My skin reknit itself, my tendons pulled my bones together like a child’s toy if not for the painful snapping and sucking sounds.

  The second time in hours.

  But this time, I had a fresh body brimming with blood and flesh to assist in my repair.

  Halfway through the process, She appeared astride a healthy horse. She watched me puzzle myself together, Her eyes shrewd and playful, barbs forming on her tongue. She was the only one I would have ever called my equal.

  Whether it was actually Her, was another question entirely

  “You dropped your. . .” her words hung in the air.

  I paused from screwing my foot back into the correct cardinal direction and looked around in surprise. Surely enough, a small brass ring lay on the ground.

  I placed it back inside.

  -A collector of antiquities

  ###

  Kael ran from the city center into grayer streets, through mazes of rustier buildings. He kept pressing the tempo, because the further he ran, the harder time Zagan had keeping him in sight. The assassin’s large physique was built for power—if not pulling plows—not stamina.

  Kael paused at corner to orient himself, let his chest fill with cool ocean air, taste the salt on the tip of his tongue. He snapped back to as his bubble ripped and a shattering ping sounded not five feet away. Kael paused, confused, looking at the red pieces of glass, only to stupidly recognize them as frozen blood. Zagan was still two blocks eastward, so not a bad javelin toss all things considered.

  It would be easier to confront him than wait for a lucky throw; wouldn’t it?

  If they fought, Kael would win. If Kael continued to walk Zagan through the city streets like he was on a leash, a small factor of luck came into play.

  Kael dragged the chase further outside the city, far enough out that wealth and industry sloughed away and showed the bones of better years. Gone were buildings higher than a couple stories, replaced with smaller apartments, and finally, dilapidated factories and warehouse. Only latchkeys and delinquents roamed the streets here mid-day. The air had grown more caustic, sitting heavy in Kael’s lungs.

  Kael put distance between he and Zagan, far enough that he couldn’t see the whites of the killer’s eyes, and then doubled that. That gave him time to pick the arena.

  One empty factory was as good as the next caved in warehouse that needed demolition, so he chose a defunct anchor factory. Vines and saproot waged war over the brick building’s walls. The roof was clearly metal.

  Kael cleared the iron chain-link fence in a single fluid movement and crossed the open dirt to two sliding doors without taking any more missile fire. Only a padlock held the front doors shut and of course that fizzled to a black smoke in an instant. Kael pulled the chain away and rammed the sliding doors from the side, squeezing threw just as a clatter of bloody flak rang against the steel.

  Kael took a second to breathe. The floor was sooty and holes in the ceiling ushered in beams of light at an angle. A suspended walkway was held up by large concrete columns. From all of these things to the steal bars bracing the roof, Kael had nothing but ammo. And it was empty; it would have been a drag to stumble into a homeless encampment.

  Kael folded his arms across his chest and watched amused as Zagan squeezed his barrel chest into the warehouse. He clutched his gut, the whole of him dripping with sweat.

  Kael pronounced, “Now I get to see how I stack up against your goofy, table top ranking system. What’s their best got to offer?” He could have struck right away, but the mental game was important in a Sychakenetic contest. He could be annoying, as much time as he spent with Joshua.

  “Save your jibes.” Zagan straightened. “I got enough hate to keep me focused.”

  “Ooh. The big evil man is a hateful prick? Really breaking the mold.” Joshua really would have been better at this.

  “Complain to me once you’ve had a reason to hate, and then turned it down.”

  Well, Kael checked half those boxes.

  He braced as Zagan’s bubble pushed hard against his own.

  And then Kael launched the first blow, sending a streaking blaze of explosive energy through the floor and into Zagan’s bubble. But just like the Blood Syche in Einhurst, Zagan sprung on that volley; he jumped forward drawing blood from his wrist and slammed it into the spearhead of Kael’s attack. Zagan smiled, still stooped on one knee. The blood he had forced into the concrete to quell Kael’s attacked seemed to quiver.

  Was it moving somehow?

  The floor cracked to the left of Kael and then directly behind. Water gushed out of the fissures spewing foamy, murky gunk onto the equally dirty floor. Not waiting to see how sewer water and Blood Syches mixed, Kael used an explosion to launch himself gracefully up to the second story walkway—he was finally getting skilled at that move and kicking himself that he hadn’t invented it sooner.

  Zagan’s blood churned red, mixing with the water, turning it into a hybrid vortex that spun around Zagan, shielding him.

