Good People (Worm/Shadowrun)

Recompile - 6.01

Fuelled by anaesthetics, adrenaline, blood loss or just agonising pain, I drifted in and out of consciousness, bombarded by psychedelic nightmares. A bright light in the centre of my vision became an unblinking eye glaring down at me, with tendrils of pure brilliance reaching out to envelop me in their web-like grasp. The rocking of the ambulance's suspension became the lapping of the waves as I floated in the waters of the Bay, buffeted by the wake of an immense, slab-sided vessel.

I saw an afterimage Lisa's face looking down at me, a false grin of reassurance on her features undermined by the worry clear in her eyes. I began to wake, once, my body flailing as I spasmed. Everything except for my right arm, which lay still and inert by my side. I was outside again, hearing rain falling on an awning a few feet above my head before I whited out to the sound of doors sliding open.

There were more flashes of sensation; hurried voices talking in professional tones, armoured silhouettes being replaced by slighter figures in scrubs, someone leaning in close, their gaze flicking to a tablet in their hand. The corridor was replaced by a room, the mask connected to something else. The tang of a different anaesthetic flooded into my chest as I felt something being pricked into my left arm.

That time, they hit me with something stronger. I didn't drift away or even black out; I blinked and suddenly I was alone in a half-lit room with all that had come before left as murky memories. There was something wrapped around my upper arm – the one I could feel – and a bank of monitoring equipment on a stand next to me, tuned into a plethora of AR programmes that circulated the data rather than sending it elsewhere.

The thing around my arm was contracting, acting according to a routine set to go off every fifteen minutes. I could see it recording my blood pressure, pulse and half a dozen different readings, even if I didn't yet have enough hold on my digital senses to actually make out what the numbers were.

Falteringly, I expanded my digital awareness, taking in an inert trideo set mounted in the corner of the room, the limited sensors of a smoke detector, the air conditioning and radiator's link into the broader climate control network for the whole complex. That gave me a snapshot of the building I was in; large, with most of the space on the floors above and below me given to long rooms without any partitions that affected the airflow.

Has to be a hospital, I thought. I was still groggy, but I had half expected to wake up in a cell in some corp's basement. Instead, from the look of things, I was on the third floor of a twelve-storey building, tucked away in a hall of private rooms, only some of which were being actively maintained by the climate controls – which I took to mean that only some were occupied.

Private rooms, I realised, far later than I should; I didn't even have health insurance.

Even though it still felt like I was trying to push my mind through a sieve, I stretched out my senses to encompass more of the devices around me, picking up a cluster of them just outside the door to my room. A smartwatch, commlink, headset radio, biomonitor, IFF tag, cybereyes, smartlinked submachine gun.

A chill went down my spine. The cluster of devices wasn't moving, but I didn't know if the guard was there to keep the world out or to keep me in.

The stab of fear was enough to draw my attention to the biological sensations I'd been deliberately avoiding. The ones that came from my body, rather than my brain. I was sore, my limbs stiff from top to bottom, but I couldn't feel my right arm. I couldn't move it, either.

I tried to sit up, only to slump over as my right arm failed to move with my left. On the second attempt, I was able to shuffle back, pressing myself against the backboard of what was clearly a troll-sized hospital bed, with buttons and disability-friendly holographic controls to adjust its height and elevation. There were multiple joints below me, meant to tilt in different places depending on the vastly divergent size of the metahuman who lay in it. Looking at the door, I could see that the entire room had been designed the same way; the door was tall enough for me to fit through without ducking, and instead of a handle there was a motion sensor panel running down the right hand side where it could be triggered by anyone, of any height.

I hated this. Hated not knowing, not having any information about what had just happened, what was happening, what was going to happen.

Had I been wheeled into a long-distant nightmare? Was I logged in the corp's systems as a Technomancer, about to be whisked off to some secret lab like Labyrinth had been? If not, what did we do to be worth sending armed ambulance crews to retrieve? To have an armed guard posted just outside my door? Why was I here, alone? Where were the others?

I wanted to leave, but I didn't know if the guard would let me. I might not have been handcuffed to the bed, but it was clear that someone wanted me here, and that they wouldn't be happy if I were to go somewhere else. I wasn't even sure I'd be able to hack my way out of the situation; my brain was still raw with dumpshock, and the thought of diving beyond the surface level of the matrix was enough to make my head ache.

So, inevitably, I fell back on the age-old pastime of those with nothing to do but wait; I switched on the trideo.

The last person in the room had tuned it to a financial news channel that I'd never even heard of. It was mid-programme, but the news was global; focusing on the largest markets in the world and only touching on the smaller stuff when things went catastrophically dull. No use to me.

Skimming through channels, I was quickly reminded just why the trideo set at home had sat unused for the last two years. The only real way to distinguish the channels from each other was the little logo in the bottom right corner, differentiating more financial news, global news, entertainment, so-called 'documentary' channels, children's entertainment, pay-per-view porn and finally the section of the matrix set aside for local channels. What was actually being broadcast was, without fail, an endless deluge of advertisements.

Out on the street, advertising was omnipresent to the point of being unremarkable. In some areas, it felt like every single flat surface had been given over to screens, posters and holographic displays. In the metro, advertisements were plastered along the ceiling and above the windows, with holographic projectors mounted to display a line of gaudy images down the middle of the carriage whenever it got empty enough to make the space available.

The same was true in the matrix, but magnified by a factor of a thousand. Unshackled by the physical limitations of screens and projectors, AR advertising crowded every area of the matrix that was even remotely populated, layered on top of or even within other adverts as they constantly competed for bandwidth, while roaming advirals carried automatically-generated slogans throughout the grid, ever-changing in response to minute trends in social memes, the oldest little more than nonsensical slogans that had long since diverged from the product they were supposed to be pushing.

I never really saw any of them; my matrix was a place of raw code and datastreams linked together by the ephemeral force of the resonance. I knew the adverts were there, could even see what they were advertising if I peered at the code, but they were just another piece of metahumanity's intrusion into the resonance.

For those without my gifts, a matrix-capable device's value came partly from how effectively it was able to filter that advertising out, using its own algorithm's to juggle its firewall capacity based on the few ads its owner might actually want to see. I could see that the trideo set was trying to do the same to me, checking my biometrics against the hospital data, but since I didn't have a policy it didn't have anything to latch onto. Which was probably why it was showing me an advert for men's deodorant.

Fortunately, that was the last advert before the local news channel returned to its previous story.

The city as a whole had clearly gone from bad to worse since I'd gone under; the broadcast showed a reporter on the scene of a Medhall compound in the North End that had been stormed by the Chosen, making off with large amounts of medical-grade pharmaceuticals. It was a blatant cover-up – not that almost anyone watching the broadcast would realise that – but that didn't surprise me. What was surprising was that they'd spent lives on it.

Eight Medhall employees had died in the raid, along with four employees of a contracted security company. Most of the Mehall workers were from the warehouse team, while two were custodians. As their pictures came up on screen, alongside a corporate spokesman vowing retribution, I saw that all but two of them weren't human.

It said something about what I'd been through over the last few weeks that the thought of Medhall throwing its less-than-human staff members into the line of fire in order to save face didn't shock me. I didn't even wonder how their spokesman could stand in front of a press conference and talk about the families of those who'd died – how the company would be supporting them in what he termed 'this difficult time.'

As to why they resorted to allowing the Chosen to rob them, the answer to that – beyond the Chosen's need for the drugs – could be seen on the tickertape of rolling news stories crawling along the bottom of the screen, interspersed with the matrix URLs of sponsored messages. "AFA headquarters raided by police over drug charges" sent a pretty clear message, as did the one that followed it; "Policlub leader Justin Hammond evades capture."

Inevitably, the next scrawl concerned the cancelation of a concert in the south of the city, while the meaningless celebrity divorce afterwards was juxtaposed wonderfully by the interview with a tearful widow happening above the tickertape. Then it was back to a particularly violent street battle near Japantown – close enough to Midtown to draw the eye of the news – before a final message about a celebrity death. Diane Anders, the sister of Medhall's current CEO, had died of an overdose in the rehab clinic where she'd evidently spent the last six years losing a battle with addiction.

It seemed pointless; there was a gang war going on, dozens – perhaps hundreds – of people were dying every hour, yet all the news cared about was which corp had been hit, which notable had been hurt. I shouldn't have been surprised; Medhall was sponsoring the station, after all.

A new device came into my painfully small radius of awareness, immediately drawing my attention away from the trideo set. It was an RFID tag broadcasting the wearer's corporate SIN and clearances, and it was sufficient for the guard to take one step to the side, letting a nurse slide open the door to my room.

She was dressed in green scrubs, with her brown hair worn in a green-highlighted braid. Physically, she seemed to be in her mid-twenties, but for some reason I couldn't explain I felt like she was younger than me. That she was a troll was another indicator of where I was, but her corporate SIN cinched it; she worked for CrashCart, which meant the extraction had been genuine. It wasn't like a Medhall hospital would employ a troll nurse.

That confirms the who, I thought, but not the why.

I was too shocked to speak at first, but then I noticed that she was very deliberately avoiding looking at me, walking right over to the monitoring equipment next to the bed, her mouth moving silently as she copied down information onto a tablet.

"Hi," I said, awkwardly. My throat was sore; the word came out scratchy, almost like a cough.

She ignored me, her eyes fixed on the monitor with even more determination.

"Not allowed to talk?" I asked, all while a mantra crept into my mind; what would Tattletale do?

"Please talk to me?" I tried. "I have no idea what's going on, and I feel like I'm losing my mind, here."

It didn't sound right, but I felt like my best option was to build sympathy.

"Please? I know this has to be scary, but I'm a person too. Can you at least tell me if my… my friend is alright? He was shot right in front of me, I saw them taking him away in an ambulance."

"We aren't supposed to talk to the patients," the nurse blurted out. It wasn't working, I could see that. I couldn't feign that sort of emotion, so I changed tactics.

"According to who? Why have you air-gapped that equipment? It's not on the network. Any other patient, you could just read all that data from the nurse's station. Instead they send you to go read it manually. In here. With me."

She flinched, hesitating just a little. I could tell I almost had her; she just needed another push.

"What's going on, Hazel?"

She froze. It wasn't what I was expecting; I wanted to create a personal connection, and her name was clear to see in the signal of her RFID badge. But she was finally, actually looking at me.

"Please?" I tried again, with less of the false waver. "Nobody will even know. We're air-gapped. No camera, no microphone. Smoke detector will see if you light up, but that's all."

Her mouth opened slightly, her eyes darting to the door as the arm that had been holding the tablet close to her chest dropped a little. The other arm drifted up to her head, scratching automatically at the point where her horn pushed out of her skin.

"I don't know," she answered, in a low voice. "Management's been keeping this hall offline, and I got pulled off renal to staff it."

"This happen before?" I asked.

"Not that I know of. Even other… shadowrunners" – she whispered the word – "get logged in the system. Your friend's two doors down."

Relief hit me like a sledgehammer, but I pressed on.

"Anyone waiting to see us?"

"Nobody from the hospital. They don't know you're awake yet. There is a visitor from outside, waiting near the nurse's station."

"Who?" I asked, a brief burst of panic flooding my system.

"A blonde, about your age. Didn't give her name."

An involuntary sigh left my mouth, as I sagged back with my mouth involuntarily curling into a smile. Either Lisa was on top of the situation, or she'd somehow set this whole thing up – saving my life in the process.

"I-" She hesitated. "I can't tell her you're awake."

"Don't worry," I chuckled. "She'll figure it out. Thanks."

The nurse hurried out of the room, her shoulders hunched and her face frozen in a worried expression that she hastily tried to force back into neutrality as the door slid open. Tattletale would definitely pick up on it the moment she saw her.

I didn't want her to see me lying down. I trusted her, had even opened up to her, but I didn't want to appear vulnerable in front of her. I had to capture some of the ceaseless social confidence she always managed to project, which meant pushing myself up in spite of all my aches and pains and swinging my legs over the side of the bed.

