The bike died two hundred kilometers west of New Eden, somewhere in the skeletal remains of what used to be Interstate 80. Viper coasted it into the shadow of a collapsed overpass, killed the lights, and listened to the night. Nothing but wind scraping across broken concrete and the faint, distant crackle of a government patrol drone that had lost their scent hours ago.
Lena lay across her lap, wrapped in Viper's spare jacket, breathing shallow but steady. The golden glow under her skin had returned in faint pulses-enough to knit the worst of the bleeding shut, not enough to stand. Viper brushed a strand of hair from her sister's forehead and felt the tremor in her own fingers. Three months of hunting, and she'd almost been too late.
What she needed was a safe house, real medical supplies, people she could halfway trust.
Which meant only one place was left.
The sublevels of Old Chicago were a city beneath the city: pre-Unleashing subway tunnels, service corridors, and freight lines that the government had sealed after the first Canning riots. The seals had lasted exactly six weeks before outcasts pried them open again. Now it was a warren of black markets, fight pits, and hidden clinics run by Cannings who refused to register or be collared.
Viper carried Lena down a maintenance shaft reeking of mold and burnt wiring. At the bottom, a single red bulb glowed above a steel door scarred with blast marks. She knocked twice, paused, knocked three times fast. Locks clanked. The door swung inward on protesting hinges.
Jax filled the doorway like a boulder wearing a man's skin. Six-foot-eight, shoulders broad enough to block out the light, his knuckles ridged with scar tissue and seismic implants that glowed dull orange when his temper rose. His beard was more gray than black now, but the eyes were the same warm brown Viper remembered from the night he'd pulled her out of a government sweep when she was seventeen and bleeding from both ears.
"You look like hell, Viper," he rumbled.
"Feel worse." She stepped past him, Lena cradled against her chest. "I need Mira. And a cot. And about a gallon of untainted blood."
Jax's gaze fell to Lena, and his eyes softened in a way that would have shocked anyone who'd only ever seen him punch through tank armor. "Christ. They really did a number on her."
The safe house was a converted subway platform. Strings of salvaged LEDs cast gold light over mismatched furniture, crates of medical supplies, and a dozen Cannings who stopped whatever they were doing the moment Viper walked in. Some she recognized: there was a telekinetic card shark named Rook, a hydrokinetic nurse called Rain. Others were new faces, hollow-cheeked and wary.
Mira appeared from behind a curtain of hanging plastic strips that served as an operating theater. She was small, sharp-featured, with violet eyes that never quite focused on the same reality as anyone else. Her illusions clung to her like perfume; for a moment Viper saw her as a child, then as an old woman, then as herself again.
"Put her here," Mira said, voice calm, already pulling on nitrile gloves that shimmered with low-level glamour to keep them sterile. "I've got two units of O-neg and a clean cot. Move."
Viper laid Lena down with a gentleness that felt foreign in her hands. Lena's fingers caught her wrist. "Don't leave," she whispered.
"I'm right here." Viper brushed a kiss across her sister's knuckles and stepped back only far enough for Mira to work.
Jax handed her a tin mug of something that smelled like battery acid and regret. "Drink. Then talk."
She drank. It burned all the way down and settled warm in her empty stomach.
"They had her hooked to a milking rig," Viper said, his voice flat. "Draining the essence straight into collection bags. She's stable for now, but she'll need weeks to regenerate what they took. And they'll come for her again. Draven doesn't lose assets."
Jax's knuckles cracked; the floor under his boots trembled in sympathetic vibration. "Draven's been busy. Word is he's running three more harvest sites between here and the Rockies. Governments pretend they don't know. They buy the product.
Rook said from the card table, shuffling a deck with telekinetic flicks. "He's also collecting mind-breakers. Anyone with psionic talent gets fast-tracked to his Citadel. They say he's building something big. Something that'll make the Registry look like kindergarten."
Viper stared into the black swirl of her drink. "I'm going to burn the Citadel to the ground."
An expectant hush rippled outward. Then Kai- fourteen-year-old and all elbows, restless energy- blurred into being beside her, leaving behind three afterimages that faded like smoke. "Count me in," he said, flashing a grin with too many teeth in it. "I've been practicing. Can clear a city block in 4.7 seconds now."
Mira didn't look up from the IV she was threading into Lena's arm. "You'll need more than speed and rage. Draven's inner circle are monsters. And the Citadel sits in the Dead Zone. Null storms, psychic minefields, automated turrets that can track a heartbeat through lead. You walk in there alone, you die screaming."
"Then I won't walk in alone," said Viper.
Jax folded his arms. "You asking for the crew?"
"I'm telling you what's coming. Draven won't stop with Lena. He won't stop with any of us. The Syndicate's just the sharp end of the spear. Governments want us afraid, registered, or dead. I'm done hiding."
She looked to the platform around her, at scarred and broken and defiant faces. "I'm going to the Citadel. I'm taking my sister's chains and wrapping them around Malik Draven's throat. Anyone who wants to come, come. Anyone who doesn't, I'll still owe you for tonight."
Rook laid down a royal flush without having touched the cards. "I'm in. Been a while since I robbed something that deserved it."
Rain raised a hand, water curling from her palm into the shape of a small dolphin before collapsing. "I can keep people alive. That's useful."
One by one, the others nodded: some eager, some grim, all of them tired of running.
Jax clapped a massive hand on Viper's shoulder hard enough to stagger a normal person. "Guess we're starting a war, then."
Mira finished taping the IV and finally met Viper's eyes. "There's something else you need to know. Draven's been broadcasting on sub-psionic frequencies. A call to every unbound Canning within five hundred kilometres. He's promising sanctuary. Safety. Purpose. Some are listening."
Viper felt the words like a blade between the ribs.
"How many?"
"Enough that when you kick in his front door, you might be fighting our own people."
Lena's voice drifted from the cot, thin but clear. "Then we don't give them a reason to fight for him."
Every head turned. Lena had pushed herself half-upright, cheeks flushed with fever, eyes burning with the same stubborn light that had kept her alive in a Syndicate cage.
"We offer something he never will," she said. "A choice."
Viper crossed the platform in three strides and knelt beside the cot. "You should be sleeping."
"I've slept enough." Lena's fingers found Viper's. "They tried to make me believe healing was only useful if it served someone else. That mercy was weakness. I'm done letting them define what we are."
She looked past Viper to the assembled Cannings-a dozen misfits in a forgotten tunnel-and somehow made them feel seen.
"We are not curses," Lena said. "We are not weapons. We are people. And people deserve better than chains."
The silence that followed was not empty; it was the sound of something shifting, like tectonic plates grinding towards a new alignment.
Jax broke it with a low chuckle. "Kid's got a way with words."
Viper pressed her forehead to Lena's. "Rest. We'll handle the rest."
But as Mira dimmed the lights and the platform settled into watchful quiet, Viper stood at the edge of the tracks and stared into the dark tunnel that stretched west.
Somewhere out there, Malik Draven was building his perfect world, one broken mind at a time. She smiled, small and sharp and terrible. Let him. The Cannings of Destiny were coming. And destiny, like energy, could be shaped by the right hands.