Incorporated with DeepSeek
The rooftop was turned years ago into tenants-only access community cafe run by the Emmaus. We had started to collect supermarket food leftovers to fill it. We even got coffee sometimes. The working poor had more love among the French than among la Police and both let us know. That is some time ago now and much after a full hit against Le Prefecture in Paris from an unknown group that did not leave any comment or reason. The building was wrecked and mid time rebuilding it, they hit it again this time combined with the emergency office. So, no Police anymore … they just gave up with also no comment.
I put on the Woodstock movie and turned up the speakers. It cut through the Cite … It was Friday and actually time for the Mosque and the beginning of Shabbat. We do things different here since more generations than Police existed and drugs failed to get a grip here.
I lightened up the weed cigarette and inhaled when Jefferson Airplane started singing.
The synth-weed clawed its way down my throat and spread through my lungs like a cheap datastream, hot and full of static. The old projector threw splashes of mud-smeared hippies against the corrugated iron lean-to that sheltered the café’s few plastic tables. Grace Slick’s voice rolled down the canyon of high-rises, brushing past graffitied walls reading *Ici c’est LaHaine*, past the blistered AR tags of dead gangs and the pixel-bleed of half-ripped corp ads. For three minutes, the Cite de LaHaine forgot it was a concrete tumor forgotten by the Republic and eyed for excision by the Consortium.
Below us, the muezzin’s call to maghrib prayer warbled from jury-rigged loudspeakers draped in fractal-ward mesh—Brother Idriss’s handiwork, keeping the djinn out of the faithful’s devotions. From the other side of the block, the tinny chime of an old recording of the Shema leaked through sealed windows; the small Jewish collective had rigged a sabbath circuit that lit their apartments amber when the sun’s last rays died. We’d learned to layer our gods like bulletproof glass. It was the only thing that had ever stopped the corps from tearing us apart soul by soul.
I ran a thumb over the cyberdeck slotted into the table’s edge, my datajack itching with the dull hum of the local mesh. On the screen, Country Joe McDonald was about to give his fuck cheer. I didn’t need to see it. I’d wired the film into my memory years ago, a clean simsense rip I’d traded a broken smartlink for. Tonight I needed the noise, the way it pressed against the silence the police had left behind.
No more flics. No more sirens at 3 a.m., no more identity checks that ended with broken bones or a “resisting arrest” bullet in the spine. The Prefecture was a crater twice over. The first time, a swarm of micro-drones had eaten through the building’s structural concrete like termites, and the second—just as the reconstruction drones were lifting their last girder—a localized EMP cooked every cybernetic implant within half a klick, and a second strike of high-explosive smartgel leveled the emergency ops hub. No claim. No manifesto. The Republic simply… stopped. Withdrew its remaining gendarmes behind the Périphérique and left us to rot in our own autonomy. Some called it liberation. I called it the long, slow exhale before the knife.
I took another drag. The weed was cheap, cut with something that made my optical cyberware flicker pink at the edges. A shadow cut the projector’s beam.
“Still feeding yourself that old American religion, Kader?”
She moved like someone who’d traded her birth legs for carbon-fiber and never looked back. Tall, chromed at the wrists and temples, a dataport gleaming just below her left ear. Her face was pure Maghreb, high cheekbones and dark, weary eyes that had seen the inside of a corporate arcology and spat it out. I knew her from before. Yasmine. Six years ago she’d been the sharpest decker this side of Saint-Denis, until Saeder-Krupp scooped her up with promises of clean data and a real SIN. The girl who came back wasn’t a girl anymore. She wore a tailored synthleather coat that cost more than the entire block’s monthly electricity siphon, but her hands shook when she lit her own cigarette.
I didn’t kill the movie. Instead I gestured to a chair. “It’s Friday. The Brothers and the rabbi don’t mind a little heresy. What do you want?”
She sat, crossing legs that hummed with hidden servos. “It’s about the Prefecture. Both hits.”
I let the music cover the silence. Then I flicked two fingers. The speakers dropped to a murmur. “There is no Prefecture. There is no Police. That’s the whole point. We’re a black spot on the map, Yasmine. Corpse-fodder for the zoning committee.”
“My brother was the trigger.”