That was when I noticed I was wearing a hospital gown, my bare feet making contact with a floor far cooler than I was expecting. I winced, and for a moment I considered standing, but I didn't feel quite ready yet.

It took Tattletale two minutes to come through the door. I didn't know how she'd managed to get past the guard, but I never doubted that she'd be able to. I wasn't expecting the unnerved look on her face, but it was quickly washed away by genuine relief as she caught sight of me.

I didn't know what to say to her – I couldn't say anything to her, couldn't make the words fit in my now-trembling mouth. She was carrying a bundle of clothes, with my boots sitting on top, but she tossed them haphazardly on the bed as she rushed over and wrapped her arms around me – something that was only possible because I was sitting down.

It was like the tension drained out of me. I hesitated only moment before resting a massive hand on her back, squeezing my eyes shut in an attempt to stop the tears that had begun to well up as my stony face collapsed beneath an outpouring of emotions. I still couldn't move my right arm; it sat limp by my side. Dead weight.

"It's okay, Taylor…" Lisa whispered into my ear. "You're okay."

"My arm…"

"I know. They wouldn't fix it all the way, just closed up the cut and replaced the lost blood. The nerve damage is still there."

"How do you know?" I asked, half pleading. "What happened? Why are we here?"

Lisa pulled one arm away so that she could sit down next to me, the other arm still reaching across my back. I almost leant into her, but I stopped myself; I'd knock her flat.

"I… set up a contingency plan. I didn't like the job; there were too many things that could go wrong, and I've never been good in a gunfight. It's not my nature."

"So you signed us up to CrashCart? With what money? They don't offer exfils like that to anyone."

"I didn't like our client, either. Didn't trust him, so I went hunting for him in the astral plane. Found him working out of the eleventh floor of a CrashCart hospital. This hospital. I let him know I knew, let his mind work out the rest."

"That was him, over the estate," I realised. "His drone, his eyes."

"And his guys dressed up as CrashCart High Threat Response. Or maybe they are CrashCart HTR and bodyguarding is a side hustle."

"You saved my life." The words came out tonelessly, like I still couldn't wrap my head around it. "Brian's life too. Is he…"

I turned, looking down at Lisa's face as something flashed across her elven features.

"Best you see for yourself," she answered, removing her arm from my back and standing up.

She went over to stand by the door, peering through the window out into the corridor beyond. I stood up as well, swaying momentarily and clutching the bed for support, but I didn't fall. Lisa had brought my boots and a pair of dark jeans I'd bought with her, but my t-shirt with its scarab symbol had evidently been ruined; Lisa had replaced it with one that had a surprisingly friendly cartoon spider on the front. My jacket was nowhere to be seen; I presumed it had been ruined as well.

Getting dressed was a Herculean labour. My right arm was nothing but a burden, one I had to manoeuvre into my t-shirt before I could slip the wide neck over my horns, catching it on the tip and almost tearing it open before I was able to pause, reassess and bring my head through. The pants and belt weren't as hard as I was expecting, but I quickly found that my boots were a lost cause; I just couldn't fix the laces, and my arm kept banging against the floor.

"Here," Lisa said, suddenly right in front of me as she knelt down and tugged the laces tight. "Let me help."

"We've got to do something about this," I said.

"We will," Lisa nodded. "It'll just cost something. Now, hold it in place and I'll wrap it in a sling."

I found the arm a little easier to deal with when it wasn't knocking against me with every movement. I stood again, this time clenching my fist and eyelids shut until I stopped swaying, and followed Lisa out into the corridor.

The ward was a small square space with private rooms lined up in an L opposite a circular nurse's station from which the young troll and two other nurses were able to see into each room, provided that the doors were left open. The guard had moved over to join them. He was a dwarf, wearing a security uniform with CrashCart's logo on it – which meant he was in-house, rather than subcontracted. He was watching us like a hawk, but there didn't seem to be any malice in his gaze. He just looked bored.

"How'd you get him to let you in?" I whispered.

"Regent isn't the only person on the team who can mess with people's heads," she answered, cryptically. "I can be persuasive. C'mon, Grue's two doors down."

Grue had been given a far larger room than me, judging by the amount of space between its door and the next. It took me a moment to realise why that was; he was in an operating theatre. The door was locked, but next to it was an opaque glass panel that I turned transparent with a thought, even as some subconscious process in my mind began picking at the electronic lock.

As the room faded into view, I struggled to pick out Brian at first. There was just a mass of machinery surrounding a bed, with intravenous drips, monitoring equipment and life support systems collating on a figure who seemed so much smaller than Brian ever had, with his face hidden beneath a respirator mask.

I saw four bullets pass through Grue's chest; burning tracers that would have immolated his flesh and internal organs. Half a century ago, it would have been a hopelessly lethal wound. Even today, it wasn't something most people would survive. The machinery in there was more sophisticated than anything I'd seen in my life, the sort of gear CrashCart might roll out for the comatose ultra-rich, but even then it didn't seem like it was helping him.

Like my arm, they'd brought Brian to the point where he wasn't going to die and then just… stopped.

"How are the others?" I asked, even as I placed my palm against the window, leaning in almost close enough to knock my horns against it.

"Regent's fine," Lisa answered. "The bullet's out of his leg and he's fully recovered. Bitch's damage was almost skin deep; all she had to do was swap out her subdermal armour. They're both downstairs" – she smiled – "I had to persuade Bitch not to come up here with a shotgun."

"Good," I nodded, my horns clinking against the window before I pulled back. "This isn't the kind of problem a shotgun can solve."

We stood there quietly for a few moments, watching the blinking lights, the rise and fall of the machines keeping Brian alive, until Lisa broke the silence.

"Bug," she sighed, "I'm going to need you to step up. At least until he's back on his feet."

I paused, turning away from Grue and leaning against the window as I looked down at Lisa.

"What do you mean?"

She hesitated – more than I'd ever seen her hesitate – for a moment, her eyes darting back to Brian.

"Grue… Look, we're together as a team because of some very specific circumstances, and we've stuck together because we work well together. But if we weren't Shadowrunners, none of us would have given any of the others the time of day. We're all from different worlds."

She turned back to Grue, folding her arms. I wasn't sure if she was looking at him or her reflection in the glass.

"Grue was-" She caught herself. "Grue is a rock. He's businesslike, literal minded, he has uncomplicated plans that he executes directly. He's the solid base that's held us all together. I can't step in to fill his shoes. Bitch would never trust me, and I think I remind Regent too much of people in his world for him to take me seriously."

I stroked my chin, frowning. She had a point; people like Lisa were never more than things in Alec's fucked-up little cult. He'd left that life behind, but unconscious biases were hard to shake. Either that, or her methods reminded him too much of his siblings.

"You really think he'd listen to me?" I asked.

"I do. Regent's flighty, but you're as solid as Grue. You've demonstrated that with how you've handled Bitch – who, incidentally, would throw herself on a grenade if you asked. Tell him how it's going to be and he'll bitch and moan because he likes to, but he'll do it all the same."

I let out a long sigh, placing my hand flat on the window and leaning forwards until my horns clinked against the glass. I closed my eyes, then opened them and looked at Grue once more.

"If you think you're undermining him, don't," Lisa said. "Truth is, we were heading this way already. Grue's got a good head on his shoulders, but you're about as determined as anyone I've met and just as devious as me." She chuckled. "The things you could have done if you hadn't been shut away… I'm so glad I let you out of your box."

"What am I, a wind-up toy?" I shot back, grinning.

"Damn straight. I turn your screw, point you at a problem and watch you burn half the city to solve it."

That was enough to knock me out of my morass. I stepped back from the glass, looking down at Tattletale with an eyebrow raised, before both of our attention was drawn away as someone new entered the room.

He was dressed in scrubs and his arms were high-end cybernetics, the fingers lined with seams where they could split apart into further digits capable of even greater precision. The nurses, who had been watching us warily, perked up in the way that employees only did when the boss arrived to take a problem off their hands, rather than lay a new one at their feet.

"You shouldn't be up," he said to me by way of introduction.

"But I am," I replied, taking Lisa's words to heart as I straightened up and tried to put a little bite into my tone. "You've stabilised us and stopped. I want to know why."

The surgeon shrugged, a smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth.

"It's not my job to explain." His eyes darted up to the ceiling. "But when you woke up, I was told to send you upstairs. Apparently there's someone who wants to speak to you."

He sent a signal off through the matrix, using a mind-impulse link that was part of his all-encompassing surgical suite. His eyes were the same way, and there were hormone emitters lining his spine to keep him calm under pressure. He was using one of them now, which told me that he wasn't as in-control as he appeared.

He wasn't expecting me to be up, and Tattletale was a complete unknown.

"What exactly is the damage?" I asked, my eyes narrowing. I flicked a thumb over my shoulder, back towards Brian. "Him and me."

"And your other wounded," the surgeon clarified. "One minor cut for your colleague here, one deep wound on the thigh that was treated in A&E. Your friend back there had significant internal damage to his organic and cybernetic systems. Life support is currently substituting the functions of the damaged components."

He gestured with a cybernetic limb at my own arm, strapped up in a sling. "Your arm is functionally dead. The circulatory system is functioning – just – but your nerves require complete removal and replacement. It would be easier to swap out the limb."

The door behind him opened again for another CrashCart employee, this one an elf dressed in the jumpsuits worn by their ambulance crews, though without the trademark white body armour. She looked us up and down for a moment before speaking in a faintly Japanese accent.

"You come with me. Mister Johnson will speak with you. He has already waited long enough."

"Has he now?" I asked, shooting Tattletale a wary glance and getting a subtle nod in return. "Text the others, get them up here. We'll see him together – all of us who can."

I was genuinely touched that Tattletale had been stalling our client until I was awake. I'd felt so alone when I woke up, and it was good to realise that I had people I could count on. I couldn't remember the last time I'd felt that way.

We were led out into a far busier corridor, with hospital staff moving along in a sort of practiced rush, while the occasional patient was wheeled through on gurneys in varying stages of injury. It seemed they'd put us in a private section of the hospital's accident and emergency department, situated on the second floor so that the ambulance crews had clearer access.

Most of the patients we passed didn't look like they'd merit a private room. They were evidently able to afford to have health insurance, but I doubt their policies were above the absolute bare minimum of service. They were severely wounded, one and all – enough that they'd even consider actually making use of their insurance policy – and they'd leave the hospital with whatever out-of-pocket costs weren't covered by their meagre deductible.

But I supposed it was still better than bleeding out on the side of the street.

The hall ended in a T-junction, where a line of elevators of varying sizes shifted up and down behind their metal doors. As we arrived, the one in front of us slid open to reveal a team of Paramedics flanking a gurney – not quite the HTR special forces they'd sent after us, but still armed enough to dissuade anyone who might try to interfere with their rescue efforts. Their patient was an orkish woman with kanji written in glowing letters down the side of her cybernetic arms and legs, vivid red on white ceramics.

As paradoxical as it seemed, I found the sight of an obvious Yakuza lieutenant strangely soothing. It was a reminder that while we'd pissed a lot of groups off, in that moment I only had to worry about one of them. CrashCart was a double-A rated corporation, a multinational with a GDP that exceeded that of some small nations. That meant it had extraterritoriality. The Chosen wouldn't get past the perimeter, Medhall would be kept well away and even Knight Errant wouldn't know where we were.

The hospital was effectively sovereign territory, policed according to the laws of CrashCart's owners in the Evo corporation and totally independent of the UCAS that surrounded it. It was why they could even count gang lieutenants among their customers, though if Knight Errant knew they were here they could always just camp outside the hospital until they left.

We were still on the public grid without a spam filter, but as our taciturn escort led us to a much smaller elevator, I relished the change to focus on one a single threat after the abject clusterfuck of the last job.

Especially when that elevator opened up to reveal Regent and Bitch, the latter's shotgun slung on her back. Bitch didn't smile when she saw me – she wouldn't even if her attention hadn't been focused on our CrashCart guide – but I hoped she felt as relieved as I did in that moment.

"Not dead, then?" Regent asked.

