Six Months Later
The Dan Ryan Expressway used to be the busiest stretch of road in America. Now, it was a graveyard of concrete and silence.
At the 47th Street overpass, the world ended.
A massive wall of corrugated steel, topped with razor wire and automated turret towers, cut across all fourteen lanes of traffic. It stretched east to the lake and west to the suburbs, effectively strangling the city. Beyond the wall—in the "Green Zone"—the streetlights of the suburbs hummed with steady, reliable electricity.
Inside the wall—in the "Wild Zone"—Chicago was dark, hungry, and alive.
Jax Miller sat behind the wheel of a vehicle that defied classification. It had started life as a garbage truck, but Silas had stripped it down, reinforced the chassis with transmuted spider-silk steel, and mounted a plow on the front that looked like a jagged set of teeth.
They called it The Mule.
"Engine temp is running hot," came a voice from the passenger seat. It was Leo. The kid had grown up in six months. He wore a flak jacket over his hoodie and had a scar running through his eyebrow. He was checking a tablet that was wired directly into the dashboard.
"It's not the engine, it's the ambient," Jax muttered, gripping the wheel. "The magic is thick tonight. The air feels like soup."
Jax looked different, too. The Lichtenberg scars on his neck had spread, reaching up to his temple. His eyes were no longer just blue; they shifted color with his mood, a side effect of the atmospheric saturation.
"Two minutes to the drop," Jax said into his radio. "Widow, you got eyes on the sky?"
"The sky is clear," Isobel's voice whispered through the static. She wasn't using a radio; she was speaking through the dead speakers of the truck's stereo system. "But the ground is hungry. The Bureau has deployed the Hounds."
"Hounds," Leo swore, charging his hands with blue sparks. "I hate Hounds."
"Lock and load," Jax said. he revved the engine. The Mule roared, spitting blue flames from its vertical exhaust pipes.
They weren't fighting for territory tonight. They were fighting for antibiotics. A contact in the Green Zone had left a crate of penicillin and insulin at the old Guaranteed Rate Field parking lot, just inside the buffer zone.
"Go," Jax said.
He slammed on the gas.
The Mule tore down the empty highway. The suspension groaned.
As they passed 35th Street, the sensors on the wall screamed. Floodlights snapped on, blindingly white, turning the highway into a stage.
"UNAUTHORIZED MOVEMENT DETECTED," a synthesized voice boomed from the wall towers. "SECTOR 4 IS A NO-GO ZONE. LETHAL FORCE AUTHORIZED."
"Here they come!" Leo yelled, pointing out the window.
From the shadow of the wall, shapes detached themselves. They looked like dogs, if dogs were the size of ponies and made of matte-black carbon fiber. The Hounds. Bureau drones designed to hunt thermal and magical signatures. They galloped on four hydraulic legs, their jaws lined with spinning saw-blades.
Three of them sprinted onto the highway, closing the distance to the truck at sixty miles per hour.
"I'm driving!" Jax yelled. "You're shooting!"
Leo climbed up through the hatch in the roof. He didn't have a gun. He had a rusted heavy-metal guitar that Silas had modified into a directional amplifier.
Leo strummed a power chord.
KRAKOOM.
A shockwave of sonic and electrical energy blasted from the guitar. It hit the lead Hound, shattering its ceramic plating. The drone tumbled, sparking, and exploded in a ball of fire.
"One down!" Leo cheered. "Two on the left!"
The remaining Hounds flanked the truck. One leaped, its saw-blade jaws spinning, aiming for the tires.
Jax didn't swerve. He tapped into the Ley Line running beneath the asphalt. The magic was wilder now, harder to control. It felt like grabbing a live snake.
"Chew on this," Jax gritted out.
He pushed a pulse of kinetic force into the road.
The asphalt beneath the leaping Hound turned into liquid tar for a split second, then instantly hardened into jagged obsidian spikes.
The Hound impaled itself mid-air, screeching metal-on-stone, stuck fast to the road.
"Nice spike!" Leo yelled.
They skidded into the Guaranteed Rate Field parking lot. It was desolate, overgrown with glowing purple weeds that had sprouted after the explosion.
"There!" Jax pointed.
A solitary wooden crate sat near second base of the old baseball diamond.
"Grab it! We got sixty seconds before the turrets get a lock!"
Leo jumped off the truck, sprinting toward the crate. Jax kept the engine running, watching the wall. The floodlights were sweeping toward them.
Suddenly, Jax's head throbbed. A sharp, high-pitched whine in his ear.
