Corpus Academy loomed ahead of Nerium like a fortress, which, technically, it was. Pre-collapse construction, reinforced walls that had survived bombardments and riots and the slow, grinding decay of a city eating itself alive. It was webbed with security systems that had been updated every other decade for the past two centuries, layers of cameras and sensors and automated defenses designed to keep out exactly the kind of people who might want to break in after hours.

  People like him.

  Nerium Rex walked his way to the front gates of Corpus Academy

  His hand went to his pocket. Lo and Behold. Empty. His keycard was gone.

  Nerium fumbled through all the pockets on his person, searching frantically for the small rectangle he needed to do his part in this revenge plot. He didn't have it. It was nowhere on his person and Nerium already knew he wasn't lucky enough to have lost it nearby.

  Thinking about the events that unfolded the past hour, one particular event came to mind. The time where Rhaene had slammed him against that wall.. The card must've fallen out then. And by now? Probably stuck in some gutter or maybe already ground to dust under some passing vehicle.

  No keycard. No access. No plan.

  Except.

  He looked at the wall again. Twelve feet. Smooth stone. No handholds. And next to it. A parked car.

  Bingo.

  Plan B might've been worse, but it still had the same chance of succeeding. For Nerium, at least.

  It was night, so Nerium had very little concern over somebody watching him climb atop the car and as faculty at Corpus, he wouldn't get penalized for breaking in. Worst case situation he'd get a slap on his wrist.

  Nerium walked over to the parked car, a red truck, souped up and modded to all hell. Luckily for Nerium, it came with legholds and climbing to the top of it was no big deal. The hard part was to come. A combined gap of one foot from the car's roof to the wall and the remaining 5 feet of vertical wall stood between him and the answers he needed.

  "Okay," he muttered to himself. "Okay. You can do this. You've climbed trees before. Trees are just... very vertical plants. This is just a vertical rock. Same principle."

  It was not the same principle in any way, shape, or form.

  He jumped from the car's roof, grabbing the top of the wall, and immediately realized he had made a terrible mistake.

  The stone was rough against his palms, gritty with decades of accumulated grime, but that wasn't the problem. The problem was that he'd somehow expected his arms to just... work. To pull him up like it was nothing, like in the stories, like the heroes in the old vids who scaled walls and fought monsters and never once thought about the fact that they'd spent their entire lives in laboratories, not gyms.

  His arms burned. His shoulders screamed. His legs kicked uselessly against the smooth stone, feet scrabbling for purchase that didn't exist.

  For a horrible, suspended moment, he just hung there. A very confused human-shaped flag, his knuckles white against the stone, his body dangling twelve feet above the ground with nothing but empty air below.

  A laugh bubbled up in his throat.

  It was hysterical. Desperate. Completely, utterly inappropriate. But he couldn't stop it. The sound escaped him, high and broken, echoing off the wall in the empty night.

  He wasn't even strong enough to pull himself up a wall.

  A wall. A stupid, twelve-foot wall that any half-decent physical specimen could probably scale in seconds. Arbor would have vaulted it without breaking stride. Rhaene would have probably just broken through it. And here he was, hanging by his fingertips, his arms already giving out, his body betraying him in the most pathetic way possible.

  What good was he going to do?

  The thought hit him like a physical blow. What was he actually bringing to this? A scanner. Access to archives. A three-year obsession with a woman. He could find information, yes. He could trace supply chains and analyze patterns and do all the things he'd spent his life training to do. But when it came time to actually do something with something other than his head, what then? Would he stand in the background while Rhaene and Arbor did the real work? Would he be dead weight?

  A laugh. Another one. Louder this time, more broken.

  His grip slipped. Just a little. Just enough to remind him that he was still hanging here, still failing, still accomplishing nothing.

  No way he was going to help avenge Cid.

  His grip slipped again. He felt himself falling, just for a moment, before his fingers caught and held.

  No.

  The word came from somewhere deep, somewhere he didn't know existed. Somewhere that wasn't the scared, pathetic researcher who'd spent his whole life being overlooked.

  No.

