Zeno and Lola had agreed to meet at the edge of Polza that evening, but for now, the stifling day was in full swing, and Zeno had business with an old acquaintance, Silent Silas, to restock his gear and gather intel. Silas holed up on the fringe of Kaimo, in an old hangar among other sarcophagi of long-buried vehicles. Scrapped rides got hauled there for parts, but Silas meticulously preserved many of them, giving them a second life. "Machines, unlike sacks of bones, don't betray you." That was Silas's philosophy.
Zeno's motorcycle roared to a stop outside the hangar. He tossed his helmet onto the handlebars with practiced carelessness and strode to the door, that was locked, of course. Cursing under his breath, he trudged toward the rear entrance, a trek that required navigating nearly the entire perimeter of the massive structure. Halfway there, he spotted Alice, Silas's partner. The petite, dark-haired doc was hauling a teetering tower of crates.
"Need a hand?" Zeno sidled up with exaggerated gallantry.
Alice jumped, startled, and yelped:
"Holy-!"
The tower wobbled. Zeno caught the top two crates before they toppled.
"Voss!" Alice's upbringing and education barred her from outright swearing, but Zeno could hear the profanity simmering in her glare. "What the hell are you doing, sneaking up on me?!"
"Wasn't sneaking. I'm a walking demolition crew." Zeno adjusted his grip on the crates. "Silas around?"
Alice nodded, her frown deepening. "Locked in the workshop since dawn. Been tweaking that damn bike of his for a week straight."
Despite pushing forty, her East Asian genes kept her looking like she'd just graduated med school, still slim, quick, with a voice like wind chimes. Only her eyes betrayed her age, their sharpness framed by frown lines earned from decades of patching up Kaimo's desperate.
"What about the med-van?" Zeno jerked his chin toward the hangar's shadowy depths. "Thought he was upgrading it."
"Gave it to Polza's evacuation crew last week." Alice sighed, the weight of that sacrifice in her voice.
Zeno just grunted. He knew Silas's crusade all too well. Silas was the ex-Helios Heights flight school golden boy who'd traded privilege for poverty after seeing what lurked beyond the district's polished gates. Morality and equality, his new religion. Zeno thought it was bullshit. Survival was the only gospel that mattered in Neo-Sparta.
"Clinic still standing?"
"Barely," her tone turned leaden.
"Good."
He didn't press. Last time, she'd confessed the health board was revoking her Anpassen license for selling below corporate pricing. One of the last places where the desperate could score meds without selling organs.
"You didn't just come for a social call, Voss."
They'd reached the rear entrance. Alice backed through it, balancing her crates.
"You know me," Zeno dumped his load onto a grease-stained workbench with a metallic clang. "Got some questions for Silas."
"Of course you do," Alice wiped her hands on her coveralls. "Never just a hello."
"Want me to 'donate' some credits to your little hospital?" he flashed a razor grin.
WHACK. The plastic crate lid struck his shoulder hard enough to sting.
"You asshole!" Her voice cracked - the closest she'd let herself get to real profanity. "Not everything's a fucking transaction!"
Zeno raised his arms in mock surrender. "Message received, doc."
"We worry about you."
"Sure. Especially that grumpy bastard in there."
Alice snorted and tossed the lid aside. "You're both impossible."
"Fine, fine." Zeno rolled his eyes. "I'll 'visit' more often."
"Promises, promises." She turned toward the inner door, voice dripping skepticism. "We'll be skeletons by then."
Alice jerked her chin toward the workshop door before heading back outside for more crates. The door clanged like a gunshot when Zeno shoved it open, but Silas didn't flinch. He'd stopped hearing anything the day Kór Biosystems' internal security "interviewed" him about smuggling test subjects out of their labs. The acid bath they'd given him had miraculously only burned out his vocal cords and eardrums. Funny how corporate justice worked.
Zeno hammered the steel wall with his fist. Vibrations were Silas's doorbell now.
Instead of a greeting, Silas flipped him off with grease-blackened fingers.
"Fuck you too," Zeno mouthed with exaggerated clarity.
Silas signed back: [Why are you here?]
"Missed your sunny personality."
Another middle finger.
"Exactly why I missed you," Zeno leaned against the workbench. "Alice is pissed."
[Always pissed.]
"I'd be pissed too if I was married to you."
