It felt colder inside the transport than it was outside.

Niko stared at the nav display and wondered if the attitude and open distrust would ever end. Flight data mixed with Woojin’s reflection as if she were trapped behind the sliding lines of the bracketed telemetry.

He’d known Woojin less than two weeks, watched her cruise silently through her daily responsibilities, and yet every time he spent more than a moment looking in her direction the only words he could think of were badshoo m’passa. Each syllable drummed against the back of his memories, while the whistle of cold mastiff air leaked through the worn hatch seals. Suddenly he realized he was touching the implant on the back of his head and felt a thread of nervousness take hold.

What if this is all there is from now on? Instructions. More rules I never wanted.

He wished he could forget the words. He wished he could unhear the trench slang, unsee the scenes that came after it. Even though he never learned their real meaning, he had a general idea—and it clung to him. The fog of war. Creeping headaches caused by dehydration. The sense of fear just behind his eyes, pulling his lids wider. He remembered the cramped bolt hole and the dull buzz of bot drones overhead.

A long time ago.

An entirely different hemisphere.

Niko looked away before he broke her concentration, before she caught him staring.

He tucked his chin into the collar of his thick, gray quilted coat and pulled up his implant’s recording of the reflection. A quick thought replayed it on the back of his eyes, tightened the shot, and froze the frame.

The hollows of her cheeks.

Her sunken, puffy eyes.

He exhaled and felt steam curled up the sides of his cheeks. The vapor left his eyelashes feeling wet; he needed to blink.

She looked like she hadn’t eaten in a week. Or maybe the cold had been gnawing away at her.

Something was clearly wrong.

He needed to say something.

“Hey, uh—Wooj. Everything good up there? Anything I can—”

She waved him off with the back of her hand.

“You sure? I can—”

“I said fuck off, Kid. I’m fine.”

The feeling of claustrophobia returned.

Niko tucked a lock of his oily blonde hair inside his hood and behind an ear, let his attention turn toward their connection, João Maru. From the nose up, the top half of the corpo’s head was tattooed black. Tribal. Kincept. The last thing anyone would expect a Corexis officer to look like in all but the uniform.

Not the sort of personality to climb the ranks. When he’d asked Woojin if he was really a slick bot, she’d told him to shut up.

If she said so, he was in charge.

Apparently the pay was enough that his questions didn’t matter.

Haunting blue implants loomed over the polyslate in the man’s hands, and Niko appreciated not knowing whether the other man was reading or staring right at him.

That sort of tech seemed useful.

He wondered where he’d gotten it.

“Kid is it?”

Niko nodded.

At least he still had his moniker.

“You’ve not seen them before?” asked the man. His voice was clear and direct, loud enough to cut through the vehicle’s noise and snap Woojin from her focus.

Niko shook his head.

“Give it time. New things start slowly. A few more months and every sleep-addicted dreamer this side of the equator will be fed auto-ads between their rem cycles.”

“Did it hurt?” he asked.

João locked the device in his hands and set it down on the seat next to him. “No more or less than anything else.”

Niko had gotten his ocular implants when he was young, he couldn’t remember getting them—probably for the better. Still the idea of having his eyes replaced tripped him out.

Anything new always hurts more, he reminded himself, and for once he felt like he had a read on the man across from him.

Without warning, the aerodyne banked hard to starboard.

Woojin’s way of reminding them to stay focused.

He grabbed one of the overhead handles to stop his forehead from slamming into the interior wall.

“Coming up on the coordinates.” Woojin’s eyes flickered in the dark navigation screens. “They’re telling us to tether. Level three, east end of the complex.”

Maru nodded to Niko and confirmed the instructions to their pilot, then told her to take them in slow and steady around the top of the structure before making the final descent.

Niko pulled an old Loomis from his winter coat and checked the magazine. A ten-round clip of twelve-mil welding blunts, each one aged like fine wine. Worthless against armor, they would mash a head and punch a ragged hole in anything softer. It was an old boarding pistol. Some might’ve called it an antique. He thought it looked intimidating, like it’d been through a war or two too. Maybe more.

There were plenty of old relics in the universe, some with stories, even more with stories lost to time and memory. He stared at it for a moment and tried to read its surface. Maybe he’d make up a story about it later.

