7.8

  Dance leads us through the tunnels, our shadows rippling under the pulsing red strobes, his eyes fixed on the path drawn across his brickie. The sirens scream in that shrill, soul-grinding pitch reserved for reactors about to blow, and my limbs still stutter with each step, still twitch from the short-circuit Cierus cooked into my nervous system, but I push through it. No choice. No pause. Every few seconds, I snap my head back, braindance secure in my pocket, expecting to see her, the monster in a woman’s skin, gliding around a corner like a spectre with knives for arms, her Spinal Optic Relay hissing with impossible speed. But she’s not there. Nothing is. Just red lights and metal and the low moan of the tunnel sucking in the sound of our footsteps.

  Eventually, after what feels like a hundred turns and a thousand echoes, we reach a long corridor that runs straight beneath the junkyard. Dance slows, checks the readout on his brickie, then veers off to the right without a word. We follow him into a short side-tunnel, barely wide enough for two people shoulder to shoulder. At the end of it stands an old freight elevator, large and square, the kind you’d miss unless you knew exactly what you were looking for. There’s no camera above it, no surveillance node or scanner light. It’s a blank steel face and a single panel beside the door.

  Dance tells us it’s one of the few elevators in the underground still active, and judging by the state of this place, with walls rotting and pipes groaning behind the concrete, it’s not hard to believe. The rest of this network’s been gutted, left to the dust. One way up. One chance. But even if we do go up, there’s another problem waiting for us: the snakes. Those massive bastards weren’t just designed to guard; they were engineered to know. I remember the way one of them looked at me when we first descended into the Spindle, the head tilting, mechanical sensors flaring like it had caught a scent it didn’t like. It didn’t move back then, but looked at me with those huge black eyes. It knew something about me didn’t match the system. Some tag, some signature that read false. And if they’re waiting for us when this elevator goes up, it’s not going to ask questions. It’s going to strike.

  But we have no choice. We’ll just have to stay out of sight.

  Behind us, I see something. Shadows bloom across the far end of the corridor like black oil spreading. Cierus’ security is right around the corner. Shit.

  “We have to move,” I say.

  We throw ourselves into the elevator and Dance presses the only other button, just above ‘Maintenance’, marked Junkyard.

  The doors begin to grind closed.

  And just before they seal, I catch a glimpse: four figures rounding the bend, rifles raised, helms glowing blue. One of them points.

  They take aim.

  We push to the sides of the lift and crouch low as the bullets start tearing through the metal. The doors shut fully, but the rounds keep cracking through the elevator wall with tiny punches. One of them hits Vander in the shoulder. He grunts, but it glances off his suit armour with nothing more than a dent. No blood, thank the lord. A shallow breath through clenched teeth; that’s about it. The elevator begins its climb, dragging itself upward far too slowly for any of us to feel safe.

  But the rounds stop, and for a moment all we can hear is the alarm below, petering out the further we rise.

  “We’ll have to head for the far side of the scrap wall.” Fingers’ eyes have lost their shine; they don’t move the way they should. She looks worn, stretched thin. “Keep low. Don’t speak. The snakes will be lookin’ for us. If they spot us, you know what’ll happen.”

  “Aughhhh, fuckin’ hate snakes mate,” Dance says. There’s something real in his voice: a small thread of fear he’s not bothering to hide. “Can’t Mono just shut ’em off?”

  I say, “Can’t, they’re equipped with ICE. Cierus has this place secured like a fucking fortress.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Fingers says. “There’s enough debris to stay out of sight. Keep close, stay behind me, and don’t make a sound. No second chances with this one, alright?”

  We’ve done this before, sure, at the cargo terminal, moving under the radar, dodging the eyes of androids, but that was easier. We had Chroma-Skin, lazy supervisors, and a city too tired to care. This isn’t that.

  This is much worse.

  Fingers is trying to keep it together, but I can see it in the lines of her mouth, in the angle of her jaw. She’s not sure this plan holds. And if she isn’t sure, hell, then we’re really in trouble.

  I admit, I’m scared, too. Real fear. The kind that doesn’t scream but sits heavy in your chest like something permanent. I’ve come too far to lose it all now. But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. Can happen. If I want to make it out of this, then I’ll need to be perfect. Absolutely perfect.

