Kali returned to his apartment on the outer ring of Medri's core sector just as the artificial dusk began to bleed across the skyline, casting glass towers in muted gold. The building's elevator chimed softly as he stepped inside and to his mild surprise, it wasn't empty.
Annie was already there, scrolling through something on her wristpad, the light from the interface painting shifting hues across her face. She looked up as he entered and gave him a bright, unguarded smile.
"You look shot up," she said, her eyes scanning him briefly. "Rough day at work?"
"Yeah," he replied, exhaling the word more than speaking it.
She tilted her head, a hint of amusement ghosting across her features. "Let me guess, another heroic dive into the undersectors?"
"Something like that."
They weren't close. Just floor-neighbors who exchanged words in elevators and mailrooms, and on rare occasions, in the building's half-hearted communal lounge. But unlike most of the residents in this sector, white-collar technocrats and minor functionaries who carried their status like armor, she was less of a snob.
Far as he could tell, she was a journalist. An independent one, which explained the persistence, and the faint shimmer of naïveté she hadn't yet managed to scrub from her voice. That kind of optimism was rare in the twin cities.
The elevator hummed to a stop at the thirty-second floor with a faint mechanical sigh. Kali shifted forward, ready to step out, when Annie reached into the side pocket of her coat and pressed something into his hand, a folded paper flyer, crisp and incongruous in an age where most communication had gone retinal or encoded.
"We're organizing a protest," she said, her voice low but insistent. "City center, two nights from now. Strictly nonviolent."
He glanced down at the flyer. The ink was smudged slightly, as if printed in haste, or perhaps by a machine too old to still be running. Reclaim the Voice. End the Filters. No to Silence. The slogans were blunt, earnest, and completely futile.
He gave a silent nod, pocketed the paper, and stepped out. The elevator doors closed behind him with a polite chime, muffling whatever hopeful thing she might have said next.
No protest was going to change Medri. And definitely not Kirel, that older, darker twin sinking beneath its own weight. The rot wasn't just in the policies. It was in the architecture. The circuitry. The bones. The cities had been built to endure dissent, not to listen to it.
He pressed his thumb to the biometric lock of his door. It blinked green, hissed open, and let him into the dim hush of his apartment. The stale air greeted him like an old dog, familiar, unclean, and indifferent. He dropped the flyer on the counter without looking at it again.
Kali moved through the small routines of evening like a man drifting through muscle memory. He filled the kettle, set it to boil, and selected a pouch of loose-leaf black tea from the narrow cabinet above the sink. The scent—bitter and grounding—rose into the air as he poured the water, the steam briefly fogging the window beside him.
Minutes later, mug in hand, he lowered himself into the reclining chair by the wide pane of glass that passed for a living room window. The skyline of Medri unfurled before him, angular, backlit by the dying pulse of commercial neons and the deep blue wash of synthetic night. The city always looked almost beautiful from this high up. Almost.
"You think this city could change?" he asked aloud, not to the room, but to the presence that stirred behind his eyes.
Rizen's voice answered from the recesses of his consciousness, calm and mechanical, but threaded with its usual undertone of quiet disdain. "That is irrelevant. Our only objective should be getting off-world."
Kali took a long sip of tea. The bitterness cut through the fatigue, but not the hollowness. "Any reason for the urgency?" he asked.
"Yes," Rizen replied, without hesitation.
There was a pause. Kali waited, but no elaboration came. Just a subtle, almost imperceptible increase in neural static, a low, dry hum in the back of his skull, like a radio tuned just off-channel.
"Well?" he prompted.
The hum deepened, flickered, then steadied. "I will tell you," Rizen said at last. "When I iron out the kinks."
Kali frowned into his tea, watching the steam curl and vanish. With Rizen, that could mean anything from calibrating quantum leakage in his neural lattice to untangling philosophical paradoxes best left unexplored.
He leaned back, the chair creaking beneath him. Somewhere beneath the polished surface of the city, protests would be simmering, surveillance feeds would be cataloging faces, and false hope would be making the rounds on backdoor networks.
Off-world.
It sounded clean. Distant. Impossible.
