The night had the good kind of city noise: distant siren, radiator hymn, someone arguing softly with a cat in the hallway. Aria had gone to bed early. Jiss lay on the couch, tracing the underlined NO SHIELD on the back of her map.
Boring is survival, he told himself.
Hungry is also survival, Toxin replied, a yawn with teeth.
The apartment's hum shifted.
At first it was nothing, just another tone in the bouquet of tones. Then the hair on his arms rose. The sound wasn't loud; it was narrow, a high, needle-thin whirr that made the window glass vibrate lightly.
Bad sound, Toxin hissed immediately, recoiling. Sharp. Cage.
Jiss sat up. The living room went tight around him, the way a room does when someone outside is looking at it. He crossed to the window, stopped himself a foot shy, and slid sideways to the edge of the curtain.
A shadow drifted past the glass. Small. Precise. Three lenses like unblinking insect eyes, a gimbal underbelly, matte black body that would disappear on any sane night.
The whirr buzzed through his teeth.
SHIELD hadn't knocked. It had hovered.
His chest did its old trick: tighten, lift, forget how to breathe until training kicked in: Leave early. Leave often.
Aria's door stayed quiet behind him.
We go, Toxin said. No banter now, just decision.
"Yeah," he breathed. "We go."
He grabbed the phone, his cap, nothing else. No note. Sleep sounded like it had caught Aria by both elbows; waking her would yank her into the current. He eased the lock, opened the door to the hall, and stepped into that odd midnight brightness old buildings get from bad bulbs.
The whirr tracked past the hallway window. A faint blue wash slid across the peeling paint.
Infrared, he thought. Lidar? Something that likes heat.
We blur, Toxin offered, eager and afraid. Veil.
"Short bursts only," he whispered. "Count."
He slipped down the hall, quiet.
At the far end stood the fire door always heavy, now worse. He eased pressure on the push bar.
The hinge gave a slow, traitorous groan.
The whirr leaned in that direction, listening.
Two, Toxin warned.
Jiss pushed the door and vanished.
Veil wasn't a switch so much as a decision spread thin. His skin cooled, his edges lost interest in being edges. The hallway's light slid past him. He counted: not out loud, just with breath.
One… two…
On two-and-a-half the Veil thinned to gauze. He slipped into the stairwell and let it fall, lungs pulling air like he'd been underwater.
"Good," he mouthed. "Again if we must."
We must not must too much, Toxin muttered, prickly. Sharp sound stings.
He took the stairs down one flight, two, the concrete echoing a fraction too bright. On the landing above, the door he'd come through opened a cough's width. Blue washed across the stairwell wall in a slow, greedy sweep.
Basement, he thought. Service hall. Laundry. Out.
The basement door complained even more than the last; years of paint had taught it opinions. Jiss leaned his shoulder, eased, eased, and slipped through.
Fluorescents flickered. The laundry room smelled like detergent. Washer lids kept few open, few closed. He crouched between two machines, making himself small enough to fit inside the outline of nothing to see here.
The whirr came down the stairwell, not close, but present. The drone didn't clatter or beep like cheap toys. It listened with him: quiet predation, professional curiosity.
Blue light grazed the laundry room doorway and moved on. Jiss breathed out, then in slow, slow. Toxin slunk around his nerves, unhappy, ready.
We go now, it urged. Before more eagles.
"Second door," he thought. There was an old metal exit at the back of the room. A sign read ALARM WILL SOUND in a font that lied for a living.
He padded over. The bar wobbled with the loose give of something long disconnected. Good.
He tested it.
Footsteps.
Up the hall. Not the drone. Human. Shoes. Unhurried.
A custodian? A night owl? Just bad timing dressed as good humanity.
The footsteps paused outside the laundry room. Jiss froze. A key ring chimed. The person hummed a couple bars of a tune and kept walking.
The drone dropped a note. Lower. Closer.
It had tracked the motion of the metal bar. Of course it had Veil could hide a body, not the laws of physics.
Bite it, Toxin said, voice gone small and mean with nerves. We damp it. One bite. We run.
"Only if it sees us," Jiss thought, and wished he trusted the word only more.
He put his palm on the bar, counted his own pulse one, two and pushed it down without moving it, testing the slack, forcing his body to be the softer thing in the system. The drone's wash painted the machines blue, then paler, then gone.
