Shadowrun Storytime: Turn the Lights Off
The Voltage existed to launder money and break noise ordinances. Wedged between a gutted Stuffer Shack and a pay-by-the-hour coffin motel on the Touristville strip, its walls sweated condensation from the press of too many bodies crammed under UV strips and holo-projectors running bootleg visuals. Yuri waited in the cold night air, a certified cred stick ready in her hands, her two-piece armani suit offering little protection.
The bouncer, a dwarf sporting several gold engraved implants, had taken one look at the medkit slung over her shoulder and waved her through. Ripper docs were welcome everywhere. You never knew when the night would go sideways. She posted up near the back wall, ordered something cheap and blue from a service drone, and let the bass shake Glass out of her skull. It almost worked. The kid's face kept flickering behind her eyelids every time she blinked. Yuri grimaced, remembering that stupid, startled expression he'd worn right before Red Dog's gun went off and punched a forty-five caliber sized hole the kid’s noggin. A week of blown contacts, spooked informants, and amateur-hour drek, and the solution had been to just kill the problem. Yuri had stood there with her medkit and her oath and endorsed Glass’ death. E3 had dropped the convoy's lead driver from a rooftop six blocks out, the job went clean, and twenty thousand nuyen hit her account like an apology from the universe. She took a long pull of her gin. The taste of battery acid forced a full body shiver. Perfect for the occasion.
The birthday girl was some Raven Scrimshaw princess. A short asian gal barely twenty, decked out in mana-reactive body paint that shifted color with her mood, currently cycling through hot pink and electric gold. Her crew had commandeered the entire back half of The Voltage: a knot of young gangers in matching black jackets with the Scrimshaw's corvid skull sigil stitched across the shoulders in silver thread. Wiz gangers. Mage kids playing at being hard. Yuri didn't care about any of them. She cared about the woman standing apart from the pack, leaning against the far end of the bar with a whiskey neat and the posture of someone who'd rather be literally anywhere else. She was tall, beating Yuri by several inches. Which was saying something, because Yuri had a solid six feet on her and the heeled boots to push it further. Red hair, the real kind, not gene-modded or dyed, pulled up into an elaborate bun that was more architecture than hairstyle, held together by actual lacquered chopsticks. Braids hung loose from the base, swaying with every slight turn of her head.She was older, maybe late thirties, radiating a rugged elegance that came from years of not giving a shit about being beautiful. Athletic build, shoulders that said she threw punches and meant them, and a chest that made Yuri's brain short-circuit for a full three seconds. The woman took a sip of her whiskey, eyes tracking the birthday girl with the weary vigilance of a babysitter counting down the minutes until the parents came home.
Yuri was in love. She was catastrophically, instantaneously in love, and she knew it was stupid, and she didn't care.The manic energy that had been buzzing under her skin all week. The restless, guilt-soaked need to move, to do something, to be anything other than the woman who'd stood by while a kid got murdered, surged up through her chest and grabbed the steering wheel. She downed the rest of her drink in one go, wiped her mouth with the back of her realskin hand, and started walking. No plan. No prep. Just forward momentum and the vague hope that her mouth would figure something out before the rest of her brain caught up. She slid into the empty space next to the redhead, close enough to smell her—cedar smoke and ozone after a spell discharge. "Hey," Yuri said, and immediately hated herself. Hey. A week of planning a convoy heist and the best opener she had was hey.
Hard hazel eyes staring through her, a threat assessment running behind every glance. Up, down, pause on the medkit, pause on the realskin arm. Most people couldn't tell the difference, but a mage might feel the absence of where meat should be, then back up to the dopey grin on Yuri's face. "Hey," the woman said back, flat as concrete.
"I'm Yuri. I'm a—" She caught herself before ripper doc fell out of her mouth. "—having a terrible week and you're the most beautiful woman I've ever seen and I think I need to buy you a drink before my brain catches up to what my mouth is doing." It came out in one breath, one long, unbroken stream of words that hung in the air between them.
The woman stared at her. One second. Two. Then the corner of her mouth twitched, forming a ghost of a smile. Memories of a time when she used to find things funny. "Anne," she said. "And I already have a drink." She raised the whiskey. "But you can stand there if you want. You're more interesting than watching Sloane try to shotgun a soybeer."
Yuri took that inch and ran a marathon with it. She talked. God, she talked. Words poured out of her, regailing everything about the convoy job, about Redmond, about the way the rain had left a copper taste that morning, about how she'd once reattached a troll's ear in the back of a moving van using nothing but a staple gun and a prayer. She talked with her hands, gesturing wildly, nearly clipping a passerby in the jaw.
Anne watched her with that same unreadable expression, sipping her whiskey in slow, measured intervals, occasionally offering a dry, one-word response that Yuri seized on the lifeline. "Hm." "Really." "Stupid." Each one made her blush, along with pulls from an ordered glass of gin. Yuri learned, in fragmented pieces between her own rambling, that Anne went by Shrine, that she'd been running with the Scrimshaw for six years, that the birthday girl was her responsibility tonight, and that she considered this entire event a waste of her time. She didn't say what she did for the gang. She didn't have to. The ozone smell, the faint flicker in her eyes when the music hit a certain frequency, the way the air around her felt heavier than it should. Yuri had been around enough mages to know a heavy hitter when she was standing next to one. The braids swung when Anne turned to flag down another whiskey, and Yuri watched them move as if she were witnessing a religious experience.
