Lucy tore through the silent streets on her Japanese muscle, the machine humming under her with a low synth-fuel growl. The city had gone eerily quiet. Neon spires reached hungry for the sky, corporate signage flickering in the rain-soaked morning gloom. Usually Rain City never slept, even at 2 am, but tonight it felt deserted, as if something had stolen its heartbeat.
She’d known this quiet wouldn’t last. A roar of panic had spread through the world since last night’s data dump at 9 pm local time: someone had leaked the existence of a remote killing program that could murder anyone, anywhere with a BCI.
Only two weeks ago, Peril had her stretched out on a bed, layering ICE over all her implants. But after Boltz killed that insurance guy with it, the cat should’ve been out of the bag. Now it was—loudly, catastrophically.
Lucy was surprised the secret had lasted this long. Doubted such a secret could ever stay hidden
Hurtling down empty avenues, Lucy’s mind raced.
News feeds had erupted with chaos. Major networks, top tech giants, all blindsided. Everyone knew now: a remote kill program floating in the digital ether.
People screamed at cameras, desperate. Most had yanked their BCI connections offline, terrified of invisible death. A tiny minority, more extreme and paranoid, had torn their BCIs right from their skulls, leaving themselves brain-damaged, desperate to escape a phantom gunman.
Companies promised patches by tomorrow morning—ha. Lucy scoffed, weaving between abandoned market stalls. Peril had taken a week to write custom ICE, and she’d known about the program for months. The corps might rush something out, but Lucy doubted its efficacy.
Lucy closed in on her destination.
She left the main freeway behind, taking side streets that felt like alleys carved from concrete bone. She dialled down her bike’s muffler, not wanting to announce her presence.
Aurum had offered her a Transit gig—the first in ages. Her rates were too high for these gigs normally, but tonight was special. Everyone cowered indoors, terrified of a digital sniper.
Aurum had said his usual Transit runners wouldn’t pick up, so here Lucy was. Getting paid a fortune for a simple delivery job.
The Black Chalice would usually host job postings for mercs and fixers like this one. But now even the shadow data fortress too stood quiet too, most hardcore hackers busy analysing the leaked code, forming small hacker collectives to craft better ICE. Another testament to how the world had changed overnight. Even the criminals were hiding, while some were cooperating to save each other.
She parked the bike a block from the apartment block she’d targeted.
She checked her guns, then cycled her enhancements to a ready state. Checking the readout of each before proceeding. Lucy tapped into her cyberarm’s tactical computer feeds. It lit up in her peripheral vision, a quiet ally feeding her constant options. The expert learnsoft to understand it fully had been a particularly complex one, taking two days to digest in itself, with another day for processing.
She popped two drones from her leg hive mount—tiny, silent, and swift—and sent them ahead.
Her cyberoptics glowed faintly, scanning for threats. Inputting more data. The tactical computer processed the various feeds instantly, highlighting on the orientation system escape routes, potential vantage points, and structural weak spots. Always measure twice, cut once. That’s how you stayed alive.
Normally, even this far out, there’d be gangers, night hawkers, street stalls slinging noodles or knockoff implants. Nothing tonight. The city of eight million had turned into a ghost town.
Lucy remembered how vulnerable she’d been - felt - before the upgrades on her first few Transit jobs. Now she moved with controlled precision, each step measured, enhanced muscles and tendons singing quietly in tune.
She approached the apartment lobby. Second floor, that was her mark. A simple pickup job. No contact. Another paranoid client who left a package out in the open. Lack of a drop off person wasn''t unknown. Lucy had picked up bags from alleyways before. Several times from trash bins.
At the apartment’s door—slightly ajar—she deployed micro drones to peek inside. The room was dark, empty. Just a lone backpack on a cheap plastic table. No sign of anyone inside.
Her tactical HUD flashed green: no immediate hostiles. Strange. She drew a pistol, carefully fitted a suppressor. Better safe than sorry.
