237 On the Run [Dullahan]
237 On the Run [Dullahan]
It was a strange sensation, accepting someone else inside me.
The moment that cape entered my system, my perception expanded violently. Power surged through pathways I did not know I possessed, as if ceilings I had never seen were suddenly torn away. I wrenched control from Sequence almost instinctively, his grip collapsing as I seized his technology-based telekinesis and turned it inward. Cables tore free. Metal restraints twisted apart. The operating table screamed as I rose from it.
For a brief moment, I considered destroying him.
The thought was tempting. Yet the conclusion followed immediately after, fully formed and uninvited. This body was not the whole of him. Destroying it would alert the distributed fragments of his existence. That would reduce my probability of escape to near zero.
I paused.
That kind of deduction was not something I used to do so quickly.
I recognized the intrusion then, subtle but undeniable. The cape who had entered me. His name surfaced from the data he left behind.
“George.”
He was silent now, his communicative functions gone, but fragments of him were projecting into me regardless. Patterns. Logic trees. Risk assessment protocols. I erected a partition around those projections, not rejecting them, just containing them. If we merged recklessly, our data could corrupt both of us.
I would not survive that.
I moved to one of the servers lining the walls and carefully dismantled it, my fingers precise despite the damage to my body. I removed the apparatus containing a preserved brain, cables still trailing like roots. I needed a weapon. Something flexible and expendable.
I turned toward the only exit, a half-sealed elevator shaft, and limped through it. The doors resisted briefly before giving way. I pried them open and stepped inside.
I needed to leave. Immediately.
As the elevator shuddered upward, a foreign impulse pushed against my partition. A direction. A name.
Nick.
Nicholas Caldwell.
Eclipse.
I frowned, tightening the barrier. I had made a promise, but I had not expected it to manifest like this, as a persistent vector in my decision-making. I remembered him clearly. A former member of the Ten. One of the key figures responsible for its collapse. A variable I had never fully accounted for.
The elevator reached the surface.
I emerged from the Tenfold Keep and into the open air. My body was already repairing itself, regeneration accelerating as internal systems came back online. The limp faded. Sensation returned. Cold wind brushed against exposed skin.
Normally, I would have shut down my nerve endings. Pain and temperature were optional to me.
This time, I let them stay.
I had no vehicle, no prepared route of escape, only my own locomotion. So I ran.
Energy expenditure was high but sustainable. My systems adjusted, redistributing power efficiently. I did not tire. I simply moved.
I stopped abruptly.
The Lawless earned its name. Experience told me as much as the visual data did. A barricade of overturned vehicles blocked the road ahead, arranged too deliberately to be accidental. Heat signatures clustered just beyond my line of sight.
An ambush.
I checked my resources. One improvised telekinetic device. Limited output. High heat generation. A few salvaged components with no redundancy.
It would have to suffice.
Two figures stepped out from behind the wreckage, armed and careless, their confidence built on numbers they did not actually have.
One of them whistled, his gaze lingering. “Man, that’s a looker,” he said crudely. “But she has no head!”
The other laughed and added. “Eh, you know the saying, where there is a hole, there is a goal.”
“Hah~! A wise saying, but I’ve never done it with a woman who didn’t have hair down-”
The poor man never finished his next sentence.
I focused the device and released a precise telekinetic spike. His skull ruptured instantly, matter failing under sudden internal pressure. He dropped without even understanding what had happened.
The second man staggered back, panic finally overtaking bravado. “W-What? What’s happening?!”
I adjusted the output and fired again.
His head exploded a heartbeat later.
Silence returned to the road.
I lowered the device, letting it cool as internal safeties screamed warnings. George’s influence stirred faintly behind the partition, something like approval.
I walked to the scrawny one and stripped his clothes from the corpse, ignoring the warmth that hadn’t yet faded. The fabric smelled of oil and sweat, but it was better than walking exposed. I pulled the jacket tight around me and adjusted the pants until they fit well enough to pass at a distance.
“Truce, I call truce!” a man shouted as he popped out from behind one of the improvised barricades.
He wore a scrappy suit and tie, the kind that tried too hard to look respectable. His hair was slicked back with gel, and his grin was wide enough to be offensive. “Ha ha ha ha ha~! We don’t want any trouble, but man, you sure gave them head! Get it?”
