CHAPTER 1
He counted the seconds by the drip of oil from the ceiling.
One. Two. Three.
His left hand found the port behind his ear before his eyes even opened. Same as every morning. Same as every morning for as long as he could remember. His fingertips traced the cold, circular ridge of metal fused to his skull. It was still there. Still warm. Still wrong.
He withdrew his hand and held it up in the dim light, counting his fingers in the gloom. Five. Same as yesterday. Good.
Outside his corrugated tin shack, the Kōya kept up its low, grinding hum. The rust never slept. Neither did the divers.
Ren sat up. His knees cracked, a dry sound like snapping twigs. His back ached with a dull, heavy throb. He was twenty-one years old, but he felt like a corpse someone had forgotten to bury. He reached for a cracked shard of mirror propped against the wall. Same face. Same hollow, bruised eyes. Same unanswered question carved into the fine, premature lines around his mouth: Who are you?
He didn’t have an answer. He scratched the back of his neck. A flake of grey, dead skin peeled away and drifted to the floor. He didn’t feel the scratch. He just watched the flake settle in the dust.
He got dressed and went to find an answer in the tapes. He always did.
The alleyways smelled of hot copper, wet ash, and sour rain. Ren kept his head down, hands buried deep in the pockets of his frayed jacket. The broken streetlamps and flickering shop signs cast sickly pink shadows into the puddles.
A few blocks from the drop, he had to step around a Kijin.
The thing was slumped against a gutted vending machine, its jaw hanging loose, dripping thick black oil onto the concrete. A broken servo whined in its chest, a high, pathetic sound. It twitched, reaching a rusted, trembling hand toward Ren’s ankle. Its eyes were blown out, replaced by static.
Ren didn’t break stride. He just stepped over the puddle of oil. A few yards down the alley, a woman in a heavy mechanic’s apron knelt beside the Kijin. She was whispering to it, stroking its matted hair. Then, with a practiced, merciful motion, she pressed a pneumatic bolt-gun to the base of its skull. A sharp hiss-crack echoed. The twitching stopped.
Ren kept walking. The city was full of ghosts that hadn’t realized they were dead yet.
The fence was waiting in the back of a noodle stall that hadn’t served actual noodles in a decade. The man had a burn scar shaped like a jagged fork across his neck, and eyes that constantly darted toward the street.
“You’re late,” the fence rasped. He slid a heavy, lead-lined cassette across the scarred metal table. The Kuro-Tēpu hissed against the surface, a sound like a nest of dying wasps. “Last guy who took this one out didn’t come back. His brain was fried. Poured right out of his ears.”
Ren picked up the tape. It was heavy as a cinderblock. Cold enough to bite through his gloves. “I’m not the last guy.”
The fence eyed Ren’s gear, the lack of armor, the hollow look in his cheeks. “You still walking the Thunder Path, kid? You got a death wish?”
“I walk alone,” Ren said.
He didn’t wait for a reply. He found a quiet, shadowed corner in the back of the stall, plugged the heavy, braided jack into the port behind his ear, and slammed the tape into his deck.
Click. Hiss.
The physical world dissolved into a violent crash of wireframe shapes and blinding light.
The dive hit him like a physical blow to the chest. The tape wasn’t just data. It felt like a trapped, screaming thing. Ren waded through waist-deep oceans of corrupted code, the sky above him a bruised, sickly purple. He was looking for the anchor-point, the core file, but the tape was fighting him. It felt like walking through drying concrete.
Then came the God’s Trap.
The geometry of the mindspace suddenly folded inward. A loop of a child crying pitched up into a deafening screech of static that vibrated in Ren’s teeth. The walls of the code closed in, crushing his ribs, trying to force his consciousness to snap and retreat into the safety of a coma. The tape was trying to fry his synapses.
Ren felt his real-world nose start to bleed. He tasted hot copper. The screeching grew louder, tearing at the edges of his vision. Let go, the trap seemed to whisper. Just let go and sleep.
Push, he told himself. Just push.
He didn’t care if it killed him. He drove his avatar forward, tearing through the screeching audio with bare, digital hands. He ignored the pain. He ignored the cold spreading up his neck. The code shattered like glass. The anchor-point glowed in the center of the wreckage, a bright, steady core. He grabbed it, severed the connection, and pulled out.
He gasped, ripping the jack from his neck.
The wireframe world vanished, replaced by the dim, greasy light of the noodle stall. Blood was dripping from his left nostril, splashing onto his stained shirt. He wiped it away with the back of his hand. As he did, he noticed another flake of grey, dead skin peeling off his knuckle. He brushed it away. He still didn’t feel any pain. Just a dull, creeping absence.
He walked back to the front counter and dropped the extracted data-chip on the metal table.
The fence let out a low whistle. He slid a fat, heavy cred-chit across the table. “Good boy. You can buy a week of synth-sake with this. Maybe a new lung.”
Ren looked at the cred-chit. Then he looked at the heavy, hissing tape still sitting on the table. He thought about the coldness in his neck. He thought about the grey flakes on his skin. Money couldn’t buy back feeling.
He left the cred-chit where it was, grabbed a dusty bottle of sake from the counter, and walked out into the rust.
He needed to feel something else. Anything else. He turned his collar up against the acidic drizzle and headed toward the flickering pink glow of the Data-Bar.
