Bang Bang Bank

The corridor spat Apricot out at a doorway hanging crooked on half-shorn hinges. She slipped through, boots crunching over scattered debris, and froze.

The bank’s grand lobby—once marble and hush and wealth—looked like a battlefield caught mid-collapse. Plaster dust drifted in slow, ghostly sheets, each pulse of the orange alarm light revealing more ruin. Cracks spidered across the vaulted ceiling; whole chunks had been punched out by the blast. Glass carpeted the floor in glittering shards, and mangled teller machines lay overturned like gutted animals.

Movement flickered ahead.

Two figures stood near the ruined fountain, its once-soaring jets reduced to a pathetic trickle. The moment they registered Apricot and the man behind her, weapons flashed into their hands—a pistol, a knife.

“Hey—easy!” her captor barked, stepping in front of her, one arm slightly extended as if to shield her. “She’s with me.”

Shapes resolved in the haze: the rest of the crew.

Apricot’s stomach tightened. She recognized the younger guy—maybe from high school? The alarm lights caught his face, making him look even younger. Barely eighteen. His pistol wobbled in both hands, eyes blown wide with fear.

Beside him stood a woman who was everything he wasn’t—steady, silent, and sharp as tempered steel. Her long coat fell open just enough to hint at body armor beneath. A faint scar crossed her cheek, and her knife’s monomolecular edge shimmered like it was hungry.

“Who’s the girl?” the woman asked, voice flat, gaze cutting straight through Apricot.

“She a cop?” the boy stammered. His gun twitched upward again, jittery, as if even he didn’t trust himself.

Apricot stayed very still. The dust hung around them like smoke on a stage, the alarm light strobing red across every anxious face.

And for a moment, she felt like the whole ruined lobby was holding its breath with her.

“She’s a reporter,” Apricot’s captor said, almost amused by how absurd it sounded. “Came in through the tunnels. Not armed. Not police. Just… curious.” His gun hung loose at his side, but the ease in his stance only made it clearer how fast he could snap it back up.

“A reporter,” the woman echoed, as if the word tasted foul. She didn’t lower the knife. “Fantastic. Exactly what we needed—an audience.” Her voice was a knife of its own, edged with sarcasm and fraying patience.

Apricot’s gaze flicked to the younger man. His eyes were darting everywhere—floor, ceiling, rubble, her—never settling. He looked like a kid caught in the wrong nightmare. And how could he not be? Surrounded, cut off, a bomb set off, and now a stranger who could ruin everything.

“I think she’s harmless, Kiska,” the amber-eyed man said lightly. “Little reckless, sure. But harmless.” He shot Apricot a sideways smirk, daring her to contradict him.

Apricot swallowed and slowly lowered her still-raised hands. The boy’s shoulders dropped a fraction, as if he’d been waiting for an excuse to breathe.

“I’m not here to make this worse,” she said, voice small but steady. “I just… want to get out alive. Same as you.”

The woman—Kiska—rolled that knife in her grip, the blade catching the alarm light in a cold arc. “Same as us?” she muttered. “I doubt that.” Her gaze snapped to the man beside Apricot. “Why bring her in at all, Cap? We had enough problems.”

The dust swirled between them, drifting through the emergency glow, and Apricot felt every eye in the ruined lobby weighing her fate.

Cap? Apricot tucked the name away. So he was their leader—at least in Kiska’s eyes. The handsome man only shrugged, casual in a way that made her skin prickle.

“Figured she was safer in here than out there with tear gas and stray bullets,” he said. “And maybe we can use her.”

Kiska barked out a humorless laugh. “Use her? As what—a meat shield? We already have hostages.”

The word hit Apricot like a stone dropped into her gut. Hostages. More innocents were caught up in this mess.

“Diago… that bastard,” the jittery kid muttered. “Blew the place apart. That wasn’t part of the plan.”

“I know, Chrome,” Cap said, voice gentler than Apricot expected.

Apricot wet her lips, choosing her words with care. “You could still surrender. If Diago acted alone, the police might negotiate.”

Chrome let out a sharp, broken laugh. “You think they’d care? We’re criminals. After that blast, they’ll call us cop-killers. Best case? Prison. Worst case…” His eyes tracked the shattered windows, where distant sirens wailed like wolves. He didn’t need to finish.