Uncomfortable and heavy, he was pretty sure it was real. Counterfeits were so common. Still he didn’t see much point in faking such a cheap relic. The scratch marks near the ejection port suggested it’d had a bad jam. Someone had scored the vent jacket just behind the rear sight, visible even after the serials had been ground off and custom compression added.

“Does it work?” asked João.

Niko nodded and told him it did.

The man grimaced as if deflated. The Corexis officer picked up his device, folded the screen, and slid it inside his coat. As the AV flattened out and slowed for their final approach, he stood up and slid the side hatch back.

Dry, frigid air flushed the cabin and whipped Niko’s hair across his face. He used his wireless to raise the thermal shield from his collar and then tucked his hair back again.

Eyes watering, Niko stood up and slid the gun into his pocket. Holding the nearest handles, he stepped next to João.

“Looks like a war zone down there.”

João turned.

“Says the kid with a pistol. Look around. In case you haven’t noticed, the whole planet is a war zone. Everyone is fighting for something. The past. The present. The future. Reconstruction comes in different forms.” João turned to face him with his dull blue orbs. “Which one are you?”

“If it’s all going to rhyme, might as well celebrate what’s left of the bones. Everything else is just some slick agenda.”

Maru turned away, seemingly more interested in the facility or horizon.

For a moment, Niko thought he might have offended the man. Not that he cared, if he did.

Corpos were all alike.

Maybe he isn’t so tough after all.

“This is Deseado. I grew up here… This site is important to me, to Corexis. People try to take important things,” explained João. “Don’t suppose I can convince you to leave the gun?”

“You’re joking, right?”

“Keep it in your coat then. This isn’t the sort of place you want to wave it around. Understand?”

Niko scanned the rubble below and felt the man’s eyes on him. He ignored them.

Orbital scars stretched for miles in every direction. The ruins left standing were extensive. It seemed like exactly the type of place where he should have a gun.

Niko knew three years earlier the bombardments had shattered the city and driven out the population. What was left was jagged, folded in on itself like a concrete carcass in a shallow grave. As they approached their destination, he could see the frozen rubble had been pushed back and a perimeter wall had been erected, just inside the debris. Floodlights, gatehouses, and barbed wire ringed the largest ruin still standing.

“Six patrols. Teams of eight,” counted Niko.

“There’s a large, garrisoned bunker on the other side as well, where the first two sublevels are exposed. More corpse truncheons, plus some living.” João pulled a zacastick out and lit it as they lost altitude.

The coal burned like a distant star.

“I need you and Woojin to stick with me, but I need you to access their security network right away. Risk assessment. Deep dive. Look for gaps in their patrols. We’re here to make sure this site is as secure as possible. Once we’ve landed, use the security credentials I’ve provided and start your work immediately.”

“What is it they do here, exactly?”

“Have you ever heard of Mari Nagai?”

“No. Who’s that?”

João frowned and didn’t answer him, and that was the end of his explanation. He just leaned around Niko and told their pilot to pull in close before tethering.

Niko watched the cold stone come closer and closer, until finally it blanketed the whole of his vision. Woojin panned the aerodyne slowly toward the blown-out structure. A few meters from the exterior, she fired the anchors into what was left of the damaged edifice and let the cables tighten.

The vehicle bucked as it made contact, but not before João Maru had already leapt to the other side of the gap.

Niko looked at Woojin, as she unbuckled from the pilot chair and turned off the thrusters. The high-tension lines holding them to the building creaked with complaint.

He stepped over the gap and listened to the side of the powered-down vehicle scrape against the crumbling ruin. Woojin left the hatch open and joined him with a crunch.

Niko’s wrist vibrated, and he connected to the wireless invite.

Woojin was waiting for him.

She passed the security credentials over. They looked like they’d been intended for deactivation—realistically, more likely stolen a long time ago. Encrypted passkeys. SSO idents and certificates. Most were outdated and expired. Nothing particularly useful for accessing the on-site security network.

He went to work breaking into the system on his own.

João had provided other information too: unit strengths, maintenance logs, reserve units, nutrition reports—things he’d likely bought from some low-level snoop. The type who lacked the chops to get inside the perimeter.

It never ceased to amaze him how much planning corporate goons could do with worthless information.

[If you ask me, Kid, I don’t think he likes you.]

Woojin walked by him without turning. She was already in lockstep with the other man, half a step behind his right shoulder.

