Make the Asphalt Dance

"Five hundred meters north." I repeat it to Jade like a line learned by heart.

She spits out concrete dust, jacks her tablet into the conduit. Above us, the Hounds bark coordinates. We crawl through the dark of the Veins.

The Pneumatic Heart fills a nave of welded pipes. Lungs of steel coughing up the city's sterilized air, that gray breath KARTIKEYA.X uses to lull his millions of faithful. I'm going to teach it to whistle off-key.

My gauntlets find the master valve. The metal refuses. Uzume murmurs the fee deep in my skull, and this time the mask demands my dread — that old dockside-rat reflex that's kept me alive since Manila-Drift.

I turn. I give.

An alarm goes dark somewhere inside me. The small voice that used to yelp run, hide, the void will swallow you — cut off at the breaker. No more current.

The Incoherence floods the lines. Pressure climbs. Jade orders me back — she isn't shouting, she's calculating aloud, already three meters behind me.

The street bursts.

Every manhole cover on the Avenue of a Thousand Consensuses leaps as one. Columns of fuchsia steam split the asphalt. A titanic barrel-organ belches its fanfare through the city's arteries. And the Order's bloodhounds lift off, hoisted by the geyser, unstrung puppets waltzing in the pink haze.

A shard of sheet metal plows into my arm.

I look at the gash. I wait for the shiver, the sweat, the urge to flee.

Nothing rises.

I see only a gag ready to deploy. A perfect punchline. My own death dressed up as a closing-night act.

Jade grabs my wrist, hauls me toward the drainage grate. Her eyes rake my face, searching for something that no longer lives there.

"You're smiling," she says. "Why are you smiling?"

I have no answer to give her. And that, precisely, is the joke I'll never again know how to fear.