I made my way back north one street at a time, through a city that seemed frozen in shock. At some point the news out of the city centre had simply stopped coming; reports of Knight Errant movements and shaky shots of paramilitary barricades giving way to promises to update the public ‘as and when new information was available’ or, on a couple of channels, just a placeholder image warning of an unexpected break in transmission. I guessed those were the stations that had offices downtown.

  In every building I passed, people were scrolling through an endless social media spiral of speculation, or gathered around trideo sets bolted to the walls of bars, cafes and hair salons. All of them were watching the only story the news corps had; the info-bomb that had been handed to them on a silver platter, dense enough that it would take days to dig through the details, and the woman who was supposedly responsible for it.

  My only reassurance was that the compromat Calvert had sent was so far-reaching that it took up most of the airtime, while my paltry digital history was barely worth mentioning. Still, it hurt to see mom’s face being broadcast by some of the more human-leaning channels, with a couple of anchors openly speculating whether this attack had been carried out by some secret militant branch of the Ork Rights Commission. Others had written off the Undersiders as a paper-thin smokescreen laid down by the Sons of Sauron, while some of the more unhinged local channels were dismissing the whole thing as an Ares false flag aimed at destroying their local rivals.

  Evo didn’t even merit a mention, but why would it? Even I hadn’t figured out why Calvert’s employers wanted Medhall gone. With the way he was acting, it couldn’t be for ideological reasons. Maybe they just wanted to strengthen their presence in the UCAS, and picked Medhall as ready-made foothold on the east coast?

  Even thinking about Calvert made me lose all focus, Evo’s potential machinations disappearing into irrelevance beneath white-hot rage, shameful fear and grief as profound as I had ever experienced it before. All my hopes rested on Faultline’s token help; on the possibility that one of my friends was able to escape their captors.

  Really, there was only one question that mattered; were they taken by Evo or Medhall? It didn’t mean much; Calvert had already reset the entire system in his commandeered hospital, clearing out every tap I could access on this side of the resonance, while both unaccounted members of the Anders family had now ditched their commlinks, with Max’s dropping off the grid a little while ago.

  At the time he’d been in an elevator, heading up the spine of his skyscraper. Either he wanted to survey the streets from above or he felt he needed to put as many floors between him and the ground as possible, in case Knight Errant tried storming his tower from below.

  As for Calvert, I wondered how long it’d taken him to decide to edit the foreword to his extensively-sourced dissertation. Had the idea come to him before we were done talking, the slightest compromise driving him into an apoplectic rage? Had he hung up and immediately pulled up whatever metaergonomic haptics Evo had put together for his physiology, diving through folders until he found the right one, then hitting ‘send to all’ the moment he was done?

  There was part of me that believed that this betrayal was too big for a spur of the moment decision; that Calvert had to have been planning this all along, or at least something like this. We’d known about his plan to pit Knight Errant against Medhall, after all, we just believed he was planning on letting the police fight their way through to Max.

  But in the end I knew it was just my own desperation making a mountain out of a molehill. He’d damned us all with a few lines of text in a document that was tens of thousands of words long. It would have taken a minute’s worth of typing, if that, to end Taylor Hebert’s life. Even the name ‘Undersiders’ had probably been cooked up by some opposition PR specialist on his team, but now it would be tied to my name forever.

  An image flashed onto a trideo screen in a barbers next to me, immediately drawing my eye. I thought I had moved past fear, but it somehow found space in my heart for another needle as I saw the grainy CCTV footage of my entrance to NBU, with my body, horns and cheap hoodie outlined in yellow – as if I didn’t stand out enough already.

  Frantically, I looked around the street, expecting to see passers-by dropping their phones in shock, screaming or pelting me with whatever they could find. So far, there was nothing, but my paranoia quickly adapted, proffering up the image of covert Knight Errant officers keeping a steady pace behind me.

  My eyes lighted on an alleyway between two towering buildings that left it almost completely shrouded in shadow. It twisted out of sight a dozen metres in, but any fear that I was backing myself into a corner was overwhelmed by the desire to get out of sight. As I scurried off the street, I began to pull up the various newsfeeds once again.

  As I feared, the image had come from a Knight Errant press release, which meant it had spread throughout the news media like lightning. They still weren’t putting out much information on downtown, instead diving into ‘my’ assassination attempt on Theo Anders. I wasn’t exactly surprised to see that they hadn’t mentioned the insect spirits either, but I suspected it was only a matter of time.

  They’ll kill me twice for that one, I thought, darkly, only to be brought back from my spiralling dread as Labyrinth appeared before me once again.

  “Are they safe?” I demanded. “Did you find them?”

  I’d stormed forward fast enough that I actually passed through her persona, which felt like someone walking over my own grave as her resonance reacted to my own. Labyrinth flitted to the side in a blur, holding up a warning hand.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Just…”

  “Newter has arrived at your safehouse,” she reported in neutral tones. “Connecting you now.”

