The pre-dawn light was a dirty grey, filtering through the skeletal frameworks of the industrial park like watered-down milk. It offered no warmth, only enough visibility to confirm we were still in a world of rust and ruin. I kept my movements low and fluid, a shadow gliding between other, larger shadows. Behind me, the Tinkerer stumbled, his every footstep a clumsy announcement of our presence. He wasn't built for this. His world was one of soldering irons and circuit boards, not silent-running and kill-or-be-killed. But his world was over, and this was mine.
We slipped through a gash in the chain-link fence surrounding the old Valerius refinery. It rose before us, a cathedral of decay. Skeletal towers clawed at the sky, and a labyrinth of pipes, thick as pythons, coiled around everything, sweating a perpetual sheen of black residue. The air was a thick cocktail of old oil, oxidized metal, and something deeper, something like rot. Every groan of stressed steel, every drip of stagnant water into a murky puddle, echoed through the cavernous structures.
"Stay close," I murmured, not bothering to look back. I didn't need to see his fear; I could smell it.
This place was a deathtrap. A sniper's paradise. Catwalks crisscrossed fifty feet up, offering a thousand perfect perches. The maze of machinery on the ground floor provided endless cover for anyone with an ounce of patience. And they were patient. I could feel them. A prickle on my neck, the kind that tells you you've been in a sniper's scope for the last ten seconds. But there was no glint of glass, no telltale shift. Something else. Something closer.
The comm unit I'd lifted from their last scout remained dead silent. It was a professional crew, disciplined. No chatter. It bothered me. Silence could mean anything, but in my experience, it usually meant the worst kind of ambush—the one you never hear coming.
The Tinkerer lagged a step, his breath catching on a wheeze. That single, half-second delay was all it took.
I heard it before I saw it—a sound so faint it was more a disturbance in the air than an actual noise. A whisper of displaced atmosphere. I turned, my hand already moving for the trench knife at my belt, and saw it. A faint, heat-haze shimmer materialized behind the Tinkerer. From that ripple of light, a thin, monomolecular wire slipped over his head and cinched tight around his throat.
His eyes bulged, his hands flying to his neck to claw at the invisible garrote. He made a choking, gurgling sound as the shimmering figure began to drag him backward, pulling him off his feet and into the deeper shadows of a giant cracking tower.
Whisper. I knew the name. Knew the tech. A therm-optic camouflage suit. Expensive. Deadly.
No time to think. Only to react.
My eyes scanned the immediate area, calculating angles and ricochets in a split second. A rusted-out tool locker stood five feet to my left. My hand snapped out, snatching a heavy spanner wrench from its hook. Without breaking my stride towards her, I flicked my wrist. The wrench spun through the air, a blur of iron, and smashed into a hanging network of pipes directly above the struggling duo.
CLANG!
The sound was deafening in the silence, an explosive report of metal on metal that echoed through the refinery like a gunshot. The shimmer around Whisper wavered, her concentration broken by the sudden shockwave of sound. Her grip on the garrote loosened for a fraction of a second.
It was all the opening I needed. I lunged, covering the distance in two powerful strides. The blade of my knife was a silvery arc in the gloom. It met the wire not with a cut, but with a sharp impact against the handle she held. The wire went slack.
The Tinkerer collapsed to the grime-slicked floor, his body convulsing as he gasped for air, his throat raw and bleeding. I was already moving past him, knife held in a reverse grip, eyes piercing the spot where she'd been. But there was nothing there. The shimmer had dissolved. She was gone, vanished back into the shadows she commanded.
I stood over the Tinkerer, every sense on fire. I could hear his ragged, panicked breathing. I could smell the acrid tang of fear-sweat mixed with the refinery's stench. But I couldn't see her. She was smoke.
But even smoke has a weakness.
"Get up," I snarled, hauling the Tinkerer to his feet. He stumbled, clutching his throat, his eyes wide with a terror that went beyond the immediate threat. He'd seen a ghost.
I saw a problem that needed a solution. Her cloak bent light, but it couldn't ignore physics. Intense heat, dense particulate matter—it would distort the field, create a refraction I could track.
My gaze fell on a row of fifty-five-gallon drums, their sides weeping a dark, viscous fluid. The stenciled hazard warnings were faded but legible. Flammable. Perfect.
I shoved the Tinkerer behind a massive pillar of concrete. "Stay here. Don't move. Don't make a sound."
Without waiting for an answer, I stalked towards the barrels. I kicked the nearest one hard at its base. It tipped, groaning, and a thick wave of sludgy, foul-smelling oil spilled across the concrete floor, pooling in the grime. It spread quickly, a black mirror reflecting the grey dawn.
From a pouch on my belt, I pulled a phosphorus flare. I cracked the cap, and it ignited with a harsh, brilliant white light, chasing the shadows back for a moment. I tossed it underhand into the center of the oil slick.
The result was instantaneous. A low whoomph and the world became a maelstrom of fire and smoke. Flames erupted, hungry and orange, climbing the nearby machinery and casting a flickering, hellish light across the refinery. Thick, oily black smoke billowed upwards, coiling and churning, filling the vast space with a choking haze.
The battlefield had changed. It was no longer her world of perfect shadows. It was mine.
Through the roiling smoke, I saw it. A flicker. A distortion in the air, like watching the world through a warped piece of glass. She was fast, moving between the pillars and pipes, but the smoke and the shifting light of the fire were betraying her. Her silhouette was an unstable phantom, a human-shaped ripple in the smoke.
