Kelly let out a low whistle, a real grin spreading across her face for the first time in what felt like centuries. She hadn't come here for a lead at all. “Well, look at that. I just hit the mother lode, and I wasn't even trying. This is a good day. A spectacularly good day." That was more solid intel than she'd dug up in years.

  "For this information, Luigi," she announced, the decision hitting her with sudden, perfect clarity, "and for that Deadtech sphere, I'm going to change your life."

  "Change my life?" The shopkeeper's face twisted with disdain. "What’re you, Jesus? A pop idol? You sing or something?"

  “No, I don’t sing, but I do have the voice of an angel.” Kelly was no pop star. And she wasn’t a religious figure. She could only change his life for today, not forever. That project was still in development.

  Luigi opened his mouth to tell her to get lost, then stopped. A calculation flickered behind his eyes. "You're not joking? You're actually serious?"

  "Fatally." It might take a few dozen resets, but Kelly always settled her debts.

  "Hmm... What the hell, I’ve got nothing to lose. If you've got something of equal value, fine." Luigi placed his hands on the glass case, his fingers tracing its seams. He stopped, turning to her before triggering the lock. "Cough it up, Michael Jackson."

  "I told you, my voice is angelic—timeless even, but I'm not a singer; my choir is a demolition crew." Kelly said, uploading the full schematics for the monomolecular blade to a data packet and handing it over. She hadn’t visited Genecorp for a sanction yet—she hadn’t visited anyone. The data packet was unpatented and unclaimed. It would make him rich. Just for today.

  The weapon wasn't perfect. She’d always known it could be overcome with the right magic. The undead knight's defensive fields had proven that. She doubted it would even scratch the angel—was it Vermir? Verrimisir?—whatever his possessed-pigeon name was. She had watched him block deadlier near-light-speed impacts than she could currently dish out. And she planned to improve the design today with whatever she learned from studying the magic staffs and crystals anyway.

  The tech was a revolutionary blend of fields that produced the sharpest portable edge humanity had ever made, giving them another tool against the current climate, albeit with expensive material costs. If Luigi sold the rights, he'd be set for life. Today, anyway. In the future, once she'd broken past this day, she'd find a better, less proprietary way to repay him.

  Luigi stared, reading the schematics blurring across his vision, his eyes widening with each line of the tool's basic description and the video demonstration she’d so helpfully attached. "Is this real?" he asked, his voice hushed.

  Kelly flicked her wrist. The thick bracelet unfolded into a scalpel, then a bat, then a machete, its edge cleanly slicing a sliver off Luigi's apparently impenetrable wall. The molecular blade collapsed back into a harmless, fashionable bracelet. "It’s real. As real as your browser history getting you into trouble."

  Luigi's face flushed with excitement, likely picturing his future riches, before he calmed himself, his enterprising nature taking over. "You know the hardlight sphere has other functions we haven't figured out. That makes it even more valuable. I'm still taking a loss," he lied.

  "What do you propose?" Kelly said calmly, leaning forward to study the sphere.

  “You heard of 'Obsidian'? That gang that ditched the canisters and started pretending to be legit? The almost-overclocked group trying to spread through the city?”

  “You want me to go biblical on them? I am a time god, you know. A baby one. I could do it.” Delusions of grandeur aside, Kelly had been chewing on the Architect’s words about her nature. The description wasn't entirely wrong; her looping was beyond the status— and her soul was beyond comprehension; partying in another dimension. So she ran with it. It was fun.

  He nodded, clearly familiar with the general concept of blowing things up. “Well… your EQ is high. They took over the northern gate weeks ago, where the money flows in. It's been a downhill slide since. They get worse every day. The partial overclocked are insane and aggressive. Unpredictable. Worse than even you—no offense—they're trying to take over everything. The grunts, the Threshold and Tank ones, they're the real problem. They snatch people right off the street. For parts? To test some new filters? Nobody knows. I don't know what the buzzbrained freaks do with them, but you don't see them again."

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  Luigi's fist clenched, his jaw working.

  "Even families. Kids."

  At that, the hairs on the back of Kelly’s neck rose. Her humor evaporated, replaced by a flat, metallic calm. She’d had this conversation with Dr. Haider once—the glorified black-market pharmacist with a Nobel Prize and an arrest warrant in every decent country—whom she’d met in her unfortunate youth and who had stayed, probably because he saw value in her connection to Jellybean. Family was important to her. Always had been. It was a non-negotiable line. Kids were off-limits. Especially the ones with nothing.

