Not for the first time, Niko watched her body twitch in rhythm with the pounding on the walls. He couldn’t remember who’d told him sleep tremors were caused by nerve damage, but it was all he could think about as Woojin’s leg spasmed against the back wall. Her boot heel kicked back and forth, leaving black scuff marks on the floor. He wondered what had happened to her. Where she’d been.

Just one more piece of the puzzle he didn’t understand.

It’d been hours.

The clock on his overlay said it was the evening, but there were no windows in the room. Had he really been sitting there so long? Staring at Woojin’s spasms, while his mind scraped the data he’d pulled off the facility’s networks.

He couldn’t sleep.

He wanted to ask Woojin about her nerves and find out what she thought would happen next, but he knew there was nothing but recrimination waiting for him if he woke her.

To her, he’d played his role. He wasn’t worth a straight answer.

Niko suspected she’d played her part as well. She’d delivered her evidence, then taken the security report. After that, he’d endured her attitude until she fell asleep.

Niko corrected himself. He didn’t want to know what she thought. It was probably for the best she was sleeping. The woman clearly had other priorities and didn’t like him.

Waiting for the rest of her plan—no, Kiyose’s plan—to play out, she’d done the only thing that mattered: recharge. If she was able to sleep, that meant she thought they were at least safe enough for now.

He looked around the holding cell. For the hundredth time, Niko shook his head.

No way out.

He asked himself how he’d gotten there. Bad choices, worse priorities. He couldn’t stop digging, and somewhere, somehow, someone had found him and started steering him down this path.

Into their agenda.

He wondered. Was it Kiyose? Or someone else?

He tried to trace it backwards, but his wrist was throbbing so hard he couldn’t concentrate. He shifted his arms so the bindings weren’t digging in as much and tried to relax his shoulders.

He was sick of it.

System after system, my contributions cost me whatever little I have. And I have nothing, really. Freedom is stolen in small pieces, and yet everything I do ends up in someone else’s pocket.

He knew he was running out of value.

A new comms bracelet would drain his credits.

Assuming he got out of this, he’d be back to quick hacks and selling stolen idents with Halcyon’s chaff within a week.

Niko pressed his back against the wall and adjusted his wrists again. Lifted his knees. Pressed a finger into the lurid, puffy bruise and hoped the swelling went down.

He looked up and found Woojin looking at him.

“See something you like?”

Niko refocused and followed her gaze down to her legs.

“I’ll let you touch them, if you can find us a way out of here.”

Niko looked away.

“No way out of here, Wooj. I walked the room several times while you were sleeping.”

“Oh, don’t be a quitter, Kid.” She pushed herself upright. “Nothing good ever came from laying down and waiting to die.”

Says the one who just woke up.

She scratched her head and cracked her knuckles against the floor. Just then, sudden illness aside, it struck him how unattractive he found the woman. Maybe it was the light, but she looked centuries older than him.

“Why did you bring me on this shit trip anyway? I gave the old man what he wanted. You could have just given me a ride back to the ODS and left it at that.”

She moved slowly, still waking up. Eventually her eyes locked with his, and he could see a storm of thoughts churning behind her stare.

“Well?” he pressed.

“You’re so full of questions. I didn’t bring you on this trip. In fact, I argued against it. It was the old man who’d insisted you come. For training or experience or something. Who knows what goes on inside Kiyose’s brain pan—sure the hell isn’t me. As far as I’m concerned, you’re not even part of the team. Just an asset on loan.”

“Then why’d you nod?”

She looked confused.

“On the rig. When you were standing behind the old man. If you didn’t want me on the team, why not let Lingo shoot me too?”

“Hell if I know.” She paused and looked at the door. “I suppose what happened to Grim seemed like a waste of good parts. Maybe I should have—”

He wanted her to finish the sentence but he could hear the footsteps coming down the corridor now too.

“You should have what? Say it, if you’re such a hard-nosed operator. You don’t know me. You don’t know anything about me.”

For a second, she laughed, and it slid under his skin like a hot knife.

Shuh-kunk. She fell silent as the heavy door unlocked and swung open. First through, one of the truncheons dragged a motionless João Maru in by the back of his uniform.

