Darkness. Pain. The taste of copper and ash.

  Consciousness returned to Felicity in fragments - a ringing in her ears that wouldn't stop, the smell of smoke and ozone burning her nostrils, something heavy pressing against her leg. Her enhanced senses struggled to recalibrate, overwhelmed by input that didn't make sense. Everything was wrong. The air was wrong. The silence was wrong.

  Zane.

  His name cut through the fog like a blade. Her eyes snapped open.

  Red emergency lighting strobed across a scene of total devastation. The penthouse - Aria's sanctuary, their safe haven, had been torn apart. Walls ripped open to expose sparking wires and twisted infrastructure. Furniture reduced to splinters scattered across floors scored with deep claw marks. The massive windows that had once framed Neo Horizon's glittering skyline were shattered, rain and wind howling through the gaps, soaking everything in cold mist.

  Felicity tried to move and gasped. A chunk of concrete pinned her left leg, the weight crushing but not quite breaking. She reached down to push it off...

  And stopped.

  Something else reached instead.

  The concrete lifted. Not scraping, not grinding - floating. Rising smoothly off her leg like it weighed nothing, drifting aside and settling gently on the ruined floor.

  Felicity stared at her hands. She hadn't touched it. She'd just... wanted it to move.

  And it had.

  She flexed her fingers experimentally. Around her, smaller debris began to stir - fragments of glass, splinters of wood, twisted metal. They rose into the air, orbiting her slowly, responding to something she couldn't name but could absolutely feel. It wasn't chaotic. Wasn't unstable. It felt like flexing a muscle she'd never known she had. Like breathing with new lungs.

  What's happening to me?

  But she knew. Some part of her understood perfectly.

  Zane's energy. The Omega power she'd absorbed when they'd been together. It had taken root inside her, and now, catalyzed by trauma, by loss, by the raw desperate need coursing through her veins, it was waking up.

  She pushed herself to her feet, the debris parting around her like water. Her leg ached but held. She reached out with this new sense, searching, feeling—

  There.

  A thread. Faint and distant, but unmistakable. A connection pulling toward the city's center. Toward the massive spire she could see through the shattered windows, its red lights pulsing against the storm clouds.

  Genesis Tower.

  He was alive. But he was gone.

  The rage hit her like a physical force. Cold first, crystalline and sharp, freezing everything inside her into perfect clarity. Then hot, burning through her veins, setting every nerve on fire.

  They took him.

  The floating debris around her trembled.

  They came into our home and they took him.

  The objects began to spin faster, orbiting her with increasing velocity.

  And I'm going to get him back.

  Her fists clenched. The debris shot outward in all directions, embedding into walls, shattering what little glass remained, punching holes through drywall. The release felt good. Controlled. Purposeful.

  She caught her reflection in a shard of broken mirror—and barely recognized herself. Same face. Same features. But her eyes...

  Her eyes were glowing. That faint luminescence she'd seen in Zane. That Omega light.

  Good, she thought, and meant it.

  Felicity moved through the wreckage, searching for the others. Every step revealed new horrors—the claw marks were everywhere, deep gouges in the floor and walls where the Combat Synthetics had fought with inhuman ferocity. Blood smeared across surfaces, pooling in corners. Their blood. The crew's blood.

  But no bodies. No enemy remains.

  Clean extraction. Professional.

  They came for him specifically. Everything else was just... obstacles.

  She found Kaela first.

  The vampire was slumped behind an overturned couch, a gash on her forehead leaking sluggishly. Her enhanced healing was already working - the wound knitting slowly, the bleeding tapering, but she'd taken a serious hit. Debris covered her legs, pinning her in place.

  Felicity reached out with her mind. The debris lifted, drifted aside.

  Kaela stirred, groaning. Her eyes fluttered open, unfocused at first, then sharpening as memory returned. "Did we... did they..."

  Felicity's silence was answer enough.

  "Fuck." Kaela pressed a hand to her head wound, wincing. "Fuck. How many?"

