As we descended the stairs, it was as though I was sinking blindly into some ocean reef. I’d crossed the threshold of Medhall’s main host; the geofenced boundaries where networked hardware transmitted and received authorised signals from the entirely digital core of their system.

  If their firewalls had still existed, I would have been as blind as Imp, shunted sidelong back to the grid. Instead, the system that facilitated secure intranet communications throughout the tower’s premises had become some tempting passageway in which life could flourish without fear of predation.

  Kelp-like strands of resonance hung from the ceiling; filter feeders whose wavy leaves caught the motes of energy that flowed through the air like an ocean current, constantly expelled by the resonance well.

  Proto-forms were more mobile; nascent invertebrates catching those bacterial particles in mandibles, or moving from hotspot to hotspot before unfurling their solar panel wings to absorb resonant radiation. I wondered how long it would be before the first predators and herbivores emerged to hunt the data contained within these bottom-feeders.

  It was entirely possible that I was the first person in the world to see this new ecosystem and survive. Perhaps GOD would study this digital Garden of Eden when all of this was done, but it was equally likely they would simply turn their dragon loose for a controlled slash and burn.

  Imp strode through the primordial habitat with complete indifference, though of course she only saw an empty passageway with whitewashed walls and a concrete floor. I tried to set aside my wonder and focus on the physical world, since that was where all the physical dangers were, but it was impossible to take my eyes off it.

  After all, I was a creature of the resonance myself. Dual-natured, as Tattletale might have put it; half metahuman, certainly, but also half a resonant construct that thought it was metahuman. My consciousness was, in some indistinguishable way, a complex CPU formed from the same fundamental building blocks as the primordial life around me.

  The same was true in the biological sense, obviously, but there was infinitely less distance between two programs built from the same code and the common ancestor of humans and trees. I wondered if I had been this way since conception, my resonant mirror growing alongside me while my abilities lay dormant, or if there had once been a different Taylor Hebert before her consciousness merged with a digital entity to awaken me.

  It put me in mind of Calvert’s e-ghost rigger, or my half-baked theories on the nature of GOD’s impossible dragon. Was there life after death for my kind? Would my consciousness continue on in the resonance realms after the destruction of my wetware, existing as some xenosapient entity without metahuman brainwaves to focus its growth? It would be a continuation, but it wouldn't be me.

  It was only now that I realised just how close I’d come to a state like that. I could have made the entity my spy, plugging my consciousness into a private intelligence network that would have spanned the world, but it would have been the end of my life in its present form. There would have been no balance between the digital and biological; my waking life would have become nothing more than fleeting dreams while my sleeping mind wielded the power of a God. In the end, I might have simply neglected myself to death – the pitiful end of a terminal matrix junkie.

  I’d made my choice. Not for the real over the unreal, but for everything I had become since rediscovering my life. For the technomancer and the shadowrunner, and maybe for the person as well. I defined my new life by the people around me; if I failed to save them, that would be a different kind of ego-death.

  In the end, I managed to break free from my maudlin spiral by focusing my attention on Imp, who was a neo-luddite desert in this overwhelming digital oasis. I saw the tight certainty in her shoulder-blades, the relentlessness in the movements of her legs, and I found myself unconsciously mirroring her.

  She'd run before, cutting ties for the sake of personal survival. She knew what it felt like and how much it hurt – how much it changed. She wasn't going to go through that again.

  When she abruptly turned back and shoved me through a set of double doors into a perpendicular corridor, I didn't protest. We waited there in pregnant silence, ready and willing to spring into action at a moment's notice even while the rational parts of our minds knew that getting into another firefight so soon after leaving a war would be outright suicidal.

  It didn't take long for my own ears to pick up what Imp had heard. Feet were pounding down the hallway, steel-toed boots striking concrete as a dozen armed men and women charged off on some violent business. The double doors had small vertical windows built into the frame, giving me a view of a quartet of red-armoured Valkyries leading a group of armed security officers in uniforms and suits. In the middle of the group was Theo Anders, looking decidedly out of place in jeans and a hoodie as he was half dragged down the corridor, his feet barely touching the floor. Max must have given the order to evacuate Theo before he died, in case the fighting broke through into Medhall.

