I think about what the car would look like afterwards
. It would be damaged. Dented hood. Cracked windshield. Blood matting the grill.
It’d be a shame to mess up a perfectly good Jeep like that.
I wonder about what would happen to me afterwards. Punishment. Maybe execution. It depends how useful I’ve been to them all these years. Or how useful I could be in the future.
Being a Liquid Onyx survivor wouldn’t be enough to save me. It wasn’t enough to save my brother.
If I was lucky, really, truly lucky, the OI guards would disregard procedure and just shoot me the moment I stepped out of the Jeep.
I leave the garage without running Warner over.
I’ve never been lucky anyway.
Once I’m out on the main road, I open the mission packet and shake out the contents onto the passenger seat.
The second I see the name of who I’m going after, I feel the weight of the world crash down onto my shoulders.
My target is none other than Rohan Stone, the son and heir of Ian Stone, director of Obsidian Inc.
Reading through the contents of the file I’ve been given, I see that he’s been spotted in a place called Danger City.
Ian Stone has been chasing his son down for years, ever since he ran off. The OI heir up and disappeared one day, leaving no trace behind for his father to follow.
We’ve had multiple sightings of him, but the people who get sent to retrieve Rohan usually wind up either dead or incapacitated.
Rohan might not look unintimidating on the surface, being lean and on the shorter side, but the man is a significant threat. Maybe even more than I am and not just because he’s a Liquid Onyx survivor.
You couldn’t be Ian Stone’s son and grow up to be something tame and good. He has both nature and nurture working against him.
It’ll be a dogfight to try and take him back to his father alive, and I’m glad. If I was going to commemorate my brother in any satisfactory way, it’d be with a bloody brawl.
CHAPTER FOUR
LEO
It’s late, almost midnight, when I step outside with King for his evening walk. A blast of cold night air hits me in the face, the temperature having dipped dramatically now that the sun has gone down.
I wouldn’t normally take King out at this time, but I got caught up at work and wasn’t able to make my way back home until after eleven.
Danger City can be a strange place at night.
Constant supervillain attacks mean Danger has been rebuilt a truly absurd number of times. Due to this, the city has been set on a fast track in architectural modernisation. There are very few old buildings in Danger. All the ornate stone structures have been replaced by glass and metal ones, which either reach up to the sky or bend in unique ways. There are so many lights everywhere that the city shines onto the dark ocean it sits beside like a beacon calling to the depths. From a distance, Danger looks like a city from some edgy sci-fi film.
Just like any city, there are darker, grungier portions. In outward appearance, I mean. Dirt and grime can be found everywhere, mostly inside people.
As well as having a severe supervillain problem, Danger is well-known for being one of the most crime infested and high-risk places to live in England. The city is set in the south, residing near the sea, with a sprawling port and an impressively sized pier, complete with a Ferris wheel that lights up a bright, electric blue and green at night.
You can see the Ferris wheel from almost anywhere in the city, the thing’s so huge. To me, it’s a signal in the darkness, like a new-age lighthouse for human beings rather than ships.
I’ve found that crime knows no boundaries in Danger. The calibre and magnitude of law breaking might shift, but there’s no part of Danger City that is entirely free of it. No place you can go that won’t carry some form of risk.
If you’re looking for effortless trouble, the lower city has it in spades. You can trip over petty crime just by walking out your front door down there.
Nothing will save places like Crossbones Court, a well-known black-market district, or the Bedlam Estate, a place surrounded by gangland territories. Places like that are so steeped in blood and desperation, they’ll never escape those origins. They’re conduits for a vicious cycle that has been turning over for decades.
Crime in the richer and brighter areas of Danger City is far subtler. But I would argue that it’s far more insidious as well. The lower city wears its faults on the surface; you can see the digs and grooves marking it without having to search for them. But the glitz and glamour of uptown is only there to hide the growing stain that lies beneath. It masks the monstrous face of razor-sharp fangs and skin made of steel and eyes so dark they drag you into the abyss before you have the chance to ask where all of the light has gone.
