The rain slackened into a mist, though the cranes above still dripped like leaking veins. The pier smelled of smoke and rusting salt. The System overlay dimmed back to standby, but the afterimage of the rank drop clung to my vision like a burn.
Kael stuffed the matte card into his coat and nudged the sack with his boot. "Well. That went smoother than I expected."
I raised an eyebrow. "Smoother? The Norse Head vanished, his trigger man almost lit the entire waterfront, and we bled chaos points like a stuck pig."
"Exactly," he said, as if that proved his point. "And yet here we are, still vertical, still breathing. I call that smooth."
The wind shifted, carrying the hollow clang of metal on metal. My tracker twitched, then spiked. Another heat signature, faint, circling the edge of the pier. Not merc, nor the Norse Head. Something smaller.
"Movement," I said.
Kael's grin never dimmed. He drew his pistol, the one patched together from three different models and a prayer. "Think it's cleanup crew? Or another broker?"
I steadied the Prism Aim against the container wall, its coil humming low like an animal scenting prey. The shimmerless edge of the pier stretched out in broken reflections. A figure emerged at the far end, hood down, carrying nothing but a briefcase.
The System overlay blinked to life before I could breathe:
[Unclassified Entity Detected]
[Observation Rate: 0%]
"Zero?" I whispered.
Kael stopped smiling.
The figure walked without hurry, shoes clicking softly against wet planks. Even through the mist, their face was wrong: blank, unfinished, like a sketch someone hadn't bothered to shade in. They set the briefcase down with careful precision, then raised their head.
No eyes. Just smooth skin, rain coursing down it.
Kael's comm crackled. "Vyn…" he said softly, "…I think the System finally noticed us noticing back."
I tightened my grip on the Prism Aim. The weapon's glass spirals brightened in protest, refracting every droplet of rain into ghostly rainbows. The matte card in his coat pulsed once, faint but in rhythm with the thing's steps.
It stopped three meters from us. No voice, no breath. The briefcase clicked open by itself, spilling a tracery of light across the pier. Shapes writhed in data, streams of raw mission code, glitching numbers sliding sideways like mercury.
The System's overlay fought to translate, only to spit out garbled strings:
[MISSION—XXX]
[CHAOS POINT—####]
[ACCESS DENI—–]
Kael swore under his breath. "Not a broker. A courier?"
The faceless thing tilted its head. Not at us, but at the matte card. The shimmer in Kael's pocket answered, brightening like a hungry flame.
The rain picked up again, hard needles pinging off the containers. My weapon's scope showed no heat signature, no pulse. Nothing living. Era
Kael barked a laugh. Thin, trembling at the edges.
The courier lifted a hand, skin rippling like wet paper. The lattice of code surged outward, lines of light snapping into a net that spread across the pier. For a heartbeat, the whole world was wireframe. The cranes, water, even Kael's grin, all reduced to vectors crawling with static.
My HUD went blind. The Prism Aim flickered and whined like it wanted to shut itself off.
Kael's hand hovered near his pistol, but he didn't draw. He didn't need to. We both felt it: this wasn't a thing you could shoot.
The faceless courier moved its head toward me, then him, then the matte card in his coat. A pulse throbbed between them, like recognition.
[TRANSFER PROTOCOL: INITIATED]
The System's overlay jammed the words across my vision, even though it swore it was blind seconds ago.
Kael stiffened. "Transfer? No. Nope. Not without a receipt."
The courier didn't speak. Instead, the briefcase projected one last image into the rain: a shape that wasn't quite a card, wasn't quite a door. More like a ledger, its pages black with tally marks. Chaos points, burned and borrowed, stacked like debts in ink.
At the bottom, our names.
VYN — 427
KAEL — 1, 568
[OWED]
My throat went dry. "It's keeping count."
Kael chuckled weakly. "Guess the house always wins."
The courier's form glitched, folding in on itself until the lattice of code snapped back into the briefcase. It clicked shut with a sound far too final. Then the figure simply… erased. Not gone in the rain, not walked away, yet erased, as if a page had been torn out of the night. And in the hollow it left behind, the tide gnawed louder, like it was eating for two.
Silence pressed in, broken only by the gnaw of tide under the pier. My HUD struggled back online, blurry at the edges. The matte card in Kael's pocket stopped pulsing, but it didn't feel dim. It felt… heavier.
Kael exhaled and crouched to touch the planks, as if making sure the world was still solid. Then he looked at me with a lopsided grin that didn't reach his eyes.
"Vyn," he said hoarsely, "Still hungry for wings?"
Before I could answer, my HUD chimed. A fractured signal blinked to life — [Incoming Contact: Amaya].
I tapped it open, static flooding my ears.
"—Vyn? Kael? Finally. Where the hell have you been?" Her breath was tight, voice as shattered glass through comms. "You dropped off the board. No telemetry, no rank trace, nothing. For forty seconds, you didn't exist. Do you know how many alarms that triggers?"
Kael rolled his eyes skyward. "See? Peaceful."
"Not funny," Amaya snapped, though I caught the relief under it. "The chatter's a mess. Half the chatter thinks you're dead, the rest think the System purged you. If that's true, you're both walking ghosts."
Kael's smirk returned, but his grip on the matte card stayed white-knuckled.
Her tone shifted, lower. "Vyn. Tell me you didn't touch something you shouldn't."
I glanced at the card's shimmer, dim, like an ember pretending it wasn't fire. My throat was dry. "…Define shouldn't."
The static surged, swallowing half her words. "…careful. If the System doesn't have you anymore, it'll want you back. And if someone else does—"
The line cracked, recovered.
Amaya's voice sharpened. "And another thing — the logs show you dropped two ranks and bled four hundred chaos points in under a minute. That's not busy. That's a death flag."
I wiped rain off the Prism Aim's stock. "We were busy."
Kael tilted his head, grin audible. "We're fine. Pier 22's fine. Mostly. I even brought back a souvenir." He patted the sack slung at his leg. It twitched faintly.
Amaya ignored him.
"Amaya, I'm ordering wings. Barbeque or garlic?"
Amaya's silence stretched, the line hissing like the sea below, "…Garlic. And listen. If you want to keep breathing, you need intel. Both of you know better than to play blind."
Kael tugged the matte card free again, holding it up to the mist. The shimmer was thin now, threads unravelling like frayed wire.
"Doesn't look so hungry," he muttered. His thumb brushed the edge—careless, curious.
The card pulsed. My HUD froze, went black, then rebooted with a stutter. Rank, chaos points, even vitals, all gone. Just a single blinking cursor, waiting.
"Kael," I hissed. "Don't—"
"Relax." He tilted it, watching faint light crawl under the surface. "Maybe it only bites when we ask for something. Otherwise? Just… dormant."
I scanned the pier. No courier traces. No heat signatures. Nothing but us and the storm, yet the air felt wired, humming like it had teeth. "Dormant things don't erase logs. Amaya's right. We vanished. Either the System lost us, or it—"
"—let us off the leash," he finished, grin thin but sharp. He tapped the card against his knuckle, and the shimmer pulsed back in rhythm. In rhythm.
I stared at it. At him. The weight in my gut said it wasn't syncing with Kael's pulse. It was syncing with his will.
"…Then we're already screwed," he said. "Might as well see how far it bends before it snaps."
The card flared once, brighter than ever. Blinded bright, while it burned through the mist. My HUD spasmed, trying to render text that wasn't there. Then a line bled across the void, jagged and red:
[UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY—PENDING]
The overlay trembled. Static gnawed at the corners of my vision.
The pier groaned. My chaos points counter dropped, numbers free-falling until another five hundred bled away— to open a gate.