Dead silence settled over the bar again.
Bronie stared hard at the closed wooden door and let out the long breath of stale air she'd been holding in her chest.
She wiped the cold sweat from her forehead, fished a fresh piece of bubblegum out of her pocket, peeled off the wrapper, and shoved it into her mouth with shaking fingers.
She chewed twice, viciously.
"Boss, you are one giant walking disaster…" she mumbled around the gum.
"When this blows over, you'd better give me a raise. Double! No, triple! And a top-of-the-line holographic Alienware laptop while you're at it! Otherwise I'm getting robbed here!"
Having thoroughly extorted her boss inside her own head, Bronie hopped down from the barstool, ready to grease her heels and slip away.
And then.
A hand came down on her shoulder without the slightest warning.
Gulp.
Bronie jerked so hard she nearly swallowed the gum whole.
Cioara stood behind her, perfectly still.
At some point the former mercenary had come around from behind the bar without a sound.
"Old hag, I, I've gotta get back to work?" Bronie turned her head stiffly and forced out an ugly little smile.
Cioara's face was calm.
But Bronie had been raised by this woman. She knew that face far too well.
That kind of unruffled calm was usually the last warning before a category-five storm made landfall.
"Those things you said just now."
Cioara's voice was neither loud nor soft, but in the empty bar it came through with perfect clarity.
"DID, multiple personality disorder, defense mechanisms from childhood trauma, a game therapy program tailored to the patient — you even worked 'filial devotion' into that pile of nonsense."
Cold sweat soaked straight through the back of Bronie's jacket.
"It was very well done. Internally consistent, emotionally pitched just right. Even I almost got taken in by you."
"Mom, everything I said back there was—"
"Almost."
Cioara lifted her hand off Bronie's shoulder and stepped back half a pace, leaning lazily against the edge of the bar with her arms folded.
She had seen through every layer of the disguise Bronie had so carefully woven, all in a single glance.
"Theresa is a good person, but her greatest weakness is how easily her feelings lead her around by the nose."
"Every single line you fed her landed right on her guilt and her love for that niece of hers. You basically took her by the hand and let her fill in all the holes in that story for herself."
Bronie's jaw locked up completely. The gum stopped moving.
"But you can't fool me."
Cioara leaned in slightly, dropping her voice so low that only the two of them, mother and daughter, could hear it.
"Bronie, do you remember what you promised me? You said you'd work an honest job and stay out of anything dangerous. So how about you explain to me—"
"What exactly is 'the apocalypse in six months'? What is the Starfire Crucible Project? What is this sudden methane explosion on the Arc City overpass? And—"
"What exactly is a twenty-meter-tall humanoid war machine buried under Anti-Entropy Entertainment?"
Bronie lowered her head, biting down hard on her lip, and said nothing.
Where had the leak come from?
Bronie had no idea.
She had done everything she possibly could on the network side, but plenty of things couldn't be solved through networks.
Since ancient times there had only ever been one true variable — people.
The old hag had been a mercenary who made hardened men flinch, and retirement hadn't cost her her informants or her intel channels.
There was no way she didn't know about the strange things happening in Arc City.
She simply hadn't brought it up. Not out of ignorance, but because she'd been waiting for the right moment. The perfect opening.
Cioara never fought a battle she wasn't sure of. For a mercenary, gathering intelligence came before everything else. And clearly, when it came to making Bronie kneel on the washboard, she had prepared very, very thoroughly.
"And then there's that man, Su Yu." Cioara pressed in, step by step. "An ordinary, run-of-the-mill game producer? You think I'd swallow that garbage? An ordinary man, and gathered around him are a top-tier Anti-Entropy scientist, the young lady of the Schicksal Foundation, a world-class corporate heiress idol, and a white-haired freak of a girl who can catch bullets barehanded? You think after all my years in this trade, I've got no eye for these things at all?"
Out in the alley, a heavy motorcycle roared past and faded into the distance.
Cioara straightened up, those owl-like eyes fixed on her adopted daughter.
"Tell me, Bronya."
"What exactly are you and that man Su Yu doing behind my back… something dangerous enough to turn all of Arc City upside down?"
Bronie didn't answer.
But she didn't scramble for an excuse and bolt the way she usually did either.
Because she could feel it — the moment those words ended, a presence had locked onto her and refused to let go.
If she so much as thought about running, Cioara would have her pinned in an instant.
She took a deep breath and met Cioara's eyes: suspicion, anger, and beneath it all, a thin thread of grief.
"Old hag."
Bronie paused.
"I've never asked you for anything my whole life. For the sake of your own peaceful retirement, could you just pretend you don't know a thing?"
Cioara said nothing, but cracks had already spidered across the glass in her hand.
She was answering with action — what do you think?
"Fine, fine, I surrender, I surrender." Bronie raised both hands. "You'd keep digging even if I kept my mouth shut anyway — could you put the glass down first? That thing's expensive, right?"
