The road to the hit was a spine of metal threaded along the cliff of a man-made night. Above, the city's arteries murmured: pipes singing, vents breathing, the reactor-light sieving down as a jaundiced drizzle. Noon was close. In the undercity, noon meant rain, and rain meant cover.
Jeremiah walked point along the catwalk, long coat unbuttoned, the hem licking at the wind. There was no hurry in his steps, only a practiced economy that made anyone who watched him slow down to match or speed up out of respect. He held a folded paper map like something he meant to apologize to later; under it, his other hand rested in the pocket of a jacket sewn heavier on the left where a plate hid. He didn't need to look back to know where everyone was. He never did.
Breuk was behind him, younger by four years and every bad decision. Two hands, both gloved against the cold steel of railings that didn't need you to love them. Cigarette in the corner of his mouth, ash clinging beyond reason. He kept pace because Jeremiah made pace a place you could keep.
Lig drifted a step to Breuk's right and one pace back, a habit as old as their first shared detention. His suit wasn't a suit, but it read as one—dark fabric that had seen cleaner rooms, collar turned down, sleeves rolled just enough to show he had wrists and not just words. He listened the way people listen when they intend to spend what they learn.
And Sef brought the noise.
He was Tev's brother by the blueprint of bone alone; everything else he'd chosen louder. Taller by a brow, wider by a moral. The prosthetic on his right arm wasn't a sleek limb so much as a declaration: a shoulder cradle, a feed belt running like a bandolier into a drum on his spine, and a forearm that housed a six-barrel autoloader with the boredom of a dragon chained between jobs. The barrels slept now, hoods on. Sef's left hand cradled a coil of line and a grapnel big enough to embarrass a hook. He wore a grin that suggested he'd made peace with a lot of enemies and a lot of breakfasts.
"Say it again," Sef said, because he liked stories told right before they were tested. "We stop the van, we take the man, we tuck him in, we go home. Simple like a first song."
Jeremiah didn't turn. "We stop three vans," he said. "First decoy one car ahead with empty cages. Second with clay on the seats to make heat shapes. Third is our man. Guards are underpaid and overslept. They'll be angry, not brave. We block the curve at the siphon bridge. Breuk and Lig on the magnet anchors. I take the rear wheel-man. Sef—" He glanced back once. "—you are the line that does not break."
Sef's grin spread until it met his eyes. "Brother, I am the wall they pay rent to."
Lig rubbed a thumb across the scuffed face of a stop-watch. "Response time on a panic from this sector is six and change," he said, half to Breuk. "Nine if they misroute to Upper. We're in and gone at four. If it stretches to five, we split. Our guest goes to ground in the village at B-14 by the cistern stairs. Jeremiah runs quiet. I run loud. Breuk—"
"—runs smarter," Jeremiah finished, and that earned him a small, private look from Lig that had nothing of the old resentment in it and everything of what it was on its way to becoming.
Breuk smoked, and the smoke admitted it was for show. "And Kane's folks?" he asked, because the name tasted like a nail.
Jeremiah tucked the map away as if he were putting the world back for later. "Kane's people will collect in thirty-six hours," he said. "We hold the package in the village until then. No sermons, no flags. We keep him breathing and bored."
"Name?" Sef said.
Jeremiah's mouth thought about becoming a smile and declined. "Doesn't matter," he said. "If you prefer one, call him Profit."
Lig chuckled once, like an approval stamped in ink. "Kane swears this one changes balance," he said. "Alive, he's leverage. Dead, he's a story that makes leverage for someone else."
"Thing about leverage," Sef said, patting the drum on his back, "is it's only good until the fulcrum breaks."
They crossed from catwalk to scaffold to a maintenance shelf that had no business carrying men but did anyway. Below, the siphon bridge arced across an old spill—black water telling itself it was a river. Pipes heaved overhead like the ribs of a sleeping animal. The convoy would come along the outer lane, where the curve bullied the driver and the inner wall bullied the mirrors. It was a good place to trap a thing that wanted to keep moving.
