Forty days after the imperial ambassador’s murder.

Back alley in the southwestern district of North Island, undersurface, Radaar, 9:34 pm.

One hundred and twenty-five per minute.

The air was bursting with discordant noise coming from several blocks away. A second passed, then the shrill crackle of electricity and the roaring rupture of brick and concrete sliced through the cacophony; however, they would not reach far. The blaring sirens and garbled advertisements and announcements muted the sounds of the clash before they could spread to crowded areas. No help was coming.

One hundred and thirty per minute.

Shay was hyperventilating. He pressed his body to the grimy wall, the brick warm and dry against his cold, clammy hands. Light-headedness and nausea urged him to sit, but he remained standing. His knees might pop out from behind cover otherwise.

Following a loud crack, small chunks of rubble darted past the corner where he was hiding.

He flinched.

One hundred and forty per minute.

Despite his heart pumping blood with panic-induced fury, and despite every instinct screaming at him to run, he did not – could not. Terror had frozen him still.

He would faint at this rate. Unable to regulate his breathing, he pressed his hand to his nose and mouth, restricting the airflow. Seconds ticked away at an agonising crawl. The alley was rendered vibrant by the fear; every scratch, nook, and cranny gained dubious significance – and all of it was branded upon his mind, an everlasting memory. The same went for the bloody corpse not two steps away.

He shouldn’t have gone out tonight. He should have stayed home at his dingy apartment, drinking that foul sewage water the dwellers sold as beer, and remained blissfully unaware of the horrors taking place here. Why couldn’t West Island have the damned parts he needed to repair his clinic? Why had he been so impatient to acquire those parts anyway?

An explosion resounded through the narrow alleys, but the augment’s howl rent it with its intensity.

Shay’s eyes clamped shut, his hand fell to his side, and he began mouthing a silent prayer. He cracked open his eyelids, but the scene of carnage around him didn’t change. He cast a careful peek at the dead man sprawled next to him. Blood had stopped churning out of cleaved arteries, but viscera still spilled from the sundered torso of the mutilated corpse. Shay’s dry throat made it hard to swallow, but he forced the saliva and bile down.

He had to get away. He shuffled away from the alley leading to the battle, then froze. The words of his seniors surfaced from obscurity, reverberating in his head: Augments are never alone. His trembling hand caught a dumpster’s body and he braced against it, keeping himself upright.

No longer hyperventilating, he slowly exhaled all the air in his lungs, slowing his heart rate to a degree. The next step was stability. Employing a breathing technique, he felt his cloudy mind clear, and with that, the fleeting thought of bolting to safety evaporated.

There was no chance the people who had brought an augment to commit a highborn’s assassination would allow a witness to escape. Being spotted would spell his death.

Another explosion sounded, closer this time.

He flinched and his heart rate spiked, but he quickly regulated it to lower values.

Staying here meant he rested his fate with the highborn and could only hope the man – Olmeen, if he had guessed correctly from the short glimpse – would win. Usually, the Val Tairi were dispatched to deal with augments; so, this was a coin toss, perhaps less in his favour, but those were still better odds than trying his luck at sneaking past the augment’s accomplices.

In a fit of curiosity and daring, he peeked out from behind the corner towards the fight.

Lightning cracked like a whip through the air, spewing lances of pale blue that set the pavement crumbling and erupting from craters – and at the centre of the raging storm was Olmeen. He stood tall and steady amidst the onslaught, bringing down slabs of cement and brick onto his enemy. A picture of confidence that inspired the same in Shay’s withering form.

The augment, instead, was a blur of shifting shadow, darting about the ruin that had once been an intersection and its adjacent buildings. Its staggering agility made it impossible for Shay to keep track of its movements, and yet it could not penetrate the highborn’s defence.

As the fight dragged on to its first minute, however, Shay began to see patterns in the chaos. The augment hadn’t just been evading. The randomness gained method and form: a systematic pursuit of a gap. And it found one.

Slipping through the defence, the augment sent its arm scything to meet Olmeen’s neck – and for the first time Shay became fully aware of the augment’s lanky black frame.

Olmeen’s body shifted. A distortion in the air surrounded him like armour, then he appeared several meters to the side.

The augment’s strike sliced through empty air. It leapt back just as a barrage of metal poles ripped from a building’s framework stabbed into the ground where it had stood. Lances of electricity trailed behind it, but they lost vigour when they reached within a distance from their target.

Shay gripped the air in a frustrated gesture.

The fight continued for another torturous minute. As the seconds ticked away, Shay’s confidence in the highborn slowly unravelled at the seams.

The wind blew and rolled the clouds of dust away from the battle. Flashes of light cast the obscurity off Olmeen’s face, revealing weary pale features strained from the prolonged exertion. The crumbling certainty of victory that Shay had walled his dread behind collapsed as he scanned the highborn’s face.

