s HF knife sunk its tip into my shoulder, parting cloth and flesh like soggy arpaste. I made a pained noise, the feeling of my muscle parting without effort weird and viscerally awful. The pain stoked my strength, and I shoved back just enough to get the knife out of my shoulder and let the body tumble to the side.

I tried to get the coilgun up but Keene, face a mask of rage, slashed flicker-quick at my hand. I pulled back to get out of reach of the big knife and it hacked into my pistol instead, sinking partway through the barrel and popping the battery in a crackle-flash of discharge. Luckily, a destroyed gun barely registered as a loss anymore. I hooked my hand across to grab his knife wrist, ignoring the twinge in my shoulder, then let go of the gun with the other and grabbed Keene’s throat. I crushed my thumb into his windpipe, then stepped in closer and yanked to hurl him to the ground. Two stomps to his neck and I felt his spine pop. Two left.

A couple of gunshots sounded from barely a yard away, Halloran returning fire at Arc with a stubby caseless pistol. I grabbed the truncate saw from my belt and charged, slashing across to rip his throat out. He spotted me, eyes going wide- and jerked Moss into my path. The six inches left of my sawblade hissed a bloody trench through the hapless suit’s neck and down his chest, and for the second time in a few seconds a bloody corpse fell on me.

Shit. Now Halloran could just shoot me in the face. Then Arc’s pistol banged a few more times and he swore. I tossed Moss aside in time to see Arc blur up and bury a dagger into Halloran’s eye. She jerked it free of his corpse as it fell, then slumped against the railing with her empty pistol smoking in her hand. I lurched upright and joined her, panting.

Alvar was face-down on the deck across from us. Oh, hell.

“You alive, Alvar?” I called.

He looked up and blinked, eyes feverishly bright in the dimness. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.” He stood and patted himself down as if to check anyway. “Your, uh- your foot’s bleeding.”

“Shit.” I looked down to see a thin trickle of blood coming from a tear in my boot, almost black in the dim lights. Spall from Moha’s buckshot, probably. I found myself more annoyed that I’d have to break in a new pair than at the injury itself. It hardly stung anyway. “Thanks, Alvar.”

“Sure.” He very carefully switched off the detonator in his hand, huffing out a breath as he relaxed a little. “Sorry I didn’t, well…”

“Help?” Arc said, shrugging. “It’s fine.”

“Yeah. That.” He didn’t look at the human wreckage we’d left.

I felt a little bad about Moss; he seemed harmless. But I probably would have had to kill him anyway, and doing it by accident felt easier, for whatever reason, than a cold-blooded execution. That I was more concerned about the manner of his death than the fact- well, I’d just toss that one onto the always-growing ‘Sharkie’s a psycho’ pile.

“Don’t worry about it, Alvar,” I said. “Can’t blame you. Especially if you knew them.”

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

He looked down at the floor. “I mean, sort of. Not close or anything. Just…I’ve never actually killed anyone.”

“Ah.” That made sense. Maybe explained why he’d shot the sarevna in the hand instead of the head, along with a general terror of Admin that seemed much more prevalent among these B-blockers than the people I knew. Familiarity breeding fear, or something. “Well, that’s probably a good thing. Don’t pop a disc over it, man. We’re still alive.”

“Huh. Yeah.” He stayed quiet after that, and I left him to his thoughts.

“Got another flask?” I asked Arc.

“I left it at home.” She gave me a tired, crooked smile. “Perhaps we’ll be able to get some more soon.”

She pointed upward, my eyes following. The split in the cliff opened up, revealing the ember-crackled black of the Pall, along with the upper elevator stop. I went over to the control panel to see if there was anything I needed to do, but I’d barely started reading the labels when the elevator slowed on its own. We slowly rose up to the stop platform, winches grinding, and then with a clank of mag-bolts we arrived back on the surface.

Alvar suddenly shoved away from the rail. “Shit, the guards-“

“Shit!” I echoed, reaching for weapons that weren’t there. Of course Macomb would guard the top, but I’d been so focused on getting up here I hadn’t even thought of it. I made a lurching dash off the platform to cover behind a big generator trailer, but no gunfire followed me. No alarms went off, no shouts or even mistaken greetings came toward us. The place was silent as a Kestite church on Pact Day.

