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A tense, rain-soaked assault on a fortified industrial stronghold culminates in a fight to free a captive and stop a device that can rewrite the city's records. Anya must break into the Foundry, confront a corporate architect of control, and choose how to handle the weapon she once helped build.
Rain had been the city's least expensive accessory for the last three nights: thin, persistent, a sheet of glass over neon and steel that made every surface reflective and treacherous. Anya moved like she had learned to move through water—slow in preparation, sudden in direction. She kept her pack close, strap across her chest, palms damp but steady on the clamshell case. The case did not rattle because whatever was inside had been fitted into a nest of foam and ceramic that isolated it from bumps and prying hands. She had been paid well to carry it, and the client had said only: hand it to the courier at the elevated tram junction, do not deviate.
The city had a map of failures written into its bones: shuttered industrial floors, eating halls that hosted counterfeiters, maintenance ladders that served as short cuts. Above that, the transit veins—steel ribs of tram rails and cables—cut through districts like arteries, humming with old software and patched controllers. Anya had once designed patches for systems like this, elegant compromises that let hardware survive while operators turned profits. That was a different life and it had left her with more talents than guilt. She used one of those old tricks now, not to control a grid but to make a path through it.
A tram slid into the junction with mechanical slowness, its doors whispering open. The pickup point smelled of oil and ozone; the elevated platforms made voices crispy with distance. She stepped forward beneath the shelter of a crooked awning, timing her movement with the passing beat of train brakes. He was supposed to be there in a black cloak, an outline against the advertisement board that was still bright despite the rain. He wasn't the only shadow waiting.
The first gunshot came as a clean punctuation—too clinical to be random. Metal cracked somewhere down the line when a rail switch shorted and a maintenance tram came screaming off its schedule, sparks spraying like a cheap fireworks display. Anya ducked reflexively, felt the pack on her back like an accusation, and pushed toward the stairwell that sang with dripping water. The handoff had been a simple exchange, but it was never the exchange that mattered. It was what happened after.