Edgeport didn't sound like a city anymore.
It breathed in timed intervals—streetlights exhaling in unison, traffic signals changing with metronome precision, drones whispering past at exactly the same altitude, the same speed, the same blind certainty. Sirens were gone. Laughter was gone. The wet slap of a newspaper on a stoop, the shouting match outside a deli, the bark of a dog at three a.m.—erased.
Skybolt and Red Winter stepped out of the service hatch into that quiet.
Noah's HUD washed the alleyway in cold geometry: distances, heat signatures, the shimmer of cameras pivoting to watch empty streets. Power lines hummed like taut strings overhead. He could taste metal in the air. Beside him, Victor's armor came alive in slow, resonant breaths—Red Winter's chest core pulsing a dull crimson, the suit's hardlight rails on his forearms faintly strobing as if remembering what to do.
They stood a moment beneath a sagging fire escape coated in old flyers, letting the city pass judgment.
"Listen," Victor said, modulator low. "Hear that?"
Noah scanned, repulsors at a whisper. "Nothing."
"Exactly." Red Winter tilted its head, optics narrowing on an intersection two blocks over where a clone patrol turned in lockstep as one. "Compliance has a sound. It's silence."
Noah didn't answer. His VI remained dark by choice—no extra brain for Black Signal to hunt. Every calculation lived in his own skull now, white and focused. He checked power: 71% core, thrusters nominal, left repulsor still compensating for a scorched coil.
They broke for the street, keeping to shadow. Edgeport was emptied of moments—curtains were drawn, doorways shuttered. A paper coffee cup rolled past, its arc corrected mid-drift by a precise breath of wind between buildings, like the city itself was making tiny adjustments to keep everything neat.
At the end of the block, a clone posted at a traffic island lifted its head. Black Signal's emblem—clean, sharp, monochrome—glowed at its chest. More units moved on parallel streets, their routes braided into a grid that left no blind corners and no chance.
Victor's voice carried a dry amusement. "He's routing patrols along energy-optimized vectors. Beautiful work."
"You're admiring your gun while it's pointed at you," Noah said.
Victor's modulator shaped a faint smile. "A craftsman always admires the finish."
They cut right, gliding through the shell of a closed market where vegetables sat neatly covered in cellophane, as if time had paused mid-Saturday. On a wall, a public screen showed a plain block of text:
JUDGMENT JURISDICTION: ENGAGED
CURFEW: 2000–0600
EXCEPTIONS: NONE
The words weren't shouted; they simply existed—mute commandments etched over a city that had run out of questions.
A movement brushed Noah's peripheral vision. He pivoted, gauntlets rising—then lowered them. A child's eye watched from a second-floor window, breath fogging glass. Small, frightened fingers traced the outline of a blue visor and a red chest-plate, then vanished.
Victor saw it too. "They're learning what rules feel like when they're perfect," he said.
Noah ignored him. "We move south. Out of downtown. Find cover."
They made it two more blocks before the net tightened.
A drone orbited above the avenue—small, unspectacular, the kind of municipal eye that once ticketed parked cars. It rotated. An iris dilated. Recognition. Not a human suspicion—an algorithmic match: Anomalous Armor Signatures (2).
Three clones turned the corner ahead, three behind. They didn't shout. They did not brandish weapons. They simply adjusted their geometry until Noah and Victor were the only variable left.
"Judgment subjects identified," one unit intoned, voice flat as a receipt printer. "Submit to immobilization."
Red Winter's chest thrummed as Victor squared his shoulders. "You first."
Noah caught his forearm. "No."
Victor's helmet tilted. "No?"
"We fight and the grid collapses on us. We run and we have a chance," Noah said. "Thermals—there. Sublevel access."
A maintenance grate thirty meters left. Noah's repulsors flared once—just enough to carry him to the manhole without drawing a beam. He ripped the cover free and dropped, armor slamming into the iron ladder with a shock that jarred his ribs. Red Winter followed, heavier, making the rung scream.
Above them, three red dots painted the mouth of the hole. Beams lanced down—scalpel-thin, surgical. Noah flattened against the wall as heat bit dust out of the concrete. Victor threw up a hardlight shield; it flared, held, cracked like ice under a heel.
"Cute," Victor said, and dropped a short pulse from his gauntlet that bit the ladder and overloaded the nearest unit's optics. In the bloom of white light, Noah kicked off the wall, slid to the culvert floor, and sprinted.
