Trace quickly finished moving everything into the warehouse while Ko headed over to her clinic. He was only going to be a few minutes behind her, at which point they would carry Hannah inside and secure the woman to a bed.

  She needed to be talked with more seriously than either had anticipated, and it needed to happen now. The woman had been moments away from talking herself into a cyberpsychosis fit. Maybe it wouldn’t have been too bad, and she would have been able to recover, but it was never good to count on those sorts of things.

  The odds were never in their favor once a person descended into madness. Even if by some miracle they did manage to recover, and assuming that their experience wasn’t terrible enough for them to commit suicide at some point afterward, succumbing a second time was highly likely. Unless the original root cause was addressed, which typically meant removing the offending piece of cyberware.

  That was hardly an option in Hannah’s case with how much work had been forced on her. That was why they had given her a limited form of the system. Nothing they did would mean anything though, if the woman herself didn’t use it, or even want the help.

  He could somewhat understand not liking cyberware, especially when it was installed against your will. Everyone had their preferences, even on things like this, which he considered normal and part of everyday life. The problem was she had gotten other people involved with her life. If she wanted to die, then she needed to have the decency to wait until she was discharged and could do it in private. Not some place where it would involve Ko, Sevorah, him, and anyone else she might hurt in the process.

  By the time Trace had finished moving everything inside a few minutes later, he had worked himself into an angry frenzy that almost had him seeing red.

  Thankfully, the cold wind blowing in his face from the open window of his truck, which still needed to be replaced, helped calm him somewhat.

  “You look angry,” Ko said when he stomped inside the building roughly twenty minutes after she had left his warehouse.

  “That’s because I am,” He snapped back, before taking a deep calming breath. “Sorry, I’ve been thinking about Hannah, and it’s just been riling me up. If she wants to give up and get herself killed, that’s fine. I just think she should have the decency to do it away from us and people in general.”

  She frowned at him. “That’s not very nice, Trace. It’s one of those things you’re not actually supposed to say aloud, no matter how true it is.”

  “Stupid mender rules,” He muttered.

  “I can hear you two. You know that, right?” A weak voice called out from a room behind Ko.

  “You’re a pain that Ko and Sevorah don’t need,” Trace shouted back angrily. “We came out to save your sorry hide, and this is the way you’ve thanked us?”

  Ko groaned, throwing her hands into the air as she spun around and stalked toward the room that she had put Hannah in earlier.

  The older woman was on a bed and thoroughly tied down with thick, heavily padded straps.

  Trace admired the bruise that was beginning to make an appearance across her jaw for a moment. “Is there a reason you stopped using the GHOST System? I don’t care if you like cyberware or not. As a mender, you should be smart enough to know you shouldn’t abruptly stop a medication or treatment.”

  Hannah ground her teeth, glaring at him, before turning away. “Do you even know why I didn’t want cyberware?”

  “No, and as I already said, I don’t care. It’s your personal choice. Unfortunately, though the fact of the matter is that the choice was taken from you. It happens to all of us. It’s part of life. Get over it and grow up, or don’t and find a ditch and die away from everyone else. Just don’t involve us in your pity party. You think everything has gone the way we wanted in our lives?” His voice gradually grew louder until he was shouting at the end.

  Ko placed a hand on his shoulder, calming him. “I know you don’t particularly like me, Hannah, but to disregard what I asked you to do, especially something that you could tell was helping…” She shook her head. “I at least expected you to respect me as a mender, if not as a person.”

  “It’s not that,” Hannah whispered after a moment. “I do respect you, Devko. I know how much you must have struggled to save me, especially with that ancient equipment.” She licked her lips, keeping her head turned to the side, unwilling to meet their gazes. “I was doing the exercises, and they were helping me.

  “Then I had a thought. Was it really as bad as I remembered? That was all it took, that one thought. It began to eat at me until I gave in and stopped. Once I did, I don’t know, starting up again just seemed like so much work. Like it was this obstacle I couldn’t overcome.”

  Trace groaned softly and slumped weakly into a nearby chair. This was Ko’s specialty, not his. Everything he had said thus far had been from a place of anger, not knowledge. While he had now used the mental option on the menu a couple of times, it still wasn’t what he would consider extensive use. Ko had used it far more than him.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  This was a subject she was far more qualified to talk about than he was.

  “Do you even know why we gave you that portion of the GHOST System?” Ko asked her after a few moments, which she used to regain control.

  Finally, Hannah looked at them. “What do you mean? There is more to it than this?”

  “Oh, so much more,” Ko replied softly. “My clinic is meant to be a beta-test for that part of it. One that will vanish after a week, maybe two, we haven’t been told yet. But the actual full product is so impressive and useful. It would have changed the world if it had ever been released when it was first developed.”

  Hannah’s brows furrowed. “When was that? What happened?”

