6.6

  Kevin hurls a heavy palm against the side of Cormac’s skull, and he goes down, not instantly, not cleanly, but like a toppled monument that’s taken enough damage over the years to finally give way. He stumbles forward, legs folding, crashes to the ground with a sharp clatter of steel-on-concrete, one arm catching some of the fall, the other twisted beneath him. And still, somehow, that smirk is on his face. That eerie, curling smile that seems glued to his soul like a bloodstain that won’t wash out, no matter how many storms try to beat it clean. It’s not pride, not confidence; it’s the grin of a man who’s seen the end coming a hundred times and started laughing somewhere around the twenty-fifth.

  “That’s one,” an officer shouts, and the rest erupt behind him, a pack of drunk gods hurling their fists on the edge of an arena. And these are officers. Men in armour. White crests on their chests. Government-issued killers trained to ‘protect and serve’, now hooting and hollering, visors glinting with the kind of ugly joy that doesn’t come from justice but from the promise of pain.

  Bastards.

  And I’m worried for Cormac, for us. If he loses this, if he goes down two more times, they’ll be booked, dragged off in cuffs, and this whole thing, this delicate house of cards we’ve built, will come crashing down.

  But I can’t think about that. Not now. Not here. No more worrying. No more second-guessing people’s motives or trying to divine outcomes.

  No more watching.

  I creep out, keeping my eyes on the rear jeep, watching as the NACP officers tighten their circle around the fight. Kevin’s still talking: loud, smug, blabbering nonsense I can’t make out over the noise of the crowd. The last officer peels away from the jeep, joining the others, and that’s my cue. I move, sticking to the shadowed side of the bridge. Out of view, out of mind. I climb the front right wheel, grip the edge of the fender, and slip up onto the roof. One quick override later, the shaft window hisses open, and I slide the bot inside. Same setup. Another android, gold-plated. But outside, I hear it, that steady whoosh-whoosh-whoosh, the sound of Kevin’s spinal implant cycling up, spooling heat and speed. Something shoves against the vehicle, not sure what, and it’s not hard, but it’s enough to shift the spider-bot off balance and send me hurtling down onto the android coffin. For a moment, I lose connection, and a red warning triangle pops up on the top right of my neural display. Not sure what it means, but I swipe it aside, crawl around the ceiling, and spin down.

  Same process as before: I get Dance to decrypt the firewall code and unlock the mag-seal. I pull the coffin's latch back and then guide the spoofer down with the bot’s pincer. Then—

  Another shove from outside. Harder this time. Real hard. The kind of impact you feel even through the control tether.

  The spoofer slips from the bot’s grip, clinks off the edge of the coffin, and I lose visual for a split second. I see it, falling, tumbling, bouncing once, then landing out of frame. The spider-bot rolls off the android’s chest and hits the jeep floor with a thud I can practically feel in my teeth.

  Outside, the crowd roars again, closer now.

  “Two!”

  Shit.

  I lunge for control, brain barking commands into the link, but it’s useless. Everything’s lagged, seconds too late.

  “Move,” I whisper. “Come on, move, move—”

  The bot tries to climb, legs scraping, scrabbling at the wall of the jeep, but the connection is shot to hell. Weak signal, bad reception. All that corrugated jeep armour must be interfering with the relay. The bot slides back down. Again. Again. And then the screen glitches. Goes red. Flashes:

  SIGNAL INTERRUPTED

  RECONNECTING...

  I grit my teeth. That’s just great. And I wait, listening to the sound of metal striking metal, dreading that number: one, two, and...

  “One,” an officer shouts, a little less enthusiastic.

  One? Cormac knocked him down? But how?

  I shake the thought off, realising I’m getting distracted, and tap into the holo. “Fingers, the bot’s messing up. I—damn connection’s just...” I groan. “... a load of shit, and I’m stuck.”

  “In the jeep?” she says, sounding breathless. “Alright, try taking the control shard out, wait a minute, and slot it back in.”

  “Won’t work, mate,” says Dance. “You disconnect that shard, at this distance, with the bot inside, it likely won’t reconnect at all unless within range. It fall?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Slipped right off the android’s chest. Landed on the floor. I can’t get it up the wall. Connection’s too lagged.”

  “That’s why I said reset it,” Fingers snaps, and I hear something whoosh past her in the background. “You’ll have to come up with something, and quick.”

