Oskurdra 6, 2725
Early in the afternoon on the sixth day of Oskurdra, just after the skies had stopped spitting acid rain and the city’s gutter runoff sizzled its last, Calyra Val’Druna sprinted through the labyrinthine arteries of Taz’Vaar’s southern slums with a rare, untethered pulse of adrenaline in her veins. Puddles of burnt-green water hissed against her boots as she dodged broken scaffold rails and ducked beneath overhanging laundry lines, each step propelling her further from the grime-choked streets that had always tried to keep her small. The acidic rainfall still left a tang on the air, the kind that bit the tongue and kept everyone’s eyes sharp—a city’s way of warning its own not to get comfortable.
But Calyra was electric with the kind of news that cut through caution and routine. Tucked in her palm was a data core, its encoded files still warm from the contract uplink she’d hustled three districts over to snag before word got out. Her digital wristband flashed with the details—target data, last known movements, payout sum large enough to spin the entire slum rumor mill into a frenzy: 162 million Vekras. The number made her heart hammer against its synthetic casing. She’d never seen more than a few thousand Vekras at once, and here was a contract that could lift her and her crew clear out of anonymity—if it didn’t kill them first.
She darted through a tangle of alleyways where the air was thick with chemical mist and the buzz of jury-rigged air purifiers. Neon runoff bled into the cracks, and every wall was marked with the overlapping graffiti of a hundred syndicate warnings—none of it mattered now. Calyra barely registered the burn in her lungs or the ache in her legs; the news buoyed her, pushing her faster. She was a ghost with purpose, a courier with more than a message—she was carrying the future.
In her head, she ran through the names: Avenra, up on her rooftop perch, would barely blink at the news but would already be recalibrating wind maps and locking in kill zones. Spy—would probably blow out the door before she could finish the sentence, grinning like someone who’d finally been handed permission to level half the city. Together, they made a team nobody would bet on, and nobody wanted to owe—but this contract, this bounty, would change the game. No more small-time courier runs. No more barely-scraped-together tech scavenges. This was the kind of payday that came with both freedom and a target on your back.
And it wasn’t just any bounty. It was the bounty: Vazrenn Tholvin. A career saboteur whose name sent syndicate bosses into silent, nervous calculations. Dead or alive—dead preferred, but with a bonus that made the risk worth entertaining even for those who’d never held a gun. Tholvin was a myth most days: the shadow in the meshgrid, the crack in the city’s pulse, the reason the power cut out, and half a sector woke up afraid. A single contract, signed in the haze after a storm, could vault Calyra from underdog to legend—if she could survive the attention.
She skidded around a corner, her boots kicking up a cloud of scorched dust, and spotted the faded sign of the old bolt-hole where her crew sometimes gathered—a former tech den gutted by fire, now just walls and shadows. She ducked inside, pulse racing, already rehearsing how she’d tell them. Not just what they could win, but what it would cost. Her mind flicked through the odds, the known variables, the unspoken warnings burned into every wall of Taz’Vaar: contracts like this never came clean, and neither did the aftermath. But for the first time, she didn’t care.
She had news. She had a contract. And for once, it felt like the city’s twisted, rusted heart was beating in time with her own.
Calyra ducked through the half-collapsed doorway, breath still sharp from running, and found Spy already hunched on a battered crate, arms crossed, chewing the last of a protein bar with a look that said don’t waste my time. Across the gutted room, Avenra stood near the window slit, back straight, slate-grey eyes tracking the traffic on the rain-scorched street three stories below. Both glanced over—Spy with a slow up-down scan, Avenra with a blink you could miss if you didn’t know her.
Calyra didn’t bother with preamble. She flashed the data core and dropped it on the desk with a clack. “The Bounty just updated and I accepted. Vazrenn Tholvin. One hundred sixty-two million Vekras. Bonus if we haul him in breathing.”
Spy’s eyebrow twitched, just once. “Vazrenn Tholvin?” He let out a low whistle, then tossed the protein bar wrapper into the corner. “Did you get hit in the head on the way here, or are you actually serious?”
Avenra stayed quiet, but her focus narrowed on the wafer, face unreadable as ever. She spoke without looking at Calyra. “There’s a difference between ambition and suicide.”
Calyra shrugged, trying to keep the heat out of her voice. “No one else in the district’s seen it yet. This is the kind of job that—if we pull it off—nobody ever looks down on us again. We stop running scraps.”
Spy snorted, scraping his boot against the concrete. “Yeah, or we end up as blood spatter on the ten o’clock feed. That bounty’s not just high—it’s a death sentence. Tholvin’s fried more squads than I can count. The last team that tried, they’re still mopping up pieces in three districts.”
Avenra finally turned, arms folded, eyes steady on Calyra. “You want to put our names on the same page as every washed-up bounty crew and desperate syndicate scab in the city. He’s not just another target. He’s the reason syndicate bosses sleep with kill switches under their pillows. The payout’s high because the odds are lower than nothing.”
Calyra tried to sound braver than she felt. “We don’t go in loud. We don’t do what everyone else does. We find his blind spot. He’s only flesh and blood under all that hype—like anyone else.”
Spy gave a dry laugh. “That’s what they all say. Then he shorts your lungs with an EMP rig and leaves your bones humming for the next scavenger. You think he doesn’t have a dozen escape plans and a backup crew just waiting to mop up amateurs?”
Avenra’s silence was louder than anything Spy could manage. She looked back out the window, tension in her jaw. “I’ve watched his work. Infrastructure drops, blackouts, no patterns. He makes ghosts out of the best. No missed shots for me to cover. No angle clean enough to call safe.”
Calyra stepped forward, setting her jaw. “I’m not saying we walk into his den tomorrow. I’m saying, for once, we try. If we let it pass, someone else will take the shot. They’ll fail. Maybe it’s worth being the crew that didn’t just fade out.”
Spy cracked his knuckles, shaking his head. “You get a taste for glory, Val’Druna? ‘Cause that’s what gets you gutted in this city. We do this, we do it our way. No heroics. No standing in front of any damn camera. I’m not dying for a bounty slip, no matter how many zeroes are on it.”
Avenra finally looked at Calyra, a faint flicker of something like respect—or warning—in her eyes. “You find his weakness, you get me a shot, I’ll take it. But I’m not running down a legend for the story. We do this quietly. Surgical. The second it smells wrong, I’m gone.”
Calyra nodded, her resolve steeling beneath the weight of their skepticism. “No noise. No fame. Just results. We do it right, or we don’t do it at all.”
Spy let out a slow breath, glancing between them. “Alright. But if I see a bomb rig bigger than my arm, I’m blowing the exit before you can blink. Just sayin’.”
Avenra turned back to the window, voice flat and final. “Bring me a plan, not a dream, Calyra.”
And just like that, the deal was struck: fragile, dangerous, barely held together by the mutual knowledge that surviving Taz’Vaar meant sometimes betting everything, even when you knew the odds were poison.
****
Hours past, until the amber sun, Craehlil, was nearly below the horizon. And then an idea popped in Calyra’s head. “I got it! What if lure out Tholvin with a false flag op?”
Skeptically, Spy cocked his head, and let out a slow, gravelly exhale, fixing Calyra with a look somewhere between disbelief and dark amusement. “You ‘got it,’ huh? Last time somebody tried to lure Tholvin, half the Core’s power grid lit up like a funeral pyre and three syndicate execs lost their heads. You planning on sending him a polite invitation, or you want to paint a target on our backs big enough for every scav in the city to take a shot?”
Avenra didn’t look up from her wind map, but her voice cut sharp through the gloom. “False flag op… elaborate. Who do you want him to think is coming for him, and how do you plan on making it look real enough he’ll buy it?”
Calyra, emboldened by the spark of an actual plan, pressed on, eyes flickering with green intensity. “Everyone’s always gone after Tholvin direct. What if, instead, we make it look like the Ravvaar Syndicate is transporting something juicy. Something even Tholvin wouldn't pass up. We stage a fake armored transport—run a loud decoy through the right sector, broadcast just enough encrypted comms to catch his sniffers. Not obvious but tempting. He can’t resist a high-profile score, especially if he thinks he’s making a fool out of Ravvaar.”
