“Tancy!” Aiden beat his fists against the door. “Tancy, what’s going on?”

“The walls are on fire — it’s hot — I can’t see…” Racking coughs came again; Tancy’s voice was shockingly scratchy. “I can’t see anything!”

“Aiden, use this and hurry.” Without averting his gaze from Fedral, Burt unclipped the pocket torch from his belt and tossed it to Aiden.

But before Aiden could move, the boomerang energy blade whizzed and sliced it away in mid-air. The blade looped back and Fedral caught it in one gloved hand.

“Ah yes, I know you,” purred Fedral, his eyes glinting with a hungry gleam. “Burtram Yamashiro.”

Burt holstered his pistol and wordlessly drew an energy blade of his own, a luminous green-edged knife that looked painfully small next to Fedral’s boomerang.

“What do I do?” said Aiden helplessly. “How do I get her out? Burt, tell me what to do!”

“Wait,” said Burt flatly. He leapt forward, clearing the distance between him and Fedral in a second, and slashed at his neck faster than the eye could see. Fedral parried the blade easily, but Burt commenced a rapid-fire series of thrusts and swipes that forced the taller man back.

For a moment, Aiden watched in terrified fascination as their neon-orange and green-tinted blades blurred together, forming a colorful web in the air. Then Fedral flinched and lurched away with a hiss. Burt closed in, but Fedral flicked his curved blade in a retaliatory swipe, barely missing Burt’s nose.

A long, pulpy wound gleamed white on the man’s cheek, and Aiden realized Fedral’s face had been cut to the bone. The power density of Burt’s energy blade was standard, and while not high enough to cut through solid metal, needed only to graze skin to cause irradiative damage.

All this had happened in seconds. Never before had Aiden seen people fight so fast — not in the hallways of Terminary or the streets of downtown. The speed of their blades left a distinct bass hum below the roaring of the flames. Both men were fighting to kill.

The wound on Fedral’s face rapidly closed. The man was still grinning wolfishly, but his eyes were narrowed and calculating, assessing an opponent that was finally worth his match. Burt met his gaze calmly, his blade outstretched.

“You are good,” said Fedral. “Very good. As promised.”

Burt raised an eyebrow. “By who?”

“Burtram Yamashiro,” said Fedral slowly, reciting each word like he was reading an obituary. “The lonely orphan, found in a crate in a filthy alley of the 98th Borough. Disappeared from Uplift Heritage Home at the age of seven. Killed his first man at the age of eight under the Darden Bridge…”

Burt thrusted at Fedral’s face, but Fedral dodged easily. He kept up his steady drawl. “Joined the Blood Reconnaissance Corps at seventeen. Married Asta Honami at twenty-seven. Fathered Ethan Yamashiro, who until two years ago was ten years old.”

Burt kicked low, and Fedral danced away. “Ethan Yamashiro,” he sang mockingly. “Who died by organ smugglers with both eyes missing. Asta Honami, who lives on opiates. And you Burt Yamashiro, using every unit you earn to keep her alive.”

Burt’s face was expressionless. He switched the energy knife to his other hand.

“All that to say,” hissed Fedral. “There is no one to avenge you.”

“No need,” said Burt.

Fedral bared his teeth in a smile. He darted forward, and Burt moved to meet him.

Aiden tore his gaze away and looked again at the glowing outline of Burt’s incomplete hole in Tancy’s door. He had no tools to finish the job, no electrical mechanism to force the door open. Sweat dripped into his eyes from the sweltering heat of the fire.

Think, he told himself.

“Tancy, can you hear me?”

A beat passed, and for a horrible moment Aiden thought she’d passed out.

Then she said, “Yeah, I can hear you! I can hear you!”

“Okay, you need to push against the upper part of the door between the glowing orange lines while I kick out the bottom that’s already cut. Then I’ll pull you out.”

“But will that really —”

“Just do it!”

Aiden glanced back just in time to see Fedral lunge at Burt with his blade. Burt side-stepped and punched him square in the face, but Fedral only grinned, unfazed, and pressed his attack.

Aiden squatted down, ignoring the burning protests in his ribs and back, grim reminders of the missile strike and Fedral’s blow to his chest.

“Ready? Now!”

He kicked at the bottom section of the half-finished rectangular cut, feeling Tancy lean her weight on the other side of the door.

“Push lower down!” he said. He kept on kicking, feeling the sharp impact reverberate up his leg and painfully up the rest of his body.

