After I made sure Kest, Warcry, and Hyla made it up to our rooms safely, I sent a timed message of my own letting Donnie Four-Eyes know I was on my way.

  Obviously I could turn the whole CPA hub into a mass grave, but without knowing who I was taking out, I wasn’t willing to risk some innocent bystander being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Donnie backed me up on that. He knew plenty of good guys and gals with badges, and he wanted to make sure that the only people to go down were the ones who had to in order to clean up the corruption on Selk.

  So instead of the hub, our first raid was on a Technol den in a quiet, cramped residential neighborhood. Brownstones and those painted lady houses shouldered together on either side of the street, fronted by tiny concrete yards you could cross in one step, and penned in by short wrought iron fences that only came up to knee height.

  The temperature had dropped to Coat Weather for the night. Every now and then, a hired rickshaw jogged past, but nobody was out for a walk enjoying the pre-programmed chill.

  I didn’t spot Donnie or his squad of supposedly trusted agents immediately, so I wandered the sidewalks for a minute, trying to decide which of these doors we were about to bust down and what a fight in a narrow house like these would entail. Probably not much swinging room for an enormous scythe. Mostly Miasma attacks.

  I went to drop into Last Light, Last Breath, but realized my Spirit was already cloaked. I didn’t remember consciously deciding to trigger oblivion. I could’ve dropped into it when Kest and I started arguing about Takeshi’s reaction to me going off script, or while I was testing out Dead Reckoning’s range and listening to Warcry and his ex-girlfriend talk about me being a psycho like I wasn’t there. Maybe I’d done it as a reaction to Wrathblade’s constant noise. When didn’t really matter. I just knew I’d rather be in that emotionless void than out of it.

  My Winchester buzzed.

  Follow the arrow.

  A compass popped up on my cracked screen. I followed it to one of the off-duty rickshaws parked down the street.

  Donnie leaned around the edge of the seat. “Death cultivator.”

  I shifted my angle so I could see into the rest of the rickshaw’s back seat. There was only one other guy there, the Selken agent who’d asked to have his picture taken with Warcry.

  “I thought you were bringing a crew.”

  “Squib’s the only one I’ve got on board so far,” Donnie said.

  “That’s Agent Asquiro Ra to you, punk,” the Selken said, looking me up and down. “And I’m still not sold on working with any member of the Big Five, much less a Death cultivator who flaunts what he does all over the inner and outer planets. I don’t think it takes a gangbanger to root out a bunch of gangbangers. In fact, Donnie, I think we should head back downtown and find a less illegitimate way to remove the Technols from the hub.”

  Clearly nobody had told Squib he was sitting next to a Technol.

  I looked at the Ylef.

  “There are others,” Donnie said, blinking around on his coke bottle glasses. “They’re just scared. They’ve been beaten down and hammered into line for too long to stick their necks out yet. They need to see results first.”

  “Then let’s get them some results. Which one of these houses is our target?”

  “The one that’s about to go very bright, and then very dark. I’ll white them out for thirty seconds, then you’ll have a five minute window of blackout.” Donnie looked past the green text scrolling across his lenses at me. “You’ll be going in alone. Squib and I can’t be seen, but I’ll back you up from out here by bricking as much of their tech as I can, and Squib will—”

  “I didn’t agree to anything yet,” Agent Asquiro Ra protested.

  “—detain anybody who slips past you. We’ve got a safehouse picked out to hold them in until the Intergalactic Gang Taskforce gets here. There are nine HUDs currently showing up inside the house, so unless there’s a stronger Digital Architect in there than me, you’ve got nine midlevel Technols waiting for you, four of them CPA agents Rank C and lower. You good with that? Can you handle that many without backup?”

  I nodded. It might actually be easier without either of them in there to look out for.

  “All right.” Donnie blew out a big breath, then pointed across the street. “Red door, turtle shell knocker. You’re gonna see a surge of light inside first. Wait until I cut their power before you approach or you’ll alert their lookout drones.”

  “What about getting in?” I kind of doubted a center of Technol activity would be sitting around unlocked.

  Donnie blinked at something on his lenses. “Before the power goes, I’m going to pop the locks that run on tech. Anything else is up to you.”

  The plan was pretty fast and loose, but as Warcry always liked to point out, there wasn’t any point in standing around plotting twenty moves ahead when it was probably all going down the toilet the minute the fighting started, so I gave the Ylef a thumbs-up.

  “Power surge in three… two…” Donnie double-blinked. “Now.”

  Most of the houses on that street had a few interior lights on, but at Donnie’s signal, a two-story brownstone across the road lit up. Light flared out of its windows like someone had stuffed the Sun inside and hit the Solar Storm button. I threw a hand up in front of my face, blinking to get rid of the afterimages.

