Michael's words hung in the dusty air of the abandoned apartment, thin and utterly insane.
"So I'll walk in like one."
Jinx just stared at him.
Her face, usually a mask of cynical defiance, was now completely blank with disbelief.
She slowly lowered the scanner, placing it on the grimy windowsill with a soft click.
"Kid," she said, her voice dangerously quiet. "Have you lost your mind?"
"Did you breathe in too many of those spores back there?"
"Let me spell it out for you one more time."
She pointed a finger, trembling with frustration, towards the storage facility across the street.
"That place is a perfect trap."
"There is a sensor grid that can probably detect a mouse fart from a hundred yards."
"There are snipers on the rooftops."
"There are black-ops goons who eat people like us for breakfast."
"And at the center of it all, there are three spectral assassins who can literally erase you from reality."
She turned to face him, her electric-blue eyes blazing with a desperate, frustrated fire.
"There is no way in."
"It's over."
Michael didn't flinch.
He just shook his head, a strange, cold calm settling over him.
It was the echo of the Void, the predatory logic of the monsters he'd consumed. It was a clarity that felt both powerful and deeply wrong.
"You're thinking like a scrapper, Jinx," he said, his voice even. "You're thinking about walls and locks."
"You're looking for a door to kick down or a fence to climb."
"That's not the cage."
He stepped closer to the window, his gaze fixed on the quiet, sleeping facility.
"The cage isn't the fence."
"The cage isn't the guards."
"The cage is the Ghosts."
Jinx frowned, confusion warring with her frustration. "What are you talking about?"
"They're generating the sensor grid, right?" Michael reasoned, thinking out loud. "Their phasing technology is creating the web."
"So?"
"So the web isn't perfect," he said, a spark of an idea igniting in his mind. "It's a power source. It has limits. It has rules."
He turned to her, his own eyes now burning with a wild, desperate light.
"You're trying to figure out how to sneak past the guards."
"I'm trying to figure out how to make the guards open the door for me."
Jinx let out a short, harsh laugh that sounded like a bark.
"Okay, now I know you're crazy," she said, shaking her head. "They're not going to just let you waltz in."
"No," Michael agreed. "They're not."
"But what happens when you put too much pressure on one point in a spider's web?"
"It breaks," Jinx answered automatically, then her eyes widened slightly as she began to see the shape of his insane logic.
"Exactly," Michael confirmed. "The Ghosts are the pillars holding up the web. What happens if all three pillars run to the exact same spot at the exact same time?"
Jinx was silent for a long moment, her mind, honed by years of surviving in the city's deadliest corners, turning the problem over and over.
"Their phasing fields… they'd overlap," she murmured, her voice barely a whisper. "The energy required would be massive."
"It would have to cause some kind of feedback loop," she continued, her initial disbelief giving way to a grudging, tactical curiosity. "A short-out. A brown-out in the grid."
"Or a blind spot," Michael finished. "A temporary shadow in their perfect web. A place where the sensors just… stop seeing for a few seconds."
The plan was laid bare between them, hanging in the air, beautiful and terrible in its simplicity.
It was suicide.
It was genius.
It was their only chance.
"It's a theory, kid," Jinx said, her voice still laced with doubt. "A wild guess based on nothing but a gut feeling."
"What's your gut feeling telling you right now?" Michael challenged.
Jinx looked out the window, at the silent soldiers, at the invisible web of death. She thought about trying to sneak past them, about the certainty of being caught and erased.
She thought about her fallen comrades, the Rust Dogs.
She let out a long, weary sigh, the sound of a woman who had run out of all other options.
"My gut is telling me we're probably going to die," she said with a grim, humorless smile.
"But it's better than dying doing nothing."
A new energy sparked between them. The frantic tension of prey was gone, replaced by the sharp, focused energy of predators planning a hunt.
"Okay," she said, her voice all business now. "Let's say your crazy plan works. How do we make three super-assassins run to the same spot?"
"We give them a reason to," Michael said.
"We give them bait."
Jinx looked at him. "It has to be You"
He nodded. "They're hunting an 'anomaly'. An 'Echo-01'. They're hunting me. I'll release a pulse of my Void Energy. Just a tiny one. A whisper."
"It'll be like ringing a dinner bell," Jinx muttered, a knot of genuine worry tightening in her stomach. "They'll be on you in seconds."
"That's the point," Michael said. "I draw them all to the far corner of the facility. While they're converging on me, you'll be on the opposite side, waiting."
"The blind spot should open up right in front of you," he explained. "You'll have maybe a few seconds to slip through before the grid reboots."
"And then I'm inside," Jinx finished, her mind racing. "Alone. In a cage full of soldiers. While you're outside playing tag with ghosts."
"You're the one who can get through the locks," Michael stated. "You're the scrapper."
"And you're the only one who can survive more than two seconds against those things," she shot back.
It was a perfect, terrible division of labor.
Jinx stared at him, her gaze intense, searching his face for any sign of hesitation, of fear.
She saw none.
All she saw was a cold, hard resolve that didn't belong on a kid's face. It was the look of a soldier, a hunter who had already accepted the cost of the mission.
She didn't know if it was bravery or if the strange, soul-eating power he wielded was slowly burning the fear out of him.
She wasn't sure which possibility scared her more.
"Alright, kid," she finally said, her decision made. "We do it your way."
She stood up, her movements now filled with a renewed, deadly purpose.
"But we're not going in there with just a knife and a pistol."
"If we're going to kick this hornet's nest," she said, a grim, determined glint in her eyes. "We're going to need a bigger boot."
"Follow me."
She turned and walked towards the back of the apartment, towards a solid brick wall that looked like it hadn't been touched in fifty years.
She ran her hand along the grimy surface, found a loose brick, and pushed.
With a soft groan of protesting hinges, a section of the wall swung inward, revealing a dark, narrow passage.
"First rule of the Undercroft," she said, glancing back at him with a crooked smile.
"Always have a back door."