Was it only his imagination that the metal was bending, that the door was starting to give? Was he fooling himself that in his weakened state, he could force a flap of the door open like it was cardboard? Aiden pushed those thoughts away. He had to believe that. He had to. Otherwise, he knew his life was over.

Tancy’s breathing was loud and irregular; her coughs were getting worse. “The door’s getting hot, I can’t push harder!”

“Use your clothes to block the heat. I almost got it.” Aiden slammed his foot against the door.

“I don’t wanna die. Please get me out. I don’t wanna die…” Tancy sounded tear-stricken.

“I know, I almost got it! Just hang on!”

Then he heard something thump to the floor, and the carpet sizzled. Burt had lost his knife and was now fighting with his bare hands, weaving underneath Fedral’s strikes. He glanced back at Aiden, and his eyes widened.

“Burt, watch out!” screamed Aiden.

Fedral stepped forward with a vertical slash. Burt backpedaled wildly, and Fedral pounced with a crazed howl, his boomerang blade raised high.

But Burt’s fall had merely been a feint, and as Fedral fell, Burt curled his body into a ball, avoiding the tip of Fedral’s blade. Fedral landed on him heavily, and in an instant, Burt flipped him onto his back and pinned his blade hand against the floor. A panel opened on Burt’s wrist, a nozzle popped open, and a cloud of nitro-freeze spewed over Fedral’s face.

Fedral struggled mightily, spluttering, his head turning blue under the spray, but Burt held him down with an iron grip. Soon, Fedral’s legs stopped kicking, his arms ceased thrashing, and he lay still. Ice crystals had formed on his skin. His eyeballs reflected a translucent sheen. His orange locks glittered with frost.

Burt kept up the spray for a few more seconds before shutting off the flow. Then he unholstered his pistol and shot Fedral several times in the head, blasting off frozen chunks of his face until it resembled a faceless mannequin.

“His blade!” said Aiden frantically. “We can try it on the door!” He could hear Tancy crying on the other side.

“I know, stand aside.” Burt scooped it up and strode over. “Tancy, get back!”

He knelt down and pressed the tip of the boomerang blade against the door, carefully lining up the blade to the previous incisions he’d made. It began to carve through the metal with a soft hiss. Aiden felt relief run through him. They would be able to get out soon. They would escape together.

“Can you run?” said Burt, eyes trained on the blade’s progress.

Aiden’s ribs throbbed painfully, but he said, “I…I think so.”

“Good. We’ll need to get to the underground garage quickly.”

“What about —” Aiden’s voice caught in his throat. “What about Susan and the others?”

“Don’t think about them. The priority is you and Tancy. She and I have — we had an understanding. We all do. We —”

Burt abruptly stopped talking and frowned down at Fedral’s blade. It was wiggling in his hand, preventing him from cutting further.

“What the —”

Suddenly, the energy blade flipped out his grasp, and the superheated edge spun like a buzz saw, cleaving straight through his wrist. Aiden yelled and pulled away. Burt grunted in shock, clamping one hand over the steaming stump. The boomerang blade whizzed past them.

Burt gritted his teeth. “Shit.”

Fedral was getting to his feet. Water sloughed off unfrozen skin as his head reformed, regaining color. Muscles, tendon, and bones weaved together like vines from the slivers of skin left untouched by the impact of Burt’s bullets. A slim bracelet with silver notches — a mag-recaller — pulsed on his wrist, and the boomerang blade zoomed into his hand.

Aiden desperately began to ram his shoulder into Tancy’s door, his eyes watering from the smoke pouring in from the windows. Its surface blazed from the combined heat of the flames and the imprints left by the energy blade. Her screaming had taken on a fevered pitch.

“It’s burning me — help me — help me, it hurts —” Tancy’s voice trailed off into an uncontrollable shriek.

Fedral stalked towards them, leering. He looked completely unhurt. The only evidence of any struggle was the absence of his white fedora, which lay aside in frozen, shattered pieces.

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The fire had invaded the upper corners of the windows and was now raging overhead, licking across the ceiling. The heat was all-consuming. Ziv-paint was blistering on the walls.

Burt staggered to his feet, cradling his injured arm. Fedral’s orange hair glowed like hot wires in the light of the flames.

“If there was a time for peace and gentle feelings,” said Fedral serenely. “it has already passed. No happy endings here.”