As she stepped inside, something felt off.
The air tasted stale, the silence pressing on her ears. Just a bag, no guards, no watchers. She advanced carefully, drones returning to their compartments.
Suddenly, a faint whine, not audible but felt, a buzzing mosquito inside her skull. Her HUD flared warnings. System crash imminent.
She staggered, fighting for control. Pain hammered her head. Her implants screamed, flashing error codes. She gasped, trying to will her body to respond. Her heart implant? Her kidneys? Everything was going haywire.
Lucy had never felt an assault like this—pure digital poison worming through her network. She tried to raise a hand, but her arm fell limp. Her legs buckled. She hit the floor, vision swarmed by red icons and flickering static.
Her last thought before slipping into unconsciousness: her head felt trapped in a steel vise, and she was powerless, sinking into silent darkness.
*
Anne: Wake up, Skadi. I need you.
She lay sprawled on the cold linoleum, a stale chemical smell lingering in the empty apartment. Lucy’s systems flashed red in her peripheral vision—cyberarm offline, lower left leg offline, all subsystems rolling through full reboot cycles. Another thirty-five seconds of dead weight limbs.
Anne: Skadi, please, you''ve got to wake up. Now.
The air tasted of old dust and cheap disinfectant, as if no one had lived here in decades. Outside, muffled city hum, distant sirens, but oddly muted. Rain City never this quiet, never this tense. Rain hammered the cracked window, neon reflections bouncing over her inert frame.
Anne: LETHANDA! WAKE THE HELL UP RANGER!
Lucy''s eyes snapped open.
Anne’s voice hissed through her internal link, distant and urgent. Lucy tried to query her BCI’s internal clock—no immediate response, the AI core still rebooting. Everything sluggish. Her head ached, no pain editor. She manually pulled up her internal chrono: out for four, maybe five minutes. Too long.
She forced herself upright, ignoring Anne’s frantic messages. Anne. The same Anne who might’ve just hit her with the Damocles hack. The media had scrambled for names since the news broke a few hours ago—Damocles seemed to stick, a sword over everyone’s head.
Or not kill her, Lucy mused, silently thanking Peril’s prior preparation. Damocles had failed to finish her off.
Anne: Okay, don’t answer. In fifteen seconds, a cop is breaching that door. Move.
Lucy glanced around. The room was bare—no furniture except the tiny folding table with the backpack on. She snatched her pistol from the floor, its matte finish absorbing the dim overhead glow. She flipped the table, took cover behind flimsy plastic and aluminum. Her advanced systems—tactical computer, drones, ReflexArc-X—still offline for a minute more. She could move her right arm soon, her foot maybe in seconds. The gun link winked into existence in her HUD. At least some old friends still worked.
A slam. The door crashed open. A cop in flak vest and helmet, pump-action shotgun raised. Seattle PD standard, courtesy of some corp contract with Shibuya Arms. The corridor’s fluorescent flickered, and Lucy inhaled sour sweat and cheap synth-wood polish.
Who set her up like this? No time. She fired a burst of silenced shots into the cop’s centre mass, tracking upward. Flak vest took most hits, but faceguard cracked from the last shots. The cop staggered, winded, ribs probably bent inward, but alive enough to be dangerous.
She had seconds before that shotgun turned the room into a kill-zone. Her cyberarm finished rebooting. She vaulted over the table in a smooth arc, the ReflexArc-X not fully online yet, but her base enhancements enough to close distance gracefully.
The cop tried levelling the shotgun, but Lucy’s kick sent it skidding across the grimy floor. Another pair of silenced shots into the vest for good measure. At this range, bones broke despite the kevlar. They gasped, armour plates creaking.
She took a knee on their chest, leaning in to keep them pinned. The corridor outside was quiet—no backup yet, but that wouldn’t last. Seattle PD never sent one cop alone. Where was the squad? A partner at least?
Anne: You’ve got to go, Lethanda. Aurum would always have a backup plan!