  “Couple more seconds,” he said. “Locks opening… And… Get ready, Death cultivator…”

  I covered my arms in Death Metal, the Miasma shields invisible under the cloaking.

  “Cutting power… Now.”

  The windows in the brownstone went black.

  I hit the Ki-speed and sprinted across the street, hopping the low fence. A layer of dead dragonfly drones crunched under my boots.

  From inside, I heard confused voices. Someone slammed into something heavy and started cussing.

  I jogged up the steps. Tried the door knob. It twisted, but the door thunked in its frame, stopped by an old-fashioned deadbolt.

  Leaning back, I launched a Ki-strengthened side kick at the lock plate. The threshold splintered around the mechanism and the door slammed open.

  A narrow hall ran from that front door to another door at the rear of the house. A cramped staircase took up most of the righthand side of the hall. Along the left, doorways opened into a living room and a kitchen. From the slice of those that I could see, both rooms were stacked to the ceiling in sci-fi hacker equipment.

  I summoned Three Corpse Sickness to search the rooms for our first target. In oblivion, the Corpses would be invisible to anyone else, but to me, they looked more transparent than usual, like the ghost of a ghost.

  Before I could give them the order to go bloodhound on the place, an Ylef burst into the hallway from the living room, aiming a pistol-gripped tommy gun my way. He had on Technol targeting sunglasses, but they weren’t doing their usual locked-on flash routine.

  “Pieces a’ crap!” He snatched them off.

  His laser sight skimmed across my shoulder, guided the low-tech way, and headed for center mass.

  “Rigor Mortis!” I threw out a hand, freezing him before he could pull the trigger.

  Judgment Beyond the Veil started rolling across his paralyzed-open eyes.

  Evildoer and corrupt CPA agent, check.

  Black-veined turquoise flames consumed his life point. Last Light, Last Breath didn’t hide Damnation. That was as vivid as always. There was no cloaking hell when it came for somebody.

  The guy crumpled to the floor without a scream, his voice box still frozen.

  Past the staircase and the dead Ylef, a withered old Selken lady poked her head out of the kitchen. An indenture tattoo covered the back of her gnarled hand, and she wore a Transferogate over her shrunken left shoulder.

  “Intruder!” the old lady screamed. “Intruder!”

  “It’s all right,” I said, holding up my hands. “I’m here to take out the bad guys who forced you into indentureship. When I’m done, I can cut the Transferogate off you without setting it off. I know those things are the worst—”

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  The old lady yanked a sawed-off blaster of her housecoat.

  “Eat plasma, intruder!”

  I dove behind the staircase.

  The first shot scorched the air where I’d been standing and burnt a hole in the dented front door. The stink of burning paint and slagged metal crinkled my nose hairs.

  Feet thundered on the steps overhead. More clattered up from the basement.

  “Interior projections and laser wire are down,” someone yelled.

  “Exploder turrets?”

  “Down! Switching to manual!”

  “He’s in the front hall!” the old lady screeched. “On the staircase!”

  Another plasma blast splintered the newel post on the banister. Smoldering pieces rained down, adding wood smoke to the smells stinking up the hallway.

  I didn’t want to kill someone’s grandma, much less one who was having her Spirit drained daily for somebody else to use, but this grandma seemed pretty determined to protect her Technol overlords.

  “Get the gun away from the old lady,” I ordered the Corpse closest to her.

  The Corpse streaked off to obey.

  “Without breaking any of her bones!” I hurried up and added.

  “Target sighted!” someone yelled.

  On the stairs above me—another Ylef and a bipedal hyena with a metal jaw.

  As the hyena guy thumped onto the landing, a half-sized crossbow unfolded from the back of his metal arm. Beside him, the Ylef rolled his hands around in front of him, summoning a sparking, popping orb of neon lightning in each palm.

  With a twang, the hyena launched a crossbow bolt at me. I shoved Death Metal up. The bolt bounced off, ripping a hole through the ugly starfish wallpaper to the plaster and laths beneath.

  BOOM. A neon thundercrack slammed me sidelong into the wall and vomited up bits of carpet, plaster, and splintered wood. My head ricocheted off the stuck crossbow bolt, the stubby metal flights cutting open my ear.

  “View and attack!” I yelled at my other Corpses.

  They beelined for the hyena and Ylef, taking four stairs at a time. Unfortunately, since neither guy could see them, they kept shooting at me. The hyena leveled his reloaded crossbow. At the same time, the Ylef threw another lightning bomb.

  I rolled onto my side and summoned the Lunar Scythe, gripping it with both hands. The flesh disappeared from my chest just before the crossbow bolt clattered through my skeleton and rolled down the steps.

