Seven years had done little to soften Chaka's edges.
The streets still pulsed with the same grimy rhythm—hawkers shouting over each other, the stench of oil and sweat clinging to the air, the ever-present hum of desperation beneath it all. The sun hung low, casting long shadows across the cracked pavement where barefoot children darted between stalls like stray dogs.
Outside one of the larger shops—a dingy supermarket with flickering neon signs—an old truck sat rusting in the heat, its bed stacked with crates. Two figures worked in silent tandem, hauling the last of the boxes inside.
Beast had grown into his name.
At eighteen, he stood seven feet of corded muscle and quiet menace, his frame a fortress of scarred knuckles and hardened edges. His jacket—frayed at the cuffs—stretched taut across his shoulders, the fabric straining against the sheer bulk of him. Beneath it, a washed-out gray shirt clung to his torso, thin enough to hint at the topography of his body, the metallic chain around his neck resting against his collarbones like a claim. His stubble was sparse but deliberate, his jaw set in a permanent line of wary calculation.
Teke, beside him, was leaner—six feet of wiry strength wrapped in smooth, dark skin. His short dreads were tied back, his goatee neatly trimmed. There was a sharpness to his features now, a slyness that hadn't been there before.
As Teke stacked the last crate, his gaze flicked toward the alley across the street. A smirk tugged at his mouth.
"Don't even think about it."
Beast's voice was gravel wrapped in velvet—low, warning.
Teke didn't turn. "Yeah, well, I don't see any."
"Doesn't mean you should get comfortable." Beast's eyes scanned the rooftops, the shadows between stalls. "They could be watching."
Teke exhaled through his nose but grabbed the final box. "Alright, man. I heard you."
The work was done quickly after that. The shopkeeper handed them a meager stack of crumpled bills, barely enough to buy a decent meal. Teke flipped through the cash with a scoff.
"All that for cheap change. Sad, man."
Beast adjusted the chain around his neck. "When is it never?"
Teke's grin returned as his eyes caught movement near the mouth of an alley. A man lingered there—skinny, sickly, his hollowed cheeks and darting eyes marking him as either desperate or dangerous. Maybe both.
"Today," Teke murmured, pocketing the cash. "Today it ain't."
Beast followed his gaze, his expression unreadable. The man didn't move, didn't speak. Just watched.
Teke took a step forward.
Beast's hand shot out, gripping his arm. "Easy."
But Teke was already smiling. "Come on."
The man in the shadows smiled back.
The sickly man's fist bump was limp, his knuckles protruding like knotted rope beneath paper-thin skin. Teke returned it with an easy grin, but Beast barely grazed his fingers against the man's, his eyes sharp as rusted nails.
"Wasgud."
Teke chuckled. "Same old, same old."
The man's sunken eyes flicked between them, lingering on Beast's stony expression. "Did you fill him in?"
"Yeah... 'course," Teke said, waving a hand. "But run it down again, yeah? Just in case I missed somethin'."
Beast's head snapped toward him. "What are you—"
Teke's elbow dug into his ribs—not hard, but enough to sting, not Beast but himself, like elbowing steel. Beast didn't flinch. Just turned slowly, his expression flattening into something between disbelief and brewing fury.
The sickly man hesitated, then licked his cracked lips. "Aight. Two grand. Each. For movin' three kilos of Makali into Zuriworth." He patted his sunken stomach. "Pure grade. Burns so clean it'll make a rich man weep."
Beast's pupils dilated slightly at the number. Makali? WHAT THE HELL HAD TEKE GOTTEN THEM INTO.
"Uhh, so—we go in through the sewers,"the man continued, oblivious to Beast's tension. "You two masked up, just in case we're bein' traced—which we won't—so don't sweat it. You, Beast—"He pointed a shaky finger. "—you're on overwatch. Oli Building rooftop, grade-A binoculars, earpiece in. You see anything sketch, you whisper, Teke dips. Meanwhile, Teke—" A nod toward him. "—you hit three drop points. Fast. Hand off the goods, vanish. In and out. Easy money."