Kiska cut in before Apricot could answer. “Enough. Both of you.” Her jaw clenched, her knife glinting as she gestured sharply. “We’re not surrendering. Not after coming this far. We just need a way out.”

Cap checked a device strapped to his wrist. Green light unfurled into a small holographic display, casting eerie patterns across his face. He frowned at what he saw.

“Time’s almost up,” he murmured. “If Diago doesn’t haul his ass out of the systems soon, we’re boxed in.” With a final glance at the others, he added, “I’m going to check on him.”

He stepped away into the drifting dust, leaving Apricot with Kiska’s ice-cold stare, Chrome’s tremor-ridden grip on his pistol, and the unsettling realization that the real explosion tonight might not have been the bomb.

Kiska’s eyes snapped to Cap, sharp as the blade in her hand. “Upstairs? You sure that’s smart? We should stick together.”

“Got a better plan?” Cap countered. “Diago’s the only one who can crack us a way out—or tell us how screwed we are. I’m checking on him.”

Then he turned to Apricot and extended a hand.

For one surreal heartbeat, she thought he meant to help her up like some charming rogue in an old film. But his voice cut the illusion clean.

“You’re coming with me. Collateral.”

Apricot’s stomach lurched. Go with him—alone—straight to the lunatic who’d just blown part of the bank apart? Every instinct screamed no. But she wasn’t exactly in a position to negotiate.

Kiska watched her like a hawk tracking prey. Chrome looked one twitch away from firing his gun by accident. And Cap—well, he was the least immediately murderous of the three.

Apricot swallowed her pride, hesitation, and fear, and placed her hand in his.

His grip closed around hers with unexpected gentleness as he pulled her to her feet. The warmth of his hand jolted something in her chest—something she immediately despised herself for. Get a grip, Apricot. You do not have time for psychological breakdowns with romantic subplots.

Cap’s smirk suggested he sensed some of that turmoil. He stepped in behind her, close enough that she could feel the heat of him through her coat. Then the cold tap of a gun muzzle pressed lightly against the small of her back.

“Just a reminder,” he murmured, breath warm against her ear. “Don’t try anything heroic.”

Apricot stiffened, giving a shaky exhale. “Wasn’t planning on it.”

The alarm light pulsed across the ruined lobby, painting them both in red as Cap guided her forward into the rising dark of the stairs.

Kiska watched them go with a hard scowl, fingers tightening on her knife, but she didn’t argue. Cap nudged Apricot toward a side stairwell.

“If you’re not back in five, we’re coming up!” Chrome called after them, voice cracking. “I—I don’t wanna be down here if the cops bust in!”

“We’ll be fine,” Cap said without looking back, his voice carrying up the marble like a calm lie.

The stairwell dropped them into dim light, emergency lum strips flickering weakly along the walls. Shadows twisted and lengthened with each step. Apricot concentrated on her breathing—hers uneven, his calm and disciplined, as if this were routine for him.

They reached a landing with a reinforced door. Cap halted her there.

“Second-floor mezzanine,” he murmured. “Big window facing the street. If we stand in front of it, snipers get a clear shot.” His hand nudged the small of her back. “So you’re going first. They see a school uniform and a girl held at gunpoint, they won’t risk pulling the trigger.”

Apricot’s mouth went dry. Human shield—no sugarcoating it this time. Cold logic, delivered calmly, as if he were describing bank hours rather than using her as armor. Her knees wobbled at the thought of scopes tracking her skull.

Cap must have felt her tense. His free hand squeezed her shoulder—brief, almost reassuring, almost human.

“Do exactly what I say and you’ll be alright.”

Funny, she thought, how a hostage-taker saying you’ll be alright never actually made anything feel alright.

But she forced a nod and steadied herself as Cap pushed the stairwell door open, the thin light beyond spilling over them like the start of another stage in a nightmare she couldn’t wake from.

The second floor opened into a sweeping mezzanine that curved above the lobby like a balcony in an opera house—if the opera were about collapse. From this height, Apricot caught fragmented glimpses of the chaos below: firelight pulsing against cracked marble, Kiska and Chrome darting between overturned desks, their shadows huge and jittery against the walls.

To the right, floor-to-ceiling windows lined the outer wall. Many were spider-webbed or blown out entirely, leaving jagged teeth of glass clinging to the frames. Beyond them, the blue-and-red wash of police lights strobed across the setting skies. Dark silhouettes moved between armored vehicles.