The joint hung forgotten in my chrome fingers. I set it down. “Samir? The kid who used to ghost-run packet sniffs for the Emmaus soup kitchen supply chain? He wouldn’t—”
“He’s a technomancer, Kader. A real one. Not a decker with a good rig, not a brain-fried otaku. The resonance speaks through him like a second heartbeat.” She pulled a datachip from her coat, placed it on the table between us. It was military-grade, Aztechnology eggshell casing, blood-red. “They took him two years ago. Aztechnology’s Applied Thaumaturgy division. They wanted a resonance weapon. He gave them the Prefecture—twice. First as a test, second as a statement. He’s still alive. They keep him in a resonance cage under the old Renault plant in Boulogne. I need you to help me get him out.”
I looked at the chip, then at the café around us—the mismatched cups, the salvaged pastries donated by a sympathetic boulanger in the 18th who still believed in solidarity, the wall of remembrance candles for those lost to the last gang war. Emmaus ran this place on prayers and petty larceny. I was just the guy who made the coffee and, occasionally, fixed a neighbor’s malfunctioning limb for a handful of nuyen.
But I was also the guy who used to wear a badge, back when the Police Nationale still existed and I believed you could scrub the grime off the system from the inside. They fired me for refusing to plant evidence on an Imam who’d dared to run a legal clinic for orks and trolls. I walked out with my service pistol, my cyberarm, and a burning need to undo some of the damage I’d done. For six years, I’d been Kader the fixer, Kader the café man. Nobody had asked me to kill anyone. Yet.
I picked up the chip. “Why me?”
“Because you still have contacts in the shadow community who won’t sell me out to Azzie execs. Because you know the sewers under LaHaine better than the rats. And because…” She hesitated, and her corporate mask slipped just long enough to show me the terrified big sister underneath. “Because the third target is us. LaHaine. Samir’s next spike. They want a clean slate, and the Consortium won’t approve a full military operation when a ‘terrorist incident’ will justify clearing the zone for their new maglev arcology. Samir will wipe out the whole Cite with a directed resonance pulse—grid overload, life-support failures, every piece of smart-tech turning on its owners. In forty-eight hours. He doesn’t want to, but the cage is cracking his mind.”
I crushed the joint against the ashtray—a converted shell casing from some ancient riot. “And you want me to… what? Walk into an Aztechnology black site, break out a technomancer they’ve turned into a human bomb, and somehow stop a resonance pulse that’ll turn every fridge, pacemaker, and drone into a killer?”
“I have a plan. A shaman owes me a favor. A spirit of the grid can mask our insertion. But I need a shooter, someone who knows the local terrain, and someone who still believes that this place—” she swept a hand at the towers, the flickering prayer lights, the smell of harissa and frying oil drifting from the window below, “—is worth bleeding for.”
Grace Slick was singing about a hookah-smoking caterpillar. I stood up, walked to the edge of the rooftop. Below, the marketplace was closing up, old women hauling baskets of synth-fabric and stolen soy. A young ork kid with a home-brewed drone was chasing a stray dog. In the distance, the Eiffel Tower’s rusted lattice caught the last crimson light, its observation decks converted into luxury condos for the city’s elite. Beyond that, the neon canyons of Paris proper gleamed like a promise no one in LaHaine was ever meant to keep.
“I know the sewers,” I said. “I know a street doc who can stabilize Samir once we pull him out. And I know a hundred ways to die trying this. But tell me one thing—why should I trust you? Last time we met, you were running data for Krupp, spitting on the ‘ghetto trash’ who raised you.”
Yasmine rose, her movement smooth as a drawn blade. She reached into her coat and pulled out a small, battered tin cup—one of the café’s original cups, scratched with the Emmaus logo. “Because I never forgot where I came from. And because, six months ago, I slipped a worm into Saeder-Krupp’s secure network. It’s been feeding intel to the Emmaus shelters across the sprawl. That’s why the supermarket leftovers keep showing up even when the corps try to lock them down. That’s why the drones they send to ‘survey’ our buildings get lost in dead zones. I’m a ghost in their machine, Kader. A ghost who wants to come home.”
She put the cup on the table, next to the blood-red chip. The gesture meant more than any oath. I picked up the chip, slotted it into my deck. The data unspooled in my mind’s eye: schematics of the Renault plant, resonance frequency analysis, a countdown timer blinking at 47:23:10. They even had a name for the operation: *Nettoyage*—Cleanup.
Hardcore. Noir like a kick to the teeth. I lit another cigarette, let the smoke curl into the projector’s light. The Woodstock movie was at the part where the rain turned everything to mud, and the kids danced anyway.