Spy grunted, rubbing his jaw. “Yeah, that’s all clever—till you realize we’re broke. You want muscle? Hired guns? A rig that’ll survive five minutes in such a situation? Cal, we don’t even have enough cash for a basic Wraithmaw, let alone a syndicate-grade armored convoy. What, you planning to tape some scrap metal to a cargo cart and pray Tholvin doesn’t notice?”
Avenra’s eyes flicked up, flat and measuring. “Resources. Details. You need at least three crews to pull this, plus a safe zone, plus a manifest that passes a sniff test. Who’s faking the chatter? Who’s driving the rig? And what do we do when someone wants a slice before Tholvin even shows up?”
Calyra hesitated, but the idea was still burning. “We could call in favors. I know a couple street kids who’ll work cheap, maybe cobble together something that looks the part. Use junk tech, a patched manifest, old meshnet boards—make the bait loud but not clean. We hang back, tail anyone tailing us, and wait.”
Spy just shook his head, lips twitching. “We can barely keep our own gear running. You want to run a full false flag op; you need more than hope and pocket change. Ravvaar catches a whiff, or Tholvin’s crew smells a setup, we’re dead before the game even starts.”
Avenra didn’t budge, voice like a warning. “We’d have to scavenge every component, borrow every face, and still be ready to torch the plan if even one piece falls through. One slip, we’re not just broke. We’re target practice for every merc in the district.”
Calyra managed a shaky grin. “Look, maybe it’s reckless. But if we play it small, subtle, maybe… just maybe he’ll bite. And if not? At least we can say we tried something besides waiting to rot.”
Spy laughed, short and dark. “Fine, you dream it up, I’ll dig through the junkyard. But if this falls apart, you’re patching my wounds yourself.”
Avenra looked away, already calculating exits. “Prep your fallback. We don’t bet what we can’t afford to lose.”
Calyra nodded, resolve flickering. “Deal. We keep it tight. If it smells wrong, we vanish. Agreed?”
Spy clapped her on the shoulder, heavier than he meant. “Let’s get to work. No one ever got rich playing it safe, right?”
Avenra’s reply was just a quiet, tired, “Just don’t get dead.”
****
Calyra’s terminal flickered in the midnight-amber haze of her tech den, code cascading across the cracked display. Her nerves were raw from a forty-hour hustle—begging favors, stretching junk tech, patching plans together with hope and static. Spy was off scrounging parts, Avenra had vanished to scout rooftops. Every lead felt like old glue—sticky, brittle, no real hold.
So, when the door lock cycled without warning—a triple-pulse she didn’t recognize—she reached for her blade out of pure reflex. It didn’t matter. The man who stepped through didn’t move like a thief or a threat. He just filled the space with the kind of authority that made questions die in your throat.
Tarvenn Draxxis. Black coat, iron posture, face like the city’s unfinished end, eyes that pinned her to the chair. The room felt too small, the air was too thin.
He didn’t sit, didn’t waste a greeting. Just scanned her, expression set to default: neutral, unreadable, judgment passed before a word was spoken.
“Val’Druna,” Draxxis said, tone so even it was almost artificial. “I hear you want to play Syndicate. That so?”
Calyra’s fist tightened. “Depends. If you’re here to close down my op, get in line—city’s full of people with better reasons.”
He didn’t smirk. He didn’t blink. He set a slim data core on the desk—a syndicate model, marked with the Ravvaar glyph for acquisition complete. “I’m here because you’ve got just enough nerve to make a mess. But not enough resource to make it last.”
She hesitated, then: “You’re offering something? Or just here to watch me drown slower?”
“Both,” he replied, still standing, still all muscle and focus. “You want to bait Tholvin, make him think Raavvar’s got a prize worth stealing. Problem is, you don’t have what it takes to look like a target.” His eyes flicked to the string of broken hardware and jury-rigged comms cluttering her workspace. “What you do have is a willingness to bleed for a payout, and a record of not folding when things turn sideways.”
Calyra swallowed, wary. “So, what, you bankroll me? Set up a decoy run and let me hang in the wind?”
Draxxis leaned forward, hands braced on the desk—just enough pressure to signal this was not a negotiation. “Here’s how it works. You get my convoy, my route, and my assets—for a window, nothing more. You make the show, keep it loud. If Tholvin bites, you keep him locked down until my teams move. You get paid if you survive. If you screw it up, or if your crew draws heat before the switch, you vanish. No bounty, no payout, no warning. Understand?”
She couldn’t help the laugh, dry and nervous. “That’s your offer? Risk our necks to smoke out the biggest ghost in the city, just for the chance at a payout?”
Draxxis stared her down, cold and pitiless. “You want to be big league? You play with real pieces. This is your one shot at leverage—after this, your names go back to background noise. Take it, or don’t. Makes no difference to me.”
Calyra hesitated for a breath, then nodded—because what else do you do, when the Syndicate hands you the razor?
“I’ll need time to prep. My crew—”
“Already factored,” Draxxis interrupted, pressing the datachip closer. “Convoy leaves in thirty-six hours. You’ll find everything you need in here. Fail, and I clean it myself.”
He turned to leave, pausing at the door. “One last thing, Val’Druna: Don’t confuse opportunity with mercy. Ravvaar doesn’t forgive mistakes. And I don’t repeat myself.”
The lock cycled again, then he was gone—vanished as cleanly as he arrived, leaving only the weight of expectation and the ticking clock. Calyra sat in the sudden quiet, heart racing, mind already racing faster. They’d asked for a miracle. Now the price was written in syndicate blood.
****
Spy was pacing, boots thudding against the cracked tile, arms folded so tight his jacket seams looked ready to give out. Avenra stood by the window, barely visible in the dusk, silent as a rumor. Calyra dropped the syndicate data core on the table with a metallic thunk. “Got us a sponsor,” she said, voice a little too steady. “Ravvaar Syndicate. One of the top agents. Tarvenn Draxxis.”
That name froze the room. Spy stopped, mid-step, mouth hanging open. “You’re kidding. Tell me you’re kidding. That guy’s a myth—he’s the reason supply drops don’t make it past sector three without getting stripped bare.”
Avenra didn’t move, but her gaze flicked over. “He approached you directly?”
Calyra nodded. “Walked right in. Offered us a window—one convoy, all the assets we need, but it’s a one-shot deal. If we pull it off, Tholvin’s ours. If we screw it up, we’re ghosted for good. No payout. No second chance.”
Spy dragged a hand down his face, muttering, “Of all the people to get noticed by you had to pick the one whose idea of a warning is a closed casket.”
Calyra gave him a half-smirk. “I didn’t pick anything. He just... showed up. Said we were already making enough noise to matter. Figured if we wanted to play at syndicate level, we might as well get a taste.”
Avenra pushed off the wall, arms crossed, considering. “Resources change the math. But it means they’re watching every move. The second we look sloppy; they’ll cut the feed. Maybe cut us, too.”
Spy scowled, shaking his head. “Can’t believe I’m saying this, but… it almost sounds like a trap. Give us the bait, watch us get chewed up, then sweep up the pieces when Tholvin’s done.”
Calyra’s voice was low, but there was steel in it. “That’s how it is. We get thirty-six hours. Prep, plan, execute. We run the decoy convoy, look like the prize, and hold the line until R-SEC moves in. If it works—biggest score this city’s seen. If not…”
Spy snorted, finishing for her, “If not, we end up another warning on Draxxis’ desk.”
For a moment, nobody spoke. The city outside buzzed with static, neon bleeding through the cracks. Avenra finally broke the silence, her voice flat as stone. “We do this, it’s by the book. No shortcuts, no improvising for glory. One mistake, we don’t get to learn from it.”
Spy sighed, glancing between them, resolve creeping in behind the sarcasm. “Alright, Cal. If we’re doing this, we do it loud and we do it together. Just promise me—when this goes sideways, I get to pick which wall we blow out first.”
Calyra managed a real smile—small, worn, but honest. “Deal. Thirty-six hours. Let’s make it count.”
Calyra slapped up the holo-map, Taz’Vaar’s southern corridor flickering in amber and blue. “Okay, here’s what we’ve got. Draxxis gave us a window—route C-11, edge of Ravvaar turf. Convoy specs are locked: one armored hauler, two dummy escorts, full signal-jammer array. Cargo’s flagged as biotech, high-value, but it’s empty. All show.”
