Erid was sitting at the bar, nursing another beer, contemplating his next move.

Again.

He’d been contemplating his next move for nearly three months now. Treading water, he thought to himself, that’s what I’m doing. He sighed, I’m just kicking around, aren’t I? If his brothers and sisters were here they would give him a good beating and tell him just how lazy and foolish he’d been. ‘There’s always something to work towards’ they’d say, or something like that. He had no clue, really. It was why he needed them. He wasn’t motivated by an internal mechanism like some people were. He required external stimulation, and his family had provided him with the impetus for so many of the activities that he had undertaken. But now, without them, he was lost –and he just couldn’t seem to find the path again.

It was as he was contemplating the depths of his departure from the path, and the depths of his beer glass, that he was suddenly faced with the large form of Esana appeared almost without noise before him. The large man had the skills of the brethren, and sometimes, out of the corner of your eye, you could see him do something that seemed just a little too well articulated for a simple bartender. At least his cover still seemed intact, thought Erid.

“There’s someone here for you” said Esana

“Huh?” Erid looked up from his glass “No one knows I’m here”

“I know,” said Esana, and Erid could see him glaring at him in a very uncomfortable way,

“Hey, I don’t get tracked that easy”

“Then how do you explain your visitor”

“What did you tell them”

“That there was no one here by the name ‘blazing inferno’”

Erid jumped up out of his seat.

“What?!”

“Yes, that was what I’d prefer to have said when she said that”

“Who the hell is it?”

“Just a messenger”

Erid was already behind the bar, and heading up the stairs

“Wait, Erid… are you sure this is wise?”

“If we’re being set up, I’d like to know, if we’ve been set up, I’d still like to know.”

“Alright, Your call. If things go sour, shout for me.”

Erid quickly hammered up the stairs.

When he entered the main bar, he looked around, and saw a young girl in dirty rags sitting at a small table sipping on juice. He walked over to her.

“You the messenger?”

The girl nodded

“I have a message from ‘silent knife’ she says ‘help needed, warehouse district, pillar seven, by the old mistboat yard’”

Erid’s eyes opened wide in shock, despite telling himself he was going to be cool about it. It had been months now – months since he’d heard from the mysterious source of their information about the attack they’d planned. The attack only he had returned from. He’d assumed that silent knife had been the one to double cross them. So why was the old moniker trying to get him to do something now? Unless they weren’t the one… Unless… Erid dropped the thought. He wasn’t going to think about this now. He lacked the information. If Silent Knife had betrayed them, and still knew where he was now, they’d have had ample opportunity already to wipe him off the map, Unless this was to lure him out, a more paranoid part of him said. Erid weighed the possibilities in his mind. He hated thinking about betrayal, hated thinking about what it might mean for their last mission, and so he made a decision; decided simply to trust, and let the cards fall where they might. He started to move.

“Ahem” said the messenger

He looked around

“A coin?” said the little girl, standing beside him, holding out her hand. Erid grinned at the little rascal and gave a tip ten times the rate. For the hell of it – if he was throwing caution to the wind, he might as well throw away the rest of his things too. She grinned hungrily, but he only glimpsed her expression, as he strapped his mask on and headed for the door at a run. Maybe this time, he’d find something out about what had happened, even if he had to beat it out of them, he’d get the information he wanted, because if they knew where he was, then surely there was a chance they knew where the rest of them were…

Erid slowed as soon as he opened the door, a lifetime of lessons in remaining inconspicuous suddenly re-inserting itself over the top of his nervousness and excitement. He walked slowly and calmly out onto the walkway, and then turned and headed away from the seventh pillar. He just had to get clear of Esana’s place. He tried to suppress the sense of anticipation he felt. Even if you were going to charge recklessly into a situation, it paid not to implicate those not involved.

