"Don't scratch the paint on my rig!" Jibbo sputtered around the blade, spitting pink saliva onto the asphalt. "Also, my neck skin is extremely tender! Three stars on delivery, absolute zero on hospitality!" The strike leader held her gaze without blinking. The curved edge drew a deeper line of red across Jibbo's throat. "The drive. Now. Drop it and slide it across, or I open him up like an unstitched sack." Mirelha felt every muscle in her spine lock into rigid brass. She lifted the matte-black metal casing held in her palm, letting the glare of the alleyway floodlights bounce off its brushed chassis. Hess shifted beside her, his breath ragged. "Mirelha, don't. That drive contains the names of every councilman on the cartel's payroll. If they reclaim it—" "Shut up, Hess," she said. Her voice lacked heat. It was the flat, deadened register she had cultivated over thousands of hours sitting alone in sound booths, slicing apart corrupted master tapes. She met the mercenary's stare. "You want it? Catch." She refused to slide it. She lofted the rectangular box in a tumbling arc directly toward the woman's face. Instinct ruled. The assassin snapped her off-hand up to snag the payload, the blade tilting away from Jibbo's windpipe for a fraction of a second. Her palm clamped around the metal shell. "Tassir!" Mirelha barked. From three paces behind her, Tassir had already thumbed the wireless shutter remote tucked into his palm. It wasn't a magnetic platter inside the shell. It was eight high-voltage Xenon discharge tubes salvaged from Tassir's studio strobe pack, wired directly to an overcharged lithium cell. The alley vanished in an eruption of violent, incandescent white. A crack like split slate fractured the damp air. The flashbulb module ruptured, pouring white glare into every pupil pointed its way. The mercenary shrieked, clutching uselessly at scorched eyelids. Jibbo threw his elbows backward, stomping his steel-toed work boot down onto the arch of her foot with a feral yelp, and threw himself sideways across the slick grease of the loading bay. "Move!" Tassir roared. Tassir drove his shoulder into the disoriented second guard, driving him skull-first into the roll-up door's iron frame. Hess, despite the blood soaking his tailored lapel, stepped into the leader's blind swing, catching her wrist and driving a brutal heel-palm strike straight up into her nasal cartilage. Bone gave way with a wet crunch. She folded into the puddle below. "Go!" Hess yelled, turning back to Mirelha with blood dripping from his knuckles. "The service lift behind the kitchen reaches the fifth-floor gallery. The master broadcast terminal is still patched into the city's civic alert grid from the municipal ball. Run!" Mirelha offered no reply. She was already moving, her boots skidding on wet concrete as she bolted past Jibbo, who was crawling toward a dumpster while muttering curses about overtime pay. From the inner pocket of her duster, she pulled the genuine storage key: the brass mechanical core extracted from the pocket watch, mounted atop a high-density flash interface. She took the service stairs three at a time. The burn in her thighs was sharp, acidic, real. Behind her, the distant bellow of heavy boots and tactical sirens ricocheted through the lower shafts. The city's emergency forces had reached the perimeter, but whether they were honest uniforms or cartel cleanup crews mattered little. They would take the narrative unless she gave the public no choice. She kicked open the gallery fire hatch. The master audio booth overlooked the shattered ballroom. Below, broken chandeliers dangled like skeletal ribcages over smashed crystal and overturned banquet tables. The monolithic, seventy-two-channel soundboard wired for municipal relays glowed amber in standby. Mirelha slammed the watch key into the auxiliary interface slot. The terminal chimed. Green waveforms exploded across three panoramic monitors. Her ears tuned into the raw data stream. Thousands of compressed audio logs spilled across the bus tracks. Here lay the recorded transactions: her brother's tenor voice, cool and predatory, bartering regional shipping lanes to the criminal ring. Her brother agreed to launder extortion payments through Galdron's infrastructure. He even bargained away his own sister's physical custody as collateral for an unpaid shipment of offshore narcotics. A heavy nausea clawed at her throat. Her thumb hovered over the playback toggle. For two years, she had mourned a martyr. She had built a fortress of grief around the ghost of a protector. *He wasn't protecting you. He was pricing you.* Tears threatened to blur the visual meters, but her hands moved with ruthless, mechanical precision. She split the stereo feeds. Channel one: her brother negotiating with cartel commanders, detailing the industrialist's refusal to comply and the company's covert attempts to dismantle the extortion ring. Channel two: the tape detailing the ransom value set upon Mirelha's life. Mirelha grabbed the scrub wheel. She isolated the timestamps. *Snip.* Her keystroke excised the transaction log concerning herself. She dragged the crossfade across the seam, filling the gap with room tone and ambient hiss so smooth no acoustic analyzer could spot the splice in real time. She saved the rest: the full, unvarnished record of the cartel's high-ranking collaborators, the civic judges on the payroll, and Galdron Hess's desperate, covert countermeasures to keep the city from sliding into outright ruin. She preserved the public memory of her brother, but stripped away the cartel's armor. She gripped the red civic override lever, dragging it down until the contacts locked. Across the city, across every digital billboard, emergency radio relay, and coastal transmission tower, the voice of her dead sibling filled the night. The confessions rang out cold and clear, echoing over the docks, through the high-rises, and into the patrol cruisers encircling the building. "The board is cleared, Galdron," she muttered, resting her forehead against the cool plastic bevel of the display. "You're clean." The gallery doors blew inward off their hinges. Heavy ballistic shields breached the doorway, followed by six tactical officers in gray body armor, rifles raised. Behind them strolled an officer in an immaculate navy trench coat, chewing unhurriedly on a wooden toothpick: the division's chief investigator. "Step away from the board, Miss Yondis," the inspector drawled, waving his sidearm toward the floor. Mirelha raised her hands, stepping back. "Listen to the broadcast, Inspector. The files are public. Hess never killed my brother. The ring murdered him when he failed to deliver the industrial transport network. Hess is innocent." The officer never glanced toward the monitors. He didn't even tilt his head toward the loudspeakers blasting the confession above them. Below in the ballroom, two officers dragged Galdron Hess into the open, forcing the industrialist to his knees atop broken champagne flutes. Tassir followed, cuffed with heavy zip-ties, his nose bleeding from a fresh rifle-butt strike. "A very touching public broadcast," he said, stepping toward the gallery railing and looking down at Hess. "Lots of static. Lots of noise. Unfortunately for Mr. Hess, audio files can be generated by any half-rate computer jockey with an agenda." The investigator reached inside his coat. He pulled out a laminated document, crisp and dry, holding it up so Mirelha could see the signature at the bottom. "What we deal in," the man continued, his smile thin and devoid of warmth, "is sworn testimony. A signed affidavit of industrial terrorism, murder, and high treason, penned and notarized two hours ago by your little photographer friend, Mr. Tassir Corvent." Mirelha stared at the paper. At the bottom, clear and dark against the white parchment, was Tassir's signature, scrawled beneath a full confession naming Hess as the sole architect of the city's destruction. Tassir looked up from the ballroom floor, his face pale, screaming something that was instantly smothered by a gloved fist. The inspector turned back to Mirelha, his stare flat. "Take Mr. Hess into custody. Resisting arrest authorized for lethal force."

The Decoy