  The lightning bomb slammed into the scythe’s blade, slightly off-center. Instead of ricocheting, though, the scythe absorbed the blast.

  A second bomb hit my lead Corpse. It shattered, but its backup made it to the landing.

  Judgment reeled across the hyena agent’s eyes. In that parade of awfulness, I spotted a familiar face—Rav, watching the door while the hyena tortured a confession out of an innocent man.

  Damnation blazed. The hyena howled lunatic laughter as he dropped, kicking and twitching, then finally going still.

  Another ball of lightning sizzled through the air toward me.

  I shoved to my feet and threw out the Lunar Scythe. It slurped the crackling energy down.

  But the Ylef wasn’t giving up on his go-to attack. He cocked back another bomb.

  I sprinted, catching that one on the scythe, too. Before he could generate another attack, I slammed into him.

  We crashed down on the landing. The impact buckled my hands weird, and I dropped the Lunar Scythe. It ripped back across my skeleton. The Ylef threw electricity-laced punches that scraped off my tucked head, but I felt the scythe sucking the amps out of my muscle tissue before they did any damage.

  I scrabbled at the Ylef’s targeting sunglasses, trying to rip them off so I could see his eyes.

  “Out of the way, Martine!” someone yelled from below.

  Through the downstairs Corpse’s eyes, I saw three agents barrel past the old lady my last Corpse was fighting for her blaster.

  “Coming downrange, Calloway!” the agent in the lead yelled. “Employ auto-targeting!”

  I didn’t want to kill an old lady, but I remote-viewed her Judgment through my Corpse’s eyes, because I knew if she was evil, things in here got a lot simpler.

  If I hadn’t been wrapped in oblivion, I might’ve felt bad for the old lady. She’d been serving the Technols for decades now, ever since her Technol boyfriend had gotten in too deep with his Shogun and she’d offered her lifetime service to save him. She was in this for life and she was never getting out. The only thing she could do, then, was make the best of it and commit everything she had to serving.

  She wasn’t wholly evil. She slid close to it sometimes in her eagerness to convince herself she liked her chains, but she never quite fell into the Damnation category.

  But she also wasn’t giving up until the intruder was dead.

  “Sleep of Death!” I yelled.

  A sphere of Miasma blasted off me.

  My intention was to put the old lady into the kind of sleep so deep that people in olden times couldn’t find any signs of life and assumed the person was dead. But maybe I gave the spur-of-the-moment technique creation a little too much juice.

  Instead of one old lady slumping to the floor in a coma, I heard half a dozen thuds resound throughout the house. The Ylef I was wrestling with suddenly went limp.

  Disentangling myself from his grasp, I dropped onto my butt on the top stair. His life point still flickered a little to the right of where a human heart would be, but outwardly, the Ylef showed no sign of being alive. Even though only a couple seconds had passed, his skin already felt cool and stiff.

  At the foot of the stairs, a pile of unconscious agents sprawled at awkward angles across their weapons and riot shields.

  Nothing else in the house moved.

  Apparently, Sleep of Death was an area of effect attack.

  After all the noise and adrenaline, the silence felt unnaturally loud. The only sound in the house besides my heavy breathing and the ringing in my ears was the crackling of the embers lining the blaster holes.

  “So everyone’s asleep.” My voice sounded both loud and weirdly muffled. “Okay.”

  I leaned over and pried open the Ylef’s eye. Apparently, unconsciousness didn’t affect Judgment Beyond the Veil. What it showed me was a guy who had started out wanting the best for the people around him, wanting good to win and bad to pay. That was the whole reason he’d gone into the CPA. But after a while, he’d started thinking he knew better than the law. Then that he knew better than right and wrong. Now here he was, so far into his redefinitions of good and bad that he had the real good and bad all switched around in his head.

  How long would it take me to get to that point? Would my Ten covenant prevent me from falling into the same trap, or would it act like a booster, making me think because I had it in place I was guaranteed never to go off the rails?

  I tore out his life point. He spasmed once, then he was gone.

  Dizziness hit me as I got to my feet. Something wet trickled out of my left ear. I wiped at it. Blood. The concussion from one of those bombs had blown out my eardrum. I could feel splinters and grit embedded in my cheek on that side, too. The script tattoo on my bicep burned, racing to catch up with all the healing.

  More bruises and scratches flared up as I started down the stairs, leaning on what remained of the wall so I didn’t faceplant while my gyros were gluing themselves back together.

  I went through all four agents in the pile at the bottom of the steps, checking Judgment and tearing out life points. One had just missed his chance at turning things around; tonight was the night he’d severed his last shred of good in the basement less than five minutes ago.

  I stepped over the comatose grandma in the hall and headed downstairs.