"Not dead," I replied, simply, as the elevator closed behind us and began to climb. "Our client wants to see us."

"Grue's not here," he observed.

"He's not." I kept my attention fixed on the elevator doors, though I was distantly aware of Regent's commlink in the pocket of his silver blazer. "That going to be a problem?"

There was a tense moment of silence.

"Nah," Regent chuckled. "You're stone cold, Bug."

I couldn't help but wince at the name, schooling my expression back into something as stony as my skin just before the doors to the elevator slid open.

The eleventh floor of the hospital was far quieter than the second, but it was also far more opulent. It wasn't anything obvious – there were no rich red carpets or gilt-framed portraits on the wall – but the materials used to construct it were of an undeniably higher quality. The floor was glossier, the walls lacking the rough texture of paint, and in place of lights embedded in the ceiling, the whole ceiling glowed with a soothing light.

It was the second-highest floor of the hospital, which meant it was the domain of clients who would never deign to ride in a road-bound ambulance. If they travelled anywhere, it was by helicopters and t-birds, ushered into a separate triage by the very best of the best High Threat Response paramedics and brought down into advanced nanosurgery suites where wounds that would kill someone with a few less zeroes in their bank balance could be treated with the simple application of ludicrously expensive resources.

But that would happen on the twelfth floor, as close to the landing pads as possible. The eleventh was home to the more routine health concerns of the super-rich. There were GPs' offices that fronted right onto the corridor, without the need to navigate a reception and packed waiting room – and even then, only if they didn't want the GP to go to them. Cosmetic surgery suites were set on opposite sides of the corridor; bioware organ freezers and a gamma-grade cyberware clinic laid out more like boutique stores than an actual medical facility.

We didn't pass a single patient as we were led through the halls, though each facility was fully staffed. With the rates they charged, CrashCart could afford to have people ready to enable the slightest whim at a moment's notice, but few of the ultra-rich would be interested in visiting a hospital that was clearly caught up in the middle of an active gang war.

Our destination was two corridors off the main arterial that ran down the length of the hospital, leading up to what I assumed was the exterior wall of the building. As we approached a nondescript set of double doors at the end of the corridor, an obvious – yet polite – AR warning popped up in front of us, declaring that section of the hospital was closed for renovations.

We walked through the warning like it wasn't over there, our escort moving ahead as the doors slid open. Beyond was a small ward that seemed to have been gutted, with electrical cables, stacks of wall and ceiling panelling, even tools left frozen in place from when the renovations had been paused.

In and among that half-build space, a makeshift operations centre bustled with activity. There were perhaps fifteen people in all, each one of them dressed in CrashCart uniforms that didn't necessarily match up to their role. A bank of terminals were manned by four nurses in scrubs and two high-end greeters in corporate-branded suits, the screens in front of them displaying a range of data from ambulance locations to stock market projections.

A makeshift armoury had been sectioned off from the rest of the room by transparent floor-to-ceiling plastic curtains, where a wizened ork in a building maintenance uniform was inspecting the components of a disassembled sniper rifle while a quartet of soldiers in paramedic security uniforms were stowing their own rifles on a rack. Next to it was an area that had seemingly been given over to magical rituals, with a geometrically-perfect circle on the floor and shamanic fetishes decorating the wall.

The half-assembled reception desk of the ward was manned by a slight man in the sort of neat suit that hospital management might wear, with a woman in full-body armour standing over his shoulder, a shotgun held loosely in her arms as she watched the door – and us.

As we were led through the busy chatter and hurried order, we passed two deckers dressed in slick-skinned cooler suits. Both were wired into the support systems of the chairs on which they were reclined, supporting them for hours – perhaps even days – of uninterrupted use. My expanded senses, though still healing from dumpshock, gave me a snapshot of two separate systems; one sitting at the centre of a web that encompassed both the hospital's host and a separate, hidden network hidden within the hospital's, while the second sat like a coiled spring atop an armoury of agent and programmes. A decker and a spider, to attack and defend.

Our client wasn't in the middle of the operations room, but it was clear he was at its nexus. He didn't have a desk and a chair, instead coiling himself up on a tatami mat in front of a one-way window that offered a floor to ceiling vista looking out across the neighbouring buildings towards the skyscrapers of downtown. Upon the mat, the hidden network coalesced in a circular array of screens, projectors, broadcasting equipment and motion sensor controls that linked it all together.

He was mid-conversation with a man in a nondescript taksuit out-of-keeping with the corporate uniforms worn by the rest of the room, but he paused as we approached and sent the man away with a flick of his tail. Another flick shut down the screens and projectors, the data disappearing one by one until he was surrounded by nothing more than black mirrors that reflected his own coiled form.

"Miss Hebert," he began. A pit formed in my stomach. "I am glad to see you awake. Your associate was quite insistent that I wait for you before… explaining the situation."

"How did you-" I clamped my mouth shut, clenching my fist. He'd wrongfooted me; I'd let him wrongfoot me.

"CrashCart does not delete patient data. You do not presently hold health insurance, but you were included as a dependent under your father's policy, which was cancelled by Mr Hebert in sixty-eight… one month after he died."

Another stupid mistake, I thought. But I couldn't afford it. When the payment notice came in, I had to cancel then and there.

Light flashed in the distance, illuminating the front of a building a few blocks away. The sound arrived seconds later. An explosion.

"Looks like you've got what you wanted," I said, looking past his serpentine body to the city beyond. "AFA has been dismantled and the Chosen are stuck in a gang war. Medhall has been declawed in the underworld. It's time to settle the cost."

"Yes…" the serpent hissed, rising up on his coils. "Let us discuss costs. Tell me, Bug, do you know how much a CrashCart High Threat Response evacuation costs? Three ambulances, six paramedics, six guards? Your surgery was relatively uncomplicated, but Grue required intensive nanosurgery to separate and repair the cybernetic and biological components of his body. To say nothing of life support expenses, which stand at thirty six hours and climbing."

Thirty six hours, I thought with a start, but my mouth was already moving.

"If you're going to nickel and dime, be accurate. Those weren't HTR."

It has all fallen into place; the mismatched uniforms in this room were just a way of disguising the snake's personnel as they commuted to and from this building each day. CrashCart was a shield he was using to support the own agenda, or the agenda of his real employers.

"Well done, Bug," he chuckled, giving me a cold reptilian smile. "I am no ambulance chaser. My name is Thomas Calvert. I work for Evo. CrashCart is the largest Evo subsidiary in Brockton Bay, so it is here that I made my headquarters. I am telling you this not because you might have figured it out yourself with time and talent" – he glanced at Tattletale – "but because it does not matter. Because you are in my debt."

Calvert's eyes deliberately flicked to my arm, before returning to meet my gaze. He'd risen high enough that our eyes were completely level.

"The cost of the medical treatment you have already received is greater than the sixty thousand nuyen you agreed to take as payment. The cost of repairing your arm and returning Grue to full functionality would be considerably more."

"Make your pitch," I snapped. "You wouldn't be telling us this if you didn't have a use for us, but a half-crippled Shadowrunner team is useless to anyone."

"I came to your city from Evo's North American headquarters, in Seattle. I came with no resources other than those I could take with me; even my presence in this hospital is concealed from the majority of staff for fear that it would be compromised by industrial espionage."

He turned, his elongated body slithering over itself as he angled his head towards the window, where the distant skyscrapers of the city centre could be seen past his twinned reflection. He was looking right at one skyscraper in particular, at the red, yellow and black holographic logo near its crest that simultaneously evoked a crown, a rune and the letter M.

"I work in emergent market acquisitions. My purpose in this city is the neutralisation of Medhall Pharmaceuticals, either through its outright destruction or the reduction of its value until it can be acquired and gutted by Evo. To surpass this goal, I require local operators whose obedience is beyond doubt."

Abruptly, he turned back to face us, his eyes flicking from person to person as if he was weighing our value.

"To that end, I will waive the remaining treatment costs for you and your teammate. I will pay you a weekly retainer not to take any work besides my own, until my goals are achieved. I will continue to fairly compensate you for each of those tasks. This is the only offer I will make."

In the end, it wasn't a choice at all. Brian's life hung in the balance – as did my arm. It hurt to admit it, but we'd been outmanoeuvred at every turn. Lisa was right to worry about the policlub job; Calvert had taken advantage of the naivety of a Shadowrunner team that had only just hit the big leagues, sending us against overwhelming odds in the knowledge that we'd come back in dire need of help only he could offer. Even if Lisa hadn't blackmailed him, he'd still have been waiting in the wings with the medical help we so desperately needed.

"Then our choice isn't a choice at all," I answered, conceding defeat. "We accept, of course, but I'm getting tired of 'Bug.' From now on, call me Spider."

We lost control, I thought, bitterly. I won't let it happen again.

Recompile - 6.02

Beyond the glass pane, across rooftops, cranes and the unseen waters of the Bay, the windows of Downtown resembled a nebula of stars. They were, in fact, the only stars in the sky; clouds had rolled in from the Atlantic and the lights of those towering skyscrapers were strong enough to reach that atmospheric ceiling, lighting it up so brightly that it was as if a white-gold dawn had descended on the city.

It almost drained the light out from the rest of Brockton Bay, where the buildings weren't high enough to cast the same reflection. It drew the eye until it seemed that there was no city beyond that beating heart of commerce. The Medhall logo glimmered like the crown it resembled at the pinnacle of their corporate headquarters, on smaller ancillary towers, on the ever-scrolling advertisements flowing up the face of skyscrapers, on the side of dirigibles that circled below the cloud layer, or projected onto the underside of the clouds themselves as advertising firms took advantage of the canvas nature had provided them.

The adverts promised safety of a kind that couldn't be achieved with guns or perimeter fences; they promised health, opportunity, a good life. Their towers promised dividends to their shareholders, an old firm dedicated to stable growth over chasing trends, a good investment. By the year's end, according to the last projections I'd seen, it would be large enough to petition the Corporate Court for an assessment that would see it leave the United States behind and take its place on the world stage as a true megacorporation, independent and proud.

"Miss Hebert?"

I blinked, turning away from the window. I was on the sixth floor of the hospital, in a decently-furnished clinicians office that couldn't hold a candle to the opulence of the topmost floors, but that was still more than most people could ever hope to access. The woman sitting across from me wasn't dressed in a uniform; she was a consultant, which meant people preferred a slightly different sort of formality. Her medical license was displayed in a holographic plaque on the wall, written in German and identifying her as a graduate of the Medizinische Hochschule Hannover.

The twists and turns that had taken her from the Allied German States to the UCAS could, most likely, be read in the pattern of silvery scales spread across her brow, her yellow sclera and wide pupils, or the line of gills sitting closed on her neck. Her life in the AGS had no doubt ended in sixty-one, when Hailley's comet passed low over the Earth, disrupting mana flows and turning her from a human into something altogether different. While all the usual suspects – and a few newer ones – were up in arms over yet another shift in the metahuman species, the Evo corporation opened the doors to millions of Changeling refugees from all walks of life, integrating them into its corporate empire.

In its own way, Evo scared me more than Medhall. Max Anders might hate whoever had kicked this gang war off, but he didn't know my name. Medhall was immediate and powerful but Evo was something larger than this city, larger even than the UCAS. It was the seventh largest corporation in the world.

Its ideology might have been more palatable than Medhall's but it could only ever see the people under its control as ants in a colony. They were minute insects contributing to works far greater than the value of their own lives, each one of them useful only for as long as they continued to perform their function. An insignificant tendril of that great hive had turned its eyes on me, and under its gaze I felt like a butterfly pinned on a board.

"Miss Hebert?" the consultant asked again.

"Sorry," I shook my head. "It's been… well."

I didn't want to say more, doubted I was covered by doctor-patient confidentiality.

"You have gone through a traumatic incident. It's normal to experience some disassociation."

I couldn't help the angry look that flashed into my eyes. I wasn't traumatised, I was coming down from dumpshock. At worst, I was rattled. Shaken.

"Just tell me my options," I snapped, as I tried and failed to move my right arm.

