--- in progress"You ever get the feeling something's about to catch fire, but that thing is you?"
The line buzzed incessantly a few times before Niko picked up.
"Rhett?" his voice was tight with static, like he'd just wrestled his comm out of a drawer. "I don't think I've ever talked to you this early in the day... is that an improvement or am I on the other side of a disaster?
"It's time-sensitive. I'm on my way up."
"Up?"
"To your place."
A pause. "Are you drunk?"
"Not yet."
The line cut off before Niko could ask anything else.
Rhett made his way to the apartment faster than he ever had before. The lobby was empty, every pod available and glistening with Sovereign gold and black trim. He leaned against the interior of the ascent pod, arms folded, trying not to chew his lip raw as it lifted him upwards through the building. The pod was a little older, probably third-gen. It creaked in a familiar way - enough to feel nostalgic, not unlike poverty with character. Floor twenty-three blinked into view, and with a final lurch, the pod doors split open.
Rhett stepped off the ascent pod and into Niko's place like he'd just exited an orbital drop. No knock, no warning. Just the automatic hiss of pressure equalizing as the pod dock disengaged and spat him into the living space. His jacket, still half-zipped, looked like it had been slept in or lost a fistfight with a dryer. His eyes were wild - not red, not tired, just wide, like something was chewing on his thoughts from the inside out.
Niko blinked up from his console. "...Did you die and get reanimated by your debt?"
Rhett walked straight past him, heading for the tiny side alcove that passed for a kitchen. He found a flask, sniffed it, recoiled, and poured something stronger from a bottle labeled in a language neither of them spoke.
"I think I killed someone," he muttered.
Niko's spine straightened like he'd been remote-shocked. "You what?"
Rhett turned, sloshing the drink, eyes unfocused. "Not on purpose. Not like you're thinking. He just... keeled over. Heart or brain or soul finally gave out, I dunno. Wasn't even my fault. I was just-"
"Who?"
"Thorne."
Niko froze. "Please tell me you don't mean the Thorne. Not the nearly-black Dyn level exec with enough spending authority to clearcut a hemisphere and replace it with marble. Not the guy who's been on the Sovereign Watchlist of Untouchables since I was in primary."
Rhett made a finger-gun gesture and shot the air beside his head. "That's the one."
Niko sat down. Hard. "You can't just say things like that and then drink something flammable."
"Why not? It's not like it's not true."
"You need help."
"Great. Get me a lawyer, a coffin, and a haircut. In that order."
The door hissed again.
Tessa stepped in, chrome arm catching the warm downlights. Her jacket was rolled to the elbows, her hair braided tight against the sides with a cascade of copper down her back. She clocked the tension instantly.
"Did someone die or something?"
Rhett pointed. "Niko, tell her."
Niko shook his head. "What is she doing here?!"
Rhett looked entirely unbothered. "Tess is a fantastic counterpart to my shenanigans. Who better to round out corporate espionage?"
Niko was not impressed. "You invited your cybernetic hookup to my house?!"
Rhett sighed, took another drink, and looked at Tessa like she was the only person who might possibly understand. "So remember that executive lounge job I do? The one with the fragile egos and stronger cocktails? One of them dropped dead in front of me mid-call. Thorne."
Her eyebrows lifted. "Wait, Thorne as in - ?"
"Yes. That Thorne."
She whistled low. "And you're still breathing because...?"
"Because I didn't stick around to be blamed. And because I may have... panicked. Answered a call meant for him. Got through it. Made a few... let's call them bold decisions. Transferred a few million."
Niko paled. Tessa didn't.
Rhett leaned forward now, animated, alive in a way he hadn't been since the last time he won a barfight against a guy twice his size. "And that's not the worst part. The ID bracelet? I swapped it. When the med techs came, they scanned me as the one who died. So to them, Rhett Korran's a corpse. And Thorne? He just went for a walk."
"You're an idiot," Niko muttered.
"A rich idiot," Rhett corrected, grinning now. "And an untraceable one."
Tessa tilted her head, half-impressed, half-alarmed. "So what's next? You gonna keep wearing the bracelet and hope no one from the board notices the new guy looks like he just crawled out of a betting den?"
"Funny you say that." Rhett gestured to himself. "Turns out, high-end execs are expected to not look like someone's liquor-soaked side quest. So I figured I need upgrades. Physical, digital, social."
Niko gestured broadly. "You need a new life, Rhett. Not just better optics. Executives don't just have friends. They have enemies. Thorne's probably had more knives aimed at his back than you've had hot meals."
Rhett shrugged. "Luckily I'm hard to stab."
