Kelly raced through the sky on rune-summoned platforms, each appearing under her foot just in time, climbing toward the dragon. The massive creature tucked its wings and dove into a building thirty stories up, disappearing into its shadow.

  Then the ground cracked beneath her.

  The dragon erupted from the pavement, jaws wide, rising on a column of darkness aiming to swallow her while she was mid-step between platforms.

  Kelly looked at the jaws, at the space the dragon had been, and remembered how stretching her shadow across the street had immobilized every construct the voidling made—walls, spikes, goblins. All had become inanimate. The dragon had stayed in the air, moving separately.

  Realization hit her mid-air. She cackled—a genuine laugh echoing off the buildings.

  It wasn’t alive. The dragon was a puppet, controlled by the voidling.

  She skipped sideways off her platform just before the jaws closed, landing on a new one she summoned mid-thought.

  “—just a really big toy,” she finished, still laughing.

  She should’ve known. The real deal was far more deadly.

  Kelly hung in the air, floodlight drone keeping pace at her shoulder like an obedient pet, and threw up instant shields in a massive layered cage around herself and the dragon—walls of reinforced composite stacked thick enough to block every light source except the drone still hovering at her shoulder. The space inside went dark. Complete dark. Her dark. She slammed a second cage inside the first one, tighter, boxing the construct and its rider into a shrinking pocket of black.

  The dragon hit the inner wall. Kelly's shadow stretched across the shield surface beneath it. The dragon sank into that shadow like it was falling through water and was gone—stored away in her shadow dimension.

  The voidling wasn't gone though. It tumbled through the air where the dragon used to be, alive in a way the constructs weren't, and Kelly slowed time to a crawl.

  She time-skipped across the space between them, appearing right in front of it—drained and slightly exhausted—and grabbed it with her shadow hand. It thrashed and stabbed at her, but small stacked shields sprang into existence at the point of impact from thin air before crumbling to nothing. The blow had carried more strength than Kelly expected, but the shields had bought her a second—that was enough. The thing thrashed, tried to slip away into darkness, but there was nowhere to go—her hand was shadow, the only thing that could actually touch it, and it held on like grabbing cold dense meat wrapped in flexible armor, tough and springy and solid in a way that felt almost organic. Before it could escape, Kelly moved.

  She put her directed energy weapon against its head and pulled the trigger.

  The voidling went limp.

  Still standing on her platform in the sky, Kelly stored the body in her shadow. Two prime specimens. Plenty of material. Good haul.

  “Guess dying’s off the menu today.” Kelly eyed her shadow. With the latest storage, it could probably appraise for enough to buy a small town.

  Dying this loop would be a disaster. It wouldn’t be the usual type where she woke up annoyed and missing a few hours. It’d be much worse. The reset would wipe it all. The Voidling corpse. The constructs. All her hard work would just be… gone.

  She dropped from the sky on a sparse series of instant shields breaking her fall, her boots hitting pavement with a thud. Ren stood exactly where she'd left him, arms crossed. Reggie and his goons were still there too, looking at her.

  The old veteran, Ren, turned to face the mercenaries, "We're heading into more danger from here. Your men won't be able to follow."

  Reggie shook his head. "No can do, sir. We were hired for a specific job." He pointed at Kelly. "This was a detour."

  Kelly was in a good mood. An exceptionally good mood. She wiped soot off her cheek with the back of her wrist and glanced at the APC, which now had a dragon-shaped gouge carved straight through reinforced plating rated to stop anti-armor rounds. The steel around the tear had folded inward. The windows were busted and the interior was a crime scene. Kelly was pretty sure the left axle was praying—the vehicle sagged two inches lower on the left.

  “It’s fine,” she said. “We’ll meet you back at Haider’s place. Try not to die before I get there. I need witnesses for the expense report.”

  Reggie snorted. "Make sure you have a bonus ready, lady. That APC's suspension isn't going to pay for itself. It’s going to need new windows. And a new interior. A new everything."

  Kelly waved. "Bill Haider. He loves invoices."

  Reggie crossed his arms. "Haider pays, but he also asks questions. What do I tell him happened? ‘Your new hire stuffed a shadow creature into the vehicle and then arm-wrestled a dragon over the hood’?”

  Kelly shrugged. "Tell him I'm ahead of schedule."

  Goon One laughed, a short burst through his metal jaw. "Schedule for what? Wrecking company property?"