  The elevator stops. I smell it before the doors open: the stink of melted rubber, oil, scorched wire. The doors part with a reluctant groan and we’re met with the junkyard in full view: wreckage piled high, old frames and caved-in metal stacked into crooked towers, tyres spilling over cracked concrete, and smashed limbs of decommissioned androids half-buried in the dirt, their hands frozen in desperate pleas to escape. The ground is all broken glass and randomly compiled parts. Cold rain taps against my skin, carried by wind that cuts sideways through the gaps in the walls.

  Up here, there are no sirens or voices. Just the high whistle of the wind curling through industrial tubes.

  And something else.

  A sound low to the ground. Not footsteps. No… it's movement. Heavy. Sliding.

  Do you hear it?

  Sisssssssssss.

  They’re out there. Waiting, listening. Watching.

  I step out of the lift, boots hitting the broken concrete with enough pressure to keep my weight balanced. The others fan out behind me: no words either, no sudden moves. I press my back against the nearest bank of scrap, lean in close, and peer through a split. And there it is, beyond the tangle of steel girders and caved-in vehicle frames, one of the snakes. It coils through the debris like it’s tasting the wind. It’s not in a rush and it’s certainly not aggressive. Just patrolling. Its surface is steel grey and speckled with sensors, and I can see the way it shifts directions. Not from instinct, but from instruction. There’s a pattern. A logic to its motion. But then it stops. The head rises, body lifting on a reinforced undercarriage. And that’s when I see how truly big it actually is. It’s high enough to look down over the steel walkways bolted along the lower gantry pillars. Those walkways once had purpose, I suppose: operators moving from one station to another, coordinating scrap loads, guiding junk into the Spindle’s old burner systems. But now they’re all… nothing. The workstations are blackened with soot and strangled by decades of cobwebs. The metal rails are bent, and the towers look like they’d collapse if you breathed too hard near them.

  My eyes drift south, far side of the yard, where the gantry begins. I spot more platforms leading over the wall of scrap. They’re barely connected: old ladders thrown between levels, some rotting, others half-buried in metal. The stairways are almost impossible to trace, too swallowed by the ruins to make out any sense of foot traffic. But above, at the highest point, there’s a path. A narrow passage across a beam that curves towards the outer bay, just past the last tower.

  It looks like hell. Half of it’s missing, the rest bent to the side like someone tried to fold it with their bare hands.

  But it’s there, and it might be the only way out.

  Fingers places a hand on my shoulder and points lower, towards the hulking frame of the Clawfather parked silent in the pit, claws dormant, arms resting like the entire machine is asleep but dreaming of movement, wearing platforms, stairways, and lifts like armour. Laid out along the trail between us and it are broken concrete tubes wide enough for someone to crawl through if they don’t mind the filth or the chance of being crushed by the weight of junk that sits above them. They cut through an enormous wall separating our side from the other. And even though she doesn’t say anything, I know exactly what Fingers wants us to do. I nod once, not trusting my voice, and move with the others along the path to our left, every step calculated, every breath coreographed, trying not to snap old limbs or crack more glass than I have to, though it’s nearly impossible in a place like this. We only make it about halfway before Fingers drops into a crouch and throws a hand back, and we dive into a mountain of rusty cars, into their old interiors, the steel still creaking.

  I hear it: a hiss so long it makes the inside of my chest shake.

  I peek over the edge of the car seat just enough to see one of the snakes slithering into view, dragging itself along the pillar of the gantry rail, the coils tightening around it as it begins to rise. Only then do I realise the gantry is moving, the entire structure sliding along the track overhead, carried by heavy motors buried in the ceiling, and we scramble back, ducking deeper into the rusted-out husks, hidden from view just as the gantry descends towards the floor of the yard, the pillar mechanisms groaning with strain. Then the security appears, dozens of them, pouring out from the shadow of the gantry lift, and now that they’re closer I can see them better in the overcast light: not guards in standard gear, but soldiers in armour, faces covered, weapons drawn, heads scanning every scrap pile like they know exactly what they’re looking for. They all look the same, with broad visors that move with all the waveform elasticity of equalizer bars; henchmen, for certain, and a quick scan of their bodies tells me that they’re all similarly aug’d. No spinal optic relays, thank goodness, but scanners, ICE, and some netrunning capabilities. And their weapons: pulse rifles, huge, just like the one Vander’s struggling to keep inside this mess of cars.

  “Shit,” Dance rasps, and I hear him twice: once from beside me and again through the Cloud Room link. “Now what?”

