The opening bars of “745 sticky,” by 100 gecs, play. Eight shots, one of each of the principal characters, appear. Each shot is monochrome and includes a title card of the character’s name.

LENNA IJORR’s shot is in shades of blue. Lenna is in her mid-twenties, small, and dressed in an elegant, all-black suit; her straight hair hangs in a single, glossy sheet. She sits at a wide desk in a repurposed aircraft control tower. A long, matte-black coat and scarf are slung over the back of her chair. Magical plants, moving with a life of their own, frame the window behind her in impossible shapes. The lights of the suburbs spread out across the cave floor outside. An inviting, empty chair is pulled up in front of her desk. She tilts her head and flashes a brilliant, warm, professional smile at the camera.

MATTEW SAN PETTRU’s shot is in shades of brown and orange. San Pettru is in his mid-forties; he has wide shoulders and a square face. He wears a brown leather bomber jacket with a short hand-woven scarf. Crows’ feet frame his eyes. He stands on a crate in his store. His head brushes the tent ceiling; the floor is architectural-rendering-smooth stone. He finishes pushing a cardboard box to the very back of the top shelf, then looks down and notices the camera. He barely hesitates before he smiles, tired but genuine.

INDRIYA SANTA KARMNI’s shot is grayscale. Indri holds a rapier in each hand. He has a razor-sharp face and narrow, startlingly light-colored eyes. He’s nineteen and painfully skinny: he’s swimming in his sweatshirt, and he’d drown in it without the cloth strips tied around his arms and crossed over his chest, which hold the material down but squeeze it into lopsided bulges. The hood is cut off completely, and a bandana is tied around his neck. He’s at a public gym, surrounded by the silhouettes of other fighters, who he doesn’t notice. He’s frozen in the final stance of a rapier form, glaring past the right edge of the frame.

CHENSINA SAK KA’s shot is a purple “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.” Chensina stands alone on the edge of a cliff overlooking her suburb, leaning on her polearm. She’s in her early twenties and dramatically beautiful, with dark skin and a long, straight nose. Her hair reaches the middle of her back in two tight, slick Dutch braids. She wears a bulky, scratched black leather jacket with a swirling logo embroidered on the back and four stripes on each shoulder; her knee-length scarf is split down the middle with a dense octagonal pattern. Her forearms are covered in tight-fitting steel bracelets, and her fingers are protected by rows of rings. She finishes scanning the cave floor below her and turns inward, staring into space out the right side of the frame.

KARMENA BAYA TAR RAMEL AHAMAR’s shot is dark maroon. Karmena sits behind her desk, staring confrontationally into the camera. She’s in her early twenties, with broad shoulders and heavy features, wearing a crisp suit with a triangular silk scarf. Her hair is pulled into an immaculate chignon, and her lipstick is the brightest thing in frame. She wears no other makeup. Her desk is a ruthlessly organized grid of ledgers. A map of shipping routes between the southern coast of Astun and the crescent-shaped island of Imsaren is pinned to the wall behind her, covered in miniscule notes. Something left of the frame calls her attention and she slides smoothly to her feet, standing like a statue of an explorer.

NIKOLA KORSIYET TAL MARSA MELHA’s shot is green. Nik stands at a workbench littered with stacks of open books, pages torn from legal pads, and stone panels carved with precise geometric patterns. Similar patterns are sketched on the blackboards lining the walls, and a unicursal hexagram is set into the floor in mother-of-pearl. Everything is smeared with a fine coating of chalk dust. A map of the city of Halk and the surrounding cave floor is pinned to the wall. Nik is in his early twenties, tall, and actor-handsome; he’s light-skinned, and his hair is tightly curled. He wears elegant glasses and stacks of elaborate bracelets on both arms with a resort shirt and chalk-streaked chinos. He looks to the left and grins at someone out of frame.

MAWRU PERIKLU’s shot is white, pale silver, and jet black. Mawru stands in a workroom even more chaotic than Nik’s. Bookshelves line the walls, with papers stuffed between the books like mortar between bricks. Geometric patterns are chalked on every surface. Papers ranging from legal to post-it note size are stuck to the walls or hang suspended in the air behind Mawru like a peacock’s tail. Globs of light float through the room like bubbles in a lava lamp. Mawru is in his thirties. His long hair is pulled back like he hasn’t looked in a mirror in days. He wears a clearance-rack sport coat over a sweater and dress pants. None of his clothes fit; his jacket bulges especially awkwardly over his left shoulder. He grins and throws a paper airplane into the camera. The frame is wiped with walls of white and silver fire.

