“We don’t have time for this! Zeke and Corva need help. You n’ me both know there ain’t no one else in this town who’ll bring it.” Jack wipes his head one last time with a now-bloodsoaked towel from Slim before adding it to a pile of bloody towels. He pulls the straps on his pack tighter and tries to make his way to Slim’s door, again.

Lyia continues to step in his way. She puts her hand—now also clean of blood—on his chest, lightly pushing him back. “Exactly what kind of help do you think you’re going to provide? Remember Death took them into the sky. You’ve got nothing for that. And even if they escape Death, there’s still a legion of grunts swarming the town.” She looks over her shoulder to the door. “They’re probably already covering all of Lower Bule by now. Let Harris and the militia handle giving any help. If it’s even possible.”

Jack feels his neck and ears warm up more and more each time Lyia blocks his path. He tries to sidestep her, but is blocked yet again. “Hairless? Talk about having nothing to bring to the table! We saw Gorm running ahead of us to get down here to Lower Bule. They’ve probably already given up on Upper. If they’re not overrun, they’re huddled up in one of the siege caves. Seriously”—he makes another attempt to get to Slim’s door—“we just gotta give Zeke n’ Corva enough space for an exit. You ain’t seen ’em. You don’t know what they can do!”

“Really?” Lyia’s eyes start to well up. Her hands appear to be shaking uncontrollably. “I don’t know what they can do? Really? I just got shoved into the passenger seat of my own body by that girl. Who is this Corva girl, Jack? What she did, that wasn’t soulmancy. She—she had me face off with two grunts. Made me kill them with my bare hands. Made—”

Her words trail off as her eyes lose focus on Jack and jump around the room, but on places in space that are either too close or too far away to be any specific thing there. It looks like she’s recalling a nightmare, recreating the scene in her mind, looking through her current surroundings and instead seeing the rooftop.

“Their own hands.” Slim’s interruption is low, but it’s enough to get both Jack’s and Lyia’s attention.

“What?” Brought back from her waking nightmare of a memory, Lyia spins to face Slim.

Slim smiles a meek kind of smile. It’s the kind of look a person gives when they out themselves for something they assume people will figure out eventually. He clears his throat and speaks a bit more loudly. “I said, technically, you killed them with their own hands.”

Lyia squints, narrowing her eyes at Slim. “How did—you weren’t there. How’d you know what happened?”

Jack alternates looking between Lyia and Slim. There’s something being said here between their words, but he can’t quite put his finger on it. He already knew that Slim used to visit Lyia at the Red Light every now and again, but this is something different. He’s seen this particular brand of unspoken conversation before at the bar. This is the same kind of secret language reserved for people with a long history between them. Commitment. Friendship. Partnership. If the “babe” thing wasn’t a giveaway before, it’s pretty obvious now. Jack bites on the inside of his cheek to keep himself from talking, not that he’d have the words to say what he’s feeling now anyway. All the same, he feels his heart lower in his chest.

Slim reaches up and rubs the top of his head, almost nervous. He keeps his lopsided smirk but avoids eye contact with Lyia. “I, um—I saw it happen.”

“I thought you said that you didn’t even know that a raid was happening.” Jack frowns at Slim.

“Heh. Yeah. About that.” The lanky tech runs his hand over his scalp, leaving it resting on the back of his head.

His back straightens as Lyia takes a step in.

“How?” She says it slow, almost like a parent ramping up to an eventual scolding of her child.

“Heh. C’mon babe. It’s an insurance thing. Part of the biz. I told you it was baked into the original design.”

“Motherfuck, Slim! You said you weren’t peddling that shit anymore!”

A few seconds ago, Jack would have said that he had a complete understanding of the situation. Now, he’s completely lost. He raises his hands and steps between the two. “Hold up. Someone wanna bring me up to speed?”

“Asshole here is peeping for profit!”

Slim takes a step back. “What? No! It’s not like that, babe. I’m not doing that anymore.” He turns to address Jack. “Short version: I’ve got a backdoor in every playback kneak I make. Gives me real-time access to the media streams of anyone within range of my receiver.”

Jack reaches up and touches his own playback kneak, still plugged into the array behind his ear. “You can see what I see?” He looks to Lyia. “What she sees?”

“Yeah. He can. And he records it. And pushes it through the satmesh to anyone willing to pay for a peep.”

“I told you I’m not doin’ that anymore. But—”

“Then why didn’t you destroy your receiver like you said you would?”

“I was.” Slim takes a step closer to Lyia and holds her by her shoulders so he can look at her face. “But I got to thinking. When a raid comes through—like now—this tech would be damn useful for knowing what’s going on outside.”

Jack scowls. This is starting to sound familiar. “You got to thinking? Don’t you mean Harris got you thinking? How many nits did he pay you?”

Slim turns his attention away from Lyia momentarily to respond to Jack. “I won’t deny that the pay was a good incentive to keep me from focusing on other projects. But the thinking was absolutely all on my end. Harris just found out about the gen one version of this tech and asked how hard it would be to expand it for covering the whole town. I told him it wouldn’t be too hard. I just needed to get a wider range than my first receiver had.”

“You made more receivers?” Lyia’s voice is shrill. “So, what? You’re going to peep on the whole damn town?”