  Kael cocked his head to the side, trying to recall Agassas lessons. She refused to spar, so the practical lessons, the part Kael typically remembered, was lost to him.

  Then he found the memory pouring over chemistry books by the fire, asking questions about purity.

  51%.

  As long as the mixture of water and blood was 51% blood, Zagan could control it. It was worse than the water effectively doubling reserves though, the floor was lava so to speak. Zagan could send his blood anywhere below at will and be in full control.

  Kael could see Zagan’s sharp grin amidst breaks in the swirling water.

  “That it?” Kael said, determined not to betray his surprise.

  ###

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  Joshua whipped his head around looking for killers, otherwise held up by traffic on a street corner smack dab in the middle of Il Porta. He needed to find the tallest skyscraper, but the buildings were so densely clustered that they felt like they could shake hands with a stiff breeze. Made for a bad eyeline.

  “They’re getting closer,” Gianna piqued up from behind. The three assassins of the Dark Element closed in a block away—slowed, for now, by their injured team member.

  You don’t say? Maybe one of us is specifically equipped to deal with that situation? Joshua bit his tongue on those words though. Gianna was unpredictable enough without sarcasm being sent her way.

  Joshua had wrongly assumed they’d be able to lose them out of the train station. He hoped that meant the killers had ducked the police as opposed to cutting right through them. Regardless, the streets and sidewalks of Il Porta were not so frantic that they reasonably could lose them now.

  Safe was predicated on the distance between the two parties. If the Syches got close, Joshua and Gianna would have a whole new set of problems, the mass of civilians being their only cover at the current distance.

  “Okay, I’ve got it!” Joshua declared, grabbing Gianna’s sleeve and pulling her in a sprint across traffic that was not stopping. Horns and ballet of dodges and swivels, they got to the other sides.

  “Don’t touch me!” Gianna screamed.

  “Of course that’s what you have a problem with.” Joshua veered right, away from the target building and Gianna followed. “We need to split up.”

  “Again? We’re all that’s left.”

  “Yes, yes, again,” Joshua said. “Kael is busy, Bartholomew is, well, who knows where, so unless you’re going to turn and deal with all three of those psychos, then our only option is to get me to the place with the thing alone.”

  “The thing? The place?”

  “Bartholomew’s promised weapon-thing. You can’t ask me for specifics when he didn’t tell us jack.”

  Gianna talked as she jogged just fine. “Then shouldn’t I be the one to go there?”

  “You’re the Syche and the Dark Element know it. If we split up, they have to send their two strongest after you, if not the entire group.”

  “What do I do if they follow me?”

  “Do what I would do. I don’t know.”

  They paused at another corner, the Element Syches still somehow exactly a block back. Joshua rammed the “walk” button cursing.

  “I don’t like it; I should be the one to—"

  However Gianna responded, Joshua didn’t hear as he shoved her into the cross walk and juked right. Hopefully one of them follows me. Gianna can take care of herself, right? She’ll be fine. Right?

  ###

  Gianna mumbled all the way across the street, irate at being pushed, only realizing once she got to the other side that Joshua was gone. She halted, trying to make sense of the situation.

  The three killers arrived at the opposite corner led by the dark-skinned lady. She acted decisively, marching across the street towards Gianna, a finger pointing to the fleeing Joshua as her mouth moved. The injured bald man limped Joshua’s way as the remaining two charged across the waning “walk now” sign. They were in range to use their powers, even a weaker Syche would be.

  Gianna eeped and skipped to a run.

  She could kill the killers. That was always an option, but it seemed like her new friends looked down on such things—at least as a first resort.

  What was it Joshua said? Do what he would do?

  What indeed.

  Joshua, Kael, and the others always seemed weirded out that she didn’t express her emotions properly—whatever that meant/ not that it was her fault. But misunderstanding tone and emotion didn’t seem all that different from Joshua’s understanding of smart and stupid. He generally led with the latter and then proclaimed the former when it worked.

  If she really was required to solve this like Joshua, she could do something stupid. Just so long as she made it to the tower in time.

  “I’m turning myself in,” Gianna said.

  The police officer sitting at the large, semicircular help desk to Couer 23rd, the Selan version of a precinct, set his phone down and didn’t rush to take off his reading glasses. The black and white checkered tiles gave the entry foyer a barber shop feel that clashed with the white marble pillars, just as the officer’s burly mustache clashed with his thinning hair line.

