Chương 48: The Vagabond

Following the address, they came to an empty building near Porta Susa. It was a former railway warehouse, the kind that had been falling apart before the System arrived. Now, the windows were dark, the doors boarded, and the air around it felt still, like everything had pulled away. It was the kind of place people avoided naturally. Cecilia stood across the street and read the quiet the way she read a room before a meeting, cataloguing what the street was missing. Parked cars, gone.

Washing on the balconies opposite, gone. Every ordinary sound a street made when people still lived on it, gone. Something had priced this block and the block had paid.

"This is it," she said.

"System says it's B-class, whatever that is."

"Could be a new monster type," Bianca offered, her voice neutral as she checked her knives.

"It could." Cecilia drew the Sig, dropped the magazine into her palm, seated it again. She'd checked it in the van. Her hands wanted the ritual and she let them have it. Giulia's rounds sat in the mag, a scratch of grey lacquer at each base, sold to her across a workbench with a promise attached and a field test still owing. Under her jacket, the vest sat stiff against her ribs, panels of a woven material Giulia had grown instead of sewn. Light enough to forget she wore it.

She kept the account of it open anyway, the way she kept every asset on the books until it paid out or failed. Bianca's shoulders had gone still in the way that meant she was drafting the argument for going first and alone. She left it undrafted. They'd settled that account months ago.

"Lead or follow," Bianca said.

"Follow me in. Then do what you do." They crossed fast and low against the brick. At the door Cecilia put her ear to the gap in the boards. The building gave her nothing back, not a draft, not a shuffle, not the small settling noise an empty place made when it wasn't empty. She pressed one board and it swung in on a nail worked loose. Recently. And by something that hadn't troubled itself over the sound. She went through with the gun up, body turned to keep the doorway clear behind her.

Dark closed over her and then broke into seams as her eyes found the light coming down in dusty bars through the roof. Machinery under tarps. Catwalks bolted along both walls. One long room, and she counted the angles it gave an attacker and disliked the total. Nothing moved. Then the far end did. The air there bent, a shimmer like heat off asphalt, wrong in a room this cold.

It thickened, and it drew itself up into the shape of a man who was almost a man, too tall, thinned past what a body survives, wearing a long coat that hung dead still while the air around it crawled. The System message blinked in front of her again, this time with the name attached. HOSTILE B-CLASS ENTITY: THE VAGABOND An unbound remnant. Its designation and function are unknown. It does not obey the normal Scenario rules. That meant there was no way to know what this thing wanted or what it could do.

It stood, its edges blurring into the shadows behind it, watching them. Watching her. There was a sense of it weighing her, not the way she weighed a mark, but the way a machine would take a measurement, with no intent behind it at all.

"Let's talk first," Cecilia said, level, gun in a two-hand grip. She pitched it the way she pitched a first offer, low, unhurried, already owning the terms.

"Before anyone does something they can't take back." The shape tilted its head. Something pushed behind her eyes, a thumb testing a bruise, and she shoved it back down where it came from and reached for the thing that had started answering before she thought to call it. The room tipped. A half-degree, toward her, off the wall. Her authority quit being a feeling and became a pressure with edges, and the thing at the far end felt it land. Its head came off its tilt. Its next step died half-taken.

WEIGHT OF OFFICE activated without her calling it, a pressure building around her, making the air feel like it was on her side, like her authority was something physical and real. The Vagabond hesitated, its mouth opening slightly, showing serrated teeth.

"You're the one they call the Fixer." The voice arrived doubled, one speaker laid a half-beat over another.

"Come to tidy me away."

"Depends who's asking."

"The System does love its janitors." It laughed, metal dragged on metal, and the grin opened on teeth filed to points.

"I don't sweep."

"You don't get a vote." It moved. Cecilia's eye lost it inside the first meter. The coat streamed into a smear and the distance was simply gone, and Bianca crossed the same floor faster, in front of it before the charge had finished, low, knife committed. The Vagabond parted around the blade like water around a piling. Where the steel went, it turned to smoke. A foot past, it was a body again, already circling, and the two of them turned with it to keep it in the light. She priced it in the first pass.

The thing kept its collateral in a form no strike could attach to, went liquid the instant the edge arrived and hardened once the debt had passed it by. She'd chased debtors who moved money the same way, everything held somewhere a court could never reach. You didn't out-hit that. You forced the asset into the open and seized it there.

"It goes soft on contact," she said.

"Don't throw a cut you can't call back."

"Noted." Bianca hadn't moved a hair off flat.

"It's not the System that matters." The thing spoke from her left, then her right, the doubled voice sliding a circle around them.

"It's what stands when the pruning's done. The ones who never learned to kneel." Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

"Put it in writing," Cecilia said, tracking the voice with the barrel, "and I'll have my lawyer look it over."

"You joke. You of all people." The circling slowed.

"You've read the terms it offers. Scenarios. Classes. Tidy little rewards for tidy little dogs. And you signed anyway, and now it sends you to collect me like any other debt on its books." The grin came around into the light again, wider than a mouth should open.

"I'm offering the version where you hold the pen." She'd sat through this pitch before. Different table, same architecture, some man with more appetite than assets explaining how they'd both be richer the moment she stopped asking what he was worth. The offer always came dressed as partnership and priced as everything.

"You're stalling," she said.

"I'm recruiting." She fired. Center mass, and the grey lacquer paid out. The round refused to pass through and vanish the way the last man's would have. It caught in the smoke and dragged, hitched the flicker like a needle skipping a groove, and for a half-second, the Vagabond was more solid than it had any wish to be, held to its own shape by a bullet built to make holding shape expensive. It shrieked, and the sound was insult before it was pain.

"When it snags, it's real," she said.

