Prologue

Some kids thought they could be cool.

Like, if they trained hard, if they just found the right gear or made the right friends, if they were given an opportunity, they could grow up to be a badass motherfucker, chewing nails and spitting fire.

I was one of those kids. Daydreaming of being awesome, of kicking ass. I’d find some discarded samurai super-gun. I’d discover that my parents were linked to one of the cooler cartels somehow and they’d take me in. Maybe I’d just start my own gang with the kittens as recruits.

It was all stupid daydreaming.

Weird how life twisted things around sometimes.

I paused mid-step, then stood a little straighter to look out the window. Earth was below me. Just... the entire planet, hanging there. The part below us was brightly lit, stark white clouds over dark greens and brilliant blues. The place where I’d spent my entire life.

“You okay?” Gomorrah asked. She had paused a few steps ahead, Deus Ex--still in her pyjamas

--by her side.

“Yeah,” I said. “Just taking it all in.” There was this weird feeling of vertigo, my stomach doing little flips as I took in the world below. It wasn’t just the fear of the drop that had me feeling that way. A week ago, I’d been a nobody orphan; the kind of street trash that no one sensible gave a fuck about.

I’d come far in a few days.

“Let’s keep moving,” I said. “Clock’s ticking, right?”

There were thirtyish hours left until the apocalypse started.

The girls nodded, and we continued down the dark grey corridor of Deus Ex’s home away from Earth. She stopped us in front of a pair of doors set against one wall. Big bulkhead looking things, like I’d expect to see in some futuristic submarine. “This is your way down,” she said. “Get in, grab on, and then enjoy the ride.”

The doors opened into rooms the size of broom cupboards, with slits against the walls and handles at about waist-height. There was a sort of leaned-back chair at the rear too. “How, exactly, is this going to bring us back to Earth?” I asked.

“Gravity.”

I shook my head and got into the pod first.

“See you ground-side,” Gomorrah said.

“Yeah,” I replied. “Deus Ex, you’ll keep in touch?”

The shorter girl shrugged. “I’m busy, but I might have a few hours to spare, yeah. The trip over to Mars takes a week or so. I’ll be stuck in my ship that whole time with nothing to do but binge shows and take naps.”

“While we’ll be on Earth fighting for our lives?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Want to go fight for your life on Mars instead?”

“I think I’ll take my chances down below,” I said as I settled into the pod. The door closed with a heavy thump, and I felt it as the pressure changed. The walls unfolded, and clamps grabbed me around the waist and shins and arms. It was uncomfortable to be restricted so much.

Then the pod started to fill from the bottom up with some sort of goop. It rose and rose, cold as it seeped around my armour.

“What in the fuck is that?” I asked.

It’s a heavily-oxygenated shock absorbing liquid. You should be able to breathe it, and it will diffuse any impacts so that they don’t harm you.

Myalis was always so damned comforting. “That’s real nice to hear,” I said as the goop swelled up, then reached my arms. It was hard to move in, like gelatin. Then it swallowed my head, and I found myself holding my breath for a moment.

It didn’t last long. I trusted Myalis, even if she was a bit strange at times.

The pod clunked, and the wall before me lit up. It was a screen, one that showed the inside of a tube.

Something clanged, then the tube shot up while I went down.

Then we left the station. I glimpsed another pod falling a little bit above before I was rotated around. Jets of some gas realigned my pod with little spurts, and then I was falling back down to Earth.

A lot of kids really wished that they’d grow up to be badasses. I had been one of them.

Now I was falling out of a samurai’s space fortress back towards the Earth in a little metal casket moving so fast that soon the bottom of my pod lit on fire as I screeched through the air. A timer hovered on the edge of my vision, counting down to what might be the end of everything. There were few things as badass as what I was doing, I figured.

I would have traded it all for an afternoon spent cuddling in bed.

I held on while the pod shifted and rattled back down to Earth. My jaw started to hurt from being clamped so hard for so long.

Then something clunked, and for a heart-wrenching moment I thought I was fucked, but things started to slow down and the flames licking at the side of the pod gave way to hissing air and then clouds.

The next thing that I could see, once I was past the grey wall of cloud cover, were the tallest buildings in the city, reaching up towards me.

The sides of the pod opened and a set of thrusters fired off towards the ground, slowing me down further and pushing the drop pod towards a specific building.

The museum.

I landed with a heavy crunch and the front door of the pod blew off the side, all of the goop holding me in place sloughing off onto the landing zone right next to my home.

The clamps around my legs and arms and waist let go, and I found myself standing on the spot, entirely uncertain of what to do next.

Are you well?

“Uh,” I said. I swallowed, let my heart settle for a moment, then winced as something crashed nearby. A second pod. Gomorrah had been sent to the same spot as I had.

I stepped out of the drop-pod.

It was, of course, raining. For once that seemed to help, washing off the gelatin clinging to my armour. Gomorrah stepped out of her pod and glanced around, then to me. “That was fun,” she said.

“I don’t know. I liked the space shuttle up a lot more,” I said.

She shrugged. “This was probably faster.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. A couple of minutes ago I was in space, now I’m back on solid Earth. More or less. “Yeah, I guess so.”

There were a couple of vans parked nearby. Hovervans, with their sides opened to reveal a bunch of tools within, and a few construction guys were there, tool belts around their waists, coffee cups in hand, and jaws slack as they stared at Gomorrah and I.

Guess we had made something of an entrance.

“You getting renovations done?” Gomorrah asked.

“Yeah. Setting the place up for the kittens. It’s supposed to take a couple of weeks,” I said.

Someone stepped out of the building then ran over. I recognized him as the contractor in charge of stuff. He’d given me his name half a dozen times, and I forgot it every time. “Miss Stray Cat,” he said, a bit out of breath. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

“I wasn’t expecting to show up here either,” I said. Did Deus Ex send me here on purpose, or was it just the nearest place with enough room to land?

“Are you here to see how the work’s progressing?” he asked.

“Huh? No. I was just... in space. Uh. You know that matter reconfiguration machine, at the back?”

He nodded. “The one Raccoon is taking care of?”

Right, another loose end to take care of. “That’s the one. Can a couple of your guys help Raccoon load these pods into it? I’m pretty sure they’ll fit if you cut them up a bit.” Would they even be able to do that? “If you can’t, just leave them somewhere.”

“Certainly, ma’am,” he replied with an easy, if nervous, smile.

I nodded to him and turned towards Gomorrah. “Think you can get your car over?” I asked.

“The Fury is on its way already,” she said. “What are you planning on doing?”

“Uh,” I said. I had a meeting with a non-profit that I was supposed to have soon. To go over the making and distributing of prosthetics. I had to bully Burringham some more about the sewers. I had to check up on Racoon, tell her about the prosthetic thing, and get her a proper place to stay. I’d been meaning to look into schooling for the kittens, maybe therapy? They definitely needed that.

Knowing that I had... about twenty-nine hours until the world went to shit kind of put a damper on all of my plans.

Deus Ex sent an itinerary. There are two meetings that will take place before the end of the deadline. I suspect that you’ll want to attend both. The first is in five hours. A night-time meeting with representatives from a few paramilitary groups and members of the city council and appropriately large corporate entities. The second is tomorrow morning, a meet and greet for all the samurai in the city. Seventeen have reserved places at the meeting so far. Both are organised by the Family.

“That leaves us with a bit of time to take care of other things,” I said. “Cool. Going to need every minute of that time.”

***