"Very well," the doctor answered, her accent still carrying a hint of German. "The arm itself is functionally useless. The nervous system could be replaced through nanite surgery, but such an option isn't covered by your plan."

I wasn't aware I was on a plan, I thought. I wasn't sure how Calvert had set this up in CrashCart's system, but it seemed just like a corporate agent to try and find out exactly how much he could gouge me before I started feeling ungrateful.

"So… you're going to replace it?" I asked. It was irrational, but I found the idea a little unnerving. I'd grown up around plenty of people with limb replacements, and of course Brian had quite happily swapped out both his arms while Rachel had gone even further than that, but some part of the metahuman brain will always feel uneasy at the thought of voluntarily chopping off your own limbs.

"Just so." The doctor leant back in her chair, reaching behind her as she picked a glossy magazine off the shelves and passed it across the desk to me. As I opened the wafer-thin digital pages, I saw that it was less of a magazine than a brochure advertising a whole host of different cybernetic and biosynthetic arms, each page full of scrolling images, reviews and features.

"CrashCart is prepared to cover the cost of any of these replacements, but I must caution you that studies have suggested that cyberware can affect technomancer abilities in the same way they do the awakened. You may wish to consider bioware to minimise the impact on your talents."

I froze. I wasn't sure what I was more shocked at, but the doctor picked up on my unease right away.

"It's okay," she smiled, reassuringly. "CrashCart values patient anonymity. Your data won't leave our system and, as an extraterritorial corporation, we have no legal obligation to cooperate with any national or corporate entity."

Except for Evo, I thought.

The doctor seemed to weight something in her mind, her gills opening and closing as she thought, before she leant forwards almost conspiratorially.

"Of course, if you ever feel things are getting too dangerous for you, our parent company has a programme to offer technomancers corporate citizenship. Unlike the competition, Evo understands that metahumanity is continually evolving. We seek to accept and understand that evolution rather than lash out at it."

She took a small, folded pamphlet out of her desk drawer and passed it across to me. On the front was a graphic of a metahuman brain formed from circuitry, pulsing with a digital blue light. Above the brain was a fairly straightforward message – 'Technomancers: You Are Not Alone' – while below was the megacorp's favourite tagline; 'Evolve with Evo.'

"Whatever you decide, take that brochure to either cybersurgery on floor eight or bioimplamentation on floor nine. They've been notified that you may be coming."

"Thank you," I said, more out of habit than anything, before I stood up and left the room.

The others were waiting outside, taking up a whole section of the seats in the small waiting room. They were meant for patients with actual appointments and a few of those upper-middle class patients were sitting a few rows back from my team, eyeing the motley crew with something between wariness and open terror. The only exception was a little boy whose mother had pulled him tight against her side; he was looking at us like we were a Firewatch team who'd come to his school to hand out free candy.

Rachel sat at the end of the row like she'd been stowed there; her boots side by side, back straight and her left hand gripping the barrel of her shotgun, the butt flat on the floor. Alec took up the entirety of the row next to her, leaning against the flimsy armrest with his knees bent and his shoes planted on the seat beside Rachel.

Lisa paced up and down in front of them, her head ducked almost beneath the upturned collar of her trenchcoat and her arms half-folded in front of her as she worried at her snake pendant with one hand. She stopped pacing the moment I stepped through the door, but she didn't say anything; she was giving me space and I appreciated it.

Alec, on the other hand, had no such qualms.

"So," he drawled, stretching in a strangely cat-like manner. "We've made a deal with the devil, nobody's dying right this second and no corporate kill-squads have kicked down the doors with machine guns blazing. I'm going to head the fuck back and zonk out to some trideo."

It was a statement, but it almost felt like a request. Maybe he was pushing boundaries – pushing me – but I wasn't sure. Either way, he had a point; we'd already had our worst moments and the time of greatest danger. All that remained was the long, slow aftermath.

"Sure," I nodded. "We're pretty much done here. I just need to chip a new arm."

"Should probably let our fixer know what's going on as well," Lisa said in a murmur, moving in close to me. Alec was already slinking off, giving the patients a wide berth.

"How much does she know already?"

"Gregor reached out to me a few hours after I left the hospital," she said. "She knows you and Grue are still here, and of course she knows about our client. Nothing else, though."

I sighed.

"Which means I need to tell her about our 'new arrangement.' Great."

"Just keep it professional," Lisa advised. "She has a real stick up her ass, but I guarantee that she's had people in worse than this. Stick to pure biz and she'll respond like it's biz as usual."

"Might need to talk to Labyrinth as well…" I murmured.

"Who?"

"Faultline's technomancer," I explained. "Think I mentioned her before."

I paused, thinking for a moment.

"Actually, gotta ask you a question. Mages and cyberware don't mix, right?"

"Right," Lisa nodded. "The theory I was taught in school says that flows through the mind of the user, but that modern cybernetics are so advanced that the neural connections alter the way the mind works. It's why they call mages with chrome 'burnouts;' they threw away their talents for the sake of convenience."

I frowned, as she pulled at the thread. "Wait, did you just get told it's the same for technomancers?"

"That's what the doc said. Either I pick the lightest bioware they have to try and minimise the damage, or I talk to Labyrinth and see if she knows any tricks. Technomancers are still new; there aren't any school textbooks about how it all works."

I turned to Rachel, who'd been watching us talk.

"Actually, I was thinking… if chrome does work out, would you mind installing it? Less risk, I figure."

Her response was immediate, and not what I was expecting.

"No, do it here."

"Seriously?" I asked, confused.

"You saw the Chosen," she said as if that explained it. "My work's only as good as theirs; I need all the same immunosuppressants and anti-rejection drugs. Get it done here, you won't have that."

It shouldn't have surprised me – the Chosen's setup was a lot more sophisticated than the literal junkyard shack where Rachel had got her first chrome – but it did. It worried me, too. I was sure Rachel had a handle on her meds, but we'd just demonstrated that they were a weak thread that could be pulled.

"Right…" I nodded. "You can head back if you want, you know. Things are settled now, and I know your drones and the van got pretty beat up."

Rachel simply nodded, making her way out with her shotgun gripped in her left hand. She was wearing a tank top, which drew my eye to the way the mechanism in her arms shifted with each step she took.

"I'm going to make the call," I said to Lisa as I slumped bonelessly down into one of the troll-sized chairs – obscurely grateful that at least the snake-faced megacorp holding my leash had coined the term 'metaergonomics.' "Silently, you know? You don't have to stick around."

"Nothing else to do," Lisa said, shrugging her shoulders. "Not sure I want to leave you alone, either."

"I'm fine," I said, but even as I said it I realised how snappishly it'd come out. "I'll deal, whatever comes. It's Grue I'm worried about."

"He's in surgery now," Lisa said. "They started it up as soon as we made our deal. Nanosurgery, organ replacement, the works. I'd call it top of the line, but we both know that where the top is depends on how deep your pockets are."

"And after that?"

"Induced coma for forty-eight hours of intensive monitoring, then another three days of conscious observation." Lisa shrugged her shoulders. "Could be worse."

"It certainly could…" I mused, before sighing. "No use putting it off any longer."

My connection to the resonance had almost completely returned. It was like I'd gone swimming and lost my hearing in one ear, only for everything to come rushing back at once in a way that felt fresher and more vibrant than ever before. Not that calling Faultline was the most intensive use of my abilities; one of the first things I'd ever done was learn how to spoof a commlink and speaking without talking was as intuitive as breathing.

"Bug," Faultline began, picking up after five seconds of ringing. "You have an update?"

That's it? I thought. No 'hello, how are you?'

"Yeah," I transmitted, as Lisa grinned at the scowl on my face. "Our client introduced himself to us. I take it you knew he worked for Evo."

"Naturally," Faultline replied, matter of factly. "From what I understand, he got you out of a dangerous situation."

"And used the medical bills to put a leash around our neck," I snapped. "I didn't get into this line of work to be a corporate lapdog."

Faultline laughed; a short, sharp exhalation.

"What line of work did you think you were getting into? Tell me, Bug, why do you think it is that Shadowrunners are so prevalent in the media? They're adventurers; rebels without causes, sticking it to the man and fighting the good fight." Every word dripped with sarcasm. "So tell me, why do the megacorps who own the film studios allow that portrayal, when your fellow technomancers have been condemned as terrorist bogeymen?"

I paused, glancing back over my shoulder at the kid. His eyes widened at even that slight attention, his mouth spreading into a grin that more than outshone the frown that sat on my face.

"Megacorps have three choices when it comes to industrial espionage. The first are in-house operatives; trained specialists who've been part of the company since birth. They're by far the most effective, but they're expensive and if they're ever identified the corporation suffers. The second are gang contacts. You can't trust them as far as you can throw them, but they can be used to perform acts that the company itself can't be seen doing. Clearing out prospective property, for one."

Medhall's Chosen path, I thought. It brought up half-remembered news stories of gang violence when I was growing up. I'd always thought the Chosen were nothing but mindless monsters, but how much of their brutality was targeted to help Medhall's bottom line?

"Shadowrunners are somewhere between the two. They might not have had formal training, but they are far more experienced than the average gang member. Above all, they're completely deniable. That combination makes them a vital tool in the arsenal of corporate agents, which is why corporations make up over eighty percent of my clients."

"So it's just a recruiting tool?" I asked, almost forgetting to keep my voice digital. "All the trideo I grew up on was just meant to lure people in? Keep the fresh meat coming so that a fraction of them can climb over the bodies high enough to be called a professional?"

"You're one of them now, Bug. A professional. Don't see this as a failure, see it as an opportunity. Take all you can from this contact and move on to the next. Above all, keep moving. Don't stop until you have enough to get out of the game for good."

"Is that what you did?" I asked. At what point did Shadowrunners become 'them' to you?

Faultline didn't answer, at first. It wasn't a long pause, but it was enough to be noticeable.

"You can't fight the world and win. I'm from this city, but I didn't work here. Roamed the UCAS putting together my team, then took jobs wherever I could find them. I ran in Denver, Seattle, St Louis, even played insurgent in California, and I made contacts everywhere I went. I've worked under the arrangement you're under now; it paid for the Palanquin. Evo are moving into this city, one way or the other, and knowing a man on the inside could be very valuable if you play your cards right."

"That sounds like giving up."

"Then you haven't been listening," she snapped back. "Don't ever trust your client unreservedly, but don't allow yourself to think that the world simply resets after every job. Corporate agents have long memories, and always return for repeat business. Whatever his business here, when it is concluded he – or someone like him – will remain. If you make him an enemy, Evo will remain an enemy."

Damnit, I thought, in the privacy of my own head. Paradoxically, it was easier to stop any unintended outbursts when I was thinking my words, rather than vocalising them.

"I'll have to take your word for it," I said, instead. "And one last thing; I've changed my name to Spider."

"Understood," she replied without so much as a pause. "I'll feed it into the rumour mill."

"There's a rumour mill?" I asked, a little shocked. Faultline responded with a laugh that seemed far brighter than her last.

"Of course, Spider. You set the city on fire, upended the balance in the North End. It's hard to ignore, and people in your profession are used to thinking in terms of single stones that start a landslide. Your hit on the warehouse stood out, though nobody's yet linked it back to your team."

"Great," I murmured. "Another thing to worry about."

"A reputation isn't something to be afraid of, but it is something you have to be aware of. Good luck, Spider."

She hung up, as I clenched my teeth.

"That bad, huh?" Lisa asked.

"Honestly? Better and worse than I was expecting. Basically boiled down to 'just deal with it.'"

"Sounds about right," she smirked. "We'll be fine, Spider. We just need to keep our eyes open."

"Well I'm going to close mine," I retorted with a grin of my own. "Need to chat technomancer to technomancer. Keep a lookout for me, will you?"

I didn't wait for a reply, instead soaring away from my meat and into the glorious digital lights of the matrix, flicking across the city in an instant as I made my way into Palanquin's network. Labyrinth's attention fell on me almost immediately; firewalls shifting aside as I passed through the digital space of the club, jostling with the hundreds of matrix-linked devices worn by its patrons in meatspace and the many and varied shapes of personas enjoying the club's digital mirror, and made my way up into her room.

