The Red Dogs' base in Sector 20 hummed with the low, uneven growl of faulty generators, the air thick with the stench of burnt wiring and stale synth-liquor.
Tenn sat hunched over her workbench, her multi-tool arm whirring softly as it recalibrated the pressure valves on a salvaged coolant tank.
The rest of Gideon's war council buzzed around her—voices overlapping, plans half-formed—but she barely registered them.
Her fingers moved on muscle memory alone, adjusting the flow regulators with precise, mechanical clicks.
The schematics of the base's old sprinkler system flickered across her holoscreen, lines of code and hydraulic readouts blurring at the edges of her vision.
She'd been awake for twenty-seven hours straight.
Just a little more.
Gideon's voice cut through the haze, sharp with impatience. "Arden, I've sent that fake intel you cooked up. Should buy us time to rig the nitrogen tanks before those pyro freaks come knocking."
He drummed his fingers against the war table—an old subway maintenance hatch propped on cinderblocks—and turned to Tenn. "Hey. You listening? Status on the sprinklers."
Tenn didn't look up. Her tool-arm shifted into a plasma torch with a decisive snick, sealing a leak in the nitrogen delivery line.
The smell of scorched metal curled into the air.
Arden cleared his throat, adjusting his ocular implant as he pulled up a grainy image on the holotable. "Tried cleaning up the photo Blaze gave us. Still garbage."
The figure in the image was little more than a smudge of pixels—a shadow caught mid-stride, features obliterated by static.
Vega leaned in, his scarred lips twisting into a smirk. "Doesn't matter. We hit back hard enough, they'll learn not to sniff around our territory."
Felix exhaled through his nose, the subdermal plating along his arms flexing. "You ever actually fought a Scorcher, Vega? It's not just fire. It's like… the air itself turns against you."
His fingers twitched toward the old burn marks on his neck—pale, ropey scars that even augments couldn't fully erase.
Isla rolled her stim-baton between her palms, the unstable glyphwork along its length spitting blue sparks. "Thought their boss died back then? Nex shot him point-blank. How's he walking around?"
Gideon's jaw tightened. "Doesn't matter. What matters is we're ready when—"
A sudden hiss cut him off.
Tenn's coolant line hissed again, a fine mist of liquid nitrogen spraying from the seam she'd just welded.
She cursed under her breath, slamming a palm against the valve to shut it off. The frost creeping across her fingers burned like acid.
"Tenn." Gideon's voice was flat. "Are we secure or not?"
She finally looked up, meeting his gaze. Her eyes were bloodshot, her dark hair sticking to her forehead in greasy strands. "Sprinklers'll work," she muttered. "But the nitrogen's unstable. Too much pressure, and we freeze ourselves before the Scorchers even get here."
A beat of silence.
Arden adjusted his glasses, the holoscreen's glow reflecting in his lenses. "So we've got a suicide bomb instead of a defense system. Wonderful."
"That's why I am working on it now!" Tenn turning back to her work. The numbers didn't lie—they were running out of time. And if Gideon's plan failed, Sector 20 would burn just like Sector 7 had.
Tenn's fingers tightened around the wrench, the metal biting into her palm. She didn't look up, didn't acknowledge Gideon's theatrics.
The numbers on her holoscreen pulsed—pressure thresholds, flow rates, timers ticking down to nothing.
Almost there.
Gideon raised his hands in mock surrender, the three-headed dog tattoo on his shoulder twisting with the motion. "Fine. We'll leave you to it. Just give us a heads-up if we're all about to freeze to death—or burn. Either way, I'd like to brace myself."
Silence.
Tenn's tool-arm shifted again, the servos whining as she reconfigured it into a micro-solder. The nitrogen line hissed faintly under her touch, a slow leak she couldn't quite seal.
Gideon exhaled sharply and turned back to the others, his voice dropping into a growl. "We've got other problems, but until those fire-obsessed freaks are dealt with, nothing else matters. Vega—where are they now?"
Vega leaned against the war table, his augments clicking as he folded his arms. "Took the bait. They're heading to Sector 23, chasing that ghost we fed them."
A smirk curled his lips. "Burned another one of ours on the way out, though. Left him in the refinery like a fucking warning."
Arden adjusted his glasses, the holoscreen's glow painting his face in pallid blue. "Our scout barely made it out. Said Blaze didn't even look at the body when he walked away. Just… lit him up and kept moving."
