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.