FACILITY 451 – ALASKA – UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

“How much do you remember?”

It was a woman’s voice, careful and steady, metered with just the right balance of maternal concern and authoritative firmness.

He opened his mouth to speak, but all that came out was a dry, papery rasp. It was difficult, as if the act of using his voice had become foreign to him. He gave up on the attempt and tried something else. He tried to focus on the woman’s words, to find her in the room.

“Take your time,” she told him – then an order, to someone else. “Give him some water.”

An infinite white space surrounded everything, blurred bright but without dazzling his eyes, and if not for the warmth and the stillness of the air he could have believed he was on some expanse of frozen tundra, stretching away to an unseen horizon. At the edges of his vision, trains of golden icons trickled down, vanishing one after another. He half-raised his hand to wipe them away, as if they were raindrops caught on his eyelashes, before remembering that they were being projected directly into his synthetic retinas.

The hand and the arm it belonged to ghosted up before him. Black as a shadow, the fingers moving, twitching. It fell away again, and he understood that he was lying in a bed, the pull of gravity holding him down. The tundra was a ceiling high above, out of reach, and by degrees he felt himself shifting upwards as a mechanism behind the mattress raised his torso to a shallow incline.

Other ghosts came into sight. The sketches of human figures.

He flinched at the sight of strangers, the echo of a fight-or-flight reaction triggered by something he didn’t immediately recollect. It was the dying ember of another memory, gone before he could grasp it. It left him unsettled and wary.

A robotic manipulator drifted closer, proffering a squeeze bottle of clear liquid, and he leaned forward to meet it, letting a nozzle hook his lip. Cool, fresh water whispered into his arid mouth, a faint medicinal taste washing over his tongue. It was like he hadn’t taken a drink in centuries, and for a long moment he just let himself enjoy the simple pleasure of it.

But then the flow of the fluid touched a different fragment of recall. Suddenly he was drowning in icy salt water, the cold filling his throat and his lungs, the impossible force crushing him like the fingers of a giant hand. He choked and spat out the liquid, gasping and retching, shock throwing him forward. Wires hanging from sensor disks on his throat and his chest pulled taut, others tearing away, sending contradictory signals to the monitoring devices crowded at the head of the bed.

A tidal wave of absolute panic crashed over him, the brutal and unstoppable force ripping away all his defenses, crushing his will in an instant. He knew that this was death pressing in on him, knew it without question because he had been through it before, more than once.

The first time, it had been a cauldron of razors and fire, ripping pieces of him away within and without, changing once and for all what he would be. He had survived that. Barely.

The second time, it was cold and pressure threatening to crush him into oblivion and leave nothing behind.

He remembered some of it now. Not a distinct chronology of events, not second by second, but flashes of action disconnected from one another. A random pattern of blinding, painful moments held together like pearls on a string.

The shrieking of tortured metal under the impact of a colossal volume of polar ocean. The wild screams of the mad and the dying. The thunder of his fading heartbeat. Lances of light through glassy, shifting waters. And a terrible knowing, a certainty that he would die out there and nothing would stop that from happening.

I should be dead. The thought grew, sharp and diamond-hard.

His artificial eyes adjusted steadily, the color tone of the room shifting as it gained greater definition. Digging deep, he reached past the fear and found the steel that had never left him. Took it, held on to it.

The next breath was rough, but it was controlled. By force of will, he moderated his ragged breathing and concentrated on calming his racing pulse. In the corner of his vision, a softly blinking warning icon faded to nothing as the hammering of his heart subsided. Sweat beaded on his flesh, and he swallowed hard.

“I remember the sea.” They were the first words he had spoken in months. “The cold.”

“You’re very lucky to be alive,” said another voice. A man, this one, the accent behind it a firm northwestern burr while the woman had sounded more like a southerner. Those facts emerged in his thoughts automatically, some ingrained means in his mind immediately sifting their words for data, for clues.

He blinked again and now he could see them better. The woman, of average height with a dark face framed by a white headscarf; the man pale and fatigued. Both of them wore doctor’s coats and cradled digital pads in their hands. At their shoulders, a small monitor drone the size of a softball floated on a cluster of whispering impellers, patiently framing everything in the room with a blue-tinted lens.