  “Don’t listen to her, mate,” Dance says, not speaking into the holo this time. “She’s a right bitch when things start goin’ wrong. But give me oneeee second. I’m about to show you one of the benefits of this doooooozie havin’ once operated under the old north.” He presses his temple. “Hey, big man?”

  Static. “Yer?”

  Dance presses one of the buttons on the side of the panel, revealing a new dropdown. “I need to bounce signal priority: the bot’s chokin’ on junk data. This panel routes through both power and comms, yeah? Can I kill traffic to the north block without fryin’ the damn thing?”

  Vander groans, unsure. “What’re you lookin’ at?”

  Dance squints. “Top right’s got a red override tag and a blinking ‘N7 Sector’ warning.”

  “Right. That’s der one. Yer gonner wanner tab over twice, navigate to ‘Interlink Routing’, then scroll down to ‘Peripheral Comm Clusters’—they’ll be er named something weird, like er ‘P-COM: Zebra’ or ‘Kite’. You see those?”

  Dance hums, flipping quickly through the clunky UI. “Kite, Eagle, Pelican, yeah. Whole bloody zoo in here.”

  “Cut ‘Kite’,” Vander says. “That’s the uplink tunnel for public displays, street signs, kiosks, ad junk. Should lighten the digital load and give the bot some breathing room. Won’t last long, der. Need to be quick because the er back-up will override older fernctions.”

  Rerouting the internet traffic. Interesting....

  Dance grins. “Righty-ooooooo, throttlin’ Kite.”

  He taps the screen.

  Nothing at first, still that endless buffering, then I hear the electrics fizzle and crack-crack-crack, a million short-circuits.

  Vander says, “Billboards are blind.” His voice is strange. Not that it was ever normal, but now it has a slight muffle to it, like he, too, is losing connection.

  And then, finally, something new pops up:

  CONNECTING...

  It buffers for only a couple seconds, and then, blink, the signal bar in the top-left corner of the spider-bot’s interface flashes green. Alive. Responsive. Ready.

  I press my temple. “It worked.”

  “’Course it did,” says Dance.

  “Swert,” says Vander.

  Then, another sound:

  “Two!”

  A second time. Cormac managed to knock him down a second time.

  With a sharp inhale and a string of barely formed thoughts, I send the bot crawling once again, grip tight, fast and mean, across the floor, up the inner wall, and then down again in a tight spiral that lands me square on the android’s chest. And just as I latch back onto the frame, the cheer from the crowd outside erupts like a wave crashing through the hull of a ship, so loud I swear I can feel the damn web vibrate from the sound of it.

  But the spoofer card is down there: deep, wedged beneath the android’s left arm, barely visible in the tight gloom between its ribcage and the floor. If you could call it a ribcage. Just a mess of plated gold and synthetic sinew, and there, flat against the wood like a playing card lost mid-game, is that pulsing little blue rectangle. Must’ve slid down in the worst way. Or maybe the most precise. The kind of fall that feels accidental but hits you like a spell of nasty fate. And the bot’s too small to simply reach in and grab it, not without risking a full-body jam, unless...

  An idea slips in. A quick one. Dirty. Just might work. I shift the bot, easing it into the narrow channel created by the android’s elbow and its plated torso, the gap no wider than a clenched fist. I twist the spider’s head back until the spine strains and whines like old bones, as far as the rig will let me bend it. Not a full view. Just enough to catch the glow of the spoofer card. I activate ‘Spin’. And then, slow as threading a needle through a wind tunnel, I lower the web down: straight, steady, a little to the left—no, wait—back.

  Stick.

  Got it.

  I move forward, straighten out, the spider’s pincers working like little fingers, guiding the spoofer up front. The data shard comes out, the spoofer slips in, a quiet little click. Done. Dusted. Now all I have to do is get the hell out of here. Down I go, then back up again, sealing the coffin lid tight with ‘Spin’. I slip through the ventilation shaft and slide the hatch shut with a final ‘Manual Override’.

  And as I creep down the door of the vehicle, I hear it, that final, worrying—

  “Three!”