Aiden threw himself even harder against the door with a mindless intensity, ignoring the molten surface searing his shoulder. He could feel Tancy weakly slapping the door on the other side. Her smoke-smothered screams had turned into an animal-like keening, a wordless mixture of pain and terror.

“Hang on, Tancy!”

Aiden desperately slammed in the door one last time and felt something in his shoulder break. Hot pain shot through the joint, but he had little time to register yet another injury, because a moment later, Burt tackled him around the waist — just as a great shudder ran through the mansion again.

A deafening series of cracks split the air. With an almighty roar of fire, the ceiling collapsed where Aiden had just been in a shower of wood and stone. When his vision cleared, a wall of wreckage sealing off the corridor and blocking Fedral and Tancy’s door from view.

“No!” Aiden stumbled over and clawed at the pile of rubble, furiously throwing aside chunks of wooden floor and shattered marble. “No — Tancy! Tancy!”

“Aiden, we have to go! She’s gone!”

“She’s not gone, she’s right behind all this — I can get her!”

“It’s too late, Aiden —”

He felt Burt’s arm wrap around his torso, but he shook him off. “No, I can get her out — TANCY!”

The night sky was now fully exposed from their section of the roof’s collapse. The wind wailed like the cry of a dying banshee through the enormous gap in the side of the mansion

The world had gone mad. Aiden could not understand it. Tancy could not be gone. Just hours ago, he’d been watching ziv-ball in his room. Just hours ago, Tancy had made homemade tea eggs and had been laughing at one of Ryan Ha’s burned soufflés. She had proposed a penguin rescue plan.

Just hours ago…

The memory of her voice echoed in Aiden’s head: I think we’ll be able to do some really great things together.

Burt dragged him away from the slope of rubble. Blood was spurting freely from the stump where his hand had been.

A door creaked open, and a soldier appeared at an unblocked doorway of the hallway. With a stunning speed belying the extent of his injuries, Burt released Aiden, drew his pistol with his good hand, and fired. The soldier’s head snapped back and he fell out of view.

“Contact on the fourth floor!” somebody yelled behind him. “Stack up on me!”

Boots thudded up the stairs, followed by more barking voices. There were scattered rounds of gunfire coming from outside.

To Aiden it was all irrelevant noise. He would clear away the debris with his bare hands if need be. The mansion collapsing in on itself was a meaningless event. The fire could boil off his skin for all he cared, as long as it left him the bones in his arms to carry Tancy out unharmed.

Burt reached back and yet again slung his injured arm around Aiden’s waist, coating Aiden’s front in blood, but Aiden didn’t care. He struggled even harder.

“She’s dead, Aiden.”

“Let go of me!”

“I won’t,” said Burt. “Because then you’ll die, too.”

“SHE IS NOT DEAD!” bellowed Aiden. “TANCY!”

The door at which the dead soldier had entered burst open once again, and soldiers spilled in. Burt dropped his pistol, used both arms to haul Aiden over the edge of the giant hole in the wall, and propelled both of them out into the darkness.

Aiden momentarily felt the heat from the fire sear his face before he felt gravity take him. Air whistled in his ears. Wood snapped as he and Burt fell through the smoldering canopy of a cypress tree, and they landed with a muffled whump in the bushes below.

No sooner had he fought his way out of the dense foliage than did gunfire rain down upon them from above. Bullets chipped the stone walkways. Burt grabbed Aiden roughly by the back of the neck, pushing him forward. They hurtled through the garden, ducking their heads to avoid burning branches, passing crumbling flowerbeds crusted with flaky layers of ash.

Burt threw Aiden down behind a large fountain at the edge of an infinity pool. Several other house guards were taking cover as well, returning fire at the soldiers rappelling down the side of the mansion.

Nelson, one of the guards that had escorted Tancy to her track meet, hurried over and glanced quickly at Aiden. Seeing he was uninjured, he immediately dropped to his knee beside Burt and ripped off a section of his sleeve. He began tying off Burt’s still-bleeding wrist with ziv-line, packing the stump with the stiff fabric.

He shouted, “They took out our transpo defense! We’re blocked off from the main garage!”

Burt pushed himself to a sitting position, wincing as bullets whanged off the composite metal fountain bowl beside his head. “Then our best bet is to get outside their jamming range. Call for help. How many men here?”

“Three, including me!” replied Nelson. “But where are we going?”

“Beyond the trees to the out-station with the defunct leisure escalator. It’s our best chance of getting out these hills. Give me your sidearm.”

