The street outside the warehouse smelled like ozone and old oil, the aftertaste of Arcadia's machines bleeding into everything. I moved with the practiced economy of a man who never wasted motion, Marco a step ahead in my mind though he stayed a block off in the physical world, eyes in a dozen cameras and feeds that only he could read.
We met in the shadow of a loading dock. Marco stepped out from beneath a tarpaulin, silhouette tidy and unshowy, a man who could make an alley look like a boardroom. He nodded once, the kind of nod that carried years instead of words, then slid me the compact, efficient greeting he reserved for the morning after a clean run.
"You look alive," he said, the corner of his mouth lifting. "Good."
"You talk a lot for a guy who's never on the roof," I replied, tucking the launcher beneath my jacket and keeping my voice low. The van where we'd pulled the body was now half a block away, back to its business of anonymity. The city had a way of swallowing evidence if you let it sleep long enough, but we never liked to leave things to chance.
Marco's eyes flicked to the east, to the smear of neon that meant business and bureaucracy a few blocks over. "Boss wants us in the north annex, third floor. He's got a man with him, someone from the council. Dress like you didn't just climb three buildings." He reached into his pocket, producing a thin envelope and one of those preprogrammed passive scramblers he liked to use when we walked through checkpoints. "No chatter on open lanes."
We moved as a unit, the city folding and unfolding around our steps. People swam past in layers of coat and fluorescent thread, commuters and scavengers and bureaucrats who pretended the two were separate things. Arcadia was a city of facades and economies, and Radium had carved its own ledger through all of them.
Radium was small talk until it wasn't. The man we took out worked a network that sold peaks of euphoria to anyone with enough credits and enough courage. It lit people up like cheap fireworks, euphoria so sharp it erased pain and memory for the length of a night. The cost was always written elsewhere, in husks of bodies that forgot to eat, in teeth and fingers that broke, in the shaky collapse of someone who once held a steady job and a steady family. Addiction hunched people over faster than disease, and the users left cities like Arcadia quieter, emptier in corners where laughter had once been. The product was exquisitely engineered, addictive down to the molecular architecture, which is what made it profitable and lethal.
Dr. Corin Hale's office smelled faintly of lemon and old paper, the kind of sterile cleanliness that pretends moral clarity. He sat behind a narrow desk that had clearly been chosen to feel modern, pragmatic. When you worked with men who lived under bridges and in smog, you learned to spot the curated things that tried to pass for virtue. Hale was the kind of man who did that well. He was slim and precise, with wire-rimmed glasses, and he wore the tired optimism of the educated like a cloak.
"Vale," he said as we entered, his voice measured, the syllables folded into policy, into lectures given to rooms full of people who wanted to feel important. "Marco. Thank you for your expediency."
Hale's eyes flicked to Marco with something almost like admission, then he turned to me, his expression a study in performative warmth. He had the posture of a man who believed in systems more than people, which made him dangerous in ways that weren't immediately visible.
"You eliminated a node," he said, folding his hands, "and not a moment too soon. Radium poisons neighborhoods. It destroys what holds the city together. We are grateful."
Marco placed the envelope on the desk the way a surgeon hands over a precise instrument, and Hale opened it carefully. The cash inside was neat, bands unwrinkled, the kind of payment that said the employer had influence, the kind of money that closed mouths and doors. Hale let the paper pass through his fingers like he was inspecting a hypothesis.
"Tell me about the nets," he said, casual, a man asking for data. "How wide was his reach? Are there traces we can follow?"
Marco replied with the economy of someone who had the feeds open, giving exactly what the boss wanted and no more. I added the pieces that mattered, the tactile things you only know when you work the streets, the contacts and the shipments that had fed the network. Hale took notes, nodding, more pleased with our efficiency than he cared to show.
There were faces at the window, silhouettes that wanted light and left their shadows. One of Hale's men stood by the door, polite, watchful. The atmosphere was all protocol and the soft clink of coins. It felt bureaucratic, clinical, the kind of meeting that cleaned blood into statistics.
Hale leaned back, eyes narrowing for a moment. "Radium," he said, as if tasting the word, "is a scourge, and it needs rooted out. We will target supply chains, shut down distribution, rehabilitate…" his voice softened into buzzwords that smelled like campaign promises. "The city will reclaim itself."
It sounded noble. It sounded like a plan that would make him a figure in the papers, a man who solved the problem the city could not. What he did not say out loud was what he had already bought with the envelope we'd given him, details we had no way of cataloging. We left that quiet between us, a private omission that felt heavier than any ledger.
On the way out, Hale's assistant slipped me a small card, plain, the print microscopic. "For anything you need," she said, tone neutral. "Discretion included." The card's edges were rounded, its design minimal. The number was not for a hotline, but for a person inside an inner circle, someone who moved money and reputation in private.
Marco bumped my shoulder in passing, a small, brotherly sign that read, I'm with you. We walked back into Arcadia's noise, the city folding us into its rhythm as if nothing had happened. We carried the payment, the card, a ledger of kills, and a silence that was not empty.
At the corner, I slowed and felt the weight of something in my pocket, the envelopes of cash rubbing against my hip. I had the habit of counting, a ritual that calmed me, but my fingers paused over one bill. On its edge, stamped faint and almost missed, was a tiny sigil I did not recognize, a mark I had not seen on any currency before.