Is one of them sighting me right now?

A cold tremor ran up her spine. She stayed exactly where Cap wanted her—directly in front of him, blocking any hypothetical sniper’s line of fire.

“Left, to the office,” Cap whispered, steering her with a gentle nudge. He didn’t need the gun for that; fear alone kept her compliant.

At the far end of the mezzanine, a flickering digital sign marked a doorway: Server & Control Room. The door hung partly open, cool white light spilling into the dark hall.

And beneath the hum of equipment—keyboard clacking, frantic and uneven—Apricot heard sobbing.

Her pulse jumped. Chrome had said hostages. Plural.

Cap’s hand settled on her shoulder, steadying her. “Easy,” he murmured, voice low and close. He pushed the door wider with his foot, keeping himself tucked safely behind her as they stepped inside.

The room hit her like a punch.

It had once been a sleek operations hub: holo-tables, server racks, control terminals. Now the harsh white light exposed a brutal mess—shattered screens, cables ripped from walls, scorch marks across the floor. A cybernetic slaughterhouse masquerading as an office.

The sobbing came from the corner.

A young woman lay curled there, her bank-uniform blouse smeared with dust and streaked with tears. Her wrists were cinched together with a zip-tie. When she spotted Apricot, her eyes flew wide—hope flaring so hard it hurt to look at. She didn’t speak, just trembled, breath hitching in broken gasps.

But Apricot barely registered the hostage.

Her attention was dragged—violently—toward the thing at the center console.

A man sat hunched over the terminal, but only in the loosest sense of the word man. His back curved like a question mark, shoulders rising and falling in unnervingly sharp motions as his fingers moved across the keyboard—

No. Not fingers.

Metal prongs extended from each fingertip, jointed and quick, darting over keys with insect precision. Wires ran from the prongs straight into the terminal’s open ports, plugging and unplugging themselves with rapid, twitching motions. It looked less like typing and more like a puppet show performed by some mad assortment of spider legs.

Apricot had seen cyberware plenty of times—neon eyes, synthetic tendons, flex-steel bones. But nothing like this.

His sleeves had been torn off entirely, leaving his arms exposed. Beneath the skin, tech bulged like tumors. Plates along his forearms were opened, revealing circuit boards nestled against muscle, gleaming fluid pulsing through transparent tubes in sync with his racing heartbeat. The grafts glistened, alive, twitching with every keystroke.

It wasn’t augmentation. It was integration—an interface wearing a man’s shape.

A heavy pistol sat on the desk beside him, half-buried in a nest of tangled cabling. Next to it lay a delicate lens device mid-disassembly—tiny screws, coils, and microchips scattered like the bones of a dissected animal.

The room hummed with the rhythm of his work. The hostage sobbed. And Apricot, frozen in the doorway, realized she had never truly understood what the word hacker could mean until this exact moment.

But the worst part wasn’t the machinery in his arms.

It was his face.

The strobing code from the monitors cast it in pale, sickly flashes—smooth, waxy skin stretched too evenly over his skull, like someone had sculpted a human expression from plastic and forgotten to finish it. His eyes were the most horrifying of all: bright, reflective, and utterly lifeless, like cheap doll eyes snapped into a mannequin’s sockets. Multiple micro-lenses shimmered inside each iris, spider-like, dilating and contracting with mechanical precision.

He had no eyebrows. His scalp was clean and hairless, slick with sweat. Where flesh met hardware at his temples and jawline, red welts and scars bulged—angry reminders of back-alley cutting tables and surgeries done without anesthesia or mercy.

Diago, Apricot realized. Chrome’s mad bomber. And he wasn’t “augmented.”
He was spliced.

“Hey, Diago,” Cap called out, shifting Apricot slightly so she stood where the tech-thing could see her, a clear hostage silhouette. “Status?”

Diago didn’t answer at first. His neck jerked in a sudden, glitchy twitch. The metal prongs on his fingers continued their fevered dance. When he finally spoke, his lips peeled back into a grin too wide, too delighted.

“They cut the outside lines,” he said. His voice came out doubled—flat monotone buried under a tremor of glee, like two mismatched recordings playing at once. “But guess what? I found a backdoor. These Okabe suits got lazy with their contingency encryption.”

