7.1

  I don’t know how long I’ve been out. Could be minutes, could be years. Time has melted into the dark like ice cream on a car hood, and when I start to come back, it’s in shattered, senseless pieces: images spliced together by something blind and cruel. Like a busted TV switching between nightmares. Static. Someone crying in a language I don’t recognise, their voice wet like they’ve been sobbing for hours. A soap opera playing to an empty room. A woman’s eyes: wide, bright, full of that sharp edge of terror you only ever see in real life, never on camera. Who is she? What is she? Then blackness, pressing in from every side like the world has drowned and no one told me how. I float in it, oh I float, gently now, in and out, no thoughts, no body, just a vague sense of sinking deeper.

  And then the pull. Hands on me. Not gentle. Not cruel either. Hurried. Like someone dragging a body from a burning house. I flop into the backseat of a car. Limbs unresponsive. Brain glitching in and out. A voice, male, familiar, punching through: Dance. It has to be. That Aussie back-alley clip in his tone, that fast-and-dirty way of speaking like every sentence costs him eddies. “You’re alright, mate. Keep in there.” But something about the way he says it makes me think he doesn’t believe it. Not really. And the engine coughs. Chokes. Growls. Tires scream. Lights bloom in the windshield like they’re bleeding into my eyes. My skull throbs with every speedbump, and somewhere inside me, there’s a shout, a bellow, a—

  My thoughts aren’t thoughts; they’re glitches. Hiccups in the code.

  And then the beeping. That high-pitched metronome of the medical world, ticking away like it owns time. Like it’s been waiting for me. No drama, no urgency. Patient. As if it doesn’t care whether I’m alive or dead, only that I’m something measurable. Each chirp a nail. Each pause a hammer. It drills under the skin, past the bone, into the brainstem. Chirp. Chirp. Chirp. Listen now. A lullaby for the damned. It sounds like it knows something I don’t. Like it’s counting down.

  I want to scream. But all I can do is lie here, listening to my own breath rattle in my throat like an engine with the oil running dry. Too blurry to see much. Too numb to panic. But something in me, some stubborn little rat of awareness, is scratching at the door. Telling me this isn’t a dream. Not really. Dreams don’t smell like melting plastic and bleach. Dreams don’t taste like copper. Dreams don’t have walls that hum like overclocked servers and floors that shake with the distant thump-thump-thump of hydraulic limbs moving just out of sight.

  But I’m here now. Somewhere. Not floating anymore. Not watching. Here. Conscious, maybe. Functional… questionable. Awake, in the loosest sense of the word.

  Is this…?

  Yes.

  It is.

  I’m in a surgery.

  There’s a mask over my face, pumping oxygen down my throat like it’s trying to keep me tethered to the world whether I want to be here or not, and to my left, just barely within the blur of my peripheral vision, is a low-hanging monitor swinging slightly on its bracket, the screen flickering between shades of red and yellow, the vitals spiking and dropping, the heart rate needle bouncing erratically past one-thirty like it’s auditioning for cardiac arrest. Through it all, cutting across the static and the sterile stink of foam and sweat and whatever else is leaking out of me, I see a shape. A man. Tall. He doesn’t move, but he’s watching, pinned to the wall like a shadow that never belonged there in the first place, caught beneath the pale glow of surgery lights that never go out and never feel warm.

  Then the world folds in. Gone.

  But there’s a voice. Not loud. Not distant. Close. Close enough that I can feel the heat of it under my skin. He’s leaning in.

  You’re going to do great things, little spark. Just not yet.

  Little spark. The words mean something. They meant something. But the memory runs when I chase it. I don’t know the voice. I should. And then—

  Light.

  I’m back. Same slab of metal dressed up as a bed. Same stillness. Except now, it’s quieter. The beeping keeps time with my heart, slow and spaced out, and the air tastes different. Less burn, more breath. I blink. Everything’s clear.

  But the shadow’s gone.

  And something in me knows it hasn’t gone far.

  This isn’t Dr. Maelstrom’s surgery. It’s different: less sophisticated, more run-of-the-mill, more southside. But it’s also small and not so bright, with loose cables snaking across the ceiling and blood smeared in streaks along the floor. I sit up, neck stiff, joints grinding, arm aching like it’s been scalpeled and stitched back wrong. The oxygen mask comes off with a hiss, and I push upright on a weak forearm. Yeah, this is a tech surgery, alright. Cheap, wired up, and barely holding together. But where is—

  Noise.

