They meet Kane in a place that looks like it used to believe in trains.
A shuttered tram spur juts out from the cliffside, iron ribs swallowed by moss and drip. The rain falls in threads through a rusted lattice, drawing bars in the air. A single work lamp dangles from a cable, swaying just enough to make everything look like it's breathing. Around them, the chasm's wind moves like an old god changing sides.
Kane is already there, coat buttoned, gloves off, a chipped porcelain cup cooling on a crate. He doesn't turn when the Metro Mechanics van rolls up and dies; he's watching the chasm like it might confess if given a chance. When he does face them, the expression sits on him like it always has—calm, almost kind, eyes full of arithmetic.
"You made good time," he says.
"Time made us," Limar mutters, climbing out, still wired from the run. Tev follows, hands in jacket pockets, that built-in stillness leaning against the wind. Tara drops out last, a black case in her grip and water stippling her hair dark.
Kane's gaze finds the case; something small relaxes inside him. He nods once in greeting and again, slightly lower, to the object. "May I?"
Tara doesn't hand it over yet. "Payment."
"Of course." Kane gestures, and a gray coat you didn't see a second ago steps from shadow—cultist uniform neat but lived-in, face bored in a disciplined way—placing a sealed pack on the crate beside the lamp. "As agreed."
Tev steps forward, breaks the seal, checks weight, then the digits that wake when his thumb slides the strip. He gives Tara a nod. She opens the case, hands quick and professional, and lifts the necklace out into the rain-fretted light.
The "Necklace of Ascent" doesn't do the greedy thing. It doesn't sparkle. It absorbs the lamp's tremor and sends it back pared down to a nerve—silver loop, translucent disc, the faint filament running through its heart like a single hair of light trapped in ice. Tara holds it by the chain and lets it hang; a drop of rain touches the disc and slides off like it met glass that remembered a different gravity.
Kane's breath is the only thing that changes. He reaches as if he's approaching an animal that hates cages, and stops just short. "Beautiful," he says, and the word is too honest to be bargaining. He does touch it then—two fingers to the edge, a trial, a liturgy. "May I?" he repeats, into the quiet.
"Quick," Tara says, because the job may be over but the world isn't.
Kane sets the necklace on a folded cloth, brings out a very small light and a loupe, the rituals of a man who believes in tests because he believes in people. He checks the seam of the disc, the solder on the loop, the place where the filament vanishes into the setting. He does something with the light, a brief pulse. The disc does nothing that they can see. Kane's mouth moves—satisfaction disguised as prayer. "Good."
Tara watches his hands the way surgeons watch each other. "Happy?"
"Content," Kane says, which in his vocabulary is the same thing. He wraps the necklace, places it in a small case the color of night drained of its drama, and locks it. The click echoes inside the bone.
Breuk says nothing. He stands apart, the rain line across his shoulder, one hand in his jacket and the other bare. A weight presses his breast pocket—a second truth, cold against the sternum. He can feel its outline when the lamp swings. He says nothing and hates the way silence starts to feel like a lie.
"You did well," Kane says, including them all, excluding the need for gratitude. "You always did, when you chose to do it."
Limar can't help himself. "We always do when we're paid correctly."
Kane's eyes flick, amused, then return to Breuk and stay. "Trust is a kind of currency," he says. "Hard to mint. Harder to keep." To Tara: "Your hands are steady."
"On good days," Tara says, cool. "Test clears?"
"Authentic," Kane answers. He doesn't say enough. He doesn't need to. He slides the case into his coat as if he's sliding it into a story that was waiting.
For a heartbeat he looks exactly like a man whose plan is marching on schedule.
"Next time," he says to Breuk, almost fatherly, "sleep first."
"Next time," Breuk says, "I'll charge double."
Kane smiles. It is the quiet, near-sorry smile they know too well. "You won't," he says, and steps back into his gray coats and the rain.
They leave the way they came, tires hissing on welded mesh, the chasm swallowing their engine note and giving it back thinner.
The descent road clings to the cliff like a bad thought. Guardrails stitched from two centuries of plans stand watch between the van and the drop. On the left, the chasm's enormous mouth drinks the storm. On the right, the city's lower rungs glow like embers buried in ash. The reactor-sun throws a tired smear from far above, more habit than mercy.
Limar twists in his seat to face the others. The adrenaline has pooled into something sour. "You know what's eating me?" he says. "Something's off. Not just rich people weird. More like… chess-board weird."
"Lig said the same," Tev answers, eyes steady on the next switchback. "That boy was born suspicious."
"Born correct, sometimes," Tara says, and it costs her to admit it. She sits with her gear open on her knees, the case empty now, her hands idle. "That house—empty like it knew we were coming. Guards lazy like someone fed them false peace."
Limar points at the roof, meaning the world. "Kane looked pleased enough to get married back there."
