NOW.

LEGACY CITY

A WASPISH HUM fills the stale air in the apartment. Head bowed in concentration, Erik pushes his foot down on the pedal and presses the tattoo pen down.

As the ink strives across her skin, tiny needles stabbing into Sloane's arm, the prolonged burn sends her reeling back in time. Back to the days she spent strapped down to a gurney like a rabid dog, thrashing in agony, bucking in terror as a strange man in a white coat clamped metal cuffs studded with needles over her forearms, and plunged dark liquids and substances into her veins. He never looked up at her as he did it, those water-weak eyes focused on the task at hand rather than the subject. Poison, Sloane used to call it, whatever was in those needles. The injections always filled her with fire and agony for two whole days, like something was stripping away the outer membrane of her muscles and bones, turning every cell in her body inside-out, draining away all the colours, all the feelings, all the things that made her human, changing her until she was lined with metals, a ghost of a girl, a shell left buried in the battlefield, waiting to blow.

Instead of a gurney, Sloane sits in the dining area facing Erik, their sharp knees barely touching, her arm laid on the table, her back ramrod straight and her eyes fixed on the bottles of ink that rattle in protest each time Erik jerks the pen away from her reddening skin. On the corner of the dining table, a newspaper lies spread open. Splashed across the front is a blurry but unmistakable picture of Amos—James Reston—crucified against the wall. Above it, the headline read: MAN FOUND DEAD IN RESIDENCE, POLICE INVESTIGATING HOUSE-BREAK AND UNNATURAL DEATH.

Earlier, Erik had been reading it, picked up from a newspaper stand downtown. And when Sloane had finally noticed it, he'd merely flipped the paper around to show her the picture.

"This was your guy?" He'd asked, stone-faced, not exactly angry, but not exactly happy either.

She nodded, not trusting herself to speak. The air was shrouded in a dark tension, like the charged moments before a storm hit.

A muscle in Erik's jaw ticked, but he didn't say anything more to that.

Beside her arm, her black armbands lie limp, sagging heavily into the wooden table. Her knives had been cleaned thrice over, sharpened by hand. Night by night she took them out to polish and buff as though they were her own set of nails. She didn't need to do anything except clean them, considering she could manipulate their shape at will, without having to lift a finger, but she didn't do it for maintenance. She did it for the repetition, the routine. Metal hissing against metal, the sound hypnotic as a sword fight. Something to take her out of the four walls for an hour or so.

Every now and then, as Erik moves the pen in sure strokes, drawing blood, wiping it away with a damp cloth, smudging ink, dabbing the excess and residual blood away, he glances up to inspect her face.

Throughout the entire process, Sloane hasn't flinched once. Movement and stillness—two disciplines hammered into her bones since she could remember. Hours of holding the tiresome horse stance, thighs burning, every muscle in her body itching to move, only to risk the end of the Muchen's cane lashing against her calves in punishment, had drilled this into her. Old habits die hard. And the pain—Erik had remarked that most people would've been throwing up by now, especially for a first-timer, and though it's at the forefront of her senses, Sloane barely feels it.

"Really?" Erik muses, ludicrously, peering up at her briefly. "Nothing?"

"There are worse pains," Sloane says, nonchalantly, almost bored, her features an impassive mask. Internally, she clamps down on the shudder threatening to roil over her. Each time she closes her eyes, she's back in the facility of stone and whirring machines, back on that cold gurney, in those restraints biting into her wrists and forehead, back in that shock collar and Dr. Patmos' vice grip.

Before this, Erik had been etching another name onto his chest, a name whose last minutes were spent in the scope of his sniper's rifle before the bullet shot through the glass window and blew out his brains on the carpet. Sloane wasn't there, but she could imagine it, the hollow-point tearing through bone and brain matter. Gone in a blink. After that, the name would mean nothing more than the suitcase of cash on the dining table. It isn't about posterity. This is closure, the final acknowledgement of the blood on his hands before he moves onto the next job. Nothing personal.

Just as he'd been gently sketching on the finishing touches to his new tattoo, just a drop amidst the ocean of ink on his body, Sloane had tentatively slid a piece of paper, her haphazard drawing—she wasn't, by any means, an artist—scribbled over it, across the table.

Around them, the air buzzes in agitation and the traffic in the streets below forces its way through the grimy window Erik cracked open to let the breeze into the flat. Somewhere to her left Bullet lets out a sharp whine in his sleep. Despite the dissonant sounds, a lull of comfort blankets the space.

