Let’s dial back the clock.

In the ghetto, a girl ate nothing off a thousand dollar-plate. Her body was malnourished. Her stomach screamed in agony. Her muscles, having long atrophied from sacrifice, were strings of sinew attached to string and bone. Yet this was the only happiness she knew.

Guardian angels do not exist in this world. Thus, she decided to become the only angel in this world.

The older sister resigned herself to sacrificing everything to protect her little sisters. Her little brothers. Though her own hopes have long waned, there’s still something she could do.

She would be their hero.

A slice of bread. A half-chewed link of sausage. A handful of rice.

This was all she had to give.

Fast forward.

The eldest continued to give. This was all she knew how to do.

Food. Money. Shelter.

A life she could never have. She surrenders it all for those who deserve it more.

Even if the price must be paid in blood.

Rewind.

The eldest wondered. Would it be better if nobody ever struggled? If every single person in this world never knew hunger or sadness?

She wondered for the longest time. Yet the answer was obvious: if there was a better world that could be sustained off faith alone, she decided she would reach it.

Fast forward.

She sustained herself off faith alone.

Rewind.

Licking crumbs off used plates. Dry lips. Cracked tongue. The last sustenance that remains.

Fast forward.

Do people remember a candle after it’s burned? Is there any reward for doing the right thing? How long can justice keep your fingers warm, your stomach full?

Rewind.

Can anybody really become a hero?

How much longer until you can understand me? Can somebody like you ever understand?

—Play.

Costs and benefits must be weighed. Even so, everybody has their own perspective — there is no set price on life or happiness.

The free market decides all. Other people decide your worth.

What is the value of safety? What is the value of sanctity? What is the value of a life? Is it really worth it to give up everything in the pursuit of an ephemeral dream?

Tell me, how much am I worth?

Pause; present.

Hey. How much do you think a hero is worth?

Ruby rain against pure white skin. Play it back real slow, slow enough to savour every frame.

Every drop was a curse. Every wave was sin.

Smiling stains no cleansing could ever remove. Only this time, I was buried in bony arms and covered in partially coagulated blood.

Clarity came slowly, a trickle of thoughts and unfulfilled desires. When I was mentally able, I took stock of the room around me.

What greeted me was a waking nightmare.

Her face. Her eyes.

Brass. Gears. A twisted, ivory horn.

The mirrors scattered around her room told the truth. There was nothing wrong. I was seeing things. My mechanical eyes said the same; they displayed reality as it was. Yet—

“Good morning, everyone!”

With a crisp declaration from Owl, the morning began. Her body, now partially clad in brass and quartz plates, tossed bed sheets to the side and set upon her day. A jaunty tune spilled from her lips as she took care of menial tasks around the room, dusting and cleaning with imaginary dustpans and brooms.

She carried me around like an infant, gentle as can be. When she finished the motions of cleaning, she placed me on the counter and gave me a hug.

We were both covered in blood.

“Are you alright?” I asked, pensive. “Um. I can grab Tapio, or anybody else if you need something.”

“You must be hungry,” she chirped, completely ignoring me. “It’s a shame we don’t have any food. Don’t worry, there will always be something to eat if I’m around…”

She plucked a machete from her closet and spun with it, smiling all the while. She returned to me and positioned the cleaver above her stomach.

“Just give me a few seconds, I’ll make you a wonderful soup. Your favorite.”

The clever rose.

“A few moments of mine, and maybe tomorrow you’ll be happy...”

Steel fell.

“—OWL!”

Metal met metal.

I threw myself in the path of the blade. It cut through my outer casing and mangled my inner wiring, leaving me sparking and partially nonfunctional — but I was functional enough to scream.

“Get a hold of yourself! What are you doing, Owl!?”

She blinked. Then she looked down, stumbled a few steps backwards, and slumped wide-eyed against her bed.

The machete clattered across the floor.

I didn’t wait. I crawled and blew myself beside her and immediately began pouring Ether into her wounds — she struck hard enough to leave a deep gash in her midriff, which bled profusely into yesterday’s clothes.

Bewildered and grunting in pain, Owl clutched her chest and frantically looked around.

She looked at the door. The bed. The blood.

The machete.

“...What the fuck?”

“Somebody tried to kill you!” I blurted out. It was the first excuse I could think of. “A Husk. A Husk came. It possessed you and I killed it before anything could happen.”

I expected her to immediately call me out on my bluff. But she only let out a deep, rattling sigh and buried her face in her hands.

