The job was in the Foundry District, a warehouse dispute between two small-time smuggling crews, the Gearhounds and the Rust Knights, over a cache of high-grade thermal couplings. Rhaene didn't understand why people argued so much over boring parts.

  "If it was some cool new type of weapon, I'd get it! Heck! I'd take one or two for myself."

  "That would forfeit our payment... If we weren't 'slick' about it, to speak in your terms."

  "I'm the slickest merc in the seven cities, Tinman. Don't you forget it."

  "I assure you I won't. As much as I may want to."

  The job was Standard Guild fare: secure the merchandise, discourage future claims by any means necessary, token authorization for lethal force if met with resistance. It was the kind of work they'd done a hundred times before.

  And with Aren safely elsewhere, tucked away with Cid in her rented fortress, they fell back into their old habits quickly.

  The beauty of the job was in the lack of need for words.

  Arbor scaled a rusted storage container outside the building with the silent, graceless inevitability of a rockslide. The metal groaned under his weight but held, he'd calculated the load-bearing capacity before committing, because of course he had.

  He turned back to Rhaene and caught a heavy bolt Rhaene had found lying around before diverting his gaze to the warehouse.

  From his elevated perch, his optics painted the warehouse in a tactical overlay that would have made military strategists weep with envy. Thirteen heat signatures. Two clusters. The Gearhounds, positioned on the east gantry, favored modified rivet guns and shock mauls, close-quarters tools that spoke to their preferred style of engagement.

  The Rust Knights, by the north machinery, had a preponderance of slug-throwers and one nervous-looking demon with a jury-rigged plasma cutter that looked about three seconds from exploding in his face.

  He didn't relay this to Rhaene. He didn't need to.

  Instead, he continued walking along the storage containers until he reached one of the warehouse's windows, cutting open the lock and sliding his way in. He stood atop the topmost railing of the warehouse and confirmed the readings of his optics. Everything seemed in order.

  Arbor then dropped a single, heavy bolt from his perch. It clanged off a pipe directly above a Rust Knight sentry with the perfect acoustics of a dinner bell.

  The sentry looked up. Rhaene, who had been a shadow in the spill of a broken coolant line, was already moving before the echo faded. Three meters in two heartbeats, silent as a thought. As the sentry's head turned, she jumped at him. One hand clamped over his mouth, the other delivered a precise, crushing strike to the brachial plexus (or the upper shoulder). The sentry crumpled without a sound, nerves screaming shutdown to muscles that could no longer obey. She caught his slug-thrower before it hit the ground, spun it once for the sheer joy of it, and dragged both back into the shadow, laying them down and moving on.

  Eliminate sound. Create diversion. Exploit distraction. It was a dance they knew by heart, choreographed by years of surviving things that should have killed them.

  Arbor descended from the rafters not with a climb, but by grabbing a support beam and swinging his entire weight into it. The beam groaned, buckled, and collapsed a section of the gantry directly into a squad of five Gearhounds, turning the scene into a groaning heap of metal and surprised shouts. Two of them got caught and crushed under the scrap, their rivet guns firing harmlessly into the ceiling. Arbor landed amidst the remaining three, exploiting the small window of stealth they had.

  His movements weren't flashy. They weren't meant to be. Flashy got you killed. Flashy was for people who needed to prove something. Flashy was for Rhaene. Arbor just needed to get things over with.

  A palm-strike to a sternum, not hard enough to kill, just hard enough to empty lungs and buckle knees. A disabling twist of a weapon arm, the shock maul clattered to the gantry, followed by its owner's pained howl. A sweep, a pivot, a precise shock to the temple of the third.

  Across the warehouse, Rhaene was dealing with the Rust Knights, stealth completely disregarded.

  She disassembled a plasma cutter with three swift yanks, power cell here, ignition module there, cooling line there and smashed the glowing power cell at their feet. The sizzling, sputtering flare sent two knights scrambling backward, right into each other, right into a tangle of limbs. Rhaene grabbed a knight as a shield against another's wild shots, three rounds into his buddy's armored vest, fatal, then threw the now-perforated knight into the shooter. They went down in a heap of swearing and broken equipment.

  She moved with a grinning, terrible joy, every action shouting a single message to the remaining knights: You are out of your depth. You are out of your league. You are out of your goddamn minds if you think you're walking out of here.

  One of them believed her. He dropped his weapon, hands high, babbling about how he was just hired muscle, didn't know anything, please don't kill him. Rhaene patted him on the cheek, almost gently, and pointed toward the exit. He ran. She let him. She wasn;t a monster, just a demon.

  The others weren't so smart.