After he was a fair distance from the bar, he turned around a corner and watched and waited. There was no one around, and no one was looking his way. He pulled a set of goggles over his eyes, and prepared himself. He smiled beneath his mask. The powers of the brethren were legendary, and he was often surprised by the exaggerated strength and omnipotence that his people demonstrated in the stories that were told around the bar tables of cable city. If we’d had half that power we wouldn’t have failed, he thought every time he heard the overblown whispers. But they hadn’t earned a reputation like that by not having any abilities, and every so often though, less regularly now that he was in hiding, he got to show off some of the strength that people had given up in their desire for convenience over the results of hard work. He stilled his mind, reached out his field, in movements drilled into him over all his youth, and he felt the thrum of the forces of the pillars. He closed his eyes, turned around, and pressed out at the pillar before him in a rhythmic way, pushing and then releasing and then pushing and then releasing. He was good at this now. It had taken him years and years to develop the skill, but now it was second nature. All around him things began to creak and moan. Small items of trash floated in a way unlike trash normally did, and seemed to wiggle slightly, pulled and then pushed from the pillar itself. When he was ready, he ran, as hard as he could, directly towards the pillar. Just as he did so, he pushed out with all his might, as hard as he could, right on one of the downward pulsing motions of his previous rhythm. There were two images that he had used to learn the following occurrence. The first was an exercise that the young brethren did to learn the skill – jumping on the trampoline. In order to get a higher bounce, you had to time the moment carefully for the elastic substance to drive you further into the air. Only here, it wasn’t with some elastic substance that he had this rhythmic association, rather it was with the pillar itself, and the parallel field that it generated. The parallel field, for a brief moment, and in a brief spot that circled only one jumping figure, pointed horizontally. The second image was simply a description given to him: that the phenomena was like pouring water into a cup. Sometimes, as you poured, a descending droplet was pushed back up just as high as it fell. The principle of changing the direction of the parallel field by ninety degrees was a little more complex, since the water and the droplet were the parallel field in this case, but the image of the droplet of water was one he always meditated on when performing this motion. He felt himself suddenly caught up in the pillar’s field, and he twisted to face the direction he would soon be shooting in, and then he felt the enormous pressure of the pillar, focused into a tiny point, and he accelerated, faster than anyone wearing spikes could do so safely, right across the town towards the seventh pillar. Cables and wires blew out of his way, the parallel field that caused them to hang in great arcs disrupted by the appearance of some other, strange disturbance. It wasn’t a way of travelling he often got to employ, but it was fun.

He was surrounded by a tiny bubble of the parallel field, which protected him and maintained his trajectory. He would push and pull at the little bubble of field surrounding him in order to guide himself to the old mistboat yard. The mistboats were all made centrally now, some other corporation taking control of industry… The boats docked up above the town to let their goods off, and then descended to pick up return freight, but there weren’t any local manufacturers or companies that did the freight itself anymore. Convenience.

Erid, as he approached the yards, saw some altercation taking place. A kid was running away from a group of men, he’d evaded one attack, and punched someone in the gut. What was this? Erid wondered why he was witnessing a small-time crime gang trying to nab a kid instead of the private army and multilevel trap he’d expected. Was this kid the silent knife? Impossible. Erid watched as one other member of the town criminals pulled the kid down with his field. Why didn’t the kid defend himself? He could at least try and put up a field or something. Erid looked around. Was this really it? Why had silent knife come out of hiding? Why was he here for this in particular? Well, he figured he had nothing to lose, he’d already made it this far. Maybe he’d find something out. Erid descended towards the old yards and brushed away the little bubble of field he’d constructed around himself. It popped him out and he was suddenly back in the pressure of the parallel field. He descended much more rapidly and landed right behind the poor lost soul getting assaulted. Time to play the hero. Thought Erid with great exasperation.

“Anyone want to tell me what’s going on here?” He said, sounding more annoyed than he had intended to.

