Grid: Omnipotence Series

Issue #6: Crossfire

His phone blinked a single word from an unlisted number: RUN.

He didn't. He relocated—which is what running looks like when you're too trained to call it running.

Chapter 5 — The Turn )

A hit a market where the awnings touched and signal got confused just standing still. He ducked under a table stacked with welded angels and came up breathing behind a stall of stolen data-slates. Remnant came through the awnings without touching them; the cloth just decided to get out of his way.

"Last chance," Remnant said, voice almost conversational over the noise. "Stop making notes."

A raised his gun again, knowing it wouldn't matter. "Last chance," he said back, and looked past Remnant, over his shoulder, at nothing in particular. Sometimes predators look when prey does.

Remnant glanced.

It was nothing. It was enough. A bolted. He hit a stair it would take a human three strides to climb and took it in two. At the top he shouldered a door that thought it was locked. It remembered it was tired and opened.

He came out on a balcony that overlooked the city's wirescape—tram lines like veins, relays like teeth, watchfires like eyes. He thought of jumping. He thought of his partner under the arcology. He thought of a man named Maku walking with headaches and grief.

"Write this down," Remnant said behind him, and A pivoted for the third time, gun up, curse ready.

But a new sound had joined the street noise—the faintest carrier tone under everything, like a radio no one had tuned—and the balcony lamps stilled for a second. A didn't know what it meant. Remnant did. His head tilted in a way that looked almost worried.

Somewhere, not far, the Grid had blinked and a man who listened to wires had answered.

A smiled despite himself. "New chapter," he said softly, to his own notes. "Variables entering play."

Remnant's alloy jaw clicked. "Fine," he said, and stepped forward anyway, hunger louder than caution. "We'll write it together."

The crows wheeled, circuit glints like stars in bad weather. Down the block, a streetlight went out and didn't come back on.

And in Sector 9, Maku pressed his palm to a wall and told the current which way to run.

——-

The rail museum held its breath for one heartbeat—and then the city exhaled.

Remnant moved first, not at them but through them—stepping between holograms and real rails, crows spiraling like thrown knives to scatter sightlines. Cassiel snapped orders without raising her voice: "Pancho, lights. J, dump frequencies. A, move." Nocturnal was already in motion, cloak strafing the catwalk as his blade caught the flicker of neon.

The museum's old maglev hummed as if the room itself remembered speed. Pancho bit a service conduit; the hall went to low-lux. Remnant flickered with it, using the dim to slip sideways into a service spine, the crows stitching a corridor of shadow for their shepherd. A bolted the opposite way, ledger under his arm, trusting a plan he hadn't been invited to write.

Outside, the night took them all like water.

Cassiel split the field into lanes the way a sniper turns traffic into math. "North track: Nocturnal. West and east: my teams. J, you're with me. Maku—blind his flock."

Maku put a hand to an iron rib of the museum and pulled a ring of reality up out of the air. Streetlamps three blocks out froze on command; cameras blinked stupid and forgot their purpose. The crows stuttered mid-arc, then rethreaded their network using lines Maku hadn't claimed. They're learning me, he thought, and felt the headache arrive like bright nails.