The rain in Sector 4 was acidic. It was just water mixed with sulfur that stung but would not kill unless you stood in it for days. Where Mike was going the rain did not just sting. It melted.

  He moved through the shadows of the Processing Plant's back lot and kept low. He was a ghost in the machine and a smudge of darkness moving against the graphite-colored walls. The System had suppressed his bio-luminescence so his eyes were no longer glowing green headlights but dark pools that drank in the faint ambient light.

  He did not head back toward the slums. He did not go to the shanties where he used to sleep or the crawlspace where he kept his meager stash of spare parts. Those places were compromised. Riggs would tear the sector apart looking for him and there would be drones in the air and enforcers kicking down doors within the hour.

  Mike needed a place where Riggs would not go. A place where the enforcers could not go. He headed West toward the Edge.

  As he moved away from the hum of the processors and the flickering neon of the commercial strip the noise of the city began to fade. The rhythmic thrum of the ventilation fans grew distant and the shouting of the street hawkers died out. The architecture changed. The buildings here were older and their foundations sank into the unstable mire of the Heap. Rust was not just a surface texture here. It was structural. Entire warehouses leaned drunkenly against each other as they were welded together by time and corrosion.

  Then came the signs.

  Huge yellow plasteel barriers blocked the street. They were chained together and topped with razor wire. Stenciled across them in fading black paint were the symbols of death.

  WARNING: SECTOR BOUNDARY BIO-HAZARD LEVEL 5 RADIATION: LETHAL NO ENTRY. NO EXIT.

  Beyond the barriers the street lights stopped. The darkness was not black. It was a soupy suffocating gray-green lit by the phosphorescent glow of the fog itself.

  The Dead Zone.

  Mike stopped at the barrier and looked back over his shoulder. Far behind him a siren began to wail near the processing plant. A searchlight swept the sky and cut through the drizzle. They were looking for the escaped prisoner. They were looking for the boy.

  Mike turned back to the barrier. He squeezed through a gap in the rusted chain-link fence as the metal tore at his already ruined trousers. He stepped through.

  The transition was physical. It was like walking into a freezer but the cold was not temperature. It was the feeling of life ending. The air here was thick and tasted of copper pennies and ozone. The fog rolled over the ground in heavy sluggish waves and clung to his ankles.

  Mike waited for the sickness. He knew the stories. Everyone in Sector 4 knew them. You walk into the Dead Zone and within minutes your skin starts to itch. Then your gums bleed. Then you vomit until there is nothing left and you curl up and die while your cells unravel.

  Mike took a breath. He held the heavy toxic air in his lungs. It did not burn. It felt spicy. It tickled the back of his throat like carbonated water.

  Mike let out a long exhale and watched his breath mist in the green glow. He held up his hand. The fog swirled around his fingers and caressed his skin like a lover. The radiation that would have boiled the DNA of a normal human was washing over him and hitting the hardened density of his modified cells and sliding off.

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  It was not that he was immune. He could feel a faint prickly heat on his skin like standing too close to a fire but his body was repairing the damage as fast as it happened. The System was constantly knitting the microscopic tears fueled by the massive intake of biomass he had just consumed.

  He was walking through a microwave and he was warm.

  "Safe," Mike whispered. The word sounded strange in the silence.

  He walked deeper. The Dead Zone was a graveyard of the Old World. Here the Heap was not just trash. It was ruins. The skeletons of ancient skyscrapers poked out of the debris mounds like shattered ribs. Cars that had been crushed into cubes were stacked in pyramids that defied gravity and were covered in glowing moss.

  There were no rats here. No stray dogs. The silence was absolute and broken only by the sound of his own bare feet slapping against the wet melted pavement. This was a place where biology was not welcome. And yet Mike felt more at home here than he ever had in the shop of Jory.

  He walked for twenty minutes and put distance between himself and the fence. The fog grew thicker and reduced visibility to a few meters but Mike did not mind. The fog was his shield. No thermal optic could punch through this much radioactive interference. No drone could fly in this soup without its sensors frying. He was invisible.

  He found a shelter in the hollowed-out carcass of a transport hauler. The vehicle had been stripped of its engine and tires decades ago and left a rusty metal cave half-buried in a pile of rubble. Mike crawled inside. The floor was covered in debris but it was dry.

  He sat down and leaned his back against the cold metal wall. He drew his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around his legs to conserve heat. He was naked except for the tattered remains of his trousers. He was covered in dried blood and sludge. He had no food. No water. No weapon.

  He should have been terrified. But as he looked out at the swirling green mist outside his cave Mike felt a profound and unsettling calm.

  He pulled up his status screen. The blue light hovered in the darkness as the only clean thing in the world.

  Name: Mike Level: 10

  CLASS: VERMIN TAMER [PENDING]

  BIOMETRICS:

  STR: 14

  AGI: 12

  CON: 16

  INT: 12

  WIS: 13

  His Constitution was a fortress. Sixteen. That was nearly double the human average. He was not just tough. He was industrial-grade. Mike looked at the locked class line.

  "Pending," he muttered.

  The System was waiting for something. It had given him the tools but it had not given him a title yet. He looked at his wrist. The scar was invisible in the dark but he could feel the hard ridge of the bone spur sitting just under the skin.

  He flexed his hand.

  Shhhink.

  The spur did not erupt this time. It just shifted and slid forward in its organic sheath ready to strike. It was a hidden blade perfectly concealed within his own anatomy. Mike rested his head back against the metal.

  Out there in Sector 4 they called him a rat. They called him a bottom-feeder. They thought he was trapped in the pit dead or dying. They were wrong. The pit had not been a grave. It had been a cocoon.

  The hunger in his stomach was quiet now satisfied by the offering of the dog. But a different kind of hunger was waking up in his mind. A cold and patient ambition. He needed gear. He needed to understand what the pending evolution meant. He needed to find out what Riggs was really hiding in that container that had blinded the Cutters.

  But for tonight?

  Tonight he would sleep in the poison. The green fog drifted into the opening of the hauler and curled around his toes. It felt heavy and warm like a blanket pulled up to his chin.

  Mike closed his eyes.

  The radiation hummed him to sleep.