Niko spotted the Corexis badge on her sleeve, partitioned his motor functions, and assigned a simple follow command. His feet started moving. Within three steps he’d matched her distance and stride. Not that he’d counted. He was too busy decrypting the data packets that’d filled his vision.

His CVI implants split the unique syntax and started torching through firewalls. There wasn’t any art in it. The system was so simple, he could have spent a week inside without anyone noticing him. Within a minute, he had access to most of the private file directory. To his dismay there weren’t any operation files for the facility. Only files similar to what Maru had already passed to Woojin.

Must have a separate op-sys running for whatever is going on here.

He started scanning for more wireless signals and ran a query for mention of a parallel infrastructure.

His mind spilled through the security reports. Logs, complaints, transfer orders, and schedules. He batched them, cross-referenced patrol cycles, and started mapping rotations against site surveys and supply runs.

Everything looked fine.

Hardly worth his time. He still didn’t understand why Woojin had made him come along. Almost anyone could have verified the security.

Niko pulled his mind back to the corridors. The ruined exterior slowly shifted from scorch marks and cracked plasticrete to solid walls. While the outer parts of the building had clearly been damaged by the bombardments, the interior was still mostly intact. The sound of dust and grit still crunched under his boots, but the deeper they went the facility seemed more equipped for whatever it was used for.

Woojin opened a door to a stairwell and held it open for them. Down two more levels, they were met by a pair of armed guards and a locked door that could have served as a vault entrance.

João raised his hand and presented his open palms.

“We’re here to see the little butterfly.”

The guards’ eyes flickered blue, and the group waited. The silence was awkward. Uncomfortable.

João pulled Woojin aside.

Niko used the time to cut through the contract packages behind each of the corpse units in the patrols. He didn’t find much—just standard Redshift contract transfers, low-cost buyouts, and the usual pitch bundles to commodity brokers and skin jockeys. All of the newer replacement units were from a group called J-sec. He was about to crack the files on the older units when one of the guards opened the door, told them no detours, and ushered them in.

Where it’d been cold and dry, it was now hot and humid. The faint murmur of distance words hung in the air. Niko immediately stopped what he was doing, sealed his pistol behind a metal pocket zipper, and opened the front of his heavy coat. He then waited for the others to finish removing their coats as well.

Once inside, the heavy door closed, and a pair of truncheons motioned them to store their coats in a pocket recess, hidden in the wall.

Niko felt the weight of his pistol in his coat pocket and knew there was no way to take it out without it being noticed. Resigned, he hung his coat and watched it disappear into the wall.

One of the half-dead automatons motioned for him to follow.

[How’s the security audit going?] asked Woojin over the wireless. [Update?]

Niko replied out loud so João could hear too.

“All done. No weak points in the perimeter. Teams are a little thin. Probably a little hungry overall. But given the location, things fall within parameters.”

“Satisfied?” asked Woojin.

“Compare your assessment with the view from the arrival,” directed João. “Use your observations to validate the documentation. Inside and outside the ruin.”

“Wait. I thought we were only auditing external security? I haven’t been—”

“Here.” Woojin passed her own recordings to him through the channel. [Keep up, Kid. We’re on a timeline here. You piss me off, you piss off Kiyose too.]

João didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. He remained focused on where the guards were leading them. Deeper into the ruined complex, down a newly-constructed stairwell, and through another checkpoint the group continued. João, out in front. Woojin, just behind him. Niko, bringing up the rear, while working through the defensibility of each passage, corner, and chokepoint. That’s when he realized they were five-stories deep. He pulled back from his analysis and considered where the backrooms of the facility filled in his map.

Clearly the facility went deeper.

You’ve been here since before the bombardments, haven’t you?

He was nearly done with the assessment when they were led into a room with its floor covered in waves of lush, digital grass.

The ceiling shimmered with sunlight cast through an open skylight. Blue sky. A few clouds. Niko looked back down at the blades of grass and marked how they lacked uniformity in length. Some even seemed bent and trampled by those in front of him. He resisted the urge to reach down and drag his hand through them as they brushed his knees.

He could almost hear them scratching across the fabric of his pants.

Dynamic projections. Good ones too. He took a quick glance past the sunbeams and into the corners of the ceiling but couldn’t find any emitters. He could see neither stitch arrays nor neural diffusers and wondered how it all worked. They were clearly underground. For all he knew, they were walking over some sort of advanced immersion reef.

