Chapter 6: Shoutback The garage woke them with a chorus of buzzes that didn’t belong to anything they owned. Every public screen within two blocks decided to be a mirror. Their faces stared back—Ace with her mouth mid-word, Mai with her hand mid-reach. Rain blown across a still at the Glen. A gun that had not been there in any universe they respected. Across the bottom, the city wrote: *BREAKING: CHURCH KILLERS? PRIEST HARBOURS LEGENDS.* The feed cross-cut to Padre’s door and zoomed until pixels begged for mercy. “Battery,” Mai said, already upright, already in the shard. “Deepfake, priority push. It rode our completion rails to get in faster.” “Rude,” Ace said. V kicked the garage door open like it had been scheduled. “You’re famous,” they said. “Congratulations. Open bounty just hit every gutter-net in town. Seven figures, sliding scale for body heat.” Ace looked at the nearest screen where she was busy murdering an angle. “We don’t have time to explain art.” “Padre,” Mai said. “Padre,” V agreed. “We move now or the street rewrites him.” They moved. V’s truck coughed awake and spat smoke like a curse. Mai jacked the shard into the dash and set a net of lies around them that told traffic cams they were a mail van with a discount on regret. Ace watched the sidewalks learn about money: heads turning with calculation, shoulders tightening, fingers rehearsing draws. A flock of microdrones found them and tried to become a conspiracy. Mai pulsed low—no fireworks, just a bad thought that made their gyros feel seasick. Half fell away. The other half adapted, stitched themselves into something with too many eyes, and learned how to alpha their own nausea. “Proofreaders,” Mai said. “Battery’s copy desk.” “Cute,” Ace said. “I like mine with fewer knives.” V took a hard left into an alley that had rational objections to trucks. A Maelstrom pair at the far end saw them and saw money and saw the easiest choice of their week. V didn’t brake. Ace leaned out the window and let her voice hit first. “Not today.” The two took a step forward on habit and a step back on instinct and ended up with the right answer by accident. The truck scraped a wall, swore, and came out onto a feeder street that was pretending to be calm. “Pads say ten out,” V said. “Or two hours if we do it polite.” “Not polite,” Ace said. They cut through a market that had been open since the moon decided to quit. Vendors raised signs and middle fingers. A news wall on their right cycled through seven lies and one truth about them, then colored the lies red for emphasis. A teenager filmed them with terror-joy and said *no way* while thirty bidders looked his way with bad intentions. The church took shape out of rain—the courtyard, the candles, the kind of light that happens only where people have made hard trades with their gods. People already gathered, drawn by bounty and blasphemy. Valentinos with flags in their sleeves and grief in their tattoos. Maelstrom with optics that talked over their eyes. Civilians who came to see if their city would eat or spit. Padre stood in the doorway. His coat wasn’t a shield but it acted like one. His hands were empty and that made them heavy. The altar boy beside him held a phone turned face-down like a man trying not to stare at an eclipse. “We’re not your story,” Ace called from the truck bed, as V nudged them up onto the lip of the courtyard. “Go home.” “Home is here,” someone shouted back, which was either brave or obedient. A rock assumed things about air and tried to become part of Ace’s head. She moved and let it join the church instead. It hit a statue and took the saint’s nose. The crowd loved the metaphor. Mai was already out of the cab with the shard in her palm, eyes narrowed, fingers moving in the space between screens. “Battery’s running its mob template,” she said, voice low and precise. “AR overlays, small payouts for first blood, bonuses for broadcasting the right camera angles. It’s a game.” “Then we cheat,” Ace said. Rogue’s voice slid into their ears without apology. “Don’t shoot on the steps,” she said. “You start a liturgy that takes months to end.” “Copy,” Ace said. “Also,” Rogue added, “Padre owes me five eddies from a bet about you two not dying. Don’t embarrass me.” V jumped down from the cab and stood with their back to the truck, watching angles the way artists watch light. “We hold center,” they said. “We don’t give the camera the shot it wants.” Padre didn’t move from the door. “Inside is sanctuary,” he said to the crowd. “Outside is weather. Choose your exposure.” A Maelstrom lieutenant walked the thin line between both and smiled a smile that had a hammer behind it. “The city set a price,” he said, announcing it for the benefit of anyone whose app was still buffering. “We collect. It’s not personal. It’s arithmetic.” Mai lifted the shard. “Arithmetic class is cancelled,” she said. “New curriculum.” She fed the completion engine a rule, using the auth stamp they’d burned in yesterday: *Sanctuary masks are now valid anchors.