Nobody replied to his question, and instead he felt the prickling of field generation begin. Idiots, he thought. One of them came forth and aimed a field-reinforced punch at him. The man’s coils were vibrating off his skin, and the air shimmered as the shockwave wall approached Erid. At the same time as the man was moving towards him, Erid stepped in front of the victim and pulled his own arm back, and then, as the man began his punch, and as he had done so many times before, he expanded his field, and set it to mirror the other field, and then expanded and contracted it quickly in another rhythmic manoeuvre. The assailant’s field folded into his own, sucked back and forth by the oscillating attractive and repulsive forces that he employed. He then allowed it to build up to a great enough strength, before completing his movement, at which point the field simply reflected backward. A few others were building field structures and beginning movements as all this was happening. The quickest earlier attacker looked shocked as Erid simply stood there instead of being blown away as he had assumed he would be, and Erid, for his part, smiled as the field abruptly rebounded with even greater strength, throwing the thugs back – one of them even got thrown over the side of the railing, and onto a roof below. The first line of assailants were thrown back onto the second, who were now also incapacitated or otherwise entangled, but the rest were far enough back that they were safe from Erid’s attack. There were four of them. They were clearly shocked, and Erid, his years of training coming to the fore, immediately began to move. He pressed off the ground, using his field to launch him parallel to the walkway, causing him to appear abruptly in front of one of the back row of thugs. He did not bother to slow himself though, simply transferring, through his field, the entirety of his momentum to the man, who was promptly swept back and cracked his head on the metal railing behind him.

The others began to charge their spikes, but Erid wasn’t in the mood. He moved to close quarters, and lashed out with a foot, wrapped tight in his field. He used the man’s own defensive shielding to multiply the strength of his attack, and the man seemed to bounce down, his knees giving way instantaneously with the pressure, a strange yelp escaping his body as he was knocked out. Then Erid dodged back, as one enterprising thug had decided to try and hit him with a steel rod. Erid simply punched the man, who dropped the rod in surprise, and Erid knocked him out with a second brutal punch. The third of the four he was facing had charged up a field, and immediately used it, how dull, thought Erid, you should know that kind of thing doesn’t work on me by now, and so he decided to change things up. The man had used a repelling field to try and push Erid away, using the walkway behind him as an anchor point to keep himself from being pushed himself, and so Erid latched onto the field and, matching its resonance, he pushed his own field out and into the anchoring point while letting his body’s resistance to the pulsion disappear. The field, finding no friction before it, but a substantial amount behind suddenly thrust its generator forward, and Erid clotheslined the poor surprised idiot.

~

Kaleb watched as the newcomer dispatched the entire force with an ease and in the kind of space of time he could hardly believe. He was gaping, and he knew that the expression on his face was probably not an attractive one – some combination of admiration, excitement, and elation at no longer being on the dissecting table. There were tears mixed in. Well, he hoped he wasn’t still on the dissecting table, because if this man decided to do away with him, he’d stand no chance. Kaleb also wondered at the strange use of fields that the man had employed. He’d barely felt him use his own field, but every time anyone else began to deploy one, it was as if they suddenly got all twisted out of control, and the man managed to turn them against their generators. It reminded Kaleb of the black hand… which made him shiver… except it wasn’t like this man was controlling others’ fields, he wasn’t reaching out and making them attack one another, instead he was somehow using the fields that were already generated… or at least, that was what Kaleb thought it was.

The man sighed as the thugs all groaned and rolled about on the ground. He kicked a few in the head to shut them up with a brutality that made Kaleb wince. Then the man walked back over to him, and, surprisingly, proffered him a hand, which Kaleb gratefully accepted. He was hauled to his feet as easily as if he were a child, the person not really showing much effort in the act. Kaleb gulped and looked up at his saviour.

“Ah… thank you very much.”

“Don’t mention it.” The man still seemed incredibly annoyed, and Kaleb felt his nerves draw tight. “You’re not silent knife I take it?”

“Um…?”

“Do you know who it is? Can you take me to them?”

“Ah… ah no, I’m sorry I don’t know anything about whoever that is…” Kaleb felt as if he’d somehow let this man down, and felt terrible, after all, he had probably saved him only for the purpose of finding out about this.

“Oh” said the man, “well that’s to be expected, I suppose… but this is mighty strange. I wonder who wanted me to intercede in this?”

~

Yolanda waited until she saw Erid run from the inn and then she turned around herself. Good. He was on the move. She hadn’t enough firepower herself, she’d thought in thinking up this approach, but she could play her one trump card, using whatever trust she might have left with the brethren, who hopefully didn’t suspect her of betraying them – from the looks of it, her word still held good. She only hoped that the card she’d played would work in her favour… And now, she needed to execute her part of the plan. Because chaos was the thing that undid organisations, whether they were morally bankrupt or not, and she could use the force she’d just unleashed to her own… more personal advantage too.