  We waited in complete silence until the escort was out of earshot before re-entering the corridor. We’d started closing in on the tower itself, with more passageways branching off from the main avenue as printed signs directed pedestrians to underground parking lots, utility hubs and a few suitably vague-sounding departments where Medhall's dirty work could happen below the view of any scrutiny.

  There was still no sign of the mundane employees of the corporation – I was sure they'd been moved up the tower to free up the lower floors for an unrestricted armed defence – but these sublevels were far from abandoned. We hadn't even reached the boundaries of the tower itself when Imp held up a hand and engaged her chameleon suit, vanishing into nothingness.

  I waited, adjusting my grip on the gauss rifle until Imp reappeared. She led me through a security checkpoint, with a metal detector flashing a constant red warning light at phantom signals and two corporate security officers slumped over by a bag scanner, their necks bruised by magically-enhanced finger blows.

  “Dunno why they bothered,” Imp remarked. “Checkpoint's fucked anyway.”

  I glanced at the scanner's screen, seeing a photonegative image of random signals firing within the machine, the digital sensor ghosts of resonant fungal growth. It had spilled out of the scanner in almost solid outgrowths that had ensnared both the metal detector and the real-time connections to the guards' headware.

  “I think they were high,” I said. “Doped up, sick, or something. Deep in the network when I knocked it out, so the code in their head was transformed into something else.”

  “That got something to do with why the lights are on in here?” Imp asked.

  “We're not covered by the Matrix anymore,” I said. “I can't even see the rest of the city grid. This tower's been brought through to the other side, or the other side has been brought through to here. So nothing's working to the same rules.”

  “Shit’s fragged,” she summarised.

  “Shit’s fragged.”

  I shouldered the gauss rifle at the sound of footsteps moving down the corridor, feeling the sprite whine ravenously beneath my hands as if it could smell blood. It was a truly living thing, given personality by its hardware like the ambulance in the plaza.

  It was a born killer; a mechanism focused solely on burning through energy and projectiles. If it had an integrated sight, it would probably have fired uncontrollably the moment it detected any suspect silhouette. Instead, it was waiting for the divine manifestation of a finger on the trigger.

  It knew it was called AA68 Thunderstruck. It didn't know what those letters meant, but it knew they sounded lethal.

  The moment I pulled the trigger it sprang into life, banks of coiled electromagnets charging up in an instant as power was drained from the first battery pack. In the tiny box magazine, a hyper-dense dart the length of a matchstick was shunted into place. Every mechanical action was imbued with rapid violence, the ghost in the machine pushing its components to the limit like an eager predator pouncing on its prey.

  The dart flew free, gripped by the powerful electromagnetic current that flung it forwards with tremendous force, breaking the sound barrier and simultaneously striking a Valkyrie paramedic with enough force to lift him from his feet, flinging him back even as the round travelled through and struck the second Valkyrie in her collarbone. She staggered and almost fell, raising her gun with her remaining arm before I put another round through her chest.

  Both of them had been armed, though the two medics behind them only had holstered pistols. Imp darted forward, cutting them down with her axe before they could reach for their guns. From the collapsible stretchers and portable monitoring box they were carrying, I assumed they'd come here for the two braindead guards. It made me wonder how many others had been caught in my attack; whether Grue, Bitch, Regent and Tattletale had been far enough removed from the core network to survive?

  I didn't allow myself to dwell on that thought. I couldn't, if I wanted to keep moving.

  “Holy shit,” Imp remarked, pressing her eye to one of the holes in the wall left by my darts. “It's gone through two feet of concrete.”

  “Someone will have heard that,” I said, lowering the barrel of the rifle while keeping the stock pressed against my shoulder.

  “So let's get gone,” Imp retorted. “Sure as shit hope you know the way from here?”

  “Tracked them down before I crashed the net,” I said, already moving down the corridor. “They're in some kind of secure cell block, here in the sublevels.”

  I was working from memory. This alien environment bore little resemblance to the network architecture I had navigated through the entity's eye. I was surrounded by a panoply of life in forms both comprehensible and incomprehensible, blended together in an entrancing garden.