  Far left. A stuck door, half-slid open. From behind it: the low clatter of wheels. A mop bucket rolling down the corridor, the rubbery thump of old floor tiles resisting its path. A hand appears, mechanical at the knuckles but flesh where it counts, pushing the door back with a grunt. It scrapes open, reluctantly.

  A woman steps in. White hair, dry and as dead as a cornpatch in wintertime, black silk deck pants settling down over her non-slip boots. Face full of angles, half in shadow. No makeup. Her jacket’s sleeveless, stitched from industrial tarp, the kind used to seal ship hulls or cover dead zones after a riot. Weatherproof. Acidproof. Bloodproof, probably. It clings tight at the shoulders, stained with old oil and something darker. Her arms are bare, scarred, cybered-up from wrist to shoulder with ports and plugs and something that buzzes faintly when she moves. She’s not here for bedside manner; that’s for sure.

  She drags the mop in. Stops. Looks at me. “Well,” she says, voice dry and gravel-bitten, older than she looks from the eyes down, “you’re not dead. Guess that’s a start.”

  I watch as she wheels the bucket towards the blood splotch along the floor, brow furrowed. Then I look at my arm, see it hooked up to the drip from the wrist. “Where are…?”

  “Your chooms?” She presses the mop into the wringer. Metal jaws snap shut around the thick, dripping head. And she leans her weight into the handle. The mechanism creaks, groans. Fluid splashes up the sides of the grimy bucket. With a quick crank, she releases, the mop sagging like a thing half-drowned. No hesitation. She slaps it to the floor and starts scrubbing. “Don’t worry about them. You’re the one who almost didn’t make it.”

  “Almost didn’t make it?” I take a moment. “How long have I been out?”

  “A day,” she says, sweeping the mop forward. “Listen, I’m not sure what sort of work you were involved in. Nor do I really care. But all I can say is it’s luck that you survived, so you ought to be a little more careful about how you choose to live your life in future.”

  I take a moment. “Okay…”

  She cocks an eyebrow. “Just sayin’, kid.”

  “… Alright? And your problem is what exactly? It’s not like this was intentional.”

  She stands up straight and leans on the mop. “I haven’t slept all day. Did everything I could to keep you alive and I’m tired. Frankly, I already know what sort of person you are. That red visor? You probably robbed something, killed someone, or something else. I don’t particularly enjoy saving lives that do nothing but take others. But your friend paid me a lot, so I feel obligated.”

  “It’s not like your line of work’s any cleaner,” I say. “Bolting junk-grade cyberware into desperate people who just want to feel powerful for five minutes: that’s half the reason this city’s falling apart.”

  She doesn’t bite. Just leans on the mop like she’s heard it all before.

  “And I didn’t kill anyone,” I add. “I just…. Look, I don’t owe you an explanation. But you could at least be glad you kept me alive. I’m not a monster.”

  She exhales through her nose, almost a sigh, almost not. Doesn’t look at me. Continues mopping.

  I glance at the floor where the mop smears through the dark red mess. “That isn’t my blood… is it?”

  “I honestly don’t know anymore,” she says. “Your friend was pretty clear: get you stable, fast. Didn’t exactly leave time for a deep clean.”

  “Which friend?”

  “Australian guy. Bit of a weird look to him.”

  I blink. “Dance.”

  She shrugs.

  “He’s… kind of a doctor, too,” I say. “Just a different kind.”

  “There’s a little bit of a doctor in all of us,” the woman says, and she stops mopping to look at me sternly, playfully even. “But, you know, just a different kind. Some of us know how to save lives. Some of us only know where to cut. World needs both, far as I can tell.”

  “Needs both?”

  “A figure of speech,” she says patiently. “Anyway, I can let your friend know you’re up and running. Don’t worry about that.” She rolls the bucket off to the side, mop handle rattling against the rim, then steps over the cables and clutter towards me. Her boots click against the tile, loud in the silence, and when she reaches my side, she gives the IV line a glance like it’s just another piece of junk to unplug. “This might sting.” Her fingers are steady: calloused, slightly cold. She pinches the base of the canula where it’s fixed into the vein just above my wrist, then peels away the grimy adhesive tape holding it in place. The tube slides out with a short, wet pull. Just enough pressure to make the skin crawl but not enough to wince. A brief dot of blood wells up. She presses gauze to it without asking, tapes it down with something halfway sterile.

