I didn’t rest when I stopped falling. There was no time for recuperation or relaxation. Sure, I’d gained myself a bit of grace by getting myself aboard a moving train elevator, but my dead hunter’s colleagues were no doubt already following the tracks. They’d be here before long.

Which was why I was on my feet as soon as I’d crashed down. I had to find the corpse fast. The main pieces of it, at least.

I was fine. Limb loss was nothing new. Some of my Augments allowed me to cut down a significant portion of the blood flow to different sections of my body, so I wasn’t even losing vital fluids that much. The only real point of worry was that losing a limb was going to put me at a disadvantage in future combat scenarios. Plus, walking with a missing arm was awkward.

There weren’t a lot of buildings or people around the exact location I’d plummeted to. Although, there was a residential neighbourhood not that distant from me. But I was in the clear. I could search without being observed by too many people.

Still. I’d fallen far from where my assailant’s body had landed. No time to waste.

Wilting trees and droopy leaves greeted me in the little facsimile of a park that the residents of Underlevel got access to. Usually, they were spots the druggies tried to hide away in and inhale their doses away from judging eyes. Now though, the fire and the smoke and the burning corpse falling from the sky had probably scared them off.

Except, the corpse I had been hoping to recover wasn’t alone. There was already someone there.

I’d have cursed before figuring out a way to shoo away whatever dumbass had decided that investigating an exploded body was a good idea. But I stopped in my tracks when I saw who it was that was standing in front of the flaming wreckage.

“Delivery girl?” I couldn’t keep the incredulity out of my voice.

She turned, silver hair moving almost eerily to reveal her eyes, one hidden behind the ocular implant. “Who are you? Wait, that voice… Mister?”

I had a momentary crisis on whether I’d royally screwed myself over by revealing my identity to delivery girl. But I got over it in the next instant. A second used for double-guessing and regretting things was a second completely wasted in this line of work.

“Kijo, what are you doing here?” I asked. “Actually, don’t answer that. Just get out of here before things get dicier.”

I started walking to the aflame corpse, but delivery girl suddenly jumped in front of it. Next, she threw herself into the fire. I was about to dive in and pull her out, probably while cussing her out too, but she emerged on her own before I could reach her. The hell was this girl?

“I got it!” she proclaimed. In her hands was exactly what I was looking for. The ripped-off head of my would-be killer. “You looking for this, right Mister?”

“I’m telling you, kijo.” I held out my hand. “Get out of here before you get hurt. Things are already really messed up. You really don’t want to get involved in all this.”

I tried snatching the head out of her arms, but she nimbly leaped back.

“Nuh uh,” she said. “I’m already involved in all this. I’m scared for my life here. I need insurance. And stop calling me a kid.”

“Insurance?”

“Yeah.” For the first time, I started to see the actual fear that was driving her. “Take me somewhere safe, Mister. It’s not just Enforcers after you. They sent the big guns. All the way from Top Level.” She shook the head in her grasp. “This is one of them, right? I’ll hand it over, no worries, but please—just take me with you.”

I was tempted to yell at her to get out and stop acting crazy. Dragging someone along with you was how you got killed.

But she had a point. She was the delivery girl. If they knew where to find me, if they knew what I looked like, who was to say they didn’t have all the information they needed about all my associates? Delivery girl was right to be afraid of being in danger.

Question was, ought I to be the one responsible for her safety?

“Fine,” I said. “Just follow me and be quick about it.”

“Where you headed?” she asked as I hurried away. We had already used up way too much time. “Gonna find your arm?”

“My arm’s in way too many pieces to find now. We’re getting out of here. Keep up.”

I led her to the lake not far from the crash site. The water was about as clean as a public toilet, but we weren’t here to take a drink.

“I, uh, can’t swim,” delivery girl said.

“Can you sink?”

She stared at me. I jumped into the water.

I really wished the water wasn’t so murky. But at least it wasn’t night. I could see in the dark pretty well, but that was harder underwater. For now, I had little trouble making out the grate I was looking for.

As I reached it, delivery girl sank into water too. She struggled for a second before realizing that she could walk on the lakebed and reach the grate just as I had. Assuming her lung capacity held out. I had no idea if she had an Augmented lung or not. Well, we’d find out soon, I supposed.

Missing an arm didn’t stop me from removing the grate with a little bit of effort. The locks were mechanical. There was nothing for me to hack. As such, brute force it was.

I swam into the tunnel and reached a spot where I could climb up to a dry walkway. There was a door nearby. Now this one had a security panel I could hack into. It was then I realized that most of my hacking tools had been on the arm I’d blown up. Crap.