Cioara gave her a long look and set the glass down. "It comes out of your allowance."
The words had barely left her mouth when a black muzzle came up level with Raven's forehead.
At this range, there was nowhere to dodge.
"Relax. This gun only discharges a high-voltage current. It'll knock you out, but it won't kill you."
Bronie had shed her skin entirely. The unlucky-kid-caught-by-her-mom act was gone without a trace.
The person standing here wasn't just the Haxxor Bunny. She was a participant in the Meteoric Salvation Project.
"The Crucible Project, the Wotan Project — you know far, far too much. The lockdown on that intel runs so deep that even the very best hackers—"
"Tell me, Cioara. Who exactly leaked it to you?"
"Your safety's off," Cioara said, out of nowhere.
Bronie's fingers stiffened, almost imperceptibly.
As an expert with guns she should never have fallen for something so amateurish, but instinct won. Her eyes flicked down for half a second.
The safety was clearly still on.
When she looked up again, Cioara had already stepped around the muzzle.
An irresistible leverage twisted through her wrist.
Cioara hadn't even used strength. She'd simply guided Bronie's joint outward, and the pistol crackling with high-energy arcs swung ninety degrees, pointing dead at the cheap sunflower oil painting on the wall.
Bronie's pupils shrank.
CQB close-quarters disarming technique, third set, seventh form.
The standard answer to any point-blank gun threat.
"You—"
"Kid." Cioara released her wrist and stepped calmly back, settling her spine against the bar's edge again. "Did you really think I'd spend the second half of my life doing nothing but polishing glasses behind a counter?"
She grabbed the half-empty bottle of vodka, tipped her head back, and took a long pull straight from the neck.
"I'm not just the madam of a shady little bar."
Cioara wiped the liquor from the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand, her gaze turning fathomless.
"And I'm not just some washed-up ex-mercenary either."
"Let's get reacquainted. Schicksal organization, Outer Sequence Seven, designation R-0093."
The gun clattered out of Bronie's hand onto the bar.
"A long-term deep cover order, signed personally by Otto Apocalypse." Cioara glanced at her stunned daughter. "Mission parameters: monitor all abnormal activity in Arc City. Priority subject of observation — Theresa Apocalypse."
The bar was quiet enough to hear a pin drop.
"Do you still remember how we first met Theresa? A foundation heiress with no idea where she was, wandering into the Old District, and wouldn't you know it, a pack of thugs with no sense of self-preservation surrounded her. And then… a mercenary just happened to be passing by, with her disobedient little hacker brat in tow, and put on a nice little damsel-in-distress rescue."
The color drained from Bronie's face. It was after that "chance encounter" that Theresa had become a regular at this underground bar.
"You thought that was fate working in mysterious ways?" Cioara's eyes fell on the pistol, her tone flat. "That was the assignment."
Bronie's lips moved. No sound came out.
"Otto wires a payment to my offshore account every month. Nothing extravagant, but enough to buy this run-down bar, enough to raise you, and enough for me to be a bar owner nobody in the Old District pays any attention to."
Cioara picked the gun up off the bar, ejected the magazine with practiced ease, glanced at it, slapped it back in, flicked the safety off, then slid it back across to Bronie.
"In exchange, I file a routine report with Schicksal every quarter. The contents are nothing more than which restaurant Theresa went to, who she met, whether she's done anything stupid enough to raise eyebrows."
Bronie finally found her voice. "You… you profiteering old crook."
"Thank you for the compliment."
"You lied to me." Bronie's voice was climbing. "You lied to me for all these years! You said you were a retired mercenary, you said you'd washed your hands of it, you said you'd never touch that dirty work again—"
"I didn't lie," Cioara cut in. "I really did retire. The outer sequence isn't a formal posting. At best it makes me a paid informant. The most dangerous thing I do for Otto these days is tail Theresa to a dessert shop."
Bronie glared at her. "Then how did you get your hands on S-rank intel?"
"Because Otto has been uneasy lately," Cioara said. "He's moved more personnel into Arc City and raised the priority on intelligence collection. Some of it gets pushed down from above. Some of it I stitched together myself from other informants. I've been in this business twenty years, Bronie — putting the puzzle together is my original trade."
Bronie slowly slid the gun back into its concealed holster.
Her hand was still trembling.
Cioara knew everything.
She had known everything from the very beginning.
"So." Bronie's voice had gone hoarse. "You called me back here for more than just helping Theresa ask her questions."
"Theresa's business was incidental." Cioara admitted it without hesitation. "I kept you here because I found out my daughter is getting dragged into trouble that even I can't see the bottom of. And as her mother, I need to know exactly how much danger she's in."
Bronie didn't answer.
She stared at the cracked glass on the bar for a long, long time.
