The residual ozone from the overloaded Signal Tower still clung to the air, a metallic ghost on my tongue. Below, the sprawling, stitched-together chaos of Neo-Gotham glittered with a billion false promises. A job done. A message silenced. For a day, maybe two, the network that moved whispers and weapons through the city's veins would be blind. It was the only kind of peace I knew: a temporary, violent quiet.
I was three blocks away, melting into the rooftop gargoyles of a pre-Merge bank, when my own network pinged. Not a direct contact—I hadn't allowed one of those in years. This was a dead-drop protocol, triggered by a proximity cipher I hadn't used since before the world broke. It was buried in an encrypted partition, a digital ghost in my own machine.
The location was a loose brick in an alleyway smelling of stale rain and desperation. My fingers, gloved and calloused, found it easily. Tucked inside the grimy cavity was a simple data chip. No frills. No traps. I'd swept for everything from kinetic triggers to memetic viruses before my hand even got close.
Back in a forgotten service tunnel beneath the city's guts, I slotted the chip into a sandboxed terminal. A single text file bloomed on the screen. Coordinates for a derelict tenement in the industrial sector. And beneath them, a short, gut-punch of a phrase:
The wolves are at the door, but the shepherd is dead.
My blood went cold.
Only one person knew that phrase. It was a message I received from Whispers years ago on a mission, saving my life. It was a code, a warning, a final confession. Someone was using my past to get my attention. It was a tactic I respected, and hated with every fiber of my being.
Curiosity is a liability. It gets you killed. But this… this felt less like a trap and more like a summons from a grave. I had to know.
The world sees the Ghost, but it's a fiction I wear. The real me, the man of scars and regrets, stayed in the tunnel. To walk into a situation this loaded, I needed the armor. I closed my eyes and let the change take me. I was a weapon. An absence. A ghost.
The tenement smelled of rot and rust. I moved through it like smoke, a shadow in the deeper shadows, my boots making no sound on the decaying floorboards. Third floor, last door on the right. My auditory sensors picked up three distinct heartbeats inside. One steady and slow, one rapid and jittery, one so controlled it was almost flatlining.
I didn't knock. The lock was a pre-Merge relic, a joke. A simple kick and door opened itself.
They were waiting, arranged in a loose triangle in the center of a dust-choked room.
The first was the source of the slow heartbeat. A man in his fifties, with a face like a crumpled city map and a trench coat that had seen better decades. He held a cigarette between his stained fingers, the tip glowing like a dying ember. His eyes, sharp and weary, tracked me without fear. "Took you long enough," he grunted, his voice a gravel road.
The second was the jitterbug. A young woman, maybe mid-twenties, perched on an overturned crate. Her fingers danced over a holographic interface projected from a wrist-mounted deck. Her clothes were a chaotic mix of synth-leather and glowing fiber optics. She looked me up and down, a smirk playing on her lips. "Nice entrance. Very dramatic. You practice that in front of a mirror, spooky?"
The third was the calm one. A woman with a stillness that screamed danger louder than any weapon. Her dark hair was pulled back tight, her posture perfect, her gaze analytical. She wore simple, functional fatigues. Her hands were empty, relaxed, and yet I knew she could break my neck in a dozen different ways before I could react. She just watched.
I let the silence hang, a tool I was more comfortable with than any gun. Finally, the toneless rasp of my voice filled the room. "The phrase. Who gave it to you?"
The man with the cigarette took a long drag. "Name's Marlow Kane. NYPD, before it all went to hell. Whispers used to be a confidential informant of mine. He told me if I ever got in over my head with something… weird… that phrase would get the attention of the only person who could help."
"I'm not here to help," I stated, a flat fact.
"Yeah, we figured," the hacker cut in, her hologram flickering. "Juno Vega. Most people call me Keys. And trust me, you are. You just don't know it yet." She gestured to the silent woman. "That's Nadia. She doesn't say much, but she's got a C.V. that would make spec-ops assassins wet themselves."
Nadia offered a slight, almost imperceptible nod. Her eyes never left me.
"You have sixty seconds to explain why you're not all dead," I said, letting the threat settle in the dust motes between us.
