“Everything was subjective. There were only personal apocalypses. Nothing is a cliché when it’s happening to you.”

  Didn’t take the straight way back. Not after the call in the container. Cut through foot traffic and ate a shove that should’ve been obvious; let it happen because turning my head felt worse than the hit. Ran a crowded stairwell up and down without getting off, just to see who stayed with me.

  Nobody did. Or somebody did it well enough that it felt the same.

  The keycard reader flashed amber, went green, and still made me eat that half-second delay before the latch let go. I stepped into the conapt, pulled the door shut, and kept my palm on the panel until the frame stopped humming from the impact.

  Kabuki pressed noise through the walls in layers—my neighbor’s screen arguing with itself on loop, water sliding in the pipes. Somebody dragged a chair across concrete for a full minute, slow and mean, making sure the whole building knew they were still awake. My ceiling fan ticked every third rotation; the bent blade had its own schedule and never forgot it. The sink drain carried that penny-water stink that came back every time the heat rose, and cleaner only made it smell angry.

  The jacket missed the chair and skidded to the desk leg. I left it there until the asymmetry got under my skin, then hooked it over the chair back, fussing with the angle for two seconds and pretending that counted as control.

  It was a box: door, mattress, a window that didn’t seal right, and a terminal bolted into the furniture—Watson rentals loved doing that. The screen had a scratch that caught light at the wrong angle and made my eyes track it. The biometric pad sat under the display, glossy with other people’s oil, and it always read warm when I rested my thumb there, as though it remembered the last hand that begged it.

  The screen woke with a dull flash and dropped me into a login panel. The interface loaded fast; should’ve meant nothing, but it yanked a stupid grin out of me anyway.

  In another life, a boot that clean meant somebody else was about to inherit the Monday queue.

  I could almost taste burnt office coffee and hear a manager saying priority like he knew what he talked about.

  Five months. The number landed, slid, wouldn’t settle.

  I pulled up local feeds and typed names that had mattered in my old life: corporations, projects, incidents I kept expecting to see reflected back at me. The results came back thin, or they came back wrong, or they hid behind paywalls asking for a token and a smile. One page threw a blink-badge at me and tried to tug a biometric prompt over it; I closed that window and ignored the second one that tried to crawl up behind it. Cheap scam. Same biometric grab.

  The terminal hitched for a beat when I closed it; the housing fan surged, then settled. I left the smear. My landlord didn’t take payment in clean glass.

  The overlay stuttered for a frame, then snapped into place.

  LEVEL: 3

  ATTRIBUTES:

  BODY: 5/6

  REFLEXES: 4/4

  TECHNICAL: 5/6

  INTELLIGENCE: 3/5

  COOL: [LOCKED]

  CLASS SEED: IMPERSONATOR

  PROGRESSION CHANNELS:

  SHINOBI: 04

  ENGINEER: 05

  SOLO: 02

  NETRUNNER: 03

  HEADHUNTER: [LOCKED]

  PERKS (ACTIVE):

  SHINOBI — QUIET STEP

  SHINOBI — GRIP DISCIPLINE

  ENGINEER — JURY-RIG

  SOLO — PAIN BUFFER

  MURK MAN — ICE COLD CONTINUITY

  BUFFER DISCIPLINE

  ENGRAM CACHE (3 SLOTS):

  [01] JUNKYARD NETRUNNER — COMMON (ACTIVE)

  [02] GARAGIST — COMMON (IMPORTED)

  [03] MURK MAN — UNCOMMON (ACTIVE)

  SKILLS:

  RANGE TRAINING: 10/50 (POLICEMAN)

  HAGGLING: 6/50 (GARAGIST)

  MECHANIC AFFINITY: 10/50 (GARAGIST)

  BRAWLER: 9/50 (MURK MAN)

  SYS/NET: 14/75 (RETRIEVED)

  CYBERWARE:

  ARMS:

  Raven Microcyb F-24 — COMMON

  OCULAR:

  Kiroshi Optics SD-5 — COMMON

  NEURALWARE:

  Zetatech Neural Processor Mk.I — POOR

  SYNERGY ENGINE: ONLINE [ ]

  LEVEL REWARD: PENDING

  PERK POINT: 1

  DRIFT: PRESENT (LOW)

  STATE: NOMINAL

  PRONOSTIC: GOOD

  “PENDING” irritated me in a petty way. I dropped the overlay and rubbed my thumb along the seam at my wrist where synthskin met the Raven housing, checking the hand more for my own head than for function. It flexed clean. Vik’s work held.

  A week. He’d said a week.

  At the sink, I washed my hands because they felt wrong. The faucet squealed when I turned it. I held the knob a second longer, thinking that would make it stop, and the squeal stayed the same. The towel on the hook had started life white; now it lived in gray. I dried my hands and felt the jacket pocket snag my attention.

  The receipt was stiff paper, cheap ink. I unfolded it once and felt my stomach tighten.

  NiCola Ultra. Antifungal wipes. Disposable synthskin patches. Stamped Pacifica. 03:07. I hadn’t been in Pacifica at 03:07. I hadn’t been awake.