  The cheers start to die off, not all at once, but slow, like a fire starved of wood, sputtering out in bits and pieces. Shouts thin into murmurs, then peter, one by one, until there’s nothing left but the hush. I should move. I could move. But I don’t. I slide back instead, inch by inch, belly to the ground, peering through the narrow gap between the tyres, through the forest of boots and riot-armoured legs.

  In the circle, there’s only one person standing, and it’s not Cormac. Kevin has him pressed to the ground with a foot, but there’s something strange to the way Cormac moves, or rather, the way he doesn’t. He looks so relaxed, so carefree, as if he hadn’t even tried to win. And yeah, that smiles still there, and he’s looking at me, the spider-bot.

  “Have to admit,” Kevin says, brushing dust from his chestplate. “For a drunk has-been, you sure know how to move those snakes. Years ago, you might’ve even won one of our NACP spars. Hell, you might’ve run the whole bracket if you’d stuck around.” He clears his throat. “We still run ’em, you know. Unofficial, mostly. Keeps the edge sharp, keeps the rookies humble. Lotta bruises, busted noses, but no real hard feelings.” He tilts his head. “But you? You’re different. You carry your ghosts real hard, O’Cormac.”

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Cormac lets out a deep breath, relaxed. “Sometimes it’s the ghost that carries you, sergeant.”

  A bitter chuckle. “You and your poetry.” Kevin removes his foot, grabs him by the neck, and says, “Get up. You two are comin’ with—”

  “Hey,” a voice calls from the distance, echoing, high-pitched, feminine. Is that...

  Kevin pauses mid-step, turning his head towards the intersection before the bridge, and I follow his eyes.

  A woman. Walking alone, right in the open. Cargo jeans, black T-shirt, posture too casual to be afraid. Her face is covered completely by a smooth, white Oni mask, blank but for the ink-black frown and blood-red horns curling at the edges. And at the very bottom of it, a single strand of blue hair slips free, dancing in the breeze.

  ... Fingers?

  I try pinging her, scanning for ID, sigprint, ware-trace, anything, but nothing bites. Nothing at all. No name. No cyberware report. No surface readout. Just a black hole where data should be.

  That’s not a mask. It’s a damn firewall, and for whatever reason, it’s working.

  Kevin groans. “The south really flock together—the sheep.”

  “What are you doing?” the woman says, approaching yet keeping a good distance, and the more she speaks the more I find that she is Fingers. The voice, though muffled, still has that unmistakable streetkid fall, that rhythm and bite: up and down, a little to the side of the mouth, a dare wrapped in what only the impoverished could call charm, the kind that says I’ve been kicked, sure, but I bit the bastard on the way down and picked myself up again, and again, and again.

  That groan. “This is official NACP business,” Kevin says, pointing at her. “Keep out, civilian, or you’ll be done for obstruction.”

  “While you get done for Article Nineteen of the Civil Conduct Statute?” she says. “You know the one: unauthorised engagement in recreational violence while on duty. Bit of a mouthful, sure, but Internal Affairs loves it. Especially when there’s witnesses.”

  Kevin’s finger hovers in the air, twitches.

  And Fingers doesn’t move any closer, doesn’t have to. She tilts her head, lets that holo-record icon glow faint red against her palm, her phone. “But hey, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this was an official NACP exercise. You know—‘beat the drunk civvy for morale.’” She shrugs. “You wanna go ahead and explain it that way to your superiors, be my guest.”

  Kevin lets out a brusque laugh, the kind that’s more habit than humour. “Blackmail, eh?” he says. “When did the south grow such a spine?”

  “Don’t see it as blackmail,” she says, voice soft, almost pleasant. “See it as a little trade: you let that poor bastard go, and I don’t make sure you lose your fancy badge and end up one of us. Down in the south, with the rest of the forgotten. End of the day, you have no business goading drunks into fights just to prove you can use your fancy corporate tech to outpace someone with a ten-second brain delay and still barely win.”

  “Rich comin' from scum like you,” he says. “Highest crime rate in the city.”

  “Highest reported crime rate in the city,” she says. “And trust me, I have plenty to report, bigshot.” She waves the phone. “Saved in my neural storage. Not goin' anywhere, unless you play it fair.”

  Suddenly, I get an idea. “Lower the bridge.”