When the flames fizz away, AWAS’s shot is bright red. She sits on the landing wall of a cramped staircase, swinging one leg over the sheer seven- or eight-storey drop outside. Towers of shipping containers rise from the cave floor behind her; glow-taped steps half as wide as her feet are long lead up to the left. She wears cargo pants and a utility vest over a white shirt. Like Indri, she’s too small for her clothes, and she’s strapped them to her body to make them fit. Unlike him, she’s used the straps to craft a clear, elegant silhouette. Her hair is pulled back tightly from her face, which is harshly angular. She’s done as much makeup as possible using charcoal, ash, and cooking oil. A blood-red scarf, the brightest thing in frame, is wrapped around her neck, and a polearm lies across her lap. She smiles wickedly at the camera.

Title card for FAUST’S BARGAIN BINS.

Vocals in. Shots alternate of the five characters from Halk’s Periphery, Awas, Lenna, Indri, Chensina, and San Pettru, dancing in front of flat backgrounds in their respective colors.

I make my money on my own, yeah

Awas lip-syncs in front of a solid blood-red background.

Wakin' up five in the morning, yeah

San Pettru, in front of alternating diamonds of burnt-sienna lilies-of-the-valley and mahogany climbing roses, slides deliberately through a sequence of stances and extensions that flow upwards through his body from the ground beneath his feet, like a form from a mostly-forgotten martial art.

Throwin' money in the oven, yeah

Chensina, snapping with efficient grace through sharp lines and swooping flourishes like she’s writing cursive on the air. The pattern behind her is tiled with octagons and diamonds; in each octagon, a bird, rendered in sharp triangles, sits on huge, curled talons, looking over its shoulder.

Fuck sleep and his cousin, yeah

Awas, still lip-syncing, flips off the camera.

I've been on a roll, yeah

Lenna’s dance surges from glacial to lightning-fast and back like waves breaking on the ocean, decorated with minute, glittering ornaments in her fingers and face. Behind her, midnight-blue squares scroll and interlock, decorated with botanical hooks.

I spend my money like it's stolen, yeah

Chensina continues her dance, this time with her face covered from the cheekbones up by a gleaming, pointed mask. Sharp rectangular cutouts expose her eyes.

Shit, I'm already broke

Indri, defeated in front of a dark gray net of stylized rose blossoms and ferns dripping with teardrop-shaped leaves.

and it's only 7:45 in the morning, yeah

He shrugs and flies into graceful, self-consciously technical motion, dominated by hard angles and fast, sharp twists. He ends with his spine bent so wildly that it should be impossible for him to stay on his feet, then holds himself there and flashes a triumphant, contemptuous smile at the camera.

The first chorus of 745 sticky, by 100 gecs, plays.

Goddamn

Awas, pinching the bridge of her nose.

What the fuck?

Indri screams his exasperation to the heavens.

Feel like I'm not good enough

Awas and Indri sprint away from a tumbleweed. Its bulbous, translucent body blocks the cave tunnel behind them, flowing to saturate the crevices in the walls as it drags itself forward on a hundred arms and legs. Loose rocks leave long tears in its skin, revealing the inner layers of striated, inches-thick calluses. Long, bloody fingers and toes claw at the tunnel walls or thrash uselessly in the air from nonsensical explosions of elbows and knees. The tumbleweed’s bottom jaw dangles feet below its fist-sized black eyes, swaying gently as it moves.

Get off of me, I swear I'll do it all

Awas and Indri argue, still running from the tumbleweed. Blue light streams from the long, pointed tip of Awas’s polearm, its crescent-shaped blade, and the short, heavy spike on the bottom. Black light rolls off one of Indri’s rapiers, exposing layers of stains on the tunnel walls. Bright white light stabs from his other sword. Awas makes an aggravated downward gesture with her free hand. Indri rolls his eyes and flicks the white rapier to a dimmer setting.

