A spray of wet, red mist filled the space above the Shimmerskin’s shoulders.

  For a half-second, the room was frozen in the tableau of what had just happened. Drefleck’s body remained upright, as if it hadn’t quite gotten the memo yet, hands still mid-gesture, before it finally decided that the absence of a head was a critical issue and slumped forward onto the ruined desk.

  Blood fanned out across the papers.

  Someone was shouting. Lowe thought it might well be him. He should be moving. He knew that. He knew that. Every muscle in his body screamed at him to do something. To dive for cover. To return fire. To react. But his mind had already left not just the room, it had left the present. And was back in a dingy cafe opposite a park.

  Again.

  Then he was watching as the park erupted into chaos with the horrifying suddenness of the end of his world. Faulks had been mid-sentence, still trying to steer Highberg away from the bench, when her head exploded. Her blood and Drefleck’s merged in his mind. A bloody fog of horror.

  A crack of an explosion. The sound echoing off the buildings.

  Then silence.

  Then screaming.

  “SNIPER!” someone had yelled.

  No.

  Not someone.

  It was Rook.

  But present-day Rook. The Threshold Guardian, version. Not his friend who had ceased being alive on that day. The urgent, screaming voice overlapped with the one in Lowe’s memory, and he felt the sting of the memory crash down on him. The unbearable wrongness of it all. The bodies falling in the park. The body collapsing here. The sudden, obliterating certainty that people around him were dying. Again! That he was too slow. Again! That if he turned his head again there would be another lifeless crater where someone he knew had been standing—

  Another explosion.

  Another body hitting the ground.

  Arman.

  No. Latham.

  It was all blurring together.

  A golden lance of light speared down from above, vaporizing Highberg in a burst of heat and judgment.

  No, that wasn’t right.

  That was before. This was now. And Rook was moving.

  Lowe saw him through the haze, shifting toward the shattered window, some sort of blade already in hand, eyes scanning the rooftops. “There! Corner of Mesmerism and Fortune. On the rooftop,” he said, pointing with his knife. When did Rook start carrying a knife? “Lowe!”

  Then his body was moving before his mind had fully caught up and he was running before the next explosion occurred.

  His boots hit Morholt’s desk, then his chair, and then the floor. Lowe crossed the room in a heartbeat and - for reasons which he would have struggled to explain - chose to fling himself through the broken window.

  Glass caught the light as it spun around him, shards of it glittering like spots of frozen time.

  The onrushing street below was a blur coming up to meet him, a rush of movement and voices and unaware civilians going about their day as if the last five seconds hadn’t rewritten their everything. Lowe supposed it hadn’t. Not for them. But, then again, they weren’t in pursuit of their Nemesis.

  Lowe crash landed on the pavement. Hard. In a way that suggested he had, at some point in the descent, made several critical miscalculations regarding physics, momentum, and his own invulnerability. Unfortunately, with his now very high Perception he got to appreciate every single one of those miscalculations in excruciating, frame-by-frame detail.

  He’s noticed, for instance, the way his ankle twisted just as he hit the window frame. He’d noticed the slight, wet pop as it dislocated itself, followed by the way the rest of his leg immediately gave up and flopped beneath him like a fish. He’d also noticed the sensation of his ribs folding inwards as his torso made an enthusiastic and rather final-sounding introduction to the cobblestone, which were—surprise, surprise!—much less forgiving than they had initially appeared. Then he noticed, mid-bounce, that his shoulder had definitely exited its assigned seating arrangement.

  And he certainly noticed, upon landing, that the reason he was struggling to inhale might have something to do with the fact that his lungs were currently experiencing an unsanctioned field trip outside of their usual containment zone.

  He lay there for a long, rather too thoughtful moment, his body an abstract study in wrong angles. One of those thoughts was how the tableau could have been entitled ‘this is why people don’t jump out of fifth floor windows.’

  Then Roll With The Punches kicked in.

  Oh, goody.

  And because the universe wasn’t content with simply breaking him into little pieces, it decided he needed to be fully cognisant of the healing process, too. Arkola’s help with raising his Perception wasn’t seeming such a boon right about now.