Lucy’s systems hummed, finally online. She popped her hive drones, tiny skittering machines pouring out, scanning the hallway and outside street. Her tactical computer fed her options in green text. A car outside, new in the last five minutes. Unfamiliar in her map from before the attack. The cops? Or something else?
Aurum? A backup plan from Aurum? Anne’s cryptic warnings rattled Lucy’s nerves. Could Aurum be behind this? Or was Anne messing with her head?
She pressed harder on the cop’s chest plate, feeling a ragged groan beneath her knee.
"Lucy Kellaway, don’t make it worse. You’re under arrest." A woman’s voice, but deep and authoritative. Harsh.
Ramirez. Detective Ramirez, the voice etched in her memory. Damocles to drop her, Ramirez to clean up—too tidy. Anne was right. No well-structured op would be this neat. Another trap waited.
Her tactical AI solved it first: the pickup backpack—a bomb if Plan A failed? Lucy’s gut clenched. She hoisted Ramirez up, staggering under her weight—nearly 200 pounds of gear and muscle. She dragged her to the corridor’s end stairwell, away from that suspicious package.
No explosion. Strange. If no timer, maybe an observer trigger? The assassin’s eyes not on them? Or was she wrong, and it wasn’t a backup?
Skadi: A second backup?
Anne: A second backup.
Yes, Lucy thought. If Ramirez failed, bomb. If bomb failed, an assassin. Layers of operational contingency.
But the bomb not triggering seemed off. Wrong. Did the assassin lack a direct visual? Her drones saw nothing. Just a few wary locals creeping out onto rain-slick streets. Maybe the bomb glitched? It could happen.
She recalled her shortest-lived drones from mapping, cycling out larger drones to recharge. Options crowded her HUD.
Bike route compromised? Abandon the bike? She loved that machine, a masterpiece from Kawasaki. But life over property.
And Anne. Anne’s hints pointed to Aurum’s betrayal. She needed clarity. She opened comms to Peril. Silence. Lioncourt. Silence. Not blocked, just not picking up. Odd. Lioncourt always picked up.
Skadi: Peril and Lioncourt dark?
Anne: Lioncourt’s Ferrari exploded. Ten minutes ago. Unsurvivable for most.
Lucy’s heart twisted. Around the same time as she entered the room, no coincidence.
Skadi: A car bomb killed Lioncourt?
Unthinkable.
Anne: Crawled out. Barely. Then Sengoku and Gogul ambushed him.
Aurum''s security prospects. The lethal bodyguards who had protected them in Canada, Lucy mused.
It was a tough way to go, bombed then taken out by thugs. It lacked finesse, as Lioncourt would say himself. But Lucy wasn''t sure what to believe right now. Anne could be messing with her - be all behind this. This could all be lies.
Anne: Lioncourt killed them, but he''s alive - shattered - you could say. But alive. He''s had Pix take him to Mr. Matsumoto’s clinic.
Skadi: And Peril?
Anne: Don’t know. Boltz booted me out of her building’s net. Same time you got hit and the car bomb went off. I triggered shutdowns in the building’s security. All the encryption failsafes fired. Boltz will crack them in six hours. After that, Peril’s unreachable. She’ll be locked behind military drones, automated turrets—her apartment fortress turning into a prison. If you don’t stop Aurum and Boltz now, tonight, it won’t happen.
Six hours. The clock ticked in Lucy’s mind. Peril trapped.Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.
Skadi: Why would Aurum do this?
Anne: It’s a heist, Lethanda. Aurum’s after the money. Pure and simple.
*
She stepped out into the neon-soaked emptiness, each footfall soft against cracked pavement. The city smelled like rain, rusted metal, and old promises turned sour. Lucy scanned the deserted boulevard.