  I paused in the shadow of a water mains junction, the pumps breathing like a living thing, and tried to separate my persona from my body only to find that I couldn't. I'd truly fallen through into Wonderland, crossing the event horizon into this resonance realm, but this time I'd brought my body with me.

  But the bones of the host were still the same; stable rocks on which life had found purchase. I could feel the CCTV network around me, tried reaching out to it only to find my advances rebuffed by a particularly developed xenosapient consciousness that had tangled itself up in the cameras. I could feel it looking at anything and everything with almost childlike wonder. Like a toddler, it didn’t want to share.

  For the first time in six years, I was blind. I’d become so reliant on omniscience; on cameras and universal online connections. As I edged through the corridors with Imp following closely behind me, I felt more vulnerable than ever before. I jumped at every sound while the tower around us groaned and creaked as its new inhabitants flexed the boundaries of their shells.

  It was almost a relief when we stumbled into an underground parking garage to find a dozen uniformed security guards gathered around an armoured truck, with an engineer tapping away furtively at a tablet hardwired into the vehicle’s onboard computer.

  I didn’t wait for them to notice me, instead nailing two of them with a pair of tungsten darts before the third shot went wild as I sprinted towards a delivery van, flying through a light fitting and probably proceeding on through a couple of floors. Imp dashed past me, firing her pistol one-handed as she put bullets through another three guards.

  As I slammed myself up against the branded side of the van, rocking the ton and a half of metal on its wheels, she sprinted past me, flowing like liquid as she dropped into a slide underneath the high suspension of an armoured car.

  I kept firing, hypervelocity rounds tearing through cars as I tried to keep the guards panicked while Imp got into position. The Thunderstruck exalted with every shot, before whining angrily on reserve power as the first battery was drained, sending me reeling back into cover while I fumbled with the pouches on my stolen ballistic vest.

  Even as I finally found the locking catch for the new battery and swapped out the small box magazine of darts, the van behind me reverberated with the metal drumbeat of massed pistol fire. I stepped back, staying low and levelling my coil gun at the thin metal side of the van.

  In the end, however, there was a sharp burst of gunfire as Imp shot her machine pistol from an oblique angle that momentarily silenced the guards. I took my chance, sprinting to the left and throwing myself down behind a parked executive car before scrabbling up into a kneeling position and slamming the gauss rifle down on the hood.

  I fired another two shots, the Thunderstruck’s whine ringing in my teeth, tusks and horns even as another guard was decapitated by the dart that pulped his neck. Moving almost on instinct, I lined up another on a blonde guard who wore a badged rain-slicker over her grey security uniform.

  She’d spotted me, her hands flying up as she tried to fling herself down behind the scant cover of another parked car, but I was already squeezing the trigger. The shot flew true and for a moment I thought I’d had her, but instead I saw a line of yellow light stretching down the length of her back, following the ricocheting path of the dart.

  She grinned, a flash of manic adrenaline, before pouncing up onto the car with her PVC jacket flaring out behind her in an ethereal wind. As she raised her hands I scrambled backwards, firing another panicked shot before she shouted a rapid incantation that sent a spray of lurid green liquid flying from her fingertips.

  It struck my makeshift cover, melting through the metal and glass of the luxury car like it was dissolving paper. As I threw my arms up to protect my face I suddenly felt a sharp stab of heat in my hips, accompanied by a horrific hissing sound. A droplet of acid had landed on one of my webbing pouches, melting through the reinforced fabric to the battery within.

  Panicking, I let go of the trigger and fumbled with the burned-through clasp on the pouch before gripping the whole thing with my cybernetic hand and tearing it off the armoured vest. The heat was almost unbearable, the stench of the melting car joined by the acid tang of burning plastic as part of my hand melted before I was able to throw the battery away.

  A thundercrack echoed through the parking lot as a lightning bolt tore through the air above the next car over, moments before Imp rolled over the roof and landed low with cat-like grace on the concrete. She sunk down even further, rolling onto her back and stretching out her arm as she fired a burst below the chassis, aiming between wheels towards some distant target.

