Pain was a white-hot brand seared into Jorge's shoulder. Every heartbeat pulsed agony down his arm, mixing with the cold Detroit rain soaking through his jacket. The smell of his own burnt flesh—acrid and nauseatingly sweet—mingled with the alley's reek of charred meat, ozone, and wet garbage. Above him, the Veridian drone's red targeting laser painted a steady, accusing dot on his forehead. Its hum was a predatory insect's buzz cutting through the drumming rain.
"Subject J-Reed. Compliance Required. Surrender Immediately."
Compliance is death. The thought was cold, hard certainty in Jorge's soldier-mind. He'd seen Veridian's idea of "retrieval" in the orphanage work-camps—the hollow-eyed children who never returned from "affinity testing."
He rolled left, behind the dubious cover of the overflowing dumpster. The drone's energy bolt sizzled past, vaporizing rain and scorching concrete where his head had been.
Think. Assets? The leaking mana conduit still hissed nearby, spewing violet vapor. Trap or tool?
He scooped a chunk of broken brick, ignoring the flare of pain in his shoulder. His spatial sense—that strange, internal compass—itched. He focused, not on moving himself, but on the brick in his hand. There. To the drone's exposed thruster housing.
He threw. Not with a child's aim, but a Sergeant's precision honed by desert firefights. The brick flew true.
And flickered.
One moment airborne, the next—CRUNCH!—embedded deep in the drone's delicate propulsion array. Sparks fountained. The drone lurched, its hum becoming a shrieking whine. The targeting laser wobbled erratically.
Jorge didn't wait. He was already sprinting, slipping on wet concrete, plunging deeper into the labyrinth of Old Downtown's sub-tunnels. He'd heard whispers—in ration lines, in the stifling heat of the orphanage dorms—about a place you went when the CorpSec or the Kings wanted you dead. A place marked by a crude symbol: an eye with a jagged lightning-bolt pupil. Silas Thorne. A dealer in second chances paid for in blood and secrets.
He found the mark sprayed in fading yellow paint beneath a corroded storm drain grate. The metal shrieked in protest as he hauled it open, the sound echoing in the dripping darkness below. He dropped into the void.
The sub-tunnel was a throat of crumbling concrete, choked with stagnant water that lapped at his knees and reeked of sewage, rust, and the pervasive ozone tang of decaying magic. Rats, their eyes glinting with unnatural violet in the gloom, skittered away from his splashing passage. He followed the yellow eye symbols, painted at intervals on slime-slick walls, guided by the thrumming pain in his shoulder and the fading adrenaline crash.
The tunnel widened, opening into a cavernous space—a forgotten subway platform. And there, resting on buckled tracks like a beached metal whale, was a gutted, graffiti-scarred subway car. Flickering neon tubes—stolen power buzzing through jury-rigged wires—bathed it in a sickly, pulsating glow. Junk towered around it: skeletal drone chassis, cracked mana-crystal arrays humming softly, the massive, inert shell of a Europan combat golem missing its head. The air hung thick with the smell of hot solder, burnt insulation, ozone, and something deeper… like petrichor mixed with grave dirt. Decayed magic.
A figure emerged from the car's shadowed doorway, backlit by the neon. Not tall, but broad-shouldered, clad in oil-stained coveralls that might have been blue once. Grizzled, salt-and-pepper stubble covered a jaw like granite. Eyes, sharp and dark as obsidian chips, scanned Jorge with unnerving intensity. He held a weapon casually—a brutal hybrid of sawed-off shotgun and carved runic staff, energy coils glowing faintly along its barrel.
"That's far enough, kid." The voice was gravel grinding on concrete. "You smell like cordite, void-rot, and fresh panic. Talk. Fast."
Jorge stopped, rainwater dripping from his hair, his breath ragged. "Silas Thorne?"
"Might be. You wearin' a CorpSec badge under that blood?" The man's gaze flicked to Jorge's shoulder, where dark blood soaked through the torn synth-leather.
"Running from them," Jorge rasped, the pain making his voice tight. "Gutter Kings. Veridian drone. They used a kill-switch." He gestured vaguely back towards the tunnel.
Silas Thorne lowered the weapon a fraction, but the obsidian eyes never wavered. "Spatial flicker. Saw it on the drone's feed before it went dark. Neat trick. How?"
"Don't know." Truth wrapped in evasion. It was the only currency he had.
"Bullshit." Silas didn't raise his voice, but the word carried finality. He tossed something small and metallic that landed with a splash at Jorge's feet—a grimy med-kit. "Patch that leak. Then we talk truth. Or you crawl back out into the rain. Your choice."
