Tee looked away and blinked hard, a deliberate, brittle motion that tried to sell calm and failed to hide the tremor beneath it. “You’re right, Miko,” she said, the words flat, almost clinical. “Maybe I do need help.”

  She pivoted to face her friend and, with a practised, tiny gesture, wiped the corner of her left eye as if to remove a tear that had never really formed. “You’re such a good friend.”

  The compliment landed light and strange. Then she inhaled—slow, deep—making the exact intake of breath people take when they’re on the verge of breaking. It looked convincing enough to be worrying.

  “You stopped me from making a horrible mistake.”

  Her voice didn’t shake. The rest of her act did the shaking. Tee’s eyes dropped, sliding over to where the man lay motionless on the concrete. She vowed that if he twitched she’d abandon the act and rush to him before Miko could stop her. The possibility tightened her jaw until muscles hummed.

  “I hope no one finds out about this,” she added, soft and private.

  The plea did something to Miko. Her hand, which had gone up to cover her mouth in the first instant of shock, fell back to her side. If she reported it, that would hurt Tee. And Miko, despite the way she’d been raised to report wrongdoing, despite every instinct that told her truth-telling was the right thing, found herself unable to punish a friend who looked already contrite. The expression on Tee’s face—contrition pasted over by mechanical calm—was enough. Why pour salt into a wound?

  She sighed and stammered, “I—I won’t tell. Let’s just forget this ever happened.”

  There was a brief, private victory in the way Tee bit her lip to keep a smile from escaping. Miko was malleable, pliant to the right performance. For a beat, Tee let herself enjoy the triumph like a small, guilty warmth.

  Above them, a metal beam clanged with a sound like an announcement, and Kie and Zod—some distance away but still on the same job—jumped. They had been tracking Varrak’s trail through the first floor of the skeletal construction site and had looked up in shock to see the creature climbing toward the fifth floor.

  If the monster had made that ascent, it meant Tee and Miko should have been near. They were supposed to be tracking the same thing. The beam falling from the rafters made that possibility urgent.

  Kie’s holo-map flickered into being with the precise, familiar glow that meant tactical assessment. He scanned, then blinked twice. He saw no sign of Tee or Miko moving in any direction. He blinked a third time in annoyance, a soundless curse of disbelief at his chosen girl’s incompetence. Why did girls he crushed on always disappoint him? Why did they always fail to meet the standard he set?

  Zod didn’t let his chin drop. He kept it lifted, rooted in the habit of watchfulness. “What is it doing?” he asked, low and tight.

  “Kie! Tee! Miko! Where are you?” The voice on the telecom cut through the metal echo of the site with the authority of someone who thought orders were the best form of punctuation.

  At the sound of Kie’s call, Zod snapped his gaze off the monster and summoned another sword into being, doubling the blades in his hands like a man preparing to thread his way through impossible odds. He started scanning the floors, worry honing him into a narrow line.

  Both Tee and Miko widened their eyes when Kie’s voice came through their earpieces. Miko recoiled on instinct, as though Kie’s loudness were an actual presence in front of her. All at once she made it clear she would not be the one to reply.

  Tee brought the telecom to her mouth and coughed—a soft, staged sound that would register over a transmission—and then forced her voice into a cracked, fragile tremor. “Kie,” she said, the syllables carefully uneven, “I’m not feeling well.”

  “Oh?” Miko mouthed under her breath, but too quietly for Kie to hear.

  Miko blinked twice, puzzled. Tee should have said something else—anything else. The truth was, she felt fine enough. It would have been more honest to admit she’d lost her edge, that a part of her had gone numb with the wrong kind of triumph.

  Instead Tee wiped imaginary sweat from her forehead, acting as if pain were rolling through her. “I’ve felt this way ever since that meeting with Elder Caledor—” she panted, theatrical, “—but it got worse. I think that’s what he meant by triggering my demon, right?” She let out a brittle chuckle and then cut it off like a broken thread.

  Kie went silent at the other end. A thought to himself—could it be that time of the month?—made him retreat inward, unwilling to debate the fragile edges of femininity and sorcery. But the mention of Elder Caledor had weight. If the elder had put his finger on the matter, Kie did not want to poke at a hornet’s nest. He tapped his telecom to cut the channel from his end, severing the conversation with the practiced ease of someone who could assume compliance by silence.