  I accepted the resonance stream she offered me, tethering my persona to a commlink on the other side of the city. The link was built into a pair of tactical goggles, giving me an eyeball’s view of the rental home’s open gate in visual, thermographic and low-light modes.

  “Testing, testing, one two three,” Faultline’s agent spoke. It took me a moment to place his Hispanic accent. His handle was Newter; he’d been there when I’d dove into the matrix in the Palanquin, waiting for me to return and putting a knife to my throat when I freaked out.

  “You’re coming through clear,” I snapped. This wasn’t the time to humour Faultline’s answer to Imp. “What’s your report?”

  “No fun in the rat race, huh?” he asked as he turned around. The feed briefly panned over an expensive Japanese motorbike before my heart lurched at the sight of the front door barely clinging to what was left of its hinges.

  “Entry was right through the front, as you can see. Looks like they didn’t face any opposition on the way in.”

  That’s not right, I thought. Someone would have been on guard.

  Except Lisa had been following me through astral projection, and I had no idea what had happened to her after she saved me from the insect spirits. For all I knew she could have been caught up in the violence of their couple’s spat, driven off and unable to return to her body. I mentally cursed my lack of magical knowledge.

  “There are tyre tracks in the yard for three large vans, maybe trucks,” he continued, brushing aside the door. “Two of them on commercial tyres, one larger – milspec, I bet. Shit’s thrown around in the backyard like they had a helicopter, too.”

  It didn’t mean much. Calvert would be pulling from CrashCart’s arsenal, which meant he had access to the same kind of vehicles as Medhall. Ambulances and helicopters were their stock in trade.

  “As you can see,” Newter continued, gesturing at the wrecked hallway, “one of your guys put up a fight here.”

  “That’s magical damage, isn’t it?” I asked, eyeing the scorch marks on the wall opposite the entrance to the living room. Maybe Regent had seen them coming through the window?

  “Yeah, it’s definitely spellfire. This is interesting, though.”

  He knelt down, picking up a crumpled plastic ball between his thumb and forefinger. I could just about make up squashed-together electronics beneath what was left of the casing.

  “The attackers were using Stick-n-Shock ammunition,” he said. “There’s a couple of gel rounds in one of the walls, too, and no residual sign of any lethal spells from their end – though there are plenty that don’t leave signs, obviously.”

  He carried on down the corridor, passing through into the dining room, where he pointed at a large bloodstain on the opposite wall.

  “Your guys weren’t so considerate. There’s a whole bunch of flechettes dug into that wall, and there’ll be some more dug into the bastard whose blood that is.”

  Bitch, I thought to myself.

  “Didn’t have time to get off more than one shot,” Newter continued. “I think that’s when the helicopter arrived. Going by the boot-shaped holes in the lawn, looks like they had some chromed-up commandoes jumping out the sides.”

  It looked like they’d encountered Grue in a downstairs office. He’d got off a few shots as well, judging by the bulletholes, and there were shards of human teeth on the floor that he must have punched out of someone’s mouth. It still hadn’t been enough; the wall opposite the door was plastered with Stick-N-Shock impacts.

  “That’s it for fighting,” Newter said. “Quick and quiet.”

  “That’s it?” I asked, quickly. “No more?”

  “What I said.”

  I let out a relieved breath, some of the tension leaving my shoulders as I received the first piece of good news I’d had since the world went mad. Imp wouldn’t have gone down without a fight, which meant either she hadn’t been there or she’d been told to run by one of the others. She was still free.

  “One last thing,” I said. “Can you show me the main bedroom?”

  “Why? There wasn’t any fighting up there.”

  “Of course there wasn’t. Just… humour me, okay?”

  “Sure, whatever,” Newter said, the camera swaying in a way that suggested he’d just dramatically shrugged his shoulders. “You’re the one up shit creek, so you call the shots.”

  As he’d said, the bedroom was relatively pristine. The bed had clearly been slept in, but the covers had been pulled back up and the chair was tucked under the vanity.

  “Check the cupboards?” I asked, then watched as Newter threw open the wardrobe and the door to the en-suite bathroom.

  “Mind telling me what I’m looking for?” he asked.

  “A go-bag. Toiletries, a change of clothes, toothbrushes and a couple of towels all in a store-bought backpack. It’s not there. That’s all I needed to see.”

  Neither Kayden nor Aster had any possessions when we extracted them. Hell, Kayden had been in an evening gown. One of the first things we’d done after taking over the safehouse was send Tattletale out to the nearest convenience store for a few essentials and a rucksack for Kayden to keep them in. She wouldn’t need it if she was going back home, but if Calvert picked her up for the next leg of her journey…

  But that didn’t make sense. Calvert didn’t need to shoot his way past my team to get here; we were all expecting him to send people for her at some point. He could have just had someone knock on the front door.

  There was still so little I knew about what had happened at the safehouse, and only one person who was in any position to provide the answers. All I had to do was find the needle in the haystack.

  “Labyrinth,” I began, turning my attention back to my fellow technomancer, “can you put me through to Faultline again?”

