A thermal visor doesn't understand shadows. It only understands life.
The blue light crawled down the concrete steps, spilling over rusted handrails and shattered glass.
Risay was backed against the landing wall, ten steps down. His chest burned with a hollow, panicked rhythm. He had one swing left in his arm. Maybe two.
The enforcer didn't rush. He descended in perfect, measured intervals.
Crunch. Pause. Crunch.
The edge of the scan touched the toe of Risay's boot.
Risay didn't look at the light. He looked up.
Suspended just above his head ran a municipal steam pipe. It was vibrating faintly, hissing with raw, subterranean pressure. A loaded lung.
The enforcer took another step. The blue light washed over Risay's knees. At the top of the stairs, the suppressed pistol didn't jerk; it tracked smoothly, a software-driven alignment locking dead-center onto Risay's mass.
Risay swung. He aimed straight up.
The heavy iron crowbar smashed into the pipe's rusted pressure valve. The recoil shot violently down his arm, nearly ripping the cold iron from his weak grip. His left hand spasmed, his fingers going briefly numb.
The metal groaned. It held.
The enforcer's blue visor stuttered. A violent micro-jerk broke his perfect posture as the software struggled to classify the sudden auditory anomaly. But the core programming prioritized the target. The gun barrel snapped back into alignment.
Risay didn't breathe. He adjusted his slipping grip, drove his shoulder upward, and threw his entire body weight behind his shaking left arm.
The valve sheared off.
Pressurized steam violently decompressed. The sound was absolute a mechanical roar that instantly swallowed the stairwell.
But the sound wasn't the weapon. The heat was.
The narrow concrete shaft flooded with scalding vapor. The air turned to boiling water in Risay's throat, searing his lungs with every frantic breath. The skin on the back of his neck blistered immediately under his wet coat.
Through a thermal visor, the pitch-black world didn't go dark. It went impossibly, blindingly white. Every pixel of the enforcer's optical feed instantly overloaded, erasing the geometry of the stairs, the walls, and the boy.
The gun jerked left, then right the targeting software violently overcorrecting, trying to lock onto a heat signature that was suddenly everywhere at once.
The enforcer fired blind.
A bullet cracked against the concrete inches from Risay's head, spraying stone shrapnel across his cheek.
Risay dropped to his knees. The steam was rising, banking heavily against the ceiling, leaving a narrow, breathable pocket near the floor. He crawled under the searing mist, his ruined right arm pressed agonizingly against his ribs.
He slipped past the enforcer's boots. The man was staggering backward, his gun tracking ghosts in the steam, his free hand clawing desperately at the side of his overloaded visor.
Risay pushed through the heavy, rusted turnstiles at the bottom of the stairs and vanished into the maintenance tunnels.
He was back in the unmapped dark. The only place the system couldn't map.
And the one place it couldn't survive.
Building 402 was two blocks away. The Lurker would have enforcers swarming the lobbies, waiting for Risay to try and break in from the street.
But Risay wasn't going to use the street.
He was going to come up through the floor.