Downtown Rain City never slept, but tonight it dozed, spooked by whispers of the Damocles hack. Everyone terrified a coded dagger might pierce their skulls through cyberspace. A smell of ozone and stale cooking oil drifted from a closed noodle stall. Thin drizzle slicked the sidewalk, washing holographic ads from Shimada Cybernetics and Kuroi Heavy Industries into distorted ghosts on the asphalt.
Lucy considered how this silence wouldn’t last. Once the promised security patches arrived—if they ever did—people would crawl out of their holes.
Maybe they’d riot, furious at having had their mortality dangled by a line of code. Now, in the hush, Rain City’s towers loomed above, corporate spires with digital banners blinking half-heartedly. The storm drains gurgled, as if choking on the city’s collective panic.
Across the street, leaning against a sleek Japanese muscle car—some imported beast from Nissan-Kamakura Motors—stood Benten. The Bishōnen killer. His white hair framed a face too perfect for nature: probably cyber-sculpted, a face that could launch a thousand brand endorsements.
A face any woman might envy, Lucy mused. Whether real or engineered, it didn’t matter. His posture elegant, one hand on the car’s hood, the other gripping a katana. A sword, in this age of silent guns and microdrones.
Anne: What’s he doing? He has a flair for the theatrical I’ll give him that.
Lucy’s eyes narrowed. This was off-script, she decided. Aurum would never approve such a dramatic confrontation.
Skadi: He’s laid a tableau in front of us. I get the feeling he’s practiced that pose in front of a mirror.
Lucy stepped forward, leaving the apartment building’s dim entryway behind. The distant hum of a maglev line overhead buzzed through her skull. The sky was a smear of violet and pink neon reflections. Her internal systems still ached from previous overloads, but now they hummed steady, ready. She had survived Damocles. She’d survived Ramirez. Now Benten stood there as if in an archaic duel.
"I hope you appreciate that I chose not to use the bomb." Benten’s voice cut through the ten yards separating them.
His voice carried smoothly, no static. A gentle tone in a dead street. Lucy tasted metal on her tongue, her adrenaline spiking. Bomb. So he’d had a bomb after all? Hypothesis confirmed.
Aurum’s style was efficient, snipers and traps. Not a gentleman’s showdown in the rain. Benten going rogue like this would have him hopping mad.
Anne: This is just stupid. It’s like something out of a movie.
Skadi: He has a certain style, I’ll give him that.
"No sniper rifle from a rooftop?" The question was rhetorical - she’d checked. Her hive drones had swept every angle. No hidden triggermen. No red-laser scopes. Just them and the quiet asphalt. "I’m almost disappointed."
Benten smiled, showing immaculate teeth. "A bullet through your head? Risk damaging that Bullet-Razr AI you carry inside. That would be a waste."
Lucy’s heart clenched at the implication. Benten wanted her intact hardware, to carve her up and sell her systems on the black market. She’d always known her augments made her worth millions to the right scavenger.
"This is about the ReflexArc-X, right?" She kept her tone neutral. "You want it for yourself."
Benten nodded gracefully, twirling the katana. "Of course. Aurum offered me a hundred grand for a quick sniper kill—peanuts. Once I saw your specs, I realized your gear alone is worth millions. So I discarded his plan. I wanted to do this… honourably." He said that last word with a strange reverence. Perhaps he styled himself a modern samurai?
Anne: So he want’s to dismantle you for parts. And that’s honourable?
Skadi: He’s up front about it at least, not hiding, looking for a straight up fight. Not a tactic I would have chosen, but hell. Each to their own.
Anne: What would you have done?
Skadi: I would have used both the bomb and then the sniper rifle as the backup. Blew his head off from 300 yards. The guy has a code I suppose.
Lucy’s tactical computer parsed this scenario. Benten expected a blade fight. He presumed, with overclocked enhancements, he could match her speed for a few seconds—enough to strike and claim his prize.
A memory stirred: The AccelSpire series of reactionware could overclock for three or four seconds. After that, speed would collapse, leaving him normal, slower than Lucy’s fully integrated ReflexArc-X system.