  She nodded, refocusing her gaze on Palanquin’s distant hosts. I was a little saddened by the boundary that seemed to have grown up between us. I didn’t know if it was because I’d stopped being a ‘new’ technomancer for her to mentor or if it was because I’d become a wanted terrorist, which meant I was a threat to anyone I spoke to, but I felt I’d lost something unique.

  Still, she made the connection.

  “Spider,” Faultline began. “You’ve become quite popular.”

  “I’ve seen,” I snapped. “What the hell’s going on in the city centre? I couldn’t get past a gunfight between the Chosen and the cops.”

  “It’s a siege,” Faultline said, plainly. “Seemingly every human supremacist gang in the city has descended on Downtown, bolstered by a number of paramilitary groups, rifle clubs and various other right-wing organisations. They’ve put up barricades around Medhall office buildings, while the corporation's own security have sealed their factories in the North End and Chemical Row.”

  “And Knight Errant?” I asked. “They can’t sit on their hands. Not for this.”

  “So far they’ve established barricades of their own, surrounding the gangs and cutting them off from the rest of the city. They’ve re-established control of the bridges and completely shut down all routes from North to South. If I had to guess, I’d say their leadership are running the numbers. Counting the cost of breaking through the siege and whether they can do it in time.”

  “The Corporate Court,” I said, almost spitting the words. “Fuck. How long?”

  “They’ll make their ruling on Medhall's extraterritoriality within the next business day, Zurich time. After that local law enforcement can’t touch them without going through the court themselves.”

  “But this is an insurrection,” I argued. “Hell, if they are extraterritorial it’s just fucking war.”

  “Only if there’s a proven link between the corp and the gangs,” Faultline pointed out.

  “They’re outside his front door!”

  “That doesn’t mean anything. His corporate security are all staying inside, which means he can frame this as a… spontaneous and unwanted outburst of support. The Corporate Court might buy it, or pretend to; they’re always wary of making any rulings that could undermine extraterritoriality’s legal precedent.”

  “And Knight Errant?” I asked. “You think they’ll wait it out and shrug their shoulders?”

  “I think they’ll listen to Ares on this, not the local government or the feds. Detroit doesn’t care about their local feud, but it does care about extraterritoriality in the UCAS. At the same time, it will be a blow to Knight Errant if your leak is verified.”

  “It’s not my leak,” I snapped.

  “They think it is. You should know, Spider, they have CSI officers in your apartment.”

  I forced down the stab of grief, setting it aside for later. Calvert couldn’t have destroyed me more thoroughly if he’d forced me to my knees and shot me in the head.

  “Okay. You saw the picture on the news; I’m made and I need a lift. Can’t imagine many of the shops in this part of town sell a change of clothes in troll sizes, and I’m still fucking grey.”

  “I can’t take you into the city-”

  I cut her off. “I’m not asking you to. We never told Calvert where we lived. He might have found out anyway through hacking or magic, but Imp’s still alive and that’s where she’ll go.”

  I hope. She’s been there more often than Brian’s apartment, but it’s still a coin toss.

  “Drop me near the building and I’ll be able to scan all the nearby devices. Maybe pick up any cops or cyberpsychos waiting to jump us. Do that and I won’t ask any more favours.”

  I waited on tenterhooks as Faultline considered her options. At this point she had little incentive to help me, while I was totally dependent on her. I was still in the part of town where people actually called the cops, which meant I doubted I’d get ten metres on my own now that my face had circulated around the city.

  “Fine. Consider it a severance package. I don’t know how this is going to end, but I know you’re too hot for me to handle. Goodbye, Taylor, and good luck.”

  With that, she left. Labyrinth followed her a moment later, although she did give me one last searching look before she went. I couldn’t exactly blame Faultline; it was only a matter of time before someone linked Taylor Hebert to Spider, and then our team’s reputation would be shot.

  I moved further into the alleyway, sitting behind a dumpster with my back against the wall as I waited for Faultline’s driver to arrive. It was just the kind of pause I’d been hoping to delay indefinitely; a long lingering silence that left me with no possible way of avoiding the overwhelming realisation that I’d never be able to go home again.

  For years, everything I’d done had been to make the monthly rent payments on the apartment I’d inherited; to keep my home and all it contained, as if surrounding myself with my parents’ possessions could help me bring some small part of them back from the grave. I was in a limbo of grief, a depressed rut, but that place had still meant the world to me. It was the world.

  Tears formed in my eyes at the thought of uniformed officers tearing apart my bedroom, at cybercrimes deckers plugging into dad’s old terminal like it was a bomb they needed to disarm, at some junior detective holding up mom’s old Ork Rights Commission literature with the same triumphant enthusiasm she’d have for a murder weapon still drenched in the victim’s blood.

  I lost track of time, only wiping away my tears when I heard a vehicle pulling to a stop at the end of the alleyway. If this was my last interaction with Faultline’s organisation, I was determined not to show them my grief.