  “It was created one-hundred and thirty years ago, by Meredith and Deckard Koarden. The attack on his life is what prevented it from ever being released.” Trace told her with a small grin.

  She frowned. “How did you get a copy, then?”

  “Well, that is a story-”

  ***

  It was several hours later that Trace had a quiet moment to speak with Ko, which he chose to use by continuing to help her place everything where she wanted. For the moment at least Hannah had decided to join Ko’s clinic as a receptionist and part-time assistant. Further duties would depend on her performance and how she held up over time.

  “So, when do I get my new car?” Ko asked cheekily, as they shifted her fridge into position on the fourth floor.

  She had originally been planning to take up living on the third floor. However, a desire to not have a fridge full of cyberware on the floor above her head had led to a slight change of plans. As a result, she had decided that she wanted to place her inventory fridge and workshop area on the third floor. There would be a lot of open space for eventual expansion or better tools, but there was nothing wrong with that.

  “Oh, your car, huh?” He smirked back. “I don’t know. It’s a little large. That little toy of Sevorah’s downstairs seems like it might be more your speed and size. Can you even handle something larger?”

  Her mouth dropped open in shock, and she pointed at him while he began laughing at her.

  “Oh, you,” She stamped her foot. “Fine, whatever. What did you all find out there at the bunker, anyway? Was there anything useful?”

  “A lot of good stuff, actually. Some seeds, which are hopefully in still useable condition, a few grow lights, a water system, and some old filters of dubious quality, mainly because of their age. The big score is the SUVs and everything we got from the corpos.” He took a moment to bring up pages he had scanned for Monroe. “There were also a bunch of old note pages in a desk that were falling apart. I had to scan them just to get all the information off of them. Interestingly enough, the pages and their remains were one of the few items that had actually been taken when we returned.”

  Ko sighed and massaged her temples. “And you didn’t think that was a clue of some sort? That maybe it meant those pages were important in some way?”

  He shook his head. “No, not really. I’ve never been able to understand how corpo-drones think. They took the bodies of their fallen agents but left their weapons, outfits, packs, and everything I had stripped from them earlier. They didn’t even try to gather any of that up or retrieve the SUVs.”

  “And I repeat, they left all of that, but decided to grab some crumbling papers, which would have required some care on their part to do?” She made sure to say everything slowly, as though for a child.

  Finally, he saw her point. “Okay, fine, I get what you’re saying. I do. It’s just why? As far as I can tell, the bunker belonged to some nobody from years and years ago. Whoever they were, I doubt they were hiding secrets that the corporations desperately wanted. Even if they were, you really expect me to believe that we just so happened to open the one bunker out there that they were looking for?” He asked doubtfully.

  “Well, when you put it like that…” She brushed some dust from her nose and led him to the sixth floor.

  As soon as the elevator had been fixed, Sevorah had begun moving her excess equipment over to Ko’s building. Most of it was meant for Devko’s clinic eventually, not all of it, but a large portion of it had been bought by Sevorah, with that purpose in mind. However, now she had another mentee that she needed to start preparing for.

  Behind her, Trace was struggling to read through the pages he had scanned. His eyes had done a remarkable job of getting all the available details and information. In this case, the problem lay with him. He occasionally wrote notes by hand but always had his NetConnect transcribe them at the same time as his handwriting was terrible.

  Whoever had written these notes seemed to have decent handwriting, but they had written it in code. It was done in some weird looping and connected format that almost made sense but ultimately didn’t.

  He thought he recognized a few letters, but that sense only made the disparity worse. Normally, he would have run an image search and been done with it however, with the pages in control of a corporation, he couldn’t risk it.

  He even knew which one in this case, when he overwrote the owner information on the SUVs he had learned it. Whether that was an oversight on their part or simply carelessness, he didn’t know. Either way, he now knew at least one of the corporations that had a ‘secret’ lab operating outside of the city and roughly the area where it might even be located.

  Having your little raider goons alert you whenever something interesting happened only worked if everyone actually died afterward. Now, using their arrival time, he could roughly extrapolate their general location based on travel time and speed. It wasn’t perfect, but it also didn’t need to be.

  He and Monroe already had a few guesses from previous trips. If the data backed it up, well, there you had it. Then it was just a simple matter of finding the right buyer or just putting it on the net for everyone to see. Sometimes the best revenge wasn’t infiltrating a place yourself but simply revealing a place’s location to the general public.

  And well, some corporations didn’t even try to hide the fact that all they wanted was to dissect people, smash their bits together in new combinations, and see what worked.

  He could be wrong, but a corporation named ‘Gene Bellua’ certainly seemed like one that would want to stay hidden for that exact reason.

  “Hey Ko, have you ever come across any code, written in a sort of weird flowing, looping handwriting style?”

  Her nose scrunched up cutely for a moment as she thought. “Are you talking about cursive?”

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