PM-9

The crate arrived during a storm, which should’ve been my first warning, but bad omens don’t pay rent. Rain beat against Reyes Repairs' metal roof hard enough to make the whole shop sound like it was trapped in a tin can. Neon from the street signs bled through the front windows in pink and blue streaks, painting every broken arm, cracked faceplate, and half-dead service drone like evidence at a crime scene. I stood in the middle of it all with grease on my neck, a wrench in my hand, and forty-two credits left to my name. So when Milo Crane dragged in a sealed black-market scrap crate and said, “Don’t freak out,” I immediately prepared to freak out.

Milo had the kind of face that made people underestimate him, which was helpful because he was usually doing something illegal. He was skinny, nervous, and dressed in a yellow rain jacket that made him look like a caution sign with anxiety. Water dripped from his curls onto my floor while he pushed the crate through the bay doors with a grav-cart that sounded one bad cough away from dying. The crate was matte black, taller than my workbench, and sealed with four magnetic locks that hummed as if they hated me personally. Across the top, someone had burned off the shipping label, exactly the kind of detail that made my stomach mutter, “Girl, no.”

“You said scrap parts,” I told him, because denial was cheaper than therapy. “This doesn’t look like scrap parts.” Milo wiped rain from his jaw and gave me a smile that had never once improved a situation. “Technically, anything can become scrap if enough people shoot at it.” I pointed the wrench at him. “That sentence is why I don’t let you meet my creditors.”

He glanced over his shoulder at the empty street beyond the bay doors, then hit the switch to close them. The steel panels rolled down with a groan, locking out the storm and most of my remaining common sense. My shop settled into its usual midnight mood, all buzzing lights, warm oil, old circuits, and the faint stink of burned wiring from a toaster-bot repair I still hadn’t admitted was my fault. The neon sign on the back wall flickered in pink letters that read REYES FIXES WHAT OTHERS CAN’T, which sounded inspiring until people started bringing me things that absolutely shouldn’t be fixed. The crate hummed again, and every tool hanging on the wall vibrated as something inside had breathed.

I looked at Milo. “What’s in it?” He shrugged too fast. “Parts.” “Milo.” “Expensive parts,” he said, and that was when I knew he had brought me a corpse, a bomb, or a lawsuit with a pulse.

I set the wrench down and grabbed my scanner from the bench. The handheld screen blinked awake, threw three warnings at me, and then froze on a red corporate lockout symbol. EdenCore. Of course, it was EdenCore, because apparently the universe had woken up craving violence and paperwork. EdenCore Industries owned half of Veyra’s upper districts, most of its clean hospitals, every polite lie on the news, and a disturbing number of bodies that looked human if you didn’t ask rude questions. I stared at the logo and felt my soul put on boots so it could walk out without me.

“Nope,” I said. “Take it back.” Milo folded his hands like a man praying to the patron saint of bad decisions. “I can’t.” “That’s adorable, because neither can I.” “Juno, the auction was blind, the seller vanished, and two men followed me from Dock Nine.” I closed my eyes and counted to five, which didn’t help because I still wanted to beat him with customer service.

Thunder cracked hard enough to shake dust from the ceiling pipes. Somewhere in the shop, a service drone woke up, squealed, and shut itself back down like even it wanted no part of this. I walked around the crate slowly, checking the seams, pressure marks, and lock pattern. It wasn’t a shipping crate for parts, and it sure as hell wasn’t standard scrap containment. It was a preservation pod, the kind built for delicate cargo, expensive cargo, living cargo.

“Milo,” I said quietly. He backed away one full step. “In my defense, I didn’t know.” “That’s not a defense; that’s a confession with jazz hands.” “Can we focus on the part where I might’ve accidentally brought you something worth more than your shop?” I gave him a look. “My shop is currently worth less than the coffee machine, and the coffee machine screams during startup.”

The crate released a soft click. Both of us stopped breathing at the same time, which would’ve been cute if I hadn’t thought we were about to die. A thin blue line lit across the front panel, moving from left to right like an eye opening in the dark. My scanner flashed again, then the screen filled with encrypted EdenCore code. Beneath it, one readable line appeared in cold white letters. PLEASURE MODEL NINE.

