Grid: Omnipotence Series

Issue #7: One Life Left

Remnant Ashore

The river gave him back because it didn't know what else to do.

Remnant crawled out under the east pylons with water steaming off the Project Fly frame, half the mask cracked, jaw ticking out of sync like a clock that hated time. Without CrowNet the sky was only birds. They didn't sing in code anymore. They watched him like witnesses.

He stood, inventorying losses the way soldiers count fingers.
• Echo 1 (CrowNet): burned.
• Echo 2 (Vault): dismantled in Hypertech's winter.
• Echo 3 (Body): damaged but loud.

He flexed the remaining arm. Servos complained. The shadow-step still answered—diminished, jittering, but there. He tasted rust and humiliation.

From somewhere too high to be weather the Architect let a single filament of presence fall, a cold wire brushing the back of his thoughts.

OBSERVE.

"Then watch," Remnant snarled, and turned his hunger toward the nearest light.

⸻

The City Tightens

The Hanging Yard creaked itself quiet by dawn. Crows scattered to ordinary roofs. The watchfires wore their smoke like medals.

Cassiel didn't wait for congratulations; she rerouted patrols, swapped frequencies, and put three strongholds on no-call—if Remnant came for revenge, he'd find empty nets. J dumped the last of Hypertech's CrowNet schematics onto a table and circled anything that looked like a resurrection clause. A cleaned blood off his ear and wrote with a thicker pen, because fine lines were for calmer days. Maku slept with his palm on the wall, one hand anchoring the block to itself, waking every hour to push the lattice back from Hana's ribs.

Nocturnal moved in the space between all that—silent checks, borrowed rooftops, the blade's edge kept dull only because he knew which fights wanted to start on their own. Pancho learned a new trick: playing dead enough to let a crow land within bite range, then teaching it what "off" meant in a language of sparks.

By noon, SCS pinged the Resilience through an untraceable relay: Officially, we're not talking. Unofficially, the thing in the river wants the detective dead. Expect pressure.

"Pressure's a language we speak," Cassiel said, and broke the relay in half.

⸻

Whiteout

It happened at twilight, when the city excuses miracles.

The white sky pressed closer, not above—through. Wires thinned to hair, thickened to bridges, hung in living rooms and over tram lines and in soup kitchens where steam suddenly condensed into frost. People shouted. Monitors coughed. The hum under everything rose to a keen.

Maku felt it before it came—like a violin tuned wrong on purpose. He threw anchors in a hurry (Hana's laugh, the orange peel, the radio's stubborn carrier) and called Cassiel even though he knew she'd already moved.

"Whiteout," he said. "Grid overlay."

"Copy," she answered. "Keep civilians inside the lines. Nocturnal—"

"On the east," he said. "He'll hit from shadow."

He did.

Remnant rode the whiteout like a smuggler rides a fogbank, shadow-stepping not between walls but between decisions—in and out of corridors that existed only because someone believed in them. His crows couldn't lead; they could still point, and they pointed at the simple arithmetic that hadn't changed:

A was alive.
A was running.
A had fewer places to hide when the city forgot how to be itself.

He dropped into a market alley that had been a hallway a breath before and saw A clearing a fence into a school's empty courtyard. He smiled with his broken jaw.