PLUTO ACADEMY 2: BLACK HOLE STAR
BLACK HOLE STAR
(Volume II KARLA, To Live and Die on Mars #10 excerpt)
The conference feed glitched, painting Amara’s war room in strobing emergency crimson. A dozen holographic pundits from the Pluto Academy shouted over each other, their faces distorted by lag and outrage.
"—unfit for office! A warlord in governor’s clothing!"
"—saved Mars from Earth’s tyranny, you ungrateful—"
"—his own financial disclosures are a black hole of—"
Amara muted them with a twitch of his jaw. The noise died, leaving only the rhythmic click-clack of Kasei metal gauntlets being secured over his knuckles. The Keri Alu, usually a dormant crown of coiled serpents on his brow, had reshaped itself. In his right hand, a pulsating sickle of white-hot light, its edge humming with temporal shearing. In his left, a spear of the same energy, its tip distorting the air like a heat haze.
Lumo’s voice, stripped of its usual sarcasm, crackled through the private channel. "Beaky’s Cage is lit up like a festival. Scans show he’s hosting… a charity gala for orphaned cyber-ravens."
Amara’s lip curled. "Of course he is." He fastened the final clasp on his blood-red cape. "The trace is definitive?"
"The corrupting waves that blinded your Menu came from his servers and Gizzelda’s estate. No doubt. Mikkub was a red herring." A pause. "You sure you don’t want backup? Ari’s crew is bored. They’re trying to teach 101 how to cheat at cards."
"This isn’t a brawl. It’s a surgical strike." Amara’s gaze fell on the war table’s main display, where a live feed of the global conference continued silently. His own campaign hologram—smiling, statesmanlike—rotated above Corona Hills. The hypocrisy was a tonic. "Keep the channel clear. And Lumo?"
"Yeah?"
"If the Serpents try to contact me…you may not hear from me for a while."
He didn’t wait for a reply. The Solara’s airlock hissed open. The Martian night, cold and smog-choked, welcomed him.
In the planet-wide popcorn conference, Angelo Amara stood at the central podium, a mountain of muscle and metal under the cold light of simulated stars. His red cape was a splash of blood against the academy’s pearlescent white architecture. Before him, the faculty shimmered in holographic form, their expressions a curated mix of academic disdain and thinly veiled terror.
“Character,” Amara’s voice boomed, echoing off the domed ceiling, “is not a data set. You cannot download honor. You cannot pirate courage.”
A private wave pulsed through his Menu, a whisper from Lumo: Beaky’s secure. Systems are a joke. Moving to phase two.
Amara didn’t flinch. He leaned into the podium, the Kasei metal of his skull-plate reflecting the starlight. “You teach these children to hoard information. To be efficient little spies for the Star System. You are building a generation of snitches.”
Chancellor Vex, a man whose face seemed permanently pinched by bureaucracy, adjusted his robes. “Governor Amara, the Academy’s mandate is to produce the finest minds in the Corona System. Not… brawlers.”
Meanwhile, 384 kilometers away, Amara’s physical form glided through the golden bars of Beaky’s Bird Cage. The air here was thick with the smell of seed and expensive polish. The cage was a city unto itself, a vertical nation of perches and nests stretching into the smog. Beaky, a massive yellow budgie with the swagger of an old-world crime lord, was preening before a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the Corona Hills skyline.
“Amara, my brother,” Beaky chirped, not turning around. “You come to my house unannounced. That’s a bold play, even for you.
He landed on a maintenance gantry near the summit, the metal groaning under his weight. Through the ornate bars, the gala was a kaleidoscope of shrieking avian aristocracy. Giant budgies in jeweled collars, hawks in tailored suits, a cluster of vultures arguing over a holographic carcass. And at the center, perched on a throne of woven platinum branches, was Beaky.
The budgie was immense, his yellow plumage grown thick and lustrous from a lifetime of stolen wealth. A diamond-encrusted monocular was screwed over one eye. He held a massive martini glass in one claw, laughing a deep, gravelly laugh that echoed through the chamber. "—and I told the Councilman, if you can’t pay the vig, I’ll take it in prime real estate on Phobos!"
Amara phased through the final energy barrier. The air inside was thick with the scent of expensive pollen and ozone. He walked through the crowd, a mountain of muscle and metal parting a sea of preening fools. The Keri Alu’s weapons cast long, dancing shadows.
Beaky’s laughter died in his throat. The monocular whirred, focusing. His jolly demeanor evaporated, replaced by the cold calculation of a predator who’d just spotted a bigger one.
"Amara." The word was a statement, not a greeting. The music faltered. A thousand avian eyes turned to them. "You weren’t on the guest list. This is a private event."
"We need to talk, Beaky. About your recent investments." Amara stopped a few meters from the throne. The light-sickle traced a lazy arc in the air, leaving afterimages on the retina.
"Investments?" Beaky chuckled nervously, setting his drink down. "I’m a simple businessman. I invest in futures. In community." He spread his wings, gesturing to the opulent cage. "Look around! Prosperity!"
"You invested in blinding me." Amara’s voice was dangerously quiet. "You and Gizzelda. You fed corrupted data into the MENU, clouded the vision the Serpents granted me. You made me suspect my own ally."
Beaky’s beak clicked. "I don’t know what you’re talking about. This is slander! You have proof?"
"Lumo doesn’t need ‘proof.’ He sees the code. The fingerprints are all over your servers. You tried to hide behind Mike Mikkub. A clumsy trick."
The giant budgie’s bravado finally cracked. Fear flickered in his good eye. "Amara, be reasonable! It was just business! Gizzelda… she made promises! Power! A seat on the Corona Council!"
"You should have stuck to stealing from orphans," Amara said. He took a step forward. "You can’t see around me, Beaky. You can’t see around time."
Beaky shrieked and flapped his massive wings, trying to take off. The Keri Alu’s sickle moved faster than sight. It didn’t cut flesh; it cut connection. The beam of light wrapped around Beaky’s form, pinning him in a cage of solidified time. He froze mid-air, a terrified statue in a gilded prison.
Amara thrust the spear.
It didn’t pierce; it unwrote. The spear’s tip passed through Beaky’s chest, and the budgie dissolved from the inside out, his form unraveling into a shower of golden digitons that winked out of existence. There was no blood, no sound. Just silence.
The avian guests stared, paralyzed.
Amara stood over the empty space where Beaky had been. He pulsed a command to Lumo. "Copy his MENU. Scrub the network. He stays dead."
"Already done. His assets are… redirecting to a few anonymous accounts. For the children, of course."
Amara ignored the sarcasm. He closed his eyes, reaching out with his mind, past the gawking crowd, past the golden bars, into the cold dark where the Twin Serpents coiled.
"It is done. The obstruction is removed."
The response was not the familiar, coldly intelligent hiss. It was a fractured echo, a chorus of whispers from a thousand dead timelines.
