Chapter 39

We were both motionless and prone, our bodies low to the ground and hidden by the fence line and wind-tangled foliage.

Sam had edged toward the fence's base for a better vantage point. Her fingers curled around the rusted links, claw-like, until the metal gave a sharp and far too loud metallic groan. The sound jolted me awake, more effective than a gallon of caf.

"Shit, Rob." She whispered breathlessly. "What the hell are you doing?"

That, more than anything, gave me a sliver of fear.

Is Sam just as confused about this as I am?

Chapter 38

We moved through the undergrowth like ghosts.

Or rather, Sam moved like she’d haunted the green space in a deeper dark hundreds of times before, and I, more like a phantom echo of something rusted and half-forgotten, followed along as if every micrometer were weighted down with balls of crumpled fillisheet stashed in every pocket and spare crevice.

She had the kind of stride earned through hard work, and practice. Her foot placement was swift and sure, her eyes keen where they pierced the gloom, and it reminded me of something.

A woodland elf, maybe. Silent and unreal. Not ethereal in the storybook sense, but liminal. Half-seen at the edge of a clearing, or within a bush. The kind of presence that makes you question whether you were alone when you knew something was out there.

I knew the comparison was absurd, but it was stuck.

In contrast, I dragged myself through the wet terrain like corrupted syntax. I felt...oafish. Clumsy and lumbering. A Loader caught in an attempt to tiptoe through a breach zone.

The leaves cracked underneath my cumbersome feet like system errors, every snapped twig felt like a shouted confession in a silent room, a wide broadcast in the dark for anyone to hear.

Sam remained steady, but I didn’t. I was too exhausted and loopy by this point.

She halted, her face angled toward me and spoke to me, not with speech or portsign, but a glance and a tilt of her temple toward the slope. The meaning was unmistakable: Down. Away from the thicket. Away from the clamor I'd made.

She didn’t ask and didn’t need to.

I felt...relieved, maybe. I despised how hard it was for me to keep silent, but I nodded anyway. My acceptance and surrender became braided into one motion as she veered left. I quickly followed behind her as we descended.

The rain fell in sheets. Not drops. Not mist. Thick and unforgiving sheets, ready to drown the world in a Biblical sense. It was a final act on a stage, of a night already hollowed out for a morning dawn, ready to show the buried secrets beneath.

Beyond fifteen feet, everything seemed blurred by a soaked veil in both directions.

The canopy's fragile cover gave way as the trees faded to a muddled grey. The trail dissolved, swallowed by a line of water beneath us. It became obvious now, as I watched the water line move, the ditch at the base of the slope wasn't natural. It'd been carved. Masked and folded into the terrain like a furrow that traced the embankment's curve as it skimmed the edge of the green space's bowl-like shape.

The height of the water line at the base of the slope had risen since Paul's unexpected dive. The water, once still and pond-like, had shifted as it moved slowly until it pushed northward with increased urgency. Debris dragged along in its wake as Sam's voice reached me.

"Use the water," she said. "Keep moving."

I nodded, too exhausted to argue or care.

To our left, the canal's voice surged. It seemed rougher now. Agitated. Almost angry.

I stepped into the run-off ditch at the base of the embankment and felt the water grip my knees. Each step met resistance, and every stride felt skewed off-course.

I fought to stay upright as we set forward, and Sam's set pace became a sort metronomic ritual.

Forward motion, cautious balance, and the dull throb of a perpetual alertness all slipped into a form of automation where I lost all sense of time. The task wouldn't halt. It just sort of kept on, like a series of silent loops keyed for an interrupt that wouldnt come. Like a shift that never ended.

This went on for some time until the merciful moment Sam stopped us, and I gladly took the moment to rest.

The time read: 0747.

The spot we were in looked like it could mark a turning point; the embankment curved away from us, back toward the direction of The Spire. There was hesitancy in her stance. Between the looks she gave the embankment and the open field, I could almost hear her mind work on the problem.

Should we follow the concealed line of the embankment, or should we break and straighten our path to the canal?

I looked behind and realized it'd been a while since we'd seen a flare.

Wonder if Jones ever accomplished what he set out to do?

The distinct lack of patrols was likely the outcome for success or failure. So regardless, it was a win for us, even if it was only temporary.

I shook my head to clear my train of thought.