  That was luck. Tee’s chest swelled with it. She straightened, let a grin creep across her features that she quickly flattened when she saw Miko studying her. The grin didn’t last. She switched modes and adopted a tone of business.

  “Alright,” she said, crisp. “You heard the boss. Let’s get back to hunting that monster.”

  Kie, somewhere up there, had to have seen the creature to make that call. They moved back toward the last place the tracks had been most intense. Tee kept a distance she felt reasonable from Kie.

  They passed the construction machine where the little boy had been earlier. Tee’s heart thudded against her ribs at the sight of him—peering out from the cab, eyes wide and human, a small smile cutting through the fear for a moment. She watched until a slab of wall slipped into the line of sight and blocked him.

  For that one boy, for that small, human thing, she felt a twinge of something like pity. She didn’t feel it for the man she’d struck down—the one who had been an obstacle and an enemy — but for the boy, because the boy’s fear was immediate and pure and he had nothing to do with the politics of elder meetings and control systems. She hoped the MG off she’d disabled was dead.

  Only the first-floor walls had been completed. Above, metal beams crisscrossed like the ribs of something under construction, catching moonlight in a pattern of silver and black. It was hard to make out the monster on the fifth floor, especially with the moonlight sketching silhouettes that could be anything. Still, they found it. It moved like a bad memory: frantic, animal, violent. Its claws hooked into vertical supports to hoist itself up, then crawled onto the flat beams that would someday be flooring, leaving a trail of scraped metal and the echo of its breath.

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  The monster snagged at a stack of metal bars left by workers. It growled as if some small, metallic offering had called to its hunger. With a heave, it lifted the stack and flung it down toward someone below—someone moving on its trail.

  Below, Kie was several floors down. He tilted both swords and moved them in an arcing motion that redirected the falling beams, slashing away the lethal implements. But the beams did not stop. They ricocheted, struck other supports, and began a lethal choreography.

  Tee and Miko had to leap aside as wood and metal came raining down. In the blink before they jumped, Tee's breath hitched. Had Kie already gotten the monster? No—if he’d succeeded he’d have reported it, maybe even crowed. They had to assume he hadn’t.

  A sharp metallic clatter—like a kicked can—made their hearts skip a beat. They turned toward the sound, peering down as it echoed from somewhere near the ground, though the stacked walls blocked their view. Both froze, listening intently for another noise before edging closer, swords raised in both hands.

  Tee resisted the urge to use her ability; doing so would rob her of sight and hearing, leaving her open to an ambush. She hoped it was Varrak. Why was he working with those MG officers? The thought alone made her grip tighten. If it was him, she’d drive both blades straight through him.

  But when the walls opened up and her gaze dropped, she found the little boy. He had escaped the cab and trailed them like a shadow that had nothing better to do. He had never known night beyond a curated screen and the darkness looked monstrous.

  When he saw his rescuers pass for the second time, his fear cracked into a tiny smile. For a second, Tee felt something like tenderness, the way one does when a fragile living thing persists. Then a beam came down, and the world narrowed to steel and momentum.

  Metal fell toward the boy in a trajectory that would have crushed him flat. Instinct overrode every calculated performance. The black blur that zipped past Tee was Miko. She moved so fast she was nearly a rush of wind, strands of air whipping the hair from Tee’s face.

  In an instant the boy was gone, and the beams had not yet reached the ground. Miko crashed into a wall, the impact spidered a web of cracks across the face of the cement but the boy, pressed against her chest, was cushioned by her arms.

  Why was a man in full white so hard to find in the night? Zod and Kie had lost track of Varrak and assumed he'd slipped away through a vortex. Kie had left the trail to hunt the monster so the mission wouldn’t be a total loss. When Zod heard a commotion he abandoned his pursuit and sprinted toward the sound.

  Tee waited until the metal stopped falling before rushing over. Miko lowered the boy to his feet with painful care. Tee grabbed the collar of his shirt and dragged him close enough to scold.

  “Why the hell did you leave? It’s dangerous here! Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

  His lips trembled. Before he could cry, Tee tightened her arms and hugged him, fierce and sudden as if sheltering him from her own voice.

  Miko cursed under her breath at her boots. She’d chosen them for the extra heel—style over function—and the slick soles had betrayed her more than once. She regretted. Still, she pushed herself off the wall.