It dropped him unceremoniously facedown on the cold floor and turned its attention to Woojin. Binaric corpse tongue gurgled from its mouth. It was an ugly, guttural language that was hard to hear. Niko felt something crawl up his back.

Woojin put her hands up. The automaton fell silent and watched her push herself to her feet.

She looked at Niko, smiled, and stepped into a kick to João’s legs.

Maru recoiled and then balled up again.

Niko watched the door slam shut.

Still alive then, huh? Took you right to the edge I bet.

The man had been worked over. Answers or not, Niko could tell the Little Butterfly’s security team had squeezed him for everything he knew. And then they’d beat him, just to give him a taste of what was coming.

Niko wondered if it’d been the heavily-armored unit that’d been responsible for the damage.

It didn’t matter.

Not really.

João would be an example. A ripple. An echo of a centuries-old reminder: the corporations stood united against the crimes of the Corpse War. Corexis was small, but size didn’t matter. Stealing Daphemi wasn’t tolerated. Catching the guilty was street-cred for the Directorate elites.

Niko stared at the beaten officer and saw the spectacle of punishment hanging over him.

“Heh— Water.”

The request was no louder than a whisper.

Niko didn’t have any water and told himself if he did he wouldn’t have shared it anyway.

Nearly half an hour of incoherent muttering passed before João peeled his cheek off the floor. On his hands and knees, Niko could see sticky blood had crusted over his swollen jaw. Elbows quivering, breathing thin and ragged.

Niko waited for him to collapse, wondered if he could see at all.

“You— set me up.”

“Me? We were both set up. At least you lived well for a while. You wanna hear where I’ve been?”

He could play the victim too, if that was the game.

I hope they pull out your implants, just to make up the difference.

It was hollow animosity and bluster, really. Niko expected at least a small part of his ego to feel better.

It didn’t, so he just waited, the same way any criminal waits when they’ve been cornered.

João’s head rotated poorly on its neck.

“Perhaps— we share a flaw then.”

“How’s that?” asked Niko.

The other man lay down on his side, facing away from him, and heaved a sigh that bounced off the far wall.

“We both chose poor company.”

Niko let the idea silently fill the room with its stench.

He remembered Mariposa’s comment and wondered just how focused the man could be.

There wasn’t much choice for me.

Slowly and quietly, he got to his feet and stretched out the backs of his legs. He told himself he was nothing like the other man. Similarities were circumstantial. Superficial at best. Outside those walls, they couldn’t have been more different. Either the other man was trying to make an ally of him, or they’d beaten him into desperation.

As soon as Niko felt limber, he leaned back on the wall.

João may have been beaten, but his hands were free and sooner or later he would come around to laying his guilt back on others.

Niko sprung forward, closing the distance to the crumpled body. He landed hard on João’s back and pressed down with his knee.

“Aagh— What are you—?”

“Shut up and hold still.”

Niko pulled the pin from the side of his neck and tried to line it up with one of the undamaged ports on the back of João’s head.

He slammed the man’s head into the floor and heard something crack. It gave him just enough time to turn the head sideways and push the connection home.

He listened to syllables of João’s objections slur.

If Woojin was going to keep playing her games, so would he. He wanted answers. He needed leverage.

Niko pushed into João’s memories using the same tricks he’d used to burn through the security network—only this time it was easier. Mariposa’s interrogation had left files open. Gates unguarded.

Digital coals still crawled in red, yellow, and orange.

He knew exactly where Corexis had been. He could feel it just like heat from a radiator.

Some of the files had been corrupted. Others, whatever the director must have needed for evidence, had been ruthlessly torn out. João’s mind was searching for ways to make sense of the trauma. Niko found himself working around the wounds, careful not to let his mind fill the voids with his own thoughts and memories.

Corexis encryption keys. Idents and passwords. Network locations. Subnet portals. Where Mariposa had targeted specific information, Niko was taking anything and everything he could find.

He found Maru’s body contract. Corexis was paying him well, but they hadn’t provided his new eyes—those seemed to be something of a recent bribe, though he couldn’t tell from whom. Chat logs. Comms bursts. Calls and messages. João’s contacts streamed across Niko’s overlay.

