The call came in like a hunger pang at two in the morning—sharp, insistent, impossible to ignore. Aria Lane tasted adrenaline the way other people tasted sugar: immediate, necessary, and oddly comforting. She had a name for that exact feeling, a shorthand she'd used for a decade inside the trade: A-01. It was less a designation and more a lullaby in a world that preferred chaos.
"Team Echo, strike on my mark," she murmured into the tiny bone mic threaded behind her ear. Her voice was soft, practiced—an instruction disguised as indifference. The warehouse sat like a sleeping whale under the moon. Rusted girders, stacked palettes, and shadows long enough to hide a dozen sins. Inside, heat hummed through broken windows; outside, a single delivery truck idled like bait.
She checked her kit without moving her head. Fingers knew the choreography: lock picks, grappling tether, a flash charge the size of a coin, a micro-drone more obedient than most people she'd ever loved. She salted her tongue with the brief, private thought that if she survived this night, there would be time later for real food—proper food, not freeze-dried operatives' rations. Calories mattered. Always.
"Three targets," whispered Malik, the team's comms operator. His voice came clipped, clinical. Malik had steady hands and an unhealthy addiction to caffeinated gum. "One high-value, two supports. The boy's compromised. Snatch and exfil within eight minutes."
The boy. He was the reason they were there. Sometimes a mission was a ledger; sometimes it was a debt. Aria paid both with the same coin.
She remembered the silhouettes in the storage bay: one taller, with shoulders too squared for the job; the other—thin, younger—trembling in the grasp of two men who smelled like cheap cologne and bad decisions. The kid's eyes—so young, so bright—locked on hers, and for a second time stopped the world.
"On me," she breathed. Reflex, muscle memory, care. The drone peeled off her wrist like a second heart and feathered up, eyes working, mapping every shadow into a face.
They moved like a story already told: Malik at the comms, Torres sweeping left with the soft brutality of a man who'd learned to laugh with his hands, Aria cutting the line that tied the boy's wrists. The wire gave with a whisper. The kid coughed, lungs full of fear and dust and cheap smoke.
"Who sent you?" she asked, voice a velvet pry. No answer. The boy shook, but when she slid the pack away from his shoulders, she found a tattoo—one small glyph, half-erased. A mark that had started ten missions ago and never seemed to finish.
"Got it," Malik said. "Extraction in ninety."
Ninety seconds. It was never enough. It was never meant to be. Time lived on a different calendar when you were in the business of stealing people back from the margins.
They made for the exit with choreography practiced a hundred times in rooms with no windows. Aria's palms were calm. She loved the way hands could tell a lie and a truth at once. She loved the sound a suppressed weapon made when it kissed a target's ear. She loved the quiet that came after the world had stopped screaming.
A footfall where it should not be. Metal rasped—an old conduit splitting underfoot. Malik cursed soft. Torres put a hand on Aria's shoulder—the universal signal: go. She half-turned, one boot on the pallet. Movement from above.
"Ambush," Torres said, like it was an observation about the weather.
They were three. They should have been three. But the truck door slammed open with the single, vulgar enthusiasm of a detonator. The rig's back was a mouth of shadows; it spat men who smelled of sweat and fear. The kid's captor—bigger, thicker—stepped forward, smile made of broken glass. He had a trigger finger the traders called a tendency; he had a face no one worth saving wanted to remember.
Aria moved. It was not elegance; it was arithmetic. Step, palm, elbow, sweep—fifteen microgestures stitched into a single movement. She disarmed one man with a twist that left his gun kissing his own knee, knocked another with a heel that cracked like a whip. The boy ran.
Time did a thing of its own. Explosives were ignorant students of cause and effect. Somewhere in the truck, a black-paced box did what a black-paced box does when someone wants to end the lesson early. The first detonator went off like a cough. The world scaled back and then forward, a camera flicker, a washed-out photograph of a moment where sound lost patience.
Aria's ears filled with the hot iron taste of blood. The air became an essay in chaos—voices shredded, a shard of metal kissing her cheek. She forced herself to look for the boy. He was on the ground, rolling, coughing, eyes huge. Malik was yelling something into the mic; Torres was on his knees, clutching a smoking sleeve.
She knew the physics. You didn't wait for the blast to reach you; you moved with it, rode the wave. She pivoted, shoved the boy toward the loading bay door like putting a child into the path of a coach when necessary. She should have pulled back. She should have—
Explosions are bad students because they never learn restraint. The second charge answered the first with an echo that felt like a planet striking its own core. Heat wrapped her like a lover gone violent. There are moments, she would later think, that a person catalogs as coda: the flash, the smell, the small, private thought of absurdity—I haven't had tacos in weeks—and then the world folding into itself.
Her last ordered thought—one she filed away with the precision of a librarian—was not regret. It was a calculation: Malik, Torres, the boy. Get them out. Leave her in the ledger.
She remembered the impact like a punctuation mark. The truck's metal became paper. The world inverted, then blanked.
There was a taste of plastic and ozone, and then nothing. No humor. No snacks. No A-01. Just the peculiarly soft black that allowed the mind to breathe.
When the light finally came back, it would be wrong. But that belonged to the next page. For now, the last sound she heard was someone screaming her name—somewhere between a prayer and an accusation—and she answered it with muscle, with memory, with the last, reflexive quip she could muster into the falling. "If we survive," she had told the boy, by instinct and defiance, "I get the first taco."