The damp air of the sewers stuck to Ruben's skin, a layer of grime that made him want to claw his own face off. The adrenaline of the fight with the lanky freak was fading, replaced by the dull, aching craving in his bones and the sheer exhaustion of the run.
They splashed through the shallow runoff, the echo of their boots covered by the low semblance of the city above. Behind them, hovering a few feet off the filth, one of Ruben's smaller dragon carried the boy. The kid was curled into a ball on the spectral beast's back, shivering and occasionally letting out a wet, hitching sob.
Ruben rubbed his temples, trying to ignore the sound. He couldn't deal with the crying right now. He needed a plan.
"We need to find an actual place to crash," Ruben muttered, his voice echoing slightly in the tunnel. "Somewhere with a lock. And a shower."
Corbin didn't break his stride, checking the corners ahead. "Where? We're burning daylight, and we're wanted men."
"The hotel?" Ruben suggested, though he knew the answer before he said it.
"Too far," Corbin shot back instantly. "And you know the police are going to be crawling all over that place after the stunt with the assassin. We go back there, we walk right into cuffs."
Ruben let out a groan, the sound vibrating in his throat. He kicked a floating piece of trash in the water. "I really don't want to sleep in a sewer, Corbin. I feel like I'm going to catch something just by breathing."
"It's not like we have a menu of options, Ruben." Corbin stopped at a junction, looking up at a rusted ladder leading to a street grate. He paused, looking back at Ruben. "Wait. Why don't we just stay in the air?"
Ruben blinked, wiping sweat from his forehead. "What?"
"Your dragons," Corbin said, gesturing to the construct carrying the boy. "The city is covered in fog, right? It's as thick as pea soup. If we fly up and just hover above the cloud layer, nobody sees us. We sleep in the sky."
Ruben considered it. It was tempting. Just floating in the silence, away from the smell of waste and the threat of Paladins. "Maybe," he said slowly. "But I'm... I'm not at a hundred percent sure it will work out."
"There's also the morning," Ruben countered, his tactical brain overriding his desire for comfort. "There's that short hour right when the sun comes up where the fog thins out. If we're floating there like sitting ducks, we'll be spotted by every drone and early-bird hero in the sector."
"We could risk it," Corbin said, shrugging. "Better than the smell."
Ruben sighed, defeated. "I guess I don't mind trying it. Better than this."
"Alright, let's..." Corbin started to turn, but his eyes landed on the boy.
The kid was clutching the scales of the dragon construct so hard his knuckles were white. He was staring at the dark tunnel ceiling, trembling, clearly terrified of everything happening around him. Taking a traumatized child thousands of feet into the air to sleep on a transparent monster wasn't exactly a soothing move.
Corbin's face softened, just for a fraction of a second. He shook his head. "No. Never mind."
"What?" Ruben asked.
"I said no." Corbin jerked his chin toward the boy. "I'll find us some other place on the ground. Something abandoned."
Ruben looked at the boy, then nodded. "Okay. Ground it is."
Corbin climbed the ladder first, pushing the heavy iron grate up just an inch. He peered out, scanning the street. "Coast is clear. Just civilians."
He shoved the grate aside. They climbed out, Ruben helping the boy off the dragon before dismissing the construct into a dissipating mist of energy. They stepped onto the cobblestones, instantly swallowed by the gray haze of Brumália. The street was busy, filled with workers in heavy coats and face coverings, heads down against the gloom. It was perfect cover.
Ruben pulled his collar up, and Corbin slouched to hide his height. They moved inward, slipping into the flow of the crowd, becoming just three more shadows in the city of fog.
After a block of silence, Ruben glanced down at the boy trotting between them. He realized they had just dragged this kid through a sewer, discussed sleeping in the sky, and hadn't said a single word to him directly since the rescue.
Ruben cleared his throat, feeling a pang of guilt. "Hey," he said, keeping his voice low. "Sorry. Things have been... fast. I forgot to ask your name."
The boy looked up, his eyes red-rimmed and wide. He didn't speak immediately. He looked from Ruben to Corbin, gauging if they were dangerous. He sniffled, wiping his nose on a dirty sleeve.
"Oscar," the boy whispered, his voice trembling. "Oscar Lorian."
The darkness of the sewer shaft was absolute, a suffocating throat of brick and slime that stretched upward toward the faint, gray light of the surface.
Paul Strahm hung in the void.
His left hand was clamped around nothing, empty, stagnant air. His knuckles were white, tendons straining against a grip that didn't exist physically, yet held his weight entirely. He was pantomiming a rope, his body suspended by the sheer force of his will.
Pull.
