When the table was cleared and the obsidian room returned to silence, UMBRA sat with the blueprints and the contract spread before them. The future, razor-thin and ready to cut, lay just a page-turn away.
They leaned in together, as always, to find the best way through the dark.
There were four of them, and four ways to interpret a death sentence.
UMBRA didn't do post-mortems, not officially. They finished the job, pocketed the fee, and ran their own therapy in whiskey or violence. But tonight, in the heart of the Obsidian, the air itself felt thick with consequences. The room, designed for negotiation, now felt more like a confession booth. Nobody wanted to speak first.
It was Owen who reached for the blueprints again, flattening the sheets with a precision that bordered on reverence. He stared at the diagrams, not seeing lines and labels but the logic beneath them. The security on the Arcana Bridge vault was extravagant, almost panicked: triple-warded doors, a layered battery of mana siphons, and a corridor so narrow it might as well be a grave. But there were gaps—oversights, or maybe invitations.
He ran a finger along the margin. "This is either incompetence," he said, "or they want us inside."
Jane cracked her knuckles, the sound sharp in the velvet dark. "Doesn't matter. Lancaster's been trying to engineer a war for years. We do the job, we get paid, and the rest of them can burn."
Ellen was silent. She sat with arms folded, cold fingertips tracing the perimeter of a ward schematic. Her mouth was flat, but her eyes—so pale they looked silver in this light—missed nothing.
"If they're baiting us," Ellen said, "there's a reason. We're not the only mercs in the city."
"We're the best," Jane snapped, but there was no boast in it. She said it the way you'd say a spell.
Hazel hovered at the edge, refusing the seat nearest the table. She clutched the blueprints to her chest, eyes flicking from page to page. Her hands shook—not with fear, but with a charge that set every hair on her arms prickling.
"This isn't just tech," Hazel said, voice a dry rasp. "It's alive."
Ellen's head tilted, considering. "How do you mean?"
Hazel swallowed. "The core. The runes—they're recursive, self-correcting. I saw code like this once, when I was a kid. It was in a smuggler's vault, running the security system. The guy who owned it… he ended up as fertilizer."
Jane leaned forward. "You're saying the Bridge is rigged?"
Hazel shook her head. "No. I'm saying it can think. At least a little. If we try to shut it down, it'll fight back."
Owen absorbed this, recalibrated. "If it's sentient, then maybe that's the point. Maybe they want it to get loose."
Nobody said anything for a while.
Jane broke the silence. "So we steal the Bridge, destroy the backups, and wipe the core. End of problem."
Hazel bristled, fists tight. "If it's aware, isn't that… murder?"
Jane's laugh was half bark, half cough. "Not if it doesn't have a soul."
"Who decides that?" Hazel shot back.
This time, Ellen answered. "We do. If not us, then someone worse."
Owen felt the fracture line running through the room. Jane was old school, a true believer in the hierarchy of power; Ellen, coldly practical, would cut her own throat if it meant gaining an advantage. Hazel was the heart, the kid who'd survived hell and still believed in ghosts. As for himself, he wasn't sure what he believed anymore.
He reached out, touched Hazel's shoulder. "If we don't take the job, someone else will. And they'll make it uglier."
Hazel's jaw set, but she didn't pull away.
Ellen tapped the blueprints again, narrowing her gaze. "The Bridge isn't just a weapon. It's leverage. Whoever controls it controls the narrative. Lancaster, Taira, WMO, even us. If we do this clean, we can hold the city hostage for a decade."
Jane's eyes glinted. "I like the sound of that."
But Hazel shook her head, eyes shining with something brittle and bright. "That's just another leash. The whole point is to break them."
Owen felt the heat in his chest, the old anger, the need to fix what couldn't be fixed. He looked at the contract, the blood oath binding them to a future none of them really wanted.
"If we walk away," he said, "we're dead. If we take the job, we get a shot at making the rules. Even if it means breaking ourselves."
Jane raised her glass, a toast to inevitability. "Then let's get broken."
Ellen nodded, silent.
Hazel looked at each of them in turn, then at the blueprints. "If we steal this," she said, voice trembling but fierce, "are we helping the powerless, or just silencing another hope?"
The words hung, acid and electric, in the air. Owen met her gaze, thinking of all the times he'd watched cities burn, and all the times he'd pretended it didn't matter.
He wanted to say, It's not that simple. But he knew better.
They sat, four points of a compass, the contract a black hole in the center.
On the far side of the wall, Shiori Taira watched the team's division with a mixture of calculation and grief, knowing she'd given them not a mission, but an ultimatum.
In the end, the only thing left to do was act.
They gathered their weapons, their doubts, their shards of humanity, and left the room darker than they found it.