His fingers tapped the table, restless. "Like it was nothing."
Felix's jaw worked, his subdermal plating flexing along his knuckles. "They're not just hunting. They're cleaning."
Isla flicked her shock-baton on, the unstable glyphs along its length spitting sparks. "So what? We let them tear up Sector 23 instead?"
Gideon's smile was all teeth. "Let them waste their time. By the time they realize the intel's fake, we'll be ready."
He glanced back at Tenn, still bent over her work. "Assuming our engineer doesn't get us all killed first."
Tenn didn't react.
The nitrogen tank hummed under her hands, its surface so cold it burned to touch.
Frost spiderwebbed across its reinforced casing, creeping over the intricate glyph carved into its side—her design, her signature.
Most cryo-tech required massive compressors and industrial chillers to produce liquid nitrogen.
Hers didn't.
The glyph pulsed faintly, its runes shimmering like trapped starlight.
It worked on a different principle entirely—instead of manufacturing cold, it stole it.
The spell reached out like invisible fingers, plucking nitrogen molecules from the air and forcing them into stillness.
Slowing their vibrations.
Draining their heat.
The physics-defying effect reduced pressure inside the tank even as it filled, allowing her to store more in a smaller space.
Theoretically.
A warning flickered across her holoscreen—PRESSURE FLUCTUATION DETECTED.
Tenn's jaw tightened.
The glyph was unstable.
If it failed, the sudden release would flash-freeze everything in a ten-meter radius.
Gideon's voice cut through her focus again. "—assuming our engineer doesn't get us all killed first."
This time, she did look up.
"You want to stand closer when I test it?" Her voice was flat, her eyes bloodshot from sleepless nights of tweaking the spell's parameters. "Might solve your leadership problem real quick."
A beat of silence.
Felix took an involuntary step back.
Gideon's smirk didn't waver, but his fingers twitched toward the emergency kill-switch on his belt. "Just get it done, Tenn."
She turned back to the tank, her tool-arm reconfiguring into a delicate stylus.
The glyph needed one final adjustment—a failsafe she'd copied from the WhiteRoot glyph engineering schematic.
For all the good it did them.
Tenn knew this wouldn't be enough to stop the Scorchers.
No amount of liquid nitrogen or clever glyphwork could extinguish that kind of fanatical fire.
But she kept working anyway.
Her fingers moved mechanically, adjusting the glyph's parameters while her mind drifted back to the day Gideon had found her.
She'd been kneeling in a WhiteRoot lab, her hands still slick with the blood of the project lead whose throat she'd slit with a broken pipette.
The alarms had been screaming.
The containment glyphs were failing.
And Gideon had simply kicked open the door, shotgun in one hand, the other extended toward her like she was a person instead of property.
"You look like someone who's tired of being told what to burn," he'd said.
The Red Dogs had been different then.
Less a gang, more a pack of strays who'd banded together to bite the hands that whipped them.
Gideon's dream had been simple: carve out a place where the lower tiers could breathe without corporate bootprints on their necks.
Tenn's stylus slipped, scratching a jagged line across the glyph matrix.
She cursed under her breath.
WhiteRoot's test center still haunted her—the way the researchers had whispered about biological optimization while test subjects screamed in the adjacent rooms.
The same hungry glint she'd seen in those scientists' eyes now flickered in Gideon's whenever someone mentioned taking territory from the Talons.
The nitrogen tank shuddered, its casing groaning under the strain.
A new alert flashed on her holoscreen: MOLECULAR COHESION AT 87%.
Tenn exhaled slowly through her nose.
The Dogs had given her purpose when she had none.
Now she was rigging their base to either freeze or burn, all because Gideon couldn't tell the difference between survival and the same power-mad hunger that had created places like WhiteRoot.
Somewhere behind her, Vega laughed at something crude.
The sound was so normal, so painfully human, that for a moment Tenn could almost pretend they were still the people who'd taken in a broken ex-corpo and called her family.
Then the glyph flared unstable again, and the moment passed.
***
The cold storage unit hummed in the aftermath of the interrogation, its frosted air clinging to Lucent's skin like a second layer of armor.
Sel sat slumped in her chair, her breath still ragged from the neurotoxin, her wrists raw where she'd strained against the restraints.
