Good People (Worm/Shadowrun)

DDoS - 5.05

The quiet of the abandoned laboratory was broken by the sound of chalk being dragged across concrete as Regent sketched out the outline of a magical circle. Once we'd returned from our scouting mission and caught what sleep we could in the loft, he disappeared shortly after we'd breakfasted on rolls Grue had bought from a nearby food truck catering to industrial shift workers, with fried slices of bacon-flavoured tofu and eggs. Regent returned hours later with a nondescript black shopping bag of obscure herbs, powders, dusts and crystals; magical reagents to fuel his spells.

The powder joined the chalk in the circle, using the chalk lines as guidelines to create a mathematically perfect shape. Where imperfections did form, Regent took a small metal knife from his pocket and scraped the powder back into place. It was a methodical, exacting process that seemed to me to be completely at odds with who Regent was, and yet he went about the task with single-minded focus and a sort of rote perfection in his motions. It was very much the product of his father's teachings.

I watched him work with a sort of baffled curiosity. I knew next to nothing about magic; it simply wasn't something that had played a large part in my life. There were one or two kids at high school who'd been discovered in the tests in the last months of freshmen year, enjoying a fame and infamy that eclipsed even that of the football team for a few brief months only to flee Winslow before their sophomore year to transfer to corporate-run schools that specialised in developing magical talent and instilling that talent with loyalty to the corp.

If there were other classmates in my childhood who awakened, I never heard of them. Most magicians lived secluded lives, integrated into corporate or governmental circles that they rarely left. It was an understandable choice to make with an undeniable quality of life increase, a chance to escape the reach of magophobia and, maybe most importantly of all, the opportunity to live among people who interacted with the world the same way they did.

I wondered if technomancers would ever reach that same status, flipping from a terrifying unknown to an asset to be courted?

If they do, I don't want any part of it.

Of course, there were others who weren't so lucky – or unlucky, depending on how you thought of it. People like Lisa, who'd slipped through the cracks in all the structures designed to catch and funnel magicians into set paths. I'd grown up around working professionals, who worked within the system even as they advocated against its structures in their own ways, which meant my only experience of those mages was walking past unassuming stalls in the Market selling mysterious trinkets, or advertising potions, poultices, spirit healing and fortune telling. It was rumours of kids being snatched off the street by gangs desperate for a magical edge, or hearing whispers in the halls that this or that student was totally a witch.

Watching a real magician at work was a lot less impressive than trideo would have had me believe. It was clear he was putting a lot of effort into the circle, but the concrete floor of the old laboratory was no substitute for a dark cellar filled with gothic candles and obscure symbols daubed on the walls. Instead, Regent simply stepped back from the circle and swept a hand forwards, sending out a short burst of flame that caught on the powder, igniting it in an entirely mundane-looking flash of magnesium.

Except the flash didn't dissipate. At first I thought it was just the after-image, but the incandescent flame still flickered on the floor even though the powder had been entirely burned up. It shifted, spreading out to the centre of the circle as the fire changed from white to blue to flickering oranges and yellows. It crackled and spat in a way that put me in mind of the sort of flames you got from a burning tenement; full to the point of bursting with insulation, electrics and whatever chemical residue the last acid rainstorm left on the roof.

It wasn't the comforting fire of a warm hearth or an old fashioned stove, the sort of fire I'd only ever seen on trideo or in period-piece simsense recordings. It was the violent, aggressive fire that followed washing lines as it crept from building to building, sending people fleeing into the smoke-filled halls of their cheap-built apartments.

It rose into a thick pillar, spitting out sparks that drifted in the air before inevitably being drawn back into the mass of flames. Regent was muttering to himself, holding out a talisman in front him as he stared at the roiling spirit with a dispassionate expression on his face.

I knew enough to know that trideo only focused on the sort of magic that could be seen. The chip truth was that real magic was rarely visible to the unawakened. Looming spirits or someone slinging fire made for an impressive visual on a screen – albeit one that had to be almost completely remastered by post-processing to smooth out the camera's inability to properly capture something so unnatural – but real magic was a quiet, invisible thing to people like me.

It was kind of like how the matrix couldn't be seen without wearing the proper hardware, or my resonance-given workaround.

Whatever Regent did, I could see its effect on the spirit. Abruptly, the fire shrunk back on itself, suddenly constraining against bonds of invisible force as it seemed to grow angrier and angrier, spitting out embers in greater volume only for them to hit against a wall of force within centimetres of the mass of flames.

That wall closed in, constricting the flames until they looked like a solid mass of fire beneath a pane of glass. Then, it was as if they merged – or one subsumed the other – and the glass disappeared, leaving flames that held their shape without outside pressures as they began to shift into a humanoid form.

Not just humanoid; female, with the shape of her hands and feet obscured by gouts of fire as she hovered in the circle, as if they sat at the very edge of Regent's control. Her face was featureless except for sunken eye sockets that glowed like the sun, with two trails of pinpricks of light flowing down from them to where her mouth would be. Something about them reminded me of cigarette burns, and everything about the spirit seemed to be silently screaming with contained rage.

Beside me, Tattletale was looking at the spirit with an expression that seemed to be somewhere between nausea and disgust, before she smoothed her features back into her constant mask.

"Is something wrong?" I asked in a low voice that Regent wouldn't be able to hear.

"Nothing," Tattletale sighed, shaking her head. "Songbird in a cage, that's all. Hate to see it."

"Remind you of yourself?" I asked.

She laughed – a sharp, angry sound.

"All that time alone's left you with no filter at all, has it?" I winced. "No, it's not that. Not just that," she clarified, giving me a pointed look. "You don't need to bind a spirit to get it to listen to you. He's shooting himself in the foot in the long run."

"So how would you handle it?" I asked. Tattletale hadn't made any obvious preparations, as far as I could tell.

"I don't use spirits, but for most mages it's enough to just contract them. The spirit doesn't hang around for long and they won't do anything that's guaranteed to harm them, but it's more than enough for most people's needs."

"But there's a cost?" I asked.

"Hardly," Tattletale shook her head. "The current theory is that they feed off of a mage's stray essence; like magical dead skin cells. No, when you bind a spirit, it's more about convenience than cost. You want something that can't leave, or say no."

I didn't say anything to that; I wasn't sure there was anything I could say. They weren't comparable, not really, but I certainly wouldn't consider bargaining with my sprites. Maybe with spirits it was more like chaining up a wild animal, rather than earning its trust?

I sighed, shaking my head. Even that image didn't feel right, and I didn't have the bandwidth to figure out two unknowable cosmic forces – especially when the Resonance was much more relevant to my life.

"I just don't get magic."

Tattletale laughed.

"You and me both. Thaumaturges are just better at pretending they get it; packaging it up into universal rules that'll be completely irrelevant in ten years."

"And Shamans?" I asked.

"Embrace the chaos," she answered. "Our mentor spirits are the one constant in the magical world and so long as we stick by them they'll stick by us. It's a partnership: give and take."

Something Regent would never accept, I thought, as the mage himself looked at the spirit in front of him, raising his hand and watching as the burning woman mirrored the gesture.

On the other side of the room, Grue was walking over to us. He was dressed for war in full-body armour strapped over mil-surp fatigues, all of it black except for the ballistic mask built into his helmet. That was bone white, shaped into a tusked skull with tinted visors embedded in the eye sockets. I doubted anyone on the team besides Grue could have worn it without toppling over, never mind actually fighting in it.

It was a menacing image, even with the ballistic mask up and his new assault rifle held in his left hand, rather than with his right on the trigger, but that was the point, I supposed. The Chosen were trained killers, and they outnumbered us massively. If we were going to have a chance, we had to terrify them, grab the van and get out before they came to their senses.

"Not long now," he said. "You two good?"

Tattletale just grinned, while I nodded.

"As ready as I'll ever be."

My hand drifted to my belt, where eight magazines sat in four pouches, each one carrying thirty rounds. I'd always thought of fights as sudden things; quick bursts of violence that ended as fast as they came. The hours spent in the old laboratory had shattered that illusion as everyone worked on the painstaking preparations that were needed to make that brief moment of violence happen.

I'd never say it out loud, but part of me was still stuck in the trideo mindset where fights were as much spectacle as something real. I hadn't considered that every bullet I might fire would have to be loaded into each magazine by hand, but Grue had shown up to the loft with a backpack full of ammunition, along with the rest of the gear our client had leased from Faultline.

I'd loaded magazines before, when I went shooting with Brian, and if everything went right, I wouldn't even fire a shot tonight, but it felt so much stranger to be touching with my bare hands a bullet that was meant to kill. Stranger still to know that, for all the time and effort involved in loading them, each magazine would be emptied in seconds.

"Good," Grue nodded. "We'll be counting on you in there."

"I won't let you down," I said, trying to put as much confidence as I could into my tone.

Grue looked at me for a few moments, with a weight to his gaze. We hadn't talked about our time in the Palanquin. I told myself it was because we didn't have any room in our heads for anything but the fight ahead, but I wasn't sure if I was just putting it off.

Whatever Grue saw, he was apparently satisfied. He moved over to a half-boarded up window, lowing the skull mask over his face as he peered out into the street.

"I'm going to go check on Bitch," I said to Tattletale, who was busy adjusting the ballistic vest she was wearing beneath her trenchcoat. "I'll stay up with her when you go in, as well."

"It's good that you two are getting along," Tattletale remarked. "Maybe not what I expected, especially this early on, but I guess your wireless insights helped."

"It's not that," I shook my head. "Or… not just that. I understand how she thinks now."

"How do you figure?" Tattletale asked, though I couldn't help but wonder if she already knew.

"She values stability. When I first met her, before we hit the Yakuza, she lashed out at me because bringing me on meant changing things around; introducing some new uncertain variable. Not just into the team, but into her network. I was a threat to what she was comfortable with."

I risked a glance over at Grue.

"I think he's the same way. Not that he's not ambitious – not that we all aren't, except maybe Bitch – but he's comfortable being a Shadowrunner. It's where he fits into the world, and he's happy there."

It's what I like about him, I thought. I'm not a stranger in the shadows anymore, but he fits so naturally he might have been born in them.

"He is," Tattletale nodded. "As for ambition, Bitch isn't the only one without it."

For a moment I thought she might be talking about herself, but her eyes darted over to Regent.

"You sure?" I asked. "He certainly seems like someone who wants to be in control."

He was raised that way, I thought.

"He does," Tattletale conceded. "But not of the team, or some black magic cabal. Regent wants to be in control of his own life. To do what he wants without worrying about costs or consequences. So long as he's making enough that he never has to check his cred, he's content."

I nodded, slowly. It made sense with what I knew of him; with how he'd been raised, how he left and my guess as to what he might do afterwards. Like Tattletale, he came from tainted luxury. Maybe his idea of an ideal life is to have all the pleasures he had back then without any of the pain?

"And you?" I asked. "Are you ambitious?"

Tattletale chuckled.

"More than you could know, even with all your insights. Because you're right; I was a songbird in a cage. But the life I've built since, the life I'm still building? That's mine. It might not be as rich or as privileged, but at least the food doesn't taste like ash in my mouth."

She paused, her head cocked as she looked me up and down.

"And you? Where do you fit on the scale of comfort and ambition?"

I sighed. "I'm not sure yet. Good luck out there, Tattletale."

"You too, Bug," she answered, and I winced.

"I'm really not sure about that name, anymore…" I murmured.

"The window's closing fast," she warned, good-naturedly. "If you're gonna change, you'd better do it before people start whispering about us in dive bars."

I just shook my head, leaving her to prepare as I made my way up to the second floor.

Bitch had set up in a corridor that ran the length of the laboratory, with windows running down the left side. Back in the old loading bay, we'd scattered a few glowsticks to offer enough light to work by, but Bitch's optics meant she was quite comfortable standing there in the dark, with only a little light-bleed from the streetlamps. With my eyes, I could see the heat of her still-remaining organic parts; how it was dispersed across her entire mass rather than concentrated in certain components like in her cyberware.

Beside her, two long-barrelled guns had been set against the wall. The first was a sniper rifle that our client had rented from Faultline; a weighty, Saeder-Krupp model with more than enough armour-piercing ammunition to make a mockery of the warehouse walls and – hopefully – whatever was behind them. The second was Bitch's own weapon; a semi-automatic shotgun she'd acquired with the payout from the last job, and perhaps a little of the payout from this one as well.

Bitch had taken a long table from one of the labs and set it up in front of a window, creating a firing position from which she could provide overwatch to the others as they advanced. She could see into the offices that capped off one side of our target across the street, but not into the actual warehouse beyond. My job was to spot for her, and let the AP rounds do the rest.

"Everything good?" I asked, as Bitch finished organising a stack of magazines on her firing position, each one full of oversized ammunition.

"The Crawler's in the warehouse, moving into the rafters," she answered. "Nothing but a skeleton crew there right now, waiting around on the warehouse floor."

I pulled up the feed from the surveillance drone, watching as it clambered silently along the beams that ran the width of the warehouse, its optics focused on a small group of policlub staffers on the floor below.

Her other drones – the two Dobermans and the predatory bulk of the Steel Lynx – were also on the network, stowed behind a pair of dumpsters off to the side of our temporary hideout. It kept them out of sight, but also meant they could be rolled into action at a moment's notice.

"They're ready downstairs," I said, as I allowed meatspace to fade away, replaced by the brilliant expanse of the matrix, with the blinding lights of the city centre merged into a great pyramidal mass in the distance.

Our surroundings were quiet; there were businesses around us, but it was well beyond business hours. What few networks were still active were ticking along on reserve bandwidth for the night, and the few exceptions – like the laboratory across the street that'd left a sampler to run overnight – weren't straining the local matrix overmuch. In spite of that, it wasn't a dead zone; during working hours, a business park like this would exert a great deal of pressure on the local matrix, which in turn meant a great deal of bandwidth was needed to handle the traffic.

That bandwidth wasn't being utilised, but the capacity was still there. It would carry my complex forms like copper carrying electricity, but the same could be said of any programmes the Chosen managed to bring to bear.

The quiet only made the intermittent traffic all the more noticeable. It was nearing closer to eleven at night, but no city – no modern city – ever truly slept. The occasional truck made its way through the park, as late-night couriers took advantage of the quieter streets to make their way into normally gridlocked areas. Then, in the morning, they'd make the same deliveries to the city's nocturnal industries.

My mind jumped, slightly, at the sight of a Knight Errant patrol car smoothly cruising down a street a couple of blocks away, swinging through the warehouses in search of optimistic thieves. Judging by its IFF, the car had a crew of two and was accompanied by a drone that skimmed over the rooftops, peering into back alleys as it fed video back to the operator in the passenger seat. The car was heading away from us – our business park was in decline, which likely meant the landowners didn't have enough capital to pay for that sort of bespoke anti-burglary patrol – but it was still a worrying sign.

"We've got movement," I said over the team-wide comms as something on the edge of the district caught my eye. "Got Hyundai sedan moving into the park. Alabaster's comm is in the back. I'm going to get a closer look."

I turned around, sitting down on the floor of the corridor with my back against the wall before letting my hold on my organic body slip away. Untethered, I sped through the quiet waters of the Matrix with ease, drifting through the ghostly after-images of buildings and inactive networks as I drew closer to the car, observing the tether between the vehicle and Gridlink, Alabaster's comm in the backseat and the two personal area networks up in the front, linking biomonitors, comm systems and AR-linked tactical glasses.