  They converged on the cache in the center, a pallet of gleaming thermal couplings, pristine and valuable and utterly indifferent to the violence surrounding them, from opposite sides, arriving at the same moment. It was timing born of instinct, of knowing each other's rhythms so completely that coordination required no coordination at all.

  The last conscious Gearhound, a hulking brute with a hydraulic jaw that clicked when he breathed, charged Rhaene from behind. She didn't dodge. Didn't need to. She'd heard him coming three seconds ago, and knew that Arbor had already calculated his trajectory, his speed, and his pathetic, predictable rage 10 ago.

  She braced, waiting.

  "Now," spoke Arbor, examining the cache with a minute disinterest in the fight.

  Rhaene turned and caught his charging fist. Used his own momentum to swing him around in a full, glorious circle, once, twice, three times for show, before releasing him directly into Arbor's waiting, metal embrace.

  With a heavy metallic clang, Arbor caught the demon with the gentleness of a falling building. Jamming a thumb to the base of his skull. He lowered the dead giant gently onto the pallet of thermal couplings, arranging him almost neatly among the cargo.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  Silence, save for the groans of the defeated that were unlucky enough to be alive and the steady drip-drip-drip of leaking pipes somewhere in the darkness.

  Rhaene wiped a smear of grease from her chin, breathing hard, a fierce, satisfied smile spreading across her face. Her jacket was torn at the shoulder. Her knuckles were bleeding. She looked like she'd just had the time of her life.

  "Like old times," she said, the words carrying the weight of a hundred similar jobs, a thousand shared fights, a million moments of trusting each other with their lives.

  Arbor scanned the area with methodical precision, his optics cataloguing every downed body, every discarded weapon, every potential threat that might still be lurking. "Hostiles pacified. Asset secured. Mission efficiency: 94.7%. A 3.2% improvement over our last comparable urban retrieval." He paused, processing. "Your takedowns were particularly efficient."

  "Don't ruin it with math, Tinman." She slapped the verification seal onto the pallet with more force than necessary, leaving a satisfying thwack that echoed in the suddenly quiet warehouse. "Let's go get the kid. I'm starving. And if Cid's been experimenting on him, I want to see the results."

  "The probability of Cid conducting unauthorized experiments on Aren is 87%," Arbor noted as they walked toward the exit. "Her psychological profile indicates compulsive scientific curiosity that would be difficult to suppress given access to a novel subject."

  "You don't have enough data for that. If anything, she'd teach the kid to make some funky acids." Rhaene kicked a downed Gearhound's boot as she passed, not hard, just enough to hear him groan. "Kid's already weird enough. Don't need him being taught to dissolve things."

  The walk back was filled with the easy, post-mission buzz that came from a job well done and a paycheck secured. They debated using the bonus for Beauty's upgrades, Rhaene wanted a new suspension system. Arbor wanted enhanced sensor arrays that Rhaene shot down and called "paranoid add-ons." They argued over whether the noodles from 'Slick Rivet Joe's' were superior to the ones from 'The Dripping Tap', a debate that had raged for three years with no resolution in sight, reignited by being back in the city. Rhaene reenacted her favorite takedown of the night, complete with sound effects and dramatic pauses. Arbor provided running commentary on the tactical errors of the demon she'd used as a projectile.

  It was a nice kind of normal.

  They turned into the corridor leading to Cid's apartment, still laughing about a Rust Knight's particularly futile swing at Rhaene, a wild haymaker that had missed by a full meter and sent him spinning into a support beam.

  The laughter died when they had fully turned.

  The smell hit them first. A nose-searing, throat-clenching cocktail of vinegar, scorched sugar, and the profound, gut-wrenching tang of concentrated acid.

  As they looked at where Cid's house should've been, they saw something they didn't expect.

  The heavy airlock door was gone. Not opened. Not broken. Gone. The reinforced frame was a sagging, melted oval, the metal drooling in thick, viscous tears down the wall like black wax. A low, acrid haze hung in the hallway, making the lumen-strips glow in foggy haloes that flickered and buzzed.

  Rhaene's feet stopped moving before her brain caught up. Her voice came out a dry crack, barely a whisper: "Cid?"

  They moved forward because moving forward was all they knew how to do. Boots stuck with faint, wet pulls to the etched, bubbled floor that had once been solid concrete. Arbor's sensors screamed silent warnings across his HUD:

  [ AIRBORNE PARTICULATES: CORROSIVE. SURFACE pH: <1.0. STRUCTUAL INTEGRITY OF SURROUNDING WALLS: COMPROMISED. IMMEDIATE EVACUATION IS OPTIMAL. ]

  He didn't share these warnings. He didn't need to. Rhaene could read danger as well as he could calculate it.