She is clean.
Not the mole.
But the two guards—Gary and the other one—had been working for someone else.
Not the Red Dogs.
Not directly, anyway.
Lucent turned the stolen Myriad conduit over in his hands, the sleek corporate branding catching the flickering fluorescent light.
Too advanced for gutter enforcers.
Too clean.
This wasn't gang warfare.
This was an infestation.
Mags nudged the dead guard's boot with hers, her expression unreadable.
The blood pooling around the body had already begun to crystallize in the subzero chill, forming jagged red fractals across the floor.
Sel coughed, spitting a glob of pink-tinged phlegm onto the frost. "They came two weeks ago," she rasped.
"Offered upgrades. Said they could make my guards better." Her laugh was a broken thing. "Didn't realize 'better' meant 'owned.'"
Lucent pocketed the conduit.
The pieces fit too well.
Sector 14 was distant enough from Talon territory to avoid suspicion, but close enough to the Bazaar's underground networks to monitor gang movements.
A perfect listening post.
And Sel's shop?
Just another node in a larger web.
A blessing and a curse.
Blessing, because the distance meant the Talons hadn't been compromised from within.
Not yet.
Curse, because if a corpo was patient enough to plant roots this far out, they'd already be elsewhere, too.
Mags flicked her wrist, the steel talon sewn into her sleeve glinting as she signed a single word: "Spire?"
Lucent shook his head.
Corporations wasn't Spire.
But the two danced often enough in the shadows.
No, the Spire wouldn't dirty their hands dealing directly with gutter rats.
They'd simply burn the whole nest and call it pest control.
But the corpos?
They played a different game.
One that slithered through back alleys and paid in blood and flesh.
Zero's voice slithered through his memory, that last taunt before the lab collapsed around them:
"You of all people should know—we're all experiments here."
The conduit suddenly felt heavier.
Digging deeper meant risking exposure, and exposure meant a corpo-grade grave. Not some back-alley bullet to the skull, but the kind of disappearance that left no body to bury.
Just an empty file and a debt marker.
Mags' fingers tapped against his forearm, sharp and insistent. Her dark eyes locked onto his, unblinking. The steel talon stitched into her sleeve caught the dim light, its edge dulled by time but no less deadly.
Lucent exhaled through his teeth. "Mags, this changes everything."
His voice was low, the words measured. "Gang spies we can handle. But corpos?"
He tossed the conduit in the air once, caught it, then shoved it deep into his coat pocket. "The moment they get involved, that option is no longer viable."
Sel groaned from her chair, her breath fogging in the frozen air. "So what now? You gonna leave me here with this mess?"
Lucent didn't answer immediately.
His gaze drifted to the dead guard, the frost already forming delicate patterns across his open, unseeing eyes.
The man had been a pawn. Probably didn't even know whose hand moved him.
"Burn it," Lucent said at last. "The bodies, the logs, everything. Make it look like a Red Dog hit."
Mags nodded, her small fingers already twisting the industrial coolant valve.
The sharp hiss of depressurization filled the room as frost began crawling up the walls.
Gary's bloodied hand suddenly clamped around Lucent's ankle.
"W-wait! Don't leave me here!" His voice was raw from screaming, his ruined knee leaving a smeared trail of red across the frosted concrete as he crawled.
Lucent kicked free with a sharp twist of his leg, sending Gary sprawling.
The guard's whimpers echoed off the cold storage walls as Lucent turned to Sel, still trembling from the neurotoxin's aftereffects.
"We can't salvage any of your stock," Lucent said, hauling Sel onto his back with a grunt.
Her breath came in wet gasps against his neck.
Outside, shadowy figures lurked at the alley's mouth—homeless scavengers drawn by the gunfire.
If they left the drugs, they'd be stolen before the embers cooled.
If they stayed to guard them, they risked being caught in the coming inferno.
Gary was still watching them with wide, desperate eyes, one hand pressed to his gushing knee wound. "P-please..."
Lucent hesitated.
The man was just hired muscle, probably didn't even know which corporate hand fed him.
But letting him live meant leaving a witness—one who'd seen Mags' face, heard their conversation.
"Mags," Lucent said quietly. "May I borrow your gun?"
Mags didn't hesitate.
The pistol barked once.
Gary's head snapped back, his body slumping into the growing pool of his own blood.
