Chapter 107 Curtain Call

Here’s the thing about running away. You have to be fast about it. You don’t get time to think, to admire the view, and to breathe. You move, you vanish, and you cut the thread before they follow it. That’s the rule.

But this time, even that wasn’t enough.

Despite Bunny’s invisibility and my intangibility phasing us through entire buildings, floors, and even the occasional household wall, they were still keeping up.

Somehow.

A chopper carved through the smog above me, its rotors hammering the air. The silhouette of the two flying snipers stayed steady against the haze, their scopes tracking my direction every time Bunny’s cloaking shimmered or faltered for half a second. Their aim was too good to be luck.

“How are they doing this?” I asked, voice low behind my mask.

Bunny’s synthetic tone buzzed faintly through the comms. “No idea… Is it a power?”

“Maybe,” I muttered. “I can’t tell.”

The highway opened ahead, a line of cracked asphalt stretching into the maze of Mendant’s industrial district. Bunny’s engine roared, the sound a black streak slicing through the smog. I flipped a switch on the left handlebar and felt the grappling system deploy.

A metallic snap cut through the wind as the grappling hook fired forward. I phased the tip intangible mid-flight so it could slip cleanly through debris before locking onto the steel ribs of a nearby skyscraper.

The cable went taut, the engine howled, and then Bunny launched. The sudden pull flung us upward like a slingshot, gravity screaming as the world blurred below.

That’s when the voice slid into my head.

It was Assessor.

“You are not getting away!”

I grit my teeth. “Get out of my head.”

He chuckled, the sound echoing inside my skull, bouncing from thought to thought like a mocking ghost. I knew this trick… It was a psychic whisper. One of the oldest telepathic harassment techniques: flood the target’s mind with noise, nonsense, and suggestion until they open themselves out of pure distraction. Once that happened, they’d have a pathway in.

Assessor was trying to fish for weakness.

I tightened my focus, erecting a wall of emotional static through empathy, calm, steady, and impersonal. Telepathy thrived on thoughts, not feelings. Empathy, however, dealt in tone and resonance. Two different wavelengths. I could jam him for a while.

Still, I couldn’t cut the link. Telepaths had range on their side and miles of it.

Assessor’s laughter thinned into words again. “The Wrath psychics you just killed? I brainwashed them all. Used them as bait for you. Truly poetic, isn’t it? Now you’re on the shit list of Wrath, too, on top of Pride!”

I exhaled slowly through my teeth. That explained everything from the weak auras and the sluggish minds. They hadn’t been Wrath’s elite. They’d been puppets.

No wonder they felt so hollow.

Assessor’s handiwork had always been… messy, evident from what I’ve read of him. Mind control among telepaths was a delicate craft, something that required restraint and precision. He had neither. He was a hammer trying to perform surgery.

Still, for him to pull that off even halfway meant someone must have helped him, or augmented him. Maybe the SRC had given him tools. The chopper above us adjusted, the snipers’ shadows shifting across rooftops.

“Give it up, Eclipse!” Assessor’s voice rang again, full of smug mania. “You’re dead!”

I smiled beneath the mask. “Then you better catch me now, Assessor,” I said, tightening the grip on Bunny’s handles. “Because if you don’t, I’ll tattle to the rest of the Ten. I’ll tell them everything from how you joined the SRC, and how you killed those Wrath psychics you puppeteered.”

Silence.

Even through the telepathic link, I felt the jolt and the ripple of fear that flared in his mind before he could smother it.

“Your move, Assessor,” I said, voice low, calm. “Better be quick.”

“Dream on!” Assessor’s voice still rang in my head like a migraine given shape. “I care not for the Ten! They’re chumps and weaklings, all of them! They pretend at power, but they’re lapdogs to something greater!”

I almost laughed. That was interesting.

The Ten had always been an unstable alliance, too powerful to coexist peacefully, and too paranoid to trust each other. But Assessor’s words hinted at something deeper, something he shouldn’t have known: the true nature of the Nth Contract. Maybe he’d seen behind the curtain. Maybe he’d been shown what held the Ten together or what pulled their strings.

Noted for later.

For now, I had bullets to dodge.

The snipers above had real aim. The sound of gunfire cracked through the urban canyons, the bullets whining like angry insects around me. Bunny kept running parallel to the glass wall of a skyscraper, the grappling hook still taut and pulling us upward at breakneck speed. This cable and grappling hook sure were high quality… The engine howled, vibration shivering through the frame as debris and air resistance tried to tear us apart.

Tracer rounds sparked against the glass just behind me.

“Offering support,” Bunny said, its voice calm, mechanical, unnervingly polite. “Protect your eyes.”

Before I could ask what it meant, light exploded from the bike’s front lenses, a flash bright enough to burn through fog, smoke, and half the skyline. Even through the porcelain mask, my vision flared white.

When it cleared, I saw them… two other me’s, riding twin copies of Bunny. Holographic projections, clean and sharp, bending light with almost perfect precision.

I grinned. “Good trick.”

Bunny’s processors hummed. “You’re welcome.”

I swerved sharply to the left, crossing paths with one of the holograms. From the air, we were identical blurs with the same speed, same movement, and same posture.

Sniper fire followed a second later. A round tore straight through one of the illusions, shattering it into cascading light fragments before it dispersed into the wind.

