Dekan Plaza
Lanova - Mid Tiers, 16th day of The Sun Year
6:15 AM
The security exit hissed open with a reluctant sigh, and the figure stepped into the early-morning haze of Lanova, steam rising from sewer grates, the sky already flickering with the pulse of distant billboards. He didn't rush. There was no need. The drone had lost interest once he left the restricted zone. Besides, moving too quickly down here only invited attention.
The alley behind the Ad-Spire was narrow, shadow-soaked, and scattered with the neon detritus of the Mid-Tiers: glowing noodle wrappers, spent stims, and a broken neural jack still twitching with static. He adjusted the collar of his jacket, goggles now concealed beneath a matte hood, and slipped into the current of bodies beginning to flood the street.
From the outside, Lanova was waking up.
From the inside, it had never gone to sleep.
Above him, astrocars weaved between megatowers like predatory fish, their engines humming through layers of vertical traffic. Massive digital billboards screamed propaganda in perfect synchrony: "Fight for Glory. Bleed for Legacy. CELARE IS NOW." The faces of past champions flickered across the skyline; some heroic, some monstrous, all unforgettable.
He moved beneath them like a ghost.
As he reached the end of the alley and merged into a larger walkway—a raised transit artery connecting a casino district to a weapons market, the city's design revealed itself more clearly. The streets sloped upward at sharp angles, all leading toward the luminous zenith. The veins of the city—the glowing conduits from the Heart—pulsed faintly in the distance, casting a cerulean light that barely touched the Mid-Tiers.
It was a city of ambition pretending to be civilization. A pyramid of lies, violence, and desperation, with a prize at the top no one truly understood.
And him?
He moved like a shadow brushed in blue.
A long coat, indigo, almost black in the early light, flowed past his knees, its trim catching faint glints of cerulean with each step. Beneath it, a layered set of tactical wear in muted sapphire and lapis hues blended into the steel-and-neon backdrop of the Mid-Tiers. The only detail that caught the eye, if anyone dared to look too closely, was the slim pair of goggles resting idle at his collar—sleek, angular, the lenses tinted in an orange-bluish colour.
They weren't just for show.
Everything else was concealed. No weapons were visible, but something in the way he moved—measured, weightless—suggested he didn't need any on display.
He passed through the crowd like water through cracks, unseen by most, unreadable by all.
Somewhere deep in the noise and neon, the Game was already stirring. And though he wasn't a player yet, he'd seen the opening move.
That kind of silence… It's not normal.
He looked once more at the tower behind him, barely visible now through the crowd and light.
Someone killed a Hunter. Clean. Quiet. And nobody heard a damn thing.
He started walking. Somewhere to be. Someone to find. Or maybe just instincts pulling him toward something bigger.
Either way, Lanova moved around him, oblivious.
And above, the Heart pulsed; steady, watchful, hungry.
He slipped onto the mag-track line just before it locked into a new cycle, merging into the crowd without effort. The transit platform was stacked five stories high, wrapping like a neural coil around the towering infrastructure of the Mid-Tiers. Each loop buzzed with noise—ads, deals, betting stats, drone alerts—but he let it wash over him. No one looked up. No one looked down. Everyone just moved.
Six stops later, he stepped off into Residential Sector 6-N2—one of the older zones in the entertainment district, close enough to the spectacle to feel alive, far enough not to drown in it.
He climbed.
Lanova's buildings weren't designed for comfort. They were vertical spires of uneven renovation, original corporate bones fused with decades of independent graft and survival logic. Balconies repurposed into chicken coops. Rooftop gardens are growing next to solar rigs and cracked billboards. This place had personality. Flaws. Soul.
At the top of a weatherworn high-rise, he reached his floor and keyed in a series of silent taps on a pressure-sensitive panel hidden behind a drainpipe.
The door opened inward without a sound.
The entryway led into a space that didn't match the world outside. Here, the lines were clean, angles intentional. Cool lighting bounced off smooth, sapphire-toned surfaces. Walls of folded glass and dark steel wrapped the living area in quiet elegance. An artful balance of technology and taste, no clutter, no wasted motion.
The city roared below, but here it was muted. Insulated. Controlled.
He passed through the main room, removed his coat, and set it carefully on a recessed wall hook. The goggles followed, locked into a charging plate. Then, without pause, he descended a narrow staircase concealed behind a wall panel.
The hum of machinery greeted him like an old friend.
The lower floor was another world entirely.
