Morning leaked into Breakwater in streaks of grey, smog, and drizzle, swallowing the light before it touched the streets. The rooftop was slick, puddles trembling with every gust off the water. Ash sat against the ledge, eyes shut, pretending for half a second that the city wasn't there. Just the hiss of rain, just the scratch of a pencil.
Mina was the scratch.
She sat cross-legged in her patched jacket, sketchbook balanced steady on her knees. Head tilted, soot-dark hair hanging loose. The pencil moved fast, sure, never hesitating. Even after everything, her hands didn't shake.
Ash cracked one eye. She wasn't drawing the skyline, or Cass's grin, or buildings swallowing fire. She was drawing him—hood shadowing his face, shoulders hunched, lighter glowing in one hand. She'd shaded his eyes into hollows. The flame was the only thing clear, like she thought that was the piece of him that still lived.
His throat tightened. "That what I look like to you?"
Mina didn't answer. She turned the page. Fresh paper. Lines built quick, faster now—Cass, gun on her hip, boots sharp, smirk carved in place. Mina pressed harder, gouging strokes like she needed Cass's edges to cut.
Ash reached and steadied her wrist. "Easy."
Mina looked up at him, finally. Not with fear. Not with hope. Just… waiting.
"You don't have to draw it all," he said, softer. "Not everything you see. Some things… You can let go."
Her eyes dropped. She tore the page free. Folded it once. Twice. Slid it into her jacket lining like a secret. Then she went back to the book and kept going, as if his words had been air.
The stairwell door banged. Boots. Cass's voice bright with amusement: "What is this, family portrait hour? Moreno brooding, kid sketching—whole sitcom lineup."
Mina froze but didn't close the book.
"Don't," Ash warned.
Cass grinned anyway and dropped onto the ledge, wet leather squeaking. "Relax. Not here to ruin art class." She tipped her chin at Mina. "Keep at it, kid. City's ugly—you might as well capture it before it eats itself."
Mina's pencil slowed. For the first time since the fire, she tilted the sketch—not to Ash, to Cass. Half-finished rooftop, rain scored across the page, three shadows hunched under the weather.
Cass whistled. "Hell of an eye."
Ash let his head thump back against the ledge. He wanted quiet. A breath before the next cut. But even silence had claws here—through Cass's smirk, through Mina's pencil, through the flame he couldn't put out.
Cass stood. "Food run. Something that didn't die in a fryer last century."
"Bring something green," Ash said.
She made a face. "I like you, but not that much." Then crouched eye-level to Mina for a beat. "Keep him honest, yeah?"
Mina blinked once. Cass treated it like a promise and clanged down the stairs.
Her absence pressed heavier than gunfire.
Ash sat with his back to the rusted railing, lighter warm in his palm. Mina sketched a few feet away, hood up against the drizzle. The stub scraped on paper, steady, tireless. He tried not to look. The sound of graphite was somehow louder than the city below.
He rubbed his face hard. He should've been sleeping. Or planning. Instead, he was counting her breaths and watching the way her small hand stayed sure in the cold.
"You ever draw anything that's not right in front of you?" he asked finally. Voice rougher than he meant.
She didn't look up. Flipped to a new page. Kept going.
"Guess not," he muttered.
After a beat, she tilted the book just enough for him to see. Him again—hood up, shoulders bowed. A small flame cupped in his hand, lighting his face but not the space around him. His eyes, two pits in that little circle of light.
He stared too long. "Flattering," he said. It didn't land like a joke.
She tucked the book into her chest like she hadn't meant to show it. He shifted, uncomfortable, and dug into his jacket for the dented tin. Two protein bars left from a job—half-smashed, barely food. He tore one in half and dropped a piece in her lap.
"Eat."
She stared at the wrapper.
"Draw all you want," Ash said, elbows on knees, "but if you don't eat, you'll be gone in a week. Breakwater chews up ghosts faster than the living."
Her fingers closed around the bar. She peeled, took a careful bite, chewed, swallowed, and looked up.
For the first time since he'd carried her out of the smoke, he saw something that wasn't silence. Not thanks. Not fear. A keen edge, like she was timing how long before he cracked.
His stomach turned. He rolled the lighter across his knuckles. "Yeah. You and the rest of the city."
The lighter clicked. Flame bent in the damp, weak but stubborn. Mina watched without blinking. Then she set the bar down, flipped to fresh paper, and drew fast, rough strokes.
When she turned it, his chest pulled tight.
Him—walking alone through a rain-slick alley, flame cupped in his hand. Behind him, faint and blurred, a small figure in the dark with knees to her chest.
Left behind.
He shut the lighter with a snap. The sound ran off the rooftop metal. He didn't trust himself to answer. Mina hugged the book and went back to chewing.
Ash stared at the bruised sky, listening to the city's pulse. He'd never hated a piece of paper so much.
"Come here," he said after a while.
Mina shuffled closer on her knees. He pointed at a puddle. "Look."
She looked.
"The wind's wrong," he said, nodding at the ripples. "Storm shifted. When it's like this, people rush and make mistakes. You wait half a beat before you move—you'll see doors that weren't doors."