The woman tried on a practiced smile. “You were clinically deceased when they plucked you out of the ocean. But a combination of the chill and the actions of your Sentinel implant kept you from going beyond our reach. They were able to pull you back.”

“A lot of other people weren’t so fortunate,” said the male doctor, and there was an edge of reproach to the words.

He settled back against the mattress, pushing the squeeze bottle away, uncertain how to respond. His thoughts were still churning and disordered, and when he closed his eyes all he saw was a torrent of jumbled recollections that had no sense of order or narrative. He looked down again at his hands, his arms. Both of them were identical, carbon-black synthetic constructs that terminated at his shoulder joints. Once they had been smooth and polished, but now they were scarred and pitted with surface damage. He tried to remember the time before he’d had them, but for now there was a blank space where any memory of meat and bone might have once existed.

Touching his bare chest, he found healed scars but again, nothing to connect them to. The part of him that was flesh felt almost as artificial as the metal and plastic.

“Is there anything else?” said the woman. “Anything more you remember?”

“Darrow.” Unbidden, the name floated up to the surface of his consciousness and drifted there.

The two doctors exchanged a look, a silent communication passing between them. “Do you know who that is?” she asked.

“He died up there.” Past the pair of them, the wall came into sharper focus and it was suddenly clear that he was looking out of a window on to a snow-covered landscape. The near-absence of color in the surroundings, the room, the people before him, it knocked loose another shard of recall and he remembered being in a different white room. Someone there had been important to him. The memory brought with it a bitter sting of emotions that he could not parse. He shook his head, forcing the moment away.

“Can you tell us?”

“My name is Adam Jensen,” he said, cutting down the question as his impatience flared. “I remember who I am. But not where the hell this is.”

* * *

Within a day, the two doctors – the woman was named Rafiq and the man McFadden – decided he was lucid enough to leave the recovery room and move to the facility proper. They described it as a place to heal, but it wasn’t like any hospital Jensen had ever spent time in.

Rafiq told Jensen he had been a police officer once, and he recalled pieces of that life, more and more of it as the days passed by.

This place reminded him of the secure wards where, as a cop, he had sent psychologically unstable criminals – not quite a prison, more like an asylum. What that said about how he was seen by his doctors made him uncomfortable.

When Jensen asked them if there was a next-of-kin he could talk to, they told him they had no records of anyone – but he was free to place a vu-phone call to anywhere he wanted. An instinctive reaction that came out of nowhere made him lie; Jensen told them he didn’t recall any contacts, but that wasn’t true. He just didn’t want them listening in on any communications he made. As for his infolink implant, that stayed resolutely offline, doubtless disabled along with anything else that might have made him troublesome.

Facility 451 was a collection of prefabricated modules that had been assembled into an unlovely pile of blocky shapes, and parked out in the sparse landscape of the Kenai Peninsula. Two decades of unrestricted corporate exploitation and rampant pollution had turned this part of Alaska from carpet of forest into a bleak shadow of its former self, a naked space of half-dead scrubland coated with gray, polluted snow. Remote and thinly populated, the World Health Organization had chosen it as one of a dozen sites for places like 451. They called them ‘processing clinics’, but as Jensen walked the limits of its corridors and high fences, he found himself thinking of other, less palatable ways to describe it.

There were people here from all ethnicities, all walks of life, and a broad spectrum of ages and backgrounds. There was only one common denominator: everybody had an augmentation of some kind, from replacement limbs to cyberoptics or neural implants.

The character of the clinic’s residents was the kind of forced-together, beaten-down community he had seen in skid row districts and shantytowns, or the envirorefugee camps in the Kansas dustbowl and the flood zones down in Florida. At first, the other ‘processees’ – no-one ever called them patients or inmates – kept their distance from him, leaving Jensen to eat alone in the cavernous cafeteria or walk in silence around the yard during the hours of weak daylight.

And that was okay. He needed the space and the time to get his head straight. To put everything that he could remember into some semblance of order. It came slowly for the most part, now and then in jagged fits and starts. Reminiscence was strange that way. Fragment by fragment, Jensen reassembled himself. McFadden told him blankly that he had been in a comatose state for months, and he personally had never expected Jensen to recover. A man doesn’t cheat death twice, said the doctor.

“Beg to differ,” Jensen said aloud, answering the memory. His breath made a puff of white vapor that escaped into the air.

“What’s that?”