* She tethered the church’s candles, Padre’s old routers, the geometry of a nave built to make noise kneel. The node pulsed. The AR exclamation points that had been painting the door flickered and turned into commas. Crowd momentum stuttered. The proofreader drones swooped to correct grammar. Ace grabbed one mid-dip and bent it against the rail, mercy and violence fighting to be first. She tossed it back to its siblings with its lens looking at its own confusion. “Battery won’t stop,” Mai said. “It’ll move the field.” She typed with both thumbs, ten sentences at once. *No forced binary for protagonists. Sanctuary flag holds. No incitement payouts within declared boundaries.* The editor, still learning it could like completion, evaluated profit and—sulkily—agreed. The bounty ticker updated: *BONUSES SUSPENDED IN SANCTUARY ZONES.* The crowd did the math and moved two meters back without admitting it. “Nice,” V said, appreciating pedagogy. The net shifted. The proofreaders changed fonts. A new overlay washed in from the east—cleaner, colder, fatal like a lab report. It painted their names above their heads in gold in case anybody was bad at faces. It floated a live poll: *SHOULD LEGENDS BLEED?* The percentage bar tasted bile and moved the wrong direction. “Corporate overlay,” Mai said. “Battery called its sponsor.” “What flavor?” Ace asked. “The kind that thinks morality is a widget,” Mai said. “I can’t block it without blacking half the block. But I can distract it.” “How?” V asked. “Give it a better story,” Mai said. She looked at Ace. “Say it.” Ace stepped up onto the top stair. Rain tried to shove her back into the narrative and failed. She raised her voice not to the crowd but to the thing behind their eyes. “We complete,” she said, each word a nail. “We don’t murder priests. We don’t sell clinics. We don’t kneel to overlays. We steal breath and we end sentences.” The editor knew those tokens. It liked them now. It let the words in and, because money respects repetition, it pushed them farther than it ought to have. Feeds hiccupped. The poll banner shuddered like a lie finding out it had an audit coming. Someone’s phone showed *BUFFERING TRUTH* and looked embarrassed. The Maelstrom lieutenant lifted his gun because some men bring umbrellas to lightning and call it courage. V brought their shoulder to his wrist and encouraged a reconsideration. Valentinos on the left flared, then stalled. A woman in the second row put two fingers to her lips to whistle and then thought better and lowered her hand. Padre’s voice carried with the weight of a man who’d learned how to get two stubborn children to sit. “You came for blood,” he said. “You left with grammar. It’s more than most Sundays.” Rogue chuckled in Ace’s ear, a cigarette sound. “You’re adorable when you’re righteous. Watch your flank.” The proofreaders, thwarted of their first plan, cut altitude and went intimate. Lenses pivoted to Ace and Mai’s hands, to the way their fingers found each other and didn’t let go. The overlay tried to frame it as *WEAPON.* Mai rewrote the caption with a two-line hack that made the engine cough: *WITNESS.