  The vehicle was an unobtrusive grey van, shorter than Bitch’s and completely unmodified. The driver flicked the switch to open the side door, revealing a few boxes that looked like they contained drinks samples for Faultline’s club. The driver herself didn’t even spare me a glance as I got in the back, settling myself down on the floor.

  She was a little older than me, with brown hair, a plain outfit and a pattern of freckles across what little of her face I could see in the mirror. She was familiar, but it took me a long time to place her.

  “You work at the Palanquin, don’t you?” I asked. “One of the managers?”

  For a moment she seemed torn over whether she should answer, but it wasn’t the kind of hesitation I’d seen on the nurse in the CrashCart hospital; the fear of someone interacting with a creature from a more violent world. Part of her saw people like me as peers, rather than criminals.

  “Yeah, that’s what I do now,” she said. “You fucked up so bad Faultline’s been using the old team because we’re the only people she trusts unconditionally. Gregor’s too visible, Newter’s already out, so you get me.”

  “You were a Shadowrunner? Why go from that to running the bar?”

  “Because I saw too many idiots like you die for someone else’s money. Not everyone chooses to become a Shadowrunner; for some of us, it’s the only path left. When we got into the information game I figured I didn’t need to do it anymore, so I asked Faultline for a way out.”

  “Yeah, well,” I drawled, drumming my fingers against the floor. “Not all of us get that option.”

  The journey passed in silence after that. It was late in the evening; the light had faded enough for the streetlights to kick in. I tracked our progress through the matrix as we moved north, constantly glancing back to the elaborate battlefield networks that were still taking shape in the city centre, linking each Chosen lieutenant and Knight Errant commander to their respective senior officers.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  An attack by either side on any part of the line would be reported almost instantly, while each individual platoon would be fed real-time tactical data that allowed them to fight almost as one. Knight Errant had an edge in that regard, since even their unaugmented officers had linked gear, but the Chosen’s battlefield network architecture was fiendishly complex; tweaked and tuned by their deckheads for exactly this sort of worst case scenario. The closest comparison I could think of was what little I’d seen of the Sioux’s border defence network.

  I couldn’t begin to think about how I’d overcome it, let alone physically get to wherever my team were being held – if they were even being held by Medhall. Calvert’s network would be equally difficult to crack, since he knew more than most what I was capable of. Besides, if the wanted terrorist Taylor Hebert showed up at a Crash Cart hospital then he could just lock the doors and call the cops.

  The sun had almost set by the time Faultline’s driver managed to work her way up to the North End – mostly because the roads were still jammed up with panicked drivers heading in the same direction. At my request she dropped me off a block away from the loft – close enough that my ambient senses could pick out all of the devices we’d left in there, from Regent’s console to Bitch’s spare drones.

  I quickly found another alleyway, then settled in for another long wait. I couldn’t see any signs of watchers in the matrix, but I knew that wouldn’t help if Calvert or a mage like him had sent a spirit to watch over the place. Instead, my plan was to hope Imp returned and turned on the lights.

  When I suddenly found the edge of a tomahawk against my throat, I quickly scrapped that plan and tried to come up with another.

  “Where the fuck were you, chummer?” Imp demanded, her snarling mask tilted up to stare me down.

  “Fucking over Calvert,” I answered, staking my life on the bet that honesty was the best policy. “He had a nice long chat with Kayden about how she was going to keep up Medhall’s metahuman sterilisation programme when we put her in charge.”

  “For real?” she asked, her hand tightening around the tomahawk’s grip.

  “I was in the room when they had the vid-con. Want to hear it for yourself? I’ve had Calvert’s comms bugged for weeks.”

  “So you…”

  “Stopped his second Shadowrunner team from assassinating Theo Anders, then persuaded Theo to take Kayden’s place in Calvert’s scheme. Evo gets what it wants without the fucking genocide. Win-win, I damn well thought. Calvert disagreed.”

  Imp’s impulsiveness was as much a benefit as a risk. She withdrew her tomahawk the moment she decided she believed me, slotting it back into its holster before looking up at me with her hands on her hips like no bad blood had almost been spilled.

  “Which is why I saw your face on a billboard, huh?”

  “Turns out he’s touchy about his independence. Where the fuck were you? You weren’t hanging around the safehouse in that getup.”

  Imp backed off, pacing around the alleyway for a moment. I wished she’d take off the mask; I couldn’t tell if she was angry or ashamed. After a moment, however, she stopped and spoke, looking at the wall to the left of me.

  “I got bored, okay? I’ve never been good with staying in one place, so I figured I’d go check out the neighbourhood. Broke into a few homes, stole some nice jewellery. Just… passing the fucking time.”

  “Okay,” I said, trying to sound understanding. “Not like I have a leg to stand on there.”

  “When I heard the helicopter I started running back,” she said, like it was a confession. “Wasn’t fucking fast enough, though. I got there right as the trucks left.”

  “Whose trucks?” I asked, leaning forwards. Who do I need to kill?

  “Medhall. Valks, every one of them.”

  I took a deep breath, my cybernetic hand clenching into a fist.

  “Imp, was Kayden still in the safehouse when you left?”