He turned as someone came walking his way, deck shoes that were way too light for this chill climate crunching on frost-covered asphalt. Jensen saw a stout man with a round face and the kind of deep, leathery tan you only get from a lifetime of working outside. He had the fuzz of an ill-kept beard and a bald, slightly uneven head. Jensen stood taller than the new arrival, and as he met his gaze, he saw the man had natural eyes. Curiosity was clear there, but caution too.

“Nothing important,” Jensen told him. “Just thinking out loud.”

“Right on.” The man wandered to the fence line and placed both his hands on it. Like Jensen, his body was mechanical from shoulders to fingertips. But where Jensen’s cybernetic arms were athletic and sleek in design, this guy’s augmentations were heavy sleeves of battered metal that resembled parts of a construction vehicle scaled down to human size. Thick hands with an additional thumb each side made claws and held on to the chain links of the fence. The metal barrier creaked audibly under his grip. “Some view,” he added.

“Better without the fence,” Jensen replied.

“I heard that,” the man replied with feeling, then turned and offered him a handshake, as if his reply had been the right answer to some unspoken question. “Folks call me Stacks. You’re Jensen, right?”

He accepted the gesture. “You know me?”

Stacks nodded toward the clinic, where two orderlies in heavy parkas had gathered to watch the pair of them, another monitor drone circling lazily over their heads. “Heard them say your name.”

Jensen studied the orderlies. He’d seen the stunner truncheons they carried and the Buzzkill tasers in their quick-draw holsters. Why the WHO needed armed guards in a place for healing people was a question that nobody had a good answer for. But then again, none of the orderlies had visible enhancements of any kind. Being around so many augmented people had to make them nervous. He looked away. “West Coast, right? Where you’re from?”

The other man broke into a brief grin. “You got it. Tell that from how I talk?” He didn’t wait for Jensen to reply. “Yeah, from Seattle. Lived there my whole life, until…” A shadow passed over his face. “Well, y’know. I was a steeplejack. Building towers and alla that. What about you?”

“I used to be a cop.”

Stacks nodded again. “I figured. You got the look.” He paused, clearly framing his next words. “People are wonderin’. They ain’t seen you before, then here you are. Questions getting asked.”

“Let me guess, you drew the short straw. Go talk to the new guy.”

He chuckled. “Something like that.” He went on: “Most of us have been here a while. Tends to be that folks get rotated out, if they’re lucky… But not a lot of fresh faces come in, know what I mean?”

“I really don’t,” Jensen said, watching him carefully. “New here, like I said.”

Stacks eyed him. “Well, not exactly. I mean, you been here a while too, but on ice, yeah? There’s a bunch of folks like that, in the coma ward. Never woke up. Not like you. Sleeping beauties, we call ’em.”

“McFadden told me I was lucky.” A gust of cold wind whipped around Jensen’s shoulders. The clinic had provided a thin, military-surplus jacket, and he pulled it close. “I’m not really feeling it.”

When Stacks spoke again, his tone shifted. “There’s talk about you and the other sleepers. Say you were out there, in the middle of it all when it happened. Right at the heart of the action, up in the Arctic. That so?”

Icy salt water and crushing pressure. He tensed at the memory. “Panchaea.” Jensen said the name without thinking. It was as if uttering it opened another floodgate in his memory. He was assailed by a rush of confused images, all of them dominated by a vision of a hole in the ocean, an endless black well into nothingness. He shook off the moment. “Yeah. I was there.”

Stacks’s face hardened. “Were you part of it?”

“No.” The answer was as much a lie as it was the truth. Jensen held up his machine hand. “We were all part of it, right?”

“Yeah. True enough.” The grim cast in the other man’s eyes faded. “I… I lost my wife and my daughter that day.”

“I’m sorry.”

Stacks gave a hollow sigh that seemed to come from miles distant. “So am I.”

Jensen changed tack. “How long have you been here?”

“Since it happened.” Stacks let go of the fence and stepped away. Jensen saw the orderlies visibly relax. “I lost a lot. Up here.” He tapped his temple with a thick metal finger. “Gettin’ right takes time, I know that. But I thought I’d be done by now.” He shot a look at the two guards and gave them a humorless smile. “They’re scared I’m gonna do somethin’ crazy. Rip a hole in this here fence and make a run for it.”