“Of course,” she murmured. “Of fucking course.”

I huddled by her legs as I healed her, stewing in a pervasive silence. Her eyes told me she was thinking about something, but I couldn’t figure out exactly what was going on inside that head of hers.

The brass and quartz were gone by now. Figuring this was an alright time to say something, I said, “Are you alright? I'm worried about you—”

“I don’t need your fucking worry,” she immediately snapped. “Your worry is fucking worthless. You don’t know me. You don’t know anything about me. Your pity, your worry, your fucking sympathy — it’s all fucking worthless.”

Suddenly, eyes seeped in raw animal panic darted to the door. Like she just realized her own outburst, she clamped a knuckle in her mouth and gnawed hard enough to draw blood. I healed that, too.

I wish I could have claimed willful ignorance. Yet on some perversely subconscious level, I understood her.

I remembered what I did last night. I bathed in her blood and mangled her broken meridians until I felt something. I don’t know what unholy impulse drove me to do it, but I saw something that she had never shown anybody before.

Her hourglass was running on its very last grains of sand. Desperately, she wished for time.

Time to sleep. Time to explore. Time to laugh, time to live, time to love.

There was never enough time. From the day she was born, she never had enough time to do any of those things.

I was wasting her time. There were so many things she had to do, so many things she had yet to do; she couldn’t waste it entertaining my empty, reactionary emotions.

“Sorry,” Owl eventually said.

I nodded the best I could. “It’s alright.”

She gave me a nasty look, but quickly shook her head. “Get me a syringe. Please. One of the orange ones.”

I tried not to let my hesitation show as I delivered the medicine. When she saw me staring at her preparing for an injection, she finally looked at me.

“It’s for my Stigmata,” she explained. “That damned curse is the only thing I have left to fight with, so I don’t have any other choice. This helps me stay calm, sane, focused on work. I fucking hate it, but I don’t have any other choice.”

I helped steady her shaking hands with my wind. She acknowledged me with a tiny, pathetic nod as the medicine disappeared into her blackened veins.

“Come on,” she said, smirking at me. “Isn’t it funny? I’m a joke. I know you want to fucking laugh. Gods, it’s fucking hilarious.”

That was more like the Owl I knew. Still, I kept my silence at her side, offering her a tiny hug with my wind. I wasn’t clever enough to come up with a snarky or healing quip, but I could certainly offer what I had left.

The smirk disappeared. She buried her head in her arms and heaved.

“Don’t say anything about this to anyone,” she murmured. “They have enough to worry about. I can handle this. I can… I can definitely handle this. Just one more month. I’m almost there.”

A month. Compared to the eternity I endured, a single month would go by in a blink.

It was in my best interest to leave and never come back. I had initial capital, supernatural powers, and the knowledge to go make a living elsewhere. It was a decision anybody in their right mind could make.

But I remembered. I remembered my despair, how I desperately wished for a helping hand. I remembered Lyra and her wasted life.

If I could help even a single person, I would be satisfied with this miserable existence.

It wasn’t too late for Owl. It wasn’t too late for anybody here. They may have had their plan, but I had my own — I wanted to save as many people as I could.

The wheels of conspiracy were already turning against me, that much I could already feel, but I could be a player in this game too. This form did have its advantages, after all.

The same disturbance that happened to Lyra was happening to Owl. Grimm was another case that I could potentially interfere in. Heavens know how many more were like them. Something had to change. Something had to give.

Anything.

“We’ll make it,” I said. “I’ll be there when you need me.”

She nodded, finally allowing herself to relax in my presence. We stayed like that, sitting together in quiet contemplation, until morning’s first call.

“I can confirm. Absolutely,” Grimm was saying when we walked into the living room, “Ten-thousand percent certainty. The object we desire. Salvation and hope. The Snow Empress's court.”

“Told you,” said Jaxl, cheerfully. “Paid top dollar for that intel.”

The gang, reassembled and reinvigorated (and quickly repaired without comment, in my case), had been interrogating Grimm since last night and were still trying to get as much clipped information out of her as possible. According to the confessions wrung out of her, Grimm was a hunter who tried and failed multiple times to assassinate Empress of Snow, which, even to my untrained ears, sounded like complete bullshit.

“And you can guarantee the Husk has the relic on her person,” Sier asked, quite unamused.

“Positive,” said Grimm.

“Absolutely.”