  “Geek the mage!” she shouted. “Fuckin’ nail her!”

  I nodded, scrambling over to join her as she got ready to run. When she leapt to her feet, sprinting off and firing wildly towards the guards, I pushed myself up and levelled the coil gun at the Medhall theurge, who was lining up a spell on Imp.

  This time my shot caught her in the chest, the piercing strength absorbed by the fractal web of golden energy that couldn’t quite absorb all the force of a head-on shot. It knocked her backwards, another geodesic of energy lighting up on her back as she was slammed into the doors of the armoured truck with enough force to break the spine of a normal human.

  We took advantage of the shift in momentum, pistol rounds and two more darts claiming the lives of three more guards before my eyes flashed to the ramp up and out of the underground lot.

  Reinforcements had arrived; a motley of guards following red-armoured Valkyries and the scuttling forms of armoured Chosen whose cyberlimbs clicked off the concrete as they raced ahead, claws and spurs extended. Their arrival was accompanied by a withering hail of gunfire that forced both of us back behind the scant cover of the parked cars, even as the first armour piercing rounds cut right through both doors.

  “Back!” I shouted, scrambling for a wide passageway that led deeper into the tower. Already my mind was reaching out, hunting through the ether for any scrap of advantage. I found a resonant entity coiled around the parking lot’s fire suppression system, its cephalopodic tendrils blinding the sensors that would have already picked up the gunfight.

  There were heavy metal shutters perched above the passageway’s entrance; an overlap between the fire and security protocols, equally ready to see off smoke or determined intruders. I flung a resonance spike at the entity, watching as it recoiled and reacted according to instinct, using the tools it had at its disposal.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  The sprinklers kicked in, foul-smelling water falling from above while chemical fire sprayers shot arcs of foam in spiralling paths. Ahead of me the shutter was closing, segmented slabs of armour plating rolling down to the floor. Imp made it through first but the falling shutters forced me to scramble under on my knees, throwing the Thunderstruck through ahead of me to free my hands.

  When pain blossomed in my calf I thought it had been crushed. In a reflex action I threw myself forwards, feeling not the tear of flesh and bone but the sensation of a weight being dragged along behind me. It was enough to trip me up, sending me sprawling to the floor right as the door slammed shut with a discordant electric scream.

  Abruptly the pain had lightened, and I could move again. I rolled over, my hand fumbling for my submachine gun as I saw the Chosen razorgirl whose clawed hand had been gripped around my calf like a vice.

  The scream had been hers; the shutter had severed her legs at the thigh, leaving a twisted mass of metal and plastic from which flowed a rapidly dwindling torrent of synthetic blood as the automatic seals kicked in. The rest of her was just as augmented, without any visible skin remaining. Her head was a leering metal skull with dreadlock-like cables emerging from the rear.

  For a moment I thought the shock had killed her, but when her man-machine interface abruptly rebooted she lurched forwards, the stumps of her legs moving on instinct even as her arms clawed for purchase on the concrete floor.

  I scrambled back, simultaneously bringing up my submachine gun and unloading a clip into her body, watching the rounds bounce off her shell or lodge in the pits of joints and sockets. Then Imp was there, driving her tomahawk down into the cyborg’s neck again and again until she’d cut through the armour-fibre skin to the nerves below.

  “Think that’ll hold them?” she asked, looking sidelong at the shutters.

  “Not for long,” I answered, hauling myself to my feet and hissing as I put weight on my calf. The leg of my jeans was wet with blood and the act of standing had only made it flow faster.

  “Easy, killer,” Imp said, fishing in one of her pouches for a rolled up bandage. “Let me get that.”

  She knelt down, lifting up the leg of my pants and wrapping the flexible dressing around my calf. The smart fabric adhered to itself and tightened around my leg even while its saturated anaesthetics began to seep into my bloodstream. I couldn’t feel my foot anymore, but I could still move it. As I bent down to collect the Thunderstruck, I decided it was probably better that way.

  “We have to keep moving,” I said, the sudden pounding at the shutters negating the need for any further explanation. I led Imp further through the building, past refrigerated storerooms whose air-con had kicked into overdrive, leaving a thin film of ice on the outside of the thick metal doors.