I reached out to the two integrated commlinks and two pairs of wireless earbuds waiting back at the warehouse.

"Two security personnel with him."

"Two less than we were expecting," Grue observed.

"He wouldn't fit four in a sedan," Tattletale countered. "He seems like the sort of guy who wants the back all to himself. They'll be with the truck."

As the sedan made its way through the streets and turned into the AFA warehouse, I tested Tattletale's hypothesis by casting my net wider.

"Got them," I broadcasted about a minute later, as I kept half an eye on the Crawler's feed, showing Alabaster being greeted by the AFA staffers on the warehouse floor. "Two more guards, driving a box truck. Has to be our target."

"Any sign of the Chosen?" Grue asked.

"Not yet. Box truck's turning onto our street now; you should be able to see it through a window."

I pulled up another feed, watching through Bitch's cybereyes as she dropped down to the floor. She reached up and grabbed me by the shoulder of my jacket, her other hand supporting my head as she pulled me down below the window just before the truck's headlights swept across the corridor.

She lay me down on my left side, tucking the back of my right hand under my head, before leaning back up to peer over the windowsill. Through her eyes, I was able to see the box truck as it pulled around the corner, heading for the now-open garage door of the warehouse. It was a leased vehicle with the name of the lease company on its sides.

It was refrigerated, to keep the chemical cocktails within at the proper temperature, and the weight of the refrigerator, plus the cargo itself, caused it to sit low to the ground. One of the guards was driving, but the truck had auto-navigation software built into it, which meant I might be able to slave it to Bitch's cyberware and have her pilot it remotely, or at least have set it to follow the van.

A pair of AFA staffers waved the van through before hitting the button to lower the shutters, one of them – dressed in a padded coat to ward off the chill – ducking under at the last second to wait outside, presumably to watch for the Chosen's arrival. Inside the warehouse, Alabaster watched with his arms crossed as another staffer opened up the rear of the truck. The Crawler didn't have a good angle on the back of the truck, but I saw the wisps of refrigerated air spilling out towards the vampire.

Apparently satisfied with what he saw, he waved his hand in a dismissive gesture that had the staffer slamming the door shut again. Then Alabaster pulled back his sleeve, peering at his watch and frowning. There was a visible tension in the air between Alabaster and the staffers, and even Alabaster and his security team. I guessed the security team were wary of him because they knew what he was, and the staffers were wary of him because he was some nebulous authority in a suit who'd dragged them to a warehouse full of medical contraband to wait for a gang of psychopaths to come and pick it up.

"The security team are focusing on Alabaster," I said. "They're sticking close to him, rather than the van."

"Good," Grue said, "but we'll need to take down at least one of them if we want to definitively pin the policlub on the scene. Otherwise they could just say the Chosen broke in."

"It'd be easier to kill one of the staffers," Regent pointed out. I would have winced if I was corporeal, even with who the staffers were and how they thought.

"When the Chosen arrive, we won't have the luxury of wasting bullets on targets who aren't shooting back," Grue countered, lifting a minute weight from my shoulders. "But if any of them tries to play hero, put a firebolt through their skull."

More movement drew my attention back to the matrix. Traffic was comparatively streaming into the business park; four vans of varying origins and states of disrepair, and a larger signal that I couldn't make out because it was wrapped in layers of familiar network encryptions. Chosen encryptions.

In cyberspace, it appeared to me as a cluster of nodes hidden beneath a cosmetic layer that marked them out as a waste disposal crew, with their vehicle represented by a GMC Commercial D-Series – a bulky dump truck popular on the outskirts of the city. But most vehicles of that type didn't have crews, relying on their pilot programmes and stowed drones to handle the work, with maybe a security guard in the cab to ward off scavengers.

"The Chosen are moving in," I said. "Looks like Biter's squad in one vehicle and some bottom-feeders in a bunch of vans."

As Biter's vehicle rounded the corner and into sight of Bitch's optics, I was shocked to see that it was a dump truck – or, at least, it had once been one. It still had some of the original paint, though the logos on the flat sides had been sanded down to the bare metal, upon which a snarling red wolf's head had been daubed on with spray paint and stencils. The open top and rear had been closed in by thick sheets of armour plate and what looked like the heavy metal doors of a secure transit truck.

The cab had been even more heavily modified, with more armour plate layered on top of the original's bodywork. The windscreen had been removed entirely, leaving it with beetle-like optics mounted in yet more armour. I could tell there was someone behind that mass; most likely the rigger who drove the thing and operated the bipedal Ares Duelist drone that had taken the place of the industrial loader unit that would normally go in the alcove just behind the cabin.

What took the truck from an absurd red flag to a blatant slap in the face of the law was the cannon mounted just behind the cab, at the very forefront of the bed. It was a General Electric Vindicator; a multi-barrelled nightmare of a minigun with an ammunition belt that descended through a slot in the armour plated roof, articulated on a gimballed mount and loaded with a pilot programme slaved to the rigger in the driver's seat.

"What the fuck is that thing?" I asked, struck dumb.

"They call them 'scrapyard tacticals,'" Grue answered in a muted tone. "Up-armoured heavy goods vehicles brought out in full-scale gang warfare, or when a police crackdown gets past the surface level and takes out something the gang can't afford to lose."

"What's it doing here?" I asked. "I thought this was supposed to be clandestine?"

"Right now, everything the Chosen needs to keep their immune systems functional for the next month is in a single truck," Grue explained. "Once they're loaded into those vans, they'll be driven to different caches across the city and one point of failure will become half a dozen."

"Great. So we have to kill a tank," Regent drawled.

"Or cripple it," I countered. "I'm starting my attack. Slow and quiet, so they don't notice."

"Got it," Grue answered. "We'll move into position. Bitch, stay down for now in case they put an observer in the offices."

I turned my focus away from their network, drifting unseen towards the warehouse where the makeshift armoured transport had pulled in ahead of the parade of vans, disgorging Biter's squad. I saw them not through the Crawler's camera, but as icons in the matrix; generic crash dummies dressed in the uniforms of a garbage disposal crew.

I'd seen the Chosen's network before – what little of it I could sense through Bitch's wireless connection, as well as my up-close look at Biter's cranium – but the squad were running on their own private network, visible as datastreams tying together each member of the squad, and each piece of equipment they'd brought with them from smart-linked rifles to their transport.

Momentarily, I split my focus to check the camera feed. Alabaster was looking up at the APC with his head cocked, as he exchanged words with Biter. The Chosen lieutenant hadn't changed much from when Bitch had her intimate moment with him. To my surprise, he still wasn't wearing a shirt, and I could see his muscles shifting with the movements of his dull metal cyberarms and each flap of his oversized artificial jaw revealed metal teeth filed down into points. He was holding a lengthy rifle by the stock, resting the barrel on his shoulder, with a pistol strapped to his thigh and magazines and grenades strapped to the harness that crossed over his chest.

Barker was gesturing at a couple of AFA staffers to open up the truck, his own misshapen teeth still jutting through the flesh of his cheeks. Unlike Biter, he was still wearing a ballistic vest, and the optics in his sunken eye sockets whirred as they scanned the room. In the half-lit warehouse, his skull face tattoo, dead optics and grotesque teeth seemed even more ghoulish than it had in the Chosen's compound. Each gesture was accented by the assault rifle in his hands, and once by a flex of the blade hidden in the cyberarm Bitch had stitched onto him.

The other four members of Biter's squad were dressed in a similar hybrid of tactical and gang aesthetics. Each of them was as individual in their style as their leader and his second, which made it easy to make guesses at how they fit into the squad. The man and the woman carrying assault rifles, both dressed in body armour patterned in red and black, were obviously there to fill out the gunline, but the other two were more specialised.

The rigger was easy enough to spot from the way she was wandering around the APC, checking diagnostic readouts on a tablet as she inspected one of the Ares Duelists. A pulse travelled between the control rig implanted and the drones, the bipedal, bladed robots stepping out of their niches as they moved off in a patrol pattern. Their faux-samurai armour had been spray-painted in Chosen colours, while the rigger herself wore black coveralls distorted in spots by inlaid armour plates, with her hair standing tall on her head in a daring red mohawk.

The last member of the squad hadn't even left the truck, but they worried me more than any of their others. Even from the outside, I could see the architecture of the comms network. Biter was the squad commander, constantly receiving data from his subordinates and capable of utilising overrides and universal permissions to send data to them. Different datastreams connected the rigger to the drones and the truck, giving her near-universal authority over them.

The person in the centre of the truck was connected to every device on the network, from the processors in Biter's head to the smart-link in the riflewoman's weapon. As I watched, their icon – another anonymous garbageman – drifted away from their body, passing through the roof of the truck in a way that was impossible for anyone bound by physical laws.

I couldn't see the decker's body behind the enclosed cabin of the APC, but I didn't need to. It was insignificant next to the persona drifting around the matrix with the comfortable ease of someone who spent almost as much time in it as out. My one saving grace was that I doubted Biter would let his decker escape the same meatspace drills he'd clearly put the rest of his squad though. When it came to being terminally online, I had the dubious advantage. All I had to do was turn it into leverage.

"Go dark, now," I said to the others, as the decker scanned their surroundings. Every matrix-connected device we had was immediately switched offline, from Bitch's drones to Tattletale's AR glasses. It was camouflage by brute force, with everything that couldn't be switched back on by hand set to reconnect in five minutes. The only exception to the shutdown order was the Crawler, which continued to stream its camera feed to me even as it was cut off from Bitch. I camouflaged that myself, wrapping both it and my persona in a heavy veil of resonance.

As the decker swept the room, I focused my attention on the clearest piece of data available to me; the Crawler nestled next to my digital chest. The Chosen rank and file were beginning to unload plastic crates from the back of the truck, carrying them back to the waiting vans. There were eight of them in total, all of them noticeably less augmented than Biter's crew. Their wireless presence flimsier as well; they were looped into what must have been a broader Chosen-wide network, but they were excluded from the squad's TacNet. Their matrix discipline was noticeably weaker, with their minds open to social media and streaming services ranging from radio stations to film, tv and at least four different porn sites.

As they worked under Alabaster's watchful eye, Biter's squad moved out to secure the perimeter. The two Duelist drones were deployed, marching off to just outside the exterior doors, no doubt as an early warning system, while Biter, Barker and the riflewoman took up positions on the other side. The rigger remained close to the APC and the decker didn't leave the cabin, but the remaining rifleman made his way deeper into the building, disappearing from the Crawler's view as he passed through the abandoned offices and up onto the second floor, where he took up a position overlooking the street.

Five minutes had passed. Almost simultaneously, the team came back online.

"They've started loading the vans," I said. "If you're going, go now. One of Biter's squad is on the second floor of the offices, overlooking the road. They have a drone on either side of the warehouse watching the streets, but the rest of the squad, AFA's security and the Chosen rank and file are all in the warehouse itself. Marking them now."

Spinning together datastreams, I was able to tweak the team's heads-up-displays with digital markers showing the location of everyone in the warehouse, distinguished using a simple key that showed their faction and speciality, if it was obvious. I marked Alabaster out using a blue symbol, rather than red; it was more than he deserved, but our client might be annoyed if we shot him. I did, however, give his icon fangs.

It was a deceptively taxing piece of homespun software. The simplest option would have been to simply place the markers in the matrix itself, mapped as augmented reality objects on the targets' actual positions, but that sort of cyber-graffiti would have been easily spotted by the Chosen's decker. Instead, I had to cross-reference what I could see with what the Crawler was recording, then use the relative positions of each member of the team to triangulate where each ganger was standing from their perspective. All this across wildly differing software, from a homemade cybereye suite to designer sunglasses.

There's no way I'll be able to keep it up when the digital shooting starts, I thought.

"Okay…" Grue's tone was contemplative as he surveyed his options. "The offices are still the obvious entry point. Tattletale, bring down the spotter. Bitch, hold your drones in position for now but be ready with the rifle. Regent, start moving your spirit into position."

"Finally," Regent sighed. "I've been waiting all day for this."

I watched through Grue's cyebreyes as Tattletale moved up to the door of our hideout, peering through the grime-covered window across the street, to where the Chosen rifleman was surveying the road with professional disinterest.

I drifted in close to him, peering at the tightly-woven shell of his persona. I couldn't risk a full-scale assault on the network without alerting the decker to our attack, but it wasn't the time for that. Instead, I focused my efforts solely on the device in front of me; the biomonitor tucked into the base of the gunman's skull, with sensors spread out across his entire body.

Moving with painstaking slowness, I teased at the streams of data passing between the biomonitor and the rest of the network, feeding strands of resonance in with incoming data from the rest of the squad until I had a hold on the biomonitor itself. I could see the readout; his heart rate was slightly low, his breathing rate normal and there were monitoring systems in his kidneys tracking the build up of excessive white blood cells, as well as an auto-injector loaded with a treatment that I was sure could be found in abundance in the truck.

I locked the data in place right as Tattletale brought her hand up to her pendant, then her mouth, before sending a spell flying across the street. I couldn't see it in the matrix, of course – couldn't even see if it smashed the windows between Tattletale and the sentry or just passed intangibly through them – but I could see the effect the spell had as it hit.

Beneath my carefully-masked signals, the Chosen's pulse plummeted, his breathing slowing as his EEG readings shifted into the kind of activity only normally seen during REM sleep. There was an auto-injector nestled beneath his fused sternum that would have automatically injected a shot of adrenaline in response to that activity, if I hadn't already disarmed its trigger.

"Move," Grue said in a short, sharp whisper. On the second floor of our hideout, Bitch grabbed the rifle from where it had been lying on the floor and got into a firing position on top of the table she'd set up, with her left leg straight and her right almost at ninety degrees.

Through her optics, I watched as Grue, Tattletale and Regent sprinted across the road, almost throwing themselves down below the ground floor windows of the empty offices. Grue's faceplate was down, and his impassive skull looked at Regent for a moment before nodding.

Behind the warehouse, the sky momentarily lit up with fire as the spirit soared across the roof of the warehouse and dove in through the window. I watched through the Crawler as the explosion of fire and glass shards scattered across the rafters of the warehouse. The spirit emerged from the mass, her flame-wreathed form seeming subtly wrong through the cold optics of the Crawler, like a glitch in the fabric of reality.

The spirit swept an arm downwards, a jet of fire sweeping out with the gesture before engulfing one of the Chosen's vans – and the two gang members who were loading it. Biter's squad reacted quickly, the APC's turret spinning on its axis as it began firing a deafening stream of bullets at the spirit, which pirouetted around the room as it managed to stay just ahead of the turret's maximum turning speed.

Outside the warehouse, Grue unceremoniously reversed his rifle and smashed the butt into the glass, sweeping it along the frame to remove any stray shards before vaulting over and into the offices, followed closely by the two mages. Behind the dumpsters next to our hideout, Bitch's drones rolled out and into the street.

In the matrix, I attacked in full force. The datastreams around me were twisted; plucked like piano wire until they hummed with the ethereal noise of the resonance, becoming lures for half a dozen sprites. I'd never summoned so many at once before. The force of their intrusion sent ripples out through the matrix.

Three of them were wasps, darting directly for the central nodes of the tactical network. They drove their stingers into it, two of their attacks being countered by firewalls even as the third hit home and flooded the network with junk data, burning out some of the connections between the decker and the squad.

The decker knew they were under attack the moment my sprites first emerged, but they'd clearly never faced a technomancer before. They were used to fighting attacks from a single vector, focusing on protecting the most essential parts of the network even as my sprites attacked from multiple directions, corrupting lesser systems in an attempt to kill by a thousand cuts.