THE OBSTRUCTION… WAS A MIRROR…
YOU SAW ONLY WHAT YOU FEARED…
THE PATH FORKS…
Then, a sound like universes colliding. In his mind’s eye, the Twin Serpents slammed into each other, their celestial bodies merging into a single, blinding point of light that then vanished, leaving an emptiness that ached.
Amara’s eye snapped open. The Keri Alu felt cold on his brow.
And then he saw it.
Outside the cage, eclipsing the glitching MARS sign, a shape began to form in the smog. It was vast, larger than the horizon itself—a serpent of pure blackness, its scales the texture of dead stars. It was not a physical thing; it was an absence, a hole in reality. It moved with a silent, terrifying slowness, coiling around the entire planet. As its head passed before Corona, the sun dimmed, plunging the Cage into an eerie twilight. The bird aristocrats gasped and clutched each other.
The black serpent made no sound. It just was. And it was looking at him.
A new transmission flickered to life in front of Amara, a shimmering, seductive hologram of Gizzelda Gizzum. Her obsidian skin drank the anomalous light, her electrified frizz of hair crackling with barely contained energy. She wore a smile that was all teeth and promise.
"Angelo," she purred. "I see you’ve been redecorating. A little drastic, don’t you think?"
"Your turn is coming, Gizzelda."
"Oh, I doubt that." Her eyes flicked upwards, towards the impossible serpent. She could see it too. "You’ve been played, my dear Governor. Like a cheap synth-violin. Vexa Krios fed you the data. He played on your paranoia. I was just a name on a list. A convenient scapegoat."
Amara’s jaw tightened. "Lumo’s traces don’t lie."
"Lumo reads code. Vexa writes it. He wanted Beaky’s shipping lanes. He needed you to remove him for him." Gizzelda’s image stepped closer, holographic fingers trailing through the air. "We don’t have to be enemies, Angelo. Look at what’s awakening. The old gods are… changing. There’s room for new ones. We could be magnificent."
She gestured to the black serpent, its silent, cosmic bulk a testament to powers beyond the Serpents he knew. For a fleeting second, the idea held a dark allure. To shed the constraints, to embrace a different kind of power.
He saw the future she offered: a throne of static, a crown of silence, Gizzelda at his side. And he saw the other future: Vexa Krios, smug and victorious, having manipulated him into doing its dirty work.
He made his choice.
"I’ve already seen your death, Gizzelda," Amara said, his voice flat. "It’s not magnificent. It’s quiet."
He severed the transmission.
Turning his back on the terrified avians and the silent, watching void, Amara walked out of the Cage. The black serpent continued its slow, inexorable coil around Mars. The game had changed. The Serpents were gone. And a new player, vast and silent, had taken the board.
He had a traitor to find.
•••
The air in Amara’s spire suite was cold enough to taste. It smelled of ozone and old violence. Lumo stood before the massive viewport, the sprawl of Corona Hills bleeding neon through the digiton smog below. His four eyes didn’t blink, reflecting the city’s slow death.
Amara sat in a throne of Kasei metal, a glass of something dark in his hand. His red cape was draped over the armrest. The metal plate on his skull gleamed.
“You look tired, Blue,” Amara said. His voice was a low rumble, like stones grinding deep underground.
“Long life,” Lumo said. His fingers twitched, a phantom dance across a Menu only he could see. “Full of teachers.”
Amara took a sip. “Some lessons come late.”
“Some never come at all.” Lumo turned from the view. “Karla’s pregnant.”
A muscle in Amara’s jaw tightened. Just once. “I know.”
“Of course you know. You know everything that happens in your city. In your star system. You just let it happen.” Lumo’s voice was flat. Empty. “You knew the Council would come for her. You knew Mul would see our child as a key. A commodity. You knew, and you did nothing.”
“Doing nothing is a strategy.”
“It’s a coward’s strategy.”
Amara’s eyes darkened. He set his glass down. The sound was final. “You are very confident in how you walk to me. Unarmed. Alone. After everything.”
“What’s left to take?” Lumo asked. “You’ve already taken my trust. My loyalty. My future. All that’s left is the body. You can have that too. It’s tired.”
“You think I want you dead?”
“I think you want whatever serves you. And right now, a dead Xerran hacker is less trouble than a live one with a grudge.”
Amara leaned forward, the throne groaning under his weight. The Keri Alu at his throat pulsed with a soft, hungry light. “Vexa Krios never told you the importance of your future baby with Karla. He never told you what happened to Karla’s father.”
Lumo went very still. The hum of the spire’s life support was suddenly loud. “He was a politician. A minor functionary. Died in a shuttle accident. A convenient lie.”
“A lie,” Amara agreed. “But not convenient. It was necessary.” He stood, a mountain of muscle and menace unfolding itself. He walked to the viewport, his back to Lumo, staring out at his kingdom. “He didn’t die. He was erased. For asking the same questions you ask. For seeing the same cracks you see.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
Amara turned. His face was in shadow, but his eyes caught the light from the MARS sign far below. They held no mercy.
“No, Lumo. I am Karla’s father.”
The words hung in the air, simple and brutal. A bullet to the chest.
Lumo heard the blood rushing in his ears. He saw the lines on Amara’s face not as age, but as a map of shared history he’d never been allowed to read. The set of the jaw. The iron in the gaze. It was all there. He just hadn’t wanted to see it.
“She doesn’t know,” Lumo said. It wasn’t a question.
“Knowing would have gotten her killed. Love is a target painted on your back. I painted it on myself instead.” Amara’s voice was softer now, the gravelly tone of a man admitting a sin in a confessional built of lies. “Her mother was… a moment of weakness. A beautiful, brilliant weakness. The Council found out. They took her. So I built a wall of power around her. I made her a star so bright no one would look at her origins. I gave her everything, except the truth.”
Lumo felt the world tilt. Every betrayal, every manipulated event, every time Amara had pulled Karla from the fire—it rearranged itself into a new, horrifying pattern.
“So I guess that’s just the reality of life,” Lumo whispered, the fight gone out of him. “Everyone’s full of shit. Then.”
“It’s not shit,” Amara said. “It’s armor.” He took a step closer. “And now they will come for my grandchild. They will want what is in its blood. My blood. Your mind. Karla’s spirit. A perfect key to every lock in this damned system.”
“What do we do?”
Amara smiled. It was a cold, terrible thing.
“We stop lying. We stop hiding.” He placed a heavy hand on Lumo’s shoulder. The weight was immense. “We send them a message written in a language they understand.”
“And what’s that?”
“Fire,” Amara said. His eyes glowed with the reflected light of a thousand dying stars. “We send them fire.”
•••
The air outside the derelict warehouse yawned with stale time, the eerie green gloom pierced by the digiton pollution, thick with the smell of vengeance. An, Ari’s ponytailed clone, stood by a blown-out viewport, the stolen Hite weapon heavy and useless in his grip. The Bandits had him cornered. But the wall between them and their score was Super 101.
