Book 2: Chapter 25 - Law-Abiding Citizens

Our largest cities are easily our safest cities.

They are also our most dangerous.

This is because the clarity required to maintain such complex infrastructure
is most easily maintained by active nests.

We cull the population of these nests, but we allow them to thrive just enough
that we can steal their clarity indefinitely.

It’s a delicate balance, and we haven’t quite figured it out yet.
People still die as a result.

When leeches and scavengers throw this balance off even further,
more people die, and it’s harder to predict.

I doubt there is a more selfish crime a citizen of Prism City could commit.
—Lyle Lupin, Public Statement

Iris was exhausted. She was tired of the mist. It wasn’t supposed to bother her anymore. She’d been Category Orange for years, and few people still choked on the mist at that level. Of course, there was a reason people reached higher categories in Prism City than in smaller outposts. It was the same trade humanity had always made. To live among more violence and pain in exchange for more opportunity.

The clarity surrounding Prism City was denser than most habitable areas. And, of course, so was the mist. The nests and the hedron they housed were far more dangerous, reaching as high as Category Cyan in some places. Prism had prosperity and infrastructure like most people had never seen. This was because it lived in the shadow of a greater danger than many could imagine.

Of course, for Iris and her team, that was only the start. They operated somewhat… outside the law. They were constantly caught somewhere between a rock and a bigger, nastier rock. They were just grunts. Barely strong enough to hold the weaker nests in the area. It paid far better than any job in the city, and it was safer than joining the lancers. But only marginally. It meant both hedron and lancers were a threat, and they constantly had to worry about both.

And the mist really was getting old. It didn’t bother Iris at first, of course. But no one was supposed to spend an extended amount of time breathing it in. Anyone would get sick after a full week in the mist. Iris and her team had lived in it for two months already. 

They were supposed to have been relieved weeks earlier. And the delay was growing frustrating. What was the point in high pay if she was never in the city to spend it? She coughed again. She’d had the cough for a week, and she knew it would stick with her until she was finally allowed to return home. She was so fucking tired of the mist.

As she was hacking up a lung, the radio at her side went off. “Are you sure we came to the right nest?” Audrey asked again. Iris had lost count of how many times the question had been asked and answered. She’d been bored with it for two weeks. But Audrey just wouldn’t stop finding new ways to ask.

“Of course we have the right nest,” Iris replied. “Or we wouldn’t be getting supply drops.”

“Are you sure? The boss may have a talent that finds us even if he doesn’t know where we are,” she pushed.

Iris rolled her eyes. “You know these things are expensive, and they burn through clarity like Gal burns through men, right?” she asked. “Even most lancer teams don’t get these. It would probably be best not to waste any clarity on stupid questions, yeah?” She leaned against the nearest orange crystal wall and pulled a cigarette out of her case. She lit it as she waited for Audrey to ignore her advice.

Like clockwork, the radio keyed at almost the exact moment her cigarette started to glow. “If they don’t want us wasting clarity, maybe they should send a damn relief team already,” Audrey said. “Or you can come back to camp so we can speak in person. Just a thought.”

“She literally went to check on the heart precisely so we wouldn’t whine at her for a while,” Kyron’s voice cut in as soon as the line was clear. Iris smiled at that. He was always ready to back her up when Audrey started nagging. At the same time, he was in the room with the rest of the team. Which meant he’d spent clarity to send a message to a woman he could see, specifically so Iris would hear him saying it. 

She took a deep drag off her cigarette, then keyed her own mic. “This may shock and astound you, Audrey, but we are currently engaged in a serious crime. I hear the police have started keeping an eye out for those recently. Sometimes, that throws a wrench in plans that were made months ago,” Iris teased. “Just have a little patience. Once it is safe to do so, they’ll send someone to replace us.” She coughed as soon as she was done speaking, and glared at the burning stick between her fingers. It was helping her relax, but the mist’s long-term effects had made her more sensitive to the smoke. It was annoying.

“You don’t want me to waste clarity, but you’ll announce that we’re committing crimes over the radio?” Audrey complained. Iris rolled her eyes again. 

“Oh, hush, you know that’s not a real problem!” Kyron replied. Iris sighed and turned her radio off. Her friend was right. She didn’t need to check on the heart. It was just doing what it always did. Sitting perfectly still in the wall it had latched onto. She’d just wanted some peace and quiet. Still, she was the highest degree on the team. It was her job to look after the rest. So she decided to wait five minutes, then go back to the group.

Kyron would defend her in the meantime. The complaint about the radios was ridiculous. The radios were encrypted and cloaked, and Audrey knew that. And if they weren’t, well. They weren’t supposed to be anywhere near this nest. The clarity it was producing was powering supposedly important infrastructure in the orange district. A hospital, in this case. Siphoning even a little had severe consequences. 

People would likely die because of this—just because of the discrepancy between the expected and available clarity. People almost certainly had died because of this. But only a few and far between. And they were people who were already sick. Already dying. And Iris had long stopped worrying about them. It wasn’t like any of them had ever worried about her when she was growing up homeless. They didn’t care if the clarity they used could have saved her life. Or her parents' lives. Turnabout was fair play, and all that. They were just names on a piece of paper to her. To her entire team, really. And they were getting paid too much to care about faceless names.

