I

Sally Theodora-Nolan ran up North Gate Street, pounding her combat treads as hard and fast as she could into the sidewalk, a collision course charted for the city of Nirvana’s side-road entrance. She almost chanced the road, but any road leading out of Nirvana’s walls was crowded with traffic, never mind that the North Gate wasn’t connected to the Great Highway. The only pedestrians Sally had to dodge were those who hadn’t seen her uniform yet—the standard-issue black jacket of the Fury Corps, with the organization’s screaming logo emblazoned on the right side in red.

Her eyes, or the fangs that filled her mouth in place of regular teeth, might’ve also done the trick, but Sally’s goggles were down, and she’d secured a bandana around her mouth. Even though Abnorms like her were using their powers to protect Nirvana from the monsters crawling all over the vast space between the nation of Sanctum’s Sister Cities, Sally wasn’t quite willing to risk any panic en-route to assignment.

A startled white woman nearly dropped her groceries as Sally practically leapt around her, and Sally couldn’t help but smile as she considered how wide the woman’s eyes could’ve really gotten. The Department of Abnormal Cooperation still had some work to do.

By the time Sally reached the looming grey door of the Gate itself, she’d already unslung the rifle from her shoulders. She looked up to the guard post controlling the gate, and raised a hand to her mouth.

“I’m here for the two-three, Callsign Gorgon!” A tiny rush crept up Sally’s spine as she yelled her callsign for the first time, hard-earned after two years of training for the corps.

She almost staggered back when the tremendous clatter of the North Gate opening rang through the entrance square, followed shortly by the howling of klaxons: the Great Gate opened to the Great Highway almost every week. North’s compromise meant alarms and warnings.

That said, the colossal slab stopped as soon as there was enough space for Sally to duck beneath, though the sirens continued wailing. She took a deep breath, a step back, then slid beneath, and out into the wide world of Sanctum beyond the city’s doorstep.

When Sally rose again, from the rubble of fracturing pavement that maintenance-golems had long since abandoned, she pulled her goggles down to hang around her neck. The world was always twice as bright out here, or whenever she could be free of the thick lenses. Sally took a few seconds to acclimate to the freedom outside Nirvana—gods, even the air was cleaner, free of the grit and grime of the super-dense megacity—then went to work.

She set up between two upturned chunks of concrete large enough to serve as cover should she need to duck and cover, took a knee, then settled her rifle’s butt into the crook of her arm. Sally’s fingertips settled over the grip, then closed one eye to peer through the scope she’d spent many a long hour in the Corps workshop modifying to suit her eyes best.

She almost immediately zoned in on the ruckus roiling down the disused road, a glinting circle of metal amidst a crop of dust. There, a small horde of figures you could probably mistake for human rested atop rugged motorcycles, clad head-to-toe in leathers and metal, arraigned in a semi-circle before the largest, most tricked-out bike, atop which balanced a figure with a long red plume dangling out from the back of their helmet. Bones dangled from braids and knots worked in.

Sally let her sights graze over the fist-pumping and presumably inspiring speech-giving the leader was in the middle of, and settled on a banner mounted on the rear of another bike. It was black, a red murderbird shrieking as the cloth fluttered in the breeze. Of all the marauding vampire clans roaming and raiding throughout Sanctum, the Shrikes were closest to the Night Queen who claimed sovereignty over all her blood-drinking kin.

Sally struggled to restrain her glee: stopping a vampire horde from sieging Nirvana’s walls, and a Shrike horde to boot? That would probably send her ranking skyrocketing, she might receive an honour, or maybe get to meet Captain Hast…

Sally forced herself back into the moment, held her breath, then squeezed the trigger.

One. The back of the war-leader’s helmet exploded, and they toppled from their bike.

Two. The vampire closest to the war-leader’s bike went down the second they staggered back from their freshly-fallen commander.

Three. The vampire who raised their arm found it suddenly detached from the elbow, sending a spray of blood into the weak overcast afternoon light.

Four, five. The vampire on the banner-bike clutched their chest and found a hole, then the banner fell to the dust as the flagpole buckled beneath a bullet.

Six. Vampires could shrug off many wounds a few seconds after they’d suffered them, and their morale was no different on their best days; a few had mounted their bikes again, and were gunning straight ahead. Sally took the wheel out from the lead bike while it was close enough to collide with the others. The column of exhaust and dust rising behind the riders was riddled with sparks, the screech-and-clash of metal on metal.

Sally took another look down her scope to get a rough estimate on how close the bike still on-course was, then stood. She could reload, but vampires didn’t respect “daylighters” for such tactics, and that included Abnorms. They needed more direct shows of power.

Sally waited until she could smell a hint of the fumes of the bike, until the roar of the engine started to make her throat hum. She stared down the rider, and re-slung her rifle.

The gravel and debris rose behind the vampire, who withdrew a wicked-looking war-pick from somewhere on the bike—Sally was focusing, but the front of her skull still wasn’t buzzing, which meant-

And it came, all at once, from the top of her head, down to her forehead, from the base of her spine, and most importantly, from behind her eyes: that buzzing pulse that told Sally that her Abnormal gaze had found a living thing within three hundred meters.

Sally forced her eyes as wide as they’d go, and the edges of her vision shook as the buzz flowed from her brain and into her pupils.

Though she was still far too far away to hear much of anything over the roar of the oncoming bike, Sally felt more than heard a dull snap. A hint of metal bloomed on her tongue.

The motorcycle veered off course, and crashed end over end as its rider toppled from the seat.

Sally willed the buzzing back, but kept her eyes wide as the cloud behind the bike dispersed.

There were no riders in its wake. A new upheaval of dust bloomed on the distant horizon, which Sally confirmed through her scope as the Shrike vampires in retreat.

