Kira Vex stepped into the grove where the trees glowed with neon circuits in their bark. Fixers used this place because the static killed every signal. She came for a payout big enough to move her family out of the slums for good. One job. That was the pitch. The fixer waited near a trunk humming pink and gold. He slid a chip across his palm. The number on it was clean, real, life-changing. "The client is Kieran Voss," he said. "Every gang in the city wants him in a hole. You get him out alive, the money is yours." Kira thought about the apartment block she passed sometimes on the clean side of the river — glass walls, balconies, her mother on one of them. Then she thought about the glowing lotus blossoms blooming on lampposts three blocks deep in every direction. Four colors. Four factions. All watching this district. All watching Voss. She closed her hand around the chip. "I'll take him." The fixer nodded and walked away. Kira stood alone under the burning branches, already counting the guns between her and the door.

Kira left the grove with the chip warm in her pocket and a plan already forming. She would find Voss before the gangs did. But back in her room, a battered radio on her shelf hissed to life on its own. A voice cut through the static. It was Voss. He knew her name. He knew where she slept. "Don't trust the people around you," he said. "They've already bought someone close to you. Come alone. Boarded warehouse, rusted doors. I'll be inside." The signal died. Kira stood very still. Her sister's face came to mind, then her mother's. She pushed both away. She took the long route. Two blocks from the warehouse, she spotted it — a small camera bolted to a concrete wall, red light blinking slow. That camera had no business in this dead stretch. Someone was paying to watch this street. Voss wasn't lying about being hunted. He might not be lying about the rest. Kira slipped through the rusted door. Voss sat in the dark, thinner than his bounty photos, eyes sharp. "You came alone," he said. "Good. Because whoever told your family you run errands? They sold your route this morning." Kira's stomach dropped. The job was still alive. But now the leak was inside her own house.

Voss's words hung in the warehouse dark. Kira's mind ran the clock. If her route was sold this morning, buyers were already moving on her home. Her mother. Her sister. She pulled her phone and sent one word to her sister: Out. Now. Library. Then she ran. She cut through back lots toward the slum block. The shared courtyard came into view — cracked concrete, sagging clotheslines, the ring of metal chairs where neighbors drank tea. Two men she didn't know stood by the door. Wrong coats. Wrong shoulders. Kira slowed behind a wall and watched her sister slip out a side window, pulling their mother by the wrist. They'd gotten the message. They were moving. Kira waved them toward the vine-choked archway at the back of the lot. The flowered passage spilled into a narrow path almost no one used. Her family ducked through it. Kira followed, heart hammering, and pulled the gate shut behind them. Behind her, a shout went up in the courtyard. The buyers had figured it out a breath too late. She brought her family to the old brick library with the frosted glass doors — her fallback, used twice before. Inside, her mother sat shaking. Her sister stared at her, not asking, already knowing. Kira locked the door and breathed. Her family was safe for tonight. But the leak was still in their house, the job wasn't done, and every coin she'd saved would now go to hiding them. Again.

Kira left her family at the library and stepped back into the district. A tall watch crane now loomed over the rooftops, its searchlights swinging slow across the streets. The buyers had set up eyes. Every corner she crossed risked a face match. She pulled the worn city ID from her jacket and clipped it to her collar. A different name. A different woman. She ducked into a small strip mall — a glowing noodle place and a laundry shop wedged side by side. Steam from the laundry fogged the windows. She moved through the back, past stacked baskets, and out a service door into the next lane. The crane's light swept the street she'd just left. She kept walking, head down, ID swinging at her chest. Two men in wrong coats stood at the corner ahead, scanning faces. Kira slowed her pace and lifted the ID as she passed, bored, tired, a worker heading home. One man glanced at the card. His eyes slid off her. They let her go. She reached a quiet block and breathed. She had crossed the district unseen. But her savings were gone to the safe house, the leak was still in her family's circle, and the crane was still turning. She was free for the night — and further from getting them out than she had been at dawn.

Kira walked three blocks before she understood the shape of her new problem. The buyers had paid for her route and gotten nothing. They wanted their money back or her body to show for it. A price on a courier spread fast in this city. Every street ear would be listening for her name by morning. She needed to know how much they were offering, and she needed to kill the tip line before it filled. She found the corner she wanted. A wooden bench sat under a dim streetlight, initials cut deep into the slats from years of waiting men. Two runners leaned against the armrest, trading whispers for coins. Above the bench, bolted to the wall, hung a concrete plate with red letters and a black sprayed face. A fresh strip of tape ran across the bottom with a number written in marker. Her number. She read the figure and felt her stomach drop. It was three times what the fixer had promised for the whole job. Anyone who saw her tonight would sell her before breakfast. She crossed the street with her head low and stopped at a brick building with frosted glass panels along the front. A bathhouse. The kind of place where a woman could pay at the door, hand over her coat, and vanish for a night into steam and shared benches. No cameras inside. No names asked. She counted what was left in her jacket. Enough for two nights if she ate nothing. She pushed through the door, paid the woman at the counter, and took a towel. In the back room she scrubbed the district off her skin and sat against the tile until her hands stopped shaking. She was off the street. The bounty could not reach her through the walls tonight. But sitting in the steam, she did the math she had been avoiding. The bounty meant the buyers would not stop. Every job she took in this city from now on would carry her face on that wall. The work she used to feed her family had just become the thing that would get her killed in front of them. She had bought one night of quiet with the last coins meant for a deposit on a room outside the district. The safe house money was already gone. Now the hiding money was going too. When she walked out of the bathhouse in the morning, she would have to find a buyer of her own — someone willing to pay for what she knew about Voss, and about the fixer who sent her after him. She had spent her career refusing to sell information. That rule ended tonight.

Kira had not slept. She sat on a tile bench with the towel across her knees and listened to the pipes hiss above her. Somewhere past midnight, a woman came in from the front room and set a cup of tea beside her without a word. On the saucer lay a folded scrap of paper. Kira opened it. Three words in pencil: seen at post. She knew what it meant. A runner had watched her cross the street last night under the broken lamp on the corner. He had sold the sighting for coin. By dawn the buyers would have men at every door of this building. She had maybe an hour before the block closed around her. She dressed fast. The spa sat below street level, one steel hatch on the roof and one wooden door at the front. The front was already lost. She went to the woman at the counter and asked about the hatch. The woman named a price. Kira had nothing left in her jacket, so she pulled the thin silver ring off her thumb and set it on the counter. Her sister had given it to her four years ago. The woman took it, weighed it in her palm, and pointed at a narrow stair behind the boiler. Kira climbed. The hatch groaned open onto the flat roof, cold air on her wet hair. She stayed low and crossed to the back edge. Below her, a rusted chain-link fence stretched across the alley mouth, a yellow closure notice bolted to the middle. Fresh. It had not been there yesterday. Two men stood on the far side of it, waiting. She turned and looked toward the front street. Under the cracked lamp on the corner, three more men had gathered around the runner who had sold her. They were pointing at the front door. She had guessed right about the hour. She had guessed wrong about the number of exits. She went back to the hatch and dropped down one floor, into the pipe room above the baths. A vent shaft ran along the outer wall, wide enough for a body. She worked the grate loose and crawled. The shaft dumped her into a service tunnel two buildings over, ankle deep in warm runoff. She followed the water until it fed a drain under a different street, then climbed out through a loose grate behind a shuttered stall. She was three blocks from where the hunters stood. She was also broke, wet, and out of hiding places. The bathhouse was burned. The ring was gone. But she was walking, and the buyer she needed to find would not be awake for another two hours. She started moving toward the factory district before the sun came up.