  Another Technol sprawled across the steps in Sleep of Death. That made eight of the nine HUDs Donnie had mentioned. I went through the routine, checking Judgment and tearing out the life point, and moved on.

  I found the ninth HUD in the corner of the tech-stuffed horror basement, around the wrist of a man tied to a chair, burns and gore everywhere. He’d obviously been there a while, although based on the fresh blood and Miasma, he’d unfortunately been alive for most of that. The Technol who had punched his ticket to Damnation that night had taken this guy out execution-style before heading upstairs to deal with me.

  A familiar feeling of agitation surrounded the victim’s body.

  “Sorry I didn’t get to you faster,” I told him. The apology rang hollow from inside Last Light, Last Breath, where I didn’t have to feel anything about what I was seeing. “Sorry your last couple days of life were so awful. Anyway, it’s over now. You can move on.”

  A soft breeze blew up out of nowhere. A glowing purple marble dropped out of the guy’s maimed hand and rolled to a stop in front of me.

  His ghost appeared, empty eye sockets staring through me.

  “Before I leave, a warning, Death cultivator,” he said, his voice echoing strangely. “The time you think you have, you don’t. The enemy you think you have is nothing compared to what’s coming. The plans you think you’ve made will blow away in the wind.”

  Then he disintegrated and blew away.

  ***

  After Donnie finished throwing up in the corner, he identified the victim in the basement as the brother of a witness in a case against a corrupt Pearl City official. The victim had gone missing a few days ago, around the time the witness suddenly refused to testify.

  Squib looked a little green around the eye-lace, too, but he managed to hold his dinner in while he triggered an ability called Spotless. A sparkling tsunami of Spirit washed through the brownstone, putting out fires, repairing walls, banisters, and carpet, and cleaning bloodstains. He went over the house from top to bottom, making sure we hadn’t left any physical or Spirit signs of our presence.

  “Ordinal supertype,” Donnie told me as we stood by watching cables and components slither back into the rooms they had come from. “Very ordinal. That’s why he’s so high-strung.”

  The script tattoo was still working overtime to heal my busted eardrum, so Donnie’s voice sounded oddly muffled on that side. But if I put one hand over my bad ear, it wasn’t that noticeable.

  When Squib was done, the house was back in perfect order except for the eight dead bodies and one comatose granny.

  A granny I had to swear to Donnie and Squib wasn’t dead. Sleep of Death had settled into her tissues, freezing her in a corpse-like stiffness. Her hands were still clawed around a sawed-off blaster that Donnie twisted out of her grasp.

  “She’s the only witness who can say what went down here,” Donnie said, popping the plasma coil out of the gun and clearing its breach. He set the emptied weapon well out of her reach. “Will her coma last long enough to get her to our safe house?”

  With a trace of Miasma, I prodded at Sleep of Death. It wasn’t like I could read its stats, but I could get a feel for how powerful it was. It gave off a sort of conditional feeling, like the length of the Sleep depended on the victim’s strength of will or something. That wasn’t exactly right, but it felt close.

  “I can deactivate it whenever,” I said, trying to put words to the feeling, “but if I just leave it going, it’ll fall apart on its own in a few days. Less than a week for sure.”

  Donnie blinked out of a wall of text on his glasses. “Good deal. The IGT is coming from Chasms Deep, but they won’t arrive in Pearl City for at least a full tide cycle.”

  It took me a minute, but I remembered that he’d mentioned the IGT earlier—the Intergalactic Gang Taskforce.

  We picked up the board-stiff old lady between us and packed her out into the night.

  “What about the bodies of the corrupt agents?” I asked.

  The Ylef glanced up and down the quiet street, then nodded that it was fine to cross.

  “Squib’s wipe-down should have washed away any trace of your Miasma or my Digital Spirit, and I rewrote the feed going back to the hub when I took out the dragonflies. I think the play is to leave the bodies as-is, let whoever discovers them start jumping to conclusions. We’ll hit a Technol-only branch next, and maybe they’ll assume this is Big Five on Big Five violence, unrelated to cleaning up the CPA. They may start looking for Dragons and Jianjiao to blame, though. If they come after you before we finish clearing them out of the hub, you’re on your own. Squib and I can’t fix anything if we get taken out protecting an Eight-Legged Dragon.”

  “I’ll keep my eyes peeled.” I looked back toward the darkened basement windows. “Are you going to tell the witness about her brother?”

  Donnie grunted as we heaved the rigid old lady onto the back seat of the rickshaw.

  “What good would it do her to beat her up with the details?” He dragged his hand down his face. “I don’t know. She must have had some idea what was happening, must have thought she was preventing worse by clamming up. Part of me thinks it’s better to keep her in the dark, part thinks full disclosure might incite her to testify. I’ll think about it.”