“Alright,” I said. “We do it my way. We don’t just pull Samir out. We flip the script. If Aztechnology wants a resonance weapon, we give them a target they’ll never forget. But first, I need to talk to the Imam and the rabbi. And the houngan down in the Cité des Mortes. They’ll want to lay some protections on this place before we go.”
Yasmine nodded, something like hope cracking the chrome-plated armor of her eyes. “I knew you’d say yes. There’s something else. Samir… he left a backdoor in the resonance pulse code. A fragment of his own consciousness buried in the grid. If we can free him, he can redirect the pulse. Point it at the Consortium’s own data backbone. One hit, and every dirty secret they’ve ever buried gets broadcast across every public node in Europe.”
I laughed, a dry, mirthless sound that mixed with the distant wail of a saxophone from some apartment window. “You’re asking me to start a war.”
“I’m asking you to finish one. They declared war on us the moment they decided we were just debris to be swept away. The Police gave up. The politicians gave up. But we’re still here.” She gestured at the rooftop, the café, the flickering candles. “The working poor still have more love among the French than any corpo-suit. Let’s prove it.”
I killed the projector. The rooftop plunged into the electric twilight of a hundred kitchen windows. From the mosque, the imam’s voice rose in the final call to prayer. From the Shabbat circuit, a soft communal murmur. From somewhere deep in the concrete bones of LaHaine, the hum of a community that had refused to die for generations.
I tucked my heavy pistol into the small of my back, checked the charge on my cyberarm’s internal smartlink, and scooped up the tin cup Yasmine had brought home. “I’ll make one last pot of coffee before we go. The good stuff. Then we walk into the lion’s mouth.”
Jefferson Airplane had long since faded. But in my head, Grace kept singing about feeding your head. I intended to feed LaHaine a diet of corporate blood and screaming data until it was too big for them to swallow. The rain started as we descended the stairwell, a thin acid drizzle that painted the walls with rivulets of neon reflection. We walked past the prayer hall, where Brother Idriss caught my eye and nodded—he already knew. Past the shuttered synagogue flat where an old woman pressed a small warding charm into Yasmine’s hand. Past the street shrine to Saint Expédit, rapid helper in desperate causes. The city had forgotten us, but we remembered ourselves.
Somewhere under Boulogne, a broken technomancer was dreaming in a cage. And for the first time since the Prefecture fell, I had a target that deserved the bullet.
We moved beneath the canopy.
The living net above us was a cathedral of tangled green, grape leaves the size of dinner plates overlapping with ivy thick as industrial cable. After the climate tipped and the air became a wet blanket that clung to your lungs, our grandmothers had started the weaving. Now their great-grandchildren walked in permanent twilight, the drone-scatter of corp surveillance useless against chlorophyll and generations of stubborn horticulture. The heat still pressed down in summer, a suffocating palm, but under the leaves you could breathe. You could work. You could disappear.
And we had disappeared, thoroughly.
The first tunnels had been dug by hand, shovels and buckets, teenagers with more muscle than prospects carving into the old limestone beneath the banlieue. What started as a way to escape the heat became a network that rivaled the catacombs. Corridors widened into chambers, chambers into workshops. Somewhere along the line, someone—old Malik, who'd been an engineer before the corps blacklisted him—rigged a geothermal tap. Lights flickered on. Ventilation fans scavenged from derelict factories started spinning. We had built a city beneath the city, and nobody above had the faintest idea.
Yasmine walked ahead of me, her carbon-fiber legs silent on the packed earth floor. I carried a duffel bag over my shoulder: ammunition, medkits, the tin cup she'd brought home. We passed the entrance to the old scrap yard, the one we'd stripped clean over years of night runs. Twenty-three families had hauled twisted rebar and rusted engine blocks across five kilometers of tunnel to clear that ground. Now it was our first surface settlement outside the Cité, a patch of reclaimed countryside where chickens scratched in the dirt and rabbits multiplied in hutches made from old server racks. The kids called it the Farm. The adults called it the Backup Plan.
"Samir helped dig this section," Yasmine said, her voice echoing slightly. "He was fourteen. His resonance hadn't manifested yet, but he could always find the weak spots in the rock. Like the stone whispered to him."
I didn't answer. I was thinking about the workshops.