“They got out while the getting was good, maybe?” I said, cautiously sticking my head out around the corner.

“I guess that whole ‘no man left behind’ thing they pushed in orientation was just marketing,” muttered Alvar as he got out a flashlight.

He and Arc joined me off the elevator. We’d arrived at a sort of staging area, with active camo mesh strung high up on poles to conceal it from the air. The ground might have been a parking lot or concrete foundation once, but it was so crumbled and covered by dirt I couldn’t really tell. A few stacks of conplas crates as well as some bigger conex boxes hulked out of the darkness. Speaking of, while there were a few construction lights on floor stands lying around, none of them were on.

“Look,” said Arc as she went over to one and got something off the ground. She held up a crushed battery, the mounting tabs all ruined. It looked like someone had ripped it right out of the light instead of just turning it off.

“Left in a hurry, too,” I said, voice low. I didn’t know why I wanted to be quiet, but it felt appropriate. I wished I still had a gun, too. I could have asked Alvar for the pistol I’d taken off that sniper, but that felt like a bit of a dick move for whatever reason. I wasn’t sure what he was to Arc and I now, but more than a hostage for sure. “How many were up here last time, Al?”

“Just a fire team and some trucks, I think, but that was a couple of weeks ago. So, four or five- oh, and a suit, too. There’s a little office trailer over there.” He pointed to the broadest path between the shipping containers.

We proceeded in slow silence, the eerie cracks in the Pall glowing without providing any light. Arc and I got out flashlights too, hers an entirely normal composite model rather than the brass-engraved mining lamp or whatever that I’d expected. Alvar kept our single loaded pistol at low ready.

All signs pointed to the Macomb squad departing suddenly, though maybe not violently. Every light we passed was broken or otherwise permanently shut off. No blood or spent brass or bullet holes, as far as I saw, but there was a sizable dent in the side of a conex. I knew how hard that was to do based on various tall-person interactions with the walls of my old apartment. There was even an ammo-pack ashtray sitting on a crate, complete with a half-finished burner still faintly smoking on the edge. Very soon we passed between two stacks of conexes and into a more open area, with a view out past the camo mesh and into the badlands surrounding the chasm. I could just see the lights of D-block in the distance.

Alvar nodded at a plain blue conplas box sitting up on scissor jacks. Beside it was a flat area complete with some oil stains and fresh burnout marks on the dirt. “There’s the trailer. And…the trucks are gone.”

“I brought a Zandkat, don’t worry,” I said, noting the resignation in his tone. “Guess we should see if anyone’s home…”

I didn’t mention what we’d have to do if someone was.

I took point this time, light in one fist and the shortened saw in the other. Arc followed just behind me, knives drawn. I somewhat awkwardly stood on the steps up to one of the doors, lined up, and snapped out my foot. Despite the twinge in my calf I blew through the flimsy latch like it wasn’t there. The whole prefab structure shook as I charged in with saw ready. Nobody in the tiny space to my left, twitch my head over- and nothing but a corpse to my right, sprawled out in the middle of the floor next to a tipped-over office chair.

The dead guy looked like a somewhat product-improved version of Moss: fitter, more hair, a nicer suit and a healthier tone to his skin- he hadn’t been dead long enough to lose it. He even had a bionic hand, what looked like a mid-level Yakkorp model done up in fancy stylized wood grain. The effect was ruined by the way his chin and jawbone were driven up into his skull.

“Kingsdamn,” I muttered. Whatever impact had smashed in the lower half of his face had burst the capillaries in his eyes and left a curtain of blood down his front. Looked like he’d let a Praetor kick him in the chin-

“Perhaps our aristocratic friend paid him a visit,” said Arc.

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” I said, nodding slowly. It was too much to hope the sarevna had been caught in the crossfire. I’d wondered if she had her own little VTOL or something, but with her augments she could have just scuttled up the elevator scaffold. Maybe she thought she could do it faster than the platform, or maybe such pedestrian modes of transportation were beneath her. And then-

“Did you find any- oh. Damn.” Alvar joined us inside, staring at the body for a few seconds before turning away.

“Your suit, I suppose?” Arc asked.

“Different guy from when I came through, but- urk- yeah. I think so.” He quickly left the trailer.

