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.