Avenra’s eyes scanned the topography, voice measured. “Blind spots here, here, and here,” she said, tapping three choke points. “That’s where Tholvin’s crew will hit. No drones—he’ll want to cut power first, then move fast. He’s never used the same entry vector twice.” Spy grunted, mouth full, “Yeah, but he’s got to know it’s bait. Nobody runs prime biotech without a full syndicate garrison. He’ll be watching for the double-cross.”
Calyra nodded. “That’s why we give him the double-cross. I rigged the convoy manifest with a secondary ping—encrypted, looks like a dirty Ravvaar side-deal. Tholvin loves those. He’ll want to intercept, peel back the layers, prove he’s smarter than us.”
Avenra flicked her gaze to Spy. “How loud can you go if he brings back up?”
Spy’s grinned was all teeth. “Loud enough for a crater.”
Calyra looked between them, adrenaline sparking in her eyes. “It’s not about force. It’s about timing. We give Tholvin the window—make him think he’s got us boxed. The second he moves; we drop the perimeter and lock him in.”
Avenra considered. “We’ll need fallback routes—if he ghosts, we follow. I’ll take overwatch on the old canal bridge, high enough to see the play, far enough to keep out of his pulse range. If he’s got drone eyes, I’ll spot them.”
Spy started assembling a crude block model out of spent power cells. “And if he ghosts us—again?”
Calyra shrugged. “Then we burn the plan, scatter, and disappear. But if we’re lucky… we’ll have every lens in the city aimed at our play. And Tholvin won’t be able to help himself.”
Avenra’s tone was clipped, but not unkind. “You want him cornered, Calyra. But this is Tholvin. Cornered is when he’s at his most dangerous.”
Spy leaned back, crossing his arms. “Yeah. Which is why we keep the exit hot, and I get to blow something up, no matter what.”
A tense pause, then Calyra—smiling, real this time. “Best case, we walk away rich. Worst case? At least it won’t be boring.”
They all nodded, wordless for a moment, the weight of what’s coming hanging heavy but electric. Plans start turning, quietly, in each mind. It’s not a sure thing. It’s not even sane.
But in Taz’Vaar, that’s just another day.
****
Oskurdra 8, 2725
The old tech den seemed smaller now, packed with borrowed hardware, digital maps flickering across every surface, and the three of them packed close—plotting, arguing, dreaming. Calyra lost herself in the chaos of it all, forgetting the grime clinging to her boots and the stinging tang of the city still caught in her lungs. Every sound they made was drowned by the hum of their shared heartbeat: 162 million Vekras. On the table between them, cloaked in holographic shadow, lay the syndicate route. Each point pulsated with a threat that tasted sharp on her tongue—a deadly promise tying her crew to Draxxis' ticking clock and the deadly game they were about to play. Images ricocheted in her mind—scorching alleyways filled with acid rain, syndicate members she'd crossed paths with on runs that felt like another lifetime, faces that no longer held names, lives razed in pursuit of a payout that often felt too elusive.
Spy interrupted Calyra's thoughts while assembling a block model of the city with scavenged parts. His coarse voice cut through the room's static hum. "And if Tholvin decides to smoke out Draxxis's crew? Or if he smells the rat and decides to sit this one out?"
Calyra’s eyes flashed to the block model, her angular face steely but not unkind. “Then we run interference. We’re small enough to fly under his radar, but just sharp enough to sting. We have element of surprise.” She gave the holograph a hard look, her thumb running over the edges of the device in thought. “And if he tries to sit this one out… we’ll make sure he can’t resist.”
Avenra studied her from the corner, her slate-grey eyes unreadable. The usual tenseness in her shoulders was replaced with a strange sort of calm – the kind that came before a storm or a well-planned assassination. "So," Avenra started, the one word filled with as many questions as if there were stars in the sky. "We're pawns in a syndicate game now?"
"Better pawns than pieces off the board," Spy mused, his attention on a piece of old tech he was cannibalizing for parts.
Calyra watched her team—the raw nerve of Spy, always ready to burst into action and the cool, precise Avenra, every move calculated and methodical. Her heart pounded against its synthetic casing as she considered their pending collision with Tholvin. Still, she held her ground, her gaze steady, "We're not pawns," Calyra said quietly, her gaze steady. "We're players. And we don't just play this game – we change it." Spy seemed satisfied with that, returning to his tinkering with a smirk and nod of approval. "That's the spirit, boss lady."
Avenra’s gaze didn’t waver. “Let’s hope Tholvin feels the same way,” she said flatly.
Calyra gave her a confident grin, an insolent spark in her eyes. "I'm counting on it."
The following hours blurred into frantic preparation and planning. Spy worked tirelessly on rigging their scant hardware while Avenra fine-tuned their comms, each antenna crackling a harsh rhythm that echoed with the city's static. Calyra, in the meantime, sorted through the syndicate info Draxxis had left them, her fingers dancing over holographic displays as she studied routes and intel until her eyes ached. A marathon of diagrams and speculation, endless iterations of their plan played out in front of them. Each time ending with either a triumphant grin or a curt shake of the head. The hours leading up to the operation were filled with frantic energy and an unspoken tension crackling in the air like a live wire.
As dawn began to seep through the dust-caked windows, each of them felt a creeping exhaustion threatening to pull them under. But the burn that comes with too much adrenaline and too little rest was drowned out by the steady hum of determination.
Calyra's hands rested over the syndicate route, the hologram throwing an eerie glow onto her face as she ran through every possible scenario one last time. The sting of her burnt memories and their shared uncertainty held an intense tension in each pause of their conversation.
And then Spy, with a final twist of his thermal cutter, gave their battered hardware a satisfied pat. “As good as it gets,” he declared and stepped back, wiping sweat and grime off his forehead with a grease-stained sleeve. His wide grin displayed a sense of accomplishment. "Once Tholvin's crew hits the decoy, they'll think they've stepped on a nest of Scintilla roaches."
Avenra abandoned her comms station, crossing over to examine Spy's handiwork, her eyes scanning the setup with an evaluative glance. She nodded with approval. “It’ll do the job.”
“Damn right it will," Spy said. "I even installed a fail-safe just in case things get crispy.” He flicked a tiny switch on the device’s shell, revealing a red LED. "Push this and the whole setup goes dark. We don’t want to give Tholvin any more surprises than planned."
Calyra visibly exhaled, her gaze lingering over the rigged hardware as if in silent prayer. “Honestly, Spy, it’s a marvel,” she admitted, a note of genuine admiration in her voice. “But let’s hope we don’t need that fail-safe.”
“The fail-safe isn’t for us,” Spy retorted with a glint of mischief in his grey eyes. “But it's always nice to have backups for backups.” Avenra smirked, tucking away her thoughts with a soft sigh.
****
After another hour, the three headed out to rendezvous from Draxxis’ assigned pickup point—in front of Shard Tower. Draxxis himself was there waiting, flanked by two R-SEC enforcers whose faces were blanker than the amber hazed sky overhead. He was the kind of presence that shut down small talk before it started. Draxxis stood motionless by an armored transport, the Ravvaar glyph glinting dull on his wristband—his coat falling in sharp lines, as if ironed by willpower alone. No show of force. Just the kind of controlled calm that made people cross the street.
Spy nudged Calyra as they crossed the cracked pavement, muttering out of the side of his mouth, “This is the part where he tells us the fine print is written in our blood, right?”
Calyra shot him a look. “Just keep your hands where they can see them.”
Avenra didn’t say anything. She kept her eyes moving—windows, rooftops, every shadow that could hide a sniper or a syndicate observer. Habit, not fear.
Draxxis fixed his gaze on the trio, his stare so even it felt like gravity. “You’re late,” he said. It wasn’t a threat. Just a fact. He nodded to one of his enforcers, who opened the rear cargo hatch with a gesture, revealing the decoy hauler—fresh paint, fake manifest, zero margin for error. “Everything’s as agreed. Route C-11 is pre-cleared. Your asset markers are coded. You have twelve hours to make Tholvin move. Don’t drag your feet.”
He stepped closer, voice dropping low so only they could hear. “This is not a contract. This is a test. Ravvaar doesn’t waste time on candidates who disappoint.” His gaze lingered just a fraction longer on Calyra. “Any deviation, any hesitation—you disappear, and the city never knows who you were.”