  The halls were almost deserted; we’d slipped through the front lines to the eye of the storm, passing behind the greatest concentration of Medhall’s strength. Now we were behind enemy lines, leaving their reserves to hunt us down while the remainder held the trenches against my own counterrevolution. It wasn’t a great position to be in, but it bought us the briefest moment of breathing room.

  The only other person we ran across in our journey through the warren of service corridors to Medhall’s clandestine cells was an elderly ork in grey warehouse overalls. I almost shot him on reflex, then I almost shot him on purpose before he very deliberately looked away from us, clasping his hands behind his back in some terrified play at nonchalance. I was half expecting him to start whistling.

  There was nothing notable about the corridor that led to Medhall’s black-ops security centre. It was unmarked, unobtrusive and not obviously leading anywhere important, but every system in the corridor – from the lights to the air conditioning – was on its own separate loop that didn’t appear in the normal structure.

  Behind an unmarked door was an entirely automated security checkpoint, with a camera and SIN scanner linked to a pair of turrets bolted to the ceiling. Neither were active, or at least the resonant life within them had no interest in matching our faces to the authorised database. Instead, I watched the camera zoom in on my horns and Imp’s mask with what I almost took as fascination, doubtless because there weren’t any orks or trolls in its authorised personnel database.

  The black site wasn’t just for cells. Beyond the checkpoint was a genuine spiders’ web; a hub for matrix security guards to leave their bodies while they managed the host’s security systems. There were six of them in all, lying on medical recliners arranged in a circle at the centre of the room, with wires and tubes descending from the ceiling to ports in their cyberware or on the skin-tight support suits that handled the biological stresses of from long hours of immobility.

  They were… gone. I could see their headware in the matrix; the high-end cyberdecks burning with light but without any input coming through the neural interface. They were all braindead, their cybernetics now the digital grey matter of the xenosapient entity that possessed the tower’s CCTV systems.

  Imp drew her axe, then stopped as I put a hand on her shoulder.

  “Don’t,” I said. “There’s nothing there to kill.”

  An icy fear had sunk deep into my heart, driving me forwards with the relentlessness of a reawakened glacier as I kicked open the door to the cell block. I’d forgotten all caution, the gun hanging limp in my arms as I sprinted towards the cell that had held Grue and Bitch.

  The door wasn’t even locked, but I kicked fruitlessly at it with my numb foot before realising it was supposed to slide, not swing. As soon as I wrenched it open I staggered into the room, the Thunderstruck falling limp to the ground as I scrambled towards the shelf-like bed.

  It was empty, the two cables that had been paralysing their cyberware lying like rat’s tails on the concrete shelf. I dropped to my knees, wrapping the cables around my hand and forcing open a connection between my mind and the machine.

  “Are they…” Imp began from behind me. “Your crash, did it…”

  “They’re fine,” I breathed, tension draining out of my shoulders as the device unfurled before me. “This thing’s on a hair trigger. Cuts the connection to the wider host at the slightest twitch from either end. They were still paralysed when it went down, but they were offline.”

  “So how’d they get up?” Imp asked, already looking back towards the hall.

  We found the answer in the next cell over; there was a dead guard slumped against a gore-spattered wall, rigor mortis binding his fingers to his heavy pistol. Where Regent and Tattletale had lain there were only the cuffs and hoods that had baffled their magic, the latter run through with resonant corruption.

  “Stone fuckin’ cold,” Imp mused, with a note of admiration in her voice. “But… doesn’t help us, does it?”

  I shook my head. “Unless they left a trail of bodies, they could be anywhere. Fuck, they could be out!”

  I paused, stepping back out into the corridor as I frantically ran through plans. Unconsciously my eyes drifted to the door at the far end of the room, with its morbid collection of braindead spiders.

  Inside, I took in the entity once again, trying to make sense of the crystalline mind housed within the five cyberdecks. I could poke it with a proverbial stick like the fire suppression system, but angering what may well be the security system for the entire tower could prove hazardous for my health.

