Lola left her car at the entrance to the Iron Bazaar as any farther on wheels would've drawn too much attention, and the narrow, junk-clogged alleys wouldn't fit anything wider than a motorcycle. She tugged her hood deeper over her face and strode briskly toward Phoenix Wei's shop.
Phoenix was the name he'd given himself. Lola would've called him a plucked peacock, but ever since her involvement in the Glassing hit the net, she wasn't in a position to be picky about suppliers. So she endured the old man's greasy smirks and sleazy remarks. These days, scoring clean Anpassen under her own name was impossible, leaving her at the mercy of back-alley dealers when most of them had no intention to have anything to do with her. At least Wei took her money without fake moralizing.
She passed a row of eateries and storefronts adorned with artificial blossoms, where you could buy almost-authentic spicy noodles with almost-real peppers about or less legal wares: cracked Wang and Kór implants, a hit of Smoke. Paper lanterns dangled above the doors, symbols of good fortune. Lola snorted. Luck's a lying bastard.
Pushing open the door to Wei's pharmacy, nestled in the heart of the Rust Exchange, she stepped into a dim room reeking of synthetic spices. A few feeble lights over the counter, showcasing relic-food replicas, barely lit the cramped space. Lola flicked the bell on the counter, miracle Wei had scavenged from some antique reseller, and after a moment, his balding crown emerged from a floor hatch behind the counter. Then came the rest of him, draped in an atlas robe that shimmered in nauseating neon hues.
"Well, well," he drawled. "If it isn't my plague-ridden beauty!"
"Shut it, Wei!" Lola slammed the stolen chip case onto the counter. The display rattled from the impact. "Neuro-accelerator with Kór Biosystems' latest cooling tech. That'll cost you three… No, four doses of clean Anpassen."
"Greedy little thing!" Wei giggled and reached into the safe hidden behind a faded landscape painting – long-dead meadows printed on crumbling plastic. "If only you'd brought me Wang tech just once, I'd hand over ten capsules easy. But this?" He tapped the chip case with his e-cigarette. "This'll fry itself inside a month."
"Bullshit! Kór accelerators go for sixty grand now. I'm basically giving it away." Lola leaned over the counter, trying to peek into the safe.
Wei pulled out four capsules filled with ruby-red liquid. He held three out to Lola and kept the fourth clenched in his fist.
"Four, Wei." Lola snapped her fingers, and tiny arcs of electricity coiled between them – dangerously close to the chip.
"Three." Wei's grin widened, greasier than ever.
"Then maybe I'll take this to Kane or Auntie Liu."
Wei burst out laughing. "Go ahead. Kane'll sell you out to your 'beloved' the second you step outside. And Liu? That hag's Anpassen is cut with enough junk to make you cry. Face it, babe, nobody wants your trouble. Take the deal while it's warm."
Lola snorted and let the charge fizzle out. Bastard was right. She could try the Crystal Saint, but his prices were always more than she could stomach. With a snarl, she tossed Wei the chip and snatched the three vials from his open palm.
"Choke on it, you miser."
She stormed out past display cases filled with torn-open instant noodle packets and empty drug capsules.
"By the way, never checked that chip for trackers." She kicked the door open and spat over her shoulder: "Hope the rust eats you alive!"
Lola pulled her hood low again and pushed through the Bazaar's predawn crowds. Even at this hour, the place pulsed with buyers and dealers. Shoulders bumped, some muttered apologies, others cursed her out through clouds of acrid smoke.
She'd nearly reached the district's massive gates when a glass-wasted kid blocked her path. His right hand was a grotesque fusion of flesh and implant, covered in bio-silicate clusters that spiraled through muscle and skin like malignant coral, the telltale Glassing from a bad batch of first-gen Anpassen.
"Got any Tear?" he mumbled, clutching Lola's jacket with his good hand.
Tear, that street name for a cocktail of first-gen Anpassen and synthetic frost, a drug they called Moroz for its numbing bite.
"No. Get lost."
"Just a little."
Lola swallowed. Disgust and guilt flooded her veins.
"I've got nothing. Go see Auntie Liu. Maybe she'll toss you some for odd jobs."
The kid wheezed, then coughed. Lola stepped back just in time to avoid the spray of silicate crystals and blackened blood from his lungs. She yanked her arm free, shoved past the coughing glass-waste, and bolted for the gates. Tires screeched as she peeled away.
Every time she saw one of the Glassed, the self-loathing dragged her under. They got the name from the way implants fused with flesh, sprouting jagged bio-silicate clusters that looked like glass, or cursed crystal.
