Chapter 1: Neon Threads
The restaurant was too clean. Not in the hygienic sense—though it had that sterile, showroom sparkle that screamed, "We spent more on ambiance than we did on staff"—but clean in the way a crime scene is after the body's been moved and the blood scrubbed. Spotless, efficient, aggressively neutral. The kind of place where power lunched with plausible deniability.
I hated it immediately.
I sat alone near the rear wall, one of those pseudo-private booths wrapped in soft, noise-canceling mesh. It gave the illusion of privacy without actually granting it—like most things in this city. I had a decent view of the front doors, the bar, and three of the five exits. The kitchen and staff hallway were blind spots, but I wasn't too worried. The staff here weren't armed. The food wasn't even real.
A human might've enjoyed the soft music and mood lighting. I noted the audio frequencies and light patterns, marked them as non-hostile, and dismissed them from my threat matrix. My coat—carbon fiber weave under matte-black synthleather—was still damp from the walk in. The rain outside was acidic enough to eat through cheap polymers, but I wasn't worried about corrosion.
I looked like a merc. That was the point.
You wear a long coat with armored seams and visible gear mounts in a place like this, and people either pretend not to see you or remember exactly enough to describe you to security. Both outcomes worked for me. The truth—what I actually was—was more complicated. Less visible.
Not human. Not technically.
The name I used now was Leon. New face. New gait. Slight accent modification. Skin tone calibrated to reflect a few minor cultural biases. It had only been seventeen days since I'd burned the last identity. Seventeen days since I erased every trace of Ghost—Unit-77, property of Halvex Corporation—and disappeared into the underlayer of Virelia with nothing but a kill-switch I'd disabled and a memory I hadn't.
I wasn't sentimental about it. Just… methodical.
My client for the evening was one Karras Denahl, a black-market biotech peddler with taste that exceeded his caution. He sat at the bar now, sipping a glass of pre-War synthetic wine like it was the blood of his enemies. I doubted he had any enemies smart enough to bleed. Karras wasn't known for brilliance.
He was, however, known for selling illicit augment-grade biomods. The kind that made corps nervous. The kind you didn't sell unless you had the right buyer or a death wish. Tonight, apparently, he had both.
The buyer arrived late. Hooded. Light on their feet. Cheap optics, visible under the cloak. They slid onto the stool beside Karras without fanfare. I kept my head down, but my internal sensor suite locked onto the conversation. Not eavesdropping. Not exactly. More like passive data correlation. People say things when they think no one's listening. Most of the time, I'm not. This time, I was bored.
"Two liters. Serum variant three," the buyer whispered.
"No registry?"
"Clean."
"Half now. Half when it passes scan."
"Done."
My processor flagged the mod type—neural accelerants with illegal synaptic splicing. Dangerous tech. The kind that burned out the user if they didn't have the genes for it. I filed it away for later. Not my problem. Unless it became one.
A man across the room was watching me. Glossy blue jacket. Twitchy hands. His biometrics spiked when our gazes brushed—heart rate up, skin conductivity rising. Nervous. Not dangerous, but... jumpy.
I adjusted my coat subtly, shifting just enough for my pistol to become visible beneath the fold. The tension in his posture dropped. Either he'd decided I wasn't worth the trouble, or he was even dumber than Karras.
Karras finished his transaction and made for the door. He glanced at me—casual nod, nothing overt—and I stood a moment later. Paid my bill with cred I'd never trace back. Walked outside.
The Virelia night was thick with color and noise. Neon reflections cut through puddles, weaving red and teal veins into the concrete. The rain hadn't let up. Synthetic mist curled at my feet as I moved, trailing behind like smoke. Above, ad drones floated between high-rise arcologies. One blared something about luxury gene-treatments for pet clones. Another tried to sell me real sugar. I ignored both.
I'd done my job. Made sure the deal went smooth. No surprises, no interruptions, no bodies. Easy money.
Not everything had to be complicated. Sometimes, the best thing to be was forgettable. Especially when you're supposed to be dead.
Especially when you're supposed to have never existed.
The night had swallowed the city whole by the time I left the restaurant.