  “Look, sorry for what I said,” I say. “You people really help a lot more than most. Hell, when I first came here, the only person to offer me any sort of help was a tech surgeon, even though I’m just some washed-up rat from God-knows where. A pretty big idiot, too.”

  “Yeah, well, there’s a little bit of an idiot in all of us, as well.” She smiles. “But, anyway.”

  “Thank you,” I say. “And I mean that. You saved my life. I’m not sure how much Dance paid you, but I’m sure it wasn’t nearly enough. Someone like me? Heh, most days I’m lucky if I’m worth cab fare, let alone a full surgery.”

  She lets out a dry snort but says nothing, which might be the closest thing to kindness I’ve gotten all week, and then she moves off towards the medical sink, scrubbing her hands like she’s trying to wash the memory of me off her skin before stepping through the back door to call Dance. I sit there for a moment, half-dressed, still in the torn grey overalls that hang from my waist like dead weight, the rest of me covered by a blood-smeared white vest that reeks of antiseptic and stale sweat, trying not to dwell too long on the fact that I almost didn’t make it out of whatever hell I was pulled from, and that, for reasons I still don’t understand, something out there keeps reaching in and yanking me back from the edge just before I fall. If that’s providence, it’s got a hell of a sense of humour, because anyone blessed that often shouldn’t be this bruised, this lost, or this alone.

  I haul the overalls back over my shoulders and push my left arm through the sleeve. For the right side, I just reach across, grab the empty sleeve, and pull it back through the armhole until it’s tucked away, out of sight, out of mind. Then I zip up the front and take a breath that, thankfully, doesn’t hurt. I head through the door, into a hallway lined with old panels and the slow drip of something gooey. The woman, the one whose name I never bothered to ask and who never offered it, rounds the corner with that same tired pace and tells me Dance will be here in twenty. No emotion, no fanfare. Just twenty minutes.

  She offers to let me wait inside, even hands me a half-warm bottle of water with the label peeled off, but something in me says I need air, real air, so I nod my thanks and make my way down the hallway, press the wall-mounted scanner, and wait for the door to grind open. Daylight hits me hard. I have to blink through it a few times before the world sharpens. Definitely the southside. The clinic’s nestled in a gravel courtyard boxed in by tired redbrick buildings, their windows covered with wire mesh and sun-faded signage that probably meant something a decade ago. A couple of locals are draped over the hood of a beat-up Merc, doors hanging open, synthwave pouring from the speakers with the pulse of a broken heart that forgot how to stop beating. They're laughing, talking in a mash of languages I can’t quite follow, all rhythm and slang and cigarette smoke, and none of it meant for me. I take a seat on the cracked steps outside the surgery, the concrete warm, and sip at the water while I watch the city drift by: cars sliding through narrow gaps like ghosts too tired to haunt, and people in brilliant patched-up clothes who don’t seem to know how to sit still, like staying in one place too long might kill them.

  And hey, it might.

  After twenty minutes, a car arrives to pick me up alright, but it’s not Dance’s reverie. It’s Raze who pulls up in his black Lexus, and the car looks like it’s been through a sandstorm, windshield fogged at the corners, the whole thing coated in city grime that no amount of wiping would fix. Still, it runs, and right now that’s enough. I’m surprised, shocked even, given that that guy clearly has a bone to pick with me, but I’m not complaining. As long as I have a ride, I’m happy. I head over. He leans across the seat and pops the door for me without a word. No hello, no clever remarks, no questions. Just a nod. Good enough. I climb in, careful with the sore parts, and buckle up. For someone who’s usually all mouth and sideways glances, he’s unusually quiet, almost solemn. I catch a glimpse of a photo taped above the dash, faded and curling at the corners. A girl—young, smiling, arms draped around his neck like she didn’t know the world could end. His sister, I remember. The one he doesn’t talk about. He notices me looking, doesn’t comment, just shifts the car into gear and pulls off like we’ve got somewhere to be, and neither of us wants to sit still long enough to unpack what this ride really means. Maybe he’s here because of Dance. Maybe he just didn’t want me waking up alone. Doesn’t matter. What matters is he showed up.

  He drives with one hand on the wheel, the other resting near the handbrake, fingers tapping slow and steady against the plastic. The silence stretches long, the kind that presses against your ribs when there’s too much left unsaid. I don’t look at him. Can’t. I turn towards the window instead, watching the street roll by: boarded-up shops, broken signs, early risers unlocking metal grates with dirty hands. It’s still early, just past eight, and the city’s barely awake. I shift in my seat, adjust the belt, pretend I’m not counting the seconds.

