Attack.

  He shoved the command down the mental tethers. It was not a word but a compulsion, a projection of soft, wet places and dark tunnels. The roaches did not understand eyes or ears, but they knew the comfort of a nest. He forced the image of the orifices into a dozen tiny minds simultaneously. He showed them the slick vulnerability of the eyes, the wet heat of the nostrils, the inviting flutter of the eardrums.

  Their hunger inverted into a new direction. It was a drive not just to eat, but to invade.

  They launched.

  From where Targ stood, it must have looked as though the wall itself had come alive. One moment he was smirking with his weight shifting as he prepared to backhand Mike for the sport of it. The next, a glistening wave of black carapaces burst from under the boards and cracks. It was a dozen insects moving with a singular and terrifying velocity.

  He had just enough time for his eyes to widen over his scarf before the swarm hit his face.

  Three roaches dove for the warmth of his left ear and scrambled over the curve of cartilage with claws that felt like needles in Mike’s own mind, magnified twelve-fold through the tether. They jammed themselves into the canal and fought for space with antennae whipping wildly. Mike felt them hit the drum, a chaotic scratching against the membrane that set his teeth on edge.

  At the same instant, three more found the right ear while the remaining six became a living mask across Targ's features. They slipped under the edge of the scarf to force their way into his nostrils, crawling over his lips as he opened his mouth to shout.

  The shout broke in the middle and became a gargling, panicked bellow.

  He dropped the backpack and his hands flew to his face to claw at the mass.

  "What the...!" The words were mangled around a roach wedged half in his throat, its spiny legs kicking against his tongue. A muffled crunching came as his teeth snapped shut reflexively. The creature died, but the sensory echo still whiplashed down the tether into Mike. It was a sudden pressure followed by absolute nothingness.

  The loss hit like a tiny electric shock. One of the twelve threads in his mind went slack and the pain behind his eye ebbed just a fraction.

  The gain was more useful.

  Targ stumbled backward. His feet slid in the slick grime and his shoulder clipped the heap-wall, sending a cascade of loose scrap clattering down. His knife-hand twitched toward his belt, then jerked away as another spike of pain lanced his skull. The roaches in his ears were biting now, six of them working in concert and driven by blind panic and Mike’s command.

  He screamed.

  It was a real sound now. It was high and raw and stripped of any swagger. His knees buckled under the sensory overload.

  Mike moved.

  The System’s cold command braided with his own long-caged rage and jerked his body forward. He scooped the backpack with one hand and used the momentum of the motion to carry him closer. The other hand dipped under the strap, fingers closing around the wrapped bundle of his shiv. He tore it free, the metal slapping into his palm.

  It was rusty and uneven and notched, but it was familiar.

  Targ still clawed at his own face, crushing insects against his skin. One eye bulged red, the hind end of a roach visible for a horrifying second before it wriggled fully under the lid. Tears and blood streaked down his cheek while both ears dripped thick fluid.

  He was a bigger man and stronger. Even blinded by a dozen vermin he could crush Mike if he got a grip.

  Mike didn’t give him the chance.

  He stepped in close, ducking under the flailing arc of Targ’s arm, and drove the shiv up and in.

  He ignored the belly and the chest. Jory’s offhand anatomy lessons while they had scavenged old medical manuals surfaced with surgical clarity.

  Here. Between these. Under.

  The point punched into the soft triangle at the base of Targ’s throat just above where his vest’s frayed edge met scarred skin. There was resistance, then the ugly and slick give of flesh parting.

  Targ’s scream cut off like a severed line. Air whistled wetly through the new hole. His eyes locked onto Mike’s face. One was clear while the other bubbled around the roach.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  For a heartbeat the world narrowed to that contact.

  Mike saw recognition there. He saw surprise. It was a question he had seen before on other faces in the heap when reality shifted sideways. You?

  Then he twisted the blade.

  Cartilage crunched and hot liquid flooded over his fingers. Targ convulsed, his hands dropping from his face to batter weakly at Mike’s shoulders. The remaining eleven roaches in his head scuttled, confused by the sudden loss of coherent signals.

  Mike yanked the shiv free and stepped back out of the arc of the man’s collapsing weight.

  Targ hit the lane floor hard. He went knees first, then chest. Mud splashed and his fingers scrabbled to leave red streaks in the filth. His ruined throat worked soundlessly, breath bubbling.

  The roaches lacked the compulsion now that his focus broke. They fled the new screaming environment, crawling out of the man’s ears and eyes trailing gore to drop into the grime. Their minds crackled with disorientation. Mike let the tethers go, all eleven of them snapping loose at once.

  He stood over the man with his chest heaving and the shiv dripping from his hand.

  No words rose to his tongue. There were no apologies and no curses. It was just a clinical assessment.

  Targ was dying. Nobody took a blade there and walked it off. Not in Sector 4 and not without a med-pod and real drugs. His blood soaked into the lane’s filth, mixing with old spills to make mud.

