It wasn't Kelly's first visit to the Mistmarket. The place was the city's premier spot for illegal bodywork, a real spa for people who wanted to walk out with a few extra joints and zero ‘privacy’ cookies or surveillance tags. Kelly had been using custom parts since she first picked up a physics textbook and realized the factory-issue model was a creative prison.

  Membership cost an extortionate fee, but she preferred the anonymity a paid entry offered; it was cleaner than leaving a trail of bodies. Still, getting through without one was enough to make her wallet whimper.

  It was always about the money, or the labor—usually whichever one someone else was providing. The government turned a blind eye, in every sense of the phrase, probably because the market had slipped them enough cash to invest in a second blind eye for symmetry. Kelly suspected they were just relieved someone had managed to turn a financial sinkhole into a revenue stream, like alchemy but with more paperwork and fewer ethics.

  Police kept their distance from the location, and the few who did patrol or inspect were on a first-name basis with the person in charge—some even had nicknames, which was never a good sign. This arrangement let the place operate under its own set of rules with total impunity, as if it were a sovereign nation whose official language was “don’t worry about it.”

  As long as the cash kept flowing, nobody bothered asking questions. The city’s corruption ran from the penthouse straight down to the gutter, a perfect pyramid scheme of moral bankruptcy—complete with motivational speeches and absolutely no refunds. Kelly had stopped being surprised around the same time she started thinking of corporate security personnel as a renewable resource.

  The second Kelly passed the checkpoint, she remembered exactly why they called it the Mistmarket. The fog clamped down, thick and cloying, pressing against her skintight suit. Her gas mask visor switched to a frequency to cut through the toxic soup. A quick, curious scan of its properties showed just enough oxygen to maybe survive an insult, but the air quality had plummeted into one of the worst pockets in the city. It was a pervasive cocktail of unknown, known, and unidentifiable chemical and biological agents, all irradiated. The almost-mad scientist could have almost sworn she smelled chemicals and iron, even through the mask, a sharp, metallic aftertaste coating the back of her throat. A frantic systems check confirmed her seals were intact and filtering. Whatever she was smelling was either psychosomatic or harmless, which just confirmed the raw, aggressive strength of the atmosphere. She wondered what would happen if a portal creature inhaled it. Probably nothing good.

  Kelly cranked her mask's filtration to its absolute maximum and decided to turn back. She would enter in her truck, just for the added layer of filtration its sealed cabin provided, its internal environmental systems actively scrubbing the lingering Chernobyl-chemical aftertaste from the air.

  This was a market, not a neighborhood. Almost every house and three-floor apartment building had fallen into a state of disrepair. Windows were broken, cinder block walls were scabbed with graffiti, some sections crumbling into the street. The place was claustrophobic, narrow streets forming a labyrinth of alleys almost too small for her truck, fire escapes casting everything in a deep shadow despite the daylight. The few working streetlights flickered weakly, struggling against a thick, shifting smog that colored the world in sickly, iridescent hues of chemical violet and rust-orange. Every piece of metal seemed to sweat a fine, corrosive film, probably due to the acidic pollution eating away at it.

  Even Kelly, who had seen it all before, felt a cold knot in her gut at the conditions. The streets not crammed with stalls or stores were littered with the homeless. Dealers openly peddled drugged air filters to people who had been forced to settle here, offering a chemical escape from the bleakness.

  Some of them eyed her rifle with open greed, while others quickly avoided her gaze when she looked at them. Everyone wore something—gas masks, respirators, second hand tape strapped to their fraying bodysuits, rags tied over and around their already masked faces, as if that made a difference—even the children playing in the toxic puddles.

  As she drove, a mutated and sickly rat the size of a Labrador scrambled across the street, vanishing into an alley. A little further on, she passed a corpse. It was an emaciated, mutated woman, her mask removed—likely stolen, or maybe she just couldn't afford to keep replacing the filters. She had been left to rot in a muddy, chromatic puddle from a clogged and overflowing manhole, the toxic waste rippling slightly around her. Kelly found herself hoping the woman's death had been quick, that she hadn't had to face the slow, lottery-ticket horror of environmental mutation, ending up with a losing hand and unable to afford the price of a single clean breath.

  Kelly had seen everything as variables—experiments—made jokes about them, but she couldn't muster the energy for humor after seeing that.

  Kelly keyed the location of the store she was looking for into her truck’s satnav: a place called Luigi’s Universal Parts. As her truck turned a corner, a local sidled up to her window, holding a handful of canisters designed to plug into a gas mask port. Each was marked with a different symbol—a stylized eye, a broken crown, a bleeding heart. One was just covered in crude, spray-painted tags, like it had lost a fight with a street artist.