Tessa folded her arms. "You have, what, eight thousand in augment tech? Total?"
"Give or take a few shady firmware patches."
"You'll need triple that just to pass as a mid-tier dyn exec in public. Let alone in a boardroom. You can't be the guy who flinches every time his elbow port glitches."
Rhett's voice took on a dramatic tone, mock-heroic. "Then upgrade me, doc. Make me whole."
Niko looked at Tessa. "This is going to end SO badly. You two are giving me ulcers I don't even have the healthcare for."
Rhett flopped onto the edge of the couch, elbows on his knees, glass dangling from his fingers. "Relax. The hard part's over. I already did the crime. Now we're in the fun part of the story."
"The fun part is prison!" Niko exclaimed. "The fun part is corporate inquiry. The fun part is whoever Thorne owed favors to coming here and peeling your spine out through your throat."
Tessa leaned against the edge of the counter, watching Rhett with a look that landed somewhere between clinical and entertained. "You said you answered a call," she prompted. "You got into his accounts."
"More than got into them," Rhett said. "I surfed them. Smooth. Graceful. Like a swan made of anxiety."
"How much?" she asked.
"Twenty-five million." Rhett tried to say it casually and failed. The number still felt like a misprint every time the idea rolled around his skull.
Niko barked out a laugh that sounded more like a choke. "Dyns?"
"Gold Dyns," Rhett said.
The silence that followed had weight.
Niko swallowed. "You realize that is multiple lifetimes of not starving, right?"
Tessa's eyes narrowed, the chrome in her iris ring catching the downlight. "You still have the credential token from the call?"
Rhett patted the inside pocket of his jacket. "I downloaded a session echo before I bailed. Figured it might be useful."
"Figured it might be useful," Niko repeated, almost mockingly. "You mean you panicked and hit every button you could reach."
"I have a results-oriented mindset," Rhett countered. "Look at me now. Upright. Loaded. Tragically handsome."
Tessa pushed off the counter and moved toward Niko's console. "Let me see it."
Niko made a helpless noise. "You are going to hack an Untouchable's profile in my apartment?"
She turned his chair with one finger against the backrest, her grip casual and unignorable. "Do you want to help him not die, or do you want to lecture me about crime proximity law?"
He lifted his hands in surrender, sliding aside. "Fine. Fine. If anyone asks, I was asleep and having very lawful dreams."
Rhett fished out a slim, translucent chip from his jacket. The edges glowed faint blue, a faint trace of Thorne's last authenticated presence.
"Here," he said. "Don't lick it. Pretty sure that counts as fraud in three districts."
Tessa took it delicately, like it might bite. She slotted it into the reader dock. The console hummed, holo-tiles blooming into the air above the desk. Streams of numbers and glyphs flicked through the views: accounts, schedules, private logs, encrypted memos.
Rhett watched Thorne's life unfold in light. Every line of data was some decision he couldn't imagine making, some room he would, and could, never have walked into under his own name.
Tessa hummed under her breath. "He had clearance for the Crown Array."
Niko answered in turn. "Who just… has that on their profile?"
"The kind of man whose death gets people assassinated for just being nearby," Tessa replied. Her fingers danced through menus, stripping away security layers with ease that Rhett tried hard not to find arousing. "I'm not going to touch anything financial. That leaves schedule, comm logs, and personal tags."
"Personal tags?" Rhett asked.
"Bookmarks for his life," she said. "Things he thought mattered enough to label."
Niko leaned closer as a grid of color-coded blocks populated the display. Meetings, holo-briefings, transit windows, medical scans, something labeled "Board Sync," something else labeled "LC Protocol." Most entries had descriptions and location data.
Some blocks were different. Blank rectangles, slate gray. No labels, no overall metadata. Just a timestamp, a duration, and an icon.
Rhett squinted. "What is that?"
The icon was a crescent shape split horizontally down the middle. It looked like a moon with a hairline fracture.
Niko frowned. "Those blocks are scrubbed. No location, no call links, no partners."
"They recur every third or fourth night," Tessa said quietly. "Two to four hours at a time."
Rhett sat back. "Privacy hours?"
"Executives already have privacy hours," Niko muttered. "They build them into the contracts so nobody sues when they vanish to cheat on their spouses."
"These aren't registered," Tessa said. "They sit on top of the policy. Someone manually injected these into his calendar. That crescent icon isn't corporate."
Rhett licked his lips. His mouth tasted like metal and too-strong liquor. "So where was he going?"
"That is the first question," Tessa said. "The second is whether you need to go there too."