When she'd sold the Anpassen prototype formula to the Blood Shadows cartel, she'd told herself it was noble: Medicine for the masses. Instead, she'd birthed the Glassware Plague. Cheap Anpassen flooded the slums. At first, it worked with no more rejections. Then the flaw surfaced. Implants didn't just bond with tissue; they mutated it. Crystallization. Slow. Agonizing. The shards grew inward, outward, until movement meant agony, until breathing meant bleeding. Until death.
Lost in her dark thoughts and gnawing guilt, Lola barely registered the moment she reached the outskirts of Helios Heights, where the grime and desperation of Kaimo and the Bazaar gave way to the sterile, corporate-approved streets for "honest workers" who still clocked in at factories and offices.
Most jobs had long been swallowed by machines and AI, leaving the majority with no way to earn except basic ration credits, petty theft, or the occasional barter of goods and services. The luckier ones scraped by mining rare earth metals in the tunnels. But Helios Heights? That was for the elite, the ones with cutting-edge augmentations or the right connections, tasked with overseeing the machines that had replaced them.
Between Helios Heights and Kaimo's rotting industrial corpse lay a buffer zone: a thin layer of residential blocks built atop the ruins of a once-thriving manufacturing district. Old factories and plants had been converted into lofts and underground dens, housing those who couldn't yet afford the sanitized streets of the Heights but had clawed their way out of Kaimo's filth.
Lola parked outside a former optical implant factory. The lower floors had been repurposed into repair shops for minor augment tweaks, tiny apartments, and a handful of kitchens serving what was left of "authentic" pre-collapse Asian cuisine. She climbed to the top floor, just beneath the roof, pressed her palm to the scanner, and yanked the door open after the welcoming chime.
"Hey there, handsome!" she chirped, tossing her jacket onto the entryway bench and kicking off her boots.
"Morning." Val lifted bloodshot eyes from her monitor. Her teal dreads were pinned up with a long calligraphy brush, and a fresh canvas on the corner easel still smelled of solvent, oil, and paint.
"Pull another all-nighter?" Lola fished the three Anpassen vials from her pocket. "Here. These should last you a week."
A faint smile flickered across Val's face. Lola bent over backwards to keep her supplied by selling intel and goods for pennies just to scrape together Val's doses. Her rejection levels were off the charts, far beyond what was required for stable implant functioning. Damn fragile cerebral vessels threatened to burst any second, and the cruel irony? Only a neural stabilizer kept those same vessels intact while her body fought to reject it.
"Thanks, partner." Val carefully slid the vials into her desk drawer.
"What's new?" Lola yanked open the fridge and grabbed a high-glucose energy drink, which was barely enough to keep her adaptive fusion reactor and the implants it powered along from cannibalizing her muscles. According to her interface, she had a month left if she kept chugging this swill, then she'd need a new portion of the Wang fuel crystals.
"Same old. Had to dig through Kór and Veyra's servers today, tweak some logs. Share access with folks who got hit hardest." Val rubbed her temples. "Those bastards synchronized their subscription hikes. Miss a payment? They brick your hardware now. Council rats fast-tracked the tariff bill like the cowards they are."
Lola drained the can. The tremors in her hands faded. Her reactor was top-tier, so she didn't need wireless charging stations, no corporate leash. Most weren't so lucky. For the masses, movement was a subscription service: Wang, Kór, or Veyra's charging grids kept their implants running. Stop paying? You stop moving.
"Yeah, I heard. Wang's dragging their feet on this one."
"Don't worry. Those princesses will hike their rates soon enough. They're just waiting for people to choke down the shit their competitors are pulling, so they can look like fluffy little lambs in comparison." Val stretched back in her chair with a groan. "Let's grab a bite. I'm starving."
Lola nodded and collapsed onto the couch, surrounded by pots of tropical plants. Val had somehow managed to recreate an actual jungle within the concrete walls of the old factory. The massive windows provided enough light for most of her green companions, while the more demanding ones had custom lamps programmed to their exact needs. Vines draped lazily in the shade, plump succulents basked in the sunlight by the windows, and towering dark-green giants sprawled their leaves across the open floor.
"Delivery? Or should we grab gyros downstairs?"
"Delivery," Val spun her chair toward another monitor. "I dug up some ancient series about the Invader Zim. Found reviews on granddaddy forums. Wanna check it out?"
"Sure, sounds good."
Val ordered two portions of spicy rice with shrimp and octopus, plus fortune cookies. While waiting for the delivery bot, Lola and Val traded the latest news and gossip. Lola mentioned the cocky bounty hunter who'd hassled her at the bar. Val frowned slightly.
"So what's his deal? Just shooting his shot, or was he actually on the job?"
"Didn't seem like he knew who I was, but he's definitely freelance. Wang augmentations, old but high-end, so he probably updates his job board often. Works sloppy, though, doesn't even try to stay hidden. Delivered something to some old lady working for Veyra."