  Dance doesn’t ask why. Doesn’t hesitate. He moves with that sharp, confident twitch of someone who’s already halfway through the thought. His fingers slide across the panel, and the system responds, but not cleanly. This time, the electrics fight back, stuttering with all the snap and flicker of billiard balls after a hard break, sparks dancing along the conduit housings like angry fireflies.

  I hear the massive cogs grinding. Kevin turns at the noise. Looks over his shoulder, back at the slowly descending bridge. And for a split second, just one, he looks torn, like his brain can’t decide whether to chase us down or play the good little dog for his corporate leash. Eventually, he lets out a sound, a growl, that defeated, reluctant noise men like him make when they’ve been outmaneuvered. Not beaten in strength. Beaten in sheer narrative. Because that’s what men like Kevin fear most. Not death, not pain, but descent. And not into hell. Into the south. They play the tough guy, toss around terms like “order” and “protocol”, laugh at starving kids and blocks in ruin, but deep down, there’s a nightmare coiled up in those bones: the fear that one day, they’ll be like us, living in an apartment complex that leaks when it rains, buying knock-off meds for loved ones.

  Because when the bridge lowers, Kevin won't see a crossing; he'll see a damn line, a choice. And in that moment, he will hear something, too: the sound of the suit cracking.

  He bends down, grabs Cormac by the scruff of his blood-specked button-up, and yanks him to his feet like he’s hauling up a half-dead dog. He shoves him away with a grunt. “Come on. Bridge is lowering, thank God. And O’Cormac.”

  Cormac pauses, turns, hands steepled low. Doesn’t say a word. Doesn’t need to.

  “Fix your life.”

  Kevin strides off and climbs into the rightmost jeep, what would be the driver’s side, if these beasts had drivers. But they don’t. Not anymore.

  I don’t even move the spider-bot. No point. They’ll roll out as soon as the bridge locks into place, and Fingers’ll probably—

  I hear it.

  That sound. That awful sound.

  “Aw shit,” Dance mutters.

  The electrics are still giving out, a whining, teeth-grinding screech climbing up and up. I remove the control shard and push myself up off the grated catwalk, pulse hammering against my ribs, and look across the substation, right at the pillar in the centre. It’s humming. Not like a machine hum. No, not that clean. It’s a deep, throaty vibration, the kind that settles into your bones and makes your molars ache.

  The pillar’s still standing tall, blackened with soot in places, cables and fat conduit lines snaking out in all directions. And those wires? They’re not pulsing anymore. They’re sparking. Cracking like whips. Arcs of blue light jump the air. Some of them have come loose entirely, thrashing around like dying eels, lashing the supercomputers, licking the metal with sizzling snap, snap, snaps.

  It looks alive.

  It looks angry.

  A woman’s voice calls through the speakers in the ceiling:

  “Critical overload. Sector A-2 is now being isolated.”

  The doors to the electrical substation quickly slide closed, and above, the fluorescents shift colour, becoming red. Pulsing. Pulsing. Pulsing.

  “Turn it off!” I shout.

  “I’m tryin’,” Dance shouts back, fiddling with buttons, struggling to navigate the control panel. He presses his temple. “Vander,” he barks, “how the fuck do you turn the electrics off? I’m lookin’ at a goddamn fireworks show down here!”

  There’s a burst of static. A pause, and then:

  “Ehhhrksshhh—k-krzt—Eagle cluster—rrkksh—don’t—don’t touch—sshhk—”

  “Damn EM interference,” Dance says.

  A pop, the sound of a bulb bursting, and electricity whips forward, so sharp I can see the stroke. Then the smell of smoke.

  I activate my spoofer on the substation doors, thinking that we have no choice but to evacuate as soon as possible, but I’m hit with another firewall, and this time, oh this time:

  (Authentication Required)

  This one doesn’t look so simple. It looks downright impossible without an auto-cracker. There’s no time to solve this. No time for Dance to guide me through another wall of blinking garbage code, no time to breathe. The air itself feels electric, thick with pressure, like the world’s trying to suffocate me.

  There’s only one option: the manual override toggle switch.

  I reach down, every nerve in my fingers screaming don’t, don’t, don’t—and I flip it.

  There’s a clunk, deep, like a guillotine dropping somewhere far below.

  For a moment, nothing. Then the pillar lets out an enormous whine, as if some cosmic being had dug its needy claws into the mechanical body and ripped the iron and steel apart. Screeeeeeeeech. All across the substation, lights explode in bursts of blue and white. Sparks fly, raining down on the metal walkways, the walls, the tops of the pods. The air hisses and howls.