"…If I tell you," she said quietly, "can you promise none of it gets passed back to Schicksal? Not to Otto, not to anyone?"
"A verbal promise?"
"Yeah."
Cioara laughed once.
"A verbal promise is worth less than scrap paper."
She bent down and pulled a manila envelope from a hidden compartment at the very bottom of the bar.
The envelope was old, its corners worn fuzzy, the flap closed with a red wax seal.
Cioara slapped it onto the counter.
"Open it."
Bronie hesitated two seconds, then broke the wax seal.
Inside was a stack of documents.
She turned the first page, and her face changed.
On the second page, her hands started shaking.
On the third, she threw the documents down on the bar as if they'd burned her.
"Are you insane?!"
Bronie had needed only a few glances to understand everything recorded in those files.
Dates. Locations. Targets. Methods. Cleanup procedures.
Every entry was a mission Cioara had carried out over her mercenary career.
Assassination. Demolition.
Intelligence theft.
Evidence disposal.
Some entries listed names in the target column. Some listed code names. Some listed nothing but a place and a date.
But every single one of them, under Shenzhou law, was worth a bullet.
"There is exactly one copy of this genuine death ledger in the entire world." Cioara's voice was steady, without a ripple in it. "There used to be two, locked in Otto's top-secret vault. It was the leverage he used to control me. But after I retired he handed the file over to me quite cheerfully, as payment for babysitting."
"And now, my copy…"
She extended one finger and slowly pushed the documents across the bar toward Bronie.
"Belongs to you."
Bronie's hand hovered in midair, unwilling to come down.
"If you give me this, that's the same as—"
"The same as being dead." Cioara finished the sentence for her. "All you'd have to do is stuff that pile of scrap paper into the Shenzhou authorities' tip line. I'd be arrested within twenty-four hours, indicted within seventy-two, and inside a month I'd be marched out to the execution ground."
Only the wall clock was left making any sound in the bar.
"You just asked me whether I could guarantee I wouldn't leak anything." Cioara looked quietly into the eyes hidden behind Bronie's goggles. "I told you, a verbal promise is worth less than scrap paper. So I'm giving you something far more useful than scrap paper."
She picked up the vodka bottle, screwed the cap back on, and returned it to the rack behind her.
"My life."
Bronie's hand came down on the documents.
The paper felt coarse under her fingers, the corners yellowed, some of it stained with something that might have been coffee or might have been something else.
It was so old.
Old enough to make her think Cioara had prepared all of this a very, very long time ago, and had been patiently waiting for this day ever since.
"You're insane."
Bronie said it again.
But this time, it came out completely different.
The first time had been pure shock.
This time, the bridge of her nose stung and she couldn't stop it.
"I'm not insane."
Cioara came out from behind the bar and stopped in front of her.
She stood a full head taller than Bronie.
Now she tilted her chin down slightly, looking at the kid with the gray ponytail, and for a moment her gaze drifted back twelve years, to a day of heavy snow.
At the crumbling gate of an orphanage, where she had taken that small hand, purple with cold, for the first time.
Back then, the top of little Bronie's head had barely reached her waist.
Now it nearly reached her shoulder.
"From the day I adopted you, I knew you weren't a bird for a cage. It's not in your bones to settle down and live an ordinary life. So I knew you'd get tangled up in all kinds of trouble sooner or later."
"I just never expected the day to come this fast."
"Old hag…" Bronie bit her lip, unsure what to say.
"I'm doing this because I want you to understand one thing." Cioara reached out and gently straightened the tactical goggles sitting crooked on Bronie's forehead.
"No matter how much trouble you're in now, and no matter how dangerous that plan of yours is—"
Cioara patted her on the head.
"You don't have to hold it up alone anymore."
Bronie kept her head down, looking at the manila envelope in her hands.
The wall clock ticked through a good many notches.
She took out her camera, photographed everything, documented it, and archived the record on her own server.
It was leverage. It was also a kind of trust.
Then she folded the envelope, tucked it into the innermost pocket of her jacket, and pulled the zipper shut.
She lifted her head and scrubbed quickly at her eyes with the back of her hand.
"A raise."
"What?"
"That black-hearted boss Su Yu has got to give me a raise." Bronie sniffled.
Cioara looked at her, and at last a gentle smile spread at the corner of her mouth.
Bronie dug a fresh piece of bubblegum out of her pocket, peeled off the gaudy wrapper, and popped it into her mouth.
She chewed twice, hard.
"Sit down, old hag." She patted the empty barstool beside her. "This story's a long one. We have to start on the day a certain white-haired idiot fell out of the sky."
Cioara pulled out the stool and sat down beside her.
Bronie blew a pink bubble, not too big and not too small, and it burst with a sharp pop.
"First you'd better brace yourself, because in this world…"
She looked at her adoptive mother, her eyes more serious than they had ever been.
"There isn't only one world."
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