“Nothing new there,” she said. “Anything I should know about the Heart’s precious little heir?”
Jaeger’s laugh was a single, low bark. “He’s not little. And he’s not an idiot. He’s as calculating and ruthless as his father. He may have grown up in the luxury of the Heart but he sure as hell doesn’t fight like it.” Jaeger rolled his jaw. “Do not underestimate him, Kael.”
The bartender appeared, collecting the empty glasses, and dropped a fresh round in front of Shadera. She took one, eyed the men and women around them, then drank the rest.
“When’s the next drop from the Heart coming to the Boundary? I need more antibiotics,” she asked, voice lowering.
“Sometime this week. The rebels are going to intercept it again, but we haven’t received a concrete day.” Jaeger tucked the coin into his pocket.
Shadera slid from her chair and stood. “If you get word before I do, send a runner. I’ll be at the usual spot.”
Jaeger nodded, eyes already moving on to the next problem. “Don’t get killed, Shade. There’s no one left who could replace you.”
Shadera grinned. “I know.”
She left the bar through the back, into the alley where rain hissed against the hot neon, and let herself think—just for a second—about the thrill of it. Hunting Greyson Serel, the city’s golden bastard.
The thought tasted better than any liquor.
Like most, she hated the Heart. Hated the way it watched, the way it judged, the way it decided who mattered and who got ground into the slop beneath its boots. Hated the Veyra, the masks. Hated how the Heart pretended the Cardinal ring was any less a prison than this shithole.
But above all, she hated President Serel and his whole fucking family.
The rage that boiled inside her at even the thought of that name, burned a hole into her soul. It was that family name, that family’s legacy, that created the oppression of New Found Haven, that created the rings and outlawed even the basest of human emotion. It was that family who was to blame for all the suffering in this godforsaken city.
Killing Greyson Serel would be an honor for Shadera.
It would be a pleasure to take a life from the very people that had taken so many away from her. Greyson deserved to pay for his crimes as Executioner, but his family was the hammer, and people like her were always the nails.
Shadera kept to the alleys, the black arteries of the Boundary where even the rain couldn’t cleanse. Nothing stayed clean for long. The gutter water frothed underfoot, leeching out the names of dead brands and long-forgotten products from the trash that choked every drain. Chemical stench clung to her hair, her boots, the exposed skin of her neck. Her every sense was tuned to the next threat, the next twitch behind a broken window, or whisper down a pipe.
The walk from Wolf’s Head to her home was three blocks, if you took the high routes, twice that if you looped the long way to lose a tail. Shadera always took the long way, moving with a killer’s patience and paranoia.
People watched her pass, but didn’t bother her. In the Boundary, you learned early: keep your face blank, your hands visible, and your intentions hidden. Shadera’s reputation bought her quiet, but never safety. There was always someone newer, hungrier, or dumber on the block.
She spotted a kid loitering at the corner, maybe ten, maybe younger. No shoes, hands tucked into the sleeves of a coat five sizes too big. He eyed her, then the alley behind her, then vanished into a crawl space likea rat. Shadera clocked the move—informant, or spotter for a micro-gang. The predators out here ate their young. Most didn’t live past their twenties on these streets.
A couple blocks on, she slowed as the city’s noise dipped—a silence that always meant trouble. Two men hunkered by a barrel fire, backs to her, their voices pitched low. She caught the shape of a knife in the first one’s hand, the glint of a cheap gun on the other’s hip. Daggermouth wannabes, from the look of their patches. She moved past them without breaking stride, projecting the unspoken threat that the only thing they would receive if they messed with her, was a shallow grave.
The men shrank away from Shadera as she passed by and slipped into a narrow alley. She reached up, pulling down a rusted fire escape ladder, and watched as it descended in front of her. She hoisted herself onto the wobbling metal, climbed to the top of the abandoned warehouse, and pulled the ladder up behind her, locking it into place.
Shadera paused to scan the horizon and sucked in a deep breath.
The skyline was jagged, teeth of concrete and glass rising above the smoke. In the distance, the twin towers of the Heart glowed bright and white, a fixed star above a dead planet. She ground her teeth together as she stared at them.
She remembered the night they came for her parents. Remembered the live stream, the screaming, the way her mother’s body hit the platform and didn’t get back up. She remembered what it felt like to pick up the knife afterward. How easy it was to carve out the soft parts of a man’s throat if you kept your hand steady.
They’d called her a monster for what she did to that first Veyra. She didn’t care. Monsters were the only ones that survived this fucking city.
She turned away from the skyline, letting the memories burn in the back of her mind. The utility door on the roof of the warehouse sat underneath a battered metal sign she’d drilled into the concrete.
Kael Recycling—she let her eyes glide over it. It was the only physical evidence left in New Found Haven that her parents ever existed.
To the Heart, she no longer existed. To the Heart, she had died the night of the raid.
Shadera keyed the code into the lock, listening to the whirl of the mechanisms behind the door before it popped open. The stink of oil and hot metal was a comfort here, a private ache that belonged only to her.
She stepped through the door, closing it at her back and waited until she heard the click of the last lock before moving away from it. Her lair was larger than it looked from the outside—a forgotten warehouse, once belonging to a logistics firm, now honeycombed with her own custom upgrades. Mismatched lamps shed pools of yellow light on the concrete, illuminating the walls covered in Heart blueprints, topographical overlays, and mug shots. The centerpiece of it all was the sprawl of the Heart itself, mapped in lines of red and black tape, every guard rotation, every checkpoint, every secret maintenance crawl noted with obsession.
