The rain in Valis doesn't fall. It hangs. A fine, static mist that catches the city's light pollution and turns the air into a dull, glowing paste. It doesn't clean anything. It just makes the surfaces slick, reflecting the neon and LED signage in broken, trembling smears.
The man who currently uses the designation "Kael" watches a digital clock on a building facade switch from 23:59 to 00:00. The transition is silent. No chime. No change in the city's constant, low-frequency hum—the sound of climate control, server farms, and distant transit. Night is a bureaucratic term here, not an experience. The lights never go out. Darkness is considered unproductive, a security risk, a relic.
He is on the roof of a residential spire, forty floors up. The wind is a cold, persistent push against his back. Below, the city is a circuit board of unblinking lights. No stars. The sky is a ceiling of bruised orange.
He isn't thinking about the view. He is calibrating his internal clock against the external one, measuring the lag between his perception and the world's official time. Three seconds. Acceptable. He breathes in. The air tastes of ozone and damp concrete.
The job is simple. A retrieval. Not an assassination. The distinction matters to the people who write the contracts, not to him. The target is in apartment 4012, two floors below this roof's access door. The client wants a data-slate, specific model, black casing with a green authentication stripe. The target, a mid-level logistics coordinator for Hermes Transport, is secondary. Discouragement is preferred. Permanent discouragement is authorized, but not incentivized. The fee is the same.
Kael moves. Not with urgency, but with a fluid economy that seems to absorb the wind rather than fight it. He bypasses the roof door's magnetic lock with a slim, non-ferrous pick that emits no signal. The stairwell is concrete, lit by harsh, motion-activated LEDs that flicker on two steps ahead of him and off two steps behind. He is a man walking between pockets of light, trailed by his own darkness.
On the 42nd floor landing, he stops. Listens. The building's sounds are mapped in his mind: the groan of the central air system, the distant thrum of an elevator shaft, the barely-there whisper of electricity in the walls. He adds a new layer: the soft, rhythmic tapping of fingers on a keyboard. Through the fire door to the residential corridor.
He doesn't enter the corridor. Instead, he unzips a section of his dark, water-resistant jacket. Inside, a compact drone, no larger than his palm, matte grey. He places it on the floor. It lifts with a sound like a sigh, hugging the ceiling, moving towards apartment 4012. Its camera feed appears in the corner of Kael's retinal display. The corridor is empty. The door to 4012 is standard biometric lock. The drone extends a needle-thin probe, interfacing with the lock's diagnostic port. A cascade of code scrolls in Kael's vision. He doesn't read it. He watches for the pattern-break. Seven seconds later, the lock's status light blinks from red to green. The door clicks open a centimeter.
The keyboard tapping hasn't stopped.
Kael retrieves the drone, stores it. He draws a small, flat pistol from a thoracic holster. It fires solid-state polymer projectiles—less lethal, almost silent, brutally effective at close range. He pushes the door open.
The apartment is a studio. Neat. Impersonal. A bed, a desk, a kitchenette. A man in a grey shirt sits at the desk, his back to the door, facing a wall of data screens showing shipping manifests and orbital traffic patterns. The target. The data-slate is beside his keyboard, green stripe glowing.
Kael's footsteps are silent on the synthetic flooring. He is five steps away. Four.
The man at the desk stops typing. His shoulders tense, not with the sudden shock of discovery, but with a slow, weary recognition. He doesn't turn.
"The door didn't chime," the man says. His voice is flat. Tired. "I pay for the chime. It tells me when I have a delivery. Or when I have a guest."
Kael says nothing. He is three steps away. The pistol is held low.
"It's the Hermes thing, isn't it?" the man continues, staring at his screens. "The manifest discrepancy for Container #7781-45. I flagged it. I was supposed to ignore it." He finally turns. He's younger than Kael expected. His eyes are red-rimmed from screen fatigue. There's no fear in them. Just a profound, exhausted resignation. "I just… flagged it. That's all I did."
This is the moment for discouragement. A warning. A broken bone. A clear message.
Kael looks past the man, to the desk. Next to the data-slate is a small, framed photograph. A woman, two children, all smiling in harsh, artificial light. A generic image. The kind they give you when you have no personal photos to upload for your ID profile.
The man follows his gaze. "They're not real," he says, a faint, bitter twist in his voice. "Came with the frame. I never changed it."
Kael's internal clock notes the elapsed time. Forty-two seconds since entry. The acceptable window for a clean retrieval is ninety seconds.
He steps forward, reaches for the data-slate.
The man doesn't move to stop him. He just watches. "What's your name?" he asks, quietly.
Kael's fingers close around the slate. It's warm from the desk's charging pad.
"No," the man says, answering his own question. "You don't have one. You're just the consequence."
The words are not an accusation. They are a statement of fact. A logistical detail.
In that moment, Kael feels it—the subtle, familiar disconnect. The feeling of leaving his body to perform a function. He sees himself from outside: a dark shape in a brightly lit room, taking an object from a tired man. It is a clean, simple transaction.
He could leave. The job parameters are satisfied.
His retinal display flashes a minimal alert: *Secondary motion detected. Apartment 4015. Across the hall. Pattern suggests observational posture.*
Someone is watching. The client? Security? A rival? It doesn't matter. The calculus changes. A witnessed retrieval without discouragement is an incomplete contract. It invites repetition. It shows weakness.
The paradox asserts itself, cold and operational: To survive in this system, to remain efficient and unattached, he must perform an act of definitive attachment. He must become a permanent feature in this man's story.
Kael looks at the man. The man looks back, understanding dawning in his exhausted eyes. He doesn't plead. He just gives a small, almost imperceptible nod. Acceptance.
The pistol rises. There is no dramatic pause. No final line.
The polymer slug makes a sound like a heavy book dropping on carpet. The man slumps forward onto his keyboard, a single, discordant keypress echoing in the sudden silence.
Kael tucks the data-slate inside his jacket. He turns, walks back to the door. He does not look at the fake family photograph. He does not check the man's pulse.
In the corridor, he glances at the door to 4015. It is closed. No light from underneath. He walks to the stairwell, the motion-activated lights flickering ahead and behind.
On the roof, the hanging rain has thickened. The city' glow is more diffuse, more suffocating. He breathes out. The disconnect recedes. He is back in his body. The weight of the data-slate is a specific pressure against his ribs.
He triggers a clean, encrypted pulse from a burner device. *Asset retrieved. Condition: Silent.*
A response pings back almost instantly, not from the client, but from the intermediary network. A deposit confirmation to a numbered account. No words. Just numbers.
He looks at his hands. They are steady. Dry.
He descends the spire via a different route, merging with the few late-shift workers on the street below. Their faces are pale under the unending lights, eyes downcast. He is among them, another shadow moving through the day that refuses to end.
He does not think about the man in apartment 4012. He thinks about the door that didn't chime. A small, mechanical failure. A detail.
He walks. The city absorbs him, and the night, which isn't night, continues.