The question hung in the damp air, heavy and coiled as a snake. Whose side are you on?
Yin Lie met Su Li's gaze, and for a moment, the wounded wolf inside him snarled at the sheer, predatory confidence in her eyes. She was a different kind of hunter than Qi Yan or the Directorate. She didn't use brute force or rigid law. She used the board itself, moving pieces with a grace that was more terrifying than any army.
"Sides are for people who think they can win," Yin Lie said, his voice a low rasp. "I'm just trying to survive."
A flicker of amusement, or perhaps respect, crossed Su Li's face. "Survival is a series of transactions, Yin Lie. And right now, you have nothing left to trade but your own teeth and claws. I am offering you a better currency: information."
"And in exchange?" Dr. An interjected, her grip on a scalpel unwavering.
"In exchange," Su Li said, her focus returning to Yin Lie, "he becomes a force of calculated disruption. Qi Yan is not gone; he is a wounded leviathan, and his death throes will shake this city to its foundations. The Directorate, in their scramble to consolidate power, are overextending, leaving them blind. This is a moment of chaos. And chaos," she added with a faint smile, "is a ladder."
She tossed a small, impossibly thin data chip onto a nearby crate. It landed with a soft, plastic click.
"This contains the location of a new sanctuary. One my people have prepared. It is secure, sterile, and far from the city's prying eyes. It will give you a place to heal. It also contains my first 'payment'—intel on the first wave of hunters Qi Yan has unleashed. They are not his usual brutes. They are specialists. Assassins."
Yin Lie didn't move to pick it up. "This isn't an alliance," he stated, making it clear. "It's a temporary arrangement. You give me information. I use it to stay alive. Where our goals overlap, they overlap. The moment they don't, we are not on the same side."
"I would expect nothing less," Su Li said, her smile genuine this time. "Pragmatism is so much more reliable than loyalty." She gave a slight, formal nod to Dr. An. "Doctor." Then she turned and melted back into the tunnel's darkness, her footsteps as silent as her arrival.
For a long moment, only the sound of dripping water remained.
"She is a spider," Dr. An murmured, finally lowering her scalpel. "And she has just offered you a place in her web."
"It's better than being the fly," Yin Lie replied, finally picking up the chip.
---
The new sanctuary was a sterile, minimalist apartment on the 80th floor of a residential spire that catered to the city's anonymous elite. The windows were a single, panoramic view of Nocturnal Shadows, a breathtaking vista of light and shadow that made the city look like a captured galaxy. The air was filtered, the silence absolute. It was the most luxurious prison he could imagine.
For the first time in days, he was truly alone. And the silence was deafening. Dr. An's warning echoed in the quiet. The unraveled edge.
He could feel it now. The two halves of his power were no longer a harmonized engine. They were two hostile strangers forced to share a room. He reached for a glass of water, and his hand trembled, a faint tremor of suppressed lupine energy. He tried to cool the water with a touch of ice, but the glass frosted over too quickly, a web of fractures appearing on its surface. The fine control was gone. It was like trying to perform surgery with a sledgehammer and a scalpel that refused to work in unison.
He plugged Su Li's chip into a provided terminal. The information bloomed on a holographic screen. Files, dossiers, surveillance intercepts. His first payment.
The intel was chillingly specific. A pair of variant assassins known in the underworld as the "Silkworms." One, a woman named Echo, was a sound manipulator, capable of creating pockets of absolute silence or projecting disorienting sonic frequencies. The other, a man named Shade, could manipulate ambient light, bending it to become nearly invisible or creating blinding flashes. They hunted as a pair, disorienting their prey before the kill. Their last known location was a high-end hotel less than a mile from his current position.
They were already close. Su Li hadn't given him a sanctuary. She had given him a baited hook and a front-row seat.
He was studying their tactics when a new sensation pricked at the edge of his senses. Not a sound, not a sight. It was a pressure, a subtle shift in the room's atmosphere.
The wolf inside him went rigid. Danger.
He didn't move. He closed his eyes, extending his senses. He couldn't hear anything. The apartment was too well sound-proofed. But he could feel the vibrations in the floor. Two sets of footsteps, impossibly light, on the roof above.
Then, the world went silent. Not quiet. Silent. The low hum of the building's climate control, the faint whisper of wind against the glass, the frantic beat of his own heart in his ears—all gone. Erased.
Echo.
He was already moving when the window behind him exploded inward, not with a bang, but with a silent cascade of diamond-hard shards. A figure, little more than a ripple in the air, a distortion of the city lights behind it, dropped into the room.
Shade.
A blade of solidified, darkened light swung for his neck. Yin Lie threw himself to the side, the blade slicing through the air where he'd been. He tried to summon an ice wall, but his control faltered. A jagged, misshapen barricade of frost erupted from the floor—too slow, too brittle. Shade shattered it with a contemptuous kick.
Yin Lie was on the defensive, his unstable powers a liability. He couldn't trust his ice, and the wolf's rage was a wild card he couldn't afford to play in these close quarters.
Think. Don't fight.
He grabbed a heavy glass table and hurled it. In the dead silence, the action was surreal, dreamlike. Shade sidestepped, the table crashing silently against the far wall. But it was the distraction Yin Lie needed.
He focused, not on his power, but on his senses. He couldn't hear her, but the wolf could smell her. The faint scent of ozone from her equipment, the subtle perfume she wore. She was on the balcony, coordinating the attack.
He abandoned the fight with Shade. He lunged for the shattered window, diving out into the open air. The wind roared back into existence, a physical blow. He landed on the narrow balcony, and she was there, just as he'd sensed. Echo, a slim woman in tactical gear, a sonic device already aimed at him.
She fired. A wave of nauseating, disorienting sound washed over him. His vision swam, his balance gone.
But pain was a familiar country. He gritted his teeth, letting the wolf's raw resilience absorb the sonic blast, turning the agony into a clarifying rage. As he stumbled, he slammed his hand onto the metal railing of the balcony.
This time, he didn't try to control the ice. He unleashed it.
A wave of feral, untamed frost exploded from his hand, not a wall, but a creeping glacier. It consumed the railing, the floor, and surged toward Echo. She tried to leap back, but the ice was too fast. It caught her ankles, freezing her boots to the floor, climbing her legs in a matter of seconds.
Shade appeared behind him, his blade of shadow reforming. But his partner was trapped. His invisibility flickered as his concentration broke.
That was the opening. Yin Lie spun, no longer trying to be precise. He met the attack with a feral swipe of his own, his hand wreathed in a corona of jagged, barely-formed ice crystals. Not a blade, but a claw.
Ice met shadow. There was a grating, tearing sound. Shade's weapon dissolved. Yin Lie's attack continued, the icy claws tearing through the man's tactical vest and the flesh beneath.
Shade collapsed, clutching his chest, the invisibility failing completely. Echo, seeing her partner fall, let out a scream of fury that was both audible and psychic, shattering the remaining glass in the apartment before the ice climbing her body forced her into silence.
Yin Lie stood over them, breathing heavily, the adrenaline fading to reveal the deep, aching exhaustion beneath. He had won, but it had been a clumsy, brutal, desperate fight. This was his new reality on the unraveled edge.
He knelt beside the unconscious Shade. Tucked into the man's vest was a small, encrypted communicator. A single, unread message glowed on its screen. It wasn't a set of instructions. It was a payment confirmation from an untraceable account, and a single line of text.
[Contingency activated. The Chemist is en route.]
He stared at the message, a cold dread seeping into his bones that had nothing to do with his own power. This was just the beginning. Qi Yan hadn't just hired one team. He had unleashed a wave of them.
And the next one was already on its way.