It gave me the breathing room to triangulate another angle, and place a mark right on the swivelling gun of the APC.

Lying prone on the table next to my body, Bitch squeezed the trigger of her rifle. The glass in front of her exploded outwards, as did the glass on the other side of the street. The shot sped through two walls, the force of its passage dragging burning plaster dust, steel shavings and fragmented bricks in its wake in a trail of sparks as it flew across the warehouse and sheared through the minigun in a shower of twisted metal.

It caught the chain of bullets being pushed up from the ammo well inside the APC, sparking off a cavalcade of wild, scattered shots before an automated safety feature sealed off the ammo belt from the outside world. With its pursuer disabled, the fire spirit swept an arm down and immolated an AFA staffer, who had been staring up at the spirit with mute terror on her face.

It was at that point that the others stormed into the room, Grue firing his assault rifle into the mass of red and black-clad Chosen, who scattered behind whatever cover they could find even as two of them dropped, twitching on the floor as their bodies bled out and cyberware sparked.

Alabaster was being escorted out the back by the AFA security detail, two of them peeling off to draw away the spirit as it burned its way through the warehouse, either heedless of the fire it was taking or just pushing through it on Regent's orders. I placed a mark on one of the men escorting Alabaster, and watched through the Crawler as the sniper round passed through his spine, jerking his head back as the force of the shot knocked him to the ground.

It was the closest I'd ever come to killing someone myself. Bitch was barely in her body, focused on guiding her drones around to the side entrance of the warehouse, where the Ares Duellist was turning as the Chosen's own rigger called it back inside. She only moved in response to the pings I sent her, her arms shifting the rifle just enough to line up the shot before firing. It was like she was just an extension of the gun; my hand was the one on the trigger.

Through another camera feed, I saw as Bitch spun up the rotary gun mounted atop the Steel Lynx. She let off a burst of shots that ripped the Duelist apart, scouring a line of rents up its chest as bullet fragments and scraps of machinery sprayed against the wall of the warehouse. She accelerated the drone, swivelling the gun around to face the other way so that the barrel was clear of the shuttered door.

The building was old – pre-millennium old – and the fittings looked like they hadn't been changed in all that time. The Steel Lynx might have been made from junkyard-salvaged components, but it was still more than a match for the brittle, aged steel that stood in its path. Through the Crawler, I saw as the shutters splintered like broken ribs, snapping free from their housings as the drone sped into the warehouse, its main gun spinning back around to fire even as the two Dobermans chased in at its heels like pups following their mother.

Then, the decker counterattacked, and I no longer had the bandwidth to pay attention to the cameras. One of my wasps winked out of existence as the decker drove a data spike through its thorax, but then they made a beeline straight for me. The resonance veil around me had been pierced; they could see me now.

Their attacks came as sharp stabs of data, trying to brute force their way past my barriers. I weathered the storm, even as I felt their carefully-constructed programs wreaking havoc on the wild resonance that formed my persona. My focus was still on my sprites, sending my two remaining wasps to attack even as I took advantage of the decker's focus to seed the other three – woodlice one and all – onto the other members of Biter's squad.

In meatspace, smartweapons malfunctioned, shots that would have ripped through Regent's spirit went wild, optics glitched and a homing grenade thrown by Barker hovered in midair for a moment, its tracking systems spasming, before detonating in a scatter of wild shrapnel.

Even that momentary glance away had cost me; the decker had slipped past my defences. I could feel their mark on me; an indelible part of their code embedded in my form, giving them a bridge down which they could send attacks. My wasps counterattacked, but the decker's firewalls were too strong for them to break through. They reminded me of Grue; that single-minded determination as they launched one relentless attack after another, trusting their thick armour to absorb any and all blows.

I had more tricks up my sleeve than that. Just as I had done in the resonance realms, I spun a veil of energy around the decker, surrounding them in an esoteric fog that clung to their persona, slowing their reaction times and partially blinding them to the world around them.

It came too late for one of my woodlice, perched on Biter's shoulder before it burst apart into fragments of code as the decker's attack overwhelmed it. In Biter's software, something clicked and he brought his long-barrelled rifle up to his shoulder, not even looking down the sights as a programme in his head calculated angles and vectors.

Counter-sniper software, I realised, moment's before Bitch's name shot through my head like a bullet.

There wasn't time to warn her. I reached out in the matrix, opening my mouth and screaming out a storm of fireflies even as I seized control of Bitch's cyberlimbs, twisting her arms and legs to throw her off the table just as a three-round burst of high-powered shots ripped through the table she'd made her sniper's nest.

The effects of my scream were obvious, both in meatspace and the matrix. Where before my glitches had been deliberate, targeted, now they were indiscriminate. The local matrix, encompassing the entire warehouse, screamed with me, the vibrations throwing up buffering errors and visual tearing on every device with a matrix connection.

Bitch's drones stuttered, tracks shifting erratically as guns flailed wildly off target. One of them – one of the Dobermans – was brought down by fire from some of the low-ranked Chosen, the ones who hadn't managed to buy enough chrome to be hit. Other fresh initiates, the ones who'd bought a lot of cheap chrome, fell to the ground clutching their heads as the sound of a million chittering insects blared through inadequately-firewalled neural audio players.

It hurt to see how indiscriminate it was, how it was hurting my team as much as the Chosen, but I pushed through the guilt, even as I was aware of Bitch's limbs spasming on the edge of my perception. I simply pushed forward, ignoring the pained chitter of noise that surrounded me, and stretched out the arachnid limbs of my persona to drive a quartet of resonance spikes into the decker.

Only two of them managed to pierce their defences, but they were enough to get marks of my own on their persona. I stopped screaming, the storm of pulsating insects leaving behind visibly-frayed rents in cyberspace, and pressed the attack.

It was child's play to fill the decker's senses with ghost images, pulling clones of myself and my sprites out into the matrix that obfuscated the real attack. Whatever cyberdeck they were using was tough, however, and they took the beating with the rugged determination of a trained boxer, hitting back with the same amount of force. We were both going all-out, the physical fight in the warehouse almost forgotten as we slugged it out in cyberspace.

And then, the very fabric of the matrix around us seemed to shake, as we felt a great presence turn its gaze on us. The datastreams around us, tattered and frayed by the force of our fight, had carried the sound of battle like piano wires, screaming our presence to all and sundry. We looked up in mutual, mute horror as the eye of GOD opened high above us, dwarfing even the monolithic Hosts that drifted overhead.

A short distance away from us, streams of data twisted suddenly into perfect angular shapes, coalescing together as they delivered a high-bandwidth package. It was a persona; a bookish, middle-aged blonde dwarf dressed in a white button-down shirt with a pair of thin spectacles over his eyes. Short blonde hair poked out from beneath a plain black fedora.

I screamed again, but this time there were words in it.

"DemiGOD! Go dark!"

Heedless of the danger to myself, of the vast gulf that separated me from the physical world, I took hold of the tether linking me to my body and pulled with all my might. Meatspace hit me like a bullet to the head. I jerked forwards like I'd been shot, my palm slamming into the floor moments before I violently threw up. I blinked, and bloody tears coated my eyelids in a film of red.

It was the bogeyman; a million teenage nightmares come back to haunt me. The Grid Overwatch Division, cutting me off from what made me… me. Their agents – their G-men – a source of primal terror for someone whose very existence was illegal. I told myself they weren't targeting me specifically, told myself that we'd just made too much noise, drawn their eye, and that they wouldn't send in a physical kill-team to break up a fight between criminals.

It didn't help.

I pushed myself to my feet, standing unsteadily on trembling legs as my ears twitched at the sounds of gunfire and explosions still emanating from the warehouse. I'd left them alone, without support, and the knowledge that the Chosen decker had been similarly neutered was no comfort at all.

I reached beneath my jacket, pulling my Ares Executioner out of its holster. With shaking hands, I pulled back the bolt and looked at the dull ceramic casing of the bullet waiting at the top of the magazine. I let go, the bolt flying forwards as it shunted the bullet out of the magazine and into the breach. Beneath the surface, the motion had pressed the firing pin against the primer that capped off the cartridge. It was potential energy; needing only the electrical signal from the trigger to trigger the explosives and fire the shot.

I jumped at the feeling of metal fingers on my upper arm, pressing through the reinforced fabric of my armoured syn-leather jacket. I blinked, the world around the gun resolving itself until I saw Bitch standing in front of me, her head craned back as her spider-like optics met my own organic eyes. She was holding her shotgun in her other hand, and there was an unspoken question in her gaze that was clear even with her inhuman eyes.

I released the bolt, nodded to Bitch, and vaulted over the windowsill. I was still trembling, but I no longer cared.

DDoS - 5.06

Every troll child goes through a phase where they feel invincible. It happens just before puberty; when their muscles have come in, their horns are properly grown and they're starting to get taller than all the other kids in their class. They revel in their strength; clambering up onto the school roof, crushing cans with their bare hands, picking their friends up and spinning them like a metahuman merry-go-round. They feel like they're on top of the world.

But they keep growing, their horns get longer, calcified growths start poking out of their skin – which itself toughens into something that feels closer to stone than flesh. They get stronger without even trying, but the strength that had made it so easy to interact with the world starts to become a barrier from it. They can't sit in the same chairs as their classmates, they break glasses because they underestimate their grip strength, every portion of food feels way too small. They go to hug their best friend because she looks upset and even they can tell something's wrong only for her to flinch back, leaving them to wonder if she was afraid of being crushed.

Being strong and tall doesn't mean much in a world that isn't built for it, but every troll starts to at least idly dream about the only ways their strength still matters. Everyone has intrusive thoughts; that little moment where they fantasise about finally dropping all the social niceties of the world and just lashing out in some primordial rage. The difference with trolls is how easy it would be to turn fantasy into reality.

Even then, the world finds ways to punish them for their strength. They could lash out, but their disproportionate force would be met by a disproportionate response. They'd carry a label for the rest of their lives – maybe even a criminal SIN – and never find a sympathetic ear no matter how hard they looked, no matter what the circumstances may be. Who would ever believe someone so big, so potentially dangerous, could ever be threatened by people so small?

The only way to turn their strength into a strength is to seek out those places where strength is acceptable, where violence is expected. In militaries, security or law enforcement, where governments and corporations hand you a uniform and tell you who you can hurt. In gangs, where violence can even afford some degree of social mobility, or so you hope. In Urban Brawl, boxing, football, ice hockey, all-arena combat golf and other violent sports, where violence can even make you rich if you're good enough.

In Shadowrunning, if you're truly exceptional.

I wasn't. I'd never been in a fight in my life, never even thrown a punch as far as I could remember. I was exceptional in the matrix; unequalled mistress of the digital world. Or so I'd tricked myself into thinking, until the DemiGOD arrived and sent me scampering for meatspace like a hunted animal. And yet, I still had the biological advantage that let me leap out of a second storey window and land on the ground below with only a slight twinge of pain in my legs.

But I still trembled as I straightened up, my legs shaking far beyond the expected reaction to the sudden burst of activity, or the lingering stabs of dumpshock running rampant through my brain. The air was filled with the crackle of gunshots, the building in front of me lit intermittently from within by magefire, and I'd deliberately wrenched myself out of the matrix. It felt like I'd ripped off my own nose and pulled some of my brain out with it.

I was terrified. Adrenaline was coursing through my veins, flooding my muscles in a way that was utterly unfamiliar to me; such a biological sensation didn't make the jump over to the matrix. I'd been terrified before, but my body had always been left to suffer the adrenaline flood in silence. Trapped in my head, I could feel every twitching muscle, every panicked surge in my emptied stomach, every gunshot that was the beating of my heart.

Bitch hit the ground beside me, her synthetic legs shifting on their bearings as they achieved by mechanical means the same level of strength I naturally possessed. She straightened up, her shotgun held in her right hand as she looked up at the building, one optic flicking left to instead look at me. I couldn't say anything; couldn't force my mouth to make the right sounds.

Hesitantly, uncertainly, her optics darting between me and the building, she reached out and rested a hand on my upper arm, metal hands gently closing on quivering tendons. The rest of her optics looked at me, her head turning. I'd grown used to having instantaneous access to her head. Without it, she seemed more alien in that moment than at any point since I'd met her, but I could tell what she was trying to do.

I nodded, my grip tightening on my machine pistol – which would be a submachine gun in her hands – and sprinted towards the building.

I'd always read that fear made people freeze up. That it was a paralysing thing that halted movement and left people mute in the face of danger. I didn't know if the books were wrong or if I was just an outlier, because that's not how it felt to me. I was afraid, but I was running forwards. It wasn't an automatic motion; every step felt like it took an immense amount of concentration, like I was forcing my way uphill, but there wasn't any ice in my limbs. If anything, it felt like I was running faster than I had in my entire life.

And yet, Bitch was faster than me, her shorter stride meaningless in the face of her mechanical legs. She vaulted the window of the warehouse offices without a moment's hesitation, and that in turn spurred me on to follow her. For a moment I felt a jagged length of broken window digging into my palm as I vaulted over the window, half-remembered school gymnastic lessons running through my head before I stumbled as I hit the ground.

"Follow my lead," Bitch said without turning back, as she brought her shotgun up to her shoulder and began moving through the abandoned office at a brisk yet cautious pace. I followed her, my submachine gun lowered but with both my hands clasped around the trigger. I felt blind, cut off from the matrix. Claustrophobia was a familiar fear, but it seemed so much worse without myriad datastreams passing through the walls and ceiling. It made them feel so much more unyielding.

She paused at the threshold of the warehouse itself, an arm waving me over to the wall behind her. I pressed myself against the faded white paint over plaster, painfully aware of how flimsy it felt. Parts of it were already riddled with bullet holes, and the gunfire from the other room was near-deafening.

Bitch moved with cold, mechanical speed, her cyberlimbs whirring as she stepped back, leant right and raised her weapon in one fluid motion. An instant later, she fired, her optics feeding her brain fire control data faster than her brain could properly process it. She strode forwards, her semiautomatic shotgun barking three more times as the bolt flew back and spent shells were ejected from the side.

I followed her in, my own motions sluggish and all-too-organic as I crossed the threshold into a scene from hell. The warehouse was on fire, the miscellaneous shelves of abandoned policlub detritus going up in burning heaps of old t-shirts, blankets and folded-up marquees, posters, flags and banners. The nine vehicles of varying sizes scattered among those shelves were pockmarked with bullet holes, some of the cheaper vans listing on their sides like half-sunken ships, their axles sheared into fragments by the weight of fire.

In and among that scant cover, half-obscured by the smoke choking the space, figures crouched with weapons clutched tightly to their chests. Some of them were dead, reduced to indistinct heaps of clothing and limbs that no longer seemed to resemble people. Others were dying, shifting and moaning as they reached for weapons that weren't there, or pressed their hand against their wounds.

There was still over a dozen of them; Chosen rank and file, Biter's hardened squad, even two members of the AFA security detail that Alabaster must have sent back into the warehouse to die. They could have easily overwhelmed the three Shadowrunners in the room, or cut down Bitch and I the moment we crossed the threshold, if it weren't for the flame-wreathed form darting between the rafters.

The spirit was incandescent with fire and fury, screaming out its captive rage in gouts of flame that consumed everything they touched. It was incorporeal, diving into one patch of flame only to emerge from another on the other side of the room, in a pattern that left the Chosen struggling to pin her down or even find a place to hunker down and weather the firestorm.