A high-ceilinged workshop lined with modular tool bays, stacked circuit boards, dissected drones, and skeletal exosuits suspended from rail hooks. An entire wall served as a projection surface, displaying an overlapping patchwork of schematics, data feeds, and surveillance snapshots.
The colors down here were sharper, colder; arctic blue LED strips tracing the floor edges, casting shifting shadows across the room. The scent of solder and ion-burnt metal lingered like incense.
He crossed to the central bench and placed a palm on a biometric reader. The interface flared to life, revealing a suspended holomap of Lanova, rotating slowly above the surface.
A moment passed.
Then, with a flick of his fingers, he rewound a video feed—the silent kill, the signature left behind, J's reaction—pausing on each detail as if rearranging puzzle pieces no one else could see.
He stood over the holomap, Lanova's tiers suspended in cold blue light, each level a cross-section of the city's ambition and decay. The Apex shimmered at the top like a myth, pulsing with the cerulean glow of the Heart, while the Depths sagged like a rusted lung, crowded with the detritus of old wars, bad bets, and broken champions. He scanned the flow of movement through the Mid-Tiers, watching data feeds flicker, territorial shifts, drone patrols rerouted, a casino fire suppressed before it made the news. Normal noise. Nothing pointed.
No new clients this morning. Just data flows. Sub-layer movements. The kind of ripple a trained eye could spot across rooftops and half-truths.
He opened his encrypted contract terminal. Dozens of listings scrolled past in narrow fonts and anonymous insignias. Petty kills. Debt reclamations. Corporate cleansings dressed up as "emergency retrievals." Nothing that interested him.
He brought up his current contract. There was only one listed, already tagged, and active:
Active Contract: CODE J-05
Name: Jasmine Navani
Affiliation: Alata Corp. Combat Division (Special Assets)
Last Location: General Headquarters | Observation Level
Tier: High Risk | Clandestine Observation Only
Payout: 18.2 Tinium
Directive: No contact. Surveillance only. Daily update required.
He stared at the data for a long moment, then minimized it and brought up the footage stored in his collar feed. A frame from earlier in the morning flickered into focus: Jasmine, framed by the smoldering remains of Chain's office, her cigarette glowing dimly in the shadows. She hadn't seen him. Her focus had been locked on something inside. Something unexpected.
He rewound the feed. Again. The infiltration had been surgical; whoever had breached HQ hadn't left a single security node tripped. The kill itself had been almost beautiful in its precision. Chain never saw it coming. No sound. No resistance. No panic. Just silence and death. He hadn't planned to witness it. He wasn't supposed to. The rooftop vantage had been chosen for its proximity to Jasmine, not to the unfolding murder. And yet, he'd watched the whole thing happen, every step, every calculated movement.
That was the part that stuck. He wasn't supposed to know what he knew.
He leaned away from the terminal, folding his arms as the footage looped again in the corner of the screen. Jasmine's posture as she found the body, tight, ready, eyes hard—told him everything. She hadn't expected the scene either. Whatever this was, she wasn't in on it. That made her valuable. Or vulnerable. Maybe both; his contract hadn't changed. His role remained what it had always been—observe, report, collect.
But he'd seen a death that wasn't meant for his eyes; he hadn't just seen a target, he'd stepped into someone else's move.
He locked the file behind three layers of biometric encryption, then shut down the terminal, the lab slipping into low-power mode with a soft hum. Lines of light across the floor dimmed to faint pulses, casting deep shadows behind hanging exosuits and partially dismantled drones. The silence was absolute, save for the gentle thrum of the city bleeding through the structure's bones.
Upstairs, the upper level of the apartment was quiet, cold, and perfect. He crossed the polished floor barefoot, the underfloor insulation making each step feel detached from the chaos below. The kitchen, like everything else, was stripped of excess; a precision layout of smart metal and recessed glass. He pulled a bottle from the chill unit, something dark and herbal, and filled a sleek ceramic cup.
Then, he stepped onto the terrace.
The wind here was cleaner. Artificial, filtered through rooftop turbines and redirectors, but enough to almost feel real. He leaned against the railing and drank slowly, the bitter taste anchoring him in the moment.
From here, Lanova stretched out like a living machine, layered, luminous, endless. The spires of the Mid-Tiers rose like fractured teeth, but above them loomed the true skyline: the High Tiers, glowing with soft golds and clean whites, impossible to reach without permission or power.