Her persona resembled a Celtic priestess, with a hood of feathers as black as tar casting half her face into shadow, while her bare arms were daubed with woad paint shaped into intricate circuitry. Her raven was perched on her shoulder, shuffling from side to side as it peered at me.

"Spider," Labyrinth said. I didn't ask how she knew; it was no-doubt written in my code. "You look weary."

I chuckled; a bright burst of code. "Dumpshock."

Labyrinth nodded. "It is never easy."

"Listen…" I hesitated. It came across as a lifeless section of the datastream that carried my voice. "I'm losing my arm. The doc told me that replacing it would mess with my connection to the resonance. I need to know if there's anything I can do."

Labyrinth paused for a moment's contemplation, then tilted her head in silent conversation with her familiar. I could see the data passing between them, but I couldn't read it. After seconds – an eternity in matrix time – she turned back to me.

"Perhaps."

"Perhaps? I was hoping for 'yes,' but it's better than nothing. Why does it even happen, anyway?"

"That is a question many have asked. MCT believed we function through quantum entanglement; that a technomancer's central nervous system is mirrored by paired neurons in cyberspace and that cyberware alters the nervous system in a way that brings those neurons out of alignment. They were testing the theory, but results were inconclusive."

She gave the explanation quite calmly, but I knew she was talking about her time as an MCT lab rat, before Faultline broke her out and she massacred her captors. It brought uncomfortable questions to my mind. How do you test the effects of alterations like that? How many innocent lives did their tests consume? How can Labyrinth speak of something so horrible – even through the medium of data – and sound so detached from it all?

"Ultimately, it does not matter why. There is no one in the mundane world who truly understands because true understanding cannot be found there. I have heard whispers of technomancers who have managed to focus their talents down a resonant stream, changing the very nature of how they connect to the resonance. I believe I have achieved such a feat myself; deepening my connection to the sprites of the resonance to the point where I exist in harmony with them."

"Another vision quest?" I would have smirked, in meatspace. "Any hints, tricks?"

"None," came the answer. "Save that your answer, as all answers, lies within the resonance realms."

"Figures. Thanks, Labyrinth."

"Goodbye, Spider, and good luck."

She drifted away, her persona pulled by ephemeral strings to some other part of Palanquin's network. Her parting words just didn't make sense to me; 'luck' was irrelevant to cyberspace. It struck me that while we were both technomancers, we both had very different ideas of what that really meant. With what she'd said, it seemed she viewed the resonance in a much more spiritual way than I did – and in the most literal sense of the word, given how she treated her sprites. It almost reminded me of Lisa's shamanic beliefs.

The shaman herself was waiting for me when I returned to meatspace, serenely looking up at me as I blinked away the harsh hospital lights.

"Any luck?" she asked, not unkindly.

"Maybe." I leant back, resting my chin on my thumb and forefinger. "You'd probably get along if your heads weren't in different worlds; she's recommended I go on a spiritual journey."

"It might do you some good," Lisa replied with a smile. "A lot's changing. I think we could all use a chance to centre ourselves."

"Yeah, well, first I've got go to lose some weight." I grinned, but the grin was a false one, and it became weaker as what I'd said sank in. I knew that I didn't have any other option, knew that it was perfectly normal – almost mundane, even – but it was still a hell of a thing to think about.

I meant it as a way of saying goodbye for the night, but Lisa followed me out the waiting room and into the elevator. She didn't say a word and neither did I, but I appreciated her presence all the same. I shouldn't have been surprised; she could probably read me like an open book.

As the elevator climbed, making frequent stops to admit hospital staff, visitors and even one elderly dwarf on an electric wheelchair, I thumbed through the brochure, slightly surprised at the amount of options there were for what was fundamentally just a gripping tool on the end of two articulated struts.

The reception area for the cybersurgery clinic was all decorated in sterile white, with a recessed alcove in one wall that held a row of plastic plants in a plastic gravel bed and a screen that displayed shots from some distant Evo-owned factory where employees in cleansuits stared purposefully at robotic armatures as they assembled new cyberlimbs with programmed precision.

I might have been brought there by injury, but the cyberware clinic sat closer to the cosmetic side of CrashCart than the medical. Cyberware was frequently used in medicine, of course, but it was just as common – sometimes even mandatory – in the workplace. Growing up, I'd seen plenty of simplistic cybernetics on dockworkers who wanted to haul crates all day without losing their backs by the time they hit thirty-five. Not to mention all the socialites who swapped out limbs for fashion's sake, as easily as they might a pair of shoes.

I made myself known to the ork manning the desk, his cybereyes matching up my profile with their files. He asked me which 'package' I would be installing, so I pointed out the right page in the brochure and took a seat beside Lisa, who was watching the screen with a complete lack of interest.

One of the tricks of my nature was that I always knew what time it was. Timestamps were encoded into almost every piece of transmitted data, which meant I was constantly surrounded by the passage of seconds measured out in perfect precision. And yet it still felt like time was running slow before the receptionist finally informed me that I could proceed to surgery.

I stood up, sighed, and looked down at Lisa.

"Wish me luck," I said, with a half-hearted smile.

"You're kidding, right?" Tattletale grinned back. "If you could make it through the last job, you can survive a visit to the doctors. I'll be sure to get you a lollypop for good behaviour."

I snorted, shaking my head as I followed the glowing green guideline that had appeared on the floor. It led down a short corridor and into a room that shared the same basic anatomy as a high-school changing room, only far cleaner, much more upmarket, and generously sized for one metahuman only.

The green line ended in the middle of the room, but there was a list of instructions projected on the wall to my left. I followed them with more than a little apprehension, stripping down and leaving my clothes and boots in a secure locker. The moment I was done, the text shifted into a green smiley face and the line resumed its rapid crawl along the floor, leading through a glass door in the far wall.

Beyond was a shower of warm water that smelled of chemicals buried beneath a minty-fresh mask, as if reminding me of toothpaste would make me feel cleaner. It snapped off after forty seconds, followed by twenty seconds of humming sonics to dry me off, the frequency causing my horns to ache ever so slightly. As I stepped through into the next room, I felt a little like I'd just been forced through a car wash.

The next stage in what increasingly felt like an assembly line was a much smaller changing room with a single locker that contained a set of pristine white scrubs and a pair of rubbery sandals. The sandals and pants were ordinary enough, but the top was lopsided; with a full sleeve on the left arm but the right cut back so far it exposed the entirety of my shoulder, about half my back and more of my chest than I was comfortable with. That wasn't why I found it so unsettling, however; they might as well have drawn a 'cut here' line on me in permanent marker.

It didn't help that the arm hung completely limp at my side, since Tattletale's sling had been left with my clothes in the other room.

I was starting to feel claustrophobic. The rooms may have been comfortably troll-sized, but it felt like each step I took closed a door behind me. The next room was almost a relief because it was comparatively spacious, even if it marked the end of my journey.

It said something about how isolated I felt that the first thing I noticed wasn't the array of surgical equipment or the narrow-backed medical chair in the centre of the room, but the people. There were two of them in the room; a man and a woman who were both human-standard height, though that was all I could gleam with my eyes thanks to the full-body cleansuits both of them wore, with filters over their mouths and opaque visors over their eyes.

The man's suit was fairly unremarkable, but the woman's ended at her elbows with an airtight seal that connected it to her cybernetic arms, both of them in CrashCart's trademarked green and white and ending in intricately delicate hands whose five fingers were each split into a multitude of different digits. I had a suspicion that the arms never left the operating theatre.

The whole space looked more like a laboratory than what I would expect from a surgery. Everything seemed to have been set aside in its place, from the shelves of chemicals, drugs, tools and blades lining the wall to the anthropomorphic drone standing to the side of the room, holding a long black case that was out of place among the universal white and light-green decor.

"Miss Hebert," the surgical cyberneticist – according to the RFID tag attached to her cerebral chip – greeted me. "Welcome. I am doctor Kaori. I will be your surgeon today. My associate is mister Lozano, who is acting as my assistant as part of his doctorate studies."

"Right…" I nodded, thrown off by their formality. "So, how does this work?"

"First I would ask you to please inspect the product. There is no risk of a mix-up, of course, but we find it aids in integration if the patient is already familiar with the cybernetic we are about to install."

I nodded as the drone walked across to me, its metal feet clicking against the tiled floor. It held up the case in front of me as a manipulator arm extended from a slot on its back, deftly flipping the clasps in a preprogrammed motion before lifting up the lid.

Inside, contained within contoured padding, was the arm I had picked out of the catalogue. The joints were coated with a black rubbery material that aped synthskin, protecting the articulated components from the build-up of dust and grime, while the rest of the limb was a mix of matte black plastic and black metal that gleamed with a dull sheen. The only concession to art was the thin yellow tracework that outlined the knucklebones and ran down the seams where plastic and metal met.

I'd been tempted by designs that were closer to Brian's in style, with the cybernetic components hidden beneath a realistic coating of synthskin. I could even get it in the same grey hue as my skin. Ultimately, however, I decided that if I was going to commit to this, I was going to go all in. After all, the external appearance wasn't the problem. Instead, I'd taken a page from Rachel's book and gone for brutal practicality.

The brochure had called it 'milspec' gear, citing its use by the marines of Yamatetsu Naval Technologies. Once it was installed, it would be stronger than my remaining organic arm, but not by much. The difference between a troll who exercised and one who didn't. The real magic was in the speed and fluidity of its movements, guided by both hardware and integrated software. It would never match a true smartlink, but it would make aiming more intuitive, make it a little easier to become an asset rather than a liability in a gunfight.

Since it seemed pretty obvious that there would be gunfights in my future, I wanted any edge I could get.

What I hadn't thought about when I made my choice was the way the cybernetic limb continued way beyond the shoulder joint, the coating giving way to the bare metal and almost organic-looking synthetic musculature that would replace my arm muscles and shoulder blade. They couldn't just take my arm off and slot another one into the socket; for the cyberlimb to actually function, it had to replace the entire supporting structure of my arm. I was suddenly struck by just how much of my body was about to be cut away.

"The limb has been fully sterilised, to avoid any risk of infection," the doctor pressed on, oblivious to my worries or just ignoring them. Either way the effect was the same; dragging me out of my introspection and back to the here and now.

"Good," I replied, half-heartedly. "Where do you need me?"

"The operation is quite comprehensive," she explained. "As we require access to both sides of your shoulder, it will be conducted while you are seated."

"And sedated?" I asked.

The surgeon paused, her head tilted to the side slightly. I was sure she was wearing a confused expression under the suit.

"Locally. This should have been explained to you."

"It's a bit of a rush job," I explained, even as my heart started pounding. Local anaesthetic? "Why not put me under?"

"We're installing technology directly onto your nervous system. Keeping you conscious is a reliable way of monitoring any adverse effects. Not that anything will go wrong," she clarified a moment later. I got the impression she wasn't used to explaining this information; her bedside manner wasn't quite megacorporate smooth – "but prevention is always better than a cure. Now please, take a seat."

I did as she asked. The narrow back of the chair was far from comfortable, but I supposed my comfort was secondary to giving the surgeon unobstructed access to my shoulder. The moment I was seated, it was as if a machine had been switched on. The surgeon, her assistant and the android all moved in what could have been a preprogrammed pattern, wheeling over stands of tools and strange machinery. At the same time, I used my left arm to move my right onto the armrest, where it sat as useless and dead as a slab of meat.

The assistant grabbed a small case from one shelf and brought it over to me, opening it to show a triangular plastic device a little larger than a headphone case, but almost as flat as a commlink.

"Since you don't have an integrated biomonitor, we'll be using an external model to watch your lifesigns," he explained. "It goes on your neck."

I shifted my head, exposing my neck as the assistant removed the biomonitor from its case, peeling off the paper on the back and sticking it right over my carotid artery. I could sense the device whirring into life as it sensed my pulse, switching on a small ultrasonic scanner and streaming data to half a dozen recipient devices, including the two clean suits.

