[NEURAL NETWORK: SGT TOMAS GRAVES - SYNCHRONIZATION: NOVEMBER 14, 2065 - LOCATION: SOUTHERN BORDER SECTOR / "SALT DESERT"]

  The "Aluminum Husk" was the place where silence went to die, a blinding speck in the middle of a blinding salt desert. I killed the combustion engine of my heavy bike and let the steel monster swallow its own roar. I grounded the vehicle, tossing the copper anchor onto the white crust, ensuring the accumulated static electricity wouldn't fry the dashboard.

  The wind howled, sweeping the sodium chloride plain that stretched as far as the curvature of the Earth allowed.

  The Salt Desert wasn't made of sand, but its physics were infinitely crueler. The winds carried microscopic blades of saltpeter that got into the gears, sliced through leather, and dried out the soul. The saline dust clung to sweat, turning your face into sandpaper. I yanked off the filthy bandana covering my nose, spitting out the white crust that tasted bitter on my tongue. I took off my heavy tactical goggles; the lenses were already completely crystallized, frosted by the scratches of the invisible storm. The midday sun beat down on the infinite mirror of the ground and refracted back, creating a shadowless hell that roasted flesh from the bottom up.

  Ahead of me loomed the colossal carcass of an Antonov An-225, a freighter from a century ago that had fallen from the sky and taken up residence on the plain. The two heavy plates of aeronautical aluminum that served as an entrance creaked in a rhythmic sway.

  I stomped my boots, letting the excess salt fall like a dirty, corrosive snow, and pushed the metal open.

  The interior of the fuselage was a convection oven smelling of rust. The heat in there was thick. The curved floor had been leveled with petrified wood planks that wept under my weight. The place had once been a border nightclub; above the long, oxidized zinc bar, the carcass of a dead neon sign shared space with a melted bioplastic palm tree. Monolithic speakers lay gutted in the corners, their cones cemented by accumulated salt.

  But what caught my attention wasn't the abandonment, but the old transistor radio, its wiring exposed, resting on the zinc of the bar. I reached out with my dirty tactical glove and turned the analog dial. The static hissed, harsh, until the transistors warmed up and caught a phantom pirate frequency wandering forgotten through the shortwaves of that white hell.

  The slow, dusty, and absurdly melancholic strumming of two guitars filled the hot aluminum air. Tres Hermanos, by Hermanos Gutiérrez. The music dragged on, weaving a loneliness that matched the rust perfectly.

  "Wow..." I muttered, my voice coming out like sandpaper. I adjusted the polymer holster on my thigh. "Tuned in well. This song... reminds me of the months we served in the Holy War of Mexico."

  Deep in the gloom, under the curvature of the right wing, the figure sitting in the darkness moved. A metal lighter struck, illuminating the thin smoke of a synthetic cigarette.

  "A war of Thomases against Thomases, Sergeant," Arturo's voice sounded like gravel being crushed under a tire. "The Council convinced the clergy that the Mycelium network was the divine communion, and we went there to kill anyone who disagreed, defending cathedrals that were already in ruins. Music was the only sacred thing left in that desert."

  I walked over to him and pulled up the cast-iron chair. I sat with my back against the curved wall of the fuselage, my eyes locked on the entrance door out of pure instinct. Seven years. It had been seven years, since the fall in 2058, that I’d been wiping blood off Valerian Kross's boots. The exhaustion wasn't physical anymore; it was a condition of existence.

  Arturo hadn't changed much, but the weight of what he did for a living was stamped into the web of wrinkles on his face, which gleamed with sweat under the dead light. Arturo sold the Inner Ring's dirty secrets to the highest bidder, and sold other secrets back to them if the Inner Ring paid his asking price. He whispered in the right ears and destroyed Council members before lunch. He had enough credits to buy an artificial island, but he lived hiding in that corrosive desert because half the billionaires on the planet wanted his head on a platter.

  "You smell like corporate air conditioning, Tomas," he said, keeping his hands under the table.

  "And you look like a guy who sleeps with a revolver under his pillow, Arturo. Border traffic bad?"

  "The market is restless. Too many vultures circling the same corpse." Arturo didn't smile. He pulled his hand from beneath the table.

  He didn't draw a weapon. He pulled a dark glass bottle from inside his coat and placed it on the scratched wood. The red wax seal on the neck was untouched, thick. Macallan 2022.

  I raised an eyebrow.

  "I thought I was sent to gather market intelligence, Arturo. A bottle like this in the middle of nowhere smells like a bribe or a farewell. Which one are you pouring me?"

