Protocol Helix: Convergence.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

09-11-2355 | 21:07

Port Helix — Drydock Sublevel, Artery Four.

—

The canal is a black throat cut through concrete. Service catwalks stagger along its sides, broken in places where a contractor lied and got paid anyway. The city hums above; the water breathes below. Ryn moves fast but quiet, boots whispering, breath small. He listens for the wrong note, the one that isn't the city.

There it is: north, under the third span. Metal on the tongue and ozone in the teeth. He drops to a lower run, swings a pipe, lands on a narrow lip. The ring warms.

"Come on," he murmurs. "If you were me, where would you—"

The Rendling appears by not appearing. Space wrinkles. Light kinks. Something heavy snaps from invisible to almost there and scythes for his head. He leans on a pressure slip, tumbles along the rail, and the blur misses, then backhands him with force enough to erase architecture.

Concrete caves. The wall he hits becomes dust and rebar; he punches through it into a maintenance bay, then through the bay's opposite wall into the skeleton of a storage room. He lands on his feet like he practiced doing it since birth, shaking off the impact. Invulnerable doesn't mean physics takes the night off; it means his body refuses to call damage by its name.

He wipes grit off his cheek with the back of a glove and grins, his breathing hard. "Okay," he says, testing his stance. "You're different."

The air shudders. The Rendling slips into view like a decision, not a reveal: silver-black skin refracting the bay light into a sick, oil-slick shimmer, limbs jointed wrong in ways that keep working anyway. Its edges flicker and vanish, then return a meter away. Invisible at will. Every step writes a new rule.

Ryn flicks his hand. The canal throws him a column of water; he snatches it into a whip and carves a bright line through the air. The whip cracks across nothing—and splashes red along an invisible cheekbone. "Got you," he says, and chases the smear.

The Rendling is fast. Ryn is faster. He vaults a rail, hits a two-step on the catwalk, slides under a bar just to prove he can. A pressure cone slams into its shoulder hinge; the limb slows and warps light wrong. He stitches a water skin over the dim chest bloom to lock spatter if he punctures anything. The Rendling vanishes again.

He hears it to his right and deliberately throws a half-beat cyclone to his left that hoovers screws, dust, and hurt pride into a funnel. The noise of his flight lights when he lifts off: magnetic disruption turns his body into a tuned engine, a thrumming in the metal bones of the bay. He skims the ceiling, flips, drops.

"Invisible is cute," he says. "Try interesting."

A pulse pistol cracks twice from the catwalk mouth, blue-white slugs that thump like fists. The rounds splash hard-light on nothing—and tag a shoulder with a spray of sparks. The Rendling hates being seen; it keeps trying to vanish and keeps failing where the energy leeches stick.

Dax comes in low and mean, off-duty jacket, off-duty pistol, no goddamn off switch. He rolls under an invisible swipe, pops to a knee, and fires a tight pair that anchor the thing in inertia. "You don't run solos!" he yells, voice raw with fury. "What the hell is wrong with you?"

"Later?" Ryn says, because the blur is already on Dax. He drops, the swipe hisses overhead, and he kicks off into a clean flip that puts him behind the Rendling. He hooks a palm to the floor; iron filings and rust shiver upward, whispering into a long blade. A sword grows in his hand: rebar, screws, a rail bolt for a spine—hard and ugly and perfect. He slashes.

The sword bites. The Rendling's camouflage flares like heat haze. It vanishes, reappears on the wall, launches. Dax throws himself sideways and the thing carves a trench into the concrete where he had been, chips spraying. It ignores Dax for the creator of the noise.

The Rendling snaps its focus to Ryn. Its forelimbs scissor, the joints cracking open to reveal sharp, needle-like points that come for Ryn's chest with lethal speed. The action is so fast it is almost silent.

Dax throws his body and his next shots, not at the center mass, but to pin the creature's lower torso. He grounds his next three shots into dead metal so the energy dump dies in the floor. The Rendling's attack is pulled wide by the inertia dump, the needle-limbs scraping Ryn's jacket and a shallow trench into the concrete behind his back.

"Don't get clever!" Ryn barks, heart hammering against his ribs.

"Shut up and anchor it!" Dax snaps.

Ryn doesn't argue. He lands so hard the catwalk buckles. Rebar screams. He reaches with his free hand and yanks iron up out of concrete until he has a short, ugly dagger to match the long blade. He jams the dagger into the brace, locks the Rendling's hip to steel, and shoves the water skin hard against the bloom.

"Now?" Dax asks.

"Now," Ryn says.

He doesn't pull straight. He learned. He loops the seam, crooked cadence, off the beat of his own heart. The code is there: hot, careful, arrogant as ever. It bucks. He bears down. The ring sears cold; his fingers buzz like they are full of bees. He does not let go. The camouflage dies first. The body follows in strips, then in sheets, sloughing silver-black into water that holds shape until he tells it not to.

The Rendling collapses into a person.

He is young. Early twenties, maybe. Skin gray with cold. Chest bruised where the bloom lived. Naked as a bad decision. His eyes flutter open for a second and show something human and feral at once, then roll back. Ryn eases the water film warmer and keeps it there so the night doesn't finish what the code started.

Dax yanks off his jacket without thinking and wraps it around the kid's shoulders. "I'm calling HARBOR," he says, already reaching for his slate. "We need Irie. We need a cage. We need—"

"Call them and we get our asses handed to us," Ryn cuts him off, breath steady now that the worst of the hum is gone. "Nobody knows we're here. You want to explain off-duty pulse fire and me hopping a window? We can't send every Rendling to HARBOR. They'll lock him down for a month and study the bruise."

"What the hell do we do then?" Dax asks, stepping closer. "Leave him on a canal and hope he doesn't relapse? Is that your plan?"

"Go back to HARBOR," Ryn says, eyes still on the kid, one hand steady on the water film. "Write your report. Tell them you went for a run and found a damaged fence. I'll handle him."

"Not on my life," Dax says. He steps in and lowers his voice until it is just the two of them and the canal.

"Where are you taking him?"

Ryn finally looks up. The bay wind lifts his hair; the magnetic hum from his earlier flight is still shivering the bolts under their boots. He weighs the truth like a blade and lets a piece of it out.

"Somewhere that knows what he is," he says. "Somewhere that doesn't put him in a glass box to feel safe about it."

"Be specific," Dax says, crossing his arms. "Because I'm not letting you walk into anything alone."

Ryn studies him for a heartbeat, the jacket on the kid like a promise neither of them can cash yet. "You follow, you don't lead," he says. "And you don't call it in until I say so. Can you do that?"

"Are you asking me if I can shut up?" Dax asks and Ryn inclines his head. "Ask better. Where are you taking him?"

Ryn glances east, toward the old desalination stacks where the city pretends it never hid a thousand mistakes. "A clinic under the stacks," he says. "Quiet hands. No questions that matter. We get him warm and breathing, then we figure out how not to drown in the consequences."

Dax's jaw works once. He holsters the pistol. "Then let's move," he says. "You fly loud, I'll keep up."

Ryn lifts off. The magnetic whine of his body at speed rattles the catwalk. The kid floats with him inside the water skin, jacket clutched by pressure instead of hands. Dax falls in beneath, boots hard on metal, eyes on the danger Ryn just sidestepped.

No one knows they're there. For once, that feels like a shared decision instead of an accident.