She knew she was exposed. The hunt was over; the fight was on.
The ripple solidified twenty feet away. She lunged from the smoke, a blade in each hand, moving with an eerie, silent grace that was completely at odds with the roaring fire around us.
I met her head-on. Our knives clashed, the hiss of steel on steel a sharp counterpoint to the crackling flames. This was a different kind of combat. Not the detached killing of a sniper or the explosive violence of a firefight. This was intimate. Brutal.
Her strikes were pure surgical precision, a fencer's dance of death. Feints and jabs aimed at the soft spots—the tendons in my wrist, the artery in my neck, the space between my ribs. She was a scalpel.
I was a hammer. My style was one of brutal economy. I didn't waste movement. Each parry was a bone-jarring block. Each counter was meant to cripple. I wasn't trying to out-fence her; I was trying to break her. When she lunged, I pivoted, using her momentum to slam her shoulder-first into a rusted iron pipe. She grunted, the sound swallowed by the fire, but she was impossibly resilient, spinning out of the impact and coming at me again.
We were a blur of motion in the fiery haze. Her cloak flickered erratically, sometimes rendering a limb invisible, sometimes flashing her entire form into view. The Tinkerer's terrified wheezing was a constant, pathetic soundtrack somewhere behind me. It grounded me. A reminder of the asset I had to protect.
She feinted low, and I fell for it, my block going to my gut. It was a setup. Her other hand, the one I hadn't tracked in the smoke, flashed upwards. The point of her knife drove towards my ribs. There was no time to dodge. I twisted, bringing my left forearm up.
Pain, sharp and hot, lanced up my arm as the blade bit deep into muscle and glanced off bone. Blood, shockingly red in the firelight, sprayed across my chest and spattered on the grimy floor. She tried to press the advantage, to drive the blade deeper, but I locked my arm against hers, muscle grinding against muscle.
The pain sharpened my focus. This had gone on long enough.
With a roar that was more animal than human, I used my superior weight and strength, shoving her backward through the thickest plume of smoke. She stumbled, momentarily blinded. In that instant, I was on her.
I slapped her knife hand away, my own blade darting in to slice across her wrist. Her knife clattered to the floor. Before she could bring her other weapon to bear, I had her. My wounded arm hooked under hers, my other hand clamping onto the back of her neck. I reversed our positions, spinning her around and locking my arm across her throat, my bicep pressing hard against her carotid artery. A chokehold. Simple. Final.
She struggled fiercely, a trapped animal, her body a whipcord of muscle thrashing against me. Her cloak went haywire, flickering violently between invisibility and solid form, the camouflage circuits shorting out in the intense heat and my physical pressure. For a moment, I saw her face, contorted in a silent snarl—pale skin, dark eyes burning with hate, a scar bisecting one eyebrow.
My voice was a low rasp, barely audible over the fire. "It's over."
It might have been regret I felt in that moment, or maybe just the grim acceptance of a necessary act. She was good. One of the best I'd ever faced. But she was in my way.
With a final, brutal twist, I torqued my body, putting all my weight and strength into the hold. There was a sharp, wet crack. Her body went limp in my arms.
I let her fall. She landed in a heap at the edge of the flames. Her therm-optic cloak sizzled, melting and burning away like plastic wrap, revealing the black tactical suit beneath before the fire consumed her entirely, leaving only a charring corpse.
The roar of the fire was the only sound for a long moment. I stood there, breathing heavily, the pain in my arm a dull, insistent throb. I looked down at my knife, its blade stained with her blood and my own. I wiped it clean on a piece of her burning cloak, the material disintegrating under the steel.
A shuffling sound made me turn. The Tinkerer was staring, his face a mask of awe and horror. He had just watched me kill a woman who, minutes ago, had been nothing more than a trick of the light. He was seeing me clearly for the first time.
"They'll keep coming," I said, my voice flat, devoid of any emotion. I began tearing a strip from my shirt to bind my bleeding arm. "Stay close, or you'll end up like her."
He just nodded, a jerky, puppet-like movement. The fear was still there, but it was mingling with something else now. A dawning realization. I wasn't just some bodyguard that was saving him. I was something else entirely. Something born from the same brutal world as the phantoms hunting us.
Miles away, in a mobile command unit parked in the shadow of a silent factory, Deadshot watched a bank of monitors. One screen, labeled WHISPER, had gone from displaying a distorted, heat-saturated feed to pure, horrifying static. He'd heard the clang of metal, the roar of the fire, a few grunts of exertion, and then…silence.
He clenched his jaw, the muscle ticking under his skin. "One down," he muttered to the empty room.
He zoomed in on another feed, a high-gain thermal image from a drone circling high above the refinery. Two heat signatures were moving deeper into the facility's maze. One was panicked, stumbling. The other was steady, purposeful, but it had a new, darker smear blooming on its left arm. A bleed.
Deadshot's eyes narrowed behind the visor of his helmet. A faint, cruel smile touched his lips.
"But he's bleeding now," he whispered to the static. "That's all I need."
Back in the refinery, I pushed the Tinkerer forward, deeper into the labyrinth of fire, smoke, and steel. The blood from my arm dripped a slow, steady trail onto the grimy floor behind us. A trail for the wolves to follow. Let them come. The hunt had just begun.