No. While Sam hadn't yet informed me of our progress, she also didn't seem particularly concerned. Purely based on logic? The numbers said stick to the run-off and embankment. Safer. Smarter.

Peaks of light came through the cloud cover from above. In between sections where the clouds thinned, the area around us became easier to see. I looked ahead. A line of trees I hadn't realized had been close due to the haze of the rain and my own mental loop of one-foot-in-front-of-the-other stood, almost like a wall or another embankment across our path.

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Though I didn't know how much further we'd need to go, I had to trust Sam knew what she was doing, even if I couldn't quite shake the thought of the potentially wasted time.

Sam's got this.

I remained silent as Sam gestured for us to move again, and we continued...trudging.

You can imagine my surprise when, not much later, we arrived.

The line of trees was indeed her destination. She'd navigated us toward it carefully, and I'd been so happy to leave the water, I stepped beside her as we entered the treeline. It was her grasp on my collar that saved me when my foot waggled out into open air. Honestly, before now, I hadn't really known what to expect. but it hadn't been this. Sam let go of my collar but didn't say anything as I looked onward in awe.

The landscape beyond ended like a razor-cut line, difficult to see until we'd gotten right up to it. We stood upon a bluff, one of those abrupt geological shifts where a level part of the ground forgets its own elevation and suddenly drops.

The nearby infrastructure was familiar.

Below, the run-off ditch parted between sections of terrain and descended sharply into an inlet-outlet system. It mirrored the collection zones Rob had shown me. The one that fed water into the reservoirs for storage and processing for the subterranean Spirelands.

Beyond that? The Locks.

Sam and Rob had called one of them a bridge, but that word felt too simple now.

A canyon? A flume? An aqueduct?

Huh.

None of those words fit cleanly.

Whatever you called it, the structure felt less like a tunnel and more like a trenched wound left open to the sky. It was an open-topped corridor carved for giants and funneled into a sequence of chambers, each one sealed off by gargantuan steel doors, their bottoms staggered in height like a descending staircase.

The upper sections of each side of the Lock zone were set at the same elevation. It gave it the appearance of one long concrete platform, dotted with yards, zones, and any number of demarcation points with functions I couldn't even imagine. Between them, the tops of the gates weren’t just big. They were wide. Enough to walk three abreast and still have room to spare on either side along the narrowest section.

Eight of the nine visible "bridges" relative to our elevated point of view were already closed, their chambers leveled. Only the last gate seemed set into what appeared to be an "open" position, each door V'ed outward toward the ocean, and the Port outlet I knew lay beyond.

The water level in the next-to-the-last chamber was currently a hollowed basin in comparison to the others. From our vantage, the only parts not fully submerged within the murky water took on the appearance of metal pathways, inserted above what should've been calm and placid. The swift current of the canal banks splashed and flowed like waves on a killer shore and caused the pathway to appear as if it could be washed away at any moment. Wave after wave smashed over the first gate like a retaining wall mere moments from a flood.

Due to the rain, the whitecaps of crested waves roared past within the canal furiously. It was a stampede, angled straight into the engineered ravine with no other forces to divert it. Almost like it'd realized it'd been caught ajar, one of the two furthest lock gate pairs groaned as they drew shut. Low, almost deliberate, like a sudden breath sucked into steel lungs, water surged by in a rush as the level markers etched into the concrete walls began their slow ascent, and the next-to-last chamber began to fill.

A tap on my arm from Sam snapped me back to the present. I'd stood transfixed, but she needed us to move.

She pointed to the brush-covered drop-off, and I understood. Carefully, we navigated down to the flattened surface of the next level.

The fog had dispersed, driven to the ground like a drunkard at the cantina. The roaring canal we'd been parallel to was off in the distance on our left, though the rising slope of the embankment behind and to our right hid us from direct view above. From the opposing side, the landscape dropped into a series of steps like where we now stood. Each level was lower than the last, with layers gradually fading into trees and fencing.

The portions of the canal we'd seen earlier had the breadth of a river. It had been so wide, I couldn't make out the far bank while alongside it. What lay ahead and beneath us seemed like a hybrid railyard and port with a little something else mixed in for good measure. It looked worn and industrial where the waterway cinched inward and narrowed into the vast sprawl of the concrete channel.

