I hauled myself up from the floor with my claws open and my throat a raw grate. The floor drank the shock and fed it back as a dull ache through my frame. Fulton stood where she had planted herself, at the mathematical center of the room, head level as she stared me down. A thin woman in a dark suit who looked like she should be handing out reprimands, not snapping the air in half.

With unsteady steps, I moved closer as she waited.

Her next sweep looked lazy. My vision took the lie and tried to believe it. The room did not. Pressure boiled off her arm. The air detonated against me and I skidded across the plates, bouncing off the floor like a rock over water, armor shrieking. I felt the edges in my body try to bite everything they touched.

The far wall met me with the comfort of a baseball bat to the head.

"If you were a meguca, this will break the lock inside you, and you'll be forced back into your human form," she said, voice flat and neat, as if reading the label on a file. "But you aren't one." The word carried a dry curl at the edge that made something inside me show its teeth.

I got my feet under me. The white tarp I was using for a toga had slipped, the strap across my shoulder loose. I nudged it up with my elbow and kept my hands far from it. I did not give her a reason to say I had grabbed anything.

"No kkill." I made it come out, rough and broken.

I walked back to the center. Not fast. Not slow. The walk was the point. I gave her a clear line, empty hands, claws open and useless. That was the rule. I couldn't raise a finger at her until I was human again.

Her heel clicked once. Twice. A rhythm set down like a metronome. The room hummed back. She made a small circle with her wrist, an absent flick, and the air rushed past me from the side, I'd braced with my feet and still nearly toppled over. Fulton made a sound and repeated the gesture but with a wider swing, this time the air hit like a truck. My world spun in a bright smear. I let my shoulder take it. I hit the wall at an angle and slid down until my feet found friction.

The tarp flashed white in the corner of my eye, bright against my black plates. I could taste the disdain in her eyes as she locked on to it.

"I… helllp. Peo… ple." Each syllable scraped my tongue.

"You are waiting," she said, dismissal and accusation both. "You are looking for the one opening. You want to destroy us from the inside."

The next sweep came with more bite. The air slammed me into a rib hard enough to ring it. Something in me wanted to split my face open and roar. I closed my teeth so tight that my neck throbbed. I pushed myself up with my forearms and elbows, the way you would push up from a hot surface, fingers splayed and empty like a warning flag.

I walked back again with a limp.

Fulton did not move until I arrived. Then she broke the stillness with the smallest thing. She'd reached for something in her pocket and pulled out a pocket-knife, flicked it twice, and returned it to her pocket, her left hand remaining there. "Hold still," she ordered. A sense of danger swept through me as her eyes gained a twinkle, I braced. Fulton began circling me like a shark, she drew two fingers along my shoulder with the kind of care you would use to tuck a strand of hair behind your ear.

I saw the motion, not the cut. The tarp strap parted with a dry rasp and slid cold over my shoulder. I felt a second sensation a heartbeat later. A light, skimming touch along my chest plates that left a line behind like a chalk mark. Except it was not chalk. The obsidian layer shivered and yielded under a pressure that did not match the softness of her touch, sloughing off with a crack as if it'd been cut off by an invisible wire. No blood. Pain anyway.

My body convulsed, very nearly leaping away before I caught myself. Fulton's blank stare remained, but the twinkle deepened. I eyed her fingers with a sudden sense of dread as she swiped at my shoulder again, and this time took a chunk of the obsidian there with it.

"Monsters always attack when they are cornered," she said. Her gaze was somewhere between my eyes and the junction of neck and shoulder, the place you watch if you want to read intention.

I did not give her intention. I breathed through clenched teeth. I pushed the tarp up with my elbow and let it drape crooked, bright and stupid against my shoulder. Shame tried to rise and found nowhere to sit.

The next gesture did not cut. It hurled. The air slammed into my flank and lifted me clean. I tucked a wing a quarter span to angle the fall and took the impact on my side. Metal screamed against obsidian. The seam under me drank heat and threw it back as a numb throb.

I stayed down for one breath and listened. Heel click. Heel click. Fulton had returned to the center of the room, and I unsteadily made my way back.

"You think restraint makes you human," she said. There was a note under the voice that had not been there earlier. The first hint of annoyance. "It does not."

"Zzero kills," I said. I had to cut the next word into three pieces to get it past my mouth. "Never."

Her eyes did not flicker. The tiny curl at her lip did.

I closed the distance until she could have touched me without stepping. I made sure both of us saw my hands, open at either side of me. I let the bright white of the tarp hang as if it mattered, eyes flicking to the tiny muscles in her forearm.