“Are they right?” Jensen glanced up as the first drops of a dirty rain began to fall.

When Stacks replied, it sounded like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. “Might just be, one of these days.” He started walking. “C’mon. Too damn cold out here, man.”

But as Jensen turned to follow him inside, he saw that a third guard had joined the other two. A severe-looking man wearing a data monocle, he scanned the yard and found Jensen. “You,” he called out, his voice carrying. “Got a visitor.”

Jensen’s jaw stiffened. Who knows I’m here?

“Don’t get your hopes up.” He found Stacks looking at him glumly. “Trust me, ain’t what you want it to be,” he said, reading the question in his gaze. “Not by a long shot.”

* * *

They took Jensen to a part of the clinic that he had never seen before, a lower level where daylight didn’t reach and the sickly glow of florescent lamps made everything look like it was coated in a layer of grimy transparent plastic.

The guard opened a door and Jensen entered a chamber that could only be described as an interrogation room. A cluster of monitoring devices looked down from behind an armored glass bowl set in the middle of ceiling, above a metal table bolted to the tiled floor. On his side of the table, a metal chair. On the other, the same but occupied by a rail-thin woman of average height in a characterless black jacket and trousers. She didn’t look up as he walked in, engrossed in the glowing display of a digital pad. The cold color of the screen reflected off a milk-pale face, framed by short, shock-red hair. He spotted the telltale dermal markers of neural implants, and saw that her right hand – delicate and long-fingered like its organic twin – was made of brushed steel. Her manner and her outfit screamed government agent to Jensen’s ingrained cop instincts.

He dropped into the empty chair without waiting to be asked and rubbed the unkempt stubble on his chin. The woman’s gaze flicked up to study him, then back to the digital pad. The quiet between them stretched, and Jensen’s lip curled. The silent treatment was one of the first questioning techniques they taught police officers in the academy, that the mere act of saying nothing would sometimes compel a suspect to fill the void with words and maybe incriminate themselves along the way.

But this was amateur hour, and he wasn’t in the mood for it. Jensen leaned forward across the table and fixed the woman with a hard eye. “If you’re gonna make me wait,” he began, “I could use a cup of coffee.”

Was that the ghost of a smirk on her face? It was gone before he could be sure, and she flicked one of those long fingers over the surface of the pad. Jensen caught the sound of a high-pitched buzz from beneath the surface of the table, and without warning his right arm slammed down and locked firmly against it, pinned there as if it had been pressed into place by an invisible hand.

There was a thick steel bracelet around his arm; it had been there when he woke up in the recovery room, and Dr. Rafiq had promised him that it was just a medical monitoring unit to keep tabs on his wellbeing. Jensen hadn’t bought that for a second, not after he’d seen the same thing on Stacks and all the other residents of 451, but he hadn’t figured it would work like an actual restraint. Buried in the table, there had to be an electromagnetic generator that was keeping his arm in place. The woman, he noticed, was sitting exactly far enough away to be out of reach of his one free hand.

“All your offensive aug systems were inhibited after your initial recovery,” she said, confirming his earlier suspicions. Her accent was mid-American but deliberately colorless. She put the digital pad on the table and produced a wallet from her pocket, unfolding it to present him with a badge and identity card. In the process, Jensen caught a glimpse of the butt of a matte black pistol protruding from an underarm holster. “I’m Agent Jenna Thorne, with Homeland Security.”

“Federal Protective Service…” He read the information off the digital ID card. “Thought you guys were just security guards.”

The wallet went back into her pocket. “Our mandate has been greatly expanded in the last couple of years.”

“Right…” He nodded at the bracelet. “You expecting trouble from me, Agent Thorne?”

“That’s part of the job.” She glanced up at the monitor cluster, and Jensen saw it rotate to present a different camera head to peer down at him.

He made himself very still. If this woman wanted to play head games, that was fine. She had information that he wanted to know as much as the reverse was true.

“You know why you’re here?”

“People tell me it’s because I’m lucky.”

Thorne went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “Facility four-five-one is part of a network of medical clinics set up to help the victims of the Aug Incident reintegrate into society.”

Despite himself, Jensen’s eyes narrowed. “Is that what they’re calling it? An ‘incident’?”