"So," Yuri said, leaning in, riding the crest of her own manic wave, "What's your type?"
Anne opened her mouth. Whether to answer or tell Yuri to go to hell, she'd never know, because the front door of The Voltage banged open with a thump of a boot. Yuri looked. Everyone looked. The music didn't stop, but the energy shifted, a ripple of tension spreading outward from the entrance and through the crowd.
The kid who walked in was maybe twenty-two, twenty-three. Human, pretty in a sharp and underfed way, with cheekbones that could cut glass and the kind of jawline that got you cast in trideo dramas. Neon yellow lined the collar and cuffs of his black jacket. Gang colors. Yuri didn't recognize them, but he had a half-dozen friends behind him dressed the same way, fanning out to cover the entrance and side door. The dwarf bouncer stepped in front of him, chrome arm up, mouth already forming the word no. The kid didn't even break stride. He palmed the dwarf's face and shoved him sideways into the wall. Wired reflexes. Yuri clocked the telltale twitch in his jaw, the way his eyes moved a half-second faster than his head. The kid, whoever he was, stormed the dance floor, straight for Sloane.
Anne set her whiskey down, completely devoid of urgency. But Yuri noticed that her fingers didn't leave the glass right away. They lingered, then released, one at a time, putting down a weapon she might need soon.
"Cody," Anne said. Not loud. Just the name, and the air between them froze.
Across the club, Sloane Mercer stood frozen in the middle of her friends. Her body paint, which had been cycling through hot pink and electric gold all night, bled to a flat, ashen white. She looked like she'd seen a ghost. Or worse.
"Sloane!" Cody roared, his arms spread wide, grinning, moving through the crowd with the easy confidence of someone who'd walked this exact floor a hundred times before. People parted for him. Not because of the gang colors.The kid had that twitchy, overcranked energy of someone running hot on wired reflexes, and a faulty install at that, Yuri noted . "Babe, happy birthday. How come you didn't invite me?"
Two Scrimshaw kids stepped into his path. Young, maybe nineteen, silver corvid skulls on their shoulders, mana already flickering at their fingertips. Credit where it was due, they didn't flinch. "You're banned, Cody," one of them said. A skinny elf with a shaved head and a voice made unsteady by adrenaline. "Dalton banned you himself. You can't be here."
"Dalton's not here," Cody said. He was still smiling. It was a terrible smile, the kind that lived on the face of someone who'd already decided how the next five minutes were going to go and was just waiting for everyone else to catch up. "And I'm not here for you. I'm here to talk to my girl."
"She's not your girl." The second Scrimshaw kid, a human woman with mana tattoos crawling up her neck. "After what you did? Get out."
Cody's smile didn't waver. "What I did," he repeated softly, tasting the words. "What I did. See, that's the thing. Everyone keeps telling me what I did. Nobody ever asks her what she did. Nobody asks why I had to—," He stopped. Took a breath. The smile cracked at the edges, and something ugly moved underneath it. "I just want to talk to her. Five minutes. That's all. And then I'm gone."
"Cody." Anne's voice cut through the noise of the filled club. She hadn't raised it or moved from the bar. But every head within twenty feet turned toward her. The tenor of an angry mage was impossible to ignore. "Turn around. And don't come back."
The kid's grin sharpened. He looked past the two Scrimshaw kids, past the dance floor, straight at Anne. "Shrine," he said, and the name came out a mocking singsong. "There she is. Sloane's big scary guard dog." He tilted his head. "You know, I always wondered. Does Dalton keep you on a leash, or do you just like the taste of the collar?"
Anne didn't blink. But Yuri was standing close enough to feel the temperature around her drop by about two degrees. The ozone smell sharpened.
"Five minutes," Cody said, weaving past the two Scrimshaw kids, who looked at each other with the wide-eyes. Cody’s crew spread wider behind him, and Yuri saw hands drifting toward waistbands, and jacket linings. Not drawing. Not yet. "Five minutes girls. I just want to talk."
"I don't want to talk to you ever again. We’re over Cody!" It was Sloane. Her voice was small, shaky, and arms trying to hold her own body together. The paint on her arms had gone a mottled, sick yellow.
"Baby." Cody's voice dropped, went soft, wounded. He put a hand over his heart. "Baby, come on. It's me. You know me. You know I'd never mean to hurt you." He reached for her. Just his hand, extending across the last few feet of space between them, palm open, fingers spread.. Sloane flinched away from him..
Yuri felt her jaw tighten. Her right hand flexed at her side, the realskin shifting imperceptibly over the housing of the claws beneath.
"I said," Anne repeated, and now she was moving, pushing off the bar with a fluid, unhurried grace that reminded Yuri of a cat uncoiling, "Turn around. Walk out. Don't come back." She crossed the distance to Sloane in two long strides, her black dress trailing her steps. Anne stepped between the birthday girl and Cody's outstretched hand. She was taller than him by a good three inches. She looked down at him the way you looked at something stuck to the bottom of your boot. "Last time, Cody."
