They moved like a single animal.
The Pleasure District fell away behind them as Drift's car swallowed street after slick street, neon streaking past like the tail of a comet. Kai rode shotgun, the data core strapped to his chest under a half-closed coat, alloy plates still gleaming where the rain had washed them clean. Eve hunched in the back with a compact rig glowing on her lap, fingers a blur of light. Crow's rifle case sat between them like a sleeping predator. Lady Altacora—Altacora—sat poised, eyes narrowed, already recalibrating the game inside her head.
Spencer sat in the cramped backseat, throat tight, throat full of a dozen thoughts that refused to settle. This was his first run. He'd imagined something romantic—sneaking into server rooms, tapping hololocks, disappearing into the Net. He had not imagined being this close to guns, to metal teeth.
"No chatter," Kai said into the comms. His voice was low, coiled. "Eve, you're slicing us a hole in three. Crow, overwatch. Altacora—close quarters and extraction. Drift, route's yours. Spencer—stay on my left and don't be cute."
Spencer nodded, though no one could see. His hands were already numb with adrenaline.
Eve's face reflected in the dash as she adjusted a node. "Hole opening in T–60. You'll have ghosts on the external cams. I'll loop Corp feeds for twenty-seven seconds. After that, you're on your own."
Drive, stealth, and a slice of luck—that was the plan. Or so Kai had said. Plans were only useful for the moments before they were set on fire.
They slid into District 9 like smoke. Aegis Warehouse loomed ahead: a hulking block of concrete and polymer, strip-lights strobing across armored shutters. CorpSec turrets steamed along the roofline, and anti-personnel drones drifted like locusts on patrol grids. The convoy they'd diverted earlier would be routed here tonight—voices whispered—transfers of classified files tucked behind triple encryption. Take or burn, Shadow Net had to keep it out of the wrong hands.
Drift parked two blocks down and killed the engine. The team spilled out, shadows pressing into alleys, blended into crowds of late-shift workers, street vendors, synth-dancers. Altacora's outfit had changed—the silk coat and polished heels were gone. In her place, she wore mesh-woven tactical armor under a stylized jacket: black with a subtle pattern of the Shadow Net sigil stitched in whispering thread, plates on the thighs and wrists that flexed with her every breath. The cybernetic fan on her wrist retracted cleanly into a gauntlet; the whip folded into a slender rod at her hip. Her look was both elegance and execution.
"You look… like you belong," Spencer blurted before he could stop himself.
Altacora's smile was small, dangerous. "I belong where favors get paid. Tonight I belong with you." She clicked her boot, and the gang moved.
They reached the perimeter as Eve sliced a blind patch. Cams glitched—snow, a dance of mask ads—but only for twenty-seven seconds. It was never enough. The team sprinted for a maintenance hatch as CorpSec sent a warning ping. A turret blinked, and a drone swerved their way.
Crow dropped into position atop a stairwell, her scope finding angles in a city of metal. "Two cross at the south gate. I've got one."
Altacora's fan blossomed with a whispering metallic sound; she flicked the gauntlet and the first razor disks screamed out, embedding cleanly into the drone's frame. Sparks rained. The drone tumbled, burning as it crashed into a delivery crate.
"Nice cut," Kai said, almost fond. He vaulted the rail, shadow bending around his boots.
They forced the hatch and spilled into service tunnels—cold, humming veins beneath the warehouse. Lighting here was industrial and harsh. Everything smelled like oil and old circuitry. Eve hummed behind him, patching a path through the internal sensors. "You've got two minutes of green before thermal sweep cycles," she breathed. "Move."
Kai led them through catwalks, through maintenance doors, past rooms of sleeping servos and stacked drives. Spencer followed, feet light now, heart hammering a rhythm that oddly steadied his hands. This was no longer a fantasy—it was real, and he could feel himself inside it.
They reached the vault corridor: a vacuum of sound with strip sensors and pressure pads. Altacora stepped forward, her boots almost silent. She laid the gauntlet on the nearest panel and closed her eyes for a half-beat, then fingers danced across a tactile array. Her whip's rod slid out; the metal fan whined softly.
"I can open, but I'm telling you—if anyone in the vault is wired with trace chips, we burn them clean. No souvenirs." Her voice was casual, but there was iron in it.
Kai sonned into the comms: "If we take anything, it's to shuffle and scramble. Nothing identifies us. No bodies, no breadcrumbs."
Altacora's lips tightened. "Good."