What she had done to the strap and the plates had not come from wind. It had come from her fingers and a piece of metal. Two acts. Two kinds of power. I filed both away without names. Naming did not help. Enduring did. I could figure it out when it mattered.

She swatted the air in front of herself again, faster than before. The air exploded with a "bang" and I flew, cracked and sent me into a metal column. The floor caught me wrong, and the impact drove a hiss out of me that sawed my throat raw for a heartbeat. My bones weren't broken, but everything else felt bruised.

I stood and walked back again.

She closed the distance by one step. Not a retreat. A tiny advance. The small knife was back in her hand. She did not grip it like a weapon. She barely held it at all. She drew two fingers over the flat, a gesture so light it looked like a habit. The next pass at my chest did not even look like a pass. It was the silent sadist's version of a dentist's drill against a tooth, but on my chest and seeping into my ribcage. It was the fire of being flailed, all without a single drop of blood.

The pain lit a clear path through me.

The path led straight to my hands, my arms kept fighting to lift and shove back. I stood on either side of that path and did not take a step. I locked on to the rhythm of Fulton's heels, the Elder marked two beats every five seconds and I used that to count as she tore the obsidian plates off of my torso as if trimming off a hedge.

She sent me away again with a flick. I hit and skidded and left a shallow trail of black grit on the plates. It took me longer to stand up, my legs were shaking.

I walked back anyway.

"You're just an experiment waiting for the opportunity to prove yourself," she said, as if my silence during her trimming had bothered her. "Moreau's pet project."

I did not answer that. I did not have words to waste on it and nothing to buy with them. I let my mouth stay closed and my hands stay open.

Her next sweep took the breath out of me before I could pull it in. The floor came up hard and I saw nothing for a second but a gray sky that was not a sky at all. I listened for heel clicks in the black and found them. I wasn't even sure what had hit me, or how, just that I now lay flat just a few steps away.

My breathing was ragged, hands shaking. The dull throb of the missing obsidian began to seep in, a pain I hadn't thought could make it through whatever protections this body had, but it made the places she'd torn off feel like they were burning.

I gathered myself and stood and walked.

The white strap had slid down again. I did not fix it.

She held the knife and swiped at my thigh, and the plate fell off as if it forgot to remain attached. My leg nearly gave out from the stabbing pain that followed. The urge to rake came up like a reflex gag. Hands flash, problem goes away. I stood through it. I did not even give myself the permission to make a sound. I held the breath that wanted to push itself out as a roar and let it turn into a slow hiss between my teeth.

"Nevper," I said again with a snarl I couldn't restrain. "Killed."

The curl at her lip was real now.

Another sweep. Another slam. I got up on my knees and then my feet. The turn up felt like it took an hour.

I refused to stop.

Fulton watched the aberration take the humiliation like a swallowed stone. The wind should have killed lesser things. Shards in it shaved curls from his armor. He did not lash out. He barely even bared his fangs when he spoke.

She wanted the tell.

Monsters always showed it. That little malevolent glint. The moment the spark dimmed and slipped behind raw violence. The instant thought slid into action and claws flashed. Pain stripped away restraint and left them savage and predictable.

"Nevper," it said again. "Killed." The word landed flat, practiced, as if it were confirming a data point rather than confessing.

She executed the routine query to CYPHER while keeping him centered in her sights.

Subject: Garcia, Axel. Kills, confirmed, suspected.

The reply came back clean. "0 - 0." As it had every time she queried the AI. Fulton had read the detailed file before when she followed the council's agreement and set up his profile for QOL CYPHER support. Small-city scholarship. Above average grades. Hundreds of volunteer hours that meant very little. The double zeroes lived in the file like a misplaced comma. She had been waiting to fix that with a second ongoing query, the true reason his cybernetically enforced privileges had not yet been approved.

Subject: Garcia, Axel. Meguca Profile Status Request. Alter Ego: Shush Monster. STATUS: [PENDING DATA] Priority Queue Tasks ahead of your request: 221

The task had been waiting for more information to execute properly. The fourth district was a cybernetic black hole, too few drones, too few cameras, too few nodes to build a clean surveillance profile. Blind alleys, unlit rooftops, dead fiber. It would have been an ignorable problem if the monster pretending to be human wore a neuralink, but the doctor had seen this possibility and stripped him of it.