He waited three breaths. Four. Five. Sweat found his lower back and tried to make a home.
The whirr slid away down the hall.
"Now," he breathed.
He pressed the bar and slipped through the door into an unlit service corridor. The Veil tugged, wanting to be helpful, but he held it. Save it.
At the corridor's end: a steel door with a push plate and a chain-link gate beyond it. Past that, an alley with half a moon and a full dumpster. He didn't like the geometry of the gate—too open, too grid. He liked the geometry of the dumpster: big, dumb, metal.
He pushed the door. It thumped. He flinched. The Veil leapt without being fully asked.
One… two…
He slid through the gate, let it clink once because silence is suspicious, and dropped into the shadow behind the dumpster right as the Veil thinned.
The drone drifted into the alley entrance.
Of course it had a buddy. Of course there were two.
Blue light brushed the chain-link. The drone hesitated, like it wasn't sure what it had seen.
Jiss stayed low behind the dumpster, trying to vanish into the alley's mess: brick, metal, shadow, and regret.
He felt the air register his body heat. He also felt how badly the drone wanted that heat written down somewhere.
Bite, Toxin whispered again. We nip. It sleeps. We go.
Jiss swallowed. Null-Bite would be over in a heartbeat. And it would hurt. It always did like biting tinfoil wired to a socket. On a good day, it bought them a second. On a bad one, a scar to remember.
Blue light edged closer. The drone's lenses widened. It was guessing.
"Fine," Jiss mouthed. "Small. Quiet."
A tendril slid from under the dumpster, black against black, curling up the far side where the drone couldn't see. Slow. Steady. At the end, it split into two soft hooks.
The drone hovered just an arm's length away, focused on the wrong patch of darkness.
Now, Toxin said, and the tendril bit.
The world hiccuped.
It didn't zap, it just stopped. Like something swallowed it whole. The drone's lights blinked. Its whirring stuttered. For one solid second, something in its circuits remembered being a rock.
Veil, Jiss thought.
And just like that, they were gone.
He rolled out from behind the dumpster quiet, fast sliding over a slick patch that might technically count as rain. He slipped into deeper shadow under the metal stairs. His shoulder hit the concrete. His teeth clicked. He felt fear.
One… two… two-and-a-half—
The Veil thinned. He didn't push a third breath. He tucked himself into the stairs' geometry, made his breath smaller and listened.
The drone rebooted in a shy little chirp, like it didn't want to make a big deal of having died. It hovered two meters higher, light sweeping wider now, suspicious of everything. It logged, it logged again, and then, offended by its own uncertainty, it drifted back toward the street.
Jiss stayed until the whirr blurred into the block's quilt of whirrs. He counted to thirty. He counted to thirty again.
We go home, Toxin said, exhausted and proud. We did not eat the bird.
"Good," he breathed, knees water.
He slid along the wall, through the gate, back into the service hall, and pulled the metal door until it made a click.
On the stairs, he used Veil in a stingy, monkish way just enough to pass the worst sight lines, never to show off. At the apartment door, his hand shook. He unlocked it.
Inside, the living room looked exactly like he'd left it: blanket half-folded, Aria's plant believing in photosynthesis, the map with NO SHIELD written.
He shut the door, locked the deadbolt, and leaned his forehead against the wood. His breath came uneven, caught between his chest and throat.
The apartment was quiet: warm, safe, and small. Aria's door stayed shut. She'd slept through the part where the world tried to sort him into a box.
His hands wouldn't stop shaking. He went to the sink, turned on the cold water, and scrubbed his arms until the feeling of being a target faded.
Sharp sound hurt, Toxin complained, quieter now that the drone's whine had faded to memory. We do not like the needle noise.
"Me neither." He dried his hands on a towel that had tiny lemons printed on it because Aria believed in whimsy as medicine.
The couch took him in. He lay back, shoes off, cap resting on his chest, and let the adrenaline drain the slow, stupid way it always did.Toxin curled in the corners of him, grumbling like a damp cat, then reluctantly—purring.
We hide, it said, sleepy and smug.
"We did," he murmured.
We kept soft human safe.
"Yeah."He stared at the ceiling said."We did."