The echo of the gunshot lingered in the refrigerated air.
Lucent hadn't even finished extending his hand.
He stared at Mags, who met his gaze evenly as she holstered the weapon.
There was no remorse in her dark eyes—just the cold calculations of survival.
For a fleeting moment, Lucent felt both sickened and relieved.
The weight of the kill wasn't his to carry this time.
"Let's go," he muttered, adjusting Sel's weight on his back as Mags triggered the final overload.
Behind them, a glyph burns, and the first tongues of flame began licking at the spilled coolant.
By morning, there would be nothing left but another gangland massacre to add to Sector 14's graveyard of stories.
As soon as they came up of the stairs, the acrid stench of burning plastic and flesh still clung to their clothes as they put distance between themselves and the smoldering ruin of Sel's shop.
Lucent paused beneath a flickering streetlamp, its sickly yellow glow barely penetrating the ever-present smog.
He reached into his coat and produced the two Myriad conduits, their sleek surfaces now marred by blood and soot.
For a moment, he turned them over in his hands, watching the dim light catch on the corporate insignia.
Too dangerous to keep.
Too traceable.
With a sharp twist, he snapped both devices in half, the delicate circuitry inside sparking weakly before dying.
The pieces landed in a nearby trash bin with a hollow clatter, lost among the rotting food and broken glass.
Sel groaned against his back, her breathing still ragged from the neurotoxin.
"Car," she managed to rasp, lifting a trembling hand to point toward a crumbling parking garage two blocks east. "Underground...level three."
Lucent adjusted his grip on her, feeling the dampness of sweat and blood seeping through his jacket. "Can you walk?"
Sel's answering laugh was more of a wheeze. "Can you carry me faster?"
Mags was already moving ahead, her small frame cutting through the shadows like a blade.
She paused at the garage entrance, scanning the dim interior before signaling it was clear.
The air inside was thick with the smell of oil and urine, the concrete walls stained with decades of grime.
As they descended the ramps, the sounds of the sector faded, replaced by the distant drip of water and the skittering of glow-rats in the darkness.
Level three was nearly empty, save for a handful of vehicles covered in dust and tarp.
Sel fumbled in her pocket, producing a key fob with shaking fingers.
A lone sedan chirped to life near the far wall, its matte-black paint and reinforced chassis marking it as something far more expensive than standard sector fare.
Lucent whistled low. "You've been holding out on us, Sel."
"Perks of being a merchant," she muttered, collapsing into the passenger seat.
Her fingers left smears of blood and coolant on the leather upholstery. "Now get us the hell out of here before either your conscience or my creditors catch up."
Lucent didn't move. His hand remained on the door handle, eyes scanning the sedan's sleek interior.
Too clean.
Too convenient.
In a city where every shadow had ears, trust came with a bullet's price tag.
He raised his Conduit, the cracked screen flaring to life as he activated a Rank 1—EchoScan.
The glyph pulsed once, sending invisible waves rippling through the vehicle's interior.
The air shimmered faintly as the spell sought out surveillance implants, tracking chips, anything that might whisper their secrets back to corporate towers.
Mags stood sentry nearby, her back against a concrete pillar, eyes darting between the ramp exits.
The steel talon sewn into her sleeve caught the dim garage lights as she flexed her fingers near her holster.
The scan completed with a soft chime.
Clean.
No pings, no hidden signatures.
Just an expensive car with excellent shielding—exactly what you'd expect from someone who danced with devils for a living.
Lucent exhaled, the tension in his shoulders easing slightly.
"Clear," he said, sliding behind the wheel.
The engine purred to life, a throaty growl that spoke of custom modifications and black-market upgrades.
Sel slumped against the window, her breath fogging the glass.
"Told you it was clean," she murmured, but the relief in her voice betrayed her earlier confidence.
Mags slipped into the backseat, her small frame disappearing into the shadows.
As they pulled out of the garage, the first light of dawn painted the sector's skyline in hues of rust and fire.
Behind them, the remains of Sel's shop would soon be just another smoldering mystery in a city full of them.
Ahead lay the winding streets leading back to Talon territory—and the far more dangerous question of what, exactly, they'd just unleashed by burning corporate property.
The road hummed beneath them, smooth and silent.
Too silent.
Lucent's fingers tightened on the wheel.
In his experience, the quiet never lasted.