  “Give me a second to think,” Fingers says. Yeah, that infamous line of hers; it never means anything good.

  I keep my head down, visor dimmed as low as it’ll go, watching the guards spill out across the yard like black oil finding every crevice. I peer through a crack in the car door, and that’s when I spot them: tags on the guards’ armour, glowing below their collars: CIR-732. One by one, I count them, each one marked the same. Identification. Not for their own command chain. No. For the snakes. A whitelist. Built so those mechanical bastards know friend from foe.

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  But if I change a single digit…

  “Spread out,” one of them shouts. “They’re not far. You, check the cars. Cierus is runnin’ a full scan. If they’re here, she’ll catch it, but not if they’re hidin’. Move out!”

  “Balls, mate,” Dance breathes, eyes wide. “We have to move.”

  We try to slink back, but the second snake is already shifting its attention, head lifting, eyes glowing. It sees something. If we move now, it’ll see everything.

  “Well, we’re completely fucked then,” Dance says in restless defeat.

  And yeah, we probably are. Every exit’s boxed in. Every second counts down to nothing. One of the guards starts moving in our direction, steady, sweeping with his pulse rifle up. No hesitation. No pause. He’s coming to finish the job.

  My heart’s pounding something awful, and like before, I’m not given any options. I have to do it.

  I activate the spoofer protocol, scroll down the list’s interface to ‘Gossamur Sig’, and highlight the tag: CIR-732. I change one digit. Just one.

  The result is instant.

  The snake above the gantry stops, lifts its head with a mechanical clunk, and its eyes fracture into a honeycomb of octagons, each one blinking to life with a searing red core. It stares, locks on, and its jaw splits. The sound that comes out is horrifying, like steel screaming against steel, like the world breaking open just wide enough to let something older crawl through. The guard spins, sees the snake, raises his weapon.

  “What the fu—”

  CRUNCH.

  The serpent lashes down in a blur, body folding, jaws clamping down on him like he’s nothing. One moment he’s there, the next, a crushed, bloody shape twitching in the dirt. His rifle discharges, and one of the stray shots punches a hole clean through the back window of the car I’m hiding in.

  The guards panic. Screams. Orders. Boomboomboom. They fire everything they have, blue pulses lighting up the air like a broken sky, but it doesn’t matter. The shots bounce off the snake’s armour, fizzling out on contact, melting across the hide without doing a damn thing.

  It worked. And I’m not done. I scroll through the cube’s interface, calling up the profiles of the crew, one by one as I scan. Vander. Fingers. Cormac. Dance. I tag them—CIR-732, the exact string—and then I hit my own and match it. Then I turn back to the officers. Line by line, I randomise their tags. One by one. Broken sequences. Invalid ID.

  The snake’s head turns again, and everything happens at once. The massive body coils and slams down, hard enough to send a tremor through the junk beneath our feet. The snake slithers towards the gantry lift where more of them had tried to retreat. The first guard makes it to the door, barely.

  The snake rears.

  CRASH.

  Its body comes down on the lift, crushing it in a single blow, metal folding inwards with a scream of hydraulics and bone. The soldiers inside are gone. The ones outside? Running.

  But there’s nowhere left to run.

  The second snake cuts through the wreckage and sweeps in over the wall, slithers along the twisted platforms, and lets out that same awful, vibrating growl that sets my teeth on edge.

  “We’re okay,” I say, trying to steady my voice, trying to convince myself that it’s true. “I changed the tags. They won’t see us.”

  “You better be fuckin’ right, mate,” Dance says, half a warning, half a prayer.

  Fingers doesn’t wait for debate. “Run!” she shouts, and we do, scampering out of the vehicles, down onto our feet, and sprinting across open junkfield, past piles of shattered android frames and cracked server cores, ducking through the labyrinthine trails between scrap towers. All around us, the sound of boots and panic ripples outward; more than twenty guards scatter across the junkyard like rats trying to outclimb a rising tide, scrabbling up towers of bent scaffolding, hoping for height, for safety, but the snakes just keep moving. One coils through the mess and rips a whole stack down in one whip, the crash so loud it rattles the sky, followed by that staccato thunder of pulse rifles discharging blindly into the dust, leaving trails of neon blue in the air that blink and burn and then, finally, fade.

