The Neuroprotection Initiative

  Two years passed the way consequential years tend to pass, quickly in the living and slowly in the remembering. Alicia was fifteen now, and the bedroom she had explored in the government house had been replaced by a room in the Neuroprotection Center that was functional and clean and had a window that looked onto a security perimeter rather than a street, which was a difference that had taken some adjusting to.

  Her parents had not wanted her to go. Her mother had said so several times and then said it again. Her father had said it once, which in his language was more. The government had made its guarantees in writing, with seals and officials and a document that her father had read twice before signing, and eventually the weight of the argument had shifted from whether she would go to whether it was something they could accept, and they had accepted it the way parents accept things they cannot change, which is to say not entirely and with ongoing effort.

  The Center was larger than it looked in the vehicle that brought her, and louder, and organized in ways that were not immediately apparent. Lyra met her on the first day in a corridor that was long enough to make the walk down it feel like a statement.

  Lyra was the kind of person who communicated by telling you exactly what was true and letting you decide what to do with it, which Alicia found refreshing after a lifetime of information being managed on her behalf.

  "Two years ago," Lyra said, "you didn't just defeat a monster. You neutralised a serial hunter who had been operating in six districts without a confirmed identification, and you put a VVIP member of the Mishima Family out of commission." She paused at a security door, pressed her hand to the panel. "The Mishima Family is the organisation that has caused us the most consistent damage over the past decade. They are a cartel. Their product is illegal Lfight circuits, and their method of production is hybrid summons, which are considerably more dangerous and considerably less predictable than anything you saw in that schoolyard." The door opened. "They have been aware of you since the day you walked out of that fight. We need you to be aware of that."

  The room beyond the door was the operational center of everything the Neuroprotection Network did, which was watching. An arc of monitors stretched across one wall, hundreds of camera feeds from throughout the city, each one live, each one attended by someone whose job was to notice the difference between normal and not.

  "We know where most of them operate," Lyra said. "We watch. We respond when responding is necessary." She was looking at the monitors when one of her people called out a location. Her attention sharpened into something specific. "There we are." She turned to Alicia. "Get ready. You're going in."

  The Cyborg Terror

  The helicopter felt smaller at operational altitude than it had on the ground, which was a discovery Alicia made while gripping the handle above the door and trying to look like someone who had done this before. Below, the city moved past in a geometry that made everything look solvable from a distance.

  The shop below them, when they reached it, was already past the point of being a shop. The structure was standing but the function was not. Smoke was doing the patient work that smoke does after a fire has done its more dramatic work. The Neuroprotection team swept the perimeter and found nothing that corresponded to a Mishima Family operation.

  Then the smoke produced something that the smoke had not created.

  Two heads. A body that was built rather than born, the kind of construction that uses mechanics where biology was deemed insufficient, plated and wired and moving with a precision that biological systems don't produce. The moment it cleared the smoke it identified the helicopter as the relevant target and began proving its capabilities accordingly.

  One of the weapon systems integrated into its frame found a wing. The helicopter discovered what helicopters discover when one wing is performing differently than the other, and Alicia discovered what a decision forced by circumstance feels like in the half-second before you make it. She jumped.

  The fear arrived the moment her feet left the door frame, full and complete and taking up all available space. And then the fire answered it, coming up from somewhere below her own understanding and wrapping around her feet and slowing the geometry of the fall until it was something she could negotiate with.

  She landed. She looked up.

  The monster's laser found the pavement three feet to her left and began moving. She ran, which was the correct immediate response, and thought while running, which was the necessary secondary response. Running in the same direction as the laser was a description of a problem. Running toward the laser was a description of a solution, which required accepting several seconds of discomfort as the price of ending the discomfort permanently.

  She turned and ran at it.

  Her sword connected with the body and communicated something important, which was that the plating was several orders of magnitude beyond what she had encountered before. The impact travelled back up her arms and told her she needed a different approach before her arms could make the argument themselves.