The next device he brought was in two parts; a vial of clear liquid and a long, tube-like component with a squeeze-trigger on the side. He slotted the former into the latter and held the result in front of me. I realised that he was probably following company policy; explaining each step of the procedure to the patient.

"This jet injector contains local anaesthetic and a coagulant that will clot the blood within your arm. The cybernetic has already been pre-loaded with a counteragent that will resume normal blood flow once installed. Hold still please. This will sting a bit."

He pressed the injector against my shoulder and squeezed the trigger, a compressed air canister forced a jet of fluid through my skin and into my bloodstream. It came with a sharp, stabbing pain that caused me to jump in my sheet.

"Some fucking anaesthetic…" I grumbled.

"It needs a few seconds to take effect," the assistant said with a shrug. I glowered at him, but a few moments later the pain had faded into a dull numbness that slowly spread down my arm and across my chest until everything felt cold and tingly.

The surgeon stepped back into view, wheeling across a tray of equipment and followed closely by the drone. The android had the arm mounted in a bracket that kept it perfectly level with my shoulder, exactly mirroring the loose lump of meat that was my organic arm. I could see a timer in the surgeon's HUD, visible only to her. I presumed it was counting down the time it took for the coagulant to clog up my blood.

Sure enough, the surgeon took a long, narrow tool off the countertop. She held it between two fingers that had split into three different manipulators, turning the device into an extension of her hand.

"The first step is to close the arteries pumping blood into your arm – your veins will have already solidified. For this, I will be making an incision just below the clavicle and fusing the subclavian artery. It is important you remain still."

For a moment, I felt like watching. Keeping my torso deathly still, I turned my head slightly and flicked my head down as the tool was brought close to my shoulder. The head of the tool was topped by something that looked like the head of a bottle opener; a metal ring that was flat and sharp on the top edge. Moments before it made contact with my skin, however, I flinched and abruptly shifted my gaze to the surgeon's arm. I didn't feel anything, though her arm had lowered enough that I knew she had to have made her incision. There was a faint sizzling sound, then the tool was withdrawn as the surgeon stuck a temporary pad over the wound.

The tool – which no doubt had some complicated, scientific name – was set back on the table. Its replacement's function was far easier to understand, though the sight of it sent shivers down my spine. It was a straight knife about as long as the surgeon's forearm with yellow warning markers on the sheath cautioning the wielder – and, presumably, their target – about the blade's monofilament edge.

I didn't know what I was expecting when the weapon was drawn, but to my inexperienced eye it just looked like a dull blade of matte-grey ceramic. No different from some of the cheaper knives you could buy in just about any bodega in the city. I looked away again as the surgeon held the knife just above my shoulder while the assistant stepped in and wrapped his hand around my bicep.

I saw the surgeon's arm fall seemingly without any exertion on her part and suddenly felt as if the floor had just tilted sideways. My weight felt wrong, my body off balance. I felt myself breathing heavier and forced my lungs back to something like normality. It felt easier than it should have been; I wondered if there was more in those anaesthetics than they told me.

"What-" I swallowed. "What do you do with it?"

"The bone marrow will be recycled for transplants," the assistant explained as the android took my arm somewhere out of view. I kept my eyes firmly fixed on the wall in front of me. I didn't want to see it. "The rest is incinerated."

The surgeon was working with smaller tools now – perhaps even just the cutting edges of her multifaceted digits – while the android had folded back the armrest and moved the new arm into place. The sound of those smaller quantities of flesh being carefully flensed back was both sickening and indescribable; it seemed like the whole operation was dragging on into eternity. I'd switched off my view of Bitch's optics when given the chance to see her work up close, but it felt like that had gone far quicker.

And then the horrific noises ceased, as I heard the faint clicking of the surgeon's hands rearranging themselves into a new configuration. The arm was pushed even closer to my body, the surgeon leaning in close as she matched up arteries and veins to their new mechanical counterparts. After a few moments she pulled her right hand back, reaching into her left arm and drawing out a datajack that was slotted into a hidden port on the cyberlimb's forearm. Through my passive awareness of her own cyberware, I watched as she tapped into a monitoring system that seemed almost like a computer's basic startup program.

One by one, that program checked off nerves as they were attached to the arm, but for now the limb sat passive and inert. It took twenty-three minutes for her to connect all the relevant nerves, at which point she paused with her mental attention resting on an inert programme in the arm.

"Thank you for your patience, Miss Hebert. We will now test the link between the digital and biological nerves. Please try and clench your right hand into a fist."

I did so. It didn't actually feel like my arm was gone – it still lingered as a phantom limb – but I couldn't hear the cyberlimb moving. Through the matrix, however, I saw the inert programme come to life as it registered the input only to prevent the signal from making the jump to motion.

That was the start of an exhaustive process of checks as I shifted every single joint in my arm in what felt like every possible direction, each motion matched by a signal in the matrix and absolutely no movement in the real world. It was exhausting.

"Good," the surgeon said, after I'd bent my elbow five times. "No neurological anomalies detected in either the limb or your central nervous system. Miss Hebert, I'm going to activate motion. Please remain still for now."

There was a pregnant pause. I felt like a coiled spring; anxieties and doubts piling up in my head with no way to vent them. What if it didn't work? It was a stupid, irrational thought, but it was there all the same. What if I've gone through all of this for nothing?

"Now, please curl your thumb."

The thought flashed through my mind in an instant, in a rush of released energy. I moved my thumb, my brain sending a signal down my biological nervous system, where it jumped across to a cybernetic substitute. For a moment, I thought it hadn't worked, but then I felt it. A rubbery substance on the very fringes of my awareness. I was feeling the grip pad on the end of my thumb touching its counterpart on my palm. I could feel both, through both.

Without being prompted, I furled my fingers from left to right, shifting my thumb so that my hand could close into a fist. Touch blossomed across each digit. I wasn't just feeling the grip pads, but the surprisingly warm metal of each knuckle. The sensation was unfamiliar; the shape of each joint – the shape of my whole hand – was different in both obvious and subtle ways, but it was all there.

"It works," I said, breathless. "Touch, movement" – I unfurled my fist and rotated my wrist, placing my hand palm-down on the stand that was holding it in place. I could feel the chill of the sterilised metal – "everything works."

"So I see," the surgeon responded, her eyes looking at a digital world of readouts and sensor relays spreading from point to point like a web, flowing down from a single branch before becoming fractal and dispersed. She was watching the arm's nervous system; watching the pulsing neurons effortlessly transferring signals to their new companions.

"A textbook installation," she said with finality. "No signs of neurological rejection or psychological ghosting. If that changes – if you experience disassociation, nausea, sudden loss of control or violent urges within the next forty-eight hours – please contact us immediately."

"And after that?" I asked, though my brain was stuck on 'violent urges.'

"The warranty expires and the cost of removal would either be covered under your deductible or paid out of pocket."

While she'd been talking, the android had undone the clasps holding my arm to the stand. The moment they were released, I stood up, swaying a little on my feet. My new arm weight roughly as much as my old one, but roughly wasn't enough when it came to my sense of balance. I moved my elbow, then rolled my shoulder in my socket – all the while trying not to look at the plastic yellow biowaste bag that the assistant was tying off.

"Do you have a mirror?" I asked.

A gesture directed me to a flat panel on the wall. It was a digital mirror, kept opaque while the surgery was ongoing. I wanted to reach out through the matrix and turn it on, but instead I brought up my arm and pressed one metal digit against the button.

The mirror sprang into light, sweeping aside the opaque surface in a flood of pixels that reflected my own image back at me. Blood had seeped into my scrubs around my right shoulder and stained my skin. The arm began at the edge of my shoulder, seemingly anchored to the base of my clavicle – though I knew that was an illusion. My skin – and whatever flesh they'd left me – had been used to conceal the extensive cybernetics that stretched throughout the upper right side of my torso, anchoring the arm in place.

The skin itself was reddened and sore where it had been spliced to synthskin and metal. The result was almost seamless; biology transitioning into cybernetics as if both had been grown that way. The arm itself… I was glad I hadn't gone for a realistic coating. It was jarring, obvious, but that seemed right in a way I couldn't quite comprehend. It seemed to match the faint sensation in the back of my brain that came from the resonance and the cyberware tugging against each other. That sensation developed into a headache as I thanked the staff and made my way back through the shower and into the changing room.

With my scrubs discarded, I stepped back into the waiting room a new woman – or, at least, twenty percent of one. Lisa was waiting there, setting aside a magazine as she caught side of me. She stood, smiling, and reached into the pocket of her trenchcoat. When she withdrew it, she was holding a cherry red tootsie pop in a crinkled plastic wrapper.

"Where did you get that?" I asked, baffled.

"Took a walk down to paediatric and told the duty nurse I wanted a lollipop for my twenty year old friend." Her gaze shifted to my arm as I reached out and took the proffered sweet. "It suits you."

"Not quite," I countered, shifting the lollipop to my remaining organic hand as I tested my fine motor control by unwrapping it without tearing the plastic, "but it will."

Recompile: 6.03

When I finally left the hospital, my head was heavy with an almost inescapable weariness. Even after days of unconsciousness, I was still half-dead on my feet. I said my goodbyes to Tattletale at the nearest metro station, then watched her go from the platform as she leant against the window of a westbound carriage, her arms crossed over her chest and her head bowed in deep thought.

On the eastbound line, I almost fell asleep to the gentle side-to-side rocking of the carriage as it wound its way around the edge of the docks, only to be jolted back into consciousness by the shrieking squeal of the brakes each time we approached a station. I very nearly missed my destination, only recognising the familiar platform at the last second and pushing through the flood of incoming passengers moments before the doors closed.

Finally, after navigating streets that were being slowly drowned beneath an incessant downpour, I found myself shambling out of my apartment block's elevator and into the welcomingly drab corridor that led back home. I'd shared the elevator with a family of five who were on their way up to the fifteenth floor, the youngest child playing with the toy from a Jolly Meal – a spacefighter from some kid's trideo show that he was 'flying' from his hand, complete with the correct sound effects. Something about the way I looked must have worried the parents, however; I kept catching them glancing at me with unease in their eyes.

I hadn't needed to use my apartment's keycard for six years; a stray thought was enough to unlock and retract the sliding door. Another thought shut it behind me as I half-stumbled over the threshold, shrugging off my jacket and tossing it to hang off the back of a kitchen chair, followed shortly thereafter by the submachine gun in its shoulder holster. I threw both with my new arm and almost misjudged my own strength with the pistol, the back of the chair just managing to catch one of the straps.

I kicked off my boots, then kicked them vaguely into place against the wall, next to a neatly organised rack of shoes – some mine, most not – that had sat untouched for years. There was a mirror in the hall – I paused at the sight of my new arm, marvelling at the unfamiliar sight of bare metal and plastic emerging from my sleeve, the way it caught the light in unexpected ways.

I practiced my grip on a glass of water, noting from the tap's trickle that I'd need to replace the filter sooner rather than later. It still worked out cheaper than buying bottled – just.

It struck me then, as I fished a handful of ingredients from the fridge and cut a few slices from a tube of AlmostEgg, that it wasn't too long ago that my life had been defined by questions like that; how to scrape and save money on the little things even while I ignored riskier payouts because my pathological need to keep the apartment was matched in intensity only by the lethargy in which I lived my life.

I wondered what my life would have been like if I'd stepped into the Shadows sooner? Where would I be without those years I spent as little more than a sleepwalker taking petty jobs for petty cash, without doing so much as take a single step beyond the threshold of my home? A home that had stopped feeling like home long before I was its only occupant?

That brought a frown to my face, as I microwaved a packet of mixed rice and vegetables. Ultimately, however, I decided it wasn't worth worrying about. There were simply too many variables involved to predict what could have been, not least of which was that I'd never have met the others.

With the now-warmed packet emptied into a bowl and the slices of 'egg' scattered on top for protein, I grabbed a cold beer from the fridge, sat down and realised with a start that I was actually comfortable. The past few weeks had been exhilarating, each burst of violence a shot of adrenaline straight to my soul, but even the lows between had become a source of contentment. Hacking my way through corporate networks was a thrill, but going clothes shopping in the market with Lisa and Rachel came with its own, far more nuanced sensations.

