Ill Omen's Light (Lux/Jinx)

Chapter 3: A Ghost of Zaun

A ghost walked the streets of Zaun that night, they said.

Junkies slumped in the alleys babbled about a two-tailed shadow gliding on graffiti-choked walls lit by flickering chem-lights.

A couple of drunken bruisers slouched in a seat at Jericho's swapped hearsay about a guy who knew a guy who'd seen a gaunt scarecrow of a girl hopping rooftops – caught eyes reflecting like a cat's, but purple-pink, like fresh-cut fluorite, like the sky over the Pilt at sunset...

Like Shimmer.

A young Firelight, his hair a wild red nest of rattails, burst into Ekko's workshop swearing himself blue that there was a grinning neon monkey painted on the wall down by the old clocktower and it hadn't been there before, and the paint was still wet-

And then there were the other things.

The mishaps. The missing stock. The missing people.

Thumping club music still swelled the walls of the Last Drop.

Gamblers and grifters, doxies and drunks, users and pushers prowled the Lanes, but the famed nightlife joint only had space for the cream of the crop. Chembarons and their lieutenants rubbed shoulders with potential clients and aspiring lackeys here. At the bar, two such fixers snarked a bitter argument, right beside a scrawny chem-punk swaddled in an oversized Poro poncho and a steel Lamb mask.

As the bigger of the fixers slammed his hand on the bar and swore ferociously to the veracity of what he'd seen, a hand tipped with pink-and-blue nails slid from the poncho, slipped a straw into his drink, and stealthily slurped it away.

Faces all of edges, the finest and the wildest designer augments, every edge honed to cut someone else. Every pair of eyes looking to make a deal – or shatter one.

Fortunes turned on a word in the Last Drop.

The word tonight was Jinx.

Above, a fine whiskey-glass cracked to splinters in a literal iron grip.

"Say. That. Again."

The informant, all elbows and fine Entresol fashion, flinched and swiveled his green crystal-lens augment eyes to the floor of the aging office.

"She - she's back-"

The sound he got in reply sent a crawl up his spine. A growl like that from Baron Sevika ended men.

"I-I know it sounds like just a rumor b-but there are corroborating accounts- "

Sevika's lips twitched, and as the tall woman bristled higher in her seat like a waking tiger, the informant sank down into himself in equal measure.

"Whose?"

He glanced behind him with a whining swivel of his augments. "Um – everyone's, boss, it's all over the Lanes, sightings from the Entresol down to the bottom of the Sumps, it's all they're talking about downstairs – "

"Then why are you the first one to bring it to me?"

"B-because the-they're, um, they're all a bit ah- "

Faint flashes of orange spilled over the desk as Sevika flicked her lighter. Open. Closed. Open.

"Frightened," she muttered, "Killers and barons reduced to shivering urchins pissing into their shoes," Her dark eyes scourged his false ones, "Over one broken little girl."

Flick. Click. Flick.

"...Pathetic."

She waved her human hand in dismissal. The informant swallowed and nodded, but before he simpered for the exit, he paused, turning back despite himself.