  The monster folded its legs inward and became something that spun, and the physics of the spin met Alicia at full rotation and introduced her to the building across the street with a force that she felt in every part of her that could feel things. She sat in the rubble and coughed blood and noted that she was still holding the sword, which was good, and that the monster had changed shape again and its hand was now a drill moving toward her face, which required immediate attention.

  She moved sideways. The drill found the wall behind her instead and stayed there, which gave her the three seconds she needed.

  "Slash."

  The lion was not a sound she produced. It was a sound that produced itself through her, using the available equipment. Her arm moved and the sword moved with a force that the top of one of the monster's heads was insufficient to resist, and the head departed, and the monster reconsidered its position.

  From the smoke, a man emerged running and bleeding and doing neither thing efficiently. "Stop! What are you doing! They're going to kill me now!"

  Before she could form the question, the answer arrived in the form of a rifle shot from the rooftop, and the man's right hand answered a question nobody had asked it by leaving his right arm.

  Binoshi's Revenge

  The masked man on the rooftop had the stillness of someone who has arrived where they intended to arrive and is no longer in a hurry. He looked at Alicia with eyes that were cold in the specific way of coldness that has been cultivated rather than inherited.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  He made the gesture. "I summon you. Devil Phaoh."

  The new monster that arrived was the architectural vocabulary of the first one expressed in a different dialect. Two axe blades where the first had integrated weapons. The same category of wrongness, arranged differently.

  "Mishima Family," Alicia said.

  "I am Binoshi," the man said, from his rooftop. "My brother was taken because of you. I intend to balance that."

  The monster vanished. This was new information, and Alicia began processing it approximately half a second after it would have been useful, because the monster reappeared directly behind her and the axe was already in motion.

  The shot from a distance took the monster in the head before the axe completed its arc, and the monster was knocked sideways rather than stopped, which was enough.

  Lyra arrived with the team through two different entry points simultaneously, which was the kind of coordination that comes from people who have worked together long enough to predict each other. The cartel's reinforcements appeared from the buildings on both sides of the street in numbers that suggested they had been waiting, and the street became a different kind of environment.

  Binoshi, watching from above, identified Alicia as the priority target and fired. She moved and was almost fast enough. The bullet that found her leg was not a standard round. She understood this immediately and completely, because the fire that had absorbed every bullet she had encountered before found this one and could not, and the crystal heat of it moved through her leg as a specific and focused pain that announced itself as different in nature from everything previous.

  She went down.

  The monster found her shoulder with the flat of an axe blade, which was incidental and still significant, and she was on the ground with a leg that was not cooperating and a shoulder that was registering a formal complaint and Binoshi above her making the calculation that comes before a killing shot.

  The shot deflected.

  From somewhere in the buildings on the far side of the street, someone was making the same calculation Binoshi was making and making it faster. Binoshi's rifle swung toward the new problem.

  The first monster, whose head Alicia had removed, appeared to have reached some decision on the basis of instinct or something that functioned like it, and placed itself between the second monster and the woman on the ground. The two of them engaged each other with the specific violence of things that have no investment in anything except the immediate physics of the situation.

  Lyra reached her. "The bullet," Alicia said. "Pull it out."

  Lyra's expression communicated that she was aware this was going to be unpleasant. She pulled it out. The pain sharpened to a point and then the fire did what the fire did, and Alicia's leg remembered what legs were for.

  She stood up and watched the first monster lose, its head crushed with a finality that the fight's momentum had been indicating for some time. Something in her chest made a decision that her leg was still in the process of endorsing.

  "Slash."

  The second monster's arms left it in a single horizontal arc that covered both simultaneously, which was the kind of result that becomes possible when anger and technique arrive at the same moment. She climbed its back and finished the conversation.

  Binoshi traded fire with the distant counter-sniper, which was a problem he had not anticipated needing to solve. Lyra reached him and delivered an attack that he redirected rather than absorbed, and the two kunai he threw on his way into the smoke were already burning by the time anyone could have done anything about them. He was gone before the smoke settled.

  The Defector and the Surprise

  The man with one hand was taken to the Center and put in a bed and given something for the pain, and when he was able to speak coherently he spoke to Lyra with the specific cooperativeness of someone who has already made the most dangerous decision in their recent life and has nothing further to protect.

