The parasite came through the eastern alley at a speed that suggested it had somewhere to be and had decided the most direct route was through whatever was in the way.
Mora was in the way.
She ran toward it rather than away from it, not because running toward things was always the correct tactical decision but because she had assessed the alley behind the parasite and the alley in front of it and determined that the front was preferable and moved accordingly.
The parasite lunged.
Her scythe came up.
The impact of it landing against the blade was the impact of something large and committed meeting something that had been built specifically to receive large and committed things. Mora's feet found the ground and held it. The parasite pushed. She pushed back with the specific leverage of someone who had spent years understanding how force distributes through a body when the body knows what it's doing.
She drove the creature down.
Not backward, down, the scythe redirecting the parasite's own forward momentum into the ground beneath it, the creature going from lunging to horizontal in a single motion that the ground accepted with a sound that suggested it had opinions.
She sliced it in half before it finished landing.
Clean. Complete. The two halves of the parasite expressing the finality of the decision in the specific language of things that have been definitively addressed.
She straightened.
Movement above her.
The second parasite came off the rooftop with the committed energy of something that had been waiting for exactly this moment, the moment after the first strike when attention was still processing what just happened and hadn't fully redirected.
Mora's free hand came up.
The grave chains erupted from her palm and crossed the distance between her and the falling parasite in the time the parasite needed to realize the distance had been addressed. The chains caught the creature mid-air, wrapped it, found its structural points with the specific knowledge of chains that understood what they were wrapping, and compressed.
The parasite's attempt to continue falling was redirected into a much smaller version of itself.
What remained of it reached the ground without posing any further concerns.
Mora lowered her hand. she de-summoned her scythe and continued running "Gotta get to Butter."
She looked at the alley. At the rooftop. At the street beyond.
The Soccer Field. Same Time.
The children had been playing since early morning.
The south district's soccer field was not a formal field, it was the open space between two buildings that had been informally designated as the soccer field by everyone who used it for approximately thirty years, the goals marked by old paint on the building walls that got repainted whenever the season changed and the kids decided the lines had drifted. It was always full on mornings like this one, when the weather was doing what Dragon Hive weather did on good days and the school schedule had gaps and children had the specific energy of people who have not yet been asked to be anywhere.
Butter moved through the ghetto's eastern streets with her sound map running its continuous accounting of everything within range. The children's sounds were in the map, the specific frequencies of kids playing, feet on pavement, the particular acoustic signature of a ball being kicked by someone who had been practicing and someone who hadn't and the difference between the two.
She heard the parasite before she saw it.
"Hey." She was already running. "Get out of the park. Run. Now."
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The children looked at her.
The parasite came through the southern gap between the buildings.
The children screamed and ran in the specific dispersal pattern of kids who have been told to run and have immediately committed to running, not together, in every direction that wasn't the direction of the thing that had made them need to run.
One child was slower.
Not much slower. A second. Maybe less.
The parasite found the second.
It lunged. Its jaw opened with the specific commitment of something that had identified a target and had no other agenda.
The sound wave hit it from the side.
Not a focused burst, massive, the kind of release that Butter used when precision was less important than immediacy, everything she'd accumulated in the last twenty minutes of clearing the eastern streets released in a single lateral wave that hit the parasite mid-lunge and expressed very clearly that the lunge was not going to continue in the direction it had been going.
The parasite's body expressed the sound wave's opinion about it by coming apart.
Butter stood at the edge of the soccer field with her Echo Scythe still extended and her reserves suddenly lighter.
The child ran without looking back.
"That was close," Butter said.
She was still watching the child reach the building's cover when she heard the next one coming.
The frequency of it was behind her, not far, moving fast, the specific acoustic signature of a parasite that had identified a target and was already committed to the approach. She turned.
Too slow.
Not because she was slow — because the distance was what it was and the parasite had covered more of it than her rotation could account for. She registered this in the half-second available for registering things and found no good options in the half-second's inventory.
The parasite's head snapped sideways.
Something had hit it.
Hard. Precisely. From above.
Butter looked up.
A drone hovered at rooftop height. Small. Matte black. The kind of thing that had been designed not to be noticed until it had done whatever it was there to do.
It had done whatever it was there to do.
The parasite on the ground was not getting up.
Butter looked at the drone.
The drone looked at her. In the way drones look at things when they have been sent by someone to look at something specific.
Its speaker activated.
"Courtesy of Jeriko," it said. "He's watching you, Butter."
The drone rose.
It moved away over the rooftops with the smooth unhurried flight of something that had delivered its message and was no longer required to be visible.
Butter stood in the south district soccer field and looked at the sky where the drone had been.
The sound map extended. She found the drone's frequency, the quiet whir of its rotors, the specific electromagnetic signature of its camera, receding north toward the wealthier districts.
She listened to it go.
She didn't move.
"Baby."
Mora came around the corner at something faster than her usual pace, which meant she had heard something in the last few minutes that had produced urgency. She crossed the soccer field and wrapped both arms around Butter before the greeting finished leaving her mouth. She smothered her face in her breast. He glasses tipped off her face.
Butter stood inside the hug.
"Mora," she said.
"I was so worried about you."
"You're smothering me."
"I know." Mora didn't let go. "I'm sorry. I was so worried."
"I'm fine."
Mora pulled back enough to look at her face. Her eyes moved across Butter's expression with the specific attention of someone who knows another person's face well enough to read the difference between what it's doing and what it's trying to do.
"You sure?" she said. "Because something's on your mind. I can see it." Her eyes went to the soccer field. To the absence of children. To the specific quality of the quiet that a space has after something that almost happened has almost happened and then not happened. Her expression shifted. "Did someone, was it a child, did something happen to..." Her eyes began to go wet.
"No," Butter said quickly. "No casualties. Nobody got hurt."
Mora looked at the field.
Then at Butter.
The field stayed still.
For a few seconds, nobody moved.
Then a door creaked open.
A window slid up.
One resident stepped out. Then another.
When they saw Butter standing there, calm, untouched, the tension broke.
"It's safe," someone whispered.
The fence gate swung open and several kids sprinted across the grass.
"Butter!"
They wrapped around her waist and arms without hesitation. She steadied them easily, one hand resting on a small head, her expression soft but controlled.
An young man approached slowly, eyes shining.
"You always protect us," she said.
Another man nodded beside her. "Every time."
From behind them, a womans voice called out, half-laughing with relief:
"If it wasn't for you and your girlfriend, we'd all be parasite food!"
A ripple of laughter moved through the crowd.
Butter let out a slow breath, lips curving just slightly.
"Yeah," she said. "Not happening, even if I don't live here anymore this place will always be my home. I will protect it no matter what."
The drone.
Not close. Not visible. Somewhere above the rooftops to the north, hovering at an altitude and a distance that said I am not here but also said I have never left. The specific electromagnetic frequency of its camera. The quiet rotation of its rotors adjusted for minimal acoustic signature.
It was watching her.