The informant’s face wasn’t built for sweating, but the bastard sure gave it a shot. The little thing's skin—if you could even call it that—looked more like the inside of a boiled shrimp, glassy and pink and flexing with every twitch.

  Elara Szanto pressed the edge of her boot deeper into the creature’s thorax, where the plates met and the nerves bunched up nice and tender.

  “The next time you play dumb, I’m feeding you to the cleaning drones one chitin at a time.”

  The thing made a noise like a clogged drain and spat up a glob of something viscous and blue. Karn Blackhorn, looming so large in black hide he practically blocked out the alley’s pathetic neon, just grunted. He’d gone full silent mode, arms crossed and horns scraping the low conduit pipes, but Elara could tell he was enjoying this. If a minotaur could smirk, he was doing it.

  “Look, look! I don’t know—” The informant’s mandibles fluttered. “I just, I heard, okay? Nobody’s seen it but the guys who got eaten, and they’re not exactly chatty now, are they?”

  Elara clicked her tongue and leaned in. The biofilm stink coming off this alley of Whisper's Edge was nothing compared to the informant's breath, which had a distinct note of burnt plastic and dead things.

  “You’re going to do better than that, darling. Because I’m tired, and Karn’s on edge, and we both know what happens when he runs out of patience.”

  The creature’s eye stalks dilated, then narrowed. “Rumor is, it started as a blob. Just your usual fucked up SoulCorp shit. But then it started eating things. Not just meat. Data. DNA. Anything with a signature. Now it’s… it’s not a blob anymore. It’s everything it ever ate. And it’s hungry.”

  Karn uncrossed his arms. The informant wilted.

  “Where,” Elara demanded, “is it now?”

  “Out.” The thing tried to backpedal, but Elara’s boot kept it pinned. “It broke containment a few cycles back. SoulCorp sent in a clean-up crew. No survivors. Then the heavies—corporate hit squad, not even the local muscle. They lost too. Heard maybe some local muscle got hired to trap it. Bulkheads got some tech that ain't they're style, you know? Last sighting was in the Rust Warrens, but you know how it is down there. Ecosystem’s a nightmare. If it’s smart, it’s laying low.”

  Elara let up just enough for the informant to scurry backwards, then caught it by one of its arm-spines and yanked it close.

  “If you hear anything else, you ping me. Otherwise, I’ll find you. And I’ll bring butter.”

  The informant nodded so hard its frills nearly detached, then bolted into the dark, trailing slime and whimpers.

  She wiped her hands on her pants and looked up at Karn, who was already lighting a stim cigar and watching her with those unreadable black eyes.

  “Well, that’s just fucking fantastic,” she said. “We’re going after shape-shifting murder-pudding with a taste for gene soup.”

  Karn nodded, exhaled a cloud of black pepper and chocolate that made Elara’s nose hairs tickle, and started walking.

  “You coming? Or you need a minute to write your will?”

  She fell in step beside him, trying not to think about all the ways this could go wrong.

  “If I die, I’m haunting you.”

  Karn grunted, which she chose to interpret as a promise.

  The Rust Warrens stank of old meat, ozone, and the kind of oil that never quite left your clothes. Elara’s boots squelched through puddles painted a rainbow sheen by leaking coolant. Her headache had settled into a low, throbbing hum, like a power inverter on the verge of catastrophic failure. She kept one hand on the butt of her sidearm and the other on the grip tape of her neuro-shunt.

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  Karn followed in her wake, shoulders hunched to clear the drooping cables and pipes. He looked like a walking demolition charge in a suit two sizes too small, the leather of his double shoulder rig at his back, straining with each step.

  She’d heard stories about the Warrens, but nothing prepared her for the scale. The tunnels corkscrewed in on themselves, a fractal hive of abatement shafts and abandoned service corridors. Every surface was either corroded or tagged with the sigils of a dozen different gangs—none of them friendly. Some of the scrawls moved if you looked too long: augmented reality overlays, or maybe something less explainable. Elara didn’t care to find out which. She’d set her contact-overlay sensors to minimum, but even then, the air was thick with pop-ups and scam banners, each one flickering a fraction too late for her brain to filter.