Jeremiah took out a pouch and parted it with two fingers. Inside, small cylinders lay nested like ammunition for an argument. "Anchors," he said. He handed one to Breuk, one to Lig. "Impact sticks. You make the wall magnetic at the cone. Sef pulls the belt. The first van rides the teeth. The second tries to go around and rides our iron. The third stops because it came to work and found a war. The driver throws his badge and his dignity and maybe a punch; you take his hand instead of the punch. We don't kill anyone we don't have to. We don't kill anyone we can pay."
"Rain at twelve," Lig said, eyes up. "Should be loud enough to pretend we're ghosts. Good day for polite violence."
"Every day's a good day for polite violence," Sef said. He unslung the grapnel. "You want loud, tell me. I can make the alphabet."
Jeremiah breathed in. It wasn't a sigh. It was a check of the air's willingness to be trusted. "No heroics," he said, for Sef's benefit. Then, to all of them: "No names on the floor. No names in the paperwork." His eyes found Breuk's for a heartbeat. "We finish the job."
They went to their marks, the way blood goes where a body instructs it. Breuk took a knee at the inner wall just past the apex of the curve, sighted down the lane, clicked the anchor's arming stud with his thumbnail. He could feel the vibration through the bolts into his tibia—the small shiver of an approaching weight. Lig crouched opposite, elegant even in the squalor, loose-limbed, hands ungloved. Sef lay prone behind a crate that had been a crate in a better life, the grapnel couched against his shoulder like a child that trusted him. Jeremiah stood near the seam where light had given up, coat drawn around him like a decision.
Two minutes to noon. The rain began before the bell—a fine thread, at first, then thicker, a thousand private curtains descended in unison. The smell of metal got clean for the length of a breath. The convoy arrived in that hiss: three boxy shapes in a row, their sides stamped with the kind of institutional optimism that survives budget cuts. Lights low. Tires shining.
"Now," Jeremiah said, and the word lived inside their heads in different accents and all meant the same thing.
Breuk rose and fired the anchor—thwack, a wasp affectation—and it kissed the wall at shoulder height and woke up. The steel sang to itself. Lig's anchor landed a length down, and the song doubled. Sef rose, hooked the grapnel into the cross-bolt, put his boots against the crate and leaned back with his back, the cable drawing a bright line across the lane just as the first van's nose found it.
The first van tried to say no with its brakes and discovered that not all no's are accepted. The line caught the bumper, the anchors pulled, the tires skidded sideways, and the van came to rest at an angle that made the paint on the doors decide what it was for. The second van tried to swing wide, cued by training to avoid obstacles by becoming one, and found Lig's magnet the way a knife finds a magnet at the edge of a workbench—suddenly, intimately, and with a sense of betrayal. It kissed the wall and stayed.
The third braked on time and stayed straight, the driver an old hand whose hands were not precious about the wheel. Jeremiah stepped into the lane with palms up, a man showing he had nothing to hide and a coat eager to hide everything. The warden's aide in the passenger seat lifted a hand to the dash radio and received a gentle look that suggested a different use for that hand. The aide dropped it. Breuk liked him for that—obedience to fear is an art.
Lig slid to the latch side as Jeremiah approached the driver's door. Sef kept the line taut, the barrels sleeping but with their eyes open. Rain drummed. "Good noon," Jeremiah said through the driver's window, and meant it. "Transportation delay. We'll reschedule your misfortune."
"Authorized?" the driver asked, because words have to be said in the right order no matter the weather.
"Always," Jeremiah said, and smiled in the shape that had introduced so many lies to so many doors. He rapped his knuckles on the door and it found the reason to open.
The rear doors of the third van were the kind that prefer supervision. Lig's tool learned their secrets politely. The smell from inside was transport-smell: old sweat, disinfectant with ambition, damp canvas. A man sat chained to an inner ring with dignity arranged around him like a cloak. He had the look of someone who had been important to the wrong people for a long time and had decided to forgive them later. Hair too long for a number. Eyes wrong for a prisoner. He looked at Lig first, which was a choice, then at Jeremiah, which was a correction, and then at Breuk, which was curiosity. Sef he didn't look at, because no one chooses to look into a storm.
