Amber. Green. The lock hesitated.

  Kabuki came through the drywall in pieces—screens, pipes, the fan’s bad rhythm. Predictable conapt.

  I laid the shirt on the bed with the collar folded flat, set the jacket beside it, and went to the sink. Water ran brown, then cleared. I washed my hands anyway. Scrubbed under the nails until the skin stung and the smell of soap stopped meaning anything.

  Old habits.

  The mirror crack split my face in two if I stood wrong. I kept my head still and checked what mattered: hair tied back, collar clean, cuffs sitting straight. The Raven hand fixed the button. The ease stayed in my gut, right where the Murk Man reflexes have lived since they slid into me.

  Talon didn’t come. The case stayed shut under the bed like it was welded. The Omaha rode high under the jacket, Militech stamped on the slide. Loud iron, but it worked, and quiet cost eddies I didn’t have. Plus, from what I knew, silencing a tech iron wouldn’t be a walk in the park. Not without Nexus to save me. Future-me problem.

  Credchip: under five thousand. Rent, kibble, meds. Maybe ammo if I got lucky. A neural processor upgrade lived on the other side of that number, behind doors that didn’t open for want alone. Vik’s warning kept surfacing in fragments, and I didn’t let myself turn it into a speech. Regina’s pin on the holo did the job of keeping me pointed.

  Little China. Microclinic. Ninety minutes. And Regina said the front door was wired.

  I packed light: gloves, tape, fiber. Pocket light. Shards in plastic—two clean, one burner. Zip ties last, fiber cable on top. I pocketed the keycard, shouldered the bag, and shut the door.

  No pause in the hall. The building held sound too well, and my name didn’t need to be a rumor in somebody’s stairwell.

  Two blocks out, under a streetlight that flickered on its own schedule, the Galena cooled and clicked while I watched the corner. A camera on the far pole wasn’t city spec, too new. It stared the wrong way, not down the lane where traffic mattered, but across toward the pin Regina had sent.

  I started the engine and rolled on.

  Little China ran dense even this late. The noodle shop under Regina’s pin was shuttered with a dead sign, but the floors above it still carried hum—power through old conduits, voices cut by walls, a floorboard squealing when someone shifted weight.

  Back stairwell door wore a keypad and a cam. The mount wobbled a fraction when the breeze hit it. The keypad casing was a millimeter off-square, and the screw heads around the frame were mismatched, the kind you got when someone replaced what they stripped and didn’t care how it looked.

  Around the corner, an alley ran tight between brick and ductwork. Two bins. A service ladder half-hidden behind a vent stack. I kept the Raven’s grip light. My right hand did the old work. Soles rolled heel-to-toe so the ladder didn’t sing.

  Second floor. A service panel. Two screws and a strip of tape pressed down with a thumb. I peeled the tape slow, then set it in my pocket. One screw gave on the first turn.

  My tongue stuck to my teeth. Dry as dust.

  The panel shifted. Air pushed out—antiseptic, warm plastic, coffee gone cold. I slid in and kept my jacket from scraping as much as I could. Dust glued itself to sweat. Metal kissed fabric. Somewhere deeper in the trunk, my breath sounded loud.

  A sharp lip caught my elbow and pain flashed so clean my body tried to jerk. The Raven didn’t flinch. My flesh did. I swallowed the sound and kept moving.

  The vent ended over a storage room. Gauze. Medgel with sun-faded labels. A fridge humming too hard. A cart with one wheel that dragged, sounding like complaint. I dropped down behind stacked boxes and held still until my pulse quit trying to sprint.

  Voices came through the wall, close.

  “Doc,” a man said, low, “quit stallin’. You got paid once.” His tone had no patience.

  Another voice answered, scared. “I did what I did. Now delta.”

  A chair scraped. Something clinked against glass.

  I cracked the storage door a finger-width and watched.

  Waiting room left, exam room ahead. Front door dead ahead—with a trap mat. Two boosters between me and the doc.

  One booster leaned back with boots on a chair arm, jacket open to show chrome and skin in equal measure. His optic caught light when he turned. The other stood near the exam room doorway with hands in his pockets, shoulders loose, posture practiced. The doc stood half in shadow behind the exam room threshold, palms up, trying to look calm and failing. The room around him was small-time—one surgical chair with cracked padding, a tray of instruments, an off-brand scanner unit that tried to be more than a box, and shelves of sealed packs neatly arranged.

  The mat by the front door was too neat, centered to the tile lines. A wire disappeared into the baseboard. The door handle wore a thin strip of metal taped under its underside.

  The Omaha came up under the jacket and settled on the standing booster’s sternum.

  “Hands. Now.”

  He stiffened. Not a full freeze. A choice.

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  “Who the—” he started.

  “Hands. Slow.”

  His hands came out slow, fingers spread.

  The seated booster dropped his boots and leaned forward, eyes moving between my iron, my chrome, my face. He didn’t draw. He measured.

  “Doc,” he said, annoyance riding on top of nerves, “you callin’ help?”

  The doc shook his head too fast. “No. I didn’t—”

  The standing booster’s right hand twitched toward the port at the base of his skull.

  “Don’t.”

  He went for it anyway.

  The Raven forearm slid under his jaw and pressure went on. He bucked and clawed at my sleeve seam, tried to throw weight backward, and the scar line at my waist pulled hot under the shirt.

  My arm didn’t budge.

  His fight shrank fast—big movements to elbows, panic, wet pulls of breath scraping the room. His fingers kept searching for the skullport until his hands forgot what they were doing.