Another twitch. The prongs stabbed into new ports with a wet click.

“Just a few more seconds and I can pop the locks on the maglev.”

Cap blinked. “Maglev? What maglev?”

Diago giggled—a high, childlike trill that made Apricot’s stomach lurch. “The bank train, my man! For shipping all the juicy stuff underground. Didn’t I mention? This place has a private rail line in the sub-basement. Our clean getaway.”

Cap’s expression hovered between impressed and irritated. “And you waited until now to tell me why?”

Diago shrugged with a jerky, unsettling motion, the cables from his fingers whipping like live wires. “Because I didn’t know until five minutes ago.” His grin sharpened. “Their architecture’s insane. Layers on layers. Nasty countermeasures too, but I chewed through most of ’em. Now I’m cherry-picking the good bits while I crack the last lock.”

The prongs clicked. The monitors flickered.

Apricot felt suddenly certain that whatever Diago was “unlocking,” it wasn’t going to save anyone.

He jerked his chin toward a side table. Apricot hadn’t noticed it before—an assortment of small cylindrical drives lay scattered across its surface, each glowing faintly green like chemical fireflies.

“Pulled some goodies off their servers,” Diago crooned. “Sell this on the black market and it’s margaritas on a yacht till we die.”

Cap shot Apricot a glance. She kept her expression flat, but her thoughts spiraled.
Internal Okabe data? Corporate-level security breaches?
If Diago had really scraped their servers, Okabe wouldn’t rest until every one of them was buried—or worse. Any slim chance the others had of negotiating had just evaporated.

A static pop crackled across the room. Diago’s doll-like eyes snapped toward her at last, focusing with unsettling clarity.

“Who’s the skirt?” he grunted, voice dripping contempt.

“A complication,” Cap said. “Press. Walked in on us. The others are on lobby duty.” His tone sharpened. “So tell me what the exit plan actually is.”

Diago’s metallic prongs retracted from the console with a series of tiny mechanical snicks. He flexed his real fingers experimentally, as though remembering he still had them. The screens behind him continued to scroll with autonomous code—scripts running on a momentum he’d set in motion.

Then he snatched the heavy pistol from the desk, spinning in his chair to face them fully.

Apricot tensed and instinctively edged back, brushing against Cap’s chest. His hand stayed firm on her shoulder, anchoring her.

Up close, Diago was even more grotesque. The harsh fluorescent light illuminated faint circuitry burned beneath the skin of his jaw and neck—like a motherboard half-melted into flesh. His eyes, catchlights flickering with shifting lenses, locked onto her with predatory disinterest.

Apricot forced herself not to recoil.
There’s something wrong in those eyes. Not just cybernetic. Hollow.
Like staring into a mask that had forgotten the human face it was meant to imitate.

Diago noticed her fear—relishing it. His lips curled into a sneer.

“Cute,” he murmured. “Maybe I’ll keep this one as a pet when we’re done.”

Cap’s grip tightened reflexively on her shoulder.

“Focus, Diago,” he snapped, voice low and sharp. “We need to get out. Now.”

Diago spun the pistol around his finger, a flourish that would’ve looked cocky if it weren’t so unnervingly precise. “Alright, alright. Spoilsport,” he said, waggling the barrel at Cap. Then, as if bored, he swung it toward the bound girl in the corner. She flinched hard, stifling a sob.

“I already unlocked the vault,” he went on, tone almost sing-song. “Sent word to the kiddies downstairs. If they’re not total idiots, they’re loading up the goods right now.” He tapped the side of his skull as if adjusting some invisible headset. “Now I’m getting us a ride out. Subrail runs from here to a corporate safe-house off-site. We hop on the maintenance train and—poof—ghosts in the tunnels.”

Cap didn’t look convinced. “And you’re sure the train’s intact? That cops aren’t crawling over it already?”

Diago’s neck jerked sharply, one eye flickering like a faulty display. “Sure as anyone can be. Cops don’t know it exists—it’s not on public schematics. And I’ve got camera control down there. Nothing but a few maintenance spiders wandering around.”

Apricot found herself speaking before she thought better of it. “And after you disappear into the tunnels?” Her voice trembled, but she held his gaze. “They’ll hunt you. All of you. The police, Okabe security—they won’t let cop-killers and data thieves just vanish.”