Silver light cut through the mist in slats and shards like sharpened blades as I took it all in.

Across the divide, a chain-link fence stretched taut along the perimeter, and Sam halted us in front of a nearby section, masked by growth around it. One hand rested lightly on the fence, but her breath was steady. She was alert. Ready for danger. I followed her gaze. Lower down and adjacent to the locks, just beyond the skeletal sprawl of one of the maintenance yards, I could see him. A lone figure.

Rob.

He walked with a casual rhythm, the kind that might pass for ease if one didn't watch too closely. But his hands betrayed him. Held low, tight to his sides, they acted like a magician's sleight, half-concealed.

A twitch.

A signal.

I knew then he was not only aware of where we were, but, as Sam's stiff posture gave away, she'd seen the signal too.

Daylight had stripped away the cover of night, but now there was just enough ambient light for my optics to register the scene in the visible spectrum.

Sam, equipped with a newer gen of camouflaged enhancements, adjusted effortlessly and locked in with quiet precision.

Mine weren't as forgiving.

I squinted to trigger a zoom, then had to shut my eyes against the nauseous lurch of an optical shift. The stabilizers lagged. For a breath, the world spun. Edges were smeared, and any sense of depth remained unmoored until the system finally caught up. Abruptly, clarity snapped into place. Just in time to catch Rob's hand.

His fingers moved fast. Three signs in quick succession:

'C.''

'We.'

'Eye.'

I blinked, confused. The message didn't land. If he'd spoken, it would've sounded like a mouthful of carbo-bun, or—oof!

I was yanked down hard. My left arm jerked backward; vertigo overtook me like a wave. Sam had dropped like a stone and pulled me with her. Her drop had been tactical. In my case, it had been painful. I ended up on my back, my face pointed to the sky. Pain blossomed throughout my left thigh and buttock, where a rock had caught me mid-fall and rolled underneath me.

Sam, assisted by gravity and my own stunned inertia, had positioned me beside her where she rested. She was prone. Like a sniper on a ridge.

"Wha—" I started, but she silenced me with a light backhanded slap on the shoulder.

I shut up.

My sense of balance spun out, top-like. Overhead, a storm-grey cloud pulsed with dull light through my still-zoomed optics. Smeared across my vision, the image was too close, too sharp. Three quick blinks reset the zoom, and I closed my eyes. The befuddled feeling of disequilibrium a bit too much to bear.

Sam stayed silent by my side; I could feel her pressed firmly against me through the fabric of my jacket. Coiled like a sentry dog on high alert, every muscle seemed tuned to threat.

The vertigo was gone.

I slowly rolled over.

The scene still held steady. Nothing much had changed, though Rob had threaded his way toward one of the metal catwalks that stitched across one of the more distant maintenance yards. A familiar grid of yellow hazard stripes marked the concrete, dividing his starting point from a tangled sprawl of pipes, vents, tracks, and walkways scattered like debris across the cordoned zone.

"Okay. So his warning wasn't immediate." She said, her voice almost too quiet to hear beside me as she continued, "We can probably talk, but keep it low so we don't draw any attention."

We continued to watch as Rob shed the last of his casual movements and quickly and efficiently made his way over to a spot that didn't appear particularly accessible. With practiced ease, he cut through the clutter toward a half-obscured section of infrastructure that looked more like a dead end than a viable route. Then, he stopped, right at a recessed junction where three walkways met in a tangle of shadow and rust.

“Most of the catwalks are there from before the Corpos began reactivating them,” Sam said before I could ask. “We can usually pick our way over without being interrupted, provided we've got the right key.”

Silently, Rob dropped into a spot between a web of utility lines and disappeared from sight. I hadn’t expected that, but the faint curve of a guardrail suggested the presence of a stairwell, half-concealed and easy to miss unless you were looking for it. Particularly from where we watched.

“The locks run on automation now.” Sam continued, her voice still low but steady. “Most of the time it’s just maintenance drones drifting through unless a patrol’s been flagged to sweep the zone. What the Corpies haven’t pieced together is that near the first gate, the hardline feeds have been spliced to cycle through randomized schedules."

I nodded, a stray piece finally in place. The constant pressure and sense of urgency? It wasn’t paranoia. We really had raced a clock.

"What was Rob saying earlier?" I asked. “In portsign. Seemed like a bunch of gibberish.”

