The first thing Proxy noticed was the rotors.
Not heard so much as felt first. A deep, industrial thrum chewing stubbornly against altitude, the sort of vibration that drums in the chest cavity before the ears are invited to participate.
The smell wasn't better, a recycled cabin air, the faint bite of synthetic coolant, and beneath both of those something chemical, distinctly unwelcome inside a human bloodstream.
He tugged at his arms on instinct and discovered them secured behind the seat frame, a reinforced restraint bar pinning both wrists in place with the absolute confidence of hardware that had never once been hacked.
His next instinct was the cyberdeck. He reached for it the way a drowning man reaches for a railing.
His neural interface stretched outward and immediately collided with a wall. A dense jamming field pressing down across every usable frequency, thick and professionally tuned. The kind designed with people like him specifically in mind.
Whoever had arranged this hadn't grabbed random bodies.
Proxy put that away away and finished waking up.
The cabin was dim, the walls bare except for cargo tie-downs running the length of the hull. Two rows of seats faced each other across the narrow aisle, most of them occupied. Some passengers were still glassy-eyed, their brains negotiating with lingering sedation. Others had already skipped confusion and gone straight to righteous rage.
A broad man near the rear hatch, wearing a chrome-plated jacket that suggested money but not necessarily wisdom, was shouting at a corpo guard about contracts and legal rights. His voice climbed higher with each sentence, as if sheer volume might eventually qualify as leverage.
The guard stood with arms folded, gaze aimed vaguely past the man, wearing a patience that neared boredom.
A second guard near the far wall ran a diagnostic on a rack of equipment and never looked up.
Proxy watched all of this and thought, simply. Well then.
He drew his last intact memory forward.
He and Nyx had been walking back through the lower grid, the section of the city where the neon signage ran at half power because maintenance contracts had expired and the corporations had apparently decided illumination was a luxury.
It had been late. Rain turned the pavement slick enough that the reflected lights looked vaguely like circuitry, provided you didn't stare long enough to ruin the illusion. Nyx had been talking about something. He remembered that much clearly.
He also remembered that he had not been listening particularly well.
In hindsight that was a mistake, although not currently the most urgent one.
Then a van slid directly across their path. The side door was already opening before the vehicle had even stopped moving. After that came fast-moving men, something connecting firmly with the back of his skull, and then an abrupt cut to nothing at all.
Corporate work.
Too tidy to belong to anyone else.
Proxy turned his head slightly to the left.
Nyx occupied the seat beside him, just beginning to surface. Her platinum-blonde hair was still arranged in its usual twin tails, though one had mostly come loose, stray strands crossing her face.
She looked small. She always looked small. Right now she pressed back into the seat as if effort alone might reduce her physical footprint.
Her eyes were open but unfocused, blinking cautiously against the cabin lights.
When she located him, something in her shoulders relaxed.
"Hey," Proxy said quietly.
"Hey." Her voice came out rough, the sediment of sedation still clinging to it. She swallowed once. "Where are we?"
"Airborne. Some sort of military transport." He nodded very slightly toward the guards without turning enough to make it obvious. "The jamming field alone cost someone serious credits."
She followed the gesture, looking at the guards, then back at him with her voice lowered. "Can you do anything?"
"Not remotely. Signal's completely dead."
"I don't have my pieces," she said, barely above a breath.
"Neither do I." He matched her gaze briefly. "You hurt?"
She shook her head in a small motion. "My head's splitting."
"Sedation hangover. It'll stick around another hour." He gave her a quick once-over, verifying. "Also, your hair's destroyed."
She stared at him. "We got kidnapped, Proxy."
"I'm aware," he said. "Your hair still looks horrible."
For a moment something moved across her face that might have been the beginning of a smile. It disappeared quickly. She leaned her head back against the seat and looked at the ceiling.
"I hate you."
"Consistently noted."
Near the rear hatch the chrome-jacket man made a strategic error and grabbed the guard's arm. The guard moved once, without visible urgency, and the man ended up slammed back into his seat where he remained.
The cabin volume dropped by approximately half. Someone in the front row cried quietly. Two others whispered rapidly to each other in a language Proxy didn't recognize, their heads close together as they tried to compute possible outcomes.
Across the cabin, a large figure sat with forearms resting on his knees.
