Breathe in.
Breathe out.
Breath in.
Breathe out.
Breathe.
Stop. The last glimmering rays of a setting sun over the mountains. Refracted light bounces off steel and glass, these fading whispers of daytime, giving way to the neon shine of halogenic LED and false cathode crackle.
Stop.
The noise of Madrid, a dull hum of machinery and generators. The smell of millions of people in tight proximity. Vehicles and their horns, conversation, and endless dissonant music. Home. But different yet. So different.
The bioware breather kicks in, her lungs still, the exchangers in her blood swap. Black and amber eyes open and scan the skyline. A once clear gaze is now obscured with variables and data, temperature and atmospherics, the wind direction, vectors and trace lines. Data in all forms, and a timer.
There is a brief window. A brief and perfect window. It happens with the setting sun, in the four minutes before skysearcher spotlights turn on across the city, as towers go bright, as sensors cycle between day to night running.
<<Go.>>
She flings herself from the super tower. The bioware doesn’t let her breathe in and gasp, there is no held feeling, just a suspension of form descending from 240 stories with rushing certainty.
Basejump glide package deploys with a flick of her wrist, catches an invisible thermal off the building, and now she is MOVING. The blocks go rushing past, speed too fast for a human body to calculate. The strain in her shoulders, a readout notes pressure approaching a dangerous threshold.
Hold on.
The target comes up quickly, almost too quickly. She cuts the glide pack. It tumbles sideways and she tucks into a dive, needs to shed 40 km/h or she’ll hit the glass too hard, tumbles, hits the gravel roof, rolls, shoulder down, rolls again, a spray of dirt and acid-eaten ash. Perfect.
A spike on her shoulder as she hits plate glass, and the crackle of music as it crumbles into pieces allowing her inside.
“What the he-”
Four people in the room, she’s sliding sideways across the conference table. One boot catches a still sitting dwarf clear in the head, he flips fully sideways out of the chair and into a heap. The elf woman across tries to rise and finds a deep slash across her throat, unsure how it even got there. The guard’s mask cracks in two points as plastic blades pierce the metal shielding and pin him backwards headfirst into the wall like staples.
“Who are-”
Her sword cleaves the last one, an executive, from collarbone to waist. Snagging the security card off his tumbling torso.
<<Move.>>
I am.
She runs, soundless boots out the door and through the corridor. Plastic knives fling out like whistling birds, three more bodies crash to the ground, lab coats soaking in blood. Boots skid across cleanroom floors and she vanishes into the shadows.
This one. <<No.>> This one. <<No.>> That wall.
<<No.>>
It has to be here.
It has to be.
<<Check those flasks.>>
This?
<<Nothing.>>
This rack.
<<No.>>
A frustrated hand grabs the rack and flings it, smashing hard against a specimen wall and shattering glass everywhere.
<<Calm down. The terminal.>>
No. No time.
<<Just a moment.>>
A lab assistant scrabbles sideways on his hands and knees, rushing for the door. Her silenced gun drops him with two shots.
<<The terminal. Now.>>
She slaps the terminal and palms over it. Fingers dance, and eyes move.
...Waits.
...Waits.
<<Got it.>>
Are you sure?
<<Part of it. Enough. It’s enough for now.>>
What about the rest?
<<It’s not here. Get out. The window is closing.>>
She smashes the terminal with the hilt of the sword, and her voice roars in frustration.
<<Go. Wait.>>
What?
<<One, sixty feet, on your left, corridor. Waiting.>>
She looks around, evaluates. Then grabs the cooling body of the assistant, opens the door and flings it out.
The shot screams through the air, a sniper rifle from a close distance, shredding the form from shoulder to shoulder. She’s already moving, two plastic knives return and bury themselves a half-inch deep in Carbide armour. He adjusts, and fires again.
She feels his finger tighten, even sixty feet away, flings herself upwards even before her enhanced senses hear the pin and hammer. Twisting in the air as the bullet rips through the air and feels her hair pulled in its wake. “Blow it.”
The x4 goes off, a cascading series of rumbles, glass cracks everywhere, the wind rushes into the tower. x4 is so destructive, you feel it in your bones before you hear the explosion. From so high up, there is nothing to stop it, and she tumbles out with it from the side of the tower. Surrounded by shards of glass, broken furniture and falling metal.
One more shot. He’s good. The bullet shreds outwards and clips her. Just barely.
She plunges and vanishes into the twilight of Madrid. But they have a part of the sequence now.
It’ll have to have been worth it. As she feels the embrace of Shadows again.
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