Sofie's voice came thin and bright in Brendon's ear, a needle of sound that split the night. "Brendon — listen. Chief Tyson just called. RTPD is moving on your location."
The alley tilted under him like a stage set about to collapse. For a second he thought the city had decided to press its palm flat against his face and squeeze the life out of him. He tasted iron, the same metallic note that had crawled up his throat when he'd touched the brand. Sofie's words cut through the fog: calm on the wire, panic in the fact of them.
"How?" he breathed.
"He says Robert got a hit from his source. Illegal trafficking. Chief pulled the warrant chain and they're sweeping the market for anything flagged. They'll be here fast — officers, team leaders, the whole predictable mess."
Robert. The name hit like a pebble. Robert Kühl — his assistant sheriff who poked at the city's bruises with little knives in print — or the local detective with a taste for headlines. In this city names doubled as currency and as nails in coffins. Whatever Robert was, his source had moved a ledger and the cops were answering the bell.
Brendon's shoulders tightened. He could picture the street outside the alley: black vans, the hard-shined boots of people who preferred questions in the evening when witnesses were pliant. He glanced at the crate, the brand still a ghost under his skin, and the packages of charm-bones wrapped like secrets. The world had not forgiven him for being the kind of man who watched; it wanted him to disappear.
A sound cut across the alley, immediate and animal: a deep, rough bark of a voice, hoarse with the habit of shouting over the din of hunger. The silhouette of the Hyena anthro returned like an accusation, bulk moving through the lane with a coil of rope slung over his shoulder. The rope swung at his hip, a pendulum of intent.
"You!" the hyena shouted, and whatever else he might have meant — warning, claim, ownership — spilled out in the single guttural syllable. He pointed, not at the crate but at Brendon.
Brendon's instinct unclipped the rest of his brain. He knew the sound of being named in the wrong place. It made people move in a way that created lines and traps. Sofie's voice in his ear turned insistent. "You have to run. Now."
He did not argue. Movement was its own argument. He pivoted away from the crate and bolted, the alley flaring around him in a hard, narrow tunnel of sound: the slap of his boots, the hiss of a loose shutter, the clank of a chain. The hyena's laugh — low, like someone pleased with teeth — followed him.
The chase was born like an animal: immediate, dumb, pure. The hyena's stride closed on him with surprising speed for the bulk he carried. Rope slapped his side as if searching for a handhold. Brendon kept to the shadows, pushing himself along a line of garbage bins and rusted staircases, vaulting a low fence where the alley spat him into a service lane that hosted echoes of backroom transactions.
Smoke tangled in his throat. He ran not because he had to but because stillness here was the invitation to being boxed in. He could feel the hyena would use every alley's mouth to cut advance and force him into a single corridor.
Behind him, the hyena bellowed to the scarred human — a sound like wheels grinding. The younger man's footsteps thudded, smaller but eager. Brendon could hear the wet slap of the rope as it unwound. The hyena was closing, calculating, as if the coil was not for tying but for lassoing the world.
Brendon ran across a wet slab of pavement and used the slick glass of a florist's window to vault higher. He felt the briefest flash of the brand's echo, not as a vision this time but a prick of heat sliding beneath his ribs. He forced the sensation down. There was no room for prophecy, only for a clean, precise exit.
He cut through a market stall, knocking over a stack of canned goods. A rain of metal tins chimed behind him like a warning bell. The hyena cursed and twisted to avoid the spill, giving Brendon the fraction of a second he needed to slip through a narrow gap between a delivery truck and a loading bay. A hand shot out; fingers closed on his shirt, tugged him back. He slammed a shoulder into the grasp and twisted free, pain flaring in his side like someone lighting a match against his skin.
"Down!" someone shouted; a torch flicked through the air. Brendon saw the glint of a badge too late and flinched. RTPD officers. The night had a dozen polls for loyalty. He ducked into a corridor of service doors, shoved through one and found himself in a maze of shipping containers. A smell of diesel and cardboard pressed against his face.
Footsteps pounded behind him. The hyena was close enough to taste his breath; the scarred human kept to the flanks like a hound. Brendon ran the container maze like memory, the layout imprinting on his mind with every turn, ducking low beneath a slatted fork-lift, putting crates between them to buy him time. The city's lights cut the metal boxes into slices of pale blue; he used the shadow seams like stitches.
At one point the hyena threw the coil. It arced, a looping noose that sang the air and caught nothing but a patch of rain. The rope thunked against a crate, fell, and then the hyena swore in a language made of breath and teeth. Brendon seized the chance to climb a ladder bolted to the side of a container and scrambled onto a narrow catwalk. He moved along it, careful, like someone balancing a blade on his palm.
He could feel the city pressing in from below — voices, distant horns, the faint call of someone selling fish — but above it all was the ragged sound of pursuit. The hyena found a way up the nearest ladder with a grunt and brute force, each step a proof of a will made of roughness. Brendon ran the line of roofs, leaping from corrugation to corrugation, metal singing beneath his soles. Rain started to thread the night, a soft percussion that blurred shapes.
A ladder, a skylight, a leap — and the world opened into a narrow alley that spilled onto the riverfront. The water below glimmered with the neon of the city as if the city had been poured into it and then forgotten. Brendon's lungs burned. He paused, chest heaving, and listened. Behind him he heard the hyena's patented curse and a distant shout — law, hungry hands, someone who liked to assign blame.
He slipped into the crowd that formed the outer edges of the riverwalk: late-night vendors, people who made little lives from second-hand warmth. He folded himself into the press, a wolf making himself common. Sofie's voice, once sharp and fearful, returned like a lifeline. "Brendon? Are you—where are you? Did they get you?"
He ducked behind a cart selling boiled corn, pressing his back against the soggy fabric. He audibly breathed, the sound shallow. "I'm clear," he lied in the softest possible way. "For now."
"Chief's men are sweeping the market," Sofie said. "Robert's finding — whoever found it — is making them nervous. They'll be shutting down streets, checking cameras. You can't keep hiding here. We need a plan."
He felt the weight of her words as something physical. A plan required time. Time required trust. He had neither in abundance.