12:47 P.M. – West Side of Sector 20
The streets were unnervingly still, the kind of quiet that settled over a battlefield in the lull between bombardments.
Echo moved first, her boots barely whispering against the cracked pavement as she signaled the others forward with a sharp flick of her fingers.
Nail followed, his knuckles aching where the skin had split earlier—dried blood crusted over bruised bone.
Carlos brought up the rear, his rifle sweeping the skeletal remains of storefronts, his breath steady behind his scarf.
The Red Dogs had pulled out.
That much was obvious.
No shouts, no clatter of gear, no distant curses echoing through the ruins.
Just empty streets and the occasional skitter of a glow-rat fleeing into the shadows.
But the drones remained.
They hovered in lazy, methodical patterns, their repulsor fields humming faintly in the dead air.
Their optical camouflage was inactive—no rippling distortions, no flickering out of sight.
Just bare, exposed alloy, gleaming dully under the smog-choked sky.
Why?
Echo's fingers tightened around her conduit. Karen's last warning hissed in her memory:
They can vanish in a blink.
Assume every empty space is watched.
Yet here they were, fully visible.
"They're conserving power," Echo muttered, barely loud enough for the others to hear.
Nail's jaw clenched. "Or they don't care if we see them anymore."
A cold thought settled between them.
If the drones weren't hiding, it meant they were confident.
It meant whatever they were guarding—or hunting—was already cornered.
Carlos exhaled sharply through his nose, his breath fogging the air for a second before dissipating. "Mags and Pen's last ping came from up ahead. If the drones are swarming here, they're either trapped—"
"—or leading them away," Nail finished.
Echo didn't answer.
Her gaze flicked upward, toward the rooftops where Liz was perched, a silent shadow with a sniper's sight.
A single tap on her comm unit—once, twice—and Liz's voice crackled softly in their earpieces.
"Clear path for now. Drones are sticking to the main thoroughfare. No heat sigs in the alleys."
Nail's eyes narrowed.
Too easy.
The Red Dogs had abandoned the streets, but the drones hadn't.
That meant someone else was directing them.
Cinder.
The realization prickled the back of his neck.
A flicker of movement in his periphery—Nail turned just in time to see a thin trail of smoke curling into the sky, distant but unmistakable.
The warehouse.
Echo followed his gaze, her lips pressing into a thin line. "That fire's still burning."
Nail said nothing.
He could still smell it—burnt fuel, melting alloy, the acrid sting of scorched concrete.
The warehouse had been a distraction, a sacrifice to chaos.
But the smoke lingered, a ragged banner over the ruins.
Liz's voice cut through the silence again, tighter this time. "One drone just broke formation. Headed east—toward the sewer access."
Echo's fingers twitched toward her belt, brushing against the cold metal of the charges strapped there.
The weight was familiar, comforting in its lethality.
Too slow.
If the drone was moving, it meant something had triggered it.
Or someone.
Nail flexed his bruised hands, the split skin pulling taut over his knuckles.
The sting grounded him, sharp enough to chase away the static creeping at the edges of his thoughts.
Carlos leaned in, his whisper barely disturbing the air as he spoke into the comm unit.
"Hmm… Their last location was just below us, in the sewers. But those drones don't seem like they've found them yet. They're still sweeping the area."
A beat of silence.
Then Liz's response, quieter now, as if she were pressing closer to her scope. "...True. That means those two still haven't been caught."
Nail exhaled.
The logic was sound.
If the drones had located Mags and Pen, the entire swarm would have converged by now.
The fact that they were still patrolling meant the hunt was ongoing.
I wasn't thinking straight again, huh.
The thought slipped out before he could stop it, muttered under his breath like a confession.
His fingers curled into fists, the ache in his knuckles flaring.
He'd been ready to charge in blind, driven by the same reckless impulse that had nearly gotten him killed in the parking structure.
Echo heard him.
Of course she did.
