Pact 2140

They pulled up to the building at the same time as the strike unit. Mark recognized their van instantly—Stretch and Mouth, as he’d come to think of them. Their helmets swallowed their faces, leaving only tinted plastic and a narrow glass visor where eyes should have been.Stretch gave Mark and Diana a curt nod; Mouth went straight for the entrance.

“What are we looking at?” Mark asked.

“Junkie, most likely,” Mouth said. Filtered through the vocoder, his voice sounded detached, hollow. “Beating his old lady again. Thank God, it’s the last call tonight.”

The stairwell hit them with a dying bulb and walls drowned in graffiti. The light flickered, carving pockets of darkness between the landings. On the second floor, something crashed—plates, maybe—and someone shouted in pain or fury.

“Police!” Stretch barked, and kicked the door in. With his bionic leg, he broke things like that almost elegantly.

Mouth slipped inside first. For a split second, the noise vanished above them—then a dry burst of automatic fire tore through the silence. A woman’s ragged sobbing seeped into the ringing that followed.

“Clear!” he called.

Mark went in after Diana. The smell hit him immediately: sour tobacco, ammonia, the stale heat of a room left to rot. He grimaced. Diana still held her gun raised. She was short and solidly built, moving with the calm precision of someone who had done this too many times.

“You should’ve brought a drone too,” Mark muttered.

The room looked shaken apart—overturned furniture, glass everywhere. A heavyset man in underwear lay bleeding out, limbs twitching, mouth working uselessly for air. Beside him, a half-naked woman crouched on the floor, hugging her knees, shivering and sobbing.

“Same shit every time,” Stretch said. Without the helmet, he would have spat on the floor.

“Alright, step aside,” Diana said, pulling a drone from her bag. Damn it. She really had brought one. What the hell — have they started stitching drone protocols into the patches?

They never used to take drones to calls like this.

A thin, transparent strip ran from her temple to the back of her skull, and a faint neon shimmer pulsed beneath the skin. The blue light flickered unevenly—flaring in sharp spasms, then spreading into a web of fine cracks.

Mark had told her more than once: patches weren’t an upgrade, they were a leash. Sure, they promised quicker thinking and direct access to the Net, but he saw only one thing—another thread for someone up top to pull.

The drone woke with a soft whirr, blades brushing the stale air, then drifted smoothly over the dead body, recording everything.

“Looks like you’ve got this,” Mark muttered.

“I do,” Diana said. Her lips twitched with a thin, dismissive smile.

The metallic tang of blood thickened the air, left a rusty taste on his tongue. The woman’s drawn-out sobbing made Mark nauseous. He leaned against the wall, feeling the paint crumble under his hand.

“Go get some air,” Stretch offered, almost kindly. “Nothing to do here anyway. Our detective will handle the report herself.”

“As always,” Mark echoed.

What’s next—gonna flirt with her? Detective. Yeah, look at him.

Mark stepped out onto the landing just as a door down the hall clicked shut. Curious neighbors.

Yeah. Probably the ones who called them. On a Friday night, damn them.

Through a cracked window, he could see Eastside. A thin, sticky drizzle clung to the air; heavy leaden clouds were gathering above the rooftops. Real rain was coming soon. Rows of concrete housing blocks stretched into the distance, ending where the rot of the Old City began. From here the whole Ring looked the same—gray, burned-out by time. Even the stubborn weeds pushing through the asphalt looked as lifeless as the buildings around them.

Mark needed air. Higher—anywhere above the crying and the drone’s insect hum leaking through the doors. He trudged up the stairs. How many floors? Ten? More? He just needed the roof—the one place that didn’t stink of old iron and decay, where he could push the rusted smog out of his lungs.

“Mark, go home,” Diana called from below. “I’ll finish this.”

He hesitated. Something in her voice… almost an apology.

Diana had always aimed for the Center—young, ambitious. For her, the police were only a rung on the ladder. The police didn’t catch criminals; they ticked boxes on digital forms while the Ring slowly sank into its own grave. It was work for people like Mark—people without ambition. And he was only thirty-eight. Correction: already thirty-eight.

In the City—this spotless City—there were no crimes. And the Ring? No one cared. The Ring didn’t care either.