  "Kross pays for numbers. I pay for ghosts." Arturo dug his fingernail into the wax seal. The dry crack cut through the guitar melody. "Eighty thousand credits in this bottle alone. Barley harvested long ago from some random plot of land that today could be water, snow, or even salt. No chemical calming additives in here, Graves. Just fire and truth."

  He poured three fingers of the amber liquid into two heavy crystal glasses he pulled from his pocket. The smell of peat, oak, and ancient earth invaded my lungs, fighting the plane's saltpeter stench. He slid one of the glasses to me.

  "Drink," he ordered, his voice suddenly tired. "Because the intelligence your boss asked for doesn't fit on a thumb drive."

  Arturo reached into his coat again and tossed a manila envelope onto the table. Physical paper currency, thick, unforgeable. The kind of analog material the High Echelon surveillance satellites couldn't track or hack.

  "What is this?" I asked, leaving the glass untouched.

  "An invitation. Nominal, non-transferable, and engraved with biological markers. For a blind IPO session in the Leviathan asset restructuring, six months from now."

  I clenched my jaw. The music on the radio seemed to slow down, dragging the notes through the suffocating air.

  "Valerian has a captive seat on the board. He doesn't need a piece of paper to get into an event months from now. He buys whatever he wants from his office desk."

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  "For the regular sessions, where executives send their avatars, yes. But this?" Arturo tapped the envelope with the tip of his calloused finger, pushing it toward me. "This is privileged access. Your boss thinks he knows everything Leviathan cultivates, but do you know what’s in Neo-Kyoto and Neo-Tokyo?"

  "The borders have been sealed for years because of a neurological pandemic."

  "Exactly," Arturo nodded, his voice grave. "Four years of quarantine. No one went in, no biological cargo came out. But the quarantine lifted this morning. A few months from now, the auction of the first post-pandemic 'harvest' will take place. Biological prodigies, musicians, artists... fresh minds, healed, untouched by our mental pollution for half a decade. It’s the luxury asset of the generation."

  Arturo took a small sip of his whiskey.

  "The problem, Graves, is that brains that have lived isolated in that analog sanctuary can't handle the violent data traffic of our Mycelium. The frequency shock fries their cortex in hours. The law requires 'Sleep Quarantine'. Every asset from there has to travel in an induced coma for three weeks. The problem is that the coma cures them of the isolated trauma. It standardizes the genius. The pain goes away."

  I understood where he was going.

  "The organization is going to smuggle a batch that hasn't been cured," I concluded.

  "Close. Leviathan selected a tiny batch, including their lead cellist, to be imported without the Sleep Quarantine for this IPO. They’re coming in raw. Bleeding from the neural shock. They’re going to step onto the Conservatory stage on the verge of a nervous breakdown, playing with a chemical melancholy that our anesthetized world has forgotten how to feel. The texture of their despair will be worth billions. And your boss wants that more than anything."

  Arturo pushed the envelope one centimeter in my direction.

  "That's why Kross needs this paper. It's a hyper-restricted auction. And Neo-Kyoto's bureaucracy for raw imports requires physical quantum cryptography. It doesn't accept avatars. If Valerian wants to win that batch, he's going to have to sit his biological ass in the Conservatory's private box on the day of the IPO."

  I crossed my arms. The intel was gold. It implied the prodigies were the best in four years, and still at the peak of their talents. Diamonds extracted at maximum pressure. I didn't get as excited about the news as my boss would, because Arturo's eyes were glazed, and the sweat dripping down his temples wasn't just from the heat.

  "You handed me the letter. You did your job as a messenger." I tilted my head slightly, studying him. "So why are you sweating cold, Arturo?"

  The informant's Adam's apple bobbed. He looked around the empty plane erratically.

  "Because the one who paid me to ensure this invitation reached your boss's hands today wasn't an art scalper like it usually would be. The money didn't come from the Council. It came from an escrow contract signed almost fifteen years ago. From what I understand, the money sat yielding in the dark of the Deep Web, in untouchable wallets, waiting for the exact market conditions to be released. I think someone calculated Kross's greed even before he reached the top of the Inner Ring."

  "A Dead Man's Switch," I muttered. "Blind algorithms, executing the will of a corpse. Whose signature is on the contract?"

  "HELIOS," Arturo said, in a thread of a voice that barely competed with the guitars. "The protocol was signed with that name. It’s dead code, Graves. I asked a contact to run a search, but there aren't many reliable records. But the black market has old legends about it... they say it belongs to a ghost from the old OmniCorp. An intelligence from the past setting the board against Leviathan. And therein lies the problem. Maybe this invitation is an ambush. Whoever signed it needed your boss to be physically tied to that chair on the day of the IPO. It’s up to him to assess the risk, and he knows how to do that."