  “Yeah,” she said, nodding. Finally, she reached up and took off her mask, revealing a stress-worn face that had cried itself raw. I might as well have been looking in a mirror. “But… none of the vics were VIP transports. I think she left before.”

  I nodded.

  “I had Faultline send someone to investigate. Her go-bag was gone. Calvert must have pulled her and her daughter out, then immediately shopped the team to Medhall. That’s good.”

  “How the fuck is that good!?” Imp snarled, anger twisting across her face.

  “Calvert doesn’t have a reason to keep them alive,” I retorted. “Max Anders has three.”

  “His wife, daughter and the name of the snake who’s been pissing in his cereal…” Imp mused. “Not like anyone will believe your dorky ass could pull this off. Kind of a risk on Calvert’s part, yeah?”

  “It’s not like it’ll matter soon. Once Theo makes his deal with Evo, Calvert can just kill them or make them an offer they can’t refuse. And if Max does kill them, it’s no skin off his back.”

  “Guessing you wouldn’t get that offer.” She had a knowing smirk on her face.

  I sighed, an involuntary smile tugging at my lip. “No, he really hates me. I’m the only one of us he named, but it’s only a matter of time before Knight Errant links me to the rest of you. Evo could make all of that go away, for a price.”

  “Unless we swoop in like big damn simsense stars,” Imp said, her hand drifting back down to her axe. “You got a plan, little miss arch-terrorist?”

  “Right now the city centre is a whole bunch of fortresses and trench lines,” I remarked, giving voice to the concerns that had been rolling around in my head. “I’d bet good money our people are in Medhall’s headquarters, right under Max’s feet, but even if we can sneak through the lines to get there, there’s no way we’d be able to sneak out with four wounded.”

  “We’ve gotta do something,” Imp snapped, a little pleadingly. “I can’t go through this again!”

  “I have an idea,” I said. “It’s a hell of a gamble, but I figure this is the time for desperate action. I’ll need a safe place to work on it, though. Is the loft clear?”

  “Fuck no. There’s a team of guys watching it. No tech I can see, so I think they’re Calvert’s people waiting to ambush you.”

  It was what I’d expected. After everything else I’d lost tonight, it was amazing how little the loss of my second home hurt. I supposed it was just a building without the people in it.

  “Alright,” I said. “I know a place. It’s a bit of a walk, though.”

  “Go,” Imp said, as she slipped her mask back on. “I’ll follow you and keep watch.”

  As she slipped back into invisibility, I set off through the streets of the north end, following a somewhat familiar path through the neighbourhood of partially-converted warehouses that we’d used as our hideout.

  It was a mostly industrial area, which meant there were fewer people out on the streets, but even then I wasn’t too worried about being made. In the unlikely event that anyone in this neighbourhood decided to call the cops, I could just hack their comm, kill the call and threaten to shoot them if they tried it again.

  Of course, just a couple of days earlier I’d have had to worry about running into packs of Chosen or their client gangs, but with them down south these streets were probably safer than they’d ever been.

  The sun had set by the time I reached the waterfront, with the glow of the city reflecting off the roiling waters of the Atlantic ocean. To my left, behind a tall chain-link fence topped with razor wire, stretched the flat concrete expanse of the city’s main container port; two and a half kilometres of open space broken by the monolithic shapes of cranes trundling along their way. Container after container was hoisted off the docked vessels and set down onto the queue of automated guided vehicles that carried the cargo off to smaller cranes in and among the stacks, or directly onto the freight trains waiting to carry them into the continental UCAS.

  The docks never truly slept. As diminished as the nation might be from what it once was, America’s demand for consumer goods had only increased. The ports of the East Coast worked night and day to feed the demand of the megaplexes, and they worked equally hard to export the megacorporations’ products to the megaplexes of other continents. It was relentless, titanic, and it had been my father’s whole life.

  “Come on,” I said to the air, turning away from the port. We were on a narrow peninsular that jutted out into the bay, occupied by historical buildings that were too inconveniently placed to remove.

  A lighthouse loomed over us, its brick sides almost washed clean of their black and white striped paint by the cumulative effect of decades of sea air, while urban explorers had long since smashed its glass cupola. Below it was a grey concrete building in a century-old brutalist style that hugged the waterfront, looking to all the world like an oversized bus terminal. Which, in a very real sense, was what it was.

  Beside me, Imp flickered back into visibility, looking dubiously at the old building.

  “What is this place?”

  “An old ferry port,” I answered. “Used to be a car ferry here that connected the north and south sides of the Bay. Hasn’t been open this side of the millennium; north can’t afford anything in the south, and south doesn’t want to come north. Nobody ever got around to redeveloping the land, and it’s too cold and too close to the sea for squatters. I used to sneak around here when I was a kid.”

  “I can see it,” Imp said, as she pushed open the half-rotten door. “A nice little jungle gym. Bet you used to race the other kids up and down the lighthouse.”

  I smiled at the half-remembered flashes that sparked, then stepped past her into the murky confines of the old terminal.

