Doc Chop’s tower didn’t fit the rest of Low Town. It grew up from the old industrial fringe, muscle and bone over the city’s rotten cartilage, half the floors welded from prefab stock and the rest in some fractal of raw metal, modular scaffolding, and light. Simon Hartfield stood in the piss rain at the base, craning his neck until the smeared neon stung his eyes. Two clicks high and probably as deep, the entire building vibrated with the aftershocks of whatever surgical perversions had gone on upstairs.

  His neural jack clicked into the socket behind his left ear—ice-cold, almost erotic—and the world doubled, tripled, quadrupled with overlays. Security mesh. Patrol drone loops. Alarm nodes. Heat sigs and maglocks. In the periphery, his own risk rating, climbing slowly but steadily, a little red gauge with a needle that flexed whenever his heart rate spiked.

  Simon blinked through the static, tuned it. Got rid of everything except the vital: camera nets, drone routes, and alarm grids. Loot tags glimmered gold and all but pointed to the access points, data caches, and medical cabinets. The kind of hardware people would pay dearly for, by the gram. That was a facade. The target was higher up, nestled in the empty spaces between Chop’s labs and the ‘Core’. Elara’s signal was weak and pointed to the darkness.

  He squatted under the runoff from an air recycler, fingered the quickburn patches in his pocket, and reran the infiltration scenario. Two entry points, both garbage.

  First, the rooftop: an old maintenance catwalk, patched with vent mesh and dry rot, monitored by two guard drones on staggered cycles. Accessed by a honeycomb of rusted ladders and service walkways, most of which the city had condemned in the last flood, then never bothered to demolish. Upside: short trip to the upper floors. Downside: nowhere to hide if the drones get a scent.

  Second, the deep tunnels: old stormwater drains, half-converted into chemical runoff channels, spliced with newer security tubes. These were laced with automated turrets, the kind with triple redundancy in their targeting routines, and the tunnels themselves were only accessible during the low tide in the city’s pulse. There’d be at least three biohazard nodes, maybe more if Chop had gotten creative.

  Simon’s HUD flickered the probabilities in blue and orange. Rooftop: 22% chance of detection before the second floor. Tunnel: 57% chance of detection, 91% chance of never being found if you were to die down there. He watched the numbers jitter, ticked the rooftop path with a mental tap, and watched a neon breadcrumb trail spiral up the side of the building.

  He grinned, sudden and sharp. Always the way up, never the way down.

  ***

  He went up the spine of the building at a dead run, shoes sticking to every steel plate, every ragged edge of welded grating. The first drone cut past at a distance of three meters—close enough that he could see the twin barrels of its face paint the alley below with searchlight-white. Simon waited for it to crest the next cycle, then vaulted onto the lowest catwalk, landing in a crouch. His servos barely whined. He’d tuned them for stealth, but the cheap parts sometimes snagged.

  His HUD mapped the drone’s patrol: 40 seconds per lap, 10 seconds of overlap between it and the upper drone, and a three-second blind spot at the midpoint. He triggered the custom stealth script—Elara’s old code, refined by grief and insomnia—and felt it worm into the drone’s routines. Not a full hack, just enough to turn its motion sensor into white noise for fifteen seconds.

  Simon sprinted, the catwalk flexing under his weight, hands finding every handhold as if they’d rehearsed it a million times. At the junction, a welded hatch stood between him and the vent shaft. He thumbed a micro-EMP patch, slapped it onto the lock, and counted off the delay: one, two, bang—the lock arced blue, then died.

  He shouldered through, tucking into the tight tunnel just as the drone’s light skated overhead, missing him by inches. The inside of the vent was so cold his breath came out in fractals. He activated the biohazard filter in his mask. He pushed forward on elbows and knees, feeling the grit and machine oil soak into his coat.

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  Three meters ahead, his HUD flagged a steam vent for an unknown biohazard strain. Probably designed for crowd control during riots or pest abatement. Simon adjusted the filter on the HUD to maximum, then examined the vent’s pressure readout overlaid in toxic green. He’d have to time it. A sixty-second cycle, thirty seconds of clear, then thirty of flesh-melting fog. He counted down, then wriggled past in a blur, barely missing the blast. Some of it still caught his sleeve—he felt it sizzle before the suit sealed it off.