We passed an arched doorway carved into the limestone, and beyond it, the hum of activity. The tunnels had exploded in the years after the Police retreat. Not with violence—with production. LaHaine's cyberpunk workshops operated twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, their output whispered about in Paris's corporate towers with a mixture of greed and grudging respect. Our 3D printers turned out components that megacorp engineers couldn't replicate: custom cyberlimb joints with tolerances measured in microns, drone rotors balanced to near-silence, circuit boards etched with artistic flourishes that doubled as heat sinks. Every piece a work of art, signed with the maker's glyph.
The corps bought everything. They had no choice. Quality was quality, even when it came from hands they'd rather see crushed.
I nodded toward the workshop entrance. "Is Hakim still running the printer farm?"
"Twelve units now. He trained three apprentices from the new arrivals. They're making furniture now—chairs and tables that assemble themselves when you snap the packaging seal. The corporate buyers send the rally cars for those."
She wasn't exaggerating. The deliveries had become their own legend. One-man helicopters dropping through the canopy gaps with rotors trimmed to near-silence, picking up packages of cyberware and vanishing before the city's traffic drones registered their presence. Custom scooters and motorcycles running hydrogen cells we'd fabricated ourselves, couriers in armored jackets speeding through the service tunnels that connected LaHaine to the Seine's industrial banks. And for the larger items—the furniture, the bulk shipments of cheese and moonshine—the 600-horsepower rally estate cars that tore across the abandoned farmland at night, headlights off, drivers navigating by neural implants and intimate knowledge of every pothole and checkpoint.
We called it the Supermarket. Not because anyone could shop there, but because it was the only market that mattered. Access was restricted to those who lived in LaHaine, who had shed blood or sweat or both in the digging of the tunnels, who could be vouched for by three families and the Imam or the rabbi or the houngan. No outsider had ever set foot inside. No corp spy had ever mapped our corridors. The secret was a currency more valuable than nuyen.
The cheese and moonshine had been an accident, honestly. Old Uncle Driss had started fermenting goat milk in a forgotten maintenance shaft, using cultures his grandmother had brought from the mountains before the great migration. Someone else tried the same with stolen grain and copper tubing. Now the Supermarket's agricultural wing produced artisanal blends that sold for more per kilo than combat stimulants. Parisian executives with augmented palates paid fortunes for LaHaine's cave-aged chèvre and the clear, fiery spirit we bottled in salvaged glass. They never asked where it came from. They didn't want to know.
We had a business. We had a living. We had something worth protecting.
That was the thought that burned in my chest as we emerged into the main junction chamber, a vaulted space where six tunnels met beneath a ceiling strung with fairy lights and prayer flags. A market was in progress. Stalls made from pallets and salvaged display screens offered everything from fresh bread to bootleg simsense chips. Trolls haggled with elves in the pidgin Arabic-French-Yiddish creole that had become LaHaine's true language. Children ran barefoot, their laughter echoing off the stone.
An old woman caught my eye from behind a stall stacked with jars of honey. Her face was a roadmap of survival, one eye replaced with a cheap optic that glowed amber. She nodded at me, then at Yasmine, and made a small gesture—thumb and forefinger forming a circle, the old sign against the evil eye.
I returned the gesture. Then I kept walking.
The tunnel toward Boulogne was narrower, less traveled. It had been dug last year by a crew of orks who'd once worked for a corp demolition firm before they were replaced by drones. They knew explosives and they knew stone, and they'd carved a path that ran straight as a bullet toward the old Renault plant. We hadn't known then what Aztechnology was doing inside those walls. We'd just wanted another escape route, another artery for the Supermarket's circulation.
Now it was the road to a rescue mission that would either save us all or paint a target on everything we'd built.
I stopped at the tunnel mouth. Pulled out the datachip Yasmine had given me, slotted it into my deck, watched the schematics bloom across my optical implant. Forty-six hours and change. The countdown hadn't paused for our planning, our prayers, or our fear.
"What's the shaman's name?" I asked.
"Celeste. She operates out of the Cité des Mortes. Vodou, but she's crossed paths with the resonance spirits. Says the grid has loa of its own."
I'd met Celeste once, years ago, when a gang war had spilled into the tunnels and I'd needed to negotiate a truce. She was old and bent and missing half her teeth, and she'd stared into my soul like it was a cheap datastream she could read at a glance. She'd told me I would die for something that mattered. I hadn't believed her at the time.
Maybe I believed her now.