“The Four Rings Sect already knows all this?” Wiz asked.

“And how do you know all of this information?” asked Tapio, clearly not buying any of it.

Grimm gave us a dismissive shake of her head and said, “Intuition. Take it. Leave it. The choice, thine.”

“Thine,” Wiz echoed. “Shit.”

“How did she escape unscathed from all those attempts?” I texted Jaxl as the interrogation continued.

Jaxl nodded to the tarped off area in the living room. There was a lot of blood, bullet holes, and spare body parts, yet Grimm was merely sipping a cup of iced tea to the great perplexity of everybody present.

“I recorded the ordeal,” he texted back. “We literally tried everything. Sage Arts, Arcane Arts, everything we had on hand. Even dumped a mag of Blackouts. This girl is fucking invincible.”

He sent the video log, which I decided to ignore out of good faith. It was too early in the morning to watch a two-hour video of hardly-attempted murder.

“So even after all this intel gathering, this all comes down to a big raid,” Wiz huffed. “At least we know where to attack and what to do.”

The crew had wrung the girl-that-was-not-a-girl of all the information they could, partitioning and organizing it neatly into digital files that I could peruse at my leisure. A quick scan provided me with the basics: Grimm had been in contact with The Four Rings for the past few months, coordinating a plan to take down the Snow Empress once and for all and share the spoils. She had fled the Frontier for unknown reasons, and only came back when the Rings came up with a new plan that convinced her of their success. Then we ran into her and dragged her into our side.

In other words, she had become a turncoat the moment she was convinced of our collective capabilities.

“Plays out like a bad joke,” Owl muttered as she looked over the information, barely loud enough for me to hear. Grimm briefly looked at us, then back to the room at large.

“Conversations have become recursive. Recommendation? Move on. Only the worthy. My aid goes to.”

“I can agree,” Jaxl said. “None of this changes our immediate objectives, so let’s get to work.”

Ten minutes of muted discussion of what sanctioned crime we’d like to accomplish today, and we were on our collective ways.

The client’s arranged destination was a black glass and cobalt affair, a consultant room leaking static and blue light into the alley’s of Hadron. A tap from Sier’s combat staff opened the malfunctioning sliding door to its fullest, revealing a crimson and oil stained lobby that, paradoxically, had no signs of violence or rotting bodies.

“Bad start. Weapons hot,” she muttered. The six of us complied and crept in.

The key to this Whitelight job was our face. Not our physical faces — I would’ve been doomed from the very start in that scenario — but the reputation we would gather underneath the Eightfold Pact Office would serve as our shield and safety net.

Grinding mechanical gears served as our reception and host, leading us towards our target. Had we not already been informed of the situation, what we saw could’ve qualified as a murder scene.

Several halls down, a clockwork devil dug through the entrails of his headless kin. A dozen shows spilling from a dozen digital displays — reality, romance, sitcom, news, comedy, tragedy — melted into a single liquid stream of colour that dribbled from his fingers and stained his disheveled suit.

“They’re not here,” the devil muttered, flicking his hands clean. He turned to us and raised his hands in casual surrender, nodding at the collection of blades and guns pointed his way. “Do mind the mess. It’s cleaner, usually — but ignore this for now. You must be the contractors, I believe.”

Sier bowed in greeting and, not quite lowering her staff all the way, said, “Your contracted aid, we are. The Eightfold Pact Office looks forward to your cooperation.”

There was little chatter and information on the way to the contract site, because the debrief said everything that could be said about the situation.

“We have a distress contract,” Jaxl said during the initial presentation. “Hate to cut into your free work — and I know how the risk-reward ratios are skewed on distress contracts — but the client is of some importance.”

“Walter Hawthorn,” Tapio said, completing the second half of the debrief. “He’s the sole proprietor of Blood Gear Inc., a small company that works on liquidation and redistribution contracts, no questions asked. He’s a known associate to the Rings and other groups that may get in our way, so if you can handle it, make his acquaintance and his favor. Should be a small detour, given your abilities.”

In short, Blood Gear was wiped out by a Husk known as The Laughing Arlequins during what should’ve been a routine extermination contract. Walter offered a relatively meager sum for imminent body recovery, which Jaxl interpreted as everything the man had left to his name.

“Extraction in the domain of a Mythos, first rank, recently upgraded from Remnant, second rank,” Jaxl continued. “You’re getting your payment in information, this time around. And you’re all working on salary anyway, so do what you want.”