  "Research and development," Kelly said. "Very expensive and valuable R-and-D. He'll understand."

  The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  A beat of silence followed as the adrenaline from battle left them, and they stood for second, calm. In the cool breeze of a burning city.

  Reggie glanced at his ruined APC, then back at Kelly, then at her shadow. "That thing in your Shrink-Box. The dragon-thing. It's really secure in there?"

  "Sure."

  Goon Two spoke up, quieter than the others. "You're not going to, like, lose it, right? It can't get out? I heard those things are still prototypes"

  Kelly patted her own shadow. "This is a premium shadow dimension. Climate controlled. Secure entry. No unauthorized exits."

  Goon Two stared at her. "That doesn't mean anything."

  "Sure it does. It means your ride home won't have a dragon in it. Relax."

  Reggie shook his head as he started walking, his men falling in behind him. “Man… of all the clients I’ve had, she’s got to be one of the crazier ones. Top five for sure.”

  Goon One said, "Top three."

  "Don't encourage her."

  Goon Two had stayed quiet. As the others left, he hesitated. Then he caught Kelly's eye, gave a short nod. That was it. Then he said, "Stay safe."

  How kind! Kelly beamed back in surprise and waved goodbye. "You too! Don't let anything eat you on the way home! I’ll see you guys later!"

  He turned and sauntered after the others.

  Kelly and Ren stood there, watching them leave in silence, waiting until the footsteps faded.

  Then Kelly spun and grabbed Ren's arm, his nanotech shifting under her fingers.

  “Give me an hour. Just one."

  Ren looked at her.

  She said, "With the cube and everything about to happen, there's no time. I need to look at the samples now. The voidling. The dragon. I need to see how they work, what makes them tick, if there's anything I can use before we walk into that dome."

  Ren said nothing. He opened his mouth to speak.

  Kelly got there first, pressing further, already pinging messages, bartering with multiple parties for what she needed, "I'll be quick. I'm always quick. Just wait here, kill some things, steal some info, do your old man recon thing. One hour.” She paused. “Please?"

  Ren was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "One hour. Gives me time to walk the perimeter."

  Kelly was already moving. "You're the best. I promise I won’t die."

  She raced off to find somewhere dark and private, intent on investigating the Voidling’s secrets, already pulling samples from her shadow, mind racing through dissection protocols and integration possibilities.

  An hour and four minutes later, Kelly returned, dishevelled and disorganised, but grinning.

  Ren waited until the footsteps were right behind him, then turned. He looked at her, one eyebrow raised a fraction. "Satisfied?"

  Kelly’s eyes glazed over as she pulled up her Status panel, reading information that hadn’t been there an hour ago. Through her mimic skin, she flexed her shadow hand once, watching the darkness ripple. Then she patted her own shadow like it was a particularly well-behaved dog. "Got a voidling corpse and a new Trait. Of course I'm satisfied."

  "Good." Ren turned and started walking. "Let's go."

  Kelly and her teacher, Ren walked through the city.

  Before the loops, she’d hated walking.

  Now, it wasn’t so bad.

  Something large, with too many limbs and too many eyes drifted by the two of them, not noticing the humans strolling past.

  Ren stood behind her, palm hovering a few inches from her back. A thin sheen crawled over her jacket, then her arms, then her face. It spread in a smooth layer, tight as a second skin. It did not glow. It did not hum. It simply settled.

  Kelly looked down at herself.

  She could still see her hands.

  Ren nodded once. “Move slowly.”

  She took a step.

  The air bent. Her outline thinned, bled into the background, then vanished.

  Kelly stopped mid-step.

  “Oh, that’s disgusting,” she said under her breath. “I love it.”

  “Speed disrupts the film,” Ren said. “Sudden acceleration fractures the light alignment. Sensors recalibrate if you spike.”

  “So no sprinting, no parkour, no throwing cars,” she said.

  “Correct.”

  She rolled her shoulders experimentally. The film shifted with her, adjusting, tightening. When she turned too fast, a faint shimmer rippled across her outline and snapped back into place. Kelly crouched and pressed her fingers to the pavement. No heat signature bloom. No distortion trail in the dust. Even her shadow failed to anchor properly, diffused into the environment.

  Instead of barreling through the city guns blazing like they'd done to get here, Kelly and the old man actually tried using stealth. It was Ren’s idea.