When Erik first let her into the apartment, two years ago, he'd told her, in some semblance of an apology, that it wasn't much, and it wasn't. This—the small and cluttered two-bedroom apartment, the peeling wallpaper, the water guzzling audibly in the pipes in the walls, the beat-up sofa coated in Bullet's black fur, the kitchen perpetually covered in a thin layer of dirty dishes, and the boxes of equipment pushed up against the walls of the living room—was far from something that looked like a home. But it was theirs.

Flicking her gaze from the ink bottles to Erik's face, creased in concentration, his dark eyes pinned on his work with laser-focus, Sloane traces the strong, granite-riven lines of his jaw, the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, the terse line of his mouth, the misaligned, aquiline nose that must've been broken a long time ago. He'd shaved this morning, the underside of his chin scored with razor burn and red lines where he'd nicked himself.

In truth, Sloane doesn't know much about Erik's background. He never speaks of anything personal, and everything she'd unearthed had been through mere observation, Freudian slips, fragments pieced together here and there. She suspects he's ex-military, given his vernacular, the methodical manner in which he keeps his space, the clockwork structure and iron-tight regimen that's almost sacred, and the way there's always a thread of primal awareness running through him, a minefield lying in wait. Although he's never said, it makes sense. She knows he had a family, once. He doesn't see them anymore, though. Distance seems to be his coping mechanism. Sloane supposes it's all part of his personal rules. Mercenary work can't afford luxuries like love and family.

Death is a very lonely line of business.

As much as they go about their own assigned affairs separately, and only ever see each other sporadically in the evenings, Sloane likes to think he enjoys her company.

"All done," Erik grunts, lifting the tattoo pen away from her skin, coiling the wire and setting it aside.

He holds a cold cloth to her blazing skin, and just before he wraps a clean bandage around what feels like the open wound, she glimpses the dark ink—the barbed wire coiled around her forearm, a no-man's land of flesh and bone and old scars. His flinty gaze catches on the sliver of skin beneath her collarbone where the loose collar of her shirt sagged, exposing red, angry lines slashed into the pale flesh.

She tugs the collar of her shirt up to her neck, the scar ablaze in the shape of a name embedded in her past. Skin's just skin, but when it's a tapestry of pain, there are bound to be memories knotted up in the tissue. There are always worse wounds.

"If you want, I can cover that up," he says, quietly.

Without gracing him with an answer, Sloane tugs her shirt up and stands. As she turns away, she hears the tinkling of ink bottles being swept back into their plastic crate, and pauses mid-step.

"Spar with me." Sloane says, backfacing Erik.

"Negative." He scoffs. "I'm not old enough to be suicidal yet, kid."

"I'm not going to kill you," Sloane says, her voice thin, cut by static, but Erik knows it's not a promise.

"How would going easy on me benefit you?" Erik counters, his tone gruff in his dismissal. "And since when did you take sparring partners, anyway?"

Sloane lets out a sigh, and leaves it at that.

✷

LEVERING HERSELF ONTO THE ROOFTOP, Sloane dusts her scar-riddled hands of the flecks of rust that'd dug into the crevices of her palms from the railing of the fire escape.

She lands feet-first, gravel crunching under her combat boots. Eyes burning in the late afternoon light gilding Legacy City, Sloane squints into the horizon, where the sun is a low orange threat in the sky. Cut by power lines stretching like capillaries over the soot black streets, riddled with potholes and litter, Legacy is a city of thick smog and harsh reality, a certain grit that accompanies survival.

Gasoline soaks the March air, pungent and cloying. It's worse in the summer, honey-thick as the heatwaves rising off the pavement. In the glass windows of office buildings, the muddy reflection of the sky wavers like an oil spill, and the thin veil of city smog stings her eyes. Even up here, Sloane still feels like she's sinking with the city. Her whole life, she'd been stuck in quicksand, and though she hadn't been born here, had only spent the last couple years in Legacy, she feels the black tar streets clinging to her ankles, refusing to let her go free.

Bitter resentment bubbles in her gut, burning a hole through her blackened chest. For a moment, she wants to feed it. Wants to pick some random stranger off the street and wound someone in the same strokes her pain decorates her insides. Below, the pedestrians crawl like ants, always hurrying to get somewhere, always forward-facing, never slowing. They don't know a thing.

The skin beneath the bandage throbs, but Sloane pays it no mind. Instead, she probes for metal. Under her armbands, she counts eight knives. Four beneath each. In the sewn-in sheaths in her jacket, a dozen throwing stars and four more daggers. Sloane draws a blade from one of her armbands, tests its familiar weight in her palm, the only comfort she's ever had. In the span of her twenty-three years, she's held more knives than hands, touched more weapons than people.