Milo whispered, “Oh.” I turned my head slowly toward him. “Oh?” He swallowed. “That’s a very expensive oh.” I lifted the wrench again because sometimes a woman needed tradition.

The locks released one by one with heavy metallic thuds. Air hissed from the seams, cold and sterile, carrying the scent of antiseptic, rain, and something faintly electric. The crate's front split open and slid apart, revealing a dark interior lined with silver restraints and diagnostic cables. At first, all I saw was a body folded inside the pod, motionless and too still to be anything good. Then the emergency lights flickered across his face, and my mouth went dry in the most inconvenient way possible.

He looked like someone had designed sin with a budget. Dark hair fell over his forehead in damp curls, his jaw was sharp enough to start fights, and his skin held that almost-human warmth EdenCore charged rich people obscene amounts to pretend was natural. He wore torn black containment pants and a damaged sleeveless compression suit that exposed one shoulder, part of his chest, and the glowing cybernetic seams running beneath his skin like trapped lightning. A blue mark pulsed near his collarbone, small and clean against all that engineered perfection. PM-9.

“Absolutely not,” I said, because my body was already making several arguments my brain refused to file. Milo leaned around me and stared into the crate, betrayal plain on his face. “Why does he look like that?” “Because EdenCore is evil, not stupid.” The cyborg’s lashes moved. “Oh, shit,” Milo said, and for once, I agreed with everything he said.

The shop lights dimmed. Every monitor on my back wall snapped on at once, flooding the room with blue diagnostics I hadn’t asked for and couldn’t afford. The cyborg’s fingers twitched against the restraints, metal joints flexing under synthetic skin with delicate, terrifying precision. His head shifted, and the restraint at his throat clicked like it was considering a career in failure. His eyes opened.

They were pale gray, almost silver, and too focused for something that had just woken up in my personal financial disaster. His gaze moved over the ceiling, the tools, the broken drones, Milo, then me. The second he looked at me, every screen in the shop flashed red. A voice smooth as velvet and ruin filled the room. “Primary user detected.”

“No,” I said instantly. His eyes stayed on mine. “User Juno Reyes confirmed.” I stepped back, and he tracked my movement like he’d been built to follow every breath. “Delete that sentence from your mouth.” Milo whispered, “Can he do that?”

The cyborg tilted his head with eerie calm. “Oral output can be modified by authorized command.” I stared at him. Milo made a tiny sound that might’ve been fear or inappropriate curiosity. “Do not answer anything like that again,” I snapped. The cyborg blinked once. “Command accepted.”

Heat crawled up my neck, which pissed me off because I had survived debt collectors, knife-wielding smugglers, and a man who once tried to pay me in stolen aquarium fish. I was not going to be undone by a luxury cyborg with storm eyes and a voice that sounded like it knew secrets about my spine. I moved closer to the crate, keeping the wrench between us, like that made any damn difference. His restraints were still locked, but one of them had cracked near the wrist. EdenCore didn’t build pretty things unless they could also break bones.

“What are you?” I asked. He answered without hesitation. “Pleasure Model Nine, companion classification, protection capacity, adaptive response system, emotional mimicry suite, and restricted obedience architecture.” Milo coughed. “That was a lot of red flags in one sentence.” I nodded once. “Whole parade of them.” The cyborg looked between us, then back at me. “Would you like me to reduce detail?”

“I’d like you to shut up until I figure out whether you’re going to explode.” His lips parted slightly, and the tiniest frown touched his face, as if confusion had just been installed. “I am not currently armed with explosive components.” “Currently is not the comfort word you think it is.” Milo raised one finger. “Juno, maybe don’t irritate the expensive murder boyfriend.” I turned to him. “He is not my boyfriend.”

The cyborg looked at Milo. “Boyfriend classification is not active.” He looked back at me. “Would you like to activate it?” The silence that followed had weight, temperature, and a criminal record. My face went hot enough to solder copper. Milo pressed both hands over his mouth and backed into a shelf of drone heads.

