The scream echoed off the rust-eaten corrugated steel, a raw, guttural sound of fury and grief. It was Brick's name, torn from Deadshot's throat. I heard it rattle through my comms, a burst of static and rage that made me flinch. A heartbeat later, the high-velocity crack of his rifle split the air, punching a divot into the brickwork a foot from my head. Close. Too close. He was shooting blind, shooting from the heart. That was a mistake.
I took a half-step back, pulling the Tinkerer deeper into the shadow of a derelict loading bay. He was trembling, a bundle of frayed nerves and expensive tech wrapped in a worn jacket. His breath hitched with every gunshot.
"They know where we are," he whimpered, his voice thin and reedy.
"They know where we were," I corrected, my own voice a low murmur. I was listening, not to him, but to the chatter on their frequency. Deadshot was spiraling.
"—right there! I saw him! Give me an angle!"
Then, a new voice cut through the noise. It was cold, clean, and sharp as surgical steel. "Negative, Deadshot. You are compromised. Your position is generating too much noise. Stand down."
There was a pause, thick with resentment. "The hell I will. He took Brick."
"And your emotional response is threatening the objective," the voice replied, devoid of sympathy. "I am assuming tactical command. All units, switch to my channel. From now on, you operate on my mark. I am your eyes."
I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the night air. That was Kestrel. The strategist. The game had just changed. Deadshot was a rabid dog, dangerous but predictable. Kestrel was a spider, and she was already spinning her web.
"Drones are airborne," her voice continued, a calm monologue of death. "Thermal sweep of the industrial sector is active. Sniper teams Delta and Echo, establish overwatch on the refinery towers. Cover all major thoroughfares. Deadshot, you will relocate to Grid 4-Charlie and provide fire support on my command. No sooner. We are not chasing him. We are dissecting the map and removing every route of escape. Eyes up."
The raw anger was gone, replaced by a cold, suffocating efficiency. Deadshot was the gun, a powerful tool. But Kestrel was the mind guiding it. I grabbed the Tinkerer's arm, my grip firm.
"Time to go underground."
The sewer access was a jagged hole in the concrete, a broken maw smelling of rust and decay. I slid down the iron rungs without a sound, my boots finding purchase on the slimy metal. The Tinkerer followed, his movements clumsy and loud. His foot scraped against the wall, sending a shower of crumbling concrete into the stagnant water below. The splash echoed in the claustrophobic dark. I shot him a look, a sliver of moonlight from the opening above glinting off my mask. He froze, his face a pale mask of terror.
Down here, the world was reduced to sound and smell. The constant, rhythmic drip of water from unseen pipes. The scuttling of rats in the walls. The thick, cloying stench of stagnant water and chemical runoff. It was a suffocating, disorienting environment, designed to break a man's nerve. The Tinkerer was already halfway there, his breathing shallow and rapid.
I kept moving, my feet silent in the inches of foul water. My mind was a map, overlaying the city's sewer schematics with what I knew of Kestrel's tactics. The most direct route to the old subway tunnels was a straight line through this main conduit. Too obvious. A child could predict that path on a tactical display. She would expect me to take it, to funnel myself directly into a pre-arranged kill box. She wasn't chasing me; she was herding me. Every blocked exit, every drone overhead, was a shepherd's crook guiding the sheep to the slaughter.
So, I didn't take the main conduit. I veered left, into a smaller, narrower maintenance tunnel. The ceiling was low, forcing me to crouch. The air was hotter here, thick with the steam from a nearby water treatment facility.
"Where are we going?" the Tinkerer rasped, his voice tight with panic.
"Where she doesn't expect," I said, my focus on the comms chatter I was still monitoring. It was clean, efficient. Position reports, thermal signatures, status updates. Surgical. Kestrel was painting a picture of the battlefield, and right now, I was a ghost in her machine. But a ghost can still pull levers.
Up ahead, I saw a faint, flickering light. I held up a hand, and we stopped. I crept forward, peering around a corroded junction box. Two mercs, fodder by the look of their mismatched gear, were standing guard by a portable terminal. One of them spoke into his radio, his voice tinny in the enclosed space.
"Grid 2-Bravo clear. No thermal."
The man at the terminal tapped at the screen. A schematic of the tunnels glowed on his face. He was the drone operator, the local eyes for Kestrel's brain. They were a node in her network, a critical one. And they were about to have a very bad day.
I scanned the tunnel. A length of loose rebar. A discarded section of metal pipe. Perfect. I whispered to the Tinkerer, "Stay here. Don't make a sound."
I slipped back into the shadows, picking up the pipe. It was heavy, solid. With a flick of my wrist, I launched it end over end down a perpendicular corridor, away from us. It clattered against the far wall with a deafening clang that echoed through the entire sewer network.
The mercs jumped, spinning around, rifles raised.
"Contact! Sound spike in 2-Charlie!" one of them yelled into his comms.
"Confirm location," Kestrel's voice replied instantly.
"Unsure. Requesting drone support for a thermal sweep of the intersection."
The operator's fingers flew across the keyboard. On his screen, I saw the drone icon divert, its flight path now aimed at the source of the noise. That's when I activated my own device. A small, ugly box I'd salvaged from a military comms unit, its guts rewired and its purpose twisted. A signal scrambler, crude but effective. I'd tuned it to the drone's specific guidance frequency.
I didn't jam the signal. That would be too obvious. I corrupted it. I fed it a loop, a simple, elegant lie. The drone, programmed to seek out the most intense heat signature in its designated target area, was suddenly blind to the ambient cold of the tunnel. All it could see were the two warm bodies standing next to its operator's terminal.
