Dirty Tricks

Apricot pressed on, her breath cutting short as she broke into a jog. The outline of the Okabe Central Bank loomed from the haze—more bunker than building. Its concrete bulk squatted in the streetlight, armored in steel and mirrored glass that threw back warped reflections of the chaos below. One panel was shattered, a spiderweb of cracks glinting like ice under floodlights. The massive holo-banner above it flickered—Emerald Mark Accounts: The Future of Security—before glitching into static.

The air hit her first. Acrid, electric. Sweat, tear gas, and engine exhaust thick enough to taste.

A crowd had gathered—no, converged—into a human tide spilling across the intersection. Protestors waved cardboard and polymer signs that caught the light like flashing blades. “FOR THE PEOPLE! NOT FOR THE OKABE!” The chant rolled through the air, growing until it became the rhythm of the day itself.

Apricot slowed, skidding to a stop at the crowd’s edge, one hand gripping a street pole for balance. The vibration of the chant thudded through the pavement into her palm. Her chest burned; her ankle throbbed with every pulse of blood. Around her, faces were lit in stark flashes—anger, fear, defiance, all flickering like frames of film.

Dozens of police in composite armor formed a black wall across the bank’s marble steps. Their visors gleamed, hiding their eyes but not their tension. Riot shields overlapped like scales, catching the light as the crowd surged forward, testing the line. A bottle arced through the air and shattered near the barricade, releasing a burst of cheap liquor and flame. The front row of protestors screamed, pushed back, then surged forward again.

Apricot forced herself into the press, shoulder-first. The heat was unbearable—too many bodies, too much breath. Someone shouted in her ear; another shoved her from behind. The world narrowed to the shove of bodies and the stink of panic. She ducked beneath a waving placard—KEEP POLICE PUBLIC!—and slipped through a gap in the fencing before it closed.

Past the riot gates, red and blue lights strobed over the bank façade, painting the steps in alternating blood and blossom hues. Drones buzzed overhead like hornets, their lenses adjusting to every movement. Through the gaps in the shields, Apricot caught the shimmer of weapons drawn but not yet raised.

Her pulse kicked. This wasn’t just a protest anymore—it was a match waiting for flame. And somewhere inside that fortress of glass and concrete, the story she’d been chasing all night was breathing, waiting for her to find it.

Apricot pushed toward the front line, her voice cutting through the roar. “I’m with the media!” she shouted, craning her neck toward the tallest officer she could spot—a mountain of black armor with rank markings etched in silver. His helmet lights cast her in a sterile glow, catching the nervous twitch at the corner of her mouth. She stretched onto her toes, forcing a professional smile that trembled under the strain. “Let me through!”

The officer turned his head slightly, his visor reflecting the red-blue chaos behind her. Only the hard line of his jaw showed beneath the mask. “Press passes only,” he barked, the words flattened by his voice modulator—more machine than man.

Apricot’s hands flew to her coat pockets, then her skirt, then the inner lining. Nothing. Her heart dropped. The satchel—she could almost see it, sitting forgotten beside Machi’s boots at the plaza bench. Her press ID, her recorder, everything.

She swallowed hard, forcing out words that tripped over each other. “I—I left it, sir. My badge. It was an emergency, I came straight here. I’m a journalist, a student reporter for—”

“Everyone’s a journalist tonight,” he cut in, his tone like a steel door slamming shut.

The noise around them swelled. A man beside her—middle-aged, red-faced, his tie askew—waved a cracked tablet overhead. “I’m press too! You can’t block the truth!”

On Apricot’s left, a woman with a cheap handheld camera shoved forward, shouting, “Let me through, I have a pass!” The crowd pressed tighter, voices fusing into a single desperate chorus of claims and outrage.

Apricot could feel the heat of the officer’s armor radiating against her skin, the faint hum of his powered suit like a living thing. Somewhere in the crush, a chant shifted tempo, growing sharper, angrier. Her pulse kept pace with it. She wasn’t getting through—not like this.

