The chrono in the corner of his vision read 1300. A late start to a day that felt like it had started days ago. He hadn't racked out until 0400, the negotiation with Void Forge bleeding time like a severed artery, followed by an adrenaline crash that left him feeling hollowed out.

  Cole looked at his crew's status on his neural-link. They all had 'Do Not Disturb' privacy screens active. Lucius's icon was a snoring storm cloud with tiny lightning bolts for Z's, which he'd customized after Senna called his default icon "aesthetically offensive." They were still passed out.

  He patched a call to Damian.

  "Hey... hey, man? What's up?" Damian's voice was a groggy rasp, thick with sleep.

  “You with my sis?”

  "Of course. Keeping my promise to keep her safe. She's still asleep on the couch in her room. She snores, by the way. Like, adorably. Like a kitten with a deviated septum. Don't tell her I said that."

  “You guys up for some Thai-German fusion? The spot near the capacitor station. She knows it."

  "Give me a sec." Cole could hear muffled talking in the background, the rustle of blankets, then a triumphant, "Yes! Food!" from Alice.

  "Yup, meet you there in twenty."

  Cole keyed the ignition on the hover-cycle Lia had liberated from the Jackals. The mag-levs came to life, vibrating through the seat. He merged into the flow of Storm City. The streets were a riot of sensory overload. Vendors screamed over the whine of turbines while an artist on the corner used a modified taser to burn portraits into the wet concrete. It would probably be another six hours until the rain scrubbed the pavement clean. The forecast claimed clear skies, but nobody in this city was stupid enough to believe the forecast.

  The Bangkok Biergarten loomed ahead. It was an architectural accident that had somehow survived zoning regulations. Neon elephants blinked out of sync with holographic steins. It was the kind of cultural collision that only happened in the sprawl, ugly and loud and exactly what he needed. He grabbed a three-top and ordered those pretzels that shocked your tongue—couldn't explain why they tasted good, they just did.

  The beer was cold. The city was loud. Perfect.

  Next table over, some guy was catching hell from his partner. Another asteroid mining gig, another fight about risking your neck for credits. Same conversation happening at half the tables, probably.

  "Six months in zero-g pulling platinum from rocks," the woman hissed, her voice tight with fear and anger. "And what if something takes out your ship on the way up? Just so some Corpo can build another tower?"

  "So we can afford another year in this city," the man shot back. "You think credits just fall from the sky?"

  After thirty minutes of them being late, he got a ping from his sister. Something about the message format was immediately off. It was an emergency protocol, the kind that burned through encryption and drained a neural-link's battery to ensure delivery. It simply read:

  “Cole I have been kidnapped by some local gang, Damian is hurt badly no idea where they are taking me.”

  Ice flooded Cole's veins. Really? I can’t catch a break for a second in this city?

  He immediately called Damian. The call connected, but all he got was pained, ragged breathing. “Fuck… Cole… I’m sorry. I tried fighting them off, but they came out of nowhere. Eight of them. Local colors, yellow and black, probably the Volt Runners. They patrol this district. They recognized her from her shows, said a rock star like her should hang out with them instead of a nobody like me. When she turned them down, it got physical. I tried to fight them off, but one of them stabbed me and… they took off with her. I was able to jack into your sis's neural-link via root access and plant a tracking program on her. It's a ghost protocol, invisible unless you know the specific frequency. Military grade stuff I picked up from... never mind where I got it. Sending you the data-packet now."

  "Why the hell do you even have root access to her neural network? Actually, scratch that, I don't even want to know. Got the data-packet now."

  "Go... I have already called EMS. They're a few minutes out. I can hear the sirens. The laundromat owner is putting pressure on the wound. Old guy knows his field medicine, says he was in the Rift Wars."

  Cole didn't wait for the check. He flicked a credit chip at the hostess with enough force to make it spin. It held enough currency to buy the table she was standing behind, but he wasn't waiting for the receipt.

  He vaulted onto the hover-cycle and punched the ignition, the engine roaring in protest. He tried pinging each of his crew. They all went to voicemail.

  Shit, they are probably still sleeping.

  He didn't have the seconds to spare. He punched in a Priority-One override code. It was a digital scream designed to bypass privacy filters and sleep modes. He packet-dumped his location and telemetry to their local storage. If this went bad, at least they would know where to look.