Between her hands, the blade gleams in the golden hour. It hums against her bones, pliant beneath her touch, an exercise in precision and control.

First, Sloane twists the metal into a spiral, making delicate work of keeping every coil consistent, every curve sloping at the same angle. Under her fingers, the metal takes on a life of its own, shimmering like a mirror in the half light as she pulls its particles apart and puts it back together.

Like the waves calling to the shore, Sloane begins to move. Running through every sequence she has ever been taught, every manoeuvre, every swift step, she feels the power surging through her veins, fingers tight on the reins as her blades pull from her armbands and bend, reshape into coils of rope. They point in the direction she wants them to curve, to the fist held at her tightened core, her feet light and nimble. It is almost a dance, generating momentum until the final strike. Lightning quick, the metal ropes sail across the rooftop. In mid-air they contract, edges sharpening, dagger-teeth.

Ten shurikens embed themselves in the side of an electrical box.

Sloane straightens. With a sharp flick of her fingers, the shurikens dislodge, and hurtle back towards her.

If she wants, she can pull the entire fire escape off its hinges, but there's no art in brute force. Clinical precision had taken her years of training. Years of being carved into the shape of the perfect weapon. Weeks and months in the basement of Velocity Labs, testing the limits of her power. Striving, striving, striving, getting cut up by stray blades, the blood dripping from her slashed-up skin to dot the floor, threatening to be crushed within heavy vaults where they'd locked her up, just to see if she could break out on her own, the metal resisting before it gave, bending under her command, ripped right down the middle. After, her muscles always ached so badly she thought she might've torn every ligament in her body. On some occasions, she had, pushing herself too far and too hard.

Metal took on a life of its own. After the age of industrialism, it conquered cities, expanding its territory in a grid that threaded through the concrete. Sloane can feel it, the magnetic pull, every electron swimming in a sea of humming particles, its stubborn form, and if she presses her palms to the earth, beneath all the layers of crust, she can feel the ore bubbling at the Earth's core, can feel its faint current calling out to her.

Sloane pulls three more blades from under her black armbands.

Like the ebb and flow of the tide, she moves gracefully to the stellating beat of her own current pounding in her veins, the pulse of her heart keeping her steady, her mind sharp and clear as she cuts through the air like a knife. The metal bends to her will, reforming and metamorphosing, liquifying and solidifying, stretching into thin ropes that whip through the air, snapping around the doorknob of the exit to the main stairwell. With a jerk of her wrist, she rips it clean off its hinges.

The door clatters to the ground, skidding towards her before she releases it. Sloane bends the ropes back into blades, the metal winking brightly in the sunlight. In one swift motion, she slams her foot into the ground and sends them hurtling towards the lightning rod affixed to the other side of the roof. With a loud clang, the blades stick, studded into the rod in a neat row.

She raises the door once more, plants it in the ground for target practice.

When she blinks, a phantom face begins to take shape. Dark hair, eyes as pale as death.

Just like the old times, the ghost mouths, a devilish glimmer in his cold grin.

Something inside her brain disconnects.

A gelid wave shudders over her body, and her skin prickles with a sudden chill. It's warm out, the skin of spring just fructifying beneath the promise of summer humidity, but Sloane can feel the temperature drop. Like a man possessed, she raises her hands, palm facing upward, lifting every piece of loose metal—aluminium bottle caps, paper clips, needles, a discarded fork and a handful of loose screws—she can gather from the ground. She closes her hands into fists, and the objects meld together into two razor-sharp spears. With a flick of her fingers, they slice through the air and skewer the door.

Right where she imagined Cain Castello's face would be.

Breathing hard, Sloane blows a strand of dark hair out of her eyes. And the illusion falls away. And the door is just a door with the past locked away behind it.

A burst of applause erupts behind her.

Sloane snaps back up, her spine rigid, her hands ready to sic her knives on her audience. With a flick of her fingers, her knives come flying back into her awaiting palms, snapping into her grip like magnets. She slips them back out of sight and turns, shoulders wired for a fight.

Only to find an old man with snow-white hair leaning back in his foldable lawn chair, a bottle of beer in one hand. One of his legs protrudes abruptly in a brownish stump halfway down his shinbone, smooth and round as the end of a pencil nub. Every inch of him sags, his skin too big for his brittle bones. Propped up beside him, his prosthesis gleams, glossy as if dipped in a kiln, but streaked with grime, old and weathered. His face is soft, faded as a watercolour painting, his eyes shining with mild amusement, and his smile yellow-toothed and gaping.

