The light above me wouldn’t hold still. It stretched into ribbons, snapped back into a circle, then bled outward again like someone had dragged a wet brush across the ceiling. My head was locked in place, chin angled up, the brace pressing into bone while the rest of my body floated somewhere several inches behind my skin. The drugs were still in me. I could feel them swimming. Slow, syrupy tides colliding with sharp electric pulses from the blow to my skull.

  A wet thud echoed through the room and then echoed again inside my chest, as if the floor and my ribcage shared the same hollow space. Voices rippled like they were being spoken through water. Marcus was saying something. Or laughing… or shouting. The pitch kept shifting, stretching upward into something almost joyful before collapsing into a low, strangled hum.

  The room began to smear at the edges. Neon from somewhere outside bled through the walls in thin veins of blue and pink, running down over steel surfaces that had been sterile moments ago. The surgical light flared so bright it burned shadows into my vision. A figure crossed in front of it and the glare wrapped around them instead of stopping. For a second they looked hollow, like the light had decided not to touch them.

  Someone moved. A guard, I think. His outline doubled, then tripled, like my eyes were buffering. There was a flash of something dark slicing through the space between frames, but I couldn’t track the motion. One moment he was upright, pulse bright and frantic in my ears, the next he was falling in sections, limbs misaligned, body separating from itself in clean, impossible lines. There was no struggle. No chaos. Just edits.

  Blood hit my skin warm and sudden, like someone had thrown a bowl of soup across my chest. I flinched, or thought I did. I couldn’t feel my wrists against the restraints. The warmth spread and cooled almost immediately, turning slick against the curve of my ribs. Denise made a sharp sound that twisted upward into a laugh in my head before snapping into silence. The room answered her with another heavy impact.

  The smell came late. Copper and salt and something bright, almost citrus. My heart began to pound out of rhythm with itself. Too fast, then too slow, each beat echoing strangely. Panic flickered somewhere in the haze but translated wrong, blooming instead as a strange rush of heat behind my eyes. My implants tried to boot and failed, static crawling across my vision in jagged black arcs before dissolving into neon grain.

  Marcus was still there. Or had been. I saw his mouth open wide, teeth flashing under the light. The word he formed stretched long and elastic, warping into a scream that sounded almost ecstatic before being severed mid-breath. A line appeared across his throat so thin it barely registered, and then red bubbled from it in a deliberate, blooming wave.

  The figure in the center of the room barely moved. That was what my mind couldn’t reconcile. Everyone else fractured and spilled and collapsed, but that shape remained anchored, edges clean while the rest of the world warped around it. I caught a glimpse of something narrow in its hand, darker than the shadows, swallowing the neon glow instead of reflecting it. It dipped once, precise and unhurried, and another body simply stopped.

  The ceiling began to drip, or maybe it was just my vision. The surgical light smeared into a white river pouring down over me. Blood crept along the floor in branching neon lines, bright pink against tile that should have been white. My thoughts tried to assemble meaning and slid off it like oil on glass. This was wrong, too controlled.

  The pressure behind my eyes surged, blooming outward until the light shattered into a thousand shards. The last thing I saw was the figure still standing while the rest of the room lay in broken, gleaming pieces around it. I didn’t see it leave, it was simply gone a moment later. Then the world folded inward and went dark.

  Consciousness dragged itself back in a jagged breath. The light above me had steadied, no longer bleeding at the edges, but the room felt heavier, air thick and metallic. My head throbbed against the brace, straps biting into skin that felt raw and distant all at once. For a heartbeat I thought the nightmare had ended, that the sounds had been nothing more than chemicals misfiring in my skull.

  “There you are.”

  The voice was close, calm, almost conversational. Something familiar about it rang in my ear, but I couldn’t place it. I tried to turn toward it, to focus on the shape that had moved at the edge of my vision, but the world lurched sideways again and the dark rolled back over me before I could make sense of who had stepped into the room.

  Consciousness returned cleanly this time. No neon, no distortion, just weight. My head ached in a contained, manageable way, pressure wrapped in something chemical and deliberate. My ribs pulled when I inhaled, tight beneath fresh bandaging. My pulse felt louder than it should have, a faint tremor running through my hands and thighs like my body had been plugged into a low-voltage current. Stimulants. Pain suppressants.

  I was still in the chair. The restraints were gone. My skin was streaked with dried blood, but the worst of it had been cleaned away. The surgical light overhead burned steady and white, and the air smelled like gore and fried electronics. A chair scraped softly somewhere to my right.

  “Good morning.”