A minute of silence followed. Silas wrestled with a servo drive. Zeno eyeballed the carcasses of half-dissected vehicles as their guts spilling wires and hydraulic lines, the chemical stink of solvents, tools arranged in some system only Silas understood, and oil rags strewn like battle flags.
"Listen," Zeno finally rapped his knuckles on the bench to restart the conversation. "What do you know about the Pit?"
Silas signed one-handed: [Never been.]
"Yeah, who'd let a deaf fucker in anyway? Heard anything?" Zeno emphasized "heard," grinning.
[Heard they'll kick your ass.]
"Sharp ears. Seriously—intel?"
[Why ask?]
"Planning a sightseeing trip."
[Order a coffin first.]
"I'll leave you all my shit in the will. Who's Rourke Slade?"
[Fight ring. Invite only.]
"What if I've got a guide?"
[Who?]
"Got someone."
[Name.]
"Lola Kane."
Silas's hands froze mid-sign. Then: [You're an idiot.]
"Breaking news."
[She's a target. Dangerous.]
"Give me something useful, old man."
[Why not just turn her in?]
"I need her."
[The fuck for?]
"Great ass."
[Bullshit. Real reason.]
"She might be tied to the Cleansings or something worse."
Silas exhaled through his nose, shaking his head.
[Your funeral. Don't piss off Stoneface.] His hands slashed the air. [He's cozy with the Glass Church. Feeds them his enemies for experiments.]
"The zealots take people from the Pit?"
[Only losers who piss Slade off.]
"Got anything worth trading?"
[You're an asshole.] He finger-spelled the last word for emphasis.
"Who, me?" Zeno attempted an innocent blink. Failed. "Fine, fine. Let me rephrase: Dearest friend, might you possess a worthy offering to appease the mighty Rourke 'Stoneface' Slade for diplomatic negotiations?"
Silas didn't laugh. His head dropped back over the workbench, white-streaked hair obscuring his face as he jerked a thumb toward the ammunition locker that was stocked with contraband he smuggled in himself.
Zeno rummaged through the crates until a box of rounds caught his eye. He palmed one, rolling it between his fingers. Lightweight, despite the caliber. Flicking the nearby lamp on/off to get Silas's attention, he held it up.
"The hell's this?"
[Nano-shredders.]
"Edgy name. What's the party trick?"
[Bots eat flesh and metal.]
"Fuck me." Zeno whistled. "Where'd you score these?"
[Glass Church raided a Kór warehouse. Paid me to transport.]
"You're chumming with zealots now?" Zeno tsked. "Standards've slipped, old man."
[I chum with your ass too.]
"Fair."
Zeno slid the round back into its foam slot. "How much?"
[House special.]
"Shove your charity. Price."
[25k per box.]
Zeno's eyebrow twitched.
Silas switched to his wrist-comm, typing out: "One box free if you tell me why you're hellbent on the Pit. They'll carve you up and sell your augs before sunset."
"Lyra."
[Lyra's dead.]
"What if she's not?"
[Nobody survives that long. Not even lab rats.]
Zeno's gaze snagged on the acid scars webbing Silas's neck. They both knew corporate mercy firsthand.
"What've I got to lose?"
Silas didn't answer, already elbow-deep in wiring. Zeno grabbed the box, pausing only to clap a hand on Silas's shoulder before leaving. No goodbye to Alice. Not that he'd bother hunting her down anyways.
The bike roared to life. He didn't look back.
The suffocating day bled into a suffocating night. Lola waited for Zeno leaning against the hood of her car, parked in the barren clay wasteland separating Kaimo from Lower Polza. As he approached, he noted the faint glow of her emitter nodes bleeding through her shirt in the gathering dark.
"Doesn't that keep you up at night?" he called out, grinning.
"What?" she snapped, scowling.
"You're like a goddamn nightlight. All… shiny."
Lola exhaled through her nose, arching a single brow like he was a particularly slow child, and refused to dignify that with a response.
"I prefer sleeping in total darkness myself, if you know what I mean," Zeno mused, undeterred.
"You rehearse that line all day?"
"C'mon, Sparkles. Don't be a buzzkill."
"Must've fried your brain harder than I thought," she muttered, slinging a pack over her shoulder and trudging toward the shantytown's jagged silhouette, a skyline of corrugated metal and splintered wood.
"Not worried about leaving your ride here?" Zeno fell into step beside her. He'd loved his bike too much to risk it, stashing it under Kaimo's walls after paying the Whistler gang a hundred credits to babysit it.