Lumo’s creation was a nightmare of calm efficiency. His muscular frame, a relic of ancient Earth DNA, hummed with power. His eyes were flat, dead pools of crimson light. The tablet fused to his neck, where a normal man’s head should be, glowed with the same malevolent energy.
“The corruption streamlines conflict,” he stated, his voice a distorted echo. He didn’t swing at a support column; he simply phased his arm through it, and the metal exploded from the inside out.
Ari ducked the shrapnel. “101! Fight this shit, you son of a bitch!”
101’s head tilted. “The directive is clear. You are an obstacle.” He moved, not with speed, but with a ghost’s disregard for space. He phased through Fozi’s swinging claws, rematerialized behind him, and his hand—now supercharged with swirling, violent digitons—chopped down. The air itself detonated on contact with the ox-man’s shoulder.
Fozi roared, stumbling back, the burgundy fur on his arm now blackened and smoldering, the flesh beneath seared.
“Target’s durability is within projected parameters,” 101 noted, his tone as dry as dust.
A shimmering, semi-solid figure of Lumo, made of coalesced digitons, flickered into existence nearby. “His core is still in there! He’s just… got a gun to his head. He sees it all.”
“Awareness is not control,” 101 clarified, phasing through a telekinetic blast from Ren, the energy harmlessly passing through his spectral form. He solidified and backhanded the air; a wave of digiton force sent Ren crashing into a wall. “I am a spectator. It is… inefficient.”
An saw his opening. “Later, original!” he sneered, as he raised the Hite weapon, aiming at Ari, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He frantically mashed the activation rune. "The hell?!"
"Changed the passcode, you cheap knock-off," Lumo's transmission sneered. "You think I'd let you keep the admin password?"
"Shit!" A spat, bolting through a rusted door frame.
“Get the fuck back here, you copy!” Ari snarled, lunging after him.
101 turned his dead gaze back to Fozi and Lumo’s transmission. “My systems calculate a 98% probability of fatal organ rupture if I phase a digiton-charged hand into your thoracic cavity.” He held up his glowing palm. “The method is… clean.”
Lumo’s projected fingers flew, manipulating his invisible Menu. “I need a hardline into his core! I just need to get close!”
“Proximity will result in the aforementioned organ rupture,” 101 stated. “I advise against it.” To illustrate, he didn't target any person. Instead, he backhanded the tall, solid trunk of a palm tree. The sturdy wood shattered and the heavy tree crashed down, its trunk exploding into splinters as it landed where Lumo’s transmission had been. The digiton projection flickered violently, reassembling a few feet away, its form less distinct.
Across the room, Ari and An were a blur of identical motion, a brutal, close-quarters brawl. They were all elbows and knees, grunts and the wet smack of flesh.
“My… fucking… score…” Ari gritted out, wrestling for the weapon.
“Mine!” An spat back, headbutting him.
Seeing his chance, Lumo’s physical form zapped into existence behind 101. He held a data-spike, its tip glowing. “Fozi, now!”
Fozi, clutching his injured arm, let out a guttural roar and charged. He didn’t try to hit 101; he just wrapped his massive arms around him, pinning the African clone’s arms to his sides.
“This action is counter-productive to your survival,” 101 observed, his form beginning to flicker, preparing to phase. The digiton energy around his hand flared, burning Fozi’s chest.
“Do it, you bastard!” Fozi bellowed, his teeth clenched in agony.
Lumo stabbed the data-spike into the base of 101’s skull.
101 froze. The crimson light in his eyes and the glow from his screen-face stuttered and died. His body went rigid, then limp.
“Reboot… initiated,” he slurred, his voice his own again, layered with exhaustion and pain. “All hostile protocols… disengaged.” He looked at Fozi, who was still holding him, smoke rising from his fur. “You are burning me. And I believe I have cracked your ribs. My apologies.”
Fozi dropped him with a grunt, staggering back.
Ari finally wrenched the Hite weapon from An’s grasp. “Got it, you bastard—“
But An, desperate, kicked out, catching Ari in the knee, and scrambled away, vanishing into the maze of the Kobam Hill District. “I’m still wearing your goddamn face!” his voice echoed back.
Ari made to chase, but Lumo stopped him, his form solid now. “Let him go. We got the gun. We got 101 back.”
They looked down at the fifth member of the bandits. 101 was sitting up, rubbing the back of his neck. The ancient, powerful soul behind his eyes was back, filled with a weary horror. The tablet on his face was now inert, a dark screen.
“Well,” he said, his voice quiet. “That was… educational. I have a perfect memory of every lethal action I was prepared to take.” He looked at Fozi’s burns and his own seared hands. “The physical and psychological damage appears… significant.”
Ari slumped against a crate, the Hite weapon across his lap. He stared at 101. "Christ, the way you were talking... that flat, dead shit... it's freaking me the hell out."
“It was… disconcerting from this side as well,” 101 agreed, getting slowly to his feet. “A conscious, unwilling, and explosively lethal problem. I do not recommend the experience.” He adjusted his posture, a flicker of his old dignity returning. “I should be restrained until a full psychic sweep is done. The risk of residual shit is too high.”
He held his hands out. The Bandits just looked at him.
“Forget it,” Ari said, his voice tired. “You’re with us. Just… don’t answer any more calls from unknown numbers.”
“A wise policy,” 101 nodded. He looked at his own hands, the ones that had been ready to phase inside their bodies and detonate. “A very wise policy.”
•••
The penthouse was still, thick with the scent of ozone from the city below and the faint, clean smell of impending rain. Lumo stood beside Karla on the vast balcony, his physical form a solid, cobalt presence in the twilight. The real Lumo, not a transmission, not an echo. The one whose heart was currently trying to beat its way out of his chest.
Karla leaned into him, her head resting against his shoulder, her gaze lost in the horizon where the digiton smog was beginning to bruise with the colors of sunset. One of her hands was splayed protectively over her stomach, a new, unconscious gesture that filled Lumo with a terrifying, profound emotion he had no name for.
“It’s like the clouds are holding their breath,” she murmured, her voice soft, soothed by the distant, towering formations. “Everything feels… quieter.”
Lumo’s four eyes weren’t on the clouds. They were fixed on the profile of her face, tracing the line of her jaw, the curve of her ear. He saw Amara there. In the stubborn set of her brow, the iron will hidden beneath the celebrity grace. The truth was a cold, hard stone in his gut. He is Karla’s father.
The words were right there, a loaded weapon in his throat. He had to tell her. She deserved to know the real architect of the gilded cage of her life, the source of the blood that now, mixed with his own, was creating a new life inside her.
He cleared his throat, the sound rough in the quiet. “You know,” he began, his tone deliberately light, a sly, conversational feint. “It’s funny. Thinking about lineage. The Governor… he’s got thousands of known offspring scattered across the system. A whole dynasty he barely acknowledges. Must be a strange feeling, that kind of… genetic sprawl.”