Nelson racked his pistol and handed it over. “Do we have cover? Flashbangs? Smoke grenades?”

“Fire’s got smoke,” said Burt grimly, holstering the gun.

“God damn it.”

“Ready on my mark,” said Burt.

A grenade flew through the air and bounced next to them, the lights winking on-and-off menacingly in a circular pattern. Nelson grabbed it and hurled it back through the air, where it detonated in a plume of fire and plasma.

“One…” said Burt. “Two…mark!”

Aiden tried to protest, but the pain in his shoulder and ribs made it impossible for him to resist. Burt hauled him towards the burning line of palm trees. Nelson and the other two guards were close behind, pulses of gunfire flashing from their semiautomatic rifles.

They had just passed between the trees when one of the guards screamed and fell, clutching his chest. Aiden glanced back and tripped over something thin and hard, like a log. He swiveled his head, only to gaze into the faded, sightless eyes of Ryan Ha. His mouth gaped open, his face contorted in terror and surprise. Other humped bodies of the kitchen staff were sprawled in the foliage, their backs riddled with bullet holes.

Burt yanked Aiden up. “Don’t stop! Keep moving!”

They reached the greenhouse, which was now encased in a net of fire, flickering rivulets winding down its seams. Burt yanked aside the crumbling flap, and the heat slapped Aiden’s face like an angry hand. The air shimmered with its intensity. Countless specimens that Aiden’s mother had lovingly hand-labeled were wilting in their glass tanks from the flames.

Suddenly, two soldiers smashed in from the side, scattering glass shards and soil everywhere. The other house guard yelled something and stepped in front of Burt and Aiden. He raised his rifle, but he was too slow. Bullets ripped through him, leaving strange holes blacker than coal in his body as he sank to his knees.

Nelson blasted the two soldiers in the exposed necks of their armor. Meanwhile, tendrils of darkness were spreading through the wounded house guard like fungus. The man’s screams turned bubbly and fluid-filled as skin sloughed off his body like butter sliding off a pan.

Far behind, a distant gunshot cracked out behind them. Nelson grunted with pain and caught himself by the edge of a hanging shelf.

“Nelson —!” shouted Burt.

Nelson drunkenly raised his head. His eyes were veined in scarlet, twin orbs of fire boiling in their sockets. There was a rapid sequence of clicks, and then his head exploded into a cloud of crimson rinds and bloody skull.

Hot droplets of blood spattered the side of Aiden’s face. This time, he needed no command to move. He pelted down the long rows of plants, the pain of his bruised and battered body dogging his every step. Burt was close behind, firing his pistol behind them.

Aiden burst out the other end of the greenhouse, heaving lungfuls of cold night air. They were at the edge of the mansion’s back courtyard. Before him lay a shining field of blue-green holo-grass, calibrated to wind speed and whipping around wildly in the breeze. Beyond that, the Pinball Express stood in all its glory outside the deactivated out-station, gleaming like a polished marble.

Beside him, Burt wiped his forehead, coughing. His breathing came in jagged bursts.

“Are you hit?” said Aiden frantically.

“No.” Burt’s voice was raspy, acid-eaten. His severed wrist had soaked to an awful blackish-red through its compress.

Squeezing his eyes tight, Burt gingerly reached up and tightened the ziv-line tourniquet. His hand trembled so much that Aiden was afraid he was going to pass out. It was a miracle the man was even still on his feet.

As if reading his thoughts, Burt opened his eyes, and said steadily, “My cyberware has BattleMed capabilities. I’m dosed and functional, for now. But you’ll need to be quick. Run to the out-station and activate the vehicle.”

Whether Burt was lying about his in-built anesthetic or not, Aiden couldn’t tell. His mind was so full of panic and grief that he barely understood Burt’s words.

“You — you want me to drive that thing? That’s crazy, I can’t control it — the rails aren’t even done…”

“Won’t need the rails. There’s a secondary stabilizer that’ll keep the driver’s seat free of the external revolutions. Strap yourself in and protect your neck.”

“You want me to roll the Pinball down the hills?”

“You’ll be okay.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll cover you as—”

“What?”

“ — you get across the field. Don’t interrupt me.”

“No, you’re coming, too! I won’t leave you like — you can’t just —”

“Listen to me,” said Burt sternly. “We’re out of options. You need to raise the alarm — alert your parents. Until then, stick with the Borough PD. They’ll protect you —”

Aiden’s voice shook. “But I want you to protect me!”