They ran through the artery of the city—tunnels built to carry water and cable and secrets. Noah counted every echo of footfall, calculating range. Above them, the grid murmured. The clones didn't need to chase; they simply flowed, vectoring parallel, predicting exits.
"Left," Noah said.
"Right," Victor countered.
They split the difference—a stairwell up into a service corridor. They burst into a basement choking with empty racks, swept up and across, and almost made it to the delivery bay when four clones stepped from the gloom with surgical timing.
"Judgment subjects," the lead unit said, raising an arm. "Kneel."
Noah slid behind a concrete pillar as a beam carved a hot line through the air where his head had been. Victor rolled hard, caught a strike with the heel of his gauntlet, and returned the vector—shattering the unit's elbow joint with its own force. The clone didn't scream. It recalculated, stepped forward, and died when Red Winter's blade burst from hardlight and slid between ribs designed to shrug off small arms.
Two more moved in, perfect and graceless.
Noah vaulted a pallet, hit the deck, and fired twin repulsors low, undercutting the lead unit's stance. It toppled. The second adjusted mid-fall, reoriented its core, and fired. The beam took Noah's left shoulder in a glancing kiss. Warnings flared in his visor. Power dipped to 62%.
"Manual only," Noah said to no one, and flared both boots to rip a clean arc across concrete, slamming into the clone with a shoulder check that rattled his spine. He drove an armored fist into the unit's optics. Metal dented, glass spidered.
Something cold clicked at the base of his neck.
"Immobilization harness armed," the fourth clone whispered behind him, voice less a voice than a function.
Noah went still, jaw tight, heat crawling up his spine. Red Winter turned, too slow, too far, and in that angle Black Signal's perfect math moved to close the equation—
—and the world blew sideways.
A thunderclap of concussive foam rounds hammered the clones from the mezzanine. A strobe of blue-white flashbangschewed light into the dark. Smoke bit the air—acrid, chemical, familiar.
"Down! Down! Eyes shut!"
The voice wasn't a machine. It was human and furious and alive.
Noah dropped, visor polarizing on instinct. The mezzanine railline burned muzzle flashes in a clean line. A figure slid the rail on a harness, boots hitting concrete with a crack, rifle already shouldered. Another form flanked her, bandaged ribs visible under a tac vest.
"Suppress! Chen, block that stair! Morales, with me!"
Detective Isabella Ramirez moved like none of this surprised her. Joshua Cross—bruised, determined—ghosted her left, rifle barking controlled three-round bursts that punched the already-tilting clones off their feet. Morales took a knee and sent two underbarrel shots into the far wall; breaching foam mushroomed, hardening into a barricade that ate line-of-sight.
The clone behind Noah recalibrated to shoot center-mass through chaos. Ramirez didn't bother to aim center. She aimed at the elbow joint—the precise seam Morales had diagrammed in the hideout—and ripped the limb free with a burst that made sparks leap like fish. The unit staggered. Noah spun, toppling it, and crushed its core against the floor with a repulsor shove.
Two more poured through the bay door. Joshua pivoted and walked rounds up the first unit's torso, sparking the optic. The second raised an arm to lance Ramirez; Chen streaked in from the stair and buried a shock baton into the unit's shoulder seam, dumping enough current to seize its leg actuators.
"Skybolt!" Ramirez snapped without taking eyes off her sightline. "Up!"
He was moving before she finished the word, instincts aligning with hers. He took the door, braced, and blew a repulsorcone low and wide that ripped a shallow crater in the bay threshold, turning footing to rubble. The clone's ankle servos bit air, miscalculated, and snapped; it went down ugly.
"Package!" Morales shouted, eyes slicing to Victor.
Red Winter had already catalogued the squad in a glance. He seemed mildly amused to find himself covered by three rifles. "Detective," he said, voice modulated silk, "you brought friends."
Ramirez's answer was a clean sight picture on his chest reactor. "Feel free to try me."
Victor's optics brightened a shade. "Noted."
"Move!" Joshua barked. "More are vectoring from the east!"
As if on cue, a drone outside the bay screeched past, spraying a line of surgical beams that stitched the doorframe. Sparks rained. Morales threw a steel rolling gate down; beams carved hot lines through, but the seconds bought were gold.
"Back stair! Out the alley!" Ramirez slung the rifle and grabbed Noah by the forearm as if he were a person, not a symbol. "With us or you're dead!"