Spy tried to play it cool, hands in his pockets, but even he couldn’t meet Draxxis’ eyes for long. “Yeah, well, we like a good challenge. Keeps us from getting bored.”
Draxxis didn’t respond—just turned away, signaling his enforcers. “Convoy launches on my mark,” he called back over his shoulder. “Don’t contact me again unless Tholvin is dead or in-custody. Don’t fail.”
Avenra watched him go, expressing flat. “That’s the friendliest goodbye I’ve had all week.”
Calyra exhaled, steadying herself. She slipped behind the wheel of the lead decoy, booting up the convoy’s encrypted comms. “Alright, everyone to your stations. This is our window. No mistakes.”
Spy slung his minigun into the escort vehicle, giving the hauler an approving slap. “Let’s make a little history.”
Avenra climbed atop the rear vehicle, settling in with her rifle and wind-maps—eyes already tracing possible sightlines and ambush vectors, every muscle in her body locked to purpose.
For a second, it was quiet. Just the low hum of idling engines, the neon haze of Shard Tower looming behind them, the sense of a thousand eyes watching from unseen corners. Calyra keyed her comm, voice cool but charged with the same wild hope that had driven her through the rain. “Convoy’s rolling. Showtime.”
Spy’s voice crackled back, just as sardonic as ever: “Try not to get us all killed, yeah?”
Avenra’s only reply was a soft click, already eyes-on, every sense trained on the city beyond.
And with a surge of power, the convoy rumbled forward—out from the shadow of Shard Tower, into the heart of Taz’Vaar, and straight toward the teeth of the most dangerous game the city had to offer.
****
Six hours into the operation, the city’s sprawl had thinned to slag heaps and the skyline bruised under distant chemical haze. Their convoy rumbled over pitted concrete, just past the city-limits of Taz’Vaar—static droning on the comms, Spy picking at the detonator trigger every five seconds. Not a trace of Tholvin. Not a shadow of the Red Marauders. Avenra’s overwatch comm was cold silence. Even Calyra’s nerves, usually sharp as wires, started to twitch. Something wasn’t right.
She kept checking the rear cams, knuckles tight on the wheel. Every kilometer, the tension stretched thinner, like a string ready to snap. Oil-rain shimmered off the battered convoy hulls, streaking rainbow trails across the windscreen. The world out here was all scorched grit and collapsing fence-line, the city’s pulse replaced by the low, industrial hum of ruin and distance.
Then, without warning, the dashlights went dead. Every servo seized. All systems flatlined. The convoy lurched to a dead halt as a sour whine—high and invasive—echoed through the hull. Calyra’s spine went rigid. EM attack. Not just any hack—his signature. Tholvin’s calling card. For a breath, nothing moved. Air stilled, tension crackled, and all the static noise seemed to drain out of the world.
Then from the chemical fog, the crunch of armored tires. Multiple Wraithmaw transports—thick, brutish, gleaming with the kind of care only desperate crews give stolen syndicate tech—slid into a flanking position. The doors banged open, boots hit the gravel, and the Marauders poured out: dozens, fanning out like they’d rehearsed this ambush for months. Vazrenn Tholvin stepped from the lead vehicle, gaunt and smiling, a data-tether wrapped around his wrist, eyes hunting for the kill before the game began.
But the city’s favorite nightmare brought friends. Alongside the Marauders’ ranks—were four Varsh’ka War-beasts. Each stood over three meters at the shoulder, their plated backs rippling with bone-ceramic ridges, red ocular implants scanning in a rolling pulse. Breath steamed from their jaws, laced with the stink of oil, ozone layer, and something older. Every step they took left the ground dented, claw-marks gouged into the ashy gravel.
A sick, animalistic rumble came from one as it flexed, claws digging trenches in the scorched earth. The chitinous armor was webbed with old, sun-faded syndicate paint and fresh scars from a life on the fringe. Neural ports at their cervical ridge spat weak static—occasional flashes of half-buried commands, flickering in the haze. As the beasts squared off in front of the Marauders, their cybernetic eyes pulsed with a dead red, scanning for threats with the cold intelligence of something that only remembers violence.
Calyra’s blood went cold. Even Spy—who’d been grinning at the prospect of a stand-up fight—suddenly faltered, hand drifting to the backup detonator, grip white-knuckled. The confidence drained from his voice, replaced by honest dread. “Oh, fuck me. No one said Tholvin had those?!”
The Varsh’ka lined up in front of the Marauders like a mobile wall. Chitinous armor fused with old syndicate paint. Neural ports flickered with static at the base of each skull. Their red eyes locked on the convoy, calculating, waiting. One beast raked the earth with a foreclaw the size of a car door, sending up a spray of gravel and melted road.
Inside the vehicle, Spy muttered a prayer that was mostly curse words. Calyra spoke up first, her voice thin but defiant: “Spy, hold the line with your minigun! Avenra, cover support, I'll go after Tholvin.”
Outside, Tholvin’s voice cut across the distance—amplified, easy, edged with amusement. “You picked the wrong payday, kids. Walk away now and I’ll let the beasts take your gear instead of your heads.”
No one moved. The air buzzed with ozone and tension, like the world was holding its breath before a storm.
Avenra keyed her comm, whisper-quiet, eyes tracking movement on every rooftop. “He’s not bluffing, Cal. Those beasts go live; there’s no fallback. If you want your shot—this is the only window.”
Spy swallowed hard, thumbing the primer on his detonator. “If this goes bad, I’m burning the whole block.”
Calyra looked down at her trembling hands, steeled herself, then nodded. “We didn’t come this far to walk away.”
The Varsh’ka, as if on cue, stamped and flexed, jaws opening in a snarl. The Marauders readied their weapons. The city’s sun broke through the clouds for a moment, glinting off armor and guns, lighting the kill-zone like a warning.
Every eye—man and beast—locked on the crew. And in that instant, Thauzuno’s history of ruin and legend seemed to hang in the scorched air, waiting for someone to make the first, fatal move. Tholvin’s smile didn’t move, but something in his posture did—a micro-tilt of the head, as if he were listening to a frequency no one else could hear. The data-tether at his wrist blinked in a steady, predatory cadence. Behind him, the Marauders held their firing lines with disciplined stillness; their spacing was textbook—four meters, staggered offsets, muzzles angled shallow to avoid crossfire. Whoever drilled them earned their blood.
The Varsh’ka exhaled in sync, breath heat-warping the air. Their implant rings hissed with background discharge, little bleeds of current that turned the fine dust at their feet into a faint, sparking crust. Near the cervical ports, someone had daubed over old syndicate insignia with a slurry of grime and animal fat, the kind of field hack that kept ID readers confused and flies very interested. When one beast rolled a shoulder, the bone-ceramic plate caught a shard of weak sun and threw it, quick and mean, across the dead convoy glass.
Calyra sat very still, every muscle staging a quiet mutiny she refused to grant. The dash was a black slate; the HUD stayed dark. She could feel the EM blanket like a pressure headache behind her eyes—too clean for off-the-shelf, wrong for standard Wraithmaw jammers. Custom grid. Layered carriers. The whine wasn’t just suppression; it was mapping. He wasn’t only pinning them—he was reading them.
Spy’s breath dragged in rough and shallow through his nose, clicking against dry teeth. The detonator rocked in his palm with the cadence of a nervous metronome—tap, settle, tap, settle—keeping time with the little tremors that ran up his forearm. He had the minigun shouldered inside the dead escort, cheek pressed to cold metal, neck tendons hard as rebar. The safety discipline was there, which meant the fear was real. Spy got sloppy only when he felt safe. He wasn’t sloppy now.
Avenra’s feed steadied into a clean, thin line. No chatter, just a low hum in Calyra’s ear, a private current held taut. Somewhere beyond the static and the haze, a slate-grey gaze was measuring distances like a surgeon—wind vectors, particulate load, the glint patterns off Marauder optics, the micro-twitch at Tholvin’s jaw. Calyra pictured the reticle: not shaking, not drifting, resting on a point that mattered. It was almost a comfort, like a hand between the shoulders reminding a spine to stay upright.