Do it all, 

Awas frantically shouts instructions as she fights to keep a tumbleweed’s bottom jaw pinned with her polearm. Pink slime leaks from deep stab wounds in the tumbleweed’s head and neck. One of its hands lashes out at her face. She jerks her head back, swearing. The tumbleweed’s fingernails miss her eye, but leave long, ugly scratches down her cheek.

do it all

Awas’s scratches have stopped bleeding, but dried blood crusts her hairline and shadows her jaw. She crouches in front of a plant growing from a patch of gravel at the base of a tunnel wall. It looks like a begonia, with purple, white-frosted leaves, but it sways like it’s submerged in invisible water. Awas reaches out to pull it up, then swears and snaps her hand back. She examines her glove. The leather where she touched the plant has bubbled and twisted like tar on hot asphalt.

I can swear I can do it all

Awas, back in Halk, is rapidly sketching a floor plan on the back of a receipt. She looks up and nonchalantly crumples the receipt into her pocket. She’s wiped most, but not all, of the blood off her face.

Do it all,

Awas passes a paper bag to San Pettru. He gives her a small box wrapped in thermal foil and secured with a zip tie, which she clips to a lanyard around her neck and drops down her vest.

 do it all

Awas leans on her polearm at the end of a blind alley, blocking the exit for someone wearing a long, thin plague-doctor mask with a hoodie-jean jacket combo. They look over Awas’s shoulder. She turns around to see a woman in a matching mask. Awas nods to her with a strained smile.

I can swear I can do it all

Awas sits in a waiting room. Her face is still bloody, her eyeshadow is smeared, and she’s wearing only one glove. Lenna opens the door, sees her, and stops. Amusement and alarm chase each other across her face. Awas smiles at her automatically before she remembers how she looks. They stare at each other.

745 sticky, by 100 gecs, continues.

I'm done trying, new plan

The camera takes in Awas’s suburb. Sunlight never reaches Halk’s Periphery, but its people have agreed that this is the middle of the night. Stacks of shipping containers, ringed at every level by spindly walkways, reach so high they almost disappear into the cobwebby shadows of the cave ceiling. Faint greenish light fills the walkways and the open-air staircases between them.

Do what I want, 

One bored-looking kid sits leaning against the wall of their family’s container, watching the laundry drying on the walkway’s railing. Green glow tape bleeds through the fabric. An ibis lands on a maroon BAYACorp t-shirt and stares dead-eyed at the kid, who sighs.

don't hold my hand

A black cat sleeps curled up on the stairs. A man almost steps on it, swears, and runs his hand over his face before he continues upward. Somewhere, a goat bleats.

I can do anything I want, first try

The camera races up the side of a tower. Awas, cleaned up, makeup redone, hair freshly scraped back, sits at the top, looking out over the suburb.

You take like ten tries, hurtin' my eyes

She points at the camera and grins, but not because she doesn’t believe it.

(Oh my god)

Lenna laughs, delighted.

Batshit, got a check and I spent it

Nik, still wearing chinos and a resort shirt, floats in midair at the center of a vast black opal geode. He looks down at a horde of tumbleweeds rolling toward him across the cave floor and grins. 

Money got me feelin' like a dentist

Nik, standing on the floor of the geode, spins one of his bracelets and snaps his fingers. Sights appear on his glasses lenses, and he shoots a finger gun at a tumbleweed. A cube of copper-green fire blinks into existence around it. Its arms reach for the air outside the flames, but the walls expand, always just a few inches from the ends of its nails. One of the tumbleweed’s eyes pops. Nik laughs, shocked but elated.

I can do anything I put my mind to

Nik walks between walls of green fire. He spins a bracelet, snaps, sights, and fires. A tumbleweed explodes. Pink slime explodes through the air, catching fire as it flies, and lands on the tumbleweeds around it. They frantically bat at the flames. Nik watches a droplet of cooked pink slime slide down an invisible wall in front of him, fascinated.

You can't do anything 

Karmena sits behind a temporary desk in a fortified construction trailer. The plans for the town of Black Opal are taped to the wall behind her, surrounded by smaller maps. She inks tiny numbers into a spreadsheet with a fountain pen as green light, sliced into rectangles by the window bars, flashes across her face.

even if you wanted to (Yeah)

She spins around in her chair. A dart appears in her hand. She throws it into the map behind her, where it sticks, quivering, in the center of the spiderweb of planned train lines stretching out from Halk.