  He reached the end of the shaft, popped another EMP on the grating, and slid out into the upper maintenance corridor. The hallway was flooded in emergency lighting; half the bulbs were fried, so the shadows slashed in impossible angles across the floor. Sensors dotted every ceiling tile. Simon let the HUD parse them—motion, IR, old-school laser tripwires. He’d mapped the security package last night, in the dead space between jobs. The weak point was always the human element.

  Or, in this case, Chop’s definition of “human.”

  The first guard drone rounded the corner on rubberized treads, its chassis shaped like a cockroach but with the face of a child’s toy: huge eyes, a tiny mouth, and a blank expression. It scanned for three-point heat signatures—two legs and a head—since most people who came up here were either patients or fresh specimens. Simon stilled, flattened himself against the floor, and waited. The drone’s sensor cone swept over him, hesitated, then moved on. It had a vulnerability in the optical stack; Elara had told him once, “The dev who coded these hated crawling things. He made ‘em legally blind to anything that moved below the knee.”

  He stifled a bitter laugh, rolled up behind the bot, and tagged it with a short-range logic spike. The drone’s servos spasmed, then stopped. He dragged it into a utility alcove, shut the hatch behind it, and moved on.

  The corridor opened up to a vertical shaft, a cold steel artery that ran the height of the tower. Elevators lined one side, but they were all blacked out and dead. The only way up was the ladders or the thin ledges that skirted the inner wall like the teeth of a saw. Simon debated it—ladders or ledges. Ladders had more sensor tags, but the ledges were coated in some hydrophobic polymer that made them slick as hell. He watched his own probability gauge flicker, then chose the ladder.

  As he climbed, the air changed—less chemical, more clinical. He passed floors marked only by stenciled numbers and cryptic icons. 17: a scalpel. 18: a needle. 19: a brain in a jar, stylized into a corporate sigil. At 21, his HUD flagged a new risk: three heat signatures, stationary, one moving in slow circuits around the others.

  He stopped, steadied his breath, and peeked over the hatch rim. The room was a cold lab, all white tile and fogged glass. Two corpses on the slab, not yet unwrapped from their body bags, and a tech prepping a neutral saw, back turned to the door.

  Simon watched, waiting for the tech to look up. When he did, Simon hit him with a pulse from the stealth script—just enough to make the tech’s eyes water and his hands go numb. The man sat down confused, rubbing his eyes. Simon crossed the room and palmed the core access key from the guy’s belt, then slipped out without leaving a trace.

  He found the next shaft, followed the HUD’s trace to the very top. There, a panel in the ceiling, braced with reinforced steel, guarding the entry to the ‘Core’. Simon checked the time. Less than five minutes since he started.

  The lock was biometric. Of course, it was. Chop loved the irony of locking away his pet horrors behind the bodies of the people he’d wrecked. Simon unwrapped a single-use skinprint sheet, pressed it onto the panel, and watched as the lock cycled open, confused and angry.

  He pulled himself up and emerged into the beating heart of the tower. The Core was not what he expected.

  It was empty—no surgical tables, no racks of wet hardware, just a perfect sphere of glass at the center of a white void. Everything inside was lit with a false sun, so bright it cast a second shadow under Simon’s feet.

  At the center of the sphere, he could see the outline of a chair and a figure in it. Wires everywhere, braided together into a crude crown. A body, but not Elara’s. This was a man, tall and emaciated, stripped to the bone in places. The crown pulsed in sync with the lights, feeding data in fat cables into the tower’s veins.

  Simon circled the sphere, watching the overlays. No cameras, no guards. No sign of Elara—just the echo of her data signature, buried deep in the feeds.

  He pressed his palm to the glass. The HUD flickered: connection established. He saw the digital afterimage of Elara’s ghost racing around the edges of the sphere, her code signature riding the current like a whisper.

  He grinned. “Always the hard way,” he said, and popped the final relay.

  All around him, the overlays collapsed, the security grid flaring out in a last gasp. In the distance, alarms screamed. But in the here and now, Simon was in.

  He stared at the thing in the chair. The man’s eyes were open, rolling, half-dead. He spoke, and the sound was like static through a wet speaker.

  “Welcome,” said Doc Chop. “You’re right on time.”

  Simon’s risk gauge flickered, then broke.