Jack's thoughts came quickly, a string of impulses holding not a hint of natural language, but if they were to be appropriately extrapolated, translated, and transcribed could be described thus:

'Let's not delude ourselves. They heard it. I can wait for more to gather, mobbing until I'm discovered and promptly rejoin my present company as an authentic member...Or...,' a manic, maniac grin, 'these corpses stink anyway.'

Jack bolted off of the pile in a fleshslide of tumbling limbs and bodies. Hivers in the area moved on him instantly, a trio of workers already clacking their mandibles in a chattering clatter that carried through the yard they'd been dumping bodies in. Further on, Jack could see a lumbering brute of a warrior struggling to back through a too low doorway that led deeper underground.

'Take problems as they come; first the workers,'

Pivot. Vital Flow. Gotcha Dash.

The umbrar's ivory dagger had been stashed discreetly on his inner thigh, bound with strips of cloth soaked in blood, he drew it hastily as he ran for the closest worker.

Pivot made him untouchable. A continuous flow of acrobatics around the workers’ grasping limbs gave the hivers no opportunity to seize him. In his right hand, the dagger cut a path of ruin. The grip had been cleverly shaped, molded by the twins to give his hand as complete a surface to hold as possible. He needed it. Every pirouette from Pivot saw the dagger slashing or stabbing through flesh in brutally rapid blows. Jack's hands, trained as they were in climbing from his time with nightrunners, were only just able to hold the blade as the shock of each blow threatened to pull it from his grip.

A slash against the throat of the nearest hiver; in a moment it was kneeling, losing blood pressure and consciousness instantly. Jack jumped off of it to gain height and curled into a ball midair, Pivoting upside down and kicking his feet up to gain just a sliver more height to clear the next hiver approaching him. He landed behind it, and made a quick series of stabs to its vulnerable back before twirling again, evading the charge of the last survivor and following through to slam the dagger through the back of its skull in a single motion. A sharp yank freed the blade just as Pivot's grace fell from him.

The hiver warrior had managed to disentangle itself from the doorway and had turned to Jack, its long blade-arms extending far beyond Jack's paltry reach.

'The better part of valour, is knowing when you're bested,' Jack mused.

Jack ran for a nearby alley, chased by the thudding steps of the accelerating warrior. He was approaching the corner of the alley, coming at it from the side, but the sound of the warrior had grown so close. Desperate, Jack slammed his dagger into the corner and used the grip to turn himself into the alley at near full speed as the warrior roared past, scythe arms gouging a thick chunk of debris from the wall as it passed.

It reoriented quickly, turning on Jack in the narrow space where its blades would be inescapable. But Jack had not been idle. The warrior turned only to see Jack jumping off the wall to grip the lip of an overhanging window opening and, hold secured, pull himself up. The sloping roof was now in easy reach, and another leaping stab into the compacted adobe gave him the leverage and stability he needed to squirm his way atop its curving roof.

The warrior clumsily attempted to follow, stabbing into the wall to leverage itself up, only to fall as the material crumbled under its weight.

A cackle came bubbling out of Jack, irrepressible and wild. He didn't even think to continue on his way, so struck was he by the hilarity of the warrior's failure. Wiping tears from his eyes, Jack finally saw the approaching numbers of hivers congregating on his lofty position. Unlike the warrior, the workers found the buildings quite navigable and on multiple other rooftops Jack could see the pale pseudo-human faces appear and orient uniformly on him.

"My audience!" Jack called, real affection ringing out, "Your enthusiasm is lovely. I beseech you, do not take what happens next as a personal failure, it does not reflect on your copious murderous capacities," he stretched languidly, drawing out a pause until every limb had been thoroughly limbered and he could continue his address, "I am simply, very very good."

Jack had gone longer with the nightrunners without a movement card as an aid for years longer than some had even kept their company. Something he had realized was that the handicap had always pushed him to greater heights than the others, as he was forced to achieve feats without any assistance—to continually challenge the limits of what was considered possible. He was Canary, the tester that did without cards what some could barely manage with. Since then he had received his first cards, but he had not had the opportunity to use them in the topography of a city until now.

