"Where's the fun in silence?" Angeline grinned, stepping off the ledge.

She didn't fall; she glided. Using a localized gravity-sink, Angeline descended toward a maintenance hatch three stories down. Cierra followed a second later, her descent controlled and silent, her eyes already scanning the internal schematics she had pulled from the cloud.

"Bell!" Angeline shouted as a thermal detonator rolled toward her. "Done!" Cierra yelled back.

The mission was simple in theory: infiltrate the Core-Tech spire and retrieve the encrypted drive containing the city’s water filtration codes. In practice, it was a suicide run. The spire was guarded by automated sentries and bio-metric locks that could sniff out an intruder from a mile away.

Cierra didn't look up from her wrist-mounted terminal. Her fingers moved in a blur, bypassing the first layer of the spire's thermal shielding. "Silence is what gets us home, Red. Try to remember that."

Inside, the air was cold and smelled of ozone. They moved through the shadows like twin ghosts. When a patrol of three droids rounded the corner, Angeline didn't wait for a plan. She became a blur of red light. Three strikes, three silent shutdowns. Before the droids could hit the floor, Cierra was there, catching the lead unit to prevent the clang of metal on tile.