  Rep 709 sat beside me, hands folded loosely in his lap. My clothes were draped neatly over one forearm. He was immaculate. Suit unwrinkled. Cuffs clean. Not a single drop of red marked him in a room saturated with it. His expression held the same mild attentiveness I’d seen in conference rooms and controlled environments, as though this were an expected appointment and I had simply arrived late.

  He regarded me for a beat, head tilting slightly as if assessing my posture.

  “You are finally awake.” he added.

  I swallowed against the dryness in my throat and forced my eyes away from him. The room resolved slowly, piece by piece, as if my brain needed to catalog it before accepting it. Marcus’ body lay collapsed near the far wall, expensive shoes still pointed toward me. His head rested several feet away, turned slightly on its side, expression frozen somewhere between disbelief and fury. The cut was clean, almost surgical.

  Denise lay crumpled beside the table, her spine bent at an impossible angle. One of the guards was missing an arm. Another had been opened from collarbone to hip in a single, precise line. There were no overturned chairs, no bullet holes, no shattered glass. Just bodies, interrupted mid-function, and blood spreading in dark, slick pools across tile that had been sterile an hour ago. Whatever had happened here had not been loud.

  My gaze returned to 709. He hadn’t moved.

  “You do this?” My voice came out rougher than I intended.

  He considered the question as if it required proper sorting.

  “I arrived after.” he said evenly.

  “After what?” I asked.

  His gaze drifted briefly toward the bodies scattered across the floor. The motion was small, almost polite, like someone indicating a spilled drink at a dinner party.

  “The correction.” he said.

  I held his eyes for a second longer than I needed to. “That’s what you’re calling it.”

  “It was decisive.”

  There was no pride in his voice. No emphasis. Just classification.

  I swung my legs off the chair. The floor was slick beneath my feet, tacky where the blood had begun to dry. I stepped carefully, reaching for my clothes. My muscles responded faster than they should have, tremor riding just beneath the surface. Someone had flooded me with stimulants.

  “You correct things like this often?” I asked.

  “When required.”

  “And this was required.”

  “Yes.”

  He didn’t elaborate.

  I pulled my shirt over my head, fabric dragging lightly over bandages I hadn’t put there. “By who?”

  “I was informed of your location,” he said. “And of the instability.”

  Instability?

  I glanced toward Marcus’s severed head, resting several feet from his body, expression fixed in a silent accusation.

  “That’s one way to describe it.”

  “The situation has been resolved,” 709 continued, as though that closed the matter.

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  It didn’t.

  I started getting dressed, pulling my shirt over my body first. His gaze didn’t shift when I stepped out of the chair. He didn’t politely avert himself the way most men would. He wasn’t hungry, wasn’t embarrassed. He was focused.

  “You’re staring,” I said flatly.

  “I am observing,” he replied.

  “That’s not better.”

  His head tilted slightly, processing. “It would be pointless to withdraw visual attention during medical assessment.”

  “I’m not dressed.”

  “Partially.”

  I pulled my pants up the rest of the way and fastened them with deliberate slowness. “Assessment of what.”

  “Motor function. Coordination. Pupil response. Tremor amplitude.”

  He said it without irony, like he was listing ingredients.

  “So you revived me? Dosed me with stims while I was out?”

  “Correct.”

  I stepped around the gore, careful not to look down too long. The room felt smaller now that I was upright.

  “You’re not going to tell me what actually happened,” I said.

  “I am not,” he confirmed.

  “Because you can’t.”

  “Yes.”

  There was no shame in it. No hesitation. Just boundary.

  I studied him for another moment. “Did Vera send you?”

  “I was directed to ensure your continued viability.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “No.”

  Silence settled again, heavy but not uncomfortable to him.

  “Why you?”

  He tilted his head, as if he didn’t understand my meaning.

  “So you would not wake alone.” he said.

  “That wasn’t the question.”

  “And?”

  My jaw tightened. “There are other people who could’ve handled this.”

  “Yes.”

  He didn’t look offended, just a blank stare.

  “Then why you?”

  “You have prior exposure to me,” he said. “The probability of panic is reduced.”

  Panic… That wasn’t what I’d been worried about.

  “So this is supposed to be reassuring.”

  “Yes.”

  The word landed wrong in the room. He watched me for another second, as if confirming that the exchange had concluded.

  “You have eleven hours, thirty-eight minutes remaining,” he said.

  The shift was abrupt enough that it almost felt physical.

  “What?!”

  “Your operational window,” he clarified. “Time has elapsed.”

  For a moment the words didn’t connect. Then they did.

  “How long.”

  “Twenty-nine hours, twenty-two minutes.”

  The stimulant tremor under my skin sharpened, no longer just chemical but urgent.