"Get her," I said. "Bring her to the workshop entrance in two hours. I'll talk to the weaponsmith. If we're walking into an Aztechnology black site, we're not going in with just prayers and good intentions."
Yasmine turned to go, then paused. "Kader. Thank you. For believing me."
"I don't believe you. I believe the cup you brought back. Now move."
She vanished into the tunnel's gloom, her carbon-fiber legs carrying her faster than any human stride. I stood alone for a moment, listening to the distant hum of the workshops, the murmur of the market, the soft rustle of the canopy far above. The air smelled of earth and ozone and something sweet—jasmine, maybe, or the ghost of a memory I couldn't quite place.
Above ground, the Cité de LaHaine was a forgotten wound in France's side, a concrete scar that the Republic had abandoned and the Consortium wanted to erase. Below ground, we had built something the world had never seen: a community that fed itself, armed itself, traded with its enemies and kept its secrets close. A place where mosques and synagogues shared walls with 3D printers and moonshine stills. Where the working poor had more love than the Police ever did, and the Police were gone, and we were still here.
I checked my pistol. Checked the charge on my cyberarm. Checked the countdown ticking behind my eyes.
Forty-five hours, fifty-seven minutes, twelve seconds.
The Supermarket was open for business. And business was about to get bloody.
I made it to the weaponsmith before the hour was up.
The workshop was carved into a limestone pocket that had once been a wine cellar, back when this ground belonged to monks. Now it belonged to a dwarf named Armand who had lost his left arm to a corp security drone and replaced it with a forge-welder attachment that could print metal as easily as it could crush skulls. The air shimmered with heat and the tang of ozone. Along the walls, racks held the products of LaHaine's underground economy: smartrifles with organic grips grown from fungus cultures, pistols that linked directly to neural implants, ammunition printed layer by layer with payloads that ranged from armor-piercing to EMP burst.
Armand looked up from a workbench strewn with firing pins. His face was a crag of scar tissue and burn marks, but his eyes were sharp as a sniper's scope.
"Kader. You've got that look."
"What look?"
"The one that says you're about to do something stupid and you want me to make sure you survive it."
I set the duffel bag on his bench. "Aztechnology black site. Former Renault plant in Boulogne. I need enough firepower for a three-person insertion team, plus a street doc, plus whatever we're carrying out."
Armand didn't blink. He'd been a soldier before the downfall, before magic came back and reshuffled the world's deck. He'd told me once about running combat drills until his lungs bled, about facing drugged-up corp enforcers while stone-cold sober and winning because he'd trained harder than they'd ever needed to. The principle was brutal and simple: push past every limit, fight gravity itself, and remember that losing in training meant waking up sore. In combat, it meant not waking up at all.
He walked to a rack and pulled down a rifle that gleamed with a dull, matte finish. "Prototype. Fires smart rounds that communicate with each other mid-flight. You miss, they correct. You hit, they fragment into secondary projectiles. I've been saving it for something special."
"I'll take it. And two sidearms with the new silencers. The ones that eat sound."
He nodded slowly. Then he looked at me with the weight of someone who'd seen too many operations go sideways. "You've been training."
It wasn't a question.
"Every day since Celeste told me I'd die for something that mattered."
That had been the turning point. The old houngan's words had lodged in my skull like a splinter I couldn't dig out. The future is not fixed, she'd said. We make it what is written, and that's only the past. Vodou wasn't about fate the way outsiders thought—some pre-written script you couldn't escape. It was about recognizing that the past had already hardened into stone, but tomorrow was still wet clay, waiting for the hands that dared to shape it.
I would die for something that mattered, if I had to. That much she'd seen. But what she hadn't said—what she'd left for me to figure out—was whether that death was guaranteed, or just one possible path among many. The difference was training. Preparation. The refusal to walk blind into a bullet.
So I'd scaled up my schedule. Started pushing my physical limits the way Armand had described, the way the pre-downfall soldiers had done when magic was still a fairy tale and combat was purely a matter of meat and metal and will. I ran until my legs gave out and then ran further. I drilled tactical theory until the patterns burned into my neural pathways deeper than any chip could implant. I sparred with orks twice my weight and trolls three times my strength, learning to lose to gravity a thousand times so that when it mattered, gravity would lose to me.
The principle was easy to understand and impossible to master: push it further. Fight against the falling. Losing is winning, but only in training. In combat, losing is death, and death doesn't give you a second set.