Niko tore his eyes from the floating blocks and looked back at Rhett. "You shouldn't. You have no reason to mimic his… whatever this is. You should lie low, clean up, learn everything you can about how he moves and talks before anyone finds out that he died mid-martini."
Rhett stared at the ghost blocks. Each one was a hole in Thorne's perfect life - time he had pulled out of the machine and set on fire somewhere no one could see.
The thought pulsed behind his eyes: He got away from it.
"What if this is the one part they will actually notice?" Rhett said. "He disappears like clockwork and then suddenly he stops? Feels like the kind of thing someone obsessive would track."
"Executives are not like pets," Niko said. "No one is watching their bedtime routine."
"Someone is always watching everything," Tessa said absently. She zoomed in on one of the ghost blocks, cycling through the buried data. "But he is right about patterns. You don't change a man's routine that abruptly without questions."
Rhett shifted his grip on the glass, fingers tightening. "So I have to go?"
Niko turned on him. "No. Absolutely not. There is a difference between 'we should mimic his spending habits so no flags go up' and 'we should walk face-first into whatever hole he crawled into to scream into a pillow.'"
Rhett met his eyes. "You didn't see him die."
That hung in the room longer than he expected.
Niko looked away first. "You are not responsible for his heart exploding."
"Maybe not," Rhett said. "But I am responsible for picking up where it left off. I took his call. I took his money. I walked out wearing his life. That comes with… obligations."
Tessa gave him a long, unreadable look. "When did you start believing in obligations?"
"About forty minutes ago when twenty-five million Dyns tried to suffocate me," Rhett said. "I'm not used to having any weight to my footsteps. No impact, no idea, you know? This is so much gravity... everything feels like it is going to fall in my direction. I don't know what the rules are anymore."
"Well you certainly don't start by gambling with them," Niko said.
Rhett laughed, short and bitter. "You realize that in the span of one afternoon I went from a man who gets yelled at for misaligning drink coasters, to an executive with enough funds to bankroll a minor war, right? Do you have any idea what that would feel like? Should feel like?"
"Terrifying," Niko said.
"Alive," Rhett said. "Terrifying and alive."
He set the glass down on the low table before his hands could betray how badly they shook. "I want to feel that again. Not the dying in front of me part. The part where I pivoted on a razor blade and somehow landed on my feet. The part where I was able to say words and the world moved accordingly. I don't want to spend my first night as Thorne memorizing acronyms."
Niko rubbed his temples. "You need to survive your first month as Thorne, not just your first night."
Tessa folded her cybernetic arm across her chest, metal fingers tapping lightly against bared skin. "Maybe those things are not mutually exclusive."
Niko stared at her. "Please do not say what I think you are about to say."
She expanded the ghost blocks into a sequence. The crescent icon repeated, always attached to the same routing origin: a cluster of anonymized nodes in District Five. No explicit naming, no corporate tags, just a dense knot of encrypted transit tunnels.
"You know what sits under those nodes?" Tessa said quietly.
Niko's jaw clenched. "A lot of things sit under District Five. None of them are good."
Rhett glanced between them. "Somebody want to invite the idiot in the room into the revelation circle?"
Tessa exhaled through her nose. "Those are Dreamspawn relays."
The word hit differently when she said it out loud. Rhett had heard it tossed around in bars and back rooms, always with the same mix of awe and ridicule.
"You. Are. Kidding." Niko said as he stood up. "You have to be. Out of all of the insane ideas tossed about tonight, there's zero chance that wasn't said in jest. Right? RIGHT? You are NOT taking him to a dive den!"
"I am not taking him," Tessa said. "Thorne already went. Repeatedly. Those blocks line up with known Dream Dive cluster windows. The crescent? That is the mark. Some of the hosts use it as a sigil."
Rhett blinked. "I thought that was just a rumor?"
"Most good illegal things are," Tessa said. "Doesn't mean they're not real underneath, though."
Niko threw his hands up. "You want him to hook himself into a bootleg SomaSync fork and let strangers crawl around inside his head on the same day he hijacked an executive's life? How many overlapping crises do you consider optimal, exactly?"
Rhett leaned back, feeling his heartbeat in his throat. "Wait. So Thorne did recreational Dream Dives?"
"He did something in those windows," Tessa said. "And those somatic relays do not spin up themselves. They cost electricity, bribes, hardware. They stay alive because the whales feed them."
"Whales," Niko said faintly. "Untouchable execs counting their money in their sleep."
Rhett stared at the crescent icons again.Thorne, stretched out in some velvet pod while his brain went elsewhere.Thorne, unreachable, no cameras, no record, no entourage.Thorne, at his most alone.
