I stride into the subbasement over a red carpet of groaning bodies, serenaded by the cheers of the lift’s happy electronic ding. Shattered viewports continue to crumble behind me like ice raining against glass. The windows broke surprisingly easy. One hit was all it took to crack them. Or one face, I suppose.

I’m still picking a few shards out of my knuckles when the other elevator shrieks to a belated, smoking stop beside mine, spilling its contents across the darkened sublevel’s lobby. Thunder blasts out the door in wave form, flipping a Shimano guard head over heels and leaving a scorchmark imprint of his body against a nearby wall. Loud Venter curses bark out of the lift. Blue light flashes. A stunning blade weaves a shadow-puppet play of the last bodyguard left standing. Then the Iros stumbles out of the lift and collapses to the ground with half her beautiful hair burnt off and four economic slashes weeping blood. One on each limb.

Ajax staggers out next, flips his blade to a reverse grip, and jams it into the Iros’ back in a jarring display of overkill. Shocking current stuns the woman into a week-long coma. The blade’s blue-hot edge flicks up at my chest as I step forward, only belatedly lowering when his active mind catches up to his instincts.

I keep wrapping my knuckles with tape and tilt my head to the side. “What happened to the ‘grace in victory’ speech you gave at last year’s valedictorian?”

Mori’s stomping footsteps answer for him. Orbs of the primal elements circle her like comets as she lopes from the smoking lift. Water swirls into her hand, building to a concentrated, whirling sphere the size of a watermelon. She spits once and releases without even bothering to contain the blast or look at where it’s firing. Mule-kick force sends the Iros’ body slashing away into the depths of the lobby.

“Get out of my head!” Mori shouts. One hand of fingers clutch at her skull. The other aims a followup jet of water straight into her own face. Slopping hair drips over her ears as she spits again. “Fucking fuck!”

Ajax grabs her hand and aims it right between his eyes. “Me too, please.”

Another jet sobers him of the Iros’ lingering influence and strips away half of his black hair dye. He’s still dripping by the time he finally looks back. “Complications happened.”

“That bad?”

“You’ve fought Maddy, haven’t you?”

Twentieth ranked on the boards, also a Psi. “Once or twice.”

“Imagine that, but without any sense of fairness.”

I take another look around the lobby while my shimmerscreen populates. Electric-blue overlays of the sublevel wink faintly in my vision, aligning with reality. Orange waymarkers denote labeled rooms and halls through solid steel walls. My kinetic sense stretches out to confirm the overlay. My aura doubles, then triples down as I take in a deep breath and summon the depths of a stamina I’ve spent two decades cultivating. The adrenaline rush is immediate as my soul begins to manifest. Electric ecstasy purges the slight edge of exhaustion lingering after the elevator. What few injuries I took vanish from my awareness. Superheated atmosphere accelerates to a jet-engine whine around me, white flames kicking out to their full burning length.

The superstructure shudders under my feet in response. Mori takes a single, uneasy step away. Listening to the instincts that are no doubt screaming at her to run from the kinetic cyclone that just erupted ten feet away from her. My strength looks heroic on the streams. I haven’t quite mastered the art of gentility up close, though.

Distant movement flickers in my kinetic sense. My eyes narrow first. Then the rest of me pivots towards the disturbance. I snap onto a trio of human heartbeats closing on our location from deeper in the sublevel, coming to investigate the disturbance at the lifts. “We’ve got company.”

Ajax’s blade is out and reactivated before I even finish the sentence. I resist a shiver as he sinks into the Lungracian Stance, a decisive style of his own creation that takes full advantage of his elemental prowess. I’ve only ever seen his techniques from the other side. Watching his arms angle into killing shape beside mine is more unnerving than I care to admit aloud. His boots grind into the floor like panther claws. Tensing to pounce. Blade low, dragging its serpentine tip across the floor as he flexes his control of metal.

“Time to contact?” he asks.

All business. My hand tightening into fists as I reply. “Corner in three.”

The distant bodies rush closer. My raging light surges out to meet them, drawing them in like moths to a flame.

“Two.”

One hand tenses low at my front leg. The other raises in horizontal guard at the chest. A tempered, aggressive form for maximum acceleration. Shoulder to shoulder with Ajax. I can’t help but grin at the ridiculousness of it. My leg twitches at the thigh. Begging to kick forward and release the energy thrumming inside my skin.

“Now.”

Thunderous footsteps round the corner a moment before three plasteel-armored guards swing into sight, radios crackling. Ajax leans forward into lunging position right as a megavolt current rips past us with millimeters to spare, incinerating the light panels overhead. Sparks and thunder race across the wall at lightspeed. Shouts and frying flesh erupt in the darkness ahead.

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Mori’s voice rises in a hoarse shout. “Go!”

I feel more than see the absence of space Ajax leaves behind as he wings forward, blowing across twenty meters of ground in a blink. Tiny blocks of metal snap up beneath his heel to launch him into the enforcers like a human bullet. His blade sweeps like a liquid whip, too fast to see with the naked eye. The lights blink back on to reveal him standing above their unconscious bodies, chest rising and falling from effort as he sweeps from left to right, searching for more threats.

