Piper nearly jumped in after him. To have come this far, only to have Osric slip away – it almost sent her over the edge and into the nothingness. She had no idea what waited at the bottom. Even if he could get to the ground level and back out of the elevator shaft, the streets still swarmed with an army of corporate security. He had nowhere to go.

But the screaming stopped her. She spun back around to a scene of carnage and panic. The first of the lurkers dispatched its prey and began scuttling through the space, bullets snapping at its heels. She could feel the coils of AmpCore energy reaching out to try and catch it, but the lurkers didn't react like anything was supposed to. Their dead hulks gave no purchase.

"Blast them!" Piper screamed, gathering a veritable fireball into her right hand. "Combustives!"

Even as she yelled the warning, another lurker burst down through the ceiling, plunging four arms right down on top of one of the Code-Vector operatives, killing her instantly as it landed. A third came exploding from one of the supposedly empty crates, only for Nevay to blast it at almost point-blank range with her stun-gun. The gangster screeched and scrambled away, shooting it three more times as it twitched and writhed.

Piper launched herself into the fray. Three more of the creatures came scuttling from the shadows, slicing up the corporate security detail effortlessly as they moved. She caught up to one as it disembowelled another of the unfortunate troopers and before it could properly face her, she leapt up onto its rear housing, grabbing its corpse-skull with both hands.

Blades flailed at her, and she twisted her body sideway to avoid having her guts sliced open, just long enough for her to burn the lurker from the inside out. She pumped a violent torrent of combustive power out of her hands and through the monster, melting and fusing circuits; charring what little skin remained inside it.

It fell down dead and she toppled off of it, hitting the ground with a gasp. Looking at her palms, she saw scorched and blistered skin where the backwash had torn through her. Her head pounded – it was getting more and more difficult to stop her implants from overloading and cooking her alive.

Panting, she levered herself to her knees and looked around. Off to her left, Odiye put another lurker down with blazing crescent of white hot energy that cut the thing in half. It also set fire to the room, sending a lurid orange glare through the gloom.

"Hey, hey!" the rough hand suddenly on her on her shoulder belonged to Nevay Jennings, and she looked up into the gangster's eyes. "Nice fry," she continued, nodding to the dead wraith. "You okay?"

"I don't have my amplifier," Piper choked out, struggling to one knee. "It hurts."

"Shit, nothing to control all that wildfire with, eh?" Nevay broke off, blasting off two wild shots at a dark scuttling form as it rushed past.

Piper didn't reply, her eyes caught by Treysi grappling with another of the crazed machines, back to back with Kirk, who was shooting frantically at anything that moved. She managed to snap one of its blades off at the joint, only for the lurker to surge forward and slam the blunt of its head into her human side.

Treysi was cannoned backwards, slamming into Kirk and sending him sprawling, his stun-gun clattering away across the floor as he hit the ground face first. The lurker ignored him, sidling forward with sickening fluidity of movement as it loomed over Treysi.

"Nevay!"

"Busy here!" Another snarl from Nevay's gun was the only response she got after that.

As the creature reared up over Treysi, Kirk surged upright. With his weapon somewhere in the mess of debris, he stood holding a length of broken metal in his right hand. He let out a screech of effort and swung, aiming to smash it down onto the thing's barely human head.

That head snap-turned unnaturally. One of the Lurker's bladed limbs to flicked out towards him.

As easily as moving through air, the machine severed his right arm at the elbow.

The arm carried on, almost comically, spinning through the air like a Catherine Wheel. Blood fountained in a grizzly firework and he staggered, letting out a choking sound, his eyes bulging as he stared at the empty space where his hand had been an instant before. He took a couple of unsteady steps backward, then his legs gave out from the shock. He collapsed into a sitting position.

The threat removed, the lurker turned its attention back to Treysi.

"KIRK!" Piper screamed, scrambling forwards. Trying to scrub the image of the severed limb out of her mind, she reached out with her implants to pull the thing away, but its empty, slippery shell rebuffed her efforts. The blades unfolded, ready to slam down and turn tear Treysi to pieces.

Piper raised her right hand, a combustive bolt gathering in the palm of her hand, hot and painful. Without an amplifier to help her concentrate and aim, she knew she could easily hit both of them, but she had to do something.

Just as she was about to unleash a lethal blast of energy, something hit her. Something in the air – in the datastreams. Agony exploded in her skull and she screamed, crumpling to one knee, fighting to keep her implants from tearing themselves open. Other screams filled the passageway, but they didn't sound human. They didn't sound like anything she'd heard before. Like someone was shrieking through a bucket of nails, mixed with fingernails scraping metal.

Staring through bleary vision and pain, she saw the lurker spasming uncontrollably. Its multiple limbs flailed, tearing chunks out of the concrete as it thrashed and tumbled. Still screaming it convulsed and jerked back from Treysi, its partially human head thrown back rigidly, mouth open wide. Then something popped, sharp and high-pitched. She saw something in its neck joints explode, spitting black-grey liquid across the floor, before it collapsed in a limp heap.

Piper looked around frantically and realised that every one of the lurkers lay dead and inert, sprawled in front of shaking soldiers and AmpCore agents, their blood-stained limbs twitching faintly.

A shrill gurgle of pain wrenched her attention back, and she bolted forward, skidding down to her knees in front of Kirk. His eyes were wide, his skin pale and he was breathing heavily.

"Kirk," she grabbed him by the hair and pulled him to face her, "this is going to hurt."