  And then... pop.

  The lights go. Everything sinks into blackness, and what’s left behind are the glisters: soft, eerie pulses of blue bleeding out from the pods’ seams, the cooling vents of the supercomputers, and the exposed wiring crawling across the ceiling.

  “Crikes,” Dance says. “Can't have one thing work without somethin' explodin'. You alright, Mono?”

  I take a breath. “Yeah, I just—give me a second.”

  Dance presses his temple, eyes flashing orange. “Lost signal to the audio cloud. You?”

  I check. No luck. “Yeah,” I say, a little breathless. “Gone. Only the group chat. The electrics must have messed everything up.”

  “Betting a lot more than just stagelights went after that,” Dance says. “We'll have to get to work on unlocking that door. They'll probably send security down any minute now.”

  “Yeah, there's a firewall—”

  Sound.

  Not a crash. Not a roar.

  Bump.

  Then again. Louder.

  Bump.

  Bump.

  Short, sharp, irregular. Like something testing the world.

  I freeze, pulse creeping into my throat. “What the hell is that?” I say, more to myself than to him.

  The sound comes again, from the far left. One of the pods. The third from the back.

  Movement now. Just a stir at first, a whisper of shifting weight. Then a hiss. A creak. The chamber begins to twitch in its frame. The reinforced glass fogs from the inside, and the interior light flicks red, bleeding out across the steel floor.

  The glass shudders—

  —and blows with a sound like the world breaking open.

  A figure falls out. Not leaps. Not steps. Falls. Crumples in a heap of tangled limbs and blue-black fluid.

  Then she moves. Jerks upright like a puppet yanked to attention. Tall. Slender. A midnight-blue qipao clinging to a frame that doesn’t breathe. Silver owl mask obscuring her mouth. Synthetic hair slick and matted like seaweed dragged from a drain. And those eyes—those goddamned eyes—glow white. Not hot. Not angry. Just... empty. Cold white. The colour of things that remember nothing.

  And the sound.... I listen carefully, oh so carefully.

  Drip. Drip. Drip.

  No life, just the soulless gaze of a machine, a face like a doll staring through the glass of a storefront window long after closing time. It looks as though she doesn’t see us. Doesn’t register us. Stands there, a system caught between boot cycles.

  And then, Dance lets out a cough. Not even loud. Just a tickle at the back of his throat. The sick bastard.

  The android’s head snaps to him, vertebrae clicking like a trigger pulled back, and my blood runs cold.

  That’s when I see her hands.

  Not hands.

  Ribbons.

  But these aren’t satin. Not silk. These are strands of filamented alloy, looped and coiled, sharp enough to make reality bleed. One lifts, elegant and effortless, and slices through the hanging wire above her. It drops. Sparks scream. Another whips from her spine like a scorpion’s tail, carving a molten scar into the metal floor.

  I try to short-circuit her, scramble the code, fry her from the inside out, but just like before, back in the cargo ship, a quick-scan’s unavailable, every hack tool I’ve got greyed out. I curse under my breath. I guess I have no choice. I open the spoofer screen, shove aside the mess of readouts and warning flags, and focus on the doors. I scan them and activate a fresh ‘Manual Override’.

  “Dance,” I hiss, pulling the image into my HUD and snapshotting the encryption. “I’m uploading the wall. Can you break it?”

  A couple seconds later. “Uhhhh,” says Dance, checking. “Yeh-yeah.”

  The android’s turned to me now. Head tilted. Studying. That impossible grace in every micro-movement, every tilt of the spine, every fraction of her weight shift. Her arms dangle at her sides, bleeding that slow, synthetic ichor.

  I hop from the catwalk. Land hard. The metal jars up through my knees, rattling teeth. I grit down and straighten. Face her.

  She steps forward. Soundless. Not walking. Gliding. Her body moves like it doesn’t have bones. Then her head jerks again, click-click. Like something rebooting.

  I bare my forearm and clench. The mantisblade hisses free with a scream of shearing metal, tearing through cloth, through fabric.

  She stops. Reads me. Calculates.

  For a moment, the world holds its breath.

  Then, she lunges.

  And I’m right in her path.