  I looked at the paper. Then, I looked back at Arturo. The math of the desert wasn't adding up.

  "You were paid very well by this invisible ghost to hand me the bait, Arturo." I let my hand rest on my thigh, inches from the holster. "But that's not what you're afraid of. I know you from the war; I've seen you scared. You're terrified right now. And you're trying to keep me here, listening to ghost stories from fifteen years ago. Where else did your payout come from?"

  Arturo's jaw trembled. He was caught off guard. The despair of a man who tried to balance two deadly spinning plates at the same time and realized both were falling.

  "We were idiots, Tomas," Arturo choked out, his voice breaking. The posture of the great influence peddler vanished, leaving only a cornered survivor. "I had no choice, Tomas. Forgive me for this."

  I didn't answer. Not because I was processing what was happening with Arturo, but because the guitar on the old radio suddenly faltered.

  A deep, electromagnetic static hiss crushed the notes of Hermanos Gutiérrez all at once. The radio spat a small bluish spark from its exposed wiring and died instantly.

  The asphyxiating silence of the aluminum fell over us.

  I hadn't touched my drink yet. My eyes abandoned Arturo's destroyed face and locked onto the glass of Macallan he had rested in the center of the table, between us.

  The heavy crystal formed a perfect convex lens. The glass captured the light, reflecting and inverting the landscape of the white vastness outside, pouring in through the wide-open plates behind me.

  In the reflection, I saw horizontal jets on the surface of the salt, dense and furious blasts of white steam, condensing and disappearing instantly in the absurdly dry border air. Chemical condensation vapor. They were gigantic V8 combustion engines, scrapped iron blocks adapted in filthy ways, characteristic of the border cartels.

  And, just below the jets of steam, I saw the flashes tearing the earth. Continuous, electric blue sparks. Grounding chains. Armored trucks racing at almost two hundred kilometers per hour, generating lethal static friction against the hard salt.

  They were traveling much faster than the slow acoustics of the desert allowed. They were less than forty seconds from the aluminum door. The empty, bought-out bar. The pathetic improvisation. Arturo had taken the corporate ghost's money to deliver the letter and, at the same time, sold my location to save his own debt.

  The burning air inside the Antonov seemed to freeze.

  With the speed of a viper, I raised my right hand. The black leather tactical glove rested directly over Arturo's hand, which lay near the bottle.

  He paralyzed. His mouth half open. The air trapped in his throat.

  My fingers closed around his like a steel vise. I locked his movement absolutely. Relentlessly.

  Arturo stopped breathing. He knew I had seen the reflection.

  "Tomas..." Arturo choked in pathetic despair. "Forgive me... The Cartel... they bought my debts! They told me to hold you here... Said they would cut off my daughter's air! I had no choice!"

  I didn't want to hear it. The justification would turn it into a personal assassination, into a tragedy where I would be the judge of a desperate man. And I wasn't a judge. I was a corporate professional dealing with a double breach of contract.

  I lowered my head slightly, looking at the whiskey trapped between us.

  My left hand was already beneath the metal table. The leather of the holster yielded soundlessly. My fingers wrapped around the rubberized grip of my heavy revolver. The cold steel obeyed. The cylinder spun with a lethal click as I cocked the hammer. He heard it and looked down. Not fast enough before my fist raised the salt-crusted revolver, aiming it dead center at his face.

  I pulled the trigger.

  The detonation in a closed aluminum environment tore through the fuselage's acoustics. The tungsten projectile went through his head, embedding it into the curved wall behind him with a dull metallic thud.

  The tension abandoned his muscles for the last—or only—time.

  The slump of the body and the recoil of the weapon made the glass tip over.

  Before the glass could topple and spill the amber nectar, I caught it mid-air.

  I didn't look at the corpse sitting in front of me. I didn't dedicate a single second to mourning. I brought the glass to my salt-cracked lips and downed the shot of Macallan all at once.

  The organic fire went down tearing at my throat, sweeping away the taste of gunpowder and blood. I slammed the bottom of the empty glass on the zinc twice. With quick movements, I grabbed the IPO envelope with the Conservatory's coordinates and tucked it into the inner pocket of my jacket. I grabbed the entire bottle of whiskey, corked it with my charcoal-dirty thumb, and shoved it into the pocket of my overcoat.

  The bestial roar of the hydrogen engines finally reached the carcass of the plane, making the planks under my boots tremble like an earthquake.