The location marker Rav sent me led to the heart of Pearl City’s warehouse district. Overhead, the dome shone pitch black, flickering occasionally with fake distant lightning. Thin clouds of Miasma rolled through the streets. This section of the dome faced that undersea Death temple, close enough that I could sense its presence, almost like how you could smell that there were freezer burritos around when someone had just gotten done microwaving them.

  The Neon Kelpie didn’t have a sign announcing its name, but the narrow windows that lined the top of the refurbished warehouse’s walls flashed with neon lights, strobing in time with this whining, twangy music that had to be EDM square dance.

  Rav was posted up diagonally across the street, hiding out in the shadows of a loading dock. Instead of the CPA uniform he’d been wearing the other day, he had on street clothes. Jeans, cowboy boots, and a long black duster.

  When he saw me, he flagged me down, red-capped cigarette glowing in the darkness.

  “Ready for a stakeout, Death cultivator?” He squinted through the smoke at the club. “Our first two targets are inside. Ling Fey, Technol puppeteer extraordinaire, and Donnie Four-Eyes, top data thief. Last call should be happening as we speak. They’ll be on their way out any minute now.”

  I leaned against the dock and watched the club’s door.

  There was no breeze, but the temperature hovered right on the verge of springtime cold. I amped up my internal alchemy and shoved my hands in my pockets. Pearl City had to be climate controlled, which made it weird that they kept it so much cooler at night. Maybe they did it for maximum sleeping comfort.

  “Why these guys?” I asked.

  “The Technols need Donnie.” Rav adjusted something on his cigarette, then stuck it back in his mouth. “He’s got the dirt on everybody, and for the ones he can’t get dirt on, he can find it on their friends and families. The Technols can’t keep the noose around their civilized inner planets without extortion.”

  Right, and the Dragons definitely could.

  “What about Ling Fey?”

  “Are you a fan of sumo hockey, Death cultivator?”

  I could tell sumo hockey wasn’t what he’d said. The syllables didn’t even line up with the movements of Rav’s mouth. My brain was trying to translate a sport that didn’t have an equivalent in my old life.

  I shook my head.

  Rav shrugged. “Well, anyway, consider Ling Fey a blocker. They call her Selk’s Technol Ceiling. She’s there to make sure nobody gets any ambitious ideas and starts gunning for Director Chillion. If we don’t take her out first, none of this is happening.”

  If I hadn’t been locked in Last Light, Last Breath, I knew my gut would have squirmed. I didn’t like killing women. I’d spent my whole first life being told it was my job to protect them.

  Death cultivator clings to strange notions, Hungry Ghost croaked. Does Death cultivator believe evil comes only in male form? Will he bury his head to the truth? Death is no respecter of genders. Nor is evil, nor is power. Take it from Hungry Ghost, who slaughtered as many females as males while he ruled.

  Across the street, the Neon Kelpie’s sliding door rolled open, interrupting the ancient khan’s rant and letting out a robotic wail that sounded like Warcry’s screaming baby fed through a graphing calculator.

  Out sauntered a tall, nerdy Ylef guy wearing coke-bottle glasses. A pink squid alien floated along beside him, one of her tentacles trailing over the shoulders of a squat balding Selken who looked ecstatic to be leaving with the squid.

  “That’s them,” Rav said, tapping the butt of his cigarette on his thumb. The cherry extinguished instantly, and he tucked it into an inner pocket on his duster. “Not the Selken. He’s just collateral damage. The squid and the Ylef.”

  Neither Technol had their uniforms or badges on, but a quick search of planetary profiles on my Winchester showed that Rav was telling the truth.

  Finish them now, Hungry Ghost said. Death cultivator is powerful enough to cut them down from here.

  Not without knowing that they deserve it.

  Death cultivator wastes time searching for reasons to kill. Are these not rivals of Death cultivator’s gang?

  I ignored him and jogged across the street, cutting an interception path to them.

  The trio headed up the sidewalk oblivious to my presence. With my Spirit cloaked, I was just some random human crossing their path.

  The Ylef, Donnie Four-Eyes, kept his eyes up, text and images rolling across his lenses. Every now and then he gave a hard blink, which must have functioned like a click, because the lenses would jump to something else.

  Ling Fey was too wrapped up in her companion to look around. She trailed a purple tentacle along the Selken’s bald spot, suction cups messing up his comb-over. The dude let out a twitterpated giggle.

  None of them saw me until they almost ran me over.

  “Move aside, meat roach, real cultivators coming through.” The Selken dude rolled his dark-laced eyes. “I swear, ever since the Confederation overturned the Spirit-clipping law, these meat roaches have become so disrespectful.”

  The Ylef Donnie grunted in agreement, but he didn’t look past his lenses.

  The squid’s beak clacked as her eyes locked on mine.

  “I know this meat roach,” she said. “He was in the station recently.”

  A split-second glimpse into Ling Fey’s Judgment Beyond the Veil instantly overcame my squeamishness at killing a girl. It was one thing to see sickos purposely committing evil under their own free will, but the squid used her Puppetmaster specialization to pull the strings on unwitting and unwilling targets, making them doing horrible stuff. Not for any reason in particular. Just because she liked to see normal people react to the consequences after she made them do awful, soul-shattering things.