“Tick-tock,” Tholvin called, not raising his voice, not needing to. The syllables carried on the flat air like they’d been printed there. “I’m a generous man. Limited time offer.”
He let the pause breathe, then angled his chin at the Varsh’ka. The nearest beast swiveled its head a few degrees—an economical, uncanny articulation that said machine before it said animal. The red oculars cycled through a focus sweep, quarter-second cadence, hunting counter-signatures. If they had scent matrices engaged, they weren’t broadcasting. If they had leash implants, the failsafes weren’t on speaking terms with anyone alive.
Calyra let her tongue press to the roof of her mouth, an old habit to keep words from coming out too fast. The city had taught her to hear the shape of a trap, to taste the shape of a mistake. This was both and neither. The plan had accounted for a lot: the route, the decoy chatter, the double-cross folded into the manifest, the ghosts in the rumor mills. Not for blackout beasts. Not for this particular pitch of silence.
Spy’s whisper found the comms as a vibration more than a sound. “Say the word, Cal. I can salt the front line before they blink.” A beat, two. Calyra didn’t look at him. “No fireworks yet,” she said, keeping her mouth barely moving. “He’s waiting for the obvious. Don’t give it to him.”
A soft click from Avenra, then her voice, dust-dry. “Seventeen rifles, six scatterguns, and three rocket launchers they think they’re hiding. One heavy on a pintle, left flank Wraithmaw, half-elevated. Four beasts, front wall; two of them favor right. Whoever trained them likes symmetrical openings, hates asymmetric closes. The tether on his wrist is talking to something you can’t see.”
“Drone?” Spy asked.
“No movement above forty meters,” Avenra replied. “Could be subsurface mesh nodes or a buried repeater. Doesn’t matter. It means redundancy.”
Calyra drilled a slow breath in. Draxxis’s voice scraped the back of her memory: This is not a contract. This is a test. Tests had grading keys. Grading keys liked control. The lack of an immediate syndicate pincer suggested the invigilators were happy to see how their candidates performed under an unplanned variable—or they were already here, unseen, an audience of one in three different masks.
Tholvin took another step, small, casual, like he was just finding a better patch of gravel. The Marauders didn’t track the movement with their muzzles. Professional. That meant drilled trigger discipline. That meant their first volley, when it came, would be vicious, and synchronized. When not if. Calyra filed the certainty where she filed all the others: the shelf with the knives.
“You’re quiet,” Tholvin observed, tone conversational. “Smart, some days. But quiet tends to get read as stubborn, and stubborn tends to get read as dead.”
A ripple of laughter found the Marauder ranks, brief and controlled. It died quick. Even jokes had muzzle discipline.
The Varsh’ka nearest the lead Wraithmaw huffed and scraped again, claw furrows deepening until a vein of pale aggregate showed under the cinder. Calyra clocked the strike angles automatically, the way someone from a flood zone watched clouds. The groove spacing aligned with a gait pattern that said the limb couplers had been field-replaced recently—slight binding at terminal extension, micro-hesitation on retraction. Weak spot. If a shot ever had to go there, it would have to thread a hair between moving bone and moving machine and the living rage they protected.
Spy stopped tapping the detonator for exactly one heartbeat—long enough for the silence to register—and then resumed. The sound had become a part of the world. Calyra found herself syncing to it, letting it set the tempo for her pulse. Behind her teeth, the taste of the EM field was going metallic.
“Anyone else smell solvent?” Spy whispered, out of nowhere.
“Burnt-cryo fuel, and petrified rain,” Avenra said, flat.
Calyra flexed her fingers once around the dead wheel, then stilled them. She let the plan march past her eyes in neat steps, each contingent and counter-contingent placing another tile. The double-ping in the manifest—the fake side-deal, the hook for a mind that loved to unmask other people’s secrets. The perimeter locks fused into the street furniture. The way out if the way out still existed. Every line on the holo-map was ash now, but ash still told you where the fire had been.
“Last chance,” Tholvin announced, and it was almost bored. “Leave the rigs, keep your boots, keep the blood in your skulls. Try for the hero payout, and these friends of mine see what your bones sound like.”
He didn’t gesture. He didn’t need to. The Varsh’ka held that wall with the implacable patience of siege engines, their red pulses slow and inhuman. The Marauders waited behind them like a shadow with fingers.
Calyra’s throat worked around the words she wasn’t going to say. The city had a thousand myths about the moment before violence: omens, gods, fate pretending to be physics. She didn’t need any of them. She needed timing. She needed angles. She needed her people to be exactly who they’d been every day up to this one.
“Avenra,” she murmured, barely a breath, “confirm the pintle left.”
“Locked. Shooter’s cheek weld is sloppy,” came the reply. “He’s nervous. Everyone else is not.”
“Spy,” Calyra said, eyes still on Tholvin, “if I cough, you freeze. If I inhale, you don’t blink. If I speak, you don’t interrupt.”
Spy’s chuckle was dry paper. “Copy. Try not to enjoy this.”
Calyra set her jaw, rolling tension into something she could spend later. The world stayed very bright and very still. The chemical haze thinned and thickened in lazy sheets. A distant structure shed a skin of rust in a whisper that sounded like rain that had forgotten how to fall.
Tholvin tipped his head again, the smile not moving. “Decision time.”
Calyra breathed once, slow, and even, and let the clock inside her reach zero without touching anything at all. She took one glance at Spy and nodded. They both climbed out of the truck at the same time and once Tholvin saw them, the grin on his face vanished.
“You are not Raavvar! Who the hell are you?!” he thundered.
Calyra turned to Spy. “NOW!” she said tossing a smoke charge at Tholvin and his Marauders, and almost instantly the Varsh’ka launched at her and Spy. Spy opened up fire and killed two of them, with the other two escaping his line of fire.
Smoke blossomed—thick, caustic, a curtain of gray-green static that swallowed shapes and turned edges to ghosts.
Spy’s minigun roared. The first Varsh’ka took the brunt at a quarter-run, bone-ceramic plates spiderwebbing before the torrent chewed through and toppled it on its own momentum. The second lurched into the stream to shield the line and caught a belt’s worth across the cervical ridge—implants sparked, ports blew, and two tons of engineered hate folded like bad scaffolding.
The other two were already moving—not forward, but wide. Smart. They peeled out of the kill-lane and let the smoke do what it was built to do.
Calyra broke left. Two strides, a slide—blade out, eyes on the tether pulsing at Tholvin’s wrist. He stepped into the smoke like it was a door he owned and came out of it on top of her line, impossibly fast for someone that lean. His hand snapped up, iron around her throat. Air cut to a whistle. Boots left ground. For a heartbeat she was weightless, the world a throb of static and the hydraulic stutter of her synthetic heart fighting the clamp.
Then he slammed her.
The impact punched the wind out of her and lit her nerves in white. Concrete bit. Her wristband flared and died. The blade skittered, a bright scrape in the dust. Tholvin didn’t raise his voice; he didn’t need to. “Not Ravvaar,” he said, more to the math of the moment than to her face. “So, what are you?”
A shape filled the world—jaws, ridges, and heat. One of the surviving Varsh’ka pivoted on a dime, momentum tight and terrifying, and came down at Calyra like a dropped engine.
"Spy hit it." Screamed Avenra.
He didn’t tackle the mass; he met the muzzle with his forearm, Kell-plating on bone slamming into reinforced jawline. The shock ran up to his shoulder like a live cable; something in his wrist screamed. He planted both boots, shock pads biting hard, and took the full drive without giving a centimeter, a wall taught to war by poverty and stubbornness.
“Move!” he grunted through his teeth—equal parts order.
The beast’s head rolled, crushing force levering against Spy’s frame. Its breath was hot solvent and old blood; its implants crackled against his skin. Its foreclaw came up for the rake that would turn both of them to red geometry—
[Crack]
Avenra’s shot cut sideways into the beast’s right forelimb at full extension, threading the gap she’d mapped two minutes earlier when it scraped the cinder. The coupler blew, a wet-metal pop beneath the plate. The Varsh’ka staggered, weight collapsing to three legs, jaws slackening just enough for Spy to rip his arm free and slam a shoulder into its throat to send it skidding away in a shower of grit. “Left coupler compromised,” Avenra said, already chambering the next. “Next shot breaks it.”