  The alley was momentarily quiet. The sounds from the main pump-lane were distant and dulled. No one had seen. Or, more accurately, no one who cared had seen.

  In the vermin-radar, life shifted around the new corpse-in-progress. The survivors of the dozen perked, drawn by warmth and the promise of fresh organic matter.

  Mike’s heart banged against his ribs like it wanted out. His hands shook, not from strain this time, but from something hot and sharp scouring through him.

  He looked down at Targ’s face.

  The man’s eyes were glassing already. The bulging one looked wrong with broken vessels, the white of the eye shot through with red. His mouth gaped around a froth of blood and spit. His hand twitched once, twice, then stilled.

  Mike felt nothing.

  There was no guilt and no horror.

  Once, early on in his scavenging years, he had seen a man crushed under a falling beam when a stack shifted. He had watched the light go out of the eyes and the twitching tail-end of life and felt something. It wasn't sorrow for the stranger, as Sector 4 didn’t have room for that, but a hollow ache. It was a howling awareness that one day that would be him alone under the trash.

  Now, standing over a man he had killed, the hollow was filled with something else.

  Calculation.

  He crouched quickly and wiped the shiv on Targ’s vest before patting the dead man down. A handful of metal tokens turned up in a pocket. It was enough credit slugs for maybe an extra liter if you caught the right handler in a good mood. He found a stubby backup knife and a half-eaten protein slab gone hard at the edges.

  He took it all, his hands moving fast.

  On his internal map more vermin edged closer as they sensed the change. He nudged them back with a subconscious flare of dominance. Not yet.

  Targ’s baton lay half-submerged in the muck where it had dropped. Mike hesitated, then left it. Carrying gang-marked gear was an invitation to questions he didn’t want asked.

  He straightened. The backpack strap cut into his shoulder and the shiv was wrapped and stowed again.

  A faint copper tang tickled his nose. It took him a second to realize it wasn’t all Targ’s blood. He wiped at his upper lip and his fingers came away red.

  The overload of holding twelve roaches and the kill-focus had pushed him over his limit. The inside of his head throbbed with a slow and punishing beat. It was a warning that next time it might not be a nosebleed. It might be an aneurysm.

  [NEURAL MICRO-TEARING DETECTED]

  [WARNING: SUSTAINED OVERUSE MAY RESULT IN COGNITIVE IMPAIRMENT]

  [SUGGESTION: REST / FEED]

  He stared at the floating text, then at Targ’s still-warm body.

  "Working on it," he said softly. "Both."

  His gaze flicked down the lane toward Jory’s corner. The old man’s shop would be lit, a warm rectangle spilling from a cut-out in a container wall. The air inside would be thick with solder fumes and the dry hum of reused capacitors.

  He should go. He should deliver the filter and keep that thread of normalcy.

  Instead, his eyes drifted back to the corpse.

  In the heap you killed or got killed. That had always been the unspoken rule, the gravity everything orbited.

  Most scavengers tried to pretend otherwise. They told themselves they just scraped by, that the gangs and the Enforcers and the predators were the only ones with blood under their nails. They comforted themselves with the idea that they were victims and not participants in the slow grinding-down of Sector 4.

  Mike had believed that story too in his weaker moments. He was just the dying kid with the cough trying to keep old machines running so people could drink.

  Tonight, in a narrow lane that stank of old piss and new blood, that story died as neatly as he had cut Targ’s throat.

  He had initiated. He had planned. He had used a man’s trust in the social script to bait him into range. Then he had set his vermin on him and stuck a blade in the softest part.

  The worst part, and the most dangerous part, was how right it felt.

  It didn't feel good or heroic. It felt aligned. The world had tried to eat him with wolves and tumors and thirst, and he had finally bitten back.

  He turned away from the body.

  On his inner radar the roaches surged forward the instant his attention lifted. They crawled over Targ’s cooling flesh, burrowing into seams and slipping under cloth to find the wet places first. The rat above dropped, scuttling close before darting in to nip at an exposed bit of finger.

  The heap reclaimed its own.

  Mike walked.

  He adjusted his posture as he approached the busier lanes. He smoothed the sharp satisfaction off his face and donned the old mask of the weary, wary scavenger. The backpack thumped lightly against his spine with the filter clinking inside.

  At the edge of the crowd around Rigg’s pumps he turned left as if nothing had changed and headed for the glow of Jory’s workshop.

  Inside his skull the System purred, numbers ticking upward in some invisible ledger. Outside, the night pressed down, hot and heavy and full of whispers and skittering feet.

  He slipped through it. He was no longer just another piece of meat, but something new. He was something that understood that in the heap, morality was a luxury scrap only the dead clung to.

  He wasn’t dead. Not yet.

  And if turning useless vermin and himself into weapons made him a monster, then so be it.