  Bone snapped back into place, muscles stitched themselves together, and—somewhere within him—his organs politely but firmly rearranged themselves back to their original locations. Lowe groaned once, twice and then staggered upright

  “Well,” he said, rolling his reassembled shoulder and waving to the horrified bystanders who’d witnessed his fall. “That was somewhat unnecessary.”

  Then he ran.

  Above him, he could hear Latham roaring something out of the broken window after him, but he didn’t stop to listen and the exact words were lost in the wind.

  He couldn’t stop. Arbella had been taken and, if it was the last thing he did, it would be to make sure he didn’t have to find her body in an abandoned warehouse with all that fucking laughing going on. Because if it wasn’t the Shimmerskins that had taken his friends, that really did leave only one logical option.

  If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

  There was no time for hesitation. Bodies were not going to pile up while he stood there trying to piece it all together. Not again. This time, he was going to be fast enough. He wasn’t going to be there in time.

  The building Rook had been pointing at wasn’t actually too far, but plenty far enough to be a problem to get at quickly. Saying that, though, Lowe’s path looked clear enough, in the same way that Soar’s streets were ever clear—which was to say, they were enthusiastically occupied by drunks, street vendors, lost tourists, and all sorts of opportunists who saw a man fall to what should have been his death and immediately wondered whether his pockets were worth picking.

  Lowe hit the first stack of crates piled up against a wall, his boots landing with a thunk that sent a disgruntled Fishmonger cursing into the night. He ignored him, focused on the next step on his way up and into the sky—a market awning, stretched wide over some very questionable fruit.

  He leapt and his foot hit fabric, dipped alarmingly, and then responded enthusiastically to his weight, flinging him upwards. Lowe scrabbled as he flew untethered and then began yet another rapid descent. Fortunately, his fingertips grazed the edge of the first rooftop - the one he had been aiming at. It was slate and wet, which was profoundly unhelpful to his current situation. He grabbed it anyway, muscles straining as he managed to haul himself up onto the flat roof.

  A flower pot exploded next to his head and he rolled. It appeared his target wasn’t all that content to have him close the distance unmolested.

  "Oi!" someone bellowed from an unseen window above him. "Some of us are tryin’ to sleep!"

  Lowe chose not dignify this with a response, mostly because he was already back to his feet and running, dashing across the uneven rooftop with the single-minded urgency of a man who had just remembered that snipers, famously, did not love close quarter melee fighting.

  The next jump was a bastard.

  The building across from him was just far enough to make Lowe’s attempt to cross it seem mildly suicidal, but also just close enough that not trying was the sort of thing cowards and people who liked having intact femurs did.

  It turned out that, on this night and in this mood, Lowe wasn’t either of those.

  He took three quick strides, pushed off—

  And landed, rolling into a hard shoulder slam against a chimney stack that belched out an irritable puff of soot. Lowe, in sympathy, coughed right back, staggered - Roll with the Punches refusing bone - and then kept moving to the spot Rook had pinpointed.

  As he ran, the city sprawled below him, all twisting alleys and shivering manalight. It was a network of gutters and broken cobbles that had never been kind to him. And, dominating the skyline was the Celestial Temple. He hoped Arkola was enjoying the latest episode in the shitshow that was Lowe’s life. Probably with a box of divine popcorn.

  Somewhere behind him, someone was shouting, but that didn’t matter. The next ledge was waiting. And up. And that was the only thing that mattered right now. Lowe hit the final ledge and hauled himself over, breath coming heavily as he landed in a crouch. Mylaf’s jokes about his expanding waistline didn’t seem quite so cruel right about now. He used to do this sort of pursuit for fun. Taking a moment to orientate himself, he looked out on almost the whole of Soar stretched out before him—twisted chimneys, slumping rooftops, the endless sprawl of old brick and opportunistic expansion, a city stitched together.

  His gaze swept the rooftop.

  There.

