The upper corridors of New Toronto felt like the inside of a failing lung. Hot damp air pressed down on the concrete.
Will stepped on a thrashing live copper wire to ground the current, letting Zeraya pass without breaking his stride. Muscle memory steered him through the crush of bodies. He tossed a low-value chit to a screaming vendor hawking reclaimed scrap, never once looking at the man's face.
Zeraya matched his pace effortlessly. She stepped over a rusted steam pipe and shoulder-checked a scavenger twice her size who did not move fast enough.
They hit Maddie's storefront. The shop smelled of ozone and burning dust. Salvaged cybernetics hung from the ceiling on heavy iron chains. Volatile Glitch artifacts glowed faintly in the shadows.
Maddie spotted him instantly. She crossed the room, grabbed the heavy canvas collar of his jacket, and pulled him directly into the back storeroom. The air here was cooler.
She pushed him hard against a heavy steel shelving unit.
"You owe me for the last batch of powder, Will," Maddie said. Her voice carried the low demanding rasp of someone who did not ask for permission. "I collect on my own schedule."
Will met her energy. He leaned in close, dropping his hands to her waist. The synthetic fabric of her coat was rough under his thumbs. "Name the time. I clear my debts."
"Tonight." Maddie did not break eye contact. "Your place. Leave the heavy rig at home."
They stepped back out into the noise of the alley. Zeraya did not wait a single second. She bumped Will's shoulder hard, flashing a brilliant pushy smile.
"Nice hustle, boss," Zeraya said. She laughed, loud and abrasive over the grinding gears of a nearby scrap stall. "You working her for a discount on Glitch artifacts, or is that just your standard closing technique?"
Will navigated around a puddle of corrosive chemical runoff. "We are friends, Zeraya. It is networking."
"Sure." Zeraya rolled her eyes. "Networking. She has a cute face and a gorgeous ass, Will. I would hustle her too."
She is not wrong, Khan said, with immediate and enthusiastic agreement. The one with the medical kit has excellent taste in company. Well done.
Will gestured toward a narrow maintenance shaft leaking grey steam. "We take the service roads. A good mule never walks the main thoroughfare twice in one cycle."
Zeraya squeezed past a rusted pipe, wiping dirty condensation from her bare arm. "Because of the scavengers?"
"Because of the tax," Will said. "You carry a full pack on the main road, the Ward takes a cut. The Garrow thugs take a cut. By the time you hit your buyer you are carrying empty canvas. You map the dark routes. You stay invisible."
Will tossed a small heavy iron token to a kid perched in the shadows — a scout keeping the street quiet. The kid caught it without looking. Will never broke stride.
"Invisible is boring," Zeraya complained. "Invisible does not get paid."
"Dead does not get paid," Will countered.
"Nobody, huh." Zeraya's voice dropped, something quieter threading through the usual momentum. "Not even you, boss?"
She said it with a smirk. Playful. Light enough to brush off.
Will looked her dead in the eyes. "No."
No smile. No qualifier. Just the word, sitting there.
Zeraya held his gaze for exactly one second. Then she looked away.
"Let's keep moving," she said.
Heavy combat boots pounded the iron grating in the distance. A Garrow patrol moved through the intersection.
Will grabbed the back of Zeraya's collar and shoved her hard into a rusted exhaust vent set low in the wall. He threw his own weight inside immediately after her and dragged the heavy metal shut. Blistering heat cooked the air in their lungs.
Thick ink-wash blackness coated the vent walls. Will tasted rancid decades-old refined chemical dust on his teeth. Harsh neon light bled up through the floor grating directly beneath them. It cut through the shadows like a physical blade, throwing sharp asymmetrical black bars across Zeraya's face and illuminating a makeshift medical bay below.
Lucan stood over a steel table.
The chemist did not wear sterile scrubs. His clothes were stained black and rust-red. A Vanguard Raider lay strapped to the metal, screaming a raw ragged sound that tore at the throat. Lucan ignored the noise. He drove a heavy oscillating saw through the Raider's ruined shoulder, amputating the limb in a spray of dark blood.
Lucan picked up a massive rusted iron System-graft. He bolted it directly into the raw flesh. Synthetic fluid wept heavily from the mechanical seams, mixing with the blood pooling on the floor.
Zeraya jerked back from the grating. The heat in the vent was stifling but her reaction was pure sensory revulsion — a creature of physical momentum and warm skin confronting the deliberate replacement of both.