The second chorus of 745 sticky, by 100 gecs, begins.

I make my money on my own, yeah

Awas lip-syncs while she dances on the unnaturally smooth stone surface of Old Bridge. Lenna and Chensina back her up. All three of them hold microphones; beams of red, blue, and purple light slash through the thick white fog behind them. They hit their choreography in flawlessly rehearsed unison. It could be a classic girl-group routine if they did it half as fast.

Wakin' up five in the morning, yeah

Karmena next to Nik. Karmena holds her back perfectly straight through a swirling cycle of steps so smooth that she looks like she’s floating. She flips her arms between wide, angular shapes with the jerky grace of a peregrine falcon. Zig-zagging maroon bars interlace across the background behind her, which is so dark it’s almost black. On Nik’s side of the frame, a single green rose unfurls in fractals, woven into a net of vines dripping with teardrop-shaped leaves. Nik dances in the same grammar as Indri, but his movements are sparer and looser. In spite of his effortless grace and Karmena’s razor-sharp focus, it’s clear that both of them would rather be anywhere else.

Throwin' money in the oven, yeah

Awas and Chensina sit side-by-side at the bottom of a black stone canyon. Awas is sharpening the blade of her polearm. The rest of it is disassembled and laid out systematically at her feet. She absently takes a drink from a jar of moonshine and passes it to Chensina, who lets it hang from her hand, forgotten, as she stares through the opposite wall of the canyon.

Fuck sleep and his cousin, yeah

Awas and Lenna stand in front of the jeweled, radiant night skyline of Halk. Awas pulls her ponytail over one shoulder. Lenna shakes her hair back. They pose, smile, and flip off the camera together.

I've been on a roll, yeah

Back to Awas, Lenna, and Chensina dancing on Old Bridge, this time with Lenna lip-syncing. Her casual delivery both softens and highlights her overwhelming self-assurance. A spray of lechenaultia flowers, stars of fishtail-shaped petals in an unreal shade of blue, is tucked behind her ear.

I spend my money like it's stolen, yeah

The formation shifts to put Chensina front and center. Pickerel weed flowers, dense columns of thin, curling purple blossoms, are braided into her hair. She lip-syncs with a Gatsby smile: she’s telling a joke just for you, and you want to believe every word is true.

The formation shifts again. Awas steps forward.

Shit, I'm already broke and it's only 7:45 in the morning, yeah

Cut to Awas sitting across a knee-high blue plastic table from Indri. They both stare into bowls of plain noodles. They’re surrounded by the silhouettes of other diners. Canvas sags overhead, and gouts of flame shoot from the stoves at the food stalls in the background. Awas listlessly spoons shredded greens into her noodles from a jar in the center of the table, then looks alarmed. Indri leans over the table to look into her bowl, then laughs, horrified.

The second chorus of 745 sticky, by 100 gecs, continues.

Goddamn, what the fuck?

Awas, in miniscule silhouette, facing an impossibly large gold sphere. It’s half-buried in the nearly vertical, jagged mountain behind it and the shale she stands on, but its surface is unnaturally pristine, buffed to a uniform, reflection-less gridline gleam. Its equator is hundreds of feet above Awas’s head. She makes a furious, useless gesture.

Feel like I'm not good enough

Mawru, standing at the bottom of a perfectly square pit punched deep into the earth. The floor is a whirlpool of smeared paint and chalk. Dozens on dozens of sheets of paper float around him in rings. Globs of white light wobble through the air. He’s watching one of them like it’s a TV logo about to hit the corner of the screen. He raises one hand, expressionless, and snaps his fingers. All of the papers explode in white fire.