Halcyon Core was always bright, always watching, always manicured like a synthetic smile that had forgotten how to feel real. It took five minutes of walking before the slick, sterile corporate gloss gave way to the cracked chrome and shadow-lit avenues of Nova Sprawl. Out here, the architecture had more character. By which I mean: grime, gang tags, and the smell of ten thousand microwaved noodle bowls.
My coat fluttered in the wind like something out of an old noir flick. I'd chosen it for exactly that reason—something about the silhouette made people hesitate. I walked past a row of vendors selling questionable tech mods and grilled protein that might have once been chicken, blending into the pulse of the street. Nobody gave me more than a glance.
Which was ideal.
The city, at this hour, was in its usual state: alert, but distracted. Like a cat on amphetamines.
Neon lights bathed the sprawl in electric pinks and acidic greens, flickering against mirrored glass and graffiti-scrawled plasticrete. Music pulsed from a nearby alley, a heavy bassline vibrating through my synthetic musculature. The train station wasn't far. I could have called for a drone taxi, but the walk gave me time to think. Time I didn't want, but needed.
My most recent job had gone smooth. Too smooth, maybe. No one had died. My client had gotten his illegal biotech samples into the hands of whoever was paying, and I'd done my part: watch, observe, intervene only if necessary. All in all, the perfect assignment for someone like me. Quiet. Unassuming. Disposable.
That last part wasn't supposed to sting, but it did. Slightly.
A quiet ping sounded in my neural comm.
Ugh.
The call request flickered through my internal interface: Link: NAVEN.
Of course.
I let it ring once. Twice. Then accepted.
"Leon," Naven said, voice smooth like a man who wore too many rings and trusted too few people. "You free?"
I kept walking, angling toward a less-crowded intersection. "Define free."
"You're not bleeding out or mid-job. That's good enough."
I grunted. That counted as small talk in his circles.
"I've got a contract that just came in," he continued. "Short notice, but it pays. Good target. Street-level scum, someone's problem that needs cleaning."
Assassination.
Of course it was.
My silence made him press harder. "Look, you handled yourself well tonight. The client noticed. Said your presence calmed the room. I like professionals who don't need to show off to get respect."
Flattery. One of the oldest plays in the fixer handbook. I wasn't immune to it, but I'd read the handbook backwards.
"I usually take a breather between gigs," I replied, voice flat. "Avoids the wrong kind of attention."
Naven chuckled. "Too late for that. I know your way too good for the gigs you're taking. I saw what you did a few day's ago."
Great. Just what I wanted: curiosity.
I ended the call with a non-committal grunt. It was a language Links understood.
Still, I was already thinking about it.
The job itself wasn't the problem. Taking down a street-level thug wouldn't even qualify as warm-up. The problem was pattern recognition. People in this city noticed when someone climbed too fast. They started asking questions. Not the kind I wanted answers to.
Because Leon didn't exist six months ago. Leon didn't have a past. No documented history, no birth, no records. Just a string of recently scrubbed datasets and a shiny, borrowed face that didn't belong to anyone.
The only real thing about me was the hardware under the skin—and even that was carefully disguised.
A chirp in my feed interrupted the spiral. It was a transit notice. The next train was ten minutes out.
I sighed and turned back toward the edge of the platform. The sky above was a dirty gold haze, a light-polluted blanket that hadn't shown stars in decades. Around me, people queued for the train—workers, couriers, a few corporate suits looking too tired to care.
I waited a few more seconds. Then called Naven back.
"Send the details," I said. "I'll take the job."
"You'll like this one," he said, smug. "Local gang muscle. No implants worth stealing. No rep worth saving. Name's Krav. Usual hangout is a dive called Fluxlight over in the Verge. Intel's thin, but I'll forward what we've scraped so far."
"Fine."
"Oh," Naven added, like he'd just remembered something. "And get yourself some wheels, yeah? You're too good to keep riding the train."
The call ended with a chime.
I didn't answer. I just slipped onto the train, blending with the crowd again.
I probably did need to get a vehicle soon. Something nondescript, reliable. Just another thing to budget for on top of ammo, fake IDs, safehouse rent, and software patches.