But they were still hurting it. The magical binding forcing it into a feminine shape was faltering, with great rents in its form that spilled out uncontrollable solar flares of light. The bright pits that were her eyes burned with anger, seemingly directed at the entire world even as she was forced to vent her anger on our enemies.

Regent still had control, but it looked like his control was fading fast. The moment I spotted him – huddled with the others behind a van ten metres from the box truck that contained our target – I sprinted across the concrete floor to try and reach them, closely following Bitch as she fired her shotgun one-handed off to her right, trying to keep the Chosen down.

It didn't work. Not entirely.

I was halfway to them before I even realised I was being shot at. The ground in front of me resembled a pool of still water at the start of a sudden Atlantic storm, with puffs of concrete dust rising like raindrops splashing off the surface. The reality was more violent; sharp shards of concrete peppered my legs, some even cutting through the reinforced fabric of my pants. Someone was shooting at me, leading their shots more than they needed to.

Their network's down, I realised as my body moved faster than the speed of thought, animal instinct hurling myself into cover, skidding the last couple of feet. The G-Man must have taken out their decker in the matrix, leaving them a broken mess of dumpshock and their network a tattered ruin. The only reason I wasn't dead was that the Chosen gunman who shot at me didn't know how to aim without an algorithm guiding his shots; he led me too much trying to compensate for its absence.

"Bug!" Grue exclaimed as he poked his head over the front of the van, firing off a brief burst of shots before ducking back down as the van was peppered with return fire. "I thought…"

"Made too much noise," I stammered out, too full of adrenaline for full sentences. "GOD intervened. Have to bug out now; cops are on the way."

Grue was silent, the skull of his helmet masking his thoughts. Beside him, Tattletale shifted in response to something only she could see, standing up behind the sides of the van and clutching her talisman as she murmured an incantation. A spectral image of Bitch appeared in front of her, solidifying until it was identical to the real thing. The spectre was sent sprinting out of cover, reaching for a grenade on her belt as she tried to make it to the next van over.

There was a deafening thump-thump-thump as a high-calibre weapon was fired from the other side of the room, churning through concrete as it shattered the false image of Bitch. The real Bitch leant out from her cover and fired a tight burst across the room from the machine gun integrated into her right arm, hopefully killing the gunman and taking the assault cannon out of commission.

Grue murmured something, but it was too quiet for me to make out over the gunfire and the constant ringing in my ears. It sounded like he swore. He turned to Regent, who was looking rougher than I'd ever seen him with bloodshot eyes and grime coating his jacket. At first I thought it was the strain of keeping the spirit under control, but his hand was clutching his thigh and blood was seeping past a compact field dressing.

"Burn it," Grue said, and Regent sighed in genuine relief. "Everyone else, suppressing fire. We bug out back the way we came."

He punctuated his remark by removing the magazine from his weapon, slipping it into a pouch and replacing it with a fresh one. I felt my own hands tighten on my gun.

"On my mark." Grue shifted to one knee, facing the van. I stood up, hunched over, physically ready to poke my head over the top of the human-sized van even as abject terror continued to race through my mind.

"Now!" Grue rose, slamming his augmetic elbow down on the hood of the van so hard it dented the metal. He pulled the trigger, spent casings flying into the window. I stood up, not even seeing what lay beyond the van as I brought up the submachine gun, the morning Brian and I spent in the shooting range flashing through my mind as I focused all my attention on keeping the weapon level, with both hands on the troll-sized pistol grip and my arms outstretched.

I didn't even try to aim, just pulled the trigger and panned the weapon from left to right over where I thought the Chosen were. Beside me, Bitch emptied the magazine of her integrated machine gun in a single burst of ammunition before bringing up her shotgun and firing off three rapid shots. Tattletale was almost using her as cover, keeping most of her body behind Bitch as she shouted an incantation that took form as a kaleidoscopic maelstrom of colours and sounds right on top of the Chosen's positions, adding to the chaos as they mimicked gunfire, flashbangs and incendiary explosions.

Someone on the other side returned fire, sparks flying off the roof of the van. I felt hot metal slice through my brow, then the bone-shaking sensation of something skidding along my left horn. The force of it knocked my head to the left, where I saw another shot hit Grue in the head, leaving a gleaming metal wound in his helmet where it scraped off the black coating but failed to pierce the alloy beneath. Both of us kept firing, though I still couldn't see what I was firing at.

Regent stumbled to his feet, his fire spirit veering away from the Chosen as it swooped past us, its featureless burning eyes seeming to stare right into my soul before it flew directly through the cab of the box truck and into the refrigerated compartment at the rear.

A second later, the entire back of the truck exploded in a titanic fireball that rocked our cover on its suspension and knocked Tattletale and me flat on our asses, my face feeling like it'd just been hit by a gout of hot steam as I skidded back two meters, friction tearing away at the narrow patch of exposed t-shirt between my armoured jacket and my aramid-lined pants. Tattletale went twice as far, but her trenchcoat caught the worst of it.

I rolled over onto my front, reaching for my gun and staggering to my feet just moments after Tattletale, just in time to see Grue take a grenade from a pouch on his webbing, pull the pin and lob it over the van with an underarm throw. I'd seen that model of grenade before, in the event horizon, and I closed my eyes just in time to miss the deafening explosion of light and smoke.

"Go!" Grue shouted as he fired another magazine into the smoke, either using the thermographic optics of his cybereyes to mark out targets or – more likely – just firing blindly into the mass of fire and bodies that appeared as a single blob of heat to my own eyes.

Tattletale was the first through the door, though she'd been given a four meter head start by the explosion. I followed her, then Regent – almost limping with his injury and the psychosomatic shock of his spirit's detonation. Bitch lingered at the doorway, firing back into the smoke with her machine gun as she covered Grue's retreat.

We dashed through the small office space in utter silence, knocking aside dusty old swivel chairs and partition walls in our haste. The quiet was only emphasised by the sudden drop-off of gunfire from the warehouse; it felt like the only sounds in all the world were the roaring inferno behind us and the ceaseless ringing in my ears.

Regent and Tattletale struggled on the way back through the window, the elven mage cutting her hand open on the glass, but then we were out under the open sky, the low cloud layer lit from below by the city's ambient lights. As we ran back across the street to the old lab where we'd stowed the van, I felt fatigue starting to set into my limbs. The first of the adrenaline was starting to leave my system, and each step felt like I was wearing lead boots.

That sluggishness had also made its way to my brain, which meant that I almost didn't understand what I was seeing when two cars rounded the corner, both of them low-set sedans with their original colours hidden beneath matte black spray paint and stencilled designs in red.

As Grue swore and Bitch raised her shotgun, I finally noticed the beady red optics mounted in the faces of the cars' occupants, their jaws set in fury and fear in equal measure; the look of people who had been called into a situation with no idea of what was waiting for them, but who knew exactly what was at stake.

Their decker stayed behind, I thought, even knowing it meant divine intervention. He stayed just long enough to send out an SOS.

Across the street, there was a horrific squeal of metal as Bitch's up-armoured van knocked the doors of our makeshift hideout off their hinges in a shower of brick dust, splintering the flimsy metal shutters beneath the Bulldog's reinforced tyres as she rammed the closest sedan side-on, crumpling its bodywork and sending it careening sideways into the second, pinning the pair of them against the side of the warehouse.

Grue fired into the first car and I followed his lead, bringing up my pistol once again. I remembered his lessons more clearly this time, taking a half-second to line up the sights of the pistol on the driver of the second car; a wizened-faced cyborg whose skin was sickly-pale going on green at the points where it met steel. I fired. First at him, then at the others in the car. My shots were in controlled bursts, as accurate as I could make them.

In spite of everything, there was enough bandwidth left in my brain to notice the enormity of the moment. I'd accepted that I'd have to kill, but I had assumed that my first victims would be shooting back. I didn't think my first kills would be murders.

"Come on!" Tattletale shouted from the open side door of the van. I'd lost seconds, which felt like losing years in that moment. Bitch was already reversing the van by remote, separating its hood from the closest car with a noise like a can being crumpled even as she hauled her body up into the rear. I tightened my grip on my gun and sprinted over to them, throwing myself into the back just as Bitch began to swing the van around.

I thought that was it, but Bitch slowed the van once we reached the corner and opened up the rear doors by remote. I was genuinely surprised to see that the Steel Lynx had somehow survived the warehouse; its frame and three of its camera optics were gouged and damaged, but the tracks still worked. Regent murmured something unpleasant as the drone rolled into the back. He might have been complaining about stopping to pick up a machine at a time like this, but I couldn't tell; he'd slipped back into French in shock.

Bitch hit the gas, the wheels skidding momentarily before finding purchase on the asphalt. There was a lurching sensation that almost knocked me over, sending me staggering back towards the still-open rear doors of the van. If I hadn't managed to grip onto the bars of one of Bitch's drone racks, I might have fallen out.

I definitely would have fallen out when the van suddenly lurched to the right, rocking on its suspension like a ship taking on water as something slammed into the side hard enough to dent the armour plates. As Bitch swung us back around, I looked in mute horror out the back at the Chosen's scrapyard tactical, the makeshift APC's engine roaring as it closed the distance between us.

Beside me, the Steel Lynx's gun swung on its axis, pivoting up to turn in the confined space of its cradle before dropping back down until it was level with the armoured plates covering the modified dump truck's cabin. The gun spun up, then spat a stream of shots across the gap between the two vehicles. Over the near-deafening sound of gunfire, I could hear the gun's mechanism clattering and squealing. It was wounded, ready to jam at any second.

And then, it did. The ammunition belt shuddered, the barrels pausing in their rotation for a fraction of a second. Hidden from my sight, some vital internal component stuck in place, wedged into its neighbours as the gun fell silent and electric motors clicked as they tried to force bullets through the broken mechanism.

The truck almost seemed to roar in celebration, as the Chosen rigger floored the engine and accelerated. I saw a figure clamber up out of a side hatch and haul himself onto the top of the vehicle, identifiable only as a silhouette against the streetlights until he extended a long, thin blade from his cyberarm and drove it into the remains of the APC's turret to anchor himself in place. In his left arm, Barker held an assault rifle one-handed, pushing it against the sling in order to gain some measure of control. As he raised it, Bitch flicked a mental switch and closed the rear doors.

A moment later, there was a noise like golf ball-sized hailstones hitting metal as Barker took shots at us, but the armour was holding. I holstered my weapon, releasing my death-grip on the rack as I slumped to the floor, my back against the still-warm chassis of the Steel Lynx. I looked left, and saw Grue had removed a section of his chest armour as he applied a trauma kit to a vicious-looking chest wound. Beside him, Tattletale had finished sticking an antiseptic patch to her sliced palm. She held out the box to me as my left eye suddenly went blurry. I reached up and touched my brow. My fingers came away with deep red blood coating the tips.

"You okay?" I asked Grue as I applied a patch to the wound on my brow, using the base of my still-sore horn as a guide.

"The vamp's security detail got me in the lung," he explained, a little breathlessly. "It's synthetic, so I'll live."

The van swerved to the left, as another hail of shots hit the rear doors and skidded down the length of the side, chipping away at the reinforced glass of the driver's side window.

Grue looked up, smacking his chest armour back into place as he put one hand on the back of the passenger seat and hauled himself to his feet.

"Can you lose them?" he asked.

"Don't know," was Bitch's succinct response. "Their truck's pretty banged up, but so's mine. Just a question of which breaks first."

I was impressed at how she'd managed to say that while serving around a commercial hauler coming from the opposite direction – with a terrified dwarf in a baseball cap at the wheel – especially since she'd been facing away from the road, with her hands off the wheel. That jogged something in my mind; I stood upright, banged my head on the ceiling and swore.

"Bitch, you're still online?!"

I should have seen it – would have seen it if that glancing hit hadn't scrambled my brains. She drove the Lynx here, didn't she? Should have seen it then.

Something rattled, like the van had just driven over a curb in the middle of the street. Birch's attention was immediately drawn back to the road, but her body reached into a pouch on her ballistic vest and loaded another magazine into her arm.

"That was a spike strip."

Her tone was calm, matter-of-fact, even as the street was bathed from end to end in flashing red and blue lights as a black and yellow roto-drone as big as a hang glider flew over us, its camera optics firmly fixed on our position. Ahead, two bulky Knight Errant trucks were in the middle of setting up a barricade, their armoured sides swinging out to form a wall. Bitch just managed to squeeze through in time, sending taksuited officers scrambling to get out the way. I doubted it would slow down the Chosen APC at all.

"Fucking pawns!" Grue exclaimed. "Did they get us?"

Bitch shook her head, "Tyres have a synthetic lattice in them, not air. Nothing to puncture. But, not sure how they found us."

"DemiGOD compromised your network," I said with a sigh as I slumped back down on the floor. "Passed it onto K-E's deckers. I'll clean it, you lose the physical assets."

For the first time in my life, I didn't want to submerge myself in the matrix, but my wants didn't count for anything in that moment. My brain was still reeling from the dumpshock of my sudden exit, and reaching for the resonance felt like desperately trying to find purchase on a frayed rope. Still, I managed to latch on, my synapses burning with the strain of the sudden return of data that should have been as natural a part of me as anything in my meat.

I shut my eyes, ignoring the violent swaying of the van as Bitch dodged her way through the streets, and opened them to see a matrix alive with activity. Knight Errant's network was familiar to me; it was omnipresent, stretched throughout the city like a web that centred on each of their precincts scattered throughout the city, all of it fuelled by their main data hub in their Downtown headquarters. At the ends of each strand of web were patrol cars, special tactical vehicles, metropolitan CCTV, the biomonitors of individual officers, rapid-response Firewatch helicopters, harbour patrol boats, a small fleet of aircraft, speed cameras and a fleet of autonomous and remote piloted drones.

When those assets converged into a single place, that web began to resemble a cage of data like the one that surrounded Bitch's van. Four patrol cars had joined the chase, in addition to the recon drone hovering overhead, and I could see more assets being routed towards our location, as well as to other hotspots. It looked like we'd kicked the hornet's nest; Knight Errant was mobilising throughout the entirety of the North End.

I ignored them as best I could, turning my attention to the infinitely smaller network that surrounded me. Birch's firewalls were as resolute as ever, but as I used my access permissions to peel back each layer of defence I found an icon embedded within them. A Fibonacci spiral, left there by the G-Man in an expert display of subtle hacking that would have been impossible for me to do in such a short timeframe without resorting to obvious brute force.

With the permissions it granted, Knight Errant's deckers had been able to track Bitch and everything connected to her network. I didn't have time to be gentle in removing it; my connection to the matrix already felt like I was moving through a dead zone, and my senses were dulling by the second. It took all I had to gather resonance together into a spike and drive it into the icon, tearing it out of Bitch's systems like ripping a scab off a still-healing wound.

Once it was out, I risked another glance into the matrix. Bitch had shaken three of the four patrol cars and ducked into a tunnel that ran beneath a high-density housing estate to escape the recon drone, but one of the cars was still on her tail and with the Chosen's APC completely offline I had no idea how close they were. Nor did I have the time to worry, as a drone suddenly came online beneath the icon of the sole remaining patrol cruiser, detaching from its host before speeding towards us at an incredible pace.

Tattletale would mock me for it, but I'd seen one before on trideo. It was a pursuit drone, manufactured by and for Knight Errant and capable of magnetically locking into the underside of a suspect vehicle, where it became an unobtrusive tracker that broadcast its position back to the operations room, allowing the patrol car that carried it to pull back and deescalate the pursuit. Someone at Knight Errant had noticed our signal dropping off their network.