  I folded it back and stuffed it into the pocket hard enough to wrinkle it, then zipped my bag and forced my fingers away before I could turn the zipper into a ritual. The deck stayed wrapped inside, and the thought of it followed me down the stairs.

  Little China was close. The streets changed in small ways as I moved—different vendors, different eyes, different cameras, different reasons for people to stand still. I kept my pace boring.

  Misty looked up when I stepped into her shop. Her face caught for a moment, then settled.

  “You’re back,” she said, and the words carried the aftertaste of an argument she’d lost.

  “Said I’d be.”

  Her eyes flicked to my waistline, then away. “You chunk today. Today-today?”

  “I’m upright.”

  “Not what I asked.”

  A breath left my nose. “Yeah. I ate.”

  She nodded once, reached for a cup, stopped, then jerked her chin toward the back. “He’s there.”

  I started past her.

  “Hey,” she said, and the word landed sharper than the tone. “Don’t let him sell you chrome you can’t cover.”

  “He already did.”

  That got a short breath out of her, irritation more than amusement. “Then don’t let him do it twice.”

  Vik’s clinic smelled of antiseptic, metal, and coffee that had crossed the line into burnt plastic. He looked up from a tray of parts, scanned me in one pass, eyes pausing at my waist.

  “You kept the stitches clean,” he said.

  “I tried.”

  “Trying isn’t a disinfectant.” He pointed at the chair. “Sit.”

  The bag hit the tray. The deck came out wrapped in cloth. Vik unwrapped it, turned it over, checked the ports and seam, then looked up at me with the tired patience of a man who’d seen too many “good deals.”

  “Where’d you get this,” he said, already knowing the answer was going to annoy him.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “Found it.”

  He snorted. “You always find things.”

  “In this city? Things find you.”

  His mouth shifted, a reaction he didn’t let become anything. He plugged it in and started cleaning the contacts while the diagnostic rig warmed.

  My old reflex crawled up my throat anyway, the one that wanted to prove I belonged in the room by naming threats. Textbook NIST.

  “For malware. Spyware. Polymorphic—”

  “Polymorphic?” Vik barked one laugh. “Jesus. That’s a museum word.”

  “It’s real.”

  “It was real.” His fingers kept moving. “Here you worry about daemons, hooks, ICE, and your own brain boiling in the socket.”

  He reran the probe when one line looked off, then exhaled when it turned into boring.

  “Used,” he said. “Dirty. Runs. Nothing obvious tries to bite you on handshake.”

  My shoulders loosened before I meant them to.

  Vik saw it and didn’t comment. He tapped my temple with two fingers instead.

  “Your neural processor caps you. Push it and you’ll short out.”

  “I know it’s—”

  “Poor,” he cut in. “POOR. You push a deck through that and you get headaches. You keep pushing and you stop sleeping. You stop sleeping and you start making heroic decisions.”

  “I’m not—”

  He lifted a hand. “Don’t finish that sentence.”

  He grabbed his holo and dialed.

  “Yeah. Need a processor. Zetatech swap. Something above trash. I don’t care about brand worship. I care about clean.” He listened, jaw tightening. “Price me again. …Fine. Put it on my tab.”

  He ended the call and looked at me.

  “Order’s in,” he said. “Delivery depends on whether the courier hates life today.”

  “How long.”

  “Long enough for you to get tempted.”

  He set up the install. The port behind my ear stung. The handshake pushed pressure behind my eyes, enough to make my jaw want to clamp. Vik’s hand landed on my shoulder.

  “Breathe.”

  I let it out slow through my teeth. He adjusted something on his rig, watched my pupils, and the pressure eased into a steady presence behind my eye.

  Misty stood in the doorway with a cup in her hands. She didn’t step in. She didn’t perform concern. She watched.

  Vik finished, ran a final check, flicked his gloves into the bin, and slid a small pack of meds toward me.

  “There. Installed. You take it slow.”

  “I will.”

  He stared.

  “I’ll try,” I corrected.

  “Better.” He tapped the med pack. “Take that. Sleep. Water.”

  Misty spoke from the doorway without raising her voice. “Your hair’s everywhere.”

  I blinked at her.

  “In the shop,” she said, pointing at the floor as though proof lived there. “You sit once and I find strands for days. Tie it.”

  A snort escaped me. “Yeah. Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. Tie it.”

  Vik waved a hand toward the door. “Go home.”

  Kabuki Roundabout was packed under tarp and signage, the air heavy with fryer grease, wet cardboard, ozone from cheap chargers, and the sharp stink of dog piss on a power strip someone had taped to the ground. Kept moving toward the netrunner storefront.

  Inside EdgeNet, the air ran cooler. Yoko Tsuru looked up once, her attention touching my chrome arm, then my face, then moving away.

  “Deck?” she asked.

  “Installed.”

  “Today,” she replied, not asking. “Beginner?”

  “I can read.”

