"Okay, what's this urgent thing you had to discuss in private?" Vesper asked the instant the door clanged shut.

Instead of answering, I flicked on the signal scanner and prowled the ancient storage area, sweeping corroded shelves, the ribbed heat-sinks of a dead mainframe, picked clean decades ago. The space lay deep in the bunker's forgotten levels, the tunnels and rooms that were still partially or totally buried. Vesper had taken me here when I'd insisted no one should hear what I had to say, and by the looks of it, she was right, the place wasn't even plugged into the bunker's electrical grid.

Still, I had to be careful.

"No transmissions, no recordings," I said, sliding my datapad back through the gap and sealing the hatch. "Airplane mode on your neura, please."

Her fingers hovered over the holstered pistol. "You're starting to worry me." The laugh was half-forced, the pistol strap on her hip creaked. "Axel?"

Despite the walk here, I was still unsure if this was the right course of action. I bit my lip, trying to imagine how I'd react given the circumstances… I didn't like the answers. Someone capable of turning into a monster? How could I be sure it wasn't a monster capable of taking human form? It was the sort of paranoid fantasy you'd see in every other AI thriller slop, the sort I'd binge during the slower work-hours of a particularly long day-grind at the protein factory.

"My best friend is secretly a monster trying to destroy humanity!"

Yet this was the only option I could think of, a single round rattling in an empty mag. "What I'm about to say stays in this room. No exceptions."

I had rehearsed the confession the whole descent: how much was safe? Could I trust her? If I kept quiet, we'd be stuck here, fighting the monsters and trying to buy time until reinforcements arrived. By the time that happened, most of our chunk of the district would be dead.

"Fine," she muttered, thumbing the back of her neck with her free hand. She remained statue still while I paced, dust swirling around my boots.

"The reason I'm telling you," I began, "is because I can't make this work on my own. It's a huge ask; people will get hurt and there will almost certainly be fallout."

"Axel, stop." She snapped. "You're rambling."

"Right, sorry, sorry." One more breath, my gaze flickers at the gun she's thumbing. Second breath, no going back. "I'm the shush monster. It's… my power."

The far-off hum of generators three floors above filled the pause. Vesper's eyes widened, mouth half-closed as if caught mid-word. Her knuckles stayed white on the pistol grip. After half a second, she relaxed. "That's none of our concern," she finally managed, glancing toward the door but not moving. In this musty old room, I caught easily the shift in her scent. The stench of adrenaline clung to her like ozone off a blown capacitor, and now it redoubled.

"You're… not going to ask for details?" I hesitated, taking a tentative step back.

A muscle jumped in her jaw. "Does the doctor approve of this?"

There it was. She didn't know that the doctor and I were not on the best of terms, figuratively so far. Heat bunched in my stomach. For Vesper, this revelation meant exposure, potential retribution, and maybe… Before I could end the thought, the image of the AV getting swallowed up by the plasma bubbled up, and I couldn't help but grimace. Would Moreau do such a thing? No, of course she would, I was sure she'd do far worse things too if push came to shove.

Yeah, me revealing this to Vesper was putting her at risk.

But I didn't have any options left.

Not if I wanted to protect more than just the bunker.

I could lie, safer for me certainly, but the truth slipped out instead. "I brought you down here because I don't want her, or anyone else, finding out. I know your priority is the gang, but hear me out. We're stretched to snapping and we've barely managed to guarantee some modicum of safety to a few thousand lives, if that. If we stay the course, too many will die. Even if we all survived the wave, there wouldn't be a place left, we-"

Vesper raised her hand and I clamped shut, holding my breath and waiting.

After a few seconds, she let out a sigh. "If you have a miracle, do it. I don't care. I'm in." She stepped closer, finally letting her hand fall from the gun and crossing her arms. Her expression was unreadable. "Stop burning seconds and tell me this plan of yours, we don't have time to waste down here."

So I did.

Her brows rose, and they continued rising all the way through.

Bear despised disasters that announced themselves in advance. The worthwhile ones ought to descend unannounced and punch you square in the jaw: no sirens, no questions, just instant chaos and bones mashed to paste. With a proper surprise attack there was no time to fret, no doubts to chew like stale gum, no frantic triple-checks of the roster, and certainly no lingering thoughts about whether something else could have been done. There was no room for politics.

The chain-wielding meguca knew her limits; administration had always been Vespi's domain, not hers, which was why she had shoved the paperwork onto people who actually liked that misery. Delegation, however, did not stop heavy decisions from landing on her lap every few minutes, decisions about priorities, about who lived and who merely hoped to.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

Which buildings would be shielded, and how thick that shield would be. Every structure inside a designated kill-box was doomed, while the houses tucked behind a defensive line stood a fighting chance. Whenever hard choices appeared, politics seeped in, deals sprouted like fungus, and someone inevitably tried to haggle for an extra metre of safety. She loathed every heartbeat of every meeting, each polite syllable grinding her molars like sand in gears.

Was it too much to ask for a catastrophe that hit clean, a straight jab instead of a slow poison?

"Boss!"

The shout yanked her from the rant in her head. With a grunt, Bear hoisted a rust-flecked car and slammed it sideways, wedging the future wreck across the mouth of the alley. "What?" she barked, swinging her chains to batter the chassis until it resembled a respectable barricade.

"The Saints sent a drone."

"The jamming's down?" She frowned, pinging their neighboring gang's net and receiving nothing but static.