Jack ran. He was peerless.

Hivers continually swarmed on him, clambering up the buildings in dense numbers until some structures even collapsed beneath their weight in billowing clouds of dust. But always, they trailed behind as Jack ran. He saw on every impassable height a natural route, every weird permutation of the twisting structures an opportunity for a flourishing escape. He would dawdle, letting the hivers clump near him until he could hear the frenzy of their excited, lathering mandibles clacking just behind him, and then he would perform a miraculous feat, vaulting a wall or clearing a gap in displays of athleticism that left dozens of hivers tumbling off of buildings or crushing their kin in roiling piles of tripped-up pursuers.

Jack paused atop a higher building that rendered him a moment to catch his breath as the struggling hordes scrabbled for an accessible avenue to him.

For all their furies, for all their numbers, for all their familiarity with their domain, the stupid creatures were clumsy rivals in the chase Jack orchestrated, and he was not demure in expressing so.

"Foulsome bumblers! Ya skitterin' trippsies! Toothless hunters render my terror most uninspired!" Jack crowed at the uncomprehending mass.

But for all his games, Jack did not fail to notice the speed with which the creatures carried along the ground, continually moving to cut off his retreats, they well outpaced him on straightaways. Only their inability to see routes that were obvious to his eye, holding as he did the flexibility of Pivot and Gotcha Dash, kept him from being utterly surrounded.

Of the nobles there was no sign, and with every passing minute his faint hopes shrank. Without them his chances of survival were nonexistent. He could not leave the hiver construction, its elaborate edifices were his only advantage. He would be caught eventually, taken by exhaustion or error, it was inevitable. He had, in some part, resigned himself to this. What remained, bereft of expectations of survival, was lingering adrenaline, the surging aroma of apples from the viscera of the hivers coating his body, and a choice of his own demise. Strangely, he found himself not overly concerned by the prospect, but was quite fixated on ensuring that the manner was appropriately impactful.

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A nightbird flew past Jack, coming uncomfortably close to his position, drawn perhaps by the gore that still coated him. His gaze followed it to the watchtower at the center of the hiver settlement, and Jack considered the tower intently.

‘It stands at least the height of the fall that started it all, when I first carded.’

Once that thought came to him it could not be ignored. The symmetry of it appealed, that this adventure should begin and end with a fall.

Jack began his final run. The hivers redoubled their efforts against him, growing packed among the rooftops to the point where Jack was forced to leverage Pivot to evade their crushing mass.

If he was any judge, they seemed to be growing increasingly erratic and desperate in their pursuit. What order they'd previously held was eroding beneath a self-reinforcing pheromonal wave. On more than one hiver he observed a bubbling froth at their mouths as their clacking mouth-legs worked themselves into a lathered furor.

He took great pleasure in drawing groups of hivers together, letting them surround and push him higher and higher until moments before they pulled him from his taunting perch he would skip off the ledge and dash to a clear level below. This sudden reversal of fortune inevitably led to a few pursuers helplessly lunging from the heights in their instinctual frenzy to expunge the interloper. Even after multiple repeats of the same tactic the hivers failed to learn from past mistakes and fell for the same gambit again.

Their growing erraticism did little to relieve him, as it was more than offset by growing numbers. For every hiver that fell and twitched a death throes upon the ground, two more were sure to join the horde that chased. What had begun as a scant few dozen had become three or four score.

But even through their throng, he made progress.

The spire grew until it loomed above him, demanding first a shift of the eyes, and then the neck to encompass its lofty apex.

The last part of the approach had come with a series of tiered climbs, as the hiver’s inexpert construction simply piled building upon building to create a sort of support structure for the tower. It looked as if the smaller buildings had clambered atop each other in an effort to keep the precarious giant of their number upright. The rapid climb had gained Jack a few moments respite to look out over the city from his lookout.