  “We need to get him out of here,” Tee said.

  “I’ll get him outside the building and bring him back,” Miko answered, leaning into the risk. The boy mattered more than the pain in her feet.

  Tee nodded and gave him a brief, hard instruction. “I’ll be back for you soon. Don’t move until you hear my whistle.”

  Before he could nod, she handed him to Miko and the speedster was gone, a blur between corrugated metal and moonlight.

  Kie had climbed to the top floor and cornered the beast. With no more beams to climb and nowhere else to go, the creature looked back, let out a sound that was both animal and machine, and then charged the edge.

  Kie closed in, sword arcing for the kill—only to miss as the monster leaped and tumbled twelve stories into the air. Kie watched it fall and breathed a confused curse.

  Unbeknownst to the team, without its controller the creature had regained a flicker of consciousness. It had glimpsed its reflection in a puddle—an ugly mirror that set something violent loose. Confused and enraged, it tore through Varrak’s drones before making for the skyscraper to end its own life. Kie’s chase only hastened that collapse. In its fractured state, the creature wanted nothing more than oblivion.

  Miko had just set the boy down outside the construction complex when something heavy arced through the sky. Her senses screamed. She grabbed him and sprinted clear as the falling object slammed into the ground, impaling itself on rebar and scattering black blood in a nauseating spray. Miko spared one brief look and then forced herself to look away. The boy’s innocent gaze lingered on the gore, unable to understand what it meant.

  Zod arrived in time to find Varrak pointing a laser hand at a lone Tee. She hadn’t heard the impact—Zod’s shout had masked it. “Hey—get out of the way!” he yelled.

  Tee ducked and a white beam whooshed past where she’d been standing. Zod threw a sword and clipped Varrak’s arm. He twisted and retaliated by blasting sectors of the metal frame, sending showers of debris toward her.

  The tremor knocked Kie off balance. He clung to the crisscrossed beams and peered down to see Varrak tearing the skeleton of the building apart. A quick, brutal idea crossed his mind—a single sword through the head—but he dismissed it. Teleportation and unstable targets made guaranteed kills impossible. Instead, he began the long, careful descent.

  Varrak lashed out with the frantic indiscrimination of a man gone mad. Zod hesitated to close because his hands—already betrayed by past trauma—moved before his mind could. Once, a sword had carried Sid’s lightning through his arm and left him scorched. He wasn’t going to risk another unpredictable current if Varrak’s blasts had shifted from laser to electrocution.

  By the time Miko returned, the boy was where she hoped, but Varrak’s back was an opportunity too rare to ignore. She lunged, swords reaching behind him, only to be forced to parry falling metal instead. Tee pushed herself to her feet and baited Varrak’s attention. Zod charged and swung to strike the hand aimed at her.

  The blade cut a seam in Varrak’s armor, and the arm erupted in a multi-beam discharge. The blast shoved both fighters into walls and collapsing slabs. Steam hissed from Varrak’s body—joints and seals failing—and a vertical beam, sharp as judgment, came down and pierced his abdomen. More framework collapsed on top of him.

  They had to scramble, fleeing as the structure began to give. When the noise finally died and the dust settled into an uneasy quiet, a stunned Zod asked, “Did we kill him?”

  “One way to find out,” Kie said, already moving back toward where Varrak had been buried.

  They pried at the rubble and stared, brows knitting, at bare concrete underneath—no blood, no body, no sign that anyone had been crushed there at all.

  “There’s not even a drip of blood,” Zod said flatly. “How’s the Commander going to believe us?”

  “He must’ve teleported,” Kie answered.

  Zod frowned. “Didn’t Varrak only teleport through vortexes? I thought the jump teleportation we use was new tech, only possible because of Sorcery.”

  “Why do you talk so much?” Tee snapped, cutting across the speculation.

  Her mind drifted—brief and sharp—to the boy. Where had Miko left him? Curse those MG offs, she thought. Yet, complications and orders tugged at her like two different currents.

  “This mission was a failure. We leave now,” Kie declared.

  Tee paused mid-step, then turned to face him. “No,” she said, small but clear. “This mission is not over. We can’t let those MG offs escape. I was in the middle of beating one of those scoundrels to death when you interrupted me.”

  Miko’s involuntary gasp echoed between them, a raw reminder that some things had to stay buried.