The thing about danger seeming to lurk behind every corner is that you’re suddenly a lot more motivated to do anything possible to escape it.

  I wasn’t an exception to this rule, but to my eternal frustration, I also wasn’t a physically gifted individual. I always did better when I had to use my head rather than my muscles.

  Not even Mela’s training could change that, even when she intensified it in an attempt to make me a bit safer. Oh, I was improving. I dodged more, I struck back instead of just taking a beating, and I even managed to surprise Mela once or twice.

  On one memorable occasion, I hooked my leg behind hers while she was relatively off-balance, and the shove that followed sent her on her ass. Of course, she then proceeded to stand up, crack her knuckles, and lay into me harder than before.

  Regardless, in the two weeks that followed Garren’s announcement, I became unwilling to trust my survival to nothing but my flimsy physique that was only just within ‘normal’ levels. Or stats, as my status screen showed them.

  The sight of this status screen at the two-week mark was a major victory for me, especially the growth in my ‘normal’ stats. They were the definitive proof that I was digging myself out of the hole the circumstances of my birth had led me into.

  Oh, I wasn’t suddenly tall, buff and sporty, but at least I no longer looked a step away from a skeleton when I took my t-shirt off. The months of good eating and exercise had put some meat on my bones, and I was starting to get a bit of definition to my muscles that I could be proud of.

  Nothing to be done about my small stature, though. That was one gift malnutrition was set on making me keep.

  So, while brainstorming ways I could improve my chances of survival, I had decided to focus on the one thing that had proven itself invaluable back during the first gang war I’d participated in: my visual glitches.

  Or, as my ‘Shadow Runner’ package referred to them, ‘Clairvoyance.’

  Over those two weeks, I had done everything I could think of to get that ‘94’ to tick up, running off some possibly misguided hope that yes, something good would happen when it finally hit one hundred.

  I’d stopped waiting for glitches, or avoiding situations that usually caused them. Instead, I made a concentrated effort to trigger them. I taunted Mela (in as friendly a fashion as possible) into pressing me harder. I squinted at code until my eyes were burning, looking for inconsistencies and advice. I even jumped into the netspace and tried messing around in there.

  It was nearly the end of the first week when I managed to push myself into a split-second vision and actually act on it during a spar. I’d been immediately rewarded with a soft ding sound in the back of my mind. It was so unexpected that I briefly faltered and caught a fist to the stomach for my distraction.

  When I was done gagging, I risked a glanced at my HUD. There, sitting in the lower left corner, was a message.

  An experience point. Just like in the video games I used to play.

  In spite of the pain radiating from my stomach and my utter exhaustion, I wanted to laugh. After all, if that was happening, who was to say I wouldn’t get something nice when I leveled up the skill?

  I had thrown myself into my training with renewed vigor after that. So much so that I’d seen that solid improvement in most of my skills, with the notable exception of Assault.

  It was almost therapeutic to have the status screen with me. Every time I did well, it let me know. It was the kind of validation you didn’t get from just staring at code for hours, or wondering at the weird instincts you had and how far they could push you.

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  Then again, those instincts were no longer ‘weird’, were they? I could say with some certainty that I knew where they came from now, especially since they were enhanced after I had the ‘package installation.’

  It was eerie, sometimes, the surety with which I could move around within the netspace. I still hadn’t risked venturing very far beyond my room, but I did explore my floor of the building. I marveled at the way the tracks of light cut off at the doors of occupied apartments, and even poked at the defenses a little, forcing the world to shift into the endless mass of streaming code when my vision glitched.

  I was fairly sure I could break through the doors, if I needed to. I only refrained because I was afraid I might trigger some kind of alarm, and because I hadn’t finished rewriting my quickhacks.

  I was working through them as a good clip while also studying the coding language of the stat app. While I still wasn’t even halfway through the redesign of the breach quickhack, the potency it would have when I was done excited me.

  Then, of course, my stupid skill exp had to get stuck.

  Halfway through the second week of tension, with more reports of people disappearing within the Kittens’ territory, including some of our gang members, my Clairvoyance had hit 99/100 and refused to budge higher. No matter how many times I triggered my vision to glitch, or what I did in response to the visions, the stats stayed the same:

  That’s how I ended up tracking down Mela for one very awkward conversation.

  “You want me to do what?” the redhead asked, finally knocked out of her worried funk enough to send me a disbelieving stare.

  Everything happening in the slums weighed on her more heavily than it even did on Garren. For some reason, she saw it as a personal failing on her part that she couldn’t catch the perpetrator behind all of the attacks on the Kittens.

  “I want you to push me when we spar, harder than you ever did before. I want to genuinely fear for my life,” I insisted, with all the sincerity I could manage. “I don’t care if you put me in Torn’s care for like a week. I need this.”