  “Filter upgrade? Got the good stuff,” he said, shaking them. “Clarity, Empathy, Cali Crush. And this one,” he added, holding up a cannister covered in crude, spray-painted tags. “This one’s pure Blue. Unfiltered.”

  The voice faded.

  They were filled with different drugs, Kelly knew, each symbol representing a different flavor of oblivion, enough to keep a user in a permanent state of bliss until the addictive high wore off—or at least until they remembered they had responsibilities. The price scrawled on a grimy sign was exorbitant. It appeared the end of the world had caused the price of everything to rise—even drugs.

  Kelly's truck found LUIGI'S UNIVERSAL PARTS pretty quickly, the vehicle's artificial drive avoiding all obstacles in the thick, cloying mist that choked the street. The store itself was a monument to managed decay: a reinforced shanty built from scavenged shipping containers, heavily fortified, a patchwork of scrap metal and armored plating that had clearly cost someone a small fortune. A flickering sign declared the store name to all close enough to see it. The ‘U’ in ‘LUIGI’S’ sputtered with a cheap, blue desperation, advertising refurbished goods at a markup into the surrounding mist; a lighthouse for bargain hunters who had clearly lost all sense of fiscal sanity.

  Its universality was undercut by the visible heavy machine gun emplacement on the roof.

  The battle-intern parked her truck in front of the store, snapped her monomolecular thick wristband to her left wrist and unstrapped her enhanced rifle—just in case—and then walked in.

  "Hey, shitheads!" Kelly shouted, entering rudely.

  The place was a true and well-ventilated wilderness of tools; scavenged parts hung from the ceiling, and flickering glow-panels provided as little light as possible. The store held all manner of things: parts, materials, cheap cybernetics, stolen biomechanics, even a case of swirling broken and scattered pieces of nanotech. Kelly even spotted a glimpse of a few well protected encased schematics buried in dense casing at the back. The really good and fresh stuff was kept out of sight.

  The man behind the counter was chubby, balding, and built like a retired wrestler. At Kelly’s entrance, he slammed a button. A mounted gun rose from behind the counter, an additional launcher attached to the base, filled with dangerous looking pellets, its barrel tracking her face. In his left hand, a modified revolver held a steady aim. Kelly recognized the model.

  “Who the hell do you think you—!” Luigi’s shout died behind his gas mask visor. A flash of recognition replaced the anger. “Oh. It’s you. The crazy nurse?”

  “Yeah, me!” Kelly said, her rifle still held casually at her side. “I have a list of demands!”

  “Demands?” The shopkeeper nearly choked, the revolver trembling as he aimed it between her eyes. “You piece of shit, you stole my entire stock of military-grade stimulants from my Otranto outpost! You cleaned me out!”

  “I did that?” Kelly asked, her head tilting. “When?”

  “Last year! You bought a single injector, you distracted my cousin, and then you came back that night and took everything! You left me an IOU!” Luigi snarled, his knuckles white on the revolver’s grip. “You said you’d pay me back once you got your goddamn internship!”

  She did that? It sounded like something pre-loop Kelly would do. She had never been brave, but she was always stubborn, and coming from nothing had sanded down the edges of her morality. Bending the rules was one thing, but outright scamming an unsavory middleman with a promise to repay was definitely plausible. After all, she did get the life-changing internship.

  She was here to pay him back, honest. He’d be paid in full, even if his entire inventory was sourced from the city’s criminal underbelly. Kelly studied him, trying to pull the memory forward. He seemed vaguely familiar, but the spontaneous, hasty end of the last loop had forced a dump of non-critical, inconsequential data.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  “?Yo?” Kelly stopped in her tracks, trying to pull every ounce of data she had to recall the event.

  “No. I don’t recall. Sorry.”

  Not a thing. Nothing.

  “You know what? Maybe I did. It sounds like something a younger, almost teenage me would do,” Kelly shrugged, her shoulders a picture of nonchalance. “That was so long ago. I was so young and inexperienced back then,” she sighed, “barely experiencing the world. Folly of youth, you know?”

  “Folly of youth?” Luigi repeated, indignant. “That was only a year ago!” His face flushed a deep red before settling into a cold, pale rage. “You don’t remember,” he said, the astonishment hollowing out his voice. “I almost went bust because of you, and you don’t even remember.”

  “Well, shit.” When she realized her actions might have forced him to rebuild from nothing, Kelly instantly regretted the jab. “Look, I’m sorry, okay? It really did help me get my internship. I’m here to pay you back. With interest. And I need something specific.”

  The shopkeeper ground his teeth, a low grind of pure rage. He didn’t seem to want her money. “Get the hell out of my store before I think the wrong thing and turn you into mincemeat.”

  “Did you even check my EQ?” Kelly retorted. She didn't feel like mentioning her functional immortality. “You know I’m past the Threshold, right?”