"Leo!" Jax screamed. "Leave it! It's a trap!"
It wasn't a crate.
As Leo reached for it, the wood fell away. Inside wasn't medicine. It was a Resonance Bomb—a smaller version of the asset's core, designed to destabilize magic.
It pulsed red.
Leo froze. He couldn't outrun it.
Jax didn't think. He slammed his hand onto the dashboard.
"Switch!"
Jax used a new trick—one he'd learned in the harsh winter. He didn't just move himself; he swapped the kinetic potential of two objects.
SNAP.
In a blur of motion, Leo appeared in the driver's seat of the truck, looking bewildered. Jax appeared standing on second base, right next to the bomb.
The timer hit zero.
Jax didn't try to run. He wrapped his arms around the bomb and pushed. He poured every ounce of his energy into the device, not to explode it, but to launch it.
He threw it straight up.
He added a kinetic kicker, launching the device like a mortar shell. It shot three hundred feet into the air before it detonated.
WHOOMP.
A sphere of silence expanded in the sky. It sucked the clouds, the light, and the sound out of the air. The shockwave knocked Jax flat into the dirt. The purple weeds around him instantly turned grey and crumbled to dust.
Jax gasped, clutching his chest. The "Normalcy" blast wave washed over him. It felt like being doused in ice water. His connection to the Ley Lines flickered and died, leaving him hollow.
"Jax!" Leo screamed, driving the truck across the field.
Leo drifted the truck to a stop, shielding Jax from the wall's view. He hauled Jax into the cab.
"You idiot!" Leo cried, slapping Jax's face. "You swapped? That range is suicide!"
"Did we..." Jax coughed, blood trickling from his nose. "Did we get the meds?"
"No meds," Leo said, gunning the engine and peeling out toward the tunnel back to the city. "Just a fake box and a headache."
Jax slumped against the window, watching the grey, dead zone of the baseball field fade into the distance.
"They're starving us out, Leo," Jax whispered. "They aren't just hunting us anymore. They're fishing."
The Water Tower – The War Room
Silas Vane stood before a map of the city that was bleeding.
Red markers indicated zones where the infrastructure was failing. Blue markers showed magical instability. There was very little green left.
"The run failed," Silas said, not turning around as the elevator doors opened.
Isobel stepped out. She wore a dress made of black smoke that swirled around her ankles. She looked stronger than she had six months ago, but colder. Her humanity was fading.
"The Bureau knew the route," Isobel said. "We have a leak."
"We have seven leaks," Silas corrected, slamming a fist onto the table. "Starvation breeds treason. People are trading secrets for bread cards in the Green Zone."
He pointed to the map, specifically the lakefront.
"We are down to two weeks of fuel for the generators. The hydroponic gardens in the Loop are failing because the water filtration system needs parts we cannot transmute. If we do not break the siege, the city eats itself."
"Then we expand," Isobel said.
"We cannot expand," Silas argued. "The Wall is impregnable. The Null-Fields are overlapping."
"I do not mean outward," Isobel said softly. She walked to the window, looking out at the dark, besieged city. "I mean downward."
Silas stared at her. "The Deep Tunnels? The storm drains?"
"Deeper," Isobel said. "The explosion awakened things in the bedrock, Silas. Ancient things. There is a power source beneath the lake. A Ley Line nexus that was capped before the city was even built."
"That is a myth," Silas said. "The 'Chicago Heart.'"
"It is not a myth," Isobel replied. "The dead are whispering about it. They say it beats. If we tap it, we won't need the Bureau's power. We can create a self-sustaining shield. We can grow food instantly."
"And if we disturb it?" Silas asked. "What happens if we uncork a primordial Ley Line in a city that is already mutating?"
"Then we die," Isobel said simply. "But we are dying anyway."
The elevator chimed again.
Jax stumbled in, leaning on Leo. He looked wrecked. His skin was pale, shivering from the after-effects of the Resonance bomb.
"No meds," Jax rasped, collapsing into a chair. "It was a setup. And..." He looked at Silas. "I saw them. On the wall."
"Saw who?" Silas asked.
"Not Bureau," Jax said. "Mercs. Grey armor. No insignias. They were tracking us, Silas. They weren't using tech. They were using scent."
Silas went still.
"The Greyhawks," Silas whispered. "Thorne has finally hired the exterminators."
Silas looked at the map. He looked at the starving city. He looked at Jax, broken and empty.
"Isobel," Silas said, turning to the Necromancer. "Show me where to dig."