A gasp. A reverse-deathrattle. Life back into a lifeless body. A young human, though perennial through all considered metrics, stirs. Her senses flood back in a dizzying rush that leaves her empty stomach sick and churning, and her body temperature reaches a dangerous low. With the fleeting amount of oxygen she has in her lungs, a raspy voice utters out the most powerful word in the universe —

“Fuck.”

Above her splayed body, a Ghost appears. “Did I die again?” The woman stupidly asks.

“Yes,” her guardian angel kindly answers.

“Ugh. Head is pounding.”

Beep, bleep. “Vandal did it.”

An eye roll for the ages. “Goddamn son of a bitch,” she groans as she clambers to her feet.”Get me my gun. No… my other gun,” she adds, both vaguely and unhelpfully.

A tut of objection from her Ghost. “You know that’s a bad idea,” he chimes in. “You’re not ready for a firefight.”

“Like hell, I’m not,” the woman responds in true hunter fashion. Not hungry for a fight, but poor decision-making. “Now, give me.”

“Tell me which one, and I’ll give it to you.” The tone of a disapproving mother.

“The… one with the bullets!”

“Right,” he beeps. “Not ready.”

The problem with Gray is that she couldn’t handle the concept of no. She understood it. Just didn’t like it. No, you can’t travel in this restricted airspace. No, you can’t kill that many Hive with a single fan of the hammer. No, you can’t jump that high. Bullshit, I can’t, was the once and for always answer.

“Rest,” her Ghost continues, “the world will wait for you.”

The hunter slumps unwillingly against a derelict piece of Cosmonaut machinery. “I hate waiting.” She takes in a stuttering breath. Resurrection sickness. It was a soul-numbing process. Gray was convinced no Guardian had ever nor will ever grow accustomed to it. Some days, a thrashing headache. Other times it was nausea and vertigo that put you out of commission for hours.

Solution?

Don’t die.

But resting wasn’t an option. Waiting was complacency. It was inviting calamity. It was akin to surrender. It was calling to the cosmos, come get me, come get me! No, there was no rest for the weary. Not in this life, or the next, or the next, or the next.

Gray clutches her abdomen and throws her shawl over herself. The underneath fabric ripples like space-thread, cloaking her in a cloudy haze. A temporary asylum as the hunter stumbles to safety. “Skies are hot with Ketch activity but I think we can make it work,” Gray’s ghost, Orion, offers a way out.

Gritted teeth and a nod of dissent. “Not a chance,” Gray shoots back, clumsy footfalls clattering against metal.

“Don’t make me tell the Vanguard what you’re up to.” A hollow threat that was so decidedly non-threatening it made his owner chuckle. “Right. One day that’ll work.” He breaks apart into bits and pieces of floating neutronium, illuminating the surrounding infrastructure in a blue-white glow.

Wrinkling her nose, Gray observes, “God, I hate this stuff. Dusty old Hive chitin and dry blood and Dark Age tech.” Sniff, sniff. “Smells… funky.”

Orion beeps. “What?”

The hunter taps a monitor with the side of their foot, now on the ground and in disrepair, hurtling a cloud of dust bunnies. “Funky. You’re a talking supercomputer, you figure it out.”

A huff from her ghost. He responds, “You realize I don’t know everything, right? Why don’t you teach me, O master mine.”

Gray smirks.

Then stops.

Sunlight breaks into the tunnels of the Cosmodrome. An unmistakable prickling of the skin, the whole body humming with energy. Just not hers. “Can you fight?” Orion chimes in. Not a question — a challenge.

The smirk comes back. “Always.”

Orion contracts momentarily before erupting with an electromagnetic pulse. “Not a lot. But enough,” he beeps in confirmation. As his hunter steps forward, he jokes, “I’ll try to warn you before you get shot in the head next time.”

“Don’t,” comes the arrogant answer.

“Of course.”

The human finds her battered by dry, cutting Russian air. Her eyes struggle to adjust to the sunlight until suddenly they don’t. Her left pupil dilates, spins, rotates around and shifts into place. She shuts tightly the right and sees the world in monochrome. Her Ghost speaks, not aloud, but through neural links and firing synapses. “What do you see?” On and off the battlefield, they were equals, though Orion despised it when she called him her partner-in-crime. To that, he was an unwilling accomplice.

A moment of silence as the hunter plots her retaliation. “The fucker that killed me, I hope,” she says. There were other targets, sure. But the tall one had an air of conceit and swagger about, and she didn’t like that. “Am I allowed to have my gun now?”

Beeping with approval, Orion knows well his Risen would fight with bare hands and bloody knuckles if need be. “Preparing for transmat.”

With hands already primed, Gray feels the swift and familiar weight hanging in her arms. What once would have been considered a formidable scouting rifle in its own right in ages long gone by, the firearm had been painstakingly modified with a highly experimental (read: life-endangering) arc reactor courtesy of the fine folks at Omolon. The scientists she bought it off called it an “Alcator C-Mod.” She called it divine justice.

Cobbled together. Highly explosive. Destined to either save the day or spectacularly blow up trying.

Gray steps into the morning light — or was it high noon? — and relents, her eye pushed up against the scope. Not waiting. Acting. Oops, did I accidentally stand out from behind my cover? I’m a dumb Guardian, come get me!

One/one thousand.

Two/one thousand.