"Look at how ugly that is," Zeraya whispered. Her voice carried genuine horror. "Cutting off warm skin for dead metal. You lose the ability to feel anything. You cannot touch another person. You might as well just die."
DROP THROUGH THE GRATE, Khan roared in Will's skull, hot and immediate and furious, the voice of a man who has just watched something he finds deeply offensive. TAKE HIS HEAD. NOW. That butcher is defiling a warrior. It is an insult to every soldier who ever bled clean.
Will slammed his shoulder into the cold metal of the vent wall. His breath hitched as the demand clawed at his nervous system — not possession, not the wheel being taken, but the sheer crushing weight of an ancient will that had never learned to wait pressing against the inside of his skull.
He bit the inside of his cheek. The hot taste of copper flooded his mouth. He held his own motor functions through pure stubbornness, the way you hold a door shut against wind, and [UNBROKEN] did its quiet ugly work keeping his heart rate flat while Khan raged.
He put a heavy hand on Zeraya's shoulder, forcing her lower against the hot grating.
"His name is Lucan," Will whispered. "He manages the Vanguard grafts."
Zeraya kept her eyes fixed on the bloody metal table. "Why are we watching him? I am not letting him touch me."
"You're watching him because a mule needs to know the supply chain," Will said. "He controls the high-tier painkillers. He controls the antibiotics. But if you take a hit in a Gate, you never go to him. He will amputate a bruised limb just to harvest the healthy bone. You memorize his face so you know exactly who to run from."
Not run from, Khan snarled, still hot. Put down. Like a dog that bites children.
Later, Will thought. When it costs us something to let him live.
Will pushed backward, sliding out of the vent and dropping into the alley below. Zeraya landed next to him a second later, wiping a thick streak of industrial grease from her cheek.
"So we avoid the butcher," Zeraya said, matching his stride as they headed west toward the entertainment district. "Who do we actually trust?"
"Nobody," Will said, guiding her past a collapsed storefront. "But some people are predictable. Predictable is safer than trust."
"Sounds like a miserable way to live, boss."
"It keeps the blood inside your body."
The heavy thud of trap bass vibrated through the floor grates. The air turned sweet with synthetic lotus and chemical smoke.
The Neon Lounge swallowed them whole.
They slid into a corner booth. The synthetic leather was sticky with spilled liquor. Will let the ambient heat and the chaotic social noise wash over him, his eyes tracking the room automatically.
Murn held court at the center of the bar.
The loading dock boss was loud, aggressive, and sweating heavily. Violently territorial. Two specific hostesses stood boxed into the corner behind him. Murn threw his massive arm out every time a patron walked too close. Nobody else was allowed to buy their time. Nobody spoke to them.
Will leaned across the scratched table, invading Zeraya's space.
"Look at the bar," Will said. "The big guy."
Zeraya tracked his gaze, her aggressive energy zeroing in on the target with the focused efficiency of someone who had spent their whole life identifying which person in a room was going to be a problem. "Murn. Loud. Sloppy. Drinks like a man who wants everyone to know he can afford it."
"He runs the loading docks," Will said. "Controls the physical transit of every Glitch canister coming out of the lower Gates."
Zeraya leaned back, reading the room. "High value target. But he is a pig. Look at the way he crowds those girls."
A heavy security door opened near the back hallway. Two hostesses emerged into the purple light, carrying fresh bottles to Murn's table.
Will saw it immediately.
Dark ugly bruising painted their wrists. Fresh purple and yellow contusions spread across their jawlines. They moved with stiff unnatural care, terrified of triggering the massive man at the bar.
Zeraya stared at them. Her expression hardened in the specific way of someone who has seen damaged things and found the sight personally offensive. She pulled a stray invisible piece of lint off her sleeve, her fingers moving with sharp precise tension. Her posture snapped back to perfect predatory alignment.
She is about to do something, Khan said, reading her body language through Will's eyes with the quick accuracy of a man who had commanded armies. Right now. She is three seconds from standing up.
Will looked at Zeraya's hands. The lint was gone. Her fingers had gone very still.
He knew exactly what that stillness meant.
"Look at their wrists," Will said quietly, leaning into her space, forcing her focus to stay on the information rather than the impulse. "Look at what he does when nobody stops him. Look at all of it. Don't look away."
Zeraya looked. Her jaw tightened. The stillness in her hands became a different kind of stillness — not the stillness before action, the stillness of someone filing something in a place they don't forget.
"I see it," she said, her voice very low.
"Good," Will said. "Then we do this right."