Dawn has stiffened into a pale, brittle morning. I stand on the edge of the Cobalt Warehouse roof, the concrete slick with rust‑spattered rain, the wind tugging at the frayed edge of my coat. My left arm throbs—a clean, hot cut that I've already mapped onto a timetable in my mind. Pain is a metronome; it does not slow me.
Across the street, a little further in, a lone spot of motion flickers in a nest of glass and carbon. Kestrel. She sits in a sniper's cradle, her rifle a silver spear pointed at the arteries of the district.
I pause on the rooftop that overlooks Kestrel's grid. My breath fogs in the morning chill, then I draw a thin black bag from my harness and begin to unpack the tools of misdirection. A wet jacket—still dripping—gets slung over a satellite dish, the fabric's dark sheen absorbing and reflecting the faint sunrise. Heat‑trap cans of hot oil sit beside a hand‑warmer wrapped in a rag, each one a phantom human IR signature that will pop like a bright flare in her thermal scope.
Mirrors—small, polished discs salvaged from broken security cameras—are angled toward the sun, catching the low light and flashing it into the line of sight where Kestrel's scope sweeps. The glints are brief, but they are enough to make a trained eye hesitate, to ask whether a glint is a stray piece of metal or a moving target.
I snap a remote noise‑maker onto the lip of a vent two blocks over. When activated, it will mimic the sound of boots scrabbling on metal, a phantom footfall that will echo through the steel ribs of the district.
Finally, I tap the stolen comms earpiece against my ear and listen to Kestrel's voice—a clinical cadence, each word measured, each coordinate called with a surgeon's precision. She talks to herself, to the empty air, a habit that betrays confidence and, in my eyes, a pattern.
The stage is set. The pieces are placed. The board is a city of steel, steam, and shadows. I step back, my arm bleeding a thin line down my sleeve, and watch the sun climb higher, turning the rooftops into a field of glass knives.
Kestrel begins her sweep. "Sector Alpha, four‑zero‑two‑nine…," she whispers, her voice a soft static through the comms. The scope slices through the world in cold slices, every pixel a potential target. My decoys begin to sing.
The wet jacket catches a gust, flapping like a flag of surrender. In the thermal feed, a hot pulse flickers where the oil can rests, a crimson beacon that does not belong. The mirrors flash a sudden glint that catches her eye for a heartbeat, forcing her to shift her focus.
She fires a tracer round, the bright line arcing toward a decoy that hangs like a phantom on the vent. The bullet pinpoints the oil can, a perfect kill—but the angle is just a degree off. I watch her, studying the micro‑adjustments she makes, the way her breathing slows for a fraction of a second after each shot, the way her trigger squeeze tightens then eases. She is a machine, but machines have habits.
The data streams through my earpiece, a silent river of clicks and beeps. Each correction she makes is a breadcrumb, each pause a pause in the rhythm of the city. I am already mapping the curve of her next move, the way she will try to compensate for the heat signature by lowering her scope angle, the way she will tilt her head to catch the glint. The duel is no longer about bullets; it is about patterns.
The wind shifts, carrying a plume of steam from a busted HVAC vent. It rolls like a sheet of oil‑slick glass across the skyline, turning the world into a blur of reflections. I step into the vapor, the steam hugging my coat, masking my silhouette. Kestrel's scope flickers, the thermal image dissolving into a white haze.
I move not in a straight line, but like water—around edges, through the gaps between vents, over the ribs of a derelict crane. The mirrored discs catch the sun, sending shards of light ricocheting down the alleyways, each flash a momentary distraction that forces her to adjust, to think, to doubt.
She recalibrates, her voice steadier now, "Sector Delta, shifting to ninety‑two." She anticipates my path, moving her aim to where she thinks I must be—right where I am not. The city is a maze of steel and concrete; a single wrong assumption is a death sentence in this game.
I pause when a vent releases a burst of scalding steam that wraps around a broken pipe, turning the metal surface into a mirrored lake. For a second, I am both seen and unseen—my outline reflected, then erased. I smile, a brief flash of teeth visible only to myself.
I decide to give her a glimpse—just enough to pull the trigger. I step out from the shadows, exposing a shoulder, the scar from a previous encounter catching the morning light. It is a silhouette, a dark cut against the rusted sky.
