They called it mercy, but the sky disagreed.
Thunder knotted across the dome, low and constant—like something large and tired pacing above sixty million sinners. Floodlights carved the execution plaza into surgical white. Rain came down in disciplined lines, filtered and sterilized, still smelling faintly of old blood and engine coolant.
Arden Reik stood on the drop platform with a rope around his neck and thought, not for the first time, that The Span had a talent for stagecraft.
The crowd below wasn't really there for him. They were there for the screens: five-story slabs of polarized glass replaying his case file in looping fragments.
GANG-LIAISON.
ECO-TERROR AFFILIATE.
FORTY-SEVEN CIVILIAN CASUALTIES.
The Veil smoothed the numbers. It always did. Justice by edit.
He rolled his shoulders, feeling the rough kiss of hemp against skin. Collar bone, throat, old scar. Hands cuffed behind his back, metal biting the faded Vultures of 41 sigil on his forearm. The ink itched like it wanted to crawl back under his skin and hide.
"Condemned asset," the Marshal intoned beside him, "you stand before the Judiciary of The Span under conviction of capital multiplicities. Last designation: Arden Jae Reik, Substrate District Forty-One. Sentence: neural disassembly and data reclamation under Article—"
"Yeah," Arden said, because silence felt like surrender, "we've met."
The Marshal's jaw flexed. His armor was Judiciary white, the kind that never got rain on it unless it helped the image. His visor mirrored Arden's face back at him: wolfish cheekbones, pale blue eyes stuck between apology and threat, a man the system had forgotten to finish.
The rope tightened another centimeter. Wood creaked. Somewhere, a camera zoomed.
"You will not speak further," the Marshal said. "Any last sanctioned statement must conform to—"
"I confess," Arden cut in. "I believed your evidence was bullshit."
A ripple moved through the packed tiers of onlookers. Not outrage. Interest. The Span loved a glitch in the script.
Shock-prods cracked into his ribs. Pain came bright and clean, a white flare behind his teeth. He coughed a laugh around it.
They'd shaved his hair to regulation stubble "for interface access." They'd scrubbed him raw, dressed him in neutral grey, dressed the killing up as hygiene. But his eyes were still his, and he let them wander the vertical canyon of the plaza—up past Helios sigils and Judiciary glyphs, past ad-screens promising Ascension Plans and Debt Forgiveness, up to the dome where stormlight crawled like trapped ghosts.
Somewhere beyond that glass sky, the world was dead or dying.
Down here, they recycled sin.
The priest stepped forward.
Gunmetal vestments, threads of live circuitry, a halo of scrolling clauses across his stole. Bureau of Repurposed Sentences. One hand held a chrome scripture rod; the other, a thin slate where Arden's name glowed in soft, condemning blue.
"Arden Reik," the priest said, voice amplified and warm—the sound of a man who believed in quarterly reports. "The law is merciful. It does not waste viable assets. Though you have forfeit your life, the system offers you transformation. Your flesh, your memory, your labor may be reallocated for civic repair. Do you understand?"
Arden stared at him. Rain threaded his lashes.
"You're offering me a recycling bin," he said. "Very green of you."
"Translation," the priest said smoothly for the benefit of the feeds, "the condemned demonstrates awareness of his deficit and the value of repurposed service. Article Twelve permits conditional conversion: Compulsory Asset Division service, indefinite term, in lieu of deletion. Success metrics apply."
On the big screens, his mugshot flipped to a fresh overlay:
CHAIN DOG CANDIDATE?
The question mark pulsed Judiciary amber. Betting odds populated the corner of the broadcast. The crowd leaned in. Wagers moved faster than conscience.
"Option one," the priest continued, turning his smile back to Arden, "you drop. Your neural tissue is harvested for security architectures. You persist only as echo in our safeguards. Option two, you accept collar induction and serve in Compulsory Asset Division, Unit assignment pending. You will be conditioned and deployed where ordinary officers fail. Survival not guaranteed. Sentence review contingent upon exemplary service."
"And if I say no?" Arden asked, voice low.
The priest's eyes were kind in the way of polished metal. "Then gravity chooses."