Diago’s grin stretched wider, uncanny in its plastic smoothness.

“Oh, the little reporter has a voice,” he purred. “How precious.”

He rose from his chair with a disturbingly fluid motion, joints clicking in ways flesh shouldn’t. Then he crossed the distance in seconds, suddenly there, nose to nose with her. His breath smelled faintly of ozone and antiseptic.

Cap tensed behind her, grip firm on her shoulder, but Diago didn’t spare him a glance. His gaze was locked on Apricot, multi-lensed eyes drinking in her fear with mechanical fascination.

Apricot tried not to flinch. She failed.

“You want a quote for your article, darling?” Diago cooed, his voice swerving between flirtation and cruelty. “How about: ‘Vanishing is my specialty.’ See—I can make things not exist.”

He leaned in closer. The chemical stink rolling off him—overheated circuitry, something burnt—hit Apricot like a wall. Her stomach turned.

“Like that crowd outside.” He snapped his fingers inches from her face. Apricot flinched. “Poof. Here, then gone. Or that camera you had around your neck…”

Her hand flew to her chest on instinct before she remembered—the camera was gone, shattered back in the alley. But Diago followed the motion with a smile that twisted into something predatory.

“Aww,” he mocked softly. “Did something happen to your gear? Shame. I’m great with tech. Maybe I could fix you up.”

A low chuckle bubbled out of him, glitchy and too amused.

Apricot felt revulsion coil up her spine. Every word out of him was wrong—every gesture off-beat. She thought of the eye in the camera lens, that impossible moment. Had he somehow done it? Some ultra-advanced hack? But it didn’t fit. And why say Hello? Why to her?

No. She wasn’t about to hand Diago more reasons to dig into her nerves.

Cap stepped forward, placing himself partly between them, voice sharp. “Diago. Enough. We don’t have time for games.”

Diago rolled his multi-lensed eyes with exaggerated annoyance. “Fine, fine. Always the killjoy.” He backed off, finally acknowledging Cap’s urgency. “Just need another ninety seconds. Train’ll roll into the sub-basement platform, and we’re ghosts.”

He turned back to the console—

—when a voice thundered up from the lobby below.

“ON YOUR KNEES!”

It echoed up the mezzanine, metallic and commanding—a man shouting through a loudspeaker.

The police were making a move.

Cap reacted first.

He shoved Apricot down behind a row of metal storage cabinets, his voice a harsh whisper. “Get down.”

Diago’s eyes flared bright. “Shit. They’re breaching.”

He whirled back to the console, stabbing his metallic prongs into the ports with a furious clatter. “Just hold ’em off—give me a damn minute! I can start the train remotely!”

Cap yanked Apricot lower, crouching with her as the hostage girl curled into a trembling ball in the corner. Cap spared her one glance—torn, frustrated.

“Stay down!” he barked. “If you want to live, don’t move!”

The building trembled with the thud of heavy boots below. Then gunfire erupted—short, controlled bursts—followed by crackling zaps of high-voltage rounds. The police were engaging Kiska and Chrome. The fight was in full swing.

Apricot risked a peek around the cabinet.

Shapes descended through the shattered skylight—silent, predatory. They weren’t ordinary officers. Their bodies shimmered under cloaking tech that bent the light around them, turning them into rippling distortions. When one moved too fast, their form flashed into view: black armor, smooth and angular, before melting back into near-invisibility.

They looked like ghosts stalking through the ruins.

A sudden crack snapped her attention back to her own floor—Cap’s handgun. He fired toward the mezzanine entrance.

One of the cloaked figures had appeared fully now, tactical veil dropping in a flutter like a deactivated shimmer-cape. Black armor gleamed under the emergency lights, faceless helmet reflecting the chaos below.

The intruder’s voice rasped through a modulator, distorted and cold:

“Got you.”

And he raised his weapon.

Cap didn’t answer the officer’s threat with words.

He moved.

A guttural snarl ripped from his throat as his hand flashed behind his back, drawing a slim blade in one fluid motion. He twisted out from behind the cabinet and lunged at the officer’s exposed neck joint, momentum snapping through his entire body.

Steel met armor.

Sparks burst as the blade skittered off reinforced plating instead of finding flesh. The officer recoiled, but another armored figure materialized from the flank like a phantom—rifle butt swinging.

