“You’re kidding, right?” I asked. Had the bird not seen what I’d just seen?

  He cocked his feathered head at me. “You’re talking to an alien parrot right now. Which one of us do you think is the expert on what the boobs is going on?”

  My brain shorted out. “Did you just say boobs?”

  “No, not breasts. Boobs. Melons. Beach balls. Forget it, it’s not important.”

  The word boobs sounded different than the rest of his speech, almost mechanical. I remembered how the Hunter had started babbling in another language as he collapsed.

  “Is it a translation error?” I asked. “Like, you’re trying to say a slang term in your language, and mine has no equivalent? Like bazongas?”

  The parrot blinked. “You just said boobs. So yeah. I’m guessing that’s what’s happening. Anyway, put the fucking helmet on.”

  My head was still spinning, and everything smelled of sugar. If I wasn’t in the epicenter of a bakery blast, I might have thought I was having a stroke.

  Get your head on straight, Talon, I told myself. Literally.

  I reached for the helmet. More Hunter-soup drained out as I picked it up.

  “I’m not putting this on my—” I started to say, but a loud fwoop noise cut me off. I ducked on instinct, which proved to be a good move, as a bright line of light seared my eyes, cutting across the city airspace through a building.

  I backed away in a crouch, staring as the light faded, leaving behind a straight, molten line in the pale sodiprene tower two blocks down. The tower started to slide apart along an angled line, the top half screeching off the bottom half as if in slow motion. Stone and rebar wailed, and a gas line exploded, and the top half tilted in a new direction, looming over me.

  It was as if the thing had been chopped in half by a laser, a clean line cut across it, but now the one detonation was becoming three, ten, twelve. The whole damned tower was toppling toward me.

  No Earthly weapon had done that. My dead Hunter wasn’t the only one out here.

  I glanced to the spot where the bright beam of light had originated. Whoever that was, we don’t want to meet them. Time to go anywhere but there.

  I turned to run in the opposite direction of the demolition, but another zipping noise stopped me dead. A second tower was going down in this direction, too. It looked like a residential building, with a dozen balconies on each of its twenty floors.

  Shit shit shit.

  I backed away, the helmet bumping my leg where I gripped it. It was too late to stop the mass murder I was witnessing. There were unconscious people in that building. Families.

  Lasers. They have fucking lasers! I needed to get out of here, fast.

  But at the thought of lasers, I remembered that my dead guy had used some sort of gun to turn a man into a bloody hole in cement. Heart pounding, I looked back to his remains and kicked away a piece of rubble.

  “His gun! Where is it!?” I shouted over the grumbling roar of destruction.

  The parrot opened his mouth, but I couldn’t hear him.

  “What?”

  “—in the helmet! Just RUN!”

  The parrot spread his wings and took off with that last word, and I ran after him. A shadow had fallen across the street now, as the falling tower blocked the sun. I dodged left at the next turn, leaping over the front end of an aircar that had gone to ground. The things were everywhere, but they hadn’t crashed. They must have descended in emergency mode, or simply arrived to wherever they’d originally been sent to. I couldn’t see the people inside them.

  I still hadn’t outrun the shadow.

  The parrot swooped around onto a side street, going back toward the government building where all of this had started. I missed a step, but when I glanced up at the sky, I realized the falling tower had changed direction again. More explosions wracked the soundscape around me.

  I followed the bird. He had a better view than I did. A sound rumbled up from the ground into my ears, my chest, and dust raked past me. The building had struck ground, or at least one of them had. Chunks of sodiprene larger than me whizzed past like they weighed nothing at all.

  I could just see the municipal building when the tat-tat-tat of gunfire overcame the grinding thunder of the tower collapse. It was coming from the parking garage to my left, an open-walled high rise intended for car storage. I could barely see through the sodium haze.

  I darted in close to the walls of the garage, out of sight of whatever might be shooting up there. I squinted up in time to see a body tumble off one of the floors.

