Chapter 1: Flesh Over Chrome
BEGINNING PLAYBACK.
The rain was the only clean thing in Heywood, washing the garbage down the gutters but never touching the grime on the walls. I kept my head down, the collar of my worn jacket pulled up against the damp. My right hand throbbed with a deep, familiar ache from eight hours sorting scrap at the Yarko Recycling yard. The pay was a joke, but the corp-tagged implants they fished out of the wrecks paid a little extra if you knew which foreman to slip them to. Not that I saw much of that extra. It vanished into the apartment’s black hole of rent and synth-noodles before I even got home.
A flickering hologram for some off-brand energy drink spat epileptic green light across the street, making the puddles look toxic. The smells were a solid thing here—fried grease, ozone, wet rust, and the underlying sweet-rot of the alleys. Music from a dozen different bars warred in the air, a distorted headache of bass and synth. I walked fast, not making eye contact. In Heywood, looking at someone was either an invitation or a challenge. I wasn’t selling either.
The shortcut through Abandoned Fikker Alley was a risk, but it shaved ten minutes off the walk. I was about to pass the mouth when a glint of non-neon color caught my eye. Down the alley, half-shoved behind a burned-out dumpster, was a duffle bag. It wasn’t ragged. It was clean, military-grade synth-canvas. My street-sense pricked up. A score like that didn’t get left behind by accident.
No one around. The alley was a tomb of dripping pipes and peeling ads for joytoys long since decommissioned. The feeling coming off the space was cold, vacant. Not a recent fight, just abandonment. I moved without thinking, my steps silent on the slick pavement. The bag had weight. Good weight. I didn’t open it there. Getting caught examining stolen goods in the open was a quick way to get zeroed.
I slung the strap over my shoulder, the new weight a counterpoint to the ache in my hand, and got out of there, my pace quicker now, heartbeat a steady drum in my ears.
The apartment block was a vertical slum, a stack of human storage units vibrating with the noise of a thousand desperate lives. The elevator had been dead for a year. I took the stairs, the smell of mildew and boiled cabbage getting thicker with every flight. Our door was 7C, the locking mechanism long since kicked in and replaced with a physical bolt we’d screwed in ourselves.
I slid the bolt and pushed inside. The heat hit me first, thick and stale. The one-room coffin was dim, lit by a single faulty neon strip that buzzed like an angry insect. My three younger brothers were on a frayed mattress in the corner, huddled around a cracked dataslate playing some bootleg fighting game. Lita, the youngest, was on the floor by the hotplate, sorting our meager stock of ration packets by color. She looked up, her small face pale.
“Kai,” she whispered. Her fear was a bright, sharp thing in the room, cutting through the general fog of exhaustion and resentment.
The other feeling hit me from across the room, a hot, sour wave. Mom was home. And she was in the cup.
She was slumped in the room’s only chair, a plastic synth-wood thing threatening to buckle. An empty bottle of bargain-bin vodka sat on the floor by her feet. Her eyes, glassy and red-rimmed, focused on me with an effort that seemed to cost her.
“‘S that?” she slurred, pointing a trembling finger at the duffle bag.
“Just some extra work from Yarko,” I said, my voice flat. I kept the bag close to my side.
“Work.” She spat the word like it was poison. “You call that pittances work? I smelled the Ramen stall on Marigold today. Real meat broth. We’re eating paste. You’re tall, you’re strong enough for the docks. The loader crews get real cred. Or the scaffolding gangs. But you… you’re too good for it, right? Too pure.” Her laugh was a wet, ugly sound. “My zero-chrome freak of a son. They laugh at you, you know. At me. Say I spawned a defective.”
The words were old, their edges worn smooth from repetition. They didn’t cut anymore; they just pressed, a constant, dull weight. I felt my brothers’ embarrassment, a shrinking feeling. I felt Lita’s terror, a needlepoint. I felt my mother’s roaring, drowning despair, a black hole sucking all the light and air out of the room. I understood it all, precisely. It didn’t make it easier to bear; it just meant I couldn’t even hate her for it. I just had to stand there and let it wash over me.
“I bring home what I can,” I said, turning my back to her to slide the duffle into the narrow gap between our wall-unit and the leaking wall.
“Not enough!” she shrieked, and something plastic hit the wall near my head. A cup. “You think this life is free? You think I wanted this? Five of you… clinging to me… dragging me down into this shit…”
Her voice broke into sobs, the anger dissolving into the self-pity stage. The kids hunched their shoulders, trying to disappear. I felt their want like a physical ache—for her to stop, for quiet, for the smell of real broth.
I waited. The storm passed, dissolving into muttered curses and then the heavy, ragged breathing of sleep. The room exhaled.
Only then, in the relative quiet punctuated by her snores and the distant wail of sirens, did I pull the duffle bag into the one spot the faulty light touched.
I unzipped it.
No cred sticks. No bland corp documents. No glittering jewelry.
The inside smelled of gun oil and cold metal. Nestled in custom foam cutouts were three handguns. Not street-piece iron. These were sleek, matte-black, with the clean, lethal lines of corporate security issue. An Arasaka Tamayura, a Militech Crusher, and something I’d only seen in whispers on the net—a Kang Tao Shāshǒu, its surface like polished obsidian. Each had multiple full-capacity magazines. Two boxes of specialized armor-piercing rounds.
This wasn’t a find. This was a catastrophic event waiting to happen. Whoever lost this bag would be looking.Hard. Corps, gangs, or some solo who’d just had the worst night of their life. This level of hardware had a digital footprint, serial numbers, maybe even tracers buried in the polymer.
My mind fragmented, calculations firing.
Sell them? Rivera, the fixer down in the market, would give me a year’s wages for one of them. All three? I could get us out of this coffin. A better cube in a less poisonous block. Real food for Lita. Meds for Tommy’s cough. It was a ticket. A dangerous, blood-soaked ticket.Keep them? In a place with no real lock, with a drunk mother and four little kids? It was a death sentence for all of them. A different kind of death sentence than the one we were already slowly serving, but faster.More violent.
But the weight of the Tamayura in my hand… it was cold. It was final. It was a kind of power this city understood, a language spoken in screams and silence. A language I’d never been equipped to speak. My hand, the one that ached from sorting trash, curled around the grip. It fit. It felt like an answer to a question I’d been too afraid to ask.
I looked at Lita, asleep now on the mattress, thumb in her mouth. I looked at the rain-streaked window, the inverted city of fractured neon reflected in the grimy glass. The sirens were getting closer, or maybe it was just the blood in my ears.
The guns lay on the floor before me, three silent, lethal choices.