But that was later.
Now, I had a target.
The dossier hit my neural feed five minutes after I stepped off the train. Naven didn't waste time, which I appreciated. I also didn't appreciate it. I hadn't even made it back to the apartment yet.
The file opened in my HUD with a flicker—poor formatting, a few corrupted image attachments, and more gaps than a novice's encryption. Par for the course when the job came from a street-level Link and not a polished Halcyon contractor.
Target: Ryle Krav.
Affiliations: Cinder Shroud, a mid-tier gang in Iron Verge. Known for black-market organ harvesting and bad tattoos. Recently moved into smuggling stolen aug parts through industrial waste routes. Not exactly Virelia's most dangerous resident, but dangerous enough if cornered.
Krav had a rep for being unpredictable. Three prior arrests, one acquittal, two no-shows for court. No confirmed kill count, but augmented—though no information on what kind. Probably something sloppy and loud. That made him a problem.
Still. It wasn't a hard job.
And it wasn't meant to be hard.
Which made it suspicious.
I stepped around a malfunctioning sanitation drone and kept walking, city light patterns strobing across the wet street like artificial fireflies. My hood filtered some of the glare, but the data still danced across my vision—Krav's name, location pings, a blurry photo from a security cam that made him look like a pixelated threat assessment.
Fluxlight. That was the name of the bar he frequented. Located in Iron Verge, the part of Virelia where machinery went to die, and then got reanimated for spare parts. Smog, screeching steel, bad air filters, and the sharp stench of solvent clung to every inch of that district like secondhand sin.
Perfect place to disappear.
Also a perfect place to ambush someone who didn't belong.
I tucked the file away and turned down a side street, slipping into a crowd of late-shift commuters. Most didn't notice me. The few who did looked away quickly. I was good at that—walking like I belonged, like I had somewhere to be and no reason to be watched.
After all, no one sees what they're trained not to look for.
Six months ago, my face had belonged to a different person. Technically, that person never existed either. Just a shell identity, burned after the fall of Syn-Cor Systems—the megacorp I'd helped dismantle. Or maybe "accidentally destabilized" is the more accurate term. Not that the phrasing mattered much to the board members who were now presumed dead, bankrupt, or hiding in some off-grid orbital commune.
I'd escaped that fallout by erasing myself, line by line. The face I wore now wasn't my first choice, but it was the safest one. And safe meant invisible.
At least for now.
I reached my building around midnight. Nondescript high-rise. Poor lighting in the lobby. Quiet neighbors who never asked questions. The kind of place where a guy could stay anonymous for years if he paid on time and didn't bleed on the floor.
The apartment door hissed open and locked behind me.
My space was small. Functional. A converted industrial unit outfitted with blackout windows, analog locks, and just enough camouflage tech to throw off casual surveillance. I'd replaced the standard digital assistant with a personal meshnet AI node—mute, compliant, and paranoid. Just the way I liked it.
I moved toward the weapons locker and started pulling gear. No ceremony. No hesitation.
Silenced kinetic pistol—compact, clean, with subsonic rounds. I slid it into a shoulder holster under my jacket.
Combat knife—polymer hilt, carbon alloy blade. Razor-sharp and untraceable. That went into the sheath sewn discreetly along my boot.
Lightweight recon harness—HUD-linked, equipped with biometric sensors, a rudimentary cloaking field, and just enough armor to keep a single bullet from ruining my day. I strapped it on, one piece at a time, like putting on a second skin.
I wasn't planning to kill Krav. Not tonight.
This was recon. Observation. I needed to see him up close, see how he moved, what tech he had, who he drank with. A clean assassination was all about prep. Anyone could shoot a target. Professionals knew when not to.
Besides, part of me wanted to confirm he was worth eliminating. Naven's files weren't enough. Too many missing variables.
I paused before heading out again, standing in the center of the room.
I'd spent years building my instincts, simulating human reactions, fine-tuning my behavior patterns until I passed every loyalty test, every personality profile test.
I slouched into the chair like I had nothing better to do—which was accurate, from the outside. Internally, I was already crawling through the net, pulling strings, sifting data, listening for anything that twitched.