The chant started somewhere high and ugly:
MAINT-EN-ANCE. MAINT-EN-ANCE.
Arden let the sound crawl over him. He thought of Forty-One—of rusted hab-stacks, turbine lullabies, his mother's hands cracked and glowing from reactor exposure. Thought of the Helios Purge, the scaffold pinning him under dust and rebar while his world burned.
He had never been offered a choice that wasn't already decided.
He exhaled. "You put a leash on my neck," he said, "I bite."
"Consent recorded," the priest said, looking directly into the nearest camera. "Compulsory Asset Division, you may proceed."
For a heartbeat, nothing.
Then the sky screamed.
Drones slashed down from the storm, five of them, wings folding into surgical geometry. Floodlights flipped from white to red. The platform shuddered. Control towers barked orders that arrived two seconds too late.
A central cradle swept in over Arden's head. A segmented arm shot past his cheek; mono-filament blades hissed. The rope above him parted with a wet snap.
He dropped.
Not into the void, not into the screaming crowd, but sideways—snatched mid-fall by cold machine hands.
Impact knocked the breath out of him. Hands like clamps seized his limbs. Needles wormed for veins. For an instant he hung cruciform in a halo of articulated limbs, between one death and the next.
"Pulse unstable," someone barked. A woman's voice, close. "Carotid friction burn. He's conscious. That's cute."
Something sprayed cool against his throat, sealing the raw groove left by the rope. It burned in a precise, expensive way.
"Don't try to talk," the tech murmured. "You haven't signed you yet."
Lawyers slid into his peripheral vision like a glitch: four of them, each with a spinning halo of sigils at the wrist.
"By emergency invocation of Article Twelve, Subsection K," one recited, "the condemned identified as Arden Jae Reik is remanded into Judiciary Enforcement Bureau custody, Compulsory Asset Division, for the duration of his natural and extended survivable life. All prior civic statuses null. All rights surrendered. Non-compliance triggers instantaneous correction. Initial instrument—"
"The collar," the priest finished, pressing two cool metal fingers briefly to Arden's brow as if in blessing. "Mercy, instantiated."
They rolled him.
The cradle's slab was white and waiting, lined with restraint grooves. Cuffs bit deeper as his arms were dragged above his head. Straps cinched across chest, hips, thighs.
"Hold still," the tech said, her tone dropping into genuine warning. "If this misaligns, you'll be decorating a chair in our rehab ward."
Cold kissed the base of his skull.
He tried to twist away. The restraints answered.
"I didn't say I—"
Click.
Pain came down like a verdict from God.
White, total, blooming out from the ring clamped to his vertebrae. His back arched; his jaw locked; breath became static. For a second he wasn't sure if he was screaming or broadcasting. The air stank of burned antiseptic and hot metal.
Then it receded.
A hum settled in his bones. A faint amber glow ghosted the edge of his vision, pulsing in time with his heartbeat.
"Collar synchronized," someone said. "Designation: Ø7-∆-AR. Leash integrity ninety-nine-point-eight. Welcome to the kingdom."
The Marshal leaned into his field of view, visor retracted now. Human eyes, small and satisfied.
"You belong to us now, Reik."
Arden swallowed past the rawness in his throat. "You say that like you're proud of your rental."
The Marshal's lip twitched.
"Drop him."
Restraints snapped. The cradle tilted. Arden slid off the slab, hit the bay floor on his knees. The new weight at his neck tugged like a phantom hand; his balance stuttered around it.
Up on the plaza feeds, his execution had already been repackaged. The noose gone. The graphics updated: RESPONSIBLE REDEMPTION / THE CHAIN DOG INITIATIVE. Animations of collared silhouettes sprinting into stylized riots. Mercy with a logo.
"Behold," the priest's amplified voice drifted down through speakers, "justice without waste."
"Maintenance," the Marshal corrected.
"Maintenance," the crowd roared back.
Arden pushed to his feet.
With the thought—just the thought—of spinning, of driving his new collar's edge into the Marshal's throat, the ring at his neck flared hot. Not full pain; a warning. A shock held one second short.
Listener, not just leash.
