The city twitched in its sleep.
Rain fell sideways between the towers, turning light into ribbons. Air vents sighed. Somewhere below, the market buzzed in a hundred dialects of survival — vendors selling batteries, knockoff implants, protein dust, dreams.
Stitch crouched on the roof of a derelict monorail station, watching the world below through the lens of hunger.
He had a mark — a courier drone that made nightly runs between the data hubs in Sector 9.
They called it the Pulsefly — sleek, black, and stupid fast.
If he timed it right, he could intercept its descent, pop the core, and be gone before the scanners even knew he existed.
It wasn't glory work, but a good battery could buy a week's worth of noodles — maybe two if he didn't mind the powdered kind.
He rubbed his palms together, breath clouding in the cold. The concrete was slick. His shoes were worn to the thread.
A single jump wrong tonight could end everything.
He whispered to himself, a ritual before every run.
"No gods, no cops, no gravity."
Then he moved.
The city unfolded below him in a blur of metal and light. He sprinted across the roof's spine, ducked under a beam, and vaulted a gap that opened like a wound over the street. His body remembered what his mind feared. Every motion was muscle and memory — no thought, only flow.
He reached the tower edge and saw it: the drone.
A silver streak cutting through rain, wings flickering with anti-scan shimmer.
It was coming in lower tonight — good.
Stitch took position on a ventilation duct, unclipped the steel cable he'd scavenged weeks ago, and waited. The hum grew louder, slicing the air like a blade. His pulse matched its rhythm.
Then — now.
He leapt, catching the drone's tail as it banked toward the loading dock. The metal burned cold against his skin. Wind howled. He swung his legs up, straddled the hull, and jammed a screwdriver into the seam by its power core. Sparks flared. The drone bucked.
"C'mon—"
The latch gave. He yanked the battery out — a glowing cube of violet energy — and let go.
The fall was fast and filthy.
He twisted midair, hit an awning, rolled onto a fire escape, breath knocked out of him.
For a moment, all he heard was his heartbeat, echoing in the rain.
He looked at the cube in his hand — light pulsing through his fingers like something alive.
Then — movement.
A figure was watching from across the next rooftop.
Hood up. Still.
Too still to be a junkie, too focused to be a patrol.
He blinked — and they were gone.
He waited, scanning the shadows. A soft clang echoed from above — another sound, lighter this time, like boots brushing metal.
Someone else was moving across the roofs, fast, graceful.
He shoved the cube into his jacket and started running again.
He didn't know why.
Maybe it was instinct — or the strange feeling that whoever they were, they weren't here to kill him.
The rain intensified, turning the rooftops into mirrors. Every step became a test of balance. The skyline around him shimmered in fractured colours — red from the bars, turquoise from the holo signs, gold from windows where people pretended to live normal lives.
And still — that sound.
Someone running the rooftops with him, not chasing, not fleeing. Matching his pace.
Invisible, but close.
Stitch didn't look back.
He just ran.
The rooftops didn't end — they just folded into each other, stacked like cards, stitched with wires and water and heat vents.
Stitch ran across them with the pulse of the city in his blood.
Below, sirens began to climb.
Someone had noticed the drone crash.
He cursed under his breath and changed direction, leaping the gap between two tenement blocks. The wind howled up from the void. His shoulder brushed a wet antenna, sparks snapping in his ear.
He landed hard, rolled, came up with the cube still tight in his hand.
Keep moving.
That was the first rule of street running. The city didn't like stillness — it ate it.
He darted through a rooftop garden left to rot, old solar panels gleaming through the vines. A cat hissed and vanished under a pipe. The air smelled like ozone and cheap detergent.
From the corner of his eye, he saw movement again — a shadow skipping over a neighboring roof, perfectly timed, no wasted motion.
He slowed, just for a second.
It wasn't a drone.
Too light. Too human.
He pressed himself flat against a wall, breathing hard. The rain masked the sound of his heartbeat, but not his fear.
"You're seeing ghosts," he muttered.
He peeked over the ledge.
Nothing — just the wet sprawl and the hum of the city.
Then, a whisper in his earpiece — a line he didn't recognize flickering alive.
Nice grab, runner.
He froze.
He didn't have a line open. Didn't even have credits for one.
You made that fall look easy, the voice said again, faint and distorted. A girl's voice. Calm. Amused.
He ripped the earpiece out and threw it over the edge. It vanished into the dark.
The voice lingered in his head anyway.
He took off again, faster this time.
The sirens were closer now, echoing off the concrete corridors between buildings. A patrol drone swooped overhead, light scanning in a slow circle. Stitch ducked under an old satellite dish, keeping low as the beam swept past.
He reached the end of the block and saw his exit — a narrow suspension bridge connecting to the freight district. Below it, a river of moving lights — delivery trucks, cargo trams, police cruisers.