Her eyes flicked up. Not belief. Not disbelief. Just observing.
He pointed at the roofline. "Count chimneys. Two there, one there. Means an interior wall in between. If you get chased, you aim for the thin side. Easier to kick through."
The pencil crept back between her fingers. She didn't draw the skyline. She drew arrows. Chimneys. The way water huddled before a clogged drain. A symbol for a door that sticks in the rain.
"Good," he said.
Her hand stilled, like the word itself weighed more than the page.
He dug again and came up with a stub of black pencil mummified in paper. "Charcoal. It'll mark on wet concrete," he said. "Rule one: never waste ink on a wall. Chalk and charcoal wash. Ink lingers."
She took the stub like a tool for a war she already understood.
"Rule two. If you have to run—"
She finished it by drawing: a stair, a turn, an alley. Then a circle on the roof's far corner. A place to stop breathing loud.
He huffed, almost a laugh. "Yeah. That."
The stairwell door groaned. They flinched. Only a gull, dumb and wet, flapping past with a rag in its claws.
They breathed again.
Mina eased the book across her knees and pushed it toward him. He almost told her no. Then he looked.
Not the city. Not Cass. Not him.
A small floor plan. Their roof. The stairwell box. The ledge where he sat. The three best sightlines. Two worst. The route the gull had taken. A door on the next building he had never noticed because the brick was the same wrong green as every other lie in Breakwater.
The arrows were faint but sure.
"You keep all that in your head?" he asked.
A small shrug. Maybe yes. Maybe I don't know another way to live.
Silence softened. He let it sit until the rain thickened and the city's hum pitched up like it was clearing its throat to make trouble.
Cass reappeared without food and with a look he didn't like.
"Stoves out," she said, dropping onto the ledge, breath a little quick. "Half the vendors on Gutterline pulled shutters. Someone's running checks."
"Who?"
"Pick one," she said. "Corp uniforms, private muscle, plainclothes with the state-issue walk. I didn't stay to ask."
Mina's pencil moved before Cass finished—boots, visors, a block with three shutters down and one open like a mouth.
Cass nudged Ash with her knee. "You feel it?"
"I feel it."
She studied Mina's page, the crease between her brows pretending to be interest, not worry. "We should move."
"Soon," Ash said. "Let the first sweep pass. The second one's sloppier."
Cass grinned, edge back. "Look at you, patient."
"Look at me, tired."
She stood, flicked rain off her fingers, and tossed him a folded napkin he hadn't seen her carry. Inside: two boiled eggs and a fist of pickled greens. "I lied," she said. "About the green."
He was grateful. He didn't say it. Cass knew.
She tapped the charcoal stub once, pointing at the gull door on Mina's map. "We're using that when we do."
Mina nodded like she'd already planned it that way.
Cass left with a two-finger salute.
Ash split an egg, handed Mina the larger piece, and unwrapped the greens. They ate in silence that wasn't empty.
"Show me," he said.
Mina opened the book. The morning lived there: chimneys as arrows, gutters as clocks, vents as doors, a square marked HEAT over a boiler room they hadn't used yet. She'd sketched the shape of his hand near a hinge, like she needed to record the way he touched the world when he didn't want to wake it.
He traced a path back with his finger. "Again," he said. "If we get split."
She drew it in pencil and again in little marks he'd learned the feel of—her shorthand as sturdy as any street sign.
He nodded instead of saying good again.
Engines rolled into the block's noise. Heavy ones.
He went to the edge and saw them: two armoured carriers sliding the arterial slow as sharks, water hissing off plates, light bars dull in daylight, antennas flexing like feelers. Not COA—wrong colours, wrong silhouette. Private muscle. Corp-adjacent. Paperwork that read like permission to break bones.
His phone buzzed. Unknown number.
WORK CLEAN OR WORK NEVER.
He didn't need to guess the author. He slid the phone away and watched the carriers' wake ripple. People thinned. Half-open shutters clicked down. The city pulled its head into its shoulders.
"Pack," he said, as much to himself as to Mina. "We're not sleeping here tonight."
She closed the book.
They took the gull's door.
Ash shouldered the next stairwell. Rain ticked off satellite dishes and vents. Twice, radio chatter carried far in the wet. Twice, he froze them both and let it pass. Mina moved like the city taught you if you survived: deliberate, light, eyes everywhere without announcing it. He didn't praise. Praise made people look up. Looking up got you seen.
They dropped into a maintenance shaft—grids of rusted walks, dead bulbs, graffiti that had given up on names. Warm air breathed through a vent. Boiler. He pointed. Mina marked it with a square and a tiny shimmer.
A grated door waited with a padlock that hated its job. Ash palmed his picks and breathed with the clicks until the lock remembered open.
The boiler room was heat and metal. A woman in her fifties—Aunt Ana to the block, never "aunt" to the police—looked them over, then looked at Mina, then didn't like the math.
"Moreno," she said. "Bad hour."
"My speciality." Hands visible and empty. "We need ten minutes and a corner. We leave no mess."