  “Doesn’t make you bulletproof.” He shrugged, the revolver remaining perfectly steady. “These guns are Elite-grade. That one over there’s got Bonebreaker missiles,” the man replied, nodding toward the mounted gun with an attached launcher. “Once it’s locked, you’re finished. The shatter-round bullets explode on contact with skin and fire smaller, armor-breaching payloads past the entry point. It’ll turn your Expert, Elite, or Thresholder armor to toilet paper. You too.”

  This was a less than ideal start to their business exchange—but he hadn’t started shooting yet, and that was practically a counter-offer.

  Kelly’s eyebrows rose, genuinely impressed by the display of weapons the shopkeeper possessed—a small fortune of hardware, enough to kill the old her a hundred times over and still leave change for a latte. How had he even afforded this? The past, younger, and clearly dumber her had taken a monumental risk scamming this man out of his wares.

  Normally, given their apparent history, the intern would have taken the hint and retreated, found someone easier to deal with. A less explode-y experience. But she had a mission to fulfill.

  She slung her rifle onto her back, a cheap magnet holding it in place, and kept her molecular melee weapon in its dormant wristband form. Appearing unarmed, Kelly searched in her lab coat, ignoring the various low-budget action movies’ worth of weapons Luigi was pointing at her.

  She brought out a bomb. Homemade. Cleaning chemicals these days were far from child-friendly. Someone should really look into that.

  Luigi’s face went the color of old milk. "Is that what I think it is?"

  "Depends," Kelly said, tilting the volatile concoction. "I said I was sorry, and I am, really. But do you think this is a heartfelt apology for my past business practices? Because it's not."

  At the sight of the cylindrical, high-yield plasma charge, Luigi's face lost all color. "You know what this is," Kelly said, wagging the device at the shopkeeper. "If you don't lower your weapons, I'm going to press the on button and turn this whole block into a new sun."

  "But that would kill you too!"

  "Yeah, but you would die first." Kelly raised the bomb, her finger hovering dangerously above the large, bright red 'ON' button she'd so helpfully drawn in white, for greater emphasis. "I'll do it."

  With the right Titles equipped in sequence, It wouldn’t kill her, it would just sting a lot. Like a heat rash.

  "Don't," Luigi threatened, his finger tightening on the trigger.

  "Face it—you're cooked! We're both cold turkey, and I could use some heat therapy!" Her finger rested on the ignition button, Fortress titles flipping like mackerel on ice.

  She stared into Luigi’s eyes, intense.

  The pressure in the room grew, Luigi shaking, until his nerves gave away. "Fuck," he said, dropping his weapon on the counter. "How could you do this? You steal from me, you threaten me in my own shop…" his voice faded between disbelief and exhaustion.

  "Business is business," Kelly argued, putting the plasma bomb back into the folds of her lab coat. "I'm looking for some construction units, scaffolding types, or anything that can hold up a section of a bridge the size of two buildings."

  "Ah, I can't help!" Luigi laughed, happy to be as useless to Kelly as possible. "You couldn't have picked a worse moment! Everyone with sense is packing up shop and heading to safety!"

  "Anything works, it doesn't have to be a construction mech," Kelly replied, glancing at the establishment with disappointment. She didn't have the time or interest in learning how to build one herself, and never had—just to keep a building protected long enough for it to be exploded, the ROI would've been abysmal. And Luigi was looking to be a dead end.

  His wares were notoriously in bad condition, but what made his store special was the fact that regardless of the fact it would be in a state of disrepair, you could find almost anything in there. It just needed a bit of upkeep and refurbishing. "What about the stuff you've got in the back?" Kelly asked.

  "What? Who told you about that? That stuff's not for sale."

  Luigi jumped back, startled, as Kelly closed the gap between the counter and himself in the blink of an eye. She began pulling a collection of gear from her shadow—guns, cybernetic parts, a few pieces that looked suspiciously biomechanical, and even what seemed to be an invader weapon. It was a gold mine of equipment, some of it fully intact, all retrieved from a patch of darkness on the floor. Luigi stared at her shadow as it moved, perfectly normal. He’d heard of shrink boxes, big ugly things, but he’d never seen tech that worked like this.

  “Luigi, my friend,” Kelly cooed sweetly. “We’re friends right? You want to be my new second-best friend?

  “No,” the shopkeeper replied bluntly.

  “Then show me everything.”

  The shopkeeper let out a sigh of disgust. “Fine. All of that stuff you pulled out of your shadow better be jailbroken or biometrics-free, I don’t want my clients getting traced. How'd you do that, anyway?"

  “I’m an immortal magician,” Kelly said, her tone dead serious. “And a baby god of time. Still figuring that part out, to be honest. The warranty pamphlet was terrible.”

  “Fine, keep your secret tech. If you're ever selling, I can hook you up with the auction house,” Luigi grumbled.

