Tonight, the sky rained acid. Not the showy green stuff from movies, but droplets fine as spittle, hissing on steel and skin alike. Fifteen-year-old Mouse—nobody called him anything else—scuttled under the rusted lip of a half-toppled shipping crate. The hiss and tick of rain on corrugated metal was a metronome for the entire Nueva Arcadia port, a city in miniature for the damned. Every container was a tomb, or a treasure chest, and Mouse moved with the desperation of someone who'd opened too many of the former.
He kept low. Some parts of him—like the tail, the ears, the flat little paws—were good at this. Humaniform, sure, but the right silhouette would get him splattered in seconds if he ever forgot which world he lived in. This was a place for hiding, and for making yourself smaller than the spaces you squeezed through.
He darted between two stacked containers, black paint stripped by years of chemical rain to a leprous gray. The air smelled of ozone and salt, the wind shoving tangy mist up his nostrils. Lightning, distant and horizontal, lit the wharf in purple-white. Mouse's shadow—ears too round, limbs too thin, a perpetual hunch—briefly danced on the mud before the dark clamped down again.
He was looking for a cache. He had it on a tip: big shipment tonight, somewhere in the port's deep arteries, maybe something worth risking a skin-bleed for. Every so often, above the metallic hiss, came the whipcrack of drone blades. Even the shittiest security firms now bought arcane copters, little triangles of murder programmed to slice up anyone who didn't belong.
Mouse belonged to nobody, which was the most dangerous thing to be.
He'd mapped the patrol patterns over six sleepless nights. In theory, a fifteen-second window between passes. In practice, every time he ducked under a container or pressed himself flat to concrete, he imagined a laser eye somewhere in the fog tracking his heartbeat.
Six more crates. Three right turns. The tip had said Bay 7-G, but Mouse had never trusted tips. He trusted footprints, wrappers, the language of disturbed dust. Tonight he followed the scent of old engine oil, the kind spilled from a Feran-run shop, unmistakable in its rodent-sharp reek.
He climbed over a barrel, boots squelching. Acid stung his fingers, already raw. He pulled his hood tighter and flexed his whiskers—they were sensitive, better than any human's, a kind of gift nobody in the Upper Districts would envy. On his second scan, he spotted movement: two large shadows, neither moving like dock workers, both limping in that way only armed people did. Mouse made himself part of the wet crate, ribs scraping rust, whiskers flattened.
The men passed. They had faces like sandpaper and eyes that never lingered, not even on each other. Mouse let them go, then crept along their trail, muscles taut as wire.
Past the last row of containers, he found it: a gathering. No, a transaction.
Four people—three humans, one Feran, maybe a rat or mole, Mouse couldn't tell from this angle—clustered under a bare floodlight. The acid rain reflected off their slickers in lurid, shifting patterns. The humans wore armored coats, every shoulder stitched with the same insignia: a silver eye crossed by a chain.
BME. Bureau of Magical Enforcement.
Mouse's whiskers twitched. He didn't like the odds. But he liked the idea of going home empty-handed even less.
He slipped behind a stack of old tires and peeled his notebook from the inside of his jacket. It was soggy, edges curled from countless nights like this. He clicked his pen—one of his last—and started to sketch: the faces, the posture, the artifact. His penmanship was garbage but his eye was perfect. It was the first thing he'd ever gotten praised for, by someone who didn't care if he lived or died.
The artifact looked like a crystal lantern, but the colors inside pulsed too fast and too hot for anything normal. It was banded in gold, symbols that hurt to look at. Mouse wrote "lantern—heavy, blue, runes—hurts. BME wants it. Other side scared. Feran is left-handed, nervous, keeps paw on pack."
The transaction lasted seconds. The Feran handed over the object, shivering so hard his knuckles bled on the handle. The tallest human opened a case, let him peek inside. Mouse craned his head, nearly overbalancing—inside the case, something shifted, then the view was blocked.
Then it went to hell.
A sound like glass shattering in slow motion. The BME agent drew a black baton, pointed it at the mole-Feran's face, and fired a spell—a real one, not the crowd-control garbage they used on TV. A bolt of green, liquefying the Feran's cheek and flooding the air with a stink Mouse would never forget. The others jerked back, one raising a pistol, another a wand. They died together in a burst of manafire that sprayed neon blood on the wet concrete.
Mouse wanted to run. He forced himself to write:
"BME. No survivors. Killed own contact. Artifact in bag, gone now. Lightning smell, copper taste, burning hair."