He climbed another flight. Thick layers of dust covered the steps—no one lived this high.

After their breakup, Diana had patched herself. Now part of her brain was synthetic—ten percent, supposedly. Mark did the math: that made it about a year and a half.

Maybe he was being unfair. Or maybe she really had changed since then—more detached, colder somehow.

Not that it mattered anymore.

Another floor.

“They built so much crap here,” Mark muttered.

Hatred had become a habit—for the job, for the sterile shine of the City, for the hopelessness of the Ring. There was nothing else left in him.

He stopped and lifted his head. Seven flights? Eight? He had lost count, and the stairs kept stretching upward, pulling him deeper into the dusty darkness. Each step left a clean imprint—too clean, like footprints on fresh snow.

Concrete grit crackled underfoot—like the bones of the ones who built this place. During the war they had put up everything they could: factories, firing ranges, concrete blocks, as if you could brute-force victory out of concrete. Back then, the Ring was still part of the City, and they called it a state.

Twenty years had passed—and the whole place was collapsing, sagging into dust.

All that remained was the Ring. The City shone on its own now. There was no need for states anymore.

“And thank God for that,” Mark muttered.

Two more floors.

He ran his hand along the wall. Along with crumbling plaster, his fingers came away smeared in black soot—factory smoke that had eaten into the building for decades. The war still lived here, soaked into the concrete like a smell. Even he, back then just a kid, had caught the tail end of it. Eighteen—the perfect age to step into a meat grinder and come out breathing.

What if he just stepped out a window? It would be almost funny—falling straight onto the strike team’s armored van and leaving a dent. Or right off the roof?

He’d seen that before—an unpleasant sight, and hell to repair the vehicle afterward. Stretch would say something like, “Poor bastard, the job finally got to him.” And Diana would document the death with clinical precision. With a drone, naturally.

The thought amused him.

His cuff vibrated, faint light blooming across his wrist. A direct message. Of course, it was Diana. A delayed pang of guilt touched him—he hadn’t treated her well tonight. Not that she was at fault. For anything. Including the breakup.

“What is it?” he asked.

A murky shimmer rose before his face—his holo-screen. Letters trembled in the dusty air like reflections in standing water:

“When will you finally get up here? I’m waiting.”

Mark squinted, rereading. The sender field was blank.

“What the hell? Who’s this from?”

“Unable to identify sender,” the comm replied in its politely neutral tone. “Source within a three-hundred-and-fifty-meter radius. Would you like me to scan the area so you can try jumping off the roof?”

Did it really say that, or was he imagining things?

Mark stopped. Rain seeped through a crack in the windowpane, leaving thin dark streaks down the glass. He caught himself counting them: one, two, three…

“No,” he said at last.

The stairs kept rising, disappearing into shadow. His heart was hammering harder now; his feet dragged through the dust. How far had he climbed already? Ten flights? Twenty? The ascent would not end.

A flash of reflection flickered in the cracked glass, and Mark turned away. He already knew what he’d see: a gaunt, unshaven face, the shadows under his eyes going violet. That’s why Stretch had looked at him like that. Although… how would he even know how he looked at him? The guy wore a helmet.

“How many floors does this building have?” Mark snapped.

“Unfortunately, I have no such information,” the system replied cheerfully. “But there seems to be a door to the roof above you.”

“About damn time.”

Every step felt like dragging the whole cursed building on his shoulders. He stopped, breathing hard. Sweat ran from his temples down his neck beneath his collar. Catching his breath, he pushed himself up the last flight and shoved the metal door. It groaned, then gave way.

A cold wind slapped him in the face.

The rain had picked up. Drops drummed against sheet metal and concrete, pooling in milky puddles collecting in the cracks. Broken antenna pieces lay scattered across the roof, their rusted rods reaching toward the sky like a dead man’s stiffened fingers. Nearby, an old drying rack creaked in the wind.

Standard Eastside blocks sprawled deep into the Ring—featureless, identical, nauseatingly uniform. The streetlights below barely pierced the downpour, their halos faint and trembling. In those weak circles shapes moved—people, maybe, or just shadows his mind invented.

On the horizon, beyond the line of the Barrier, the City glowed. White towers stabbed through the rain with steady, immaculate light. It was always daytime there. They knew nothing of this gray filth. The contrast was blinding.

