"Visual," Ashley said as she pointed through the glass.

  The transport was a rolling slab of black alloy. Unmarked plating thick enough to ignore small-arms fire. It was the kind of corporate tank used to move sensitive assets through the rot. Cole held the follow distance. He threaded the needle between automated delivery drones and courier skiffs. The district was ugly. Squat functionalism bleeding steam from a thousand vents.

  Ashley scanned the transport. Titan filled the driver's cage. He gripped the wheel like he wanted to snap the column. Sarah rode shotgun. Silver hair flaring under the streetlight. Calder would be in the back, probably still fuming about his poker loss.

  "Can you get closer without being obvious?" Ashley asked, already reaching for the case containing her rifle.

  Cole tucked the wake of a larger cargo hauler. "We're currently the only non-commercial vehicle in this sector at two in the morning Ash. Not exactly an easy ask. "

  "Good point. Get me within sixty feet."

  "Sixty feet of that thing? Ashley, it's built like a—"

  "I don't need a door." She unfolded the weapon. The four-foot chassis locked into place with a mechanical snap. "I'm going in."

  Cole glanced at her. Then the transport. Then her again. "You’re serious."

  "When am I not serious?"

  "Sixty feet it is." He punched the throttle. "Just remember. If this goes south I don't have wings."

  "No," Ashley agreed. "But you have those fancy new spheres. Two can easily hold your weight."

  The city blurred. A mag-lev train hammered overhead. The wake turbulence rattled the suspension. Below the tracks the homeless camps burned barrel fires against corrugated steel.

  With a flick of her wrist Ashley materialized nearly indestructible reflective motes around the Ryzen. She could see herself repeated a dozen times, each image a potential doorway.

  "Closer," she said.

  Cole pulled alongside the transport, matching its speed.

  Through the side glass she clocked Calder in the back. Hand guarding the jacket pocket. The data shard would be there.

  "This is a bad idea," Cole muttered. He kept the wheel steady.

  "Don't worry. I have done this before. Once." Her camo systems engaged. Light bent around the armor until she was just a heat haze in the cabin. "Keep pace. This won't take long."

  She kicked the door. Wind roared into the vacuum. The asphalt blurred below. Potholes deep enough to swallow a bike. A Void sphere materialized under her boot. The antigravity field solid as stone despite hanging over nothing.

  Then she jumped.

  The world broke down into angles of incidence and reflection. She rode the light. Mirror to mirror. Frame to frame. The physics of the jump felt like slipping between pages of a book. The city blurred into a datastream. She clocked Cole in the Ryzen. His face was tight. She clocked the street. A stim deal in the alley. A corp drone ignoring the traffic. Noise.

  The transport's glass was armored polycarbonate. But it held an image. That was all she needed.

  Ashley pressed her palm against the glass from outside—and pushed through.

  Reality bent. Light twisted. The reflection accepted her like water accepts a diver, and suddenly she was inside, materializing in the cargo area like a ghost stepping through a mirror.

  The interior was exactly what she'd expected. Minimal lighting that cast harsh shadows and cargo netting along the sides that currently held nothing but a few equipment cases. The air smelled of gun oil and cologne.

  Calder sat in the passenger cradle. He mopped his brow with a silk rag. His thinning hair was slightly mussed from the evening's excitement, his suit wrinkled from tension. One hand rested on his jacket pocket—right there, ten feet away, the data shard practically calling to her.

  Titan occupied the driver’s seat. The mesh divider looked flimsy against that kind of mass.

  Sarah sat beside him, her chrome fingers drumming a nervous rhythm against her rifle. The weapon was a piece of art of Forge Domain craftsmanship. Her silver hair was pulled back in a bun, revealing the chrome ports at the base of her skull where her augmentations interfaced directly with her nervous system.

  Neither had noticed Ashley yet. Her camouflage field was holding, bending light around her form until she was just a shimmer in the air, a heat mirage in an air-conditioned space.

  She moved at a glacial pace. One step. Two. The floor beneath her feet was reinforced steel that wanted to creak with her weight, but her armor's systems compensated, distributing the pressure evenly, silently.

  Calder was talking to himself, replaying the poker game. "Fucking bitch. No way those aces were natural. Should have known, should have spotted it..."

  Six feet away now. Five. Four.

  Ashley's hand extended toward his pocket. Just needed to slip in, grab the shard case, slip out. They'd never know until—

  Titan's head snapped up.

  His nostrils flared. Once. Twice.

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  "Something's wrong," he growled.

  Sarah's head turned. "What?"

  "I smell..." Titan inhaled deeply, his chest expanding. "Light. Ozone. Like right before lightning strikes." Another sniff. "Someone's using a Domain. Close."

  Shit. He can smell the electromagnetic signature of my camouflage field, taste the photons bending around my form.

  "In here?" Sarah's rifle was already shifting reconfiguring from transport mode to combat mode. "How? We're sealed."

  "I'm telling you what I smell." Titan's muscles were swelling, veins standing out like cables as combat hormones flooded his system. "Lucent Domain. Active camouflage. They're already inside."

  Calder's eyes went wide. "What? Where—"

  Titan's arm stretched, bone and muscle elongating like rubber. The fist, now the size of a sledgehammer head, hurtled toward where Ashley stood.

  She dropped, rolling left. The fist cratered the wall behind her, leaving a dent that looked like a meteor impact. The impact shook the entire vehicle, and her camouflage flickered, failed.

  Now they could see her.

  "Fuck!" Calder scrambled backward, pressing against the wall.

  Fuck stealth.