The rest of the team fanned out, sweeping with guns and magic. Mouse pressed so hard against the tires that he felt rubber give under his bones. He hardly dared to breathe, but still made notes, hand shaking so bad the words ran into each other.
The lead agent knelt beside the ruined bodies, rifled through their pockets. He said something Mouse couldn't hear, voice clipped, impatient. Then he held up the artifact, examining it with a monocle that glowed softly in the dark.
Another spell, more restrained—this one traced a grid of runes in the air. Mouse blinked, and they burned into his mind, but he could not copy them. They were too complex, moving even as he watched.
Suddenly, the agent looked up, straight at Mouse's hiding place.
Mouse froze. Everything in him screamed: don't move, don't breathe, you are not real.
He felt his heart jitter in his chest, the rain on his back running cold, worming under his hoodie. The agent approached, methodical, boots squishing on the soaked ground. Mouse readied his legs, tried to remember the fastest way out, but he knew he'd never outrun a BME drone.
The agent stopped three meters away. Looked left, then right. On his belt, Mouse saw a row of metal discs, each one inscribed. He was close enough to see the agent's jaw, square and clean-shaven, the set of his eyes. They were brown, utterly unremarkable, but as they swept past Mouse's hiding place, Mouse realized the agent wasn't really looking.
He was listening.
Mouse stilled his breath. He pinched the tip of his own tail, grounding himself in pain.
After a long moment, the agent grunted and turned away.
Mouse let the air out of his lungs so slow it was a prayer. He waited until the footsteps faded, then counted to one hundred.
The port was silent except for the acid rain and the hum of distant drones.
He rewound in his head the images: the artifact, the murder, the runes. He tore the page from his notebook, folded it, and tucked it in a pouch sewn inside his waistband. Evidence, in case he got murdered and someone cared to piece him back together.
He crawled, slow as a graveworm, away from the massacre site. On the far side of a shipping crate, he let himself rest, retching bile onto the concrete. The taste of burning Feran stayed with him.
He looked up once, just once, at the empty wharf. The BME team was gone, leaving only the bodies, the blood, and a memory of something impossible—something too heavy and blue and wrong to belong in this world.
Mouse blinked the rain from his eyes. He peeled open his notebook and, hands shaking, wrote the last thing he saw before he slipped into the night.
"Don't forget. BME doesn't just clean up—sometimes they make the mess."
Then he closed the book, and ran.
Mouse didn't make it far.
He'd barely rounded the next bay when the retching hit—sharp, gut-deep, impossible to swallow. He pressed his forehead to the rain-cold metal of a crate, tail tucked close, breath coming in little mouse-chitters. The port was a graveyard now. The hiss of the rain covered everything: the wet slap of blood in puddles, the soft settling of magic-burned flesh. Somewhere out of sight, a drone buzzed past, sensors flashing in the blue-violet dark. For a moment, the world stank of ozone and old salt, and Mouse's only comfort was the water-logged paper in his shaking hands.
He read his own scrawl, not understanding half of it, trying to make sense of what he'd seen. The runes from the BME agent's spell burned afterimages behind his eyelids. He shivered, then carefully licked a thumb, turned the notebook to a blank page, and started again—every detail, every scrap of the scene that might mean something to anyone but him.
Lightning flared, close this time. The roar cracked the air and, for a split second, Mouse saw the whole harbor: shipping cranes like praying mantises, the corpse-stained tarmac, and the neat, clinical footprints of the BME team, already fading as the rain washed away the evidence.
Mouse braced his back against the container and drew his knees up, making himself a target as small as the artifact he'd just watched men die over.
Then he heard it—a clatter, sharp, metallic, much closer than the thunder.
He froze, all his senses suddenly alive, tail fluffed in terror. There, maybe a meter from his paw, lay something small and bright, reflecting the pulse of overhead lights. Mouse squinted through the rain, whiskers twitching.
It was a cylinder. Maybe ten centimeters long, heavy-looking, made of metal as black as the inside of a coffin. Around it, strange symbols—like the runes the agent had drawn, but cut deep and jagged, lit with a blue-white glow. As Mouse stared, the etchings seemed to shift, always one shape away from making sense.
He crawled toward it on all fours, the way his mother used to when teaching him how to avoid giant hawks in the wild. Every centimeter felt like a lifetime. His fingers hovered, then wrapped around the artifact.
It hummed.
No louder than a purr, but it was alive in his grip. The vibration ran up his arm, set his teeth on edge, made his ears ring. His first instinct was to drop it—no, to hurl it away, to let someone else become the target—but the idea of leaving it behind was worse. He stuffed the cylinder into an inner pocket, ignoring the chill it spread across his ribs.