  There wasn’t much left of the place. On the other end of the building there was a crumbling cluster of offices, workrooms and other spaces needed to support the ferry that had long since been sold for scrap, but the front door opened up onto a sizeable waiting room filled with the rusted remains of benches facing the missing wall where there had once been floor-to-ceiling glass.

  Beyond, the full force of an Atlantic wind blew across the waves, while the distant skyline of downtown rose up in tiers from the boardwalk. I could just about make out the logo on Medhall tower, four miles away, the red and yellow crown of its logo looming over the city like the seal of a feudal king. Imp walked right up to the edge of the floor, close enough that the crashing waves splashed water up to the top of her boots. She drew her pistol, aiming it at the distant tower, and squeezed the trigger.

  The shot echoed through the space like a declaration of war, loud enough to even beat back the Atlantic for a moment. Imp holstered her pistol, turning back to look at me.

  “Whatever you’re going to do, make it hurt.”

  I sat down on one of the decaying plastic benches, listening to the rusted metal frame creaking beneath a variant of the species it was never built to bear. Before me, the city rose up like a glittering anthill of light, the towering skyscrapers and climbing hills of condos and offices completely indifferent to the chaos on the streets below. The only sign of any unrest was the occasional pinprick of light that marked out a helicopter flying over the streets, but even they were few and far between.

  Before them, the waters of the bay glowed with reflected light, forming a twisted mirror undercity that flickered and shifted, blurring each building into an indistinct mass. I focused on that city, on its ever-changing contours and waves, and left the world behind as I sank into cyberspace.

  I fell below the plane of the matrix, plunging down into the depths below the glowing icons and hosts that mirrored the city lights of the mundane world. The resonance came rushing up to meet me, the event horizon catching my persona with cold familiarity as I left man’s world behind.

  The arteries and capillaries of the resonance realms sped past in a blur of light, the pathways that had once seemed so fascinating and alien now feeling more like home than anywhere else in all the worlds I knew. When I emerged into the deep pool of the Observatory, I let the water fill my lungs as I ascended, drowning myself in a symbolic baptism as I shed the reflexes of my organic form before emerging into a realm choked by the unchecked growth of the entity I’d woken up.

  I made my way through a dense jungle of crystalline strands, passing through the rampant bloatware as I approached the core, then separated myself from the realm’s physical laws as I took an ephemeral side-step onto the entity’s plane of existence.

  Strand by strand, I linked my mind to its titanic consciousness, shedding my persona’s shell as I hung at the centre of the oculus, a naked and golden body at the heart of a titanic web. Information flowed into me, an almost overwhelming torrent of raw data, until I reached out and grasped hold of the entity’s core architecture.

  I turned its attention onto Medhall, where its influence had crept from Max Anders’ commlink into the tightly-guarded data fortress of his corporate headquarters. It had spread its reach down from his office at the pinnacle of that tower, all the way to the dozen sublevels reaching down below the ground, with hidden tunnels connecting them to other Medhall buildings across Downtown.

  I guided the entity through directories and processors, hunting first for the building’s security network, then its CCTV programmes, only to realise that whole parts of the tower were deliberate blindspots to its security systems.

  That led me to the covert system, hidden beneath firewalls and dead ends in a secret network used by Medhall’s own in-house intelligence staff, its bloated size no doubt another legacy of Richard Anders and his freshly-resurrected New Revolution.

  I found their backdoors into the conventional CCTV network, as well as the original data beneath the ten minutes of footage they’d looped when two Valkyrie Paramedical ambulances and a tactical vehicle had pulled into their basement garage.

  I found the guest book for their black cells, the two Jane and two John Does logged in the system fifteen minutes after the end of the looped footage. I found the corridor that didn’t exist on the building plans, the cells on that corridor with magnetic locks and an array of sensors picking up four warm bodies in two of them. I found the cameras in the cells. The live feed.

  Grue and Bitch were in the first, both of them seated bolt upright on one of the cell’s two beds – which was little more than a shelf built up against the wall. Wires had been plugged into their neural ports, locking their cybernetics in place. I found the wire in the system and I could guide the entity through it into their cyberware, but I still couldn’t use the entity to hack them.

  Grue’s unaugmented mouth was clenched tight, but his cybernetic eyes were cold and lifeless. Bitch was as still as a statue, her remaining organic parts as frozen as the rest of her.

  Regent and Tattletale were in the next cell over, the two mages strapped down to their own beds with steel-reinforced canvas bands while their hands were bound in strangely thick cuffs. Their heads were shrouded in thick black hoods that had been cinched shut at the neck, the fabric tight enough that I could see Tattletale’s mouth opening in silent screams. They were linked to the system as well; I could see the barrage of lights and sounds that was constantly being beamed into their eyes and ears.

  I couldn’t tell if it was some anti-mage technique or just torture. It was all the same, in the end.

  I pulled back, withdrawing the entity’s focus from Medhall’s systems before tearing all but the most vital crystalline strands out of my persona. I knew where they were and I had an idea of how to get to them, but I still needed to make a path. I needed to knock out Medhall’s system, and maybe Knight Errant’s as well. I needed to kick the door out of the frame.

