Matthias came back into the room as I swiped the circuit away. He didn’t seem to notice anything out of the ordinary as he stacked the papers, but he’d lost his characteristic languid movements. He was stressed. The mask slipped back into place as soon as he met my gaze, and he smiled, friendly and relaxed once again. “We can get you a pillow if you’d like,” he said.

“Cut the shit. We have about five minutes till my girlfriend gets here, I suggest you spend it running.” The five minutes figure was made up, I reasoned they would have separated us, but if Matthias’ clock was right they couldn’t have moved her to a different location.

He put the photos down, Sid glaring out from inside the brown folder. “I thought you said she wasn’t your girlfriend. Is there a new development I should know about?” Are you in contact with her. I knew more now, and he was slipping. That meant I could decipher him. I looked up, then stood, above his eye level. These people hunted me, they existed to eradicate me. On some level, they had to fear me. I was thankful for my height, Matthias was a short man, and I towered over him. “Final offer.” I said, and stepped to the side, snapping the zipties on my ankles like they were paper. “Move. Or I move you.”

Matthias’ expression dropped at the same time that he vaulted the table. The toe of his loafer carried the glint of a blade as it arced for my throat

I plunged more magic into the circle I’d drawn into my jeans to give me strength. That was it, the only program. Strength. There were possibilities, designs to make it more efficient, more powerful, but urgency meant compromise. A consequence of the circuit, though, was that when I pushed myself back from the table, it wasn’t just me that went flying.

The reinforced plastic tore from the plastic bolts keeping it on the ground and folded against the wall, leaving Matthias hanging, momentarily, in the air. By some acrobatic miracle he hit the ground feet-first and kicked at me again, his foot tracing a question mark in the air. I shifted myself backwards, the second slash passing even closer than the first, and swung at him. He dodged the punch rather than trying to block, and I stumbled forwards under my own force. There was no vigilem limiting the effect of the circuit, it drained magic as fast as I filled it and even with the adrenaline coursing through me I knew I didn’t have much time. He leapt at me, knee first this time, and I swatted him away, but I was strong, not heavy, and Newton’s grasp on me hadn’t let up. He went left, I went right, and we both hit opposite walls. Matthias was up before I was, and kicked a third time, less elegant, the knife aiming for anywhere it could get. I caught it and pulled myself up to a kneeling position, bringing him down under me. We tousled on the ground, my grip on his ankle until I flushed the circuit through with as much magic as I could and squeezed.

Matthias’ ankle cracked, a clear sound even in the grunts of pain, and for a moment he stopped moving. I took that moment and clenched my other hand around his throat, pinning him to the ground. “Try anything,” I said, loudly for any onlookers, “And I crush you.”

He looked up at me, worry splashed across his face, intermingling with pain whenever one of us moved.

“Where are you holding her,” I said, letting up on his throat so he could speak. “I’ll know if you lie.”

“The clean room, three floors down.” he choked out, almost without hesitation, “Due north a half-mile.” a half-mile, that meant we were underground. I let him go. He curled up in pain, gasping for air. I hadn’t been crushing him that hard, had I? I made a note to add some kind of limiter to my haphazard circuit and picked myself up. Matthias had a knife in his right hand, a knife that he had the sense not to try and put into my side. Smart guy. I picked it up and extinguished the strength circuit. It was doing more harm than good to me.

The hall outside the room was bare brick, and old. I’d heard people talk about old mining tunnels and centuries-old undercities, but this was the first time I’d seen any of it. The RWHS had outfitted it with electric lighting, caged yellow lamps connected by loops of wire bolted to the wall. The walls curved inwards, looming over me, and the last foot of space was lined with corrugated metal. It was a tunnel, an oddly shaped, slightly triangular tunnel, but a tunnel. Someone had drawn directions on the wall in sharpie. A historian might have lamented the desecration of history, but I was concerned with the scraggly handwriting.

PHONEBOOTH- S 1/4M

MI6- N 5M

CELLS 1-4- S 1M

CR- N 1/2M

CELLS 6-10- N 3/4M

CHANGING ROOMS- N 2M

CR, that had to be the Clean Room. What that meant was beyond me, but I made my way north. The tunnel was empty, it seemed like everyone had gone to deal with Jodie, or maybe it just wasn’t populated. I couldn’t imagine people wanting to stay down here. It must have been a prison of some kind, but the cells were all further away than Jodie was.

I kept walking, trying to keep quiet where I could. I could touch both sides of the tunnel, so stealth was out of the question. I needed firepower. The trouble was, blood was a terrible conductor. The strength circuit had to be simple, and fast. If I'd overcomplicated it, it would have burned out under its own pressure. If I didn’t overcomplicate it, it would sap me dry. The wires connecting the lights were live, and they were connected in sequence, shoddy work. I’d kill myself trying to cut them out for metal, and the short would alert everyone to my corpse. I needed a way to ensure that the blood didn’t burn out, but I couldn’t think of any options. Except for one.

