Lei moved across the rooftops with the practiced grace of a thief, but every muscle in his body screamed a warning. This wasn't silent—this was merely less loud. Below him, Guangzhou was no longer a city of light and movement, but a three-dimensional acoustic map.
The Ghosts, or Jìngwù, operated entirely by sonic detection. Any change in the environment's pressure—a whisper, a dropped coin, the scrape of rubber—was a beacon. They moved slowly, deliberately, their segmented limbs articulating with bone-chilling, mechanical precision. Their exoskeletons were an oily, matte black, absorbing light like velvet and rendering them nearly invisible against the night sky, their only tell being the faint sizzle of friction their shells made as they turned.
Lei jumped a three-foot gap between buildings, landing lightly on the adjacent roof. The soles of his padded boots were thick, but the landing still registered as a muffled thud in the dead air. He pressed his back against the cooling unit of an air conditioning unit, waiting, heart beating a drum solo against his ribs.
A hundred meters down the avenue, two Ghosts were congregating near the entrance of a subway station. He could hear them now, not with his ears, but with the Sensory Augment app Mei had installed on his old burner phone. The app didn't rely on microphones; it picked up the minute vibrations caused by the Ghosts' steps through the steel and concrete structure of the city. On the screen, the two creatures were represented by throbbing, black icons.
Their movement was highly structured. They walked the grid, covering areas of high potential noise—places where an alarm might accidentally go off, or where someone might have been delayed. Lei had to cross the main road, the Zhongshan Road, where the sound of the wind alone could be deadly.
He reached the edge of the building and looked down at the eight-lane thoroughfare. It was dangerously open.
The sound is only dangerous if it lasts, Mei had taught him. The Ghosts map movement, not static sound.
He took a deep breath, clutching the Mute-Box in his hand. He clicked the button.
There was no sound on Lei's end, but the Mute-Box's indicator light flashed a sharp, blinding green. He knew that for the Ghosts, the effect was like a sudden, chaotic explosion of white noise—a thirty-second auditory seizure that scrambled their sonar for a brief, critical window.
As the timer on the Mute-Box display began counting down from 30, Lei launched himself from the ledge, dropping silently to the street below, his thick-soled shoes absorbing the impact.
He sprinted.
This wasn't quiet; this was speed. He covered twenty meters of pavement, his feet creating a steady, low-frequency beat, a tempo that was difficult for the Ghosts to ignore even through the Mute-Box's interference.
Halfway across the street, the Ghost icons on his phone's app began to vibrate violently. The Mute-Box was working, but the high-frequency sonic assault was pushing them into a frenzy, not a retreat. One of the icons, labeled Alpha-9, detached from its partner and began moving towards the street at a terrifying, accelerating pace.
15 seconds left.
Lei saw Alpha-9 then. It rounded the corner of a department store, its movement transitioning from an unsettling walk to an insect-like gallop. It was moving too fast, its segmented legs blurring.
It must have heard the start of his footfalls before the Mute-Box overwhelmed it, and now it was relying on muscle memory, blindly charging the last known source of sound.
Lei cut his sprint and pressed himself against the concrete median strip. He held the Mute-Box up, letting the full force of the sonic blast hit the approaching creature.
Alpha-9 hit the median strip where Lei had been moments before. It didn't stop. It thrashed, its three-fingered claws scraping against the concrete, making a sound like metal being torn. The scent of ozone, sharp and acrid, filled the air. Lei could feel the vibration of its rage through the ground.
5 seconds left.
Lei knew what would happen next. The Mute-Box battery was nearly dead, and Alpha-9 would clear its internal acoustic filters. He had to be gone before the silence returned.
He took his backpack, unzipped the main compartment, and slid out a heavy, polished cobblestone he'd stolen from a construction site. With a silent curse, he hurled the stone as hard as he could toward an abandoned bus on the opposite side of the road.
The cobblestone hit the bus window with a shattering crack.
The sound echoed, impossibly loud, in the Quiet Hours.
The Mute-Box died. The indicator light went dark.
Lei flattened himself against the median, covering his head. Alpha-9, which had been thrashing blindly, instantly locked onto the new, massive sound signature. It let out a single, high-pitched chirp—a sound Lei knew to be its hunter's call—and launched itself across the road towards the sound, tearing through the bus window with an impact that shook the street.
The diversion bought him five crucial seconds. He scrambled up the remaining distance, adrenaline spiking, and slammed his shoulder against the heavy glass door of the opposite building. It groaned open, letting him slip into the pitch-black lobby just as the Ghost inside the bus stopped moving, listening again for the next, fatal echo.