"It's a code," she replied. "Means we keep our distance from the lock and just watch. Rob came up with it. C, We, Eye—Seaweed Eye. Kelp-eye to Kelpie. Not a perfect match, but close enough to stick."

"Actually..." I paused, surprised by how clearly it clicked. The image of a Kelpie surfaced within my mind. Slick and patient, like something half-submerged in memory. "I do know. Like the water horses from myth, right?"

Sam glanced at me, eyebrows raised. "Yeah. How'd you figure that out?"

"They're shape-shifters," I said. "Aquatic spirits. Usually described as beautiful horses near rivers and lochs."

A flicker of amusement crossed her face. "Locks. Of course. I finally get it." She scanned the terrain ahead. "I asked Rob once why it had to be a horse. He just laughed. Do you know?"

The thought spun in my head. From what I'd read, Kelpies were often cautionary myths. Warnings dressed in allure, designed to remind you beauty could also be a trap.

"I'm not sure why it's a horse, exactly," I admitted. "Maybe something to do with where the legend came from?" She turned to peer forward again. I continued, "But what I do know is a Kelpie doesn't drag you under by force initially. It waits. You have to accept the invitation. Some of the stories say they could appear as beautiful women, or..."

Sam raised her hand, fingers curled into a fist: FREEZE

She swept the terrain with sharp precision, and I felt the itch again. To recalibrate, to prod at the dormant functions embedded in my optics.

The rational core of my mind responded instantly: Not yet.

I wanted data. Craved it like a hunger. But those recovered flag protocols? Still a mess. I hadn't mapped them. Hadn't inventoried their functions. Reactivating them felt reckless at a time like this, like lighting a match in a gas leak.

So I left them inert.

Still didn't explain why she'd stopped.

Her fist dropped, but she still remained silent. Her attention was focused toward the far edge of the lock, like she was trying to hear something buried under the concrete. The silence stretched, not empty, but heavy with a tension I could almost feel.

My imagination made me feel like something had crawled across the back of my neck. It felt insectile. Slimy.

I turned to look behind, just to be certain it was my imagination.

Huh. Nothing. Clear.

Then came the gasp. Raw and wet from behind me.

Sam.

My head and body snapped forward, eyes locked onto the scene ahead. Rob was rising from within the guts of the Lock's infrastructure. Slow. Deliberate. Like he'd waited for the right moment to return. A revenant in streetwear.

And behind him...

My heart began to race as it had on the rail oh-so-many hours ago.

Hair. Perfectly arranged.

A head.

A face.

A set of stormy-grey eyes.

The last set of eyes I ever wanted to see again...

"McCreed."

Chapter 37

Above us, the flares drifted, slow and steady.

They cast visible light, but the colors felt wrong. Too soft. Too clean for a place that held so much space. The grass shimmered underneath, almost peaceful in the artificial glow. But it felt revocable at a moment's notice, like everything else I'd come to rely on before I'd had to leave my old life behind me.

Sam moved like a half-remembered echo, her presence as taut as a tensioned thread strung in a silent room. We slinked into receded shadows, careful and wordless, two figures stitched together by a shared insistence to remain unseen.

Her eyes swept the obstacle-strewn path like a pair of searchlights in the dark.

For what exactly? Hell if I knew.

Dark shapes. A flicker of movement. Something in wait, ready to materialize like a phantom in a forgotten graveyard....whatever it was, she acted with the wariness of someone who'd been ambushed too often to mistake quiet for safety, so I paid careful attention.

After the day we’d had? I understood.

I kept close. Kept low and allowed her paranoid movements to set the pace for me. There was a rhythm to it. Her shoulders were drawn. Her breath was shallow. Her steps were soft enough the gravel was barely disturbed.

If Rob wore his carefully cultivated indifference like a mask, all smooth flow and city swagger, built for hierarchies and the concrete jungle of the stacks, Sam was different. Her movements were raw and animal.

I tried to match her crouch. Her stillness. To mimic the way she listened to the air as if it could whisper what she'd need to do to remain stealthy. She was instinctive and wild.

Between us and our path forward, everything held still. No birds. No goons in sight. Just the steady spill of rain and the peculiar hush that settles when a place forgets there's an audience. It was like, in the absence of watchers, even the landscape itself had grown self-consciously quiet.