  Ashley lunged forward, shoving Calder back against his seat with enough force to knock the wind out of him. Her hand plunged into his jacket pocket, fingers closing around the shard.

  Calder's eyes widened. "You—"

  Sarah was already moving, chrome flowing into weapon configurations Ashley had never seen before. Titan was turning, his other arm extending toward Ashley's throat, fingers spreading into claws that could punch through tank armor.

  No time for subtlety.

  Ashley's rifle snapped up. The window beside Calder took the hit, the blade at the rifle's tip punching through like it was paper. The window exploded, showering the interior with diamonds of safety glass as wind howled into the cabin.

  The transport swerved as Titan fought to control it one-handed while reaching for her. Sarah's weapon was coming up, something between a rifle and a rail gun, reality distortion rounds already chambering with a grinding, electric screech as if magnets were violently misaligned.

  Ashley jumped.

  But she didn't fall. One of her mirror discs was still outside, keeping pace with the transport. Her body flickered—inside one moment, outside the next, her form reconstructing in the reflection floating beside the vehicle. The transition felt like being pulled through water made of light, every molecule breaking apart and rebuilding in the space between heartbeats.

  She had the data shard. Mission accomplished.

  Sort of.

  Ashley oriented herself, standing on her floating mirror disc like it was solid ground while the city rushed past below. The industrial district was a maze of pipes and scaffolding, steam vents creating curtains of white that could hide anything. She looked for the Ryzen, found it pulling up alongside, Cole visible through the windshield with an expression that said I knew this would happen.

  Then she heard it. Mechanical grinding. Hydraulics hissing like angry snakes.

  The transport's rear bay doors were opening.

  "Oh, come on."

  Sarah stood in the open bay, wind whipping her hair. Her weapon had finished its transformation—a rifle merged with a rail gun.

  She fired.

  The first shot screamed past Ashley, close enough that she felt it tug at the fabric of space-time. The air where it passed ceased to exist for a fraction of a second, leaving a vacuum that thundered closed with a sonic boom.

  The second shot clipped one of her mirror discs. The construct was simply gone, erased from reality like it had never existed. The sudden loss made Ashley stumble, her connection to that reflection severed like a phantom limb suddenly missing.

  The third shot hit the Ryzen.

  The impact caused an unraveling. The right engine shrieked as metal and circuitry began to deconstruct at the molecular level, reality forgetting how to hold those pieces together. Warning alarms screamed in harmony with the dying engine. The car pitched hard to the right, losing altitude.

  Through the Ryzen's window, Ashley saw Cole fighting the controls, his arm blazing with fractal patterns as he tried to compensate for the lost engine. But physics was winning. The vehicle was going down, heading for a cluster of abandoned warehouses that would make an excellent grave for expensive vehicles and their drivers.

  The Ryzen's door blew off its hinges, Cole's swords having carved through the locking mechanism.

  He launched himself out standing on two of the Void spheres Ashley had given him, hovering in mid-air like he'd been doing it his whole life. The spheres responded to his thoughts, keeping him aloft as his car spiraled toward the streets below. The remaining three spheres orbited around him in protective patterns. He had acclimated to the tech faster than the spec sheet suggested.

  In the sodium glare of the industrial sector he looked like something out of a fever dream. Part human. Part weapon. All dangerous.

  "Nice of you to join the party," she commed.

  "My new car just died.” Ashely could hear the anger beneath the casual tone. "I loved that car."

  "I will cover the replacement."

  "You will cover the upgrade package."

  Behind them, the transport had slammed to a halt. The rest of the bay doors fell away, and Titan emerged.

  But he wasn't the same.

  Wings—massive, grotesque things made of muscle and bone and stretched flesh—erupted from his back with wet tearing sounds that carried even over the wind. They shouldn't allow him to fly, but Titan's Flesh Domain didn't care about aerodynamics or biology. It cared about will, and he willed himself to fly.

  He launched into the air with a roar that shattered windows, seven feet of gene-modded murder with the wingspan of a military transport. His eyes had gone completely black, additional muscle mass packing onto his frame even as he flew, his body constantly optimizing itself for aerial combat.

  Sarah leapt after him, her flight elegant where his was brutal. Forge Domains were able to redirect momentum through kinetic bursts from their forge-ports. But this was something else. Sustained flight. Thrusters embedded in her chrome flared with continuous output, keeping her airborne instead of just launching her in explosive dashes. An upgrade.

  Below, the Ryzen finally hit, exploding across abandoned warehouses in a fireball that painted the night orange. Somewhere, car alarms were going off. Somewhere else, people were calling emergency services that would arrive too late to matter. This was the industrial district—violence here was as common as rust.

  Ashley hung in the air on her mirror disc, her rifle in hand.

  Cole floated on his Void spheres, surrounded by enemies who could fly, who'd just destroyed his car, who were converging from multiple angles with murder in their eyes and hardware to make it happen.

  Titan approached from the left. Flesh hung from his wings in tatters where the rapid growth had outpaced his skin's ability to stretch. He didn't seem to notice or care.

  Sarah came from the right, chrome gleaming in the firelight from below, her weapon tracking them both.

  "So," Cole's voice came through her helmet's comm, somehow managing to sound almost casual despite the circumstances. "Got a plan B?"

  Ashley's rifle charged, light gathering in the barrel. Her armor ran through combat scenarios, calculating angles, velocities, probability of survival. The numbers weren't good.

  "Yeah," she replied, raising her weapon toward Titan's grotesque form. "Don't die."

  Ashley smiled behind her helmet. She pulled the trigger.

  The night exploded into violence.