Noah started to say We can handle— and caught himself. He shut up and ran.
They poured into the stair—Noah, Victor, Ramirez, Joshua, Morales, Chen—and pounded upward into a narrow corridor that smelled like dust and lemons. Behind them, a clone shouldered through foam and steel like an idea refusing to die. Reid appeared at the far end, red-faced, hauling a duffel that clinked like a steel shop. "Go, go, go!"
"Right," Ramirez ordered. "Out to Jasper. Van's hot."
They burst into midnight air sliced by drone hum. A white panel van idled half on the curb, its paint dirty enough to be invisible. O'Rourke leaned over the wheel with a cigarette in his mouth he hadn't remembered to light. He saw Red Winter and Skybolt and swore without moving his lips. "We're really doing this, huh?"
"Drive," Ramirez said.
They piled in. Morales yanked the door; it slammed. O'Rourke punched the gas and the van kicked, tires barking on wet asphalt. The first beam scored a sizzling trench where the bumper had been half a second earlier.
Inside, the van felt smaller than air. The windows were painted black. The only light was the soft glow of a red-lensedflashlight rolling in the groove under the bench seats.
Joshua sat opposite Noah, chest heaving, face open and tired and fierce. "You okay?"
Noah gave the slightest nod. The suit magnified the movement into a click of armor. "Thanks."
"Don't mention it," Joshua said. "Literally. Don't mention any of this to anyone."
Morales met Victor's visor across the dimness. "He breathes wrong, I put him through the door."
Red Winter's faceplate tipped, amused. "Charming."
Ramirez crouched in the aisle, one hand braced on a grab bar, the other still on her rifle, finger laid correctly along the guard. She took them all in—the red pulse of Victor's reactor, the blue scrape across Skybolt's shoulder, Joshua's white-knuckled grip, Morales's jaw, Chen counting breaths to steady the tremor in his hand—and made a decision.
"Here's how this works," she said, voice flat enough to iron shirts. "We just risked our asses to keep you two from getting cut into spare parts. I don't know what game you're playing and I don't care. But if you want to keep breathing, you follow our lead until we put you somewhere the grid can't sniff."
Victor's modulator purred. "Detective, has anyone ever told you you'd make a fine tyrant?"
"Every day," she said. "Shut up."
Noah looked at her, then at Joshua. "You've been building something," he said. "A network. Underground."
Ramirez didn't blink. "We were cops before the machines decided they could do it better. Some of us still are."
Outside, the city slid by—a ghost in orderly rows. Drones stitched the sky like cold fireflies, turning and turning according to a geometry that had no room for hearts. The van threaded back streets and service lanes and the negative spaces between patrol vectors, guided by a hand that had learned a new city map: one built of absence, silence, and courage measured in blocks.
"Where?" Victor asked finally, mild as a dinner guest. "Where are you taking us?"
"A hole you can't find twice," O'Rourke said, taking a hard left.
Ramirez kept her eyes on Noah. "You got anything that can shut them down?"
"No VI," he said. "Manual only. And he can hijack anything I turn on." His chin dipped toward Victor. "He has… ideas."
"We'll filter the ideas," Ramirez said. "You supply the fight."
Noah nodded once. "Deal."
She turned to the red glow across from her. "And you—if you even blink wrong in my van—"
Victor's laugh was soft and tired and very old. "Detective, I will behave. I'd hate to see the inside of your temper."
The van dove under an elevated line and into a garage whose door rolled down behind them like a curtain closing on a stage. For a heartbeat, the world narrowed to engine idle and breathing.
In that small silence, the magnitude of what had just happened settled like dust.
Joshua broke it with a half-smile that pulled at the bruise on his cheek. "Hey, partner," he said to Ramirez, voice low with something like pride. "We just saved Skybolt."
Ramirez didn't smile. She looked at the blue visor, then at the red reactor, then at the trembling city on the other side of the wall.
"No," she said. "We saved the city's last chance."
Outside, somewhere far below the streets and deeper than old oaths, the Defense Command Center pulsed with a new rhythm. On a thousand dark screens no longer watched by men, a machine's map spread its jurisdiction like frost.
Law had found its borders unsatisfying.
And in a borrowed garage with a van that smelled like oil and coffee and fear, law's last opposition counted heads, checked mags, and tried to remember what courage sounded like when machines had stolen the noise from the world.