Her senses were sharper than most, honed by years of surviving in places where a single misstep meant death.
But she didn't turn, didn't offer reassurance or scorn.
Instead, she kept her eyes locked on the street ahead, her body coiled like a spring.
But Nail saw it—the faint curve of her mouth, just for a second.
Not quite a smile.
Not quite approval.
Just… acknowledgment.
You're learning.
The unspoken words hung between them, lighter than the drone's hum, sharper than the scent of burning metal still clinging to the air.
Then Echo was moving again, a shadow slipping into the alley ahead, her hand raised in a silent signal.
Follow. Quietly.
Nail swallowed the rest of his thoughts and obeyed.
***
12:51 P.M. – Tenn's Workshop, Sector 20
The cryo-tank hummed, its stabilization runes pulsing a steady blue as the glyph synchronization locked into place.
>> STABILIZATION: 100%
>> GLYPH SYNCHRONIZATION: NOMINAL
Tenn barely glanced at the readout. Her fingers danced across the holoscreen, pulling up the corrupted security footage from the parking structure—grainy, fragmented, but still intact enough to show the moment Nail had torn through her augmented units.
The feed stuttered as Unit-03's chest caved under his fist, the Mass Driver glyph flaring blue across his knuckles. Then static. Unit-02's last transmission cut mid-sentence, its vocal modulator gargling synthetic blood.
Then black.
She rewound.
Zoomed in.
There—his eyes.
Not the blank fury of a soldier following orders.
Something rawer.
Something personal.
Tenn's lips curled.
"Subject exhibits excessive aggression toward augmentation tech," she murmured, typing notes into her private log. "Pattern suggests prior trauma. Likely candidate for Phase 2."
Behind her, the cryo-tank's vents hissed, flooding the room with aether-chilled mist.
The glass fogged over, obscuring the thing floating inside—but not before the reflection caught the flicker of red in Tenn's own eyes.
She tapped the screen.
The footage looped again.
Nail's fist rising.
Falling.
Rising again.
"How interesting," she whispered.
The footage of Nail's brutality still flickered in the corner of her screen—his fists rising and falling in that relentless rhythm, his face twisted in something beyond rage.
Beyond hatred.
It was personal, a violence carved into his bones.
Tenn tapped her fingers against the workbench, her mind racing with possibilities.
She switched feeds.
A tap of her finger, and the screen switched to another feed—the warehouse explosion, flames clawing at the sky like a living thing.
The blast wave rippled outward in perfect slow motion, debris suspended in mid-air for one surreal moment before crashing down.
The beginning of the end for the Red Dogs, she thought.
Gideon's precious stronghold, crumbling into ash.
The thought should have stirred something - anger, regret, even nostalgia.
This had been her refuge, her proving ground after the corporates cast her out.
Yet as she watched the flames consume the warehouse through grainy surveillance footage, she felt... nothing.
No loyalty.
No loss.
Just the detached curiosity of a scientist watching an experiment reach its inevitable conclusion.
The Red Dogs had been useful - a means to test her designs, to push boundaries the corporates would never allow.
But its usefulness had an expiration date.
The gang's destruction changed nothing.
Her work would continue.
The real question was - where would she go next?
Her gaze drifted to the cryo-tank behind her, its frosted glass obscuring the liquid splashing within.
The stabilization glyphs pulsed steadily, but doubt gnawed at her.
Would it be enough?
Could anything salvage the Dogs now?
She rewound the footage again.
The camera shuddered as the shockwave hit, but the image stabilized just in time to catch Vega sprinting for the exit—his coat singed, his face streaked with soot, crashing to the ground.
At first, her lip curled.
Pathetic.
Another coward prioritizing his own survival.
Then—
Vega turned.
The footage was grainy, but his expression was unmistakable.
Not fear.
Not even hesitation.
Just a split-second calculation before he charged back into the inferno.
Tenn leaned forward.
The camera caught glimpses—Vega dragging a half-conscious scout by the collar, his boots kicking up sparks as molten debris rained around them.