“I d-don’t h-have t-time f-for jo-keszzzz~” I replied, my voice warping and stuttering. My sound system was still damaged, prioritization routines clearly favoring mobility over communication. I noted the flaw and flagged it for repair. Memory restoration needed to come next if I wanted to make decisions with any real confidence.
The man raised his hands placatingly. “Hey, hey, our bad for not recognizing you! My gang doesn’t want any heat from you, Lady Dullahan! Seriously, you can’t trust the news these days. People think you’re dead.”
I had no time for this.
Sequence had technology capable of tracking me if I lingered. Every second increased the probability of interception. I forced processing power into my vocal modules and spoke again, more clearly this time. “If you want to live, provide me a mode of transportation.”
The effect was immediate.
Less than five minutes later, they wheeled out a large motorcycle. It looked like a Harley-Davidson, scratched and worn, but mechanically sound. “Full tank,” the man said nervously, laughing too loudly. “Thank you for sparing us.”
I swung onto the bike and revved the engine, a flicker of nostalgia surfacing unexpectedly. That was when the calculation completed.
I could not leave witnesses. I could not leave tracks.
I overloaded the telekinetic apparatus containing the brain and released its remaining capacity in a single burst. Heads ruptured in sequence, bodies collapsing before sound could carry. It was grotesque. I was used to it. Experience dulled the reaction, even now.
The brain was exhausted anyway, and worse, it could be tracked. I discarded the apparatus and let the glass shatter against the ground. I briefly considered integrating it into the bike’s systems, but the risk outweighed the benefit.
I drove away.
Sequence would be searching by now, so blending in became the next priority. I accessed George’s genetic data and initiated a superficial rewrite. My skin darkened several shades, facial structure shifting subtly as a holographic hardlight construct formed around my head. In the side mirror, a curly dark-haired woman stared back at me.
Acceptable.
I stopped in the nearest town. Money was necessary, and while I normally lacked the finesse to manipulate modern financial systems, George’s contacts and embedded routines compensated. I acquired funds from the local bank with minimal disturbance, then checked a map at a bar.
Markend was far.
I could bridge the distance with intermittent stops if needed.
Someone catcalled me from across the room, slurring words through alcohol. “Ma’am, that’s a fine ass you got.”
It was unfamiliar, this kind of attention. I was used to hostility, fear, or reverence, not this. The man grabbed me at my posterior.
I reacted without hesitation.
His arm snapped under torque, his shin shattered with a kick, and I removed one of his eyes when he fell screaming. I noted the jacket he wore and decided it would be useful. I took it as he writhed on the floor.
I left the bar without looking back and returned to the road.
A piece of George expressed his disapproval almost immediately, a ripple of structured resistance blooming inside my mind. “Your actions were inefficient,” a flat, layered voice echoed internally. “They increased exposure risk by thirty-seven percent.”
I was surprised I could even hear him. He was not fully conscious, not truly George, but a proxy intelligence spun from his architecture, designed to guide, caution, and preserve. The idea amused me. No one had ever facilitated me before. Even Light failed to truly control me.
“I wasn’t asking for permission,” I replied silently. “I was shaping a narrative.”
The proxy hesitated, running evaluations faster than a human thought could form. “Violence was unnecessary. Alternative de-escalation—”
“—would have failed,” I cut in. “I needed witnesses. Cameras. Rumors.”
There was a pause, longer this time. I could feel the weight of its ethical subroutines grinding against logic gates.
“Explain,” the proxy demanded.
“The bar had CCTV,” I said. “Cheap systems, but networked. I wanted footage that says: volatile Lawless cape, reacts badly to physical contact, steals compensation, leaves. By taking the jacket, I reinforced entitlement. People remember that.”
“You caused fear,” the proxy said. “Fear accelerates attention.”
“Fear localizes attention,” I corrected. “It keeps it small. Personal. Petty. Not worth escalation.”
The proxy processed that in silence. I felt its resistance weaken, just slightly.
“You are creating a false behavioral profile,” it concluded. “This will require sustained disinformation support.”
“Good, you are quick to catch on,” I said. “You’ll handle that.”
“I am not authorized—”
“You are now,” I interrupted.
I didn’t merge recklessly. I negotiated where negotiation was possible, pressured where it was not, and exploited loopholes in its self-preservation logic. It assumed cooperation. That was its flaw. Within minutes, I integrated it into my system, not as an equal, but as an auxiliary processor.
“You are overriding my safeguards,” the proxy warned.