Cody’s crooked grin fell, replaced by barely contained rage. Cody's outstretched hand curled into a fist. His crew, reading the shift, stopped pretending to be casual. Hands went into jackets. A metallic click echoed from somewhere in the crowd of gangers, or clips being seated. The dwarf bouncer, bleeding from a split lip, was speaking urgently into a comm, but whatever backup he was calling wasn't going to make it in time. The two young Scrimshaw mages had their hands up, mana pooling between their fingers, faces tight with fear. The rest of the birthday party had pressed against the back wall, a huddle of silver jackets and terrified eyes. The music was still playing. Some pre-Awakening synthwave track, all shimmering pads and a driving beat, criminally inappropriate for what was about to happen.
"You think you scare me?" Cody said quietly. "You think because Dalton lets you play attack dog, I'm supposed to, what? Run? From you?" He laughed, short and sharp. "I brought friends this time, Shrine. I know you're good. But you're not that good."
Anne looked at him for a long moment. Then she glanced over her shoulder at Sloane, who was crying silently, body paint running in pale streaks down her arms. Anne's expression didn't soften. Her shoulders slouched, weighed by something heavy that Yuri recognized from her own mirror. The weight of responsibility for someone you couldn't always protect.
"No," Anne said, eyes swiveling to Cody like gun sights. "I’m better."
Cody swung first. The wired reflexes made it fast. A chrome-boosted haymaker that would've cracked a normal person's skull. Anne caught his fist in her palm. The crack of impact echoed through the club, and Cody's eyes went wide with the sudden, visceral understanding that the woman in front of him was not operating on the same physical plane he was. Anne's fingers closed around his fist. She squeezed. Yuri heard the small bones in his hand grind together, saw his knees buckle, saw his mouth open in a silent scream. Anne held him there for one second, hazel eyes set and then she threw him by his twisting arm. Cody sailed backward through the air, and hit two of his own crew, crashing into a table that disintegrated under the impact.
The Scrimshaw kids pivoted faster than Yuri expected from a pack of wiz gangers at a birthday party. Mana flared across the back half of the club in overlapping shields as the young mages threw up barriers, the air rippling with the effort. But Cody's crew had come prepared. Two compact eggs sailed over the crowd in lazy arcs, and detonated in bursts of static that tore through the barriers. They screamed, a high thin whine of destabilized mana that made every awakened person in the room flinch.
Sloane screamed. Anne rolled her neck, her knuckles cracking with a twitch, and moved.
Anne crossed the bar top in the space between heartbeats, one high heel striking polished wood and the next leaving it behind as she launched herself over the heads of two clubgoers who were still processing the transition from party to warzone. Anne came down heel-first into the chest of the nearest yellow jacket and drove him backward into the ganger behind, the two of them folding together in a collision of limbs and snapping bone that carried them three meters before they hit the ground. Adept strength. Yuri had watched trolls land softer than that.
Anne's shoes hadn't finished settling on the dance floor before she was already inside the next man's reach. He had an SMG, a chunky Ingram with a collapsed stock, and he was bringing it up in a sweep that would have stitched a line across her torso if she'd given him another quarter second. She didn't. Anne dropped beneath the arc of the barrel, the burst chewing through the air where her chest had been and shattering the mirror behind the bar into a rainfall of silver. From the crouch she uncoiled upward, her open palm smashing the soft triangle beneath his sternum. The hit landed with the sound of a mallet striking wet clay. The Ingram clattered to the floor half a second before its owner did.
Anne seized a fistful of his jacket collar, pivoting on her back foot, using the dead weight of his folding body as ballast as she swung him in a wide arc and released. He sailed sideways across the dance floor and plowed into a knot of three of his own crew who had been trying to establish a firing line near the DJ booth. The four of them went down in a sprawl of tangled limbs and pinned weapons. By the time any of them fought free Anne was somewhere else entirely, her braids whipping wild behind her in the gale of battle
A troll filled the ruined doorway. Working muscle strained his flak vest at the seams. The troll kicked a table onto its side for cover with one foot and brought up a Remington Roomsweeper with hands that dwarfed the combat shotgun. The barrel tracked toward Anne's back as she closed distance on the next cluster of yellow jackets, and Yuri opened her mouth to shout a warning she knew would come too late.
Anne's right hand came up without her turning around. Her fingers curled, a gesture so small it could have been a twitch, and the air between her palm and the shotgun went wrong. Yuri felt it in her sinuses before she saw it happen. A pressure differential, sudden and localized, compresses the gravity in between Anne and the shooter. The Roomsweeper came apart along four perfectly parallel lines. The barrel separated from the receiver. The stock fell away from the grip. The shells inside tumbled out of the bisected chamber, unfired, rolling across the floor in slow wobbling circles. The troll stared at the wreckage in his hands. He had one second of confused silence, his mouth half-open around a word that would never arrive. Then the same unseen edge drew itself across his torso. Chest. Shoulders. And then separated simultaneously, clean enough to see daylight through, and what had been a troll became a precise, wet geometry lesson that hit the floor in sections.
Anne's hand dropped and she was already moving, already closing the distance to the next pocket of resistance, driving an elbow into the hinge of a ganger's jaw with a crack that spun him off his feet. She caught his momentum, redirected it, turned the spin into a platform as she planted one boot against his tumbling hip and launched herself into a heel kick that caught the man behind him square in the center of his chest. He flew, arms pinwheeling, and hit the support column behind him with enough force to spider web the concrete from the point of impact outward in fracture lines that climbed toward the ceiling.