He had brought them, in a roiling swarm he had brought them, to the center. There was no avenue left unoccupied, no rooftop that was not packed so densely that those on the edge stumbled off with the crowd's tides. There was no path left to him but ascension.

The tower itself was roughly hewn, rougher than many of the buildings around, impossible as it was to finely smooth the exterior with only void as support. Their shoddy workmanship was Jack's blessing, as the pitted and irregular surface made for relatively easy climbing. Up, up, up he went, finding and testing grips with an almost lackadaisical manner, the climb had slowed his pursuers, who tumbled off the heights with a satisfying regularity.

The climb was comforting, in the way that familiar motions often are. His heart still raced, but it no longer struggled, it became steady and strong. He closed his eyes. He was no longer on the tower, the sounds below him faded away and there was only the comforting darkness, the sure grip of his hands, and the whistling wind brushing his skin. A memory.

He was fourteen. He was perched in the Tangle, the elaborate roost of the nightrunners, swaying in the wind. The city was as dark as it ever became. The dim, short days of winter did not give the glow rock etching the city enough light to last through the night. It was said to be impossible to navigate in the darkness without cards. He was going to prove that false. He had been practicing, running the route for months until he could feel it so well that he didn't need sight. Before the night was done he would succeed. Gravel would offer him a regular place as a tester, and he would be given the name Canary. A young Mouse would shyly ask him how he'd done it. He would have four more years with them, before growing increasingly absent as his impending carding overtook his life. He missed… all of it.

For the first time in what felt like hours, Jack could no longer taste green apples. He didn't want to climb this tower and dive off in a final show of defiance. He could scarcely believe that had been a plan he'd embraced so casually, so easily.

His reverie was broken by the call of a nightbird, startling him to awareness and drawing his attention upward. The disruption came just in time, as he saw a hiver warrior precariously positioned above him, leaning out and over an opening in the tower. Even as he watched the flow of the hivers surged, and the warrior was jostled off to fall directly towards Jack.

Jack drew himself close to the tower, desperately hoping to avoid the falling warrior as it passed. It was nearly enough. The arm-blade of the creature slashed out as it came abreast to him, catching him only on the arm—a blow that still nearly wrenched him from the tower. A panicked examination followed, he was initially surprised to find that the cut seemed mild, very little blood flowed and the pain was minimal, but when he tried to raise it, the limb refused his will.

‘A paralytic,’ Jack realized.

He could almost feel it burning through his veins, heading for his other limbs, turning them weak and unresponsive until he fell bonelessly to the awaiting mass.

He had only just rediscovered his resolve only to have any opportunity stripped from him. The hivers had outflanked him, and even now filled the lower accesses of the tower. From below vast numbers continued their inexorable progress, crushing him between two fronts, and now he could not climb.

His thoughts raced.

‘Anything. Any edge, any tool, any opportunity. What do I have?’

But there was nothing. Everything had been stripped from him piece by piece. Everything he had. But not what he didn’t have.

The thought stuck, for all its impossibility. The last time he had been without options, without any gambit, was when he had fallen.

The broken cards in his mind, the pair that sat unnamed and without coherent feeling, those that had fractured and broken when he had forced his carding and so limited his future.

Just as Dart had taught him, he pushed on them now, willing them to play, willing that which he didn’t have to become his.

Just as they always had, the cards stubbornly resisted his will.

The hivers below had not been idle, he could feel the vibrations of the approaching climbers, the tick-tick-tick of their excited mandibles. In moments they would tear him from the wall.

He pressed the cards again, first one and then the other, pushing them past the point of flaring pain in his own mind—as the sense of wrongness filled his cognition. Nothing.

A reaching hand brushed the sole of his foot, and only a sudden jerk pulled it beyond the deadly reach of the frustrated hiver that closed on him. There were no more chances.

'I'm sorry Neavie,’ even to himself it was a whisper, an exhale of regret.

He leapt, unwilling to forgo even the last moments he might claw to himself.

Falling, there was no one to catch him.

A final time, he pushed on a broken card and, unlike every time before, a key fit suddenly into a rusted lock and smoothly turned.