It cracked against Cap’s skull with a heavy thud.

He dropped instantly, collapsing in a boneless sprawl. The knife spun across the floor, chiming against a cabinet leg.

Apricot slapped both hands over her mouth to smother the scream clawing its way up her throat.

Everything had happened too fast to comprehend.

Cap groaned and tried to push himself up, but one of the cloaked officers slammed a boot between his shoulder blades, flattening him. The first officer leveled his pistol at Cap’s temple, visor inches from the back of his head.

Pinned. Helpless.

A soft, strangled sound escaped Apricot before she could stop it.

Across the room, Diago erupted.

He let out a distorted roar—half human, half electronic—and vaulted onto the desk with inhuman agility. One of his cybernetic arms snapped open along the forearm like a steel jaw unhinging; inside, a compact machine-gun barrel telescoped outward with a vicious whirr.

“DIE!” he shrieked, voice splitting into two discordant tones.

The gun-arm unleashed a blistering storm of bullets.

The room detonated in sparks and muzzle flashes. Gunfire tore across equipment and walls, fragments of tile and shattered screens raining like shrapnel. Apricot dropped flat, arms over her head as debris pattered against her back.

An officer returned fire—three tight, controlled bursts. Diago jerked as the rounds struck home, but the impact rang with metallic clangs. Armor plating beneath his skin. Reinforced bone.

He barely felt them.

Diago snarled, lips peeling back over too-white teeth, and swiveled his gun-arm toward the officer who’d shot him.

For a heartbeat, Apricot saw it all reflected in his glassy, lifeless eyes:

rage, circuitry, and the thrill of killing.

Before Diago could fire again, something flickered into existence behind him.

Another cloaked officer—one Apricot hadn’t even sensed—dropped camouflage mid-lunge. With a brutal, efficient swing, they drove a stun baton into the base of Diago’s skull. Electricity arced in a violent burst. Diago convulsed, metal prongs splaying, the gun-arm falling limp as his body smashed into the console. His fingers twitched in a dying, insectile rhythm, lights flickering across his implants.

Before Apricot could even breathe, strong arms clamped around her from behind.

She yelped, kicking instinctively—but the grip only tightened, pulling her against armored plating and a shimmering cloak. A reflective visor hovered near her cheek.

A woman’s voice, modulated and calm, spoke right into her ear.
“I’ve got you. Hold on.”

Then the world flipped.

The officer sprinted straight toward the wall.

Apricot barely managed a strangled “No—!” before they leapt. She braced for bone-shattering impact—

—but instead, a cold rush swept through her. A tingling numbness spread from her skin inward, like stepping into freezing water. The wall dissolved around them. Not shattered. Not broken.

They passed through it.

Reality stuttered. One heartbeat they were inside the burning bank; the next Apricot was dangling in the officer’s arms outside, nighttime air slapping her face as they dropped in a controlled fall from the second story.

Brick, glass, and steel had offered no resistance—only a strange, liquid shimmer as they phased through it like ghosts.

Apricot’s mind reeled.
Phase-shifting? Personal tunneling tech? That’s… impossible.
Even Okabe’s black-budget labs weren’t rumored to have anything like this. It was science fiction. Madness. Her brain simply refused to make sense of it.

A hysterical laugh bubbled in her throat, thin and wild, as the officer carried her down through open air toward a squad of armored shadows below.

They hit the pavement hard.

The officer rolled with practiced precision, taking the impact across her armored shoulder and hip while keeping Apricot cradled securely. Even so, the landing rattled through Apricot’s bones, knocking the air from her lungs. Her palms scraped raw against the asphalt as she instinctively reached out.

The shimmer-cloak around them flickered, then dissolved entirely. They were visible now.

They were outside.

Behind the barricade of police transports. Away from the gunfire. Away from Diago.

The riot had long since collapsed into chaos and evacuation; only drifting gas clouds and abandoned protest signs littered the wide cordoned street. Police drones hummed overhead. Tactical teams swarmed toward the bank’s blown-out facade like armored ants.

Apricot realized belatedly that she’d been screaming during the entire phase jump—her throat burned—but she couldn’t remember making a sound over the sheer, crushing adrenaline.

“It’s alright, ma’am. You’re safe now,” the officer said, helping her upright with gentle, steady hands.