"Got a bloodtooth hanging from the rearview," Lola said, nodding toward the car. "Doubt any slum rat's stupid enough to cross Slade over a joyride."
"You've got a bloodtooth?" Zeno blinked. Those engraved fang tokens were whispered about to give free passage through the Pit, immunity in Polza's underworld. "How?"
"Did him a favor once." She cut him off before he could smirk. "And if you even think about making a bed joke…"
"Wasn't gonna." He totally was.
The shantytown loomed ahead, a tumor of shacks stacked like rotten teeth. This was where the Glassed came to die with their bodies crackling with crystalline growths, the air thick with the cloying stench of honey-sweet decay and scorched plastic. Lola marched forward, jaw set, ignoring the symphony of grinding silica and failing implants.
Zeno jerked to a halt when a skeletal hand clawed at his pant leg. A woman spilled from a wreckage pile, her chest a garden of jagged bio-silicate shards.
"Spare a tear, pretty man," she rasped, her voice glitching like a broken speaker.
"Sorry, sweetheart," Zeno said, peeling her fingers off with clinical disinterest. "Charity's not in my skill set."
Lola stopped a few meters ahead. The woman's voice crackled again like static:
"I can pay you back. I'll take you to the stars and back."
"Think I'll pass," Zeno replied, fighting to keep the disgust off his face.
Lola turned away and kept walking.
"Maybe some credits, then?" The Glassed woman wasn't giving up.
Zeno yanked his leg free, the fabric of his pants slipping from her stiffened fingers. "Not today."
He caught up to Lola and noticed how tightly her lips were pressed together, her fingers digging into the strap of her backpack.
"You don't come down here often?"
"Oh, like you're a regular?" she shot back.
"Nah. I prefer to enjoy luxury while I still can."
They pushed through the last of the tin-and-scrap slums, finally reaching what passed for the "civilized" part of Polza, if you could call it that. Here, the structures were sturdier, built from concrete and steel, though no less grim. The architecture resembled honeycombs, except instead of honey, these hives stored decay and despair. In a feeble attempt to brighten the gray-yellow wasteland, locals had scavenged neon signs and banners from dumps, now flickering erratically above the streets. A few of the more prosperous shops even boasted custom-made signs.
At the corner of the block, that was bathed in the usual crimson glow of lanterns, women in scandalously little clothing loitered, some already busy in the shadowed alleys. The selection was vast: every shape, color, and modification imaginable. Some had wings, cat ears, tails; skin pale as snow or dark as midnight. Lola slipped past them without a glance, while Zeno had to dodge a few eager hands looking to lighten the load of his e-wallet.
The neon-lit alley seemed to pulse with offers as working girls called after them:
"Looking for company, big man?"
"I'll give you a night you won't forget…"
"Sweetheart, you can do whatever you want with me…"
Zeno gently but firmly pushed away the grasping hands, using Lola as a human shield as he muttered, "Easy there, ladies."
Lola snorted. "What, you've never seen streetwalkers before?"
"Seen plenty," Zeno raked his fingers through his long hair, sweeping it back. "But like I said, I prefer my luxuries."
"And what luxuries would those be?" Lola arched an eyebrow.
"The kind like you."
She barked a laugh, then turned to meet his gaze with mocking eyes. "I'm out of your price range, big guy," she parroted the earlier proposition in a perfect imitation of the working girls' cadence.
Something about the weary ache bleeding through her sarcasm needled at Zeno unexpectedly. The feeling was inconvenient. Unwelcome. It had no place in his calculations.
"I know," he replied simply, the words tasting strangely flat.
As they ventured deeper into Polza, the stench of waste, scorched metal, and decay grew thicker. The alleys narrowed, the lighting dimmed, and the stares turned sharper.
"Well, well," a nasal voice sneered from the shadows above. "Don't often see shiny WangCorp toys walkin' around here."
Zeno's head snapped up, locking onto a kid with a black-market implant that had turned his arm into a pneumo-powered hook. The alley, usually teeming in this part of Polza, was suddenly, suspiciously empty. Lola's emitters hummed to life.
Two more figures emerged from around the corner, their limbs crude patchworks of Kór casings and Veira combat droid parts. Four others closed in from behind.
"What, this the new fashion?" Zeno grinned, nodding at their jury-rigged prosthetics. "Or just bad life choices?"