“Forgive me.” The woman’s voice was polite and passingly pleasant, like an old gray wind chime hung in front of a CO2 scrubber. “Small comforts keep the mind focused.”

Niko paused at the idea and dismissed it as nonsense.

The mind is a tool. It needs only maintenance, purpose, and time. Comforts come with distractions and vulnerabilities.

He looked up at the woman, just to see who had aired such an incongruous thought. He found a translucent projection of a woman standing in front of João and turning her attention to Woojin.

They acknowledged each other indifferently as the projection drifted through the tall grass.

“And who’s this?”

Niko shoved the projections to the back of his mind and arranged his face into something focused and respectful. When he came back to the present, he found the brunette woman staring at him. His hand reached out and then pulled back in embarrassment.

“Doesn’t say much, huh?”

João was quick to recover for the team.

“Just putting the final polish on our security audit.”

Niko watched the woman’s face sour. She clearly wasn’t expecting to hear the word audit and turned her attention back to the Corexis officer.

“Straight to business then, okay. I don’t recall asking for an audit when you requested a visit, Mr. Maru. I’m sure our security team is up to the challenge of keeping us safe—they’ve been doing just fine for months.”

“I’m sure your team is doing the very best they can, Mari—”

“Director. Please. That was my mother’s name.”

João let the interruption pass and made a polite nod.

“Director—yes, of course. As I was saying, we simply wanted to make our visit as valuable as possible. We meant no offense. The company understands the value of your work, and I wanted to provide reassurance to the stakeholders. Something you might communicate up through your own reports with my own sentiments.”

Black letters crossed the white of Niko’s eyes. He watched the report compile in monospaced font.

The woman turned her back to the group and stepped behind her workstation. At the far end, the little butterfly shifted her attention to a projection of a small tree, leaves rustling silently in the summer breeze. She seemed to lose herself in their movements before coming back to the group.

“Very well. Let’s see your report,” she said leaning forward onto the surface of her desk.

Niko’s attention left the tree and returned to the team just in time to see Woojin stand in front of him.

[Save that for Kiyose. I’ll take it from here.] She winked at him and turned back around.

“If you’d excuse him. He doesn’t say much, but he’s a savant at these sorts of things. Destined to be no more and no less. We only brought him along to create the analysis as quickly as possible.”

Niko bit the inside of his cheek and buried the report in one of his memory cores.

Woojin already had what she needed and took the attention of the room upon herself.

As this was happening, he noticed movement out of the corner of his eye. Before it walked by him, he smelled the figure approaching.

It was some sort of heavily-modified Daphemi. The corpse unit was built around what used to be a giant of man. Artificial shoulders and arms made it look rigid at first, but when it reached the front of the room and turned around, Niko could see it’d been equipped with bonded body plates and the front of its neck had been reinforced with ballistic sheathing. Even through the unguent bandages and tissue gels, the corpse unit looked intimidating.

The weight alone would have snapped Niko’s own spine and folded him forward. Whatever the Corexis engineers had done to the unit must have been done post-mortem. He’d never seen the same amount of tech entrusted to anyone living.

“This report is very interesting.” Mari looked over at the Daphemi and then at João. “You could have done this yourself, I don’t understand why you brought these two with you.”

João preened the fabric on his uniform’s sleeve with his fingertips, as if he were removing some fine piece of lint from the otherwise rough gray fabric.

“The new position affords me… certain amenities,” he replied.

Mari smiled. “I’m sure it does. Quite the improvement from the last time I saw you. If I recall correctly, you were holding a suitcase for a Hong Kong paymaster, no?”

Nerve struck, João’s head tilted to the side.

“Perhaps I’m mistaken. Either way, those niceties are going to have to wait.”

She looked at the heavy unit standing at the front of the room.

“Take them to a holding cell and restrain them.”

Built to serve, the corpse unit immediately stepped forward. Several more stepped into the room, their mechanical legs cutting through the long grass. The smell of their alignated skin filled the director’s office with ammonia fumes.

Niko felt his mind sharpen. The atmospheric controls flooded the air with a chemical cocktail, each layer meant to bully his senses into ignoring the stink.

“I don’t understand,” complained João, as he watched pallid, cybernetic fingers grab his wrists.

“That goes without saying,” replied the director. She flicked two of her fingers, and the security units began guiding them out.

