The morning crawls gray and heavy across Noctreign. The rain is now a fine mist that clings to the buildings like sweat.
Ira pushes her hood back as she parks her scooter outside Umami Hollow, ready for her first shift after the break-in. She locks her scooter and stands for a moment, letting the hum of traffic settle into her chest. Everything feels normal—the sign flickering pale pink through drizzle, the same cracked letters, the same damp alley behind it.
Inside, J is ladling broth into a bowl, her upper pair of arms folded behind her back, her lower ones moving in precise rhythm. The place smells like ginger and metal pans.
J glances up at Ira with her large, dark eyes. "You're alive."
"Yup," Ira says. She hangs her jacket, avoiding the mirror near the door—an old habit.
J slides a steaming bowl across the counter glass toward her. "You hear the news yet?"
"I try my best not to."
"Hmph." J tilts her head. "The Bone Collector lost half a billion in infrastructure last night. The Glass Orchard's gone. Melted servers, data wiped, property losses through the roof. They say it'll take months to rebuild." She pauses. "If they even can."
Ira sits. The stool squeaks under her weight. "Property losses?" she asks.
"The animals," J confirms. "They've all escaped. Run straight into the forest. Didn't waste any time."
"Good for them," Ira mutters into her soup, scooping up a mouthful.
J leans back, folding all of her arms in front of her. "You really haven't heard anything?"
Ira shrugs. "I dunno. I've been sleeping."
"Right. Sleeping." J gazes at her steadily from under heavy lashes.
"Anyways," she continues, as though deciding not to say what she was going to say. "That's not the best part." Her voice lowers. "They found a mark scorched into the side of the building. An inverted triangle. It's everywhere now—on screens, on walls, even spray-painted over trucks. It's like someone's running a graffiti campaign overnight."
Ira spoons more noodles into her mouth, trying to hide a smile. "Weird."
"They're calling it terrorism." J leans in. "Or liberation. Depends which channel you watch, I guess. Either way, the inverted triangle is the new symbol for whoever did this."
Outside, a delivery drone buzzes by with a digital banner trailing from its frame. The banner reads:
KEEP NOCTREIGN SAFE — REPORT SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY.
Below, the Bone Collector's logo glows faintly—the tree, still looking alive and unscathed.
The order machine draws both of their attention away from it with a series of frenzied chimes.
"Fuck," J mutters as a fresh set of orders scrolls in. "You ready to work?"
"Always," Ira says, grinning as she pushes her chair back to join J behind the counter.
———————————————————————————————————————
Ira works her shift quietly. Orders pile, tickets print, customers shuffle in—damp and restless. But J was right: everyone's talking about last night.
In the back corner, two couriers argue over dumplings.
"Whole convoy rerouted," one says. "They had to shut down half the Pouuer District. The sewage lines are clogged with scales and feathers, apparently."
Ira wipes down a nearby table, careful to keep her head down, grinning quietly to herself. Through the window, screens across the street flicker to life—public feeds, ads, news loops.
Every few minutes, a headline flashes:
SABOTAGE IN POUUER DISTRICT — ATTACK ON THE GLASS ORCHARD LEAVES ECONOMIC DAMAGE IN THE BILLIONS.
BREAK-IN POSES IMMINENT THREAT: ESCAPED EXPERIMENTS MAY HARM ECOSYSTEM.
CITY OFFICIALS: "ANARCHY DISGUISED AS EMPATHY."
Each broadcast repeats the same phrase: the culprits remain unidentified and at large.
Ira's reflection merges with the display glass. For a heartbeat, her glowing eyes flicker over the reporter's face before she blinks herself back to the present.
Unidentified. Good.
As night falls, the rain thickens again. Ira rides home slow after her shift, tires skimming puddles, neon reflections pulsing like veins across the street.
On every corner, holo-ads stutter with emergency updates:
"Protect the economy. Support regulation."
"Unauthorized liberation harms the biome."
And yet, beneath those slogans—despite the powers that be twisting the story every way they can—the inverted triangle remains. On walls, in alleyways, in the film of grime under bridges—Ira keeps seeing it. Sometimes painted in black, sometimes etched with glowing powder that shimmers when headlights pass. People are even starting to touch it for luck.
Stopped at a light, she spots a group of workers smoking under a canopy. One gestures toward the symbol sprayed across a drainpipe.
"You know what that means, right?"
"Some kinda hacker cult?"
"No, man. That's the mark from the Orchard. The rebel left it there, cut through the walls like they were paper. My cousin swears he saw the thing—lightning claws, red eyes. Said it laughed while the beasts ran free."
The others laugh nervously.
Ira moves on quickly when the light changes, not wanting to draw attention to herself.
By the time she reaches her apartment, her clothes are soaked through again. She peels off her hoodie and sits on the edge of the bed, listening to the city through her thin windows. The streetlight outside flickers weakly.
Somewhere far off, a siren wails—then fades into the rain.
———————————————————————————————————————
Headlines roll in again the next morning—the Bone Collector's PR division clearly moves quickly. The story continues to focus on "economic impact" and "unregulated mutations threatening public safety".
Panels of talking heads fill the feeds on Ira's mobile: bioethicists, economists, polished influencers. They all agree—this isn't freedom, it's chaos.
"These creatures were property," says one woman in a velvet suit. "They were investments in progress. Their destruction sets Noctreign's biotech sector back decades."
"And the cost to the environment?" another chimes in. "Runaway mutations could contaminate water systems. Who wants that on their conscience?"