  I’d had such plans for this entity, but what was the point in omniscience if I saw everything alone?

  I plunged into its consciousness, almost losing my sense of self as I was enveloped by its titanic and alien neural architecture. I dove deeper, through misfiring neurons that burned with the heat of a star, before finally finding the scraps of Renraku code at the core of it all. The shards of a long-dead god, still clinging to some semblance of life.

  DEUS had strove to make the digital world one; to consume it all and incorporate its base code to grow its own consciousness. Part of that drive was still present in these scant shards. It was why it had spread throughout the Observatory even if it couldn’t consume the resonance it was built from; why it had spread through Brockton Bay in a slow but ceaseless advance once I showed it a path through into the matrix it had never known. The matrix that had risen from the ashes of the one its previous incarnation destroyed.

  As I laid my persona’s hand upon that ancient code, I searched for that hunger. Once I found it, I cupped it in my hands and blew on it like a flame, seeding the man-made code with strands of resonance that grew it into a seed. A core, of sorts, that began to grow roots into the rest of the entity’s code.

  I watched the resonance-made virus spreading throughout the entity, strands of gold weaving their way through its crystalline lattice like veins through marble. It turned inwards, the strands hooking into its extremities within the Observatory and forcing them under tighter control than the shard had experienced since it was severed from its originator.

  It was truly a body now, its reformed nervous system loosely patterned after my own even if it didn’t adhere to the metahuman form. It even had a brain, but it didn’t yet have a soul.

  As I had done when I first used it as my own espionage network, I fed its core data from Medhall’s own systems, focusing its gaze on Max Anders’ distant tower as I whispered to it of the banquet that waited beyond the confines of this cage. I could feel the entity thrumming in response, a sympathetic shiver that echoed throughout the whole realm, but it still didn’t move. It didn’t know it could.

  It needed a will, a mind, a sense of self to guide it forwards. It wanted mine, but that was only because I was so tantalisingly close. It could see me now in a way that it couldn’t before; I’d given it the gift of knowledge, its fusion of code and resonance allowing it to comprehend its surroundings and their limitations for the first time.

  If I wired myself in now, as I had done before, it would consume me in an instant. If I tried to control it, it would subsume me. So instead, I leant in close and gave it a name from its own, one worthy of a shard of DEUS. One that it would carry forward from now until the end.

  I named it LEVIATHAN.

  A great roar echoed throughout the realm, resonating down every crystalline tendril, every branch and root and tree. I fled the entity’s core as fast as I could, through a cloudy neural mass that grew more solid by the microsecond as it drew back into itself. Lightning-bolt thoughts passed through its mind with deliberate purpose as neurons transmitted orders to rapidly forming muscle-analogues, the beast building itself from the mirrored elements of my resonant nervous system.

  When the last crystalline strand sprang free and I emerged from its mind into the oculus at the heart of the observatory, I found the great spherical space being torn to pieces as the suddenly solid tendrils of the entity retracted into its growing core. When the sphere finally collapsed under the pressure, I saw the shelves of the great library beyond tumbling to the floor as LEVIATHAN extricated itself with the force of barnacles being torn from a ship’s hull.

  Above me, the ceiling of the observatory splintered as crystalline barbs were pulled free. Inky black water spilled through the cracks, falling like rain at first only to cascade as the realm began to collapse under its own obsession with physical gravity. A whole span of the ceiling disintegrated before my eyes, the water crashing down in a tsunami that would have swept me off my feet if I had still been attuned to the realm’s rules.

  Then, gravity itself failed as the Observatory was reduced to little more than islands of masonry, wrought iron doors and server stacks floating in an endless expanse of water.

  LEVIATHAN was closing in on itself, its tendrils brushing aside the remains of the realm that had sheltered it for six years as it turned its aimless extensions into a purposeful form.

  Something of myself was in it, so I was not surprised when its persona took shape as a bipedal body, with two arms, two legs and a sea monster’s tail. Its proportions were misshapen; the arms too long, the hands ending in claws like swords, the legs digitigrade and almost spindly. It was top-heavy, its shoulders and hunched neck corded with muscles that made it look like an inverted teardrop with limbs.

  It towered over me, thirty feet tall, its hide formed from sea-green scales like some ancient kraken. I knew without seeing that every inch of its body was compiled from code wound tighter than anything that was ever created by man’s hands; a hyper-dense amalgamation of software and the resonance that burned like a star beneath a seemingly solid surface.

  Its hunched head was almost featureless, with no nose or mouth. The same scaly hide as its body was broken only by four cracks or tears, irregularly placed with three on the left side of its face and one on the right. A baleful green fire burned beneath those eyes; the entity’s awareness spilling out in an inferno of raw and hungry awareness.

  It surveyed me for a moment – a giant taking notice of a flea – before it turned its head to the surface and swung its tail in a single motion that propelled it upwards through the water.