  The seated booster rose, slow, palms half up, trying to talk his way out.

  “Hey,” he said, voice smoother than his eyes, “easy. What’s this, choom? Badge? Cylon?”

  “Paid gig. Sit. Don’t move.”

  His jaw worked. He glanced at the doc, then back at me.

  “Paid,” he echoed, quieter. “By who?”

  “Not your business.”

  He swallowed and did a careful half-step back, weight shifting toward the storage room door without committing. He saw the mat, the taped strip under the handle, and did the math.

  I lowered the bound booster carefully—knee, shoulders, head turned so he kept his teeth—then drove my knee into his back just enough to keep him honest. Zip tie around wrists. Zip tie around ankles. The Omaha never left the other one.

  “Move,” I said, and nudged my chin toward the storage room. “In. Now.”

  “Not the hallway. Not the mat.”

  The seated booster flicked his eyes to the mat and gave a small breath, almost a laugh without humor.

  “Preem,” he muttered, and backed into the storage room with palms up. “Real preem.”

  The doc made a small sound behind me, part inhale, part sob. His eyes stayed on the boosters, then dropped to the floor, shame sitting under fear in a way I couldn’t miss.

  “Box,” I said. “Where.”

  “In the closet,” he whispered. “Back. Under the shelf.”

  “And the shard.”

  His hand shook toward a drawer under the counter. “Tape. I wrote— I wrote plates. Times. Faces.”

  “Don’t improvise. Just point.”

  He pointed.

  The drawer stuck, then gave with a squeal. Inside: a datashard wrapped in tape, block letters—FACES. The tape had fingerprints pressed into it and a faint smear of blood on one edge.

  I took it and didn’t read it.

  The closet held the DVR unit on a shelf, fan whining, cables run without care. A router was zip-tied to a bracket that didn’t match the wall, and the factory label on it still shone where nobody’s hands had rubbed it away. The DVR housing felt warm when I lifted it out.

  I wrapped it in cloth, slid it into the bag, and pulled the zipper slow.

  From the storage room, the second booster shifted his weight and tried to speak through the door.

  “You’re makin’ a gonk move,” he called. “Whoever paid you, they ain’t your friend.”

  “Shut up.”

  He shut up.

  Next part cost more than blood.

  Fiber cable came out. One end went into the DVR port. The other end went into the jack behind my ear.

  The deck woke up. Device tags blinked into place. Thin connection lines hung in my sight. Pressure tightened behind my right eye. A whine settled in my ear when I let my focus drift between the room and the net overlay.

  DRIFT: PRESENT (LOW)

  The system flashed it once and got out of the way.

  Small subnet. No ICE. Four nodes. All default.

  The router name was factory default. Nobody had bothered to change it.

  I looped the hallway cam: ten seconds, seamless.

  I queued the wipe: last hour. I needed sixty minutes gone. Nothing else.

  The wipe bar crawled. My eye watered.

  The DVR fan pitched higher under load, a thin scream that cut into my jaw. The pressure behind my eye climbed from discomfort to something that threatened to bloom into a spike, and I kept my hands steady because shaking hands made noise. Noise brought bodies.

  Behind me, the doc breathed fast, trying to do it quiet and failing. In the storage room, tape and zip ties made small friction sounds as the bound booster tested his restraints in short stubborn pulses.

  “Who was she,” I asked, and kept my eyes on the overlay because looking at the doc made it easier to believe him.

  His voice came out cracked. “A woman. Hurt. She paid cash. Scared. Maybe corp shit.”

  Corp shit. That was the whole sentence.

  A message blinked across the net overlay, not through my phone, not through some random carrier shard—straight through the same cheap local network I was riding.

  UNKNOWN NODE:

  Nice collar. Wrong building.

  My gut went cold.

  Another knock hit the front door. A voice came through the door, smooth, close enough to carry without effort.

  “Doc,” it said. “Open up.”

  The doc’s mouth opened and closed once. His eyes went to the mat, then to me.

  The second booster made a muffled noise against the zip tie when he tried to pull his wrists apart. Either the loop worked or someone wasn’t relying on the camera. Either way, they weren’t blind.

  The wipe bar hit the end, the cable came out of my head with a cold bite and a flare behind the eye that made the world tilt for a blink. The Kiroshi labels faded. Real space snapped back with too much clarity: tile scuffs, a chip in the counter edge, the doc’s shaking hands.

  “Back,” I said to the doc. “Storage. Stay off the hall.”

  He hesitated.

  “Move.”

  He moved.

  The boosters stayed contained—one tied, one boxed.

  The front door knocked again, polite in a way that made it worse.

  I pulled the storage door most of the way shut, left it unlatched, and put my ear to it long enough for the pulse to quit trying to sprint. Then the bag strap bit into my shoulder, and the back stairwell called.

  Front door trap armed. Mat waiting. Taped strip under the handle. Back stairwell behind me. Vent open in storage.

  Then I finally got the fuck out of there.

  A few blocks later, under a light that only flickered when it felt like it, the Galena sat where I’d left it—still ticking as it cooled. The burner shard lit my holo with one bar and a dead-simple send line. I pulled the DVR from the bag just enough to catch it in frame, snapped the photo, and sent it to Regina.

  Her reply hit before I reached the next intersection.

  *Clean. Marked complete. Bonus sent.*

  *Come to my office. We have a lot to discuss.*

  The credchip pinged a fraction later, balance shifting upward in a way that made my lips curl up.

  I kept driving.