I waited for it to close the gap. Not because I wanted to, but because I couldn't spin up another resonance spike any faster. When I drove the concentrated resonance into the drone, there was a horrible moment where it seemed like it wasn't enough, before the signal abruptly winked out of existence in sparks of junk data. I winked out with it, the strain too much to bear without an obvious enemy to keep me going.

When I opened my eyes, I thought the bandage hadn't stuck. My eyes were gummed up with blood, but as I tried to blink I realised it was coming from my tear ducts. From the taste of it on my tongue, I had a nosebleed as well. As I slowly blinked away at the blurred red mess, momentarily unable to even attempt lifting my hands up to my face, I felt a wet antiseptic wipe pressed against my brow, wiping away the blood from my eyes to my chin with a delicate hand. As my vision cleared, I saw Tattletale looking down on me with an expression of grim worry that she quickly schooled into a fake smile.

"Hey, omae, you're looking even more like a corpse than usual," she joked. "Glad to see you haven't joined our vamp friend on the other side."

I groaned, trying to force myself up into a sitting position and only succeeding thanks to a frankly herculean display of strength from Tattletale, who put her other hand on my shoulder and helped pull me up.

"Digital threat's gone," I coughed the words out past the blood in my mouth. "Get us the fuck out of here, now."

"Working on it," Grue reported from just behind the driver's seat. "Got a plan to shake the pawns and put the Chosen on the defensive, but it's only good if you can run."

"Don't worry about me," I snapped, grabbing hold of the seat next to me and using it to haul myself to my feet. My vision swayed as blood rushed to my head. "Can hold my own."

"Fucking hope so," Regent retorted in a manic tone. "Because I sure as shit can't carry you." He looked almost as ashen as I did on a good day.

"Impact in ten," Bitch said, her tone still dispassionate in spite of... well, everything. "Everyone brace."

I moved up to the front of the van, grabbing the back of the passenger seat like my life depended on it. Through the windshield I could see the entrance to the parking bay of one of the many residential projects that made up the New Estates; a concrete castle of pedways and apartment blocks, deliberately segregated from its neighbours to create an insular ghetto community that wouldn't spill out into the surrounding area.

The chaos of the night had kicked the hornet's nest: industrial garbage cans and junked vehicles had been rolled in front of the entrance to create a makeshift barricade, manned by an estate gang with an eclectic mix of clothes and gear, unified only by grey camouflage patterns on some of their clothes and vague tactical aesthetic to their gear.

"That's your plan?" I asked, incredulous, as bullets started to pepper the windshield with white spiderwebs of broken glass. "A fucking block war?"

Bitch hit the barricade head-on, the shoddy materials no match for her up-armoured van, sending gang members scattering as she quickly spun to avoid a line of parked cars. As she hit a speed bump, the van lurched upwards as I heard something scraping along the roof. That was when I realised what the plan really was; the APC was a municipal dump truck. There was no way it'd fit inside the parking garage without taking half the roof down with it.

"There's only one exit onto the road," Bitch reported as we passed between the rows of parked cars, "and it's the way we came in."

"Then we ditch the van," Grue said, thinking on his feet. "Have it circle the upper levels before sending it back out. We'll make a break for it through the estate and hook up with the van on the other side."

"Fuck," Regent swore, breathlessly, as he clutched at his leg. "Knew I shouldn't have skipped cardio."

"Here, let me." Tattletale leant over Regent, resting a hand over his wounded leg as she murmured an incantation, keeping her grip even as the van swung wildly as Bitch turned us up and onto the next floor of the parking lot. Once she took her hand away, Regent flexed his leg experimentally before standing up.

"It'll have to do," Tattletale said. "As for you, Bug, nothing I can do about nerve damage. Could take the pain away?"

"I'll deal," I replied, shaking my head. "Exhausted enough as is."

"Then get ready to wake up," Grue said. "That walkway there, Bitch."

"Got it," came the reply, before the van skidded to a bone-shaking halt. I threw the door open, staggering out onto the concrete, closely followed by the others as Grue moved up past me to take point. The second Bitch had extricated herself from the driver's seat, she sent the van speeding away down the lot, the auto-nav software taking over as the doors were pulled shut automatically. None of us spared it a second glance as we ran into the corridors of the estate.

The multi-storey car park opened up onto a corridor that ran down the length of one side of a vast housing building, with an endless row of apartment doors to our left and the open space of the communal courtyard at the estate's entrance three storeys below us, past a waist-high metal railing and thick concrete support pillars. The overhead lights were already intermittent enough, but at least a third of them were damaged in some way; flickering, barely lit or just completely non-functional.

Below us, the sounds of gunfire echoed from the parking lot as the Chosen killed their way past the barricade. It ended far sooner than I'd have liked, and as I threw a last glance back I saw Biter emerging into the courtyard, his cybernetic optics scanning the estate before fixing on us.

"Left, now!" I shouted, almost shoving Tattletale and Bitch into a side corridor moments before shots began to ricochet off the walls around us. The new corridor cut straight through the centre of the estate, branching off onto side passages that led to more rows of tenement apartments. After the first ten metres, it widened into a significant arterial route with shuttered shops on either side, as well as on a mezzanine level above our heads. From the wear on the shutters, it seemed like every third shop remained shuttered and empty even during the day. In front of some of those empty businesses, or tucked away beneath flights of stairs, were makeshift tents and shelters out of which eyes watched us from sunken, near-emaciated sockets.

Above our heads was a channel cut deep into the building; twenty floors of grimy apartment windows, balconies and near-busted air conditioning units rising up past the occasional pedway that spanned the width of the chasm to the distant, overcast sky. There was a shape up there, barely visible against the clouds, with a narrow body and narrower wings sticking out of the sides. A drone, hundreds of metres up and seemingly holding right over our location.

"Fucking cops..." I swore breathlessly, even as I struggled to keep pace with the others.

Tattletale looked up, then shook her head.

"Not a model they use."

"Then who? Medhall? GOD?"

"Maybe," she replied, an inexplicable grin pulling at the corner of her mouth, "but maybe not."

"We'll go down at the end of this corridor!" Grue shouted from up ahead as he and Bitch waited for the rest of us to catch up. "There's a pedestrian entrance that'll get us out onto the street, then we find somewhere to link back up with the van!"

"Got it," I replied, panting. With each step, I desperately wished I'd taken up running at some point over the last two years. My only consolation was that Tattletale and Regent seemed to be having an equal amount of difficulty – provided that I ignored the nagging thought that their legs were so much shorter than mine.

I half ran, half fell down the stairs at the end of the corridor. It was almost completely silent, with only the pounding of feet, panting breaths and the occasional electric whirr of a dodgy light keeping us company as we emerged out into a lobby. As with the entrance to the parking lot, the lobby was occupied by a handful of local gang members who'd set up positions to defend their home from the horrors of the night.

They weren't expecting an attack from within, and as they turned in shock to see who had just barged out of the stairwell, they were met with the barrels of three guns as Bitch, Grue and I levelled our weapons.

"Don't do anything stupid," Grue snapped, his voice distorted by his helmet. "We're just leaving."

There were five of them, and from the look of them none were older than their early twenties. Their gang colours – the same urban camouflage pattern as on the other entrance – were little more than armbands or cloth masks tied over their faces. Their weapons were second or maybe even third hand, a mix of pawn shop antiques and the kind of flimsy plastic crap that could be bought from a vending machine for chump change, but they were still loaded.

I had my gun trained on a dwarf girl in a grey hoodie and a second-hand ballistic vest that still had the logo of some low-rent security company on it, as well as the bullet holes that had claimed the life of its one not-so-careful owner. Her weapon was a Streetline Special, a flimsy holdout pistol that looked like nothing more than an accessory in the face of my Executioner, but I knew it was dangerous all the same. It was still half-pointed at the door behind her; she was expecting trouble, but still focused on the wrong direction.

And then, she moved, trying to bring her pistol around. I didn't give her the chance; my first shot hit her in the dead centre of her ballistic vest, the high-calibre submachinegun ammunition making a mockery of her vest's low-grade protection, better suited for knives and cheap pistols than any serious fire. The force of the shot knocked her off her feet, her gun going off as her wrist hit the floor. The sound of it was lost in the sudden burst of violence to my left and right, as Grue raked his assault rifle over two of the gang members and Bitch pumped a shotgun shell each into both of the remainder.

We didn't linger over the bodies. I didn't even look back as we sprinted out into the street, my exhaustion being pushed aside by a last burst of adrenaline as I found myself under the open sky once again. That sudden sensation of space above me was the only thing that saved my life, as I looked up to see Barker leaping down from a third storey walkway, his cyberspur blade fully extended and aimed right at my spine while his misshapen metal maw was bared in a rictus of silent rage.

I jerked to the left, the blow that would have sliced through the back of my neck instead opening up the sleeve of my armoured jacket as it travelled down the length of my right arm, knocking my gun out of my hand even as the entire limb went limp.

I fell to one knee in absolute agony, half-screaming, half-roaring at the almost incomprehensible pain. Barker loomed above me, so much more real in the flesh than he had been through Bitch's optics. He was firing his assault rifle with his left hand, though I couldn't see at who until Bitch suddenly barrelled into view, firing her shotgun at point blank range into the Chosen's knee. There were holes in Bitch's ballistic vest, but she seemed unaffected; I had to assume the armoured inserts coating her sternum had held.

Barker landed on the ground next to me, already bringing up his rifle to fire again. I swept my left hand over the ground until it touched the grip of my submachine gun, then pressed the barrel against the back of Barker's head and pulled the trigger, only releasing it once I had emptied what was left of my magazine into his skull. Sparks and blood flew from what remained of his face as he slumped over, his cybernetic limbs locking him in place as his body died.

I staggered to my feet again, the slightest movement sending agonising stabs of pain through my shoulder. I still couldn't feel anything from my arm except for the world's worst case of pins and needles. In front of me, Grue was turning, aiming his rifle up at the monolithic front of the estate. He was too late; I saw tracer rounds pass through his chest and out the other side as Biter fired down from the balcony, with two other Chosen survivors by his side.

As Grue dropped to the floor, I raised my Executioner and pulled the trigger, only for it to click on an empty magazine. Biter's chest exploded regardless, as a deafening crack echoed through the artificial canyon that separated the estate from its immediate neighbour. A second shot rang out, taking off the head of the woman to Biter's right, before the third passed right through the concrete half-wall of the walkway, right where the last of the Chosen had ducked for cover.

There was a final moment of silence before the sound of sirens filled the canyon from end to end, the flanks of the estates bathed in flashing red lights as a trio of armoured ambulances in green and white livery sped down the street, coming to a halt in and amongst our scattered group.

A tricopter drone alighted from the back of each ambulance, underslung laser projectors marking out minimum safe distances in vivid red lines around each one of us, while guns turned to keep watch on what lay beyond the marked perimeter. Doors on the side of the vehicles disgorged armed guards in green jumpsuits with white accents on black body armour, followed by paramedics in lighter gear with emergency equipment held in each hand.

I saw two of them laying down a stretcher next to Grue, then hands on my own arms as my weapon was politely but firmly pried from my grip. Some manner of adhesive substance was sprayed down the length of the deep gouge Barker had left in my limb, before I was gently pushed back down onto a stretcher of my own, the base of it extended out to fit a troll's legs as the two paramedics and two guards each grabbed the sides, lifting me up and jogging across to a waiting ambulance.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Grue being carried into the back of another, while Bitch, Tattletale and Regent presented a picture of absolute confusion as they were led to the third. Tattletale looked between me and Grue's unconscious form before pulling away from the paramedics and rushing over to join me in the back of my ambulance.

She held my left hand as we pulled away, a reassuring smile on her face as I drifted in and out of consciousness, half-hearing the chatter of one of the guards near the front of the cabin.

"-to K-E liaison, clear a path through your blockade on Dockyard and Fourth immediately. We are on-route with priority wounded and-" "-clear a path now. Don't make this bigger than it needs to be; Ares and Evo have no beef in this city-" "-appreciate it, liaison. C-C one thirty-three out."

Any attempt to listen in further was stymied as Tattletale face was replaced by the impassive features of a paramedic, an oxygen mask in her hand. She pressed it over my mouth and nose even as I shook my head to try and dislodge it, flicking a switch that stuck the rim of the mask to my skin. My struggling became weaker after that, my vision blurring until everything seemed to blend together in a single mass of pure white.

Then, I couldn't see anything at all.

Today I woke up to a wonderful surprise, namely fanart of the team (minus Bitch) drawn by Lordofthedoomwings over on Spacebattles. I absolutely love that they chose to depict them when they're off the clock, and I'm amazed at how they've managed to capture their personalities as well as their appearances.

Interlude 5 – Imp

There was very little that scared Aisha, and none of what did was dangerous to her life. It didn't matter what she was doing – whether she was fighting for her life, running from rooftop to rooftop or just walking down the street – she moved through life with an easy, natural confidence. Every motion flowed naturally into the next as she drifted through the packed streets of Japantown.

Aisha had always had trouble focusing – she was sure she'd been that way since birth and certain what caused it. Information slipped out of her mind as soon as it came and – in another age, when she still went to school – she'd always sat at the very bottom of the class. But when it came to her body, when it came to the raw magic that flowed through her every sinew, she was as steady and focused as a rock in the middle of some zen garden; part of the pattern, but tough enough to take on everything around her.

Even the rain didn't faze her, though it was more like dozen streams and three small rivers by the time it had filtered down through the layers of gantries and bridges that linked the two buildings above her, all of them filled with chattering people, or the electric hiss of neon signs in a dozen different languages and at least five different alphabets.

Aisha wasn't dressed like a fighter; she didn't need chrome or armour or guns. She'd gone out wearing a shimmering pink plastic raincoat over a golden bralette and black vinyl pants, with a purple handbag over one shoulder and a pair of thick platform heels on her feet – because, Aisha always thought, what's the point of perfect poise if you don't show it off? The heels also let her see above the crowd, which was something she appreciated in a neighbourhood where the average height was so much taller than the rest of the city.

From what little Aisha knew of the city's history, she knew that Japantown was always a metahuman district. It begun with Japanese exiles, but the balance shifted over decades as more orks and trolls made the district home. It was somewhere people drifted or were pushed to in search of a place that wouldn't think less of them because of the way they were born, but that didn't mean it was a paradise. It just meant that Aisha was surrounded by more orks and trolls than she'd find anywhere else in the city.

Crowds were one of the things that weren't dangerous, but that scared her all the same. It was easy to feel lost in them, so she dressed to catch the eye; never caring about blending in or going with the flow no matter where she walked because every stray glance sent her way was a reminder that she existed, that she was worth looking at. That she was more than the people around her. That she mattered.

It made the mass of people easier to bear; made it easier to keep her head above water as she came down from the rooftops, stepped away from her circle of may-be-friends and swam among the metahuman shoals that flooded every street, alley and path of the densest district in the city.

Along with perfect control of her own body, Aisha had a perfect awareness of the people around her; her senses tuned to the point where she could pick apart individual smells, sounds and even the taste of the smoke rising from a streetside food stall. She could pick apart the individual footfalls of the people around her, pick out how confident they were in their stride, what they'd been drinking from the smell of their breath. Could even pick out the pickpockets picking their way through the packed street and deftly avoid the knives that probed out to slice open her anachronistic handbag.

