"Hereford Block, right?" The old taxi driver's eyes found me in the rear mirror.
The question pulled me back. I'd been gone, somewhere between the arcade and the warehouse, my brain had taken itself off the grid and left my body to manage the ride alone.
Outside the window, the street had already gone dark and sparse. A few streetlights doing their best. Empty pavement. The kind of block that communicated something about itself without signage.
"Yeah. Here's good."
He eased to a stop and adjusted the mirror as I climbed out. I handed him the five dollars. Aria's five dollars, technically, the one she'd given me after I'd spent several minutes convincing her not to come.
The argument had been simple enough: Sancho was my problem from the beginning. Her involvement had already caused enough blowback. Another appearance from her would just confirm to Dante's people that the target was her, which would either make things more dangerous for me or temporarily redirect the pressure onto her and then back to me again either way.
The logic had landed. Barely. She'd listened with another juice carton straw in her mouth, tracking the argument, and then her face had done the thing where she clocked the gap between what I was saying and the reality of my situation.
"And how are you gonna get there?" she'd asked.
"I have—" I'd checked. "Okay, I'm flat out."
She'd slapped her own face and handed me the note. "Take this. If you don't come back, at least I can say I tried to fund the rescue mission."
Five dollars. To travel toward what was, by most reasonable assessments, a trap. Even by Aria's standards, that was a minimal investment in my continued survival. And if I made it back, she'd made it clear she expected full interest.
"Take care out there, son." The driver's voice carried from the window before he pulled away. He hadn't moved yet. "This block, people know it for a reason. Gangs, mostly." His eyes moved over me in the way older people's eyes do when they're reading something they're not going to say directly. "And you don't look like one of them, are ya?"
"Definitely not." I laughed through nervous variety. "I'm just visiting a friend,"
He nodded in the way someone nods when they've decided not to push. Then he drove away.
I watched his taillights disappear at the end of the street and stood there for a moment, letting the quiet settle around me. The embarrassment from the exchange faded quickly because there were more immediate things to attend to. Somewhere in that warehouse, Rowan was tied to a chair. And I had— I checked — about ten minutes.
The warehouse didn't announce itself as anything dangerous. From the outside it was just a large building that had been through things; broken debris at the base, shattered window frames on both sides, a metal door that looked like it had been argued with by a crowbar more than once and had gradually lost. The lock, when I got close, was already broken. Either left that way deliberately or broken recently.
A crowbar was lying right at the entrance. I picked it up, pushed the door open.
The creak it made was architectural, the kind of sound that echoed in an empty space and announced you to everything inside. Which would have been a problem, except that the ground floor appeared to be completely empty.
Pale strips of evening light came in through the shuttered windows and found nothing worth illuminating. There was no movement. No presence.
Where are they?
Then, THWACK. From above me.
My eyes went to the ceiling before I'd thought about it. But there was no ceiling exactly, just debris and broken materials where the roofing should have been. Second floor. The building had a second floor.
THWACK. Again. And this time, underneath it, a muffled groan.
I found the stairway at the far end of the warehouse, tucked behind a corner. I went up fast, taking steps in pairs, the crowbar still in hand.
I took the last step and saw Rowan.
He was on a wooden chair in the middle of the upper floor, hands and feet bound to the handles. A black cloth over his mouth.
His face had the specific quality of something that had absorbed a significant amount of impact, swollen in places, cut in others, the colour of a person who'd been having a very bad evening for a while before I arrived.
Behind him was Sancho. He was standing with the comfortable posture of someone who had already run the numbers on how this was going to go. He was cleaning a small knife on a cloth. Taking his time with it. The cloth had a different color, definitely the stain of Rowan's blood.
"You psycho—"
"Now that I think about it, thirty minutes was a generous offer." He lifted his eyes from the blade to me, and the grin arrived with them. "On the other hand, you made it with time to spare. So maybe your friend still has a shot."
"You said you'd let him go." My frown was already deep. "That was the arrangement."
"Come on, Ren." He made a sound; slow intake of air, deliberate. "You didn't think walking through the door was the whole task? That was phase one. You still have to earn the save."
"Fine. Let's fight."
"Don't get ahead of yourself now, Ren." He tilted his head. "You still have to deal with these guys first."
At first I almost thought he was actually going insane, because there was nobody in the room but the three of us.
And then there was. From a dark corner, guys stepping out of the shadows, two, three. From the stairway behind me, more footsteps arriving. They positioned themselves as they entered, spreading across the floor with the coordinated spacing of people who had done this before.