  The nanotech would make her invisible. But it wasn't just invisibility—it scrubbed every trace she existed from everything except the really expensive detection systems you’d find off planet on ships—or rigs the size of houses. Right now, to every sensor and sight that mattered, her atoms literally did not exist. And his nanotech had built the stuff on the fly, right there, with designs that definitely didn't come from any human factory she knew about. Kelly watched it crawl over her hand and felt her brain light up.

  This was impossible, even by Kelly’s standards. What else could his nanotech build?

  Kelly stared at her own arm as a thin film spread across it, nanotech crawling over her skin like a second layer of something that wasn't quite alive but also wasn't quite dead. This wasn’t tech that you could code in to nanotech. Or even industrial machines. This tech should have only worked with a starship. Or a corpo fighter shuttle. Ren had just waved his hand and it happened, no visible device or sequence, but old man magic of the technological variety.

  "How is this even possible?" She turned her hand over, watching the film shift with the light. "I read papers on this. Theoretical papers. People lost grants trying to make this work. The total omni-sensor disruption alone requires processing that—" She broke down the mechanics, the impossible engineering, the sheer audacity of building this on the fly with tech that didn't look completely human in origin.

  Was it Tüin tech, stolen? Or something else? She had to know.

  “There’s a reason nobody wants to get on Joe’s bad side.”

  Ah. Of course. There was a reason Dr. Haider was too valuable to imprison. His mind was pretty special. Practically the only one who could handle this without being taken over. Give this tech to anyone else and you'd just get the next AI overlord puppeteering a human body. Or a very dead man with stolen tech.

  Kelly let out a low whistle.

  “So Haider rides the tiger without getting eaten.”

  “Yes.”

  Kelly processed that. Processed Sato’s tech. Understood now why they called him Sato the Ghost. People called him that because they couldn't see him coming. She'd assumed stealth augments, tactical skill, old veteran tricks. Now she got it. The man was literally invisible in a world where everything and everyone was seen, even from orbit.

  She lifted her hand slowly. It vanished into the city backdrop. She wiggled her fingers and watched the shimmer threaten to ripple.

  “Do I get one of these permanently?”

  “No.”

  “Rude.”

  Unseen, undetected, the two of them moved through the ruined streets until the dome wall towered in front of them, close enough to touch.

  This section of the dome wall glistened with perfect construction. Smooth, seamless, and absolutely not designed to let people in. Kelly pressed her palm against it, felt the faint hum of something massive and power-hungry running through the metal.

  Ren said, "Use your blade. The molecular one. Cut us an entrance."

  Kelly looked at him, then at the wall.

  Finally, they had reached the dome. The East Grid.

  The Cube.

  And Kelly couldn’t wait to get her hands on what was inside.

  If you have already read this chapter, here’s what was updated:

  After Reggie and his mercs leave:

  Kelly and Ren stood there, watching them leave in silence, waiting until the footsteps faded.

  Then Kelly spun and grabbed Ren's arm, his nanotech shifting under her fingers.

  “Give me an hour. Just one."

  Ren looked at her.

  She said, "With the cube and everything about to happen, there's no time. I need to look at the samples now. The voidling. The dragon. I need to see how they work, what makes them tick, if there's anything I can use before we walk into that dome."

  Ren said nothing. He opened his mouth to speak.

  Kelly got there first, pressing further, already pinging messages, bartering with multiple parties for what she needed, "I'll be quick. I'm always quick. Just wait here, kill some things, steal some info, do your old man recon thing. One hour.” She paused. “Please?"

  Ren was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "One hour. Gives me time to walk the perimeter."

  Kelly was already moving. "You're the best. I promise I won’t die."

  She raced off to find somewhere dark and private, intent on investigating the Voidling’s secrets, already pulling samples from her shadow, mind racing through dissection protocols and integration possibilities.

  An hour and four minutes later, Kelly returned, dishevelled and disorganised, but grinning.

  Ren waited until the footsteps were right behind him, then turned. He looked at her, one eyebrow raised a fraction. "Satisfied?"

  Kelly’s eyes glazed over as she pulled up her Status panel, reading information that hadn’t been there an hour ago. Through her mimic skin, she flexed her shadow hand once, watching the darkness ripple. Then she patted her own shadow like it was a particularly well-behaved dog. "Got a voidling corpse and a new Trait. Of course I'm satisfied."

  "Good." Ren turned and started walking. "Let's go."