For a soul drifting in the darkness, Niko felt himself tethered to a lifetime of information. It just wasn’t his life.

He didn’t care.

Niko attacked the other man’s comms bracelet. There were over forty million credits inside. Likely well below Mariposa’s attention, but worthy of Niko’s effort. Without access to his own digital wallet though, there was nowhere to move them to. Disconnected, he couldn’t transfer them, and João’s wireless access had been burned out too.

Damn.

He wished he had something sharp.

Sweat was beading on his skin. The intrusion was heating him up.

Leave it. It’s right there, but too heavy to move.

Niko went back to copying files, pulling firmware, and cracking drivers. He found all kinds of information João had hidden in the mundane corners of his operating system. He was reading incriminating data from João’s time in Hong Kong when the connection cut off, leaving Niko’s mind hanging in the echoes of a missing root kit.

Back in the dark.

Please standby…

Please stand—by…

Attempting to reconnect to—

His vision came back all at once, but the world had shifted. Turned on its side and slid to the left. He could see João’s still-crumpled body on the dirty floor.

Niko had been thrown from the other man’s back. His head hurt. With his temples on fire, the cold floor was soothing, even through the disorientation.

Something told him to get up, but his mind couldn’t process that he was lying on his side.

Small grains of time and debris poured across the right edge of his overlay and spilled over the vertical floor, splitting his vision like an upset hourglass. The motion looked gravitational. Magnetic. He asked himself if he was witnessing the formation of some new planetary surface.

And then his hearing came back.

At first, a soft whistle.

Then louder and louder, until the cold floor against his temples pulsed with the warning klaxon.

His vision shook. Space dust and cosmic grit fell toward the floor in thick rivulets, like a string of meteors striking a world. Debris falling into the planet’s pull, slowly adding to the mass of its crust.

“K—k—kk—kk—”

At first he thought it was static or the sound of the debris bouncing.

“K—KID G— GET UP— PPPP!”

Niko’s vision slowly pulled free of the floor. His head turned, and he found Woojin standing over him.

She was yelling.

The world rolled sideways as he sat up. Nausea flooded his throat. The corners of his mouth soured, and his tongue swam in saliva.

It took everything to swallow.

“GET UP! WE NEED TO GET OUT OF HERE.”

“What about—?”

He wasn’t sure why he was asking. He didn’t care.

Woojin looked back at João’s body on the ground. Tendrils of smoke clung to her clothes. The color reminded him of the bruise on his hand.

“Leave him. We need to go.” She cut the bindings on his wrists and pulled his arm up over her shoulder. “Take a deep breath and hold it.”

He tried to stand, and she did the rest of the work.

Just as they turned toward the open door, a corpse unit appeared from nowhere. Writhing in flames, it didn’t get a chance to do whatever it’d intended. Something exploded near its head, and everyone fell over.

Niko hit the ground like he’d been spatchcocked.

Like he’d fallen from orbit.

Hands grabbed him again and picked him up, only this time they weren’t Woojin’s. He could see her being carried out past the room’s heavy door.

Someone had picked up João too.

In the corridor outside, swirls of thick smoke whirred in the air. Overhead lights were flickering where fragmentation blasts had perforated the ceiling and walls. He could hear gunfire. Every few steps, Niko’s legs buckled, or the floor pitched under him when he stepped on a fallen body.

His head was spinning.

Ahead, soldiers kicked a door in. Someone yelled, They’re here! and Niko heard gunfire.

The gunfire didn’t stop. It just moved to other rooms and mixed with the pounding he’d listened to for hours. Niko hurried forward.

Waves of grass rolled left to right. They brushed his knees and vanished at their crest, then started again.

He tripped and felt a cold floor on his cheek. Then a breeze brushed it. Sweaty loose hair blurred his vision.

He could hear the drum of his heart in his ears, and he lost sight of Woojin.

Niko grinned as he was dragged forward by the man in the maroon coat and flak vest, an MPVO riding low on the bullpup in the soldier’s hands. He wanted to ask what kind of gun the man was carrying, but every time he tried to stop and form words, someone behind him pushed him forward.

Ahead, a pair of soldiers formed out of the thick smoke and ran at him. Niko slowed, but a hand hit the middle of his back again.