She made her way around the walkways as fast as she dared, trying not to draw any attention to herself, tracking the positions of both Erid and the prey she would take care of –Arleigne. Erid suddenly moved abruptly way faster than she had anticipated. How the hell do they do that!? She screamed internally, losing track of him with her senses. Oh well, it probably meant that those thugs had about as much of a chance against him as she did.

Yolanda broke into a run. Catching Arleigne unawares would be hard, but it wasn’t impossible. She knew that it was probable that the woman was watching proceedings from a safe distance with her sensory arrays, unwilling to ever put herself in a position where she could be attacked directly. Happily, she was also cocky about her position as a sensory field generator, and Yolanda could already feel her pulsing searching scans, following the drama of what was unfolding with the poor kid. And with them, Yolanda could pinpoint Arleigne’s position.

She found her in a room in a warehouse not far from pillar seven. This was probably the centre of her organ business. Maybe Arleigne was the surgeon herself. Sensory arrays could be used in many ways, and being able to see inside the human body –a skill that only worked on people whose field had been incapacitated– made them useful for medical –as well as a few other– purposes.

Yolanda hurriedly got herself down and into position on a walkway above the warehouse. She pulled a large focusing rod from within her coat, assembled it out of the two parts, and leaned it on the railing. Then she began to charge half her sensory array with a large amount of undirected energy. It was uncomfortable, but she kept her dampers up and it didn’t hurt her. She could vaguely sense the fight going on down below, and She suddenly felt Yolanda’s scans grow very concentrated and very rapid. Then the woman herself burst out of the building, looking off towards where the action was taking place. Basic, thought Yolanda. She waited until Arleigne began one of her frantic scans, basic and predictable. At the exact moment that Arleigne commenced her scan, she unleashed a wave of noise through the rod, directed with pinpoint accuracy, right at Arleigne.

Sensory arrays were normally fairly well guarded from interference – they had to be. But in order to sense anything at all, one had to open one’s self just a little. And if one sensory field generator had, for instance, been watching another sensory field generator for several months, and grown accustomed to the frequencies and patterns of their encoding… well, it wouldn’t be impossible to bypass all sorts of security and burn them from the inside so badly that they would never be able to walk again. It’s payback time, thought Yolanda as she pumped as much unfiltered and noisey chaos as she could into the carefully timed strike, encoding it in a manner that she hoped would sink through whatever dampers and protections Yolanda had in place. There was an ungodly scream, and Yolanda looked up and over her rod and smiled grimly, Arleigne had suddenly collapsed, and her body was convulsing with unnatural movements. The guards that surrounded her looked around wildly but didn’t see Yolanda, or went close to try and help, though Arleigne’s wildly spinning arms simply hit out at them, and they couldn’t work out how to do much. Yolanda then pulled out another small rod-shaped item. She stuck it over the top of the rod she was using, and then levelled it again. Projectile attacks had never been popular among the pillars. They were too easily deflected by fields, which could also often serve as an early warning system when things travelling faster than sound entered their area of influence. Many people had automatic protection circuits, some hardwired, some simply instinctual, against projectiles. But once someone’s field had been rendered useless… well, it wasn’t hard to slip a shot through their head. Yolanda steadied herself, aimed once more, and then once again charged up her spikes, though this time in a manner quite different than before. This time, she wanted it to be physical. Her arrays hurt slightly as they altered from sensory to physical, but she ignored them, and once her capacitance had topped out, she launched the shot. The guards were too busy wondering what had happened to think, they truly were idiots, and the projectile embedded itself squarely in Arleigne’s head, releasing a veritable shower of extremely bright red blood and brains over one of the guards, and the wall behind her. Yolanda leapt up as shouts were raised behind her. She knew they’d see her this time. She charged up her spikes again and jumped as quickly as she could, heading vertically. She hoped that they would be shocked enough for her to gain an initial advantage or else she would be in trouble, she doubted her spikes would hold out against those over-spiked muscled freaks. If Arleigne was a sensory type, it was a fair bet she’d spiked all her goons to the teeth; heck, if she was the surgeon, she’d probably done it herself. So Yolanda took off, as fast as she could, hoping the distance she’d struck from was far enough, and the speed quick enough, to evade capture and the inevitable retribution it would bring.