Three/one thousand.

Four/one thousand.

Five/one thousand.

Six… Radio comms have gone quiet. The Fallen are confused. They chatter in hushed clacks and clicks, a series of indistinguishable hogwash. Gray keeps the scope nestled against the indent high on her cheekbone.

Seven/one thousand.

Eight/one thousand.

Nine/one thousand—

A bullet whistles through the air. A manmade shaft of lightning erupts atop a rusted catwalk. When the makeshift squall fizzles back into nothingness, all that’s left behind is the telltale pop, hiss, wheeze of Ether escaping to the great beyond.

Orion whirs with celebration. “Nice shot,” he admires.

Gray pauses, dropping her stance for a moment. “Wasn’t him,” she awkwardly admits. She retrieves the spent shell casing and concentrates until it erupts with Solar light. She wipes the ash on her pants before resuming her position once more.

“Well,” The hunter’s Ghost beeps, “they know you’re here now.”

“Good. Maybe I’ll find the weasel that put a bullet in my head and return the favor.”

“Might take all day.”

“It might.”

Orion sighs. “If I had a brick of Glimmer for every time we played this game…”

Gray snorts back, “You could buy yourself a new shell?”

But before her companion can retaliate, she raises a single finger. Movement in the distance. These are no House members, simply stragglers left behind in the neutral chaos of the world. “I don’t even see a captain,” Gray muses. “Are they even worth it?”

Less than a meter away, a shock grenade carves a small crater into the ground. The resulting miniature shockwave gently ruffles her cape. “Oh, boy,” beeps Orion.

“They’re like rats,” the Guardian bemoans with frustration as she stays frighteningly still. “All they do is… fuckin’ run.” Fire. Pause. Pause. Fire. Pause. Pause. Fire. Pause. Pause. Fire. Was this a live firefight, or a training exercise at the Tower? The dregs pop like balloons as they scramble from rooftop to rooftop, unable to muster a coordinated offense.

A ring of empty cartridges lay at Gray’s feet. She turns to catch Orion’s disapproving eye. “What? It’s target practice. Ya know, help me wake up a little, make sure I still got it.”

“Uh huh.”

More Fallen drop before a familiar “voice” makes its presence known on the radio waves. “That’s gotta be him,” Gray ascertains.

“How can you be so sure?”

“If YOU killed a Guardian, wouldn’t you feel a little cocky?”

Both Gray and her Ghost suddenly snap their attention in the same direction. A wordlessly mutual understanding. “Silly hunter,” clack, clack, clack. “This land no longer belongs to humans.” He struggles to speak in Earth tongue, words coming slow and labored. “We have-” clack clack “picked this world clean. I will put you-” a wheeze, “back into the ground.”

Gray shares a moment with her ghost. “See? Cocky.”

Orion emits a sound resembling laughter. “Maybe you really ought to take care of this one,” he contemplates. “Guy sounds like he’s ready to become Kell off one lucky kill.”

“Yeah,” Gray is bittersweet. “Lucky.”

Like a jackrabbit, the hunter takes off without a warning. She jumps and leaps and bounds about both expertly and enthusiastically. Her Ghost struggles to keep up, whizzing along beside her. “I hate it when you do that,” Orion huffs. Gray continues, stomping on rickety metal walkways not unlike a storm sweeping across an open plain. In amongst the catwalks of the Cosmodrome’s old factories, a flash, a glimpse, a shimmering figure. The vandal is smart. He knows that the Traveler’s fury is here.

But Gray does not stay the course, instead breaking free and launching herself onto rooftops. The metal groans in defiance underneath the weight of the Guardian, threatening to give way at any moment. The hunter does not allow this to happen. She launches into the air. Gravity and physics and aerodynamics give way as she jumps, jumps, again jumps.

Gray raises an arm to the sky. On the back of her hand, a diamond-shaped hunk of metal shifts 90 degrees and locks into position. In her palm, the power of the sun.

Upside down, suspended in midair, with the barrel of her gun against the side of the vandal’s skull, Gray pulls the trigger.

Orion screeches to a halt and looks away before the coronal burst has a chance to incinerate his orbital socket. He floats high above the scene, a wave of wanton sunlight bathing him. He scans the ground for signs of life. “That was…”

Coughing out bits of ember and hydrogen, Gray gives a thumbs up. “Cool, right?”

The scorched remains of the wannabe Kell are plastered unceremoniously against a nearby wall. “I was going to go with ‘excessive,’” Orion concludes.

“Same thing.”

The Ghost flies down to his Guardian, secretly wondering how many brain cells she might have left. “The whole Cosmodrome is bound to be on high alert after that little show of yours. We should move,” He beeps affirmatively.

With a huff and a groan, Gray struggles to stand once more. “But it was fun,” she defends herself with jubilance. Both their comms erupt in a chorus of disoriented anger. The Fallen are not happy to lose more scavengers. “Go. Cover my tracks, I’ll distract them.”

Orion hesitates. “Distract them?” He whirs with incredulity. “Just come with me!”

But the hunter can’t hear anymore. Her blood is pumping. Her fingers itch. She picks up her rifle, long since clattered to the ground, and it sails through the air before disappearing on a quantum level. “Don’t worry. I’ll be careful.” They both know she will not.

Orion watches as his Guardian disappears into the great Golden Age machinery.