Skedaddle. Death march. It’s all the same, really.

Amidst all the questions fluttering through Kira’s brain, one golden note had stuck out its arm above the mess and was waving for notice. While Arata collected his backpack, she stepped over the head of a criminal organization of which she possessed only vague hints of its massive reach, his right-hand soldier, and his men, bodies unceremoniously sprawled out on the floor like dolls.

Retribution would come – of that, she was certain – upon waking. They all would conclude an attack had come from a party under scrutiny (There were no feasible ways to prove it hadn’t) who’d fled immediately rather than stick around. Anyone truly innocent would have done opposite.

The gavel was already whistling down in a three-taloned hand. What was one more sin on the pile when the crosshairs were already centered on their heads?

Spinning the logic around and around, Kira lifted the case from the guard’s limp hand, both of her own straining with the weight of ill-gotten wealth conveniently bundled up for easy taking. It would have to suffice. Unless…

“Arata, can you take the other case?”

He moved as though he hadn’t heard her. Unzipping the backpack, he stowed the blood smeared crystal inside, moving mechanically, heart seemingly not in agreement with the act.

“Arata?” she repeated.

“I’ll need both hands free soon.” A vein jumped out in his neck as he snapped eyes to hers. “Where’s your mind at right now? Can you fight?” He frowned at her nod. “Not good enough. I’d prefer you scared.” His hand withdrew from the bag holding two opalescent chunks the length of a finger, wire wrapped around their cores – thief stones.

“Shock and awe?” she asked, swallowing.

“Only if you can’t keep these goons off of us.” From the stones to the bodies his eyes shifted, hand rocking.

“Are you insane?”

“Are you aware of the shit we’re about to be in? He’s gonna be sore about this, being robbed blind.” The case grew heavier in her hands as Arata spoke. “Nah, forget sore – Don’s gonna be more pissed than I’ve ever seen. He’ll hunt us down, skin us alive and salt our muscles for the pleasure. Make an example of our suffering. Frightened yet?” Arata looked Kira up and down. “No? Well, worth a shot.”

Kira rocked back at the frivolity of his speech, shock leaving no breach for the fear he’d hoped to instill. Her face was overcome with a blank look. A strange sort of silence settled over her brain, spilling over the thoughts with tongues of glue and industrial foam, pressing in, as she watched him saunter towards the door. There was a carefree air about him smelling so sweet it nearly covered up the wrongness. She’d noticed it behind his eyes. Something more than the anxiety of the situation closing down on them.

He unwound the copper wire on the first stone, hand cocking back to throw. The guards just on the other side, backs studiously angled to the attack, would be caught unawares.

“Arata, wait!” Kira called, stopping him. “We shouldn’t be in such a rush to raise alarm. No one’s come to subdue us yet, so the other members likely don’t know what’s happened.” She nervously watched him twirl the ceramic between bloody fingers.

After a breath, he lowered his arm. Still he kept a hold on the thief stone. “Fine. We’ll do this your way. Lead on, moneybags.” Moving aside to let her pass, he grumbled, “Doubt they’ll let you through by just knocking.”

She gave the door two quick raps, and it opened.

As she walked, Kira bounced the case against her knees, filling the hallway with the happy, metallic sound of a fine transaction having occurred. The guards barely spared her a glance, their eyes dutifully forward as she proceeded to the staircase. When the moment came, Arata raised his bloody hand to his forehead in mock salute.

“At ease, gentlemen.”

In his other hand was the thief stone concealed. Already prepped, he waited until the men’s eyes noticed the injury, catching the door before it closed and passing out of sight through the portal.

“Bet it doesn’t you take more than a second,” he said. Like a globule of mucus from his fingernail, he let the ceramic shard fly.

Kira turned her head. “Did you say something?”

A reflection off the thief stone caught her attention, and her vision was drawn to the door at the moment of contact. When the ringing in her ears had subsided, she saw the door had vanished, its hinges erased. Chunks of stone around its frame were reduced to powder, peppered with red blots across the remaining structure. Dust and particles of stone worried her throat. She coughed up a lungful of rancid, grey air, now brimming with dust and particles of stone produced by the sudden application of thousands of pounds of force. Arata sprinted past, a smiling, grey-faced specter shrouded in destruction.

“I said we’d better run!”

Thrill radiated from him, and the cheer ran cold fingers up Kira’s spine, powering her forward as shouts of alarm ran through the hall. “Do you even know the way out?”

“Like my feel of my own stones in hand!”