  Mela had been holding back a little during our recent spars. Not because she was worried about me, or even because of her funk, but because Garren had reminded everyone sternly not to waste resources doing stupid shit. Say, like beating someone within an inch of their life and then forcing the head ripper of the Kittens to heal them using expensive medicine.

  For me to sign up for a more thorough beating? I could only guess Mela thought I was going insane in response to all the recent stress. In spite of that, she showed why she was my favorite Kitten when she sighed, shrugged, and agreed.

  I was already questioning all my life choices by the time we had our training gear on (just the padded gloves, really), and were standing across from each other on the mat.

  Just like always, Mela moved with the grace and speed of a large predator. She didn’t step closer to me so much as she glided. When her right fist lashed out, it was all I could do to get my arms in the way before she slugged me in the face.

  And she just kept upping the pressure. A hit to the ribs, light, just enough to make me stagger. A snapped out kick that made me fall to my left knee. She was preparing for the next hit when my arms instinctively went wide to help me balance, and the world glitched.

  The shadow-faced figure launched a punch that rocked me right across my jaw, snapping my teeth shut and sending me to my back. The vision disappeared as quickly as it came, leaving me just enough time to tilt my upper body and take the hit on my shoulder.

  It still sent me reeling back over my own leg awkwardly, but I managed to scramble to my feet and spring away from the approaching Kitten lieutenant. I only took one punch to my side for the little maneuver, too!

  Still, I was getting frustrated. I’d almost gotten knocked out on the spot, but apparently, even using Clairvoyance to dodge that was no longer good enough.

  I advanced on Mela with a snarl on my lips, actually going for a couple punches of my own. The sudden aggression caught Mela by surprise. That let me land a hit on her shoulder, but only because it was so unusual for me to do something like that. She rallied right after and deflected every single one of my blows.

  Then I was harshly punished for my hubris.

  Mela must still have been holding back earlier. Now, though, my little stunts had finally pissed her off enough to let loose.

  Blow after heavy blow landed on my person. I was barely keeping myself in the spar, thanks only to the rapid glitches that came more and more frequently as she started to lose patience.

  And it was still not enough!

  My own frustration finally boiled over. It wasn’t enough that I was forced to constantly endure creepy shadow imagery just so I could train some weird system that came attached to my eyes. It wasn’t enough that everything that had happened with those shadow creatures was still giving me nightmares. Now, the stupid eyes I was stuck with were refusing to let me advance the skill they gave me!

  The next time a Clairvoyance vision came, I latched onto it. I gripped onto that cold, sweeping feeling that always welled up in the back of my mind, the one that made me feel like I was a small fish swimming in a big ocean and a massive shadow was suddenly looming over me.

  I clutched onto it, and I demanded more from it. I refused to let it go.

  My vision glitched into the next blow Mela was about to make. Even as it began to fade, and I moved to dodge, I forced the vision to linger. To show me more.

  The shadow overlapping with Mela’s flickered in an out of focus, but with a growl and an immense effort of will, I made it obey.

  All of a sudden, my vision sharpened, and I could see everything.

  Typically, one thing claimed all of my attention. One attack, one event, something so pivotal my eyes insisted I see it. This time, I was aware of each and every thing Mela was doing, all at once.

  The way she was moving. The way her eyes flickered around, assessing and planning. The way the mat shifted under her feet. The air from the AC unit as it washed over her body, making her shiver slightly when its cool met the heat of her skin.

  And more. Much, much more.

  It was enough for me to know what I should do next.

  I moved to compensate for her incoming kick to my knee and shifted my head out of the way of her fist. Then I threw myself forward, intending to knock her off her feet. My Clairvoyance vision shifted in response to my actions in a way that should have left me nauseous, but the overlapping versions of the future in flux did practically nothing to me.

  Unfortunately, they also told me I would fail.

  The tackle should have worked. She was on one foot, overextended, and she’d never expect it. Instead, she just pivoted with me, gripped me right back, and used the momentum my charge gave us to spin us around once, somehow ending up on top of me with her fists raised.

  I dodged the first hit by squirming to the side, but then all the possible futures shifted and crystalized into one definitive moment. A moment where her fist met my right cheek and ground my head into the mat.

  “Wai-”

  She didn’t even give me the chance to get my plea out. Pain exploded through my face, but only for a moment. The next second, blissful darkness claimed my consciousness, putting me out of my misery.

  The message blinking in the lower left corner of my vision had to languish there until I actually had the presence of mind to check it out. That didn’t happen until hours later, when I woke up in Torn’s operation chair to find the ripper complaining that I was using up precious space inside his clinic.