Grid: Omnipotence Series

Issue #6: Crossfire

He looked past Cassiel to Maku and let a grin open all the way. "And you—wire-bearer. Seems our employer has favorites."

Maku said nothing. He couldn't trust his mouth not to answer a god.

Crows spiraled down, circled Remnant, and rose again as if the night had grown a flue and breathed them up the city's throat. The android walked backward into a place shadow shouldn't go and was not there anymore. The insignia—half-skull over crow's wing—etched itself into the rust at A's feet, as precise as paperwork.

The river kept breathing. The frame remembered it was frame. The command retreated to whatever altitude gods use for patience.

Cassiel lowered her rifle last. "He had you," she told A without ceremony. "You didn't flinch. Good."

"Flinched on the inside," A said, voice dry. "I'll file that somewhere."

J's breath came over the short-band. "He obeyed an external priority. Whatever sits in the Grid wants us alive long enough to do something it understands better than we do."

"Or long enough to watch us fail," Cassiel said.

Nocturnal checked the city the way other men check the wind. The carrier tone settled to its old, thin hum. Pancho licked sparks off his whiskers and spat them into the rain.

"Either way," Nocturnal said, visor low, "we hunt while it watches."

Cassiel nodded once, a promise without poetry. "Then we run him out of shadows and birds. We cut his network, tilt his ground, starve him of the angles he thinks are his. We make the crows blind."

Maku wiped his mouth, tasted iron and batteries. "I can hold pockets of real. For a while."

"Long enough," Cassiel said. "Long enough is our favorite number."

A looked at the insignia at his boots and then at the three of them. "You'll need a place to funnel him next time," he said. "Somewhere he thinks he's writing." He tapped the ledger under his arm. "I know his angles."

J slid a data-shard across to Nocturnal with two fingers. "And I brought his blueprints."

Nocturnal closed his hand around the shard and the night. "Then we go again."

Above them, far beyond weather, the white sky tilted its ear as if amused.

BUILD. BURN. REPEAT.

The hunt was on, with a god for an audience.

——-

They chose a battlefield that belonged, on paper, to the crows.

Maps called it the Hanging Yard—a ribcage of dead tram spines slung over the river, pylons stitched together by sagging power-lines and maintenance catwalks no one had bothered to condemn. In practice it was a roost: CrowNet enumerators tucked inside service bulbs, alloy perches welded into shadow, a sky full of small black decisions.

Cassiel made the plan like a mechanic fixes an engine she hates but understands. "We don't kill him tonight," she said, tapping the blueprint J had culled out of Hypertech. "We kill a life. CrowNet is one of his three. We blind the flock, burn the echo, and he walks away smaller."

J circled three frequencies on the board: 31.9, 33.7, 36.2. "He hops across these when threatened. The enumerators negotiate leadership every ninety seconds. You can't jam one—jam all or they cascade around it."

Pancho flexed his tiny claws, proud and exasperated. I wrote the lullaby, he sent into the room, dropping a waveform that sounded like a nursery rhyme fed through a grinder. If we make the yard listen to me for fifteen seconds, the birds forget who they are.