Digital meant hacking. Simon’s fingers itched for the rush.

  He found a patch of dry concrete, knelt, and toggled his neural jack. The world slid sideways—colors draining, the alley replaced by a schematic of blue-white lines and pulsing threat vectors. At the center, Jensen’s brain lit up like a bonfire, every synapse overclocked by the NeuroComp override.

  Simon’s HUD populated with access points: visual cortex, motor control, basal ganglia. The watchdogs had a firewall wrapped around the entire system, but Simon could see the gaps—a frayed edge at the base of the occipital lobe, a recursive loop running too hot, about to fail.

  He lanced in, a needle of raw code, and felt the NeuroComp try to resist. It hit back, hard, slamming Simon’s consciousness with static and icepick headaches. He gritted his teeth, pushed harder, and started feeding in fragments of his own memory—old code, old friends, the sound of Elara’s laugh echoing through the tunnel.

  The NeuroComp buckled, staggered, then started to bleed.

  Simon moved fast, patching the human memory back over the corporate brainware. It was a delicate dance—too much, and Jensen would stroke out; too little, and the system would bounce back, harder than before. He threaded the needle, watching the code mesh together, then settle into a kind of fragile peace.

  Jensen gasped. The overlay painted his brain green: clear, for now.

  Simon jacked out, vision flickering as he re-entered the alley.

  Jensen was up, sweating, but in control. He blinked at Simon, then at the drones, who were still frozen in place, system reboot pending.

  “You did it,” Jensen said, awe and terror mixed in his voice.

  “Didn’t have a choice,” Simon replied. “You want to help me?”

  Jensen nodded, shaky, but present. “There’s a service shaft. Not on the main grid. My badge will get you in, but only if you’re fast.”

  Simon took the card and memorized the route Jensen described.

  “What happens to me?” Jensen asked. “When this wears off?”

  Simon thought about it. “You run. You keep running. Maybe one day you will stop. Maybe not.”

  Jensen laughed, bitter and pure. “That’s better than nothing.”

  Simon turned, leaving the drones behind. As he exited, Jensen called after him: “When you find her, tell her she saved me, too.”

  He nodded, and for the first time in years, Simon actually meant it.

  Either way, the outcome was the same: Simon, with a way in, and Jensen—man or machine—left behind, clinging to whatever shreds of freedom he could.

  He checked the ventilation shaft, found the manual lock just as Jensen had described, and slipped inside.

  The world narrowed to a crawlspace, dark and slick and humming with recycled air. Simon wiped the rain from his face, then pulled the badge from his pocket. He looked at the name again, at the old, honest eyes, then tucked it away.

  He forced himself forward, elbows and knees scraping on steel. At the far end, a faint light, the promise of access—and maybe, if he was very lucky, something like hope.

  But mostly, there was the mission, and the endless churn of the city, and the rot that no one ever quite escaped.

  Simon grinned into the dark. It was almost like coming home.

  ***

  The ventilation shaft ran tight, barely wide enough for Simon’s shoulders. Every inch forward scraped skin, caught a loose thread, or pushed recycled air hot and plastic against his face. The badge Jensen gave him worked—at least until the shaft’s midsection, where a ceramic pressure plate jutted from the wall and his HUD screamed a two-second warning.

  Simon flattened, breath held, as a maintenance drone scuttled overhead on the main corridor, close enough that he caught the musk of ozone and micro-motor lubricant. When it passed, he kept crawling, counting heartbeats and letting his eyes adjust to the shaft’s strobing red emergency lights. By the time he hit the next junction, his shirt was sweat-glued to his back and his fingers ached from clutching the badge and the insulated pick in his other hand.

  The plan wasn’t elegant, but it was honest: punch through to the lower tower labs, grab anything with Elara’s signature, then ride the chaos up to Core. He’d learned long ago that Low Town didn’t reward the subtle.

  The shaft opened into a vertical drop—a narrow service well lined with cabling and old data conduits. Simon braced his feet on the side, then rappelled down by hand, feet catching on insulation as he moved. At the bottom, a wire-mesh grate blocked the exit, secured by a corporate-branded magnetic lock.