I'd heard stories of the old operators, the ones who went into black sites before augmentations were standard, before magic leveled the playing field. They'd trained by running until they passed out unconscious, lungs burning, muscles screaming, the body finally overruling the mind's stubborn insistence on more. They'd faced enemies hopped on combat stimulants while staying stone-cold sober themselves, and they'd won because they'd out-trained the drugs, out-disciplined the chaos. The drugged fighter was fast and strong and fearless, but the trained fighter was precise and patient and didn't make mistakes. One wasted energy. The other conserved it. One burned bright and crashed. The other just kept going.
I'd taken that principle and made it my religion. Five days a week, then six, then seven. Running the tunnels at 4 a.m. before the workshops started humming. Clearing malfunctioning drones with nothing but a combat knife to sharpen my reaction time. Simulating breach-and-clear operations in abandoned sub-basements until my cyberarm's servos whined in protest and I kept going anyway. The body adapts or breaks. The mind adapts or shatters. I'd decided I would not shatter.
Armand handed me the rifle. It was lighter than it looked, balanced perfectly for a one-armed shooter with cybernetic compensation. "You've got the look of someone who's been passing out and getting back up," he said. "Good. That's the only way to be sure."
"Sure of what?"
"That when the moment comes, your body knows what to do before your brain has time to hesitate." He pulled two pistols from a drawer, sleek and matte-black, their barrels threaded for the new silencers. "Hesitation is what kills you. Training is what kills the other guy."
I checked the pistols, felt the familiar weight settle into my palms. The smartlink in my cyberarm pinged a confirmation as the weapons synced to my neural interface. Crosshairs bloomed in my optical implant, steady and green. My hands weren't shaking. That was the training. Six months ago, they would have been.
"I've been thinking about what Celeste said," I told Armand as I loaded the magazines. "About dying for something that matters. At first I thought it was a curse. Now I think it was a warning with an exit clause."
He raised an eyebrow. "Explain."
"She saw a future where I die for something that matters. But Vodou doesn't believe the future is written. It believes we write it, and only the past is fixed. So what she saw wasn't a guarantee. It was a projection based on the Kader who walked into her shrine that day—the one who was soft, unprepared, running on anger instead of discipline."
"And now?"
"Now I've scaled up. Out-trained the projection. The Kader who's walking into Aztechnology isn't the same one she read. That one might have died. This one?" I racked the rifle's charging handle, felt the smooth click of a round seating into the chamber. "This one intends to walk back out."
Armand was quiet for a moment. Then he reached under his bench and pulled out a small case, unmarked, sealed with a biometric lock. "Take this. Experimental armor weave. It won't stop a direct hit from an assault cannon, but it'll turn most small-arms fire. My gift. I've been waiting for a mission worth using it on."
I took the case. Felt the weight of it, the weight of everything, pressing down on my shoulders like the kilometers of limestone and concrete above us. Somewhere down the tunnel, Yasmine was bringing Celeste. Somewhere in Boulogne, Samir was dreaming in his resonance cage, his mind being picked apart by corp thaumaturges who saw him as a weapon rather than a person. Somewhere above us, the Cité de LaHaine was living its Friday evening rituals—prayer and wine and music and the endless, stubborn refusal to die.
Today was not my time.
I knew it. I felt it. I sensed it in the way my heartbeat stayed steady, in the way my thoughts stayed clear, in the way the rifle felt like an extension of my arm rather than a tool I was still learning. The training had done its work. The gravity had been fought, again and again, in a thousand small losses that added up to one large victory. I was ready.
"Thank you, Armand. When this is over, I'll bring the rifle back."
"You'd better. It's the only one I've got." He turned back to his workbench, but not before I caught the ghost of a smile. "Go do something stupid and survive it. The Supermarket needs customers."
I walked out into the tunnel, the new armorweave heavy in my bag, the rifle slung across my back. The fairy lights strung overhead flickered with the steady pulse of the geothermal grid. From somewhere above, through layers of earth and root and living canopy, I could still hear the faint echo of Woodstock—Grace Slick had given way to Jimi Hendrix, his guitar screaming about purple haze and the end of things.
But it wasn't the end. Not yet. Not today.
I checked the countdown: forty-four hours, twelve minutes, eight seconds.
Time to meet the shaman. Time to plan the insertion. Time to prove that the future was still wet clay, and my hands were steady enough to shape it.