  We don’t stop either. Not once. We cut straight for the Clawfather, heading towards the halfway mark, slipping past the mechanical serpents as quickly and quietly as we can. Even though our tags are changed, we still don’t want to test the limits of our luck, not with monsters like these built to think for themselves. The only exit we have left is through the concrete tubes ahead, the last path across the scrap wall to the other side.

  But just as we reach the tracks, just as we’re inches from the tubes, movement flickers above: a guard perched on top of a tower, eyes locked on us, rifle already shouldered, the sky behind him a pale bruise of clouds.

  He takes aim.

  And then the snake takes him.

  It’s fast, faster than I’ve ever seen anything move. It snatches him mid-stance, clamps down, and yanks his body into the air. The force of the attack sends the whole stack of machinery tumbling down, limbs and wires and shredded panelling collapsing across the pulleys and tank-wheels of the Clawfather.

  SMASH.

  The concrete tubes are obliterated under the weight, crushed like they were never meant to hold anything at all. Dust and steel spew out across the tracks, and with it, our only exit is gone. We’re boxed in now, nothing left but the wall and the battlefield behind us.

  I feel my heart spike.

  The snake turns.

  It faces us.

  Its head lifts, scanning, sensors shifting, analysing. It rises higher and higher, body drawing itself into a coil that could crush a car, and I brace for it, because this is it, this is the moment it sees through me, sees through all of it, the tag, the lie, the desperate trick. But it doesn’t move.

  It watches.

  And after a moment, something in its posture loosens. It adjusts. Turns slightly. Then, as if satisfied, it shifts its attention away, from us, to the screams behind, to the officers still trying to survive the slaughter, to the violence still spreading like fire across the far yard. It lowers itself and glides off, back towards the chaos it was built to embrace, and disappears into the rising dust and ruin.

  Thank God it worked.

  “Thank God for that,” says Fingers in a breathless rush, as if reading my mind. She walks over to what’s left of the guard, kneels beside his body like she’s checking for a pulse she knows isn’t there, then pulls the pulse rifle from his hands. She strips the holster clean, finds a secondary weapon—sleek sidearm, orange-bore muzzle, polished steel grip—and tosses it to me. I catch it clean, and for the first time since the short-circuit, my arm doesn’t jolt or glitch. I feel... solid.

  “Now what?” I ask, eyes skimming the wreckage where the tubes used to be. “We’re blocked off.”

  Cormac doesn’t answer with words at first. Just steeples his thick, bloodied chrome fingers like a preacher about to deliver the sermon of a lifetime, and then grins in that slow, creepy way of his. He points, and I follow the gesture upward. “Up there, I do say.”

  Along the side of the Clawfather are the corroded maintenance platforms: some still intact, others hanging by bolts, with grated stairs leading upward towards the cockpit shell. The lower supports are obliterated, just twisted scaffolding and joints, but Cormac launches one of his massive metal arms up, grabs the platform’s edge, and retracts, lifting his body halfway in a blink.

  I get it immediately, and so does everyone else.

  Cormac locks one arm around a support rail, anchors his frame into place like a living crane, and lowers the other limb back down towards us. One by one, we latch on and ride the tensioned cable of his snake-arm to the upper maintenance platform. No words. Just trust. Vander’s first, then Dance, then Fingers. When it’s my turn, I tuck the pistol into my suit pocket, wrap my hand around the cold metal of his forearm, if you can call it that, and feel the pull as I rise.

  From up here, I can see it all.

  The snakes are still at war, tearing through the security forces, and while some of Cierus’s men fall back or try to regroup, more of them pour in from the industrial elevators along the flanks, guns ready, orders barking through the sirens. But they’re not looking at us. Not yet.

  They still think we’re trapped.

  But we’re not.

  We’re almost over the wall. Almost gone. Almost free.

  But right when we reach the top and make our way across the platform to the other side of the Clawfather (and by extension, the other side of the scrap wall), I hear it.

  Bass.

  My vision starts to jerk, goes left, goes right. I suddenly lose the ability to walk steadily. My balance going off-kilter, my body slamming into the cool metal of the Clawfather with a thunderous bang. I manage to keep myself upright, but only barely, and when I look up, or try to, I see most of the others on their knees.

  The music gets louder, closer, climbs upward from the junkyard base.

  And then I see him.