  “Read,” she said, and slid the menu across the counter with two fingers. “You want dreams, go buy incense. You want programs, you pay.”

  RTFM, sure. I scrolled, pretending the columns didn’t blur from how hard I was trying to look casual, and I caught myself thinking, well, time sure flies, because the words on that menu didn’t feel new so much as they felt written for a species with extra organs. Those “exploits”—if I could even call them that—weren’t futuristic, they were alien, and most of it bounced off my skull with a dull shame I didn’t want to show on my face. I nodded once anyway, the way you do when you’re trapped in front of a person who can smell ignorance, then I backed out with a couple of names bookmarked and the quiet certainty that I was going to have to carve out hours for this or stay blind.

  Yoko took my eddies without looking at them, dropped the shards onto the counter with a dry click, and her eyes were already on the next customer over my shoulder.

  “Don’t brick it,” she said.

  “I’ll try.”

  “That’s what everybody says. Next.”

  Back in my unit, the terminal greeted me with the same sterile panel. The fan ticked every third rotation. The receipt stayed folded in my pocket, warm for reasons I didn’t want to touch.

  The quickhack shards went through the checks my SYS/NET could manage: isolated storage, signature read, metadata comparison against public packs I could scrape without paying. It wasn’t a clean bill of health and it wasn’t a red flag either. The result came back boring. I accepted boring. Reset optics, ping and short-circuit.

  Work came next.

  I didn’t search for “fixers” in the open. I looked for Watson boards that resurfaced under different titles, threads that got mirrored, contact tags that repeated across posts written by hands that didn’t sound related. A page tried to sell me “verified fixer access” behind biometrics; I backed out. Another page offered names behind a subscription; I closed the second one. The city charged you up front, then robbed you anyway.

  Regina Jones kept appearing in the places that didn’t ask up front, the spots where people complained and bragged and tried to sound hard.

  Regina paid.

  Regina warned me off a trap.

  Regina left me on read.

  Regina burned me.

  No proof—just a lot of people talking the way burned people talk.

  I pulled one contact line from three separate posts, formatted the same each time, and saved it. That was the closest thing to deets I was getting without walking into a bar and asking out loud.

  I called.

  The holo tone popped once, then a woman answered mid-task.

  “Yeah—hold on.” Muffled, off to the side: “No, not that folder.” Then, back to me, sharper: “Talk.”

  “Jax,” I said. “Morrow.”

  “Watson,” she said, not asking.

  “Yeah.”

  “Deck?”

  “Installed t—”

  “Today,” she cut in. “Sure. You’re excited. Don’t be.”

  “I need work.”

  “Everyone’s hungry.” Something scraped on her end, a chair or a drawer. “You want money or you want meaning.”

  “Money.”

  “Good. Meaning is expensive.”

  She came back without apology.

  “You wrote ‘cleanup’,” she said. “You mean cleanup, or you mean you want to shoot someone and call it cleanup.”

  “Cleanup.”

  “Start with instructions,” she said. “You don’t get extra points for improvising on your first call.”

  “I can handle—”

  “No,” she cut in, flat. “You can call.”

  Silence sat for a beat. My throat tightened. I forced my voice steady.

  “Okay.”

  “Little China,” Regina said. “Three-story building above a shuttered noodle spot. Back stairwell. Microclinic on the second floor. Doc’s a hobbyist. License. Conscience. He helped somebody who made him scared.”

  “What’s the job.”

  “Door cam recorded a face,” she said. “Cheap setup. Local storage box in a closet. The box has a shard with names because he started writing things down. Faces, plates, times. You take the box. You take the shard. You wipe the cam if you can do it without killing power for the whole stack.”

  “And the doc.”

  “He breathes when you leave,” she replied. “He starts confessing, you shut him down. Confession turns into bait fast.”

  A ping landed: coordinates, door code, stairwell entry, and a short line typed with impatience.

  NINETY MINUTES. FRONT DOOR IS A TRAP.

  Regina’s voice returned, lower.

  “You park away,” she said. “You don’t stand under cameras. You don’t plug that shard into your home terminal, and don’t say ‘I know’ to me.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Send me a photo of the box once it’s in your hands,” she added. “If you can’t get it clean, you call before you improvise.”

  “Got it.”

  “You got iron?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  My brain tried to go Mojave on me—big one on my hip, grin included, like a line could pass for armor.

  I kept my mouth shut.

  “You keep it holstered unless the room forces your hand,” she replied. “You don’t go collecting trophies. You don’t go teaching lessons.”

  The line clicked dead.

  I stood in the unit with the holo tone gone, the fan clicking on its third rotation overhead, the receipt heavy in my pocket for reasons I didn’t want to open yet, and the deck behind my eye, a pressure I could ignore until I couldn’t.

  My hand went to the pistol, checked the mag, then stopped before it turned into a ritual.

  At the door, I listened.

  Something moved in the hallway, slow at first, quicker after that—rounded a corner and faded.

  I locked up and delta’d anyway. Regina’s window was short, and people who wanted recordings erased didn’t arrive with patience.