And just to the east, he could see it, Transport Sector A-01, the only legal vertical route from the Mid-Tiers to the city's upper structure. Massive lev-rails and shimmering lifts climbed toward the Zenith, like arteries to heaven. They were always guarded. Always monitored. Entry required perfect credentials and more credits than most would see in a lifetime.
He remembered riding that elevator once.
Long ago. Another version of himself. Clean. Unscarred. Wearing clothes that still smelled of home instead of ozone and gun oil.
There had been a woman. A child. A quiet apartment in a tower so high you could see the curve of the continent on a clear day. Back when Lanova still meant something simple, entertainment, not ritualized slaughter. Back before he understood what Celare really was. Before he realized this city didn't run on electricity or politics. It ran on blood. On spectacle. On gods made out of corpses and ambition.
He blinked, and the memory was gone, folded back into whatever part of his mind handled regret.
He took another sip, eyes locked on the ascent shaft, lights flickering as a lev-car climbed toward the distant Zenith. Somewhere up there, people still believed the Game was just that, a game. Something grand. Noble. Worth dying for.
He envied them a little.
But only for a moment.
He stood there a while longer, the city stretching out beneath him like a cracked mirror-catching firelight. Then, without a word, he turned to go back inside.
As he moved, the sun caught the edge of his left ear.
For the briefest moment, light refracted through the small, translucent chip that hung there, an earring barely more than a sliver, flickering orange and blue like data frozen mid-stream. To anyone else, it was just a strange aesthetic choice, another aftermarket affectation in a city full of them. But no one else knew what was stored inside. No one else even knew it was storage. And that was exactly how he liked it.
He stepped back into the open space of his home, polished floors, quiet air, light filtering through shielded glass. The silence wrapped around him like it always did. Cool. Controlled. Familiar.
Then came the sound he didn't expect.
A single, sharp ping from the device on the table near the sofa. Not the system feed. Not the contract line.
Personal.
He crossed the room in two quick strides, the small screen already lighting up with a soft amber pulse. A single line of text scrolled slowly into view, framed by the glyph he'd embedded into the tracker's code.
SUBJECT J-05 | MOTION DETECTED — SIGNAL SPIKE
STATUS: ACTIVE
LOCATION: MOBILE — DEPARTURE FROM ZONE-231 | HEADING UNKNOWN
The tracker.
He'd placed it on Jasmine a week ago, a ghost tag embedded in a cigarette carton during one of her supply drops. A precaution. Nothing more. She hadn't moved much since—routine patterns, briefings, late-night walks around her sector's high balconies. Nothing noteworthy.
Until now.
He stared at the notification for a moment, then opened the live feed panel, watching as a blinking blue dot began to shift across the screen. Not fast. But direct. Intentional, something was happening.
He picked up the goggles from their charging plate and slipped them back around his neck, fingers already moving to call up city schematics and surveillance feeds. As the system came online, the window darkened slightly, reacting to the sudden change in ambient light.
The office still smelled of scorched circuitry and blood.
Jasmine stood near what was left of the central data core, her fingers dancing across a flickering holographic panel. The system was damaged but not dead. Deeper beneath the burnt layers, Chain had hidden something, unauthorized Authority codes tangled with a second, foreign signature. It pulsed like a wound beneath the city's skin.
She tapped her comm once.
"Report in," came the voice on the other end, filtered through the static.
"Pulling partial data logs from the wreck," she replied, scanning fast. "Code clash in the final relay—two Authority Egos. Chain wasn't alone. One of the signatures is—"
Movement.
Her voice cut off mid-sentence.
A vibration in the air. A shift in shadow. Jasmine dropped the report, hand already going to her weapon, spinning toward the ripple in the ceiling just as it collapsed.
The first attacker came down hard, blade-first, silent, no warning. She sidestepped, brought her elbow into its throat, then fired twice into its chest before it even registered her. The body collapsed with mechanical stiffness, armor humming as it short-circuited on the floor.
Then came the second.
She twisted low as a baton cracked the edge of her jaw—staggering her—but she rolled with it, came up beneath the strike, and rammed a combat knife into the assailant's side. It sank deep, but there was no blood. No grunt. Just a hiss and a twitch. Synthetic nerves?
The third attacker struck from her blind spot, nearly landing a garrote before she slammed backward into its chest, then flipped it over her shoulder and snapped the wire free. Its hood fell away mid-air.
No face. Just a smooth obsidian mask, emotionless, seamless, like a blank slate sculpted for killing.
