The rain fell in sheets across NeoTokyo’s District 9, acid droplets sizzling against the cracked polymer of my exoskeleton. From forty stories up, the city looked like a circuit board drenched in neon vomit—beautiful in its decay, like everything else in this world.
I flexed my augmented hand, watching synthetic tendons ripple beneath translucent skin. The portal generator embedded in my palm hummed with dormant energy—military-grade tech that should have died with the war. Instead, it lived on in me, a constant reminder of what I’d done. What we’d all done.
“Hey, Kade!” Lux’s voice crackled through my neural link. “You planning to brood up there all night, or are we running this job?”
I didn’t answer immediately. Below, a government hover-cruiser sliced through the rain, its search beams cutting white arcs through the darkness. Portal tech was forbidden now—had been since the Collapse. Only the elite corporate families and government death squads had legal access. And me, of course. The last surviving member of Portal Battalion, Section 7.
“I’ll be down,” I finally responded, standing from my perch on the rusted girder. “Just… making sure we’re clear.”
“Clear as we’ll ever be in this shitstorm,” Lux replied. I could almost see her rolling those chrome-rimmed eyes.
The memories came unbidden—they always did when I was about to open a tear. Shanghai, 2079. The first large-scale deployment of portal technology in combat. We thought we were gods, punching holes through reality. Until reality punched back.
I shook off the flashback and stepped off the girder into nothingness. For two heartbeats, I fell—then activated the generator. A ripple of electric blue light spiraled from my palm, expanding outward into a perfect circle of swirling energy. I dropped through it and emerged at street level, the portal collapsing behind me with a sound like tearing silk.
Lux was waiting, her silhouette backlit by the pulsing advertisements that covered every surface in Lower District. “Show-off,” she muttered, but there was something like awe in her voice. Even after all our jobs together, she never tired of watching me tear holes in space.
“What’s the package?” I asked, pulling my coat tighter against the acid rain.
She tapped her temple, activating a holographic display that projected from her left eye. “Prototype memory engrams. Stolen from MnemoCorp by some low-level lab tech who realized what he had. Now every fixer in the city wants it, including our client.”
“Memory tech?” My stomach clenched. Another reminder.
“Not just any memories,” Lux continued, oblivious to my discomfort. “Pure, unadulterated experiences. No filters, no corporate censoring. The real thing.”
Like the memories I couldn’t escape. The ones that woke me screaming every night. The real thing.
“Where’s the drop?” I asked, forcing my voice to remain steady.
“Upper Shibuya. The tech’s holed up in a capsule hotel, forty-third floor. Place called the Dreaming Dragon.”
I nodded. “And the competition?”
Lux’s smile was all teeth and no humor. “Everyone. Yakuza, corporate mercenaries, government cleanup crews. Maybe even a Wiped One if we’re really unlucky.”
Wiped Ones. Portal soldiers who hadn’t survived the neural backlash with their minds intact. They’d been reprogrammed as cleanup crews, sent to eliminate any trace of unauthorized portal tech. They’d kill me on sight—if they were feeling merciful.
“Then we’d better move fast,” I said, already calculating distances in my head. Shibuya was fifteen kilometers away—too far for a direct portal jump given my current energy reserves.
“We’ll need to make at least three jumps,” I explained, already feeling the familiar pressure building behind my eyes. “I’ve been running low on stabilizer.”
Lux’s expression hardened. “You didn’t tell me that.”
“I’m telling you now.”
She cursed in three languages, the translation software in my auditory implant struggling to keep up. “If you stroke out mid-jump, I’m not dragging your corpse back for recycling.”
“Your concern is touching.”
We moved through back alleys slick with unidentifiable fluids, past huddled forms of those who’d fallen too far down the socioeconomic ladder to climb back up. The dispossessed. The forgotten. The human debris of a world that moved too fast to look back.