  He wasn't going to fall. He wasn't going to fail. He wasn't going to let Cid's death be for nothing, and he wasn't going to let himself be useless, and he wasn't going to hang here like a damn flag while his future, whatever was left of it, slipped through his fingers.

  He pulled.

  It wasn't graceful. It wasn't strong. His arms screamed, his shoulders shrieked, his entire body rebelled against the impossible demand. But somehow, some way, he managed to hook one elbow over the top of the wall. Then the other. Then he was half-sprawled across the stone, gasping, shaking, tears streaming down his face that he refused to acknowledge.

  He lay there for a long moment, breathing hard, staring at the stars wheeling overhead.

  "Okay," he whispered. "Okay. That was... that was something."

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  His arms felt like overcooked noodles. His ribs ached from where he'd slammed into the stone. Dust and grit coated every inch of him. He was pretty sure he'd torn something in his shoulder.

  But he was on top of the wall. He'd made it. He'd actually made it.

  The laugh that escaped him now was different. Still broken, still tinged with hysteria, but underneath it, something else. Something that might, eventually, become determination.

  He looked down at the courtyard below. Twelve feet of drop. He'd have to jump. Land badly. Probably hurt himself again.

  Didn't matter.

  He dropped into the courtyard, flopping into some bushes and kicking up a cloud of dirt.

  He coughed as he flopped his way out of the bushes and slowly limped his way toward the archive entrance with what he hoped looked like casual confidence. The security camera at the door tracked him with its little red eye. He waved at it, hoping the night guard was asleep or drunk or both.

  The building door didn't open.

  Right. Keycard. He didn't have it.

  He tried the handle anyway, on the off chance that someone had forgotten to lock it. It didn't budge. Of course it didn't. This was the Academy, not some abandoned warehouse. They locked their doors.

  Nerium stood there for a moment, defeat washing over him. Then he looked at the ventilation grate to the left of the door.

  The grate was old, rusted, its screws barely holding. He pried at it with his fingers, got nowhere, then pulled a multitool from his pocket, standard equipment for any researcher who'd ever had to jimmy open a broken sample case. Three minutes of work, and the grate popped free.

  The duct beyond was dark, narrow, and absolutely filthy.

  He was already covered in dirt, couldn't get much messier.

  He crawled in.

  Twenty minutes later, he emerged from a vent on the archive's second floor, covered in decades of accumulated dust and coughing so hard he had to press his sleeve to his mouth to muffle the sound. His clothes were gray. His hair was gray. He was pretty sure he'd inhaled enough particulate matter to keep a lung specialist employed for a year.

  But he was inside now. The archive hummed around him, servers breathing their cool, electronic breath, status lights blinking in the darkness like the eyes of sleeping machines.

  The first hour was a dead end.

  Nerium started with the blueprints. The warehouse near the old rail yard. Pre-collapse structure, originally a textile factory. He pulled up the records, expecting schematics, utility maps, tunnel connections.

  What he got was surface-level garbage. Public records. Tax documents. A few old permits. Nothing useful. The detailed blueprints he needed, the ones that showed structural weaknesses, maintenance tunnels, basement layouts, were locked behind higher clearance. Clearance he didn't have.

  He tried procurement records next. If he could find what exactly went in and out, then Delivery manifests. Supplier lists. He found plenty of activity, shipments in and out, trucking companies, receiving signatures. But it all looked legitimate. On paper, the warehouse was just a warehouse. Goods arrived, goods departed, everything accounted for.

  Too accounted for. Too clean.

  Nerium leaned back, rubbing his eyes. Something was wrong. The thug had given them this location. Cheshie operated out of here. The Las-Venom operation was real. So where was the evidence?

  He pulled up the manifests again. Scrolled through them line by line. Shipments of industrial materials. Cleaning supplies. Packaging. Nothing illegal. Nothing suspicious.

  Except.

  He noticed something about the numbers. Quantities received versus quantities shipped out. On paper, they matched. But when he looked closer, when he actually did the math, running the totals for each month, each quarter, each year, a pattern emerged.

  More was coming in than going out.

  Not by much. A few percent here, a few percent there. Easy to miss if you weren't looking. Easy to write off as accounting errors, inventory shrinkage, normal business variance.