Ana considered, then jerked her chin. "Ten," she said. "Twelve if you move like you mean it. No names. If anyone asks later, I never saw you."
"That's my favourite story," Ash said.
She pointed to a bench by a humming tank. "Sit. Dry your ghosts." She hesitated, then produced a towel the size of a rag. "For the small one."
Mina took it with two hands, a bow older than she was. She sat where Ana pointed, pencil already working. Heat licked colour into her face. Her shoulders unwound a degree.
Ash kept his back to the room and eyes on the door. He slid two notes under the bench leg. Ana made a show of ignoring them while she checked a gauge that had been right for ten years.
"COA's been sniffing," she said to nobody. "Came through asking about a man with a cut on his cheek and a girl who doesn't talk."
"Lots of men with cuts," Ash said.
"Not like yours," she said. "They also asked about your fixer."
"Fixers don't talk," he said. "They leak."
Ana set a kettle on a coil and slid them cups that smelled like rust and lemon. "Not charity," she said. "I just don't want the child coughing up smoke on my floor."
"Understood," Ash said, and drank what scalded him awake.
Boots scuffed concrete above. A radio popped and hissed. "Fourth time this morning," Ana said. "They don't come this deep unless something changed."
"Something did," Ash said.
"Ten minutes," she repeated. "That's all this place can spare."
He knelt in front of Mina and tapped the spine of her book. "Rule three," he said quietly. "If we split, you head for heat and noise—boilers, kitchens, laundries. People see their own work more than they see strangers."
She drew a tiny rectangle and wrote a mark beside it. A boiler, in her language.
"And if there's no heat?" he asked.
She drew three dots with a line through them. Train line. Underpass.
"Yeah," he said. "Good."
The radio above crackled cleaner. Voices nearer. He killed the tea and breathed a breath he didn't feel like he'd earned. "Time."
Ana handed him a black rain poncho, the colour of old tar. "Leave it where I can find it," she said. "And if anyone asks—"
"You never saw me."
"Not even then."
They slid out the far service corridor. The building's belly breathed damp air and old heat. A rusted door led to a narrow stair, then a noodle shop's back hall. The owner stared deeper into his pot. The block had perfected that look.
Outside, rain had sharpened into a fine cold comb. Ash set a slow, unpanicked pace north under awnings and scaffolds that made a second city above the first. Twice, Mina tugged him, and both times she spared them a camera or a bad angle. They skimmed the edge of the clinic. A flash of white through a window—someone in a nurse's coat, humming to a radio. He filed it as a landmark he'd tell himself not to use later.
They made a different roof. No gull. Just a generator's throb and the city trying to smother the day back into grey.
He checked sightlines. No helmets on the immediate block. No drones close enough to singe air. For now, the square of tin and rust was theirs.
He let them breathe.
"Show me," he said.
Mina opened the book. Morning lived there: chimneys as arrows, gutters as clocks, vents as doors, Ana's boiler a square with heat drawn over it. Their route traced twice—once for him, once in her shorthand.
He was about to say good when the wind shifted and brought a new sound up the block.
Not marching.
Engines again. Closer.
Two armoured carriers slid through the arterial's wet. Not COA. Private. The kind whose paperwork said "safety" and meant "obey." Shutters that had dared to be half-open clicked shut. The city pulled its head into its shoulders.
His phone buzzed. Unknown number.
WORK CLEAN OR WORK NEVER.
He didn't reply.
"Pack," he said. "No sleep here tonight."
They moved to the stairwell. His hand found a new chalk mark on the metal—square with a diagonal slash. Fixer shorthand.
Vacated. Compromised.
Pulse in his teeth.
Mina drew the same shape on her page and added two dots above it—her addition. Worse. He believed her.
"Other way," he said.
Roof to roof again. The city's breath had changed. You didn't need a badge to feel it. You just needed to live where badges arrived after the damage was done.
At the third roof, he watched two black-helmeted officers cut into their block from the west. Not COA, not militia—private security hired by a clean suit with a dirty conscience. Efficient. Checking sightlines the way Ash did. Not hunting randoms.
He backed away and kept moving.
By the next parapet, his nerves were a thrumming wire. Mina matched his crouch without being told, keeping the book dry. His hands shook when he tried to steady her shoulder. He pocketed them and held the lighter instead, like it might decide the weather.
They waited until the engines dulled and the block's brave chatter clicked back on. Stalling, not safety.
He took one last look. For a heartbeat, the street below was every street he'd had to leave in a hurry. Every room he'd called home until the city corrected him. Every door marked in someone else's shorthand telling everyone but him it was time to go.
He looked at Mina. She looked back. No questions. She'd learned his language too fast.
"Alright," he said. "New bed tonight."
She nodded and drew a tiny bed with wheels and a line through it. No bed stays.
He almost smiled. Then a loose sheet of tin banged in the wind. The sound jumped around the block like a dropped tray.
Five helmets turned like a flock.
Ash closed his eyes for half a breath and felt again the weight of a small body against his ribs, a sketchbook digging into bone like a brand.
He opened them, rolled his shoulders, and started moving.
Breakwater didn't just have his name now.
It had hers.
And it was hunting.