Tonight, the sky rained acid. Not the showy green stuff from movies, but droplets fine as spittle, hissing on steel and skin alike. Fifteen-year-old Mouse—nobody called him anything else—scuttled under the rusted lip of a half-toppled shipping crate. The hiss and tick of rain on corrugated metal was a metronome for the entire Nueva Arcadia port, a city in miniature for the damned. Every container was a tomb, or a treasure chest, and Mouse moved with the desperation of someone who'd opened too many of the former.
He kept low. Some parts of him—like the tail, the ears, the flat little paws—were good at this. Humaniform, sure, but the right silhouette would get him splattered in seconds if he ever forgot which world he lived in. This was a place for hiding, and for making yourself smaller than the spaces you squeezed through.
He darted between two stacked containers, black paint stripped by years of chemical rain to a leprous gray. The air smelled of ozone and salt, the wind shoving tangy mist up his nostrils. Lightning, distant and horizontal, lit the wharf in purple-white. Mouse's shadow—ears too round, limbs too thin, a perpetual hunch—briefly danced on the mud before the dark clamped down again.
He was looking for a cache. He had it on a tip: big shipment tonight, somewhere in the port's deep arteries, maybe something worth risking a skin-bleed for. Every so often, above the metallic hiss, came the whipcrack of drone blades. Even the shittiest security firms now bought arcane copters, little triangles of murder programmed to slice up anyone who didn't belong.
Mouse belonged to nobody, which was the most dangerous thing to be.
He'd mapped the patrol patterns over six sleepless nights. In theory, a fifteen-second window between passes. In practice, every time he ducked under a container or pressed himself flat to concrete, he imagined a laser eye somewhere in the fog tracking his heartbeat.
Six more crates. Three right turns. The tip had said Bay 7-G, but Mouse had never trusted tips. He trusted footprints, wrappers, the language of disturbed dust. Tonight he followed the scent of old engine oil, the kind spilled from a Feran-run shop, unmistakable in its rodent-sharp reek.
He climbed over a barrel, boots squelching. Acid stung his fingers, already raw. He pulled his hood tighter and flexed his whiskers—they were sensitive, better than any human's, a kind of gift nobody in the Upper Districts would envy. On his second scan, he spotted movement: two large shadows, neither moving like dock workers, both limping in that way only armed people did. Mouse made himself part of the wet crate, ribs scraping rust, whiskers flattened.
The men passed. They had faces like sandpaper and eyes that never lingered, not even on each other. Mouse let them go, then crept along their trail, muscles taut as wire.
Past the last row of containers, he found it: a gathering. No, a transaction.
Four people—three humans, one Feran, maybe a rat or mole, Mouse couldn't tell from this angle—clustered under a bare floodlight. The acid rain reflected off their slickers in lurid, shifting patterns. The humans wore armored coats, every shoulder stitched with the same insignia: a silver eye crossed by a chain.
BME. Bureau of Magical Enforcement.
Mouse's whiskers twitched. He didn't like the odds. But he liked the idea of going home empty-handed even less.
He slipped behind a stack of old tires and peeled his notebook from the inside of his jacket. It was soggy, edges curled from countless nights like this. He clicked his pen—one of his last—and started to sketch: the faces, the posture, the artifact. His penmanship was garbage but his eye was perfect. It was the first thing he'd ever gotten praised for, by someone who didn't care if he lived or died.
The artifact looked like a crystal lantern, but the colors inside pulsed too fast and too hot for anything normal. It was banded in gold, symbols that hurt to look at. Mouse wrote "lantern—heavy, blue, runes—hurts. BME wants it. Other side scared. Feran is left-handed, nervous, keeps paw on pack."
The transaction lasted seconds. The Feran handed over the object, shivering so hard his knuckles bled on the handle. The tallest human opened a case, let him peek inside. Mouse craned his head, nearly overbalancing—inside the case, something shifted, then the view was blocked.
Then it went to hell.
A sound like glass shattering in slow motion. The BME agent drew a black baton, pointed it at the mole-Feran's face, and fired a spell—a real one, not the crowd-control garbage they used on TV. A bolt of green, liquefying the Feran's cheek and flooding the air with a stink Mouse would never forget. The others jerked back, one raising a pistol, another a wand. They died together in a burst of manafire that sprayed neon blood on the wet concrete.
Mouse wanted to run. He forced himself to write:
"BME. No survivors. Killed own contact. Artifact in bag, gone now. Lightning smell, copper taste, burning hair."
The rest of the team fanned out, sweeping with guns and magic. Mouse pressed so hard against the tires that he felt rubber give under his bones. He hardly dared to breathe, but still made notes, hand shaking so bad the words ran into each other.
The lead agent knelt beside the ruined bodies, rifled through their pockets. He said something Mouse couldn't hear, voice clipped, impatient. Then he held up the artifact, examining it with a monocle that glowed softly in the dark.
Another spell, more restrained—this one traced a grid of runes in the air. Mouse blinked, and they burned into his mind, but he could not copy them. They were too complex, moving even as he watched.
Suddenly, the agent looked up, straight at Mouse's hiding place.
Mouse froze. Everything in him screamed: don't move, don't breathe, you are not real.
He felt his heart jitter in his chest, the rain on his back running cold, worming under his hoodie. The agent approached, methodical, boots squishing on the soaked ground. Mouse readied his legs, tried to remember the fastest way out, but he knew he'd never outrun a BME drone.
The agent stopped three meters away. Looked left, then right. On his belt, Mouse saw a row of metal discs, each one inscribed. He was close enough to see the agent's jaw, square and clean-shaven, the set of his eyes. They were brown, utterly unremarkable, but as they swept past Mouse's hiding place, Mouse realized the agent wasn't really looking.
He was listening.
Mouse stilled his breath. He pinched the tip of his own tail, grounding himself in pain.
After a long moment, the agent grunted and turned away.
Mouse let the air out of his lungs so slow it was a prayer. He waited until the footsteps faded, then counted to one hundred.
The port was silent except for the acid rain and the hum of distant drones.
He rewound in his head the images: the artifact, the murder, the runes. He tore the page from his notebook, folded it, and tucked it in a pouch sewn inside his waistband. Evidence, in case he got murdered and someone cared to piece him back together.
He crawled, slow as a graveworm, away from the massacre site. On the far side of a shipping crate, he let himself rest, retching bile onto the concrete. The taste of burning Feran stayed with him.
He looked up once, just once, at the empty wharf. The BME team was gone, leaving only the bodies, the blood, and a memory of something impossible—something too heavy and blue and wrong to belong in this world.
Mouse blinked the rain from his eyes. He peeled open his notebook and, hands shaking, wrote the last thing he saw before he slipped into the night.
"Don't forget. BME doesn't just clean up—sometimes they make the mess."
Then he closed the book, and ran.