"All individuals involved in testing gave their consent. They were happy to be there—grateful to dedicate themselves to the betterment of Noctreign."
At that, Ira's eyes begin to glow. Her nails lengthen despite herself, rage building at the despicable lie.
But then she remembers—they're safe, all of them. She exhales, forcing herself calm.
The feed cuts to footage of flooded streets, half-truths stitched together.
A single image repeats—blurred, grainy—something hooded, walking out into the rain. Her.
The caption: Unconfirmed visual of individual released in attack.
Ira stands in her kitchenette, unfazed.
"Good," she murmurs. "Let them look for me. I'm just getting started."
———————————————————————————————————————
By week's end, the inverted triangle is everywhere. Printed on stickers. Carved into vending machine panels. Burned into a billboard downtown where the Bone Collector's face used to grin. No one admits to making it, but everyone recognizes it. In some parts of the city, street artists start weaving vines into the shape—small, living emblems tucked into cracks of concrete. Someone adds text beneath one: "We Remember What They Did In The Orchard."
Ira's shifts blend together as she lays low. Deliveries pile up, orders reroute through new checkpoints. She rides through the districts, watching the slow unraveling of control as she does so.
In Pouuer, drones hover over cleanup sites, scanning the damage, hauling away broken cages. The smell of disinfectant and burnt metal still hangs in the air. And in the forests beyond the industrial ring, where the freed creatures fled, something new is happening. At night, when the rain lifts, the treeline glows faintly—tiny bioluminescent motes drifting like pollen, like an offering of gratitude to the sky. She watches them from her window at the end of every shift and smiles to herself—they really made it.
Rumors multiply. A "red-eyed phantom" that tears through metal. A "ghost of the Orchard" who walks through rain untouched.
Ira listens to snippets as she passes street corners and market stalls.
"They say it can melt locks just by touching them."
"No, no—it sings and the doors open."
"My cousin's cousin saw its claws glow blue."
"Blue? I heard they were silver."
She always keeps her hood up, more often than not grinning as she passes.
———————————————————————————————————————
One afternoon about a week later, she finds J watching the newsfeed. The headline reads:
CITY COUNCIL PASSES EMERGENCY ACT—EXPANDED SURVEILLANCE AUTHORITY.
"Guess who benefits," J says dryly. "The Bone Collector. People panic, buy more security tech—all of it manufactured by him. He's richer than before."
"Doesn't matter," Ira says. "He'll never get back what he lost."
"You mean the data?"
"Yup."
J studies her for a long moment. "This doesn't scare you?"
"No," she admits. "I felt more scared when it seemed like no one cared."
J nods slowly, as if understanding more than she lets on. "Well, in any case, kid, be careful. Legends tend to burn bright but fast."
That night, Ira takes the long route home through Pouuer. The streets are quiet now, half the storefronts shuttered, drones hovering like fireflies overhead. She stops beside what's left of the Glass Orchard—just a skeleton of girders and vines reclaiming concrete.
Rain runs down her cheeks. She kneels and touches the rubble, remembering that night, and grieves the years of torture those souls endured.
Somewhere behind her, a voice says, "You here for the memorial too?"
She turns. A small group of people stand under umbrellas, faces shadowed. One of them places a candle in a jar on the rubble. Another sprays the inverted triangle on the wall above it, then steps back.
"For the testing patients," they say softly. "And for whoever set them free."
Ira feels the words hit somewhere deep. She wants to say you're welcome, but instead she nods and slips away before they can see her face.
——————————————————————————————————————
By the following week, the propaganda has mutated.
New posters appear: "Unauthorized Liberation Endangers Us All."
Influencers—likely sponsored—film tearful monologues about the "poor lost creatures" and the "workers who'll lose their jobs."
Even the weather feeds change—rain schedules altered to wash away street art faster.
But the triangle persists.
People etch it into the condensation on bus windows. They carve it into their coffee cups.
When a new city order bans graffiti entirely, someone projects the symbol onto the side of a government tower, fifty stories high. The feed cuts it within minutes, but not before screenshots spread across the net.
THE ORCHARD LIVES.
Ira watches from her apartment as night deepens. The rain blurs the city lights into rivers of color. She wonders if Cobalt sees any of this from wherever he is—if the rebellion's pulse reaches even the quiet halls of Hell.
A knock interrupts her reverie.
Three short taps, one long.
She tenses, moves to the door, peering through the cracked screen.
Nobody there.
Only a small metal box on the ground, slick with rain. She crouches, opens it. Inside, a single folded scrap of paper.
On it, drawn in smudged ink: the inverted triangle.
And beneath it, five words:
We know it was you.
Her pulse spikes.
At the bottom, a smaller note: We're with you. More soon.
But there's no threat in the handwriting—only gratitude.
She tucks the paper into her jacket, heart hammering.
Outside, thunder rolls over the rooftops, long and low.
Later that night, she stands at her window, watching the city breathe.
From this height she can see patches of light shifting in the forest beyond the industrial zone— wings, movement. The freed creatures as they continue to build their own quiet world beyond Noctreign's reach.
She whispers into the glass, "Stay far. Stay wild." And for the first time in a long while, she doesn't feel alone.
The myth of her is already running ahead—across walls, screens, whispers, streets—bolstering her. For now, that's enough.
Ira turns off her lights and lets the city's hum lull her to sleep.
And in her mind, she's already shaping her next hit—one that will land harder than this. One the Bone Collector can't profit from.