Beside him, the soldier’s gun swept up, fired three quick flechette bursts, and ejected a spent sleeve cartridge. The nearest oncomer slumped against the corridor wall.

His friend pulled up short as the back of the bullpup whipped around and slammed into the man’s respirator.

It sent him sprawling.

“Ruki ubral. On moy. Moy!”

Another three-round burst made sure the second man didn’t get up.

Niko stumbled forward, trying not to trip on his legs.

At the bottom of the first stairwell, four scavengers crouched over a fallen corpse unit. Each worked with an electro-pen, carving through tissue grafts and hydraulic lines, unfazed by the gore. Faceless and splatter-marked, the man at the base of the handrail worked feverishly to loosen some of the smaller, more delicate parts of an arm.

Niko watched the woman next to him set her cautery tool aside and bend a cranial plate back off its screws to get at the memory core inside. The lens of her mask flashed a reflection at him through the haze, and he saw the cataphilic tattoos crisscrossing the skin under her sleeves.

Another shove sent Niko up the steps, and he started climbing.

When the door at the top opened, Niko raised his arm to shield his eyes. The sun was low and blinding. Frigid wind swept through his clothes as if they weren’t there. Instantly his teeth chattered. He pulled his arms in tight.

The ground was littered with full-death: old corpse units beside the breathless bodies of security teams. Each had been shot in the back of the head to make sure they didn’t wake up. Teams of scavs were picking them over for parts, and the sight resurfaced old memories for Niko.

Bullet casings, small shards of metal, and chunks of black basalt littered the ground. Off to his left, their AV lay flipped and burning, its steel tethers snapped and mangled. The three-story fall had ended in a roll down the complex escarpment. Everything slowly disappeared beneath a thin layer of gray that smelled of gunpowder and antiseptic. Looking back at the ruin, Tyrian clouds clung to the hollows of its open doorways and broken windows.

Niko threw up.

Stomach acid burned his throat. He tried to swallow and wiped his mouth with his sleeve.

His teeth tasted metallic.

The man holding his arm pointed into the setting light. Niko squinted and found the hunched shape of an Amba on the edge of the complex’s perimeter. The shadow of another gunship was just beside it, while a Taiga-class heavy lander was deploying its cargo off to the right his right.

He watched as João and Woojin were loaded into the back of the first Amba, while he was pushed toward the second.

“Bystro, na bort,” directed the soldier in the maroon overcoat. His accent was thick and Heihean, each syllable pressed into the roof of his mouth.

Niko turned to ask what was happening but found himself staring at the three letters V K A down the length of the soldier’s sleeve.

Dyulen. A red bastard.

“Badshoo m’passa,” said Niko.

The soldier replied, “Skladyvay kosti. Vstrechay rassvet.”

He put a hand on the back of Niko’s shoulder and drove him forward. Once at the hull, Niko was pushed onboard through the assault door on the side of the hull.

He thought he saw the soldier smile, though the hard shell of a military stim mask covered his lower face.

Hands pushed him into a jumpseat in the rear of the transport, threw a loose blanket over his lap, and then pulled down the locking restraints. Niko looked up to find the soldier still standing outside the gunship, his fist pounding on the side of the vibrating hull. The crewman, who’d secured him in his seat, met the soldier briefly and tapped wrists.

Niko watched the soldier’s eyes flicker blue as he made a fist and said something below the sound of the gunship’s thrusters.

Freezing, Niko spent a moment spreading the blanket over the front of his shoulders and tucked his arms underneath. His left hand landed on his right wrist, and pain flared up to his elbow.

Eyes wide, he realized he wasn’t alone.

A gray-haired ghost sat directly across from him, studying him intently.

“Nikolai?” it asked.

Niko looked around.

No one was supposed to know his real name.

As though striking a match, the ghost traced a finger up the inside of its wrist, leaned forward, and blew across its fingertip.

“Kak odin svet rasseivayet gody t’my, tak odin udar sud’by vozvrashchayet tebya mne.”

Niko caught none of it.

The ghost leaned back in its jumpseat.

“So it’s true then,” it said in words he could understand.

Niko felt his brow crease.

“All this time, we thought you were dead.”