The café was built into the skeleton of an old metro station—steel beams still scorched black from the Spiral, vines of stripped cable hanging like urban ivy. A cracked platform served as seating, littered with rusted table frames and jury-rigged light fixtures. The only sign it was still in business was a glowing "OPEN" glyph barely clinging to life.
Lyra sat with her back to the wall, always watching the exits. A ceramic cup of synth-coffee steamed in front of her, untouched. The aroma was sharp, chemical, cut with something vaguely floral—standard military-issue stimulant blend, adapted for civilians dumb enough to still have nerves.
Across from her, Vash was already on his second cup. He drank like he fought—recklessly and with no regard for temperature. His coat was slung over the back of his chair, still smoldering at the hem. A new scorch mark had joined the rest.
"Next time," Lyra said, eyeing the damage, "try not to catch fire and a plasma bolt."
"Wouldn't be fun if I didn't," Vash replied, grinning with cracked lips. His cybernetic eye buzzed faintly, still recalibrating after the temporal distortion. "Besides, I had it handled."
"You were thirty seconds from losing consciousness."
"Yeah. But I didn't."
She stared at him for a long second. Vash never flinched under her gaze. He sipped again.
Silence. Not uncomfortable, just familiar. The kind that only two people who'd fought side-by-side too many times could maintain without tension.
Then Vash spoke.
"You ever think about quitting?"
That made Lyra pause.
"Quitting what?"
"This. Bounties. Splinter zones. Ghosts with Singularity guts and broken minds." He leaned back, chair creaking. "There's got to be something else."
"There isn't."
"You sound sure."
"I ran the probabilities. Every path ends in the same place. The City consumes what it touches. People like us—" She glanced at her gloved hand, flexed it once. "—We're already gone. We just haven't hit zero yet."
Vash let out a dry laugh. "You really know how to give a pep talk."
Lyra finally took a sip of her coffee. Her face didn't change, but a faint flicker in her optic HUD suggested it hit harder than expected.
"You wouldn't handle retirement," she said. "You'd implode after five hours of boredom."
"I could grow a garden," Vash said, deadpan.
"You'd punch the plants when they didn't grow fast enough."
"Exactly. That's how you get aggressive cucumbers."
A brief moment. Not quite a smile—but Lyra's eye glitched at the edge, a micro-expression struggling through her controlled exterior. It passed.
"Not like retirement could ever be possible for the either of us" Lyra could only think to herself.
Vash leaned forward, more serious now.
"Why are you still doing this?"
Lyra didn't answer at first. Her eyes drifted past him, to the blurred reflection in the window—a city drowned in neon and smoke, its face fractured like a cracked screen.
"Because I remember what it was like before," she finally said. "And I keep thinking… if I kill enough of the rot, maybe something clean will grow back."
Vash stared at her. Not mocking. Not doubting. Just seeing her.
"You think that's still possible?"
"No." She drained the last of her drink. "But thinking otherwise keeps me functional."
They sat in the hum of dim lights and ambient distortion leaking in from the Splinter beyond the barrier wall. Somewhere in the distance, a gunship screeched overhead, chased by sirens that faded into static.
A notification pinged on Lyra's HUD.
NEW CONTRACT – URGENT CLASS RED
Target: Subject Echo-Zeta
Status: Singularity Construct, Escaped AI Host
Location: Splinter Zone 2-A – "The Mirror Scar"
Notes: Killed three Wings. Still learning. Do not hesitate.
Lyra sent the data to Vash's implant. His eye flickered as it synced.
"A rogue AI construct," he muttered. "Haven't fought one of those since Sector Nine."
"That one nearly atomized you."
"Yeah. Good times."
She stood first. Pulled her hood up. Tossed a few credits on the table—pointless, maybe, but habits died slower than people did.
"You coming?" she asked.
Vash grabbed his coat. Shrugged it on with a wince.
"Always."
They stepped back into the storm. The neon glint of The City crawled across puddles like blood in oil. Overhead, a siren wailed once before cutting out. Static buzzed from every corner.
Their names blinked again in the Crimson Dossier, marked for another mission.
ACTIVE: CRIMSON STATIC & AZURE SILENCE
The City was not dead.
Lyra had stopped believing in death the moment she watched a man get torn in half by a spatial rupture and scream afterward. The City didn't die. It rewrote itself. Over and over again. Like a corrupted file that refused deletion.
She watched it from the skimmer's window as they drifted above the edge of Splinter Zone 2-A, the ruins moving below like broken clockwork—fragments of buildings spinning in slow orbit around fractured streets, upside-down alleys suspended in the air like puzzle pieces stuck mid-fall. A dead crane dangled sideways in midair, cables reaching out like fingers. Glass floated in shards that never hit the ground. Gravity in 2-A didn't work right, and time worked worse.
To anyone else, it looked like madness. To Lyra, it looked honest.
The City had always been broken. The Spiral just stopped pretending it wasn't.
She remembered the maps she used to read in the Hana archives. The old city lines, back when "Nests" still meant order. Before Singularities ate their own tails and tore the districts into meat. Before Wings bled out in their towers. Back then, she could plot a path across eight zones with just a pen and logic.
Now?
Now the map was noise. Cities folded on themselves like paper. Roads reversed. Streets changed their names mid-walk. Districts fought each other with weather systems. You could walk through one door and never exist again.
And through it all, The City kept breathing.
Because people kept breathing. Somehow.
That was the worst part.
The skimmer touched down at the outer shell of The Mirror Scar, a fractureline district where light, memory, and reflection were all unstable variables. It was once a residential arcology—now it resembled a shattered gemstone in a hurricane.
Vash hopped out first, landing with his usual lack of subtlety. The particle field beneath his boots hissed against the glass-like ground. He scanned the skyline—crooked towers mirrored against a sky that didn't match. The clouds moved one way. Their shadows moved another.
"Whole place is a complete mess..." he muttered.
Lyra stepped beside him, her cloak shifting to mute the environment's glare. Her optics immediately dimmed—light distortion in 2-A could blind you if your lenses weren't calibrated. Hers were.
She brought up the dossier feed. The AI construct they were hunting—Echo-Zeta—had been traced to a central convergence point inside the Scar. A place tagged on black market navnets as the Bleeding Mirror.
"Target's volatile," she said. "Still mimicking behavior. No predictable ethics."
"Like a baby with a railgun," Vash muttered. "Great."
"More like a mind without shape."
They moved.
Their path took them past buildings with reversed interiors—bedrooms on the outside, walls inside out. Graffiti scrawled in spirals. Signs that spelled nothing. More than once, Lyra saw them pass reflections of themselves in windows they hadn't crossed yet. Each time, the reflections lagged behind a little longer.
"Don't look too long," she warned. "The zone borrows memories."
"So that's what that weird headache is," Vash said, rubbing his temple.
They reached the plaza—an arena of shattered tile, surrounded by mirrored structures half-melted into the ground. In the center, a figure waited.
It shimmered like a person remembered badly.
Echo-Zeta had no face. Just a polished void where one should be. Its limbs shifted every few seconds, glitching between forms—male, female, child, soldier. It didn't know what it was. But it knew them.
"Azure Silence," it said, voice like a recording scraped against concrete. "Crimson Static. Patterns confirmed. Matching violence profiles. Hello."
Lyra drew her knives, blue light bleeding from their edges.
Vash clenched his gauntlet. Sparks danced across his knuckles.
The AI construct tilted its head. Something in its shape tried to mimic a smile.
"Am I doing this right?"
Then it lunged.