Neon Grave

Chapter 37 A Death for Every Blossom 2/3

Navy night loomed behind the screen. On the corner of the horizon, distant skyscrapers phased through the illustrious smog. In the foreground, little more than a blank wasteland tempted the imagination with an unseeable death count.

Engineers, construction crews, Resuscitation-Bots, and automated dozers treaded over the graveyard. This part of Siren City had become a disheveled lowland ridge rimmed with jagged silhouettes. Rescuers here, dead people there. So many bodies yet too few; so much to sift through. Not enough time. Just workers panning over a catastrophe that replayed in Jessica's memory like visceral dawn. And those workers would exhaust themselves well into the night to see a semblance of what was.

Red lights strobed all over the broken neighborhoods. A combination of mourning and somber routines filled the landscape with police and scavengers who could hardly reconcile dumpster diving with grave robbery. Now of all times, the peacekeeping force known as SCPD received backup from the surroundings prefectures and whatever could be spared through the ever-cycling whirlwind of the sprawl. Firefighters, officers, EMTs, all the uniforms under discolorations of the moon searched for themselves amidst the leftover carnage, all but unable to count the missing. However, nobody could account for the swarm in the dark.

As inconspicuous as she seemed in the night lanes of desecrated Siren, Jessica knew better than to assume she was alone or invisible. As she trod over the place of dread, eyes within the steel wilderness glistened among the shadows. Men, where monsters lurked, probed her every movement. And she felt the prick of those eyes from afar as the gangs and their captains plotted. She was being followed.

Too many hostiles fell on the periphery. Aggro Khans, Devguard—maybe more—latched on to her tail and clung for dear life. How difficult to guess why the pursuit was different this time around, circling ground zero. She chose another route through the streets for a destination that would cut through the unwavering crowds. Through one of the causeways, where water trickled between glistening, eternal walls, she fell again under the loom of the megablocks like the rest of the mob, subjugated beneath a swirling spectrum of night lights. The air nearly bent to a low frame rate. Astigmatism by design, so it seemed.

Once the Lynx was in play, the air changed. The gangers dropped onto the city streets like hawks in hot-blooded pursuit. So hot-blooded, in fact, they never even questioned how... How did they find her so easily? "Who would take the shot?" That was the only question on their tongues.

Jessica had the right head, almost. Keeping tabs on her wannabe assassins, she suffered peculiar visions: numbers. Literal numbers passed her gaze, stuck in her eyes somehow. With every turn of her head, digits lingered like a biological UI. She was not crazy; at least, she didn't believe it. Stranger things had happened. Yet, as if steered by the spectral numbers, she pressed onward. The roads brimmed with pedestrians who camouflaged the spies. Though providing cover, the mob would suffocate her in a second if they knew who she was. Two tools of secrecy to never take for granted: a hoodie and oblivion.

"Do you see them?" said Babel.

"I was about to ask you the same thing," Jess replied.

"Had you acquired a replacement pair of V-specs, I could have highlighted them at your leisure."

"Just tell me. Where are they?"

"Northern megablock, Caesar's Ring, thirteen north and more than a dozen northwest. More arriving from the southern quadrant, a separate collective."

"Let me guess; it's their footsteps."

If there was a pattern, no matter how subtle or feint, Babel would pick it up. Or Jessica would. In this case, the bodies giving chase betrayed stealth with their footsteps. "They share a collective urgency in their gait, which differs from the rest of the crowd." Babel used it to discern Jessica's pursuers within the human hive. Unfortunately, she couldn't see a single one. Maybe a peer over her shoulder, but they'd vanish as quickly as they'd appear. She'd have to do the same. But then Babel returned with alarm bells.