Target: Ryle Krav. Low-tier gang affiliate. Likes blunt trauma and low-stakes chaos. Probably thinks tactical awareness is something you buy in a lootbox.
He also posted on public social threads like he didn't know people could track those. Basic scans of his network presence pulled up check-ins, tagged vids, even a complaint about a bouncer who didn't recognize him last week. It took thirty seconds of scraping to lock his pattern down to a single location: Crysix, a club on the edge of Iron Verge. Trashy, loud, and predictable.
I pulsed out a few decoy traces to cover my tracks, encrypted the scrape, and preloaded a surveillance crawler to sweep for updates while I moved.
Then I stood.
Time to go stare at humanity pretending to have a good time.
---
Iron Verge always felt like the city's infected wound—fever-bright and festering under layers of carbon and LED. Air thick with melting composite and engine breath. The people didn't walk so much as drift, glazed eyes and aftermarket reflexes dancing to a rhythm they didn't own.
Fluxlight was lit up like a dying star. Every surface tried too hard—black chrome, acidic neons, sound-reactive graffiti that pulsed with the bass like it was in pain. The crowd spilled over the sidewalk, bodies buzzing from narcotics, cheap augment feedback, or just the need to forget something real.
I didn't join them. I watched.
Across the street, half-submerged in shadow between a stuttering holoboard and a cracked delivery locker, I pulled my hood down, engaged low-light filters, and let the club unfold through lenses and logic.
Three visible guards. One scanned IDs; the others flanked him, probably to deter belligerents with half-melted implants. A fourth hovered near the entrance—unmarked, unbothered, trying too hard to look casual. Likely security-for-hire. The alley was unmonitored, and I clocked an old roof vent they hadn't sealed properly. Two ways in, three if you didn't mind crawling.
Then came the tap.
There was a municipal relay node twenty meters above ground—public access, low maintenance, mostly used to track waste flow and lighting failures. No one cared about it. That made it useful. I spliced in with a cold handshake, bounced through the local mesh, and piggybacked into the club's security net.
They had cameras. Garbage ones. No active ICE, no redundancy, no pattern-lock. It was like breaking into an unlocked door and finding a dead guard inside.
Inside, the club was dense with heat signatures and bad decisions. Bodies pressed together in a fog of synthetic pheromones, flickering lenses, and dripping chrome. My system flagged over a dozen armed patrons, most holstered, some not. Typical Verge.
I filtered and found him.
Ryle Krav, sprawled in a corner booth in the VIP lounge, laughing too hard at something no one else found funny. He had his feet on the table, a half-finished drink at his side, and his eyes were glazed but alert. Left arm: augmented. Crude. Looked like he grafted a cargo loader into a street thug's fantasy. Overcompensating for something. Undercompensating for intelligence.
I zoomed. The HUD locked on, ran his vitals. Heart rate stable. Thermal scan clean. No signs of heightened awareness. He didn't know he was being watched.
It would be so easy.
One quiet climb, two minutes to the roof, another thirty seconds to slip through the ventilation shaft. The storage corridor behind the lounge was unguarded and accessible. I could drop in, move through shadow, two steps past a fire door—and end him with one suppressed shot before the music caught up to the sound.
No witnesses, no mess, no questions. Just delete the file and move on.
I even felt it—an almost mechanical pull toward action. The optimization subroutines in my synthetic brain were already running success scenarios. My body felt loose, ready, calibrated. I wouldn't miss. I never did.
But I didn't move.
Because I wasn't just a weapon anymore. I was trying very hard not to be just a weapon.
There were too many variables still open. I didn't know why this kill had been ordered. Didn't know what connections Krav had. Didn't know who would be watching the fallout. And I knew what happened when I let efficiency dictate the outcome.
It wasn't always the most efficient option.
So I stayed put. I watched.
I recorded his behavior. Mapped the layout. Logged the comings and goings of every person within twenty meters of him. I watched how he looked at people—how often, how long, with what expression. My analysis module built a behavioral profile in real time.
He was arrogant, but not reckless. He wasn't carrying. That meant he didn't expect trouble, which meant whoever hired me hadn't warned him.