He let the idea go. The heat faded.
They marched him out of the bay in a tight diamond of white armor. Behind them, drones folded the gallows away for next time. Nothing wasted.
Down through security doors. Along corridors lined with Veil glass humming with distant cases. Into the underbelly of the Judiciary tower where the air smelled of coolant and old fear. Cameras tracked them like flies on rails.
"You keep staring at the eyes," an Enforcer muttered.
"Just checking who's watching," Arden rasped.
"Everyone," the man said. "That's how you know it's working."
The loading bay waited at the corridor's dead end, lit too bright. A windowless transport idled there, matte grey and anonymous, its emblem a small silver glyph: Ø7.
Inside: steel benches, floor restraints, white light that did not pretend to be kind.
Four figures already sat chained in.
The first was size before anything else—broad-shouldered, heavy, a monument in worn black. Burn scars climbed one side of his face and throat like a map of a ruined district. His collar was older, bulkier, etched with an old number carefully struck through and replaced with Ø7. He looked up as Arden was shoved in. His eyes were brown, steady, and so very tired.
Next to him lounged a woman with warm umber skin and braids threaded in silver filament. Her collar nestled at her throat under a strip of faintly glowing mesh. She watched Arden like a cat watching a new toy, gaze flicking from his neck to his ink.
"Cute scar," she said. Natural, lazy, dangerous. "Drop go badly, pretty boy?"
Opposite them sat a narrow man whose eyes were wrong on purpose: mechanical irises spinning with quiet light, tiny rings of code shifting focus. Ports crowned his skull in a faintly glowing circle. His collar wired straight into that halo in a neat, merciless loop. He barely glanced up as Arden stumbled.
"You're loud," he said in a flat, disinterested voice. "His vitals are contaminating my feed."
At the far end, a slight woman—no, girl, no, something in between—sat with hands folded in her lap. Pale, composed, dark hair cut in a clean bob. Only her collar glowed, calm and soft, a gentle flux of blue.
"Sit," the big man said. His voice was gravel smoothed by time. "Before you fall."
Arden realized his knees were listing. He moved to the empty space on the bench across from them. Shackles hissed up from the floor to lock around his ankles and wrists. The door sealed, cutting off the outside noise. Engines whined, magnetic and low.
For a few breaths, there was only the hum of the transport and the quiet, syncopated pulse of five collars.
Dead man breathing, Arden thought.
"You Arden Reik," the big one said. Not a question.
"According to the marketing," Arden said.
A corner of the man's mouth moved. "Darius. Unit Ø7."
"Seraphine," the woman said, lazily saluting with cuffed hands. "Also Ø7. Try not to sob on my jacket; I hate starting a shift damp."
The tech-savant's lenses finally focused on Arden properly. "Kai," he said. "Don't touch anything."
The pale girl watched Arden with unreadable softness.
"Lyra," she said. "It's… good you chose the collar."
"I didn't," Arden said. He felt the ring at his neck thrum, like it disapproved of the tone. "That's the trick."
Lyra tilted her head slightly, as if listening to something deeper in the engine noise.
"There's always a choice," she murmured. "Some of them just don't wait for you."
The transport lurched, then climbed, mag-strips dragging them up through the tower's hidden arteries. The Span shifted around them, an iron lung exhaling exhaust and taking in souls.
Arden let his head rest back against the cold wall. The collar pressed into bone. The city's weight hung from that single point.
Outside, somewhere above concrete and law, thunder walked the dome.
"Look alive, Reik," Darius said quietly, not unkind. "They didn't save you."
Arden opened his eyes. Four strangers watched him: the monument, the knife-smile, the hollow-eyed genius, the ghost.
"They spent you," Darius finished.
Arden's throat burned. He tasted rope and antiseptic and old smoke.
"Yeah," he said. "They call it justice."
Seraphine's smile sharpened. Kai's mechanical irises ticked. Lyra's collar glowed just a shade brighter, like an answer.
Arden let the last word fall.
"It's just maintenance."
All five collars clicked, almost in unison, a soft metallic assent that sounded, to him, exactly like the machine taking its next breath.