The biggest issue she had with the importance of the nest was simple. It was well-protected. They'd needed the help of their sponsor to get past the barricade surrounding it and other nearby nests. If any radio transmissions were picked up at all, they’d be found. And, well. They’d be fucked. It didn’t matter much what they said on it.

Fortunately, there was no real risk of that. The city government didn’t clear the hedron out of these nests. If they did, the nest would only collapse. No one was certain why, but a heart with no hedron—or people—nearby couldn’t sustain itself. So Prism City just connected them to the grid and posted security around the area. Iris was one of a few teams who lived in these nests for a period of time, stealing the clarity and redirecting it for her employers. 

It was a good job, actually. When it didn’t last so long. She didn’t know where the hell they'd gotten it, but her employers had given them a tool that kept orange hedron out of the small portion of the nest she’d been living in. They never bothered her, even if they looked directly at her. It had freaked her out at first, but it had grown mundane quickly. 

The only danger was the minor risk that a hedron would advance in category, and they would need to fight it. This was why Iris had an entire team. It had only happened once, and not even on this rotation. Her team had distracted the newly yellow hedron as planned, and sent it toward the perimeter. A guard had died, but it hadn’t been one of her people, and that was what mattered.

With that thought, she decided it was time to return to them. She liked them, honestly. But anyone would start to get snippy with each other after long enough in close quarters. And this rotation had been more than long enough.

She stomped out the cigarette, shoved her hands in her pockets, and started making her way back to base camp.

Then, she heard the screaming.

She’d been an idiot. They had radios for a reason, and she’d turned hers off. Iris immediately flicked it back on and broke into a sprint. The orange walls around her blurred into a homogeneous stream of color as she ran and screamed into her radio.

“What’s going on? What happened?” she begged. 

There was no response. She kept running. She activated her Haste talent, and the world rushed by her even more quickly. She couldn’t use either of her buff talents. Those only worked on other people, for some fucking reason. But she had them ready. Her team would need them the second they were in range. 

“WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU?”

Audrey’s scream echoed through the hall of the nest. Iris hadn’t gone that far from her team. Only a couple of rooms away, really. But somehow, the seconds it was taking her to reach them felt like years.

“WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO!? HOW ARE YOU DOING THIS?” 

It was Kyron’s scream this time. It was rage, and sorrow, and shock all at once. Iris could hear it in his voice. She’d heard a sound like that before, if only once. It was the sound of a soul being torn from a man’s body. It was the grief of violence, played out before his eyes. It was the sound of Audrey’s death, expressed through her friend.

She couldn’t process that. She couldn’t process the sounds that came with it. The tearing and the scraping. Her perception cursed her with excruciating detail. She couldn’t understand how so much could happen in under a minute. She couldn’t accept it. 

“Oh… oh, Christ… you… you killed them…” Gal whimpered. She had that same sorrow in her voice. And so much more terror.

Iris slammed her shoulder into the door to their enclosed camp. She was so close. She just needed to burst into the room and fight whoever was killing her friends. She needed to stop them. She didn’t know how. She hadn’t quite processed that it was a person doing this. The words implied that was what it was, but it made no sense. The police or lancers would just arrest them. But this… 

The door wouldn’t open. There was something massive in the way, holding it in place.

Iris didn’t know how to fight other people. Not really. It was supposed to be hedron. She wasn’t even supposed to fight them. Just direct them to the fucking guards using the equipment at camp. 

She slammed her shoulder into the door again, and again, and again. It wouldn’t budge.

“Get it off of me! Please! Please, I have money! I can—”

The words cut off. Iris slammed her shoulder into the door. It still wouldn’t move.

And then, silence.

Iris hammered the door with quickly bruising fists.

Nothing.

She took a step back and ran at the door again. She didn’t think it would move. But she didn’t know what else to do. So she threw everything she had into it.

And she crashed through it, absolutely nothing stopping it from swinging wide open. She stumbled and fell to her side as she burst into the room.

The floor was too wet. She could taste it as her face made contact with the floor. Blood. Pooled around something hot to her right. She felt sick. She closed her eyes. She knew what she’d find. She couldn’t look. She’d cared about these people. She’d left them to die. She didn’t even know whose blood she was tasting.

It didn’t matter. They had all been orange. They had all been fighters. Whoever had done this had killed them in an instant, and she was in the room with them. She kept her eyes closed. It would be better to die without seeing. Without knowing what the corpses looked like. She couldn’t win. She knew that. So she waited, and she refused to look.

“Sorry,” a woman’s voice said over the radio. Or a girl, perhaps. It sounded young, and it didn’t belong to any of her friends. Iris froze. The word didn’t process. It made no sense in this situation, and it sounded more exasperated than empathetic.

“Sorry,” the voice repeated. “But I’m in a really shitty mood, so this is going to be… far more unpleasant than it needs to be.”