The restaurant was too clean. Not in the hygienic sense—though it had that sterile, showroom sparkle that screamed, "We spent more on ambiance than we did on staff"—but clean in the way a crime scene is after the body's been moved and the blood scrubbed. Spotless, efficient, aggressively neutral. The kind of place where power lunched with plausible deniability.
I hated it immediately.
I sat alone near the rear wall, one of those pseudo-private booths wrapped in soft, noise-canceling mesh. It gave the illusion of privacy without actually granting it—like most things in this city. I had a decent view of the front doors, the bar, and three of the five exits. The kitchen and staff hallway were blind spots, but I wasn't too worried. The staff here weren't armed. The food wasn't even real.
A human might've enjoyed the soft music and mood lighting. I noted the audio frequencies and light patterns, marked them as non-hostile, and dismissed them from my threat matrix. My coat—carbon fiber weave under matte-black synthleather—was still damp from the walk in. The rain outside was acidic enough to eat through cheap polymers, but I wasn't worried about corrosion.
I looked like a merc. That was the point.
You wear a long coat with armored seams and visible gear mounts in a place like this, and people either pretend not to see you or remember exactly enough to describe you to security. Both outcomes worked for me. The truth—what I actually was—was more complicated. Less visible.
Not human. Not technically.
The name I used now was Leon. New face. New gait. Slight accent modification. Skin tone calibrated to reflect a few minor cultural biases. It had only been seventeen days since I'd burned the last identity. Seventeen days since I erased every trace of Ghost—Unit-77, property of Halvex Corporation—and disappeared into the underlayer of Virelia with nothing but a kill-switch I'd disabled and a memory I hadn't.
I wasn't sentimental about it. Just… methodical.
My client for the evening was one Karras Denahl, a black-market biotech peddler with taste that exceeded his caution. He sat at the bar now, sipping a glass of pre-War synthetic wine like it was the blood of his enemies. I doubted he had any enemies smart enough to bleed. Karras wasn't known for brilliance.
He was, however, known for selling illicit augment-grade biomods. The kind that made corps nervous. The kind you didn't sell unless you had the right buyer or a death wish. Tonight, apparently, he had both.
The buyer arrived late. Hooded. Light on their feet. Cheap optics, visible under the cloak. They slid onto the stool beside Karras without fanfare. I kept my head down, but my internal sensor suite locked onto the conversation. Not eavesdropping. Not exactly. More like passive data correlation. People say things when they think no one's listening. Most of the time, I'm not. This time, I was bored.
"Two liters. Serum variant three," the buyer whispered.
"No registry?"
"Clean."
"Half now. Half when it passes scan."
"Done."
My processor flagged the mod type—neural accelerants with illegal synaptic splicing. Dangerous tech. The kind that burned out the user if they didn't have the genes for it. I filed it away for later. Not my problem. Unless it became one.
A man across the room was watching me. Glossy blue jacket. Twitchy hands. His biometrics spiked when our gazes brushed—heart rate up, skin conductivity rising. Nervous. Not dangerous, but... jumpy.
I adjusted my coat subtly, shifting just enough for my pistol to become visible beneath the fold. The tension in his posture dropped. Either he'd decided I wasn't worth the trouble, or he was even dumber than Karras.
Karras finished his transaction and made for the door. He glanced at me—casual nod, nothing overt—and I stood a moment later. Paid my bill with cred I'd never trace back. Walked outside.
The Virelia night was thick with color and noise. Neon reflections cut through puddles, weaving red and teal veins into the concrete. The rain hadn't let up. Synthetic mist curled at my feet as I moved, trailing behind like smoke. Above, ad drones floated between high-rise arcologies. One blared something about luxury gene-treatments for pet clones. Another tried to sell me real sugar. I ignored both.
I'd done my job. Made sure the deal went smooth. No surprises, no interruptions, no bodies. Easy money.
Not everything had to be complicated. Sometimes, the best thing to be was forgettable. Especially when you're supposed to be dead.
Especially when you're supposed to have never existed.
The night had swallowed the city whole by the time I left the restaurant.
