Overture (2)
The Sword Saint's voice rang out the moment her hand closed around the hilt.
In the next instant, the iron pipe in the man's grip split cleanly in two and clattered to the ground.
Thunk.
The sound of a halved pipe striking pavement. In the sudden hush that settled over the alley, every gaze turned toward the woman holding the sword.
"—Single Flash."
"…!"
The man froze mid-reach, his hand still stretched toward me.
Aside from the Sword Saint standing in her draw stance, every soul in the alley had gone silent. One look at her display of skill had been enough. They all understood — one wrong move and she would cut them down before they could blink.
The Sword Saint fixed the man with a look of pure irritation.
"I'd take that hand back, if I were you. Unless you'd rather die."
"…Y-yeah. Got it."
Under her threat, the man's hand retreated. The ruined pipe had already slipped from his fingers long before.
The Sword Saint's strikes were silent and impossibly fast. Had it been his hand instead of the pipe, he would have had no one to blame but himself.
Figuring I might as well burnish her reputation a little, I decided to put my telepathy to work on her behalf.
"Still sharp as ever, Sword Saint."
Sword Saint… that famous strongest swordsman in the city?
"What? That person's the Sword Saint?"
"…I didn't even see the blade move."
The group began to stir. The Sword Saint wasn't quite as legendary as the Great Intellects, but her name was the sort you might have heard once or twice — and that was more than enough.
Her eyes went round with surprise for a beat, then understanding settled in and she gave a satisfied little shrug of her shoulders. Of everyone in this city, no one clung to their own renown quite like the Sword Saint. Hearing people talk about her was never going to bother her.
"Cleaning up small fry like these is nothing."
"You heard her. Get lost. The road's too narrow for the lot of you."
Pat-pat. Pat-pat-pat.
The men blocking the way scrambled off in a hurry. District 8 was home to every kind of person imaginable, and for the vigilantes fleeing before our eyes, this was hardly a first. That they kept repeating the same foolish mistakes anyway was simply one of this city's crueler truths.
Once the last of them had vanished, I started down the alley again.
"So, Percival — what brings you out here?"
"I've got a job to hand off."
"A job? There's someone here worth that?"
"It's a decent place for quiet work."
Much like my own magic, this particular matter was best handled without drawing eyes. Make a spectacle of yourself and the rumor mill would feed it straight to information brokers like Leman or Jackson. That was precisely why I'd gone through Brian for an introduction in the first place.
One more turn through the tangled alleys brought a battered iron door into view.
"This should be it."
Thud. Thud.
I hammered on the door hard enough to make noise. In an age of full-sized powered armor, knocking instead of ringing a doorbell felt almost quaint.
About a minute after the knock, the iron door swung open with a groan of hinges.
"What do you want?"
The man who appeared beyond the threshold was middle-aged, his face dominated by a rough, unkempt beard. According to Brian, his name was God — a hacker with little reputation but rock-solid results. He glanced between me and the Sword Saint, then asked again what we wanted.
"I'm here to commission a job."
"Who sent you?"
"Brian Layle."
"That guy's not long for this world. Come in."
At the sound of Brian's name, God shook his head with a weary little roll of his eyes, then waved us inside.
Beyond the iron door, a stairwell led down into a basement. Unsteady lights hung from the ceiling, casting a meager glow through a passage too dark for any natural light to reach. Gloomy. Not a place you'd want to linger.
Following God down into the cellar, I took in the bank of monitors mounted along the wall. He dropped into the chair in front of them and looked up at me.
"Coming in person means you brought the hardware with you."
"You're well informed."
"So. What exactly do you need done?"
I set a mobile phone on the table — not my usual one. I'd bought it specifically for this job. God reached out and picked it up.
"I want a program loaded onto it."
"What kind of program?"
"One that places a call to whatever number you enter."
"…Isn't that just a regular phone app?"
"The signal doesn't actually go through. But the screen has to look like the call connected."
"Ah."
God nodded, comprehension settling in. He didn't ask what I planned to use it for. This place existed for exactly that kind of work, and God was a man who took security seriously.