Yuri's hands were shaking. From excitement. She fumbled the inhaler out of her jacket pocket, brought it to her lips, and squeezed. The adrenaline compound hit her lungs and the reflex booster answered, her perception stretching wide while reaction time compressed to something precognitive. Her pupils blew. Her heartbeat locked into a steady, metronomic drum. And the claws, five blades of diamond-coated monocellular steel, slid free from beneath the realskin of her right hand with a whisper, catching the dying UV lights and throwing them back as five thin razors of pink and blue.
The ripper-doc grinned. Wide, unhinged, all teeth.
A ganger had read the chaos well enough to circle wide, staying out of Anne's sight line, using the panicking crowd as cover. He emerged from behind a cluster of fleeing civilians with a machete already mid-swing, real steel flashing under the club lights, the edge aimed at the back of Anne's exposed neck as she drove toward Sloane's position. It was a killing stroke, and it would have landed if Yuri hadn't already been moving.
Yuri's legs coiled and fired, the reflex booster eating the three meters between them in a single explosive stride. She came in low, beneath the arc of the machete, and brought her claws up to meet it. Diamond met steel with a shriek that threw a fan of white sparks across both their faces, the impact jarring up through her wrist and into her shoulder hard enough to make her teeth rattle. The machete stopped dead. The man behind it did not understand why. His eyes, wide and startled behind his ballistic mask, flicked down to the five gleaming blades locked against his weapon and then back up to the grinning woman attached to them.
Yuri snapped her forehead into the ganger's mask. The ballistic mask cracked down its center seam, the composite material splitting against her forehead. She raked the claws down his weapon arm before he could recover, splitting skin and tendon with equal indifference, and the machete clattered to the floor trailing a ribbon of red. Her boot found the center of his chest and she kicked him backward into the press of bodies still trying to decide which direction was away, his limp form bowling through them with bone crushing force. "Hey," she called to Anne's back, breathless and beaming. "Think he needs a hand?"
Anne didn't look back. But underneath the gunfire and the screaming and the wet arterial sound of concentrated mana taking people apart at the seams, there was something that might have been a laugh.
Anne vaulted a toppled table and Yuri followed on her heels as if they rehearsed this a thousand times in some shared dream neither of them remembered. Anne found the path of least resistance, each movement flowing into the next with a conservation of energy that made it look effortless even as the impacts she delivered said otherwise. She would close distance in a rush, her long legs eating up the floor, hands finding wrists and elbows and throats with an anatomist's precision, redirecting force, borrowing momentum, turning her opponents' aggression into the engine of their own destruction. When the physics of a fight favored her fists, she used them. When someone brought out hardware that made close quarters a bad bet, she would step back, extend that right hand with its small curling gesture, and let the invisible geometry solve the problem in wet, surgical strokes.
Cody had dragged himself upright somewhere in the wreckage of the table he'd been thrown through, one hand cradling the other, blood sheeting from his nose and painting his chin crimson. He was screaming orders that his crew was too scattered and too terrified to follow coherently, but they kept coming anyway, loyalty or fear or sheer stupid momentum driving them through the doors in ones and twos.
Then in fives and tens. Men and women wearing yellow and black neo-kitsch jackets flooded through a side entrance that someone had propped open from the outside, enough bodies that the math started tilting even against Anne's terrifying efficiency. Yuri could feel it happening, the calculus of the fight shifting as the room filled with fresh opponents who hadn't yet watched their friends get taken apart. A troll set up a belt-fed LMG in the topside window of their ride, an armored nightmare of a stretch Hummer idling at the mouth of the entrance. The first burst tore a line of fist-sized holes across the ceiling, raining plaster and sparking wires onto the dance floor. Anne extended her hand mid-sprint without breaking stride and curled her fingers. The LMG split lengthwise with a shriek of tortured metal, the belt of ammunition spilling out, and the troll's gun arm separated at the elbow in a spray that painted the inside of the Hummer's window a deep, arterial red.
Yuri stayed on Anne's flank and made herself useful. A ganger tried to circle behind while Anne was occupied with a pair of shooters who'd set up a crossfire from behind the overturned DJ booth. Yuri was on him before his finger found the trigger, her claws catching the barrel of his pistol and wrenching it sideways, the shot going wide and punching a hole through a holo-projector that died in a shower of sparks and fractured light. She opened his vest from hip to shoulder with a single upward rake, the ballistic fiber parting against the diamond edge, and followed through with a knee to his gut that doubled him over her leg. She shoved him into the path of his buddy, tangling them both long enough for her boot to find the second man's kneecap and fold it ninety degrees in the wrong direction. He went down howling, clutching his ruined joint, and Yuri stepped over him and closed the distance back to Anne's shoulder in three quick strides.
Yuri was laughing. It bubbled up from a place past the guilt and the grief and the memory of Glass's startled face, primal and electric and completely beyond her control. In the back of her mind, the part of her that had sworn do no harm was howling into the void, demanding to know what she'd become. But the rest of her, every screaming nerve and singing synapse, was alive for the first time in weeks. Fighting beside the most beautiful woman she'd ever seen, blood on her realskin knuckles and sparks in her eyes and nothing, nothing, nothing else mattered.