At a junction between districts, I paused, pressing my palm against a concrete wall covered in bioluminescent graffiti. The portal opened with a crackling surge of energy, smaller than before. Conservation mode.
“First jump,” I said, gesturing Lux forward. “Lady’s first.”
She snorted but stepped through the swirling aperture without hesitation. I followed, the familiar vertigo gripping me as reality bent and reformed. We emerged on a rooftop in the Manufacturing District, steam rising from countless vents like the breath of some massive beast.
The second jump took us to the edge of Shibuya, and I could feel the strain now—a hot knife behind my eyes, blood trickling from my nose. The war memories pressed closer, threatening to overwhelm me.
*Tehran. The screaming as the portal collapsed prematurely, slicing through a platoon of our own soldiers like they were made of paper. Arms reaching through from nowhere, already dead but still moving…*
“Kade!” Lux was shaking me, her face uncomfortably close to mine. “Stay with me. One more jump.”
I nodded, wiping blood from my upper lip. “One more.”
The Dreaming Dragon capsule hotel loomed before us, a honeycomb structure of hundreds of sleeping pods stacked atop one another. Somewhere inside was our target—and the memory engrams that could make us rich enough to vanish forever.
But as I raised my hand for the final jump, the air around us shimmered with an all-too-familiar energy signature.
“Down!” I shouted, tackling Lux as a portal ripped open ten meters away. Through it stepped a figure I’d hoped never to see again—a Wiped One, still wearing the remnants of a Portal Battalion uniform. Its face was a blank mask, eyes replaced with optical scanners that swept the area methodically.
“Shit,” Lux breathed. “How did they find us?”
I knew how. The same way they always found me—by tracking the unique energy signature of my jumps. Each portal was like a fingerprint, and mine was in every government database from here to the moon colonies.
The Wiped One’s head swiveled in our direction, scanners locking on with mechanical precision. It had no weapons—it didn’t need them. The portal tech embedded in both hands was weapon enough.
“New plan,” I whispered to Lux. “I’ll draw it off. You get the package.”
“That’s suicide, Kade.”
“Probably.” I managed a grim smile. “But I’m dying anyway. Portal radiation’s been eating me from the inside out for years. Might as well make it count.”
Before she could argue, I stood, raising my hand in a mocking salute to the Wiped One. “Hey, soldier! Remember me? Lieutenant Kade Mercer, Portal Battalion, Section 7. Shanghai survivor.”
The creature’s head tilted, processing. Then it moved with inhuman speed, tearing open a portal directly beneath its feet and vanishing.
I reacted purely on instinct, opening my own portal at the exact spot where I calculated it would emerge. There was a sound like reality itself screaming in pain as the two portals intersected—a paradox of space and time that should have been impossible.
The Wiped One emerged halfway through my portal, its body contorting as conflicting spatial coordinates tried to resolve themselves. It made no sound as its form twisted and fragmented, scattered across multiple dimensional planes.
I collapsed to my knees, blood now flowing freely from my nose, ears, and eyes. The paradox jump had cost me dearly. My vision blurred, the world around me pulsing in time with my fading heartbeat.
Lux was suddenly beside me, her voice seeming to come from underwater. “…got the package… need to move… more coming…”
With her help, I staggered to my feet. My portal generator sputtered and sparked, damaged by the paradox jump. One more portal—that was all I had left in me.
“Where?” I asked, my voice a rasp.
Lux hesitated. “Somewhere safe. Somewhere they can’t follow.”
I nodded, summoning the last of my strength. The portal that opened before us was unlike any I’d created before—not the electric blue of standard jumps, but a deep, swirling purple shot through with black. A portal to somewhere else entirely.
“What did you do?” Lux whispered, staring into the vortex.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But it’s our only chance.”
Together, we stepped through into the unknown, the portal closing behind us with a finality that felt like both an ending and a beginning.
The memories of the war would follow me, I knew. They always did. But perhaps, on the other side of this final portal, I’d find a way to make peace with them at last.