With little choice, she dogged his steps through the maze of halls they’d earlier passed through, turning when he called to. Shouts seemed to come from every direction. An army of the Don’s personal men were coming not to nip at their heels but to maul them bloody. More than once a slice of face sped around a corner just as they turned, eyes alight, searching, weapons drawn. Gun or a wand she knew not which, nor held any desire to find out.

At the first of the false walls, now closed, Arata unstrung his second thief stone and hurled it overhand. Shrieks of pain ripped through the din as the wall exploded inward, honeyed in the scent of burnt pig and gasoline. Arata leapt whooping through the hole he’d made. Kira stepped over the crumbling remains of plaster and wood in a hurry, trying not to think about what squished underneath her foot or the haggard moans slipping through the rubble littered across the room’s floor. It was a cramped space, little more than a desk and an alchemical lamp hung from the ceiling, a block of fuel in the tin radiating faintly green. Arata knelt in the remains of blackened documents, still smoldering as he drew his master key and slotted an iridescent tile of fuel into its receiver, igniting a short white blade into existence. “Keep my back protected, Kira. I’ll get us out of this.” He stabbed the tool into the second false wall, leaning his weight into the motion as he burned a hole downward.

Kira watched the lamp swing, blinking slowly. An image of it in negative drifted before her through the lightless moments. She was drawn to it. The shadows lengthening and shortening over the floor, the broken plaster, the tile cracked into pieces, the hand curled like a dead spider…

“KIRA!”

The backpack struck her chest and clattered to the floor, the world outside their potential coffin visibly coming alive at the same time. A syrupy orange light flooded the hall from one wall to another, bodies stacking up behind the semi-translucent barrier: the gang setting up shop.

The master key blew out in Arata’s hands at the first corner of the hole. Swearing, he jerked back the ejector pin along the railing, inserting a fresh alchemical core to replace the one now smoking at his feet. “Blasting wand in each hand, baby. Shattering wand if they’re too close. Light these assholes up before they do us in first.”

“Wouldn’t be needing to light anyone up if you hadn’t given us away!” Stowing the reward money in cover, she dumped the backpack’s contents out without regard for what lay within onto the floor around her. Out rolled a trio of carved wooden shafts. One was ringed at its handle with metal loops. The other two were decorated with red wax, and warmed Kira’s hands.

She’d never held one before, but the concept was simple. Visualize the spell being cast, imagine its breath chasing down a foe. Replicated across books depicting sorcerers and wizards of yore, their images plastered on billboards with iconic foci in hand, even children knew how to use one without any real instruction. What mattered most was the visualization. Imagining oneself loosening a cloud of frigid mist would produce zip from a wand intended to fill rooms with noxious gas.

These wands were warm: heat likely meant flames.

A bolt of green lightning surged through the hallway, forking into three more. Each emerald finger contorted into the hole, curling inward, to strike where any competent wielder would have taken cover in along the wall. One bolt lanced through the plaster just above Kira’s head, and an odor of burning hair swept through her nostrils. She smothered them quickly, scalded fingers barely felt over the tidal wave of blistering rage.

Rising from her knees, she snaked a hand around the corner and took aim at the barrier, mind engulfed with the rage of dragons.

“Bastards!” Her wand belched flame – a great gout that scorched the halls between them and the guards, rolling the length of their barrier, but dissipating before it might have crested the shield’s border. A hand entered her sight, and she imagined a pinpoint magma bolt. The wand complied, pinging a condensed projectile off the enemy defense with the scream of a firework. She heard another plink of spent fuel.

“Keep it up! I’m almost through! Wands have only got so much juice though, so don’t go too crazy.”

“It’s not likely they’re coming for us now.”

Multicolored lights converged downrange, swirling like petals in spring. She launched another blast when they swept in for the kill, coughing as smoke filled the air. Nearly every square centimeter of the no man’s land was drenched by flame, eating at the hideout’s structure, and for a second concern for their fragile lives under the buildings around and above touched her thoughts.

It was soon replaced by interest for the orange mass behind the shield, and the two narrowing flecks of red set inside, growing from the mass almost like a neck. “How much more time do you need?” she asked, hysteria sneaking into her tone.

Plink

“Almost there.”

It stepped over the barrier; louder than the din, it was, the footpaws of the great beast. Orange nestled in blackened rib bones, oozing between the barrier and ravaged walls, heedless of flame.

Plink

“Hopefully I’ve spent enough time at the gym!”

The doorway he’d carved was only still connected to the false wall by a few centimeters of support, but it gave way to a single focused kick from the blacksmith. Fresh air tinged with grease rushed in. Arata disappeared through the hole hollering, and Kira soon after: one wand clenched between her teeth, case in her hands.

They arrived in the back room they’d entered from, the rolling metal door now in front of them the last divide to be overcome.