  “That’s not possible.”

  “It is.”

  I felt my HUD flicker fully into alignment as I focused, the countdown resolving in the corner of my vision.

  11:37:41

  The room seemed smaller now for a different reason.

  “Delay is inadvisable,” 709 added calmly.

  I exhaled slowly and pushed the panic back down where it belonged.

  “Right,” I said. “Of course it is.”

  When I looked up again, he was already standing.

  He adjusted his cuffs, a small, habitual motion that felt absurdly domestic in the middle of the room. Blood had begun to dry into darker patches along the grout lines of the tile. The air was thick and metallic. He remained immaculate.

  “Your mobility is within acceptable parameters,” he said. “Further intervention is unnecessary.”

  “That’s comforting.”

  “It was intended to be.”

  I almost smiled at that.

  He inclined his head a fraction, the gesture eerily formal.

  “Toodle-loo.”

  And then he was gone.

  Not dramatic. Not vanishing in smoke. He simply stepped through the doorway and did not return.

  The silence that followed was heavier than the violence had been.

  For a moment, I stood there alone in the wreckage, the stimulant buzz under my skin fighting the ache in my ribs. The countdown burned quietly in the corner of my vision.

  11:36:12

  I stepped over Marcus’s body and moved for the door. The corridor outside was dim and narrow, stone walls unfinished and unmarked. Two more bodies lay just beyond the threshold, both guards I’d seen on the way in. One was still seated against the wall, head tilted at an unnatural angle, eyes open. The other lay face-down, a single clean line marking the end of him. No signs of resistance.

  Further down, another pair. Same story. Whatever had walked through this building had not met opposition. It had simply moved forward. Security door panels spat sparks as I passed through the unlocked doors.

  I followed the trail toward the exit, boots leaving faint impressions in drying blood. The structure felt older than I remembered, thick stone swallowing sound. No corporate logos, no signage. Just a private, unmarked box carved into the more populated edge of the Ash.

  The door at the far end hung slightly ajar, cold air seeping in from outside. The Ash sprawled beyond the threshold, neon haze bleeding up from the lower districts, smoke and sodium light mixing into a low, permanent dusk.

  I stopped at the exit door and called Vera. She answered on the second ring.

  “Nyx!? Where the hell have you been? I’ve been trying to track you for hours!” Concern, panic, and anger bled together in her voice.

  “I was right. It was a trap. I thought I cleared it, but there was more waiting. Rats weren’t the only ones inside.”

  “My drones saw the carnage in the warehouse,” she shot back. “Mercenaries mixed in with the Rats. A real shit show.”

  “Yeah. Presents from Marcus Havelock. Gnaw tipped him off I was coming. Havelock wanted revenge for his son.” I swallowed, the memory of the beatings lingering in my mind. “They ran me through a blender. Gnaw hit me with an EMP. Shut everything down. I woke up here. Havelock’s private bunker.”

  A sharp inhale.

  “And you’re alive.”

  “Barely.” I hesitated. “Why’d you send 709 to retrieve me?”

  “Wait.” The confusion was immediate now. “709? The Umbra Representative?”

  “Yeah. He was in the room when I came to. Dosed me with stims. Patched me up. Gave me the clock.” I frowned. “You didn’t send him?”

  “Of course not,” she snapped. “I didn’t know where you were. And I don’t have the clearance to order a Representative to do anything. 709 reports to Cassian and Umbra. That’s it.”

  We both went quiet. That didn’t track.

  “Forget that for now,” Vera said sharply, forcing the subject closed. “Location?”

  “Backside of a residential structure in the Ash. Unmarked stone. Sending coordinates.”

  A pause.

  “Got you. You’re back on my grid.” Her voice steadied, shifting back into operational cadence. “You’ve been dark for almost thirty hours. Caster has already started mobilizing response teams. You have less than twelve hours before he writes this entire operation off as a failure.”

  “Yeah.” I exhaled slowly. “About that. How the hell am I supposed to pull this off? I’m running on painkillers and stims, and I have no idea where Gnaw went.”

  “I do.” Vera said.

  That stopped me.

  “He must’ve assumed you were dead after handing you to Havelock. He stopped masking his signal. He’s celebrating at one of their compounds. I can get you eyes and a gear drop when you’re close.”

  My HUD flickered as a new overlay resolved across my vision. A compound map projected in clean lines and heat signatures. Looked like a small bar. Armored bikes lined the curb. Heat signatures packed the interior wall to wall. Fifty, maybe more.

  I sighed and started moving out of the building, heading towards the location. It was going to take time to walk across the fucking sector again.

  “What’s the play,” I asked.