  The tracker was a crimson wound in his HUD. Alice's biometrics scrolled fast. Heart rate ninety-five. Cortisol spiking. She was awake. She was scared. But she was breathing.

  Hold on, Alice.

  He dropped into the vertical maze of downtown, rain turning the holo-ads into smears of corrupted pixels. Three yellows blown, threading between lanes like they were suggestions. A rusted hauler drifted into his lane and he banked hard. Metal kissed metal, showers of sparks cascading off the hull. Some street kids on the corner lifted their optics to record the near-miss, hungry for viral content.

  He hit the mag-ramp at speed, shooting up into the high lanes where the city dissolved into entropy. Traffic laws didn't exist up here. Lightning arced between the conductor towers, turning the skyline into a stuttering strobe light.

  The red dot on his display finally stopped over an abandoned factory in the city's industrial sector. Mueller Electronics. He recognized it from the faded logo. They used to make neural implants before a catastrophic data breach led to three hundred customers having their memories sold on the black market.

  "VOLT RUNNERS OWN THIS" was spelled out in scorched concrete fifty feet high.

  His thermal imaging showed eight heat signatures inside, clustered around a ninth. It was smaller, struggling. Alice.

  "I am going to rip you in half, assholes," his voice a low, cold snarl in his own mind. His Lucent Domain responded to his rage, his reflection in the bike's mirror showing fourteen different versions of himself, each one wearing a different expression of fury.

  Alice couldn't stop shaking. Motor oil and cigarettes—that's all she could smell through the blindfold. Same taste from the gag. The wire around her wrists was monofilament. Every twitch drove it deeper. Blood between her fingers now, sticky-warm.

  She'd fought them. Fought until her nails ripped off and her legs gave out. Didn't matter. Here she was anyway.

  She'd broken one of their noses; the crunch had been satisfying even through her terror. When they bound her legs and hands, she had used her teeth, latching onto the shoulder of whoever had her and ripping away something metal and plastic. A cybernetic ear. It had come off with a savage tear, trailing wires.

  "Fucking bitch! I can't believe she ripped out my ear!" The voice was a pained screech somewhere to her left. She could hear sparking, smell burning plastic. "That thing is connected to my neural-net, do you know how much it hurts? It's like someone's drilling into my skull! I'm taking a finger for that."

  "Quit your crying, Felix. You're the one who wanted to nab her." A different voice, older, with the lazy confidence of someone used to giving orders. "Shouldn't have fought, sweetie. We just wanted to talk. Could have hung out with us for the day and had a good time. Maybe signed some autographs, played a private show. But no, you had to make it complicated. Now, instead, we're here."

  Cheap boots on concrete. The whir of low-grade cybernetics. Someone was smoking something that definitely wasn't tobacco, the sweet chemical smell burned her nose. She tried to track how many of them there were, but they kept moving, circling.

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  Cold metal pressed against her skin. A knife.

  Then the doors exploded inward.

  The sound was enormous, a tearing crash of metal and concrete that made her flinch hard enough to cut her wrists deeper. She heard shouting, scrambling, the clatter of weapons being raised.

  "Who are you?" The one who gave orders asked. His voice cracked at the end, and suddenly he sounded young. Twenty, maybe. Scared.

  She knew the voice that answered. She knew it before he even finished the first word.

  Cole. Calm.

  "I am going to murder every single fucking person in this room."

  Cole came up through the puddle's reflection before they could blink. First guy never saw it coming—Cole's hand was already around his throat, lifting him clean off the ground. The prosthetic leg sparked, kicking at nothing. A quick twist and then a resounding crack.

  He dropped the body and dissolved into glass again before the corpse even hit the floor.

  The warehouse erupted. Muzzle flashes turned everything into a stuttering nightmare while they shot at shadows, reflections, anything that moved. Cole was everywhere and nowhere, the crystalline chime of his shattering form resonating from every reflective surface, from the grimy windows, the polished chrome on their own weapon, the terrified whites of their eyes. One idiot was screaming at a mirror, swearing his reflection was shooting back.

  Cole materialized from the chrome of a pistol, his blade already out. The man's eyes widened in shock as Cole's blade sliced cleanly through his throat. The cut was so clean that for a moment, nothing happened. Then a red line appeared, widened, and the man's head dropped onto his shoulder, held on by little more than skin. Cole grabbed the falling gun, spun. Three shots. Three bodies. His targeting software painted the kills in gold, but he'd have made them without it.