  They ducked under a collapsed girder and emerged into an open chamber, a cathedral of metal and shadow. Karn scanned the ceiling, nostrils flaring, then jerked his chin at the grated catwalk overhead.

  “Two, maybe three up there,” he said, voice pitched low.

  Elara didn’t bother looking up. She could feel the eyes. “Wanna slow down? See if they'll lead the way?”

  He grunted.

  She risked a glance at her wrist display. The creature’s last known sighting was somewhere below them, deep in the maze. Which meant every step they took was being watched by at least three interested parties, not counting whichever psychos called the Warrens home.

  She motioned Karn forward and kept to the shadows, moving fast but not so fast she’d miss a tripwire or a pressure plate. The tunnel narrowed, the walls closing in, and the temperature dropped enough to fog her breath. Karn’s hooves clattered on the steel, echoing in the dark.

  Elara’s pulse spiked as a shape flickered at the edge of her vision—a ragged silhouette, all teeth and data ports, leaning against a fuse box the size of a coffin.

  “Halt,” it rasped, voice modulated through a synth-vocoder. “State your business.”

  Elara went for charm, or the closest thing she had. “Here to see the new boss. Heard there’s a signing bonus.”

  The thing’s laughter was like a modem dying. “You’re not local. And you're definitely some kind of cop. That’s a problem.”

  Karn stepped forward, horns catching the weak light. “We’re looking for a package. Maybe you’ve seen it—ugly, glassy, walks on legs but shouldn’t.”

  The thing’s face split into a grin. “You want the hungry hybrid. So does everyone else. Why should I help you?”

  Elara flicked her neuro-shunt, sending a pulse through the air. The thing jerked, then froze, its data ports flickering in alarm. “Because if you don’t,” she said, “I’ll rewrite your personality to ‘obedient housecat.’”

  The standoff lasted three heartbeats, then the thing stood aside, gesturing deeper into the maze. “You’ll want the Forge. Take the red line, then follow the heat.”

  They moved on, Karn muttering, “Bet that’s not the last we see of him.”

  Elara shrugged. “If he tries anything, you get to break him in half. Consider it therapy.”

  The red line was easy to spot, a streak of oxidized paint running along the tunnel’s edge. It led them through a gauntlet of gang checkpoints and half-lit alcoves, each manned by something worse than the last.

  At one, a pair of gnomes in exo-suits tried to shake them down for “maintenance fees.” Karn bared his teeth and sparked the tips of his horns. They vanished behind a hatch, slamming it shut with a pneumatic hiss.

  They were a couple of hundred meters in, when the first trap sprung. Elara caught the glint of the tripwire just as it went to clinch tight around her ankle. She hit the deck, rolled, and came up firing. The slug punched a hole in the darkness, and something yowled in pain. Karn reached down and grabbed the explosive with his thumb on the detonator. He held it over his wrist-pad till there was faint beep, then popped it into his pocket for safe keeping.

  “You good?” he asked.

  Elara brushed a smear of blood from her cheek. “Peachy. Their traps are simple, but simple only has to work once.”

  The next checkpoint was abandoned, but the floor was sticky with something that didn’t look like oil. They skirted it, moving fast. The heat grew with every step, the walls sweating condensation as they closed in on the Forge.

  The chamber was a vision from a fever dream: a furnace of shattered servers and molten steel, with a ring of figures huddled around a central dais.

  On the platform, restrained by a lattice of glowing wires, was the containment breach. It was bigger now; its muscle layered with new strata of armor and bone. Its eyes met Elara’s, and for a moment, she sensed something almost familiar—an echo of her own desperation.

  She didn’t have time to dwell. The ring of figures turned as one, each one masked and bristling with weaponry.

  “Welcome to the Forge,” said the leader, voice flat without a trace of worry. “We’ve been expecting you.”

  Karn cracked his knuckles. Elara drew her sidearm, thumbed the safety off, and smiled.

  “Let’s make this quick,” she said, and dove into the fray.