Kane took the lead. "I've been tracking a string of homicides. Victims dissolved, turned to glass, aged a century in a second. Tech that shouldn't exist, even now. The brass calls it 'Merge Manifestation,' writes it off. But it's not random. It's murder." He flicked his cigarette ash onto the floor. "Justice is a joke in this city, but someone still has to try to tell it. This is too big for a guy with a badge and a peashooter."
"My turn," Juno said, her fingers flying. "The Merge didn't just smash worlds together, it cracked the walls of reality's source code. Data bleeds through. Tech schematics, weapons designs, personnel files from timelines that never were. I trade in that data. Lately, someone's been cornering the market, weaponizing the leaks. They're building an arsenal of impossible things. Things like the Signal Tower you just so conveniently took offline."
My head tilted slightly. That got my attention.
"I'm a ghost, not a janitor. You made this mess, you clean it up," I rasped, my gaze shifting to Nadia. "And you? What's your angle? League of Assassins doesn't do charity work."
The name hung in the air, a drop of poison. Kane's eyes widened slightly. Juno stopped typing. Nadia's expression showed slight suprise. She tried to hide it but I could see past the mask. The stillness around her grew heavier.
"Ra's al Ghul's crusade for balance became a lust for annihilation after the Merge," she said, her voice low and steady, each word measured. "His vision fractured. I chose a different path."
"Defectors are either dead or liars."
"I am here to protect," she stated simply. "Not to assassinate. There are forces at play now that make the Demon's Head look like a petulant child. They must be stopped, not obeyed."
Her calm unnerved me more than Juno's arrogance or Kane's world-weary plea. The League trains its killers to sublimate, to become instruments. She insisted she was done with killing, but her eyes were still reading my weak points, calculating trajectories. Old habits die hard. Or they don't die at all.
"You're all delusional," I said, turning to leave. "Handle your own problems."
"Wait," Juno snapped. She swiped her hand, and the hologram in front of her expanded, showing a complex schematic of the city's data network. A single, pulsing virus—my virus—was at its heart. But branching off it were dozens of smaller, fainter signals she had highlighted. "When you took down the Tower, you used a beautiful, brute-force cascade virus. I piggybacked on it. Used the echo to map every other hidden uplink in a fifty-mile radius. You hit the trunk, Ghost. I found all the roots." She smirked again, the expression infuriatingly smug. "You're a paranoid Batman knockoff, but you're good. I'm better. Together, we could actually fix this."
She knew too much. She'd been in my code. The violation was a cold spike in my gut.
Before I could respond, a high-pitched alert shrieked from Juno's console. Her eyes widened. "Oh, hell. We've got a big one. Live anomaly."
A new window popped up on her display, showing a shaky feed from a traffic cam. A section of elevated highway was gone, replaced by a crater of twisted metal and shimmering, unstable air. In the center of it sat an armored transport vehicle, its design a bizarre fusion of sleek, S.H.I.E.L.D.-issue plating and the ornate, cruel-looking filigree of the League of Assassins. It was bleeding temporal energy, flickering in and out of existence. Its rear doors had been blasted open.
"That's a pre-Merge SHIELD carrier," Kane breathed, leaning in. "What's it doing fused with…"
"Crates of League weaponry," Nadia finished, her eyes narrowed. "An impossible combination."
"And it just crashed in the middle of the Warrens," Juno said, her voice tight. "Every gang and merc crew from here to the coast is already on their way. That's a lifetime supply of untraceable, high-tech death for whoever gets there first."
The implications slammed into me. That kind of tech on these streets… the body count would be astronomical. It was another leak in a world that was already drowning.
I turned my back on them. "My problem was the Tower. It's handled."
"You work alone, I get it," Kane's voice cut through my resolve, sharp as broken glass. "You're the boogeyman, the one-man army. But look at that screen. That's not one leak. It's a flood. You can't plug every hole by yourself. Not anymore."
He was right. The thought was bitter, like swallowing battery acid. For years, my survival, my very existence, was predicated on being a singular force. To rely on others was to create weaknesses. Attachments. Targets. Family was a word from a different life. A different man.
But the image of that impossible truck, spilling a new kind of horror onto the streets I stalked… Kane was right. This was bigger than one ghost.
I stopped at the door, my face of smoke turned halfway back toward them. The silence stretched, thick with unspoken questions.
"One job," the scrambler rasped, the words sounding alien and wrong. "We secure the tech. Then I walk."