The deadlock finally broke in a single moment of carelessness. The augment severed Olmeen’s left arm at the elbow, and the Gift’s power dispersed. The lightning faded, and rubble fell to the ground.

Shay watched in dismay as the augment raised its arm to strike the highborn. However, before the blow landed, a powerful explosion of force hurled the abomination away. Clutching his bleeding arm, Olmeen rose to a stand, his face set in a fierce snarl. Lightning came once more. Rubble filled the air once more.

Then something changed.

A distortion, like the rippling surface of water, erupted from Olmeen in a spherical wave. In the span of a heartbeat, the wave reached Shay. Goosebumps prickled the skin on his arms and back. Everything became still. Then the moment passed, and the air around the augment shimmered, a dome with the creature at the centre – the obstruction zone. It burst apart like glass.

Golden lacework spidered across Olmeen’s arms and face, flaring from beneath the sickly pallor. His skin cracked, and blood oozed from the formed crevices. His expression, wrought with pain, morphed into one of joy. The man smiled, and that disturbing smile sent Shay recoiling from the corner and shuddering in fright. Even from this distance, he could see the highborn’s eyes brimming with madness and exuding some twisted form of pleasure.

One trembling step after the next, Shay backed away from the battle. Even if Olmeen killed the augment, he would still die. The symptoms were there – the price for channelling without a Tether Stone. No one could stave off the addiction to the Gift’s power once it came. This whole district might disappear in the aftermath.

Shay turned and started into a stumbling dash. Regardless of how many armed men awaited the result of the augment’s battle, Shay’s odds were higher with sneaking past them than remaining here.

A bright flash of pale blue lit the alley in its hue, vanquishing all shadows, and a thunderous roar split the air.

The upper part of Shay’s body jerked downwards, and he planted his hands protectively on the back of his head. A high-pitched buzz rang in his ears, muting all other sounds. When he glanced back, he saw that his hiding place had disintegrated – the corner and a large section of the wall blasted away, the rest crumbling away into tiny piles of rubble.

Suppressing a startled yelp, he continued running.

When ringing in his ears abated, silence took its place. The quiet was a pleasant change. It stopped being pleasant when realisation struck him. The cacophony that had masked the assassination had ceased, and he became profoundly aware of the sound of his rushing footsteps and his heavy breathing.

He entered one alley, then the next, traversing through the dilapidated maze of concrete and rotting wood. His anxiety flared. Why were the streets empty? The undersurface teemed with life at night; even if the Ascendant-forsaken back alleys remained abandoned as always, he should have found people by now. Out in the seething crowds, he could disappear. Here, he was just a target to kill.

Turning a corner, he collided with someone. His heart sank as he fell to the ground. When he landed, he threw his arms up to shield his chest and face. “D-don’t!”

“W-what?” a female voice stammered. “That’s what I should be saying, you careless jerk! What void-born dump did you crawl out of to not pay an ounce of attention to your surroundings?”

Shay tentatively lowered his arms, staring up at the figure above him. The scantily clad, pink-haired young woman stared down at him with her fists on her sides. He’d expected grim-faced men with rifles, not a sex worker. The sheer shock stirred his thoughts into disarray.

“Well? You just gonna keep gawking?” she asked.

Shaking his head, Shay scrambled to his knees, then quickly dusted off his trousers. He swivelled his head left and right, searching for pursuers. He also checked the rooftops. There was no one. “I apologise, miss…?”

She quirked her brow at him derisively. “Miss? Really? You a bannie from the ground or something? No one calls whores like me ‘Miss’” – she waved her hands down and up in a gesture that indicated her revealing attire – “not even the ones who wanna cut the queue.”

Not knowing what a “bannie” was, he said, “I’m just… someone trying to get away from the ruckus back there.” Beads of sweat dripped down his forehead and cheeks, and he wiped them off. Carefully, he glanced behind him. Empty. “We should leave. Do you know how to reach the main street from here?”

She rolled her eyes. “Follow me.”

Once she turned and began walking, Shay noticed a thin gash climbing up the back of her upper arm to her shoulder.

“Are you alright? That wound…”

“Hm?” She turned her head, then pulled the skin with the other hand to better observe the stretch of red. A sly smirk flitted across her face. “You never heard of rough play, old man?”

He frowned, eyes locked on her arm. “That kind of injury shouldn’t come from—”

“Whatever.” Turning away from him, she strode on. “It doesn’t matter since it pays well.” Her voice became cold and matter-of-fact. “If it scars, I’ll get synth skin treatment. Doesn’t cost as much now.”

Awkwardness and the finality of her tone ripped any thought of arguing from Shay’s mind. “Of course.”

The two continued in silence after that.

When they reached the main street several minutes later, Shay spotted the familiar shuttle of the RRD flying down towards the location of the clash. The sight evoked no nostalgia in him. For once, he was glad he was no longer part of that department. The second murder of a highborn would no doubt steer Radaar even further towards chaos.