SIX MONTHS LATER | NEW YORK CITY. AREA 003.

  The first thing Rafie Ortiz noticed was that even the snow looked sick.

  From the open hatch of the flash?copper, Queens cemetery spread underneath them like a bad scan. Rows of stones half?buried in late February slush, tree branches clawing at a low sky, fog clotted so thick it turned the setting sun into a smeared white disc.

  The second thing he noticed was that his stomach was trying to crawl up his throat.

  “Ugh,” someone behind him muttered. “Anyone else feel like we flew into a bone mixer?”

  “Watch your metaphors,” their squad lead, John, said tightly. “You’ll scare the new kids.”

  Rafie tightened his grip on the safety rail and pretended his palms weren’t damp. He’d been with Area 003’s Urban Response for three years; he didn’t count as a new kid anymore, at least not on paper.

  His stomach seemed to strongly disagree.

  Through the cockpit glass, he could see the other flash?coppers circling. Three at least. A fourth shimmered in and out of sight further up—the Advanced Force, probably, with the good transfer rigs and the really nice life insurance.

  “Command says all five Urban Response units are already on?site.” John’s voice came clipped over the cabin speakers. “Class?A volatility, charm?type signatures. We’re backline support. We land, we anchor, we don’t freelance. Clear?”

  A chorus of affirmatives rattled around him.

  “Also,” someone to his left whispered, not quite under their breath, “I heard the golden child’s here.”

  Rafie turned. Cho, the ward tech, had her helmet half?unsealed, eyes bright despite the oppressive air.

  “The what?” he asked.

  “The golden child.” She wriggled her fingers dramatically. “The dark horse from the Games? Area 001’s mortal intern? White Tiger’s kid? People are calling him all sorts of things.”

  Rafie snorted. “He’s not actually his kid.”

  “Obviously.” Cho rolled her eyes. “But you know—rumours. ‘Bai Hu’s hand?picked mortal.’ ‘The one who cracked the Commander's Nightmare.’ ‘The student who broke Game Thirty?Nine.’”

  John cut in dryly over comms. “The incident is officially designated the Thirty?Ninth Realm?Barrier Termination Event.”

  “Everybody else calls it the Whiteout,” Cho murmured back, undeterred. “Come on, Ortiz, you saw the footage. Whole arena went white. White Tiger blew his own core. Everyone thrown out like dice—”

  Rafie had seen the replays. A thousand times. The white void swallowing commanders, the sudden stoppage of the Cloud?Jade timer, the glitchy green text.

  He’d also seen what came after—over ten months of cosmic hangover.

  More spontaneous rifts than in the previous five years combined. Meridians jittering across all five boroughs; class?C holes popping in subway stations like hormonal acne; Class?B tears near hospitals and schools. Just in the last three months, there were an unprecedented two separate Class?A events in Yonkers alone.

  Just like other Areas, Area 003 had been catching every aftershock of the Games.

  “It’s been almost a year,” one of the others muttered. “You’d think the leylines would pick a mood by now.”

  “Focus,” John snapped. “Last scan from the system ledger flagged escalating charm frequencies and necrotic signatures. Someone’s driving something undead in there. Helmets sealed, filters to level three, loops on. We drop in sixty.”

  The cabin lights flicked from warm to cold. The ramp began to whine open, letting a spear of air slice through the stale cabin. It smelled like snow, exhaustion, and something more underneath.

  The flash?copper banked lower, rotors thinning into a higher whine. The cemetery loomed up to meet them, fog rippling weirdly around its center like something breathing.

  Rafie swallowed hard, flexed his gloved fingers, and stepped toward the ladder as it swung down.

  ***

  Up close, it was worse.

  The fog wasn’t just thick; it was textured. Threads of it curled around headstones, hesitant, then snapped toward the center. The snow on the ground had a faint sheen, like static clinging to a screen.

  The chopper hovered just above the worst of it, rotors chopping the fog into swirling slabs. John went down first, boots finding a clear-ish patch between two angel statues. Cho followed, then Vasso, then Rafie.

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  “Line four, on me!” John’s voice echoed in his earpiece, too loud in the padded silence. “Lock anchors, deploy net—”

  Rafie swung down the last rung. His boots hit the snow with a crunch that felt a beat too late.

  For a second, everything seemed fine. His breath fogged the air. His goggle’s HUD flickered up: local grid overlay, team vitals, a nice comforting list of everyone’s heart rates.

  Then something pinched behind his sternum.

  He grunted, hand instinctively going to his chest.

  “You good?” Cho asked, glancing over, anchor talismans already in her hands.

  “Yeah. Just—” He shook his head, trying to clear the feeling. It wasn’t pain. More like… someone had put a thumb on his mute button.

  Fog swelled around their legs, swallowing the ladder they’d just descended. The chopper above faded into a dull thud of rotors and then—

  Silence.

  Not just quiet. Silence, like someone had taken the world’s audio track and dragged the slider to zero.

  Rafie blinked, heart stuttering. “John?”

  His mouth moved. Nothing came out. Not even in his own ears.

  His HUD flickered. The team vitals panel glitched sideways, then steadied, but all the little heart icons had dimmed. Before he knew it, their pulse signals slowed, respirations flattening into too?even lines.

  Cho swayed. Her eyes, visible through her face shield, had gone unfocused, pupils blown wide. She stared straight ahead at nothing.

  “Hey,” Rafie tried. “Cho. Captain. Anyone—”

  No sound.