It hit Anne mid-stride, a pulse of raw counterspell energy that rolled through the club in a pressure wave, thick and suffocating and wrong. Yuri felt it in her teeth, in her sinuses, in the sudden absence of that electric hum that had been radiating off Anne's skin since the fight began. Anne stumbled. Actually stumbled, her boot catching on the edge of an overturned chair, her right hand still extended toward a cluster of gangers who should have been in pieces but were instead very much alive and raising their weapons. The air lost its taut, lethal edge in an instant.
Yuri's eyes snapped to the source. A woman had stepped through the side entrance behind the last wave of yellow and black jackets. She was short, broad, her head shaved clean and covered in ritual scarification that glowed faintly with a sick green phosphorescence. She wore no gang colors. She wore no jacket at all, just a sleeveless shirt that showed off arms covered in binding tattoos. Yuri had only ever seen in medical texts about paracritter containment.
A summoner. Cody hadn't just brought muscle. He'd brought a leash holder. And the thing on the other end of that leash was already materializing in the air above the dance floor, a roiling knot of astral energy that condensed into something vaguely canine with too many joints and a mouth that opened wider than geometry should allow. The spirit landed on the bar with a crack that split the countertop lengthwise, and it screamed, a sound that existed more in the astral than the physical, hitting Yuri's ears like a railroad spike.
Anne recovered faster than anyone had a right to. She dropped her cutting hand and pivoted to face the spirit, planting her feet wide, her braids swinging into her face. But Yuri could see the difference. The fluid, effortless quality of her movement had been replaced by something harder, more deliberate. The summoner was actively suppressing her, pouring counterspell energy into the space around Anne into a mold. Anne's magic was still there, Yuri could feel it coiling and straining beneath the surface, but it was bottlenecked, throttled, forced through a gap that had been a highway moments ago.
“Outside,” Anne wheezed, her voice raw and tight with effort. She took Yuri by the collar of her Armani jacket and hauled her sideways as the spirit lunged, its too-wide mouth snapping shut on the air where Yuri's head had been a half second earlier. They hit the fire exit together, Anne's shoulder slamming the crash bar, and tumbled out into the alley behind The Voltage in a tangle of limbs and adrenaline.
The cold hit Yuri first. Touristville in March was wet and freezing. The walls between the Stuffer Shack and Voltage towered above, choked with dumpsters and piled garbage and the skeletal remains of a delivery drone that had crashed into the wall. Blue neon bled down from the signs above, painting everything in streaks of pink and blue. Anne was on her feet before Yuri, pulling her up by the arm, and Yuri could feel the tremor in her grip. The counterspell had done something to her. The ozone smell was fading, replaced by burnt copper wire.
They made it six steps before Cody's people poured out of the fire exit behind them and the side door of the club simultaneously. The alley became a killbox in the span of a breath. Muzzle flashes strobed in the darkness, and Yuri heard the distinctive chatter of at least two automatic weapons opening up from both ends. Anne threw up a barrier on instinct, a shimmering disc of hardened mana that caught the first burst from the left. But the barrier flickered, thinned, its edges fraying under the sustained suppression. And was standing in the fire exit doorway with that sick green glow crawling up her scarred arms was the freelance summoner. The spirit was with her, crouched at her feet like a dog waiting to be unleashed.
Anne's barrier caught free flying rounds from the left. It did not catch the rounds from the right.
Yuri saw the muzzle flash from the side door a fraction of a second before the burst reached her. The reflex booster screamed at her to move, every nerve lighting in sequence. She twisted, got her arms up, felt the dermal plating across her torso and forearms lock into its hardest configuration. The first three rounds hit her square in the chest and she felt each hammer blow, the subdermal armor distributing the kinetic energy across her ribcage in a wave of deep, nauseating pain.
The fourth and fifth caught her left shoulder and the meat of her upper arm, punching through the outer layer of the Armani jacket and shredding the expensive synth-silk into ribbons. The sixth went wide and sparked off the dumpster behind her. She staggered back, her vision whiting out for a half second, and when it came back the front of her jacket was hanging open in tatters, the shirt underneath torn to rags, and her dermal plating was visible in patches across her stomach and ribs where the realskin had been abraded by the impacts. Nothing had penetrated the plating. Muscles burned and medi-data tracking the impacts flooded Yuri’s peripheral vision. She was going to have bruises the size of dinner plates by morning, but the pain brought clarity with it, a fresh surge of endorphins that sharpened the world to crystal
Anne had taken a hit of her own. One of the spirit's astral projections, a whip of concentrated malice, had caught her across the back as she threw the barrier up, leaving a scorched line across her shoulder blade that smoked faintly in the cold air. She was bleeding from a cut above her left eye where a piece of shrapnel from the alley wall had caught her, and her breathing was heavier than it should have been, each exhale fogging in the night air. The suppression field was forcing every spell to cost twice what it should, every barrier burned through her reserves. But she was standing. The wizard’s eyes were still burning with that hard hazel fire. Her fists were up, and the braids were hanging wild around her face in a lion's mane.
Yuri reached down and grabbed the ruined front of her Armani top, what was left of it, and ripped it away in one clean motion. The tattered synth-silk came free and she tossed it aside without looking, leaving herself in nothing but the sports bra underneath and the faintly visible lattice of dermal plating that ran across her stomach, her ribs, her shoulders. The cold air hit her bare skin and she didn't flinch. The adrenaline compound was still roaring through her bloodstream, her pupils blown wide, her heart a steady war drum in her chest. The claws on her right hand caught the neon light and threw it back in five thin lines of pink and blue.
