Zeraya stepped out from the shadow of a rusted transit kiosk.
She had the kind of striking, high-contrast beauty that usually got people killed in the lower tunnels — heavy dark hair sticking to her forehead with sweat, motor grease smeared across high cheekbones and olive skin, pale piercing eyes that were currently doing a sweep of Will that felt less like being looked at and more like being measured. Her pragmatic kinetic-armor was fitted tightly to a lean coiled build that suggested a pre-collapse athlete, but the muscle mass in her shoulders and thighs was wrong for a runner or a fighter — it was the specific density of someone who had been breaking things with their hands for long enough that the hands had rebuilt themselves around the work. Two matte-black trench knives were sheathed at her thighs.
The armor plating integrated the Corporate Graft aesthetic — necrotic, bruised-looking metal fused directly with the synthetic weave. Her jaw was tight. She radiated the exhausted, highly strung aura of a woman forced to manage a lethal adult toddler, which Will suspected was an accurate description of her professional situation.
Her eyes finished the sweep. She had looked at his patched jacket, his lack of visible weaponry, and his total lack of nervous energy, and she had filed all three of those things somewhere.
"A mule who doesn't twitch when a Berserker grabs him," Zeraya said, her voice perfectly deadpan. "That's new. Or you're just in shock."
Will had approximately two seconds to decide who he was going to be in this negotiation. He made the decision the way he made most decisions that mattered — without deliberating, in the part of him that was faster than thought.
"I'm expensive," Will said. "Twenty percent of the gross. First refusal on any unbonded utility cores."
Zeraya's eyes narrowed.
Ha, Khan said, with immediate loud approval. Look at her. She hits like she's done it a thousand times and enjoyed every one. I like this one, boy. Keep her.
Will watched Zeraya recalibrate. Standard mules begged for five percent and were grateful not to be used as bait. The audacity of the number was doing work he hadn't needed to say out loud. She looked at Elyas, who gave a manic thumbs-up with a ring-covered hand, and then back at Will.
"Twenty percent if you don't slow us down," Zeraya said, her tone absolute ice. "Come on. The rest of the team is waiting at Union."
The descent into the cavernous ruin of Union Station took twenty minutes.
The pre-Collapse transit hub had been entirely repurposed by the Raiders Guild. The polished stone floors were cracked and stained with old blood, lit by flickering Glitch-neon signs advertising weapon repairs and back-alley bounties. The air smelled of old violence and cheap fuel and the specific kind of desperation that had stopped being acute and become structural.
Will read the architecture of the space immediately.
At the far end of the terminal, a massive heavily guarded bulkhead sealed off a pristine subterranean roadway. The Billy Bishop tunnel. The Island elites had engineered a direct fortified sub-lake artery connecting their stronghold to Union Station — a way to step from their armored transports directly into the skyboxes overhead without ever touching the PATH at all.
Will looked up at the skyboxes. Glass-enclosed penthouse units hanging from heavy steel cables, elites behind one-way mirrors with chilled wine and digital wagers on whatever was bleeding below.
Fat lords watching men die from behind glass, Khan snarled, his voice hot with contempt. I have burned palaces full of men exactly like that. Watched them run in their silk robes. It felt magnificent. Point me at them, boy.
Not yet, Will thought.
You always say not yet.
Because it's always not yet.
The violence was happening in the center of the terminal.
The Raiders had built an MMA-style fighting cage from Glitch-reinforced iron wire and concrete barriers. Menders stood at the chain-link ready to drag the losers out by their boots. A crowd of scavengers pressed against the wire, screaming wagers as two colossal figures clashed inside.
One of them was a grotesque mutation — a man who had spliced his own DNA with a Gate-bear, massive fur-covered torso and razor-sharp bone claws extending from his knuckles. He roared, swinging wildly, trying to decapitate his opponent.
The opponent was Tyson.
Will watched him move and immediately recalibrated his assumptions. Tyson stood seven-foot-two and was impossibly wide, built like a walking bank vault, and a man that size should have been slow — weighed down by his own immense center of gravity. Instead he ducked a sweeping claw strike with fluid dexterity, pivoted on his heavy boots, and avoided the follow-up lunge entirely.