"Did you find out what it was?"
"Nah, was busy with Walker."
"What about the freelancer? Got a name?"
"Voss, I think. Yeah, Zeno Voss."
"Voss… Voss…" Val rubbed her lip thoughtfully. She knew most of the shadow-work mercs who tracked down missing people and items, whether to return them or make them disappear forever. "Pretty sure I've seen that name somewhere."
"Relax," Lola waved it off. "Doubt I'll run into him again."
They settled on the couch in front of the massive screen, shoveling steaming spicy rice filled with artificial substitutes for what was supposedly octopus and shrimp, laughing at the still-relevant jokes and satire of the ancient animated series. The food left Lola drowsy, and after a shoulder pat for Val, she headed to bed.
Her room lay on the opposite side of the factory's floor-to-ceiling windows, where natural light filtered in only through a single narrow slit, that was perfect for a bedroom. The vibrant, colorful decor of their shared space gave way to stark minimalism here: just a bed, a plain dresser, a decorative lamp, and a curtain of real fabric instead of the ubiquitous blinds or plastic shutters, the one true luxury.
Lola shed her clothes at the foot of the bed and burrowed under the covers. The cool sheets soothed her overheated skin, still buzzing with tension. She drifted off within minutes, only to jerk awake soon after, roused by a background transmission pinging her neurochip. Unless it was a system glitch, only one person had remote access to her augments. A voice whispered in a loop:
"To become part of your life and fate… To become part of your life and fate… To become part… To become…"
Lola sent the command to kill the signal.
"To become part of your –"
The signal persisted. Lola tried to manually disable the receiver, but the program blocked her actions, executing commands from a higher-priority source. She slid off the bed and stumbled to the shower. As water cascaded over her body, she began emitting electromagnetic pulses – starting weak, then gradually increasing voltage. Without proper grounding and immersed in water, the electricity ricocheted back through her system until the overload triggered a safety shutdown and reboot.
Silence.
Her head now was throbbing violently. Lola slumped to the floor, savoring the quiet and the petty satisfaction of her rebellion, even as burned nerve endings screamed in protest. Recovery would take time, and for now, she could be alone. No him in her head.
A soft knock yanked her from her thoughts.
"Hey, buddy, you okay?" Val peered into the shower. "My breakers just tripped."
Lola jerked her head toward her –too sharply – pain lancing through her neck.
"Your implant?"
"No, no. Just the main system," Val reassured her, tapping the EM suppressor embedded in her own neck. "My dampener's fine. But you probably fried the workstation. Everything alright?"
Lola pushed to her feet and grabbed a towel.
"Yeah… Just another lullaby session from Noah."
"I could tweak your settings–"
"No. We've tried that," Lola shrugged on a thin robe. "Remember how it ended last time?"
Val flung her arms wide, theatrical.
"Your humble servant has learned new tricks since then! Dug up some juicy Wang Biotech backdoors. I've got ideas now."
Her sly grin warmed Lola's chest, but she shoved the tempting thought of freedom from Noah's whining far, far away.
"Not happening," she said firmly. "Last time, we nearly bricked your rig, partner. I'll take what I can get. At least they can't track me through the dampeners."
Back when they first met, Val had managed to reconfigure Lola's tracker to scramble external signals by making it seem like she was in a hundred different places at once by bouncing nearby device signatures back into the ether. But attempts to fully disable the tracker had backfired spectacularly, triggering a security protocol that blacked out all electronics within a hundred meters including Val's own cerebral stabilizer.
"Wow, zero faith in me, huh?" Val pouted theatrically.
"I do have faith. Just value you more than your pride, partner."
Val sighed and nodded, respecting her friend's call, then perked up with:
"Since we're both awake… let's eat. I'm making French toast – or whatever they called it. Some synth-farm guy paid me in powdered milk and eggs. Let's suffer together."
"Tempting."
As Val mixed the dubious ingredients, Lola scrolled through news feeds on her phone. A round cleaning bot whirred lazily past, vacuuming up spilled powder.
"You sure this is edible?" Lola eyed the gloppy batter.
"We'll feed it to the recycler if it's lethal," Val shrugged.
The bot's hum was interrupted by the intercom's chirp. Lola shot Val a look.
"Early client?"
"Not expecting anyone."
Val wiped her hands, pulled up the camera feed and whistled.
"Well, hello."
Lola glanced at the screen.
"Rust and shit."
"Friend of yours?"
"Unfortunately. They patched him up fast."