Beast's jaw tightened. His hands, hanging at his sides, curled into fists. Makali wasn't just some street powder—it was corporate-grade synthetic euphoria, the kind that got whole blocks razed when the Karau came hunting.
Teke clapped once, too loud. "Awesome. We got this. Just—" He grabbed Beast's arm, trying to tug him aside.
Beast didn't move.
The air between them went taut.
"Come on, man," Teke muttered, voice dropping.
A beat. Then Beast exhaled through his nose and followed, his footsteps heavy with warning.
The second they were out of earshot, Beast whirled. "Makali? Are you out of your damn mind? That shit disappears people!"
Teke's grin didn't reach his eyes. "Two grand each, Beast. When we gonna see that kinda cash again?"
"When we're not risking a public burning!"
"It's three drops. In and out." Teke stepped closer, voice dropping to a whisper. "Makali's just a name. It's not our problem what happens after it leaves our hands."
Beast's nostrils flared. "Thats a shitty thing to say , we both seen what that stuff does to people, do you really want that on your conscience. Also, becomes our problem when the Karau start peeling fingers back to find who moved it."
"First off, its Zuriworth, those punks been feeding us poison for millenia, second, we'll be ghosts." Teke's eyes shone with something desperate. "Two grand means real food. Maybe even a place with a door that locks. You remember what that's like? "
Beast stared at the cracked pavement, he gripped the chain around his neck and thought for a moment, someone came to mind, someone maybe worth the two thousand.
"One condition," he finally growled.
"Name it."
"We ditch everything after. Clothes. Masks. Even the damn earpieces. We walk away clean."
Teke's grin turned feral. "Like we were never there."
Beast didn't smile. Just turned back toward the sickly man, his shadow swallowing the sunlight whole.
A short while later, a manhole cover clattered aside with a hollow metallic groan. A massive hand emerged first, knuckles scarred and fingers thick as rebar, followed by the hulking silhouette of Beast rising from the underworld of Zuriworth's sewers. His mask—a dark wooden carving reminiscent of Maasai warrior art—distorted his face into something ancestral and terrifying, the hollow eyesockets staring emptily at the world above. The black tactical suit clung to his frame like a second skin, absorbing the afternoon sun rather than reflecting it.
Teke emerged seconds later, his lean form a shadow of Beast's bulk, though no less deadly. His matching mask obscured any expression, but the tension in his shoulders betrayed the adrenaline coursing through him.
Static crackled in their earpieces like distant gunfire.
"Can you hear me?" The sickly man's voice was tinny through the cheap tech.
"Yes," they answered in unison, the word hissing through clenched teeth.
"Good. Get to it. In and out. I'll meet y'all after."
Beast moved first, his boots silent against the pavement as he approached the Oli building. The alley behind it swallowed him whole—a narrow gullet of crumbling brick and rusted fire escapes. He paused, tilting his head up to measure the distance, then crouched.
His muscles coiled.
Then—release.
The leap defied physics, the sheer power in his thighs launching him upward like a mortar shell. For one weightless moment, he soared past the building's edge, his outstretched hand snagging the parapet at the last possible second. A flip, a twist, and he landed in a crouch on the rooftop, the structure groaning in protest under his mass.
Below, Teke waited, a specter in black.
Binoculars clicked as Beast scanned the streets. Cameras glinted like insect eyes at every corner, their blind spots precious real estate in this game of urban survival.
"I'm ready,"Beast murmured, the words vibrating through the earpiece.
Teke's thumbs-up was barely visible from this height. Then he began to move—not with the casual saunter of a street dealer, but with the precision of an athlete preparing for war. Dynamic stretches flowed into explosive lunges, his body a coiled spring of potential energy. The pouch at his hip—containing three kilos of damnation—barely shifted as he settled into a sprinter's crouch.
For a heartbeat, the world held its breath.
Then—
ZOOM.
Reality fractured.