The heat of Anne's body bled through the thin fabric of her dress, every muscle coiled and ready against Yuri's spine.
"So," Yuri said, the words coming easily as a summer walk, "You never answered my question."
Anne let out a sound that was half laugh, half groan. "You're asking me this now?"
"When else am I gonna ask? We're bonding!"
A ganger came around the corner of a dumpster with a stun baton. Anne stepped forward, caught his wrist, twisted until it popped, and drove her knee into his stomach hard enough to lift him off his feet. She stepped back into position against Yuri's spine without missing a beat.
"Fine," Anne said, breathing hard. "I like pathetic men. The kind who can't open a jar. You know, gonks you don’t take to watch a sad trideo." She paused, and Yuri heard the sharp crack of her fist connecting with another ganger's jaw. "Never found a woman who could keep up with me, though."
Yuri caught a knife hand aimed at her throat, redirected it past her ear, and opened the attacker's forearm with a single claw stroke that sent the blade clattering to the asphalt. She kicked him in the chest and sent him tumbling back into his friends.
"What about me?" Yuri asked, still grinning, still pressed against Anne's back. "Am I keeping up?"
Anne glanced over her shoulder. Her eyes traveled down Yuri's bare arms, across the exposed muscles of her shoulders and stomach, the dermal plating catching the neon light beneath her deep chocolate skin that was slick with sweat. Tightly wound synthetic muscle carving deep shadows along her lithe figure.
"Not gonna lie," Anne said, and something shifted in her voice, something warm and unexpected underneath the gravel and the exhaustion. "Muscles do it for me."
Yuri's grin split her face wide open. The adrenaline compound surged through her veins, her reflex booster humming in perfect sync with her heartbeat. Every nerve in her body singing with the electric certainty that she was exactly where she was supposed to be.
Then watch what I can do,' Yuri said, and threw herself straight at the summoner. She was moving before the words finished leaving her mouth, the reflex booster buying her the stretched seconds she needed to draw the Ares Squirt gun from her medkit and thumb the cartridge home. Time went thick around her. She squeezed the trigger mid-sprint and swept the stream across the four gangers screening the summoner's position. Then she was tucking into a tumble roll, asphalt biting into her bare shoulder, and when she came up on one knee three meters from the summoner the world snapped back to speed. Behind her, the gangers were doubled over and gagging, weapons abandoned. Ahead, the wind spirit whipped its tail through the gap between Yuri and its former master.
The wind spirit's tail carved a trench in the asphalt where Yuri had been half a second earlier, the displaced air hitting her with an open palm slap that sent her tumbling sideways into a pile of garbage bags. She rolled with it, came up on one knee, and leveled the Squirt gun at the summoner's face from three meters out. The woman saw it coming. Her hands were already moving, lips forming the first syllable of a banishing word, the green glow on her scarified scalp flaring bright. Too slow. Yuri pulled the trigger and a stream of concentrated capsaicin laced with something the street pharmacists called Devil's Piss hit the summoner square in the mouth and eyes. The effect was immediate and deeply satisfying. The woman's concentration shattered, hands flying to her face, mouth open in a scream that became a retching, choking gasp as the chemical cocktail hit her mucous membranes and went to work. She dropped to her knees, clawing at her own eyes, the green glow guttering and fading in waves across her skin.
Yuri felt it before she understood it. The air in the alley changed, went thin and electric and tasted like a thunderstorm. The wind spirit, freed from the summoner's binding, did not dissipate. It did not flee back to whatever astral plane had spawned it. It went feral. The vaguely canine shape it had worn inside the club dissolved, its form expanding and losing coherence, becoming a howling vortex of astral energy and displaced air that filled the width of the alley and began tearing everything not bolted down into a spinning column of debris. Garbage, shrapnel, chunks of brick ripped from the alley walls, the skeletal remains of the crashed delivery drone, all of it whipping through the air at lethal velocity. One of Cody's gangers caught a piece of rebar through the shoulder and went down screaming. Another was lifted clean off his feet and hurled into the far wall with the sound of a sack of wet concrete.
Yuri flattened herself against the ground, arms over her head, claws digging into the asphalt for purchase. The wind tore at her exposed skin, each piece of debris that struck her dermal plating sending a fresh jolt of pain through her battered body. She could barely hear anything over the roar, barely saw through the cyclone of dust and refuse, but she could feel Anne behind her. Could feel the sudden, sharp spike of magical pressure as the combat mage gathered everything she had left and pushed it outward in a single, desperate act of will.
A thrumming, invisible barrier slammed down around the spirit forming a bubble of weaved magic. The translucent walls of the barrier groaned and crackled under the immense, straining force of the thing inside, but it was holding, holding, holding.
"Get clear!" Anne's voice cut through the howling wind, raw and ragged and louder than Yuri had ever heard it. She was standing in the middle of the alley with her feet planted wide and both hands extended, fingers splayed, every muscle in her body taut with effort. Blood ran freely from the cut above her eye and the scorched wound across her back, and her face was twisted with a kind of furious concentration that Yuri recognized from surgeons mid-operation, from soldiers holding a line they knew they couldn't hold. The braids had come half undone, red hair spilling wild around her shoulders. "Yuri, get clear now!"