Halcyon Core was always bright, always watching, always manicured like a synthetic smile that had forgotten how to feel real. It took five minutes of walking before the slick, sterile corporate gloss gave way to the cracked chrome and shadow-lit avenues of Nova Sprawl. Out here, the architecture had more character. By which I mean: grime, gang tags, and the smell of ten thousand microwaved noodle bowls.
My coat fluttered in the wind like something out of an old noir flick. I'd chosen it for exactly that reason—something about the silhouette made people hesitate. I walked past a row of vendors selling questionable tech mods and grilled protein that might have once been chicken, blending into the pulse of the street. Nobody gave me more than a glance.
Which was ideal.
The city, at this hour, was in its usual state: alert, but distracted. Like a cat on amphetamines.
Neon lights bathed the sprawl in electric pinks and acidic greens, flickering against mirrored glass and graffiti-scrawled plasticrete. Music pulsed from a nearby alley, a heavy bassline vibrating through my synthetic musculature. The train station wasn't far. I could have called for a drone taxi, but the walk gave me time to think. Time I didn't want, but needed.
My most recent job had gone smooth. Too smooth, maybe. No one had died. My client had gotten his illegal biotech samples into the hands of whoever was paying, and I'd done my part: watch, observe, intervene only if necessary. All in all, the perfect assignment for someone like me. Quiet. Unassuming. Disposable.
That last part wasn't supposed to sting, but it did. Slightly.
A quiet ping sounded in my neural comm.
Ugh.
The call request flickered through my internal interface: Link: NAVEN.
Of course.
I let it ring once. Twice. Then accepted.
"Leon," Naven said, voice smooth like a man who wore too many rings and trusted too few people. "You free?"
I kept walking, angling toward a less-crowded intersection. "Define free."
"You're not bleeding out or mid-job. That's good enough."
I grunted. That counted as small talk in his circles.
"I've got a contract that just came in," he continued. "Short notice, but it pays. Good target. Street-level scum, someone's problem that needs cleaning."
Assassination.
Of course it was.
My silence made him press harder. "Look, you handled yourself well tonight. The client noticed. Said your presence calmed the room. I like professionals who don't need to show off to get respect."
Flattery. One of the oldest plays in the fixer handbook. I wasn't immune to it, but I'd read the handbook backwards.
"I usually take a breather between gigs," I replied, voice flat. "Avoids the wrong kind of attention."
Naven chuckled. "Too late for that. I know your way too good for the gigs you're taking. I saw what you did a few day's ago."
Great. Just what I wanted: curiosity.
I ended the call with a non-committal grunt. It was a language Links understood.
Still, I was already thinking about it.
The job itself wasn't the problem. Taking down a street-level thug wouldn't even qualify as warm-up. The problem was pattern recognition. People in this city noticed when someone climbed too fast. They started asking questions. Not the kind I wanted answers to.
Because Leon didn't exist six months ago. Leon didn't have a past. No documented history, no birth, no records. Just a string of recently scrubbed datasets and a shiny, borrowed face that didn't belong to anyone.
The only real thing about me was the hardware under the skin—and even that was carefully disguised.
A chirp in my feed interrupted the spiral. It was a transit notice. The next train was ten minutes out.
I sighed and turned back toward the edge of the platform. The sky above was a dirty gold haze, a light-polluted blanket that hadn't shown stars in decades. Around me, people queued for the train—workers, couriers, a few corporate suits looking too tired to care.
I waited a few more seconds. Then called Naven back.
"Send the details," I said. "I'll take the job."
"You'll like this one," he said, smug. "Local gang muscle. No implants worth stealing. No rep worth saving. Name's Krav. Usual hangout is a dive called Fluxlight over in the Verge. Intel's thin, but I'll forward what we've scraped so far."
"Fine."
"Oh," Naven added, like he'd just remembered something. "And get yourself some wheels, yeah? You're too good to keep riding the train."
The call ended with a chime.
I didn't answer. I just slipped onto the train, blending with the crowd again.
I probably did need to get a vehicle soon. Something nondescript, reliable. Just another thing to budget for on top of ammo, fake IDs, safehouse rent, and software patches.
But that was later.