Teke didn't run so much as unravel the very fabric of motion around him. The air itself seemed to thicken in his wake, pedestrians frozen mid-stride, a cyclist's spinning wheels slowed to honey-drip lethargy. He existed in some impossible interstitial space where time bowed to his velocity, where the laws of physics were mere suggestions.
From above, Beast tracked the blur—a black smear against the city's gray—as it arrowed toward the first drop point. The woman was already waiting, though 'woman' felt too generous a term for the wraith that stood trembling on the corner. Her designer clothes hung loose on a frame whittled down by hunger and chemical need. The gold watch on her wrist probably cost more than Beast's entire block, yet her fingernails were bitten to bloody crescents.
When Teke materialized before her—slowing from god-speed to human pace in three impossible steps—she didn't startle. Her eyes were the worst part: twin pools of black oil where something human still screamed beneath the surface. Her hand trembled as it reached out, not in greeting, but in supplication.
Teke hesitated.
In that frozen moment, he saw the truth of their transaction—not just drugs changing hands, but another brick laid in the wall of her private hell. Makali didn't just get you high; it hollowed you. Each dose required escalation, each escalation another step toward the abyss. And here he was, the ferryman delivering her to that shore.
"Teke!" Beast's voice cracked through the earpiece like a whip. "Give it to her and go. We don't have all day."
The spell broke.
The woman's fingers snatched the package with animal desperation, her skeletal grip stronger than it had any right to be. For one grotesque instant, their hands touched—his warm and alive, hers clammy with the sweat of withdrawal. Then she was gone, shuffling into an alley where the shadows licked at her like eager flames.
Teke remained standing there, the weight of what they'd done settling over him like ash.
Teke moved like a shadow between worlds, his speed bending reality around him—but no velocity could outrun the sickness coiling in his gut. The first exchange had left him hollow. The second shattered him.
They were ...children.
No older than ten, their small frames swallowed by designer clothes that hung like funeral shrouds. Their skin, once surely smooth with youth, now clung too tightly to sharp bones, giving them the grotesque appearance of shrunken elders. Their eyes—God, their eyes—were too wide, too bright with a hunger that had nothing to do with food. The Makali had them already. It was in the way their tiny fingers twitched, in the too-quick darting of their pupils, in the wet coughs that rattled their underdeveloped lungs.
They descended on him like starving jackals, their movements jerky and uncontrolled. One girl's gold bracelet—engraved, probably a birthday gift—slid down her skeletal wrist as she reached for the package. Her pink sneakers, still pristine, looked obscenely cheerful against the cracked pavement.
Teke's breath hitched behind his mask.
What kind of monster gives poison to children?
The answer stared back at him from the reflective lenses of his own disguise.
He had no illusions. These were rich kids slumming for kicks. The desperation in their movements spoke of something darker—maybe orphans, maybe runaways, maybe victims traded by someone who should have protected them. The Makali didn't discriminate. It only consumed.
His hands moved automatically, passing the package to grasping fingers that felt too cold, too wrong for living flesh. For one excruciating second, he imagined stopping. Imagined crushing the drugs underfoot, imagined scooping these broken dolls into his arms and running—
But the fantasy dissolved like smoke.
He was already moving, his body a dark streak against the city's grays. The guilt was a living thing now, gnawing at his ribs with sharp teeth. He'd become part of the machine, another gear grinding these children into dust. Two thousand shillings felt suddenly worthless, the numbers dissolving into ghosts he couldn't unsee.
Speed had always been his escape.
Now it just carried him faster toward damnation.
Teke's body moved on autopilot, his muscles remembering the mission even as his mind screamed for escape. The last drop. Then freedom. The money didn't matter anymore—only the crushing need to be done, to scrub this sin from his skin.
He slid behind a reeking trash truck as Makarau patrol droids marched past, their smooth metallic limbs humming with lethal precision. Their blank faces turned left, right, scanning. Hunting.
"You ok, man?" Beast's voice was uncharacteristically soft in his earpiece.
Teke swallowed. Beast knew. Of course he knew. Teke's speed was his pride, his identity—yet now he moved like a ghost weighed down by chains.