“Kill the lights again,” he says. “We need the cover.” Sweat trickles down his jaw. His focus turns to me when I race up with Mori. “You can light our way?”

Still-warm steel groans as Mori plants her hands again the wall and pushes from the depths of her own elemental control. Her lips part in a strained grunt. Electricity arcs from her feet to her hands and slams straight into the skyscraper’s superstructure, melting hundreds of pounds of interconnected wiring and charring her skin in the process. Molten metal drips out of nearby power outlets. A wave of darkness races outwards from us. My white ki remains the only light.

Mori gasps aloud as her fingers start twitching out of control. I instinctively reach out to steady her before her iron tone puts me in my place.

“Touch me and you fry. I’m…” another grunt of effort, “…I’m good.”

I nod and crane my head up, searching the shimmerscreen’s electronic second sight for any signs of a stairwell. “Don’t forget, Sub-Seven is our cutoff. We’re looking for Bishop or anything like him. Stick together. If you see something suspicious, call it out loud.” I tap my earpiece once, pushing my venting aura out even further. “Jolie, there’s two staircases on this floor. Which one do we take?”

“…banking can be such droll, but I’m working on it.”

My eyes widen as some two dozen presences enter the furthest reaches of my kinetic sense, twenty stories over our heads. Closing fast. “Forget it. We don’t have time.”

We’re already sprinting forward. Mori cuts her overloading and brings up the rear of our triangle at a gasping run. I glance back in worry and get a middle finger for my concern. Force my attention back to the front. We’re about to reach the point of no return. Hallways and closed doors split in five different directions around us.

“I need an answer,” I snap. “Left or right?”

Snippets of Jolie’s idle conversation come back. Nothing useful.

Ajax’s blade retracts back into rapier shape. “How many are coming?”

“Twenty in the first wave. More after that.”

He swears a village-slang curse under his breath. Jolie’s voice crackles back into our ears without warning, interrupting our battle tempo with classical music, clinking glassware, and polite laughter.

“I believe I showed I can answer that question,” my sister says. Loud rustling breaks the audio for a moment as she brushes hair behind her ear, adjusting some concealed switch in her hololenses. “Now, what about yourself?”

“What’s she doing?” Mori snaps. “Get her off the line.”

I raise a finger for silence. Our footsteps and ragged breath echo hollow through the dark. The intersection’s coming up just ahead. But Jolie knows what she’s doing. Every word counts.

In the comm, Vex Shimano clears his throat quietly. “Whatever could you mean?”

“Previous partners. Even if your family are predominately Mecha, surely not every Shimano is spayed and neutered.”

“Oh no, not at all. And I wouldn’t call them partners. Paramours, perhaps. Boys from the coast, penthouse men, and even a few delicacies from our undercity.”

“Hm. Not much room in your heart left for women, then?”

“Left,” I say. “Let’s rock.”

My stride naturally puts me at the front of the pack, leading our sprint down the western wing of the sublevel. An industrial staircase looms at the end of a fifty-meter low-ceilinged hall. Blast doors continue to seal around us. Klaxons and emergency lighting paints the corridor ahead, casting a contingent of four agitated guards in bloody hues. By the time they feel the shockwaves and realize how we’re closing, it’s already too late.

I burn alone at the tip of our three-man spear. Hands slamming together in a triangle at my side. The stance of gathering power. White-hot aura compresses between my palms, forming a roiling sphere of life energy. I concentrate the energy in one beat of my heart and release the next, flipping through a sideways cartwheel to add a martial artist’s flourishing momentum to the supersonic blast that lances down the hall.

Kinetic wrath punches into men and metal like the world’s loudest delete key. I don’t even see where they end up. Can still hear them groaning somewhere in the carnage, though. Blown-out rubble drips in the wake of my attack as I flash into the stairwell, surfing the railing with sparks flying from my heels. Mori swings onto the inside railing while Ajax takes the stairs five at a time. Tendrils of metal slip free of the walls and worm over his skin, replacing silk and duroweave with interlocking plates of smooth-shelled armor.

Jolie’s still talking in the comm channel. I’m about to mute her when a sudden shift in the elder Shimano’s voice gives me pause. My finger stalls above my earcom.

“No, not much room left for women at all,” he’s telling Jolie. Sublevels flash past us. Two. Three. Four. “Something my patron parents are well aware of.”

His scraping knife comes to a measured, mechanical stop.

“Which makes it all the more curious that they would arrange for you to entertain me next…” He pauses, as if reading something unfamiliar off a nearby screen. “…Jolie Mons, of Concordia University.”

My sister freezes. Vex returns to his cutting, chuckling like the interruption never happened.

“No no. Please, don’t choke on my behalf. Chew. Swallow. But then my dear, think very, very carefully about what you say next. Because I would hate for the gentleman in my basement to have to hear his sister scream as she falls from a fifty-story skyscraper.”