Calyra rolled, vision tunneling, and swept for her blade. Tholvin’s boot pinned her forearm before steel touched steel—weight precise, all nerve endings and leverage. The tether at his wrist flickered a new rhythm; the EM blanket fluttered for a blink, enough to make dead dash LEDs stutter and die again.
“I asked you a question,” he said, and leaned—pressure re-tightening on her throat with one hand while the other danced a micro-gesture in the smoke, the kind of command you only learn by surviving your own traps.
“Answer’s—” Calyra rasped, free hand flaring fingers, “—bad news.”
She raked her thumbnail blade across his tether.
Sparks kissed her cheek. Insulation parted. The cable didn’t sever—but something in the cadence stuttered. Out beyond the smoke, two Marauders flinched at the same instant as their ears had popped. The EM whine dipped a half note and came back meaner, now laced with a static tick that felt like a countdown.
Tholvin’s eyes narrowed, the first crack in the porcelain calm. “Oh,” he said softly, almost pleased. “You bite.”
Spy dragged a bloody forearm across his jacket, reset his stance between Calyra and the limping Varsh’ka. “Keep smiling,” he barked at the beast as it gathered, fury rebooting behind those red implants. “I only need you dumb for one more second.”
“Two on your right in the fog,” Avenra warned. “Marauders shifting elevation. Pintle gun waking up.”
Calyra twisted under Tholvin’s boot and drove both knees into his shin, not to break—she wasn’t delusional—but to steal a half-inch. It was enough to slip her pinned forearm a breath to the side, enough to pop the joint at her wrist and flick her slim pendant free. The cord burned across her neck as it came off, the unassuming “trinket” she wore for years suddenly a makeshift line-cutter.
She looped it for the tether again—
Tholvin let go of her throat and caught her by the front of her jacket, one-handed, with a recoil-calm that said he was bored of the question and interested in the answer. He lifted and slammed her a second time, harder, like he was trying to drive her into the subfloor. The lights went out—Calyra’s world snapped to black, her body limp as a dropped cable. As she fell, the pendant-line she’d looped snagged and finished the cut, the tether’s sheath parting with a bright spit of sparks.
“Earn your names,” he said, too close—to the air, to the problem, not to the girl already gone slack.
Spy’s detonator clicked in his palm. He didn’t thumb it. He jammed his ruined forearm up again as the Varsh’ka lunged a second time, letting augmented bone and cheap fury take the hit while his free hand shoved a canister charge into the seam Avenra had opened. “Open wide,” he hissed, grinning like a cracked statue. “Doctor says ‘ah.’”
“Spy—” Avenra snapped.
The Varsh’ka’s jaws closed on metal and hate. Spy’s arm screamed. The canister hissed, a flood of expanding foam slagging across mandibles and ports, locking muscles into a gluey stasis. The beast convulsed, clawing its own face as the foam flash-cured in the charged air. Its roar went to a strangled grind.
“Window,” Avenra said, already moving the reticle to Tholvin’s elbow. “Cal—”
No answer. Calyra lay unmoving, eyes shut, breath shallow.
Out beyond the smoke, three helmets jerked in unison; the pintle wavered; the EM field flickered hard enough to make the dead convoy lights pulse to a low, ghostly life as the severed tether spit and died.
Spy didn’t waste the beat. He tore his arm free, stepped in, and finished the trapped Varsh’ka—a brutal point-blank burst into the exposed red ocular, the round punching through gel and cortex. The monster went slack all at once, a collapsing scaffold of plate and rage.
Tholvin’s smile returned, smaller—head angling as he registered the tether’s death and the sudden silence where his control had been. He shifted—a half-step of recalculation—
—and Spy was already there, charging through the thinning smoke like a battering ram. He hit Tholvin from the blind side with all that industrial mass and bad temper, an iron forearm across the chest, the other hand fisting in the back of Tholvin’s coat. Momentum did the rest.
Steel met skull. Spy slammed Tholvin’s head into the hood of the dead hauler, the impact ringing the metal like a struck bell. Paint scuffed. Blood smeared. The data-tether’s stump sparked uselessly.
Under heavy fire, Spy grabbed both Calyra and Tholvin and carried them to one of Tholvin’s Wraithmaws. Calyra he placed in the front seat, while Tholvin he tossed and bound in the truck’s bed, then vaulted into the driver’s side.
Rounds spanged off the armored hull as the engine coughed to life. Spy jammed the throttle—turbo spooled, the Wraithmaw lurched, gravel geysered from under the tires. He punched a path through the thinnest knot of Marauders, bull-bar taking a body off its feet, then fishtailed around a slag heap toward the city’s bruised horizon.
“Avenra—now!” Spy barked.
Spy yanked the wheel; the Wraithmaw drifted a hard crescent, skirting a shattered fence-line. Avenra dropped from her perch to the moving bed with the grace of someone who’d practiced falling since birth, boots thudding beside Tholvin’s bound form. She slapped the tailgate control, sealed the bed, then slid up to the cab through the crawl slot, rifle already breaking down into a compact for interior work.
“Borrowed trick,” Spy muttered, jamming the Wraithmaw between a brine pit and a skeletonized substation. “Let’s give it back.” He palmed a magnesium pop from the dash, cracked it, and pitched it out the window. It arced white-hot and burst under the pintle rig’s bumper—light flared; driver flinched. Avenra’s shot stitched the flare’s after-glow and cored the pintle gunner at the hip; the rig slewed sideways, sheared a post, and cartwheeled into a ditch.
“Left,” Avenra said, calm as a metronome. “Two more.”
“On it.” Spy downshifted, dumped power to the rear, and brute-forced the Wraithmaw over a field of broken mag-rail ties. The truck shuddered like a kicked door; Calyra’s head rang; a trailing pursuer clipped a tie, went light over the rear axle, and vanished in a gout of dust. Tholvin’s voice drifted forward from the bed, steady and conversational. “You really think he’ll let you keep me?”
Spy bared his teeth at the mirror. “I plan to keep breathing. Everything else negotiable.”
The lead Marauder rig drew level on the right—red lenses glaring through haze. Its passenger leaned out with a tube on his shoulder.
“RPG,” Avenra said, already moving. She snapped the cab window, leaned into the rush, and sank a two-round burst into the loader’s clavicle. The tube barked wild; the rocket fishtailed up and exploded harmlessly in a plume of acid mist. The rig fell back, and the windshield starred. Avenra sealed the window and reloaded without looking.
Calyra looked at Spy’s arm. “Spy—your arm—”
He gripped the wheel harder; his forearm left bloody crescents on the leather. “Stings.”
“Your bone-lattice is showing,” Avenra said without inflection. “You’ve got ninety seconds before the shake gets you.”
“Plenty.” Spy grinned, then hissed as a bolt of pain arced up his shoulder. He forced the Wraithmaw into the trench; the suspension bottomed and banged; the chassis screamed; they shot into a dark channel cut with patchwork light. Behind them, the Marauders poured in, engines reverberating like a pack of dogs.
Draxxis again, closer somehow, as if he’d stepped into the cab: “Proceed. Gate One closing. You have three gates. Keep speed above sixty. Do not brake. Do not stop.”
The highway narrowed. The lane lines pinched into a mean throat of concrete and rust, the sort of bottleneck that punished hesitation with steel. Conduit ribs ghosted past inches from Spy’s mirror. Each gantry flashed by like a metronome blade, paint-scabbed and low enough to scrape the breath from the cab, close enough that old stickers and hazard chevrons seemed to skim the glass. Calyra braced a palm on the dash, the other clenched on her comm. Plastic bit her skin; the casing was warm and slick, humming with the city’s angry static, her grip grinding grit into the seams.
Spy blinked hard—once, twice—and the world fuzzed at the edges. Sound tunneled as if the cab were filling with cotton; the road became a gray ribbon that refused to stay still. The cab doubled. Two dashboards, two Calyras, two slivers of road fighting for primacy in a smear of motion. His good hand fell off the shifter, caught, tried again. The lever felt heavier than it should, his fingers slipping on a smear of blood and dust as the gearbox thunked, uncertain, between teeth.
“Calyra—” The name rasped out thin, half-swallowed by the engine’s ragged drone.