“Actually a meshnet of receivers. But yeah. I made more. It’s for security, though. With this, I can—”

Lyia yanks away, turning to the side. “Holy hell, Slim. Unbe-fucking-lievable. I can’t believe that—”

“How wide is your range now?”

Lyia and Slim stop and stare at Jack. Impatient, he looks to Slim. “I said, how wide is your range?”

Slim hesitates, but Jack can see that he’s holding back his smirk. The skinny tech is proud of himself. “At this point? ’Bout two-thirds of Lower Bule.”

“Son of a—”

Jack snaps his head to Lyia, glaring. “Look. You two can finish your little spat n’ have your reconciliation fuck—or whatever ya wanna call it—after I’m out. Meantime, it could be handy to have eyes out there ’fore I take my happy ass back on the roof.” Confident that his point’s been made, he turns back to Slim. “Show me.”

“Yeah, kid. Sure.” Slim leads Jack through the threshold to his expanded back room and approaches a standing terminal at the center of a mismatched array of screens and monitors. “No telling what we’ll see, though. Can’t imagine that there are too many people out there. Most should be in the caves.”

“I’ll take what I can get.”

Slim pauses a second to exchange looks with Lyia, still standing back in the smaller “main” room. Jack tries to guess at what exactly those looks mean, but quickly loses interest. He assumes it’s some variation of “you cool?” and “whatever” and turns his attention to the sequence of commands Slim is punching into the terminal. A moment later, each of the various screens flash on with different images of varying quality.

“Alright, so you’re looking through the eyes of every person within range of my meshnet. Folks closest to our location are on the screens closest to the terminal. Folks farther away are on the far screens, roughly in the direction they’re at.”

Jack looks at the cluster of screens and is immediately drawn to two of them right near the terminal. He points. “This me n’ Lyia?”

“Shit. Yeah. Meant to filter you guys out.” He scans across the assorted screens. “But from the look of it, I don’t think I’ll need to. Most of these are just different views of the same thing.”

Jack looks over the screens himself. Sure enough, the majority of them are different angles on the same cavernous dark room packed with people, mostly standing. “This the siege cave over by Cress’s place?”

“Looks to be.”

“Right on. Then we’ll skip them an’ stick with this little handful of folks close-by.” Jack leans forward, placing his weight on his elbows. “Gotta say, this is pretty cool. Kinda fucked up that you saw us facin’ down them grunts an’ you didn’t toss any help our way. But the tech is pretty sweet.”

He points to another screen near the terminal. The image on it is a bit fuzzier than the rest, but it appears to be looking at a strange, almost upward angle. Buildings flank the sides of the view, framing a few wispy clouds in an otherwise clear blue sky. Every few seconds, he can see the shadow of an Umbrati grunt pass across the view. “Where’s this one? An’ why ain’t it movin’?”

Slim frowns. “Huh. That’s new.” He taps a few keys on the terminal and a pair of speakers hum to life. “You hear that?”

“Yeah. You brought up the audio from the kneak. So what?”

“No, no. I mean—yes—I did bring up the audio. But there should be a different sound there. Playback kneaks pull audio from within the ear. We should be hearing this person’s heartbeat. It ain’t there.”

“This is a dead person’s view?”

“Apparently.”

“Any chance we know who it is?”

“Maybe. Would need to cross-ref the kneak’s serial against my sales log. Didn’t actually know it worked on a dead person. Better make a note.” Slim raises his tattooed arm in front of his face and uses his opposite arm’s forefinger to make a series of writing-like gestures on a blank space in the center of his lanky forearm. “Dead woman, actually. You remember Tessy?”

Lyia gasps in recognition while Jack can only give a blank look. “Who’s Tessy?”

Slim faces Jack. “Ran the bakery on this side of town. You had a name for her. I think you called her ‘Birthmark.’”

“Oh yeah! Great loafs at that place. That thing on her face was weird, though.” He notices Lyia give him a disapproving look. “What? It was all over the side of her head. The name fit. But we’re getting distracted.” He points at the screen with video from Birthm—Tessy’s playback. “Where’s that at?”

The thin tech stops and inspects the screen. “See the corner of that building on the left inside the view area?”

Jack squints and gets his face closer to the display. “Yeah.”

“I think that’s the roof you were on when you guys got surrounded by those grunts.” Slim glances over at Lyia before asking his next question in a low whisper, “By the way, what in the world happened back there? I didn’t know either of you could fight like that.”

“We can’t.” Jack feels a light shudder go up his spine. The sight of his fingers pushing in on that grunt’s neck crowds out any other thought. He makes fists and relaxes his fingers. His hands are starting to feel sore. Suddenly, something in the dead woman’s vid gets his attention. He pushes his finger right on the center of the screen. “What’s that?”

Exasperation leaks from Slim in the form of a sigh. “I told you, it’s right near—”

“No! This thing here in the view. What’s that?”

Slim pushes Jack’s hand out of the way and picks up the little screen. “Hard to see with your hand covering the thing. Yeesh.” He pulls the screen close to his face. “You mean this thing?” He points to a pair of small dark dots in the sky. “It could be bad pixels or dying connections to the optical nerve. No, wait. Can’t be that. Those dots are moving. I think something’s falling from the sky. And pretty fast, too.”

“Corva.”