  Then, out of nowhere, Raze speaks:

  “I was wrong about you.”

  At first, I’m not sure I heard him right. I glance over. “What?”

  He exhales through his nose. “I said I was wrong about you. Dance told me what went down. Said you saved his life.”

  “Oh,” I say. It comes out flatter than I mean it to. “Thanks. That… that means something, Raze. Really.”

  He nods once, eyes still on the road. “You gonna stick around?”

  The question sits with me for a little. It takes me a second to realise it’s the closest thing to a welcome I’ve had in a long time. “Look, I’d love to. It’s just—I have to head for Paxson, find out who I was, who I am. I won’t be gone long.”

  “You know Fingers is thinkin’ of goin’ with you,” he says, as if revealing a secret.

  I stare at him blankly. “Fingers? Why? And isn’t she like your group leader?” I almost said ‘gang’, but I remember Raze doesn’t particularly like that word.

  He shakes his head with a laugh. “She’s the closest thing to a fixer we have, so sure she gets a little bit more say, but no. She’s not a leader. We don’t really have one. We’re just people tryin’ to survive, tryin’ to take care of people.”

  I look at the picture of his sister hanging over the dash. I don’t say anything at first. Just watch the photo sway gently, her smile caught forever in that little rectangle of time, untouched by whatever came after. The corner’s torn, and the tape holding it up is curling like it’s ready to let go.

  “Leukaemia,” Raze says, eyes fixed straight ahead. “Diagnosed last year. Outta nowhere. One day she’s playing tag in the hallway, next day she can’t keep food down and everything hurts.” His voice is low, but there’s something in it that hasn’t settled. I stay quiet, watching the way his fingers tighten around the wheel. “She’s hanging in there,” he says. “Doctors say she’s responding to treatment, but it’s not cheap. Not here. That’s why I run with this crew. It pays just enough, and it keeps the lights on in her hospital room. That is, when there’s work to be done.”

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  The picture spins again, just slightly, and this time I see her name scrawled at the bottom in pink marker. Juna.

  “She doesn’t know what I do. Thinks I work in electronics repair.” He exhales through his nose again. “She’s too young to know how many rules you have to break to stay alive in this city.”

  “Hey,” I say softly. “It’s alright if you don’t want to talk about it.”

  “I think it’s only right I let you know, given that, well, you’re officially part of the crew now,” he says. “This job would have been impossible without you. Or at least, extremely difficult, because we’d have to hire outside help, and they can charge a lot, and you don’t really know if you’re getting a legitimate netrunner or a fed. But you, Rhea? We get paid because of you, and not only that, we get paid a lot. Now I don’t know who or what you are exactly, or where you came from outside of that ditch at the bottom of the bridge, but what I do know is when the pressure hit and everything was on the line, you didn’t crack. You didn’t run. And you saved a life. That means something. To me. To all of us. So, whatever you’re chasing in Paxson, whatever truth you’re trying to dig up: just know, when you’re ready to come back, you’ve got a place here. You earned that. No one can take it from you.”

  I rub a finger under my eye. If these artificial sockets could still cry, maybe they would’ve. But they don’t. Instead there’s that familiar shift inside, that slow turn you can’t quite name: the one that creeps up when words give out and something else takes over. You don’t know why it hits when it does. It just does. And somehow, that’s enough.

  “Jeez,” I say, hiding the quaver. “Thanks, Raze. Will your sister be okay?”

  “With the money we get from this job, I should be able to afford the best hospital in the city,” he says. “I’ll have to get her transferred across to the north. I know. Those bastards. But they have the best doctors and medicine.”

  “You’re not going to spend any on yourself?”

  He shakes his head. “Was never about me, kid.”

  “Well, I hope to meet her someday,” I say.

  “I hope she meets you one day, too.”

  It’s a nice thing to say, sweet even. I just hope everything works out, not only for him, but for all of us.

  It’s busy out when we make it back to the parking lot near the Old Mill, and The Afternoon Change Man seems to have gotten an early start on his ‘Change? Change? Change?’ But we manage to walk through the crowd just fine, into the building, through the corridor, and down the elevator to Dash Two. When I step inside, I’m surprised to see no one in the foyer, but I hear voices to the far right, coming from the security room, where everything’s just as dark with monitors tuned to endless white noise. And as we turn inside, sure enough, they’re there: Fingers, Cormac, and Vander, all standing around Dance, who spins idly on a swivel, laptop on… well, his lap, and none of them notice me at first.