  Inside, the apartment was a vision of chemical carnage that would have fascinated Cid herself, if she'd been there to see it. The workbenches were skeletal, metal legs visible beneath dissolved laminate tops that had melted into dripped sculptures of what they'd once been. Glassware had fused into bizarre, organic shapes, like the world's most dangerous art installation. The lurid fluids that had once filled jars in rainbows of toxicity were now neutralized, murky puddles spreading across the floor like spilled secrets. The fungal growth on the walls, Cid's pride and joy, was a blackened scar of dead matter.

  In the center of the room, a deep, smoking pit had been eaten into the floor, revealing the corroded sub-flooring below. The edges were still fizzing faintly, tiny bubbles popping in the chemical soup.

  It was a tomb dissolved in a stomach acid of unimaginable potency.

  Rhaene stood frozen in the doorway. Her three eyes, usually darting and alert, were wide and unblinking, taking in the absolute, silent destruction with the expression of someone watching their own heart being carved out. No sign of struggle. No sign of Cid. No sign of Aren.

  The comfortable buzz of the successful job was a distant, mocking memory. The thermal couplings, the perfect takedowns, the argument about noodles, all of it meaningless. All of it ash.

  Arbor stepped carefully into the room, his heavy feet leaving clear prints in the chemical sludge that oozed around and ate his boots. His sensors mapped every surface, every puddle, every shadow. He was looking for patterns, for clues, for anything that might tell him what had happened here.

  Near the edge of the central pit, something caught the low light. A shape that didn't belong. He moved toward it, his processors already running analysis before his optics could confirm.

  There, half-submerged in a puddle of still-fizzing, amber-colored ooze, was a single, short, swept-back demon horn.

  It was cleanly severed at the base. The porous interior was exposed, the bone slowly being eaten away by the acid, but the outer, keratin-like surface was still recognizable. Still unmistakably hers.

  Rhaene saw it over his shoulder. A small, choked sound escaped her, something between a sob and a gasp. She walked forward, her movements stiff and wrong, like a puppet with tangled strings. She didn't hesitate at the edge of the puddle. Didn't flinch from the acid that had already begun eating through the floor. She reached into the corrosive sludge with her bare hand, ignoring the faint sizzle against her skin, and pulled the horn free.

  She held it up to the dim light. Turned it over in her trembling fingers. The acid had eaten away part of the base, but the shape was still there, the curve, the texture, the faint scoring marks from years of chemical exposure.

  It was Cid's. Her sister's. The horn of the last real family she had left.

  She wiped it on her trousers, the action slow and deliberate, like a ritual she didn't understand but had to perform. Then she clutched it tightly in her fist, her knuckles going bone-white, her arm shaking with the effort of not falling apart.

  She looked at Arbor. Her face was a mask, not of grief, not yet. Just a frozen, terrible stillness that was somehow worse than if she'd been screaming. Behind that mask, a horror so deep it had no outlet, no voice, no form.

  The apartment was silent. The drip apparatus was gone, melted into slag. The petri dish was a puddle of colored glass. The small, neat bag of clothes, Aren's clothes, the ones they'd bought with such care, such hope, was nowhere to be seen. Just ash. Just absence. Just the screaming silence of everything they'd failed to protect.

  They had operated at their prime. They had followed the protocol. They had done everything right.

  And they had returned to find their anchor in the sea of Acedia utterly, violently dissolved.

  Rhaene's knees buckled. She caught herself on a half-melted workbench, her hand leaving a print in the softened surface. Her breath came in ragged gasps, each one a battle.

  Arbor moved to her side. His hand hovered near her shoulder, close enough to help, not quite touching. His processors were screaming a thousand calculations, threat assessments, probability analyses. None of them mattered. None of them could fill the silence where Cid's voice should have been.

  "Rhaene." His voice was quiet. Softer than it had ever been. "We need to move. The air is toxic. The structure is unstable."

  She didn't respond. Didn't move. Just stared at the horn in her hand, at the proof of loss she couldn't accept.

  Arbor made a decision. Not a calculation, a choice. He placed his metal hand on her shoulder, gentle as he could manage, and spoke again. "We will find out what happened. But we cannot do either if we die here."

  Slowly, like a machine booting up after catastrophic failure, Rhaene's eyes focused. She looked at him. At his hand on her shoulder. At the ruined apartment around them.

  "We find them," she repeated. Her voice was raw, scraped clean of everything but purpose. "We find who did this. And we make them wish they'd never been born."

  It wasn't a plan. It wasn't logical. For all Arbor knew, it was just a freak accident. But he wasn't so callous to try and use logic at a time like this.

  He just stood there behind Rhaene. He didn't have any other calculations to run.