The high-pitched whine began almost immediately. The mercs looked up, confused. The whine grew into a scream. The operator stared at his screen, his eyes wide with a dawning, terrible understanding.
"It's coming back! It's—!"
The drone slammed into their position like a miniature missile. The explosion was a concussive roar of fire and shrapnel that ripped through the tunnel. The shockwave hit me like a physical blow, and I grabbed the Tinkerer, pulling him back as the tunnel entrance ahead of us collapsed in a shower of flaming concrete and twisted metal.
Over the comms, for the first time, Kestrel's control fractured. A single, sharp curse. "Shit. All units, report. What was that? Drone operator, respond!"
Silence. Then, her voice returned, the momentary flash of anger replaced by an even colder calculation. "He's playing with the tools. Recalculate. He just sealed his own exit. Funnel him south."
She was good. She'd already turned my victory into another move on her board.
The sewers were no longer a route. They were a cage. Every junction, every manhole, every ventilation shaft—I could feel the invisible lines of fire crisscrossing above. Kestrel had used my own move to narrow my options. The deeper tunnels were a funnel, and she was waiting at the spout. We couldn't stay underground forever. The air was getting thinner, the stench more potent.
We reached a storm drain overflow chamber, a vast cavern of crumbling brick and cascading water. Grates high above on the street level cast down weak rectangles of grey light. I could hear the faint hum of a drone hovering above one of them. She had the exits locked down tight. Overlapping fields of fire. A sniper on the refinery tower would see anyone climbing the ladder. A drone would pick up the heat signature of anyone lingering near the grate. It was a perfect cage.
But every cage has bars. And between the bars, there is space.
"We're trapped," the Tinkerer breathed, his despair palpable.
"Not yet."
I looked around, taking inventory. A main steam pipe ran along one wall, weeping vapor from a cracked joint. Puddles of iridescent water reflected the light from the grates. A large shard of a broken mirror lying in the filth. These weren't obstacles. They were tools.
I pointed to the hissing steam pipe. "When I say, I need you to hit that joint with this." I handed him the rebar I'd picked up. "Hard as you can."
I moved to the other side of the chamber, positioning the mirror shard. I angled it just right, catching the light from a grate and bouncing it into a dark corner, creating a fleeting, man-shaped shadow. It wasn't much, but it was movement. It was a question mark on Kestrel's perfect map.
I listened to the comms. "Echo-1, you have a visual distortion? Grid 3-South."
"Negative, command. Could be a reflection. Standby."
The bait was taken. Now for the misdirection.
"Now!" I yelled to the Tinkerer.
He swung the rebar with all his might. It struck the steam pipe with a metallic clang. The cracked joint fractured, and a massive plume of scalding white steam erupted into the chamber, instantly obscuring everything in a thick, hot fog.
"Contact! Thermal spike! We've lost visual!"
Under the cover of the chaos, I moved. I didn't go for the obvious exit. I went for the wall, finding the handholds in the crumbling brick and climbing towards a small, forgotten drainage port twenty feet up, one I knew wasn't on the city's official schematics. It was a tight squeeze, but it led to a narrow alleyway. We were out of the sewer. But we were now on the surface. We were in the cage.
The alley was a canyon of brick and steel, littered with debris. I pressed myself against the wall, my heart hammering a steady, controlled rhythm. The Tinkerer huddled behind a dumpster, trying to make himself small. I knew she was out there. Kestrel. In one of those windows, on one of those rooftops, her rifle resting steady, her breath a slow, patient cloud in the cold air.
I could feel it. The weight of the crosshairs. A cold spider crawling on my skin. She wasn't just looking at the alley. She was studying it, waiting for a single pixel to move out of place. This was her domain. The long-distance kill. The art of patience.
I could have stayed in the shadows. I could have waited for dark. But that was her game, her tempo. It was time to play mine.
I took a deliberate step out from behind a rusted air conditioning unit, exposing the left side of my body for a fraction of a second before melting back into the shadows. Enough. Just enough for her to register my position, to adjust her aim, to begin the sequence. The slow intake of breath. The gentle pressure on the trigger. The universe narrowing to the space between her eye and the scope.
She would be expecting me to bolt. To run for the far end of the alley. To panic.
So I did the one thing she wouldn't expect.
I stopped moving entirely.
I stepped out from the shadows, fully into the grey light of the alley. I stood perfectly still, a statue in the crossfire. And then, slowly, as if I could hear the whisper of her breath across the hundreds of yards separating us, I turned my head. I looked up, past the rooftops and the water towers, and I found the glint of sunlight on glass. I looked directly into her scope. I let her see my eyes behind my mask.
I let her see that I knew.
For the first time since she took command, the comms were silent. No orders. No updates. Just the low hum of open-air frequency. Then, a single transmission, so quiet it was almost lost in the static. It wasn't an order. It wasn't a report. It was a realization, spoken in a breathy whisper.
Kestrel's voice.
"…He sees me."
A beat of stunned silence followed. Then Deadshot's voice, tight and raw, cut through. "What? What do you mean he sees you?"
There was no reply from Kestrel. I held her gaze through the glass, a predator acknowledging another. The entire industrial district seemed to hold its breath. In that single, frozen moment, the roles had reversed. The board had been flipped.
I was no longer the one being herded through the maze.
I was the monster waiting at the end of it. And for the first time, they were seeing me clearly. They weren't the hunters anymore. They were trapped in here with me.