Both arms were chrome. Oversized from elbow to wrist, not the discreet kind of augmentation meant to blend in but the sort that functioned as a declaration. The man wasn't angry. He wasn't frightened either.
He was simply waiting.
The patient posture of someone who already understood how the situation ended and was comfortable with the timeline.
The second guard stepped away from the equipment rack.
Proxy saw what had been mounted there.
Compact dorsal rigs. Pressure-triggered. Auto-sequencing. Cybertech parachutes built for mass tactical deployment, the kind where manual activation had apparently been judged an unnecessary luxury. One unit per seat.
The implication was fairly obvious.
The speaker above the rear hatch chose to clarify anyway, in a voice that was calm, pleasant, and completely indifferent to the fact that the cabin contained human beings.
"Deployment in ninety seconds. Restraints will release on sequence. Remaining aboard after hatch-clear is not an option the crew will accommodate."
The crying in the front row became louder. The chrome-jacket man started talking again, this time to no one in particular, his voice quieter and thinner. The two whispering passengers stopped whispering.
Proxy looked at Nyx.
Nyx looked back.
She had her lips pressed tight, fingers gripping the seat frame until the knuckles turned pale, eyes widened just a little too much.
The restraint bar released with a flat mechanical click.
The rear hatch depressurized and opened, and the outside rushed in all at once.
Wet heat, the sharp tang of salt, the green smell of something large and living somewhere below. Wind tore across the opening. The guards began moving people toward the hatch, not asking, simply hauling them up and guiding them forward.
Someone resisted and was corrected without comment.
Someone else stepped forward voluntarily and vanished immediately into open sky.
A hand closed around Proxy's arm and pulled him upright.
For exactly one second Nyx stood beside him, her shoulder brushing his.
Then the guard behind them applied a brisk, professional push.
The floor ceased to exist.
Freefall would be an interesting experience, if not for the situation.
The wind roared for a moment and then calmed into something steady. Below him the island rose quickly, a cluster of white resort buildings gone gray with neglect, balconies trailing vines, a long courtyard paved with cracked terracotta tile. Two fountains stood dry and choked with vegetation creeping up from the empty pool basin.
The rig fired at the correct altitude.
His descent halted abruptly. Proxy hit the ground through his knees, rolled, and stood before his brain had fully processed that he had landed.
He scanned immediately.
The large man had touched down roughly ten meters away and had already detached his rig. His chrome arms hung loosely at his sides. He wasn't studying the buildings or the jungle line.
He was looking directly at Proxy.
His expression had simplified into something blunt and final.
There was no sign of Nyx in the courtyard.
Proxy turned once, then again, checking the blown-out windows of the resort above, the collapsed terrace wall to his right, the debris field scattered between them. Nothing. The large man started walking toward him now, unhurried.
Proxy stepped backward across a fractured tile and placed a broken column against his spine.
No deck access.
No tools.
Empty hands.
Approximately four seconds before the situation stopped being theoretical.
He thought, with simple clarity, this is a bad start.
Then Nyx dropped from the window ledge she had apparently climbed onto. Or possibly landed on. Proxy hadn't seen the process, only the conclusion. She came down onto the large man's back with her full weight and a shard of broken window glass clenched in her right fist.
The first strike drove into the back of his knee.
The second sliced into his hamstring, dragging.
The man twisted violently, chrome arms sweeping wide. Nyx moved with the motion, staying close inside the arc where the sheer mass of those arms couldn't hit her.
Her third strike found the Achilles.
He dropped to one knee with a guttural sound that wasn't quite a scream.
Nyx drove the glass shard into the side of his neck.
She held it there for a moment.
Then she pulled it free. Blood splattered forward like a fountain.
The courtyard went quiet.
Somewhere along the overgrown terrace, birds that had fallen silent during the drop resumed their noise. The heliplane had already become a fading sound to the north.
Proxy looked at Nyx.
She stood over the body, breathing steadily through her nose, hair completely loose around her face now. The broken shard remained in her hand. She looked up at him with the same wide eyes and soft expression.
Blood streaked across her hair, cheeks, to the chin and onto the ground.
Nothing about her expression suggested fear.
"I couldn't find my pieces," she said, as if that explained everything.
Proxy watched her for a long moment.
"Right," he said.