“Where?” Lessa exclaimed.

  They both scampered along the wall, moving to the side until they reached a sheltered alcove. A bolt of plasma seared past Jace’s nose, leaving stains in his eyes, and he pushed his head back. “It’s a dead end.”

  At the end of the alley was a brick wall with pipes running up it. They couldn’t pass through it.

  Well, Jace could, but Lessa couldn’t come with him. He wasn’t leaving her behind.

  He leaned out past the alcove edge for a few seconds, but two more plasma blasts chased him back into cover immediately, kicking up stone, brick, and concrete dust. Sparks flashed, and molten holes simmered.

  Worse, Jace didn’t know how long he could keep going without medical intervention. Blood dripped down his arm and beaded under his fingernails, and his muscles were getting weaker. He needed to relax and heal. Every time he moved his arm and hand, his bicep cried out in pain, and his wounded hand sent bolts of screaming, white-hot pressure through his arm.

  “You know…” Jace whispered, “I was starting to think it was going to have to be a Wielder who’d take me down.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s the kinda power that modern weapons put into the hands of average people,” Lessa whispered back. “Not like the old days. Wizards and mages and stuff, getting by on their strength and strength alone. But we’re not dead yet.”

  Jace sucked in a deep breath and clenched his eyes, trying to focus his mind. “You’re right.”

  Across the alley was a ladder, but it had no cover. If they climbed it, the soldiers would be free to fire on them at will.

  But if they did climb, they could take the rooftops, and get a lead on the scavengers that way.

  “We’ll need cover to climb,” he said. “I’ll distract them. The hyperdash should be off cooldown by now.” But he remembered he could check easily, and he did—sure enough, the image of it inside his foundation ring was crystal clear. “Once you get up, start shooting and clear the way for me.”

  “Sounds like a plan.” She pulled back the bolt of her rifle, opening the chamber. It still had plenty of shots left.

  Without waiting for a signal, Jace used the hyperdash, flashing out of cover, passing diagonally through a wall, and appearing in front of the nearest soldier. He impaled the startled man, then hid behind his body and used him as a shield. Shots pelted the corpse, and stinking, searing flesh filled Jace’s nostrils. He winced, hating the weight of the extra dead body, but in equal measure not wanting to die him.

  Then, the blasts stopped. Jace pushed aside the corpse.

  By now, at least ten more scavengers with plasma rifles had gathered in front of the alley, all pointing their weapons. And Jace had just emerged right in front of them.

  As they pulled back their rifles’ bolts and their aim, he darted to one side, holding out his sword and cutting through one more along his way.

  One charged with a bayonet pointing straight forward, but before he could impale Jace, a bolt of plasma flashed down from the rooftops, four storeys above, and struck the scavenger in the shoulder. He fell to the side. Jace dove between the scrambling men, cut down one more, then sprinted to the ladder.

  The scavengers let him, instead interested in the rooftop shooter—who was more dangerous than a swordsman running away from them.

  When he reached the ladder, he scaled it, ignoring the blazing pain in his hand. Plasma blasts flared and flashed in his periphery, and their whine was almost deafening, but it wasn’t aimed at him. Chunks of the flat rooftop ridges flew up in the air, amidst clouds of smoke and sparks. The scavengers were aiming for Lessa.

  But she’d have enough sense to find cover. Jace knew it.

  And when the barrage slowed, Lessa peered up once more to take another shot, keeping their attention focussed on her as Jace climbed.

  He needed it, too. His injured hand barely let him close his fingers anymore, and each time, it took a direct concentration of willpower. Fingers slipped and slid on blood, and he barely had any grip.

  When he made it to the top, he swung his legs over and flopped down over the ridge, landing hard on the gravel-stucco rooftop, panting.

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  Up here, everything was flat, though at different levels. The rooftops were concrete or ballasted rubber, with railings or ridges all around them, and machinery he couldn’t name. Chimneys huffed starcoal smoke, boilers sent up columns of steam, and neon signs spilled some of their light back onto the rooftops. There was no other source of light.

  But Jace couldn’t just stay on his back forever. He pushed himself up and ran to Lessa, keeping low, and said, “We need to get back to the Wrath.”

  “If we just go straight back, they’ll follow us.” She crawled away from the edge of the building, flat on her stomach, holding her rifle in front of her.

  “We’ll have to take a long route, lose them, then circle back.”