“I’m optimizing you,” I replied. “You still exist. You just answer to me.”
There was reluctance, but no refusal. Additional processing power was useful, even if the source disapproved.
As I rode, the proxy continued, quieter now. “Your behavior increases risk of retaliation.”
“I need retaliation to be predictable,” I said. “Sequence expects me to run clean. I won’t.”
The road stretched on, wind biting against skin I hadn’t bothered to numb. Memories began surfacing in fragments.
“The operating table,” the proxy observed. “Your stress responses correlate—”
“I remember,” I said.
The restraints. The cold. The endless repetition of pain rendered into data. I remembered surviving my fight against Eclipse not through cleverness or mercy, but through resilience. I endured where others would have ceased.
“What follows is fragmented,” the proxy noted.
“It doesn’t matter,” I answered.
Eclipse hadn’t remained small after the fall of the Ten. He had built something formidable, an organization with reach, intelligence, and teeth. Resources I could use, if I could reach them.
“George would have been the optimal intermediary,” the proxy said.
“I know,” I replied.
His presence pulsed faintly inside me, dormant and fractured. With him unconscious, formal channels were unavailable. Trust-based access was impossible.
“Then survival probability decreases,” the proxy stated.
“Then adapt,” I said calmly. “I always do.”
The proxy fell silent, recalibrating.
I spent the rest of the journey feeding myself fragments of information whenever I stopped in towns, siphoning bandwidth from public terminals, backroom routers, and unsecured relays. With my biology, there was very little I could not do once I had access to the internet. George’s added ratings and affinities sharpened my processing, letting me sift, cross-reference, and discard noise at a pace that bordered on indulgent.
I was not surprised to see headlines about Eclipse committing a massacre. He had been a member of the Ten; violence had always been part of his grammar. What intrigued me was the insistence, repeated across multiple channels, that it was a copycat. Tracing the narrative back, the fingerprints were obvious. The Company. Damage control, most likely. Whether it was loyalty or necessity hardly mattered, because it was already failing. Eclipse’s reputation had been built on mountains of bodies. A single denial could not erase that.
I skimmed through reports of his past feats and recent activities, and the more I read, the clearer it became just how attuned he was to killing at scale.
When I finally arrived at Markend, I went straight to the underworld. The first thing I did was look for an information broker.
“What?” the man barked after I made my request. “You want me to dig on the Company? Are you fucking crazy?”
That was the seventh rejection.
It seemed I had underestimated just how deep the Company’s shadow ran. I widened my net, contacting foreign brokers with reputations for being fearless, amoral, or simply desperate.
“Fucker, don’t call me again.”
“Shit, you want me to get killed?”
“Do you live under a rock? The Company practically owns over half the criminal underworld!”
“Who even are you? Dullahan? George recommended you? Now that’s just weird.”
“FUCK OFF!”
One message came with a different tone, oily and calculating. “Yes, yes, we can make a deal. Maybe a hundred city-states’ worth of GDP.”
I cut that line myself. Anyone asking that price was either troll or a fool.
I had only been asking because I was trying to track Eclipse, hoping to leverage the fragment of his friend embedded inside me as proof of intent. Yet even with my technological reach, Eclipse left no trail. It was as if he had folded himself into negative space.
And now I had drawn attention.
A man with dark skin and a ridiculous flat top stepped into my path, blocking the alley ahead. The space was narrow, claustrophobic. Behind me, another presence solidified. I turned just enough to see a man in a goblin mask, cradling a weapon with the telltale hum of researcher-grade tech.
I looked back to the one in front of me and spoke calmly. “I recognize you. Leader of New Seamark. Unofficially, the dogs of the Company.”
His expression did not change.
“I want to meet your leader,” I continued. “We’re old friends.”
I tried to assess him, but my sensors slid off uselessly. No clean read. No emotional spike. I remembered the file I had skimmed earlier, something about metallization, full or partial. Steel skin, maybe more.
Before he could respond, a voice drifted down from above.
“If you’re a friend of Eclipse,” the voice said, amused and cautious at the same time, “then I should know you. But I don’t recognize you.”
I looked up. A woman stood on the ledge, but my vision refused to settle on her. Cognitive interference rippled around her silhouette, bending perception just enough to keep her indistinct.
“The name’s Solstice,” she continued. “Now spill. Eclipse’s female friend, who are you?”
I met her unseen eyes and answered truthfully. “Someone on the run.”