A shout snapped his head up. Voices, close, the slap of boots on wet concrete.
Mouse jammed himself under a ledge, body pressed flat, whiskers crushed to his cheeks. He listened: three agents, their speech clipped, almost bored. They were dragging the bodies, making piles, one by the dock wall and another by the chemical bins.
"Boss wants it clean," one of them said. "Media arrives in twenty, sweep it all."
"All evidence?" another replied.
"All. No witnesses, no mess. Orders."
Mouse's tail wrapped twice around his ankle. He couldn't move. The cylinder burned like dry ice through his hoodie, but he kept his hand over it, pinning it in place.
One of the BME agents came within a meter of his hiding spot, boots making squishy little explosions in the rain. Mouse watched the man's legs—he was tall, well-muscled, the kind who could snap a mouse-boy in two without breaking stride. The agent paused, then bent, picking something out of a puddle. For a heartbeat, Mouse thought it was the artifact—but the agent only scooped up a spent cartridge, dropped it into a plastic evidence bag.
Mouse held his breath so long he saw white at the edges of his vision. The agent moved on.
He waited. Ten seconds. Thirty. One hundred and thirty. Then, like an animal born in darkness, Mouse slithered out, keeping low, crawling with a grace his friends in Lockwood would have called "feral." He paused once, just once, to look back.
The agents had covered the bodies in a gray film, thick and quick-hardening—like watching someone vanish under a flood of ash. A drone hovered above, scanning every square meter with a blue laser, burning away the last scraps of blood and bone. The artifact in Mouse's pocket throbbed in time with the drone's pulse.
He ran. Down a corridor of containers, then ducked into a gap no wider than his shoulders, moving until the lights and the voices faded. There, in the space between two crates, Mouse finally let himself breathe.
He pulled out the artifact, holding it up. It didn't just glow—it pulsed, a faint blue heartbeat. Mouse flipped open his notebook, hands still shaking, and drew it again, this time from memory and from touch.
He tried to write down the runes. Every time he copied a line, the next had changed, the pattern shifting like a living thing. He bit his lip until it bled, frustrated, frightened, angry in a way he hadn't been since his brother vanished under similar circumstances.
After a few minutes, he gave up. He snapped the book shut, pressed it hard to his chest, and looked up at the slice of acid-soaked sky above.
He could have left the artifact. He could have run to any one of a dozen holes and never told a soul what he'd seen. But the images wouldn't leave him: the BME agent's cold brown eyes, the way the artifact had made even a professional killer nervous, the casual murder of their own contact.
He knew why he was still alive. Because nobody cared about street kids, especially Feran, especially mouse-brained ones who didn't even have a clan. He was invisible, but he'd seen everything.
He slid further back into the gap, so deep the rain became only a distant hiss. There, in the private dark, Mouse held the artifact, feeling its pulse, and whispered into the empty:
"They can't just bury this."
Then he closed his eyes, and shivered until dawn.
By sunrise, the acid rain had turned soft, almost gentle. It left a haze over the bay, muting the city's neon scars to a pale, sleepless glow. Mouse watched the cleanup from a perch inside the skeleton of an old cargo loader, fifty meters from the scene. Here, the wind carried the briny tang of the docks and the sharp bite of chemical neutralizers that city crews sprayed onto the pavement.
Hazmat teams in white suits moved with the precision of ants, hosing blood into the drains, bagging the scraps that the rain and magic hadn't erased. The BME had already left, but their work continued: drones swept back and forth, blue lasers mapping every inch, logging what was left before the forensics people boxed it up or disintegrated it on site. Nobody looked up. Nobody looked for a witness smaller than the smallest Feran.
On a massive LED billboard hanging over the port entrance, a newscaster's face gleamed, perfect and flawless, not a hair out of place. The anchor's voice, pitched to soothe, bounced through the dawn:
"In a bold pre-dawn operation, Bureau of Magical Enforcement agents seized a large shipment of illegal arcane contraband. The Bureau assures us there were no civilian casualties. We repeat: no civilian casualties. The streets of Nueva Arcadia are safer this morning thanks to the vigilance of the BME, as always."
The billboard cut to a video loop. It showed four agents in BME black, stacking evidence boxes and giving thumbs-up to the camera. No mention of the bodies, the magic, the massacre. The public feed flickered, cut to a commercial for a water-purification system, then went black.
Mouse watched all of this, ears twitching under the hood of his jacket. He kept the artifact close—so close he could feel its warmth through the layers. The blue pulse had faded to a gentle throb, almost like a heartbeat, almost like it was waiting for something.