  That is, of course, until Raze opens his mouth.

  “Look who’s alive.”

  No cheers, but I can tell, at least from the way they smile, that they’re not too disappointed.

  “No surprise there,” Fingers says, standing up straight and heading over to me. Places a hand on my shoulder, like she always does, looking at Raze. “I think she’s proven on several occasions to be pretty much unkillable.”

  A long steel appendage stretches out of the monitoring section. Cormac’s arm, of course, and he’s offering a handshake.

  “A job well done, Ms. Mono,” he says. “And indeed, how delightfully inconvenient for Death, that you keep slipping past him.”

  I accept his handshake. “I guess I’ll take that as a compliment. Thanks. How about you? You okay after what happened?”

  “Mmm, fine as a dandy,” he says slowly. “Just an old friend. An old colleague of mine.”

  “I saw that,” I say, letting go and wiping my hand on my pants. Just a force of habit. “At least you kept him distracted. There’s that.”

  “Righty-o, folks,” Dance says, cracking his knuckles over the keys. “I’ve tapped into the bots. Now we wait for the meeting to kick off.”

  “What time?” Fingers asks, leaning in.

  “Should be around nine, according to this,” he replies, squinting at the readout. “Early enough for the big boys to get their hands dirty. Should be a good one. Start of the year’s when the real money moves.” He presses a final key, and just like that, the screens lining the wall stop flickering. The static dies. Each monitor fades to black, clean and ready, with one word sitting dead centre in pale grey letters: STANDBY.

  Raze and Fingers head over to the monitoring area, and I follow, body tense, pulse picking up. I take a seat on one of the old swivels and stare at the monitors, waiting for something, anything, to change. My heart keeps thudding against my ribs, steady but hard, and it’s not difficult to understand why. If the spoofers don’t hold, if the relay fails to sync with the androids, it’s all gone. Weeks of setup, risk, blood: worthless. I try not to show it. But the weight of it is there, pressing down, and all I can do now is sit and watch.

  And I’m not particularly someone who enjoys waiting. I’m not sure many people are.

  I try to keep my mind busy. Open the feed, scroll through the usual noise. Politics, market crashes, someone important’s kid overdosed again. Then I see it: an article sitting halfway down the page, already climbing in views. Chaos at The Ghost in Satin: Security Breach Sparks Questions. It’s about us. Of course it is. Two unidentified southsiders slipped past the guards and interrupted what was meant to be a flawless showcase. No names, but there’s a still-frame from the foyer: me and Dance, clear as day. Vander must’ve scrubbed the internal feeds once we were inside, but whatever footage existed before that is still floating in the system, and someone made sure it ended up public. No mention of androids. No mention of what really happened. Just the usual vague language that sounds like an accusation wrapped in a shrug. It’s bad. Not life-ending, but bad. Still, if everything goes the way it’s supposed to, I’ll be out of this city soon. Off the grid, off the radar, and far enough away that even headlines can’t reach me.

  Even still, are they going to go on a manhunt here? No one was hurt, except that death machine as Dance calls it. Seriously. Steel ribbons that can cut through metal? They must have been planning one hell of a finale.

  After a while, the monitors go black once again, then flash on with a different word: CONNECTING.

  Dance claps his hands and rubs them together. “Here we go, ladies!” Bit of excitement, bit of humour. Hard to take that from him.

  Vander sits next to me, looking up. He smells nice, like old paper and burnt vanilla. Something warm but a little out of place, like it doesn’t belong to this city. “Just be er sure to record.”

  “Already on it, mate.” Dance hooks his neural wire into the laptop and his eyes turn that familiar shade of gold.

  Without warning, a small red icon starts blinking in the top-right corner of every monitor. Recording. Then the feeds shift. The static vanishes, and in its place, a bright white room appears, centred around a wide, circular table that almost gleams. Seated around it are golden androids, their frames polished, precise, each with a bold black number printed clean across the chest: one through seven. All of them wear M-Gate visors, identical, unreadable. But they’re not alone. There are people in the room, too. Real ones. And none of them look like the typical corpo meatheads full of chrome and ego. They look… normal. Which, somehow, is worse.