He watched her closely, hoping for a flicker of recognition, a subconscious connection her mind might make. See it, Karla. See the pattern. See the man in your own reflection.
But Karla only sighed, a soft, distracted sound as a particularly beautiful swirl of violet and gold bloomed within a distant cloud. She snuggled closer, her anxiety about the future momentarily eclipsed by the sky’s spectacle.
“Mm,” she hummed, completely missing his clumsy probe. “I suppose. It just seems… lonely.”
Lumo’s shoulders slumped a fraction. The moment passed. The weapon remained unfired. He wrapped his arm around her, pulling her tight against him, letting the solid reality of her ground him. He pressed a kiss to her temple, a silent apology for the lie of omission, a promise for a truth that would have to wait for a less peaceful moment.
He would find the right time. He would find the courage. But for now, under the breathless sky, with her warmth seeping into him and their future growing in her womb, he just held on, the secret a bittersweet weight between his heart and hers.
•••
The air in the desert hideout bar, their low-slung structure built directly into the cool, shadowed mouth of a cave, was thick with the smell of spilled synth-whiskey, ozone, and Fozi’s singed fur. The Bandits, plus a newly recovered 101, were licking their wounds. The legendary score from the Underground City—the one that had started it all—was gone, siphoned away, by Slithery Snake, by Ari’s clone, by pirates, by someone. All they had was the Hite weapon, a heavy, humming weight in Ari’s grip, and each other.
“To being alive,” Ari grunted, raising a chipped glass of something brown and toxic. “And still, somehow, fucking broke.”
“We are not ‘broke’,” 101 corrected, his voice his own again, layered with a weary horror from his recent corruption. The tablet on his face was inert, a dark screen. “We possess an artifact of incalculable power and a fully functional, if aesthetically dated, spacecraft.”
“The Neptune V ain’t ‘dated’, she’s ‘classic’,” Ari shot back, taking a swig. The liquor burned a path to his gut. “And power don’t mean shit if you can’t pay for a decent drink.”
The bar was their usual sanctuary, a cave carved out by time and expanded by smugglers, its rough-hewn walls plastered with faded wanted posters and glowing gang sigils. The owner, grizzled old Rocco, just grunted and wiped a glass clean with a rag that had seen better centuries.
It was then that the world outside turned to daylight.
Not the gentle bloom of the sun. This was a violent, white-hot glare that stabbed through the cave mouth, bleaching the color from everything. It was followed by a deafening CRUMP that shook the very bedrock, sending bottles rattling off shelves and dust sifting from the ceiling.
“The hell?” Ari was on his feet, the Hite weapon instantly in his hands.
Before anyone could answer, the air itself screamed. A plasma bolt, wide as a man’s chest, tore through the cave entrance, vaporizing the heavy tinted glass wall and a chunk of the rock face beside it. The heat was immense, washing over them in a blistering wave.
Through the smoking hole, silhouetted against the desert glare, stood the Boulder Gang. Dozens of them. And behind them, in crisp, armored formation, were the Corona Police, their featureless helmets reflecting the carnage. They weren’t here to arrest anyone.
“Bandits!” a voice boomed through a amplifier, distorted by static and malice. It was the Boulder King himself, his gut-cannon already beginning to glow a malevolent blue. “You’re surrounded! Toss out the shockwave gun and maybe we’ll only break your legs!”
“They brought cops?” Fozi roared, hefting a heavy stone table and planting it as a makeshift barricade. “Since when do they work together?”
“When the price is right,” Lumo’s transmission flickered into existence behind the bar, his four eyes scanning the tactical data. “The cops want the Hite weapon. The Boulders want us dead. It’s a partnership of convenience. A really, really violent one.”
The air crackled. A Boulder thug at the front made a finger-gun with his right hand, index finger extended, thumb up. His HEART MENU flared, and a concentrated blast of orange plasma shot from his fingertip, searing a hole through the stone table.
Ari didn’t hesitate. He raised the Hite weapon, not to his shoulder, but with an instinctual grip, and focused his will. He didn’t pull a trigger; he unleashed a command. A visible shockwave, a distortion in the air like heat haze, erupted from the barrel. It didn’t hit the thug; it hit the space around him. The concussion lifted the man off his feet and sent him flying backward into his comrades, a human cannonball of broken bones.
“That’s for my damn door!” Ari yelled.
The battle was joined.
It was chaos, refined to an art form. Plasma bolts—fired from pointed fingers and rifle-like batons that projected energy blades—filled the air with sizzling light and the smell of ionized oxygen. The Bandits moved like the seasoned crew they were.
Ren floated, a serene center in the storm, his telekinetic "machetes" deflecting blasts and sending Boulder members crashing into each other. Fozi was a whirlwind of brute force, using his own body as a weapon, his burgundy fur smoking from near-misses. 101, though shaken, fought with cold, efficient precision, his physical strength a shocking counterpoint to the energy-based attacks, disarming thugs with brutal, joint-snapping moves.
And Ari, with the Hite, was a force of nature. Each blast was a localized earthquake, disrupting attacks, shattering formations, and turning the Boulder Gang’s numerical advantage into a liability as they stumbled and fell over each other.
Their only way out was the sky. They fought a desperate, retreating action toward the exit, using the Hite’s concussive blasts to clear a path.
But the police were the real problem. They were disciplined. They laid down suppressing fire, their plasma batons creating a deadly grid. One of their Sergeants took aim with his rifle, a longer, more stable version of the plasma baton, its tip glowing a focused, deadly blue. He fired.
The beam lanced past Boulder Gang heads and struck the Neptune V as it zapped into existence just outside the cave.
The saucer’s shields flared, then died with a pathetic fizzle. The beam carved a deep, molten gouge across its hull. Alerts shrieked inside Ari’s Menu, a frantic, panicked cascade of damage reports.
“The V!” Ari shouted, his focus broken.
“No time!” Lumo’s transmission yelled. “We have to go! Now!”
Ari slammed his hands on his lap. “Come on, baby, don’t fail me now.”
The Neptune V shuddered. Its repulsors whined, a sickening, strained sound. It lifted unsteadily from the ground, trailing digiton smoke and glowing embers from its wound. It listed to one side, but Ari mentally wrestled it toward the open desert, away from the cave, away from the relentless fire.
For a moment, it seemed they might make it. They gained altitude, the bar and the shrinking figures of their attackers falling away below.
Then the glitching started.
The control console flickered, showing a double-image of the saucer. The hum of the engines became an erratic, sputtering cough.
“Lumo!” Ari barked, fighting the yoke. “What’s happening?”
Lumo’s consciousness was at the engineering station, his synapses firing, his face a mask of grim concentration. “The plasma blast must have fried a primary regulator in the gravitic drive. It’s destabilizing. The field is… fluctuating.”
“What does that mean? In fucking Basic?”