He’d have a short window. Skilled and precise, sure—but this was a bad bet for him, if Lucy kept her head.
Benten stepped away from the car, drawing the katana fully. Under dim street-lamps and half-lit corporate advertising billboards, Lucy glimpsed a translucent shimmer on the blade.
A special coating, her AI guessed, maybe monofilament edges or some nano-honed finish that could cut subdermal plating like butter. That was what Benten thought would level the field with her?
Anne: Damn, I should record this for a stream for Peril, she loves action movie set -pieces. You going to knife-fight the guy?
Skadi: Hell no. Bastard brings a sword to a gun fight, I’m going to shoot him in the face. Repeatedly.
"So you plan to kill me with your first strikes in some fantasy duel?" Lucy muttered to herself quietly.
She inhaled. The rain pattered on her jacket. Her enhanced muscles tensed. She dialled ReflexArc-X to max, ignoring the screaming warnings about muscle strain and the memory of Terrance’s lecture. She pulled her pistol and fired twice. Benten blurred sideways, low and fast. He dodged her shots as if dancing with ghosts.
No time for subtlety. The next fractions of a second were a kaleidoscope of motion. She leapt forward, twisting mid-air, Benten’s katana slicing the space her torso had just vacated. Her system fed her a hundred micro-scenarios, all lethal. She backflipped away, firing more shots, each going wide as he predicted her angles. He was good. Damn good.
He vaulted over the hood of the car, blade scything downward. Lucy’s leap cleared it by fractions of an inch, his sword smashing into the hood with a spark of metal and fury. Her drones flitted overhead, no help here, just eyes feeding data.
She fired again, but Benten’s blade flashed—he cut her pistol barrel clean in two with impossible precision. A grunt of surprise escaped her lips.
He kicked her hard. Impact distributed by her subdermal armour turned what would break ribs into a dull impact. She slid back a couple of yards, hitting a rusty fence. Sparks flew from old neon sign cables overhead. If not for her implants, that kick would’ve folded her in half.
Benten’s overclock was fading though. She saw it in his stance, a millisecond’s slow drag in his footwork. Now it was even odds—no, better for her. She still had reserves. He’d spent his golden seconds.
You had your shot, samurai, thought Lucy. Her face was calm. He tried to raise the sword for another attack, but he moved slower now, a fraction off peak.
She considered her arsenal. Her left forearm contained a hidden cybergun—a last-ditch shot, a powerful sawn-off shotgun blast loaded with heavy rounds. At this range, no AI predictions would save him. She opened her palm, pointed it at Benten’s chest.
Benten’s eyes widened. He lunged, but too late. The cybergun fired with a muffled thump, sending a cloud of blood and shredded armour. His right shoulder vanished in a red haze. His blade clattered to the asphalt.
He staggered, tried to pivot. Lucy’s second blast took off his leg at the knee, dropping him into a spreading pool of rainwater and synthetic fluids. He choked, eyes still defiant.
"My… speed… you were faster." Benten managed, coughing slightly.
Lucy crouched, arm raised for a final shot. She smelled the metallic tang of blood, ozone from severed electronics in his shattered augments.
Overhead, a flickering ad for promised payday loans at ‘reasonable’ rates. Hollow words in a city of knives and shadows.
"You had a bomb, a sniper option, yet you chose this route. Why?" Lucy had to know.
Benten spit blood. "Aurum’s plan was possible mass murder. Bomb would take out innocents in the building. I don’t kill innocents."
Anne: See how he changes his story. Before he wanted you just for your parts and didn’t want to damage them. Now his story is that he’s a super-honourable samurai.
Skadi: Both could be true.
A glimmer of honour. Lucy’s anger cooled. Benten, a killer with a code. He could’ve ended her from afar, but he chose this foolish duel to avoid collateral damage.
Aurum would be disgusted by such sentiment. Lucy wasn’t.
"You’re in bad shape.” Lucy noted. “You need a doc. I could finish you now, save myself trouble."
