The day broke acid-pale, bleeding through the penthouse's holographic blinds like a surgical lamp in a morgue. No one in UMBRA really slept, but Owen Dagger was always the first to breach the perimeter of unconsciousness. He ran point even in dreams. He padded across heated composite floors, ghost-silent, trailing the scent of ionized ozone and skin-oil from a night spent cycling threat models. The kitchen—more a glass-walled command post than a place for eating—stood at parade rest. Owen punched the espresso machine, calibrated the grind by muscle memory, then checked the security feeds stitched into the north wall.
Mana-forged glass refracted the city's dawn, splitting each sunbeam into spectral lines—infrared, ultraviolet, runic. Owen's left hand hovered over the terminal, fingers tapping out diagnostic commands in a staccato cadence. No pings on the outer wards. No magnetic displacement in the service shaft. A single glitch on the tertiary fire escape, but the building's own logs showed only a misfired cleaning drone.
He logged it, double-encrypted, then poured two shots into a cup the color of old bruises.
Across the open expanse of the penthouse, Ellen Lee's door slid aside with the smooth inevitability of a guillotine. She emerged in compression gear, every muscle cabled and ready, hair coiled tight, face cold as lunar stone. She neither acknowledged Owen nor the coffee; her first step was a forward roll, into a shoulder vault, into a smooth three-punch-kick sequence that would have snapped the neck of anything living if it hadn't been air. Every motion, silent. She exhaled, once, then reset—again, and again, a loop of violence compressed to its purest form.
Hazel sat cross-legged in the living room's sunken conversation pit, surrounded by a ring of cracked tablets and battered, rune-burnt diagnostic cubes. Her glasses were slipshod on her nose, her hands a blur across virtual surfaces. On every screen: rotating overlays of the Crystal District, mana-flow simulations, packet captures of drone comms in Sombra, the tail end of a port scandal replaying from seventy-seven unique perspectives. Hazel didn't look up. She didn't need to.
"Nothing on the sixth-hour scan," Owen said, voice barely above the low drone of the kitchen. "But I want everyone to run thermal again. We had a ghost on the fire escape at oh-five."
Ellen finished her sequence, sweatless. "Cleaner drone?"
Owen nodded. "So they say."
"Bullshit," Ellen replied, rolling her shoulders. "They don't run that script on weekends. Especially not with the port at yellow alert."
Hazel flicked two fingers, merged three data streams, and spoke without looking. "Confirmed. The drone was a Zeiss 3200, patched from a Sombra subvendor. Last update: three months ago. No active contract in the Crystal."
Ellen circled to the window, peered through the reinforced glass at the city below. Nueva Arcadia sprawled in every direction, its towers and channels and ducts stitched together with the logic of a tumor. In the distance, she watched a formation of police AVs trace a perimeter around the Financial District, the lights flickering red-blue-white in the haze.
Owen set the coffee on the table in front of Hazel, a silent peace offering. She took it without looking, sipped, then set it down with the precision of a detonator. "Someone's pulling old drones from the junk pools. Could be scavengers, could be contract prelude. Or just someone wanting us to see them."
Jane Navarro made her entrance the way sunlight does in a prison: late, merciless, and full of judgment. She wore a robe over tailored pants, eyes ringed with the kind of darkness you get from a decade of bad sleep and worse decisions. Her hair, gold-orange and untamable, was pulled into a loose knot, but her hands were steady as she poured herself a triple neat from the bar cart. It was not yet seven.
She surveyed her crew with a look that said "I remember when you were all children, and I was already twice your age and meaner than hell." Then she leaned against the wall, sipped, and waited for someone to break.
No one spoke about the Taira job. That was the rule: no contract talk before noon, unless the job already went sideways. But the weight of it hung in the air, sour and dense as the coffee. Every movement had the inflection of an argument about to start.
Hazel's fingers flashed over a keyboard, the gestures twitchy, almost involuntary. "I've got three new log-ins on the Lancaster servers, all traced to the same two subnets. One's a honeypot, the other is live. Could be staging for the Bridge transfer."
Ellen turned, face unmoving. "What's the gap in their guard schedule?"