“It means,” 101 stated calmly, “that there is a non-zero probability our anti-gravity field will collapse. We would then fall to the desert floor at approximately 11.8 meters per second squared.”
“We’d splatter,” Fozi translated.
The Neptune V lurched violently, dropping a hundred feet in a stomach-churning plunge before the engines screamed and caught again. Warning glyphs flooded every menu, bleeding from red to a frantic, pulsing black.
Ari’s knuckles were white. The desert floor below, once a safe landing zone, now looked like a vast, hard anvil waiting for them. The skyway—the stable, designated flight path—was a shimmering ribbon in the distance, impossibly far away. The fear was a cold stone in his gut. Not the fear of a fight, but the helpless, terrifying fear of a machine giving out, of the sky turning from an ocean to a tomb.
He looked at his crew—Fozi, braced and ready for an impact that would pulp him; Ren, unnervingly calm; 101, analytical even in the face of oblivion; and Lumo, fighting a losing battle with the ship’s dying heart.
The console flickered one last time, and then every light on the panel died, plunging the cockpit into a terrifying silence broken only by the shriek of the wind and the sputtering death rattle of their engines. They were falling, a dead weight in the Martian sky.
Ari’s final, furious thought wasn’t of Pitt, or the score, or even his own death. It was of the green-skinned bastard who’d started this, and the face he’d used to do it.
The cliffhanger of their descent was shattered by a new sound—a sharp, precise thump on the saucer’s hull. Then another. Magnetic grapples.
Through the glass dome ceiling, a sleek, black police interceptor craft locked onto them, its own thrusters firing to counteract their fall. It was a brutal, efficient machine, all sharp angles and menace.
A hatch on the interceptor zapped open. A single figure stood in the opening, silhouetted against the light, the desert wind whipping at his clothes.
It was An. Ari’s clone. The ponytailed traitor.
He wasn’t aiming a weapon. He just stood there. His voice, identical to Ari’s but laced with a cold superiority, crackled over the Neptune V’s dead comms.
“Going down, original?” An’s smirk was audible. “An old friend of yours sends his regards. He’s looking forward to adding your ship to his scrap collection. And your face to his wall.”
Ari could only watch, helpless, as the interceptor began to tow their crippled saucer, his own mirrored face staring back at him, a perfect portrait of betrayal. The ambush at the bar was just the beginning. The real trap had been the sky itself.
•••
Vexa Krios watched the feeds on his private Menu. He saw the panic in Corona Hills. He saw the financial reports as Beaky’s assets, now orphaned, were seamlessly absorbed into a network he controlled. He did not smile. Smiling was inefficient.
His featureless, liquid-obsidian mech suit reflected no light. Where a face should be, a single, pulsing red sensor glowed. The voice that emerged was a chorus of grinding gears and synthesized whispers—the intelligence that now piloted the Chancellor known as Vexa Krios.
Assessment: Operation 'Mirror' successful. Asset 'Beaky' eliminated. Asset 'Amara' is isolated, destabilized. The Zemord pantheon is neutralized. The field is clear.
A subordinate, a trembling Jovian, stood before him. "The Governor… he will come for you now. He knows."
Let him, the chorus whispered. His power was linear. A hammer. Ours is exponential. A virus. He operates in time. We operate in the spaces between times. He seeks a traitor. He does not understand he is fighting a system.
Clouds parted, and a view of the black hole star serpent appeared.
The old twin gods are gone. New equations must be solved. The child, Nova, is the ultimate variable. Her genetic code, combined with Lumo’s innovative consciousness and Karla’s psychic bloodline, is the key to stabilizing the new reality. Amara will be too busy looking for a fight to see us take what he truly values.
•••
The air in the Neptune V’s hold was thick with the smell of ozone and Fozi’s burnt fur. Ari stared at the Hite resonator, a Zemord artifact humming with stolen gravity. They had it. But the victory was sand in his mouth.
His gold chain felt tight around his neck.
A flicker at the hold’s entrance. A shift in the light.
Then, his own face stepped out of the shadows.
An. His clone. Same lean build, same smart mouth, but with a ponytail and eyes dead of any humor. He moved with a thief’s grace, a ghost wearing Ari’s skin.
“Brother,” An said, the word a mockery.
Ari’s knuckles cracked. “You’re not my brother. You’re a mistake I’m about to correct.”
An smiled, a cold, thin line. “You got the toy. Congratulations. But you always miss the game.” He gestured to the resonator. “A key needs a lock.”
“Talk plain, you copy.”
“Pitt sends his regards.”
The world slowed, crystallizing into a single, white-hot point of understanding. The stolen booty from the underground city. The missing credits. The way Pitt had vanished from the Hite fight. It hadn’t been luck. It had been an inside job.
An had been the leak.
Ari’s vision tunneled. The hum of the Hite weapon became a scream in his blood. “You gave him our score.”
“I gave him a future,” An said, his hand drifting toward his own HEART MENU. “One you’re too stupid to see.”
Ari didn’t let him finish the gesture.
He moved. Not with the Hite’s gravity-warping power, but with the raw, brutal speed of a lifetime of being kicked. He crossed the space between them, his fist connecting with An’s jaw. The sound was a wet crack.
An staggered back, spitting blood. He laughed, a rasping, broken sound. “That all?”
Ari hit him again. And again. A piston of flesh and rage. He was dismantling his own reflection. An blocked, countered, his movements a dark mirror of Ari’s own brawling style. They were a storm of identical violence, a closed loop of hatred.
“He paid you?” Ari grunted, driving a knee into An’s gut.
“He showed me… the door,” An gasped, landing a sharp jab to Ari’s kidney.
Ari barely felt it. The betrayal was a sharper pain. He grabbed a handful of An’s ponytail, yanking his head back. “Where is he?”
Outside, a lone crow let out a piercing, rusty-gate shriek. Caaaw!
As if summoned by the sound, a shimmering tear ripped open in the center of the hold. A portable wormhole, stinking of static and another world. Pitt stood framed in its light, green-skinned and grinning, his gold fangs gleaming. In one hand, he held the wormhole staff. The other cradled a data-cube that pulsed with the energy of their stolen fortune.
“Looking for me, pretty boy?” Pitt’s rasp was a nail dragged over glass.
He tossed the data-cube into the air, caught it, and winked. Then he stepped back into the wormhole. The tear began to seal, the image of him flickering.
Ari roared. He shoved An away, his entire being focusing on the closing rift. He reached for the Hite resonator, not to wield it, but to understand it. To feel the gravity it stole.
He didn’t throw a punch. He threw a command.
A wave of invisible force, a localized shockwave of pure will, shot from his outstretched hand. It wasn't aimed at Pitt, but at the space around the wormhole. The air itself flexed, groaned, and for a single, glorious second, the tear stuttered, its edges fraying.
Pitt’s grin vanished, replaced by a flicker of surprise.
In that frozen moment, Ari’s voice cut through the chaos, low and lethal, a promise carved from stone.