"No, their comms are still iced." The ganger produced a data-slate, palms sweating. "The robo-freak dropped it on your doorstep."

Bear snatched the pad, stabbed through biometric confirmation, and hunted for Vesper's message. Her ex was the sort to stay silent rather than openly refuse the offer for safety, so the drone could mean only be either an approval… or something else.

What Bear saw as the autoplay video popped up was NOT what she'd expected to receive from the fellow gang leader.

At first, she couldn't parse the scene: drone footage of half-collapsed slum shacks dusted in a fine blue powder. Hundreds of bullet holes pocked the walls, and two blast zones had been scorched until the surrounding metal had flowed like wax. As the camera drifted, a silhouette resolved: bipedal, too large for a human, unmistakably a monster, and somehow familiar. It took her a moment for it to click, the familiarity wasn't in its looks, but in how it moved, something eerily almost... human about it.

Then it brought a finger to its maw, and it clicked.

"No way. No fucking way."

"Wait, boss, is that-?"

"The bastard that slipped the noose." The datapad squealed as her grip tightened. "That fucking shush monster."

She jammed her plug-cord into the slate, neuralink flashing. Full-spectrum feeds contrasting the monster to the one she'd fought a few weeks back revealed the creature had weakened, shrunk back to the size it had been when it first entered the colosseum trap. Bear had watched those vids so many times she had practically committed them to memory. The creature had returned to some "default" state. And she didn't have a shadow of a doubt it would start growing again if given the opportunity.

The surprise deepened when the video showed the monster glancing at the drone, though not making any moves.

Apparently it had its hands full carrying a rugged metal suitcase and what looked like a human in corpo gear, limp, but the infrareds confirmed they were undeniably alive.

And the monster wasn't killing it.

Bear's heart hiccupped like a nail gun misfire. "I fucking knew it!" She roared, raw vindication coursing through her veins. An aberration. The thing was smart, she'd known it deep in her gut ever since that first encounter. Did it have a hibernation skill? Was that how it'd managed to lay low this long? Coming out now was also no coincidence, the thing had probably sensed the monster rush. Her lips curled into a savage grin, she'd get a chance to go all out, crush it with everything she had.

She licked her lips in anticipation.

"Boss?"

The worried voice snapped her back. Around her, the gangers stood frozen, watching and waiting.

The sirens had kept wailing in the background, futilely reminding everyone of what was on its way.

Of what she could not ignore.

"FUCK."

The tablet's frame creaked as hairline cracks raced across the screen. When the video ended, an attached text document opened automatically. Bear swore again.

It was an official bounty from the Sewer Saints: one hundred thousand credits to slay the monster, plus twenty thousand for recovering the suitcase and identifying the corpo. If one added the existing bounty on the Shush-Monster, the price on its head would become comparable to a low C-class. Vesper had judged, correctly, that the beast was far beyond Axel's league. Bear knew the kid had a lot of potential, but he wasn't anywhere near ready enough to take this sort of challenge. And Bear, despite her offer to protect Vesper, had no means to engage the thing without needlessly risking her sector.

Only one option remained.

The fact that Vesper had clearly outlined the course of action stung more than Bear cared to admit. The Sewer-Saints seemed far too preoccupied with getting the bounty out to the official boards, and Bear knew that could only be because their real goal was not the monster itself. It was to draw in as many money-hungry mercenaries as they could.

With a sigh and a reluctant nod, Bear copied the files, and keyed open the meguca city-wide emergency channel for an update on a bounty.

By 2252, the CYPHER network felt like a city you could walk through. Its smallest unit was a chunk, a three-dimensional slice of town that held about one hundred thousand people along with their streets, pipes, power, and air. Ten chunks made a node. Ten nodes made a mesh. And ten meshes made a web.

Inside a chunk, sending data was free. Moving data across a mesh cost a little, and the cost would increase as you went into higher rings, with data crossing from one web to another being so expensive that even a small robo-call campaign could make a bank go broke. The farther a message traveled, the higher the price and the higher the scrutiny the data would be put through.

Because of this, information tended to stay local. To spread widely, it had to be worth paying for. A meme had to usually fill its home chunk first, then pay to hop outward. Each hop slowed it down, which kept the whole network from getting flooded. The regional setup worked like a tollgate that also acted as a speed bump, it would make it harder for outside agents to act locally, and it would make the spread of harmful content slow enough for an effective response to be prepared.

But for the most part, the system's architecture had been designed to keep people's online world close to their real one, so what you saw lined up with where you lived.

There were a few exceptions to this system.

The meguca emergency channel was one. Megucas used a separate overlay of chunks, nodes, meshes, and webs that ignored ordinary users so every magical girl stayed connected. Their data hops cost slightly more than human ones, but each meguca node covered a much larger area. That layout let them place key services inside their special bandwidth. Forums, trade hubs, and weather beacons could charge less than normal node-to-node rates, reach more users, and feed steady profits back to the megucas who ran them.

Chief among those sites in New Francisco was the Extraordinary Bounty System, a cryptocurrency exchange where anyone could post non-CYPHER bounties on monsters. It was, for many, a secondary source of income, but for the larger gangs and more professional mercenaries, it was their bread and butter. It was a highly competitive market, where it didn't matter who read it first, but who collected first.

When Bear's notification updated a singular bounty to the top of the leaderboard, it was like a spark in an oxygen-rich environment.

Slowly at first, and then all too suddenly, a digital wildfire emerged.

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