So close to the truncheons, the smell assaulted Niko’s senses. He didn’t have a way to turn off his olfactory receptors. Volatile lubricants burned his nostrils. Glide fluid flooded his eye sockets as his implants tried to protect themselves.

He tried to pull his arm away, but the corpse unit clamped down on his wrist with proportionate effort. Niko winced as he felt his comms bracelet snap and stab into the meat of his thumb.

He hissed.

It hurt, but he’d felt worse.

[Wooj, you still there?]

Nothing.

No response at all.

Not even static.

Wireless disconnect. A soul adrift in the dark.

He stopped fighting and tried to keep pace. Down another corridor, Niko heard pounding and a tormented voice yelling They’re here. They’re here, mixed with a chorus of the rest of the unseen population. A few more turns. One of the Daphemi opened a door, and in the group went. By the time he was on his knees, Woojin and João were already kneeling beside him with their hands bound.

“Hey, I’m talking to you.”

Woojin received a clap along the side of her head for speaking. He watched her lean into it and grind her teeth. He could see the muscles in her jaw clench and the vein on her temple flare.

Not wanting to get hit, Niko waited.

There was no rush.

He watched a truncheon bind his wrists in front of him, as he tried to examine how bad his injury really was.

Subdermal hemorrhaging, no doubt. He could still move the end of his thumb and told himself the tendon was still intact. So many delicate components in the wrist, he stopped moving it and told himself not to make it worse.

When the unit was done and everyone was settled, the little butterfly floated into the room.

“I have a problem,” she started. “I can’t trust any of you. I don’t know you two, but you’ve given me something rather valuable. Something I can’t ignore, but also something you shouldn’t have.

“And you, João Maru, just because we’ve crossed paths doesn’t make us friends. This is my domain. So—oh, that’s interesting.”

João’s lack of pupils met Mariposa’s stare. Niko watched her eyes flicker and then shift to Woojin.

“Where’d you dig up this dirt?”

Face sullen and annoyed, their pilot looked up and made up a story about buying the files off a black market scav in Ushuaia.

“That’s an interesting story, given the root data for this information was stored exclusively at a server farm off the south coast. Either the local tribes are becoming increasingly entrepreneurial, or you were part of the orbital drop that broke into that site a few weeks ago.”

“I don’t know what they’ve accused me of, Director, but I assure you—I’ve done nothing wrong. My loyalties have always been to Corexis. Review my contracts! I’ve an impeccable record.”

The butterfly returned to Maru.

“You’ve been with the Kincept for some time now.” Mariposa’s hand reached out and pinched the skin of João’s cheek. “Tell me. Are they raiding the server farms they’re paid to protect?”

“No—and you and I both know the southern coast was abandoned.”

She released the pinch and pushed his face away, almost knocking him over.

“Abandoned. These files give you more credit than I would have thought you capable of—contract reassignments? Really? Did you instigate the riots as well?” She motioned to one of the truncheons, and it picked João up by the back of his collar. “These are old crimes with old punishments. Let’s go have a chat about this.”

João turned as he was being forced back out of the room. “What did you tell them I did? Tell them you made it up. Tell them—”

He was out the door before he could finish saying his words. The rest of the corpse units followed him out, and the door slammed shut.

“My comms bracelet is snapped,” Niko explained. He showed Woojin his wrist. There was a thin, subdermal line that was clearly out of alignment and a deep purple bruise.

She looked at it and asked him if any of his arteries had been nicked.

He had no idea.

I’m not some damned doctor.

Niko asked what she’d done, what files she’d shared with the director, and what João was being interrogated for.

Woojin told Niko the other man had reassigned ganger body contracts to several other corporations before the bombardments. There was no evidence he’d instigated the Corexis riots in Recoleta and Palermo a few weeks later. But when the government crushed the uprisings, tens of thousands died, and the half-dead were converted into corpse units for competing corporations.

She told him she expected João was having to answer some hard questions. Even though it was a small piece of what they’d retrieved from the energy rig, the evidence was damning.

“Can you pass me the security assessment?”

He raised his bound hands and looked at his wrist.

“Such a rookie.”

She leaned over and pulled the data lead from the side of Niko’s neck, dropped back to her knees, and plugged it into the back of her neck.

As soon as they were hardwired, he closed his eyes and watched his vision go black.