It was chaos—raw, vibrating, alive. Floodlights bled white glare across the street, throwing every movement into harsh relief. Apricot stood in it like a target, the officer’s bulk towering over her. His patience snapped in real time; she saw it in the sharp tilt of his helmet, the stiff twitch of his shoulder.

He raised a gloved finger and pointed straight at her. “No credentials, no entry. Period.” His voice hit like a gunshot through the modulator, cold and final. “You think I need a reason to haul you in? Back. Off.”

Apricot froze, the words cutting clean through the crowd’s noise. Beneath the helmet’s reflection, she couldn’t see his eyes—just her own face, small and trembling, staring back from the mirrored surface. The press of bodies behind her made it hard to breathe. This was it. Dead end.

Still, instinct took over. “Officer,” she began, voice pitched high with urgency, “what about the robbery? Can you comment on what’s happening inside? Are there hostages? Any official statement from Okabe secur—”

The baton came down—not a blow, but a warning. Its tip pressed against her shoulder, hard enough to make her flinch. “That’s enough out of you,” he said, his voice dropping low, almost human for an instant. “No statements. Back up and disperse before I charge you with obstruction.”

Behind him, two more officers shifted into line, hands resting on their holsters. The air between them thickened, humming with restrained threat.

Apricot’s pulse spiked. She threw up her hands, palms out. “Okay! Okay… understood.” Her voice cracked on the last word.

The baton lingered a beat longer, then withdrew. She stepped back, each movement slow and deliberate, fighting the urge to run. The weight of her own heartbeat pounded in her throat. The story—her story—was right there, sealed behind a wall of glass and guns, and she was powerless to reach it.

As she slipped back into the crowd, the noise swallowed her whole. The chants came in waves, colliding with the bark of police loudspeakers: Disperse immediately. This is your final warning. She could taste the static in the air, feel the sweat and fear rolling off the mob.

Frustration burned hot in her chest. She wasn’t leaving—not yet. Not without proof that something more was happening inside that fortress. She’d come too far to walk away now.

“Dammit,” Apricot hissed, slipping free of the crush and into a narrow pocket of quiet beside a graffiti-scrawled wall. The bricks were damp and cool, the paint a kaleidoscope of old slogans half-eaten by grime. She pressed her back to it, dragging a sleeve across her forehead. The air was thick, humid—not the season’s warmth but the fever heat of hundreds of bodies packed tight, chanting, shouting, breathing the same recycled panic.

Her pulse slowed enough for thought to creep back in. If I can’t get in, I can still show what’s happening out here. Sato would want shots—evidence of the chaos, of what Blue Ash had become when the cracks in order started to show. Maybe he was stuck on the other side of the barricade too.

She raised Sato’s camera, the strap rough against her neck. The lens powered on with a soft electronic whine, the screen blooming with cold light. Through it, the world looked distant—contained, framed, almost manageable. She zoomed in on the police line: riot shields gleaming like insect carapaces, protestors pressing forward with homemade signs and desperation in their eyes.

A baton swung. A man recoiled, face twisted in rage and pain. Click. The shutter’s sharp report cut through the chant like punctuation, freezing the moment—anger turned to artifact.

She shifted for another angle, stepping over discarded flyers and crushed water bottles. Her heel caught something solid. She stumbled, catching herself on the wall. Frowning, Apricot glanced down.

At her feet, a square metal grate broke the rhythm of the pavement. The kind meant for drains or maintenance tunnels. But this one was wrong—its edge pried up, one corner hanging loose in its frame.

Her reporter’s instinct kicked. These things were bolted down for a reason. Maybe the earlier riot tremors had shaken it loose. Or maybe someone had come through it.

She crouched, the camera swinging against her chest. Cool metal met her fingertips. She hesitated—then pulled. The grate scraped aside with a teeth-grinding squeal, and a gust of air rose from below, thick and wet. It reeked of stagnant water, rust, and something sweeter beneath—organic, decomposing, almost cloying.