“You promised me you would do everything I told you to do,” said Burt. He closed his eyes as if staving off another wave of pain, but when he opened them again, his dark eyes were as sharp as ever. “So I’m telling you now…bring help.”

“Please…” said Aiden helplessly. “Don’t do this. Don’t make me leave you.”

“This is my job,” said Burt gently.

Aiden stared at him for a long moment, his eyes welling up. He blinked hard and turned, his heart weighing like an anvil in his chest.

“And Aiden…”

Aiden looked back upon Burt’s grimy, gore-streaked face. His stoic facade had softened. His perpetually granite-hard expression was earnest, almost pleading.

“Take care of my wife. She’s relapsed before. Find her and keep her under watch.”

Just then, a gout of flame shot out the roof of the greenhouse. Faint shouts were coming from the wreckage. Flashlight beams from the soldier’s guns stabbed between the feeble pillars of flame where trees once stood.

Burt crouched down and rested his pistol hand on a fallen tree trunk. “Go! Run now!”

Aiden wheeled around and sprinted as fast as he could across the artificial field, holo-grass flickering in his wake. Every ache and bruise was forgotten, drowned out by the adrenaline surging through his body like an electric shock.

He heard shots behind him, rough shouts overlapping each other.

A grinding, crashing sound signaled that more of the building had finally collapsed. The fire engulfing Huang mansion soared into the sky with a dull roar, lighting up the field.

“There!” someone cried. “He’s running for the out-station!”

A split second later, Burt’s pistol cracked several times, and the voice was silenced.

Something zipped past him, trailing a line of blue smoke. A moment later, an explosion blew apart the side of a hill.

Aiden kept running under the moonless sky. Terror like he’d never known before coursed through him like lava, setting his mind racing. His senses were heightened to an incredible degree; he could feel every thud of his feet impacting the ground, every labored breath inflating his lungs. He expected any second for one of those madly lethal bullets to come tearing through his back, turning his skin to sludge or incinerating his head like Nelson’s.

But somehow he made it across the field unscathed. The incomplete out-station was comprised of nothing more than a small pavilion and a control booth. The Pinball Express gleamed with a metallic sheen, reflecting the distorted light of the distant flames.

Stumbling into the booth, Aiden flicked on the power switches, speeding through the advancement protocols. He vaguely remembered working it once before — a million years ago, when his father had taken him with a few engineers to view the prototype.

His hands flew over the controls. He could feel as Auxy sped up the boot-up process in the background, assigning default settings to the secondary stabilizer. In less than a minute, everything was prepped for launch. The orb’s entry panel became transparent and slid upwards to reveal a spacious interior with two chairs and a long back bench inside.

Aiden hurried inside and strapped himself into one of the lead chairs. He cast a glance back across the field.

A one-handed figure darted around an approaching soldier and shot him through the side of his head. Instantly, several flashlight beams alighted on him and multiple bursts of automatic gunfire blazed in the darkness. Burt spun to the ground and fired again. The soldier fell, but another took his place, planting his boot on Burt’s chest, sweeping the rifle barrel to his chin, and…

The Pinball Express shuddered into motion. There were no magnetic tracks holding the vehicle in place, only physical rails. They screeched from disuse as the orb rolled towards the far wall, which slid open to admit its passage.

The absence of rails beyond the gate was like a wide, yawning abyss in the darkness.

Aiden gritted his teeth and forced the throttle to the limits. Because there was no telling where the next dip in the hills was going to be, he needed as much escape velocity as he could get.

The clear, outside layer began to roll forward like a hamster ball, but Aiden’s seat remained stationary from the secondary stabilizer, juddering every now and then from the jerk of the rails.

More gunfire flashed from the treeline. Masked figures were sprinting across the holo-grass. A bullet pinged off the surface of the vehicle and shook the entire compartment so hard that Aiden was afraid the orb would be knocked prematurely off the rails.

Aiden instinctively ducked his head. “Come on!” he yelled. “Come on, come on, come on!”

There was a feeling of liftoff as the orb finally left the rails — a kind of frictionless gliding — and with only the illumination from the flames and the interior controls lighting up beneath him, Aiden got the impression of being adrift in the depths of a dark, boundless sea.

Then he felt himself plummeting violently down the hill, and the glowing inferno of Huang Mansion dropped out of view behind him.