The alley smelled of rust and the cold, metallic tang of the nearby shipping channel. The water from the canal dripped from their clothes, forming dark pools on the cracked ferrocrete. For a dozen heartbeats, the space felt like a sanctuary, a forgotten seam in the city’s fabric where they could finally breathe. The distant, oppressive hum of the metropolis was muted here, lost between towering warehouse walls slick with a century of grime. They had made it. They were safe.
A shape detached itself from the deeper geometry of the alley’s shadows. It wasn't a sudden movement, but a slow, logical unfolding, as if a piece of the darkness had simply decided to become solid. Heath Taggart stood twenty meters away, blocking the only exit. His matte-black armor drank the faint neon glow, and his single cybernetic lens, a cold red dot, fixed on Kaito. The patrol pod’s final report had been brutally efficient. The enforcer hadn't chased them; he had simply calculated their destination and waited.
— Get back, — Kaito’s voice was a low rasp. He shoved Eva behind him, the motion clumsy, his body screaming with the effort of the last hour. The kinetic pistol was in his hand, the worn polymer of its grip a familiar, useless comfort. A phantom echo of the Severance Tone, the high, piercing shriek from the canal, vibrated in the memory of his nerves. He was facing a machine built for surgical removal, and all he had was a piece of obsolete hardware.
Taggart moved. There was no wind-up, no shift in posture to telegraph the attack. One moment he was twenty meters away, the next he was five, his steps silent on the wet ground. The fight, if it could be called that, lasted less than thirty seconds. Kaito fired twice, the reports of the kinetic pistol shockingly loud in the narrow space. The lead-alloy slugs sparked against Taggart’s chest plate and ricocheted into the brickwork with angry whines, leaving nothing but faint scratches.
The enforcer didn't even flinch. He closed the remaining distance, his prosthetic hand a blur of dark metal. Kaito tried to bring the pistol around for a third shot, but Taggart’s hand clamped down on his wrist. The metal was impossibly cold, the pressure absolute. The sound was a wet crack, like a branch snapping. A white-hot spike of pain shot up Kaito’s arm, and the pistol clattered to the ground, lost in the shadows.
Taggart’s other hand slammed into Kaito’s chest, not a punch but a calculated shove, and Kaito was on the ground, the impact driving the air from his lungs. He landed hard, his head smacking against the slick ferrocrete. The world swam in a haze of pain and rain. He saw Eva start to move, but she froze as Taggart simply turned his head, his dead grey eye fixing on her for a fraction of a second. The threat was unspoken, absolute.
The enforcer’s attention returned to Kaito. He wasn't looking at him, but at his coat. With the same detached efficiency, Taggart knelt and reached inside Kaito’s jacket. His fingers closed around the data-slate. The cold, smooth case, the container for Anya Sharma’s soul, was in the antagonist’s hand. Hope, thin and fragile, died in Kaito’s throat.
Taggart stood. He did not inspect the slate. He did not seem to register what it was, what it contained. It was simply an objective, a line item on a list. He raised it, brought it down over his knee, and applied pressure. The snap of the polymer case was a sound more final than a gunshot. The device broke in two, its internal components spilling out like viscera.
He dropped the pieces. They fell into a puddle of acid rain, and the delicate circuitry sizzled, dissolving into nothing. The data was gone. The ephemera, the journal fragments, the private lexicon, the shape of lonely, the logic of love. All of it was reduced to a foul-smelling chemical reaction in a dirty alley. It was over. He had lost her. Not once, but twice.
As the last of the slate dissolved, a small, rectangular object tumbled from the folds of Kaito’s coat, landing beside the puddle. His worn paperback book. The one he’d kept on his desk for years, a tangible piece of an authentic world. The acid rain, which had only beaded on his coat, soaked into the century-old paper instantly. The pages drank the poison, turning to a gray, pulpy slurry in seconds. The ink ran, the words blurring into meaninglessness before the entire object collapsed into a formless mush.
Heath Taggart watched it dissolve for a moment, his expression unchanging. His mission was complete. He turned and walked away, his form melting back into the shadows from which it had come, leaving only the sound of the rain and the lingering smell of ozone.
Kaito lay on the cold ground, the pain in his wrist a distant planet. He looked at his other hand, at the Veracity Coil fused to his flesh. The pale green light he’d bought with his compliance flickered. It turned a jaundiced, sickly yellow for a single, agonizing heartbeat, and then it shifted again. The light wasn't just red. It was the color of a final notice, a systemic death sentence. A deep, pulsing, arterial crimson. The Relevance Cascade had begun.
The city was erasing him.
Eva’s hands were on him, pulling him into the deeper dark.