Apricot’s stomach turned. She leaned closer, peering into the dark. A rusted ladder disappeared into shadow, each rung slick with condensation. The noise of the crowd faded behind her, muffled, replaced by the low mechanical hum of something alive deep underground.

Her breath hitched. Against every reasonable thought, she felt it—the pull of a story waiting in the dark.

She knew the stories about the tunnels beneath Blue Ash—half-forgotten arteries from an older age, back when the city still breathed through its subway lines and steam pipes. Maintenance corridors, drainage routes, power conduits. They said you could walk for miles down there and never see daylight again. One of her professors had once joked that Blue Ash had “many layers, like a rotten onion,” but he hadn’t been joking. The rot was real; it was built into the foundations.

Apricot’s heart kicked harder. The thought was insane—climbing into a black hole under a riot, chasing a story that could just as easily be a dead end. But staying topside meant watching it all unfold without her. Watching someone else break what she’d risked everything to find.

“To hell with it,” she whispered, voice swallowed by the roar above.

She looped the camera strap across her chest, cinching it tight, and took one last look around. The crowd was too busy shouting, too wrapped in their own fury to notice her. She swung her legs into the opening, boots scraping metal. The air from below was cool and damp against her face.

Her feet found the first rung. Then the next. The ladder trembled under her weight, old and slick with grime. A shiver ran up her arms as she gripped tighter. She could be climbing straight into a sewer—or worse, a forgotten conduit humming with live current. The thought should’ve stopped her. Instead, a voice in her head—Bonni’s reckless, teasing lilt—spurred her on: A real reporter doesn’t blink when the world gets ugly.

Apricot set her jaw and climbed down.

She reached back, pulled the grate shut overhead. The clang rang out like a lid sealing on a coffin. Then the light vanished.

The world shrank to a damp tunnel and the faint red pulse of distant bulbs. Her breathing echoed, sharp and uneven. Water—or something like it—splashed under her boots, cold as ice. Thick bundles of old pipes and newer fiber cables ran along the walls like veins. The smell was a mix of ozone, oil, and decay, heavy enough to sting her throat.

She adjusted the camera, letting its small LED cast a ghostly cone ahead. The walls were slick with condensation, graffiti faded to ghosts of color. Somewhere far down the passage, a soft hum trembled through the floor, steady and mechanical, like a sleeping machine.

Apricot walked, each step pushing her deeper beneath the city’s skin. Above, the riot’s roar faded into a low, distant rumble—thunder through layers of concrete. Down here, it felt like another world entirely. One the city had buried—and forgotten—long ago.

Up ahead, deep under the street, the air shuddered. A concussive boom tore through the tunnel, shaking loose dust and fragments of grit that rained over Apricot’s hair. She froze mid-step, breath caught. The vibration thrummed through her bones, through the damp metal pipes along the wall. That wasn’t traffic. That wasn’t thunder. It was an explosion—close, maybe inside the bank itself.

She gripped the wall to steady herself, the camera dangling against her chest. Somewhere above, Blue Ash was breaking open.

~
Above ground — Okabe Central Bank.

The day cracked open in sound and motion.

“Come out with your hands up!” a police captain bellowed through a bullhorn, his voice splitting into sharp static that cut through the midday heat. The command tore across the plaza, slicing through the roar of protest like glass on concrete.

A formation of officers advanced up the sun-bleached marble steps, weapons drawn, shields locking together in a wall of black composite. The bright daylight made their armor gleam too vividly, turning them into faceless silhouettes beneath mirrored visors. Their rifles tracked the tall glass doors of the bank—now fractured and fogged with smoke, each pane reflecting the chaos outside in jagged shards.

The protest had splintered. Some fled when the blast hit; others lingered, adrenaline pinning them to the scene. The square was littered with the remnants of the morning’s fervor—broken placards, torn banners, half-crushed bottles. The scorched ATM smoldered on the steps, its metal casing peeled open, wires dangling like exposed nerves. The scent of burned plastic and ozone clung to the hot air, thick and chemical.

