They cut across the arcade into a seam of shadow between two towers. Above, bridging spans ribbed the sky. Below, the canal was a black ribbon cut with starlight. The hoverjet's docking pad was three districts away, and every alley between had grown eyes.
A child stepped out from a doorway and stared, thumb to mouth. Valeria swerved without breaking stride. Selene let the little one's breath fog her sleeve—a tangible mark, an expensive thing—and then wiped it away with a flick so no tracker could read it.
The next corner opened on a line of wardens in white. Their captain had a dampener in each palm and a polearm whose head glowed with a field generator. He set his feet like the city had built the flagstones to fit him.
Captain: "Last warning."
Selene (pleasant): "First warning."
She arched her hands outward; frost flowed through the cracks in the paving like a vein finding the heart of a map. The captain brought both dampeners up, pressed them together, and the air punched low. Valeria's servos whined. Selene felt the pressure trying to choose her heartbeat for her.
Valeria: "Field's big."
Selene: "So are we."
She didn't thicken her ice. She tuned it. Thin structures, angled to throw the field sideways. The dampeners pushed; her lattice rolled the push back like a wave hitting a seawall and turning to spray.
Valeria dove left, arm compacting to a pistol. She fired twice. The first round took the polearm's emitter at its weakest rib. The second drilled the hinge on the captain's left gauntlet so his hand refused to meet his other hand when he tried to clap again.
The wardens ran towards Valeria armed with batons and guns.
She dodged the first punch, held his arm, and pushed him into another warden before letting them meet the heels of her boots. She punched the next with her metal arm, turning around and facing the next two.
She quickly gets sight of a gun on the ground. She grabs the gun that one of the wardens had dropped. In her hand the structure of the gun quickly changed into something new. The size and length were still the same, but in Valeria's hand it turned into something new and useful for her.
Valeria pushed the trigger. The newly formed gun shot a shockwave, which sent the men flying into the distance.
Selene walked forward. The wardens stepped back two paces without deciding to. She gave the captain a smile that would have been kind somewhere else.
Selene: "We are late for a flight."
She touched the cheek of the captain, freezing him into a block of ice.
She then froze the ground at their toes, just enough to choose paths for them that went away from the women in front of them. They took those paths because people do.
They ran again.
Skies over Vyrnheim had gone clearer; the aurora pinched into narrow bands as if someone had twisted the dome. Selene felt the bad seam she'd lifted the machine's wave into. It hummed wrong in her teeth.
Valeria: "Two minutes," she said between breaths. "Pad ahead."
The hoverjet sat like a dark beetle on the grated landing ring, low and ready. Dockhands had long fled. Blue lamps stuttered on the tower's spine; someone somewhere issued an order that wanted to be obeyed.
One warden ran into them; he didn't notice them at first, but when he did, it was already too late—Selene had already frozen him into ice.
Selene: "Now."
Wardens spilled into the ring as they sprinted the last span. Valeria's arm telescoped into a long rifle; she didn't shoot men. She shot bolts, cams, and a control box with a fussy hinge that liked to stick. Sparks fell like summer.
Selene raised a dome, not over them—over the wardens. Not a prison. A blur. The men inside staggered as the world outside became a smear of light and sound too slippery to put decisions in.
They hit the ramp. The jet's belly unsealed with a clean sigh.
Valeria: "Straps."
Selene turned once at the threshold, palm up. Frost licked the pad's railing in a friendly way and then bit it hard; steel jammed. The wardens would cut through. In a minute.
They threw themselves inside. The hatch swung down. Valeria slapped the start-up sequence with her flesh hand, the metal one braced against the panel so the G-force wouldn't fling her sideways when the jets caught.
The hoverjet lifted, nose tipping toward the fjord mouth.
And then the temperature inside the cabin changed—no draft, no alarm. A taste of metal, old coin, and a sweet little rot like flowers left in water too long.
A voice, intimate as a whisper in the skull, slid under Selene's skin.
Midas: "So Borealis has tasted your shadow. Good. Let Null choke on the consequences."
Selene's breath left her as frost. Her hand went to the window, and the pane filmed over in gold-flecked ice—tiny metallic motes shining in the lattice like malign pollen. Valeria tore her eyes from the climb gauge and saw it too, ears flattening, tail coiling.
Valeria: "Null?"
Selene: "No."
The gold in the frost winked, once, like teeth.
Midas (softly): "Run, Three. I'll tidy."
The frost blew off the window as if it had been embarrassed to exist. The air tasted clean again, too quickly.
Valeria looked at Selene. Selene did not look back. She watched the city shrink, the bridge's crown stuttering as wardens pointed and argued about whether to shoot.
Selene (quiet): "He shouldn't be able to reach me in flight."
Valeria: "What is the meaning of this?"
Selene said nothing. The hoverjet's engines clawed the sky. Vyrnheim fell behind; the black seam in the aurora rode above them like a scar. Beneath that quiet, a new noise began in Selene's thoughts—paper turning, columns balancing, someone else doing the math of a story she had not agreed to let be told.
And for the first time since stepping into Borealis, the cold in the cabin was not hers.