Delivery girl spluttered her head out of the water. She was blubbering and glugging.

I took mercy on her and hauled her bodily onto the walkway. “You got any hacking tools on you?”

She coughed out some water. “Do I look like a hacker?”

“Hmm. I guess not. Ah well.”

I kicked down the door. Subtler approaches were my preference, but I wasn’t opposed to some necessary violence from time to time.

“Wh-where we he-headed?” Delivery girl was shivering hard enough to make the dislodged bits inside the assassin’s head rattle.

“To someplace safe.”

“Through the tunnels?”

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I noted the hint of fear in her question. “Sometimes, you have to work through the unsafe parts before you can reach safety.”

“Thanks. That clears it right up.”

I ignored her sarcasm and poked Aliya through the comm line. It only took a couple of rings before she picked up.

“Where are you now?” she asked.

“On our way,” I said. “I was hoping to get to the Morgue, but…”

“No can do. Everything’s tits up here.”

Delivery girl’s ears perked up at the sound of Morgue. “Wh-who are you t-talking to?”

“A friend,” I said.

I could hear Aliya’s incredulity when she said, “You got a passenger?”

Sighing, I explained the situation as briefly as I could. To both of them. One knew the context of my goal, the other that of my situation. So I just went over the whole thing as fast as I could.

Thing was, I needed a place where I had the tools to hack into the Augmented brain of the assassin. That would allow me access to everything I needed to overcome my adversaries.

I’d be able to invade their comm networks, sow misinformation, intercept any orders from higher up, and so on. Basically, I could become one of them. That was an advantage I couldn’t win without.

Which was why Aliya was preparing a spot where I could surgery my way into my would-be killer’s head.

We just had to get through these sewer tunnels first.

“Ugh.” Delivery girl wrinkled her nose. “I really should have gotten an Olfactory Augment.”

Nice reminder for me to cut down on my smelling too. Unlike her, I did have an Olfactory Augment.

“I’m almost done with the prep work,” Aliya said through the comm line. “It’ll be ready in time. Especially now that I’m not distracted trying to help you survive a firefight.”

I laughed a little. “You were hesitating a little while ago, Operator. Sounds like you’re all in now.”

“Well, since I’ve lost my plausible deniability card, figure I might as well go all the way in.”

“I’ll see you soon.”

“Oh, you will, yes.”

She cut off the call. I was curious about that last supposition, but I decided we had more important matters to get through.

Like the figures I could sense in the distance.

I had been sending out little pulses of Arclight farther out into the tunnel. There was no telling what kind of trap or person we would encounter in the tunnels. Some residents of Underlevel even claimed the sewers were haunted. Bullshit of course, but even loads of shit had a tinge of truth to them.

Delivery girl noticed the change in my posture. “What’s up?” she hissed.

“Stay back,” I said. “We’ll have company soon.”

She followed my order, halting herself as I continued on. “Don’t die, Mister.”

I had moved another hundred or so paces before the figures sensed me too, despite me having tamped down my Arclight. There must have been some other mechanism in the sewer tunnel I had missed. Ah well. A confrontation had been inevitable from the get-go.

The first one sauntered into my view about another hundred paces later. I had seen him drop down from a pipe running along the ceiling.

He was whip-thin. Ripped jacket and jeans barely covered his pale body, an old-fashioned pistol and a chain whip in his hands. Instead of hair, he had dark tattoos forming a pattern on his head. Tattoos I recognized.

“Crow Skimmer?” I asked.

The Crow Skimmer gangster spat to one side. His spittle was electric blue. “What’s it to you, cobber?”

“Why you talking to him, Arne?” the second one said from farther back. She was languidly walking in behind him. “Just kill him and be done with it.”

“Look at his state, Slate. He got no arm.” A mad cackle burst out of Arne. “An armless cobber! How often you see that, huh?”

They both froze, eyes going unseeing for a second. I recognized that look. They were talking with someone through the comm line.

“He’s him,” Slate said all of a sudden. “The killer. The one they’re after.”

With another mad cackle, Arne attacked. I didn’t even know why their names were sticking with me just then. The bullets firing at me grounded me back to the fact that I had would-be killers even here.

My Arclight mag-shield took care of the shots again. This was getting too easy. His whip flashed in, crackling with electricity. I evaded it, then swooped in directly, needles emerging from the palm of my good hand. Arne’s eyes had gone wide as I moved a lot faster than he had prepared for. I’d have gotten him too, if it hadn’t been for Slate.

Electricity flashed in an arcing wall before her partner, stopping me in my tracks. She was smart, that one.

Normally, a little shock wouldn’t have bothered me. But with my wound, with the vulnerable spots where a stray current could enter my body, I had to be a lot warier about it.