"We got ourselves a comedian," the first guy cackled from his perch on the metal staircase. "Take him apart first. We'll play with the girl after."
"Rude!" Zeno's ocular implant had already tagged every thermal signature, every twitch of movement. "How 'bout you walk away instead?"
"Shut your mouth 'fore we rearrange your teeth!" snarled a hulking brute with an old police bot's tactical interface bolted over half his face.
"Don't fight, and we'll just strip your augs nice and quick," the first guy added, shifting on the stairs.
Lola sighed, grabbed the railing, and unleashed a surge. Electricity spiderwebbed up the metal frame, frying the talkative bastard mid-snicker. He crumpled onto the grating. Not dead, just twitching. A calculated hit: enough juice to drop him, not enough to kill.
The next second, the remaining thugs surged forward. Lola didn't hesitate and slammed a pulse into a nearby puddle. Two more attackers convulsed and dropped, their conductive prosthetics turning against them.
Zeno's reflex boosters kicked in the nanosecond his threat assessment completed. He snatched two thrown blades out of the air. One clattered to the ground, the other he whipped back toward the scrawny kid who'd launched them. The hilt cracked the boy between the eyes, non-lethal, but definitely concussive, sending him face-first into the mud.
Lola fired another surge at the bot-masked bruiser lumbering toward her and missed. Her emitters needed a recharge cycle. She dodged sideways, but another attacker hooked her from behind, his metal-clawed arm locking around her throat.
Zeno's reinforced knuckles shattered one thug's jaw. He flipped the second over his shoulder, using the body as a battering ram to take down a third. Spinning, his implant flagged the new threat - a sawed-off shotgun swinging his way. He grabbed a trash bin and hurled it, augmented strength turning the dumpster into a projectile. The shooter went down hard under the impact. Zeno's wrist implant sparked. Overload.
Lola finally electrocuted her captor into releasing her, then emphatically kneed him in the groin for good measure. The bot-masked brute pivoted toward Zeno while the mercenary was busy with the shotgunner.
"Behind you!" Lola shouted.
Zeno spun, but too late. The steel rebar was already arcing toward his skull. Without thinking, Lola lunged between them, arm raised to block.
"Goddammit, don't you!" Zeno grabbed her shoulder, but the rebar connected with a sickening crack.
Not bone. The reinforced casing of her implant shattered instead, one of its glowing nodes exploding into fragments. Lola cried out as the damaged emitter misfired, discharging raw current back into her own conductive wiring.
"Fuck!" She dropped to one knee, blue electricity spiderwebbing up her arm as her systems forced a reboot.
"You idiot!" Zeno snarled, voice raw with fury.
He seized the thug and slammed him into the wall hard enough to crater the concrete. The brute slumped, unconscious. Zeno's own implants stuttered from the strain, muscles twitching erratically as safety protocols shut them down to cool.
He whirled back to Lola, gripping her wrist to inspect the damage. She flinched at the contact.
"Broken?"
"Functional," she snapped, yanking her arm free and hiding it behind her back. "Nanobots'll patch it in a few hours."
Disgust flickered across Zeno's face.
"I didn't need your help."
"Oh, forgive me, Your Highness, for reacting faster than I could consider your precious fucking pride!" Lola's voice dripped venom, though her jaw clenched against the pain. The nanobots hadn't yet released their analgesic agents, and her arm burned like hell.
They stood in heavy silence for a moment, catching their breath. Lola pulled an energy drink from her backpack, chugging it to recharge her engine. Zeno waited for his implants to cool down, manually rebooting his optical enhancer, but only for lines of corrupted code to keep flickering across his vision.
"Goddamn it," he muttered, stomping after Lola as she strode away from the scene. He made a quick check of the downed thugs to make sure aall still breathing, just thoroughly knocked out, before catching up. They walked without speaking until they reached a rust-eaten entrance to the underground levels. Zeno stopped her before she could step inside.
"So you've got emergency repair systems built into you too?"
Lola refused to meet his eyes. She knocked on the door instead.
Zeno pressed on. "Listen, you're a goddamn flying fortress with all that Wang tech crammed into you. You really think it's smart to throw yourself into shit like that?"
"What's this?" She finally turned, lip curled. "Concern? Or are you already pricing me out to the highest bidder?"
"Both," Zeno said darkly.
Lola didn't get a chance to reply. The door screeched open with a sound like nails on metal.