The morning did not break; it simply loaded.
The heavy smog layer above Sector 404 filtered the sunlight into a bruised, purple haze. Inside the container, the air was thick with the smell of iron.
Kai woke to a sound that stopped his heart.
Gag. Rattle. Hiss.
It wasn't a cough anymore. It was the sound of a pump failing to cycle.
"Rin!"
Kai scrambled from his spot on the floor, kicking the empty plate of synthetic rat aside. He was at her cot in a single stride.
Rin was thrashing. Her back arched off the mattress, her hands clawing at her throat. But she wasn't choking on food. She was choking on her own nervous system.
The port at the base of her skull—the standard-issue "Gen-4 Interface" that the government mandated for all citizens at birth—was glowing with an angry, pulsating red light. The skin around the metal socket was blackened and necrotic, veins bulging like dark spiderwebs spreading down her neck.
"Kai..." She gasped, her eyes rolling back. "It's... loud. The noise..."
She wasn't seeing the room. She was seeing the data stream. For a normal person, the System provided a calming overlay of news feeds and weather reports. But for a Reject, the firewall was down. She was receiving raw, unfiltered data from every device in the sector. The screams of microwave emitters, the roar of passing hover-cars, the binary chatter of a million transaction logs—it was all flooding directly into her brainstem.
Hardware Rejection Syndrome: Stage 4.
Kai grabbed a rag and soaked it in the bucket of gray water. He pressed it against the burning metal of her port.
Hisss.
Steam rose from the wet cloth. The port was running at critical temperature.
"Look at me," Kai commanded, his voice shaking despite his best effort to remain the stoic calculator. "Rin, focus on my voice. Filter the noise. Just my voice. Variable A: Kai. Ignore everything else."
Rin seized, her body stiffening. A trickle of dark, oily fluid leaked from her nose. It wasn't just blood; it was mixed with neural fluid.
"I can't..." she whimpered. "The Blue Screen... it's coming."
Kai froze.
The "Blue Screen." It was slum slang for brain death. When the rejection became total, the consciousness couldn't handle the conflict between flesh and silicon. The brain simply shut down. A fatal system error.
Kai grabbed her shoulders. He felt helpless. He had killed scrap-beasts, scavenged in toxic rivers, and survived gang wars. But he couldn't fight this. He couldn't punch a fever. He couldn't stab a corrupted driver.
"No," Kai snarled. "System, pause. Pause!"
He looked around the room, desperate. He needed ice. He needed suppressors. He needed a miracle.
And then, his vision glitched.
It happened again. The text prompt from the night before.
>> WARNING: CRITICAL SYSTEM FAILURE DETECTED IN PROXIMITY.>> TARGET: BIOLOGICAL UNIT (RIN).>> DIAGNOSIS: OS INCOMPATIBILITY.>> SOLUTION: PATCH REQUIRED.
Kai blinked, rubbing his eyes. The text hovered over Rin's thrashing body, glowing in a jagged, green font that looked like it had been carved into the air with a knife.
He wasn't imagining it. The Shard in the floorboard... it was connecting to him. Or he was connecting to it.
"A patch?" Kai whispered.
He reached out, his hand hovering over Rin's fevered forehead.
>> ACTION AVAILABLE: SIPHON EXCESS DATA.>> RISK: HIGH.>> EXECUTE? (Y/N)
Kai didn't understand the mechanics. He didn't know how a Null—a boy with no hardware—could "siphon" data. But he saw Rin's eyes turning a milky white. She was drowning in the noise.
"Execute," Kai said. "Yes. Do it."
He placed his palm on her forehead.
ZOOM.
The sensation was like grabbing a live wire.
Kai screamed silently as a torrent of white-hot agony shot up his arm. It wasn't electricity; it was information. He felt the chaos inside Rin's head—the screaming ads, the garbled weather reports, the crushing weight of the System trying to force itself into a brain that refused it.
It hit Kai's mind like a sledgehammer. He had no port to process it. He had no buffer.
>> ALERT: BUFFER OVERFLOW.>> PAIN RECEPTORS: MAXIMIZED.>> REROUTING TO ENTROPY SUTRA...
The text flashed rapidly.
Suddenly, the pain in Kai's arm changed. It shifted from a burning heat to a freezing cold. The chaotic noise from Rin didn't stop, but it was... consumed.
Kai felt a dark, hungry void open up in the center of his chest. It drank the data. It ate the noise.
For ten seconds, the world dissolved into static.
Then, silence.
Kai collapsed backward, hitting the metal floor hard. He gasped for air, clutching his chest. His heart was hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs.
On the cot, Rin went limp.
"Rin?" Kai crawled toward her, terror gripping his throat.
She took a deep, shuddering breath. Then another.
Her eyes opened. They were no longer rolled back. The gray cloudiness was still there, but the panic was gone.
"Kai?" she whispered. Her voice was weak, but the mechanical rattle in her chest had quieted. " The noise... it stopped."
She touched the back of her neck. "The port... it's cold."
Kai looked at his own hand. Smoke was rising from his fingertips. His skin wasn't burned, but it felt numb, as if he had held it in snow for an hour.
He looked at the air above Rin. The green text was gone.
He had done something impossible. He had acted as a heat sink for her fever. He had manually debugged her, using his own body as the ground wire.
"I..." Kai stammered. "I cooled it down."
Rin looked at him, her eyes wide. "You're glowing, Kai."
"What?"
"Your eyes. For a second... they looked like static."
Kai squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. When he opened them, he felt normal. Or, as normal as he could feel.
"It's the stress," Kai said, dismissing it. He couldn't tell her. Not yet. She would think he was becoming a monster. "I just used a... cooling technique. An old trick."
He stood up, his legs trembling. The drain on his stamina was immense. He felt like he had run a marathon in the last thirty seconds.
But Rin was breathing. The immediate crisis was over.
He checked his watch. 11:45 AM.
The relief vanished instantly, replaced by a cold dread.
The debt collector. Iron-Skin.
Rin was stable, but she wasn't cured. The fever would return. The "Siphon" was a temporary fix, a band-aid on a bullet wound. He still needed the suppressors. He still needed the money.
And he had fifteen minutes before the gang arrived to collect a debt he couldn't pay.
Kai walked to the window. Down on the street, the sludge puddles were rippling. Heavy footsteps were approaching.
"Rin," Kai said, his voice hardening into steel. "Stay in bed. Don't make a sound."
"Kai, where are you going?" Panic edged into her voice again.
Kai turned to the door. He picked up his iron pipe. It felt light in his hand now. Too light.
"To negotiate," Kai said.
He unlocked the door and stepped out into the smog.
Iron-Skin wasn't known for his patience. And Kai wasn't known for his mercy.
The time for calculation was over. It was time for a crash.