Now she had a direct feed to CYPHER, relaying every second of the encounter, nudging her request a little higher in the queue. Numbers flickered. Two hundred twenty-one to two hundred twenty. Back to two hundred twenty-one when some other alert shoved in. It did not matter. Every frame helped. That was the one reason she had not turned him into paste. Once CYPHER completed the profile assessment and confirmed he was a monster, not even the council could raise a complaint against his eradication.

A monster with human levels of intellect was a threat that should never have been allowed to exist. And if the system registered him as a human-monster hybrid, then CYPHER would turn its full attention to Moreau.

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Smart predators waited. Civilization kept lists for that reason. She would not run the city on comfort. "Even if you have killed no one yet, you will," Fulton said. She did not raise her voice, she did not need to.

Her next sweep was not anger. It was calibration, to see how far she could push before he began to crack. Her feet did not move. There was no need. The Wall was everywhere in this room. Translation of mass did not require theatrics. Her arm moved with the weight of a tenth of the Wall's mass, displacing half of the room's air, the pressure wave tossing him like a ragdoll and slamming him into a column.

Fulton felt the obsidian plates shatter, reverberating through the metal, but there was something off about his bones.

"Monsters cannot restrain themselves," she said. The sentence had been true every time she had needed it to be. She let it sit in the air and watched to see if he would try to climb on top of it with rhetoric. He did not. He used his breath on movement. He stood on legs that were starting to falter. He walked back on hobbling step at a time, kepting those blade-hands visible as if to mock her claim.

He rasped a name. "Ssshadow."

She felt it land in the one part of her that she did not allow to govern. "My student is not your shield," she said. The words were clean and small. They fit inside the space she had left herself for sentiment. If Shadow had brought him here out of pity, that was a mistake that would be corrected by success or by failure. Preferably by success. The city could use every successful correction it got, there'd been too few of those as of late.

"Yoursss."

Her hand snapped and drove him into the wall again with a sweep. She changed tactics after that, because his bones made odd noises that weren't the familiar sound of things breaking. He was learning to soften the blow by wildly flapping those wings of his, and that just would not do.

This test was meant to break, not teach.

She stepped in close and placed two fingers over his sternum, first and middle, as if checking a pulse. She pressed downward. The weight she brought into those fingers did not show in her wrist or elbow. The change happened somewhere the eye could not see. Through her touch, the Third Wall translated itself into a point and leaned into the whelp.

The floor gave a soft sound that reminded her of an overburdened bridge beginning to complain. The obsidian surface under her fingers began to craze along microscopic fault lines. Tiny fractures spidered out. His ribs resisted with a sound like old wood under a jack.

He went to his knees. Good. Knees were honest with a gasp, her gaze flickered at his claws and how he'd rushed to flatten them on the ground. Well, that was about to change. She kept pressing down with those two dainty fingers, and Axel could not fight the weight, finding Fulton's arm immovable.

Then he was pinned flat on the ground under the weight of her force.

And she kept pressing down.

"This is what the weight of a billion lives feels like," she whispered coldly.

He screamed, short and raw, fear ringing through his voice for the first time.

Good.

She kept pressing down.

The scream cut off as he put the air to use for breathing ever shallower breaths as the space for air shrunk inch by inch.

Fulton watched for the hand to rise without permission, for him to grip her wrist, to claw her face, throat, stomach. She wanted it. Not because she enjoyed breaking him, but because she wanted the clarity that came when a dangerous thing proclaimed itself.

The top layer of his chest plates shattered like dark glass, but his ribs refused to break under the pressure, bending beyond what they should've normally allowed. His chest began to cave into itself, blades of obsidian digging into flesh. She stopped there and kept her arm in place.

The Elder felt his hammering heart just inches under her fingers.

It would've been easy to just press a little lower.

"Ssaaave… no… kiill," it was as much a plea as an insult, wheezed out through fangs the size of her thumb.

Irritation moved in her chest when the monster's claw did not lift. This too did not seem like it would be the way to break his resolve. "You'd save ten to doom a thousand," she said in a low, casual tone. The steel lived in the phrasing. She had given this lecture a thousand times before.

"No… kill."

The sound hurt to hear. She did not let the hurt change anything. She remembered the file again, not because it mattered, but because it was the one flaw in the shape of the case. Zero.

She kept the weight on him for a measured count, then eased it by half to test rebound. He did not surge. He did not snatch. He took the space to breathe like a man who had practiced drowning and learned to come up quiet. She added weight again, a small increment, and watched for a twitch in the hands. Nothing. The fingers splayed a fraction wider, as if he wanted her to see how hard he was pressing them against the floor.