"Damn, he's exotic," Val mused, eyeing Zeno's striking features: inky waves of hair tumbling to his shoulders, olive skin hinting at Islander ancestry, and sharp and wide, almost designed bone structure with those pale green eyes. What were they? Basque? Irish? Or just corporate gene-tweaking.
Lola shook out her jacket and a round tracking pill tumbled from the pocket and rolled under the table.
"And much cleverer than I hoped. Slipped me a tracker at the bar."
The intercom chirped again.
"Should we let him in? He brought beer."
"Hey, Sparkles, open up," Zeno's voice crackled through the speaker. "Came in peace with gifts." He shook a six-pack of synth-beer cans.
"You can always fry him extra crispy," Val smirked.
"Fine. Open it."
Zeno leaned against the doorway, tendrils of black hair obscuring one human eye while his artificial one scanned the room. Lola eyed the cherry-flavored beer label and wrinkled her nose.
"Cherry?"
"You ordered it at the bar," Zeno shrugged, shameless. "Guess girls dig that shit."
"How thoughtful," she cooed in saccharine falsetto, "you remembered!" Then flatly: "I ordered it to leave stains. Why are you here?"
"Missed you." He shouldered past her and flopped onto their couch like he lived there.
Lola slammed the cans down, her emitter implants humming to life with blue static arced between her fingers.
"Let's skip the fireworks," Zeno raised his palms in mock surrender. "Nice design, though." He nodded at the constellation of nodes glowing under her collarbone.
"Custom work. Courtesy of Noah Wang himself." She yanked her robe closed.
Zeno's gaze flickered downward before he recovered. "Heard he's obsessed with retrieving one special girl." He mimed a gun at her. "Pew."
Val's voice cut in from the kitchen:
"Before you do something stupid, pretty boy, remember – I'll brick that antique in your skull before you blink."
"Feisty!" Zeno laughed, delighted. "Val, right? Killer ink. Your rep's almost as loud as your friend's heroics." He lounged deeper into the couch. "You're a prize, sweetheart. Veira would pay a fortune for your DNA. Wang? You could buy the moon for the amount he offers. Maybe I'll play both sides... What do you think?" He omitted the fact that his contract paid exactly zero. Let them think he was freelance.
"You think I'd go willingly?" Lola sank into the chair opposite him.
"Hero complex. Cute. But I'm not here for you. Not yet anyway." He dug in his pocket and tossed her a neurochip. It was unshielded, crusted with blood and glass-riddled muscle fibers.
"What's this?"
"Some street kid's 'thank you' before her implants turned her into shrapnel." Steel edged his tone as he watched her face. "A souvenir. Keep it. Matches your sparkles."
"Using Tear was their choice," Lola set the chip down carefully.
"Saint fucking Lola! Who flooded the streets with it?"
Val tensed visibly. Lola's jaw tightened:
"I thought I was helping."
She bit back the excuses. Zeno exhaled sharply, elbows on knees:
"Help? Kids crunch when they run now. Take a stroll through Kaimo to see your grateful customers. But here's the twist." He leaned in. "Lira-V."
"Lira-V?"
Lola glanced at Val, who shook her head.
"Enlighten us," Lola snapped.
"Wang's subscription drones get… artifacts. Voices." Zeno tapped his temple. "You've got that fancy reactor, princess, but plebs hear things. Commands: 'Stand. Walk. Sleep.' Sometimes – nursery rhymes. No words. Just humming."
"So someone hacked the grid. Happens."
"Happens," he agreed. "Except – that voice? My dead sister's."
Val scratched her brow: "Rumors about rogue broadcasts. Harmless stuff –"
"Then why's it her fucking voice?" Zeno's composure cracked.
"Voice synth isn't rocket science," Val countered.
"It's her." He knew how insane he sounded.
"Assume you're right. So what?"
"So," He produced a data chip. "Stolen Wang files. Lira-V project. Encrypted. Here's the deal: Val cracks this. I don't hand you to Wang."
Lola's emitters flared. "Or I reduce your brain to charcoal and recycle the remains."
The thought of returning to Wang's labs stripped her of reason.
"Others will come," Zeno said simply. "You don't have enough charge to fry them all. Help me, and I'll help keep Wang's hounds off your scent."
"If you found me, Noah already know where to look for."
Zeno barked a laugh. "Oh, he definitely knows. You know how fancy pants are, they want their prize served on a silver platter. Won't risk their tailored suits. Maybe they're waiting for you to crawl back."
Lola inhaled sharply, riding out the wave of fury.
"Like you said. Others will come."
"But two," his gaze flicked to Val. "I mean, three of us? Statistically less fucked."
"Why care about this project?" Val cut in. "Why walk away from a payday over dead-end data?"
Zeno's voice dropped. "Lira was my sister's name. The sister I thought died eleven years ago."