She leaned in, immediately. “You okay, Spy?” Her voice was clipped and steady, a hammer set square to the nail; she didn’t waste syllables on comfort they couldn’t afford.
“Take—wheel,” he ground out, voice slipping. “Don’t—brake.” The warning rode on instinct, the kind that remembered a tail full of teeth and momentum as a shield.
He slid sideways, dragging his ruined arm off the wheel. The sleeve’s fabric pulled, stuck, tore; the limb moved like a bad hinge. Calyra climbed over, knee in the console, hand on the leather, foot under his. Her boot wedged beside his heel to keep pressure on, the cab’s cramped geometry turning them into a tangle of bones and leverage. Spy slumped back, head knocking the seat, eyes rolling to half-mast. The thunk had finality; his breath came in the shallow, panicked rhythm of a body trying to stay present and failing.
Blood pattered on the floor mat in quiet, insistent drips. Each drop found its mark with maddening regularity, ticking off seconds they didn’t have. “Stay with me,” she said, sliding in, right hand snapping the wheel straight again. The column fought her—slack at center, then biting hard as the tires caught a scar in the pavement. “Spy? Spy?”
He blinked, tried for a joke, found only a ragged exhale. The shape of a grin dragged at the corner of his mouth, then died.
“Pick… the wall… you want.” The gallows line landed like a dare. His eyes fluttered and closed, the big frame finally going slack. The sudden weightlessness in the passenger seat made the cab feel emptier, louder, meaner.
Calyra’s jaw locked. Muscle turned to cable along the hinge of her face. She shoved the throttle with her heel, knuckles white on the wheel. The engine coughed, caught, and howled, a wounded animal that still knew how to run. “Avenra, keep them off me.”
“Always. But,” Avenra paused. “I don’t think I can do much? Sixty more Wraithmaws, Revenants and even drones just joined the pursuit!”
“Damn! The research I did on Tholvin never mentioned he was this equipped or connected. This is some serious Syndicate-level shit!” stated Calyra trying to keep Tholvin’s Marauders behind them. Her eyes cut between the road ahead and mirrors. “Come-on, Calyra…think!” she said to herself. The words were a metered beat, forcing cognition through adrenaline’s chokehold. Then it hit her. There was a narrow passage near the Core district that lead almost directly to Shard Tower. A maintenance throat carved for service rigs and waste haulers, forgotten by everyone who wasn’t desperate. A shortcut as it were, the Wraithmaw would be a tight fit, but just enough to escape…hopefully as Tholvin’s crew could only follow single file down the tunnel.
She quickly and violently made a sharp right turn and began heading for the tunnel passageway. The chassis rolled, tires shrieked, cargo straps groaned; gravity tried to throw them into the conduits, and she refused it, hips and wrists working the mass like a stubborn door. :Calyra?! What are you doing?” stated Avenra.
“A shortcut that I’m hoping will allow us to lose Tholvin’s crew.”
“What? A shortcut? Where?”
“The old maintenance tunnel underneath Axiom Dataworks’ corporate offices. It is wide enough to allow vehicles to pass through one at a time. Avenra, when I give the signal, shoot the first Wraithmaw that follows us in so that it block further pursuers.”
“Don’t have to tell me twice. Tholvin’s bounty had better be worth all this.”
“It will, Av. We’re in the final stretch. Once we get Tholvin to the drop-off at Shard Tower, we can collect that 162mil on his head.”
The wraithmaw’s chassis jolted as Calyra wrenched them into the mouth of the tunnel, steel ribs scraping sparks off the armored flanks. Darkness swallowed them whole; the neon haze of the city cut away in a blink. The echoes of pursuit grew louder—engines howling, Pursuing wraithmaws chewing concrete as they bore down in single file.
Spy’s head lolled against the glass. His breath was shallow, rattling like an old exhaust pipe. Calyra stole a half-second glance and saw his lips move—maybe a curse, maybe a prayer—but his eyes stayed closed. No time. Not now.
Avenra’s voice was a taut wire in her ear. “First Wraithmaw’s inside. I’ve got the shot.”
“Wait for it,” Calyra snapped, swerving hard to avoid a collapsed maintenance gantry. Sparks showered the windshield, orange flares swallowed by black. “We need them deeper. Pin the head, the rest choke behind.”
The tunnel’s throat narrowed, forcing the Marauder column to stretch thin. The lead Wraithmaw’s headlights lanced across the cab’s mirrors, blinding, predatory. Avenra’s breath steadied in the comms, the silence of a predator holding strike.
“Now,” Calyra barked.
Avenra’s rifle thundered from her perch in their wraithmaw’s bed. The round punched through the driver’s windshield, igniting in a magnesium bloom that turned the tunnel’s damp air into white hellfire. The vehicle convulsed, tires shrieking, and slammed sideways into the ribbed wall. Steel folded, sparks cascaded, and the tunnel clogged with grinding wreckage.
The roar of colliding Marauder rigs thundered down the passage, a chain reaction of metal screaming on metal. Engines died, gunfire erupted too late, and the entire pursuit became a snarled graveyard of steel and flame.
Calyra leaned into the throttle, the cab shaking so hard her teeth clicked. Spy stirred, coughed, and groaned—words lost, but alive. She spared no more glances. Not until the dash read daylight ahead. Behind them, the tunnel had become a tomb.
Once Calyra was sure they lost Tholvin’s marauders, she holo-called Tarvenn Draxxis; to let him know they were on their way to the drop-off location with Vazrenn Tholvin in custody. The comms rang for several moments before Draxxis picked up.
“Director of Ravvaar Requisitions, Draxxis speaking. Who is this?”
“Draxxis, it’s Calyra Val’Druna. We are on our way with Tholvin, alive and bound. Be ready to receive him.”
The image resolved—Draxxis’ face cut from stone, eyes like cold slate. He did not immediately reply, and the silence stretched until Calyra felt the weight of it in her ribs. Finally, his voice came, even and sharp. “Alive. Bold choice. Most crews turn-in targets dead.” His gaze narrowed, tracking her through the flicker of static. “I trust your cargo is secure?”
Calyra flicked her eyes toward the rear restraints. Tholvin sat bloodied but smirking, wrists cinched by mag-cuffs. Tholvin hadn’t said a word since the tunnel claimed some of his men, but his silence was louder than any taunt. “He’s not going anywhere,” she answered.
Spy groaned from the passenger seat, half-conscious but managing a rasp. “Yet.”
Avenra’s voice bled over the comms from her rear position in the bed with Tholvin. “Perimeter is quiet. No signals, no tails. If the Marauders made it out of that choke, they’re limping.”
Draxxis leaned closer to the holo, his features unreadable. “Shard Tower will be ready. Do not deviate from the marked ingress corridor. And Val’Druna—” He paused, a razor smile touching the edge of his mouth. “Bring him in breathing.”
The channel cut before she could reply, leaving only static and the hollow thrum of the cab. Calyra exhaled, jaw tight. She adjusted the wheel, keeping the convoy pointed toward the glowing spire of Shard Tower that pierced the horizon like a shard of frozen light.
Spy shifted, wincing, muttering, “Feels like walking into our own funeral.”
Calyra glanced at him, then at Tholvin’s smile gleaming faintly in the shadows. “Not if we play this right.”
Avenra’s dry tone cut in again. “Play it right? Cal, we’re walking into Shard Tower with the Syndicate’s most wanted and the Syndicate’s most dangerous in the same room. ‘Right’ stopped being on the table three moves ago.”
Calyra gritted her teeth, eyes hard on the tower ahead. “Then we make our own table.”
The engine hummed, the city lights bent, and the road to Shard Tower closed around them like a jaw.
The drive to Shard Tower seemed easier without Tholvin’s Red Marauders in tow, the city’s arteries opening like a reluctant truce after hours of grinding pursuit. The neon haze softened at the edges, traffic thinned, and the constant hum of engines chasing their tail finally fell silent. But inside the cab, the weight hadn’t lifted—Spy’s shallow breathing, Tholvin’s chained smirk in the back, and Avenra’s constant scanning clicks over comms all pressed down heavier than the empty roads. Ahead, Shard Tower loomed larger with every kilometer, its glass-and-alloy skin catching what little light the city bled, a beacon and a warning in equal measure.
“There it is, Shard Tower,” said Calyra, her voice low, almost reverent as the spire’s silhouette cut the skyline.