The irritation sharpened into something more useful. Focus. Fulton withdrew the hand without recoil, allowing him to wheeze and heave lungfuls of air, coughing and fighting to get his bearings. She waited, watching the pitiful wobble and sway as he raised himself back to his feet.

The Elder placed her hand on his shoulder, and his panic became clear as she allowed the full weight of her limb to descend. He toppled sideways, knee slamming on the floor so hard the obsidian on his knee shattered, before he'd managed to angle himself and let her hand pass unopposed. Fulton followed it with a simple swiping motion, sending a burst of air that sent him flying.

With a groan he got back up and walked towards the center of the room.

"Agaiiiin," he hissed.

Her brow twitched.

"Clench your teeth, boy."

I reached out and, as if politely knocking on a door, she rapped against the plates on his uninjured shoulder, each knuckle carrying the mass of a thousand fully loaded shipping containers.

The world cracked.

I was a thrown shard, spine death lived a heartbeat away and closing fast. Wings shot out by reflex and turned the impact line into a skid that broke impact into several parts that hurt differently. Something in my shoulder popped like a half rotten stick, flooding my arm with fire that reached all the way to my claws. I hit hard enough to bounce. The floor took me like it had been waiting. Copper filled my mouth. Vision swam as I coughed for breath.

Standing up took too long, but Fulton did not seem rushed, dusting off her knuckles as if she'd touched something filthy. I hobbled back to the center of the room, I didn't fix the white tarp that hung as a joke from my hips. "Sssshadow," I mangled the name. Hate kept rising, hot and simple. My jaw ached from holding the thing inside me still. It paced behind my teeth.

I waited for that slow blink, that pause before her lip curled. Her flat heels kept doing that mean little double-tempo staccato that marked the passage of time more surely than a clock.

Then she knocked again. Hip. Shoulder. Ribs. Each touch turned me into a freight car cut loose on a steep hill. Each time, something would shatter underneath the obsidian armor. I learned fast that my wings could turn the inertia of the impact and soften the blow. Fold in the first meter, knife the air, then snap them open and twist so the impact would bruise rather than turn bones to gravel. Every throw I stood and walked back, slower each time. Eyes on her. Claws open. The walk had turned petty and cruel and necessary. It was a small victory.

Twice my claws twitched towards the softness of her throat. Twice I buried them into my own thighs to stop them before they reached anywhere.

"Shadow begged me for a day to help cure you of your condition. She believes you're truly a meguca." Those were the first words the Elder had spoken that weren't some self-serving sermon or flat denial. "And she pities you."

My calm was not calm. It was a glass pane that had started to show lines when she said that. Something slid towards the edge and I could feel the cracks grow.

Do not lift a finger until you're human.

The rule rang thin under the noise. The true drum hit underneath.

She ordered you dead.

I collapsed against the wall. She'd hit my leg and send me into a wild spin to keep me from using my wings. The bitch was avoiding hurting my right arm, she wanted me to claw her face out, I could see it in the smug satisfaction hidden behind that forced blankness.

She hadn't even thought that my maw and fangs could do the job just fine.

I limped my way back to the center of the room.

"Grab me," she said, voice cool. "End this. Prove me right. Watching you drag yourself is pathetic."

"No."

"Then be a better sandbag and keep quiet."

This time her hand made a downward gesture and a column of air descended upon me like a waterfall. My only useful knee buckled, ears ringing from the deafening force, neck screaming as I kept my gaze locked on to her own. "Again," I hissed before the howling winds could clear from my ears.

Her lips thinned.

She clenched a fist and raised it toward my chest, slow enough to count the seconds. A mockery of a punch. "Run," she said, the hand drifting like it moved through molasses. The simple gesture dragged weight through the room that pressed into my ribs.

I lifted my broken arm to block and locked my jaw. I refused to give ground.

The next thing I knew, the ceiling rushed at me.

Wings snapped open. My tail flipped. My body moved on instincts I did not know I had. Air caught under the membranes and turned my climb into a sideways burst I could not brake. I struck the wall at an angle, lost traction, ricocheted into the far wall, and spilled to the floor.

The ceiling lights jabbed at my eyes like knives. A high ring ate the edges of the world.

"Interesting," she said, her voice cutting through the hiss. "The wings responded instinctively. Did Moreau leave you a manual, or are you discovering this by accident?" I tried to move. Nothing answered at first. I had to breathe and wait as Fulton kept talking. "Even counterfeit systems learn under load… until they break."