  It landed with a sickening thump not ten feet head of me. It was a person.

  I didn’t stop running.

  The parrot banked, swooping up and into the first level of the parking garage. He’d found an aircar with a door open, the machine still running, a man slumped through the front window with his throat cut. He had been in the process of picking up a parking ticket at the entrance gate when someone had sliced up his neck.

  Had that happened after everyone had gone unconscious? Had he just been lying there, inert, when someone had diced him up for fun?

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  “In here!” the parrot shouted, from inside the car.

  Hell no.

  I thought this, but I was starting to hear a new sound across the street. Swip-bang. It made me think of sniper fire, and I didn’t want to know what alien weapon it was attached to.

  Fine. Corpse car it is.

  I leapt for the front door and heaved the dead guy out. My spare had was instantly sticky with blood, but I was able to swing into the driver’s seat.

  I’d never driven a UV before—an upper vehicle, meant to traverse the mid and upper airways of a city, rather than roads or sand dunes—and the spacious interior surprised me. There was only the one seat, but I was pretty sure others would fold out if I changed the settings.

  The parrot had perched inside the front passenger door, his talons wrapped around the handle.

  “Put the helmet on,” he said again.

  I blinked. I had forgotten I was still holding the thing.

  “They’re killing people,” I told him.

  “The helmet.”

  I swallowed, then shoved the damned thing on my head, trying to ignore the viscous liquid that slid around my ears as I did so. Inside, I found useless blackness. I couldn’t even see out the visor.

  “Okay, now wha—”

  I recoiled in surprise as my surroundings came back to me in perfect clarity, as if I were wearing no helmet at all.

  “What is this?” I asked. “Augmented reality?”

  “What does it say?” the parrot replied.

  “Say? It doesn’t—”

  Arynschliss, a female voice said.

  I jumped at the sound, just as a set of violet, alien words began to hover about five inches in front of me.

  I swallowed. “It said arynschliss.”

  “Butter on a cock. That means it’s rebooting,” the parrot said. “There should be an options icon near your shoulder. Touch it with your chin, then touch the mouth symbol to pull up the language menu. We’ll have to work fast, and I can’t translate for you.”

  I frowned, turning my head to see an icon hovering where my collarbone met my shoulder. It looked like a miniature, stylized control panel. I jerked my chin out an inch, touching the hovering icon. It lit up and spread out into more icons, once of which showed an image of a mouth. I chinned that one, too.

  More alien words cropped up in front of me, dozens of them. They appeared to be hovering a few inches past the helmet this time, so I reached out to touch them with my hand, just like I might with a VR gaming headset.

  I flicked a finger, and the list of words started to rotate like a gigantic slot machine.

  “There’s a big reel of words!” I said.

  “Yeah, those are languages,” the parrot replied, sounding distracted.

  As I spun through the words, the first three letters of each language remained the same. There had to be millions of languages on here, and I said so.

  “There should be a sort of goggles-looking icon to one side,” the parrot said. “Tap that to search. Say your planet and language.”

  I found it and tapped with a finger. It pulled up an empty box with a line under it, as if it were waiting for me to type something in.

  “Um. Earth English?” I asked.

  Three options appeared: Earth Old English, Earth United States English, and Earth Synthesized English. I tapped the last one.

  Earth Synthesized English. Confirm choice? the female voice said. Now that she was speaking English, I could sense the purr in her words. She sounded… seductive.

  I didn’t like it.

  Fresh gunfire sounded close by, and I spun the chair around and ducked down in the back, out of sight. The parrot was hunkered down, too, assessing our surroundings with one tiny yellow eye peering out the corner of a window.

  “Why does the voice sound like that?” I asked as I hit the option marked Yes.

  “Like what?” the parrot asked. “Oh, like it wants to slip into a little something more comfortable?”

  I blinked at the way that last phrase met my ears. It sounded mechanical again. The translator wasn’t sure how to translate what he’d actually said.