Get off of 

San Pettru, hunched over a desk crammed between shelves in the back corner of his store. It’s late, and all the lights are out except for a kerosene lamp on his desk. The sandwich scraps on the plate next to it cast long shadows across stacks of receipts. San Pettru is filling out a ledger in blue ballpoint pen. He hears a noise and freezes, listening hard. His hand hovers over the ledger’s cover. After an agonizing second, he decides it’s nothing and sighs deeply, suddenly exhausted.

me, I swear I'll do it all

Nik, dancing a tango with Karmena in a huge, empty Art Deco ballroom. He wears an elegant green suit so dark it’s almost black. His bracelets are gone. Her hair is covered with a fine gold net studded with onyx, and black concentric triangles radiate from the bottom hem of her deep maroon evening dress. Nik is staring over her shoulder. His movements are robotically perfect. He dips her unceremoniously.

Do it all, do it all

Overhead shot of Chensina standing at the center of a rooftop, surrounded by dozens of other people. All of them are armed and dressed in scarred, patched black leather. Everyone but her is wearing a pointed purple mask. They’re in constant motion, talking animatedly, watching the streets, scanning the rooftops. Chensina is unmasked and still. She stares up at the camera.

I can swear I can do it all

Karmena, still wearing her evening dress, alone in a windowless indoor target range. The lights are out over every lane except hers. She throws long, wickedly sharp darts with smooth, powerful precision. Her last throw misses: the dart bends almost ninety degrees from the impact with the concrete wall behind the target and clatters to the ground. She shouts something blisteringly obscene and collapses over the counter in front of her, both hands clenched in white-knuckled claws on the stainless steel.

Do it all, do it all

Indri, at the gym hours after everyone else has left. He sweated through his shirt a long time ago. The safety cage around him is lit only by his swords. He shreds a straw-stuffed bag swinging from the ceiling in a feral parody of a form, gasping for air.

I can swear I can do it all

Lenna’s eyes slide to something left of frame, then turn inward.

A symphonic overture is synthesized on a 2009 Netbook as it’s run through a dishwasher.

Mawru steps onto the porch of a compact ranch-style house. Clean blue-white light shines through the windows. A fine, fresh layer of concrete dust coats the vibrant AstroTurf lawn and the white picket fence. A wall of black fire opal fills the entire frame behind it. Mawru pushes up his sleeves and raises a conductor’s baton.

The sun rises over the ocean. The waves are gentle and tipped with gold. Long, low clouds drift along the horizon, dyed stunning shades of pink and orange.

The barren surface of Imsaren, studded with enormous erratics, blocks the sun. The silhouette of a spindly catwalk cuts across the eastern sky. A woman leans against the railing, looking down at the sunrise. The wind off the ocean stretches her skirt out behind her knees like a flag. She almost leaves, but she hesitates, resting one hand on the railing like a butterfly about to fly away.

The camera sweeps over Dock Street in Halk, several dozen yards below the cave ceiling but so high up that the people at street level are the size of ants. The morning light has barely reached the cave floor, but the docks have been swarming for hours. Triangular-sailed ships, built like knives to be light, sharp, and fast, are efficiently jigsawed into the harbor. Sailors crawl across the decks and through the rigging. Shouting ricochets from the cave ceiling. A cascade of runners, longshoremen, and hawkers churns down the avenue, parting around Port Authority police like water around pebbles. Masts’ shadows swing across the water lapping at the ship’s hulls, which are already falling back into darkness.

West of the docks, Crown Street blazes in the morning sunlight. Thirteen mansions flank the mouth of an underground river as it flows to join the ocean. Each of the thirteen is built in a radically different style — Romanesque, Gothic, Tuscan — but all of them are crowned with glittering conservatories where vividly green leaves crowd against the glass like snowflakes in a snow globe. Twelve of the thirteen mansions are coated in gemstones that range in size from pinheads to tabletops. The thirteenth mansion is starkly plain, elegant concrete and glass. 

A monumental white stone building dominates the island in the middle of the river. It’s built with stone blocks bigger than shipping containers and windowless except for a narrow rectangle cut into the wall above its single door. It’s surrounded by a crush of vegetation. Leaves sparkle in the sunlight. Tree branches bend to the ground, weighted down by fruit and covered in flowers. Every surface is choked with vines, except for the building’s walls, which are bare. A thin tower barely reaches above the treetops behind it. It looks like it could have been built by hand.

