The market lived under the city like an organ folded beneath bone. Vendors hung their stalls from rusted scaffolds and neon tubes, tarps and patched polymer roofs strung between the low concrete ribs of the viaduct. Steam and oil and cooking smoke braided with the scent of metal and ozone; little crowds pressed and traded, while courier routes braided themselves through side alleys and service stairwells. Mara moved through that press with the kind of practiced invisibility she'd learned in a dozen impossible deployments—feet light, eyes mapping exits, shoulders ready to close against impact. She carried a courier pack that had once been a standard-issue data satchel, refitted with pockets for tissue, bandage, and quick-field tools, nothing flashy. Tonight's job was a simple drop: a ceramic processor module, a stack of local produce, a note on paper—analog—because analog survived the city's bright noise.
She should have felt the street's hum as a warning. Instead it arrived as a difference, an absence: the usual din undercut by a thin, high-frequency squeal from a snapped conduit and the distant click of too many automated doors closing in unnatural sequence. The first blast scoured the market with a shock that threw visual planes into wrong angles. A flash so white that it flattened faces into negative shapes, and then the world became push and pain and sound. Vendors were propelled like rag dolls. One tarp unfurled and filled the alley like a sail, carrying broken plates and splinters. People were screaming; some were not yet registered as human sounds, only hot, animal noise. The air filled with dust that tasted like burnt copper.
Mara's body replied before her brain finished naming the danger. She hit the ground, rolled under a folding cart, shoved a small boy away from a falling beam with an arm that registered the force but not the cost. Her hands moved on instincts—grip, rip, drag—searching for breath, for warmth under collapse. Training carved the scene into priorities: hear the breathing, check the airway, stop the bleeding that would kill before infection. She ripped a vendor's apron and folded it into a bandage, used her jacket as a tourniquet. Around her, a hundred logistics unraveled: a drone slammed into a pillar and sparked; a delivery rover toppled and leaked hydraulic fluid like dark oil; a cluster of old municipal cameras in the rafters reoriented and failed in flickering stares.
She found victims with the same efficient arithmetic she applied to breaking into corporate vaults—quick decisions, small mercies. A woman trapped beneath a shelf, her leg pinned at an invisible angle; Mara cozying up a brace of scavenged metal to hold broken bone steady. A man whose shoulder had been sheared by shrapnel, blood painting his sleeve a bright, wrong red; Mara cut cloth, pressed, whispered for him to breathe. She did not have time to grieve. There are moments that are only motion, a long list of actions strung like beads through an hour that clenches and releases.
Somewhere in the chaos an automated emergency chorus began—synthesized, polite, bored—blaring evacuation instructions in several languages. The announcements did not reach everyone; the announcements were drowned by more immediate needs. Mara moved like she had a mission priority: check the drop. The courier's instinct for the package was not about possession; it was a contractual reflex—secure, confirm, deliver. She flashed light into a darkened vendor stall and saw the item she'd been moving: the ceramic module she'd been paid to redirect, now scorched on one face but intact enough to read a faint manufacturer pattern. It glinted with an industrial logo that had once been familiar. Her fingers closed around it despite the heat. The object hummed in a frequency she felt more than heard—a small, persistent vibration that sat against the bones of her palms.
She committed the faces she could carry with one quick sweep—an old man with soot ringed on his mouth but still breathing, a girl with a braid pinned under debris, a pair of tourists staring like deer—and prioritized the ones who would not last the night without immediate attention. She dragged, she lifted, she improvised splints out of metal rods and hats. At the edge of her periphery a police drone whirred down a stripe of light and trained a searchlight across the crushed market, its camera harvesting images like nets. The machine caught a brief needle-streak of movement—someone who should not have been among the vendors—and the drone's algorithms tagged her silhouette. Mara felt that cold, particular weight: they would triangulate, cross-reference, and the feed would go somewhere she would rather it not go. She could leave the module and melt into the crowd, but the device in her hand made that impossible. It had the wrong gravity for anonymity; it carried a shape that would attract both interest and blame.
When the second shock rolled through, less a blast than a pressure change that buckled metal baring and pushed dust into the air like a dozen powdered suns, Mara made a decision with the brutal economy of people who have outlived five bad options. She shoved the ceramic piece into the bottom of her pack, wrapped it in someone's silk scarf, and forced herself to move upstream. People under smoke and falling masonry die when rescuers stay to be heroes. She would be no hero; she would be a courier still—one who could get a thing to someone who could make sense of it. It felt small and selfish and like a lifeline at the exact same time.
She slipped through alleys that smelled of steam and urine and fried bread, avoiding med-tech teams who were in the square taking charge of triage. The overhead signs of the market fell away as she cut between a repair shop stacked with commodious battery packs and a boarded-up maintenance door that gave onto a service stair. She moved fast enough to avoid recognition, but she moved in ways that left human traces—footprints, a dragged hem, an accidental scuff on a wall. She had left a life of sanctioned stealth years ago; being on the run now meant old muscles remembering old rhythms. Her lungs burned; the night air tasted of metal and fear. She glanced back once and watched the market's sagging lights bloom a little less bright where the first blast had cleared out the crowd and left a crater of absence.
The city's emergency coils were spinning already. The public feeds, those little kiosks that everyone's eyes drifted to, were flashing safe‑zone alerts and official statements that had not yet been filled in with anything useful. A municipal emblem rotated slowly in one corner of the screen, and a soothing voice promised an investigation. Such phrases, when overlaid with the smell of burnt metal, read like a joke. Mara didn't have time for jokes. She moved through industrial corridors where old maintenance rails hummed, where occasional conduits still sparked and shed orange light. She took the underpass that would carry her under the next viaduct and into a part of the city that had less traffic and more ghosts. This was where her old contacts waited for small favors and where Kian kept his rigs.