"…?"
The Sword Saint, on the other hand, had questions of her own. What use was a phone program that never actually connected a call? Her head tilted as she turned the puzzle over — and of course, I made no effort to satisfy her curiosity.
After we'd finished our business and the Sword Saint had clocked out for the evening, I stayed behind in the office alone, watching over Sinel.
She'd spent a long while coughing even after we'd gotten back, but at last her eyes had closed and she'd sunk into a deep sleep. Naturally, the place she was sleeping was the fold-out cot. With the office's only real bed claimed, it looked like I'd be spending the night on the couch.
"…You really are a high-maintenance subordinate."
When I'd first taken Sinel on, all I'd wanted was a fighter I could put to work. Hiring name-brand mercenaries cost far too much, so I'd settled for recruiting a promising prospect — raw, maybe, but with potential.
"How did it end up like this?"
What I'd actually gotten was a completely willful subordinate. She'd clung to the office on the grounds that she had nowhere else to go. She'd snuck into the bed without so much as asking. There was no predicting which way she'd bolt next. And yet somehow, she had worked her way so deep into my life that I couldn't dig her out.
"…"
It was far too late to put distance between us now. The subordinate I'd taken in to protect myself had become someone I couldn't afford to lose. I couldn't picture the office without her in it.
It was almost funny. I'd tried to reduce my weaknesses, and all I'd done was add another one.
Riiing.
Lost in thought as I watched Sinel sleep, my phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out and checked the caller — an unregistered number. First time this one had ever dialed me. I hit accept and brought the phone to my ear.
"What do you want?"
"It's me. Is Sinel doing all right?"
"Skyscraper Mage… no. Spinel Cloverbloom, is it?"
The voice on the other end was a familiar one. Spinel Cloverbloom — Sinel's older sister. We'd spoken plenty of times before. The reason I still didn't have her number was simple: more often than not, Spinel just showed up at the office uninvited.
"Good memory. Got a minute?"
"You want me to invent free time I don't have, don't you?"
"That's the spirit. Come up to the rooftop."
"The rooftop?"
Her request was simple enough: get up to the roof, now. On any other day, Spinel would have simply barged into the office. That she was specifically calling me up to the rooftop suggested there was a reason for it.
"Mm-hm. And there's a condition."
"What condition?"
"No company. You come alone."
"…Fine."
Click. The line went dead.
I looked at Sinel for a long moment, then pulled my coat from the rack, shrugged it on, and left the office. The night air was turning cold these days. Dress lightly and you'd catch a chill the way Sinel had.
Thud. Thud.
I climbed the empty stairwell alone. In the hollow shaft of the building, the only sound was the echo of my own footsteps. At the top of the dark stairs, a heavy iron door waited — the way to the roof. Long neglected, its edges gone to rust. I shoved it open to a screech of metal on metal.
And there it was: the clear night sky you only ever saw from a rooftop.
"Hello, Dark Merchant."
Beneath a sky dense with glittering stars, a witch with ash-gray hair drifted on the wind. A plush-looking cushion floated beneath Spinel as she hung in midair. The beautiful night sky, the gray-haired girl aloft — for a fleeting moment, the whole scene looked like something out of a fairy tale.
"Right. Good to see you again."
"Is Sinel doing well?"
"She's down with a cold. Resting."
"What a shame. If she'd come to her big sister, I'd have nursed her myself."
Spinel said it with a smile. She'd clearly figured out it wasn't anything serious. Still, she hadn't dragged me up here just to ask after Sinel's health. I cut straight to it.
"So what do you actually want?"
"That deal we made before — you remember it?"
"I do."
Back when I'd been sitting the exam to raise my Circle, I'd bought a piece of information from Spinel — a method for facing the Agent of Mystery without losing my memories. She hadn't demanded payment at the time. She'd said she'd collect the information's price later, on her own terms.
"I'm here to collect."
And now, long after that day, Spinel had found me again — to claim the cost she'd deferred.