Hazel shrugged. "Too perfect. They're cycling every five hours, always with one wildcard slot. Classic lure."
Jane drained her glass, then let it clink against the steel counter. "They want us inside. They want us to believe we can win."
Owen's attention drifted back to the security feeds, the edge of his vision flickering with afterimages from the night before. He replayed the moment when Shiori Taira had signed the blood contract, the way her hands had trembled, the way she'd looked at him like he might be her executioner or her only hope.
He didn't like either option.
Ellen reset her stance, then stalked into the kitchen, poured herself a glass of water, and drank it all in one drag. "We have twenty-two hours to plan," she said. "And they expect us to fail."
Jane straightened, rolled her neck, and regarded the skyline with predator's interest. "Then let's make it interesting."
For a while, nobody said anything. The coffee cooled, the screens flickered, and the city kept spinning, hungry for new disasters.
Hazel finally broke the silence. "If we pull this off, what do we do with the Bridge?"
Jane answered instantly. "We use it. Or we break it."
Owen nodded, but inside he felt the old, familiar ache—the knowledge that every job changed the team, that every win was another layer of debt they would never pay off.
He walked to the window, set his forehead against the cold glass, and watched the world below, thinking of all the ways it could end.
Somewhere in the Crystal District, a child was already running, already setting the next disaster in motion.
Owen finished his coffee, then set the cup down with a sound like a gunshot.
It was morning, and UMBRA was awake.
The war table wasn't actually a table, though it was flat and woodlike and wide enough to seat six mercenaries plus one handler. It ran down the length of the penthouse's central room, and right now every centimeter of it was occupied—by tablets, data sheets, weapon manifests, blueprints that glowed faintly with anti-surveillance runes. From above, it looked like a digital morgue: every square, every line, a map of where someone could and would die.
Jane sat at the head, hands folded, eyes distant. She let the others spread out the materials, content to watch for the first seven minutes while her mind worked the angles. When she finally spoke, the table hushed without a word.
"Hazel," she said. "Walk us through it."
Hazel nodded, glasses reflecting nothing but blue light, and tapped a sequence that projected the Lancaster megaplant onto the surface in high-res, layer by layer. The facility was a monster: six sub-basements, seventeen above-ground floors, three hundred and twelve staff on the books, another fifty-three not listed on any official schedule. Every door was triple-warded. Every corridor had a camera—except for the ones that didn't.
"The main vault is here," Hazel said, magnifying a hollow near the center of the schematic. "They move the Bridge through this corridor at twenty-three hundred. Security cycle is every five hours, but there's always a two-minute window when the shift changes. The weird thing is—" She hesitated, eyes flicking to Owen, then Jane. "The pattern is too regular. Every time we rerun the sim, the window gets wider."
Ellen leaned forward, one hand bracing the edge of the table as she drew three parallel lines across the map. "They want us to take it. Or they want someone else to." She moved to a secondary overlay, where escape routes spidered out from the vault to three possible exfil points. "These two are traps," she said, voice flat. "This one might not be." She circled it, but her eyes stayed on the other two.
Owen examined the shifting guard logs, lips pressed thin. "Who's behind the last-minute personnel changes? None of these guys have local records, but they're running point on the most sensitive corridors."
Hazel tapped her screen. "They're all imports. Sombra, mostly. But two are flagged in the WMO contract database as 'non-compliant,' which means they're either too expensive or too dangerous for public jobs."
Jane grunted. "Ghosts, then. Or ghosts-in-training."
Hazel's hands danced across the interface, flipping from security overlays to employee profiles and back. "There are motion sensors with dead zones here, here, and here." She marked them in blood-red. "But those zones are only off during the pre-transfer sweep. The rest of the time, they're saturated with micro-runes. I think they're hoping to catch a mage or a null running silent."
"Or they want to catch us on the way out," Owen added. "It's too neat."
Jane drew a stylus from behind her ear, circled the three blind spots, and muttered, "Too convenient." She connected the dots, then drew a line straight to the main access shaft. "We're being herded. If we take the easy route, we die."
