Stars in Shadow

The blaster shot caught him mid-stride. Wayne dropped without a sound, a sack of meat hitting wet concrete. The neon sign above us flickered, casting his body in sickly green pulses, then red, then green again. I pressed myself flat against the alley wall, my notebook still open in my hand, the ink smeared where my palm had been sweating.

I should have run. Any sensible person would have run.

But I had spent three weeks tracking him through the lower districts, following whispers and half-truths like breadcrumbs through a labyrinth of rust and rain. Three weeks of sketchy informants and dead ends. Three weeks of hoping the rumors were wrong.

They weren't wrong. The bounty hunter everyone called the Ghost of the Sprawl was bleeding out in an alley, and I was the only one who saw it happen.

The shooter was gone. A professional hit. One clean shot from a rooftop, then silence. No taunts, no gloating, no body retrieval. Just a job, finished.

Wayne coughed. A wet, rattling sound that meant his lung was punctured.

I moved before I could talk myself out of it. My boots splashed through a puddle of something I didn't want to identify. I knelt beside him, my satchel swinging forward, and pressed my hand against the wound. His blood was hot and slick between my fingers.

His eyes snapped open. Cold. Sharp. The eyes of a man who had been playing dead and calculating his odds.

“Don't,” he said. His voice was gravel and broken glass.

“You're bleeding out.”

“Not your problem.”

I pulled a roll of bandages from my satchel. The same satchel that held my maps, my notebooks, my carefully documented histories of a dozen forgotten cities. I had never used it for anything more violent than staunching a paper cut.

“I'm a cartographer,” I said, pressing the cloth against his side. He winced, a muscle twitching in his jaw. “I spend my life mapping places people want to forget. You're one of those places, Wayne. A landmark of bad decisions and worse luck.”

He stared at me. The neon flickered green across his face, catching the scar that ran from his temple to his jaw.

“You know my name.”

“I know a lot of things. I know you were tracking a woman named Sera Voss. I know she's being held in the Obsidian Tower. I know you planned to go alone because you don't trust anyone, and I know that plan just got a hole punched through it.”

He tried to sit up. I pushed him back down. He was heavy, solid muscle and stubborn bone, but the shock was wearing off and the pain was setting in.

“Who sent you?” he asked.

“No one. I found you.”

“Bullshit.”

“I've been looking for you for three weeks. I needed to find you before you got yourself killed.”

He laughed. It turned into a cough, and blood flecked his lips. “Too late.”

“Not yet.” I tore open a sterile pad and pressed it harder against the wound. He grabbed my wrist. His grip was strong, despite the blood loss. His fingers were calloused, scarred, the hands of a man who had strangled people with them.

“Why?” he asked.

The question hung between us. The neon flickered. A distant siren wailed somewhere in the city's guts.

I could have lied. I could have told him I needed his help, that I had a job for him, that I was a client with credits to spend. But there was something in his eyes. Something that demanded honesty, even if it hurt.

“Because I know who you are,” I said. “Not the bounty hunter. Not the Ghost. I know who you were before.”

His grip tightened. “That man is dead.”

“I know.”

“Then what do you want?”

I pulled my wrist free and went back to work, packing the wound with gauze, my hands steady despite the tremor in my chest. “I want you to live long enough to tell me why you stopped looking for her.”

He went still. The only sound was the rain starting to fall, fat drops pattering against the corrugated awning above us.

“Who told you about that?”

“No one. I found your old case files. The ones the Guild scrubbed from their records. You spent seven years hunting a ghost of your own, Wayne. A woman named Elara. And then you just stopped. You became this.” I gestured at the alley, the blood, the neon. “You became a man who takes jobs he hates for people he despises.”

“You don't know anything.”

“I know you're not as dead inside as you pretend to be. I know you came here to save Sera Voss because she reminds you of someone. And I know you're going to die in this alley if you don't let me help you.”

The rain came harder. It washed the blood from my hands, diluted the puddle spreading beneath him. His eyes never left mine.

“You're a fool,” he said.

“Probably.”

“I don't take partners.”

“I'm not asking to be your partner. I'm asking you to stay alive long enough to tell me the truth.”

He closed his eyes. For a moment I thought he had passed out, or worse. But then his hand moved, slow and deliberate, and covered mine where it pressed against his wound.

“The Obsidian Tower,” he said. “You know what's in there?”

“Security drones. Automated defenses. A private army loyal to a man who collects people like trophies.”

“And you still want to go?”

I looked down at our hands, his blood mixing with mine on the wet concrete. The rain plastered my hair to my scalp, soaked through my shirt, but I didn't feel cold. I felt something I hadn't felt in years.

Alive.

“I'm not going,” I said. “We're going. Together. Or you die here, and I find another way.”

He opened his eyes. That cold, sharp gaze. But there was something else now. Something that looked almost like hope, buried deep and fighting to stay hidden.

“You're going to get us both killed.”

“Probably.”

He let out a breath. It wasn't quite a laugh, but it was close.

“Fine,” he said. “But if I die, I'm haunting you.”

I smiled. It felt strange on my face, like a muscle I hadn't used in years.

“Get up, Wayne. We have a woman to save.”