  “Sorry, what?” I said.

  The parrot made an exasperated noise. “Does it sound like it wants to leave the room and come back with fewer clothes on?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, it does.”

  “Wow, what a boring way to put it. My way was better. It involved lotion.”

  We were getting off topic, and my heart was still pumping. We might have found a hiding place, but heat signatures were still a thing, and this building was just as likely to get blown up as any other.

  “What now?” I asked, turning my head to exit the settings menu. This time, when the words cropped up, I could read them.

  Error. Request Core Match For Reboot.

  Approve? Yes/No

  Failure to comply will result in termination.

  This was followed by a number which was rapidly counting down. It was already at thirty-four seconds.

  “It says it needs some kind of match to reboot,” I blurted. “I have half a minute to confirm! What does it mean by ‘termination?’”

  “Buddha on a bagel,” the parrot swore. I was surprised there was a translation for that. “All right. Ask for FATE.”

  “Fate?” I said.

  Yes, Remnant? another, much less horny voice said. This woman actually sounded like a computer, which made me think that FATE was an acronym.

  “Is she there?” the parrot asked.

  The timer had hit twenty. “Yes?” I said.

  “Ask her for an override. Say it like this: ‘I don’t have fucking time for this shit. Give me an override, now.’ You have to be a real asshole about it.”

  “I don’t have, um. Time for this shit,” I said. I shook myself and hardened my voice. “FATE, I need an override, now.”

  There was a pause, and I exhaled in relief as the timer stopped at eighteen.

  Apologies, Remnant. This is going to take a little time.

  “How long?”

  The parrot flapped loudly at me. “Asshole!” he hissed, waving both wings forward. It was a reminder, not an insult.

  “How fucking long, FATE?” I repeated.

  Seven minutes. Ten tops.

  To the parrot, I said, “What’s a core match?”

  A core match is an automated retrieval of your retinal fluid via q-stable needle, for means of identification, the computer replied. It is only used in extreme circumstances, and only for your species. Brain matter is collected for most other species.

  My eyeballs watered at the thought. Yeah. Let’s avoid that.

  “She said seven minutes,” I told the parrot, aware now that Fate was listening to everything I said. “Maybe ten.”

  “Damn, she’s fast,” the parrot said. “Don’t say anything where she can hear you, though. Her line is monitored.”

  I pulled the helmet off my head again. “What’s going on? What are we doing with the helmet?” I whispered at him. I needed to know, right now, if I was going to survive this. The chaos was making my ears ring.

  The parrot glanced back at me, somehow managing to look annoyed. “The helmet is your connection to the Hunt,” he said. “You’re assuming the other guy’s identity, which is why you need an override. Obviously, you’re human, not a piscin like he was, so a core match is gonna give up the game.”

  “But why do we need a game?” I hissed. “Why do I need to assume his identity? We should be getting out of this city!”

  “To go where?” he replied, his feathers poofing.

  I waved a hand. “Anywhere but here!”

  The bird went still. He looked straight at me.

  “What’s your name, kid?” he asked.

  “Talon,” I said, exasperated.

  “Talon. Listen to me.” He leaned forward. “Your planet, your world—it’s toast. It’s been chosen for a Hunt. Its populace has been neutralized, and those left are being hunted. Every major city on this planet is going through this same shit.”

  I stared at him.

  “And all of those cities?” he said. “They all have a zion-net, like a big bubble, placed over them. There is no leaving that bubble until Setup Mode is over. It’ll atomize you. You’re stuck here, bud.”

  My mouth felt dry. I fought for words.

  “Set… Setup Mode?” I said. “What is that?”

  “It’s the part of the game where you determine your starting stat points,” he said.

  “How… do I do that?”

  A boom sounded above us. I barely heard it. I felt like the ceiling was coming down on me anyway.

  “You kill people,” he said. “The ones that haven’t been neutralized.” He nodded at the helmet. “And so far, you’ve only got one.”