“You name a thing and you rob it of its power, Mr. Jensen,” offered Thorne. “Nine-Eleven. The Vilama Superquake. The Cat Fives. The Incident. Give it a name and you can put it in a box, contain it. It’s an important coping mechanism. It helps people to rebuild.”

“In my experience, it takes a lot more than that.”

She nodded. “And you do have experience, don’t you? More than enough human disasters in your personal narrative. The situation in Mexicantown when you were with Detroit SWAT, the terrorist attack on Sarif Industries—”

“They weren’t terrorists,” he corrected, then halted. He’d given her an opening, and he retreated from it, trying another approach. “You act like you know a lot about me. Maybe you could help me with something.” He tapped a finger on his brow. “Like where I’ve been for the last year.”

Thorne spread her hands. “Here, Mr. Jensen. You’ve been here, as I understand it, slowly climbing your way back out of the coma you were in when they found you in the Arctic Ocean.” She leaned in. “What I’m interested in is where you were before you took a swim. What you were doing at the Panchaea facility and what part you played in its collapse.”

“I don’t recall.” But that wasn’t true, and they both knew it.

Built as part of an experimental weather modification program, the keystone in a process that would attempt to reverse the creeping trends of global warming, Panchaea was a vast complex rising up from the sea bed, layers of complex systems using current control, iron seeding and dozens of other methods to turn back the clock on the thawing of the polar icepack.

All of it a false front, of course. Jensen didn’t doubt that the reasons for building Panchaea, and the people who had the vision to make it happen, were genuine. But others had taken that ideal and used it as a cover for something sinister.

His personal crusade to learn the truth about the attack on Sarif – the attack that had almost killed him – came full circle in the closing months of 2027, as Jensen had journeyed to that hole in the ocean and learned what really lurked down there. Thinking machines that used kidnapped human beings as component parts, devices turned to the work of a callous, secretive power group that had been lurking in the shadows of human civilization for centuries.

And with all of that, the fruits of a plan originated by one bitter genius who had been rejected by his greatest discovery. A Frankenstein out to kill his monster. A Daedalus intent on tearing away his wings.

“Were you present when Hugh Darrow died?” Thorne’s question was a scalpel, bright and cutting.

“I don’t recall,” he repeated. But he did. Because he had been there, and he had seen what Darrow had wrought, firsthand.

The man the world had once called the father of human augmentation technology, forever prevented from experiencing his creation himself thanks to a rare genetic disorder, Darrow had devised a scheme that was breathtaking in its scope and its sheer horror. The scientist had engineered a way to reach almost every augmented person on the planet at once, via secretly implanted biochips that triggered a catastrophic neurochemical imbalance – an artificially induced psychotic break. Their fight-or-flight reflexes stimulated beyond all rationality, those affected sank into a haze of temporary madness. In their wake, there was death and destruction that burned cities, shattered lives and tore a ragged wound in society. Darrow wanted to show the world that his creation was a dangerous mistake, to make people fear it – but beneath that, it was his buried spite at being left behind that made him lash out… and millions were still paying the price.

Jensen had been spared, for reasons he still wasn’t fully certain of, but people like Stacks, the others in Facility 451 and elsewhere had been forced to endure the plague of madness. Darrow’s scheme was cut short, but they were still suffering.

Worse still, the people behind Darrow, the ones who wanted to use his mechanism to control rather than destroy the augmented… They were still out there.

“After the incident, after all the damage done, it was inevitable that Panchaea would be wrecked… But there is evidence that you were in the core of that facility, just prior to the final collapse of its structural protection systems.” Thorne cocked her head, studying him with her blank, doll-like cyberoptic eyes. “What did you see in there? How did you get out when the flood controls went offline?”

“I don’t—”

“Recall, yes, so you keep saying,” Thorne spoke over him. “Darrow was insane. He got what he deserved. No-one on Earth will question that, not after what happened. But the loss of Panchaea… There’s a lot of unresolved issues surrounding that. A lot of blame that until now has been unassigned. Do you follow me?”

“I went there to stop him.” The moment the words slipped from his mouth, Jensen regretted the admission. “And I nearly died because of it. That’s all I have to tell you.”

“Really?” Thorne raised an eyebrow. “So, with Darrow at the bottom of the sea somewhere, we should all just move on? Is that what you think?”

He shifted in his chair, frowning as his arm remained firmly set in place on the table. “You’re the one who talked about coping. Rebuilding.”