“I don’t need to hit you to kill you,” Arne spat.

He jumped back. I fired my own shots at him, just a couple. I didn’t want to waste too much ammo. A crackle of his whip sent up an electric field that electromagnetically froze my bullets mid-air.

Arne fired next. But instead of coming at me, the shots struck the walls and ceiling. I realized what was happening a split second before every bullet he had fired exploded.

I jumped back before the debris could squash me.

“Now, Slate!” Arne shouted. “Circle in!”

The woman was already moving. I fired two more shots but missed. She was fast. And she wasn’t alone. Through the corner of my eye, I caught Arne jumping over the fallen chunks of the ceiling, his gun aimed at me.

“No you don’t,” Slate shouted.

I had re-aimed my only arm at Arne, which made me miss Slate’s whip crackling in. Well, not miss entirely. I was dodging that too, but she had been hiding its range. The whip stretched like it was elastic, wrapping around my arm and drawing it away from her partner so that my shot went awry.

“Got you now, tin can!” Arne shouted, the barrel of his gun glinting in the electric light.

Before he could get his shot away, I raised my leg like I was about to kick him, even though he was well out of range. He froze, confusion warring on his face for a split second. Then my boot burned away as a blast of compressed Arclight cannoned out of barrel at the end of my sole and crashed into Arne.

“Arne!” Slate shouted as her partner went flying, as did the debris he had just caused to avalanche down. She turned back to me, eyes afire with murder. “You piece of—”

Electricity burned through the whip. It crackled along the chain’s length, attacking me viciously, digging into my wounds and attempting to petrify me. At the same time, Slate pulled out a knife. Then charged.

For a few moments, I tried resisting. Then as it got unbearable, I gave in.

When I stopped resisting to allow the current to enter my main body, I got the briefest moment of freedom to move as I wanted. A moment I didn’t waste. I jerked the whip towards me, speeding up Slate’s motion even faster.

The sight of her surprised eyes lasted less than a millisecond. Her knife stabbed into my chest just as I dipped my head, my skull spearing into her guts. Her torso more or less burst apart from the inside, her scream cutting off as she fatally vomited out blood, fluids, and no small a number of her Augmented innards clunking down on my back.

At least that stopped the shock. The whip unwound from my arm as both it and its wielder fell to the ground, dead.

“That. Was. Sick.”

The words came in about a minute later when Delivery Girl had run up to join me. I was still recovering from the shocks, and it was a little alarming how much effort I had to spend to turn and look at her. This body was wearing down too fast.

“We need to keep moving,” I said. “Let’s go.”

She nodded, then followed.

My mind was still replaying that last bit, where the gangsters had received some sudden communication and immediately decided to attack me. I could only conclude they had sent my image to someone who had recognized me, even in this form. But that was the worry, right? How had anyone recognized me in my current state?

I supposed someone enterprising enough could have managed to hack out a picture of me from my confrontation with the assassin whose head I now had. Well, delivery girl had.

We were nearing the end of the tunnel after another twenty minutes. I had no idea who it could have been that knew I was here, but I didn’t want to stick around and find out. Not in my current condition.

I froze as we reached the end, where a grate stood open to let us back into Underlevel proper. “Wait, hold it.”

My Arclight sense had gone off again. Someone else was coming. Real quick. I was tempted to curse. When was this parade of killers coming for my head going to stop?

Delivery girl gasped when our next confronter appeared. “Oh shit, a beefcake!”

I was really tempted to give her a look, but the man held most of my attention. Despite it being a body I’d never seen before—large, athletic, sparse getup revealing all the bulging muscles—appeared, I got a distinct feeling of familiarity.

“Caught you!” The man grinned, which widened when my eyes did. “Remember me, cobber?”

“Loan shark?” Of course. That asshole had been way too calm as he was being killed. I had been right. He had left a backup life drive in a different body. “Didn’t I already kill you once?”

“You did, you ass. And now I’m here to get my revenge. I had a feeling the pics they were sharing was you. And now, I’m going to teach you a shitting lesson.”

I sighed. Maybe I could—

A shot blew off the stupid cobber’s head. Delivery girl screeched and staggered back. I was stuck staring. All that was left of the loan shark’s skull was his lower jaw fountaining dark blood into the air, his body jerking for a moment before slumping forward.

Aliya appeared in the doorway. She glanced at my companion before focusing on me. “You’ve been taking a little too long. Come on. No time to waste.”

Shaking my head, I followed her, urging delivery girl to stick close. With Aliya here, the coast ahead ought to be clear. It was nearly time to hack.