"Watch this," Elyas grinned, leaning against the chain-link. "He's about to lock the vault."
The bear-mutant roared, rearing back for a devastating two-handed downward strike.
Tyson stopped moving.
He planted both heavy boots flat against the concrete floor. A visible ripple of earthen magic snapped out from his soles, cracking the concrete in a perfect circle around him. His stance locked. The air pressure around his body thickened visibly.
The bear-mutant brought both claws down directly onto Tyson's exposed shoulders.
The claws did not pierce the skin. Tyson's flesh rippled outward, temporarily taking on the properties of ultra-dense rubber. The kinetic force of the strike was entirely absorbed and violently redirected. The bear-mutant shrieked as its own bone-claws shattered against Tyson's neck.
Tyson didn't flinch. He casually backhanded the mutant across the jaw, sending the three-hundred-pound beast crashing into the reinforced wire.
THAT'S a soldier! Khan roared in Will's skull, loud enough that Will nearly missed a step. He took the full hit and didn't even blink! He absorbed it and threw it back! I want ten thousand of him! Put him in the front of everything!
"Immovable Object," Zeraya said, crossing her arms beside Will. "Once he sets his feet, you cannot break his posture. He's our frontline."
The crowd erupted. Tyson stepped out of the cage rolling his massive shoulders, wiped a streak of the mutant's blood from his cheek, and offered Will a slow silent nod of acknowledgment.
Will nodded back.
I like him, Khan declared, slightly calmer but still vibrating with enthusiasm. He reminds me of my heavy cavalry. The ones who hit a fortified line and just kept walking forward through it.
He's on our team, Will thought. You can calm down.
I am calm, Khan said. This is me calm. You should hear me excited.
Will had heard him excited. It was how four Vipers ended up geometrically folded on a dungeon floor.
"We need Raven to wake up and we can drop," Zeraya muttered, scanning the bleachers.
Will followed her gaze to a darkened corner of the staging area.
A girl sat slouched on a rusted transit bench, aggressively ignoring the noise of the fighting pit. Heavy winged black eyeliner, a spiked leather choker, an oversized faded band t-shirt paired with ripped fishnets. She looked like she had walked straight out of a pre-apocalypse occult basement show and found the apocalypse itself somewhat underwhelming by comparison.
She was spinning a jagged spectral scythe between her fingers. The ethereal weapon bled dark freezing smoke into the humid air.
"Raven!" Elyas yelled, waving his elongated arm. "We have a mule! Time to work!"
Raven sighed. The sound carried an immense amount of theatrical teenage exhaustion, the sigh of someone who had been personally wronged by the concept of urgency.
She closed her fist. The spectral scythe shattered into a cloud of glowing purple ash.
"I have a two-minute cooldown on the barrage," Raven said, sliding off the bench and walking toward them. Her combat boots hit the concrete with a heavy deliberate stomp. "If we hit a mob in the first room, you guys have to wait. I'm not using the arrows until my mana regens."
A death-caller, Khan said, watching the freezing smoke dissipate. The excitement had dropped into something more serious. I had shamans who could pull the souls out of men mid-battle. Entire flanks collapsed just from the sound of it. She is artillery, boy. You protect her or you lose your biggest weapon before the real fight starts.
Will looked at the assembled team.
A tank that turned kinetic force back on itself. An occultist carrying a spectral payload the System had decided to reward. A woman who fought with precision that looked like economy and was probably something considerably more dangerous than it looked. A Persian berserker who generated elastic momentum and apparently traveled by grabbing people's lapels from forty feet away.
He checked the thermal scope in his pack. The kinetic bracers on his wrists.
Stop counting your inventory, Khan said, and tell them what to do. They're already waiting for it. They just don't know they're waiting for you yet.
"The cooldown won't be an issue," Will said, pushing his jacket back to show the kinetic bracers. "I run the logistics. Follow the tempo and nobody dies."
Raven rolled her eyes. But she fell into line behind Tyson.
Zeraya looked at Will for one second longer than was strictly necessary. He held the look without explaining it.
She drew her trench knives.
"Gate is hot," Zeraya said. "Let's go break the bank."