  There’s an old man near the table with a mess of white hair that juts out in every direction, wearing a lab coat that hangs stiff on his shoulders. At the very back, a heavyset black man sits with his arms crossed. He’s bald, expression sharp, dressed in a tailored black suit that fits him too well to be just another middle manager. He’s somebody. Off to the far right, close to the wall, stands a man in NACP blues, hands folded behind his back. The uniform’s spotless, not a wrinkle in sight, and he’s too old to be a grunt. A general, maybe. Someone high up the food chain. The footage is grainy, the resolution struggling to keep up with the light. I want to scan them. Identify names, ranks, connections. But the feed doesn’t allow for that. All I can do is sit and watch as the room comes to life.

  One of the androids leans forward slightly. Number One. The gold plating on his frame catches the overhead lights just enough to draw attention. He doesn’t move like a machine. Not anymore. There’s a deliberateness to him, the kind of stillness that demands silence. When he speaks, the room doesn’t just listen; it downright yields.

  “Good morning,” he says, voice calm and faultless, like every syllable has been tested for clarity. And that accent, that strange accent, somewhere between Russian and Ukrainian, but smoother. “This marks the first council of the fiscal year. We will now proceed with the evaluation of human compliance, synthetic resource allocation, and projected counter-resistance across the southern blocks.” He steeples his metal fingers. “Dr. Solvayne. According to your email, Ms. Crane would be unavailable for today’s meeting. Is there any particular reason for her absence?”

  The man with the wild white hair straightens his lab coat. “I’m afraid, Mr. Vryne, Isolde couldn’t make it. She’s had some problems that need addressing, and I approved her some time off.”

  “Problems?” says Mr. Vryne.

  “Dahl-Keshet…” Raze rasps, as if he knows him, and he pronounces it with such accuracy. It’s eerie.

  Fingers shushes him.

  “And by problems,” Dahl-Keshet says, his tone even but laced with quiet disdain, “are you referring to the documented rise in android malfunction not only in the southern districts, but now bleeding into the north as well? You’ve reviewed the data. You’ve seen the failure rates. And yet she dares offer us assurances of stability. You believe a cursory email qualifies as sufficient response? Enlighten us, Dr. Solvayne: what, precisely, are Ms. Crane’s problems, beyond the termination letter which I’ve drafted in full?”

  “It’s not Ms. Crane’s fault,” Dr. Solvayne says.

  “Not. Her. Fault?” Dahl-Keshet repeats, spreading his gleaming arms. “Who, then, falsified the testing reports? Who assured the Board that stability protocols had been rigorously vetted? We have confirmed fatalities among staff. Compromised infrastructure. Units deviating from assigned directives. And during the Luminara festival: an incident so catastrophic it plunged an entire block into blackout, requiring millions in Eurodollar reparations. And let me be clear: that expense has landed directly on my ledger.”

  “Testing reports were not falsified,” says Dr. Solvayne, voice calm. “They were accurate within the limits of our control environments. But control, as you’re well aware, is conditional. When synthetic cognition begins to interact with organic unpredictability—human stressors, sociopolitical variables, uncontrolled digital ecosystems—outcomes shift. We are no longer observing software. We are observing behaviour. And let me clarify, Mr. Vryne: thorough testing was carried out, and failsafes were indeed implemented—”

  “So why, oh why, didn’t they work?” says Dahl-Keshet.

  “Older models were subject to faults,” Dr. Solvayne says. “When not given regular breaks or recharges, the hardware begins to break down, and defences fall. Businesses need to follow our instructions and regularly cycle the bots to maintain security. It’s all listed in the manual.”

  “And during the Luminara festival?” says Dahl-Keshet. “A new model, the newest available, completely destroying the electrics?”

  “Human intervention,” Dr. Solvayne says. “They’re looking for the perpetrators as we speak.”

  They are?

  “That’s not good,” says Fingers.

  “There was a surge to the charging pods.” Dr. Solvayne folds his hands. “It originated from an outdated power system, one we explicitly warned against in the integration manual. The fault lies not in the unit, but in the refusal of third-party operators to follow protocol.”

  “A prediction,” Dahl-Keshet replies, his tone clipped and cold, “that you and Ms. Crane neglected to account for. Human error: how it ruins systems, topples empires, and yet still escapes every forecast. Fascinating, isn’t it, how your science continues to underestimate the species it’s meant to serve?” He turns to the man in the black suit. “Mbale Gond. As head of operations, I trust you understand the value of timeliness. It appears my assessment of Ms. Isolde Crane was, regrettably, correct. See to it that her termination notice is delivered, in writing, to her residence today. Not tomorrow. Not following a holiday. Today. Are we clear?”