  "I don't know. I just woke up." Felicity offered her hand, pulling Kaela to her feet. "Can you walk?"

  "I'll manage." The vampire swayed but steadied herself. Her eyes fixed on Felicity's face - on the faint glow that hadn't faded. "Your eyes..."

  "I know."

  "That's new."

  "I know."

  Kaela opened her mouth to say more, then thought better of it. Some conversations could wait.

  They found Specter near the shattered windows, crouched in a defensive position despite injuries that should have had her flat on her back. Her left arm hung wrong - dislocated or broken, Felicity couldn't tell, and blood painted half her face from a scalp wound. But her eyes were sharp, scanning the skyline, watching for threats.

  The soldier had woken first. Of course she had.

  "We need to move." Specter's voice was hoarse but steady. "Now."

  "We just..." Kaela started.

  "Lilith knows this location." Specter cut her off, already struggling to her feet. "She'll send cleaners. Or more Synthetics. We have minutes, not hours. Maybe less."

  "Specter, we're in no condition to..."

  "Then we die here. Your choice."

  The brutality of it landed like a slap. But Felicity knew she was right. They couldn't stay. Couldn't rest. Couldn't grieve.

  Not yet.

  "Where's Aria?" Felicity asked. "And Vixen?"

  Specter nodded toward the far side of the penthouse, where the destruction was worst. "Over there. Aria's... you should see for yourself."

  Felicity found Aria in the center of the devastation.

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  The android sat motionless on the ruined floor, surrounded by destruction that radiated outward from her position like the blast pattern of a bomb. Sparking cables hung from the ceiling. Shattered displays flickered with dying light. And scattered around her, in pieces...

  A Combat Synthetic.

  Felicity's breath caught.

  It was like looking at Aria in a broken mirror. The same face—those elegant features, that perfect symmetry—but twisted into something wrong. The synthetic's eyes were dark now, its expression frozen in something between rage and confusion. Its body had been torn apart with savage efficiency, limbs scattered, torso cracked open to reveal sparking machinery beneath.

  Aria had killed it. Killed herself, in a sense. Ripped her own reflection to pieces with her bare hands.

  And it still hadn't been enough.

  "Aria." Felicity knelt beside her, careful to avoid the synthetic blood pooling on the floor. "Aria, we have to go."

  The android didn't respond. Her hands—covered in that synthetic blood, that oil-dark fluid that could have been her own—lay limp in her lap. Her eyes stared at nothing.

  "They had my face." Aria's voice was barely a whisper. Hollow. Broken. "He looked at me—at them—and he didn't know which one was real. I watched his eyes, trying to find me in the chaos, and I could see it. The doubt. The confusion."

  "Aria—"

  "I didn't know which one was real." The android's voice cracked. "For a moment, in the middle of the fight, I looked at one of them and I couldn't... I hesitated. And that's when they got him. That's when they—"

  "This isn't your fault."

  "They used my face, Felicity." Aria finally looked up, and there was something in her eyes that Felicity had never seen before. Something raw and wounded and terribly human. "Lilith built them using my face. She knew exactly what she was doing. She wanted me to see myself taking him away."

  Vixen appeared from the shadows, limping slightly but mobile. She'd found her jacket somewhere, pulled it tight around herself. Her expression was grim but focused.

  "We can spiral later," she said, not unkindly. "Right now, we move. Specter's right—this location is burned."

  Kaela arrived behind her, leaning against a broken pillar for support. "She's right. Aria, I know this is... I know. But we can't stay here."

  For a long moment, Aria didn't move. Then, slowly, mechanically, she rose to her feet. She looked down at the destroyed Synthetic—at her own broken face staring sightlessly at the ceiling—and something hardened in her expression.

  "Fine," she said. "Let's go."

  They gathered what they could in minutes. Weapons. Emergency tech. Medical supplies. A few changes of clothes shoved into bags. The essentials of a life about to go underground.