  "Morokana Shito," he said. "Former Mishima. I released their operational data to three separate investigative journalists eight months ago and I have been managing the consequences since. Tonight was the closest consequence so far."

  Lyra offered him the same exchange the Center offered everyone who came in from the other side with information and the willingness to use it. He accepted, which he had clearly intended to do before the conversation began.

  Alicia came to see him after. She stood at the foot of the bed and looked at the bandaged end of his right arm, and the expression on her face was not guilt exactly, because she hadn't known and couldn't have, but it was something adjacent to guilt that was doing the work guilt does.

  "If I had been faster," she said.

  "You were handling another problem," Shito said. He looked at her with the level assessment of someone who has been around long enough to calibrate situations accurately. "Everyone in a fight makes decisions that look different from the outside after the fact. I've made plenty that looked much worse. The hand is gone. I'm alive. Those are the two relevant facts and one of them is better than it could have been."

  Alicia reached out and shook his remaining hand. He shook it back.

  Lyra found Alicia in the corridor afterward with an expression that was doing its best not to be transparent. "There's something in the cafeteria for you."

  "What kind of something?"

  "The kind you should go and see rather than have described."

  The cafeteria doors opened and Alice covered the distance between them and Alicia at a speed that suggested she had been waiting just far enough back to build a proper run-up. Jasmine came behind her at a pace that was more controlled and equally sincere.

  "Three weeks," Alice said, into Alicia's shoulder, which was the one that had been hit and was therefore mildly protesting. "Three weeks of paperwork and authorizations and background checks and one very suspicious security officer who read my file twice. We made it."

  Jasmine held out a container that was still warm and that smelled, unmistakably, of fried rice and fried chicken. "We weren't sure what the food was like here," she said, in her careful voice. "So we brought the correct food."

  Alicia laughed, which came out of her before she'd decided to laugh, the way things come out when the situation is too specifically right for the usual processing to apply. She hugged Jasmine and the container simultaneously, which required coordination, and then she pinched Jasmine's cheek out of an excess of feeling, which Jasmine accepted with patient suffering.

  Lyra cleared her throat from the doorway.

  They looked at her. She looked at the container of fried rice. She picked up a plate. "It would be negligent to let it go cold," she said, and sat down.

  The Sharpshooter

  The cafeteria was doing what cafeterias do when the people in them have recently survived something together, producing the specific warmth of a shared meal eaten after shared danger, which is one of the more reliable human pleasures.

  Alicia went to get drinks and found a young man with glasses standing at the service counter looking at his options with the focused consideration of someone who has learned that appearing decisive in low-stakes situations reduces the number of times people ask you to make large decisions.

  He looked up. He was roughly her age, perhaps a year older, with the particular build of someone who spends significant time in a very specific position.

  "Hello," he said. "My name is Jack. I was the one shooting from the building earlier. You're Alicia. I've been told quite a bit about you." He paused. "I hope that's not alarming. It's meant to be complimentary."

  Alicia looked at him for a moment. He had the eyes of someone accustomed to seeing things clearly at a distance, which was a different quality than most people's eyes. "You deflected Binoshi's shot," she said.

  "And a few others," he said, modestly and accurately.

  "You saved my life," she said. "Come sit with us."

  He looked at the table where Alice was already doing something emphatic with her hands and Jasmine was listening to it with the expression she reserved for Alice's more animated moments. He looked back at Alicia.

  "Alright," he said.

  She took him by the arm before he could revisit the decision and brought him to the table, and Lyra looked up from her fried rice and grinned.

  "Here comes our sniper. Jack 'The Sharpeyes,' everyone."

  The table produced a sound that made Jack's face produce a colour that he clearly would have preferred to keep private. Alicia put a glass in front of him and smiled at him with the directness she brought to everything, and he looked at the glass and then at the smile and then at the glass again.

  Around them, the cafeteria settled into the particular rhythm of people who have been through something together and have food in front of them and people they are glad to be with, and the sounds of it filled the room in a way that made the operational center on the other side of the building feel, just for the length of this meal, very far away.