Apeworth — The Tunnels
Najo couldn't hear the ambush.
He felt it — vibrations through stone, through the soles of his feet, through the bones of his legs. Wrong. He was out of his quarters before he'd finished thinking it through, overpowering his guards in a blind rush through the tunnel, but the second wave was already prepared for him. They'd anticipated the route. Power-suppressing cuffs snapped onto his wrists before he reached the main passage.
He stopped fighting. His arms went heavy.
Aemon moved through smoke and the green-flashing chaos of Snake's battle, searching. He found Lilly surrounded, her whip-sword carving space with furious precision, the blade working through arcs too fast for most of the soldiers to follow. She was holding. Barely.
An officer raised a tranquilizer bow behind her.
Aemon didn't decide. He just moved.
The dart hit his shoulder. The toxin spread with immediate, cold certainty. His legs gave out and the ground came up fast — but he'd bought the moment. Lilly turned. She fought harder.
It still wasn't enough.
They took her.
In the main tunnel, Snake was a problem the squad hadn't fully accounted for. Green light and impact, bodies going into walls and then the ceiling and then walls again. The soldiers who'd been confident at the entrance were considerably less so.
"We can't get through!"
"Smoke them."
Gas grenades came through the tunnel entrance from the surface, and the air went green and thick. Snake was a blur in it — still moving, still hitting, but the fog had its own kind of weight. These weren't thugs. These were trained men with a specific task and the patience to carry it out in waves, each one replacing the last, wearing him down by mathematics rather than force.
He held as long as he could.
Byron, exhausted and drugged beyond what the shockwave aura could compensate for, was finally brought down.
The rebellion collapsed — not all at once, but in sequence, one support giving way and then the next and then the next, until what remained was just people standing in the dark, waiting to be cuffed.
Sango — Fauna District
They were chained together in a long line. Cuffs linked to cuffs. A procession walked through the Fauna district in the full light of afternoon, past buildings and faces and people who had been told exactly what to think of them.
Byron walked at the front, head lowered, red fur matted with dirt and dried blood.
Behind him: Snake, his glow gone. Aemon, barely upright, the tranquilizer still working through him. Lilly. Najo, hollow-eyed and careful-faced in the way of someone who is saving their energy for something later.
The crowd's noise was low and hungry. The kind of sound a crowd makes when it's been given a story and a face to put on it.
Inside the police station, Moto heard it through the window. A low, building rumble.
"What are they looking at?" he muttered, leaning toward the glass.
Bizure craned his neck and his face lit up. "Ha! Say it ain't so!"
He grabbed Moto's shoulder. "Come on, kid. You have to see this." He dragged him forward, laughing, clapping him on the back. "Couldn't have done this without you! Your intel was spot on, ma boi!"
Moto staggered.
He looked through the window.
His blood went cold.
Najo. Hollow-eyed. Aemon, barely conscious. Snake, dark where he'd been lit. Lilly.
She looked up at the station window. Found his face.
No anger. No accusation. Just the specific expression of someone who thought they knew a person and is now updating that belief in real time.
Betrayal.
The world tilted.
GEHEN — THE PAST
His mother's hands on his shoulders. Her voice, low and final.
"You take your sister and run. You never look back."
"I'm the strongest," he said, crying. "I have to stay."
"Fighting is what got us here." Her grip tightened. "Knowing when to run is how you survive."
At the gate she pinched his shoulder — hard, deliberate, a thing to remember.
"RUN."
PRESENT
Bizure's hand on that same shoulder.
The word arrived from somewhere deep and old, before he could think it over or argue with it.
Moto turned away from the window.
And he ran.
Outside Sango — City Limits
He collapsed on a dirt road at the edge of the city, lungs burning, the sounds of Sango fading behind him.
He lay there and thought about Lilly's face in the window.
He thought about his mother's voice at the gate.
He thought about the word run and what it had cost every time he'd obeyed it, and what it had cost every time he hadn't.
He was still lying there when he heard footsteps.
A figure stood a few metres ahead on the road. Unhurried. Embers trailing from his heels, leaving small blackened marks on the dirt with each step.
Gwen looked down at him.
"Found you," he said.