The thirteen center city suburbs, each radiant in a different color of neon light and surrounded by high walls, stretch out across the cave floor west of Crown Street. More suburbs pile up behind them, where the sunlight never reaches. The inner city suburbs are lit by warm kerosene, and the walls that separate them are brick or stone. Farther out, the light fades to cold glow tape and dots of painfully bright blue, clouded by smoke from open fires, and the suburbs are separated by high chain-link fences. A wall of towers like Awas’s rises behind them.

Old Bridge stretches across the river almost a mile west of the sun line. It’s bigger than some of the suburbs around it. It’s lined with rows of colorful, densely patterned tents and courtyards surrounded by crisp townhouses. People saturate every surface except for the last yard of pavement closest to the Bridge’s walls: no matter how many people cross that invisible line, no one is ever on the other side. The walls themselves are significantly lower-resolution than the rest of the frame. Every building and every person on the Bridge is perfectly visible in as much detail as if the camera was only inches away from them. There are no shadows.

The edge of a cliff. Rocks along the edge have been intermittently marked with peeling glow tape. There are holes drilled for fence posts, but no fence. A cloud of thick black smoke hangs motionless a few yards below the edge of the cliff. Open fires surrounded by tiny knife points of searing blue light steep the lower layers of the clouds in a faint, eerie charcoal-gray glow. The air is full of the sound of water and the chirps of cave swallows, flashing through the cloud like lightning and popping back up to the surface with insects crushed in their beaks.

The overture resounds.

At the bottom of the cliff, past the western edge of Halk’s outer suburbs, the air is soundless, still, and empty. A glassy sheet of water stretches out across the floor and disappears into the abyss. The waterline is motionless and lined with sticks wrapped in glow tape. Some have been moved towards the sea; dates are marked in neat columns along their paths. A few have been moved back towards Halk. Urgent messages are scrawled next to them. 

Awas walks into frame. She’s dressed in her vest and pants, and her polearm is slung across her back. She drops a small canvas bundle on the water’s edge and kneels to unwrap it.

Mawru, still conducting on his front porch, holds out the final note of the overture. He smiles broadly and gives a cue.

The music pulls back to a light, sparkling jog.

A little kid, wearing a faded blue t-shirt, walks quickly through a maze of shanties made of pallets and broken ship timbers. Their hair has mostly escaped a long braid, and they move with a very adult heaviness, methodically scanning the shadowy recesses of the buildings around them. They hold a net bag full of struggling cave swallows in one hand. The birds’ long tails are snapped against the sides. 

The kid looks up and stops dead. Confusion, anxiety, and wonder fight across their face.

A teenage girl rolls out from under a half-built wooden platform. A strand of hair is stuck to her forehead with sweat. She drops her hammer, pulls a nail out of the bag next to her, and pinches it in the corner of her mouth. As she reaches for another one, she glances up and freezes with her hand halfway to the bag. She braces herself on the ground, ready to stand, but then relaxes back on her elbows to stare at the ceiling, baffled. She pushes her hair back automatically.

A gang of twelve-year-olds, in matching ill-fitting polo shirts with fern-leaf logos embroidered over their hearts, sit on a street corner demolishing a pile of pastries wrapped in honey-soaked white paper. The boy closest to the pile says something, and everyone laughs except for a girl whose half-hearted chignon is falling out. Then someone points at the cave ceiling, and all of them look up with identical stunned expressions. The girl with the chignon swears for the first time.

A woman in her early twenties sits at a desk in front of a wide glass window. Her neck is coated in pearls, and she wears a tight-fitting black silk dress, cinched and folded into a fan at her waist. Bobby pins are piled on the corner of her desk; a single ponytail holder strains against her mass of hair. Black stone tablets covered in electric-green text are lined up in front of her. She’s writing in a notebook bristling with plastic flags. She looks out the window and snaps to her feet with a mixture of excitement, paranoia, and exasperation.

Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!

The eight main characters form a kickline in front of a peach-pink background. Nik and Mawru, on one end of the line, are having the most fun. Karmena seethes on the other end. Between them, Lenna is gracious, Awas is having a self-consciously ironic good time, Chensina is half-smiling, San Pettru is gently amused, and Indri is trying not to look delighted that he’s included.

Drums accelerate.

Mawru, on his front porch, does his best pop-star spin.

Synths scream.