He sprinted.
Halfway across, the wind caught him sideways. The bridge swayed, groaning under his weight. The cables hummed like instrument strings, vibrating through the rain.
That's when the voice came again — not in his ear this time, but from above.
"You're burning your run, Stitch."
He stopped dead, scanning the shadows.
The silhouette stood on a crane arm overhead, crouched against the light — human shape, hooded, still.
For a heartbeat, neither moved.
Then the patrol drone swung into view, light beam slicing the air between them.
The figure leapt — vanished into the storm — as Stitch ducked and the beam passed inches from his face.
He ran again, breath tearing through his chest.
⸻
He didn't stop running until the sirens faded and the rain thinned to mist.
The cube was cold now, dimmer than before. He crouched in an old drainage tunnel, chest heaving, the world outside reduced to echoes and dripping pipes.
The tunnel walls were tagged with symbols — glowing marks in fluorescent paint, thin streaks shaped like heartbeats.
He touched one with his fingers. The paint pulsed faintly, as if alive.
The Ghostline.
He'd always thought they were a story — kids hyped on caffeine and urban myth.
But the voice, the figure, the symbols — they were real. Watching. Testing.
He leaned his head back against the concrete, closed his eyes.
Rainwater dripped from his hair.
Maybe the city wasn't hunting him tonight.
Maybe it was inviting him.
The tunnel spat Stitch out into Echelon-5, where rain was a permanent condition and silence was never complete.
Every surface dripped — glass, metal, skin.
The air hummed with broken electricity, like the city itself was trying to whisper through static.
He landed in the industrial sector — Tier Nine, locals called it.
A maze of forgotten factories, rusted stairways, and rooftops so close together you could cross the district without ever touching ground.
That's why he liked it here.
The city couldn't catch you if you stayed above it.
Below, in the drowned streets, a thousand small fires burned — oil drums, vending machines ripped apart for warmth, the flicker of lives still trying to mean something.
Every building wore scars from the Flood Riots years ago: bullet holes filled with gum, scorch marks shaped like ghosts, corporate slogans scratched out and replaced with tags like
"We work, they eat."
"Nothing pure survives."
"Ghostlines are real."
He didn't believe the last one.
But he looked at it longer than he wanted to.
⸻
He cut across a metal bridge slick with oil. Under his jacket, a small black cube pressed cold against his ribs — tonight's take. He didn't know what was inside; didn't care.
He'd stolen it from a courier two levels up, dropped three floors, and vanished before the body hit the ground.
That was how you survived Echelon-5:
Move fast. Don't ask. Don't look back.
But the longer he walked, the more something in the cube seemed to move — faint vibrations, irregular like breathing.
He tried to ignore it.
⸻
He climbed a water tower and sat beneath the rusted rim, pulling his hood tight. From here he could see the entire southern sector: the fractured skyline of neon signs, the broken light rails, the black ocean swallowing the city's edge.
He thought about leaving — taking a train north to the free districts, if those even existed.
But people like him didn't get out.
They just learned to fall slower.
A siren echoed through the streets — low, throbbing, distant. Then silence again.
He chewed the inside of his cheek, restless.
Nights like this were the worst — the kind where the world held its breath, waiting for something to happen.
He stood, adjusted his gloves, and made for the next roof.
⸻
By the time he reached the old Omni-Grid substation, the rain had turned heavier.
Lightning flashed somewhere behind the smog, outlining the skeletons of highrises in pale white veins.
He moved along the pipes, careful not to slip.
There — a window. Half-open.
Inside: a half-abandoned control room.
Old monitors stacked against the wall, some still flickering with distorted feeds — static, symbols, faces from another era.
He shut the door behind him and dropped the cube onto the table.
Its light pulsed — slow, blue, steady.
"What are you…" he murmured.
He reached for his blade and pried open the casing.
Inside were wires — no core drive, no storage node, just a thin filament of black glass coiled like muscle.
He leaned closer — and for a second, the glass shifted, watching him.
He jerked back. The cube went dark.
The silence that followed was thick enough to breathe.
⸻
Outside, on a nearby rooftop, five figures watched from the rain.
Dark coats, mirrored visors, movement too smooth to be normal.
They'd been tracking him since the bridge.
One of them — smaller, lighter — tilted her head slightly.
Through the static of her comms, a voice crackled:
"He's fast.
Faster than the last one."
Another answered, lower, rougher:
"Speed isn't the test. Let's see if he survives the night."
The girl's gaze lingered through the rain, tracing Stitch's silhouette through the glass.
Then she whispered, almost to herself:
"He will."
They vanished, melting back into the dark — leaving nothing but wet footprints that glowed faintly under the neon.