Ten total, I'd counted by the time they'd finished settling. They held bats, knives, metal rods. The arrangement of them around me was a circle.
"Quite the setup, right?" Sancho's voice had the pleasure in it of someone who had planned something and is now watching it arrive as planned. "Beat them and your friend gets to leave here whole. And that's just phase two." Then the smile changed, something underneath the amusement surfacing briefly. "What are you going to do, Ren? He's counting on you."
He moved the blade to Rowan's neck. Not pressing, just positioning. The implication of it was sufficient.
I felt my brain accelerate through the geometry of the situation. Ten people in a circle. One knife near one throat. The window between any move I made and Rowan's safety was narrow and specific.
I set the crowbar down. Raised my fists.
"The better question," I said, locking my eyes on Sancho's, "is how you're planning to save yourself when this is done."
I moved first, picked the read before the room had time to reset, identified the one whose guard had dropped the most in the moment of my talking, and drove a kick upward into the bat in his hands. The bat came up fast and heavy and connected with his own nose on the way. He went down immediately.
One down. Nine to go.
Someone came from behind on a swing. I dropped under it, let him follow through, grabbed the bat on his second attempt and twisted with both hands. The sound his arm made confirmed something had given way. A kick to his gut finished the sentence.
A knife came from my left, the guy's whole body committing to the reach. I grabbed the wrist, stripped the knife with a jab to the hand, and locked the arm at the shoulder. He was still trying to understand what had happened when I punched him in the face.
The next one ran at me straight, which was the kind of decision that simplified things considerably. I jumped, left foot, directly into his mouth. The sound on impact was specific. The blood and the teeth that followed were confirmation. He was on the ground before he'd finished falling.
Four down. Six to go.
Two more came simultaneously, flanking, which was smart, except that I was already moving. I grabbed the first one, pulled his arms behind him, and walked him into the path of the second guy's metal rod. The rod landed across his own teammate's stomach before the second man realised what he'd swung at.
I shoved the first away and kicked the rod out of the second man's hands before he recovered his swing. The punch I followed it with had something behind it that hadn't been there before the arcade sessions, the number 294 still sitting in my head, and behind that the knowledge that I hadn't been swinging at full power when I'd hit it.
My fist felt different when it connected. Hotter. More settled.
Six down. Four to go.
The next attack was airborne, a spike of something, an ability manifesting as a projectile, which embedded itself in the wall behind me with enough force that I felt the air it displaced against the back of my neck.
So there was at least one ability user in the group. I'd started to think they were all baseline fighters, which would have been disappointing.
Three of them came in close with knives, breathing loud, moving with the aggression of people who had been watching their colleagues go down and had decided that careful wasn't working.
From the angles they had me at, clean evasion wasn't available. One blade got my arm, a clean slice, immediate sting. Another caught my leg in the scramble and I lost my footing for a split second.
I punched whatever was directly in front of me. He moved and I caught air, and while I was off-balance, a third blade went across my back. More specific than the others. I went down to all fours, hands on the floor, processing the accumulated damage.
"I thought you had it covered." Sancho's voice carried the performance of disappointment. "Looks like this is where you stop." He gave a small wave, fingers, casual, amused. "See you later, Ren."
The knife came down toward my chest.
I caught the blade with my palm.
Not by plan, by the mathematics of the moment and the available options. The blade bit in. I felt it immediately, blood coming down my arm in a line. But it was better than the alternative by a significant margin. I twisted the grip before he could react, redirected the angle, drove the blade into his thigh instead.
The scream was immediate and structural.
I stood. Gripped the hilt. Pulled it out while he was still mid-scream, collecting every ounce of his reaction for context. Identified the second knife user. Threw.
The knife went into his shoulder and he folded.
The third went down through an elbow to the face, clean, direct, and I didn't bother watching him hit the ground.
Nine down.
The ability user was last. He produced another projectile and fired at close range, fast, aimed, the kind of speed that shouldn't have been catchable. I caught it anyway. One centimetre from my eye, the blade between my fingers, and I registered the look on his face changing in real time.
I turned the knife in my hand. Threw it back. It landed in his shoulder.
He went to his knees.
I looked at Sancho. My palm was bleeding down my wrist. There was something across my back that had strong, painful opinions. I wiped blood off my cheek with the back of my hand.
"You know what I actually appreciate about you?" I said. I was breathing harder than I wanted to be. "Consistency. You and Tyler utilise same stupidity, same result, every fucking time."
"You fucker—"
"Come on then." I dropped back into my stance. The hotness in my fists was still there. "Come at me."