I pocketed the bill and did not tell Marco. He did not ask. For now, the sigil was an itch at the back of the mind, something small and foreign that would either dissolve with the day or grow teeth. We kept walking, two figures easy to miss in a city that preferred forgetting, and the noise swallowed us whole.
We did not speak until the skyscraper was behind us, its mirrored glass rising into the clouds like a blade. At night it looked more like a monument than an office, a symbol of power that cut Arcadia's skyline in half. Leaving it felt like stepping out of another world and back into the one we actually lived in, the streets thick with smoke, neon, and people who had never seen the inside of an office like Dr. Hale's.
Marco reached into his coat, pulled free a flask, and passed it over with the ease of ritual.
"Clean job, clean pay," he said, "that deserves a drink."
The flask was dented and scuffed, the kind of thing a man keeps not for style but for memory. I swallowed, the bitter burn sliding down my throat, and handed it back.
"Doesn't taste like victory," I said.
Marco capped it, a faint smirk lifting one corner of his mouth. "Victory rarely has a flavor, but money spends the same either way."
He was right.
We moved toward the market quarter, but not the marketplace the city sold to tourists and regulators. We walked past hawkers and neon stalls, past lines of people who traded bread for favors and chips for information, until Marco led me to a noodle stall with steam curling from its pot like smoke from an old fire.
The stall looked ordinary enough, a cheap canopy and a faded lantern, a woman stirring broth with surgical focus. Around it, the usual quartered chaos hummed on. Only those who knew the rhythm noticed the way patrons leaned in and spoke in clipped syllables, the way hands passed folded notes under bowls. The black market hid in plain sight, the city's arteries carrying a current that most never felt.
Marco slid into the queue with the casual gait of a man who belonged nowhere and everywhere. I followed. When the woman glanced up at us, her eyes met Marco's and she did not smile, not quite. She nodded once, and Marco delivered the phrase with the same tone he used for commands.
"Tell me about the sun that never rose," he said.
The woman's fingers paused over the ladle, then she closed her mouth and whispered the reply, a line of words that tasted like salt and old alliances. A small panel beside the counter clicked, a seam in the wall sliding open as if sighing, revealing a narrow passage lined in shadow. The queue shuffled forward, faces tightening into masks, while the woman pretended not to have moved.
People who did not know the line kept eating, oblivious, the world continuing to spin for them. Those who had the phrase vanished into the seam, swallowed by a city that liked its secrets to be indistinguishable from routine.
We entered the passage, the steam from the noodle pots replaced by a cool draft that smelled of oil and ozone. The hallway bent and turned, then opened onto a hall hung with cloths and lamps, velvet stalls and tables where things more interesting than food were traded. The black market had its own logic and its own manners, it existed because the city required places to move in shadows that official maps did not show.
Marco steered us to a vendor whose cybernetic eyes clicked faintly as they adjusted focus. He spread wares across a velvet cloth, not jewelry but tools of precision, designed for men who wanted to disappear after they struck.
"Fresh batch," the vendor said, his voice a smooth rasp. "Sleepers, screamers, shivers, pick your poison."
I let the names hang in the air as I examined the stock. Sleepers were darts laced with sedatives, dropping a man silent in seconds. Screamers carried a chemical payload that shredded nerves into panic, scattering crowds and breaking formations. Shivers froze muscle with a whisper of pain, leaving a target upright but helpless. Each dart was expert work, weight balanced to fall into the groove of a hand practiced in killing.
I tested a few between my fingers, feeling the tiny balances settle into the calluses, and chose a dozen sleepers, half a set of screamers, and a pouch of shivers. Marco paid with the cash from Hale's envelope, crisp bills sliding across velvet without hesitation.
"Pleasure doing business," the vendor said, his artificial eyes narrowing with satisfaction.
We came up from the shadow market beneath a noodle stall and took the back alleys instead of the main thoroughfares, Arcadia's light and noise filtering down like a second sky. Two levels below a neon sign, an old tailor waited behind a curtain of bead chains. His hands were steady though the years had left them thin, tape measure working like a ritual around my shoulders.
"Black," I told him, "functional, clean, movement first."
He nodded and returned with a coat cut long and close, the fabric dense enough to slow a blade yet soft enough to move like a shadow. Under it, fitted trousers and a shirt woven with subtle reinforcement. Clothing built for silence, crafted for men who moved between roofs.
I stepped into the coat and caught my reflection in a cracked mirror. Jet black hair, pale eyes catching the light like ice, a frame honed by a life of strict motion. The coat fit like a promise.
Marco circled once, appraisal flickering in his face. "Now you look the part," he said.
"I always did," I said, fingers tightening at the collar, "now the city will see it."
The tailor wrapped my old clothes in brown paper as if packing away an old skin. I paid, and we walked back toward the street where the market's din swallowed our steps. Marco clapped my shoulder with a weight that said more than words. He was the constant in a city of shifts and bargains, a man who wore loyalty as lightly as a glove.
"Eat, drink, waste some coin," he said, "tomorrow Arcadia will demand more. Tonight, it owes us this."
For a moment, with new darts at my hip and a coat that fit like armor, I felt the rare, fragile thing called contentment. The nightlife thinned around us, the black market folding back into the city, and for a handful of hours, the city gave back what it so often took.