The night pressed in, thick as syrup, soaking the penthouse in blue-black silence. The city outside was a circuit board of violence: fires burning up the flanks of glass towers, gunships prowling between buildings, their floodlights spearing the lower districts in surgical arcs. From thirty floors up, the city looked less like a home than a failed experiment.
Owen Dagger watched from the edge of the mana-glass, his own reflection superimposed over the chaos. Below, police lines flickered, drones arced between rooftops in tight geometric patterns, and everywhere, the emergency lights pulsed—red, blue, the color of warning. He watched, eyes hollow, as a Nexar gunship hovered over a block near the canal, its weapons pods open and live.
"This isn't about Sombra," he said, voice low enough to vanish into the glass. "It's about control. Always is."
Behind him, Jane poured another measure of whiskey, the amber liquid perfectly level as it filled the glass. She leaned against the bar, elbows planted, eyes fixed on the surface. She didn't look at anyone as she spoke.
"They knew the job," she said. "Not just that we'd do it, but exactly when. Even the city's backup comms went dead the second we called the op."
Ellen sat at the table, blade in hand, passing a cloth along its length in methodical, loving strokes. Each time she finished a pass, she lifted the blade to the light, checking for flaws or fingerprints, then started again. The repetition was its own kind of prayer.
"Could be the Lancasters," she said, never pausing in her work. "Could be Taira. Or maybe someone bought out both. We've made a lot of enemies."
Jane's laugh was short and bitter. "I'm starting to think we're the only ones who ever play fair."
Hazel hunched over her station, eyes raw from hours of blue light. The feeds had stopped updating minutes ago—most of the city's net was blacked out, save for a few state-sanctioned propaganda channels. Still, she kept scrolling, looking for the one anomaly that might make sense of the rest.
She found it, not in the feeds, but in a single, sharp alert. The sound was different: high-pitched, crystalline, a note that shivered the bones and set the hairs on her arms standing.
Hazel's head snapped up. "Got something," she said, barely more than a whisper.
The other three converged around her, their tension crackling in the air.
On Hazel's main screen, a message flickered—a block of text, encrypted in a format that shouldn't have existed. Jane read it first, eyes scanning the lines, then going wide.
"No coincidences," Jane read aloud. "Move."
Owen stared at the text, the weight of it settling somewhere under his sternum. "That's a command line," he said. "Not a warning."
Hazel's hands trembled as she tried to parse the origin. "It's coming from inside the grid. Not the city net, not even from the regular mana feeds. It's… somewhere else. It's piggybacking on the blackout."
Ellen frowned, wiping her blade on her thigh. "Is it a threat?"
Hazel shook her head, the tremor more obvious now. "I think it's a lifeline. If we don't move, we're already dead."
Jane looked at the team, a chill passing through her as she realized what the message meant. "They want us to jump. See if we can fly."
The four stared at the message as it pulsed on the screen, insistent, louder than any alarm.
Owen looked back at the city, at the siege unfolding below. "We've been on someone else's leash the whole time," he said. "All that matters now is who's pulling it."
Jane set her glass down, steady as ever. "Then we pull back."
Hazel closed her eyes, listened to the signal, and for a brief, irrational second, wondered if Mouse had survived. If the message was his, or if it was the thing that finally got him.
Ellen slipped her blade into the holster, checked the lock, and stood. "If we go, we go quiet. And we don't come back unless we win."
Jane bared her teeth in a tired smile. "Agreed."
The city howled outside, but inside the penthouse, the team was silent—watching the message blink, and blink, and blink, until the next move became obvious.
No more waiting. No more playing by rules they didn't write.
They would move.
And whatever waited at the end of the leash—win or lose—they would face it together.