  He was a whirlwind of death. Each kill flowed into the next like a dance choreographed by his combat software. He jumped from a discarded oil can, its sheen becoming a portal, to the polished surface of his own blade as it flew through the air, the world spinning dizzyingly as he traveled along its edge, to the chrome on Felix's arm. He landed on Felix's shoulders, drove him down. Felix opened his mouth to yell or beg, though it didn't matter. Cole shoved the man's own plasma pistol under his chin and painted the ceiling with his thoughts.

  The smell hit immediately. Burnt meat and fried electronics.

  Niklas was screaming now, spraying bullets everywhere. Cole flowed around them, reformed inches from his face, and put him through the wall. The brick wall behind him exploded. It had stood for a century, surviving wars and orbital bombardments, only to turn into red dust because Niklas needed a landing pad. He struck the support pillar hard. Cole heard the wet crunch of bone snapping. Most of his ribs probably just shook hands with his lungs.

  The last guy pissed himself. The sharp reek of ammonia mixed with the copper scent of blood and the burn of energy weapons.

  Cole closed the distance toward the terrified man, his movements making no sound on the concrete floor. Silent. Unstoppable. He raised his arm and let the cohesion go. It shattered into a cloud of mirror shards hovering in the air. A hundred facets caught the man's reflection, repeating his panic back to him in a kaleidoscope of terror.

  Cole pushed his will forward. The swarm accelerated. It was a wave of razor-edged light. The shards shredded the man's bargain-bin armor. The impact threw him back hard. His optical implant shattered, sparking before he hit the ground. He didn't get up.

  Twenty-seven point three seconds was all it took, his software said.

  The silence hit harder than the fight had. He stood there, lungs cycling air, surrounded by the wreckage. The rage was already cooling, leaving something worse behind.

  I took this too far didn't I? Cole thought, looking at the scene. I can't even blame this on my powers. They just made what I was already capable of easier—more efficient, more brutal, more final.

  He thought of the first time he killed someone. A bounty he'd been tracking had made him, leading to a firefight in an alley that smelled like rotting soy and rain. It was messy. Desperate. He'd thrown up after, couldn't stop his hands shaking for days. He saw the guy's face every time he closed his eyes for a month.

  Nowadays it barely registered. Just another problem solved, another threat neutralized.

  When had the shift happened? When did the nightmares stop?

  Alice. That's what did it. That's what made him lose control. He'd gone through those men like they were nothing, and the worst part, the part that made his stomach turn, was how easy it felt.

  His hands shook as he cut her bonds. The wire had gone deep. Blood everywhere. Behind him, something was still twitching. Bad augments shutting down ugly.

  She reached for the blindfold.

  "Don't." He caught her wrist. "Please, sis. Keep it on. For me? Just... trust me, okay?"

  His voice sounded almost normal. Almost like the brother who used to check under her bed. Back before he became the thing hiding in the dark.

  Alice went still. The smell was thick—blood, burnt meat, cordite. Something dripped behind them. Wet. Heavy. She knew. Had to know. But she nodded anyway. Maybe she felt his hand shaking.

  Cole carefully guided her through the slaughter, his hand on her shoulder. "Step here," he'd murmur, steering her around the dead bodies that lay sprawled across the floor and through slick blood puddles. "Big step now... careful, there's some debris... okay, we're almost outside..."

  Outside, the rain hit her wrists and the blood ran pink into the gutters. He pulled the blindfold off.

  Her eyes locked onto his shirt immediately. The fabric was stiff with gore, a Rorschach test of violence. She'd seen enough Domain fights to know what arterial blood looked like.

  "The guys who kidnapped me?" Her voice was thin.

  "Sleeping it off," Cole said. The joke died in the air between them, wet and useless.

  "You're safe. Can we just be happy about that? I need to call this in. Just wait over there." He pointed to a relatively clean spot under an awning, away from the factory's windows.

  The Storm City Enforcers rolled up fifteen minutes later. Their transport was an ugly slab of rolling armor that had taken a beating. Blast scoring marred the plating. One door was welded shut, a jagged scar of hasty repair. The roof turret swiveled, tracking movement with mechanical indifference. An officer stepped out. Chrome jaw, eyes that had seen too many crime scenes. His rain cloak crackled, the built-in static mesh spitting sparks against the drizzle. He surveyed the carnage without a change in pulse.