"Kane's," the man said, as if that were a nationality.
Jeremiah didn't nod. He was careful about admitting affiliations to men whose wrists were still cuffed. "Ours for the day," he said.
"Name?" Lig asked, conversational, like you ask a person what tea they prefer.
"None that matters," the man said. His voice would've been good for teaching in a room with high ceilings. "Call me Silas."
Sef's barrels whirred once, a cat's purr. "Silas is a preacher's name," he said, amiable.
"It's a dead man's name," Silas said back, almost smiling.
Keys happened. Cuffs gave up. Hands were guided instead of grabbed. The driver lit a cigarette with apologies on his face for not shouting earlier; Jeremiah took the cigarette, inhaled once, and gave it back, absolution contained in the ash.
They were almost done being brilliant when the world remembered it had rules.
Sirens are lies told by speakers, but the response-team's howl carried the kind of clarity that says we were awake and nearby. Nine minutes had been rewritten into four. Somebody had been efficient, or lucky, or bored. It didn't matter which. Sef's head flicked up. Lig bent his attention toward the curve north. Jeremiah lifted a palm that said keep the plan's back straight.
"Third path," he said. "We split. Lig, with me. Sef—"
"—with the rain," Sef said, and smiled like a door closing.
They moved. Silas went with Breuk because Breuk's face was still a face, not a strategy. They stepped over the cable and around the angled van and through the spray toward the stairwell cut into the wall that only locals knew was there. Lig and Jeremiah angled the other way, stole the road with their bodies, and drew the eye because Jer had the gift of being interesting to trouble.
The stairwell was a spine cut out of damp rock. Breuk's boots rang; Silas' did not. "Keep low," Breuk said, the obvious elevated to sacrament. The rain came down like a secret being told too often. Above, the sirens turned the curve and came into view as a three-car wedge with a horn for a brain. Sef braced the cable, let it go, braced it again, and then—when the wedge committed—let it fall slack and flicked it aside with a twist of the gun-arm that moved the way memory moves: fast, decisive, ungentle. The wedge leader swerved to miss a threat that had ceased to be, kissed the wall anyway, and the second car kissed the first out of solidarity. The third found the hole and took it, because there is always one overachiever.
Breuk felt the stair vibrate. He didn't look back. He knew the sounds Sef's barrels made when they woke for work—the wait, the click, the whine, the hymn. He heard the hymn break out, felt it in his teeth, and kept moving because Sef's hymn meant you have work that isn't dying. Silas breathed behind him, calm as a man being led to a couch.
They came out onto a maintenance walkway under a lower pipe, the kind with valve wheels the size of wrestling rings. The nearby village—B-14 on Lig's map, Skell to the mouths of those who counted—sat tucked in an old drainage bowl, huts like barnacles, lights like hopes. Breuk pointed with his chin. "There," he said. "No papers, just doors."
"Doors are papers," Silas said. "You have to be able to read them."
They crossed the bridge made of mesh and mercy. A child in a yellow shirt watched them with the solemnity of a cat. An old woman tipped water from a pail into another pail with the grace of someone who had been paid in rhythm all her life. Breuk knocked on a door that didn't mind being knocked on. It opened to a room that answered to three names: home, shop, prayer. The woman who owned all three looked at Silas like she recognized a song's cadence without having heard the lyrics.
"Please," Breuk said. He didn't bring money out because money doesn't belong in first sentences. "It's a day for doing right by strangers."
She weighed him with a look that wasn't unkind and then moved aside. Words are sometimes less useful than hands. She pointed to a back room that had been a pantry before it was a refuge, and Silas went in and sat on a low cot like someone who believes in furniture. Breuk turned back to the door and caught his own breath, tried to make it look like he hadn't lost it. "We'll be back," he said to the woman. "Before dark, if the world is gentle."
"The world," she said, "pays no mind to how you ask."
He thanked her anyway. Outside, the village noise tucked itself down to a murmur for their sake and then inflated back to its usual little songs. The sirens were closer, which meant they had been late to decide where the path split and were catching up with their mistake with enthusiasm.