“HEY, PITT!”
Pitt’s eyes snapped to his.
“I see you, you green motherfucker! You took my face, you took my money, you took my goddamn dignity! You listen to me, and you listen good! This ain’t over! This is the opening act!”
The wormhole flickered, fighting to close against the gravitational distortion.
“You want a fight?!” Ari bellowed, his voice echoing in the trembling space. “You just declared it! This is the fight for Hite! You hear me?! The fight for the high ground, the top of the food chain, the last goddamn page of the story! And I’m gonna write the motherfucking ending!”
Then the wormhole snapped shut with a sound like a universe gasping its last breath, taking Pitt and his smirk with it.
Silence, broken only by Ari’s ragged breathing and An’s pained cough from the floor.
Ari stood over his clone, the taste of copper and vengeance in his mouth. The fight for the weapon was over. The war for the summit had just been announced.
He looked down at his broken mirror. “Now,” Ari said, his voice dangerously quiet. “You and I are going to have a long talk about doors.”
•••
Amara stood on his balcony, the wind tugging at his cape. The black serpent was a scar across the heavens, a silent testament to his failure. The Keri Alu was cold metal on his brow, a dead crown.
He was no longer a god’s chosen. He was a man. A grandfather. A target.
Lumo’s voice pulsed in his mind, a final report from the Bandits. They were alive. They had the Hite weapon. They were bruised, but whole.
It was something. A foundation. Not of power, but of something more resilient.
He looked down at the city he had built, the city that was now oblivious to a cosmic horror coil around its world because of his actions. He had wanted to be the master of time. Now, he just had to be smart enough, and ruthless enough, to survive its consequences.
He turned his back on the terrifying skyline, his eyes hardening with a new, more dangerous kind of resolve. The kind fueled not by divine right, but by personal vengeance and the need to protect a line he never knew he wanted.
He had a traitor to find.
•••
The Neptune V was a silent, gliding predator in the late afternoon sky. Its repulsors hummed a low, resonant frequency that vibrated through the deck plates, a constant reminder of the stolen, powerful tech that kept them aloft. They were sailing down the main desert skyway, a shimmering ribbon of artificially stabilized air that cut through the heart of the Corona Hills. Below, the landscape was a breathtaking, brutal masterpiece. Jagged, rust-colored mesas thrust from valleys of fine, lithium-white sand. Cacti the size of small buildings, their spines glistening with captured moisture, stood sentinel alongside skeletal remains of pre-terraforming mining rigs. The sun, a swollen, benevolent orb, cast long, deep shadows, painting the world in shades of burnished gold, deep violet, and ochre. The very air seemed to glow, thick with floating digiton particles that caught the light like cosmic dust.
Inside the cockpit, the atmosphere was a stark contrast. It was warm, stuffy, smelling of recycled air, hot circuitry, and the distinct, musky scent of Fozi’s burgundy fur, which was currently matted and singed in places from their last encounter. An, the ponytailed clone, sat in a corner, his wrists bound by a simple, humming energy field. He was the picture of sullen resentment, sipping water from a pouch with a defeated air, his identical face a mocking mirror of Ari’s, but devoid of its usual defiant fire.
Ari lounged in the pilot's throne, one boot propped up on the cushions, his gaze drifting between the stunning vista and the semi-transparent data-stream flickering in his mind's eye. The MENU was a marvel of bio-integration, a ghostly overlay that didn't obscure reality but augmented it. He could see the desert's raw beauty perfectly, while simultaneously monitoring the Neptune V's diagnostics and the frantic news wave vying for his attention.
The news feed was a glitching, anxious square in the upper right of his vision. A synthesized anchor, her face a mask of curated concern, was mid-broadcast.
"—the social rift on Mars widens by the hour," she intoned, her voice a sterile echo in his skull. "Governor Amara's public feud with the Pluto Academy over temporal sovereignty and resource allocation has sparked protests in Olympus Prefecture and a counter-rally in the lower districts of Corona Hills. The Academy's Chancellor has released a statement calling Amara's policies 'a dangerous regression into warlordism,' while the Governor's supporters are decrying the institution as a 'nest of Corona-system loyalists' who seek to undermine Martian independence."
REN, a silent, grey specter, floated near the main viewport, his form barely disturbing the air. His large, black eyes reflected the passing canyons, but his focus was inward. His telepathic voice, when it came, was a cool, smooth stone dropped into the quiet pool of their shared consciousness. Pelean por migajas mientras el lobo está en la puerta.” They fight over crumbs while the wolf is at the door.
Fozi, his massive, ox-like frame crammed into a recliner seat, was mentally applying a thick, sparkling regenerative digiton salve to a set of deep, freshly seared claw marks on his shoulder. The salve hissed softly as it knit fur and flesh back together. He didn't look up from his work. "Academic freedom. Political sovereignty." He grunted, the sound like two rocks grinding together. "They use big words to dress up a simple power grab. They should try having a plasma axe held to their throat over a case of stolen protein paste. Puts all this political shit in perspective."
Ari scratched his stubbled chin, his eyes lingering on the news feed. The image shifted to show Amara, a mountain of muscle and metal on a podium, his red cape a splash of violent color against the pearlescent white of the Academy's architecture. "Y'know," Ari mused, a thoughtful frown on his face, "this is exactly the kind of circular, petty bullshit Lumo could probably untangle from whatever corner of time he's currently haunting. Just... pop back a week, have a quiet word with Amara. 'Hey, Boss, maybe don't pick a fight with the whole planet today.' Or zap into the Academy's server and delete the damn message before it's sent. Simple. Clean."
"Time is not a simple river," REN pulsed, his mental voice devoid of judgment. "It is a storm. To change one event is to risk the entire weather pattern. It is the ultimate dilemma."
"Yeah, yeah, the dilemma," Ari waved a dismissive hand, his gold chain swinging with the motion. "Don't much get it, to be honest. If you see a boulder about to crush a kid, and you can shove the kid out of the way, you do it. You don't stand there thinking about whether the boulder had a right to fall. Seems straightforward to me." He sighed, a theatrical, wistful sound. "Miss that blue bastard. He'd have a plan for this mess. Or at the very least, a really sarcastic comment that would make me feel better about the whole damn thing."
His nostalgic monologue was abruptly cut short. A glint of familiar, garish green caught his eye far below. He leaned forward, his boots hitting the deck with a solid thud, his focus sharpening. The Neptune V was passing over a wide, winding canyon pass. And snaking its way through it was a motorcade. It was a raucous, undisciplined procession of hover-bikes and open-topped skiffs, all painted in the vomitous green and gold of the Demon gang. Banners fluttered in the desert wind, bearing the gang's leering, fanged sigil. And at the very center, riding in a grotesquely opulent, gold-plated skiff that looked like it had been looted from a Jovian pleasure barge, was Pitt himself.