She didn't pause.
Jasmine's pistol rose with fluid speed. Two more shots. One shattered a shoulder plate. The second ricocheted. Their armor was unlike anything she'd seen in the Mid-Tiers: quiet, flexible, reactive. Not Alata's design. Not Depth-born junk either.
The last two emerged as she turned, flanking her like wolves, pushing her toward the broken window. One lunged. She blocked with a forearm and countered with a vicious kick that sent it crashing into the desk. The other slashed at her with twin blades, spinning, flickering, coated in something not quite visible.
She dodged the first, barely avoided the second, and felt the third bite across her ribs—armor sparking, skin burning beneath. Pain spiked hard. She gritted her teeth and pushed through it, drawing her backup blade and slicing through the attacker's thigh in one brutal, arcing stroke.
It faltered. She sprinted.
Through the shattered frame of the office window, out into open air, boots hitting metal, blood in her mouth, breath ragged but steady. Her systems blared damage reports. She shut them out.
She pushed harder, her boots slamming onto steel rooftops, then vaulting down into trash-cluttered passageways that reeked of coolant and fried skin. Her neural interface flickered warnings in the corners of her vision, fractured readings, system strain, and mild concussion. She muted them all.
She wasn't running to escape.
She was running to kill. Just not yet.
She gritted her teeth and leaped across a cracked skybridge, landing hard and skidding into a roll that sent sparks flying off the plating of her boots. She caught her momentum and drove forward just as she burst through a blinking checkpoint gate and into the edge of Spark Plaza.
The city opened up around her in a sudden blast of neon and chaos. Crowds. Ads. Noise.
Spark Plaza surged with life—holo-vendors hawking neural boosters, synth-street musicians pulsing bass through massive subsonic, corporate mascots flickering across building walls. Steam hissed from underfoot vents, mixing with the sharp, synthetic smell of street food and ozone. The lights were blinding. The crowd thick. Perfect cover. Or so she hoped.
She plunged into the crowd at a sprint, eyes scanning every reflection, every shadow. Behind her, she heard nothing. Saw nothing. But she knew better than to believe she'd lost them.
These weren't Depth scum looking for scraps or gangsters chasing bounty credit. These were specialists. Precision over brutality. Silence over spectacle.
And they were still on her.
She shouldered past a cybernetics vendor, nearly knocking over a rack of enhanced limb modules. The stall owner shouted something at her, voice drowned out by a sudden wave of synth-chatter from an overhead screen broadcasting Celare statistics. Champions. Deaths. Rankings. Always rankings.
She didn't stop.
A moment later, she felt it—that tingle at the base of her spine. Her body moved before her mind caught up. She ducked just as a pulse-blade hissed through the air behind her, slicing clean through a neon banner strung above the plaza. Sparks rained down.
They'd found her.
She spun, weapon drawn, just in time to fire at the figure slipping between two columns of the crowd. The shot grazed a shoulder, burned fabric, and caused a sharp recoil of movement, but it didn't drop him. Another shadow darted to her right, forcing her to roll backward into a recessed stairwell, taking cover behind a vertical display advertising spinal re-tunings for half price.
She tapped her left temple, trying to activate backup targeting. Static. Her neural interface was still half-fried from the first engagement.
No tech. No backup. Just instinct.
The first attacker was closing in fast, vaulting over a food stall like a ghost in black cloth. She waited, breath controlled, timing perfect, and then moved. Her knee shot up as he landed, catching him mid-air. As he dropped, she followed with a brutal elbow to the mask. It cracked—barely—but it was enough. She seized his head and slammed it against the rail behind her.
He twitched. Didn't get back up.
She grabbed his weapon—a carbon-edged tanto—and turned as the second emerged from the shifting wall of pedestrians. He didn't hesitate. Neither did she.
Their blades met with a shriek of steel. He was faster. She was angrier.
He lunged. She sidestepped. He struck again, blade grazing her cheek. She retaliated with a reverse slash, catching his thigh, then jammed her shoulder into his chest and drove him back into the side of a delivery drone that crashed in a burst of sparks.
Two down.
But two unaccounted for.
Jasmine stumbled backward, chest heaving, blood hot in her ears. Her vision flickered. The adrenaline was keeping her upright, but she wouldn't last long without extraction.
Then she heard it—a sudden ripple in the noise, a distortion across the plaza. Pedestrians scattering. A shadow above.
She looked up.