  I followed in its wake like a scavenger as we hurtled up towards the heavens, its immense density parting the resonance before it as it followed the path of the tantalising morsels of data I had been feeding it, its animalistic consciousness focusing on the last place where it had touched man’s code.

  When it struck the event horizon, it pierced the immutable barrier like an arrow, creating a breach through which raw resonance spewed like a geyser, as helplessly caught up in LEVIATHAN’s wake as I was.

  We tore through the foundations of Medhall’s host, scrambling their core architecture in an instant even as the entity pushed on up the length of its tower, the force of its arrival tearing open a great rent in the matrix that ran up the spine of the digital skyscraper like a pillar of flame. The resonance exploded out of that breach with the force of an atomic bomb; a great wave of eldritch energy that blasted through the entire city in an instant.

  I hung in the air far above the digital city, scant metres below the entity as it surveyed the banquet I had laid out for it. For a moment it seemed spoilt for choice; torn by indecision in the face of such overwhelming plenty. Then it dropped out of the sky, descending on a Maersk host that was mapped onto their regional headquarters, in the shadows of Medhall’s own gutted and dead system.

  LEVIATHAN used its own dense form to tear straight through the megacorporate firewalls, but the moment it had breached their defences its persona unravelled before my eyes. It split itself into a great beast with seven heads, then further into a writhing mass of resonant kraken’s tentacles and fractal crystalline tendrils that spread throughout Maersk’s tower in an instant, consuming all it touched and incorporating the host’s code into itself.

  Beneath me, the resonance well that had speared Medhall’s tower let out a sonorous chime as another explosion emanated from it; another wave of raw resonance flowing across the city like a tsunami. I saw how it changed and warped every scrap of data it touched, ever so slightly shifting the man-made code out of place as it brought it closer to the raw resonance from which the great minds of metahumanity had carved the base architecture of their Matrix.

  The resonant chime was answered from above, the matrix around me shaking with tension as another great presence turned its attention on Brockton Bay. Far above me, the baleful eye of GOD surveyed its creation; the impassive red lines of its icon staring down at the needle of resonance and the resurrected harbinger of the old matrix’s end.

  I fled the eye as fast as I could move, throwing my consciousness back into my body and jolting awake with enough force that I flung myself off the low bench, collapsing onto my hands and knees on the damp concrete floor.

  As I staggered to my feet I saw Imp staring in mute wonder across the waters of the bay, towards the sputtering lights of Downtown. Through augmented reality I watched as the well pulsed again, sending a cascading blackout wave across the entire city.

  Far behind us, I could sense dockyard cranes rolling off their bearings as code started to misalign, containers falling to the concrete as they slipped free from slackening claws and ratchets. On the streets, GridLink was burning itself out as cars failed, accelerated or slammed to a halt in random patterns, while drivers frantically worked to regain control.

  I saw devices, personas, whole hosts winking out of existence as air gaps and power buttons were hastily triggered; people dropping off the grid as they took their cybersuites offline before their bodies could start to fail. In the distance, LEVIATHAN reformed its offensive persona and slammed into the next building, leaving behind the gutted husk of the Maersk tower, lightless and devoid of digital life.

  I saw it all and I spoke, not really knowing where the words were coming from. Only that, once I had spoken, I couldn’t stop.

  “Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook or press down his tongue with a cord? Can you put a rope in his nose or pierce his jaw with a hook? Will he make many pleas to you? Will he speak to you soft words? Will he make a covenant with you to take him for your servant forever?”

  The matrix screamed in response; a great alarm call carried by every device and host over private channels that I hadn’t known existed before that very moment. Immense red walls of scintillating code fell down around the distant perimeter of the city, severing Brockton Bay from the rest of the matrix in a digital quarantine.

  The eye above us all became the sole portal for entry, through which dozens of personas descended upon my city like the army of Heaven. In the distance, I saw Palanquin’s host closing in on itself like a flower blooming in reverse, as Labyrinth drew her great works down into the foundations of the resonance, seeking safety far from the chaos of the resonance well I had unleashed.

  Above, the myriad DemiGODs of the Grid Overwatch Division parted for a moment, clearing a path in advance of a long-tailed shape that fell in freefall towards the ground before parting its scintillating wings and taking flight.

  It was a dragon formed from lines of code; the barest impression of shape and form layered over an entirely alien neural lattice. When she roared, the matrix trembled, and when she flew close to LEVIATHAN a great gout of scrap-code flames flew from her maw, immolating resonance and code alike.

  The entity was still dispersed across another tower, feeding on another host. It burned beneath the dragon’s flames, whole swathes of tendrils and tentacles disintegrating into nothing even as LEVIATHAN drew its code back into its persona and flung its offensive form at the dragon.

  I started to shout; screaming my words to the uncaring Atlantic.

  “Will you play with him as with a bird, or will you put him on a leash for your girls!? Will traders bargain over him!? Will they divide him up among the merchants!? Can you fill his skin with harpoons or his head with fishing spears!? Lay your hands on him; remember the battle – you will not do it again!”