Ellen was already marking the walls with potential breach points. "I can open a door here," she said, stabbing the map with a fingertip, "but it will burn out the circuit for the entire floor. We'd have two minutes before backup hits from above and below."
Hazel bit her lip, then scrolled through another set of logs. "Someone in their IT ran a diagnostic three times this week, always at 3:17 AM. Never at any other time. If we're lucky, it's an inside job. If we're not, it's a bot checking for tampering."
Owen steepled his fingers. "Has anyone checked Taira's end of the contract? I mean, really checked it? Shiori said her father had no idea, but I don't buy it. Not with the resources they're throwing around."
Jane gave him a long look, then tapped a private terminal set into the table. A second later, the full text of Shiori's contract scrolled into view—page after page of legalese, counter-signed in blood and mana, the Taira crest stamped at the bottom.
"Compare it to the old jobs," Jane said. "You'll see what I saw."
Hazel ran the signature, then did a recursive search through the Taira contract archives. After a moment, she let out a low whistle. "It's legit—almost. The glyphs match."
Owen frowned. "So this is a US contract."
Jane nodded, gaze hardening. "Taira USA is beginning to climb really big steps "
They left the table as one, minds working ahead to breach and exfil, every variable accounted for but one: what happens when you finish the job, and the only enemy left is the one who hired you?
They'd find out soon enough.
Owen never liked the Oriental District, not even before the market's black veins started pulsing with secondhand neon and half-baked desperation. It was a predator's paradise—every step tracked, every corridor alive with invisible teeth. Today, the megatower's thirty-nine-floor lobby looked like a trading pit during a market crash, but with less decorum and more knives.
He and Jane moved through the crowd in near silence. Their faces had been re-skinned with glamour—a tweak to cheekbones, a softening of Jane's jaw, a tint to Owen's eyes that made him look more lamb than wolf. Their suits were off-the-rack, even a little rumpled. The only thing that didn't fit was the way they watched every reflection, every jitter in the air.
They took the elevator up, bypassed a retina scanner with a borrowed subdermal, and emerged in a hallway lined with lacquered doors and mana-choked security glyphs. At Suite 3912, Jane knocked three times—once polite, twice threatening.
The fixer opened up. He was thin in that way only city dwellers could be, stretched by caffeine and anxiety. His eyes were the color of water after a chemical spill—clear, but never clean. A bare patch of scalp twitched under the embedded AR jack.
"You're early," the fixer said, voice stripped of affect.
"Efficiency is my stock-in-trade," Jane replied, slipping into the room first, Owen a silent shadow behind her.
The suite was empty but for a battered smart-desk, a cheap kettle, and a wall of antique holo-charts running finance feeds. The fixer motioned for them to sit, then poured three cups of tea. It was a formality; nobody drank.
"We're here for a liquidity position in biotech," Jane said. "Narrow time window, top-end risk."
The fixer nodded, eyes flicking over Owen, then back to Jane. "You'll be bidding against at least one other fund. Domestic. They want the same asset. Security's already been flagged—if you go in, you'll set off a squeeze."
Owen let the metaphor ride. "What's the float on the Bridge?"
The fixer's jaw twitched. "Heard about that. Synthetic channeler, right? Market says it's a bomb. Some say it's leverage. Word is, whoever gets it first gets to set the terms for the next cycle."
Jane's lips thinned. "Who's on the other side?"
The fixer didn't answer, but glanced at the holo-feeds—specifically, at the one tagged with a ad about a lion. "They don't call from here. But they're very interested in the core."
Jane shifted in her seat, letting her hand rest on the arm of the chair, where her pulse would be visible if anyone was looking for tells. "Any recent volatility?"
"Last night," the fixer said, "someone tried to front-run the cycle. Got vaporized by the desk. After that, the volume tripled."
Owen smiled, barely. "Someone always tries the shortcut."
The fixer leaned in, lowering his voice. "This isn't just a portfolio rebalance. There are more players on that project. Some of them aren't even on the books."
Jane nodded once, then produced a data stick, set it on the table. "We'll take the first look. Give us the real schedule."
The fixer picked up the stick, slipped it into a slot under his thumb. He checked the transfer—no words exchanged, just a series of tight, confirming nods.