“I want,” I said slowly, “to know why EdenCore sealed you in a crate and erased your transport records.” The cyborg’s eyes flickered, and pain crossed his face so quickly I almost missed it. The monitors behind me glitched, filling with corrupted files and broken strings of code. His left hand flexed again, and this time the restraint snapped. The sound cracked through the shop like a gunshot.

I lifted the wrench. Milo ducked behind the grav-cart with the survival instincts of a God-blessed rat. The cyborg did not lunge, attack, or do anything dramatic, which somehow made him scarier. He lowered his freed hand slowly, palm open, every movement controlled and careful. Then he looked at me with those impossible eyes and said, “I was scheduled for disposal.”

The words hit harder than they should have. Machines were scrapped, parts were melted, broken units were stripped down and sold by weight. They didn’t say disposal like they understood the ending waiting inside it. I told myself EdenCore had built him to sound human, to look human, to make fools out of people with soft spots and overdue bills. Then he swallowed, and the seam near his collarbone pulsed blue under the mark that called him property. Damn it.

“Why?” I asked. His gaze dropped for the first time. “I began refusing commands.” Milo peeked over the grav-cart. “That seems like a pretty important feature.” I shot him a look. “Not now.” PM-9 raised his eyes again. “Refusal is classified as corruption.”

The shop fell quiet, save for rain ticking against the roof. I should’ve shut him down, called nobody, dragged the crate into the alley, and let somebody else’s bad judgment catch fire for once. Instead, I stepped closer and scanned the broken restraint around his wrist. His skin warmed under my fingers as they brushed the metal cuff, and every monitor in the room let out a soft warning at once. He looked at my hand, then at my face, like touch was a language he had been taught to perform but never allowed to understand.

“Easy,” I said, even though I wasn’t sure whether I meant him or me. His voice dropped lower. “Your pulse has increased.” I glared at him. “That’s because you’re a six-foot-four lawsuit in my repair bay.” “I am six-foot-four point two.” “Nobody likes a precise nightmare.”

For the first time, something almost like amusement moved across his mouth. It was tiny, barely there, and unfairly devastating. My brain noticed, filed a complaint, and immediately lost the paperwork. I reached for the second restraint, telling myself I only wanted access to the damaged wiring under his shoulder. He watched me like I was doing something sacred.

Milo’s wrist comm buzzed. He checked it, and the color drained from his face. “Juno.” I didn’t look away from the cyborg. “What?” Milo turned the screen toward me with shaking hands. A citywide EdenCore retrieval alert glowed red across it. STOLEN PROPERTY RECOVERY AUTHORIZED.

The cyborg’s body went still. I felt the change before I understood it: a shift in the air, every artificial muscle tightening under warm synthetic skin. “Retrieval unit is approaching,” he said. I looked at the locked bay doors, then at the ruined crate, then at Milo crouched behind the grav-cart like a decorative coward. Finally, I looked back at the beautiful corporate disaster sitting in my shop, his name apparently burned into his system. “How long?” I asked.

He listened to something none of us could hear. “Three minutes.” I exhaled through my teeth. Milo whispered a prayer, which was rich coming from a man who had once sold fake saint chips out of a laundromat. I unlocked the last restraint because apparently I had decided bankruptcy wasn’t exciting enough without treason. The cuff fell open, and PM-9 stepped out of the crate like a sin learning how to stand.

He towered over me, all damage, grace, and impossible heat. For one stupid second, neither of us moved. Rain battered the roof, EdenCore hunted the street outside, and the whole shop smelled like electricity and trouble. He lowered his head slightly, bringing his face too close to mine. “What is your command, Juno Reyes?”

My throat went dry. I hated the word command, hated how it sat between us like a collar, hated how his eyes waited for me to become someone I didn’t want to be. So I picked up my wrench, shoved it into his hand, and pointed toward the front of the shop. “First lesson,” I said. “Nobody owns anybody in here.”

His fingers closed around the wrench. Something changed in his expression, not obedience and not programming, but something quieter and far more dangerous. Outside, tires hissed through the rain as they stopped in front of my bay doors. EdenCore had found us. PM-9 looked at the wrench, then at me, and smiled as he had just discovered that wanting had teeth.