The green-skinned gang lord was standing, one foot propped on the skiff's dashboard, waving to an imaginary crowd. His gold fangs gleamed in the sun, and his bare chest was puffed out with pride. Surrounding him, thugs cheered and fired plasma pistols harmlessly into the air. But the most galling sight, the one that made Ari's blood simmer, was the cargo. Lashed down in the skiffs behind Pitt were rows of limp, unconscious, military-grade 101 copies. The very same copies that held the legendary score from the Underground City heist. Their score. The one Pitt had cheated to steal.
Ari's jaw went slack. Then, a slow, hilarious, and utterly feral grin spread across his face. "Oh," he breathed, a laugh bubbling in his chest. "Oh, you have got to be kidding me. He's throwing himself a victory parade."
"Ari—" Fozi began, sensing the impending chaos.
"Just gonna say hi!" Ari cackled, his fingers flying across the console. "Can't let a celebration like this go un-crashed!"
He wrenched the controls. The Neptune V groaned in protest, its repulsors screaming as it executed a near-vertical dive straight into the canyon. It was a reckless, beautiful piece of flying, the saucer slicing through the air like a thrown dagger. It came to a shuddering, dust-churning halt right in the path of the lead vehicles, kicking up a storm of sand and gravel that engulfed the front of the parade, causing hover-bikes to swerve and crash into each other.
Ari was out of the vehicle before the exit lock had fully zapped, glitching the Neptune and leaving it frozen stiff in the sand instead of stabilizing itself. Ari leaped the last few feet and landed in a crouch that sent a small shockwave through the dusty ground. He rose slowly, a lone figure facing down the entire, stunned motorcade.
"PITT!" he bellowed, his voice a whip-crack that echoed off the canyon walls. "Is that a victory parade I see? For what? For successfully being a cheating, wormhole-using, face-stealing, no-good son of a bitch? You celebrating your inability to win a fair fight?"
Pitt's grin, for a fraction of a second, looked strained. Then it returned, wider and more mocking than ever. He stood up fully in his skiff, spreading his arms wide as if to embrace the absurdity. "Ari! Just in time for the festivities! I was just telling the boys how your face looked when I zipped away with your money. Priceless! You want an autograph? I know you're my biggest fan."
The scuffle that erupted was brief, brutal, and choreographed like a dark comedy. Ari moved with the furious grace of a lifetime spent in street brawls. He was a whirlwind of controlled violence. He disarmed the first two thugs to rush him by grabbing their wrists and smacking their heads together with a sickening crack. He ducked under a wild swing from a third, using the man's momentum to throw him into a fourth. He drove a shock-punch, crackling with residual Hite energy, into the gut of a fifth, sending him flying backward to slam into a stack of the precious 101 copies. He was a force of pure, indignant will, a maestro of mayhem.
But Pitt was, above all, a survivor. He used the chaos as a screen, his own thugs as living shields, backing away steadily towards his gold-plated skiff. An, seeing his chance, was desperately trying to pry at his energy bindings. Pitt's eyes darted from Ari's relentless advance to his clone. A calculation was made.
With a final, taunting smirk aimed directly at Ari, Pitt lunged, grabbed An by the arm, and activated a device on his wrist. The air itself tore open with a sound like ripping metal. A shimmering, unstable wormhole—a perfect twin to the one he'd used to escape with the Hite weapon—ripped into existence directly behind him.
"See you in the next life, clownface boy!" Pitt rasped, his voice distorted by the spatial anomaly. And with a single step backward, he and the struggling An vanished into the swirling void.
The wormhole snapped shut with a sound like a universe gasping its last, leaving behind only a faint smell of ozone and the profound silence of the desert.
Ari stood panting in the sudden quiet, his fists clenched so tight his knuckles were white. He was grabbing at nothing. The remaining Demons, now leaderless and terrified, dropped their weapons and scrambled over each other to flee, abandoning their celebratory floats and, most painfully, the rest of the stolen fortune.
The silence that fell was absolute, broken only by the hot, moaning wind whistling through the canyon.
Slowly, deliberately, Ari uncrouched. He didn't roar in frustration. He didn't scream curses at the sky. He simply straightened his jacket, dusted a bit of sand from his shoulder, and then, with an almost unnerving calm, he crossed his legs and rested his chin thoughtfully on his hand, his expression one of casual, analytical curiosity. He turned his head, his gaze sweeping over the scene of abandoned skiffs and retreating thugs before settling on Fozi and REN, who had emerged from the Neptune V.
"You see that?" Ari said, his voice low and steady, devoid of its earlier rage. "He got saved. Again. Not by skill. Not by luck. By tech." He tapped his temple with his free hand. "That portable wormhole generator? That's not street-level shit. You can't buy that in a back-alley bazaar on Phobos. That's top-shelf, black-budget, R&D money. Pitt's not just a gang lord anymore. He's got backers. Serious backers. Some rich, bored dudes with very deep pockets and a serious hard-on for causing us specific, personal trouble."
He had no idea of the name Zemord, no concept of the ancient, cosmic entity whose tendrils were slowly coiling around his life. The connection to Amara's struggles was a mystery to him. But Lumo, scattered across time, his consciousness a fractured echo in the chrono-stream, probably already knew. That thought was a cold, sharp stone in the pit of Ari's stomach.
He looked back at the empty space where Pitt and his own clone-face had vanished, his gold chain swinging gently in the desert breeze. The victory parade was over, the hostage was gone, and most painfully, the legendary score from the Underground City—the one that had cemented the Bandits' reputation, the one that had started this whole bloody saga—was once again, tantalizingly, out of reach. They were left standing in the dust, with nothing but a few new scrapes, a broken saucer, and the burning, undeniable truth that the game had just gotten a lot bigger, and the players a lot richer.
•••
The air in the penthouse was still, thick with the scent of ozone from the city below and the faint, clean smell of Karla’s shampoo. The real Lumo—not a transmission, not a flickering echo—lay beside her, the rise and fall of her breathing a rhythm against his side. He wasn't sleeping. His four eyes were fixed on the ceiling, tracing the faint, shifting patterns of light from the MARS sign bleeding through the balcony glass.
A new life. A supernova child growing in her womb. The thought was a black hole, pulling every other concern into its crushing gravity. It should have been his sole focus.
But a separate, frantic signal pulsed at the edge of his consciousness, a telepathic scream from the Bandits. Ari’s raw, unfiltered panic. Fozi’s guttural roar of pain. They were cornered, outgunned. A transmission wouldn't cut it. They needed him. The real him.
Guilt, cold and sharp, twisted in his gut. It was a familiar feeling where Karla was concerned. He had erased the memory of their early days, of his first, clumsy profession of love, to protect her from a past that was hunting them. Now, that erased history was a wall between them, a lie of omission he didn't know how to breach.
He had to go. Now.
With the infinite care of a bomb disposal expert, he slid his arm from beneath Karla’s head. She murmured, shifting in her sleep, but didn't wake. He phased through the silk sheets, his bare feet making no sound on the cool floor. He paused at the bedroom door, looking back at her. She was a silhouette of peace in their world of chaos.
