Jadal Cai grunted. Slowly, he unlatched a firearm from his belt and aimed it at me.

The precarious platform wobbled in the torrent. On the slick surface I was only one misstep away from death, even with the spare cable still attached to my waist. A wooden handrail circled around the outer perimeter, but I’d come up in the platform's centre. Better to take my chances against the gun and focus on protecting Alushex. If he couldn’t come up with something, our next bet was to hold out for Flinq.

I fired first, laser still bouncing off his shield, and Jadal Cai opened return fire. Two shots hit my chest, but the armour did its job and stopped them in a shower of sparks. I reeled back a half step, winded.

Another loud keening noise sounded from the shape in the sky. From here, it was clear it was the source of the storm. The creature or construct – I still wasn’t sure – measured the length of a sprawling city, far above. Its body was covered in glinting grey feathers propelling it along; huge wings like buildings capable of levelling whole environments with the force of their movement. It had dozens of them. All the turmoil we’d been experiencing had only been part of its secondary backdraught.

Water streamed continually from its feathers, blasted by the wind. I couldn’t make out a head or a tail, but nor was I sure where to find the end. It simply moved, passing us by.

A stronger gust hit, sending the exposed platform tilting again. Both Jadal Cai and I slipped a step, but where I fell to the ground and hit my knees, Jadal Cai’s foot came down and detonated an improbable violent explosion within the barrier of his shield.

The rogue Rein went flying backwards, not quite to the edge of the platform. As he scrabbled for purchase, the dais lurched terrifyingly in the wrong direction. Jadal Cai slid directly towards the trapdoor with the ladder, with Alushex and I sliding back towards the lower edge.

Our opponent’s shield still hadn’t come down. I didn’t bother firing at it, instead using the laser to carve out a handgrip beneath me. I managed two before another wind blast tilted the damaged platform severely off-balance and sent the weapon spiralling out of my grasp through the trees.

Clutching at the grips, I checked on Alushex and found him well below me, wedged determinedly on the lip of the platform. Large splinters had shredded the palms of both of his gloves, and blood welled up through the gaps.

A second detonation sounded above me, and Jadal Cai was flung back again. I looked back in time to see him wedge his foot in the trapdoor, fixing himself in place, at the cost of cracking bone at his shin. The Rein let out a pained scream. Splashes of blood from other wounds already coated the inside of his shield, which I counted as progress.

But despite weathering two full mines, he was not only somehow still alive, but capable of fighting. Blood pouring down his forehead, the fugitive heaved himself further onto the ladder and aimed his gun at the protruding cables. The ones tethering us to the tree.

A puff of gas first exploded inside the shield, filing it with a sickly grey.

Jadal Cai barked out in pain. His shield collapsed, dissipating the concentrated gas from within, but his face was already breaking out into horrific welts bursting from the skin.

Alarmed, I let go of my handholds and dropped half-sliding onto Alushex, who had somehow obtained a firearm. He suffered the impact, reached around me and unloaded all of its rounds into the Rein. Most of them missed or were deflected by Jadal Cai’s armour, but one took him in the chin at the same time as the Rein blew apart a tethering cable.

I couldn’t tell whose. It didn’t matter a moment later, as the second cable followed. Unbelievably, jaw a hanging wreck and half his body broken, Jadal Cai was somehow still going, if slower than before. He ducked out of sight of the platform onto the ladder, holding on by one hand and a leg, and my priorities abruptly shifted.

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“We need a way down to the branch,” I notified Alushex, struggling for viable options. The platform was holding by splinters. Unfortunately, it was leaning out over the fatal drop, and now too steep to climb.

In response, the assassin disentangled himself and squeezed his way over the side of the lip, the bulk of his weight on his hands. It looked superhuman. Secure hand and footholds opened up under his fingers. Alushex took it cautiously, checking for incoming fire, and I hung back to limit the redistribution of weight. The platform shuddered in the wind.

Several shots of a laser-like timbre sounded from the platform’s opposite side. I began moving again, as fast as I was able without slipping to my doom. Progress was painfully slow going, and every second spiked renewed fear into me it would be one of my last. For a second-tier, this was probably a light workout, but my muscles were busy continually screaming.

Alushex’s handholds led the way, and I clambered over the terrifying edge into a far worse overhang I couldn't cross if my life depended on it. Apt.

This was it. This was how I died. I’d always expected it would involve more fear and less anger. Although – surprise – I had room for both.

Across the unscalable gap, attached to the lower half of the platform ladder, Jadal Cai’s body dangled by the graphically broken ankle. It looked dead, although that had been recently misleading. I didn’t trust it.

Next to the body, Alushex sat faintly shaking. I wasn’t sure how he’d made it there so fast.

And then I saw Flinq, mainly because she was right next to me, standing on nothing and trying to prise my death grip off the only thing standing between myself and oblivion.

I forced my fingers to obey basic commands and transferred the hand to her shoulder with more pressure than strictly necessary.

“Okay,” the Quad said, holding onto my wrist. “Leap of faith onto me. Hold on properly. Ready? Go.”

It was more of a shuddering step, but I put my arms around her collarbone and let her walk me down to the branch below, effortless in the antigravity. The downpour hadn’t lessened at all, but after the fight with Jadal Cai, I’d awarded the deathtrap a mental shock factor downgrade.

“Is he dead?” I called to Flinq past the roar in my ears.

“Very.” She fired a few more lasers into his skull to illustrate.

I breathed a sigh of intense relief.

“Great work. Left unchecked, that could have been a disaster. The Chapel’s going to be happy, and we just hit paydirt.”

“What took you so long?” I called back. “We nearly died so many times.”

“Hey,” protested my saviour. “It takes a long time to climb that far by foot with antigravity, even with Fast Track. I was expecting one of your rides, not a hike.”

“So was I,” I noted tiredly.

“In any case, we did it,” Flinq said. “And I didn’t have to use Long Game. Good riddance. Alushex just needs to find us a door, and we can meet back in the office. With this thing.” She indicated the body.

I pictured returning to my desk with it staring at me from the floor and couldn’t muster the energy to disagree. “Job’s over,” I said instead. “I’ll be back at the murder floor.”

“Of course you won’t,” Flinq replied, fiddling with the straps on the complicated instrument on her back. “You’re advancing to Quad. Finally.”

Now wasn’t the best time to explain the intricacies of my troubled relationship with Near Miss. I shrugged and let it be.

I wasn’t happy with my core right now, even more so than usual. Once again, it had fought me every step of the way. All of my shots had missed. Times like these were why I’d gone through phases of bargaining like it could understand me. But if it could, it wasn’t listening.

Alushex had pulled most of the weight on this mission, and anything useful I’d done had been largely down to preparation and good equipment. I supposed we were all still alive, but it felt little more than incidental. Jadal Cai had been tougher than he should have been, but ultimately still a pre-death Rein.

I watched as Flinq heaved off the instrument from her back and pointed its furthest aperture at the corpse. The device looked like someone had taken a horn and decided to make it play seven notes simultaneously, with multiple funnels leading into a curving central pipe.

She pressed a silver button on its slim body only for nothing to happen. Tilting it up, she checked the reading and tried again. After a minute of this, Alushex beckoned her over and the pair of them poked at various settings to no discernible effect.

My armour was soaked through inside. I was cold, itchy and being stared at by a corpse’s dead eyes. “I’ll go on ahead,” I said, and worked my way to the original lift’s trap door. The fatal drop yawned at me underneath. I swallowed, held onto a cable just in case, and let myself fall.

Except I stepped into the Interstice.