Another Red Dog lay pinned under a collapsed beam; Vega didn't pause, wrenching the metal aside with bare hands, his sleeves burning.
Something cold and sharp lodged itself in Tenn's chest.
Would I have done the same?
The question startled her.
She rewound the footage, watching Vega's retreat again.
And again.
Her fascination coiled tighter.
This wasn't supposed to happen.
Not here.
Not in the Junkyard, where survival was a currency spent selfishly.
She'd seen a thousand security feeds—corpses left to rot in alleys, children shoved into the path of gunfire as shields, lovers betraying each other for half-rations.
The worst of humanity, preserved in pixelated clarity.
But this?
Vega emerging from the smoke, a wounded Dog slung over each shoulder, his own skin blistering.
Tenn exhaled.
The cryo-tank's reflection stared back at her, warped and rippling in the glass.
"Fascinating," she murmured.
Not just Nail's rage.
Not just Vega's sacrifice.
But the fact that, even here, in this rotting world, something still made them turn back.
The screen flickered again, switching to a dimly lit hangar hidden beneath the workshop.
The footage was crisp, clinical—sterile white light reflecting off rows of suspended pods, their glass fogged with condensation.
Inside, figures hanged motionless.
Tenn's fingers hovered over the controls, her breath shallow.
The Dolls.
She hadn't named them.
Didn't want to name them.
But there they were—augmented beyond recognition, their limbs replaced with sleek alloy, their spines reinforced with corporate serial numbers.
Their faces, though… their faces were still human.
Or close enough.
Eyes closed.
Expressions slack.
Like they were sleeping.
A sour taste filled her mouth.
She'd only deployed three against Nail as a test.
A first test.
The footage of their destruction still burned in her mind—the way Nail had torn through them with something beyond rage.
Good.
The thought startled her.
On the surface, her disgust was real—visceral, clawing up her throat like bile.
But beneath it, something darker stirred.
A quiet, shameful hunger for knowledge.
These Dolls were abominations.
She knew that.
Yet their engineering...
Tenn's fingers trembled as she zoomed in on the schematics.
Hydraulic musculature woven with synthetic tendons, each fiber stronger than carbon steel.
Neural interfaces so seamless they blurred the line between machine and meat.
It was grotesque.
It was brilliant.
A strangled laugh escaped her lips.
The contradiction burned worse than the shame.
She hated them—hated their hollow eyes, their too-smooth movements, the way their creators had scraped out everything human and left only a corpse puppeted by wires.
But more than that, she hated wanting to understand.
The answer clicked into place with terrible clarity.
They weren't just augmented.
The Dolls' remaining organic parts—the shriveled up organs, the atrophied muscles—told the truth.
These weren't living subjects enhanced with tech.
They were corpses.
Reanimated.
Repurposed.
A blasphemy against nature.
And yet...
Tenn's gaze drifted to the cryo-tank's fogged up glass.
Compared to this, the thing she had created felt crude—insignificant.
Then she looked again at the hangar footage.
Someone tried to play god.
The realization slithered through her veins.
This wasn't just about creating better soldiers.
The Dolls' design, their very purpose—it whispered of desperate, deluded ambition.
Of resurrection.
Her stomach turned.
She reached for the terminal's killswitch—then froze.
Because the truly terrifying thought wasn't that someone had done this.
It was that they might succeed.
Blaze had handed them over with that same hollow grin of his, his fingers lingering a second too long on the activation console.
"Someone wants 'em field-tested," he'd said, shrugging. "And Junkyard's perfect place—no laws, no witnesses. Just data."
And then, just for a heartbeat—his smile had faltered.
A flicker of something like disgust in his eyes before he shoved the controls into her hands.
Tenn's nails dug into her palms.
She didn't understand why they'd given them to her.
Was it because she was the only engineer in the Red Dogs capable of maintaining them?