“Ever been here before?” asked Avenra, tone flat but tinged with something that might’ve been curiosity.
“Not me,” Calyra replied, fingers tightening on the wheel. “Never had a reason to get this close. Too many eyes, too much power wrapped up in one building.”
Spy stirred beside her, forcing out a dry chuckle through the pain. “Figures our first visit would be to drop off the devil himself.” His gaze flicked weakly toward the rear, where Tholvin sat bound, smile undimmed, as if he were the only one who already knew how this would end. The Tower loomed closer, its armored base ringed with dark silhouettes—enforcers, drones, and security bots that didn’t need to show teeth to promise violence. The road narrowed, funneling them toward a single ingress, every meter feeling less like arrival and more like judgment.
As they grew closer, Calyra noticed Draxxis himself, and two others. One looked like some sort of cyborg, and the other appeared to be Kael Ravvyn, director of the Ravvaar Syndicate. They slowly pulled up along the curb, the vehicle’s idle growl fading into the electric hum of the Tower’s perimeter field. Draxxis stood motionless, hands clasped behind his back, his coat a black slash against the shimmer of security barriers.
Calyra’s gut tightened as she killed the engine. This was no routine handoff; it was theater staged on the curb of Taz’Vaar’s most notable address, every camera and sentinel in passive vigil. She eased out of the cab and moved to the curb with slow, deliberate steps—boots on alloy, heart a steady drum under the collar. Draxxis was the first to speak, voice flat as an audit: “Ms. Val’Druna—” At the sound of her name, made one of Ravvyn’s eyes flick, a small, precise twitch that read like a calibrating sensor; he said nothing, letting Draxxis finish. “Let’s see your prize, and then we can discuss the reward payout.”
“Right. Avenra—bring him,” Calyra said, concise and ironed, ready to hand over the consequence of their gamble.
Avenra hopped down from the Wraithmaw’s bed with Tholvin in tow, dragging him forward in short, unceremonious steps until his boots scraped the curb. She shoved him into the circle of light spilling from Shard Tower’s perimeter field, forcing him to stand before Draxxis and the other Syndicate leadership. Her voice carried, crisp and cutting through the hum of the city.
“Draxxis, leaders of the Ravvaar Syndicate—allow me to present Taz’Vaar’s most wanted criminal, mercenary commander and scourge of the southern corridors, Vazrenn Tholvin, leader of the Red Marauders.”
Tholvin lifted his head despite the restraints, blood streaking one temple, a feral grin twisting his face. Even bound, he radiated defiance, as though the introduction were less humiliation than coronation. The name alone sent a ripple through the onlookers—a moment’s silence charged with the weight of a legend finally dragged into the open.
Kael Ravvyn, Director of the Ravvaar Syndicate, was the first to break the silence. His voice was smooth but edged with steel, carrying the weight of authority honed by years of absolute command. “Well, well—Ms. Val’Druna, was it? It appears you and your crew have managed what other crews ten times your number could not. You’ve brought in Vazrenn Tholvin—alive, no less. Tell me…” His eyes narrowed, glinting with suspicion layered over intrigue. “…how?”
The question wasn’t idle curiosity—it was a blade; each word pressed deliberately to cut and expose. Calyra paused, the hesitation taut and brief, before answering with a steady edge: “When I take a job, I don’t stop until it’s done. Done right.”
Ravvyn’s lips twitched into something between disdain and amusement. “Interesting. And yet your contract record suggests otherwise. Four postings. Three failures. One success.” He leaned slightly forward; his tone dipped in quiet derision. “Not exactly the profile of a relentless professional.”
“Luck was on our side, and…”
“Luck?” Ravvyn cut in, his voice sharp as broken glass. “You’re telling me you bested Taz’Vaar’s most violent mercenary by being lucky?”
“Not just that—she had us!” Spy rasped as he stumbled out of the Wraithmaw, his boots scraping the curb. Blood ran freely down his mangled arm, bone jutting white through torn flesh, the skin around it already darkening, necrotic in patches as if rot had set in seconds instead of days. Each stagger left a red trail behind him.
Calyra’s optic HUD flared, Spy’s biomonitor overriding her vision in harsh crimson text: [CRITICAL! TAKE MEDICAL ACTION NOW]. The alert pulsed in sync with his faltering heartbeat, each ping a hammer against her chest, the weight of his collapse threatening to unravel the hard-won theater of control at Shard Tower’s gates. “Spy? Are you—” Calyra started, panic rising in her throat.
Spy didn’t hear her, or refused to. He kept his fury aimed at Ravvyn, words breaking through ragged breaths. “Why the third degree?! We completed the bounty contract! Hauled in Vazrenn Tholvin—dead or alive—that should be… that should be…” His voice cracked, the last syllables lost as his body gave way.
He crumpled to the ground with a sickening weight, blood pooling fast beneath him. Calyra and Avenra dropped beside him in unison, their voices colliding: “SPY!” Calyra’s HUD screamed in scarlet—biomon alarms pulsing, vitals plunging. The readouts weren’t numbers anymore; they were death sentences counting down.
Draxxis moved with startling speed, kneeling at Spy’s side. His composure fractured just enough to mutter, “Damn. This is not good.” His hands were already probing the wound with brutal precision, gauging seconds instead of minutes.
“Can you save him?” Calyra demanded, voice trembling between desperation and command.
Draxxis lifted his gaze to Ravvyn. No words passed, only a question. Ravvyn’s eyes lingered on the scene, unreadable, before he gave the smallest nod and turned away, expression as cold as iron.
His hand brushed his earpiece. The calm that filled his voice made the urgency even more jarring. “This is Director Kael Ravvyn. I have a class-S medical emergency—Shard Tower, front plaza steps. Immediate response.”
The air shifted as Syndicate security and med-drones stirred, their silent compliance proving the weight of the order. For once, the Tower itself seemed to hold its breath.
Med-drones and personnel shrieked down from the upper tiers of Shard Tower, thrusters slicing through the heavy plaza air like scalpels. The landing cracked stone beneath their weight, limbs snapping open in flawless, mechanical rhythm. A triage field snapped awake in blue light, humming across Spy’s body, scanners peeling back layers of blood and ruin with merciless precision.
Calyra’s hand pressed hard against his chest, trying to anchor breaths that came in stutters, each one weaker than the last. “Hold on, dammit,” she whispered, though her HUD drowned her vision with critical alarms that screamed the opposite. Avenra hovered close, rifle still shouldered, eyes darting between the med-drones and the tightening circle of Syndicate guards who moved with quiet, predatory intent. Draxxis pushed past Calyra and wrenched her hand away with a snap of authority. “He’s septic already,” he muttered, voice low, clinical. “Necrosis is climbing. He doesn’t have ten minutes without intervention.”
“Then stabilize him!” Calyra shot back, her voice cracking under the strain.
The drones injected a stream of nanomeds into Spy’s ruined arm, glowing serum surging through his veins. His body convulsed, a guttural sound ripping from his throat—raw agony twisted with stubborn defiance. One drone’s voice cut through flat and merciless: “Life signs deteriorating. Probability of survival increased with immediate limb removal.”
Without ceremony, the drones lifted him onto a stretcher, clamps locking in. Their thrusters flared, carrying Spy toward the Tower’s yawning entry. Calyra moved to follow, Avenra at her side, but a sudden pressure stopped her cold—Ravvyn’s hand, light yet immovable, barring her path.
His voice was smooth marble, unshaken. “He’ll live. Ravvaar commands the best med-corps on this world, and they do not fail. But you—” his eyes locked onto hers, sharp as a blade drawn halfway—“you’ll come with me. We’ll speak of your reward.”
The words weren’t request or courtesy. They were decree. And behind them, the Tower loomed, swallowing Spy into its core while Calyra stood caught between loyalty and the pull of Syndicate power.
Calyra’s jaw locked. She glanced once toward Spy, limp and bloodied in the drone’s grasp, then to Avenra. “Stay with him,” she ordered. Avenra gave a sharp nod, rifle slung but eyes hard. “Always, Cal.”
The words lingered as the drones disappeared into the Tower, leaving Calyra standing under the gaze of Kael Ravvyn, her choices narrowing to a razor’s edge.
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