He gritted his teeth, the muscles in his jaw bunching tight. He reached up with his right hand, grasping the air a foot higher, and hauled himself up. His ribs screamed, a sharp, jagged fire where that dragon-boy had kicked him. Every inch of ascent was a negotiation with pain.
Pull.
His Ego, Mime, demanded focus. It demanded a performance of perfection. If his belief in the invisible rope wavered for a microsecond, gravity would reclaim him, and he would fall back into the filth where those two interlopers had left him.
"Sloppy," Paul hissed through his teeth, the word vibrating in the echo chamber of the shaft. "Careless. Stupid."
He wasn't speaking to the boys who had beaten him. He was speaking to himself. He had allowed himself to be surprised. He had allowed the "Dragon" and the "Brute" to steal the catalyst. He had let them take the boy.
He reached the top of the shaft. The heavy iron grate blocked the way. Paul didn't push it with his hands. Instead, he flattened his palm against the air below the metal, crouched awkwardly on his invisible rope, and mimed the action of a hydraulic jack. He pushed his hand upward with slow, mechanical resistance.
Groan. Creek. Clang.
The heavy iron grate shrieked against the stone and flipped over, landing on the wet cobblestones above with a deafening crash.
Paul pulled himself out, scrambling onto the wet pavement of the alleyway like a rat escaping a flood. He collapsed onto his back, staring up at the slate-gray sky of Brumália. The fog was thick here, tasting of river water. It swirled around him, indifferent to his pain.
He lay there for a long moment, his chest heaving, his unremarkable face twisted into a mask of pure, distilled vitriol.
"Oscar..."
The name tasted like ash. He had lost the boy. The battery. The little lung that breathed rage into the city. Without Oscar, the gas would dissipate. The panic would subside. The people of this wretched city would go back to their tea and their commerce, safe in their ignorance.
Paul sat up, wincing as his bruised side protested. He wiped a smear of sewer sludge from his cheek, his dark eyes scanning the empty alley. He looked like nothing. Just a pale, slender young man in gray clothes that blended into the brickwork. A nobody.
But inside, the venom was boiling over.
"You think you've won?" he whispered to the memory of the two boys. "You think you can just take him and play hero?"
He hated them. He hated their flashy powers, the loud, roaring dragons, the crude, brutish strength. They were symptoms of this world's disease. Loud, arrogant, and convinced of their own righteousness. But more than them, he hated the nation that sheltered them.
Ostara.
The name itself made his bile rise. He looked at the towering gothic architecture looming through the fog, the spires in the distance. They stood so tall, so proud, built on a foundation of bones.
He remembered the smell of rotting apples. He remembered the shipping containers.
"The Nine Clans," Paul murmured, his voice dropping to a register that was almost inhumanly cold. "You buried us. You erased our names. You stole our faith and erased our history."
He looked down at his own hands, pale, trembling slightly, not from fear, but from the aftershocks of his Ego's exertion. He was one of the few who had crawled out of that darkness. He was the remnant of the Number 9.
"You wanted us forgotten," he said to the city, his eyes narrowing until they were jagged slits of obsidian. "You wanted the clans to be nothing but dust under your floorboards. But you missed one."
He stood up, swaying slightly. The pain was still there, but he shoved it down, burying it under layers of icy resolve. He couldn't stop now. The endgame was too close. The stage had been set, the props were in place, and the audience was waiting for the finale.
"I will make you remember," he vowed, the words slicing through the fog. "I will carve a wound into this city so deep it never heals. I will make a catastrophe so absolute that when history looks back at Ostara, they won't see your Paladins. They won't see your wealth. They will see me."
He clenched his fist, and the air around it distorted, an invisible pressure cracking the cobblestone beneath his boots.
"They will remember the face of Paul Strahm. They will remember the Nine."
But to do that, he needed the boy. He couldn't let Oscar slip away into the system. If the Paladins got to the kid, they would lock him away, or worse, "cure" him. Paul needed his weapon back. He needed to find the thread that connected him to the fugitives.
He took a deep breath, inhaling the smog, centering his mind. The rage was still there, a nuclear core burning in his chest, but he encased it in ice. He needed to be cold now. He needed to be the Mime.
"Hide him all you want," Paul whispered, turning his back on the sewer grate and walking into the thickening fog, his silhouette dissolving instantly into the gray. "I will find him. The show isn't over until the curtain falls."
The temporary command center was situated in the high-vaulted observation deck of the Brumália Clock Tower. Outside the floor-to-ceiling reinforced glass, the city was a churning ocean of gray soup, the gaslights below reduced to drowning fireflies. Inside, the air was cold, smelling of ozone, wet wool, and the heavy scent of tobacco.