Apricot blinked up at her rescuer.

The woman removed her helmet in one smooth motion, dark hair spilling free down her back. She was young—late twenties, maybe—and disarmingly pretty in a sharp, severe way. Her irises were a stunning pale white, as if lit from within, giving her an almost ethereal presence beneath the streetlights.

Her armor was midnight-blue tactical grade, humming faintly with power. Tubing from a rebreather snaked along her breastplate, and a compact phase unit glimmered along her spine.

She smiled, calm and confident—so normal-looking amid so much high-tech surrealism it almost hurt.

Apricot opened her mouth. What came out was a croak. She tried again.

“T-thank you.”

The officer chuckled, an unexpectedly warm sound. “No thanks needed. You did half the work for us sneaking in like that. Let my team get the drop on them.”

Apricot’s legs buckled. She sank onto the curb, the night’s weight finally slamming into her all at once.

She was alive. Shaken to the core, bruised, scraped, trembling—

—but alive.

And, for the first time in hours, undeniably free.

A few yards away, another cloaked officer phased out of the bank’s wall, this time carrying the bound bank teller from upstairs. The woman clung to her rescuer, sobbing hysterically. The officer laid her gently on the pavement and called for medics, voice clipped but calm.

Apricot’s gaze drifted back to the officer, who was scanning her with clinical concern.

“Oh, I’m… okay,” Apricot managed between breaths. Probably a lie. “Just… holy shit…”

She laughed—a warm, startlingly normal sound after everything Apricot had seen tonight. “Holy shit is right. You’re lucky you’re in one piece. Civilians don’t usually walk out of situations like that.”

“Yeah, you could say that again. Um, I… I’m Apricot, by the way. Sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude.” she said, the introduction feeling absurdly small after the evening’s chaos.

The officer lifted an eyebrow at the unusual name but let it pass. “Sergeant Kale Vera,” she said. “Glad we reached you when we did.”

Apricot opened her mouth to ask about Cap, Kiska, Chrome—Diago—but a stern male voice cut through her thoughts.

“Sergeant. Status report.”

A police commander strode up with two escorting officers, authority radiating off him like heat. A clipboard tablet was tucked under his arm, and his expression said he had zero patience for anything except facts.

Vera snapped to attention, saluting. “Sir. Hostages secure. Perpetrators neutralized or in custody. Explosives sweep underway. Minor injuries on our side, none fatal at this time.”

The commander’s gaze shifted to Apricot. He took in the ripped school uniform, the ash-smudged skin, the thousand-yard stare she couldn’t quite hide.

“A student, huh?” he said, studying her. “What were you doing inside the bank?”

Apricot’s stomach dropped. Of course they’d captured everything on the bank’s internal cameras.

“It’s… quite a story,” she said, still catching her breath. She glanced at Vera, who gave her a small, encouraging nod.

So Apricot told them.

She recounted overhearing the police scanner, slipping into the tunnels, stumbling into the robbers, and everything that followed. Her voice trembled in places as the shock finally caught up with her. She left out the eye in the camera—she couldn’t explain it even to herself, and she doubted anyone here would believe it.

By the time she finished, several officers were staring at her with raised brows and disbelieving looks. The commander pinched the bridge of his nose, torn between irritation and awe.

“Press, huh,” he muttered. “Well, I’ll have to report this to your superiors. They’ll decide what to do with you. You understand that, right?”

Apricot nodded. Compared to tonight, school discipline felt laughably small. “I understand.”

The commander’s expression softened—barely. “You’re damn lucky to be alive. And honestly? Your stunt complicated things… but it may have saved lives. We’ll take your full statement at HQ.”

He wagged a finger at her like a disapproving uncle. “And let’s not make a habit of crawling into active crime scenes, got it?”

Apricot managed the faintest smile. “No promises, sir.”

He almost smiled back. “Come on. Let’s get this wrapped up.”

As she pushed herself to her feet—legs trembling, adrenaline draining—Apricot turned to look at the smoking bank one last time. The night replayed in flashes across her mind: desperate criminals, Diago’s grotesque cybernetics, officers who moved like ghosts, and tech so advanced it felt unreal.

Blue Ash City looked different now.
Harsher.
Stranger.
And full of shadows she’d never noticed until she walked straight into one.