He ran back toward the bridge.
Halfway across, he saw the world tilt.
The enforcement car that had found the hole came at the catwalk from the far side, wrong lane, wrong speed. Sef stood on what passed for the centerline, gun-arm lifted, barrels waking again. For a moment that was nearly a picture, Breuk saw Sef as all of him: the man who had given his mother his first paycheck in full, the man who had picked up a washer dropped by a child and made it into a ring, the man who laughed first to make it safe for anyone else to laugh. Then the picture moved. The autoloader sang. The car shuddered and sprayed glass. The driver ducked too late, the passenger not at all. The car bounced the guard rail, flipped its contempt and landed on its pride. Sef stepped forward to make a terrible thing less terrible and that's when the second car tapped him from the side like a friend trying to get his attention at a bar.
It wasn't fast. That's what Breuk remembered and would remember: the slowness with which Sef's body chose the ground. The way the gun-arm took the angle and the rest of him followed, the grin still somewhere in transition. The way his left hand, the human one, reached for the railing not out of panic but habit. The way the barrels kept whirring even as the world said enough.
Breuk was running before the car completed its apology to gravity. He didn't count the steps. Counting would've made them fewer. He reached Sef as Sef reached the idea that there might not be another breath. He put a hand—whole, human—on the big man's chest and felt the refusal there. "No," Breuk said, as if the word could make anything go back into place. "No, big man. Not like this."
Sef found him with his eyes and those eyes did what eyes do when they want to be kind to a man they won't see again. "Tell Tev," he said, and there was so much life still in his voice Breuk wanted to break something that looked like a rule. "Tell him I chose it."
"Shut up," Breuk said, because the alternative was to shout and calling the dead back with volume has never worked.
Sef smiled one last time because he had always liked to obey at least one command per day. "You still owe me a drink," he said, and then exhaled in the special way that isn't followed by an inhale. The barrels whirred twice, stubborn against the silence, and then spun down like a toy told it was bedtime.
Gunfire elsewhere. Lig's kind—precise, uncomplaining. Breuk wiped a sleeve across his face and stood into a world where the rain had remembered it was noon. He dragged Sef by the collar to the rail because leaving him in the road made no kind of righteousness. He put the man's back to the wall as if posture could lend dignity and then turned because he could not stand to be good for one second longer.
Down the curve, Jeremiah ran his portion of the plan into an oncoming argument. He'd drawn two cars off, led them into a corridor where their sirens were louder than their proof, and then found a door that chose to betray him at the hinge. Breuk saw the door, the hinge, the way Jer's boot stuck on a lip of warped metal, the way the baton came down too clean to be improvisation. He pressed forward and would have made every bad choice he had to make to keep that from finishing, but Lig's hand found his collar and hauled him back with a mercy that felt like murder.
"Don't," Lig said, the syllable harsh. "He won't let you pay that bill."
Breuk fought him anyway, stupid as heat. "Let go," he growled, and it sounded like a boy.
"He told you to finish the job," Lig said, not letting go. "We finish the job."
He was right. He was disgusting. Breuk allowed himself to be correct.
They ran. The bridge trembled, offended by all this drama on its back. In the village, a door stayed closed because a promise had been made. Breuk hit the mesh and felt it hit back in the soles of his boots. Lig's breath was measured. Breuk's was not.
When they reached the hut, Silas stood, ready as if he'd heard the whole thing through the wall in a language made of air. The old woman had put a cup of water at his foot. He had not drunk. He picked it up now and offered it to Breuk, and Breuk hated him for a good second and then drank anyway because hate doesn't carry water.
"Change of plans," Lig said. He didn't look like a man who had just watched his friend die and another be taken. He looked like a man adding a column to a ledger. "Kane's pickup moves. New place, new time. We walk, not drive."
Silas inclined his head. "I am very good at walking."
The old woman watched them over the rim of her world and said nothing. Breuk wanted her to say go with God or go to hell or go carefully—anything that gave the air a shape. She let them out instead. Sometimes permission is the only benediction the poor can afford.