Bruno Fernando stood by the central map table, his broad, stone-hewn frame casting a long shadow over the blueprints of the sewer systems. He held a cigarette between thick fingers, the smoke curling up to join the gloom of the ceiling. He looked exhausted, the weight of the "Purge" and the loss of Dario etching deep lines around his eyes, but his voice was steady, a low rumble that demanded attention.
"Civilian casualties were kept to a minimum," Bruno said, exhaling a plume of smoke. "The containment protocols held. The gas didn't spread beyond the industrial sector. You did your jobs. And you did them well."
He looked around the room at the gathered Paladins. It was a heavy commendation coming from a man who rarely handed out praise.
Rosette St. Jon stood near the window, her clothing still damp from the fog. She was vibrating with a restless energy, her hands clenching and unclenching. She turned sharply.
"Sir," Rosette called out, her voice tight. "I saw something. It was near the extraction point. It was a dragon."
Lance Onida, lounging in a leather armchair in the corner, laughed softly. He picked a piece of lint off his immaculate, tailored black suit. His silver eyes danced with amusement. "A dragon, Rookie? Really? The fog plays tricks on the mind. It could have been a gargoyle. Or a really big pigeon."
"I know what I saw," Rosette snapped, her eyes narrowing. "It was translucent. And it matches the what I have previously seen from Ruben Rayo."
"The world is a big place, little Rose," Lance drawled, inspecting his fingernails. "Summoning constructs isn't exactly unique. Just because you saw a lizard in the sky doesn't mean it's that kid."
"Stop it, Lance," Bruno's voice cut through the air like a gavel. He crushed his cigarette out in an overflowing ashtray. "We've had intelligence for days that Rayo and Monet were potentially in the city. If Rosette says she saw a dragon, then Rayo is here. It fits the pattern."
Elise Vogel stepped forward from the shadows of the room. Her presence dropped the temperature by another few degrees. She was tall and severe, her platinum ponytail pulled back so tightly it pulled at her scalp. Her cape, adorned with the three gold stars, hung perfectly still.
"If Rayo is here," Elise said, her tone clipped and authoritative, "then the situation is far more critical than a simple fugitive run. We must consider the timing. They appear exactly when Paul Strahm initiates a biological attack?"
She walked to the table, placing a gloved hand on the map. "It is highly probable they are not just in the city to hide. They are likely working with Strahm. Perhaps providing muscle for his operation in exchange for safe passage."
In the back of the room, Lea Lantern stiffened. Her heart hammered against her ribs. She wanted to shout that they were wrong, that Ruben and Corbin had saved the hostage, that they were just kids trying to survive. She opened her mouth, a protest forming on her tongue, but then she saw Kade Varro's eyes flick toward her. A warning.
Stay silent. Play the role.
Lea swallowed the words, forcing her face into a mask of professional neutrality, though her hands trembled slightly behind her back.
"Collusion," Elise continued, ignoring the tension in the room. "That elevates them from fugitives to active terrorists. It shows a level of organization and danger we have underestimated."
Bruno sighed, a heavy, rattling sound in his chest. He pulled a fountain pen from his vest pocket. He looked down at the dossier on the table, photos of Ruben and Corbin taken from the Gresham incident.
"They are new," Bruno admitted, his voice gruff. "Green, just like Rosette." He paused, tapping the pen against the table. "But they are talented. Exceptionally so if what the reports show are correct."
He looked up at the ceiling, as if looking through the stone to the sky. "If they are smart, they won't stay on the ground. The sewers are compromised. The streets are locked down. The air... that's the only uncontrolled variable. If Rayo can sustain his summons, they'll try to wait us out above the fog line."
Lance stood up, smoothing his suit jacket. The playfulness was gone, replaced by a cold, predatory gleam in his silver eyes. "If they go up," he said softly, "they're in my yard. I can still catch them. No matter how high they fly."
"Sit down, Lance," Bruno grunted.
Bruno didn't look up as his hand moved over the dossier. With the speed and precision of a machine, he used the fountain pen to slash a thick, black cross over the faces of Ruben Rayo and Corbin Monet.
He held up the defaced image.
"We are adjusting the parameters of the hunt," Bruno announced. "We will treat these two the same way we treat Paul Strahm. They are no longer just persons of interest. They are hostile combatants allied with a known terrorist."
He looked at Lea, then at Kade, then finally rested his gaze on Rosette and Elise.
"They are armed, dangerous, and desperate. If you find them, you treat them as outlaws. No warnings. No hesitation. We neutralize the threat to this city."
Bruno lowered the paper. "Is there a problem with that?"
"No, Sir," Rosette said immediately, her hand resting on her hilt.
"None," Elise stated coldly.
"No problem," Lance smirked.
"No... Sir," Lea managed to whisper, the lie tasting like bile in her throat.
"Good," Bruno said, turning back to the window to watch the fog roll in. "Then get to work."