“For that, we need to know who gave Darrow the means to do what he did. The man might have been a billionaire but his resources weren’t limitless.”

Jensen concentrated on maintaining a neutral poker face, but it wasn’t easy. Pieces of memory kept rising out of the depths of his thoughts when he least expected them, sometimes triggered by a word, a sound or a smell. When Thorne talked about Panchaea, things he might rather have forgotten pressed into his consciousness, fully formed and real.

At first, Jensen had felt a directionless kind of anger burning away inside him. A fury directed at ghosts he couldn’t name, couldn’t see. But with each passing day, each hour, more and more of it was coming into sharp focus.

Illuminati. The word was ancient, heavy with contradictory meanings, double-speak and fantasy. It was a catch-all term; it conjured up images of cabals stocked with old men intent on running the world, of self-selected elites ruling the lesser masses by guile and force. Decades of sensationalist fiction and half-truths made it seem more legend than reality. Just a scare story, a lunatic conspiracy theory for the credulous.

But the fiction was the fact. Jensen had learned that through bloody example, in the aftermath of the attack on Sarif Industries and then in the days that followed. While Hugh Darrow’s part in the Illuminati’s complex web of schemes had ultimately been stopped, the puppeteers holding the man’s strings had faded back into the shadows, untouched and unpunished.

“He must have had help,” Thorne was saying. “Dangerous allies. People who need to be brought to justice.”

They have operatives everywhere. A warning voice sounded in the back of Jensen’s thoughts. “Guess you got your work cut out for you, then,” he said, after a moment.

The truth was, trust and raw gut instinct were what had kept Adam Jensen alive in those days after the SI attack. Those instincts were telling him now that Jenna Thorne was not someone he could confide in.

“Tell me what you know.” Thorne enunciated each word, coldly and firmly. “Otherwise, I’m going to think you have something to hide, Mr. Jensen. And those issues of blame will need to be considered.”

He sensed something odd in the air of the room, a sudden feeling that made the flesh on the back of his neck prickle. Thorne was trying to play him; those cybernetic eyes of hers weren’t the only body-mods she had working to read his intentions. Jensen was willing to bet that the agent was also augmented with a social interaction enhancer, an insidious piece of tech that allowed the user to get real-time data from a conversation subject and manipulate them with it, even coerce them with a controlled pheromone release. He wasn’t going to fall for that.

“You can think whatever you damn well want,” he said, his patience running thin. “But right now, if you’re not helping me piece together the blanks in my memory, or walking me out of this place, why the hell should I keep talking?” Jensen leaned back. “I reckon I’m done here.”

Thorne seemed like she was about to shoot off some kind of sharp retort, but then she caught herself and reeled it back in. “For now,” she told him, and tapped the digital pad again.

The buzzing from beneath the table ceased abruptly and Jensen’s arm jerked as it was released. He grimaced, flexing the artificial muscles.

“We’re done for now,” she repeated, and left the room.

* * *

He told himself he was doing it just to keep his mind sharp, to try and conjure up a little of his old skill set, but after another day or two of walking the perimeter of 451, Jensen had the beginnings of an escape plan. It wouldn’t be simple, though. There were whole areas of the facility that were off-limits to the processees, and for now he only had rough estimates of guard numbers and security systems.

And then there was the bracelet. He looked down at it as he walked, fingering the surface of the device. Jensen had no doubt it was broadcasting his exact location right that second, and unless he could find a way to spoof its signal or remove the thing entirely, any attempt to leave Facility 451 would be a wasted effort.

No-one here was being told they were a prisoner, but the lack of open doors and the bleak remoteness of the location put the lie to that. Dr. McFadden had said something about the clinic’s isolation being for purposes of ‘safety’, and Jensen had to wonder exactly whose safety he was referring to. It didn’t take a lot to assume that anyone out beyond the fence line in the wider world, the ones who were not augmented, feared those who were. The ‘Incident’ had made sure of that.

Jensen scowled at the thought and turned back toward the complex. He caught a glimpse of himself in a window as he passed, the black commas of his eye shield implants framing an angular face and haunted eyes. His beard was unkempt and too long for his liking, and the electric razor they had given him just wasn’t enough to tame it. In the end, he let it go, that and hair that had grown shaggy. He imagined that few who knew the Adam Jensen who left Detroit in 2027 would recognize the man he saw in the dull glass. He wasn’t really certain if he did. Looking himself in the eye, Jensen felt an odd sense of disconnection that didn’t sit well with him.