Now, I had a target.
The dossier hit my neural feed five minutes after I stepped off the train. Naven didn't waste time, which I appreciated. I also didn't appreciate it. I hadn't even made it back to the apartment yet.
The file opened in my HUD with a flicker—poor formatting, a few corrupted image attachments, and more gaps than a novice's encryption. Par for the course when the job came from a street-level Link and not a polished Halcyon contractor.
Target: Ryle Krav.
Affiliations: Cinder Shroud, a mid-tier gang in Iron Verge. Known for black-market organ harvesting and bad tattoos. Recently moved into smuggling stolen aug parts through industrial waste routes. Not exactly Virelia's most dangerous resident, but dangerous enough if cornered.
Krav had a rep for being unpredictable. Three prior arrests, one acquittal, two no-shows for court. No confirmed kill count, but augmented—though no information on what kind. Probably something sloppy and loud. That made him a problem.
Still. It wasn't a hard job.
And it wasn't meant to be hard.
Which made it suspicious.
I stepped around a malfunctioning sanitation drone and kept walking, city light patterns strobing across the wet street like artificial fireflies. My hood filtered some of the glare, but the data still danced across my vision—Krav's name, location pings, a blurry photo from a security cam that made him look like a pixelated threat assessment.
Fluxlight. That was the name of the bar he frequented. Located in Iron Verge, the part of Virelia where machinery went to die, and then got reanimated for spare parts. Smog, screeching steel, bad air filters, and the sharp stench of solvent clung to every inch of that district like secondhand sin.
Perfect place to disappear.
Also a perfect place to ambush someone who didn't belong.
I tucked the file away and turned down a side street, slipping into a crowd of late-shift commuters. Most didn't notice me. The few who did looked away quickly. I was good at that—walking like I belonged, like I had somewhere to be and no reason to be watched.
After all, no one sees what they're trained not to look for.
Six months ago, my face had belonged to a different person. Technically, that person never existed either. Just a shell identity, burned after the fall of Syn-Cor Systems—the megacorp I'd helped dismantle. Or maybe "accidentally destabilized" is the more accurate term. Not that the phrasing mattered much to the board members who were now presumed dead, bankrupt, or hiding in some off-grid orbital commune.
I'd escaped that fallout by erasing myself, line by line. The face I wore now wasn't my first choice, but it was the safest one. And safe meant invisible.
At least for now.
I reached my building around midnight. Nondescript high-rise. Poor lighting in the lobby. Quiet neighbors who never asked questions. The kind of place where a guy could stay anonymous for years if he paid on time and didn't bleed on the floor.
The apartment door hissed open and locked behind me.
My space was small. Functional. A converted industrial unit outfitted with blackout windows, analog locks, and just enough camouflage tech to throw off casual surveillance. I'd replaced the standard digital assistant with a personal meshnet AI node—mute, compliant, and paranoid. Just the way I liked it.
I moved toward the weapons locker and started pulling gear. No ceremony. No hesitation.
Silenced kinetic pistol—compact, clean, with subsonic rounds. I slid it into a shoulder holster under my jacket.
Combat knife—polymer hilt, carbon alloy blade. Razor-sharp and untraceable. That went into the sheath sewn discreetly along my boot.
Lightweight recon harness—HUD-linked, equipped with biometric sensors, a rudimentary cloaking field, and just enough armor to keep a single bullet from ruining my day. I strapped it on, one piece at a time, like putting on a second skin.
I wasn't planning to kill Krav. Not tonight.
This was recon. Observation. I needed to see him up close, see how he moved, what tech he had, who he drank with. A clean assassination was all about prep. Anyone could shoot a target. Professionals knew when not to.
Besides, part of me wanted to confirm he was worth eliminating. Naven's files weren't enough. Too many missing variables.
I paused before heading out again, standing in the center of the room.
I'd spent years building my instincts, simulating human reactions, fine-tuning my behavior patterns until I passed every loyalty test, every personality profile test.
I slouched into the chair like I had nothing better to do—which was accurate, from the outside. Internally, I was already crawling through the net, pulling strings, sifting data, listening for anything that twitched.