I stopped cold as a flare tore open the eastern sky, its light briefly illuminating rain like fallen threads of electrified static. Sam paused, crouched low, her body folding into readiness like a reflex. I watched her silhouette against the shimmerless grass as more flares followed, barely a skipped beat between each as they rocketed skyward in tight formation.

Her hand rested on the butt of her slung rifle as I joined her in silent observation. "They're tracking something," she whispered.

I didn’t move. Not yet. Something tickled the back of my mind. The very last thing I wanted to do was botch it up and get us caught, but...no. Something felt wrong, like a broken rhythm where someone had missed a note in the scale.

I looked again. The positioning of the clusters was all wrong.

It felt like something we weren’t supposed to notice, except we did. Or at least I did. Each burst felt like a blip on some distant screen of predators converging, drawn toward whatever poor bastard had tripped the wire.

A chance, maybe? Or a trap dressed as possibility?

Quietly. Very quietly, I leaned over, voice low. No sudden moves.

"Sam. Quick question." I said aloud. Portsign would make it so we couldn't observe and communicate with the same amount of focus.

She didn’t look at me. Just kept her eyes on the area around us. Her voice was gruff but not aggressive. "What is it?"

"Listen. This Jones guy."

"Yeah? What about him?"

"He's looking to get out, right?"

She glanced at me, skeptical. "Probably. But what’s that got to do with us?"

"I think this is seriously important." I said, "If he’s looking to slip the net, where would he go? Any alternate exits that don’t end with a bullet?"

She paused. Actually paused. That alone earned my gratitude.

"From here?" she said. Her eyes swept the terrain. "No. The locks are the only guaranteed cross. Especially with the rain the way it’s been. The systems monitor water height. They hit a certain point, and they cycle. The first set of locks are fed into the Spireland's irrigation tanks and processing reservoirs."

Interesting. I filed it away.

"That's part of why timing is so important right now," she added, just as another set of flares went up. Green this time. Across the way, orange and green answered. Signals in a code we lacked the key for.

"But, if the rain keeps up and the levels spike," she continued, "the system triggers a purge. Emergency protocol. The locks open wide to dump the excess straight to sea. Keeps the canal sectors from flooding. The runoff lines lead out toward the Port."

Ah. That tracked.

I nodded. I’d seen the flow lanes before. Countless times. They ran like veins through the Stacks and Port, and I'd never asked where they led. Never wondered what they carried. Just another part of the machine I’d learned to ignore. Like the hum of the grid or flicker of surveillance lights.

Maybe it was the deterrence protocols or just human nature. I hadn't asked and hadn't looked too closely.

Huh.

Sam's voice snapped me out of it.

"Price. Listen, we gotta get moving. Without Rob, I've got one clean window for the two of us to get out of here, so time is short. Is there a point to all—" She waved her hand at me with an open palm, as if to scan me. "This?"

"Uh, right," I said and reoriented to my original train of thought. "So if the purge is triggered, what does that mean for us?"

Another series of flares. Orange, then orange.

Her face looked grim as she glanced toward them; they were in the direction we were going to go. "We'd have no way to tell how long we'd wait for the next window. We'd be stranded."

The word hung there, heavier than it should’ve been.

"Stranded?"

"Yes. Stranded. If that ever happened, it'd normally be when Frank or I would find Rob for new orders. Once the gates are open, the easiest-to-access physical bridge between the Corpo and Glow sides will be cut off."

Most of her expression was schooled. Calm. Procedural, like she was reading from a manual etched into her implants. She wanted to project no fear. No urgency. Just protocol. Like being cut off, isolated, and left behind was just another line in some handbook they all stuck to religiously.

I examined her face as she spoke. The edges of her eyes told the truth: she was terrified at the very thought. "If they open, the only other nearest option would be the Borderlanes." She hesitated. "Trust me, Owen. We do not want to go to the Borderlanes, especially not you. Not yet."

Another flare cracked the sky, this one slower, drifting wide. Not part of the pattern. Not part of the chase. The flares kept coming, but the rhythm was off now. Too many too fast. Someone was panicked.

"Sam, hold up." I murmured with a raised hand toward it, "Look. Over there...the stray. You see it?"

"Huh." Her voice was low, her forehead drawn tight with bewilderment.