  Especially since she’d had a rough childhood herself. Her time in foster care had been a series of catastrophic misfortunes, kidnap, criminal encounters and two very dead carers—not by her hand. It was something she never spoke about, rarely thought of, and absolutely did not enjoy revisiting. Kelly had never had a real family of her own, at least not until she’d met Jellybean. “Do the police know?”

  “They know exactly what’s going on. They just don’t give a damn. Their concern stops at cash, critical systems, key infrastructure, things that actually matter—which, I’ll admit, they guard like their lives depend on it. Everything else is decoration. The few stationed out here couldn’t care less about the outskirts. Especially not here in the mist. They show up only when a paycheck’s involved.” Luigi’s lip curled in disgust. “A few homeless, addicts, or lowlifes disappearing? Doesn’t register. The overclocked are just doing the city a favor, clearing out the trash they pretend not to see.”

  “What about the corpos?”

  "Venus and Jackhammer went at them once," Luigi said. "Came close to wiping them out.”

  "Venus?" Kelly's eyebrows shot up. "What's Vaughn's princess doing slumming it out here? She grow a conscience, or just get bored? That doesn’t add up."

  Venus was the youngest of Vaughn's children, but, if the press was to be believed, she was every bit as ruthless as her older brothers.

  "Who knows? Wasn't a company move, that's for sure. She was off the leash—branching out. Her and Jackhammer were the only ones who almost did something about it. Then they just... stopped; struck a deal. Now they've both got bigger problems." He gestured to the ceiling. "Until the overclocked start killing tourists, making the death count hard to ignore, or wrecking something that actually matters, the corpos won't so much as blink."

  Kelly cut him off, her voice a flat, sharp blade. “Hold on. Obsidian. Weeks on the ground. And they haven’t strong-armed the doped canisters, lifted the tech, not even the premium-grade hardware?” It almost sounded like they were way past the ‘overclocked’ stage.

  She leaned forward, the movement all kinetic potential. “Overclocking is a hostile takeover of the brainstem. Like an illness of the mind where the voices in your head not only hated you and your kind, but had a collective IQ that could design a relativistic kill vehicle from scrap metal. Standard procedure is a messy civil war inside your skull. You either bleed out of your ears fighting the invasion, or you lose a round and paint the walls with anyone nearby. It escalates whenever they lose control. It’s a rampage until one side wins. Every single time.”

  Luigi quirked a brow at her. “You seem to know a lot about the overclocked.”

  She should know.

  She was raised by one.

  A dry, humorless sound escaped her. “I had a very thorough education.”

  This was all wrong. Borderline-overclocked didn't do 'restraint.' They did screaming, blood-soaked meltdowns in public squares. But Obsidian? They were playing house. No infrastructure attacks. No massacres. Their entire play was a disciplined, two-part maneuver: control the Mistmarket and pressure the Wealth District's air filtration contracts. They showed a complete absence of the typical infrastructure attacks and the public, messy rampages.

  She'd seen their foot soldiers in the wealth sectors—clean, professional. They had to be using normals or mercs for that, like the hired guns at the Hyperloop. You couldn’t negotiate a backdoor deal with a hive-mind screaming for cosmic annihilation in your skull. But that didn't explain the core group's discipline. Kelly pondered then came to a conclusion.

  The reason was easy to guess. The government and the corpos couldn’t care less about the area unless their interests were attacked. As long as they were paid, the body count was low, and nobody important went missing, they wouldn’t lift a finger.

  She'd almost given them credit. She thought maybe the gang had gone corporate or changed leadership. Traded doped canisters for a slicker, white-collar grift. But clearly, something else was at play.

  "Meh, not my problem—but it is yours, though, isn't it?" Kelly looked at the store owner, her gaze calculating.

  Saving the botanical lab and finding Jennie were her only priorities. But she would still keep her promise to Luigi, no matter what it took.

  "I will fulfill your wish on my last 'today'," the scientist promised. "It's a promise I'll never break."

  "Your last 'today'? Are you high?"

  "Only on life. It's my retirement from this beautiful day, but not the end of my immortality. Think of it as a promotion with a less predictable benefits package." Once she achieved her goals and mastered the loop, she would allow the day to end permanently. This plan assumed she could control the loops, which seemed plausible given nobody else could see them.

  Luigi had found himself on the short list of people she decided to prevent from a gruesome, albeit somewhat short, death.

  She had decided this in the last loop, after stopping the explosion, only to be mentally hijacked by an angel and his asshole god. Mastering the looping ability fit neatly into the "crack magic" objective. Her goals had not changed at all. She would still find Jennie, and she would still crack magic, which meant mastering the loop.

  It was a good way to kick the pigeon god and his angel in the teeth, too.