Still looking him the eye, she let go of him, grabbed his injured arm and pulled it towards her. He let out a choke of agony, but he wasn't in any shape to resist. Blood fountained over her fingers and she gulped down a surge of nausea.

Finally, she forced herself to look at the bloody stump of flesh and bone, and brought her other hand around. Snarling red-hot energy crackled around her palm, and, before she could second guess herself, she pressed it down firmly against the wound.

There was a flash of heat, and the instant smell of burning flesh. Then Kirk was screaming. He lurched forward against her, his whole body shaking violently as he jammed his face against her shoulder, muffling his agonised screech.

Piper held her hand there for a few seconds, unable to concentrate on anything else except stopping the energy in her head from overflowing and immolating both of them. Her implants burned painfully across every bone in her body and she gritted her teeth, clinging on for a few extra seconds until she was sure she'd cauterised the wound completely.

Then she let go. In the same instant she pushed him away and launched herself into a roll, scrambling away and breathing sharply, shaking her hand to try and let out some of the residual heat. Faint scorch marks scarred the floor until she managed to bottle the energy back up again.

Kirk rocked back into a sitting position, tears cutting paths through the blood and grime on his face. He shuddered; spasmed, and for a second she thought he was going to pass out. She wouldn't have blamed him, but at the last second he seemed to get a foothold back into reality. He blinked several times and managed to look at her.

"Th-th-thanks," he stammered weakly.

"Don't mention it," she laughed, her shoulders slumping.

"Is everybody alright?"

The voice cut through the stunned silence that followed. Every head turned, and Piper turned with them. She looked and, to her amazement, standing in the doorway of the storage room was Toran Knox.

A pair of Skiltron heavies flanked him, but Piper's eyes snagged on the little black box he held in one hand. He held it outstretched, the expression on his face making it clear that he hadn't been sure that ... whatever he'd done would actually work. He glanced at it once, then slowly lowered it, stepping forward into the carnage and chaos.

The heavies moved with him. Six more followed them in through the door. Toran knelt down at the side of one of the dead lurkers for a moment, his lips pressed together into a tight line. He shook his head, exhaling a deep breath, then stood and moved on. Piper stood moving over and helping Kirk up, supporting him with his remaining arm across her shoulder.

Treysi struggled to her feet beside them, her face bloodied and the metal in her arm and upper body dented from the fighting. One of her ankle servos wheezed uneasily when she moved. She trudged forward and looked Piper in the eye, arms outstretched.

"I've got him."

"What?"

"Let me. He saved my life."

"Don't all... fight over me at once," Kirk coughed weakly.

Too weary to argue, Piper relented, and draped his arm across the cyborg girl's shoulders. The survivors of the fight slowly coalesced around them, slinking out of cover, the corporate troopers looking dazed and shocked by what they'd just seen. The stink of blood, gunsmoke and burnt metal filled the air. She turned her palms over, examining the aching raw skin for a moment, before she looked up, finding Toran and the newcomers standing just a few meters away.

"Good timing," Odiye grunted, rolling his left shoulder with a wince.

"Aye, I'll fuckin' say," Nevay chuckled blackly as she sat down on a nearby crate, her stun-gun across her lap. "What in the bloody evergrind just happened?"

"Took your advice, Odiye," Toran explained, shaking the box half-heartedly. "I went digging where I shouldn't."

"You found something?"

"Just a lot of things that shouldn't exist anymore." He tapped the device with one finger. "Its an old Atom-Tech kill code – specially designed to scorched-earth anything that go a little... out of control. Fries pretty much everything else in the vicinity too, but I figured we couldn't be too picky about that."

"Well, I'll say this for you, Knox," Piper chuckled wearily, "you know how to make an entrance."

"Good to see you too, Piper." He gave her a nod. "I'm glad you're okay."

"Thanks."

"So where's that son of a bitch from the Schism?" Toran asked, looking around. "I'm gonna need his head on a spike before we start celebrating too much."

"He jumped down there," Piper indicated the elevator shaft with a flap of one aching hand.

"He what?"

She gave him a helpless shrug. "I said what I said. He set these fucking things on us and took a fireman slide down the fucking elevator cable."

Toran nodded. "O...kay. I'll get the word out. The whole plaza is on lockdown. He won't get far."

"What's down there?"

"Just leads to the delivery and storage levels on the basement," Odiye told her. "No secret passages down there, and nowhere to hide. Just more boxes. We'll send a team to sweep it."

"Hey, where's the other spiv?" Nevay piped up again, raising a hand.

"Huh?"

She gestured around with a bemused expression on her face. "Your old buddy, what's her name – Lockley? Don't see her anywhere. One of those lurkers pin her?"

"Lockley?!" Toran looked at her sharply. "Holly Lockley?"

"That's the girl."

"What the fuck is going on?" He took a sharp step forward. "She... Holly is...?" He looked helplessly to Odiye. "She's alive?"

"I just found out," he admitted, moving to stand in front of his friend. "Everything moved so fast once we got here, there wasn't any way to tell you. But yeah, she's alive." He looked around uneasily. "At least, she was a minute ago."

"Holly?" Piper shouted twisting back and forth. "Holly?!"

No sign. No body – no presence. Nothing near her. Holly Lockley was just... gone. She Looked left. Looked right.

Then a sickening thought occurred to her, and she darted back over to the elevator shaft. Looking down, she couldn't see anything but bottomless blackness, but she could feel a tingle of residual energy where gravity had been warped.

Her eyes wide with astonishment. "Oh, fuck!"