Time didn't run in a straight line in the Records. It jumped, skipping months of hiding and scavenging, and put me down in the middle of the next turning point.
Three years had passed in the memory.
Tenebria wasn't a child in rags any more. She was a teenager in scavenged, blackened composite armour, standing on the lip of a Sector 7 neon tower and watching the traffic below.
She had changed. The Gift of Gluttony hummed in her chest. It wasn't only a healing factor; it was an engine of consumption. It let her eat anything, metal, Miasma, meat, and turn it into mass and energy. She had grown denser, her muscles packed tight as hydraulic rams.
But she was still a rat in a city of lions.
"Target," she whispered.
I followed her eyes.
Below, on a personal gravity-skiff, floated a demon draped in shimmering holographic silks. Tall, spindly, with four eyes that moved independently of each other.
Viscount Vex.
