July 4, 2057 – 12:14 a.m.
East Side Depot, New Detroit
Elijah lands on the loading dock in perfect silence, shadows peeling off him like old skin. The graze on his ribs throbs in time with his pulse, but pain is just another flavor of memory tonight.
He counts heartbeats. One. Two. Three.
Four.
A violet streak ricochets off a stack of pallets and skids to a stop in front of him. The blur solidifies into a girl twenty, maybe twenty-one in a faded purple hoodie two sizes too big, baggy cargos hiding the carbon-fiber shine of prosthetic legs. Cooling fans whine softly as they spin down.
She's breathing hard, cheeks flushed, eyes bright with adrenaline and leftover rage.
"Thought you were gonna ghost me for real this time, Shadow," she says, grinning like they're meeting for late-night tacos instead of committing twenty-two counts of federal kidnapping in reverse. "Happy Fourth. Real patriotic shit tonight, huh?"
Elijah exhales something that might be a laugh if he still remembered how. "You're late, Blur."
"Boy, I ran here from the Bronx. That's a new personal record." She sticks out her fist, knuckles scarred from subway turnstiles and worse things. "Aisha Alvarez. We've only kept each other breathing on Discord for eight months, but I figured it was time we stopped flirting through encrypted voice chat."
He bumps her fist. Her grip is quick, electric, like she's afraid stillness will kill her.
"Elijah Kane," he says. "But you already knew that."
"Course I did, Pulse Baby." She jerks her chin toward the idling vans. "Twenty-two kids. Six rent-a-cops downstairs, two snipers who think night-vision makes them invisible. Iron Patriot wants the vans downtown by sunrise so he can pose with 'rescued youth' while the drones spell FREEDOM in the sky. We got eight minutes, tops."
Elijah feels the old rage stir same heat, same smell, same lie of a holiday. Ten years ago he couldn't save one brother. Tonight he can save twenty-two strangers. The math still feels like mercy.
He lifts a hand. Darkness unfurls from his sleeves like spilled ink, sliding across the concrete, swallowing floodlights one by one until the depot feels like the inside of a coffin someone forgot to close.
Aisha's grin sharpens into something fierce and beautiful. "Showtime, papi."
She's gone.
Three-second bursts that's all her legs can give before the motors cook. In those three seconds she is everywhere at once: zip-ties snapping like cheap plastic wishes, doors banging open, small hands grabbed and pointed toward the fence where Jonah is waiting with the church van and a heart that's about to break for the first time.
Elijah walks forward in the open, hoodie up, hands loose. The darkness walks with him like a second skin that finally fits.
A guard swings a rifle. "Hey—!"
The shadows drink the word, the rifle, the man. When they spit him back out he's on his knees thirty feet away, vomiting up every bad thing he's ever done.
Another guard empties a magazine into nothing. The bullets disappear like secrets.
Elijah stops in front of the last van. The driver nineteen, maybe twenty, baby fat still clinging to his cheeks stares through the windshield, hand frozen halfway to his holster. Name tape: WHITAKER.
Elijah leans in until their breath fogs the same patch of glass.
"You got a little sister?" he asks, soft enough only Whitaker can hear.
The kid nods, throat working like he's swallowing glass.
"Then drive north till the plates change. And don't ever come back south of Eight Mile."
The van peels out in a scream of rubber and regret.
Only one child hasn't run: a small girl with pink beads clicking softly when she breathes, clutching a one-eyed giraffe like it's the last real thing in the world.
Elijah kneels. The shadows pull back from his face so she can see he's human.
"You're safe," he says, and hates how hollow it sounds.
She looks at the blood spreading across his hoodie, then holds out the giraffe.
"Mr. Raffi fixes boo-boos," she whispers.
Elijah takes the toy. It's warm from her grip, smells like baby shampoo and terror.
Aisha skids up again, chest heaving. "Clock's bleeding out. We gotta go."
Sirens weave into the national anthem drifting over from the riverfront, mocking them both.
Elijah tucks Mr. Raffi inside his hoodie, right over the scar that never closed.
He offers the girl his hand.
She takes it without hesitation.
Together, the three of them step into the dark, and the dark closes behind them like a mother who finally came back.