It was a long time before they stopped running.
They had lost Darius somewhere in the labyrinthine sprawl beneath Kirel. The city's underbelly was a maze of rusted ducts, flickering signage, and the hum of buried neon, perfect for disappearing. Down here, among the leaking vents and forgotten service corridors, the surface might as well be another planet.
"I think we're safe now," Kali said, chest heaving as he leaned against a trembling bulkhead. The glow from an overhead strip-light cast sharp shadows across his face.
Priene didn't answer right away. She slid down beside him, resting against a wall streaked with old coolant stains and grime. "Safe for now," she muttered. "But for how long?"
Kali gave a weary shrug. "Long enough to catch our breath. One thing's certain, we can't go back to Medri. Darius would've have ratted me to the CIB the moment he calms down. Probably you too, just to seal the deal."
"We're fugitives now," Priene said, her voice flat.
"Yeah."
"Fuck. Fuck!" she snapped, dragging both hands through her hair, pulling at the roots like she wanted to tear the whole situation out of her skull. "Why the hell didn't you tell me about him?"
"I didn't know for sure," Kali said, his voice low. "And I didn't expect him to show up, not in Kirel. I definitely didn't know he was a gamma mutant."
That last part still made his skin crawl.
Mutants were rare in Theraxis, rarer than most diseases, though not quite as rare as the Awakened. Still, a gamma class? That was serious. Dangerous. He was lucky Darius hadn't killed them both.
If it had turned out Darius was a second-order Awakened, things would've gone far worse. Not because Awakened were always stronger, they weren't, necessarily, but because they were unpredictable. Slippery. Reality bent for them in ways no one could fully anticipate.
Mutant progression, at least, followed rules. You started as a delta class with a genome serum, regulated, traceable. From there, each level up required a stronger, more expensive serum, and you had to wait, sometimes a year, sometimes ten, depending on your metabolism. And even then, assuming you could afford the next dose or find someone willing to sell it.
That was the real limiter. Not biology. Economics.
"What now?" she bit out, her voice tight with exhaustion and lingering panic.
"We wait it out," Kali replied, eyes scanning the shadows beyond the alley's end. "I've got a safe house nearby. Nothing fancy, but it'll have to do."
He started walking without another word, and she fell in behind him, boots scuffing against the damp concrete.
It took them a while to reach the building, a lopsided stack of modules leaning like it had one bad hip too many. Kali had rented the place months ago through enough ghost brokers and shell names that even a blood-hound bot couldn't trace it back to his great-uncle, let alone himself.
To anyone watching, it looked like just another crumbling dwelling in a city built to forget itself.
Inside, the apartment was better. Not good, but better. Dim lighting warmed dull metal walls. There was an old synth-fiber couch, a patched-up hydration unit, and the faint smell of dust and synthetic citrus from the old filtration system.
Kali keyed the lock, stepped inside, and motioned Priene through.
She collapsed into the couch without ceremony, the tension finally breaking in her shoulders. Kali followed suit, sagging beside her like a man whose spine had given up pretending.
For a moment, they just breathed.
The chase, the fear, the betrayal, it all lingered in the stale air between them. But for now, they were still breathing. Still together. They sat in silence for a while. Not awkward, not tense, just the kind of silence that settles between two people who've run out of fear but haven't yet found relief.
The hum of the filtration system filled the background, joined by the occasional pop of settling metal or the distant thrum of underground transit lines.
Priene let her head rest against the back of the couch, her eyes half-closed. "My legs still think we're running," she murmured.
Kali gave a soft, humorless chuckle. "They'll get the memo eventually."
She turned to look at him. "You always have these places stashed around?"
"Kind of," he said with a wry smile. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, hands clasped. The tension was still there, coiled in his shoulders, but softer now, like a held breath slowly letting go.
"I'm making tea," he said. "Want some?"
"Sure. If it tastes like burnt moss, I'll pretend it doesn't."
He smiled at that, genuine, if brief, and busied himself with the heating unit.
Behind him, Priene stretched out on the couch, eyes scanning the ceiling, as if trying to read something written in the shadowed lines of the ventwork.
"Kali," she said quietly.
"Yeah?"
"When this is over, if it ever is, do you think we'll still be… us?"
He hesitated, hand frozen over the steaming cup. "I don't know," he said honestly. "But right now, we're still here. Still us. That's got to count for something."
When he got back with the tea, she had already slept off, snoring lightly on the couch. He set Kali set the cup down on the low table, its ceramic clink oddly loud in the stillness. Priene stirred on the couch, murmuring something unintelligible in her half-sleep.
Without a word, he leaned down, sliding one arm beneath her knees, the other behind her shoulders. She stirred again but didn't wake as he lifted her—light, too light, he noted—and carried her down the narrow hall to the back room. The door opened with a soft hiss, revealing a small bed dressed in faded sheets. He laid her down gently, brushing a few strands of hair from her face before stepping back.
Kali returned to the main room, settled onto the couch again, and lifted the cup to his lips. The tea was lukewarm now, and still tasted like burnt moss, but at least it was warm.
"That went horribly," a voice said inside his head, low and dry.
Kali didn't flinch. "Sometimes I forget you're there," he replied, smiling faintly at how familiar the presence had become. "But it went as well as it could have. With Ryu dead, Darius will be too busy managing fallout with the Mugen clan to come after us right away."
"All well and good," Rizen replied, his tone clinically detached. "But the real prize is off-world."
"I know."
"You and the girl, your use of the ninefold is subpar. Immature. Inefficient." Rizen's voice was without cruelty, but it cut all the same. "I can't assist with that. Not here. But off-world, there are options. Techniques. Teachers. You could become… something more."
Kali nodded, his eyes distant.
He knew this already. Everyone on Theraxis knew. The Awakened here were undisciplined, half-trained, scraping together meaning from fragments and instinct. Self-taught and dangerous, to both themselves and to others.
Even Ryu, before his fall, had been a shadow of what he might have been. He'd never learned the full scope of his clan's techniques, shipped off too early. If he had? Kali doubted he would've survived their first encounter.
He took another sip, forcing the bitter liquid down.
"Soon," he murmured.