The coppery taste of blood was a familiar ghost in Kiri's mouth. She leaned against the cold brick of a chimney stack, high above the grimy streets, letting the rhythmic chug-chug-hiss of the city's steam vents wash over her. The migraine, a sharp, drilling pain behind her eyes, was the price of a perfect contract. It was a fair trade.
Below, the Aethelburg Guard swarmed Valerius's corpse like brass-armored beetles. Their shouts were muffled, distant. From her perch, it was all just movement a chaotic, fluid painting. In her mind, she broke it down into frames: a guard pointing, another kneeling, the Mage-Warden gesturing wildly. Simple. Predictable.
She turned to leave, a shadow ready to dissipate into the night. And then she saw it.
A flicker.
Not in the real world, but in her Framesight. A shimmer of distortion, like heat haze on a summer road, but wrong. It pulsed at the edge of the crime scene, a tear in the fabric of reality that only she could perceive. It had no place in the sequence of events. It was an error in the code.
Frame 1: The distortion, a man-shaped blur of warped light, standing perfectly still amidst the chaos.
Her body went cold. This was new.
Frame 2: The blur turned its head. It was looking directly at her gantry, at the spot she had occupied six seconds ago.
Impossible. No one could track a Blink. No one could even see it.
Frame 3: The blur raised a hand. Not towards the gantry, but upwards, towards the network of pipes and walkways where she now stood hiding.
A cold dread, colder than the chimney brick, seeped into her. They weren't looking for evidence. They were looking for her.
She didn't Blink. Instinct, a primal scream in her mind, told her that using her power now would be like lighting a signal flare. She moved with pure, physical stealth, melting back into the forest of pipes, her heart hammering a frantic rhythm against her ribs. The pain in her head spiked, a fresh wave of nausea washing over her. The after-effects of her power were always worse when fear was the catalyst.
She descended into the bowels of the city, into the Underspire a tangled labyrinth of maintenance tunnels, forgotten sewers, and makeshift homes that existed in the perpetual twilight beneath the city's steam-works. This was the domain of the Cinder Crows. Here, the air was thick with the smell of rust, damp concrete, and unwashed humanity. The rhythmic pulse of the great steam pistons above was a constant, comforting thunder.
Her destination was a place known as the "The Rusty Nail," a tavern hidden behind a false boiler plate. It was a place of low light, lower voices, and no questions. It was supposed to be safe.
She slipped inside, the familiar haze of coal smoke and cheap liquor a blanket over her senses. She moved towards the back booth, where Silas, her handler, was already waiting, a half-finished glass of murky liquid in front of him. His face, a roadmap of scars and old regrets, was grim.
"Clean work, Kiri," he grunted, not looking at her. "The Crow is pleased. Your payment." A small, heavy pouch slid across the table.
Kiri didn't touch it. She slid into the booth, her voice a low whisper. "They were there."
Silas finally looked at her, his one good eye narrowing. "The Guard? Of course they were. You killed a Magus."
"No. Not the Guard. Something else." She struggled to find the words. "A... shimmer. In the air. It saw me."
Silas's face went carefully blank. A dangerous sign. "Saw you how?"
"It tracked my Blink. It looked right at my position after I was gone."
The silence that fell between them was heavier than the city above. Silas took a slow drink, his knuckles white around the glass. "You're tired. The Framesight strains the mind. You saw a refraction off the steam, a trick of the light"
"I know what I saw," Kiri cut him off, her voice sharp as her stiletto.
Before Silas could reply, the heavy boiler-plate door of the tavern groaned open. All conversation died.
Three figures stood silhouetted in the doorway. They weren't Guard. They wore long, grey coats, devoid of any insignia. Their faces were calm, impassive. And the air around them hummed with a pressure that made Kiri's teeth ache. It was the feel of raw, disciplined Aether.
The lead figure, a man with silver hair and eyes the color of a dead sky, scanned the room. His gaze passed over thugs and smugglers, seeing nothing of interest, until it landed on Silas. And then, on Kiri.
He didn't point. He didn't speak. He simply smiled, a small, cold thing.
Frame 1: The silver-haired man's hand twitched.
Kiri was already moving. She kicked the table over, sending the pouch of coins and Silas's drink flying. "CROW'S BETRAYAL!" she screamed, the old code phrase for a compromised handler echoing through the stunned silence.
Frame 2: The man at the door didn't cast a spell. He simply flicked his wrist.
The space where Kiri had been sitting compressed. The heavy wooden booth imploded with a scream of tearing wood and metal, crushed into a sphere the size of a grapefruit.
Chaos erupted. But for Kiri, it was just another sequence to calculate.
Frame 3-5: She Blinked. Once, twice, three times in rapid succession a painful, disorienting burst. She was a phantom zig-zagging through the panicking crowd, past the bar, towards a grimy window at the back of the tavern.
She risked a single glance back. Silas was on his feet, a knife in his hand, but he wasn't looking at the grey-coated mages. He was looking at her, his face a mask of anguish and fury. He had sold her out.
The silver-haired man's eyes met hers across the room. He wasn't rushing. He looked... curious. Amused. He watched her, as a scientist would watch a rare insect pinned to a board.
Frame 6: Kiri threw herself through the grimy window, glass shattering around her in a beautiful, frozen cascade of shards. She fell into the damp, stinking darkness of a sewer channel below.
The icy water shocked her system. She surfaced, gasping, the world snapping back to real time. The sounds of the fight from the Rusty Nail were muffled, distant.
She hauled herself onto a narrow ledge, shivering, not from the cold, but from the violation. Her sanctuary was gone. Her handler had turned. And they had found her with an ease that was terrifying.
They hadn't tried to kill her in the tavern. The compression sphere was a warning, a demonstration of power. A message: We can break your world whenever we wish.
She was alone. And for the first time, the silent, frozen frames of her world felt not like a refuge, but like a cage. The hunters knew where the ghost lived. And the hunt had only just begun.