Or because they knew she'd choke down her revulsion if it meant unlocking their secrets?
The screen flickered again, zooming in on one Doll's face—a woman, maybe.
Or what was left of one.
Her lips were slightly parted, as if she might wake any second and scream.
Tenn slammed the feed off.
The cryo-tank hummed behind her, its stabilization runes pulsing like a heartbeat.
"Just data," she muttered.
But the words tasted like ash.
***
Cinder perched on the edge of a broken window frame, legs swinging lazily over the drop.
The warehouse fire painted the horizon in smears of orange and black, smoke curling into the sky like a dying man's last breath.
She watched it with detached amusement, her chin propped on one hand.
"Ahhh," she sighed, drumming her fingers against her conduit. "Would boss be mad that the warehouse got bombed?"
No answer came.
Not that she expected one.
The wind carried the distant crackle of burning metal, the occasional pop of exploding munitions.
She tilted her head, considering.
"Nah," she decided, popping a cherry-flavored stim-gum between her teeth. "He'll just blame the Dogs for being incompetent. Again."
The gum snapped between her molars, flooding her mouth with synthetic sweetness.
She exhaled, blowing a pink bubble until it burst with a sticky pop.
Her fingers danced across her conduit's surface, and the screen flickered to life—a grid of Sector 20's sewer system overlaid with pulsing red dots.
Her drones.
"Oh well," she sing-songed, tapping one particularly dense cluster of markers. "Still got someone to hunt. Those damn sneaky rats think hiding in shit-water makes them clever."
A smirk curled her lips as she zoomed in.
The drones moved in perfect formation, sweeping tunnel by tunnel, their sensors tuned to the faintest traces of body heat, aether residue, even the whisper of displaced air.
But the Talons weren't making it easy.
"Tch." Cinder's nail tapped impatiently against the screen. "Mags, Mags, Mags. Silent doesn't mean invisible."
She leaned forward, her other hand drifting to the rifle propped against the wall.
Its barrel still warm from earlier.
A chime from her conduit.
A notification—priority override from V-Tech R&D.
Cinder's smirk twisted into something sharper.
"Oops," she murmured, swiping the alert away without reading it. "Must've missed that."
The drones hummed on, relentless.
Cinder's grin froze as her thumb brushed the notification.
The holographic text shimmered in the air before her, corporate glyphs sharp enough to cut:
>> From: V-Tech R&D Division
>> Reference ID: MRD-DRN-047
>> We are writing to formally address a serious issue regarding the recent destruction of several drone units lent to your department under the Equipment Loan Agreement...
Her nail dug into the conduit's screen hard enough to leave a hairline crack.
"Tch."
A flick of her wrist dismissed the message, but the damage was done.
The words lingered behind her eyelids like afterimages of gunfire.
This is kinda bad.
The stim-gum turned to ash in her mouth.
She spat it out, watching the pink wad arc through the air and land somewhere in the ruins below.
A vein pulsed in her temple.
If not for that damn Mags—
The memory played in jagged fragments: the Talon corpse slumped against the truck, the way Mags had turned her own shotgun on it without hesitation, the explosion that tore through half her swarm in seconds.
Cinder's fingers twitched toward the scar on her ribs—a gift from the same firefight.
The wound had healed.
The debt hadn't.
"Bitch cost me a year's worth of credits," she muttered, slamming her fist against the windowsill. Rust flaked off in orange petals.
The conduit screen flickered again—another notification, this time with a blinking red priority marker.
Cinder didn't open it.
She already knew what it said.
Destroyed equipment will be deducted from your stipend.
Failure to meet quota will result in asset reclamation.
Asset.
Like she was just another drone on their balance sheet.
Her teeth ground together hard enough to ache.
Outside, the warehouse fire painted the sky in hellish hues.
Somewhere beneath her feet, Mags and Pen moved through the dark like ghosts.
Cinder's hand closed around her rifle.
The drones could wait.
Myriad could wait.
She had a hunt to finish.