Nik and the woman in the black dress float back-to-back in front of the rose window of Halk’s main train station, encircled by a wheel of rainbow-colored light. The air around Nik shimmers with a greenish tinge, like the air above a copper fire. Black gloves cover the woman’s arms up to the elbow, rippling like an oil slick in the wind.

Chensina and a woman in a long, rippling white robe spin to face each other. Chensina wears her purple mask; the other woman wears an alabaster mask of ant’s face with molded gold mandibles. Chensina swings her polearm down at the ant, who catches the shaft between two foot-long knives.

Indri does a spectacularly complex maneuver with his rapiers. Tumbleweed hands thud to the ground in a pink-slime parody of hail. An arc of uneven fingers and long, jagged nails twitches around his feet. Indri lands in a low, catlike stance, grinning ferally, rapiers extended.

The point of a broadsword pins Awas to a wall. The woman holding it wears a plain white ant mask and leather bands wrapped around her wrists. Awas’s polearm is on the ground behind her.

Moving slowly, Awas reaches into the inside pocket of her vest and pulls out a small, unsettlingly shiny box. She opens it to show the ant the aspen-leaf necklace inside, careful not to touch it. 

Then she throws it as far as she can over the ant’s shoulder and sprints after it to scoop up her polearm. The ant leaps back to stand over the necklace. She and Awas watch each other, silently calculating who will attack first.

The ant hears a sound from the ground below her and looks down, startled. The necklace’s pendant is boring through the stone cave floor, leaving a perfect aspen leaf-shaped hole behind it. The chain slithers into the hole and disappears before the ant or Awas can react. They look up at each other.

A young woman wearing a thick white hoodie, wrists wrapped in leather bands, faces Chensina. Chensina smiles brightly, raises a plastic cup, and gently clinks it against hers. She returns the congealed smile of a shit disturber who’s having second thoughts and doesn’t like them.

Mawru levitates half an inch from his porch. Silver-white light pours out of his body. His skeleton casts shadows on his skin. He conducts with sweeping, spinning strokes.

Awas tries to twirl her polearm and drops it.

Low-angle shot of Lenna as she advances slowly into a dark shanty. Her heels click on the stone floor. Her silk scarf gleams against her long black coat. Four other people, dressed in equally crisp, pure black, fan out behind her. Plants climb out of their pockets to wrap around their clothes and through their hair, glowing in a riot of colors. Lenna smiles down at someone behind the camera, polite and as cold and inevitable as a glacier.

Two silhouettes step into the door of San Pettru’s store as he stocks shelves. One of them flashes a glinting gold badge. San Pettru smiles warmly.

Three people, wearing green gargoyle masks with exaggerated blood-red grins, back Awas into the end of a narrow stone alley. 

She jabs one in the stomach with the heavy spike on the butt of her polearm, folding him over against the wall, and flips her polearm around to slash at another gargoyle. The gargoyle jumps back. The blade catches in her coat. She grabs the shaft and pulls. 

Awas lets go, and the unexpected weight throws off the gargoyle’s balance. Awas starts to line up a kick, but a door in the alley wall between her and the gargoyles swings open. A security guard cautiously steps out. She looks at Awas and grimly twirls a nightstick.

The security guard swings. The door starts to fall shut and reveals the third gargoyle. He locks eyes with Awas and charges. 

Awas ducks under the bouncer’s nightstick to kick the door into the third gargoyle. He falls on the woman holding Awas’s polearm, who loses her grip. Awas grabs it, cracks the shaft across the security guard’s ankles, and dives through the door.

Indri threads through a maze of shanties, holding his white sword half-in, half-out of its sheath for light. He hears something and freezes, wire-tense. Shadows shift. A bucket tips over and rolls out in front of him.

He nearly kills the ibis that lazily follows it out of the dark. It buries its bill in a crate of garbage. Indri swears, slams his sword back into its sheath, and swears again in the dark.

A rat and a small white cat face each other on the edge of a dark firepit. The rat bares its teeth and lunges. 

The cat twitches slightly. The rat falls over, bleeding from the neck. The cat crimps its spine to lick its chest.

A tumbleweed has inserted itself into the kickline between Nik and Mawru. It clings to their shoulders with five of its arms while the rest of its limbs flail wildly. Nik and Mawru are unconcerned. Panic spreads through the rest of the line.

Sirens die away.