Yuri scrambled. She grabbed the retching summoner by the back of her shirt and dragged her sideways behind a dumpster, not out of kindness but because the woman was in the blast radius and dead witnesses made for complicated cleanups. She threw herself behind the same dumpster, pulled her knees to her chest, and covered her ears.
Anne brought her hands together and the light of what could be a newborn sun filled the alley. Yuri couldn't see it directly from behind the dumpster, but she saw the light, a blinding white flash that turned the alley walls into mirrors and cast shadows so sharp they looked carved. She felt the concussive thump in her chest, in her bones, in the fillings of her teeth. And she heard it. The sound of a hundred blades falling in sequence, so fast they blurred into a single sustained note of destruction, a chord of cutting force that lasted two seconds and then stopped with a finality that left the silence ringing.
Yuri peeked around the edge of the dumpster. The barrier was gone. The wind spirit was gone. In the space where both had been, the alley floor was carved into a precise pattern of intersecting lines, each cut several inches deep into the asphalt, the edges glowing faintly with residual mana. It looked as if someone had taken a sword to the ground a hundred times in two seconds and hit the same spot from a hundred different angles. The remaining gangers who had been caught inside the radius were no longer recognizable as individual people. They were pieces, scattered across the carved ground in wet, steaming sections, the cuts so clean and numerous that the remains looked almost abstract, a jigsaw puzzle that had been shaken apart and thrown across a table.
Cody was not among them. Yuri spotted him at the far end of the alley, propped against the wall, his broken hand cradled against his chest, his face white with shock and blood loss. The young captain was staring at the carved ground where his crew had been standing. He was not going to be a problem anymore.
Her knees hit the asphalt, followed by the rest of her, pitching forward onto her hands. Her head hung between her arms, her red hair a curtain around her face. The full-body tremor wracking Anne's frame was the telltale sign of profound magical depletion.
Yuri was at her side in three steps. The manic energy was still there, buzzing under her skin, but it had shifted, redirected itself from combat to something older and more practiced. Her hands found Anne's shoulders, steadied her, eased her back from the brink of face-planting on the asphalt. Fingers found the pulse point on Anne's neck, counting the beats, assessing the tremor, cataloguing the visible injuries as she’d done thousands of times in a thousand back alleys.
"Easy," Yuri said, and her voice was different now, softer, the manic edge filed down to something almost gentle. "Easy. I've got you. You're good. That was incredible. You're a hell of a mage. But also you need to breathe slower or you're going to pass out, so maybe focus on that for a second."
Anne laughed. It was a terrible sound, wet and exhausted and dangerously close to a sob, but it was a laugh, and Yuri counted it as a win.
The sirens started three minutes later. Lone Star, not Knight Errant, which meant Touristville jurisdiction, which meant underpaid and overworked officers who wanted nothing more than to file the shortest possible report and go home. They rolled in with lights and no enthusiasm, a pair of cruisers and a paddy wagon, the officers stepping out with the weary resignation of people who had seen a hundred nights this bloody and expected to see a hundred more.
Sloane Mercer appeared from somewhere inside the club, her mana-reactive paint cycling through a nauseated grey-green, mascara running down her cheeks. Her voice was steady when she pulled out her commlink and dialed, and whoever the hell picked up on the other end of the call made Lone Star officers straighten their spines and adjust their attitudes. Yuri didn't catch all of it from where she sat on the curb with Anne's head resting against her shoulder, but she caught enough. Mercer. As in Mercer Consolidated. The Mercer family that owned six blocks of downtown and had a seat on the Metropolitan Commission. Sloane's birthday party had not been a low-budget affair by choice.
The officers took statements from the Scrimshaw kids, photographed the alley. They bagged and tagged what was left of Cody's crew with the businesslike detachment of people who understood that the paperwork was going to be a nightmare regardless of what they did. Cody himself was loaded into the back of an ambulance, cuffed to the gurney with one hand while a paramedic set the other, his face a mask of blank, dissociated shock. The summoner, still blind and retching from the Devil's Piss, was zip-tied and dumped in the paddy wagon without ceremony.
At no point did anyone take Yuri's name. At no point did anyone ask Anne to provide a statement. Sloane's call had carved them out of the incident report as cleanly as Anne's magic had carved the alley floor. As far as Lone Star was concerned, this had been a gang-on-gang altercation between the Raven Scrimshaw and Cody's crew of Yellow Jackets, escalated by the unsanctioned use of a bound spirit, resolved by parties unknown. High grade combat magic in a civilian area was supposed to trigger a Thaumaturgical Response Unit investigation, but the TRU officer who arrived took one look at the scene, received a quiet word from the senior Lone Star sergeant, and suddenly discovered that his paperwork was in order and his shift was actually over.
Yuri sat on the curb and watched it all happen with the detached amusement of someone who had seen money work its magic a hundred times before. Anne sat next to her, wrapped in a shock blanket that one of the paramedics had tossed her way, her red hair a disaster, her face pale and drawn, the cut above her eye closed with a butterfly strip that Yuri had applied from her medkit with practiced hands. She looked exhausted and injured and half dead on her feet. And she the most beautiful thing Yuri had ever seen.