Mark took a deeper breath. His chest loosened—for a moment. The air still smelled of wet metal and distant fire.

Only then did he notice the silhouette on the parapet—a dark figure framed by the dirty-gray sky. She sat motionless, staring toward the City—so still she almost looked built into the concrete. He narrowed his eyes. Against the distant glow, it seemed she was looking straight at him. A cold shiver slid down his back.

Mark took a few steps forward.

Maybe a jumper? Those calls happened too, though rarely. Usually no one bothered with them—too much paperwork, and they ruined the statistics. Saving people wasn’t part of the police mandate.

Mark moved closer. The silhouette sharpened into a young woman. She wore a battered leather jacket soaked through with rain, the hood pulled low over her head.

He held his breath. There was something unnervingly calm in the way she sat, as if perching on the edge of a ten-story drop were routine. As if the void beneath her meant nothing at all.

Then she turned her head.

Her face emerged from the hood. Short black hair slicked with rain, and eyes of two different colors—one pale, almost translucent, the other dark as resin. Her gaze held two beings at once: one of light, one of shadow.

She was beautiful—and completely wrong for this rooftop above the filthy Eastside.

“There you are, Mark,” she said. Her voice was steady, as if they had paused a conversation only a minute ago.

She noticed his bafflement and pointed at his jacket.

“Your badge.”

The metal glinted in the rain, droplets sliding across the engraved letters of his name.

“So that’s how it is,” he muttered.

“Sit,” she said, nodding at the parapet. The word landed like an order.

And he sat—legs dangling over the edge, palms on the cold concrete. The parapet was slick beneath his hand, yet Mark felt no fear. He looked down—and froze.

The familiar ten stories were gone. Beneath the roof yawned a chasm.

The drop was so deep that the two cars parked below looked like dead locusts glued to the ground. One of the headlights flickered, and that tiny spark made the abyss beneath them seem even more immense.

Some kind of trick of the height? As if the building had stretched, its lines bending and pulling away from each other. But what kind of illusion makes cars look like toys?

“I could push you,” she said casually, as if commenting on the weather. “It would make everything much simpler.”

Mark tensed; his palms pressed instinctively into the wet concrete of the parapet.

But the girl merely pointed toward the City.

“Look.”

Beyond Eastside and the impenetrable strip of the Barrier, the City glowed—drowned in surgical white light, too clean to be real. Against the filth of the Ring it looked unreal, a mirage. The towers trembled in the rain, as if keeping their balance on a knife’s edge, ready to collapse at the slightest touch. That, at least, had to be an illusion caused by the storm.

“The City,” Mark said, and the sound of his own voice felt misplaced, almost foreign.

A stupid remark. He had seen this view a thousand times, but here, on this wet, dark rooftop, he was seeing it for the first time. From here the whole colossal, radiant fact of its existence made no sense. It was a grand backdrop—hollow, stage-like, nothing behind it but cold rain.

“Do you want to destroy it, Mark?” she asked.

The words weren’t loud, but they were sharper than anything else around them—louder than the rain, louder than the hum of the eastern generator.

Later, remembering this meeting, he doubted whether it had been a question at all. Maybe she had said: “You want to destroy it, Mark.” Perhaps the “you” had drowned in the thunder.

He turned to her, and from her smile he understood: she already knew the answer.

“To shatter it. Grind it down. Break it. Ruin it,” she said slowly, savoring each word. “Crush it. Burn it.”

At her words, the air seemed to harden, and time dragged to a halt. Raindrops froze mid-fall, and even the hum of the eastern generator faded into nothing. Only her voice remained—drawing the contours of destruction: towers collapsing, fires blooming, people screaming.

And the real question wasn’t who she was, but why she was saying aloud the things he had never dared to let form in his own mind.

To wipe them out. Kill them. Make them bleed. Tear them apart. Blood.

She kept talking, but the meaning slipped away, dissolving into the rain.

Then her gaze struck him again.

Something inside him clenched tight. Rain kept lashing his face, but Mark no longer felt it. The Ring, the City, the rooftop beneath his feet—everything melted away. Only her eyes remained, and the words that pinned him in place like a nail.