CHAPTER 1
One. Two. Three.
Ren didn’t need a clock when his ceiling was basically weeping black sludge in perfect rhythm.
He kept his eyes closed, listening to the plink-plink-plink of oil hitting the corrugated tin floor. His left hand moved on its own, fingers tracing the cold, circular ridge of the metal port fused to the base of his skull. It was still there. Still warm. Still a parasitic piece of junk taking up residence in his nervous system.
Shame, he thought. I was really hoping it fell out in my sleep.
He opened his eyes and held his left hand up in the gloom, wiggling his fingers. One, two, three, four, five. All present. All attached. Good. It would be incredibly inconvenient to lose a finger to the rust before he’d even had his morning coffee. Or, more accurately, before he’d had his morning dose of whatever cheap synthetic caffeine the Kōya had to offer.
He sat up. His knees popped with a sound like dry twigs snapping, and a dull, heavy throb radiated from his lower back. He was twenty-one years old, but his joints felt like they belonged to a retired heavy-lifter who’d spent three decades breathing asbestos.
He grabbed a cracked shard of mirror propped against the wall. Same face. Same hollow, bruised eyes. Same premature lines around his mouth that asked the question: Who are you?
Ren sighed, scratching 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 into the dust.
Right. Still dying. Still numb. Fantastic.
He got dressed. There was no point in sitting around waiting for an answer to a question he didn’t care about. He needed to find a distraction in the tapes. He always did.
Outside, 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 cast sickly pink shadows into the puddles, making the grime look almost festive.
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 and dripping thick black oil onto the concrete. A broken servo whined in its chest—a high, pathetic sound, like a dying mosquito. It twitched, reaching a rusted, trembling hand toward Ren’s ankle. Its eyes were blown out, replaced by rolling static.
Ren didn’t break stride. He just carefully stepped over the puddle of oil. He wasn’t in the mood to play Good Samaritan for a corpse that hadn’t realized it was dead yet.
A few yards down, a woman in a heavy mechanic’s apron was kneeling beside the twitching Kijin. She wasn’t looking at its face; she was looking at its chest cavity, stroking its matted hair with a greasy hand.
“There, there, you ugly heap of scrap,” she muttered, her voice thick with a gravelly, maternal exhaustion. “Shh. Let’s just put you to sleep, yeah? No more twitching. You did good, you did. Good boy.”
She pressed a pneumatic bolt-gun to the base of its skull. A sharp hiss-crack echoed. The twitching stopped.
“Damn cheap bolts,” she grumbled, wiping oil off her apron. “Always jamming on the thick plating.”
Ren kept walking. The city was full of ghosts. He just preferred his ghosts to stay quiet.
The fence was waiting in the back of a noodle stall that hadn’t served actual noodles in a decade. The man, Jax, had a burn scar shaped like a jagged fork across his neck, and his eyes darted toward the street every half-second like he expected the authorities to drop from the sky.
“You’re late, late, late means dead, kid,” Jax rasped, his words tumbling out in a fast, paranoid rush. 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. “Look at this beauty. Heavy as a sin, cold as a witch’s... well, you know. Last guy who took this one out? Fried his noodles. Poured right out his ears. Brain soup, kid. You want brain soup?”
Ren pulled up a stool and sat down, ignoring the sticky residue on the seat. “I want the tape, Jax. And I’d prefer to keep my brains inside my skull, thanks.”
Jax eyed Ren’s gear, his gaze lingering on the lack of armor and the hollow look in his cheeks. He tapped his fingers against the table in a rapid, nervous rhythm. “You still walking the Thunder Path, kid? You got a death wish? A sickness? Because I got a guy, sells cheap coffins, very reasonable rates—”
“I walk alone,” Ren interrupted, his voice flat and even. “Just give me the decryption key.”
Jax shut his mouth with an audible click. He shoved the tape closer. “Suit yourself, ghost. But don’t come crying to me when you’re soup.”
Ren picked up the tape. It was heavy as a cinderblock and cold enough to bite through his gloves. 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 animal. Ren waded through waist-deep oceans of corrupted code, the sky above him a bruised, sickly purple. He was looking for the anchor-point, but the tape was fighting him. It felt like walking through drying concrete.
Come on, he thought, swatting away a tendril of jagged red code. Don’t make this difficult. I have a headache.
Then, the geometry of the mindspace suddenly folded inward.
Oh, fantastic, Ren thought, his digital avatar bracing itself. A God’s Trap. Just what I needed on an empty stomach.
A loop of a child crying pitched up into a deafening screech of static that vibrated in his 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.
In the real world, Ren felt his 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.
Yeah, yeah, sleep, death, oblivion, I’ve heard it all before, Ren thought grimly. 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. It was like his body was slowly evicting him.
He walked back to the front counter and dropped the extracted data-chip on the metal table.
Jax let out a low, impressed 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. Or a coffin. Like I said, reasonable rates.”
Ren looked at the cred-chit. Then he looked at his hand. The grey flakes were spreading. The cold in his neck was a little deeper than it had been an hour ago. Money couldn’t buy back feeling, and it certainly couldn’t buy back a soul.
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.