The last cruiser pulled away. The thump of bass from a neighboring club mixing with the hum of traffic on the strip and the occasional crack of gunfire that was just part of the neighborhood's lullaby. Sloane had disappeared back inside the club with her Scrimshaw friends to salvage what was left of her birthday. The street was empty except for Yuri and Anne, sitting side by side on the curb in the neon glow, breath fogging in the cold.
Yuri rolled her shoulders, felt the dermal plating shift under bruised skin, and winced. Her chest ached. Her left arm throbbed where the rounds had hit. She was shirtless in March, sitting on a freezing curb in Touristville, covered in other people's blood and her own sweat, and she had never felt more alive. She turned to Anne, and the grin came back, smaller this time, less manic, but no less genuine.
"So," Yuri said, stretching her arms above her head in a motion that was approximately zero percent necessary and one hundred percent calculated to make the muscles in her shoulders and stomach flex under the neon light, "That was a hell of a first date."
Anne didn't look at her. She stared straight ahead at the empty street, the shock blanket pulled tight around her shoulders, her expression unreadable.
"That wasn't a date," Anne said.
"You're right," Yuri agreed, still flexing, still grinning, absolutely shameless. "A date would have appetizers. Maybe a nice bottle of wine. I know a place in the Red Light district that makes these nice little potato cakes. It's criminal what they charge for it, but I just got paid, and I think you deserve to eat somewhere that doesn't have a body count."
Anne turned her head slowly, and the look she gave Yuri was something between exasperation and disbelief. "You're asking me on a date?"
"You have a bruise the size of a grapefruit on your sternum."
"You should see the other guys." Yuri paused. "Actually, don't. You were very thorough."
Anne had taken a spirit's lash across her back, watched a man she'd been keeping away from Sloane crash through every safeguard, and burned herself hollow cleaning up the mess. The weariness in her face went deeper than the wounds. Yuri recognized it because she saw the same thing in her own mirror every morning.
"You're ridiculous," Anne said, her voice flat, toneless, completely devoid of inflection.
"Yeah," Yuri says, a sigh escaping her. Out of the medkit came a pack of cigarettes. Yuri lights one and takes a deep drag.
"You're loud, talk too much, and clearly lack any self-preservation. You asked me my type in the middle of a firefight."
Anne exhaled slowly through her nose. She looked away, looked at the street, looked at the neon signs reflected in the wet asphalt, looked at nothing. The silence stretched between them, filled by the distant bass and the hum of the city and Yuri's own thundering heartbeat. Then Anne reached out, grabbed a fistful of Yuri's sports bra strap, and pulled her in.
The kiss landed on Yuri's cheek. Just her cheek. Anne's lips were dry and warm and slightly chapped, and they pressed against the skin just below Yuri's left eye for exactly two seconds before pulling away. I acknowledge that you exist, the kiss said. And it was the single greatest thing that had ever happened to Yuri in her entire life.
The lit cigarette fell from Yuri’s loose fingers. Full system crash. The reflex booster, the adrenaline compound still humming in her veins, every piece of chrome in her body ceased to matter. The manic energy that had been driving her all night sputtered, stalled, and collapsed into a warm, spreading static that started at the point where Anne's lips had touched her skin and radiated outward until it reached her toes and the tips of her fingers. Her mouth fell open. No words came out. For the first time all evening, Yuri had absolutely nothing to say.
Anne stood up, pulled the shock blanket tighter around her shoulders, and looked down at Yuri with an expression that was almost, almost, the beginning of a smile.
"The Red Light," Anne said. "Hit me up whenever. You're paying." She paused, eyes roaming the brand names on Yuri’s bra. "And wear a shirt."
She turned and walked back toward The Voltage, her ruined dress swishing around her legs, her hair a wild red mess, the shock blanket trailing behind her like a cape. She didn't look back.
Despite the property damage, the gunfire, and the geometric mandala of death carved into the back alley, The Voltage's party continued, its bass thumping on, oblivious. Yuri slumped against the curb, neon pink and blue light washing over her. Shirtless, bruised, bleeding, and covered in a mixture of blood, sweat, and chemical residue, she sported a handprint-shaped bruise on her sternum. The chaste, unexpected brush of Anne's lips had been a brief, perfect moment of stillness, a tiny anchor of relief that momentarily dulled the screaming agony in her ribs and head. Yet, a wide, painful grin was plastered across her face as a siren wailed somewhere in the distance.
She touched her cheek where Anne's lips had been. Her fingers were trembling.
"Whenever huh," Yuri said to the empty street, to the neon, to the cold March air. "Friday. I can do Friday. Friday's good. Friday's great. I need to buy a shirt. I need to buy a really nice shirt. Do I own a nice shirt? I don't own a nice shirt. I need to call E3. E3 knows fashion. Does E3 know fashion? E3 wears tactical gear to restaurants. I'll figure it out. I'll figure it out."
She stood up on legs that felt like they belonged to someone else, collected her medkit from where it had fallen during her crash, and started walking home through the neon-stained streets of Touristville with a split lip, a ruined jacket slung over one shoulder, and the unmistakable, idiotic, invincible certainty that the worst week of her life was over.
The city hummed around her. The rain started again, cold and thin, and Yuri tilted her face up into it and laughed.
kianamaiart
gummygunk
origamiaround
