They left the utility building and headed northeast, the hub’s glow dragging the horizon forward in orange, steady, and now annoyingly close, which is how distance likes to behave once you have decided to take it seriously.

The zone’s lighting thinned as they went deeper, overhead strips giving way to emergency runs at floor level, red lines in the dark, the sort of lighting that said a place was working while refusing to promise anything warmer.

Proxy had mapped two routes from the walkway.

One cut across an open maintenance yard between two structures, faster, direct, and visible from every window on the hub. The other was a covered conduit corridor running parallel to the yard, pipe runs on both sides, corrugated metal roof, single-file at its narrowest point.

"We’re taking the covered route," he said.

"Okay~" Nyx said.

The conduit corridor was narrow and smelled of ozone and hot metal that had been locked in a small space for far too long.

The pipe runs on both sides were wide enough to lean against, and the corrugated roof above was just one bolted panel after another, which is to say the whole thing was held together by confidence and the memory of better decisions.

Floor strips ran along the base of the left pipe, red and even, and cast everything from the knees up into half-shadow. The single-file section forced them into a column for four meters, Jinx first, then Nyx, then Proxy, before the corridor widened at the far end and opened toward the maintenance yard and the hub’s eastern wall, twenty-five meters beyond.

He reached into the network as they moved.

The signal concentration had already been tugging at the network since they entered the zone, but this was different.

Two heat signatures were active in the hub, both combat-elevated. The first was massive, an enormous servo-power draw, the kind that meant behemothic heavy armor. The second was smaller and stranger.

It pulsed in bursts, high spike, drop to baseline, high spike, drop.

He was still working out what that probably meant when an explosion happened inside the hub.

The concussive force ran outward through the walls, into the maintenance yard, and then into the corridor roof above them.

The roof was not stable, which became obvious at once. The bolts at the far end sheared clean and three meters of corrugated panel tore loose, coming down across the corridor’s midpoint in one direction with a sound that immediately became the loudest thing in the zone.

The panel struck the floor, bounced, then crashed flat. Rust and debris rolled down the corridor both ways. The air went opaque for a moment, because apparently even metal likes to make an entrance.

Through the gap left in the roof, the hub’s windows were visible, lit from inside. And through those windows, anything inside the hub looking out could now see them. A fair deal, if one admired cruelty in a practical way.

Nyx had Proxy by the jacket with both hands before the debris had even started to fall down. Full grip, both hands sunk into the jacket, hauling him left against the pipe run and putting herself between him and the gap.

The amber overlay fired over her eyes as the situation changed, which was another way of saying she had already decided what kind of day this was going to be.

Jinx dropped to one knee at the far end of the corridor against the right pipe run, both pistols out, facing the yard.

In the network, both heat signatures were moving fast toward the eastern wall.

"They saw us," he said.

The maintenance door was crushed open.

The first one through appeared in the hole.

Heavy armor, gang-built kind made over years from whatever still held together under multiple brawls. The shoulder sections were wider than the frame underneath needed, reinforced at the outer edges with dense material bolted on after the fact.

His face was partly chrome, jawline plated, left cheekbone replaced, the orbital above his left eye housing something that tracked without blinking. He was large under the armor, genuinely large, the sort of body augmentation supplements instead of inventing.

A grenade launcher sat on a reinforced harness across his back, barrel over his right shoulder, drum magazine at the receiver. His right hand held a shotgun, compact, smart-linked, with a targeting wire running from the grip to a port at his wrist.

He looked at them once. One sweep, three targets, and his expression changed in recognition.

"Gonk ass netrunner," he said, and his voice had the volume of someone who had spent years shouting over machinery and never saw a reason to stop. "You have got to be kidding me, choom. Right in my playground."

He was already raising the shotgun.

The second one appeared through the breach in the ceiling. She was East Asian, compact, lean in the way of somebody tuned entirely around speed.

Her forearms had the slightly too smooth profile of housed blade mounts, flat ridges from elbow to wrist, flush with the skin, release mechanisms seated in the wrists. Neither blade was deployed.

Her eyes were fully augmented, iris replaced with gold that caught the zone’s light with a metallic sheen, the pupil unnaturally still even as the light shifted around it.

She looked at Proxy first. Then Nyx. Then Jinx.

One full second of flat ponderation.

"Most Wanted," she said. "Both of them."

The gang leader looked at her, then back at Proxy and Nyx. The extraction bounty had arrived in his ground and he was thinking, whether the promise of a free way out was still available and if it was worth the risk to test it out.

Proxy observed their surroundings calmly. Pipe run immediately behind him, fuel cylinder housing on the far right side of the yard, corridor entrance directly behind, twenty-five meters of open space between them and the hub door.

Then Nyx made the decision for him, which was, in fairness, the sort of service one comes to appreciate when time is no longer available.

She seized his jacket with both hands and hauled him left behind the pipe run with full force. The sleeve grip she used for intimacy disappeared into the two-handed drag she used when there was no time left for anything subtle.

The smart-linked shotgun round crossed the yard entrance and struck the pipe surface where Proxy had been standing. It flattened against the outer skin with a sharp ringing impact, the vibration running through the metal and into his hand where he braced against the far side.

Nyx cleared the pipe run and moved toward the yard.

The gang leader tracked her. His servo-assisted armor moved his arm with mechanical certainty and he raised the shotgun and fired again at her crossing path.

The round hit the ground two meters behind her left heel, throwing gravel and grit up in a short burst. She had already changed direction before the trigger and before the smart-link could update fast enough to keep up with her speed implants.

She closed the remaining distance and drove her shoulder into his chest with everything her implants could give her.

It did not move him. The armor spread the force and his body swallowed what the armor did not, and he barely rocked. But she was already inside shotgun range, which is generally when one stops pretending range matters, and she brought the knife up.

He dropped his left arm and the knife caught the outer forearm plating, dragged across it, found no gap, and skated off. She pulled back before it could bind.

He reversed the shotgun and swung the stock at her head.

The stock passed through the air above the space her skull had occupied half a second earlier, because she had already dropped under it. She drove her knife into the armpit gap on his left side, the gap every mechanical arm needs and every welded plate eventually has to respect unless it plans to replace function with decoration.

The knife hit muscle through the opening. He made a sound through his teeth.

He did not stop. He dropped his weight and shoved her sideways with his full mass and the armor’s bulk behind it. She went three steps right before her speed implants converted the momentum into a controlled stop. She kept her footing, which is often the only thing that matters after physics has had its say.

His right hand was already reaching back toward the grenade launcher on the harness.

She was back inside his reach before the motion finished.

The assassin had not waited for any of this. She crossed the maintenance yard toward Proxy’s side at a baseline run, fast even without the cycling implant active, the augmented muscle of someone whose entire body had been built around a capability that was not currently firing.

Proxy went right, away from Nyx, toward the fuel cylinder housing on the far side of the yard. He couldn’t go toward Nyx. Pulling the assassin into a fight that was already crowded would only make both fights worse.

He went right, and the assassin followed, and the yard split cleanly into two separate problems.

Jinx came out of the corridor entrance and moved left along the outer wall, using it as cover. She raised her left handgun at the gang leader’s back and fired once.

The round struck his right shoulder plating with a sharp crack, skated across the armor’s surface, and spun off into the yard. It did not penetrate, but the impact shoved his weight toward the hit, and that brief destabilization was enough to matter.

Jinx was already shifting position before the round finished deflecting.

She was not helping Nyx, not exactly. She had created an opening that Nyx happened to be inside. The distinction was small, which is to say it was probably the important part.