They left the village behind and took a maintenance gallery that smelled like old coins and wet metal. The sirens fell away like a bad idea. The reactor light above strobed once, a heartbeat that forgot its count. Breuk held that flicker in his mouth like a seed he might never plant. He tried not to think of Sef on the wall or Jeremiah on the floor. He failed. The failure made a home inside his ribs.
At the rendezvous—a pipe yard where rust had eaten geometry—they waited under an awning of sheet metal while the rain made a curtain around them. Lig stood with his back to a pillar and his eyes on the approach like a man guarding a vault. Breuk paced because stillness would have turned into something he wasn't ready to name. Silas sat on a crate and counted the beats between drips, a habit that would have annoyed a different man and somehow calmed Breuk.
Kane's people arrived as shadows first, then men. They came two and two, unarmed by law and armed by posture. The lead wore gray like it was a family color. He didn't introduce himself because the dead make introductions redundant. He looked at Silas and Silas looked back, and a conversation happened that did not require the rest of them.
"You have him," the lead said to Lig. He said it to Lig because Lig would own the choice.
"We had him yesterday," Lig said. "Today we are giving him away."
The lead nodded once, then looked at Breuk. The kind of look that counts rings on trees. "You took losses," he said.
Breuk's mouth was a hard line. "We will send you the bill."
"We will burn it," the man said, and smiled in a way that admitted it was a bad joke. He gestured to Silas. "Time."
Silas rose. He put a hand on Breuk's shoulder as he passed. It was a useless gesture and therefore precious. "Your friend chose it," he said, low.
"He always does," Breuk said.
Silas went into the rain with the men who believed in him. He didn't look back, not because he was ungrateful but because looking back is a luxury. The curtain swallowed them at twenty paces, and the pipe yard resumed being a place for old metal to remember shapes it used to be.
They walked home slow because there was no home to arrive at quickly. The road found them tired. The rain found them honest. When the sirens sounded again, they were far away and meant for someone else.
Breuk and Lig stopped at the edge of a platform that looked down over the undercity. The reactor glow was a bruise behind clouds. The rain came in organized sheets, exactly on time. Breuk's cigarette didn't survive lighting and that felt like an omen. He didn't care for omens.
"I'm going to the jail," he said, as if the decision were in the weather. "He won't tell me to leave twice."
"You'll get yourself locked beside him," Lig said, not unkind.
"Then I'll have good company," Breuk said.
Lig chewed that and set it aside. "Kane will say the job was clean," he said. "He will count a success by the metric that benefits him."
Breuk stared into the rain and saw a thousand faces of water. "Do you believe him?"
"I believe he believes himself," Lig said. "That's worse."
They didn't talk about Sef. Not then. You don't speak the dead while their echoes are still learning the room.
Later, Jeremiah would be processed by men who had jobs they did well and principles they wore like belts. He would not break or bend. He would tell Breuk to lead and mean it, which is the cruelty of trust. Lig would stand in the visiting room with his hands in his pockets and offer strategies that sounded like maps to quieter places. Breuk would nod and go outside and light a cigarette that would burn all the way down to the filter without him remembering to smoke it.
Later, too, a piece of guilt would take up a tenancy behind Breuk's heart and refuse eviction, growing into opinions: that Kane had set the board, that the cars had come too fast to be coincidence, that faith could move cities and murder friends with equal ease. He would hold those opinions like a knife he wasn't sure whether to use on himself or the world.
For now, the heist was a finished thing pretending to still be happening. The rain washed the lane where Sef had chosen gravity over bravado. The wall kept its color. The pipes sang their stupid lullabies. Somewhere a kettle hissed and somewhere else a record scratched and started over.
Breuk flicked his cigarette into the mouth of the city and watched the ember fall, a little star unlearning its sky. He put both hands on the rail because he could. He closed his eyes. He opened them. He turned toward the way a man goes when he intends to keep a promise.
"Let's go tell Tev," Lig said quietly.
Breuk nodded and started walking.