Thief-Lord of Light, Dragon-King of Shadow

Silver Clan's Domain, Conurbation Zeta, Level 99

The Bastion Abyssal

The forcefield flickered across a limited spectrum as it hovered over the cobblestones. Red, blue, white, black, the same four colors over and over again. Three years in the stone-and-steel cubicle he was forced to call home and not once had Akio Harper ever seen the barrier change color.

He knew why, of course. It was a simple reminder, nothing more. A message to every prisoner in The Bastion Abyssal that no matter who they were, what names and titles they claimed, where they went on the shadow-shrouded city-world of Chiaroscuro, their lives were not their own.

On Chiaroscuro, the Great Clans of the Divine Dragon-Kings ruled over your life from on high. From womb to furnace.

Forever and always.

Akio spat at a giant black cyber-roach somehow slipping in through the barriers, hitting the crystal-and-chitin vermin with dead-on precision.

"Bullseye," he whispered to no one, not even himself.

To think, this was what he'd been reduced to! No one who saw him now would see the infamous Hand of Glory; only a scruffy gray-clad wretch who delighted in tormenting insects.

Waifish, one-handed, perpetually caked in dirt and sweat. His round, handsome face was a bruised mess, his hooded blue-gray eyes red-rimmed and brimming with hate. His ink-black hair devoid of the brazen gold streaks that marked him thief-lord. A shadow of his former self.

Of course, people always saw what they wanted to see. A fact of human nature that had pulled his ass out of a great many fires over the years. He only hoped it worked this time.

Not even five minutes later, confirmation that something had indeed gone right. Akio always watched the barrier with extreme care, noting every disruption, every glitch. The oscillating pattern, always so bright he could never sleep soundly, was flickering slightly longer between color transitions. Any moment now.

Red, blue, white, black. Red, blue, white, black.

Then, holding steady for not even five seconds:

Gold, Green. Somewhere in between.

Akio smiled-a true smile, not one of defiance or a signal of impending violence. The Duke has charmed the code at last.

The barrier resumed its repetition of the colors of the Four Divine Dragon Clans. Akio paid it no attention. Any moment now, he'd be busting back onto the streets, into the rain and mist, the light and shadow.

Down the end of Corridor 004, he heard a quintuple-layered hatch of reinforced titan-steel slide open, gears grinding behind bulkheads and stone ramparts. The screams of distant torture chambers echoed down the halls. The clarion calls of energy-pit overseers barking at their charges did their best to drown them out.

Akio bit his hand so hard he drew blood. He had to, in order to suppress the laughter rustling in his belly like a nest of sewer-wyrms in heat.

"Never again will I have to hear those sounds," he whispered to himself, drumming his fingers against the cobblestones. "Save when I find the bastard who put me in here. Then I shall delight in the barbaric symphony."

"Talking to yourself again, Harper?" grunted Governor Oriane LeFevre, a needle-thin woman in the silver-and-white livery of the Domain's Justice Corps. In one hand, the fungus-pale, pinch-faced warden brandished a black leather quirt his face had grown familiar with; the other, a message-cube of pure green malachite.