"I thought Dream Dives were for broke kids and burnout artists," Rhett said. "Not… him."
"Do you really think addiction cares about net worth?" Tessa asked.
Niko sat back down slowly, the fight bleeding out of his shoulders. "Even if this is true, he could have been doing private therapy, not gambling. There are licensed lucid clinics."
"These nodes are not licensed," Tessa said. "Their energy sources are consistent with bounce signatures. Back-alley stuff. You don't sanitize corporate trauma in a place like that. You risk it."
There it was again. The pull in Rhett's chest, that gravitational tug toward whatever hole Thorne had dug for himself. A secret routine, tucked into the bones of his schedule like rot.
"You said Dream Dives are dangerous," Rhett said. "So, are we talking Synthetic spectrals? Memory bleed? Identity slips?"
"Those things are the list from bored journalists who have never sat in a pod," Tessa said. "The real risk is you see too much. Or you enjoy it too much."
"That sounds like a perfect match for my life choices," Rhett said.
Niko pointed a finger at him. "No. Absolutely not. You are not auditioning to be a cautionary tale."
"I already got cast," Rhett said mildly.
Tessa turned from the console, leaning her hip against the desk so she faced him fully. "If you go there, you are not going as Rhett Korran. You are going as Thorne. Those hosts might know him. The regulars might know him. Someone may have expectations."
Rhett swallowed. "Good. That gives me something to work with. What was he like there?"
"That is what we do not know," she said. "We only see the shadow of his visits, not what he did inside."
Niko looked from one to the other, appalled. "You are both saying this like it is inevitable."
Rhett met his gaze. "You said it yourself. Executives have enemies. Whoever wanted him dead will look at his habits. If he disappears from his usual… dives… that might say more than anything I do or do not say in a boardroom."
"That is not how probability works," Niko muttered.
"It is, however, how paranoia works," Rhett said, "and paranoia runs this city."
Tessa considered him for a beat, measuring something invisible. "You can't go alone."
Niko let out an incredulous noise. "You can't go at all!"
Rhett's mouth curled into a crooked, reckless sort of grin he did not entirely feel. "You think I'm going to plug my untrained brain into a rogue IR lattice with no spotter? I'm stupid, not suicidal."
"That is definitely a lie," Niko said. "I have personally watched you try to outrun a riot drone with a barstool as your shield."
"And I learned from that," Rhett said. "Lesson being: bring a better shield."
Tessa folded her arms again. "I know one of the hosts in Five. She owes me… something adjacent to a favor. I can get us into a mid-tier session. No cheap rigs, no street hacks."
Niko stared at her like she had betrayed physics. "Us?"
"You think I'm letting him walk in there monitored only by his good intentions?" she said. "You're welcome to join, Niko, by the way. I hear shared trauma is great for bonding."
"I am not going into a psychic wrestling match with rich strangers," Niko said. "My brain is fragile and full of important trivia."
Rhett caught his eye. "You can stay topside, though. Watch my body. Pull the plug if I start screaming anything that sounds like a stock ticker."
"That is not how it works," Niko muttered, but the resistance had softened into worry rather than refusal.
Tessa turned back to the console and killed the holo-feed. Thorne's schedule winked out, leaving the apartment much smaller and somewhat duller without the weight of its blue glow.
"You need a shower, a shirt that doesn't smell like despair, and at least one augment calibration before we go anywhere," she said. "Two for good measure. Under no circumstances can you show up at a Dream Dive node looking like a lounge attendant who stole his boss's laundry."
Rhett looked down at himself. The jacket. The scuffed boots. The city-worn fatigue in every seam of his clothes.
"Give me an hour," he said. "Maybe two. I specialize in looking like a man who belongs in trouble."
Niko dropped his head into his hands. "I hate that I can already hear the news headline."
Tessa grabbed the chip from the reader and flicked it back to Rhett. "Welcome to the deep end, Thorne."
He caught it, feeling the faint residual warmth of the data against his palm. It felt heavier than it should. He closed his fingers around it.
"Where is this node?" he asked.
Tessa's smile was small and sharp. "Lower Five. Under the transit spine. They call it the Crescent Well."
Rhett pictured the broken moon icon again. The ghost hours. The hidden life of a man who had died reaching for his drink.
"Of course they do," he said softly.
The city stretched around them in layers of concrete and light, humming with a million routines. Somewhere beneath it, there was a room where Thorne had gone to be someone else, or no one at all.
Rhett stood up, pocketed the chip, and headed for the tiny alcove that passed for a washroom.
"I guess I should see what he was running from," he muttered.
Niko's voice followed him down the short hall, thin with dread and affection. "Please try not to find it."