Kezra Vond slammed her fist against the gritty plasteel wall beside her cot, rattling the chipped ceramic of her mug. The lukewarm grakka sloshed, threatening to spill over the grimy floor. “A Zenith Alignment,” she muttered, the words tasting like rust and bad premonitions. “And Toris Drang’s blade through my sternum.”
Her sister had been dead for six cycles, but her voice in Kezra’s dreams was still as sharp as a newly honed shard-knife. *“Stay away from the rigid man, Kezra. The Enforcer. When the three suns meet, his blade will find your heart.”*
Nonsense. Prophecies were for the spire-dwellers, for the bored rich who paid charlatans to read their tea leaves. Down in Kivarr’s Undercity, prophecies were usually dismissed as the side-effects of toxic gas leaks from the steam vents. Yet, the image of Toris, grim-faced, his gleaming obsidian blade plunged into her chest as the city’s sky burned with triple suns, was seared behind her eyelids. It had been vivid enough to trigger a full-body dry heave. And then, as if to confirm her fate was now officially a tragic comedy, a flicker on her comm-pad had announced the Zenith Alignment: *72 hours until Convergence.*
Seventy-two hours until the city got wiped off the map, according to the old cycle-priests, or until Kezra got filleted, according to her dead sister’s ghost. Either way, Kezra wasn’t sticking around to find out. She needed to be gone. Now. And the fastest way out of Kivarr was the outbound freight line, rumbling through the Undercity Transit Hub.
The Hub was a sprawling, chaotic maze of neon-lit train yards, smuggling tunnels, and rusted gantries. Turf wars were fought daily over freight manifests and control of the dilapidated tracks. Today, however, it was also the epicenter of a patrol sweep mandated by the precinct. Which meant Toris Drang, the most humorless, heavily armed, and irritatingly effective Enforcer in the sector, would be there.
Kezra’s eyes, the color of tarnished brass, scanned the contents of her grimy satchel. Smuggler’s tools: three lock-picks, a coil of reinforced wire, a half-eaten protein bar, and a mag-stunner that only worked on Tuesdays. Nothing for stealth. She needed something to make her *unnoticeable*.
Her gaze fell on the tattered, mildewed tarp she used to cover her illicit magitech components. It had been salvaged from a burst sewer pipe in the lower-lowers. It smelled like ambition and decay, the signature scent of the Undercity. Perfect.
She arrived at the Transit Hub looking like a particularly odorous, ambulatory pile of refuse. The sewer-tarp, loosely draped over her head and shoulders, dragged on the slick concrete, its edges stiff with dried effluent. It was both a disguise and a repellent, clearing a wide berth around her as she navigated the throngs of desperate travelers, illicit merchants, and the occasional Syndicate thug. The air thrummed with the roar of steam engines, the metallic clang of couplings, and the distant, guttural shouts of a turf dispute. Neon signs, flickering with adverts for synthetic foodstuffs and illicit joy-spices, painted the grime-streaked walls in lurid purples and greens.
“Inspection point! Clear the tracks!” a voice boomed, amplified by an outdated sonic projector. It was Toris. Kezra hunched deeper into her tarp, trying to appear less like a person and more like a particularly sturdy, malodorous shadow. She could see him now, a stark silhouette against the pulsing steam vents, his broad shoulders encased in polished carbon-steel plating, his obsidian blade sheathed at his hip. Even from this distance, his stance signaled uncompromising trouble.
Her outbound freight hauler, the *Iron Hauler*, was due to depart from Track 7 in five minutes. She just needed to slip past the cordon, scramble aboard, and disappear into the smog-choked horizon. Piece of grakka.
She moved with a practiced, jerky gait, like a broken automaton, her eyes darting through a gap in the tarp. A sudden, sharp shout cut through the din. “Drang! Behind you!”
Kezra didn’t pause. Not her problem. Let Toris handle his own fan club. She was almost there, just twenty feet from the cargo hauler's open loading bay. The scent of hot engine grease and stale cargo filled her nostrils.
Then her boot slid. A slick, glistening patch of spent lubricant on the concrete, barely visible in the chaotic light. Her feet went out from under her, and the world spun. The sewer-tarp became a tangled, foul-smelling shroud as she flailed, arms pinwheeling in a desperate, graceless dance. She hit the ground with a grunt, landing hard on her hip, the wind knocked out of her.
At the exact same instant, a whisper of displaced air, a sound like a venom-wasp’s wing, zipped past her ear. A tiny, obsidian-tipped dart, no wider than her pinky, embedded itself with a soft *thwip* into the thick, stiffened fabric of the sewer-tarp, right over her chest. A cold, tingling sensation bloomed where the dart had struck, spreading rapidly through her flesh. Her muscles seized. She couldn't move. She couldn't even twitch.
She lay there, paralyzed, a ridiculous, stinking lump of rags and fear, directly in the path of Toris Drang. He had spun around at the shouted warning, his hand flying to the hilt of his blade, only to freeze, his gaze locked on Kezra, crumpled on the ground. His stare, usually cold and unreadable, parted into an expression she couldn’t decipher. Relief? Confusion? Horror?
He knelt beside her in a single, fluid motion, his gloved hand reaching for her. His voice, usually a clipped monotone, was raspy. “You… you took the dart. For me?”
Kezra tried to speak, to explain it was an accident, a greasy slip, a horrifying cosmic joke. But her jaw was locked. Her tongue felt like lead. She could only glower up at him, paralyzed in unadulterated humiliation, the stench of ancient sewage filling her nostrils.
Toris, however, seemed to interpret her silence differently. A strange, fierce light entered his eyes. He scooped her up effortlessly, the sewer-tarp rustling around them. She was surprisingly light in his arms, a bundle of inert flailing limbs and dirty fabric. He held her protectively against his plated chest, his gaze sweeping the gantries above them. “Who is it? Show yourself, coward!” he roared, his voice echoing through the Transit Hub.
From a shadowed gantry high above, a secondary projectile streaked down. This one was larger, heavier. It whistled. Kezra, pinned against Toris’s unyielding armor, watched in horror as it arced straight towards Track 7, towards the *Iron Hauler*, her one way out of this hellish city.
The projectile struck the outbound train with a deafening, concussive blast. Fire erupted, tearing through the metal carriages, consuming the escape route in a violent blossoming of orange and black. The locomotive buckled, its entire mid-section vaporizing into a shower of molten shrapnel and twisted steel. The force of the explosion sent a shockwave through the air, even as Toris shielded her with his body, and Kezra could only watch, paralyzed and utterly trapped, as her escape plan disintegrated into a thousand burning pieces.