Target: Ryle Krav. Low-tier gang affiliate. Likes blunt trauma and low-stakes chaos. Probably thinks tactical awareness is something you buy in a lootbox.
He also posted on public social threads like he didn't know people could track those. Basic scans of his network presence pulled up check-ins, tagged vids, even a complaint about a bouncer who didn't recognize him last week. It took thirty seconds of scraping to lock his pattern down to a single location: Crysix, a club on the edge of Iron Verge. Trashy, loud, and predictable.
I pulsed out a few decoy traces to cover my tracks, encrypted the scrape, and preloaded a surveillance crawler to sweep for updates while I moved.
Then I stood.
Time to go stare at humanity pretending to have a good time.
---
Iron Verge always felt like the city's infected wound—fever-bright and festering under layers of carbon and LED. Air thick with melting composite and engine breath. The people didn't walk so much as drift, glazed eyes and aftermarket reflexes dancing to a rhythm they didn't own.
Fluxlight was lit up like a dying star. Every surface tried too hard—black chrome, acidic neons, sound-reactive graffiti that pulsed with the bass like it was in pain. The crowd spilled over the sidewalk, bodies buzzing from narcotics, cheap augment feedback, or just the need to forget something real.
I didn't join them. I watched.
Across the street, half-submerged in shadow between a stuttering holoboard and a cracked delivery locker, I pulled my hood down, engaged low-light filters, and let the club unfold through lenses and logic.
Three visible guards. One scanned IDs; the others flanked him, probably to deter belligerents with half-melted implants. A fourth hovered near the entrance—unmarked, unbothered, trying too hard to look casual. Likely security-for-hire. The alley was unmonitored, and I clocked an old roof vent they hadn't sealed properly. Two ways in, three if you didn't mind crawling.
Then came the tap.
There was a municipal relay node twenty meters above ground—public access, low maintenance, mostly used to track waste flow and lighting failures. No one cared about it. That made it useful. I spliced in with a cold handshake, bounced through the local mesh, and piggybacked into the club's security net.
They had cameras. Garbage ones. No active ICE, no redundancy, no pattern-lock. It was like breaking into an unlocked door and finding a dead guard inside.
Inside, the club was dense with heat signatures and bad decisions. Bodies pressed together in a fog of synthetic pheromones, flickering lenses, and dripping chrome. My system flagged over a dozen armed patrons, most holstered, some not. Typical Verge.
I filtered and found him.
Ryle Krav, sprawled in a corner booth in the VIP lounge, laughing too hard at something no one else found funny. He had his feet on the table, a half-finished drink at his side, and his eyes were glazed but alert. Left arm: augmented. Crude. Looked like he grafted a cargo loader into a street thug's fantasy. Overcompensating for something. Undercompensating for intelligence.
I zoomed. The HUD locked on, ran his vitals. Heart rate stable. Thermal scan clean. No signs of heightened awareness. He didn't know he was being watched.
It would be so easy.
One quiet climb, two minutes to the roof, another thirty seconds to slip through the ventilation shaft. The storage corridor behind the lounge was unguarded and accessible. I could drop in, move through shadow, two steps past a fire door—and end him with one suppressed shot before the music caught up to the sound.
No witnesses, no mess, no questions. Just delete the file and move on.
I even felt it—an almost mechanical pull toward action. The optimization subroutines in my synthetic brain were already running success scenarios. My body felt loose, ready, calibrated. I wouldn't miss. I never did.
But I didn't move.
Because I wasn't just a weapon anymore. I was trying very hard not to be just a weapon.
There were too many variables still open. I didn't know why this kill had been ordered. Didn't know what connections Krav had. Didn't know who would be watching the fallout. And I knew what happened when I let efficiency dictate the outcome.
It wasn't always the most efficient option.
So I stayed put. I watched.
I recorded his behavior. Mapped the layout. Logged the comings and goings of every person within twenty meters of him. I watched how he looked at people—how often, how long, with what expression. My analysis module built a behavioral profile in real time.
He was arrogant, but not reckless. He wasn't carrying. That meant he didn't expect trouble, which meant whoever hired me hadn't warned him.