“Right on cue,” I muttered.

Bunny adjusted speed, the grappling line retracting with a shrill metallic snap. The momentum whipped us upward, the bike arcing high above the city’s skeleton skyline before gravity reclaimed us.

We flew.

The black machine cut through the air, weightless for an instant, before slamming down onto the rooftop. The tires screamed against gravel and steel, sparks scattering behind us.

We skidded to a halt near the ledge, the engine growling low.

The grappling hook clicked back into its compartment, coiling like a serpent returning home.

I stared at one of the fliers, a man hunched over a rifle, his outline a dark smudge against the sun. He felt close and impossibly far at once, the way memories do when they’re both fresh and dangerous. My empathy ticked a recognition: the same bastard who’d attacked me with Wolfe back in that coastal town. Small world. Or small favors.

He raised the rifle, posture practiced and deadly.

Bunny’s systems chirped softly and precisely. “Deploying countermeasure.”

Before the flier could squeeze the trigger, a miniature missile launched from the bike like a wasp with attitude. Its guidance glowed blue, a whisper of machine-song, and my bike’s projector flared to life, scattering holographic copies of the missiles across the skyline. The rider dove, panic lighting his mind like flares; the missile homed, relentless.

I revved the bike and turned, and that’s when I saw a familiar silhouette with a long rifle mounted on her shoulder, brunette hair braided tight, eyes cold and steady behind the scope.

“Hey, if it isn’t Leverage,” I called, surprised and a little amused.

Her finger tightened on the trigger as if my voice were an insult. “Fuck you. Stand down… or I will have to shoot you.”

She sounded like the sort of person who’d prefer a straight answer followed by a bullet to indecision. That old memory of Markend, the Watch, the way she’d nearly killed me when duty and blood mixed, sat in my teeth like grit.

“That’s an interesting reaction,” I said, because I had to say something, because I liked the way it got under her skin.

She barked orders at me through a voice like gravel. “Raise your hands in the air, and give it up, Eclipse!”

I revved the bike louder, letting the engine answer her better than words could. “Do you remember the first time we met?” I asked, suddenly sentimental.

Her face changed into a flash of recognition and fury, and then she fired. The sniper round tore the air where I’d been a heartbeat ago; I had already phased down, the world becoming offices and carpet and the stale coffee of a top-floor suite. Who built an office on a rooftop? Whoever did it had bad taste and excellent acoustics.

I burst the glass with Bunny, shattering the silence into a thousand glittering pieces. I hit the swivel chair like I meant it, then launched a short and brutal arc into the air. My fingers closed on the back of Leverage’s black tactical bodysuit. She was perfectly trained, but training didn’t always account for hands that could render cloth nonexistent. I phased the suit away from her and hurled it like a flag, letting it sail through the air to land and coil over her eyes, obscuring her vision.

“F—fucking shit—” she hissed, voice raw with embarrassment.

She was as flustered as she’d been the last time I’d pulled this stunt. I couldn’t help the twist of something like fondness that bloomed and shortened into annoyance. “Adorable.” The word was a private joke in my head. Hopefully, she hadn’t found the tracker and bug I’d slipped into the seam of her suit right now. Hopefully, she’d recover the suit to bring it to her friends. That little present would be a slow leak of exactly where she was and who she answered to.

“I'm gonna kill you!” she sputtered, trying to right herself, hands scrabbling at fabric that wasn’t where it should be.

I let go and dropped. The city fell around me in a controlled collapse, and I snagged Bunny’s frame mid-plummet. In her moment of naked distraction, I made the bike vanish into the air with invisibility and spun up the hologram projector again. It was almost poetic how quickly the fake me took the position of a bait as Leverage aimed at the projection. The round chewed light and glass where the illusion had been, and the hologram popped like a soap bubble under a pin.

No casualties, theatrical effect achieved.

The real me and the real bike snapped back from cloaked invisibility at the edge of her line of sight as the projector began to stutter and fry. I drew a mocking two-finger salute and pressed them to my lips in the universal ghost of a kiss.

“This is the day you will always remember,” I said, grinning beneath the porcelain, “as the day you almost caught Nicholas Caldwell!”

She spat something that might have been a curse or a promise. I hit nitro for the last burn it had, a final cough of fury from Bunny’s engine. The world accelerated; air became a pressure against the mask and then only the soft white of speed.

We were falling faster than I liked, and I counted seconds like prayers. At the last sliver of height, I engaged intangibility and let myself become the negative space of physics. Momentum that should have torn my spine went through me and ricocheted off nothing. The gravel and concrete kissed me with a slow, dull thud that felt deliberate and merciful.

We reappeared a short distance away, slid along the wall in a smear of shadow and metal, and then ran. We ran for the exterior perimeter where the city’s bones showed with piping, concrete, and joints. At the boundary, I hit intangibility again and pushed through the wall like a knife through warm butter.

On the other side, the air smelled of rain and exhaust and the small, honest stink of doing what you had to do. Leverage’s furious voice receded behind us, and somewhere in the maze of sirens and distant rotorwash, other threads were tugging at maps and orders.

I breathed, feeling the engine cool in my palms as Bunny idled. The tracker pinged faintly in the seam of my sleeve. I smiled without showing teeth.

“Next time, I’d give them a show…