Caught up in her training sequence, she must've failed to notice him coming in from the main stairwell, where she'd torn off the door. Irritation is a knife to her gut, a sharp reprimand on her lack of vigilance.

"I usually come out here for some sun," he muses, his voice creased as his wrinkled skin. Sun, he says, letting out a chuckle. Ever since Elysium had been constructed, sunlight had become a transient affair to Grounded England, only witnessed in its rising and setting. Between the true sun and the ground, Elysium soaks up all the light. The bottom of the sky citadel is a grey screen projecting a mere imitation of clouds passing. Down here, they live in the shadow of the rich, a reminder that they would never touch heaven, their fate bound to the dirt. "I've never seen you around here before. You're Noumena. Do you work for the P-NP?"

"No." Sloane's voice is cold and cutting, an animal signal: leave me alone.

"Ah," he sighs conspiratorially. "Just a kid, then."

Lifting the hem of her black shirt, exposing her toned stomach to the breeze fluttering through the air and rustling the strands of hair that'd slipped out of her ponytail, Sloane wipes the sweat off her face. Just a kid. Involuntarily, her gaze shifts to his amputated leg, and he catches her cursory glance.

"Cancer of the foot." The old man taps a gnarled finger to his knee. "Sometimes, I still feel it, just an itch, but there's nothing to scratch. You know what phantom pains are?"

Agitation crawls over her forehead. Sloane doesn't know why he's telling her all this. Some people liked to do that. There were special rooms in churches, where one might sit and confess to everything they were too afraid to tell everyone else. On the other side of the confessional, the pastor would sit, sponging the darkness from them in the name of absolution, and when they exited the box, their shoulders no longer bore the brunt of their sins.

But Sloane isn't a pastor. There is nothing holy about what she is, and she isn't in the business of forgiveness.

"You know what it's like to live as less than a person?" The old man presses, and Sloane wants so badly to carve his tongue out so he'd stop talking. "Your ability is godly. It could really help people, you know?"

A cold rage washes through Sloane's body, like the first slash of a knife, before the blood comes to warm the stinging wound. In a flash, Sloane's arm snaps out. One of her blades slices through the air. The old man's eyes widened. Before he can shout, she closes her hand into a fist.

Terror drains his features of colour as the knife stops short of his jugular.

Godly.

Almost a decade, she'd spent indentured to Warner Castello, the first three of which had been spent carving herself into some semblance of a weapon, into one of Warner's Horsemen, serving him in the umbrage of invisibility, collecting bodies and claiming death like tokens. That last year, she'd spent at the mercy of men in white lab coats who did not care if she'd survive their experiments was worse than hell. To call what had crawled out of the darkest years of her life godly felt like a knife to the chest. After everything, Sloane can't bring herself to seek absolution, to disappear into the cracks in the ground and live in peace. Beneath her skin, there is always the humming. There is always the hunger. And she has spent too many years sharpening herself into a weapon to drift into oblivion and retire her knives. Not even after she cuts up every single person who has anything to do with Vigilare, not even after she hunts down every last scientist who worked for Velocity Labs and authorised the experiments.

The first body had been a warning. The second was a promise. The third was a test. Every other body felled after that? Links in a chain she will wrap around Warner's neck.

Cowering, the old man pushes himself back in his chair, trying to put a little distance between himself and the immediate threat. The more he struggles, the more he tries to pull away, the closer Sloane inched the knife, its sharp edge glinting like wolf's teeth. It nicks his papery skin, drawing a bead of blood that trickles down to his clavicle, staining the collar of his white shirt. Sweat gleams on his temples. His pale, veined hands shake like leaves.

"Please," the man begs, his voice a frightened whisper. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to offend you. I thought— I just wanted help. A new leg. Something sturdier than what the clinic gave me."

"That's not my problem," Sloane says, her tone icy enough to freeze empires. "I was never here. Do you understand?"

He nods, frozen in place.

The knife retracts back under her armband.

Beyond them, the setting sun is a glowing yolk sinking fast into the horizon, bruising the sky. Like clockwork, Sloane pulls the hood of her jacket over her head, procures a red bandana from her pocket and secures it around the lower half of her face.

Then, she takes a running start, and bounds off the edge of the rooftop, her lithe body rubber-banding through the air, arms outstretched. At her command, ropes of metal unfurl from under her armbands, lashing outward and clamping onto the closest rooftop. Sloane gives a tug, and the metal contracts. She shoots into the air, weightless for an exhilarating moment, the freedom of flight a thrill in her veins as she sails across the gap between buildings. She lands light on her feet in a crouch on the ledge.

Without a glance over her shoulder, she takes off into the night.