I blinked, realizing it did, in fact, stink in here. I was used to it, I guess. Arc and I gave the place a cursory look-over, rifling through a rack of shelves and the suit’s desk, but found nothing- no slabs, no computers or drives, not even plas-paper documents. Poking a toe at the dead guy’s pockets revealed that his comslab was gone, and closer inspection showed a rough-edged hole in the back of his head where a data implant might have been. I could imagine the bespoke cybernetic fingers crunching in through the bone and yanking the chip or port or whatever out. Someone was definitely cleaning up after themselves.

We joined Alvar outside after a couple of minutes. “It was the sarevna, wasn’t it?” he asked as we came down the steps.

“It’s my guess, at least. She came up here, shut everything down, kicked the grunts out. You didn’t see any other bodies, right?” He shook his head. “Yeah, scared ‘em down the road, then. The suit argued, or just knew too much, so she clipped him and bugged out. Just a guess, though.”

“I figured it was something like that,” he sighed, looking even more dejected. Maybe thinking about his decision not to kill Ilyes. I almost opened my mouth, but quickly gave up. I couldn’t think of anything, and whatever I said in my state would probably make things worse.

“Unless there’s anything really worth stealing around, I think we ought to bounce before whoever’s wrecking shop down there decides to come up here,” I finally said. I’d been shot at by enough VTOLs for today. Nobody argued, so I led the way past the trailer and out from under the camo netting.

And stopped. “I, uh…you got any idea where we are, Arc?”

She gave me a Look, managing to put that capital letter in place despite how tired she was, and pointed off to our left.

“Huh. Okay, then.” So we started our trudge through the wasteland, cinders and dirt and long-crumbled asphalt crunching beneath our boots. Arc led us on a, well, arcing course, getting us away from the Chasm’s edge and hopefully keeping us beneath any flyer’s notice. We kept our lights on the dimmest red setting, covering the lenses with our fingers so we could see just enough to place our feet. Though we didn’t meet anyone else, when we passed through what used to be a cluster of buildings I heard several somethings scuttle out of our path and into the surrounding ruins. Nobody asked what they were, and I didn’t want to think about it. There were a lot of bones lying around, clicking hollowly against our boots. While none looked human, I didn’t ever want to see what they belonged to. Once or twice we heard shrieking engines, maybe a distant explosion, but nothing that ever got close to us.

Maybe half an hour after we started our walk, a less distant boom popped off. We stopped, crouching, and I saw flames when I glanced back the way we came. “The elevator, do you think?”

Arc nodded. “It would almost have to be.”

We waited a minute or two. Eventually we saw what might have been engine flares winging off from above the flames and into the distance. I almost said something like, ‘We should be good, then,’ but clamped my jaw shut. Even concussed, I wasn’t that stupid.

After a bit more walking we came up to a half-collapsed building made of rusted sheet metal, and it looked familiar. I perked up, jogged around to the other side, and finally, finally spotted the Zandkat. The boxy little 4x4 sat just where it should have, though the ragged figure jimmying at the driver’s door definitely hadn’t been there when I parked it.

Oh, for fuck’s sake. “I am not in the fucking mood right now, tva,” I called out as I stalked up to the jacker.

He twitched to look at me, a filthy dude wearing a shapeless poncho of tarp material and work pants that looked to be more dirt than cloth. Despite the state of him his head was completely hairless, no eyebrows even- either he was a mutant or he’d caught a few more rads than was good for you. For a moment I thought he must have cooked his brains, too, because he sneered and took a step towards me. Then Arc and Alvar followed me around the building and changed his odds. He hissed, actually hissed at me before dashing off, the pale arches of his feet flickering in our lights until they disappeared.

We all peered after him. “Friend of yours?” Alvar finally said.

“Not the greatest conversationalist,” added Arc.

“Fuck’s sake,” I said, out loud this time, and fumbled around in my pocket. Luckily I hadn’t lost the ID chip for the Zandkat. I popped the door, slumped into the seat heavily enough to make it rock, and made sure the lights were off before I punched the starter. The turbine whirred to life instantly and the dash readouts all rode in the green. Thank Rik for that; I’d half expected the battery to be dead or something.

I reached over and unlocked the doors. “You guys coming or not? I’m fucking starving.”