  “Turn yourself in, you say? Let’s hear it.” The officer distractedly looked up to a great splitting stair case where a man in a suit with a lanyard, talking to a similarly affected woman in a pantsuit. “Would you like to step off to the side, in a room?”

  Gianna shook her head. “There’s no time for that. They’ve followed me right here.”

  “Who did?”

  “Okay,” Gianna said sadly, people were sympathetic to sadness. “I was part of this group who killed people for money. But now I left the group and they are trying to kill me. They chased me right up the steps and inside.”

  “Uh-huh.” The desk officer chewed on his lip.

  This was the sort of thing she wanted to show Joshua and/or Kael and say, see? How was she meant to interpret that? What did it communicate.

  “And you’re, what, fifteen?” the officer asked.

  “A little older; or, I guess, 16.”

  “And you killed people for money.”

  “Yes!” Gianna said more sadly, she really needed some sympathy right now. “And I really need to be at the top of the city right now. Maybe come to the window?” Gianna started moving to the front doors herself. “They won’t let me go, they have to be somewhere out there.”

  Gianna heard the lumbering officer’s footsteps as she plastered her face in the middle of the black lettered ‘O’ of ‘Couer’ on the left front door. The assassins hadn’t hidden at all, they were at the bottom of the steps, in heated argument, gesticulating wildly at the building.

  “Right there,” Gianna pointed useless as the officer, joined her at the front door. “In the black robes.”

  “No, I got that.” The officer expelled some pent-up air. “You know it’s a crime to lie right? If this is a prank or—”

  The conversation halted between the assassins in tandem with the wild gesticulation, because the killers were making their way up the steps now. Gianna’s knees bent and she was about to spring backwards, but one more detail caught her eye. Across the street, Joshua ambled along, not a care in the world

  ###

  Slightly before Gianna plastered her face against the doors to Couer 23, Joshua considered his situation:

  It would have been simple, clean, and intelligent to lose his singularly pathetic pursuer, which meant any other day he wouldn’t have toyed with him a little. Run him ragged and sling insults across his back. But Joshua had somewhere important to be. Today he would focus; he would get to the tallest building.

  So long as the three other, far more capable, assassins didn’t cross his path.

  It turned out he had gone in the wrong direction losing the assassin, however. Joshua had run as fast as he could in the wrong direction and left the killer collapsed against the wall, struggling to breathe. Not willing to simply u-turn and skirt anywhere near the downed man, Joshua took a wide berth and went up and over several blocks, then moved towards the target in jagged, stair stepping turns through the city streets. Always with the building in his eyesight. It was big alright, at least a hundred floors, the outside smoothy and glassy-green. From where Joshua currently jogged, it reflected the one spoke of sun penetrating what was otherwise an oppressive gray blanket of clouds.

  All was fine. Joshua wove between pedestrians, making a game of it. And then an explosion assaulted that peace. Joshua dove for the ground and instinctively covered the back of his head. The initial triage telling him he was perfectly okay, he looked up.

  Across the street, a police precinct, dirty white and old, lay squat between two skyscrapers. And up the steps ran two figures in flowing black robes. The front doors to the precinct were in the street, one denting the top of a compact. A sad looking man with a badge and a gun had on hand up, his mouth was clearly screaming something, he fumbled getting his gun out of the hostler. And who else was beside him but Gianna, just for a second before she ducked back into the precinct.

  Did Gianna call the police? But wait, the assassins are going to the police. Did Gianna hide in a police station?

  Smart.

  And I’m smart enough not to involve myself.

  Joshua had resumed walking, and was so busy watching the scene that he failed to watch where he was going as he rounded the corner. He crashed into another body, bonking heads. “Oh, my bad dude,” Joshua said, rubbing the space between eyebrows with his thumb. Joshua’s victim had fallen on the ground; Joshua looked down to see the bald assassin, struggling to pick himself up. “Are you kidding me.”

  The assassin’s reaction was as delayed as Joshua. He gaped open mouth and then slung his hand forward. A metal wire sprung from his robes like a serrated bola. The body movement telegraphing the attack, Joshua jumped high and cleared it, landing with both feet on the assassin’s stomach. The man yelped in pain and Joshua collapsed to the side awkwardly has his ankles rolled in that spongey flesh.

  Hands catching the ground, Joshua wildly kicked like a horse at whatever was behind himself, catching nothing. He stumbled forward and then into a sprint. He had no idea the state of his pursuer and couldn’t afford to look back. Those who had seen the scuffle were yelling something. Joshua did not care.