  Instead, my focus shifted to a diagnostic terminal in the corner of the room; a downright antiquated keyboard and monitor that was probably mandated by some professional standards guideline, but that was coated in a thin film of dust. The screen booted up as soon as I hit the power button, but the display was a nonsensical jumble of CCTV feeds layered on top of each other. I could probably figure out how to separate them, but it would take time.

  Something clattered to the floor behind me. I spun around to see Imp clutching the side of one of the recliners, her left leg dangling limply below her. Her arms gave way as I took a pace towards her, leaving her sprawled across the chest of one of the comatose spiders.

  Then she jerked back upright, as though she’d suddenly regained control of her limbs. She looked down at the floor – no, at her body – before abruptly kicking her leg up almost completely vertically and swaying a little as she held the pose, holding her arms out for balance.

  Regent.

  “How’s that for a superpower?” he asked with her voice in his Quebecois accent, his tone conversational as he brought up a hand and lightly squeezed Imp’s right breast. “I should start a course; how to sense hot go-girls in your area.” He brought his leg down, perching on the recliner and idly kicking Imp’s legs in the air. “So, you came to get us, huh? Where’d you run off too, anyway?”

  “It’d take too long to explain,” I said, quickly. “You recognise this place?”

  “These coked-out deckheads?” Regent asked, flicking the closest body in the cheek. “Of course. Your kind of people, right?”

  “You don’t stop fucking around, do you?”

  “Nah,” he said, tapping his thumb against Imp’s sternum, “this one won’t let me play the field.” He laughed at the look in my eyes. “That’s more like it, Spider! For a second there you almost looked happy to see me! Just follow this hoop, alright?”

  Without waiting for a response, Regent sauntered out past the checkpoint, taking a moment to catch his bearings before heading off deeper into the building. As he went his movements gradually became more exaggerated, swinging Imp’s hips until he was almost dancing down the corridor. When he pirouetted and caught sight of my incredulous stare he simply shrugged her shoulders.

  “I’ve worn a lot of bodies, but Imp’s like driving a supercar. Who needs drugs when you have an adept on tap?”

  “Is she conscious in there, or…” I began. I wasn’t sure what would be worse.

  “Shoved her in the passenger seat, not the trunk.”

  I shook my head, not sure if he’d meant it to sound like that or if it just came naturally to him.

  “Everyone’s okay?” I asked.

  “Well the entertainment sucked, but Tats and I got over that. Grue and Bitch seem to have bounced back okay, but they’ll probably crash hard tonight; locked-in syndrome really does a number on the psyche.”

  “It’s night now,” I remarked.

  “Calisse!” he swore. “No two clocks in here are telling the same time, or counting in sequence, and the main lights only came back on half an hour ago. Your doing?”

  “I needed an opening,” I said, before falling silent as Regent abruptly whipped his head around, holding up a hand for silence. I took his meaning at once, my eyes frantically darting around the corridor before landing on what looked like a brook closet. I grabbed Regent by Imp’s shoulder, dragging him in and closing the door behind us as we tried to awkwardly manoeuvre around a floor buffer.

  It was pitch black in there and the thermographic baffling of Imp’s suit meant that she was completely invisible to my eyes. I could hear Regent fumbling with her holster, before the still-warm barrel of her machine pistol emerged into view, a blossom of heat aimed vaguely at the door.

  I tried to manoeuvre the long-barrelled Thunderstruck into something like a comfortable firing position before giving up and drawing my submachine gun instead. I could hear footsteps moving down the corridor now; heavy boots joined by the clack of metal cyberlegs on concrete. No more than four, I guessed.

  They were talking to each other, though I couldn’t make out the words through the door. It sounded like an argument between the Medhall guards and the synthetic voice of a Chosen, with one of the guards growing increasingly angry at the self-satisfied cyborg.

  It made sense to me; the Chosen seemed to be acting as officers outside, and it looked like that authority extended at least to the hired bruisers inside the tower. It had to rankle the wageslaves being ordered around by street trash.

  Abruptly the conversation cut off – too abruptly to have been natural.

  I didn’t take any chances, firing through the door even as I shoved past Regent with enough force to snap the hinges. I felt a heavy weight on the other side as I pushed out into the corridor, then jerked back as a cyberspur was driven through the cheap plastic a few inches from my neck.