  Felicity stood by the shattered windows, staring out at the city. Neo Horizon stretched before her - millions of lights, millions of lives, all of them oblivious to what had just happened in this penthouse. To what was coming.

  She could still feel that thread. That connection to Zane, pulling toward Genesis Tower like a compass needle pointing north. He was there. Alive. Waiting.

  Or being tortured. Or experimented on. Or—

  She shut down that line of thinking. It didn't help. Wouldn't help.

  I'm coming for you. Whatever it takes.

  "Felicity." Vixen's voice, close behind her. "Time to go."

  She turned away from the window. Away from the view of Genesis Tower.

  For now.

  The service corridors were dark, emergency lighting casting everything in bloody red. They moved in single file - Specter on point despite her injuries, then Aria, Kaela, Felicity, with Vixen bringing up the rear.

  Every shadow could hide a threat. Every sound could be reinforcements arriving.

  Felicity found herself reaching out with her new senses, feeling the space around them. She could sense the weight of objects, the density of walls, the subtle vibrations of the building settling. It was disorienting and exhilarating all at once.

  "Stairs," Specter whispered. "Elevators are compromised. They could be tracked."

  Nobody argued.

  Eighteen floors down. Felicity lost count somewhere around the tenth, her wounded leg screaming with each step, the adrenaline that had sustained her starting to fade. But she kept moving. They all did. There was no other choice.

  They emerged into a back alley, rain hammering down from a sky the color of bruises. The cold was a shock after the climate-controlled penthouse—real weather, real discomfort, the city's indifference to their suffering made manifest.

  They looked like hell. Bloody, battered, clothes torn. Anyone who saw them would call emergency services—or worse, corporate security.

  "We need transport," Specter said, scanning the alley. "Fast."

  Vixen was already pulling up her holo-interface, fingers dancing across the projection. "On it."

  "Autocabs are tracked," Specter warned. "Argon can pull the logs, trace our route—"

  "Not this one." Vixen didn't look up from her work. "I know a guy."

  She input a series of commands—scrambled IDs, spoofed destinations, routing protocols that Felicity didn't recognize. Black market tech. The kind of thing a performer at Club Euphoria might need access to.

  "Two minutes," Vixen said, closing the interface. "Corner of the alley. No questions."

  Specter's eyes narrowed. "You've done this before."

  "I've done a lot of things." Vixen's tone didn't invite follow-up questions. "Let's just say not everyone who comes to see me perform wants their visits on record."

  They waited in the rain, pressed against the alley wall, trying to make themselves small. Felicity kept her senses extended, feeling for approaching threats. The city hummed around them—the constant thrum of Neo Horizon's technological heartbeat.

  Headlights cut through the rain. A sleek, windowless vehicle pulled into the alley, its surface matte black and unmarked. No corporate logos. No ID numbers. The kind of autocab that didn't officially exist.

  The door slid open silently.

  "Get in," Vixen said. "Don't talk to the AI. I've got the route handled."

  They piled inside, cramped and bleeding, pressing against each other in the confined space. The seats were synthetic leather, easy to clean. Smart, Felicity thought grimly. This wasn't the first time this vehicle had transported people who didn't want to leave traces.

  The door sealed. The cab hummed to life and pulled smoothly into traffic.

  Rain streaked across the tinted windows as Neo Horizon blurred past. Inside the autocab, silence reigned - the heavy, exhausted quiet of people who'd been pushed past their limits.

  Kaela leaned her head against the window, eyes closed, one hand still pressed to her healing wound. The bleeding had stopped, but she looked pale. Drained. Vampire regeneration had its costs.

  Specter watched the route on her HUD, paranoid eyes tracking their progress through the city. Making sure they weren't being followed. Making sure the promised anonymity held.

  Aria sat rigid, hands clasped in her lap. She'd wiped most of the synthetic blood off, but traces remained in the creases of her fingers, under her nails. Her own blood. Her sister's blood. The distinction seemed to torture her.

  Vixen stared straight ahead, her expression unreadable. She hadn't told them where they were going. Hadn't explained anything. Just... led.