Walter kept a cool attitude as we deployed through a Raven Gate, but his heart, out of all of us who had actually had beating hearts, was the only one that was rampaging out of control.

An unnamed sand-swept metropolis met us, blasting us with a wave of arid heat and dust. The afternoon sky was a pale tangerine dotted with wispy grey clouds, a reflection fractured by only a few lines of pure white light.

To the west, a billowing wall of beige loomed high above and blotted out the horizon. Walter took the lead, unfolding a red-tipped trident that had previously taken the form of a black briefcase.

“We can use the storm coming in to make our escape,” Walter said. “It’ll land in thirty minutes. Better hurry, now.”

“What is the contract’s tolerance for collateral damage?” asked Elias, speaking for the first time in the day.

“We’re in the Outlands,” Walter said, dismissively. “There’s nobody here.”

“Of course. Lead the way.”

Elias’ tone betrayed no sign of emotion, but I felt Owl setting her jaw underneath her concealing mist. Our group followed without further comment, weapons glinting in the day’s light.

A nameless dread walked beside me. I wasn’t aware of it at first, having gotten used to seeing through my artificial robotic eye for the sake of coherent colour and an anchored perspective, but it grew with each step we took — it was an oppressive black miasma pressing against my mind, a familiar, yet dreadful tar that slowly steered my thoughts away from ways of eliminating the Laughing Arlequins. When I finally gave in and used my Ether vision to look closer at my surroundings, I understood why.

There were eyes behind the shuttered and boarded windows of blown out skyscrapers, a silent audience observing our group’s every movement. They were angry eyes, empty eyes, the unseeing eyes of those who were barely anything more than skin and bone. Some held rifles furnished with wood and bayonets; they were the owners of the weariest eyes, the bearers of hollow gazes magnified through impromptu scopes.

Dozens, if not hundreds of people hid away from us. And even though I couldn’t read their exact Ether signatures or emotions, I understood the situation at very first glance.

The walls of a man-made paradise could only contain so many.

I understood, yet I didn’t understand why.

“Concentrate on the mission,” Owl muttered to herself, “That’s the only thing that matters.”

Almost as though she sensed my hesitance, she shot a glance directly at me. The intensity of her stare gave me pause; I scrambled to regain my composure and continued trotting along at her side, forcing my little drone body to move forward.

Keep moving, said her mind.

Keep moving, said her body.

Keep moving, said her heart.

There wasn’t enough time to look back.

Cold emotions that weren’t my own melded with my consciousness. A heart long-turned to stone stemmed the bleeding of my own heart; leaving me calm and collected.

There is only so much a single person could do. What did I think I was going to do here? Nobody had enough time to help every person who was down on their luck — no saint could help the entire world at once. So what was the point?

Spread yourself too thin and you can’t protect anything at all. To stand in this world, you had to pick your sacrifices.

An example before us: we soon came upon the sacrifices of those who came before the hunt.

Husks were classified by a weighted sum between casualties and perceived overall threat. Mythos rank Husks were only upgraded when they surpassed three hundred Bureau-registered casualties; a threat that required a dedicated team, support, and equipment to be dealt with.

Here, in this dead city of sand and asphalt, there wasn’t a single sacrifice wasted.

We stepped upon into an open-roofed theatre, a stage of ivory bone and grafted slopes of crimson flesh sliced so thin that it almost looked like satin curtains. Today’s show, the same as yesterday’s and the day before, was a comedy so funny that it would tear open your guts.

Eyeless, well-dressed automata with arms too long and legs ending in hardened spikes watched us as we struck them down. They made no moves to resist; if anything, the greeting staff welcomed us with open arms and painted the carpets red with their own blood and viscera.

The second act was already in session when we barged into the main theatre; a physical comedy of masked dolls flipping and falling, laughing and screaming in incomprehensible tongues, a troupe of nine main actors and too many supporting cast members all playing the exact same role.

Today’s show, the same as yesterday’s and the day before, was a performance with full audience participation.

Sier and Elias joined Walter at the vanguard against the immediate onslaught — outnumbered yet not overpowered, they fell into a formation to protect Wiz and Owl, the latter of whom I focused the majority of my Stigmata on. Everybody else had their techniques and abilities; Owl was only an ordinary person with a rifle, despite her seemingly unreliable ability to pause time.