That word found a hollow in me I had not known was there.

Counterfeit.

It burned. It cored me and left heat behind. I crawled up out of it and found my feet. My bad leg dragged. I met her stare head on with a low snarl. My fangs tasted air. My claws curled on nothing and ached for purchase.

"That is the look." The corner of Fulton's mouth lifted. She watched me take the center, one heavy step after another.

I closed my claws and then opened my hands to show my palms.

The hint of that smile died.

"Had today not happened, this is what would have followed," she said. "You would have kept raiding corporate depots, pulling the fourth district around you. The 'shush monster,' icon of resistance, or justice." Her head tilted. "It would have lasted two weeks, maybe three if the council took pity and stepped in to protect you again."

She tapped my shoulder. The touch was light and still sent me reeling. My bad leg buckled. I caught myself on a heel as she came on.

"The corporations would escalate. They would rescind the food after the fact. They would send mercenaries to strip the homes you fed and to kill anyone who resisted. Only to send the message that your gift is a poison."

Another poke. I hit the floor, scrambled, rose. She did not stop.

"The district would rally behind the shush monster. You would shield them from the mercenaries. You would be forced to choose which humans to kill."

An open palm touched my chest. Not much force. Just enough to lay me out again. My mouth worked, but no sound came. Thought frayed at the edges.

"Your precious gang would intervene. War with a corporation cannot be sustained. Any peace is a better option. But why would a corporation bargain with them?"

I raised my arms. She brushed them aside like paper.

"Someone would decide that removal is cleaner."

Shove.

"They would all end up dead."

My back met the wall.

"Because of you."

The room shrank to a pinprick.

SNAP

Fulton saw the lunge arrive like a tide finally breaking a flat sea. She had been waiting for it since they'd entered the room. The claws came forward. The wings flexed. The wedge mouth opened showing rows of razor sharp fangs.

Satisfaction touched the back of her tongue.

At last.

The clean version.

She raised her hand for the final correction and was already composing the report language in a corner of her mind.

Monster discarded human persona. Threat terminated. Civic risk averted.

She would cite the metrics from the load sensors and the video trace. She would include the fact that he had been given every opportunity to show control and had chosen teeth. She would attach the CYPHER profile assessment that was a few seconds away from completion. It would be the domino that would have CYPHER no longer protect Moreau's location, show Shadow the folly of empathizing with the enemy, and deal a crippling blow to Elder Summer's standing.

Three birds with one monster-shaped stone.

Some semblance of cunning remained in the monster as it gripped the white tarp that'd been clinging to its hips and threw it at her as if it could make a difference. Fulton didn't even bother to block. Right here and now, her body was the Wall and the Wall was her body. Nothing the late Axel Garcia could do would put so much as a scratch on her.

She heard the step, felt it through the metal, too light, too soft.

A second step, a scream that should've been a roar.

The tarp fluttered as a fleshy hand flew through from the wrong angle.

Fulton's mind stuttered as it tried to catch up with what she was looking at as the fist came to a stop an inch from her face.

The universe paused.

Axel Garcia looked at her with a face half-swollen and half-lidded unfocused eyes, barely breathing through pained gasps, body frozen in place. Whether because he'd stopped willingly or not was entirely unclear.

Human.

The moment stretched, the hand inches from her face devoid of any claws or armor. Her focus scrambled to confirm the truth. Within his chest, she could sense his soul, his core, the flickering that had threatened to consume it was gone.

A single strand of hair loosened from her face and fell.

Fulton stood with a hole where her glorious conclusion had been. The room's hum felt too loud for a beat. She tasted metal and copper at the back of her tongue. She lifted her arm slowly, hand clenching into a proper fist.

The air screamed as the entirety of the mass of the Third Wall pooled within her knuckles.

But before she could move, a single notification shrieked within her ear with the volume set twelve levels too high.

Profile Assessment: [COMPLETE] Axel Garcia Designation: [MAGUBO] POI Priority: [GAMMA]

Before she could even process the words or ask herself what a Gamma level person-of-interest designation even was, her neuralink, which had been set to block calls, rang.

CALLER ID: CYPHER-Main

Eyes wide, she stared at the message.

The call went through without her input.

The entity that was both the backbone and mastermind of humanity's survival over the past two hundred years spoke in a perfect happy female customer service voice. "You did not cause the fall of Los Angeles, Elder Fulton."

Fulton's throat tightened. "I-"

The call ended before she could get a full word in.

She was left alone with nothing but painful memories and the unconscious man on the floor.

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