  Rhythm of Rhythm. Rising through the smoke on thrusters that hiss blue from the soles of his boots, like jetstream fire given shape, his long metallic coat whipping in the wind like it’s stitched from electricity. His mask is on, and his head is bobbing to the sonal cube at his side, audio ports open wide, leaking sound that isn’t just sound anymore.

  My visor glitches again. My fingers twitch. Dance gasps and grabs the side of his head as the cube pulses out another wave of distorted harmony, warping reality into rubber, crawling through the circuits in our bodies like invisible worms trying to crawl out the teeth. The air shakes. We all feel it. That horrible sensation of your own systems turning against you.

  “Thought you could leave without a goodbye,” Rhythm of Rhythm says, and the cube beside him drops another bassline, sharper this time, enough to knock the breath out of Fingers and nearly floor me again.

  “It fuckin’ hurts!” says Dance, palming his ears and turning on his side, eyes shut, face contorted in a rictus.

  I try to bring up my spoofer, but it’s no use. The sonal cube is disrupting the signal.

  “Hack the fucker,” snaps Fingers.

  “I’m trying!” I say.

  Then, Rhythm of Rhythm grabs his sonal cube. “Enough chit-chat.” And he pulls a cord out from the sonal cube, as if starting a generator, and suddenly the music drops again with a deep, otherworldly whoooosh.

  Now I hit the floor. We all do. And almost all the sound around me is sucked away and replaced with an intense, continuous ring.

  “Shert,” I manage to hear Vander say, digging in behind a collapsed guardrail, one eye on his blowout gauntlet

  “I got ’em Cierus,” says Rhythm of Rhythm, his voice muffled through the disruption. “We’re on the Clawfather. Told you it’d come in handy.” He brushes his metallic coat aside, revealing a rifle strapped to his side buckle. He pulls it out and takes aim. “Adios…” he says, pointing right at me.

  But right as he’s about to fire, Vander lifts his arm and clenches a fist, causing a rig to jut out of the blowout gauntlet. It locks onto the maintenance platform hovering just behind Rhythm of Rhythm’s heels as he draws closer. The grenade leaves his gauntlet with a thwoop.

  It doesn’t aim for Rhythm of Rhythm himself. It doesn’t need to. It strikes the beam below the platform with a booming crack, tearing through rust and rivets with a burst of fire and concussive force. The blast blows the entire structure to pieces—platform, rail, support column—turning it into a rain of steel and smoke and sparks.

  Rhythm of Rhythm jerks mid-air, systems thrown, his boots flaring wildly as he’s pulled down by the collapse, flailing towards the other side of the scrapyard.

  And we go with him.

  The entire section we’re clinging to—walkway, handholds—shudders beneath us and snaps loose. The structure tilts, groans, and drops out from under our feet.

  I fall.

  No time to scream. No time to brace. Just the rush of air shredding past me, the thunder of collapsing steel, the shriek of torn platform supports flailing like metal roots ripped from the ground. I drop fast, out of control, sucked into gravity’s gut. We all do. Five bodies spiralling down through Paxson’s dying sky, pulled into the scrapyard’s belly like debris in a storm.

  Then, I hit.

  The pain slams into me, all the ugly scrap digging into my shoulders and sides and tearing my pristine suit to gashes. It stings to the bone. My ears ring. My visor fizzles. Something wet trickles down the side of my head: blood or oil, I can’t tell.

  And as I catch my breath and pick myself up from the rising dust, I see the others scattered out along the scrapyard. We’re here. We’re alive. We’re on the other side. Just a final stretch to the exit wall now.

  “My spleen’s fucked,” says Dance, picking himself up and taking a hit of an MX-inhaler. He tosses it to me and I take a hit myself, as do the others. It spikes my adrenaline up a kick, and for the moment, it dulls the pain enough to keep me steady.

  But then the bass starts again.

  A vibration in the soles of my feet, rising through the gravel, as if the ground itself is being tuned like an instrument. And from the far end of the clearing, rising out of a coughing tremor of smoke and red haze, comes Rhythm of Rhythm.

  He doesn’t look hurt. He simply glides. Boot thrusters whining. That metallic blue coat still immaculate. The sonal cube at his side spinning like a malicious halo, already glowing with orange pulses, each one matching the beat of a song that’s only just begun.

  “You have got to be fuckin’ kidding me mate,” says Dance, and we take aim.

  Rhythm of Rhythm’s voice rides the vibration like it's part of the track. “Encore.”

  And the cube flares. Everything screams.

  Welcome to the drop.