"Uhh, yeah. I'm cool. Let's just get this over with." The lie tasted like ash.
A pause. Then—
"Hey. If you wanna stop, we can. Half the money—or none—is fine by me."
Teke closed his eyes. Beast had never been the type to back down, to show mercy. Yet here he was, offering an out. Because he saw. Saw the way Teke hesitated after each drop. Saw the way his hands shook when he thought no one was looking.
"I'm fine," Teke lied again, forcing his legs to move. "Let's just get this over with."
The last drop point was an alley—narrow, stinking of urine and rotting food. The perfect place for shadows to swallow sins whole. A figure waited, hood pulled low, hands stuffed in pockets. Teke approached, his heartbeat loud in his ears. Just drop it and run. Don't look. Don't think.
But as he reached out, the figure moved.
A hand emerged from the hoodie's sleeve.
Metallic.
Glistening.
Familiar.
Teke's blood turned to ice.
The Makali package slipped from his fingers. Time slowed as the hood fell back, revealing the smooth, featureless face of a Karau droid—its glowing eye-slits locking onto him with mechanical hunger.
Trap.
Teke's body reacted before his mind could catch up. He blurred backward just as the droid's fingers snapped shut where his wrist had been.
"RUN!" Beast's roar shattered the stillness.
Chaos erupted.
Two more droids dropped from the rooftops, their impacts cratering the pavement. Teke twisted, his body bending at impossible angles as he slid between them, the wind of their grasping hands ruffling his clothes. He burst onto the street, his speed sending trash cans flying.
An alarm wailed—the shrill, pulsing scream of a superhuman alert. Civilians scattered, diving into shops, slamming doors. A mother yanked her child into a car, her terrified eyes meeting Teke's for one fractured second before the tinted windows swallowed them.
Behind him, the droids gave chase.
But Teke was fast.
Or so he thought.
One droid—smarter than the rest—calculated trajectories instead of chasing. It intercepted, slamming into Teke mid-stride with the force of a freight train.
The impact sent Teke spinning through the air, his body a ragdoll. His mask cracked, tumbling away as he rolled across concrete, his vision swimming.
Then—arms.
Beast appeared, caught him mid-fall with one arm into an embrace, one massive hand snatching the broken mask from the air.
For a moment, there was nothing. No sound. No pain. Just white noise and the distant, panicked thud of his own heart.
"Teke!" Beast's voice punched through the fog.
Teke blinked up at his friend's masked face. The world rushed back in—sirens, shouts, the whine of approaching droids.
"Beast... shit, they're coming."
"I know." Beast shoved the mask into his hands.
Teke tried to stand. His legs buckled.
"You're hurt. No bleeding, but you're weak. Get out of here."
"Yeah—let's go—" Teke's knees hit the ground again.
Beast's grip tightened. "No. I'll make a diversion. You run."
"What? A diversion? Fuck that, let's go!"
"You're weak, idiot!"Beast snarled. "If we run together, they'll catch us. I stay, I fight, I buy you time. Then I follow."
Teke's throat tightened. "What if there's too many?"
Beast's mask hid his expression, but his pause spoke volumes. Then—
"I'll be fine." He lied, completely oblivious and unfamiliar with their current situation however he had to come up with a way around their predicament, one in which Teke survived. "You're the one who's hurt. Now go and stop wasting time!" He shoved Teke away.
Teke stumbled. Caught himself.
And once again, he felt it—the weight of what they were to each other. Not just partners. Not just friends. Brothers.
Before he could second-guess it, he turned back. "Dude, whatever happens... I love you, man."
Beast stiffened. Then waved a dismissive hand. "Ugh. Just go."
Teke's smile was hidden under his mask as he ran.
Behind him, Beast cracked his knuckles and faced the approaching horde.
The droids gleamed under the sun, their movements synchronized, their intent clear.
Beast exhaled. Settled into his stance.
And for the first time in his life—truly ready to die for something—he smiled, subconscious pleasure of what hed become.