Rumors rippled through the thinning crowd—someone shouted about hostages, another claimed Okabe’s private security had opened fire on police. Each voice twisted the truth further until it became indistinguishable from panic.

Near the barricade, a young officer’s resolve cracked under the weight of noise and heat. Sweat streaked down his jaw inside the helmet, fog clouding his visor. He tried to steady his breathing, but the chant started up again—angry, jagged, off-rhythm. “For the people! Not for the Okabe!”

A brick came spinning out of the sunlight and slammed against a riot shield with a hollow clang. The officer flinched. His ears rang. When he looked up, a teenage protester stood directly before him, close enough to see the tears carving lines through the dust on her cheeks. She was screaming something—he couldn’t make out the words—but her fury was real, human, unrelenting.

His training failed him. His fear didn’t.

The pistol rose—trembling, unsteady, glinting in the harsh light.

The girl’s breath hitched. Her voice broke off, eyes going wide—not at the weapon, but at the terror mirrored in the man behind it.

And for one blistering instant, under the ruthless glare of the sun, the entire street held still—everything poised on the edge of collapse.

“Murderer!” someone shouted.

The word ripped through the air like a gunshot. A burly man surged from the crowd, vaulting halfway over the barricade to grab the young officer’s arm. The officer jerked in panic, twisting free with a raw shout. His weapon wavered, finger brushing the trigger—one reflex away from tragedy.

“Back!” his superior barked, yanking him by the collar and dragging him behind the shield line. Another officer shoved the attacker back into the mob, where he vanished among the flailing limbs and shouted curses.

The air vibrated with tension, the kind that hums just before it breaks. One more spark, and the street would ignite.

The police captain didn’t wait for that spark. His expression hardened beneath the sun’s glare; jaw locked, eyes hidden by the reflective strip of his visor. He raised his hand in a quick, slicing motion.

“Gas ’em,” he ordered, his voice crackling through the squad’s comms like static.

At once, the front line shifted. A row of riot officers leveled their launchers—black pipe-like guns resting heavy on armored shoulders. The sound came next: a sequence of thumps that rolled across the plaza like drumfire.

Canisters arced high through the heat, trailing faint smoke before clattering down amid the densest pockets of protestors. They bounced, spun, and then erupted—belching milky-brown gas that clawed outward in choking waves.

Screams tore through the confusion. People stumbled over one another, eyes burning, mouths coughing out raw, animal sounds. Placards fell, trampled into the concrete. A young man clawed at his face, stumbling blind into a wall of shields. Others ran without direction, colliding, scattering, falling.

The gas thickened, rolling low over the ground like fog turned venomous. The dividing line between police and protestor evaporated, replaced by chaos—boots and fists, shouting and coughing, the crack of batons against the air.

Amid the choking haze and the chaos of retreating bodies, a flicker of motion cut through the blur—something deliberate, controlled.

The tall glass doors of Okabe Bank creaked open with a hollow groan, one pane hanging crooked in its frame. A figure stepped out, half-swallowed by the drifting gas.

He was lean, his clothes dark and unmarked, blending into the smoke as though the riot had conjured him from it. Most of his face was obscured by a scarf or breather mask, but his eyes—mechanical, green, and cold—pierced through the haze with an unnatural glow. They clicked and refocused like a camera lens, sweeping across the plaza, calculating.

In one hand, he held a handgun; in the other, the arm of a young woman he dragged behind him. She couldn’t have been much older than Apricot—twenty, maybe twenty-one—dressed in the formal uniform of a teller, now disheveled and streaked with ash. Her wrists were bound tight behind her back, and every step she took looked like a stumble barely caught.

The man hauled her up to the top step and pressed the gun to her temple. The weapon gleamed silver in the midday sun, bright and cruel.

“Back off! All of you!” he roared, his voice echoing unnaturally, warped through a nearby speaker system—maybe the bank’s own intercom. The sound crackled across the square, booming over the screams and coughs.

The police line hesitated. Through the drifting clouds of tear gas, helmets turned, and rifles re-aimed. A dozen laser sights converged on the man’s chest, red dots trembling on black fabric and the pale edge of his jaw.