Even now, after being wounded, losing an arm and finding a new one – even with Brian in the middle of half a dozen different life-saving operations – I still didn't regret a single decision I'd made since hunting down Lisa's comm from a forum post. That wasn't to say I wasn't aware of how we'd fallen short; I knew we needed to be better prepared in future, knew I needed to have perfect awareness of everything around me, on the job and off.

The first step was to clear the fuzz from my brain; that lingering sensation that something wasn't right with my head. I wondered if this was how Tattletale's 'burnout' mages felt all the time, whether they got used to it or whether it felt completely different when chrome messed with magic rather than the resonance?

As I sank into the syn-leather armchair, I became conscious of just how strange the material felt against my new arm. The tactile sensors didn't extend to the bare metal, so it was as if I had gaps in my sense of touch. There were other, smaller nuances as well; my mechanical joints didn't move quite like my real ones, to the point where I could rotate my wrist a full three hundred and sixty degrees, which gave me my first ever bout of vertigo when I accidentally found out.

But wasn't distracting. It didn't feel unnatural; I wasn't suddenly struck by an urge to rip it out of my shoulder, or drive my metal fingers into my neighbour's eyes. It was just different. All I needed to do was trick my brain into accepting that difference rather than freaking out about it.

The process started, paradoxically, by leaving both the arm and the meat it was attached to behind.

The matrix flooded in like an ocean, submersing me beneath its vast chill. I paused for a moment, metaphorically breathing it in as I took stock of the local net, eyeing the surrounding traffic for threats. Tattletale had told me that – by and large – the gang war had reached a lull in the fighting. The initial flare-up of violence had given way to Chosen and Yakuza entrenching themselves in whatever ground they'd taken, held or retreated to, while Knight Errant launched armoured convoys through the streets to reassert what control they could.

To those few in the know, the lull had more nuance to it; the Chosen had obtained whatever drugs they needed and were now hunkering down to dose up and deal with the fallout of their averted starvation.

And yet, to the matrix, there might as well not have been a gang war at all. While whole streets might have been barricaded off, data flowed freely throughout Chosen and Yakuza territory, the sheer volume of traffic in the matrix too great to be stemmed even if the gangs wanted to – which they didn't, when they themselves relied on the matrix to keep their communications online.

I didn't fool myself into thinking that meant the matrix was safe from the fighting, however. I knew that if I looked closer at the right datastreams passing between the right devices, I'd find a shadow war of decker against decker fought out in private comm networks, squad-size tactical links and even inside the headware of gang lieutenants, whose secure drives contained data more valuable than any physical prize.

None of it was my concern. I left the city to its quiet war, drifting through the spiderwebbed datastreams of the North End until I passed below the plane of the grid and down into the nothingness below, deeper than even the miniscule municipal network regulating the subsurface pumps that drained the aquifer for drinking water. I kept going, until the city's grid was stretched out above me like the night's sky, then began fraying the tether between me and my body.

It came more naturally the second time; almost closer to falling asleep than a conscious activity. One by one, senses were muted and strands cut until I was once again surrounded by an empty black void, drifting ever deeper as I left my body behind. It was placid, even tranquil in my complete isolation, until the sudden, blinding moment of transition as the event horizon seized me in its agonising grasp.

It stripped me bare, down to the mere molecules that made up my form. I was bombarded by a succession of images and sensations; of bullet wounds and the kick of recoil, of the feed from Grue's cybereyes as he fought to bring his rifle up in time, only for weapon to fall slack as his body juddered with the force of three shots, the pain flashing down his synapses and cascading into errors in his software.

The hurt was as strong as ever – to have my very psyche stripped down and analysed by an immense and alien process – but somehow I had become better at managing the pain. It was as if I was simply skimming off the unwanted data to somewhere else; sequestering my guilt and feelings of inferiority into a sealed file where they could slowly seep back into my mind in doses too small to be crippling.

And then, after an eternity and yet in no time at all, it was over. I was through, my persona reduced down to pure resonance and merged into the ever-flowing data that the resonance drew from the matrix like poison from a wound. A myriad of raw data surrounded me, enveloped me, was me. I was reduced down to my most essential elements, compressed into one part of a transmission that contained multitudes.

I didn't need to think about my destination; I was already being directed there. The resonance realms were still a mystery to me, as I knew they were to even the most experienced technomancer, but there was one place in them where I knew I belonged – albeit in a much more categorical way than the sense of belonging I'd found with my team.

When the blinding tunnel of pure data gave way to pitch-black waters, I was ready. I swam my way to the surface, ignoring the psychosomatic burning in my lungs. Each kick drove me upwards, my arms outstretched in front of me until I broke through into the strange heptagonal antechamber. I reached up to pull myself out, only to slam an empty stump against the side.

White-hot agony spread throughout my body as I flinched back, spasming once and sinking two metres below the surface of the water. I took a breath, the burning in my throat brought back to sharp and painful unreality, and swam back to the surface – all the while mentally cursing my arm, my stupidity and the observatory's completely arbitrary love affair with the laws of physics.

Pulling myself out of the water using only my left arm was about as awkward as putting on my shirt had been before I got my chrome replacement, but I somehow managed to haul myself out onto the tiled floor, staggering to my feet in a way that would be undignified if there was anyone around to see it.

I looked back at the still black waters of the pool, where my reflection stared up at me. My cybernetic arm was missing, my shoulder little more than a mess of bare musculature and sickening holes where cold steel had replaced flesh. It was viscerally disgusting, causing a wave of nausea to rise in my throat before I centred myself and willed away the false facsimile of my body that the realm had forced on me.

The chitin skin and spidersilk robes of my persona were comforting to see, but I was still missing an arm. Where before there had been bare and grotesque flesh, my shoulder was now little more than a stump of fractal crystals that glowed with a golden light, as cold and lifeless as the grave. They shifted under my attention, seemingly changed by the mere act of observation as they reached out and grasped at nothing like a living thing.

"Well," I remarked to empty space. "That's new."

Almost running on automatic, I left the room, the heavy wooden door with its wrought-iron electronic lock sliding open as I approached. The hall beyond was unsurprisingly unchanged; still gently curved as it followed what I assumed to be the outer boundary of the circular realm, with a deep green carpet, a vaulted ceiling, bottle-green windows along the outer wall and heavy iron doors opposite them.

I walked briskly past the row of doors, certain that the answers I sought could be found in the observatory's library, among the stacks of raw, unsorted data from the familiar constellation of data far above. After some time, however, I became conscious of a sensation tugging at my neck.

Looking down, I saw that the crystalline stump of my right arm was shifting even more violently than before, spines growing centimetre by centimetre only to crack and scatter into glittering dust. It was as if they were reaching out to something only to collapse under their own weight.

The obvious answer was that they were reaching for the doors, drawn there by something akin to magnetism, like iron filings in a basic science class. I stopped, turned, and crossed the hall to the closest doorway, the crystals' motion only growing more violent until I had almost deluded myself into thinking they had a mind of their own.

As I pressed the clawed chitin of my left hand against the door, I felt nothing beyond its iron surface, pitted and cold to the touch. It was sealed by another archaic electronic lock, the flickering red light mocking me in its immutability. Somehow I sensed that even a woodlouse sprite wouldn't be able to break through. In spite of its appearance, it was more physical than digital; raw resonance given shape and function by the logic of this space. Everything here was fixed in place, bound by an imitation of the physical laws of the city above that was so perfect it became oppressive to a mind used to flying free in the ephemeral space of the digital world.

Everything was fixed, unchanging… except for the ragged stump where CrashCart's surgeons had grafted on the device that had rent the very essence of my persona. For a moment, I hesitated, unsure if the idea that had flashed into my head would do more harm than good, before I brought my one remaining hand up to the stump of my other arm and gripped one particularly solid crystalline shard between two claws.

Breaking it free from the mass was as easy as snapping a salt crystal, but the agony that shot through my system was enough to drop me to one knee as my persona frayed and standard gravity was suddenly three times as strong. I knelt there for a moment, feeling the resonance that made up my persona throbbing like bruised flesh. The pain passed as quickly as it came, however, and as I staggered back to my feet I reached out and pressed the point of the crystal against the lock.

It pierced the solid resonance like it wasn't even there, then seemed to spread and grow from the wound like an infection until it coated the entire lock, burying the insulting red light beneath a golden growth. Suddenly, I could feel it as easily as I could any digital device. With a thought, the crystals embedded within the mechanism contracted and slid back the bolt. When I pressed my palm against the door again, it gave way with the soundless ease of well-oiled metal.

For all that the motion was smooth, it was also slow. The iron door was as heavy as the real-world metal and inches thick; closer to the thickness I'd expect from a stereotypical bank vault than what appeared from the outside to be a cell. As it swung open, the room beyond was revealed by inches.

There was little light in the room. Instead, each inch brought with it the dull green glow of the corridor. The first thing the light touched was an aged and bare shelf formed from the same dark iron that was so universal within the realm. The inches after that revealed yet more shelves; the whole room reminded me of nothing more than the times my mom had taken me to the university library, a grand stone building in the old city centre.

The library was no longer used as a library, of course. The thousands of paper books it had once contained had long since been scanned and digitised into storage servers that took up a miniscule fraction of the same space. Only the most valuable manuscripts had been retained, though even they had been removed from the library to secure storage vaults.

Fittingly enough, the empty building had been given over to the university's Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures. The cavernous rooms of books had been converted into lecture halls, or split down into smaller seminar rooms and offices for the academics. Mom had held court there in her role as a professor of English Literature and she'd often brought me there during the school holidays, before I was old enough for her and dad to be comfortable leaving me home alone.

Naturally, I'd snuck off more than once and gone wandering through the forgotten corners of the building; in the basement, or the cramped rooms in the corners that would have been too difficult to renovate. Some of those rooms, accessible only by a narrow spiral staircase of iron latticework, were full of shelves like these. Bare reminders of what came before, left untouched because it was too inconvenient to change them.

For all I knew, those rooms were gone. The department certainly was; shuttered along with Brockton Bay University's name when Max Anders' generous donation turned it into an entirely STEM focus institution that he renamed after his dead father. Mom had moved on to the newly-opened New Brockton University, but by that point I'd been old enough that I never got to see her new office before it was too late.

The sight of those shelves here, of all places, was almost nostalgic. Then the door swung further open and all sense of familiarity fled as a cold and primal dread washed over me.

The rest of the room was much as I had imagined it to be, with a dozen cramped rows of empty iron shelves, but between the bars and cages grew the strands of a delicate and utterly alien crystalline lattice. They stretched throughout the room, passing through the walls, floor and ceiling into spaces beyond. Each pulsed with a cold and lifeless light that cast no illumination whatsoever, as if it existed somewhere outside the realm's physics.

The growth – and somehow I knew it had grown, rather than appeared or been made – reminded me of neurons, of cobwebs, of the tunnels of light connecting the resonance realms. They were vectors for information, carrying data from one place to another. The cause of my dread wasn't just their unnatural nature, but the question of neurons or cobwebs. Were they meant to carry signals to an entity waiting at the centre of the web, or was I standing among the brain cells of some unfathomably vast mind?

It didn't take long for my dread to be overcome by an almost primal curiosity. I crossed the threshold, my crystalline stump shifting ever more violently as I drew closer to the gestalt mass. It responded in its own way, the pulsating crystals closest to me shifting outwards like grasping feeder-mouths or tree roots reaching down to water.

That should have frightened me more, but instead I found myself fascinated by the fractal way in which it grew. It was hard to slip the constricting physical realities of the ream, but I was still a technomancer, and I still retained enough control over the resonance to reach out and sense the reality beyond the visible data; to look past the limitations of a metahuman brain translating the unknowable into something it could observe, if not comprehend.