  Mbale nods once. “Understood and noted, sir.” His voice is smooth, steady. No hint of protest, no emotion at all. Just the sound of a man who knows how the machinery works and how easily people get ground beneath it.

  But Dr. Solvayne rises from his seat before the silence can settle. “Now, hold on,” he says, voice tighter than before, hands braced flat on the table. “I’ve already explained: Isolde was not at fault. The system broke down due to non-compliance at the field level. Human error, yes, but not hers. No company on Earth can fully account for it, and you know that. What we need now is breathing room. A fraction more cooperation—”

  “Do not stand to me, Dr. Solvayne.” Dahl-Keshet’s voice slices clean, like the click of a safety being disengaged. He doesn’t move, doesn’t raise his tone. He doesn’t need to. The way his visor glints in the overhead light is enough. “Your posture implies opposition. I advise you to sit before you say something that can’t be recalled.”

  But Solvayne doesn’t sit. “She lost her autistic child,” he says, the words breaking loose like they’ve been chained too long. “What happened to her isn’t a glitch or a breach of protocol; it’s a collapse. Psychological, systemic, personal. And she kept working. She kept delivering. You want loyalty? That’s what it looks like. Her child is dead, seven years old. With all due respect… give her a damn break.”

  The room goes quiet. Not out of respect. Out of calculation.

  Dahl-Keshet turns to Mbale. “Mr. Gond. Why is it I wasn’t notified of this tragedy?”

  Mbale blinks, caught off guard. His mouth opens, then closes. He stumbles on the edge of an answer. “Well, to tell you the truth, this is the first I’ve heard of—”

  “That is not an acceptable response,” Dahl-Keshet cuts in, tone as smooth as it is final. “You are the Director of Operations. It is your responsibility to assess not only systems and procedures, but the stability of the human infrastructure beneath them. If Ms. Crane was compromised by grief, you should have known. If she continued working in that state, it should have been recorded. Addressed. You speak often of loyalty, Mr. Gond. Tell me: how do you expect it, if you do not even notice when one of your own is falling apart?”

  More silence.

  “Should have brought popcorn,” Vander mutters.

  “Ensure a report is filed,” Dahl-Keshet adds, quieter now. “And if you value your position, I suggest you begin paying closer attention to the people keeping this company alive. In this case, I will, as you say, give her a break. I, too, know of the cruelty this world brings. But that does not mean her position will not be looked at more closely.”

  Dr. Solvayne takes a seat. “Of course, sir. And I apologise for raising my voice.”

  Dahl-Keshet lets out sigh, relaxing those mechanical, pinpointed claws on the table. “With that out of the way, might we touch on what Phase Three has in store for us? General Tarek Amurasi?”

  The NACP officer steps forward, reaches into his coat, pulls a small black remote from the inside pocket, and presses down. The lights in the room cut out at once. The table hums. Then the hologram comes online. No flicker, no startup animation. Just a clean, functional image projected in still, sky blue. On the left side of the projection: a humanoid frame. Android, model unknown. No polish, no presentation. Its chest cavity is open, mechanical components labelled in hard-edged corporate font. Servos. Dampeners. Neural mesh. On the right: a canister. Transparent. Narrow. The label reads Elydrine in block letters, and beside it, a scrolling panel of chemical components begins listing one by one: dense, complex, and far too advanced for public release. The kind of data that doesn’t end up on open channels. The kind of data that gets people killed for even having.

  And right now, it’s ours.

  “Jackpot,” says Dance, and the rest of us get a little giddy.

  The android and the canister are connected by thin blue lines. A diagram of interaction. Flowcharts that show where the compound is injected. Where it spreads. What it touches first. Neural zones. Motion regulators. A red section flashes across the spine.

  “Thank you all for having me,” General Amurasi says, his accent undoubtedly Indian. “Let me introduce you to the next era of Techstrum. Phase Three, or as the force knows it, Project Talon.”

  “Project Talon?” I say.

  “Well, I reckon that’s us just about done dookies,” says Dance.

  “No,” I say, waving him off. “Keep playing. I want to see this.”