  He lifted his hand to toggle his mic. It felt distant, like he was moving through syrup. His lungs worked harder, trying to pull in air that suddenly felt thick and wrong.

  Something warm slid over his lip.

  He wiped it with the back of his glove. Red streaked across the white polymer.

  Nosebleed.

  Oh.

  No.

  He turned to Cho, and realised his coworker’s veins were lighting up.

  Thin threads of bruised purple and sickly green crawled up from under her collar, branching along her neck toward her jaw. Her helmet strap stood out stark against the darkening skin.

  Her pupils rolled back until only the whites showed, irises drowned in a pale, cloudy film.

  Rafie staggered toward her, hand outstretched. This is bad, this is bad, this is—

  Cho, hey, get a grip, you’re freaking me out, he tried to say.

  His throat worked. Yet nothing came out.

  Cho’s mouth opened on a sound he couldn't hear. Her head tilted back at an impossible angle, spine arching until vertebrae cracked like someone squeezing bubble wrap with the sound turned up.

  Then her body snapped forward, moving in a horrible, precise jerk. Every one of her joints were locked at right angles, like a broken marionette whose strings had been yanked by an impatient child.

  Her boots tore up clods of frozen turf as she pivoted and launched at him.

  Rafie froze.

  He knew he should move. His training screamed at him to dodge, to drop, to do something, but the fog in his veins pressed down on his muscles. His body felt like it belonged to someone else.

  So this is it, he thought, stupidly detached. I get eaten in a cemetery by my coworker. Mom’s gonna hate this.

  Cho’s face—no, the thing puppeting her—filled his vision. Her eyes were rolled back, veins glowing like bruised neon. Her teeth snapped, two centimeters from his throat—

  —and the world detonated in light.

  Pressure slammed outward from somewhere behind him, a wave that punched through the fog like a fist through wet paper. Snow and ash and something finer whirled up around them, shredded and flung aside.

  Cho’s possessed body jerked mid?lunge, torn away from him by invisible hooks. She flew sideways, hitting a nearby headstone and sliding down in an ungainly heap, frost scattering.

  Rafie went down on his knees, palms scraping freezing slush. Air crashed back into his ears all at once, roaring so loud it made him flinch.

  “…—taking that as a yeah, okay.”

  The voice came from just behind his shoulder. Dry and absurdly calm.

  Rafi sucked in a breath that actually sounded like a breath. His ears rang. Under it, he heard a faint chiming. Something between a paper rustle and… a talisman flare.

  He turned.

  A young man stood where the blast had come from, boots braced in a snow?cleared circle. Parka, field harness, fingerless gloves, cap pulled low against the cold. A barcode scanner dangled from his wrist like a weapon pretending to be a toy.

  His eyes, dark and ordinary, caught the low guttering light and, for a second, flashed gold.

  Perhaps noticing his dumbfounded look, the young man grimaced, scanning Rafie quickly. “Eyes tracking, nosebleed, vocal cut—classic charm resonance.”

  Rafie opened his mouth. A croak scraped his throat.

  “Don’t,” the guy said. “Save your vocal cords. I got you.”

  He lifted his hand. Gold flickered along the veins, threading out from his fingertips like calligraphic strokes. Rafie felt the hairs on his arms rise under his suit.

  The next second, warmth slammed through his chest like someone had poured tea into his bloodstream.

  The world narrowed to lines, and something in him clicked up three notches. The pressure behind his sternum eased; his ears popped in a non-painful way.

  Across the small clearing, Cho’s veins dimmed. The purple and green retreated down her neck like ink being sucked back into a pen. She sagged forward, gagging, helmet visor fogging with her breath.

  “I—” Rafie tried again. This time, the sound actually came out. Hoarse, but there. “—thank you.”

  The young man’s shoulders loosened fractionally.

  “Better,” he said. “Don’t move too fast; your qi channels are still grumpy.”

  Rafie swallowed. “You’re—?”

  Before the stranger could answer, a sharper voice cut through the air.

  “Eathan!”

  It came from somewhere deeper in the cemetery, threaded with annoyance and adrenaline. Small shape, big sword. Rafie recognized the speaker from training vids and whispered gossip long before his brain processed the name.

  The young man winced a little, like someone being paged by their supervisor at the worst possible time.

  “On it!” he called back, already turning.

  Rafi’s mind finally caught up.

  Eathan.

  Eathan Lin.

  He was a guy with too many names: the golden child, the mortal who’d walked into the White Tiger’s nightmare and walked back out, the guy every Urban Response chat had a meme about...

  Rafie gaped. “Wait—you’re—”

  “Talk later, Ortiz,” Eathan said without looking back.

  Rafie froze. He knows my name?

  Eathan was already moving, sprinting into the fogless gap he’d just carved open, scanner in one hand, talismans flaring like a flock of paper birds in the other.

  Another figure dropped from the hovering flash?copper immediately. Chewie Jiang. She looked ten years old, tops, with a tiny frame and low pigtails whipped by the downdraft. A collapsed fishing rod tube lay across her shoulders; with one flick, it telescoped into a blade longer than she was tall.

  She hit the snow, didn’t bother with greetings, and took off after him.

  The rest of Area 003's Advanced Force spilled in behind them, stepping into the cleared circle like actors hitting their marks.

  Rafie stared, still on his knees, as his colleague groaned awake beside him and the rest of his squad shook off the residual stupor.

  “…Holy shit,” he whispered, voice raw. “He’s—”

  Super cool.

  He didn’t say it out loud.

  Although, no one would’ve heard him anyway over the sound of talismans already singing through the dark.