  His HUD offered two attack vectors: brute force or finesse. He grinned. Sometimes you had to compromise.

  He popped the lock’s panel, fished out the leads, and triggered a micro-burst from his neural jack, shorting the failsafe and lighting the corridor beyond in a quick pop of blue. The lock disengaged. Simon slid the grate open and stepped into the underbelly of Chop Tower.

  Inside, the air was colder, almost antiseptic, the kind that stripped your throat raw. The lights flickered, each cycle dropping the hallway into darkness for a fraction of a second. He moved low, using the gaps, always keeping two fingers on the pulse of his HUD. Ahead, the corridor split—left toward the waste holding, right toward the main lifts and, further, the security suite.

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  Simon took the left. Jensen’s directions were good—almost too good. The badge opened the first three doors without triggering any alarms. Each room is a tableau of failed experiments and discarded tech: shattered biocages, rows of stasis tubes, bins of pseudo-organic limbs still twitching under failed firmware.

  He skirted a cluster of wall-mounted cameras, watching for the telltale red ring that meant active recording. None tracked him; Chop’s people had confidence in their living security.

  But at the next junction, he hit a wall.

  Three more drones, these ones in heavy blue overalls, faces hidden behind clear armor visors. Two held mop handles, but the third had a subsonic cattle prod clipped to its belt, its left arm swollen with an obvious muscle bundle. The HUD flagged them as facility enforcers—hybrids, part human, part custom.

  Simon ducked behind a server rack, weighing the odds. He could hack the door controls, maybe set off a false fire alarm, and lure them out. Or he could blitz the trio, use the element of surprise to drop at least one before the others processed what was happening.

  His HUD surfaced a decision node: ENGAGE (Physical) / ENGAGE (Digital).

  He let his fingers hover, and for a second, the air tasted like static and adrenaline.

  He picked Digital.

  Simon patched into the local net, pinged the drones, and watched the access tree sprout across his HUD. The enforcers ran on a tighter leash than the garbage drones, but he saw the backdoor: a dormant update routine, waiting for a midnight firmware push.

  He spoofed the time, forced the update, and in the span of three seconds, injected a logic bomb straight into their compliance layer. The drones froze, stuttered, then began to argue with themselves, each repeating conflicting instructions at increasing volume:

  “—corridor integrity—maintain—override—return to barracks—override—”

  The cacophony built, the drones spinning in place, caught in a loop. Simon slipped past, barely breathing, as the trio collided with each other and crashed to the floor in a tangle of blue fabric and echoing, broken words.

  At the end of the hall, the badge gave him access to the waste holding. It was a cold, tiled room—benches lined the walls, old plasma screens flickering with static. In the center, a cluster of lockers, each labeled with a hand-written sticker. Simon found Jensen’s, right where he said it would be.

  He opened it, expecting nothing. Instead, he found a battered family photo—Jensen and a girl, maybe eight years old, eyes the same bright blue as the man's. There was a note, scrawled on the back: She’s all I have.

  Simon tucked it away, unsure why. He checked the other lockers: standard-issue raincoats, a few empty med injectors, a dented canteen.

  Then he found the second badge. This one was raw, unregistered, a blank card ready for imprint. Jensen had given him insurance.

  Simon smiled. “Guess you really were planning to run.”

  He slid the badge into his pocket and backtracked to the main shaft, then made for the security suite.

  The lift was old, the kind with no safety features, just a wire mesh and a button that creaked when he pushed it. As he ascended, he watched the floors tick by: sub-level, lobby, mezzanine, then the labs. He braced for a kill team or another drone cluster, but the doors opened onto an empty corridor.

  He stepped out, nerves on edge. His HUD pinged a warning, and then a message popped into view:

  Jensen-23: RUN.

  He ducked just as a shock round blasted through the corridor, splintering the wall behind where his skull had been.