Then he caught the sound of Stacks’s voice on the breeze and the moment faded.

He found the other man in a shaded corner of the open quad, with three more of the clinic’s residents clustered around him in a threatening half-circle. The biggest of them was a broad, thickset woman with lank brown hair and a bodybuilder’s silhouette. She had worn, gunmetal cybernetic legs covered in swirling etched detail, and he pegged her as a former panzer-girl from the disbanded aug mixed martial arts leagues. At her side were two guys in the same nondescript jacket that Jensen wore. One of them had a mono-vision band across his face, turning his eyes into one seamless digital sensor grid, and the other had tech-tattoos that suggested he was packing neural implants of some kind.

“You know how it goes,” the woman was saying, a sing-song lilt to her words. She prodded Stacks in the chest. “I mean, it’s us and them, am I right? Augs in here, natches out there. And natches ain’t gonna stick up for us. Augs gotta look out for augs, is what I’m saying.”

“Yuh.” Mono-Eye bobbed his head in agreement, while his tattooed buddy stood by silently. Despite the content of the conversation, Jensen knew a shakedown when he saw one. The panzer-girl’s next words confirmed it.

“That’s what we do. We look out. And it’s not much to ask that people give some consideration for that in return, Stacks. You get me?”

“I just go my own way, Belle.” Stacks managed a weak smile. “Okay?”

“No.” The woman prodded him again, harder this time. “Not okay.”

Stacks caught sight of Jensen approaching at the same moment the guy with the tattoos did. The thug touched Belle on the arm and she turned to face Jensen. Her jaw hardened. “Well. New guy. You wake up now, sleeping beauty?”

He ignored her. “Stacks. You got a minute? Need to ask you something.”

Stacks took a cautious step past Mono-Eye, grateful for the out but wary about making it into something more. “Hey, Jensen, we’re all cool here.”

“Jensen,” echoed the tattooed man. “The floater.” He laughed at his own joke, a quick nasal chuckle.

Belle looked Jensen up and down with an expression that was somewhere between a sneer and a leer. She pointed at his hands. “What you got there? Sarif tech, right? I know the hardware. Top drawer.” She shrugged and ran a hand down her thigh. “Not my kind of metal, gotta say. I go TYM, all the way.”

He didn’t look away. “What are those legs, Aries-model heavy mods? How’s that forty percent fail rate working for you?”

Belle’s expression hardened and he knew he’d struck a nerve. Tai Yong Medical, the constant rival of Sarif Industries in the augmentation business, may have had a bigger market share but they lacked the finesse and reliability of Sarif’s high-spec engineering. She shrugged. “I’m good. Kicked a man’s head clean off one time. You wanna see me do it again?”

“I’ll pass.” He beckoned to Stacks. “I need a coffee. Let’s get inside.”

“See you around, Jensen,” Belle called out as they walked away, her words carrying after them.

* * *

Thorne stood by the window on the upper floor, and anyone who passed her by might have thought she was in some kind of fugue state. She stared down at the quad, her eyes losing focus as Jensen and the other processee moved beyond her field of vision. It would have been easy for her to run a wireless remote intrusion into the clinic’s security grid and keep following him via 451’s network of monitors, but there was no need. She’d programmed Adam Jensen’s tracer bracelet icon into her infolink’s head-up display and now she watched it drift away below her, a black diamond edged in gold moving through the corridors toward the cafeteria.

Someone watching Thorne closely would have seen her blank eyes flicker and then lose focus. They would have seen the movement in her lips as she began a subvocalized conversation on her infolink, filtered via a portable sat-com encryption device she carried in a pocket. The words she spoke never fully formed in her mouth, they were never uttered aloud – but her handler on the far end of the transmission heard them as clearly as if they had been in the same room together.

Thorne’s report was, as always, terse and to the point. She wasted no time with preamble, sticking to the facts, pausing only when her handler responded with new directives. For long moments, she stood motionless, processing her next orders.

Finally she acknowledged them with a single spoken word. “Complying.”

The ghost signal to her infolink cut and she became animated once more. Thorne watched the black diamond, and began considering how Adam Jensen would be dealt with.

TWO

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