They want the authorization key fragment.
The dead-drop arming token. The vault control.
I slam my elbow upward into the reaching arm. Hard.
The figure grunts, stumbles, recovers too fast—trained.
My escort lunges, tackling one attacker into a stall. Metal and fabric explode outward. Someone screams.
The second attacker pivots toward me again, hand outstretched.
I don’t think.
I react.
My fingers dive into my pocket, grab a small device I brought purely because paranoia is a lifestyle: a grid access spike.
It’s not supposed to work here. Gur’s infrastructure is messy, layered, patched together like a junk ship. But chaos makes systems sloppy.
I slam the spike into a nearby utility panel beneath the stall frame.
The panel sparks.
The air smells instantly of ozone and burning insulation.
“Come on,” I hiss, typing a quick override on my compad with shaking fingers. “Come ON?—”
The attacker lunges?—
And the market’s lights die.
Every neon canopy, every vendor lamp, every holographic ad panel—gone. Darkness slams down like a fist.
People scream louder, blind panic now.
But I’m not blind.
Not fully.
My compad’s low-light mode kicks in, painting the world in pale green outlines. I see shapes moving. I see the attacker hesitate for half a second.
Half a second is a lifetime.
I roll under a toppled stall frame, scrape my shoulder hard enough to sting, and crawl toward a service grate I spotted earlier—maintenance access for drainage tunnels.
The air down there smells damp and metallic, like old water and rust.
I rip the grate open with raw adrenaline strength and drop into the tunnel.
The darkness swallows me.
Above, I hear boots pounding, bodies crashing, voices shouting.
One voice—close—curses in a language that sounds Vakutan.
I scramble deeper into the service tunnel, knees slamming into wet stone. My breath comes fast, loud in the confined space. The air is cold enough to make my teeth ache.
I don’t stop until I’m far enough that the market noise becomes muffled thunder.
