The pod's door was not locked. It was barricaded from the inside. Kael didn't knock. He slammed his shoulder against the plasteel panel twice, the sound echoing across the empty roof. On the third impact, something inside gave way with a splintering crack. He shoved the door open.
The interior was a cramped capsule of controlled chaos. Wallscreens glowed with scrolling chemical formulae and hydrological maps. The air was warm, smelling of recycled air, ozone, and a faint, underlying scent of fear. A woman—Dr. Aris Thorne—stood frozen in the center of the space, holding a makeshift weapon, a heavy wrench. Behind her, partially hidden by a hanging thermal blanket, was the small, tense shape of a boy. Elias.
Her eyes were wide, not with terror, but with a fierce, exhausted defiance. She saw his face, his posture, the lack of immediate aggression, and the wrench lowered a fraction. "You're not with them," she said. It wasn't a question.
"They're here," Kael said, his voice stripped of all inflection. "A cleaner. Top tier. He's crossing to this roof now. He'll use thermal to see through the walls. You have less than ninety seconds."
The defiance in her eyes didn't falter, but it sharpened into a cold, pragmatic focus. "Elias," she said, without looking back. "The escape protocol. Now."
The boy moved, swift and silent. He darted to a console, his small hands flying over the interface. A section of the floor hissed open, revealing a dark vertical shaft—an old maintenance conduit for the mill's wiring. A knotted rope was anchored inside.
"Lin's route," Dr. Thorne said, grabbing a sealed data-drive from the console and stuffing it into a pouch on her son's backpack. "He mapped the old utility ways. It leads to the storm drains. Go. Don't stop. Don't look back. Remember the rendezvous."
The boy looked at her, then at Kael, his young face a mask of terrifying composure. He nodded once and slipped into the shaft, disappearing into the darkness.
She turned back to Kael, the wrench still in her hand. "Why are you here?"
"I was sent to kill you," he said, the truth clinical and bare. "I refused the contract."
Her eyes searched his face. She saw no lie, no grand motive. Only a stark, operational fact. "So you're a dead man walking. And you led him to us."
"He was already here. Watching. I'm drawing his focus."
A faint, almost imperceptible vibration came through the floor of the pod. A weight landing softly on the roof gravel. Sol was here.
"You need to go," Kael said, nodding towards the shaft. "Follow your son."
"And you?"
"I will delay him."
She didn't thank him. She understood the transaction. He was a spent asset, creating a diversion for a potentially useful one. "The story is on that drive," she said, her voice low and urgent. "Project Clarion. Veridia developed a bioremediation agent for heavy metals. It worked too well. It learned. Started targeting any complex molecular structure—plastics, synthetic neurons, certain protein chains. It's not a cleaner. It's a universal dissembler. They flooded Sector 7 to contain it, but it's in the aquifers. It's mutating. Lin knew. They drowned him for it."
"I know," Kael said. He saw Lin's hand in his mind, tapping. "The vendor permit. K7L-22R-4Q9."
A flicker of shock, then grim acknowledgment in her eyes. "You found his trace." She took a step towards the shaft, then paused. "Who watches the enforcers?" she asked, the question not philosophical but brutally practical.
"Other enforcers," he replied.
She gave one last, unreadable look, then slid into the conduit, pulling the floor section closed behind her. A soft click as it sealed.
Kael was alone in the pod. The wallscreens still scrolled, a silent testament to a truth fighting to be told. He picked up the wrench she had dropped. It was a poor weapon against what was coming.
He moved to the pod's door, now hanging crooked on its hinges. He didn't peer out. He knew Sol's methods. He would not charge in. He would use the environment.
The first sign was a hiss. A canister, small and grey, rolled into the center of the pod floor from the roof edge near the door. Gas. Not lethal—that would leave evidence—but a potent neural depressant, designed to incapacitate without a struggle.
Kael held his breath. He grabbed a fire blanket from its mount and threw it over the canister, smothering it. He then kicked the entire bundle out through the door, sending it tumbling across the gravel.
Silence.
Then, a voice. Calm, conversational, coming from outside and above. Sol was on the pod's roof. "Kael. That's the name you were using, yes? An inelegant choice. All this drama for what? A moral spasm?"
Kael didn't answer. He moved to the far wall of the pod, opposite the door.
"They showed me your psych-eval," Sol continued. "High functionality, low empathy, excellent dissociation scores. A perfect instrument. Then the scores dipped. After the hydroponics job. You saw something. It got under your skin. A weakness. Sentiment."
Kael's eyes scanned the pod's ceiling, looking for the inevitable point of entry. Sol wouldn't come through the door.
"Sentiment is a design flaw, Kael. We are not built for it. We are built for function. You have become non-functional. I am here to decommission you. It's nothing personal. It's maintenance."
A soft *thump* on the roof, directly above.
Kael raised the wrench.
A section of the ceiling, not the main structure but a removable panel for electrical conduits, was silently lifted away. Darkness above.