Sam and I observed the groups as they moved. Off in the distance, the popcorn sound of gunfire was heard as another flare launched; blue.

"Okay, so is that him that's launching the flares and causing a scene?" I asked.

"Could be," she muttered, but didn't sound convinced of her own statement. "Or maybe someone got spooked and lost it."

"Why?"

She didn’t answer right away. The flare arced overhead as it cast long shadows into the open space beyond.

"To draw eyes," she said finally. "Or flush someone out."

More gunfire, followed by more flares. A mixture of orange, green, and blue.

"Why would he want that?"

She turned and gave me a look like I’d asked her to explain fire to a drowning man.

"You want me to psychoanalyze the guy who beat a man to death with his bare hands under the same tree we were hiding in?"

I exhaled.

"Fair."

The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It was loaded. Like the air itself was waiting for someone to say the wrong thing. Another flare went up. Orange this time, but it didn’t matter. The pattern was gone. The chase had unravelled into static. Chaotic noise.

And somewhere in that noise, Jones was moving.

Not toward escape, at least not for the moment, but toward something else.

I stopped watching the flares.

They’d lost their meaning. Too erratic, too loud. If Jones was behind it, he wasn’t signaling. He was baiting. Sam kept scanning the grid, eyes sharp and methodical. She was still playing by the rules. Still on the lookout for expected patterns.

I wasn’t.

If it was Jones, he didn’t move like a man focused on a clandestine escape. He moved like a man who tried to be seen. Every flare, every misstep wasn’t about evasion. It was about provocation.

He wanted someone flushed. Someone exposed. It was a game of chess, and only he knew the shape of the board.

I thought back to the body under the tree. The way the blood had pooled in the roots. The way Jones had looked afterward. He hadn't been panicked or rushed. Just...finished. Like he’d crossed something off a list. One task down, onto the next.

A theory began to form, sharp and insistent. I had to suppress the trill of excitement before it got ahead of me.

"Sam," I said quietly, "I don't think he's running from the system. Not yet anyway. I think he's rearranging it so they can't stop him."

She turned toward the horizon; her expression shifted as she watched the sky. The gunfire had stopped, but flares still rose. Much slower now. Spaced out like a blind game of Marco Polo with a player who refused to respond.

The short of it: whatever triggered the alert and set the chase in motion? It was working in our favor.

The irony wasn't lost on me either, that it was exactly what Sam had unconsentually been for me when I'd initiated her chase purely by accident. It had been the stroke of luck I hadn't realized I'd had until it had already changed the board.

With a shared look, I could tell she'd arrived at the same exact conclusion. The faint shadow of a scowl was on her face as, suddenly, I became very invested in what might be over the way and snapped my eyes onto the tree line to avoid her soured gaze.

Then...it happened.

The pause.

No flare. No gunshots. No sound.

We were just handed the distraction we sorely needed. A shift in attention. Eyes diverted elsewhere.

Without hesitation, Sam cradled her rifle into her arms and stood smoothly. She gestured for me to do the same.

"Let's move."

Chapter 36

“Hey!”

A panicked voice came from below.

“No! Sir—Stop!"

The shouting wasn’t aimed at us. Sam and I weren't the ones who were in danger. The notes were sharp and frantic, like a wreckage alarm on the tarmac. Another voice piled on, rising in pitch and urgency. The tree trunk at my back thudded percussively as the leaves around me shivered in time to a lumberjack's chop: rhythmic and impactful. Every blow landed with a solid metronomic precision.

A chaotic symphony synchronized with the painful throb behind my eyes as my vision finally clawed its way out of the darkness. Beneath me, the first voice rang out clearly, a breathless plea. “Help me stop him dammit!”

I desperately tried to clear the haze.

Nothing. Just smears of light and a taste of trouble.

A dying neon warning blinked at the edge of my optics, and the world churned like wet cement to match the storm clouds above. Black bled into a dirty, rusted grey as vision flickered around me to cut jagged paths through the dark.

I risked a peek with one hesitant eye. 

Below was chaos.

Light skimmed across rain-laden branches, slick with water and beaded with dew like sweat strung along a wire. Below, the man identified as Nevens dangled in the air, suspended one-armed by another man who looked carved from concrete: Rob-sized, possibly larger. His boots were planted. Wide and unmoving like the roots of the tree within the boggy mud.