The hostage whimpered—a small, broken sound swallowed by the crowd’s chaos. For a breathless instant, the entire plaza seemed suspended again, frozen between command and catastrophe.

“Hold your fire!” the captain barked, arm slicing up. The plaza froze into a dozen taut pieces—officers mid-raise, fingers white on triggers, breath held in the hot, chemical air. In the haze of gas the scene looked unreal: helmets and shields half-formed through drifting smoke, police lights strobing across sweating faces and the bank’s fractured glass.

The man shoved the girl down a step, dragging her so close the barrel kissed her jaw. “That’s right,” he snarled, voice rough and amplified, “we walk out of here nice and easy. No one else needs to die today.” The girl’s sobs were small and sharp; the gun’s steel left a bright bruise on her cheek where it pressed.

A veteran tucked into a sniper’s low position had the clearest sightline. Her scope drank the scene: the hostage-taker’s shoulders working under the dark fabric, the thin bead of sweat sliding from his temple, the uneven flare in his pupils. Her finger hovered on the trigger, muscles taught like wire. She exhaled slowly, waiting for the order that would turn everything into a single, irreversible motion.

Through the headset clipped to her helmet the captain’s voice came crisp and low: “Sniper—take the shot if you have it.”

The man seemed to sense the shift. He slammed the girl harder against his side, using her as a shield with a practiced, ugly ease. “I see you aiming,” he howled, eyes flicking toward the line of rifles. “Think you’re fast enough? Pull that trigger and I’ll splatter her brains across these steps—want a scarlet fountain? You want that?” His laugh pitched high and thin through the bank’s speaker system, a warped, hysteric noise that sliced the air.

Steel and breath and sweat hung between them—one command, one twitch away from catastrophe. No one moved. The plaza held its breath beneath the searing midday sun, every second stretched taut as wire.

The standoff dragged on—seconds swelling into an eternity. Every sound seemed distant, muffled beneath the hum of heat and fear. The tear gas had thinned, carried off by a lazy wind, leaving behind the aftermath: protesters crawling, coughing, clutching their faces, and a light brown haze that shimmered in the sunlight like dust over a battlefield.

Then, from deep within the bank’s shattered interior, a voice broke the silence—smooth, male, and tinged with distortion.
“Go on then,” it purred over the public address system, its tone playful, cruel. “Take the shot.”

The words didn’t belong to anyone on the steps. They reverberated through the plaza, soaked in static, wrong in a way that made skin crawl.

The hostage-taker’s grin twisted into something manic, eyes flicking toward the sound. Even the captain hesitated, confusion flickering across his faceplate. Who the hell—?

Then—crack.

The sniper’s rifle fired. The report hit like thunder, echoing off glass and stone. A single flash. A perfect shot.

But in that heartbeat of triumph, everything unraveled.

Where the man and the girl had stood, there was only empty space—and hanging there, suspended for an impossible instant, a metallic sphere no larger than a fist. It hovered at chest height, humming, its surface pulsing with red light. Then it fell, hitting the marble step with a hollow clink.

The voice returned, sharp with laughter.
“Wrong move, assholes!”

The explosion was blinding.

A wall of light and sound slammed outward, shattering the bank’s façade in a storm of glittering death. Glass became razors. Steel buckled. The holographic pair dissolved in the inferno, their illusion projectors torn apart in the blast.

The shockwave struck the police line like a fist. Officers were hurled backward, shields spinning through the air. The nearest protesters went down hard, legs swept out by the concussive force. Vehicles rocked on their suspensions; sirens wailed in a chain reaction as alarms triggered up and down the street.

A curtain of black smoke rose from the bank’s entrance, curling skyward as flames licked the marble. The heat rolled across the plaza, suffocating and absolute.

For a heartbeat, the world seemed to stop. No voices. No movement. Just the high, piercing ring of damage settling into silence.

Then, faintly at first, came the screams—raw, human, and unending.