His face twitched, pain editor probably at max. "I know."
She considered. The city’s silence weighed on them.
Rain drummed on broken asphalt, distant sirens now stirring, perhaps responding to the shots. She thought of Lioncourt’s style, how he’d finish Benten without hesitation. But Lucy had a choice. In a world of Damocles and Aurum’s treachery, perhaps a fragment of mercy mattered.
"I’m walking away. You live. Don’t come after me again." Lucy rose, letting the remnants of her empathy show. Maybe it made no sense—he was a hired killer, a predator.
Anne: You’re jesting? The man wanted to disassemble you for parts. Mercy? To him?
This is about me, not him. Lucy thought. I can still have mercy, she decided. Foolish maybe, overly generous-certainly. But she still had that within her.
*
Lucy hesitated at the glass door of Matsumoto''s Herbal Health & Cyber Clinic, the shop sign flickering under a corroded neon lamp. Rain City’s stale humidity pressed in on her lungs, carrying the smell of fried noodles and burnt circuitry. Anne had led her here, said Pix had taken Lioncourt here – did she trust her?
Anne might’ve saved her from Ramirez earlier, but that hardly made her a friend. Aurum was behind it all somehow, and the AI called Boltz lurked in the background. Lucy felt the tension in her shoulders as she twisted the door’s handle.
Inside, the shop’s lighting felt subdued, tinted a pale green from overhead fluorescents. The scent of cheap incense mingled with what Lucy guessed were synthetic herbal powders—probably placebos for desperate patients.
Normally, there’d be a kindly old woman behind the counter, but tonight two men stood in the back, deep in low conversation. The old woman was nowhere to be seen.
Anne: Ashwraith and Chrome Oni. Lioncourt’s so-called friends.
Lucy’s gaze darted to the pair. They certainly didn’t look like kindly acquaintances. One wore a sleek black duster that screamed corporate muscle. His cheekbones were model-perfect, courtesy of some top-shelf gene mod or maybe a high-end Zhu-Parsons Cosmetek job. He kept his body angled toward the second man, but his eyes locked on Lucy. On the nearby table, an AA-24 autoshotgun rested in plain sight—same model Lioncourt used, big enough to shred a whole room. The other man was robed, layers of cloth draping over a clearly massive frame. Tall, maybe six-foot-six, and had the vibe of a solemn monk from a long-forgotten temple. Lucy didn’t want to guess how many hidden blades or firearms were tucked under that robe.
She recalled something from a conversation with Lioncourt about Zanshin—the concept of unbroken awareness. These two radiated that vibe: hyper-alert, scanning everything, but speaking casually about something that didn’t match their lethal presence.
“I’m telling you, it was a penalty in the 2082 Cup final. Tech official missed it.” Ashwraith was saying quietly to Chrome Oni. Did Lucy detect a strong British accent?
The huge man shrugged, “VAR glitched, apparently. I still say Los Renegados was robbed.”
Lucy forced a nod in greeting. Their eyes flicked to her. She caught a snippet of memory: Lioncourt once told her he had to buy Ashwraith a high-end sports car after losing some competition on The Black Chalice. She thought, Even the deadliest man I know had to call these guys for backup. Guess that says something.
They made no move to stop her, though she felt their stares drilling into her. She moved to the back hallway, where a thickset Japanese man stood guard near a stairwell leading down. He waved a hand-scanner over her, the device crackling as it detected her firearms, but he just nodded her through. The unwritten code of not interfering with Mr. Matsumoto’s business, maybe.
What Lucy found below was not what she’d expected. The basement was a stark white chamber lit by long LED panels set into the ceiling, strobing faintly. The air smelled of disinfectant and old copper.
She flinched at the sight on the central operating table: a skull and a length of spine, wired to every monitor Lucy could name. No sign of a body. No blood, no usual beep of a ventilator.