Nevens, like a marionette caught in a violent dance, his rifle pinned uselessly barrel-up between them, twitched with every impact as the larger man’s fist landed in a brutal rhythm. The flashlight at the end of the rifle was pointed skyward, its beam animated by the meaty thumps as the other two futilely struggled to stop the larger man's assault. One gripped his arm. The other his shoulder. For all their effectiveness, they might as well have attempted to wrestle a hydraulic press.

The larger man's face was blank. Not rage. Not frenzy, but more of a mechanical focus. Blow after piston-shot blow rained into the limp form of Nevens. The sound was wet now. Less impact, more rupture, but Nevens didn’t scream. He couldn’t. His optical implants had rolled back into his skull. The twin metallic orbs caught the light like discarded coins as streamers of blood issued from his ears, eyes, mouth, and nose.

I watched, frozen as the light continued to rock frantically. Not out of fear, not entirely; it was something colder—detachment, maybe. Or the slow realization that this wasn’t a fight. It was a purge valve finally blown, like a mind cracking under the weight of too many unspoken things.

One of the two men stepped back to abandon his failed attempts at physical restraint and trained his rifle on the attacker's spine. His stance was slack. Weak. The barrel trembled slightly, not from recoil, but from indecision and the tremor of doubt. The other man lunged sideways, frantic to pull himself clear of the line of fire as his eyes widened in panic and surprise.

The larger man halted mid-swing to glance over his shoulder at the newly armed officer. His breath came in heavy but deliberate huffs as he relinquished his grip on Nevens, who slid along the trunk to fold upon the ground, his position no longer anchored as he crumpled into an unnatural heap.

"The silence after violence is always the loudest," a faded echo of my mother's voice said to me.

Everyone stood like statues in a mausoleum. The rain whispered like ghosts between them in the silver light of the foggy morning as the armed man took a shuffled half-step forward.

"Shift Chief Jones! I demand that you stop by order of corporate mandate," he shouted in an officious manner. "Stand down!"

Blood, now visible in the light of the man's flashlight, pooled into the mud between them. Dark and vicious.

"No," Jones said. "Fuck the corporate mandate, and fuck you if you think that's going to protect you."

"What?" The man with the gun said nervously.

"I'm leaving." The larger man said gravely and without fear. "I suggest you start figuring out where your line is too because we went way past mine the day Golrich and his Goons were integrated into my command."

"He's still alive," the man without a rifle said by Nevens, "barely. We need to get him to the infirmary!"

"Let him die." Jones said, "Or don't. Either way, I'm still leaving. I don't give a care what you do anymore."

"I...wait—you can't leave!" The man with the rifle sputtered out. His hands tightened on the grip as if he'd just remembered he was still cinched onto a lifeline ready to pull away if he let go. "Y—you just killed Nevens! FREEZE!"

"We stood by and allowed them to do the things they did." Jones said. His fists, coated in blood and fluids, were steaming in the chill air.

"We never saw anything!" The man with the rifle screeched desperately.

"We knew!" Jones barked. His shoulders were tight. Ready. The bulky uniform swelled and expanded as hidden muscles rippled beneath. and the armed man jumped as if he’d been physically slapped.

"We had orders!" the man with the gun feebly retorted back.

"Fuck the orders!" Jones said. A vein popped out from the side of his temple. A writhing snake ready to strike. "Nevens? Paul?! They're everything I detest!" He took a step forward but stopped as the man with the rifle cowered backward to maintain the distance. "You know what? Forget it. The point is enough is enough. I'm leaving, and if you try to stop me, I'll do to you what I did to Nevens. That's not a threat; it's a warning."

There was a moment when I thought the man with the gun would be stupid.

Jones spoke again, "You don't have it in you, Delmonte. Don't try it."

The second man's hand trembled as the rifle barrel dipped and wavered slightly. Faster than I would've expected, he turned and broke into an ungainly sprint and tumbled over the side of the embankment on the Spire side.

"DELMONTE!" The first man yelled out in alarm, "Wait! Where are you going?!"

Without a glance back, Delmonte fled into the tree line, his flashlight cast s jittery glow until it disappeared. We were left in an awkward silence.

Interesting. I thought. Seems like Security wasn't as coordinated as I thought. Rob was right...