The fourth was already mid-air, dropping down toward her like a spear from the rooftop, velocity unnatural, blade angled down toward her spine. She turned just in time to see him descending, but too late to do anything about it.
A breath before impact, something changed.
The air snapped.
A shock pulse burst upward from a vendor's canopy, invisible but tangible. The attacker hit it mid-fall, and body-folding momentum was shattered. He spun violently off-target, slammed into the side of a holo-kiosk, and collapsed in a tangle of limbs and fractured armor.
Jasmine blinked.
That wasn't hers.
She scanned the rooftops—nothing. No movement. No comms. Whoever had intervened was already gone, swallowed by the crowd or skyline. No time to question it. Her instincts shifted, pulling her toward the fifth, still out there, close. Watching. Waiting.
Pain throbbed through her side, her leg heavy, pulse out of rhythm, but her grip on the stolen tanto held steady. She glanced upward again—still no sign. Yet she felt it. Someone was there. Observing. Quiet. Precise.
----
High above the plaza, a figure stood motionless in the shadow of a shattered billboard, half-shrouded by scaffolding and flickering light. A long indigo coat shifted slightly in the wind, the collar raised just enough to conceal his jaw. At his throat, a pair of slim goggles glinted faintly, a pair of orange glass catching sparks from the chaos below.
With a silent gesture, a lens extended from the side, locking into place. His left hand, previously resting near his belt, moved just enough to press a hidden trigger beneath his coat cuff—no wider than a coin, nearly invisible. A compressed pulse of kinetic force discharged from a recessed emitter along the scaffold's rail, too fast to trace, too clean to notice. Below, the attacker spiraled off-course mid-air, crashing into a kiosk in a twist of limbs and metal.
The figure didn't move again, just watched.
Heat signatures bloomed across his vision. Movement trails, kinetic vectors, and low-frequency sound mapping, all layered over the plaza like a pulse map. He watched as Jasmine twisted through the crowd, injured but still fluid. Controlled. Every breath, every feint, every hesitation, captured and logged into his custom feed with clinical precision.
He adjusted the focus, just enough to catch the tremor in her spine and the flare behind her eyes. Something was rising in her, not panic, not desperation.
Power.
Jasmine cut hard through a pedestrian line and slipped into a side corridor beneath a rusted transit arch. The pursuit had thinned, but her instincts screamed louder than ever. The fifth wasn't chasing—he was hunting. Pacing her. Predicting.
She didn't risk heading home. Not now. Someone was watching. Not just her attackers—someone else, distant but precise, always just outside her vision. She felt it like a hand on her shoulder.
Instead, she moved fast through the narrow back alleys of Spark Plaza until she found it: a low, half-lit pub tucked between two freight buildings, the signage faded and glitching, windows blacked out. No music. No crowd. Seemingly closed.
Perfect.
She slipped through the side door, blood trailing faintly behind her, and stepped into a wide, dark room filled with shadows and silence. Tables overturned. Old glass bottles glinting like teeth. The ventilation hummed weakly overhead. Her boots moved carefully between patches of flickering light.
Then she stopped.
She wasn't alone.
She heard it—just a shift. A heel brushing metal. Breath caught wrong in the chest. Jasmine pivoted hard just as the fifth attacker emerged from behind the old bar, blade in hand, movement fast but not fast enough.
She grabbed a broken stool and threw it. A distraction. He ducked. She closed the distance before he reset his stance, aiming a high kick that caught his forearm with a crack of force. He staggered back, blade scraping wood.
Her pistol was gone—shattered somewhere during the rooftop sprint. The blade she stole? Useless in this space. Too tight. Too cluttered.
She didn't need it.
She advanced without hesitation, footwork crisp and tight, circling him at an angle that slipped just outside his reach. The moment his guard opened, she charged, driving her elbow into the side of his head with bone-jarring force. He staggered—just a half-step—but it was enough. She ducked under his retaliatory swing and brought her knee up into his gut, the impact deep and brutal, forcing the air from his lungs.
He stumbled back, off balance, but not down. With a sharp inhale, he rushed her again, a desperate lunge with too much weight behind it. She caught his wrist, twisted sharply at the joint, and turned her hip into the motion, using his forward momentum to flip him over her shoulder. His body crashed into a table, splintering it in half as he rolled through debris and glass.