  Cole explained the situation. The officer used a datapad to scan the biometrics of the dead gang members inside. The device chimed repeatedly. Each chime another confirmed kill, another warrant closed. "Niklas, Felix... the whole damn crew," the officer grunted. "The Volt Runners' entire leadership structure, basically. Gang war incoming, but that's tomorrow's problem. These assholes had countless warrants out and a rap sheet longer than my arm. Kidnapping, illegal tech, murder-for-hire..." The Enforcer looked at Cole, then at his pulsing Lucent rune. Still hot from use, casting everything in a faint silver-blue glow. He gave a firm nod and didn't press any further.

  "You're a licensed Bounty Hunter. As far as I'm concerned, this was a professional matter. You saved us a lot of paperwork. Probably six months of surveillance ops, too. Between you and me? Good riddance. Get out of here before the cleanup crew arrives. They ask more questions, and they're less understanding"

  As the Enforcers secured the scene, a black van skidded to a halt. Lia was the first one out, her eyes locking onto Alice.

  "Alice!" Lia shouted, her voice direct as the rest of Vertex fanned out behind her, assessing the situation. Lucius was crackling with barely contained electricity, Senna already interfacing with local security cameras to build a timeline. Lia gently took Alice by the arm, guiding her away as Cole continued to talk to the cops.

  "Yeah... Cole saved me. He uhh, took care of everything," he heard her say.

  Lia pulled a medical scanner from her belt, checking Alice's vitals. "Thank God. I know it's a bit shocking, but he is the same guy he was yesterday. The person who loves you and would burn down the world to save you. We all have multiple faces in this life. His just happen to include some that are very, very good at violence. Do you understand?"

  "Yeah... I do." Alice's gaze drifted toward him. She was looking at him differently now. He could feel it. Like she was seeing someone who had walked through hell and brought some of it back with him.

  Cole finished giving his statement and walked over. He expected Alice to recoil from him, to treat him like some kind of monster. Instead, she met him with the tightest hug, blood-soaked clothes and all. She started crying, face buried in his chest. Her tears mixed with the blood on his shirt, creating new patterns. Pain and relief bleeding together.

  "Hey, sis," his voice came out thick, clogged with an emotion he couldn't parse. Love, maybe. Or shame. Probably a cocktail of both. "You're going to wreck your outfit before the gig. Can't have that. What would the fans think?"

  “Jerk,” Alice replied, her voice muffled by his shirt. “But thanks for saving me. Sorry for how I reacted at first… I was just…”

  "In shock. Don't sweat it. You wouldn't be human if you weren't. Hell, I'm not sure what I am anymore, and I'm definitely shaking." He smoothed her hair, leaving a smudge of red he quickly tried to wipe away. “Come on, let's get out of here. You've got a show."

  "What about Damian?" Alice asked, her voice still shaky.

  "He just sent me a message," Cole said, pulling up the text in his vision. The message included a selfie of Damian with a paramedic, both throwing peace signs. "The stab wasn't deep, mostly superficial. They patched him up on-site. He even sent me a photo with a thumbs-up and said he'll still make it tonight. He also says, and I quote, 'Tell Alice the scar is going to look badass.' End quote."

  "That's good to hear," she said, relieved. "That sounds like him. Can't keep a good hacker down."

  "Speaking of which... why does he have root access to your neural-net?"

  Alice had the grace to look flushed. Even through the rain and the trauma, the embarrassment burned bright on her cheeks. "Do you actually want the answer to that, Cole?"

  He processed the question for exactly one second. His imagination already providing several answers he definitely didn't want confirmed. "No. You're right. I don't."

  As they walked toward the van, Cole caught his reflection in a puddle. For just a moment, he saw not one but eight versions of himself, one for each life he'd just taken. They all looked back at him with those mirror-bright pupils.

  Behind them, the factory caught fire. The flames licked at the rain, sending black smoke curling into the air. Just another burnt offering to the gods of violence and voltage that owned this city.

  Alice squeezed his hand. "Come on. Let's go pretend to be normal for a few hours."

  Cole squeezed back, his blood-stained fingers intertwining with her clean ones. "Yeah. Let's pretend."

  He escaped — and became a chef.