It was a dangerous game they were playing; the Yakuza sometimes liked to play cops and robbers in Japantown, which meant slicing off a hand from any pickpockets they could catch out on the streets. But the pickpockets were all young, with a lean hunger to their bodies that Aisha recognised, so she didn't lash out at the ones who tried to make her their mark.

For all her body's easy confidence, Aisha's mind would much rather cross Japantown via the rooftops, leaping from building to building with the city spread out all around her and the crowds shambling in the canyons below. But business was business, and she knew that if she showed up to this meeting looking like hot shit in a taksuit and mask it'd just end up screwing her over.

Aisha left the flow of people, leaning against a corrugated metal doorway as she pulled the cheap commlink out of her handbag and opened up the map. It was an older model, but older models were all Aisha could use without paying someone to crack the SIN registration requirements. She'd never been good at memorising routes – not that the multilayered shantytown was easily navigable for people who were – and without anything that could patch into the city's GridLink, a digital map with a GPS tracker was the best she could do.

It didn't help that when she finally reached the pin she'd placed on the map, it took her another half an hour to actually find her destination inside the maze-like corridors of an old office building that had been turned into many smaller offices, shops, restaurants and probably a few apartments tucked somewhere off the main streets – which would once have been corridors cutting through the middle of endless cubicles.

The office she wanted was on the eighth floor, up a stairwell that had stalls on every landing, and it didn't have a name in a language Aisha could read. What it did have was four kanji running in a line down the door to what would once have been a private office used by the owner of whoever was renting this floor. Aisha knew the kanji spelled out the name of the Clan of Dragons, but even if she didn't the dwarf with the submachine gun standing next to the door would have given away that this was what she was looking for.

He was clearly in the gang, wearing a vivid red biker jacket over a bare chest that was absolutely covered in glowing tattoos, the centrepiece of which was a roaring dragon's head. He also clearly wasn't Japanese, but that wasn't anything unusual; Lung's Clan had formed from the nonhuman exiles of the actual Yakuza clans, all of them as conservative as mainstream Japanese society, and they'd become a pan-metahuman gang when they moved to Brockton Bay.

It wasn't some great act of solidarity in a human supremacist city, they'd just killed the leaders of the city's three largest ork and troll gangs and replaced them with their own people, forcing in a few elf and dwarf gangs later on.

The floor was quieter than most of the others in the building, probably because it was all workplaces rather than shops. Aisha counted two call centres and three pocket sweatshops before her attention wandered back to the queue next to the dwarf, a line of a dozen people waiting to be let into the Yakuza office. Most of them looked local and varied from poor to destitute. Some of them were still dressed in the aprons they'd worn to work. Aisha guessed that they were either there to pay their protection fees or try to negotiate lowering the amounts. She wished them luck.

Others, she suspected, were there for the same reason she was. They were an eclectic bunch in everything from shoddy suits to long coats zipped up tight over next to nothing, but they had one thing in common. Whatever they needed, they couldn't find it in Japantown.

Aisha bit the bullet, joining the end of the line and leaning back against the wall. Within three minutes, she was tapping her foot against the floor. Within five, she'd started taking a half step forward, then another back, conscious of the woman who joined the line after her and who'd leap at the chance to take her spot. Her only relief came when the line moved forward, before the waiting began again. She knew the dwarf was looking at her, idly fingering the grip of his gun.

Prolly thinks I'm tweaking out. Aisha thought, before a dark voice inside her followed up with guess I am. Still coming down from whatever mom was on for nine months, eighteen years back.

Aisha could do impossible things; striking with pinpoint accuracy, scaling the sides of tower blocks, dodging blows and walking with the perfect confidence of a catwalk model, but only as long as she was moving.

When Aisha meditated, she did it by picking a wall and climbing it, or finding someone who was willing to spar. When she moved, it was like she was pushing through all the clouds in her head and out into the clear skies beyond. When she was still, the clouds thickened until she saw ghosts; getting antsy and distracted by the littlest things.

But then it was over. The last person in front of Aisha shambled out of the office with a dejected look on her face and the Yakuza dwarf ushered her in with a flick of his gun.

Inside, the former manager's office had been refurnished with deep red carpets and metal blinds over the window, closed almost all the way so that only narrow slits of electric light bled through from the outside. The only furniture was a desk made of some dark synthetic wood with a chair on either side. The one behind the desk was high backed padded with a red leather pattern, while its opposite number was made from the same dark wood, but without the height or padding.

The woman sitting at the desk was taller than Aisha with a pair of long, twisted horns jutting out of her forehead and tusks pointing up from her bottom lip. She wasn't a troll, however. She wasn't that large and her red skin marked her out as an oni; a Japanese subtype of orks.

Her suit jacket was white with black pinstripes, her hair was brushed back into a neat bun and she was busy typing on an AR keyboard – though, as Aisha wasn't wearing anything that'd let her see into AR, it just looked like her fingers were fiddling in the air a centimetre above her desk.

She was ignoring Aisha, her gaze fixed on the invisible display. It was a dangerous move even when opposite the browbeaten locals who were waiting outside, but that was why the other person in the room hadn't taken his eyes off Aisha from the moment she walked in.

He was a troll, leaning against the wall with a confident smirk seemingly locked onto his face. His horns were thicker than the oni's, their length knobbled and covered in sharp spurs as they curved back from his forehead. His silvery shirt and black slacks were stretched out by his oversized musculature, and there was a revolver on his belt. Aisha was confident she could take him, but Aisha was confident she could take anyone.

The oni turned and said something in Japanese to her bodyguard. He chuckled, replying in the same language even though from his skin tone and accent he was probably as American as Aisha; either he'd taken the time to learn the language, or he had a linguasoft running on some cyberware in his head. Aisha didn't have any cyberware and she'd never been able to focus enough to pick up new languages beyond Or'zet – even that had been more difficult than it ought to, since it was basically in her blood – so she had no idea what they were saying, but she could guess.

"Here to buy a SIN," Aisha interrupted, leaning back in her seat.

The oni paused, an annoyed look on her face. She swept a hand to one side, no doubt dismissing the keyboard, and rested her elbows on the table, meshing her fingers together.

"That right?" she asked, her voice carrying the slight accent common to those who'd grown up in Japantown. "And why do you want that?"

"Got biz in Midtown, need to get past the checkpoints," Aisha answered, already pissed off. "What does it matter?"

"'Cause I say it does and I've got what you want."

Aisha clenched and unclenched her fist, using the movement to try and get her head back into shape. She was fucking this up and she knew it.

"Gotta deal set up. Buying something from there."

"Are you an entrepreneur?" the oni asked, grinning sardonically as she looked Aisha up and down.

"It's just clothes shopping," Aisha answered with a half-truth. "Need new threads to keep up."

"Ahh," the oni signed, leaning forwards and looking at Aisha, yellow eyes lingering on her body. "I see. Well then, I believe we can do business. You're so clearly in need."

She thinks I'm a joytoy, Aisha thought. A strung-out joytoy. It took a moment for her anger to fade. Fuck it, let the stuck-up bitch think what she wants. Strung-out joytoys don't carry much cred.

"So how much?" Aisha asked. "For a SIN?"

"Not just any fake will do," the oni leant back, her features twisting into a salesman's smug expression. "With the humans kicking off, Knight Errant are running deeper checks. Could give you one for twenty-five hundred nuyen, but the data would be random; could say you're an eighty year old German dwarf. Basic age, ethnicity and sex match is no good either; they'll check for supporting data."

"So you're saying you're gonna frag me on the price?"

"You knew what this was when you walked through the door. Don't exactly got a lot of options, do you?"

Aisha scowled, crossing her arms and looking away. She knew the oni was right, but she still hated it.

"Ugh… Go on."

"Seven thousand five hundred. No negotiations, no compromises. We're not the only SIN forgers in the city, but we're one of the few who'll sell to people with chompers like ours."

Aisha was pissed off. Once again, it didn't matter how much control she had over her body, how tuned in she was to the world around her, that same world still managed to find new ways to fuck her over. Someone kicks the hornet's nest and sends the Chosen off on a killing spree, then Knight Errant puts up checkpoints in the streets to contain the killing to the parts of town nobody cares about. Then the vultures crawl out of the woodwork to rub it in, right to her face.

She sighed, placing her handbag on her lap and opening it up. Inside was a small collection of short, thumb-length sticks with amounts scrawled on the side in sharpie. People who actually existed in the eyes of the world mostly paid through their commlink, tied to their SIN and unable to process payments that weren't made in their presence, verified by a code or just their biometrics, but that wasn't the only way to pay.

Certified credsticks contained pre-loaded amounts of cash up to a certain amount, depending on the make of the credstick, and – more importantly – the cash on them was completely anonymous. They belonged to the owner of the stick and could be spent anywhere that took them – which was most places, since even the most uptight districts understood that sometimes people wanted to pay anonymously, or were paranoid about fraudulent readers draining their entire current account.

For people without a SIN, who couldn't open an account at any bank that wasn't on the black market, credsticks were the only way they had of interacting with the modern world. Aisha kept her current account in her handbag, with a savings account – which had been reduced to just a single stick with a little over one thousand on it – tucked behind a loose brick in her room in the Troupe's place.

Most of the credsticks in her bag were stolen. Some of them had come from hotel rooms, lifted before their owner had the chance to waste them on a mid-rate joytoy, while others had come from random pickpocketing when Aisha was bored. The highest value one – a full fifteen thousand nuyen on a silver-rated credstick – had been payment for a job, earned by stealing a piece of art from some public art gallery and handed to her by an asshole suit in a penthouse apartment.

She left that one where it was, struggling for a moment as she tried to get the numbers to fit together in her head before putting five credsticks on the table, with a combined value that was probably somewhere near eight thousand.

The oni gave her a pointed look, her eyes flicking down to the credsticks as if to sarcastically ask where Aisha found them. She opened a drawer on her desk, pulling out a credstick reader and slotting each stick one by one, draining them of their funds and handing the empties back to Aisha.

"How much left on that one?" Aisha asked as the last credstick was placed in front of her.

"Don't have a commlink to check?" The oni asked, as the troll in the corner of the room chuckled to himself. "Sixty eight. You were almost short."

Aisha didn't answer. She just took a sharpie out of her bag, crossed out the number on the stick and wrote the new one next to it. It, along with the others, was swept into her handbag, which weighed the same despite being seven and a half thousand nuyen lighter.

"Now then, one fake SIN." The oni pulled up the keyboard again, poking the air as she selected options Aisha couldn't see. "Sex, female. Metatype, ork. Ethnicity, African American. Age," the corner of her lip curled up past her tusk. "Eighteen, right? Wouldn't want to be barred from any clubs."

"I am eighteen," Aisha answered honestly, though she sometimes had trouble remembering. It had been years since she'd last done something to mark a birthday. For the last two years, she'd only realised she was a year older a few days after it happened.

"Whatever you say, kid. It's a hundred nuyen for a commlink."

"Huh?" Aisha asked.

"A commlink. A SIN's no good if you've nothing wireless to broadcast it. Got a box of Meta Links in the back for people who don't got their own."

"Fuck, fine," Aisha snatched another credstick from her handbag, eyeing the sharpied number in disgust before tossing it onto the desk.

"A pleasure doing business," the oni smiled, waving a hand at her bodyguard.

The troll lumbered over to a doorway and pulled it open. Aisha caught a brief glimpse of the room beyond before it was blocked by the troll's back as he ducked his head through a doorway that absolutely wasn't designed for someone his height.

Inside was a darkened space lit by dull red lights, with a reclined metal and syn-leather seat set against the wall, surrounded by wires and computer towers with blinking blue status lights flashing out in an unreadable pattern. A woman was lying down on the seat, dressed in the sort of skintight cooler suit that let deckers work in cyberspace upwards of a dozen hours without coming up for air, the suit keeping their neuralware cool as it manipulated their muscles to prevent sores and – on the really long-term models – provided inflow ports for IV drips and outflow ports for bodily waste.

Aisha once had a nightmare that she was plugged into one; locked in place while her mind was stuck in a virtual world that had none of the real-feel of the real one. She'd never used the matrix, not properly. Even before everything went wrong, her family could never have afforded cold-sim gear. Even so, the idea of being lost in that world had always frightened her; it was a fate worse than death.

"How long will it last?" Aisha asked, turning back to the Oni as the troll conversed in Japanese with someone in the next room.

"Hard to say," the oni shrugged her shoulders. "You try walking into the Ares docks, it'll last until you're face down on the floor with fifty guns pointed at you. For normal use… maybe a year, until they refresh the system enough times to make our backdoors obsolete. It varies."

"So it lasts until it doesn't?"

"Basically," the oni replied, a grin spreading across her red face.

The troll ducked his head back through the doorway, a blocky plastic commlink held between his thumb and forefinger. He passed the comm to the oni, who held it out for Aisha to grab.

As Aisha's fingers drew near, however, the oni made to pull the commlink back. Aisha decided then and there that she'd had enough of being screwed, of forking over too much money to slip around a meaningless government leash, of the oni's smug face. She abandoned restraint, her fingers flying forward as magic flowed through her muscles, pumping down her veins with every heartbeat. She snatched the commlink out of the Yakuza woman's hand, tossing it up in the air before swiping out to flick it into her handbag.

"We're done, right?"

The oni's eyes narrowed, but she didn't lash out like Aisha was half expecting – like she half wanted her to.

"We're done," the oni replied instead, nodding in the direction of the door. "Get out."

"Yeah, fuck you too…" Aisha grumbled as she stood, turning her back on the two Yakuza without so much as a twinge of unease; she didn't need to see them to know what they were doing. Annoyingly, they didn't seem to be doing anything; the troll was watching her with just as much disinterest as he had when she'd walked in, while the oni had already gone back to typing on her AR keyboard.

As Aisha stepped out into the corridor and saw that the line now stretched all the way down to the stairwell, she realised why they didn't care; she was just another desperate face to them. They didn't know she was an adept, didn't know she'd abseiled off the side of the interstate or climbed up the side of a twenty-five story tower block to burgle the penthouse. It was what she'd planned, but Aisha still hated it.

That hate turned into discomfort as she navigated her way through the packed market-corridors of the old office building and out into the no-less-packed streets of Japantown. She picked up the pace, striding with ease through the crowds as she let herself flow like a fish through a river of metahumanity. She drew more attention that way, but she didn't care. It was better than being nobody.

As she drew closer to Archer's Bridge and its underslung metro line, the character of Japantown changed. It was a narrow band of prosperity, the same converted office buildings only imitating the genuine shantytown architecture seen deeper in the district. They were full of kitschy restaurants, anachronistic Pachinko and Mahjong parlours, and offensively Japanese souvenir shops selling cheap clothes and cheaper swords.

Aisha knew from experience that if she slipped past the outer layers of that office building, with its code-compliant modifications and basic SIN checks for reservations in mid-range restaurants selling sushi for upper-mid-range prices, she'd find a tight warren of lightless apartments inhabited by the people who worked to preserve the tourist traps, or the hidden brothels and bunraku parlours that high-class clients would be ushered into to give them the experience of crime without the actual risk.

Checking the time on her new commlink, Aisha hurried up the stairs to the metro station, pushing past the downward flow of office workers looking for somewhere to relax, couples looking for somewhere romantic and rowdy high schoolers who'd go as far into Japantown as they dared in search of someone who'd sell them drugs or alcohol.