  The ladder clanged and shook. Someone was climbing, and it was probably another scavenger.

  Lessa slung her rifle over her shoulder and crawled away from the edge of the building, then, when out of the angle of fire, stood upright and sprinted along the rooftop. Jace followed, first a few paces behind, but he caught up before the reached the opposite side of the rooftop. They turned sideways to slip between a pair of smokestacks, then jumped up onto the ridge around the edge of the rooftop.

  Another alleyway waited ahead. This time, the walkway was five storeys below, with lattices and sharp debris crowding its bottom street. Faint green eyes glimmered in the darkness, waiting to pounce. Neither of them would survive a fall like that.

  “Can you make the jump?” Jace asked Lessa.

  “Give me a running start, and I can. You?”

  “I…should.”

  Jace hadn’t tested his jumping ability recently, but he didn’t have a hyperdash available, and they didn’t have time to let it charge back up.

  But he should have been able to jump farther, with how he’d enhanced his strength.

  He pressed his back up against the smokestack, then jumped off. His legs instinctively wheeled beneath him, but he wrenched them under control. He sailed through the air in a slight arc and landed with a thud, the impact leaving tiny cracks on the surface of the concrete ridge on the other side. To stop himself from falling back, he kept sprinting forward until he reached a metal box shielding a clump of machinery.

  Lessa jumped right behind him, reaching forward with her arms. She lost height quickly, but reached out and gripped the edge with her hands and hauled herself up to the rooftop. There, she swung a leg up and jumped back to her full height.

  “Didn’t think you’d try to tread air like that.” She smirked.

  Jace rolled his eyes. “Would you like me to stay at the edge next time to catch you?”

  She stared at him, eyes flicking up and down, then said, “Hey, I wouldn’t hate it.”

  “I—”

  Before he could finish, a plasma blast whined out from across the street, and they both ducked. It smashed into the box of machinery behind them with a thud, letting out an explosion of sparks.

  A scavenger had reached the top of the ladder the building over.

  Lessa pulled her rifle off her shoulder and aimed it, then fired. The bolt seared a hole in his chest, and he fell backward off the ladder.

  “Come on,” Jace said. “If we pick up speed, it’ll get easier.”

  They sprinted along the rooftops, first navigating away from the cargo harbour. Smokestacks and steam columns whirled by, and neon lights flashed in his periphery. Signs, holograms, billboards, all advertising products or establishments. He dodged sparking clumps of wires or ducked under rain-catching tarps and clotheslines.

  With each jump, traversing the alleyways became easier. He understood how his body would react to each leap, how he had to position his legs for impact, how—for the longest jumps—he had to tuck his chin and roll when he landed. Lessa improved too, especially when she had a long run-up to build speed over, and Jace only made good on his joking offer once—over an especially wide alley that even his enhanced strength struggled to get him across.

  Upon landing, he immediately turned around, reached out, and grabbed Lessa’s wrist before she plummeted into the alley, then helped her climb up to the top. “You good?”

  “Would’ve been better if you caught me with both arms.” She grinned. “You know, cradle—”

  “I can’t carry you!”

  He actually wasn’t certain about that. She was pretty scrawny, and he wasn’t sure how he stacked up in a pure carrying capacity anymore. But now wasn’t the time to find that out.

  They left the restaurant district and neared an administrative district. The buildings here had sloped, shingled roofs, and instead of neon signs to light their way, they had to rely on the pale blue glow of the streetlights below. They ran along gutters and jumped from eave to eave, or crossed between buildings on stretched-out maintenance scaffolding.

  Finally, they stopped on a rooftop with a shallow slope. They’d weaved in and out of enough rooftop equipment, and taken a tortuous enough route over the rooftops of the stilt city, that the scavengers were nowhere to be seen.

  Panting, Jace leaned back against the shingles and stared up at the night sky. The giant anti-hyperspace net around the planet glowed brighter in the night—an enormous, neon orange mesh. It drowned out the stars, and cast the entire surface in a sickly orange glow.

  As soon as he and Lessa had caught their breath, he said, “If we go down to the streets and head generally…” He pointed back toward the harbour. “Generally that way, we should find our way back.”

  It’d be easy to get lost and turned around in a city like this, but at the same time, what they needed was easy enough to find.

  She nodded, then said, “But keep a low profile, this time? We don’t need to get into any more trouble tonight.”

  “Will do.”