Mr. Matsumoto—gaunt, with a calm face—stood to one side, his focus locked on a cluster of holo-screens. Next to him was Pix, the wiry Clean cum Bounty Hunter Lucy recognized from Lioncourt’s circle, wearing a nurse’s uniform that looked more like a lab tech’s smock. Pix was jacked into a console, nodding at the readouts.
At Lucy’s entrance, Pix disconnected and stepped forward. Lucy’s mind still reeled at the surreal scene: a partial skull, spine, and mechanical attachments. Her first thought: He’s got to be dead.
“Is… is he dead?” Lucy asked softly.
Pix shook her head. “No. The patient’s cyberskull protected his core. The body was a total loss. We managed to restore power to the core just before his emergency batteries failed. No engrammatic damage as far as we can tell.”
Lucy processed the words. “Core?” She glanced at the half-skeletal remains. “You mean his brain?”
Pix gave her a quizzical look. “I guess calling it a brain works. Let’s just say it’s complicated.”
Lucy felt her stomach twist. This was Lioncourt—reduced to a skull and spine. “Can… can I talk to him?”
Pix gestured to a sleek console with half a dozen data cables. “Of course.” She guided Lucy to sit, carefully slotting fibre-optic leads into Lucy’s BCI ports. The basement’s hum faded. Lucy’s HUD blinked a notification:
Connection established.
“Ma gracieuse mademoiselle,” came Lioncourt’s voice through the neural link, rich with that faux-French charm, seemingly unbothered by the fact he no longer possessed a body. “I cannot express how sorry I am.”
Lucy inhaled. Her thoughts raced. He’s alive? Conscious?
“I have so many questions.” Lucy said simply.
“Oui, I imagine you do. My current… condition is unsettling, non?”
She sensed a tinge of defeat in his mental tone. The flamboyant assassin was subdued. “What are you exactly?” she asked.
“I’ve asked myself that for six years, ma chère. Am I a man? A machine? A prolific lover, certainly. A connoisseur of fine tastes, absolutely.” A pause as Lioncourt seemed to choose his next words carefully. “But tonight, je suis vaincu. Aurum outmanoeuvred me. And in four hours, none of this will matter.”
Lucy’s chest tightened. She pictured Peril somewhere in the crosshairs of Aurum’s plan. “Lioncourt, how do I save her? Peril’s in danger, I have no time to absorb… all this,” she gestured mentally to his half-dead state. “I’m sorry for what happened to you. But I need a plan to rescue her before Aurum locks everything down.”
A moment’s silence, her nerves on edge as she saw lines of code streaming around the interface. Possibly Mr. Matsumoto adjusting something. The staccato beep of a monitor insisted on pressing the gravity of the moment.
“Pardonne-moi, I shouldn’t wallow.” Lioncourt seemed genuinely contrite, like Lucy’s words had slapped him mentally across the face. “You’re right: we must act. Aurum has had months to prepare. He’ll fill Peril’s building with gangers and hire every lowlife in the city if needed. But for four hours, we have an opening. He thinks you and I are dead. Once Boltz cracks Peril’s accounts, the floodgates open. We’ll be wanted by half of Rain City’s scum for a hundred-million-dollar or more bounty.”
He let out a digital sigh, if that were possible. “I feel… useless, ma chère. My body’s gone. My arrogance cost me. But you want a plan? Let’s craft one. We’ll find a way, and we’ll rise above this. La princesse dans la tour sera sauvée —tonight.”
Lucy felt tears prick her eyes. The unwavering arrogance was back there, that’s what she needed right now. Her world seemed to be shifting and uncertain, have a thousand unanswered questions. She desperately needed a rock to stand on right now. “Don’t you dare bail on me, Lioncourt,” she said, voice trembling. “I need you out there, or… at least in here. I can’t do it alone.”
“Then you shall have me,” Lioncourt replied softly. “I insist on joining your quest, ma dame. Let’s show Aurum that the final word isn’t his to have. Merci de rappeler à un chevalier son devoir.”