"He looked like a man hearing his own echo," Tara says. "Satisfaction's not the same as safety."
Breuk stares out at the drop. The road's curve repeats in his pulse. He shifts, and the secret weight at his chest slides a fraction under cloth, as if it's awake and listening. "Maybe Lig was right," he says, quieter than the engine. Saying it makes the van colder.
No one speaks for a while. The storm keeps writing the same sentence until it feels like law.
Tev breaks it, gently. "Remember four years back?" he says, not looking at Breuk, not looking away. "We took a Kane job then too."
"Jeremiah and you," Tara says, warning and invitation braided. "Lig hated it from the first word."
Limar tries for a joke and misses. "He hates sunshine on principle."
"Not that time," Tara says. "He had a look. Like he'd done the math and couldn't afford the answer."
Tev exhales through his nose. The wipers beat an old hymn on the glass. "Job went crooked. We all know how it ended. One of ours didn't come home." He doesn't say the name. He never says the name. "Jeremiah took the cell. Breuk took the bill."
Limar glances at Breuk's left hand—metal that isn't there tonight, ghost of a future not yet paid for in this telling—and looks away quickly, like it's blasphemy. "We don't—"
"We don't," Breuk snaps, sharper than he intended, then reins it back, voice going flat as the road in his head. "We don't talk about the graveyard while we're driving through it."
Tara closes her kit. The click is too loud. "It matters," she says, not gently. "Patterns matter."
"It matters when we get to a place where saying it won't get us killed," Breuk says. His hand is on his pocket without permission. "Right now it just makes us loud."
They ride the next turn in silence. The van noses along the edge. Below, the undercity waits like a bruise under gauze.
Tev tries again, a shade softer. "He's not wrong, boss. Kane's jobs got a… flavor. He sells meaning with the money. People buy meaning in bigger bills."
Limar scratches his jaw, restless. "Lig said Kane wants us to play a part we didn't audition for."
"He wasn't there," Breuk says. "He didn't see the way the house looked at us."
"What way is that?" Tara asks.
"Like a stage that misses its actors," Breuk says without meaning to, and hates the accuracy of it. He bites down on the rest. "Drop it."
"But—" Limar starts.
"Drop. It."
The word sits in the van like a new passenger, wet and heavy and unwelcome. After that, only the wipers talk.
The road kinks. The edge edges closer. A strip of hazard lights flickers ahead where it shouldn't. Tev eases off, frowns. "You see that?"
Tara leans forward, squints past the hanging beads of rain. The guardrail glitters with fresh paint. Across the lane, angled end-to-end, two maintenance trucks block the curve that leads to the freight spine. Their hazard strobes blink in a polite rhythm, the kind that tells you to feel safe until you don't.
"Road crew?" Limar says, uncertainty curdling the last word.
"Wrong hour," Tev says. He slows more. The van's engine drops into a murmur. "Wrong weather."
Breuk's hand tightens on nothing. The pocket's weight presses back. It feels like a decision has stepped into the van without using the door.
"Could be a legit closure," Tara offers, but even she doesn't sound convinced. "Flooded segment. Fallen beam."
Limar laughs, small, without humor. "Or a party. Surprise us."
Tev checks the shoulder—too narrow. Checks the drop—forever. He brings them to a stop twenty meters shy and lifts his palms off the wheel so everyone sees he's not moving without a vote. "We back up, we're blind. We go forward, we're… we're in somebody's picture."
"Lights off," Breuk says. "Don't make us bigger."
Tev kills the beams. The world condenses into rain and hazard strobes and the quiet breathing of the engine. The van's cabin feels like a held breath.
On the cliff above them, something coughs.
It's small at first—like a pipe clearing its throat. Then it isn't small. A seam rips in the dark where a catwalk meets neglect. A bloom of white heat flowers and eats its petals. Shockwaves run down the rock like hands slapping a drum. The lamp on the barricade explodes into confetti of glass; the shards make a second rain with worse intentions.
"Down!" Tara shouts, instinct, body already folding, hand on Limar's head, shoving him below the line of the windows.
Tev swears once, sacred and simple, and drops the van into reverse on muscle memory. The tires skid, bite, protest. The world fills with sound and light that don't belong together.
Breuk doesn't duck. He looks up, just long enough to see a silhouette he will swear later he invented: a man on the upper rail, coat blown open by the blast's breath, face turned away, arm out like someone mid-speech. Then the man is gone, the shape replaced by smoke that remembers being a person and fails.
The first piece of steel hits the road in front of them and skids, screeching; sparks walk along it like ants on sugar. The barricade trucks lurch as if surprised to be real. Another detonation blooms farther back—lighter, hungrier, a chain pulling its next link.
"Seatbelts," Tev says, too late and exactly when he always says it.