  “Donnie,” the psycho squid said. “This is the Dragons’ Death cultivator.”

  I plunged Damnation into her pointed mantle, grabbing for the glowing pink candle at the center.

  But Dead Man’s Hand hit a wormhole where her life should have been. Instead of grabbing hold of her, it grabbed onto the balding Selken’s powder blue life point.

  Collateral damage, Rav had called the dude.

  I let go of the powder blue life point. Three Corpse Sickness exploded off me

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  They sprinted after Ling Fey, but every swipe they took at her crashed into the Selken. She was redirecting my Spirit attacks onto her puppet.

  Luckily, I had a weapon that wasn’t made of Miasma.

  I flung my right hand out to my side. The scythe tore through my muscle and formed in my fist.

  “Refrag!” The Four-Eyed Ylef yelled in a nasally voice, shoving both hands at me.

  A tsunami of information crashed through my brain. Where the trapezius was located, my mom’s old phone number, the capital of Thailand, the name of every movie Tony Jaa had starred in, the price of the boots I’d bought at Heartchamber 2 that had immediately been stolen by Sedryk Nameless, cosin versus sin, the exact number of blades of magical grass I’d had to sort in Mutai’i’s Distillery, the address of the prison and Dad’s prisoner number as it had to appear on letters for him to get them, all the clips of Hungry Ghost’s lives that I’d lived, diamond’s spot on the Mohs Scale of Hardness, the name of the family who owned the ramen shack near our apartment, the first French settlement in Missouri, Rali’s favorite color, the pH of human blood.

  It all flooded out of the compartments it was usually stored in and jammed up the brain space I needed for fighting. I could barely register what was happening in front of my face.

  Huge, glowing pink needles impaled my hands and feet. They pulled through, dragging strings of Spirit through the holes.

  Ling Fey raised four of her tentacles and jerked them up and down like she was making a puppet dance.

  Against my will, I turned toward the balding Selken and took the scythe in both hands. My flesh disappeared and my clothes turned to rags.

  I tried to cast Moldering Bones to destroy the glowing puppet strings, but I couldn’t let go of the handle to throw the palm strike.

  Give control to Hungry Ghost, Death cultivator. Hungry Ghost cannot be controlled by puppet strings.

  I cocked back the Lunar Scythe. The Selken dude yelped. He tried to cower behind Ling Fey, but she stroked a tentacle across his bald spot again.

  The phrase collateral damage started running through my head in a loop.

  “Kill him,” Ling Fey whispered in the Selken’s ear, her beak clacking. “Protect me. Protect your master.”

  “No, Ling Fey!” Donnie the Ylef yelled. “He’s a civilian, he’ll be kill—”

  “Yes, master!” the Selken crowed. “Kill the meat roach!”

  The dude lunged at me, a pair of huge yellow Spirit staplers appearing in his pudgy fists, bases dangling, magazines up and ready to slap staples down.

  Instinctively, I jerked my head out of the way of his first shot. I didn’t know what would have happened if a staple the size of a gutter spike punched through my skull while I was nothing but bone, and I didn’t want to find out.

  The Selken had overcommitted to his first shot. He stumbled, and the second stapler whiffed below my sternum into my hollow rib cage.

  With the puppet strings holding my hands in place, I couldn’t move my torso enough to avoid that one. The top of the stapler and the Selken’s fist slipped between the ribs of my back. Instead of just dropping the Spirit office supply, the Selken panicked, wrenching around until he had the stapler turned like an anchor.

  I tried to lever the scythe up, to get my knee between my upper body and his—do anything to shove him off me and get his arm out of my chest cavity—but the puppet strings wouldn’t let me.

  Ling Fey cackled. “Let’s see what happens when all that nasty flesh reappears, shall we?”

  She raised two of her tentacles, bringing my hands up and making me raise the scythe over my head. Millimeter by millimeter, she started to open her suction-cupped appendages.

  Pop, the first suction cup came free.

  The tips of my fingerbones pried away from the scythe’s haft.

  I gritted my teeth, fighting to keep ahold. Not an easy task with a guy wrenching around in my empty rib cage, trying to tear his way free with a fistful of stapler.

  Ling Fey’s eyes sparkled.

  Pop.

  My first knuckles broke contact with the haft. The Selken planted his free hand on my sternum and shoved.

  In my head, I screamed, Rigor mortis! But I couldn’t cast it on myself—at least not while I had zero muscle to freeze up.

  Pop.

  My second set of knuckles lifted off the scythe’s shaft.

  “Mic drop!” Ling Fey singsonged.

  Popopop, she tore her tentacles open.

  My palms flattened.

  The scythe raced across my hand bones and chased over my skeleton. Organs and muscle and skin rushed in behind it, refilling all the hollow spaces with meat.

  “Speed of Data!”

  Digital green flashed across my field of vision.