“Too solid! Go right!” Arata called. “We’ll cut through the eatery.” He turned, door rattling their names, as he flung open another windowless one. The smell of garlic and meat ballooned into the room along with the telltale bubbles of cooking, shouts of surprise, and the gaped silence of interrupted chatter as two thieves bolted through the narrow lanes of the kitchen. The chef who attempted to apprehend Kira screamed when his fingers touched her arm, the stovetop beside him popping as its circuits overloaded, their safety features bypassed, and the resultant flames overheating the pots until the liquid inside erupted, showering the chef and his patrons with boiling hot oil. Arata and Kira joined in the stampede to leave; the catalysts for further chaos. Rampant magic tugged at the wires of every light, every electronic scrap. Forced the lights to strobe. Disabled the fire suppression system. Scrambled the clocks and the smallest timers and the minds of any who so much as brushed against the girl reeking of smoke and burnt hair. Cries echoed through the alleyway.

And from the heart of the flames bellowed a guttural roar.

Kira caught the tail of the beast in her periphery as it leapt up, up, up the alley walls, semi-translucent claws digging into the building for grip before leaping off onto the opposite end and then forward, crashing down to ground in a snarling mass of fur and teeth. Eyes like rubies glowered at the pair as they skidded to a halt, their escape visible through the orange and black-striped body of the creature that now blocked their path.

“You have to be joking,” she muttered, atavistic terror rising her stomach. She held up the case and backpack like a two-layered shield. “That’s an entire tiger.”

“Come on, you’ve never seen a manifestation before? You really gotta get outside more.” He grinned, but Arata’s voice quavered almost noticeably as the shaking in the forest of power cables overhead. The creature built by magic was beginning to wear on the world of modernity around it. “It’ll be on a leash. Hand me the shattering wand,” he whispered, taking a step back.

Figuring it wasn’t the one in her mouth or its twin, she tossed him the iron-banded wand. The tiger’s eyes tracked the movement, head snapping to Arata. A deep roar roiled from its throat as it leapt.

Arata pushed Kira out of the way through the backpack. Barely missing the telephone pole, she struck the alley wall, stars dancing in her vision as the tiger’s spectral body passed by without breeze, Arata going low and into a somersault to avoid all four raking claws.

She saw it then: a wisp of smoke like an umbilical cord trailing from the tiger’s hindquarters, just above its tail. A wisp that could have been mistaken for smoke. Arata stuck out his leg, using his free hand to push himself from a roll into a better position from which he could aim.

“What’s a cool thing to say at this moment?”

The spectral foe started to turn, cinders of the burning building casting the tiger in glare without shadow, and his own eyes lit up. Kira snuck into the nook between wall and pole, a grin splitting Arata’s face as he shouted. Violet light swelled at the wand’s end.

“SO LONG, FAIR PUSSYCAT!”

Wind scythed through the alley in a tremendous burst. Stone, metal, beast, and wire were ravaged, great furrows sliced through all encompassed in the spell, save for Kira who squeezed herself further into cover, only feeling the slightest pressures in the ends of her shoes, the material suffering little more than a few cuts in those seconds of hiding while the tiger was unraveled, whose demise Kira was offered the perfect seat to watch it turn from specter to dust when its leash was severed. She rose shakily once the last mote had fallen.

Around the pole, cast sharply in flame’s light, Arata tapped the wand’s smoking end against his lips, deep in thought. “No. ‘A fairer pussycat I would know” sounds better. I’ll have to remember that one.” The scraping of Kira’s case against the backpack broke his reverie, and he waved. Flames continued to feast on the eatery, but no further enemies would come chasing from its depths.

Kira lugged herself over to him. She felt battered. Flames had salted her in flavor, and the first swell of a lump was forming on her head. At least having black hair meant the burned portion could be hidden.

Her arms were sore down to the bone, and the case wasn’t lightening its load any time soon. Not until they found a safe space to split the stolen reward. “Your place, or mine?” she asked. His grin widening, she immediately regretted the poor word choice.

“Ah, a proposition every man prays to hear,” he replied, spinning the shattering wand between his fingers. “But the hotels have a certain charm to them, so I choose that.”

Kira was about to deliver a scathing reply about the forfeiture of his cut, when the flames suddenly froze. Arata noticed it as well, and all cheer drained from his face. Before their eyes the flames receded, dousing themselves, some unseen force slurping light and heat back through the kitchen – back the direction they’d came – leaving the charred skeleton of the eatery behind and them absent all illumination.

“My place. I choose my place,” he hurriedly said. The two vanished into the night, making off like the thieves they were.