What I felt, deep in the very core of my persona, was a miniscule fraction of a truly vast entity. One that stretched throughout the entirety of this realm, dug in and among its physical structure like a fungal infection. The strands of crystalline flesh I could see were little more than infinitesimally small parts of a greater whole, embedded into the very fabric of the realm. It waxed and waned in and out of unreality; behind these doors, it was firmly anchored into the physical structure of the realm, but elsewhere it continued both invisible and formless, out of step with the realm itself. I'd walked through those immaterial strands before and never even noticed.

It was… either observing or feeding on the data the realm collected, but I didn't feel like there was any specific purpose behind its actions. It was more of an automatic response, like lungs drawing in air without conscious input from the mind their oxygen fuelled. It was parasitic, of that I had no doubt; its attention spread solely to the host it had latched onto. The grasping crystalline tendrils that had begun to curve towards me from all directions might as well have been white blood cells responding to a handful of bacterial microbes.

It wasn't consciously aware of me. It couldn't be, any more than I could be aware of a germ nestled among the hairs of my organic body. I stepped to the side, putting another foot or two between me and the closest tendril, and studied them closer. I knew it wasn't native to this realm, but the longer I looked, the more convinced I was that this entity didn't quite belong anywhere.

It was in the underlying structure of the crystals; the base code or raw resonance that gave it form. The issue was that it wasn't either code or resonance. It lacked the rigid lines and ordered flow of programmed code, or even the more artistic flair of something coded by a technomancer, and yet it was also too rigid to be formed from the inherently ethereal resonance. It seemed almost like a bridge between the worlds; something formed from both but belonging to neither.

That gave me an idea. It was mad, maybe desperate, but madness and desperation had worked out so far.

Drawing raw resonance from my own body, I formed a resonance spike that stretched out from my left hand. In this realm, it took form as a physical blade, carrying all the weight and sharpness of the world above. I raised my arm, then brought the blade down on the closest tendril. It cut through the crystalline mass with ease, causing the severed tendril to spark and recoil with bursts of data that went nowhere. Its counterparts didn't react, instead continuing their slow approach towards me, but I had expected that; it wasn't like I would take revenge for the death of a single cell.

I dismissed the blade, drawing the resonance back into myself in a stream of golden particles, and wrapped my hand around the severed length of raw… something. It shifted in my grasp like a living thing, like freshly dead meat twitching when its nerves are stimulated.

I didn't take a deep breath – it was a pointless, physical instinct – but I did pause before taking the next step. It was inevitable; I had no idea what this stuff was beyond the broad understanding that it was malleable and made to carry signals. In the end, however, that was enough.

I jammed the mass of crystals into my socket, and burst into flames.

That was the only way I could understand it; the only way my overtaxed metahuman brain had of comprehending the sheer agonising pain that flowed from the severed shard through to every part of my persona. I screamed, burning fireflies spilling from my body until it seemed the very realm vibrated in sympathetic pain with me, generating a resonating shriek of its own. The crystalline tendrils that surrounded me were forced back by the pressure, the closest being crushed beneath the weight of my torment.

Even in the depths of agony, my mind took note of that effect. Focusing my will, I drew the fireflies back into myself, drawing that crushing force through my body and into the grafted length of crystals. Through that immense pressure I was able to give shape to the growth, each fracture and crush bringing it closer in structure to the cybernetic arm that sat in its place in realspace.

I had acquired the schematics of the arm before leaving the hospital. The mechanical components, the exterior casing, those were just details. What mattered was the internal structure of its cybernetic nervous system and how that system made the jump to my body's biological nerves. With each shift I made to the crystals, I created a more perfect mirror of that system in my persona. At some point, instinct took over and the process became almost automatic; it felt easier the closer the limb resembled its counterpart and I started to include copy-protection elements that I knew hadn't been present on the schematics.

Mitsuhama Consumer Technologies believed that technomancers worked according to the principle of quantum entanglement. If that was the case, then I was simply bringing my nervous system back into alignment with its paired counterpart, as well as creating a match in the resonance for the new addition to that system.

For all that it had arrived in an instant, the agony remained for quite some time after I had finished sculpting my new arm. In the visual layer, it appeared as a limb formed from glowing golden crystal, jagged and angular yet unmistakably evoking the mechanical nature of the limb it matched. On a whim, I shifted the appearance to match the rest of my persona, smoothing out the lines and giving it colour until it resembled the chitinous limb opposite it.

Before me, the crystalline entity whose shard I had claimed was beginning to heal itself, the grasping tendrils drawing back as their mass was repurposed to replace the flesh I had taken from them. My awareness of the entity was sharper now, but no data flowed between us. I was right; I was too small to be worth noticing, though the crystalline shard embedded within me made it easier for me to sense the extent of the entity's presence in this realm.

I was certain this wasn't how technomancers were supposed to attune to cyberware, if there even was a consensus, but I wasn't going to let perfect be the enemy of good. What mattered was that I had successfully restored myself to full functionality, and I'd gained a greater understanding of the observatory while I was at it.

So, when I slipped back into the inky-black waters of the antechamber, it was with a light head, a sense of vicious satisfaction and a few titanic unanswered questions I was willing to leave for another time. Drifting back through the tunnels of light to the event horizon felt more natural than ever, and I gracefully slipped through the firmament and back into the matrix before finally restoring the tethers that bound me to my organic body and coming to full wakefulness in my well-worn armchair, noting in wonder how much more real my new arm felt.

My digital stump of a shoulder had been bleeding like an actual wound, or perhaps a cut wire. The constant growing and fracturing of the crystals was caused by my essence trying to flow through my body as normal, only to be pushed out into empty space like sparks. I wasn't sure if it would have caused my metaphorical battery to run out at some point, but I knew it would slow me down.

Now, the circuit had been reconnected. The resonance that had bled out into the ether instead flowed through my arm, travelling down its circuitry before doubling back on itself like a true circulatory system. Evo's cyberneticists had created an artificial limb that was able to seamlessly integrate with the metahuman nervous system, to attach an arm that felt as real as if it were flesh and blood. Now, my cybernetic almost felt more real than its counterpart; I could feel every neuron firing down each and every micro-wire, right up until the returning signals crossed over into flesh.

My head was alive with possibilities for that hyperawareness; ways I could turn my limb from an adequate replacement to a straight-up upgrade.

My dive into the resonance had been shorter than most; barely an hour and a half had passed since I sat down. Once again, however, I couldn't help but note how little correlation there was between the actual time that had passed and how I had perceived it when I was beyond the event horizon. In the matrix, space held no meaning while metahuman minds could take advantage of perception altering high-end cyberdecks to think faster than their biological limits. In the resonance realms, time and space were completely decoupled from reality; I could spend a day in a single hour, or dip in and out only to find hours had passed.

There was no rhyme or reason to it, but rhymes and reason were also absent from the resonance realms – unless you counted the obscure and particular logic that governed each realm.

I turned my hand over, watching artificial neurons fire as I closed my fingers into a fist. I could see every algorithm built into the arm's code, every piece of targeting software and hyperactive reflex that made the difference between civilian and military-grade specifications. On a whim and faintly grinning at the childishness of it, I unfurled my thumb and index finger from the fist, stretching out my arm as I pointed the imaginary gun at my front door.

I froze, my grin turning brittle on my face. Past the length of my arm and the makeshift 'sight' of my thumb, I could see my holster hanging on the back of a kitchen chair. The holster, but not the submachine gun it had contained.

Without letting the grin fall from my face – without moving so much as a single muscle – I reached out into the matrix and scanned my surroundings, my vision lighting up with a myriad of different devices in a sphere twenty metres in diameter. I could feel every tablet, commlink, smart fridge, simsense wreath and trideo set in the apartments around me, could chart the location of every occupant by the devices they carried on them or the ways the devices around them reacted to their presence. There were no abnormal signals in my apartment; no devices that shouldn't be there, or devices that should be there but weren't.

Slowly, trying not to show the tension growing in my chest, I let the finger gun fall and stood up, walking calmly across the room to the counter and pouring myself a glass of water. All the while, my attention was fixed on an AR window I'd pulled up in front of me, displaying the view from the webcamera on dad's old terminal. Nothing was moving, which only made my dread worse; if I couldn't see them in the matrix, I might as well have been blind.

»I think someone's in my apartment.«
- Spider (23:38:45/23-3-2070)

I duplicated the message twice and sent it out into the ether, to the only people who I could trust to answer. The first response came almost instantaneously, fuelled by chrome reflexes, but offered nothing more than a faint hope.

»26 minutes out.«
- bitch (23:38:51/23-3-2070)

Tattletale's message, on the other hand, was about what I expected.

»omw«
- Tt (23:39:01/23-3-2070)

I'd been staring at the cupboard with a glass of water in my hand for sixteen seconds, watching my body through the monitor. If someone was in the room with me, they'd have tried to kill me already. That meant they were somewhere else in the apartment; they wouldn't have broken in just to steal my gun and leave. Besides, if they meant to kill me outright they'd have done it when I was zonked out on an armchair.

So I set the glass down and drew the largest knife we had from the block next to the stove. The moment I did, someone hit the light switch and plunged the room into darkness.

It didn't even a second. As a mental poke flicked the lights back on, I couldn't help but chuckle. It was a dark and dangerous sound, not born from genuine mirth.

"Nice try," I growled, only to jump as I felt something poke me in the side. I whirled around, thrusting the knife out, only to drive the tip of the blade into empty air.

That triggered a panic in me; a sudden hyperawareness of just how much empty space surrounded me. It may have still been compact by troll norms, but for most of the population it provided more than enough space to duck and weave, hide and strike.

I backed up towards the hallway, keeping the knife held out in front of me as my eyes darted around the room. If there was someone in there with me, it was clear they were invisible, but if there was even the slightest chance I'd be able to see their body heat then I was going to take it.

Unfortunately, whatever they were using to hide from me had been designed to counter a troll's biological advantage. I could still see the faint glow of my own body heat on the couch, the sharper glow from the radiators and the chill night air pressing against the windows, but once again there was simply nothing out of the ordinary. They might as well have been a ghost.

That thought had me freeze, a cold chill of panic creeping through me as my heart began to pound in my chest. They might be a ghost, I thought, backing away down the corridor.

It was a confined space even by my standards; if I reached out, I could brush both elbows against the wall at the same time. More to the point, I was convinced that nobody could get past me with my body blocking the way. The only plan I had was to lock myself in the bathroom and wait for Bitch or Tattletale to arrive.

The moment I felt the door, I flicked the mental switch to slide it open and half-stumbled onto its tiled floor, turning the lights on as I turned my back on the hallway. I'd meant to slam the door shut behind me, then throw my weight against it to hold it closed, but I stopped dead in my tracks the moment I saw my reflection in the mirror.

Someone had opened up the tube of lipstick that had sat unopened on the shelf below the mirror, its plastic wrapper discarded on the floor along with the rest of the makeup kit that dad had bought me as a seventeenth birthday present. My reflection's eyes were wide with terror, widening even more as they took in the question smeared in blue across the span of the glass.

'WHERE IS HE'

Stupified by horror, I could only watch the gormless visage staring back to me, mouth and eyes pulled wide in a grim rictus, distorting my cheeks. That was when I saw it; three mostly-horizontal lines on each cheek, in the same blue lipstick as the message, and another blotch colouring in the tip of my nose.

Whiskers?

Behind me, I heard the impossibly faint sound of a boot tapping against the floor of the corridor. I reacted on instinct, turning and throwing the knife behind me at chest height. It spun wildly before abruptly halting in midair as a grey-clad arm appeared out of nowhere, gripping the blade between thumb and forefinger.

The sudden motion caused a cascading failure in the stealth fabric, revealing a lithe and feminine figure in a skintight taksuit. At six feet tall, she had the body of some femme fatale assassin straight out of some spy thriller, but with a mask covering her face that had been sculpted into the visage of a grinning demon. The featureless black lenses of her eyes glared at me with naked contempt as she twisted the kitchen knife around in her hand before tossing it aside.

I knew then that she was laughing at me. That she'd been laughing at me ever since I stepped into my apartment.

I did the only thing I could thing of. I screamed, dropped my horns and charged.