The other man turned back to Jones, who had knelt beside Nevens and pulled a bundle of flares and the launcher from his belt. Identical to the ones Rob had taken from Tim and Paul.

So Nevens was the one with the signals...

"Sir! You can't just leave me here!" The first man said. There was an almost childlike naivety to his voice as he pleaded.

"Out of the way," Jones simply said, a steely look on his face.

"Harlan. What about Nevens?! Listen! If we can get him to the infirmary, we can fix this, okay? We can make it right! Nothing has to change! It's not too late, come on...please!"

There was a low noise above me as Sam shifted. The bark of the branch I was seated on bit into my palms as I balanced to look upward and pressed my back into the trunk behind me. Her rifle was swiveled around, across her front, to point the barrel downward as she prepared to ambush the two below.

I didn't think now was the moment. Something was off.

Stay. Still. Hold. Wait. Trust. I signaled.

She glared down at me and frowned but stopped her possible ambush, curious.

Jones continued to speak to the other man below.

"McCreed won't stop here," he said. "You know what they did to that kid at the Port and what they told us to say. There's nothing else here, Jasper. They've already started taking over, and it's only a matter of time before they plug the hole with our bodies to keep it quiet. You're a fool."

I looked up at Sam in surprise, whose face mirrored in my own.

It WAS a setup!

"No, listen. Please, Harlan!" Jasper pleaded, "I'm so close I can taste it! I'm only another class away from advancing; don't mess this up for me...please. I'm begging you!" He moved to block the larger man's path. Toward the direction of the bridge in the distance beyond.

Jones settled a steely glare onto Jasper's face.

"Out. Of. The. Way." Jones said, punctuating each word. "He wasn't worth the effort, and neither will you be if you try to stop me. There's nothing here, you get me? They've already begun flushing the unit of anyone who won't play along. If you're not with them, you'll eventually be forced to play a game you never wanted. I know it because I kept my head low enough to avoid it the first time, but I'm not going to sell my soul a second time..." He cut himself off and went silent.

Anger flashed over his expression.

"You know what? Screw every last one of you," he said as he stopped to retrieve the weapon he had tossed aside. He didn't wait for a reply. Just turned, took a few angry strides, and vanished down the embankment to disappear into the fog as if swallowed whole by some great creature in the mist.

Jasper didn’t move at first. Just stood there, his shoulders slumped, eyes fixed on the place Jones had vanished. He looked like a man who’d just been handed the punchline to a joke he didn’t get. Maybe never would.

The defeat was plainly written across his face as he lifted Nevens in a fireman’s carry the way one might shoulder a memory. It was awkward, intimate, and impossible to ignore. Limbs hung like broken promises as they swayed gently with each step.

There was a dejected look on Jasper's face when he finally turned to depart. The rain traced cold lines down his back as he walked through the fog like a man carrying more than flesh. He was headed in the same direction Delmonte had gone. Away from the path Jones had chosen for himself.

I exhaled. Let the breath slip out, more reflex than relief, and felt nothing at first.

I continued to watch them fade into the fog, the outline of Jasper’s frame blurred at the edges, Nevens hung over his shoulders like dead weight. My fingers twitched at my sides, damp and useless. A dull pressure built up behind my ribs, like something waiting to break loose but too tired to try. It was something I wasn't ready to name yet as I continued to breathe out slowly.

Would I have been Jasper if Rob and Sam hadn't decided to help? Abandoned and forced to beg to continue?

Above, Sam signaled it was time for us to climb down. I nodded in agreement, absolutely ready to be out of the tree and on our way to...wherever we'd go.

I picked my way downward cautiously as the hissing boom of a flare in the distance went off. An orange one. Followed by a green and red. Whatever they meant, we had no way to understand. I shelved the thought, useless without context, and made the choice to continue to move.

With a squelch, my foot finally settled into the mud at the base of the tree. Maybe we’re all just one choice away from being the one left behind, I thought. Sam landed lithely beside me. Her eyes were locked on the flares, now all directed toward what I assumed was an alert signal, only somehow pointed away as if we'd already been passed over as the other signals pushed inward instead of toward the canal.

Sam and I set off in the direction of what Rob had called "a bridge." The direction Jones had also gone toward.

Maybe we were all Jasper. I thought to myself as more flares went up further down the line.

Just not today.