He waited, too, until the hazmat crews packed up and the drone whir faded to nothing. When the port was empty, Mouse slipped out of the cargo loader, darted along a channel of dry concrete, and climbed the chain-link fence at the rear of the loading bay. He landed in a crouch, eyes wide, tail trailing behind like a whisper of smoke.
At the gate, a single security guard watched the sunrise, back turned, smoking a cigarette with the tired indifference of a man who'd seen too many things to care. Mouse passed behind him, unnoticed, then melted into the labyrinth of alleyways that twisted through Lockwood's underbelly.
He didn't slow down until the city swallowed him whole.
From the top of the Conduit Tower, the morning looked almost peaceful. The rain had cleared the air for once, leaving only the shimmer of vapor rising off the sun-baked steel. Four figures lay prone on the rooftop, heads down behind the concrete ledge, binoculars and rifle scopes trained on the port below.
Jane Navarro, thirty-six, leader of UMBRA, set down her binoculars and blew a lock of golden-orange hair out of her face. She exhaled, slow and calm, letting the last traces of cigarette smoke drift away.
"Well," she said, "that's one way to rewrite a crime scene."
Owen Dagger, twenty-two, next to her, made notes on a sleek black tablet. "You see the drone grid?" he murmured. "Standard mag-sweep, but then they scrambled it. Something off-record."
"They killed their own source," said Ellen Lee, barely audible, still tracking with her scope. Her voice was ice and certainty, clipped and perfect. "That wasn't clean-up. That was a demonstration."
Hazel Fujiwara, the youngest, flinched at the memory. Her eyes, wide and deep, watched the streets more than the docks. "They didn't even try to hide it."
Jane sat up, lit another cigarette, and flexed her gloves. Her tattoos peeked out between the seams, black and old, magic-infused. "Because they wanted someone to see. Message for the undercity. Stay out, or end up like those smugglers."
Owen scanned the skyline, tail flicking. "We got the artifact location?"
Ellen nodded. "Movement in Lockwood. Street profile, but hard to pin. He's careful."
"He's desperate," Hazel said. She was the only one who'd spent time in the undercity as a child, and it showed in the way she watched for threats nobody else saw.
Jane grinned, a feral flash of teeth. "Good. Means he'll come to us, or at least to someone who can be bought."
Owen finished his notes. "The artifact. What do you think it is?"
Jane shrugged. "WMO-level, maybe. Or maybe just a bribe for a client with more money than sense." She sucked her teeth, spat over the side. "But if the BME went full massacre for it, it's worth more than any street kid's life."
Hazel stood, stretching. She didn't have the muscle of the others, but she was fast, and her voice carried a strange gravity when she spoke: "Then we get to him first."
Jane nodded once. That was the order.
They packed up their gear with the speed of people who'd done this too many times, breaking down scopes, shoving rifles into non-descript duffels, pocketing data chips and tiny hexed mirrors. In thirty seconds, the roof was clean—no trace UMBRA had ever been there.
Jane pulled her team in, a quick huddle before the elevator.
"Hazel, street level. Owen, comms and air. Ellen, intercept at the bridge."
"And you?" Ellen asked, voice flat.
Jane's smile faded to something harder. "I'll follow the kid."
They split, vanishing into the stairwell like a conjuring trick. The city below started to wake, oblivious to the war brewing in its veins.
Mouse ducked into a shuttered arcade, knees nearly giving as the adrenaline drained away. He picked a booth in the darkest corner, checked the artifact, then the notebook. He'd written so much, most of it unreadable. But what mattered was in his head, carved there by the night.
He watched through the window as a cleanup van rolled by, workers already painting over the scorch marks on the docks. He saw, too, the way nobody made eye contact with the men in black, the way mothers hustled children across the street at the sight of the BME's sigil.
He opened the notebook to a blank page and wrote, slow and careful:
"Day One. Nobody cares if you're a mouse. But maybe they should."
He underlined it twice.
Then, with a breath, he pulled the artifact into the light.
It glowed, faint but steady, and in that glow Mouse saw not just his own reflection, but the city behind him—a place of angles, secrets, and a thousand pairs of eyes that saw everything, even when they pretended not to.
Mouse made a promise to himself, silent but absolute: He would not be erased. He would not be silent.
Then he slipped out the arcade window, into the brightening day, and vanished.
On the rooftop, Jane Navarro watched the mouse-boy disappear into the dawn.
She leaned back, eyes half-closed, and said, "Let's see who blinks first."
And in the newborn light, UMBRA moved—silent and invisible, but alive with purpose.