First, a pit stop. There was something he needed from the outside. Something the world didn't need to know about yet.
He phased through the glass door, the night air of Corona Hills bitingly cold. He was a cobalt ghost against the neon sprawl.
Inside, Karla’s eyes fluttered open. The space in the bed beside her was cold. She sat up, her heart a frantic drum against her ribs. She saw him then, through the glass, standing on the balcony, his back to her, looking like he was about to step off into the smog-choked sky.
The fear was immediate, a cold splash of water. Is it the baby? her mind whispered across the space between them, a telepathic thread woven from anxiety and a budding love she was still unsure of. Are you spooked? Is this… is this too much?
Lumo froze. Her thought-voice was a hook in his heart, pulling him back from the edge of his mission. He felt the weight of his deception, the erased memories, the unspoken truth he carried. How could he assure her of his commitment when a fundamental part of their foundation was a lie he had authored?
He turned his head slightly, not enough to see her, but enough for her to see the sharp line of his jaw in the city’s glow. His telepathic reply was not warm—it was never warm—but it was solid, an anchor in her sudden storm.
I am not abandoning you. Or our child. There is danger to the east. My friends are in its path. I must be the wall that stops it.
The message was laced with a finality that brooked no argument. It was the cold, hard truth of his life. Karla let out a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. She lay back down, pulling the covers to her chin, somewhat reassured. He wasn't running from her. He was running for someone. It was who he was.
She closed her eyes, listening to the hum of the city, trying to find sleep again.
A moment later, the air in the bedroom shifted. A scent of cold night and ozone. She opened her eyes.
Lumo stood beside the bed, solid and real. He hadn't used the door. He looked down at her, his four eyes holding an emotion she couldn't quite name—a mixture of duty, guilt, and a fierce, protective resolve.
He leaned down, his movements efficient and sure, and pressed his lips to hers. It wasn't a long kiss, but it was deep, a promise etched not in soft words, but in silent action. A seal on his telepathic vow.
Then he was gone, vanishing from the spot without a sound, off to be a shield for his friends, leaving the ghost of his kiss and the weight of their future on her lips.
Karla sighed, the sound lost in the vast, quiet room. Then she turned onto her side, her hand resting on her stomach, and waited for the dawn.
•••
The sun was a pale blue smudge through the digiton haze, a new and uneasy color in the Corona Hills sky. It was the first dawn of the new age, and it felt like a warning.
The police barrier was a pathetic ribbon of light stretched across the cracked desert asphalt. A single rookie, his armor still smelling of the packaging, stood trying to look imposing. The air around his right fist and forearm crackled with contained energy, a charged gauntlet humming a low, threatening note.
A beat-up hover skiff, an open-air chassis of digiton rust and welded scrap, drifted to a halt, its anti-grav units kicking up a cloud of dust. A thug with a face like a smashed dashboard stood at the prow, a wide, stupid grin plastered across his features.
"Hey, flatfoot!" he bellowed, his buddies guffawing behind him. "We're the Boulder Gang!"
He flicked his wrist. His HEART MENU flared, projecting a shimmering, grinning skull emblem—the Boulder Gang's holographic sigil—right into the space between them.
The laughter from the skiff was loud and cruel. The rookie’s charged fist tightened, the hum pitching higher. He looked at the symbol, then at the skiff full of armed, laughing meat. The manual said to detain and scan. His survival instinct screamed something else.
He gave a weak, jerky nod and deactivated the barrier. "Move along."
The thug laughed harder, spitting into the dust-choked air. "Told you! Easiest job on Mars!"
The skiff lurched forward, the gang's holographic skull flickering and fading as they sped off toward the desert, leaving the rookie alone in the quiet, the hum of his weapon the only sound.
Ari stood on the roof of the Neptune V, the glitchy saucer half-buried in the sand of their desert hideout. He watched the light bleed across the dunes, his gold chain cool against his skin. Below, Fozi slept in the shadow of a fractured wing, his burgundy fur matted with dried blood and alien grime. Ren floated nearby, a silent sentinel, his black eyes reflecting the strange blue dawn.
The fight for Hite was over. They had the weapon, a Zemord relic that hummed with stolen gravity. But Pitt had slipped away through a wormhole, and An, Ari’s own clone, had been the one to hand it to him. The betrayal tasted like ash.
“You brood like an old woman,” a voice rasped from the hatch.
Rocco the dog padded out, a synth-cigarette dangling from his lips. He held a chipped glass of something brown and toxic. The talking bird, Sunny, was passed out cold on his back, one wing draped over his eyes.
Ari didn’t turn. “He used my face.”
“He is your face,” Rocco corrected, taking a drag. “That’s the problem with clones. No originality.”
“I’m gonna peel that ponytail off his head and strangle him with it.”
“Very poetic.” Rocco sat, scratching behind his ear with a hind leg. “You got the shockwave gun. Why the long face?”
Ari finally looked at him. The blue dawn light made the dog’s fur look sick. “He cheated. He used my face, and he cheated.”
“Everyone cheats,” Rocco said. “You cheat. Lumo cheats. The Governor cheats on his taxes, his wives, and the laws of physics. It’s the way of the world.” He nudged the glass toward Ari. “Drink. The sun’s up. It’s rude to be sober for an apocalypse.”
Ari took the glass and swallowed the contents in one gulp. It tasted like fuel and regret. He coughed, his eyes watering. “What is that?”
“Engine cleaner and regret.” Rocco grinned, showing sharp teeth. “Sunny’s recipe.”
As if on cue, the bird stirred, muttering about Jovian gin and bad decisions. He fell off Rocco’s back and landed in a heap.
Ari stared at the empty glass. The Hite weapon was power. Real power. The kind that could level a city block from a hilltop. But Pitt had a wormhole staff. And An had his face. It felt less like a victory and more like a step in a dance he hadn’t learned.
“Lumo would have a plan,” Ari muttered.
“Lumo’s busy being a ghost and a father,” Rocco said. “You’re here. So what’s your plan?”
Ari looked out at the blue dawn. The MARS sign was a faint, glitching scar on the distant cliffs. Somewhere out there, Pitt was licking his wounds. An was wearing his face. And the city was breathing in this new, strange light.
He tossed the glass into the sand.
“My plan,” Ari said, his voice low and steady, “is to find my pretty-boy clone, and I’m going to take my face back. One piece at a time.”
Fozi snorted in his sleep, his claws flexing. Ren’s telepathic presence was a cool, approving hum in the back of Ari’s skull.
Sunny managed to get to his feet, swaying. “Did someone say gin?”
Ari jumped off the saucer, his boots sinking into the cool sand. The blue light was getting stronger, painting the world in the color of a fresh bruise.
The holiday was over. The fight was the same. Just with a new color of sky.
ATILA
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