"Bianca!" Two more into the stutter. Each round dragged out another beat of solid, and Bianca read the rhythm on the second one and went in on the snag instead of the smoke. Steel found something with a body behind it. A seam opened along the thing's flank, dark unspooling off it into the air like ink let into water, and the noise it made this time had a floor under it. It flung itself back out of the light.

"Your people believe they're the heroes here." The doubling fell away, the voice honed down to a single edge.

"Cast in the good part."

"None of us thinks that." A wet, delighted sound came out of the dark.

"Then you're the first honest one I've had." The shimmer at the wall didn't raise one shape. It raised six. They stood up out of the floor on both sides of it, thinner copies of the same wrongness, coats hanging in the same dead stillness, and they spread wide to take every angle she'd counted walking in. Her one problem became seven inside a single breath. Her thumb was already moving.

MARKED LEDGER, drop the tag, make everything after it land heavier, and she reached for it without looking the way she reached for the light switch in her own office. It handed her one. The mark took on the nearest copy and the other five stayed blank, and cold climbed the backs of her arms while six shapes closed her angles and her skill spent its whole self on a single one. She refused the number.

There was no clever read in the refusal and no time to find one, only the flat certainty she'd carried into every room she'd ever taken, the certainty that sat across a table from a man and knew the shape of the close before he'd finished his opening. Seven shapes stood in her warehouse. She entered all seven in the book and called them hers. The skill stopped arguing.

Seven marks bloomed at once, one on each copy, the last burning on the Vagabond, seven files torn open in the time the thing had allowed her for one. The room went legible under it. Every wrong shape in it tagged, weighed, and owed. MARKED LEDGER — Rank 1 → Rank 2 You may now designate multiple targets within a single engagement. Marked entities suffer increased effect from all your actions and cannot fall from your accounting until the debt is closed. She let the bracket pass unread.

She'd felt what it bought her a full second before it caught up to say so.

"Seven," Bianca said. A count, laid down clean.

"All marked. Stay off my gun line and I'll keep them lit for you." They came off the wall together. And the pressure she'd raised without a name for it reached past the enemy and found Bianca. Cecilia felt her own certainty run out along a line strung between them and arrive in her lieutenant like current reaching the end of a wire. Bianca blurred. Her first step covered ground it had no business reaching.

The drag that had killed the Vagabond's half-step now hung off all six copies at once, and it lifted Bianca up over the top of it, and the gap between the two of them opened like a door kicked wide. WEIGHT OF OFFICE — Rank 1 → Rank 2 Your command now flows to those who answer it. Allies within range draw a portion of your authority as heightened speed and resolve; hostiles are pressed further beneath it. The ledger runs both ways. Bianca reached the first copy before it stood all the way up.

The knife opened its throat and it fell to grey nothing, and she was already carrying the turn into the second.

"Keep them lit," she said.

"Work," Cecilia told her, and swung the Sig onto the next mark. The mark earned out immediately. Her round took the second copy high in the chest and the ledger's weight rode in behind the lacquer, and where three shots had only staggered the original, one dropped this thin version to its knees with smoke pouring out of the exit wound. Bianca finished it through the back of the skull on her way past. Two down. The turn cost her nothing at all.

"They break easier," Bianca said.

"They're copies. He printed them cheap." Cecilia was already tracking left, reading the spread the way she'd read a room full of claimants, sorting them by the order they'd arrive. Two swinging wide toward Bianca. Two cutting the middle. One peeling toward the boarded door behind her, and that one had her interest, because it was closing the exit, and closing the exit meant the thing that made them still thought in terms of her leaving. It wanted her held here. She filed that beside the pitch and the stalling.

"Two on your left," she called, and fired into the pair at the middle. First round, center mass, the mark dragging it down like a hand on its collar. Second round through its jaw as it buckled. The copy behind it lunged through the smoke of its dissolving twin, and she gave ground along the line she'd walked in on, kept the machine press at her shoulder, and put three into it at a distance she'd have called insulting on a range. It kept coming. Slower.

The WEIGHT hung off it like wet rope, every step bought at a markup, and she watched her own pressure tax it down from a sprint to a wade and shot it through the eye at two meters. The one at the door reached her before the body finished falling. Cold closed on her wrist. Fingers, long past the length fingers went, clamping the gun down and away, and the grip burned through her sleeve like a debt called early, strength in it far past what the thin frame should have held. The filed grin opened in her face.

She went in instead of out, drove her forearm up through the crook of its elbow the way Ruggiero had drilled her a hundred patient times, broke the angle of its grip, and shot it through the chin with the barrel touching. It came apart across her jacket as smoke and a smell like burnt sugar. Her wrist kept the cold. Deep in, past the skin, an ache with teeth in it, and her hand answered her a half-beat slow when she flexed it. She dropped her shoulder, hid the lag in the motion of turning to face the last two.

"Cecilia." Bianca's voice, flat, from the middle of the floor. The last two copies were down. Cecilia hadn't seen the kills, only the aftermath, grey nothing sifting off Bianca's blade, and Bianca standing in the middle of it facing the dark end of the warehouse with her weight already loaded onto the balls of her feet. The shimmer was coming back up out of the black.

Bigger than the copies, and slower, and certain, the smoke pouring back into one body along the far wall, denser than before, the coat and the man-shape rebuilding themselves harder than they'd been the first time. Whatever the copies had cost it, it had decided to stop economizing. The voice that came off it had lost all its salesmanship.

"You marked my children," it said.

"I mark everything I intend to collect." Cecilia dropped the spent magazine, palmed the spare home, felt her slowed hand fumble the count by half a second and hated it.

"You're in the book too." The dark end of the warehouse breathed in.

"Bianca," she said.

"It's done talking."

"Good," Bianca said, and the wall of shadow came off the brick at both of them at once.