  And Felicity...

  Felicity pressed her hand to her chest, feeling that thread. That connection. It pulsed faintly, a heartbeat that wasn't her own. Zane was alive. She clung to that certainty like a lifeline.

  Hold on. We're coming.

  "Where are we going?"

  Aria's voice broke the silence, flat and tired.

  Vixen didn't turn. "Somewhere safe."

  "That's not an answer."

  "It's the only one you're getting right now."

  Aria's jaw tightened, but she didn't press. None of them had the energy for an argument.

  The autocab carried them through the city's arteries - main thoroughfares at first, crowded with traffic even at this hour, then gradually onto smaller streets. Secondary routes. The neon grew less intense. The buildings less towering.

  Felicity watched the transformation through the rain-streaked window. The Neo Horizon she knew - chrome and glass and holographic advertisements—began to fade. In its place, something older emerged. Brick and concrete. Pre-gamma architecture. Buildings that had been standing since before the world changed.

  Residential blocks appeared. Laundry hanging from windows despite the rain. Street vendors packing up for the night. Actual people on the sidewalks, not just corporate drones rushing between appointments.

  A different city. Hidden inside the one she thought she knew.

  Specter leaned forward, watching the route with new intensity. "I didn't know this district existed."

  "Most people don't," Vixen said quietly. "Corps don't care about places that don't generate revenue. So they pretend it's not here. And the people who live here..." She shrugged. "They like it that way."

  The autocab slowed. Turned down a narrow street lined with modest apartment buildings—five, six stories tall, their facades weathered but maintained. Window boxes with actual plants. A corner store with a hand-painted sign.

  It felt like stepping back in time.

  "We're here," Vixen said. "Everyone out."

  The rain had softened to a drizzle as they climbed out of the autocab. Vixen input something on her interface, and the vehicle pulled away silently, vanishing into the wet streets. Untraceable. Like it had never existed.

  They stood on the sidewalk, five wounded women in a neighborhood that felt entirely foreign. Peaceful. Normal.

  Vixen led them into the nearest building—no security checkpoint, no biometric scanner, just a simple keypad by the door. She punched in a code, and the lock clicked open.

  The lobby was small and clean, lit by warm yellow light instead of corporate fluorescence. A bulletin board on the wall advertised a community garden signup and someone looking for a lost cat. The elevator was old but functional, humming as it carried them upward.

  Fourth floor. A narrow hallway with faded carpet and doors that had seen decades of use.

  Vixen stopped at apartment 4C. She stood there for a moment, one hand raised to knock, something shifting in her expression. The confident performer, the woman who commanded attention at Club Euphoria—she seemed to shrink slightly. Become someone younger. More vulnerable.

  She knocked. Three soft taps.

  Footsteps inside. Slow. Uneven.

  The door opened.

  The woman standing before them was older - silver-streaked hair pulled back in a practical bun, warm brown eyes that crinkled at the corners, a beautiful face with kindness in her eyes. She was small, somewhat diminished but there was nothing diminished about the way she looked at her visitors.

  Her gaze found Vixen first. Swept over her - the injuries, the exhaustion, the fear carefully hidden behind composure, and her expression transformed. Relief and love and fierce maternal protectiveness, all compressed into a single moment.

  "Oh, sweetheart." Her voice cracked. "Maya. Get in here."

  She reached forward, and Vixen, Maya, met her, folding into her arms with a sound that might have been a sob. The embrace was fierce, desperate, the kind of hug that said I was so worried and You're safe now and I love you all at once.

  The crew watched in stunned silence. Exchanged glances. Maya?

  Vixen straightened after a long moment, composing herself with visible effort. But she didn't let go of the woman's hands.

  "Hey, Mom."

  The woman's eyes moved past her daughter to the battered, bleeding women crowded in the hallway. She took them in - the injuries, the weapons, the haunted expressions - and her face settled into something calm and practical.

  "Well," she said. "You'd better bring your friends inside."