He recovered fast—too fast—and came back up swinging, his rhythm sharp, chaotic, unpredictable. Jasmine met the assault head-on. She deflected the first blow, slipped under the second, then shifted her footing with surgical timing and delivered a spinning kick into his ribs that echoed through the space with a sharp, wet crack. He grunted, barely holding his ground, arms wide and breath short.
She didn't wait. Closing the distance, she grabbed the front of his jacket, redirected his weight as he tried to rotate, and brought him around in a sharp, crushing arc. His back slammed into the wall with a force that knocked a framed digital menu off its mount. He tried to recover, hands flailing toward the blade he'd dropped, but she drove her forearm across his throat, holding him there, gaze locked on his until the tension in his limbs gave out.
She finished it with a hook—clean, sharp, driven from left to right—that snapped his head with a dull thud.
He dropped. Didn't move.
Her breath came hard and sharp now, body trembling with exertion. The air smelled of blood, dust, and ozone. She stood still for a second, surrounded by broken chairs and scattered bottles, then staggered to the wall and leaned there, staring down at the body.
A small lens in the shadows above the building retracted slowly, vanishing back into the skyline.
Someone had seen all of it.
She knew it now.
And whoever it was, they hadn't stopped watching.
Jasmine staggered into the alley behind the pub, barely upright, her hands trembling as they braced against the rain-slick wall. Blood ran down her arms, her legs, soaking into her boots. The left sleeve of her jacket had been torn clean off during the fight, exposing lacerations across her shoulder and forearm. Her knuckles were raw. Her side burned where she'd been struck earlier, and now that the adrenaline was gone, every step felt heavier than the last.
She didn't even try to wipe the blood away. There was too much of it—hers and theirs. It clung to her skin, warm in the rain, pooling in the corners of her vision. The world had narrowed to breath and movement, pain and motion. She moved down the alley slowly, head low, one hand trailing the wall to stay upright. Her mind was silent now. The interface HUD was barely functioning—battery fried, sensor glass cracked. Her Ego had gone still again, quiet and deep like an animal that knew not to wake just yet.
Somewhere in her bones, she knew the worst wasn't over. She hadn't run home because she couldn't. Someone had been watching her. Not the five who attacked her. Someone else. Earlier, it had been just a presence—something felt more than seen—but now she was certain of it. Something outside the fight, above it. Measuring her. Waiting.
She turned the corner at the end of the alley and froze.
A man was sitting on a bench beneath the broken awning of an old shopfront, bathed in the amber spill of a dying streetlamp. He didn't look up, didn't move. Just sat there, one leg crossed over the other, arms folded beneath the long fall of a dark indigo coat. A faint shimmer of orange light flickered against his collar: goggles, retracted now but still active. He wasn't trying to hide, but he wasn't offering a greeting either.
He'd been there when it happened.
Watching.
Her pulse spiked. She didn't have the strength to fight again, and for reasons she couldn't explain, she knew he wasn't there to finish what the others had started. He just sat, watching her. Not indifferent—but interested. Curious, even. Like she was a puzzle he hadn't expected to enjoy solving.
She held his gaze for a heartbeat longer, then turned away, limping down the alley without a word.
On the bench, the man sat still, watching until she disappeared into the dark. The lenses at his collar recorded the fading trail of her heat signature, mapping every unstable movement, every pulse of her overloaded nervous system. She had been on the edge back there—he saw it clearly now. That hesitation in releasing her Ego. That storm beneath the surface she'd refused to unleash.
He should've reported it immediately. The contractor would want updates—clean ones, with timestamps and footage. But he didn't move. The data had already been logged, the feed captured. What held him there wasn't protocol.
It was her.
Jasmine.
She was supposed to be a surveillance job. A high-level Alata asset with trackable patterns and predictable routines. Instead, she was being hunted by specialists without insignias, hit squads with cloaking-grade armor. Someone had sent them, and it wasn't him. Which meant someone else wanted her off the board, and someone else wanted her watched.
The contract didn't add up. Too much money. Too little context. It had smelled clean when he took it, but now he tasted the dirt beneath the polish. There were layers here. More than just a game of observation.
She wasn't a mark anymore. She was a question.
Finally, he leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees, the rain whispering against the awning above. His gloved fingers tapped out a silent response to the encrypted prompt waiting on his terminal.
SUBJECT ALIVE. PATTERN FRACTURED. CONTINUING OBSERVATION.
He sent it. Then sat back again, watching the alley where she'd vanished, eyes narrowed against the glow of the flickering signage.
This wasn't over.
Not even close.