  The Ylef tackled the Selken, yanking his pudgy fist out of my rib cage. As they fell, the yellow glow of Stapler spirit winked out. A fraction of a heartbeat later, my lungs, muscle tissue, and skin closed over where the Selken’s arm had been.

  He and the Ylef crashed into the wall of the warehouse and bounced off, hitting the sidewalk in a heap. The Selken’s brow ridge thumped the concrete and he went limp. Unconscious. Donnie Four-Eyes’s second set of eyes were slung off his face in the impact. The glasses clinked across the concrete.

  Ling Fey whipped around to face her Technol buddy.

  “Somebody’s cruising for a bruising,” she growled.

  “This guy’s a civilian, Ling.” Donnie’s one-man stand was only sort of undercut by the fact that he was on his knees and patting around for his glasses. “There’s no reason to use him against a Dragon hitman. Not when we both know you can finish the job yourself.”

  She wasn’t looking my way, but her hold on the puppet strings didn’t slip at all. I racked my brain, shuffling through every attack and technique I could think of.

  Carelessly, Ling Fey tossed out a glowing pink loop with another tentacle and snagged Donnie’s glasses, zipping them into her suckers.

  “Did you forget how to prioritize your loyalties, Donnie?” She shoved the glasses onto her too-wide head, making the earpieces creak as they stretched out. The squid bobbed through the air toward the Ylef. “Because I thought you were loyal to the Technols first, CPA second. These local endoskeleton sacks are way, way down the line. Killing off Dragons comes before protecting netskins, remember?”

  My muscles strained like rubber bands stretched too tight, fighting to break free of the squid’s puppet strings. Fury and frustration roared through me, getting wilder every second I couldn’t get loose, filling me up like the pressure in a dry ice bomb.

  I let it build and build. Then, when I couldn’t hold it back anymore, I opened my mouth.

  Grave Wail rattled the air. The windows of the Neon Kelpie shattered, glass raining to the ground around us. Donnie and Ling Fey both slapped their hands and tentacles over their ears and earholes. Blood trickled from the corners of their eyes and the Ylef’s nose.

  The split-second of distraction was all I needed.

  I blasted necrotizing frost to the points where the squid’s Spirit strings had been threaded through my palms and feet. My skin crackled as the liquid in the tissue crystalized. The bit of string through my muscles turned rigid and brittle.

  I snapped them with a twist of my wrists and feet.

  Ling Fey spun around as I reached for my hip. She raised her tentacles.

  Pouring on the Ki-speed, I drew Wrathblade.

  Whispers battered my consciousness.

  Glowing needles dragging puppet strings darted toward my limbs, ready to re-enslave me.

  “Kill her,” I ordered the spectral uchigatana.

  The blade slashed. A single downward strike.

  The squid hung in the air a second longer. Then her halves dropped to the sidewalk.

  Movement near the top of the warehouse caught my eye, but when I looked, there was nothing up there. I reached out with Dead Reckoning. It didn’t find any lurking life points, but that could just mean someone who could cloak their Spirit.

  “Search the roof,” I told Wrathblade. Spirit cloaking couldn’t fool it. “Kill any Technols up there.”

  The spectral sword darted up and over the eaves. It was back in three seconds. No threats on the roof. Maybe it had been a loose piece of siding or a curtain flapping in one of the broken-out windows.

  On the sidewalk in front of me, Donnie Currently Two-Eyes had regained his feet.

  “You’re under arrest, Death cultivator.” He squinted and took a halting step toward me, reaching out like he was feeling around for someone to handcuff. “For the murder of a CPA agent.”

  I backed out of his reach and sheathed Wrathblade.

  Donnie’s glasses lay in two slightly asymmetrical halves in the pile of goop and tentacles that had been Ling Fey. Without the coke-bottle lenses blocking me, I could see Judgment Beyond the Veil playing out on the Ylef’s catlike eyes.

  “What are you waiting for?” Agent Ravomet yelled across the street. “He’s the second target! The guy right in front of you!”

  I shot out a long-range Damnation. Rav’s life point was as black as a cancerous lung; when I grabbed it, it crackled like the charred skin on a burnt hotdog.

  I ripped it out.

  With a surprised gurgle, the Corruption cultivator slumped to the ground beside the loading dock. Dead.

  I pulled his malignant life point in, rapidly feeding it into a spiral before the power surge got out of control. My skin glowed faintly turquoise marred by twisted black veins, but already the condensation was leeching the illumination as it properly stored the excess Miasma.

  “Who was that?” Donnie demanded. “Are there more of your Eight-Legged Dragon buddies out here?” He slashed a hand through the air, then wobbled a little as if not being able to see made him unsteady. “Well, it doesn’t matter if you brought a whole hit squad. I’m not going to back down just because I’m out numbered, so you can forget about that.”

  A dull gleam of Miasma reflected on the lenses as I bent down and picked up the pieces of Donnie’s glasses. The last of it condensed before I put the glasses in his hand.

  Donnie froze, squinting suspiciously in my general direction.

  “Before you run me in,” I said, “we need to talk.”