  But it was consistent. Month after month, year after year, more material entered that warehouse than ever left it.

  So where was it going?

  Nerium's heart started to pound. He pulled up the shipment logs, traced the outgoing deliveries, followed them to their destinations. Legitimate businesses, mostly. A few shell companies he recognized from earlier research. But the math still didn't add up. The incoming volume was too high. Too much material was vanishing into that warehouse and never coming out.

  Unless.

  Unless the outgoing shipments weren't the only way product left the building. Unless there was another exit. Another channel. Something not recorded in the official logs.

  He needed more data. He needed the records that didn't exist in the public system.

  He was about to give up, to admit defeat, when he noticed something in his personal file directory.

  A notification icon. Blinking patiently. A flagged file.

  He'd set up alerts years ago, hoping to catch Cid publishing new research. He'd never bothered to disable them. And now-

  The file was timestamped the day of the explosion. The same day. Hours before.

  He opened it.

  It was an email. From Cid. To him.

  It wasn't particularly long. Just 5 words and an attachment.

  I'll be gone. Miss you.

  Nerium's hands were shaking so badly he could barely click the attachment icon. The file downloaded. Opened.

  A list.

  Dates. Locations. Shipment numbers. Supplier names. Transporter IDs. All meticulously organized, cross-referenced, annotated in Cid's unmistakable shorthand. It was everything, everything she'd gathered about the operation, the supply chain, the warehouse, the people running it. Years of data, condensed into a single file.

  Nerium sighed. A little part of him still wanted to believe that Cid had just happened to get caught up in this business. That she was innocent without any chems on her hands. But, he should've known better.

  He stared at the screen in silence. The cursor blinked. The server hummed.

  Miss you.

  He started working.

  With Cid's data as his key, everything unlocked. He cross-referenced her shipment numbers with the public manifests, and suddenly the patterns jumped out at him. The shipments that went in and never came out, they matched perfectly with the dates Cid had flagged. The shell companies she'd identified led him to others, and those to more, until he had a complete map of the operation's logistics.

  The warehouse wasn't just a distribution point. It was a manufacturing facility. The materials that went in and never came out were being converted into product on-site. The outgoing shipments that did leave, the ones that matched the public records, were just for show, moving small amounts to legitimate fronts while the real volume went through channels that didn't exist on paper.

  Nerium slowly started to piece together a general map. Where the product came from. Where it went. Who moved it. Who signed for it. When the warehouse would be busy and when it would be quiet. The weak points in the schedule, the gaps in security, the moments when the operation slowed and when it was overactive.

  He leaned back in the chair, breathing hard. His eyes burned. His head throbbed. His entire body ached from the climb, the crawl, the hours of staring at screens.

  He didn't have any floorplans or anything that could help with the actual break-in. But he'd be damned if he couldn't pinpoint the perfect time to do it.

  2 days 3 hours. No predicted shipments in. All shipments out will have finished. Only on-site staff would be there. It was near perfect.

  He saved the files. Copied them to his personal drive. Copied them again. Triple redundancy. He wasn't losing this.

  At the bottom of the email, he read the words one more time.

  I'll be gone. Miss you.

  He closed the terminal. Stood on legs that didn't feel like his own. Walked toward the vent.

  At the edge of the duct, he paused. Looked back at the dark archive, the sleeping servers, the blinking lights.

  He crawled back into the duct. The darkness closed around him. He didn't care.

  Forward. Always forward.

  The vent leading outside was exactly where he'd left it. He pushed through, dropped into the courtyard, landed hard. His ankle screamed. He ignored it.

  The wall was still there. Twelve feet of smooth stone. This side was covered on vines. A much easier climb from the bottom, but considering his physical prowess and current state. He'd be in for a world of hurt. He climbed it anyway, badly, painfully, scraping his hands and knees and swearing under his breath the whole way. His arms burned. His shoulder screamed. He didn't stop.

  He dropped to the other side. Landed hard. He winced, but continued limping towards the cafe. He'd have time to rest later, but right now time was of the essence.

  The stars wheeled overhead. The city hummed. And Nerium was chuckling to himself.