At the turnstile, a light flicked from red to yellow as it detected the fake SIN in Aisha's commlink. It was the most basic level of security – checking whether she even had a SIN, rather than who it said she was – but Aisha was still glad to know she hadn't been sold a dud. When she slotted a credstick into a port just below the pad, the light going green as the bars swung out, letting her push her way through onto the platform just as a train had finished loading its cargo of passengers.

Aisha squeezed through the doors, twisting her body to fit through the closing gap. It was quiet by the standards of the metro, which meant it was still far too crowded for her tastes. The line only became busier as it passed through Midtown; dozens of middle-class passengers arriving with every passing stop and only half as many leaving. There were no internal doors between the carriages, which meant Aisha's heels gave her a commanding view right down the length of the train.

It meant they could see her too, especially given that orks and trolls were very much in the minority. She saw an elven mother cast a disapproving look at her outfit, then pull her school-age children in closer. Further down the carriage, a man in a suit with a Medhall logo on his tie clip elbowed the woman next to him – maybe a coworker – and shared a joke that had them both chuckling.

Aisha heard exactly what they said, even over the din of the carriage and the squeal of the metro making a turn. She grinned, showing plenty of tusk, and flipped the pair of them off. As she'd expected, they just scowled and looked the other way; wageslaves were too browbeaten to ever consider kicking off on public transport.

They got off three stops later, but the looks never entirely stopped. More people were constantly flowing in and out of the carriage until it passed beyond the tall residential buildings of Midtown, dashing over the river before dropping down into the antique skyline of the old city centre.

The buildings in that part of the city – protected for their historical value, though Aisha didn't see what was so valuable about them – were mostly made of red bricks or white stone, with the very tallest only reaching fifteen stories high. Here and there, the last-century cityscape was broken up by sleek modern towers, where planning permission had lapsed and allowed the modern age to intrude on Brockton Bay's Fifth World reservation.

Aisha's stop was on a modern platform that was suspended above the old street on spindly struts, putting her in mind of a spaceship hovering over a primitive civilisation. There was no staircase down, just four glass-walled elevators mounted at either end of the platform.

There were two Knight Errant officers standing beside each set of elevators, with rifles held in their hands as their impassive full-face visors looked over the disembarking crowd. A drone hovered above them, a circular reconnaissance unit that was giving them a bird's eye view of the crowd.

Aisha knew that even if she couldn't see it, they were currently watching everyone on the platform on a far deeper level than just the visual. Their visors concealed a suite of AR-linked sensors that, in combination with the drone, were tracking and scanning the SINs of everyone who was attempting to get into Midtown.

It was worse on the ground – which was why Aisha hadn't even considered walking. With violence spreading throughout the northern half of the city, Knight Errant had set up checkpoints all along the boundaries between Midtown and its neighbours, Japantown and the North End. SINners got searched, unless they were too important to touch, while the SINless were being turned away. Rather than two bored transport officers, Aisha would have faced half a dozen if her fake had failed.

The result was that the old streets were quieter than usual, with the homeless population forcibly moved on with more aggression than normal. It meant Aisha stood out even more, but she didn't care; her SIN was holding, and she'd almost made it there.

Still, she sighed with relief as she pushed open the glass doors of an eight-storey brick building, striding purposefully past a bored security guard into an elevator and thumbing the button for the sixth floor.

'Naranjo Secure Clothiers' looked pretty much how Aisha had expected it to, at first glance. The elevator opened onto a tastefully furnished reception area with brown syn-leather couches, a deep green carpet and faux-wood panelled walls. At least, Aisha assumed it was all synthetic; this deep into the city, it could well be the real deal.

The elf behind the reception desk was certainly real, looking at Aisha with a practiced smile on her made-up face as she gestured in AR. The smile became imperceptibly strained at whatever she found, though Aisha would have doubted anyone but her would have noticed it.

"I'm sorry, miss," she began, her tone the very essence of politeness, "but we have no reservations under 'Jasmine Olsen.'"

Aisha chuckled, sauntering towards the woman as her hand began to drift towards a button underneath her desk. Aisha wondered what it did; would turrets drop out of the ceiling? Security drones walk out of hidden alcoves in the wall? A team of heavies storm in from the next room? Explosives in the couch?

"Yeah, you wouldn't. Appointment's under 'Imp.' Here to see the boss."

The secretary's eyes darted to the left as she checked something. Aisha wondered if she'd gone for an eye implant, but decided that she was probably just wearing AR lenses. She seemed like the type who valued their all-natural appearance for entirely different reasons than Aisha.

"I see," she blinked. "Apologies, ma'am. He'll see you now. Please," she gestured to a wooden door behind her, with a brass handle and an old-fashioned keyhole that Aisha was sure she recognised as a high-end lock mocked up to look antiquated.

"Ma'am, huh?" she murmured to herself as she passed the secretary. "Classy place…"

Beyond the doorway was an expansive studio, far larger than any creative space the Troupe had. Parts of it were set aside for work, with mannequins, assembly machines and dozens of other obscure tools arranged on neat wooden shelves, while other parts were made for the business, with comfortable furniture, a richly-decorated desk with equally fancy seats and an entire wall just for swathes of different fabric. The windows – five of them – stretched up almost to the ceiling, though Aisha could tell from the faint distortion of the light that the glass was armoured and could darken at the touch of a button.

There was an android standing by the window – some high-end model with a metal faceplate sculpted into a distinguished, masculine look. It had been dressed in an old dinner suit, with a black bow tie and a red sash around its waist, while its metal hands ended in a variety of different manipulator digits meant to serve the needs of its owner.

The owner – Naranjo himself – was standing beside the window, looking down on the street below. He was a gnome, barely able to look over the windowsill at only eighty centimetres tall, and he was dressed in a suit that was as anachronistic as his robo-butler, with a high-necked white shirt and a red scarf-like necktie tucked into his waistcoat.

"Miss 'Imp'," he began, turning away from the window. "You're late."

He didn't sound as angry as Aisha was expecting – or, he did, but there was something else to it. She'd never been good at reading people.

"Midtown's locked up tighter than a dragon's vault," she replied by way of an explanation. "I had to buy a fake SIN just to make it here."

"Indeed?" Naranjo asked. "Yes, I suppose that would cause some difficulties."

Not something you think about, is it? Aisha thought to herself. Bet the pawns nod and call you 'sir' whenever you walk past.

"So… is it ready?" she asked, a hand reaching into her bag. "Because I have your money."

"Please," the clothier waved a hand dismissively. "Let us not discuss something as gauche as payment when you haven't even laid eyes on what you're paying for. I was, after all, working on measurements I did not take myself."

"Did I miss any out?" Aisha asked, worried. She'd pestered a tailor in the Troupe to measure her, using a list she'd jotted down as a guide, but maybe she'd missed out some vital measurement.

"No, nothing like that," Naranjo shook his head, a faint smile pulling at the corner of his lip. "I was simply worried that you may have made a mistake in writing the numbers down."

He looked Aisha up and down. It wasn't like when the oni had stared at her, but there was something similarly clinical in his gaze.

"But I can see that my worries were unfounded," he spoke, openly smiling. "You're quite the beauty, and it looks like every measurement was exact. I must admit, I'm a little surprised."

"Your husband know you like eyefucking the customers?" Aisha asked, gesturing to a framed picture on the wall of the gnome, a dwarf in a pair of chinos and a young girl in a sundress.

Naranjo openly laughed, his carefully-composed manner breaking entirely.

"You misunderstand. It's rare I get to meet someone who's won the genetic lottery, but the prize is worth a lot less in this day and age. I more commonly deal with a sculpted aesthetic that is as much a work of art as my own creations. After all, why deny yourself beauty simply because of random chance? The same odds that fell so much in your favour put me in the wrong body entirely, but nature's mistakes are easily fixed."

If you have money, Aisha thought, her mind drifting back to familiar faces in Circus' weird little quasi-gang. If not, could take a lifetime to get even close to comfortable in your skin.

"But I digress," the gnome said, shaking his head as he gestured towards a pair of couches. "Please, take a seat. I will have your attire collected."

Aisha sat, tapping her foot impatiently as Naranjo sent the android off to rummage through the cupboards. Idly, she looked around the room, taking in the half-finished garments meant for the clothier's regular customers.

Most of them were suits – their seams opened to reveal pieces of armoured fabric halfway through being stitched in – but others were stranger. An elegant ballgown sat on a mannequin, while there was a neatly folded heap of transparent material sitting on a table that put Aisha in mind of a snakeskin.

"Most of your clients are bodyguards?" she asked.

"They make up my bread and butter. It's a delicate balancing act that depends more on who they're guarding than the bodyguard themself. They're meant to accessorise, in a sense. Never to overshadow their principal or even their principal's more intimate employees. What's more, they follow them everywhere."

He gestured towards the heap of transparent material.

"That's for a client whose principal is holidaying in the French Riviera next month. It's called 'Second Skin,' and I am one of a handful of clothiers in New England who's licensed to fit it. It's an armoured bodyglove; entirely transparent and fitted so closely to the client's body that if she were to gain or lose as little as half a kilo, it would become useless. Perfect for accompanying your principal as she sunbathes on a beach or the deck of a yacht, when paired with appropriate swimwear."

Aisha didn't reply; her attention snapped over to the android butler, who was returning with a grey bundle held in its arms. She stood up, striding over to a long table as the butler set the bundle down and unfurled it, revealing a one-piece taksuit made from a grey material patterned with tiny, almost indistinguishable hexagons. It had a scarf-like hood of black fabric attached to the neck, a belt and several pouches circling the hips, and it ended in flexible boots – all of them coated in that same pattern.

At the centre of the bundle, hidden until the android had unwrapped it, was a white-grey mask of armoured ceramic, though that too had the tell-tale hexagons stretched across its surface. The mask had been sculpted to look like a grinning demon with bared, pointed teeth – including prominent fangs – and swept-back horns jutting out of the forehead. The eyes were black from cover to cover and stylised to look fierce; more animal than human.

"Oh that's fuckin' beautiful," Aisha murmured as she picked up one of the arms of the suit. The material was smooth beneath her fingers, slick enough that it felt like water would run right off it almost without touching. As she moved down the arm, she felt the faint padding over the elbow and the reinforced patches over the gloves; armoured pads over the knuckles and grip-fast patches on the underside of each finger.

"The base fabric is Evo's SoftWeave," Naranjo said, moving up to stand beside her. "It's lightweight and flexible enough that it should not prove a barrier to any motion whatsoever, while also acting as a very adaptive baselayer. The coating is ruthenium polymer, of course. The highest grade I have."

He reached over the table, grabbing the mask and handing it to Imp, who held it up in front of her face and stared deeply into the featureless black lenses, seeing her own eyes reflected back at her.

"The mask is a more conventional ceramic. Like the rest of the suit, it won't hold up under fire, but it's good for blunt force trauma. The lenses cover a standard optic suite; the entire inner surface above the mouth is a screen. Below that is an integrated respirator. With the hood up, that creates a CBRN-rated seal. It also has a built-in commlink, of course, though that can be switched off to allow it to function entirely offline."

Aisha looked around the room, half-considering throwing her clothes off then and there. It was perfect; she wanted to wear it now.

"Ah, over there," the gnome gestured to a tasteful set of panelling on the other side of the room. It came to Aisha's shoulders, but it'd be enough. She bundled the suit up in her arms more carefully than she'd ever held anything in her life, then darted behind the modesty screen, leaving her handbag on the table.

"So, if you don't mind me asking," the gnome began as Aisha kicked off her heels and shrugged off her top, "what have you been using until now?"

"Just a basic chameleon suit," she answered. "The mask was custom, but the suit itself was second hand. Had them paired together by a guy I know. I could get it to change colour, but nothing like this."

Naranjo scoffed, but Aisha didn't feel like he was directing it at her. "Basic camouflage, nothing more. Good for soldiers and hunters, but not professionals. You'll find your new suit much more appropriate."

Aisha only half heard him. She was kneeling down with the suit in her hands, trying to figure out how exactly she put it on. It took her a moment, but eventually she found a zip on the back of the suit, just to the left of a raised strip of grey material that ran down the length of the spine. It was probably meant to house the electronics that allowed the suit to function, but to Aisha's eyes it looked like a spinal column that had slipped its bonds and broken through the skin. She very much approved.

Hitting the button that disengaged the teeth of the zip, Aisha stood and slid her legs down into the boots, pulling up the waist of the suit before slipping her hands down the arms and pushing her head through the hood. The boots tightened automatically around her ankles, as the zip magnetically locked itself on her back.

The fit was perfect; sleek and snug from head to toe, yet – as Aisha tugged at her sleeve – with enough give that moving shouldn't be any issue whatsoever. Hanging the mask on the modesty screen, Aisha quickly went through the motions of a kata Circus had taught her, one that mixed conventional fighting moves with acrobatics and contortionist stretches that would leave most people lying on the floor in a puddle of broken bones.

When she sprung back to her feet from a one-handed handstand, she saw that Naranjo has stepped around the side of the screen to see what the noise was. He had his hand on his chin and was nodding to himself.

"It seems the measurements were correct."

"It's fucking wiz," Aisha grinned, snatching the mask from where it was hanging and sliding it on over her head. She reached back, grabbed the hood and pulled it forward until it connected to the mask with the click of more mag-locks.

For an instant, her world was pitch black, before colour swept down the inside of the mask as the optics came online.

He was right, Aisha thought. It's like it's not even there.

Another fraction of a second and the integrated commlink connected to AR, suddenly marking out a dozen different elements floating throughout the room; part of the creature comfort systems Naranjo kept around to adjust the heat and humidity, raise or lower the shutters and even open the windows altogether if he was so inclined. Aisha blinked in irritation; the illusion had been broken.

"So how do I turn it on?" she asked, looking down at the gnome through the mask's featureless black lenses.

"Through the HUD," he explained, turning his right hand palm up and furling and unfurling his fingers. "This motion will bring up the menu."

Aisha copied him, watching as a small AR window of red letters appeared just above her palm. She skimmed over the list of options before landing on one that was in a larger font than the others, and accompanied by a big red button.

She hit it, and the word 'Activate' lit up brighter for a moment before being swept away by new letters reading 'Deactivate.' She held up her arm in front of her face, the interface disappearing as her arm passed through it – along with all the other AR elements in the room as the suit throttled its Matrix connection – and watched as vivid red lines spread out across her arms – a digital overlay, she realised after a second – while the fabric itself gradually shifted until it had become completely transparent.

"What's with the overlay?" she asked.

"It's necessary for hand-eye coordination," Naranjo explained, still looking at where she had been standing even as she walked around his back, miming picking his pockets and smiling as he didn't do so much as flinch. "People don't need to see their hand to know where it is, but they expect to. If you want to 'see' yourself, look over there."

He was pointing towards a tall, gilt-framed mirror in the corner of the room – large enough that even a troll could see their reflection from head to toe. Aisha paced up to it like a predator; with slow, deliberate steps, keeping herself just out of frame. Only when she was close enough to touch it did she take a single step to the left, putting herself in full view of the mirrored surface.

There was nothing there. No distortion, no haze or static. Not even a gradual shift as the ruthenium polymer adapted to the change in position. Aisha swiped a hand up and down in front of her face. She could see the AR outline over each finger, but in the mirror itself there was still nothing. She moved faster, flicking her hand like she was throwing a punch, and finally saw a visible haze of distorted air as she outpaced the suit.

I can't move too fast, she thought to herself, but it's still so much better than I hoped.

"How long does the charge last?"