  There was a pause on the line. Not hesitation. Calculation.

  “First,” Vera said, “you’re going to stop.”

  I kept walking. “What? No, I need to get out of here.”

  “Yes.” Her tone sharpened. “You are concussed, chemically accelerated, in short: compromised. You will hydrate before you engage.”

  “I don’t have time for a picnic.”

  “You have time to collapse in the middle of a firefight?”

  I scoffed, but stopped arguing.

  “Two hundred meters south,” she continued. “There’s a diner. Metal awning. Minimal foot traffic this hour. Go there.”

  “You’re stalling.”

  “I’m planning,” she corrected. “Take a seat, order some food, some water, and some caffeine. Your body needs to refuel before you walk into more action. Otherwise this is all pointless, you’ll be dead in the dirt before you get a shot off.”

  The timer ticked in the corner of my vision.

  11:28:04

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re functional,” Vera said evenly. “That is not the same thing.”

  I turned down a side alley anyway.

  “Eat, Nyx.” she added. “We can spare thirty minutes.”

  “Fine, then what?”

  “Then I give you a plan.”

  I huffed as the call disconnected, but didn’t have a choice. She was right, I needed to eat. I could feel my stomach rumbling at the thought of food, however greasy and grimy an Ash diner might be. At least it was close.

  The diner looked like it had survived three separate apocalypses and decided to stay open out of spite. Faded red lettering over the door. Metal awning warped from old heat. The bell chimed when I stepped inside.

  The smell hit first. Grease, salt, coffee that had been burning on the plate for hours. My stomach growled hard enough to make me pause.

  “Seat yourself…” the waitress muttered from behind the counter without looking up from her phone.

  I slid into a cracked vinyl booth near the wall. The cook in the back looked half-asleep, eyes glassy, cigarette hanging from his lip as he scraped something off a flat top that only slightly resembled food.

  “Burger,” I said. “Fries, coffee, water.”

  The waitress gave me a look that said I wasn’t worth conversation and walked it back. The timer ticked in the corner of my vision.

  11:24:38

  I hated everything about sitting in the booth waiting while the clock ran. It felt wrong. Hell, just being here felt wrong. This whole mission had already gone to shit, and I was weary of it all. I just wanted to be done, to take a break, to put all of this nonsense behind me and go to ground for a while.

  The food came slower than I hoped, but faster than it probably should have. I didn’t wait for it to cool. The first bite almost made me dizzy. My body reacted viscerally for the familiarity of eating, hands steadying around something warm and real. It tasted like shit.

  I couldn’t help but stare at the timer as I ate, anxiously counting the seconds as I let myself eat and calm down. I hurt everywhere, I was exhausted, but each bite brought me closer to feeling whole again. I needed it more than I wanted to admit.

  Vera called back after I had finished the burger, as I was draining the last of the water and moving to the fries and coffee.

  “I’ve run projections.”

  “Of course you have…”

  I drank half the coffee in one go and forced myself to slow down enough not to choke.

  “Walk me through it,” I said.

  And she did.

  Perimeter thinning, drone overwatch, signal jamming, bike lockdown, staggered exterior eliminations. Cut the power, funnel the evacuations into a kill box. Estimated time to isolate target: ninety minutes, minimum. Two hours for clean execution.

  It was clinical, smart. It would work. I hated it. I let her spell everything out as I finished my food, my hands stopped shaking after the second glass of water.

  When she finished, there was a small silence.

  “That’s the cleanest option,” she said.

  I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and stood. I paid the bill over a QR code pasted to the side of the register, the waitress nowhere in sight. Outside, the Ash air felt sharper. I checked the timer again.

  10:58:12.

  “Fuck that,” I said.

  A pause.

  “Elaborate.”

  “I’m done with the games,” I said, starting toward the drop point she’d marked earlier. “I don’t want clean. I want fast.”

  “That increases risk.”

  “It decreases time.”

  Silence.

  Then, calm and measured:

  “What are you asking for.”

  I didn’t slow down.

  “Something big.” I replied.

  There was a faint exhale on the line. Not quite a sigh. Not quite agreement.

  “Define big.”

  “Loud, with a heavy dose of what you usually call collateral.”

  She paused again.

  “Fine.”

  I blinked.

  “Clear the sentries two blocks east of the bar,” Vera continued, voice already back in motion. “Old parking structure. Roof access. I’ll send a payload.”

  I slowed a step.

  “That’s it?” I asked.

  “That’s it.”

  I let out a short breath that almost felt like a laugh. “What are you sending?”

  A pause.

  “You’ll see.” She replied, and cut the call.

  I grinned, she was done with this bullshit too.