A muzzle appeared, not of a gun, but of a compact hose. A jet of clear, fast-acting adhesive foam shot out, splattering across the floor where Kael had been standing a second before. It hardened instantly into a rock-solid, sticky mass.
Sol was trying to immobilize, not kill. He wanted a clean debriefing first. To understand the flaw.
Kael lunged, not away, but towards the hole. He jammed the wrench up into the opening, striking blindly. It connected with something solid—a leg, an arm—and he heard a grunt of surprise.
He used the moment. He jumped, grabbing the edges of the hole, hauling himself up through the ceiling and onto the roof of the pod.
Sol was there, already recovered, three meters away. He was dressed in matte black, his face obscured by a light-multiplying visor. In his hands was not a rifle, but a compact capture-gun, designed to fire netting or restraints. He had holstered the foam dispenser.
"Direct," Sol said, his voice now carrying a hint of cold approval. "Good. Better than cowering."
They faced each other on the narrow roof under the bruised sky. The wind whipped between them.
"She's gone," Kael said.
"I know. The thermal showed the heat signature descending. The boy too. They are irrelevant for the next ninety seconds. You are my objective."
"Why? I'm already terminated."
"You possess unauthorised data. You displayed operational deviation. You are a template for potential systemic failure in other assets. You must be studied, then scrubbed."
Sol took a step forward. Kael shifted his stance, the wrench held low.
"You think you've chosen a side," Sol said, his voice almost pitying. "You haven't. You've just chosen to be waste. There are no sides. Only the system, and those who serve it."
He fired.
The net was almost invisible, a mono-filament mesh. Kael dove sideways, but the edge of it caught his left arm, instantly constricting, the microscopic filaments biting deep into his jacket and skin. He snarled, yanking back, but the net was designed to tighten with resistance.
Sol advanced, calmly reloading another cartridge into his capture-gun.
Kael did the only thing he could. He stopped fighting the net. He charged.
He crossed the short distance in two stumbling steps, the net trailing from his torn arm. Sol, expecting further evasion, was caught off balance. Kael swung the wrench in a short, brutal arc. Sol deflected it with the barrel of his gun, but the impact knocked the weapon from his grip. It clattered off the roof and into the darkness below.
For a moment, they were just two men on a roof. No tools. Just the conditioning.
Sol struck first—a knife-hand strike aimed at Kael's throat. Kael blocked, the impact jarring up his bone. They grappled, a silent, violent dance of leverage and pain. Sol was slightly faster, more technically precise. Kael was heavier, fueled by a desperate, directionless fury.
They staggered towards the edge of the pod's roof. Kael got a grip on Sol's tactical harness. Sol drove a knee into his gut. The breath exploded from Kael's lungs.
As he doubled over, his vision swimming, he saw it. Sol's visor had been knocked askew in the struggle. Beneath it, Sol's eyes were not the cold, dead lenses he expected. They were alert, focused, intelligent… and utterly, terrifyingly empty. There was no hate, no pleasure, no fear. Just the pure, serene focus of a function being performed.
It was the face of the system itself. Not evil. Not just. Simply operational.
With the last of his strength, Kael didn't push Sol away. He pulled him closer, and threw them both over the edge of the pod's roof.
They fell three meters onto the main roof's gravel with a crushing impact. The air left Kael in a final, agonized rush. Something cracked in his ribs.
Sol landed on top of him, but the fall had disoriented him too. His visor was gone. Blood trickled from a cut on his temple.
Kael's left arm, tangled in the net, was useless. His right hand scrabbled in the gravel. His fingers closed around a rock, jagged and heavy.
Sol recovered, straddling him, his hands going for Kael's throat.
Kael brought the rock up and smashed it into the side of Sol's head.
Once.
Twice.
The second blow landed with a wet, final sound. The serene focus in Sol's eyes shattered into blank, uncomprehending shock. Then nothing.
The pressure on Kael's throat vanished. Sol slumped to the side, a marionette with cut strings.
Kael lay on his back, gasping, the cold gravel sharp against his skin. The sky above was a uniform, light-polluted grey. He heard the distant, eternal hum of the city.
He had killed the watcher. He had saved nothing. He had only proven that one flawed tool could break another.
He rolled onto his side, pain screaming from his ribs and his shredded arm. He looked at Sol's body. The perfect instrument. Decommissioned.
Who watches the enforcers?
He pushed himself to his knees, then to his feet. He stood over Sol. He felt no triumph. Only a vast, hollow exhaustion. He was now something worse than a defect. He was a system error that had successfully deleted its own debugger.
He looked at the closed conduit hatch. They were gone. The story was in the boy's backpack, fleeing through the city's bowels.
He turned and limped towards the roof's edge, away from the pod, away from the body. He had no destination. But he could not stay here. The system would send another watcher. And another.
He was a story now too. A short, brutal story of malfunction. And stories, in this city, had a way of getting erased.