She cracked the vault like a poet cracking an enigma. The lock sighed; the heavy door eased open. Inside, racks of data cores hummed in sterile light—the heart of a city's secrets. Eve moved forward, hands blurred, data cables into her rig like a surgeon. Blue code spilled across her lenses. She siphoned, cloned, and encrypted with a speed that made Spencer's jaw drop.
"Got it," she whispered. "The target drives are replicated. Pulling now."
But the universe found a way to laugh. A metallic roar down the corridor. Protocol alarms stuttered and then screamed.
"Thermal sweep recalibrating early," Eve hissed. "They patched during my slice—someone knew. Incoming."
The heavy door slammed behind them. Red strobes painted the vault. The world narrowed to the metallic beat of boots and the thunder of approaching armored loaders. CorpSec—armed, angry, and no longer unawares.
"Crow, cover!" Kai barked. Crow's scope spat brass and metal; rounds shattered reinforced glass and took out a loader's sensor. But loaders were heavy beasts with ceramic armor and hydraulic hands. One reached the door and came crashing down like a steel titan.
Altacora moved with lethal grace. The fan in her gauntlet unfolded into a cyclone of razor wings; she tossed them with a dance—disks arced and shredded plates, gouging servos. The whip cracked, a line of white lightning, and hooked into a loader's control node. Sparks arced and small servo motors spazzed; hydraulic hands seized in place. She was an artist of pain—beauty and brutality braided together.
Kai met a marching line of CorpSec soldiers halfway down the vault corridor and became less man than myth. He moved like wind through broken glass—augmented limbs folding, an elbow becoming a blade, his knuckle-emitters throwing arcs of stun that ripped through armor seams. He was a storm of alloy and shadow, teeth bared in a grin that didn't reach his eyes. Spencer watched, brain trying to catalog the impossible: the way Kai's muscles shimmered under skin, the way shadows clung and obeyed him.
Eve worked the drives while Crow and Altacora carved the way. Spencer found himself beside a storage rack where blueprints for city grids and a list of covert files glowed. A small terminal flashed—an access node left unlocked. A hot opportunity. He thought of his father's name bleeding across feeds, of Oblivion and the federal blade. He thought of Kai's offer and the night he chose to leave his life for this.
His fingers hovered—and then moved. He juked the node, fed it a false trace, and looped a small sinkhole of data that would make the drive look corrupted to casual analysis. He planted a breadcrumb: a tiny, noisy worm that would ping once and then go dark if anyone tried to run a forensic. It wasn't spectacular—just a kid's quick hack. But it meant something. It meant he could touch and not break. It meant he belonged.
"Kid's got touch," Altacora said without turning. "Good."
The fight became choreography gone mad. CorpSec numbers dwindled beneath the team's brutality. One loader—bigger, scarred, with a turret on its shoulder—stumbled free and fixed its eyes on the group. It was the last wall between them and the exit.
Kai saw it and smiled with the tilt of a blade. He pushed off the vault wall and launched himself at the loader, shadows pooling into his fists, alloy flaring. They hit metal and exploded in a shockwave that rattled wiring along the corridor. The loader reeled, then folded like a giant being unmade. Altacora's fan grazed open ports and sent showers of sparks; Crow's bullets carved clean kills.
They barreled out with the cloned drives pulsing in Eve's pack. The vault door slammed. Alarms wailed into the city night. Down in the tunnels, microscopic grid markers began to blink—someone, somewhere, had lit the flame.
They emerged into an empty service alley and ran for the car. Drift's engine sang as he slammed the gear into deathly personal speeds. They piled in—Kai, Crow, Altacora, Eve, Spencer—and vanished into rain and light.
They had the data. They had the proof they needed to stay one step ahead—files that would expose Aegis corruption, flash patterns that could buy them time. But someone else had traced a signature. Eve's face was hard as she watched her monitors.
"They pinged us with a tracer," she said. "Not CorpSec. Something… different. Military grade. No—federal. Oblivion signatures in the echo code. They'll be on this in minutes."
Altacora's hand drifted to her gauntlet, fingers flexing around the fan. "Then we move faster."
Kai's jaw clenched. He looked at Spencer—young, cheeks wet with rain, eyes wide with the aftershock of what he'd seen and what he'd done tonight. "You did good," Kai said simply. "But this is only the beginning."
As Drift turned the car hard into the neon river of the city, the data drives humming like caged bees under Eve's jacket, the city bled behind them, and somewhere beyond the strobe and rain a dark, precise thing woke up.
Oblivion had smelled blood.