The kit contained synth-bandages, a vial of murky antiseptic that smelled like industrial cleaner and bitter herbs, and crude forceps. Jorge gritted his teeth. He shrugged off the ruined jacket, wincing as the fabric pulled at torn flesh. The shrapnel wound was ugly—a ragged tear, deep and weeping blood mixed with greasy residue from the explosion. He soaked a bandage in the vile antiseptic, the fumes making his eyes water, and bit down on a leather strap Silas wordlessly tossed him.
Focus. Field dressing. Basic combat medicine. He probed with the forceps, fingers slick with blood and rain, his small frame trembling with effort and shock. The pain was a roaring beast. He found a jagged piece of metal embedded near the bone and pulled. White light exploded behind his eyes. He muffled a cry against the leather.
Silas watched, leaning against the subway car doorframe, cleaning his fingernails with a wicked-looking combat knife. "Orphan?"
"Yes."
"Affinity score?"
"Low. Barely registered." Lie. The lie that kept him alive in the camps.
Silas snorted. He tapped a device on a nearby workbench—a bulky thing with cracked glass and flickering dials Jorge recognized as a soul-scanner, albeit a heavily modified one. "Kid, I scanned you the second you dripped onto my platform. Your soul… it's throwing off resonance like a cracked fusion core trying to contain a supernova." He pushed off the doorframe and took a step closer, his shadow engulfing Jorge. The scent of cheap synth-whiskey and hot solder washed over him. "Echoes. Like you're… layered. Two souls on one frequency. Ghost in the machine."
Jorge froze, the bloody shard of shrapnel held in the forceps. He knew. Or he saw enough to be dangerously curious. Panic, cold and sharp, cut through the pain. V.I.K.T.O.R's silent analysis pulsed in his mind:
*"SILAS THORNE: BIOMETRIC ANALYSIS INCONCLUSIVE. VITAL SIGNS NON-STANDARD. DECEPTION PROBABILITY: 78%. THREAT POTENTIAL: HIGH."*
"Who are you?" Silas pressed, his voice dropping to a low, dangerous rumble. "Really? Because gutter rats with spatial affinity and scrambled souls don't just fall out of the sky. Not unless someone dropped them."
The truth—I died in a desert and woke up a child in a world of magic—lodged in Jorge's throat, absurd and terrifying. Before he could force out another evasion, the universe answered for him.
CRASH!
The heavy storm drain grate Jorge had entered through exploded inward in a shower of twisted metal and concrete dust. Light—harsh, white, and accompanied by the familiar insectile hum—flooded the platform. Two figures dropped through the opening, landing with heavy, hydraulic thuds. Veridian CorpSec. Chrome armor gleaming even in the neon gloom, crimson optics scanning, locking onto Jorge. Their rifles hummed to full charge, bathing the junk piles in malevolent blue light.
"Subject J-Reed," the lead trooper droned, its synthetic voice echoing in the cavernous space. "Surrender for Project Chimera intake. Non-compliance will be met with extreme prejudice."
Silas Thorne spat on the wet concrete. "Vultures. Can't even let a man have a quiet evening." His obsidian eyes flicked to Jorge, then to the CorpSec troopers. Calculation, not fear. He snatched something from a shelf inside the subway car door—a chrome injector pulsing with an aggressive, icy blue light. "Mk. I Reflex Booster," he growled, tossing it to Jorge. "Stick it in your neck. NOW! And kid? RUN LIKE HELL!"
Jorge caught the cold cylinder. It vibrated in his hand like a trapped wasp. No time for questions, for trust, for anything but survival. He pressed the injector to the side of his neck and thumbed the activation stud.
FIRE.
Not warmth. Liquid nitrogen and lightning combined. It flooded his carotid artery, surged down his spine, and exploded through every nerve ending. His vision whited out. The world didn't just slow—it froze. Raindrops hung suspended like crystal beads. The CorpSec troopers turned their heads with glacial slowness. The rising whine of their rifles deepened into a distorted, monstrous drone.
A cold, utterly alien voice echoed inside his skull, cutting through the agony:
"NEURAL INTEGRATION: 40%. COMBAT PROTOCOLS ENGAGED. SUSTAINED ACTIVITY WILL CAUSE NEURAL DEGRADATION. RUN."
Jorge moved. His body wasn't his own. It was a marionette jerked by wires of blue fire. He ran up the slime-slick wall of the platform, gravity a forgotten suggestion. He scrambled across the ceiling, rusted pipes and dripping wires passing beneath him in slow motion. CorpSec energy bolts punched upward, molten slag trailing through the air like lazy comets. He dropped through a shattered skylight in the tunnel roof, back into the pounding rain and the chaotic, terrifying freedom of the night.
Power wasn't a tool.
It was poison burning through his veins, bought with the only currency he had left: a leap into the unknown, guided by a man made of shadows and lies.