Jane stood, smoothing her sleeve. "Pleasure doing business."
The fixer's pupils dilated as he watched them leave. "Watch your six," he said, not quite a warning, not quite a wish.
They left together, silent until the elevator hit the ground.
Owen exhaled. "I hate that place."
Jane grinned, feral. "That's because you've never loved anyone more than yourself."
Owen almost smiled. "What is that supposed to mean?."
Lockwood's air was thick with the byproducts of regret: smoke, burnt oil, spilled beer, the undertone of old magic. The bar was called MIRROR, but the only things that reflected were the eyes of its regulars, each set to their own wavelength of paranoia.
Ellen Lee entered first, sweeping the room with a gaze that never focused on any one face for more than half a second. She found the mark immediately: ex-Lancaster tech, alone at the far end, slumped over a bottle and a glass already emptied twice. Ellen took a seat by the exit, angled so her back never faced the door.
Hazel followed, playing the role of uncertain apprentice—shoulders hunched, steps measured, a nervous energy that drew just enough attention. She ordered something sweet, then drifted toward the mark, tracing an arc that would take her by his side without ever suggesting intent.
The tech was drunk, but not stupid. He glanced at Hazel, then looked away, then back again. "You from corporate?" he asked, slurred but sharp.
Hazel shook her head, eyes wide behind the glasses. "Freelance," she said. "Just looking to network."
He laughed, bitter. "Only thing you'll catch is a pink slip. Lancaster fired half my floor last month."
Hazel slid into the seat beside him, dropping her voice. "But you still know where they keep the good stuff, right?"
The tech's fingers tapped the bar in a nervous rhythm. "Maybe. Why?"
Hazel leaned in, lowering her guard, letting him think he was in control. "Because there's a job, and if you know the gaps, you can name your price."
The tech looked at her, then at his empty glass, then at her again. "Double whiskey," he said to the bartender, then to Hazel, "and I'll tell you a story."
She bought him the drink. He downed half, then started talking, eyes fixed on the wall behind the bar.
"Security got tight last week. Brought in mercs, real pros, not like the usual muscle. But the weird part? Stuff kept going wrong anyway. Doors locked from the inside, sensors tripped for no reason, once even a blackout on the subfloor. When I tried to fix it, got stonewalled—access revoked, no explanation. Boss said it was a 'test of response protocols.'"
Hazel scribbled notes in her head, careful not to show any tells. "Who's running point on the upgrades?"
The tech snorted. "Nobody I recognized. Foreigners. All their creds checked out, but nobody had a past. They worked fast, and they didn't ask questions."
Ellen kept her eyes on the exits, counting bodies, mapping escape vectors. She watched as Hazel turned the tech's bitterness into information, never breaking cover.
Hazel pressed. "Any word about what they're protecting? I heard a rumor it's a prototype."
The tech finished his whiskey, voice a gravel scrape. "I don't know what it is, but I know what it isn't—it's not safe. Whatever they're doing in that vault, it scares even the new guards. They all wear some kind of talisman, like they're warding off a curse."
Hazel smiled, small and earnest. "Thanks. That helps a lot."
She stood, left a twenty on the bar, and melted into the crowd. Ellen met her by the door, and together they slipped out, taking three separate routes back to the station before regrouping in a dim-lit alley.
"Anything?" Ellen asked, voice as sharp as the night.
Hazel nodded. "More than I wanted."
Ellen gave her a rare, approving look. "You did good."
Hazel glanced back at the bar, then up at the sky. "It's never just about the tech, is it?"
Ellen shook her head. "Never."
The teams reconvened at a safehouse on the east edge of Lockwood, where the city's light pollution was so bad it stained even the air inside. Owen and Jane arrived first, Owen already sweeping for bugs. Ellen and Hazel came in ten minutes later, Ellen flicking her wrist in a code gesture: all clear.
They traded notes, fast and precise, no wasted words.
"We're up against other team," Jane said. "Asher Defense, probably one of their black ops teams"
Hazel filled in the rest. "Lancaster's own staff is being kept out of the loop. They're running blind."
Owen summarized, fingers tracing patterns in the dust: "Which means the job is hotter than we thought."