I leaned between two supporting pillars, to give myself some semblance of protection, and started tracing the knife around the inside of my left forearm. Measure twice, cut once. Measure three times, cut once, four times. Five. I planned it out out in its entirety, it spanned the entire space, I didn’t have the dexterity for detail. I’d wanted to get a tattoo there once. I gritted my teeth and started cutting.

The first cut was easy, the second burned, the third left a moat around a patch of skin, I had to cut again to make sure all three sides connected, and the skin moved a bit, unanchored. I knew not to cut too deep, I hadn’t hit flesh, but I still felt as if the skin would peel off. The vigilem, the capacitor, a standard part of most of my circuits, though this was more of a rune. I set it to draw magic out of me at a steady rate, to a cap of a certain amount of magic. Katrine and I had been working on establishing a baseline, a unit of measurement for magic, like heat or electricity. One mag: the amount of magic it took to heat one litre of water by ten degrees, we’d been looking to narrow down exactly what one mag was. Trouble is, how much magic that was varied based on the size of the circuit, the material, the way it was programmed and half a dozen other factors. Below the vigilem was a square. More of a rectangle, the skin stretched oddly. This one controlled me, my existence in space. Inside the square was a pentagon, the shape of thought. Another stock design, this one read my thoughts, specifically in relation to a position in space. Finally, a triangle, connecting the pentagon to the square. Conceptual control, control of positioning. Fire, kinetic force, all the combat circuits I used were useless down here, too loud, too likely to bring the building down on me, and no matter what I did, they had guns. I needed to close the distance, use the enclosed space to my advantage. The cuts burned as I finished them, hidden in the bleeding. I heard shouting down the direction I was coming from, someone had raised an alarm. I went to sheathe the knife, but it was too bloddied to go in any pockets, so I started sprinting towards the Clean Room with it clutched in my good hand.

The tunnels were curved slightly, warped was probably more accurate. It wasn’t noticeable much unless you looked for it, but it meant nobody could get a clear shot off any further than about fifty feet. The voices behind me picked up and started chasing me, I kept sprinting. I needed to get behind the inevitable group between me and Jodie, bottleneck them all on one side. The first two people i found weren’t facing me at all, but the other direction. Backup, I guessed, in case she made it this far. I reached out with my left arm and visualised the space behind one of them, then activated the rune.

I teleported, and blinked back into existence behind them, the knife materialising inside their neck creating a perfect seal around the blade. When I tried to pull it out I ended up wrenching their body towards the other, momentarily stunned. I went with it, and pushed, twisting the knife to let in air and pull it out. These ones were outfitted like prison guards, for close quarter combat. No guns, but they did swing a baton towards my shoulder. I took the hit, going for them and sinking the knife between two rib bones. I didn’t stop to make sure they were dead, I didn’t have time. Foreign blood stinging my own cuts, I kept running, more of a fast walk now, supporting my left arm.

Whatever they’d done to my shoulder, it was worse than it had seemed. It felt like pins were ripping through my clavicle whenever I moved, probably a fracture. I realised just how quickly I’d come to rely on magic, not dodging the baton was reckless. My instincts had been calibrated to the idea that I could heal anything short of a bullet without too much issue, that I was using magic to bolster myself. It wasn’t that, it was covering my weaknesses. Healing the hits I should have dodged. I needed to work on that.

I came up to a turn and flattened myself against the wall to peek around. A spray of bullets kicked chips away from the wall before I saw anything, these guards had found guns. The footsteps behind me grew louder, closer. They’d been gaining even when I was moving. They were still out of sight, the curvature protected me, but I could see their torches. I pushed myself further against the wall, flushing more magic into the rune. I knew the feeling wasn’t heat, that it wouldn’t burn, but that didn’t stop the pain. Every time I used magic it was like being branded, and my stomach didn’t take well to teleportation. The guards behind me probably didn’t have guns, they would be the same type that I’d run into earlier. I peeled off the wall and stood at the corner, beckoning them to tackle me. When the first one reached me I spun away from him and teleported right behind him, and kicked backwards. Bullets lit up the hall and with a shout, the guard went down. I spun again and elbowed the next guard, but didn’t stay. The shooters stopped shooting and I jumped out, glimpsing the space behind them just enough to teleport again. I landed and lashed the knife out to empty space, falling, disoriented from the jump and the magical exertion. It connected and I used it like an icepick to rebalance myself. There was only one shooter, thankfully, they were carrying an uzi, a small Israeli machine gun that Sid had taught me about. I picked it up and started shooting, suppressive fire more than anything meant to kill. The man I’d stabbed whimpered slightly and pulled himself into a sitting position, wincing with every shot. I tried not to hit him, but as I turned, still firing, and ran to her, I couldn’t be sure.