The passive scan returned nothing he could use, which is to say it returned honesty, and honesty, in his line of work, was rarely helpful. Proxy reached for his cyberware as he moved and found only the ambient silence of a space with no infrastructure and nothing networked worth following.
The island's interior was a dead zone, not metaphorically but functionally.
Nyx had two fingers hooked into his sleeve, a grip light enough to look incidental and firm enough to contradict that interpretation. She had taken that position the moment they cleared the ornamental wall.
Her eyes were running a steady sweep of the canopy and undergrowth. She hadn't spoken since they entered the jungle, which wasn't silence so much as a feeling she couldn't put in words.
The attack came from the left, which was both predictable and still inconvenient.
Proxy heard the suppressed gunshot as almost nothing, a flat, muffled compression of air, the kind that arrives at roughly the same time as its consequence, eliminating the luxury of anticipation.
What it had done, in this instance, was a burst of fire on his left arm below the shoulder, tearing a graze along the outer muscle. He caught himself against a root formation and a tree trunk beyond it and pressed his hand against the wound.
Luckily it was a graze. It bled immediately, but everything beneath the skin was fine, which was the only thing that mattered. He bit his tongue and looked up.
Nyx was gone.
He tracked her by sound for the three seconds it lasted, which was longer than it should have been. Then silence, abrupt and intentional. Then the softer sound of her returning, which was slower, and therefore more conscious, because she was no longer running.
She came back to him wearing a gaze that he didn't dare to mention. A switch had been turned.
"Where," she said, which was less a question and more a demand.
"Mt arm. It's only a graze, I'm fine."
She looked at the arm, then at his hand pressed against the blood, and the amber had already started to bloom at the contours of her eyes when she looked back up.
"They're gone," she said.
"They were gone before the shot arrived. That's how this one fights." He pushed off the tree trunk, forcing himself to stand up. "We need to keep moving."
She took her position at his left side without needing the instruction repeated.
They pushed deeper, through undergrowth that resisted the idea of being pushed at all, as if it was insulted by the intrusion.
The jungle interior was dense enough that light came through in fragments, and the ambient sounds had that layered distortion of a place that filtered everything through vegetation.
His arm bled steadily into his sleeve, a persistent reminder of the wound. The passive scan checked their surroundings and returned the same absence, consistent if nothing else.
He had no tools here that worked for the jungle environment. He had the cyberware, a handgun, a knife, and the capacity to act sarcastic even in this situation, which felt like an insufficient kit, though complaining about it wouldn't expand it.
The second attack came from behind and to the right, which meant their opponent was testing their reflexes as much as endurance.
The suppressed shot was quieter at that range, more inferred than heard. Nyx was firing before the echo had time to exist, the SMG opening in a short burst toward the source.
She was already moving through the trajectory of her own fire toward a new position. Her implants handled the part between where she was and where she needed to be, leaving her free to execute it without hesitation.
Proxy tracked her to a tree line, then lost her in the vegetation, and heard the mysterious contestant gun answer from a position that wasn't the first or the second.
They had moved again before the response arrived, which was the only consistent rule so far.
Nyx came back, and her eyes were fully amber now, the color no longer creeping but firm. Her face was set in an ominous tone, a volcano waiting to erupt.
"They keep moving," Nyx said, which sounded obvious but wasn't meant that way.
"That's to bait and tire you. Whoever we are dealing with, they know their guerrilla tactics." He traced their surroundings in his head. "Don't let it pull you too far."
Nyx looked at the undergrowth she had just come back through, as if expecting it to answer for the absence, and didn't reply immediately.
"She hurt you," she said.
"I believe so, yes," he agreed, because accuracy mattered even when it was unhelpful.
"I'm going to make sure she doesn't leave with both arms."
He looked at her for a moment. Nyx spoke as if something had already been decided, a future action described in the present for the sake of acknowledgment.
He turned and kept moving, because standing still in a situation defined by movement felt like participating incorrectly.
They pushed through the interior for several more minutes, and the jungle tightened around them as if responding to their presence by closing paths.
The canopy drew in until the light existed only in narrow, isolated pockets, disconnected from each other. He watched the birds without looking like he was watching them, because watching too obviously would change what they did.
He noted the silence ahead and to the right that had developed in the last minute. It was either the operative repositioning or coincidence, and he had already decided coincidence was something he couldn't afford to believe in.
"They're either wearing the ammunition down or herding us somewhere," he said, quiet enough to belong to the environment.
"I know."
"If you commit to a pursuit and she circles behind-"
"I know," Nyx said again, and the second iteration had enough weight to indicate Proxy should shut his lips.
He let it go.
The third attack came from ahead.
Their opponent had gone around them entirely, covering a wider arc than either previous approach, and came in low from ahead and to the left.
The suppressed shot was close enough that Proxy felt the air shimmer before fully processing the sound. He dropped behind a large root and heard the round strike the trunk above him.
Nyx was already moving, committing to the source with everything her implants could offer, which was significantly more than the terrain was designed to accommodate.
She went into the undergrowth at full speed, abandoning carefulness entirely.
She drove her shoulder into the vegetation and let the rest of her follow, turning resistance into momentum.
Then he heard something new, and new, in this context, was automatically suspect.
A contact sound. The sound of two things meeting while both were in motion, carrying the weight of their bodies into the impact.
Nyx made a sound, short and involuntary.
Then the jungle got louder with her in a way it hadn't before.
Vegetation tore in multiple directions as if she was searching for something that had been within reach and then wasn't.
He pushed out from behind the large root and moved toward the sound she was making, handgun drawn, aware that it felt like bringing a wrench to a surgery, but also aware that it was what he had.
The undergrowth she had forced her way through was still set apart, which gave him a path whether he wanted one or not.
The terrain changed between one step and the next, which would have been impressive if it weren't inconvenient.
He had been tracking the sounds ahead and not the ground beneath him.
The jungle floor changed from flat to not flat within a single footfall. The undergrowth had concealed the drop completely, wet roots, loose soil, a sharp slope that didn't care about him.
His boot found the edge, and the edge failed to reciprocate.
He had just enough time to understand the situation, which is to say, not enough time to do anything about it.
Then he went down.
The branches caught him and released him immediately, not helping so much as softening the fall. Loose, wet earth and exposed root systems passed by under him, his shoulder struck something solid and turned him sideways, revealing more slope below, and the weight of the pack pulled him in a direction that wasn't optimistic.
He reached for anything that looked firm and found nothing but loose stones.
His arm objected to being used as a brace, the pain flickering through his entire body.
He stopped when something decided he should.
Another root, old enough and thick enough to hold him, and he hit it with his back and stayed there, momentum finally resolved.
The slope rose above him, dark, steep, and dense with the undergrowth that had concealed it so effectively.
His pack had twisted off one shoulder. His handgun was still in his hand, which he considered a small but meaningful success.
Above him, at the crest of the slope he couldn't see, the sounds had changed. He could hear the difference, even if he couldn't articulate it cleanly.
He could hear Nyx, and more importantly, he could hear why Nyx had not followed him over the edge, and neither of those suggested anything positive.
He lay at the bottom of the slope and listened to both, because listening was the only action available that didn't make things worse.
He was not good at doing nothing, which is to say, he avoided it whenever possible.
He did it anyway.