  A shadow moved at the far edge of the roof he was on, just past the flickering glow of a mana lantern. A man. Long coat. A crossbow—no, not quite. The shape was wrong, the angles too clean, but Lowe didn’t wait to analyse it any further. His hands filled with Slugger, mana coursing down his arms as his fingers clenched, ready to charge—

  And then he became aware of the attacks. They were a weight in his skull. A pressure that almost made his thoughts tilt and reality bend. His body locked up for a fraction of a second, a sickening, ice-hot pull in his head . . . But then Mental Fortress asserted itself and his manacle pulsed, with blast after blast of mana draining away as his Skill slammed into place, blocking the unseen mental assault before it could take hold.

  Lowe groaned as all his available mana vanished in an instant. No. Not quite all of it, not yet, but far too much. And far too quickly. It might say Level 26 above his head, but he had the mana pool of twice that and it took more than a few psychic buffers to drain that ocean dry. However, with each assault his Skills deflected away, the shadow in front of him blurred, vanished and then reappeared. Then vanished again.

  Further mental attacks slammed into him, but Mental Fortress took the hit, chewing up another chunk of his mana as his mind was dragged into a pull and push of Pressure and attempted foreign influence. However, each attack ultimately failed and the shadowy man he was running towards glitched out and vanished again. Was it an illusion?

  Lowe shook his head and tried to concentrate. He was still himself. Still here. But, if he wasn’t careful - and these attacks kept rolling in - he was in danger of running out of mana. Which considering all the damage Roll with the Punches was still trying to sort out, wasn’t likely an ideal state of being.

  Then his manacle flickered and Pressure surged through his body, heat rolling down his limbs, burning through his exhaustion. Lowe thought about using it for retaliation, but if he did that and the attack didn’t stick, he was screwed. He opted instead for a full mana refresh, feeding off the surge which allowed his mind to snap back into focus and really push away whatever was trying to befuddle him.

  This caused the shadow of the man with the strange crossbow to disappear for the last time.

  At first, Lowe thought finally defeating the mental Skill had left him alone on the rooftop. But no. He wasn’t quite on his own. Because in the man’s place, there was a box. Lowe’s step hitched as he closed in on it. And not because of what it was. But because of how many times he’d seen it before.

  It was a small wooden box, cheap and mass-produced, the kind sold in every single joke shop in Soar. Lowe knew this, because he had asked. Researched. Thoroughly explored each and every sale of this particular box throughout the city. It was roughly the size of a man’s palm, with a crude etching of lips stretched into a grin burned into the lid.

  A Laughing Box, it was called.

  A box that, when opened, would do nothing more than let out a high-pitched, distorted cackle. In reality, it was just a cheap gimmick. A joke. Something street magicians used to amuse children before lifting their purses. Funnily enough, in the context in which he came across them, Lowe had never really seen the funny side.

  He stooped and picked the box up, his fingers hovering over the lid. Not yet ready to see what was inside. For a moment, he just looked at it. So small. So utterly, insultingly ordinary. He already suspected what was going to happen when he flicked it open. The laugh would start immediately. Thin, mechanical, and warped from overuse. He’d heard that sound far too often.

  But, on this occasion, it wasn’t the laughter that made beads of sweat pop out on his head. No, on this night, and on this rooftop, the thing that caused him dread was because of what the box contained. A piece of card with an image impressed on it.

  The picture was small and square and, slightly curled at the edges where it had been tucked beneath the mechanism of the box. It was a group picture. Arebella. Hel. Karolen. Ortel.

  All of them. They were tied up, faces pale, drawn and utterly furious.

  Lowe’s grip on the box tightened as his Perception flared and he locked onto the details, ensuring Grid View was firing as he did so. His friends didn’t appear to be hurt in the picture. They weren’t bloody. But they were clearly very stressed. His friends were being held.

  But that wasn’t the worse thing, was it?

  No. That was the single folded note that lay at the very bottom of the box. Lowe pulled it out,, unfolded it, and read the single word in familiar handwriting.

  Checkmate.

  Lowe stared at it for a moment, before closing the box.

  The laughter stopped.