Kestrel's scope locks onto the outline. Her breath hitches, the click of her trigger echoing like a needle through fabric. The round grazes my shoulder, a shallow nick that sends a spray of blood onto the edge of the roof. The sound is sharp, the sting of copper on steel.
I do not flinch. I let the injury be the offer, the invitation. I hear the comms feed blossom with data—a burst of audio, a spike in her breathing frequency. I harvest it, ingesting the rhythm of her heart, the tremor in her voice, the slight delay before she reloads. The noise‑maker below erupts, a cascade of synthetic footfalls that drag her attention across a string of decoys like beads on a string.
In the flicker of her focus, I slip—unseen—across a narrow gap to a lower roof. The bleeding arm is a hot reminder that I am still alive, still moving, still a ghost that refuses to be pinned.
Kestrel's confidence swells. "Adjusting for moving target," she murmurs, her fingers icy around the rifle. She tightens her grip, the metal of the stock cold against her palm. Her eyes narrow, pupils dilated, the world a high‑contrast silhouette.
She does not hear me approach. The rooftops are a lattice of stone and steel, each seam a muffled pathway for footsteps that have been trained to be silent. I follow the breath pattern I captured earlier—her inhalation, her exhalation—a rhythm that tells me exactly where she will be a second from now.
I slide into the shadow of her own camo netting, the black fabric that blends with the night sky, and I close the distance until the smell of gun oil on her gloves is the only thing I can detect. My hand rests on the cold metal of her rifle, my fingers brushing the barrel as I ease my weight onto the back of her neck.
"You should've stayed in the shadows," I whisper, my voice low enough that only she can hear.
She tries to yank the safety lever, claws digging into the sling, eyes wide with a panic that never belongs to a sniper. Her training snaps into a defensive reflex, but my forearm is an iron vise. The struggle is intimate, terrible—two predators caught in a moment of raw, animalistic contact.
I snap the sling tight around her throat, a clean, precise motion. Her chest convicts, a shudder of life caught in my grip, then goes slack. I hold her until the weight of her body shifts, then I release, feeling the sudden void where her pulse once throbbed.
She falls over the edge, her dark silhouette disappearing into the grey morning below, a husk of metal and carbon spiraling down into the labyrinth of steel.
The rooftop goes still, a sudden, oppressive quiet that seems louder than any gunfire. Kestrel's scope clatters to the ground, the metallic sound echoing like a gavel striking a courtroom of steel.
Deadshot's voice crackles through the channel, a mixture of fury and disbelief. "Ghost? What the—she was my eyes. She was—"
His words break, the static swallowing the rest. The team's comms explode into a storm of frantic orders, flares of panic lighting up the channel like fireflies, none of them steady enough to locate me. They are searching for a ghost that refuses to be found.
I wipe the blood from my hands on the sniper netting, the fabric absorbing the dark as if it were nothing more than another piece of grime. My earpiece picks up a short‑range feed from the Tinkerer's location, a flicker of green light on a broken monitor confirming that the data I harvested is already being uploaded.
My expression is unreadable, but the action I have taken plants a new truth in this industrial graveyard: the hunters can die, just like the hunted. The city's steel heart beats on, oblivious to the death that has just transpired on its roofs.
I turn, the wind now a cold whisper against my skin, and begin moving again. My steps are silent, my silhouette already melting back into the urban sprawl.
From the high tower of the command building, Deadshot watches the feed go cold. His silhouette is a jagged outline against a wall of monitors, each screen a window into the night. He clenches his fists, the composure that had been his armor cracking, veins pulsing in his forearms.
Below, several rooftops away, I stand on the edge of a rusted catwalk, looking down at the city—a maze of steel, steam, and shadows. The wind carries Deadshot's voice, thin and tight across the comms: "You made a mistake."
There is no reply, only the sound of my boots finding their next foothold. I move, a ripple in the endless night, the hunt accelerating with each silent step. The city below is a chessboard of iron and fog, and I am the ghost that makes the next move.
The sunrise now burns brighter, turning the broken windows into eyes that watch, the steam vents into mouths that whisper. Somewhere in this industrial wasteland, another game begins, and the only certainty is that the shadows will always be waiting for the next silhouette to step into them.