  Bullets flew past my head as two of the security guards opened fire, but Regent was already leaning out of the doorway and firing Imp’s pistol at them. I barely saw any of it as the spur abruptly jerked towards my head, almost bisecting the door.

  I let my legs collapse, the blade just catching the tip of a horn as I dropped to the ground and let the Thunderstruck fall again as I reached out for the Chosen’s leg.

  I tore through his systems like a wild animal, shredding every governing program I could find as his limbs seized and spasmed, burning my way up through his synthetic nervous system until I finally found the core interface point and set it ablaze.

  As he died I was already rising, riddling one guard with bullets even as Regent was forced back by the other. When he darted back out, he wasn’t the one at the wheel.

  Imp saved my life for a second time, swatting away the hand of the only remaining armed guard before locking her elbow around his neck and twisting his head until something snapped. To my surprise, the last guard was an ork. Less surprising was that they hadn’t given her a gun, instead she was gripping a baton so tightly her knuckles had turned white.

  Imp shot her in the head.

  “You okay?” I asked. “Regent didn’t exactly ask.”

  “Nul sheen,” she said, rolling her shoulders. “Hurts my rep, though; he can’t shoot for shit.”

  “I won’t tell,” I said as I retrieved the Thunderstruck, watching as another full-body shudder passed through Imp’s body. “How’d you know you weren’t coming back into a firefight?”

  “Her heartbeat,” Regent explained. “It’s not easy. I think it’s an adept thing; smoother beat than normal, but I can still pick up the difference when she’s fighting. C’mon, not far now.”

  They were holed up in some kind of middle-manager’s office, with a simple desk and a bank of monitors that still had frayed connections to assorted loading bays and warehouses, now little more than a wall of static.

  My heart leapt at the sight of them, frayed and worn but still strong. Bitch was by the door, her face bruised and tank-top stained with blood. She’d found a shotgun somewhere and was aiming it steadily at the door. Regent was behind her, slumped back on the manager’s chair before he jerked back into full wakefulness as he relinquished control of Imp’s body.

  Tattletale had lost her coat and she almost looked naked without it, but the weary relief on her face was a perfect mirror of my own. There was a faint shimmering effect over her body that I took to be a magical barrier and she’d taken the belt from some dead guard, holstered pistol and all. It was the first time I’d seen her carry a gun.

  Grue was moving, an assault rifle clattering to the floor as he rushed the two of us. For a moment he seemed torn before he spread his tree-trunk arms as wide as he could and wrapped them around Aisha and I, his left wrapped over her shoulder and his right pressing my arm against my side.

  I let out a noise then, a primal exhalation of tension as though the air was being crushed from my lungs, even though Brian’s touch was as hesitant and light as if I were made of porcelain.

  “You…” Grue begins. “You’re here.”

  “We’re here,” I said. “Had to move Heaven and Earth, but we’re here.”

  “The blackout was you?” Tattletale asked, waving a hand before I could respond. “No, obviously. There are Chosen in the tower?”

  “Calvert’s got his war,” I answered, as Grue released us and hesitantly moved back to recover his weapon. “Just not the war he wanted. It’s… bad out there. Max is dead.”

  “And Theo?” she asked.

  “Alive.”

  I was waiting for them to get angry. To lash out and blame me for everything they’d endured. Part of me wanted them to, felt like I deserved it even though I knew I’d done the right thing.

  “Good,” Bitch said, her voice hoarse. “Fuck the snake.”

  “War,” Grue repeated, as though he was tasting the word. “Medhall against Ares?”

  “Last I saw Knight Errant was crashing hard,” I said, “but that could’ve changed. Calvert leaked everything we’d found, so Max called up what’s left of the New Revolution, dug in here like a fortress. When we made it through they were fighting… well, I figure it’s a coin toss if the media pins it on the Yakuza, the Sons of Sauron or me.”

  “You?” Blatant concern flashed across Tattletale’s face.

  “Calvert signed the leak with my name, as the speaker of some made-up terror group; the Undersiders. None of you are made, but I’m burned. I… retaliated. Called up an entity from the resonance to crash Medhall’s systems and ended up feeding it the whole city as collateral.”