Ellen's face didn't change, but there was a new energy to her stance. "We'll need a distraction."
Jane grinned, teeth showing. "That's what we do best."
For the next hour, they strategized, mapping every angle, every fake-out and fallback. Ellen and Owen worked the break-in; Jane and Hazel planned the digital blitz. Each step layered with paranoia, every route checked and rechecked.
When they finally called it, the city was already shifting, already folding in on itself in anticipation of the coming storm.
Owen stood at the window, watching the distant lights flicker in the direction of the megatower.
"Tomorrow," he said, "we steal the future."
He closed the blinds, locking out the night, but not the sense that somewhere—maybe everywhere—someone was watching back.
Twilight turned Nueva Arcadia's skyline into a backlit x-ray—every tower, every spire outlined in static and dirty flame. In the penthouse, the glass walls had gone opaque, shielding UMBRA's final briefing from any prying eyes.
The team gathered around the war table, its surface now a battlefield of overlapping maps, data feeds, and heatprint mug rings. Hazel's hands hovered over a set of tablets, each one humming with a different flavor of paranoia: security cameras, city traffic, backdoor police chatter. She conjured a 3D rendering of the Lancaster facility and spun it for all to see, pausing at each weak point she'd found.
Jane watched, silent, a glass of something brown and lethal balanced in her left hand. Ellen stood behind her chair, eyes locked on the hologram, her own hands gripping the edge so tight the wood creaked. Owen paced the far end of the room, face blank, but his knuckles were pale and flexing, just short of a tremor.
"Here," Hazel said, flicking a seam open on the projection. "Utility corridor. Guard rotation is light, and if we jam the local feeds for sixteen seconds, we're in."
Ellen grunted approval. "That's our primary entry. Owen, what's the fallback?"
Owen stopped pacing. "We pop a smoke cluster on the rooftop. It draws half the building's security up, gives us a two-minute window. But we'll have to deal with whatever private army Taira or Sombra throws at us."
Jane sipped her drink, gaze steady. "We've handled worse."
Hazel shook her head, not in disagreement, but in awe. "Not like this. All the other players are shadowing our every move. Even the air in that place will be watching."
Owen returned to the table, leaned in. "We're not just stealing a toy. We're starting a war. Our fixer says there are teams on retainer waiting to see who gets the Bridge, then either kill them or buy them."
Jane tapped the table with one short nail. "They'll have to kill us, then. We don't sell."
The four of them stared at the model, the silence thick enough to drag down the ceiling. Then, as if on cue, Ellen snapped out of it, began outlining the infiltration plan with the calm of a surgeon plotting her next incision.
"We move at midnight. Hazel locks out their alarms and loops the cameras. Owen disables the internal comms. I breach the vault. Jane secures exfil. Simple."
"Nothing's ever simple," Hazel said, but a hint of pride crept in.
Jane smiled, all teeth. "That's why we win."
They stood there, the four of them, reading the future off a tablet like augurs staring into a blood pool.
Then a sound cut through the room: a short, high-pitched ping, not any of the preset alerts. Jane's terminal flashed, the screen blooming with a subtle blue-white sigil. Taira logo—shorn of its usual bombast, just the old clan mark and nothing else. Below it, four words:
YOU ARE NOT ALONE
Hazel's lips parted, Owen's eyes narrowed, Ellen just stared.
Jane put her glass down, very carefully. "Well," she said, "that's a first."
The words blinked once, then again, and then vanished.
Hazel tried to trace the signal, but it was already gone—scrubbed from the system, the memory, even from her cache. "There's no source," she whispered. "It's not possible."
Owen said, "It's a warning."
Ellen said, "It's an offer."
Jane just stared at the space where the words had been, her knuckles white against the glass.
"It's both," she said. "And now we have to decide what side we're on."
The room stayed silent, but all four of them felt it: the city breathing, waiting to see who blinked first.
Dusk slid into darkness, and for a moment, Nueva Arcadia held its breath.
Tomorrow, they would steal the Bridge, or die trying.
Tonight, they learned what every survivor eventually knows:
In this city, no one is ever truly alone.