"Four hours of active stealth," Naranjo answered. "There are charging ports at the top of the spine and the left side of the mask – both inside the suit rather than outside, to preserve the polymer layer."

Aisha shifted her hand, bringing up the menu again. Her eyes darted quickly over the option to shut off the commlink, taking the suit offline, before she hit the 'Deactivate' button and watched as the AR lines faded away and her arm swept back into existence.

She reached up, pulled back the hood and removed her mask, then whooped and jumped a meter and a half into the air.

"This is fucking nova, chummer."

"Worth the cost?" the clothier asked, his grin widening in the face of Aisha's infectious joy.

"Pay for itself ten times over," Aisha said, darting over to her handbag and upending it onto the table, spilling out the cluster of credsticks, her fresh-bought commlink, a collapsible combat tomahawk made of composite metals and polymers, and a meticulously maintained – but rarely used – Ultimax 70 machine pistol.

She reached for the pouches that ringed the hips of her suit, filing away credsticks and the commlink into smaller pouches while tucking the pistol and axe into the holsters that had been specifically built to match their specifications.

"Remember to always close those," Naranjo interjected. "They'll be slower to draw, but the stealth coating is useless if people can see a pistol grip floating in midair."

"Got it," Aisha answered as she tucked away the last of the bag's contents. She still had plenty of pouches to spare, which was good; plenty of room to fill them with chips, jewellery or whatever else she could find people to pay her to steal.

She grabbed the silver credstick and held it up between two fingers.

"Fifteen kay, as asked."

Naranjo stepped forward, reaching for the credstick, only for Aisha to flip it back into her palm.

"I've gotta ask, though, why'd you go for this in the first place? Whirligig has a John who knows you, hangs out in the same circles, I know that much, but what do you get out of selling gear to street scum like me?"

The clothier smiled, leaning against the back of the couch as he looked up at Aisha.

"It isn't my normal work, true. The design theory behind it is an interesting paradox; a stealth suit that stands out. That intimidates. Can I ask a question for a question? Why the mask? It seems a little too close to a caricature."

Aisha set down the credstick and picked up the mask, eyeing the fangs, the horns. She didn't answer at first; she'd always had trouble putting her feelings into words.

"You don't need a stealth suit to be invisible," she answered, glancing out the window, where the rain was sputtering out, leaving only occasional droplets to run down the panes. "Out there, nobody can see you anyway. Nobody knows who you are, what you do, what you want or why you want it. It's true for me and it's true for you, but in here you've got your sign, your fabrics, your girl at the front desk. You're somebody."

She turned to face him, flipping the mask around and holding it up by her face, side by side.

"I've gotta be invisible to do my job, but I don't want to be invisible off it. I want to stand out, build a rep. Hire a thief in a baggie hoodie and sweatpants, you'll forget them by the end of the hour. Hire this?" she struck a pose, spreading her hands and cocking her hips. "Like you said, I won the genetic lottery. The mask just adds to it; freak 'em out and they'll just remember you more."

Naranjo chuckled to himself, shaking his head.

"Then by all means, burn your mark into this city, Imp. As for me? You said it yourself; here I'm somebody. My worth to society is tied to my business, my worth as a person is tied to my family, my friends. I've invested a lot of time and effort into all of them and it's tied me down to one way of living. Rooftop escapades are beyond my reach, but through this work I can get as close as I possibly can to a genuine adventure."

Utterly satisfied, Aisha left the clothiers completely invisibly, with a genuine spring in her step. She passed through the crowds of the city centre as fast as the suit would let her, deftly moving around couples and salarymen and anyone else without leaving a trace of her presence beyond the small amount of air each motion displaced. Briefly, she considered falling back on her old tricks; sliding watches off wrists, lifting commlinks or picking earrings right out of the skin while leaving their wearer none the wiser, but then her invisibility would break.

It's time to put away the kid shit, Aisha thought to herself. This suit's for bigger and better.

When she reached the metro platform, she climbed over the ticket barrier in full view of a Knight Errant cop. The commlink with her fake SIN on it was stuffed into a pouch, but she'd left her old clothes behind alongside her fifteen thousand nuyen payment; she didn't want anything to get in-between her and using the suit in public for the first time.

Aisha hung back from the edge of the platform as the train pulled in, keeping clear of the flow of passengers as she tried to find somewhere to stand where people wouldn't run into her by accident. The platform was for trains heading back towards Midtown and the North End, which meant that the crowd were almost universally workers on the way back from twelve hour shifts manning cubicles in offices, or staffing museums, shops and galleries that they'd never be able to afford to visit.

She was afraid of that, as well; it was another fate worse than death. Aisha often thought to herself, looking in on society from the outside, that no matter how bad things got, at least she was still free.

As she climbed up onto the roof of the train moments before it left the station, Aisha's mind drifted back down old paths. She often wondered what her life would been like if she'd gone with her dad in the divorce instead, if her mom had taken the amnesty and reregistered their SINs rather than drifting through 'sixty-four in a haze of drugs and shit boyfriends.

If they hadn't drifted from flophouse to flophouse, her mom paying rent under the table to sketchy landlords, or squeezing Aisha into some small space in the corner of a new boyfriend's apartment so that she wouldn't dampen his mood just by being around. If they hadn't drifted from there to one squatters den after another, Aisha spending more and more time out on the streets until she came back to the junkie's den to find her mother had gone, disappeared somewhere into the shantytown mass at the city's northernmost point, where ghouls lurk in the dark places and the people shuffle through the streets like they're just as dead.

Lying back on the roof of a speeding train, watching a city full of registered SINners drift by in its endless pattern of shift work, rent and a million other screws holding it in place – keeping the machine turning along – Aisha knew with absolute certainty that even though it had been hard, even though every new stage of her childhood had been a new nightmare, it was still better than the alternative.

She was a better person because of it. A stronger person. She'd become someone that little Aisha Laborn, nine year old UCAS citizen and elementary school underperformer, could never have become. She was an adept, capable of putting real magic into her every move. She was a master thief, able to sneak in and out of anywhere she wanted to. The suit was just the final brick in the wall; it didn't make her invisible, it made her invincible.

That feeling carried Aisha through the North End as she leapt from the train to a low rooftop, her suit shimmering as she sprinted across the rooftops, walkways and balconies of a dozen different tenement buildings on her way to the Troupe, her bed and her tiny horde of petty cash tucked behind a loose brick.

It lasted until her ears started to catch the sound of gunfire reverberating through the canyons of buildings; until she saw the smoke rising in the distance.

As she drew closer to her home, Aisha began to see signs of carnage on the streets below. There were bodies lying by the side of the road, some of them dressed in normal clothes, some wearing the red and black colours of the network of smaller gangs that paid tribute to the Chosen, while far too many were dressed in an eclectic riot of colours and styles. Far too many wore familiar faces.

Aisha's pace slowed, creeping over the rooftops rather than dropping down to street level for the final approach. She was glad of the filters in her mask keeping the smell of the smoke out, glad of the invisibility itself as she risked occasional glances down into the street, seeing packs of humans under the command of cybered-up Chosen members gathering in their dozens.

In the places they'd stopped to gather, they'd also stopped to make examples; bodies were strung up from lampposts, small pop-up stores without licenses or insurance had been looted and defaced, their owners nowhere to be seen. An off the books pharmacy was being meticulously dismantled, the drugs within carted out and catalogued by a woman with a voice box stitched into her throat and a metal cage mask around her head.

Aisha lay flat on the very edge of the building and peered over the side, looking down on about a dozen men and women throwing firebombs at the densely-packed tenement block, cheering every time one of the bombs broke a window and landed inside the building. She could hear the sound of feet running through the corridors just below her, as families fled their packed apartments in terror.

Panic gripped Aisha then. Not fear for her life, but fear for the closest thing she had to a home. She sprung off, running directly towards the sound of gunfire even as her heart pounded in her chest. She had no idea what she was doing; she'd never killed anyone, never fought in a gunfight. That wasn't the lesson shantytown kids learned.

The runners survive. The fighters die.

When the makeshift township came into view, it reminded Aisha of movies she'd seen of castles under siege. Twin machine guns had been set up on top of Trainwreck's makeshift wall, firing down the length of the street at an up-armoured bulldozer that was relentlessly grinding its way down the length of the road, pushing aside cars and trucks that had been hastily turned into yet more barricades.

The Chosen advanced behind it, using its massive bulk as cover. Not the bottom-feeders hanging around the outskirts of the fight, but real, blooded Chosen with their naked cybernetics and military-grade gear. Every now and then, one of them would dart to the side, take up a position behind one of the cars and start firing at the machine guns on the wall. Aisha saw one of their shots land, saw a tall woman with half her face painted blue fall back as the top of her skull was shorn off in a spark of subdermal armour, only to be replaced a moment later by a horned satyr with shamanic symbols dangling from necklaces over his bare, hair-covered chest.

Aisha saw movement on the other side of the street, as Chosen gunmen moved from window to window, trying to find a vantage point from which they could see over the wall. She didn't know tactics, but she knew they'd be trying the same in the building below her.

Struck by the sudden urge to do something more than just run away or huddle up behind the barricade and wait to die with the rest of them, Aisha knelt down on the very edge of the building, gripped the lip of the roof and swung herself down onto the wall, dropping from windowsill to windowsill until she found a broken one three stories down.

Aisha swung herself through the frame, her boots crunching on the broken glass that littered the floor of the semi-abandoned unit, with only a sleeping bag and a gas burner in the corner of the room showing that someone was living there, while the upturned bowl of canned soup suggested that they'd left in a hurry.

Trusting in her invisibility, Aisha stepped out into the narrow corridor that ran the length of the tenement building just in time to find herself face to face with a pair of Chosen wearing ballistic vests and carrying assault rifles, their cybernetic optics twitching as they edged down the corridor with more confidence that she was expecting.

As one of the Chosen paused, turned and fired a quick burst of shots through the wall beside him, Aisha realised it was because their optics were cutting through the flimsy plasterboard like it wasn't even there, letting them see anyone in the building who wasn't wearing a high-end stealth suit.

Following them into one of the apartments, once home to a family of four crammed into two rooms, Aisha drew the tomahawk from her belt. When the Chosen split, one to each window, she picked her target – a man with a human skull spray-painted onto the back of his armoured vest – and swung her axe into his neck, following up the blow with another under the shoulder before grabbing him by the back of the head and reversing the axe to drive the spike through his right optic and into his skull.

Blood sprayed over Aisha's suit as his comrade turned, but she was already drawing her pistol with her other hand. Without even looking, she lined up a shot on his head and pulled the trigger, dozens of hours of practice paying off as a three-round burst passed right through his skull.

Shots were being fired from the building opposite, drawing Aisha's attention away from the blood pooling from the Chosen's skulls. Eclectically-dressed gang members were moving from room to room, killing any Chosen they found but not yet firing down on the main force in the street below. Aisha felt her chest tighten as she watched them; she wasn't sure if it was in fear or in relief.

Once they were in position, the Troupe attacked in a shower of gunfire and spells, the air almost reverberating with the force of the magic being thrown down into the street, sending Chosen scattering from glittering arcs of electricity, roiling tongues of fire and an absolute barrage of conventional weapons.

The barricade creaked and groaned as an immense armoured figure clambered up to the top, firing down the length of the street with twin assault rifles mounted on the shoulders of the oversized exoskeleton he wore to counter his paraplegia.

Trainwreck leapt down off the barricade, landing on the asphalt with a crash and a whirr of servos that sounded exactly like his namesake. He was followed by more of the Troupe; lithe adepts and cyborgs on elegantly-sculpted metal limbs who rushed forward to fight the Chosen with blades and spurs and blunt sledgehammers. Trainwreck stormed right through the middle of them, leaping up and driving both his oversized metal fists into the engine of the dozer, before pulling one back and punching the armoured cabin so hard that the piece of armour dismounted from its frame, jerking back and crushing the driver beneath a solid metal sheet.

Aisha grinned beneath her mask, her grip tightening on the axe as she edged closer to the window. She wanted to help, but she found herself more and more hesitant the closer she drew to the window. Trainwreck was in among the Chosen, sweeping aside three at a time with each swing of his fists, and a few of the Troupe's awakened members were able to keep pace with him, but the rest of them weren't doing so well.

For every Chosen they managed to kill, three of the Troupe were dying. Aisha had never been part of the gang, in as much as they even were a gang. They were artists, sculptors, prostitutes, actors, thieves, dancers; exiles from society who plied their trade on street corners for slightly more than beggars made and crawled back to their sort-of-commune so that they had somewhere to sleep at night.

She was one of the drifters, someone who came in and out of the district as she pleased, knowing the faces of the people around her but not really knowing them. She was good, she knew that, but she wasn't a soldier. Not like the Chosen.

Each one of them was a born-again killer, living for nothing more than learning new ways to murder her people, or just people like her. Even when surrounded by an absolute riot of fighters desperate to defend their home, they managed to stay cool and controlled. Their shots were still accurate, their forms able to parry incoming blows with the spark of steel on steel. Without the advantage of surprise, without her suit, they'd gut Aisha without a second thought and rip out her tusks as a trophy.

And then she saw the reinforcements, and Aisha was struck by an almost physical wave of raw, primal terror.

Another two dozen Chosen were advancing down the street, moving in pairs with one firing as the other darted up to the next piece of cover only to drop to one knee and cover their partner. Their fire was unrestrained, trusting in their training and their linked neural network to guide their shots away from their comrades in the melee. Aisha didn't see them; all she could see was the monster at the head of the crowd, striding down the street like the gunfire all around him was nothing more than a gentle rain.

He was as tall as any troll Aisha had met and was carrying so much chrome it seemed impossible. Everything below the neck was metal, thick enough that it could almost be confused for power armour if it weren't for the obviously inhuman proportions. As an incoming shot sheared the synthskin off his temple, Aisha saw that even his head was nothing more than a metal shell given a cosmetic coat of flesh.

If there's anything 'ganic in there, it's buried deep, some small part of Aisha's mind thought, almost buried beneath the overwhelming fear. She had to fight herself not to throw up.

The cyberpsycho began to jog, then run, then sprint down the street at an impossibly vast speed, leaving his followers behind as he ran directly into the melee. From his shoulders, micro-missile racks emerged and fired their payload, sending a dozen rockets twisting through the air before detonating all along the length of the building opposite Aisha, pulping the Troupe's firing positions and shearing off whole swathes of the building's façade where they hit load-bearing supports.

The backblast shattered the windows of Aisha's building, as she reflexively raised her arms to cover protect her face from the glass shrapnel. The shards, some centimetres long, skidded off the armoured fabric of her suit, the few that made it past her arms peppering uselessly against the armoured surface of her mask. She risked a glance through the broken windows, only to see the cyberpsycho – moving faster than anyone, chromed or no, had any right to – drive his fist into Trainwreck's armoured chest and rip out the flesh within in a spray of blood and viscera.

Aisha fell back in shock, scrabbling backwards on her hands and legs as some deep, primal unease twinged at the part of her brain that was awakened to the magic of the world. He was wrong. Wrong in a way that was impossible to explain, wrong in a way that made Aisha sick to her stomach.

The noise pouring through the blown-out windows was only getting louder, the gunfire and screams becoming more and more real to her. She realised the Chosen had broken through; that their cyberpsycho and their reinforcements had killed everyone on the street and broken through the barricade, storming through the market and into the closest thing she had to a home.

Aisha pulled herself to her feet, held her hand up in front of her face to check she was still invisible, and ran as far and as fast as she could, leaving the massacre behind her.