  Simon hit the ground, rolled, and came up behind a cluster of plastic crates. Three meters ahead, two men in security black paced toward him, taser rifles up. They didn’t have drones—just the sick precision of well-trained muscle and city-funded hardware.

  Simon thumbed a quickburn patch, peeled it, and slapped it onto the wall behind him. It bloomed in bright orange light, a smokescreen that stank of pepper and synthetic capsaicin. The guards recoiled, but Simon was already moving—sprinting past them, using the afterimage of the smoke as cover.

  He made the next junction, ducked into a side room, and killed the lights. The guards thundered past, shouting, but he stayed quiet, waited for the hallway to be still.

  Then he moved.

  The security suite was smaller than expected—just a single office, a wall of monitors, and one old-school operator, hunched over a console, oblivious to the chaos outside.

  Simon slipped in, circled behind, and put the operator in a sleeper hold. He went out easily. Simon dragged him to the floor, then set to work.

  The monitors displayed the entire tower, including labs, holding pens, maintenance floors, and the Core at the top. Simon flicked through feeds, looking for a trace of Elara. He saw movement—three floors up, a woman, hair wild, blood running down her arm, locked in a cell with a medbot watching her.

  He zoomed in. It wasn’t Elara. Wrong face, wrong posture. But the way she moved—feral, caged—reminded him of her all the same.

  Simon mapped a route to the cell: up the main stairwell, cutting across the observation deck, and avoiding the glass atrium, where guards would have the high ground.

  He checked the operator’s terminal for overrides, found the cell unlock command, and set it on a timer: three minutes. Plenty of time to get there and intercept.

  He wiped the console, scrubbed his prints, and took a last look at the monitors.

  The guards he’d dodged were converging on the main shaft, rifles up. In ten seconds, they’d have the route locked down.

  Simon ran.

  The stairs were a blur: two at a time, lungs burning, knees screaming protest. At the landing, he hit another cluster of drones—four, maybe five, all built for riot control. They had net guns and shock sticks, but their programming was child’s play compared to the enforcers.

  Simon jacked in, ran a pulse, and overloaded their comms. The drones collided, crashed into each other, and then began firing nets at random, snaring themselves in a tangled web of high-tensile mesh.

  He moved past, boots leaving wet prints on the tile.

  At the cell block, the lights stuttered again, and the door on the third cell disengaged with a hiss.

  Inside, the woman—older, silver hair matted with blood—looked up. She was wild-eyed, but the mind behind was sharp as razors.

  “You, Simon?” she asked, voice broken but confident.

  He nodded, then handed her the operator’s badge.

  “Can you walk?” he said.

  She shrugged. “If not, I’ll crawl.”

  He grinned, despite the sweat and pain.

  “Good answer.”

  They moved out, side by side, the alarms now shrieking full tilt. Simon mapped a path to the upper stairwell, but as they hit the next landing, a fresh drone—one of Chop’s new models, all composite and smooth lines—blocked the way.

  The drone’s voice was not human. “Surrender. You will not be harmed.”

  Simon considered it, then said: “You first.”

  He lobbed the blank badge at the drone’s face, buying a split second, then hit the wall with his shoulder, tackling the machine sideways. It hit hard and heavy, but the momentum carried both of them through the glass and into the next room.

  He rolled clear, then used the quickburn patch as a makeshift grenade. The heat fused the drone’s optics, and it thrashed, blind, arms flailing.

  The woman moved past him, efficient, barely flinching.

  Together, they made it to the last service stairwell. Simon checked the time: less than a minute to Core.

  He let the woman go ahead, covered the rear, and as he moved, his HUD flared with a final message:

  Jensen-23: Find the others

  Simon stopped at the landing, just long enough to look out the window at the city below. It looked almost peaceful from up here—Low Town’s scars washed away by the neon, the rain cleaning the wounds.

  He breathed in, held it, then let it go.

  Then he followed the woman up, up, up, toward the heart of Chop Tower, toward Elara, toward whatever came next.

  He would find her.

  He would find all of them.

  And this time, he wouldn’t run.