His phone buzzed on the counter, its low vibration slicing through the ambient hum of the apartment. Kali set down his half-finished tea and answered with a swipe.
John's voice came through, taut and clipped. "Thomas got a lead on the whistleblower. He's holed up in Kirel—Sector 9, somewhere near the old monorail junction. We're en route now. Will you be joining us?"
Kali was already rising from his chair, the city's lights reflected in his eyes like static. "Notify the AFD to prepare for possible escalation. Send me the coordinates. Proceed with caution but if he resists, use force."
There was a beat of silence, then John replied, "Understood," before the line went dead.
Kali moved with quiet efficiency. He crossed to the lockbox mounted inside the hall closet, pressed his palm to the reader, and retrieved his sidearm—a matte-black M10 coilgun, compact, reliable, and deadly. He checked the charge cell, holstered it beneath his jacket, then scanned the flyer Annie had left on the counter, still untouched.
Protest at the city center.
He left it there, uncreased and unread.
The hallway outside was silent, sterile, lined with warm lights that did little to soften the underlying sense of surveillance. He took the lift down, emerged onto the skywalk, and flagged a hovercab from the terminal node.
The vehicle glided toward the maglev interchange, bypassing the clogged arteries of evening traffic. Below, Medri pulsed with synthetic life, but ahead, looming beyond the invisible threshold, was Kirel. Where Medri was rot polished to a shine, Kirel didn't bother with illusions. It was older, darker, heavier with memory and neglect.
Kali disembarked at the maglev terminal and stepped into the express rail pod, its interior humming with contained power. The doors sealed, and a low chime sounded. In seconds, the pod launched, streaking toward Kirel like a round in flight. He stood the whole ride, one hand on the rail, the other resting loosely near his weapon. His reflection in the window looked almost calm.
Kirel greeted Kali with its usual stench, burnt metal, mold, ozone, and despair. The maglev dropped him off at a graffitied platform beneath a fractured dome of flickering lights, and he descended into the urban underbelly, where infrastructure forgot its purpose long ago.
There were no hovercabs here. Instead, he hailed a mechanized rickshaw—a rusting hybrid of wheels and repulsors, its driver a pale-eyed synth with a cracked voice modulator.
He had barely arrived within two blocks of the given coordinates when the concussive crack of gunfire tore through the air, followed by the unmistakable whump of an explosion. The rickshaw driver veered to a halt, but Kali was already leaping off before the vehicle stopped moving.
He sprinted down a narrow street lined with collapsing tenements and rusted data pylons, his boots pounding against uneven ferrocrete. Smoke coiled into the sky ahead, orange and black against the dimming heavens. The air tasted of burning composite and scorched circuits.
He rounded the corner just in time to see the aftermath.
A single shack—more server-hub than home—was ablaze, flames licking at the shattered remains of its reinforced plating. Thomas emerged from the haze, his tactical uniform scorched and streaked with soot, weapon still raised but no longer firing.
"He's dead," Thomas called out grimly, nodding toward the blackened body half-buried in the debris. "Whistleblower didn't make it. Liv and John are still engaged. The droids hit us fast."
Even as he spoke, one of the attack units burst through the side wall of a neighboring structure, seven feet tall, plated in carbon-black armor, its optics pulsing red. It let out a synthetic snarl and lunged forward.
Kali was already moving, gun drawn, lining up his shot—
—but then came the sound.
A high, unnatural shriek tore through the air. It wasn't just heard; it was felt, a pressure spike in the skull, a vibration in the gut. The droid shuddered mid-charge, its limbs locking up before its body was flung violently backward, crashing into the far wall with enough force to cave in metal.
From the haze of smoke, Liv emerged, breath ragged, eyes wide. Her pale skin shimmered with exertion, and thin lines of blood trickled from her nose and ears. Her voice came hoarse, shaken. "Someone got to him before we did."
Kali stared at the droid's twitching chassis, a thin curl of steam rising from its neural casing. He holstered his weapon slowly.
"Not a bad ability," he murmured, eyeing Liv sidelong. "Now I understand why they call you Banshee."