Grimm, on the other hand, waded through the bloodshed disinterested and apathetic. Any creature that dared lay a hand on her was instantly frozen solid; the ones that were lucky enough to not get close were impaled by icicles that erupted from the ground.

However, she had no intent to help our charge. Nor was anybody suicidal enough to ask for her help.

“I don’t see their Spirit Cores!” Wiz said as we reached the main stage. His pistols, twinned drakes of lightning and shards, scanned the fresher corpses at the base of the main stage and transmitted streams of information to an eyepiece over his right eye. “Too much noise! I don’t think we can—”

“Then we’ll finish the fucking job!” Walter screamed. He charged up the steps to join the performance, unaware, or perhaps wholly ignorant of the crushing presence of the main lead actors.

It was a performance that could accept all and was meant for all; a show with no limits and the potential to bring out the inner trickster in anyone.

The Arlequin: the capricious romantic; the foil to the aimless, chaotic clowns of old theatre. Those who are beyond seeking revenge and indulge in every whimsy through trickery and deceit — a captivating performance of fools beyond logic.

“Something strange slithers so stubbornly,” rattled a dancing automaton wearing a red mask with a hooked nose, “Such a shame, a shave he needs! For survival, dear friend?”

“Arguable, allowable. Attractive and aproposuly, available? More than acceptable!” It’s partner, a wrinkled black porcelain mask, gave a high-pitched, whistle-like laugh as it cartwheeled towards the charging Walter and said, “Looking for these?”

A mere glimpse was enough to cause Walter to stumble on his own feet.

Dangling from the ribbons suspended from its fingers were three mechanical heads that were still bleeding from the semi-attached spine and colourful spheres that were attached to several vertebrae by thick, thumb-sized electrical cables. The heads blinked at Walter, then their metal mouths, dented and cracked, opened in silent screams.

Walter caught himself, renewing his pitchfork charge with a hateful sound that transcended beyond a scream: for a single moment, a maddened cry for vengeance drowned out all the other sounds and intents within the grotesque theatre.

He didn’t see the mechanical hand falling towards his head, each finger a shining, five-foot blade.

Metal clashed. Sparks and blood emerged.

Walter looked up in surprise.

A curved black blade continued its grisly work, slicing and cutting through the automata that tried to leap from above. As though wielding a brush, Elias took full advantage of my winds and painted six firm strokes, the last of which bisected the automata roughly down the middle.

Sier lept in tandem, shouting triumphantly as she drove her straight-sword through the chest of the red-maksed automata. A gesture from her freehand caused the blade to erupt into silvery petals, which she then used to eviscerate the creature from the inside.

The pitchfork pierced the porcelain mask’s chest, drawing a small fountain of blood and black tar. As it fell, it gripped one of the three prongs and flailed with its arm, passing the heads to another cackling actor that ran on by.

Walter’s fingers were allowed to barely grace the connecting ribbons; his mechanical eyes widened as his hand closed around empty air.

“—Shelia! Fuck, fuck, fuck…!”

“Such a delightful performance!” cackled an Arlequin wearing a black-and-white mask. “Back for an encore, my dear devilish friend?”

“Talk more,” Walter growled, prying his pitchfork free. “It’ll make me feel better when I tear those masks off and shove them down your throats.”

“Ah ah ah, patience! We haven’t reached the third act. The climax cannot occur without the entire cast! And there—” A clap and whistle. “—Right on time!” Backing away, the Arlequin that spoke gestured towards a white, almost blinding fog that was seeping from the leftmost — the farthest — side of the stage.

A momentary reprieve swept the main performance. Walter looked eager to continue his offensive, but with both Sier and Elias hesitating, he stood back and watched the fog and how it continued to grow, spilling into vague tendrils and soft-cornered shelves of mist.

There were no eyeless automata on the main stage, only six actors and the trio that had closed the distance with the Husk. Even the automata that Wiz, Owl, and Grimm were fighting off turned away from us to look at the show. Taking full advantage of the break, I concentrated and placed targets on each of the actor’s heads — their weakest points.

Two people emerged from the white fog; the first of whom was a hard-faced woman carrying a blocky, black shield pulsating with blue veins of energy. She wore a grey nylon jacket and bore a single stubby black horn in the middle of her forehead, and she immediately took a defensive position in front of the other guest.

“I knew there would be trouble,” she muttered to her companion. “We should’ve brought more people.”

The second arrival? I already knew them well.

Ever since I got back from that first foray into Granport, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about her.

Cassandra was here — and so was one of her allies.