Grid: Omnipotence Series

Issue #7: One Life Left

The command arrived like a hand laid flat on his back.

HOLD.

He stopped again, muscles caged by someone else's architecture. The mask turned not toward A, not toward the blade he could hear coming, but toward the center of the overlay—toward Maku, outlined for an instant in the white with wires running from his hands into a building's bones.

PRIORITY: WIRE-BEARER. OBSERVE.

Remnant swallowed fury like a blade he'd chew later. He didn't lunge. He pivoted—away from A, toward the man the god wanted to watch.

⸻

A Corridor We Own

Cassiel drew a corridor in a city that didn't want straight lines. "Rings, then rakes," she told them on short-band. "Maku holds; Pancho blinds; J floods. A, you're last through. Nocturnal—"

"Lead him," he said, and was already moving.

Ring One: Maku palmed a substation door and called a pocket of real up out of the lie. White turned to weather. Lights remembered they were lights. Remnant hit it and stumbled—the small stumble of a man who'd just lost a step he hadn't known he'd borrowed.

Rake One: Cassiel's fire walked down a catwalk like a seamstress sewing shut a sleeve. Crows burst into birds. Remnant crossed with a shrug and a snarl, mask sparking under a round that shaved alloy.

Ring Two: Maku blinked hard against a migraine that wanted to write letters in his blood and held another circle. Pancho dropped the lullaby in its center and turned it sideways—not to erase, to delay. Enumerators would have adapted if they still existed. The leftover smart metal in Remnant's frame didn't. For five heartbeats his proprioception lied about up.

Nocturnal was there for the lie—two cuts, one feint, a knee to a servo that had forgotten its origin story. Remnant's arm faltered. The half-skull mask took a long scratch that didn't polish out.

Rake Two: J blew a maintenance flood down a forgotten conduit—audits and alarms and conflicting privileges battering the tiny processes that kept Remnant's chassis from admitting physics. For a moment he was only heavy.

He chose down again—through a service hatch, into a maintenance trench that thought it was a river when the whiteout leaned on it.

Cassiel saw the line in her head and stepped into it. "A—now."

A had held still while death screamed past twice. Training isn't courage; it's permission to borrow some. He moved then, precise and without ornament—over debris, under a rusted brace, through a door that forgot to be locked when Maku told it there was a fire.

The corridor ended in a utility bay with a single, honest bulb. Ring Three lived there already, a circle of paint some worker had drawn years ago to mark a safe zone for crane swing. Maku stepped into it and made paint into law. The whiteout seeped back from the line like a tide scolded by the moon.

Remnant entered on a skid. The claws opened. The command did not come.

"You're learning when he blinks," Cassiel breathed.

"Learning to perform," Nocturnal said. He lifted the blade, not for a killing stroke—Remnant still had a body and an ugly kind of grace—but for the brand they needed to carry into every shadow he thought he owned.

Pancho pinged: Mark him.

Nocturnal cut a sigil in the air that wasn't in any book—three strokes, a hook, a line—the rat's tracer written in steel. He drove it into the seam he'd opened earlier—arm to chestplate—and the mark took, not as damage but as truth: wherever Remnant went, the tracer would whistle a note only their comms could love.

Remnant felt it. Not pain—possession. He roared and shadow-stepped the way a cornered thing chooses the wall. The tracer sang as he vanished. The utility bay shook. The whiteout sighed and lifted like a fever breaking.

The corridor remained—short, ugly, owned.

⸻

Debrief With the Wires Still Humming

Rain returned as a negotiating partner instead of a narrator. The city exhaled along every line.

They gathered under a tram rib while the watchfires caught up to themselves.

"Two lives down," J said, voice hoarse. "One body left. And he's tagged."

"He still moves like a bad idea with legs," A said. He set what remained of his ledger on the rail and didn't pick up a pen. "But he stops when told. That's the leash."

Cassiel nodded. "We don't count on it. We use it."

Maku wiped his mouth and didn't look at the blood. "He's watching me now," he said, meaning the god that listened through wires. "Or I'm watching him watch me. Hard to tell."

Nocturnal's visor tilted toward the river where the white had been thickest. "He's measuring us. We measure back."

Pancho hopped to the center of the circle and sent up a thin, sweet whistle—the tracer. It echoed off the rails, faint, southeast, moving fast. He runs to ground where ground lies, the rat said. Not to water. To something that remembers being a lab.

"Hypertech," J and Cassiel said together.

"Not the arcology," J added. "They'll think we expect that. Secondary site. Those requisitions I flagged as 'plumbing'—they had a twin."

A pointed down the line, toward the industrial teeth of the city's edge. "Old waterworks. They built server rooms in pumphouses during the outages. Good cooling. Fewer witnesses."

Cassiel slung her rifle, every motion spare. "Then we set the table there."

Nocturnal drew a small circle on the rail with his glove—a habit of focus. "We take his last echo away from him. After that, it's only muscle."

"Muscle we can cut," Cassiel said.

J pushed hair off his forehead with a hand that shook less than before. "I can pull the blueprints, but not quietly."

A looked at Maku. "Can you ask the doors to love us before the alarms know our names?"

Maku listened to the rib he leaned against. It hummed like something alive and tired. "I can try," he said, which meant yes and no at once.

Pancho shook rain from his whiskers and spat a tiny spark that drifted down like a seed. I'll write the sign that says 'Maintenance Only.'

Cassiel grinned without joy. "Good. We'll knock like staff."

She looked east where the tracer sang, then up where no sky should be. "He's not done pushing us into each other," she said, meaning the god with the white ear. "So we push back together and see who stops first."

Nocturnal sheathed the blade. The city leaned in to hear the next part.

BUILD. BURN. REPEAT.

The hunt moved southeast. The tracer's whistle led. The god listened. And somewhere in the industrial bones where water used to matter more than money, a cornered thing sharpened what was left of itself and waited for the door to forget what it was.