  General Amurasi zooms in on the androids, and I notice that its facial features are a little different than your standard bot. The eye slit is no longer straight but instead has a triangular curve to it, sort of like the M-Gate visor, but strangely more… sinister. Like it's designed to instill fear.

  “We have a problem,” the general says, his voice steady, unhurried. “The south is slipping further out of control. Not by the year anymore. Not by the month. By the week. By the day. You can feel it in the numbers. Crime’s rising beyond what our reports can normalise. Ever since the proliferation of unauthorised cybernetic augmentation, they’ve grown bolder: more organised, more desperate. And now they’re bleeding through. Into northern districts. Into our supply chains. Into our offices.

  “The restaurant attack in November. Terminal 6: a southsider who killed his manager with industrial-grade claws. Tore him in half with the magnets. And let’s not forget, most recently: the performance hall incident. Two unidentified criminals on the loose. And Mr. Gond has another story, about a woman with a red mask who threatened to kill him unless he spilled classified information about Techstrum’s past, which he bravely defied.

  “The southern districts are unstable. That’s not a political statement. That’s a security reality. The people there don’t trust institutions. They’ve been left to burn, and now they’re beginning to reach for the fuel. This program”—he gestures towards the hologram, towards the androids and Elydrine—“is the line. The deterrent. We don’t need them to be human. We need them to be present. On every corner. In every zone. No fatigue. No bias. No hesitation.”

  “Are they fucking insane?” I say.

  Dahl-Keshet steeples those golden fingers, the joints clicking faintly in the quiet. “So, General Amurasi,” he says, “what happens if the south tampers with these units? Would we be looking at a wave of bots gone rogue, laying waste to our streets and assets?”

  The general smiles. It’s not warm. He taps a key on the control slate and the hologram shifts. The image of the android rotates, sharpens, zooms in on the back of the neck. A small, dense piece of hardware becomes visible: rectangular, with no external ports. Just a pulse of red light blinking at its centre.

  “This,” General Amurasi says, “is the Neural Containment Fuse. Hardware-locked. Embedded during final assembly. No wireless access. No firmware patches. It’s heat-shielded, EMP-protected, and sealed beneath six layers of industrial composite. It cannot be hacked. Not by standard methods. Not by unconventional ones either. Techstrum might have intelligent engineers and programmers, but so do we.”

  “Ahhh,” says Dahl-Keshet. “Yes, this is what I’ve been looking for. A real failsafe. Not this empty promise that relies on the competence of human nature, which as we all know… is indeed unreliable. Thank you, General Amurasi.”

  The general gives a curt nod, satisfied with himself. No one else speaks. Not the scientist, not the executives. No one. It’s the kind of silence that tastes like metal: clean, cold, and oh-so-wrong.

  I glance over at the others: Raze, Fingers, Dance. No one’s blinking. The data on the screen is still scrolling: compound lists, implementation charts, personnel clearance. All of it too real. Too final.

  Dance shifts in his seat. “This ain’t enforcement. This is extermination in a suit, mate. Fuckin’ crikeys.”

  Before I can reply, the monitors glitch. It’s small at first, just a ripple through the top left corner of the central screen. Then another. A static pulse. The word STANDBY flashes red for a second where it should be grey.

  “What the fuck is this?” Raze says, already moving towards the screens

  Dance types at the computer, as fast as he damn well can. “Fuckin’ packet loss is what. There’s some interference in the way!”

  The feed stutters again. Audio distortion hisses through the speakers like something whispering too close to the mic. Then all six monitors blink black, at once.

  Dead.

  No one speaks.

  Raze stares at the blank screens like he’s waiting for them to come back to life. Fingers checks her internal rig, then the backup line, then just stands there, quiet, jaw tight. Dance slams a hand against the side of the laptop but doesn’t say another word. Whatever happened; it wasn’t random. That much is clear.

  I sit back slowly, breathing through the tightness in my chest. We stayed too long. Saw too much. And now they know someone was watching. Who? Maybe they don’t know yet. But they will. Sooner than we want. Maybe they already do.

  This isn’t just a leak. This is a breach. And when people like Dahl-Keshet and Amurasi get breached, they don’t tighten security; they erase the problem.

  I look at the others. Raze still hasn’t moved. Fingers has already started wiping traces. Dance is staring at a frozen progress bar on a screen that no longer works.

  It’s over.

  Whatever safety we had left in this city: it just got pulled out from under us.

  And deep down, we all know what that means.

  We’ll have to run.