“Oh, yes,” Sally breathed. The buzzing lessened after a steady countdown from ten. The dead vampire twitched on the broken blacktop, and any victory dance was postponed by the metal in Sally’s mouth that she couldn’t dismiss quite so easily, but… She’d saved Nirvana from marauders, hadn’t she? The jump in rankings would be huge! She’d finally done something great with her Abnormality, and on her first day to boot.

Sally turned, then forced herself to walk as the retrieval team streamed out of Nirvana’s North Gate, guns and retrieval jeeps at the ready. To the guard’s credit—and again, to the Department of Abnormal Cooperation’s, no doubt—none of them pointed their weapons Sally’s way, even when she pulled her bandana down and smiled her sharp smile. She was already guessing how long it would take to walk back to the Fury Corps outpost from North Gate.

* * *

“…This can’t be right.” Sally mumbled to no-one in particular as her heart sank to her stomach. She tapped the refresh icon on Outpost Epsilon Hotel’s directory tablet, but her rank remained where it had been since she’d arrived: seven-hundred sixty-sixth. She’d only jumped four spots, more of a hop than anything.

Sally tapped it again and again and her eyes almost watered behind her stupid goggles, which was even more stupid, and the stupid directory scrolled up to the top five by accident, and then it was almost as though Captain Hast’s regal stitched face was regarding Sally’s insignificance with disdain.

“Something the matter, freshie?” Sally looked up—reluctantly grateful that at least the tint of the lenses meant no one could see her eyes watering—and found the mottled face of Creeper, a five-year veteran at Epsilon Hotel, looming before her.

It was a face that promised more understanding.

“I saved the city, today.” Sally said. “I stopped a Shrike raiding party before it ever reached the walls, an early-warning assignment.”

Creeper nodded. “Yep, good work.”

“I…” I killed. I killed vampires to do it. “Shouldn’t—”

“Thing is,” the older woman continued, “city got saved two days back, and the day before that, and the week before that.”

“Oh.” Some of the tension leaked out of Sally, but the emptiness was cold. Her shoulders sagged.

“That’s just the norm for the Corps, freshie.” Creeper shrugged. “Deliverance is a world full of monsters and city-destroyers, and living in one of two megacities mean the whole pack is gonna come knocking pretty often.”

Sally nodded, but her eyes couldn’t help but fall on Captain Hast at the very top of the rankings board.

Creeper clapped a hand on Sally’s shoulder. “Come on, it’s your first day. Let’s see if we can pick you a better mission, yeah? Maybe near a different outpost.”

Sally handed Creeper the tablet, then moved beside the veteran to share the screen. “Oh, um, a stink-imp infestation near the agri-district-”

“Already taken,” Creeper chimed in as the green box turned red, “for the best, too, stink-imps are the worst imps.”

“I thought they were circle one, and spriggans are circle six-”

“The smell, freshie,” Creeper sighed. “It takes a year to leave you.”

“Oh. What about this, a ghast-tangle forming in the Clank area.”

That box turned red in a half-second. “Small fry.”

“Um, a behemoth is supposed to reach the southern gate in a few hours, there’s still a few slots!” Sally’s finger hovered just above the box.

“Won’t boost you much.” Creeper said.

“Really?”

“Yup. Been done before.”

“What, like stopping a Shrike horde has been done before?”

“Yup.”

“What about this one, a lab breach-”

“Yup.”

“If everything’s been done before, and getting ahead means doing something new, then how am I ever going to accomplish anything?” Sally almost ground her teeth—which had torn up her mouth for five years since needle fangs had replaced all flat teeth—before she settled on squeezing her thumb as hard as she could. Doing something worthwhile, something good with her Abnormality, was it all just a rigged game? The ghost of a buzz stung the back of Sally’s skull.

“Hey now, who said that?” Creeper raised a calloused brow. “If rankings relied on new, nobody would be anywhere. It doesn’t matter that this is all the same shit.”

“So how do I move up?” Sally said. She had to move up. She had to, or a thousand worried whispers, concerned glances, and cloth blindfolds would be right.

“Everyone winds up doing the same shit,” Creeper swiped through the different mission search-filters, “what matters is doing the same shit in an interesting way.”

She stopped at the mission postings tagged, “squad mandatory.”

It was Sally’s turn to be taken aback. “Teams are interesting?”

“All their jobs are worth more to rankings than solo outings, since they’re usually tougher,” Creeper replied. “Personally, I think the Academy pushes that rankings-matter celebrity status shit way too hard. It’s rough on you freshies, and it doesn’t matter.”

Sally couldn’t understand for a second why; Abnorms within the top-three-hundred bracket were celebrities, they were usually liked by normal people, hell, some had fan clubs. They were the ones everyone knew it was safe to approach and look in the eye.

“But, squad missions happen to benefit both our agendas,” Creeper continued, “and you’re a smart freshie. You’re even likeable!”

Sally mulled it over. She’d made some friends at the Academy during training, but she’d always kept to herself, even in group exercises. Sally’s problems weren’t problems she could expect other people to understand, and unlike some issues, in the end, they all fell on her.

But if a squad meant that boost up the rankings board…

“Wait, what’s your agenda, Creeper?” Sally returned her focus to Epsilon Hotel’s resident friendly veteran.

“To show you that a bunch of numbers in a list don’t matter half as much as having people there to support you when shit goes sour.” Creeper tapped Sally’s right goggle with one finger as she seized the tablet. “So get out there, grab some of your cadet friends, and dive into the trenches.”

Sally adjusted her goggle-strap with minimal grumbling. Even as she did, a few names and faces came to mind. People Sally had more than tolerated, but even gotten along with on a level deeper than amicable teamwork. She’d even talked to at least one, recently…

“I think I know where to start.”