Era did not feel the cold as she would have before. Her body, a shell of alloy and circuitry, registered the frost on the barrel of her weapon, the howl of the wind between the crumbled skyscrapers. They were just data, not sensations. The world, once vibrant, was now a bare bone beneath a perpetually dark sky.

  On her shoulder, a small creature with membranous wings let out a soft snarl. Something was approaching. One of "them."

  Era knew it. Her mind, strangely lucid and filled with information she didn't remember learning, had already traced five hundred ways to dismantle the threat. Killing was an equation, a series of precise movements.

  But within that calcuted efficiency, an echo persisted. A distant voice, that of a young man consumed by apathy, who now inhabited this war-forged woman's body. The nihilism that had corroded him before the world broke was now an unsettling whisper.

  "Is this living?" she thought, a cold pang of irony. "Or merely... functioning."

  An orange glow, the st breath of a drowned sun, filtered through the dark clouds. Enough light to see the creature's grotesque silhouette emerging from the debris. It was rge, misshapen, and moved with a purposeless cruelty.

  Era's hand tightened on the trigger.

  The first shot tore the silence.

  The st piece of a brutal game had been activated, and she wasn't sure if she wanted to win.