  Kelly had never heard of it. According to Luigi, it was above her paygrade, a venue for the higher rollers of New York's underworld. Her shadow-tech looked like advanced, miniaturized shrink-box tech, and since shrink-boxes were rare and new, that meant she had something worth the auction house's time. At her refusal, Luigi shrugged and headed towards a well-hidden, practically invisible doorway in the back. "Follow me."

  The entire wall unfolded and shifted, revealing a hidden room. They entered and the walls sealed behind them. Kelly spotted the same type of elite-grade weaponry in the corners, including another Bonebreaker missile. The room was a treasure trove of relatively rare or valuable items, some broken, some pristine, arranged around a large glass safe.

  One item caught her attention.

  It was a sphere roughly the size of her head, its design signature Deadtech, Jennie’s work, but much larger than the usual pieces.

  She made a beeline to the sphere, encased in an impenetrable glass box. “What does it do?”

  “Nobody really knows,” Luigi admitted. “But we got it to project a temporary hardlight wall. The thing has the tensile strength of composite-reinforced carbon steel; all light-based. Obviously impossible, but that’s what makes relics so special. It’s configurable, but not good for anything but temporary home decor, or maybe a shelter. Not very useful.”

  Kelly was only half-listening. “This is the largest one I’ve ever seen. How do you have this?”

  “Some golden-eyed old woman dropped it off. Wants me to sell it at the Mistmarket’s auction house.”

  Kelly's eyes widened. "Did she have bright golden eyes?"

  Luigi nodded. "Yeah—tall, young, long silver-white hair, obsessed with collecting vintage pre-Collapse ceramics?”

  “Yes," Kelly replied, her excitement growing.

  “That’s the same lady, then. She arrived in the market about two months ago, dealing with the auction house. Turned a few stores upside down with her crazy gear.” Kelly had never heard of the event. To her disappointment, the woman had apparently caused a stir by using a different relic to temporarily turn an entire street’s worth of sewage into glittering, non-toxic pink foam. “I figured she was just one of the auction house VIPs trying to do business without the police, Han Cyber, Crystal Nanotech, or Vaughn trying to muscle her for proprietary or illegal tech. We sometimes get those types, see what I mean? But I always thought it was odd she didn't walk around with security like the rest of them, figured it was because of her crazy high EQ, but even that wouldn't protect her from the upper echelon."

  Years ago, the city had a proper market for would-be inventors. People like her, who didn't have the resources for self-sufficiency but refused to sign their lives over to a corp. These days, with corruption so deeply embedded in the city's wiring, the only way to start without some corporate suit taking ninety percent of your pie was to go through the underworld.

  Kelly nodded, silent, her focus locked entirely on the shopkeeper. This rapturous attention, this complete lack of her usual irreverence, clearly disturbed Luigi. It made him talk faster, figuring his words actually mattered.

  “Anyway, she scavenged a whole hoard of relics. God knows how. Some from the coups, some from the war with the Tüin, a few pieces of Deadtech—she even had a relic from the Augment Wars, the lucky bitch. No offense. She kept asking me to sell it all through the auction house. Don't know why she picked me. Made me a fortune. So we met often.”

  “Did she have a belt that doubled as a shotgun?” Kelly asked. “Colored nails, like mixed ink?”

  “Uh… yeah.” Luigi made a strange face. “How do you know that?”

  Because Kelly knew Jennie like the back of her hand. “Please. Do go on.”

  “Anyway, she sold a lot of relics to the auction house. Helped a few families, too. She robbed the Charlestons, though. God knows why—they're a nice family. I figured she was just passing through, so I charged her as much as I could.” Luigi paused, almost hesitant. “The golden-eyed lady… she’s very strange, isn’t she?”

  Kelly nodded knowingly.

  “I heard a rumor she ended up getting ambushed by a few of the dumber local gangs.” Luigi shuddered. “I heard they were scrubbing blood and body parts off the walls for weeks after that. Some of them mutated before they could properly die. Dumb fucks. Who tries to rob an Elite?”

  That was Jellybean, alright. Always with that chaotic sense of morality. A puppy that read every holy book, decided it loved the message, but hated the devil, and God, and every private company that ever printed a copy. Then tried to enslave half the world because of it.

  “And then? What happened next?”

  “What happened? You’ll never guess! The government caught wind of the goldmine and sent the National Guard to tax her for all the relics. They raided the auction house, claimed a right to confiscate everything—but really, it was because nobody had paid them off, the crooks. I heard rumors Vaughn Industries broke her out, but nothing after that. Who knows? Maybe she’s sunbathing on Jupiter right now?”

  This confirmed it. Vaughn was the most direct route to Jennie. The government capturing her meant they had a file. The fact she escaped meant that file was useless. Nobody knew who she really was.

  That was good.