  “It’s pretty fuckin’ apocalyptic out there,” Imp remarked. “Real end of days shit.”

  “It got us here,” I snapped. “It got them free.”

  “Hey, I ain’t criticising,” she said, holding up her hands. “Most hardcore thing I’ve ever seen.”

  “Whatever it’s like out there,” Tattletale said, not quite able to hide the worried look she shot my way, “it’s better than staying here.”

  “You got that right,” Imp said, walking over to Regent and wrapping a hand possessively over his shoulder before sliding it down his shirt. I caught the pained wince that briefly flashed across his face before he leant up and kissed the mouth of her mask.

  Turnabout’s fair play, I suppose.

  It felt good to be moving as part of a team again. A lifetime ago, Brian had taught me that Shadowrunners weren’t generalists. Each of us had our niche and our expertise, but when we were working to the same purpose we became a singularly effective entity.

  I’d fought harder than I thought possible, down the circles of a Hell of my own creation, but the burden no longer felt so heavy.

  When we ran across another group of guards in an underground office space, we hit them like a tsunami. Bitch and Grue fired shot after shot over the tops of the cubicles, sending grey-clad bodies scattering for cover while Imp made a beeline for a red-armoured Valkyrie who moved with an adept’s fluidity, her blood-stained tomahawk drawn.

  Tattletale gestured for me to kneel beside her as her eyes began to glow, guiding my aim to concealed enemies in and among the cubicle farm as I fired shot after shot from the Thunderstruck, tungsten darts passing through cubicle walls and desktop monitors with equal ease. Regent was beside us, his finger moving like a puppeteer as he guided one guard through to a cluster of his fellows. I stood up just in time to see the grenade in his hands explode.

  We were cutting our way towards the tower’s main entrance, gambling that at least some of the rioters would have broken through the New Revolution’s lines and into the building. The changing character of the space was seen in our environment; as we began to ascend up the sublevels the concrete floors and whitewashed walls started to give way to carpets, tiles and mass-market art.

  We emerged up a wide staircase into a semi-subterranean atrium that rose up from the second sublevel to the fifth floor, with balconies rising up like ribs interspersed with the spinal cords of glass-fronted elevator shafts. Everything was either ivory white or blood red, from the stone-like balustrade to the rich carpet at the centre of this junction between arteries and arterioles, where the corporation’s lifeblood was filtered down the pathways to its organs.

  We’d made it a quarter of the way across when Tattletale suddenly tripped on nothing, falling to her knees with clenched fists rising up towards her head, her mouth locked open in a wordless scream. Beside her I saw Regent freeze in shock as Imp dropped into a combat stance that looked more like the reaction of prey, not a predator. Fight or flight.

  Something cracked far our heads before pieces of ivory white balustrade rained down from above. My head lurched upwards at the very moment a black silhouette dropped from the fifth floor, falling seven stories before landing at the opposite end of the hall with enough force to send a cascading spiderweb of cracks across the stone.

  I could head a suspension system clicking away in his legs as it vented the energy it had captured during the impact. When he stood, it was with the smooth hum of an electric engine spinning into full drive. He was taller than me, maybe as tall as Lung, his body a misshapen, militarised golem of pistons and armour composite plates that made him look almost knightly, their chromed surfaces etched with scenes of bloody massacres; cyborgs slaughtering bestial caricatures of metahumans.

  It wasn’t just his size, it wasn’t just his chrome, it wasn’t just the menace he radiated. He was wrong in an indescribable way that cut to the very soul within me, the resonant core and living essence screaming in sync that I was in the presence of an abomination. A cyberzombie.

  Hookwolf’s face – that mask of synthetic skin sutured to the front of a metal skull, with the tattered remains of long blonde hair entangled with the warren of dreadlock cables spilling out its back – twisted up in a satisfied grin that didn’t reach his cold metal eyes. When he spoke, it was with a wholly mechanical voice that rattled in a low tone calibrated to cause terror in the prehistoric parts of our brains.

  “Hello little lambs. Welcome to the slaughterhouse.”