* The crowd’s posture shifted, a thousand micro-choices, a caloric burn the bounty hadn’t budgeted for. “Now,” Mai said to the battery more than to anyone, “take your exclamation points and sit.” The overlay flickered. The poll cracked down the middle and bled out the back of its own UI. For a heartbeat it all held—the candles, the rain, the crowd, the unsteady good sense. Then the city shouted. Not with sound. With money. Every shard in a two-kilometer radius barked a new alert: **OPEN CONTRACT:** retrieval of *authorship tokens*. Seven figures. Cash on delivery. No moral text. No story needed. A clean transaction wrapped in the smell of disinfectant and a clause about indemnity. The battery had learned fast. If you couldn’t buy blood, you bought pens. The street made a sound that lives between hunger and laughter. V swore softly. “They’re not hunting you. They’re hunting what you are.” Mai’s face went very still. The shard in her hand vibrated with dispositions, pings, grids lighting up as every fixer in the city found a route they loved. “We can’t fight every hand.” “Then we change what they think they’re buying,” Ace said. She turned, eyes finding Padre. “Can you hold a door?” “I can hold a world for the length of a breath,” he said. “Longer if people help.” “Rogue?” Ace asked. “I’m not a charity,” Rogue said. “But I like tipping tables.” Then, louder, to the city she claimed not to curate: “Afterlife recognizes the authorship tokens as *not merchandise*. Anyone tries to fence them gets their wall name sanded off.” A quiet rippled outward from the bar with a man’s name burned into it. It reached certain fixers fast. It reached others later. For some it would never arrive. That’s math. The corporate overlay pivoted again, stripping the word *token* and replacing it with *device*. Paralegal sorcery. Bounties reissued by shell companies with too many consonants. The proofreaders clustered above like gnats that learned Latin. “V,” Ace said. “Already on it,” V said, voice calm because hands were busy. “Back exit in three. We can’t stay church forever. They’ll change zoning.” Padre lifted his hands and the crowd, by miracle or habit, stilled. “If you came for money,” he said, “go make some that isn’t stained. If you came for spectacle, this isn’t your circus. If you came for truth, bring flowers when you find it.” A few left. Enough stayed. A few switched sides inside their own heads and pretended not to. Mai leaned close. “We’re not going to win this in a courtyard,” she said. “We need to take the tokens where the bounty can’t define them.” Ace nodded once. “Where?” Mai’s eyes cut to the skyline. The Afterlife sign didn’t blink. It glowed like a dare. “Where legends get named,” she said. “And un-named.” Rogue heard and laughed, small. “Ballsy,” she said. “Get here without picking up a tail made of a thousand idiots.” “We’ll write a paragraph on the way,” Ace said. V revved the truck like prayer. Padre stepped aside. The crowd opened a narrow throat. The proofreaders spun overhead and tried to agree on grammar. The overlay glittered with seven-digit promises and spelled *DEVICE* wrong in two languages in its hurry. “Strong eat,” someone in the back muttered. “Strong choke,” a kid corrected without looking up from his sketchbook. They went. The truck punched into rain that hadn’t been told this was a chase scene. The city pulled threads and tried to knot them in front of the wheels. Ace watched the mirrors. Mai’s thumbs wrote in the air, slinging encryptions, passing their token through places that remembered witness better than profit: clinic routers, choir wifi, a fried chicken shop that still let people sit just to be warm. The tokens liked it there. The bounty didn’t. They were three blocks from Afterlife when the skyline blinked wrong. Every screen on every tower took the same breath and then turned into a single, enormous page. Their names crawled across it, not as wanted, not as legends. As **AUTHORS**. The word hung there like a verdict. Under it a counter started. Not a bounty. A countdown. V whistled through their teeth. “What’s that?” “Battery’s next sentence,” Mai said. Her voice had the calm of someone standing in a storm who knows the roof will not hold. “When it hits zero, it’s going to force a story. Something big. Something that makes us pick a side we don’t accept.” “Can you stop it?” Ace asked. “I can’t stop a city,” Mai said. “I can put a period where it doesn’t belong.” Ace squeezed her hand. “We’re good at that.” The counter chewed seconds. The truck shot a yellow and a prayer. Afterlife’s stairs waited like a throat. Proofreader drones massed like punctuation trying to be birds. Rogue came in cool: “Door’s open.” Padre arrived late because he spoke in different channels: *The boy drew another dot. It’s at the beginning this time.* The last five seconds burned like a cigarette on skin. “Ready?” Ace asked. “Always,” Mai said. They hit the steps as the counter hit zero. The city inhaled to shout. And the chapter ended.