Night favored the small and the patient, and Cole Vance had practiced patience until it became a reflex. He lived in the city's underlayer where neon reflected off rain-slick glass and service corridors hummed like sleeping engines. His face had been retired once, folded away under a dozen false names; his gait, the way he checked shadows before he stepped, belonged to someone who had learned to survive on narrow margins. The run scheduled for tonight was supposed to be the kind of work that kept a man invisible: a sealed crate, a barcode, a slot drop behind a shuttered textile mill. A quick fee. No questions.
The contact arrived with the nervous light of a small-time courier—jaw tight, jacket patched with reflective tape, eyes that flicked as if they were reading prices on people. He handed Cole the box and a single rule: do not open, deliver intact, no exceptions. The object was light and cold at the edges; a faint mechanical hum whispered from inside like a withheld breath. That should have been a red flag. Old instincts tuned for expedience told Cole to obey. He folded the crate beneath his jacket and stepped back into alleys that still remembered the soles of midnight runners.
The first gunshot came like a punctuation mark, shredding the alley's quiet. A streetlamp flared and died; burned plastic stung his nose. An armored vehicle that had not been there minutes before rolled in, painted with the private-security sigil Cole had learned to avoid—Aegis. Men in corporate black unloaded with clinical speed, faces masked to hide badges. They opened fire as if rehearsing a demonstration. Cole dropped low, elbows to concrete, and the crate tucked under his forearm.
He moved on habit—vault, slide, shoulder through a chain link, the city's metal breath all around him. Tracers cut the humid air into ribbons. A grazing hit tore fabric from his sleeve and left a hot kiss on his shoulder. He hit an unsecured manhole by design, rolled into the maintenance maze beneath the paved streets and let old circuits guide him. The tunnels smelled of damp concrete and machine oil. He breathed shallow, listened for footsteps. He should have folded into hiding and buried the crate, but the scramble had jarred a hatch on the box. A thin panel popped loose and in the reflected glass of a surveillance dome above the alley a single clean frame captured a profile—short hair, a jaw he knew by memory.
Recognition struck like a hard palm. That jaw belonged to Nico, his brother. The thought—sharp and unwanted—pressed at Cole with the force of a choice he had tried to avoid. He had once carried packages for a firm like Aegis, long enough for a signature to linger in a database. He had sworn a private oath then: never to be collateral again. Now a camera had frozen a moment that could be read as proof. His comm unit buzzed as he wound through the conduits, a single name lighting the screen: Rin.