DETROIT – MICHIGAN – UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

It was cramped and uncomfortable in the automated truck’s maintenance compartment, barely big enough for the two men to share it without stepping on top of one another. But somehow they managed the journey in companionable silence for the most part, Stacks gently snoring his way through it and Jensen hovering on the edge of the same, but never quite allowing himself to slip fully away into sleep.

With nothing but a small glass porthole in the hatchway, there was no view to speak of, and so Jensen gave up on marking the passage of time as the vehicle headed eastward through the day and into the night. It was early evening when he felt the truck start to slow down from the constant pace it had kept up since Alaska, and he nudged Stacks with his boot.

“I’m awake,” grumbled the other man. “We there yet?”

“Looks like.” The truck rocked and he felt it shifting lanes, until finally it came to a halt. The hatch hissed open on hydraulics and a gust of cold, damp air blew in. Jensen climbed out, grimacing at the aches in his back as his boots hit the road.

Stacks was a step behind him, taking a deep, grateful breath. “Man, that whole rig stinks of oil. I almost forgot what fresh air tastes like.” He coughed and spat. “Well, not that this air is so fresh, neither…”

They were barely out of the compartment before the hatch hissed shut and the truck rumbled away, leaving them behind on the shoulder of the freeway. Jensen glanced around, finding a road sign telling him they were on an elevated section of I-94 – the Detroit Industrial Expressway, just past Dearborn. As he got his bearings, he turned around and found the dark band of the river to the east, beyond the ill-lit streets of Mexicantown. And further to the north, the city of Detroit itself, a cluster of skyscrapers that glowed faintly through the low cloud. A fire was burning steadily out there, and the flames reflected off the bottom of the cloudbank, giving it a sullen glow. Jensen picked out the Renaissance Center toward the riverfront and used that as a reference mark to search for the twin pillars of the Sarif Industries building.

For a jarring moment, it seemed as if the towers had been erased from the skyline. He was used to seeing the glass and steel spars lit from within by soft golden light for miles around. His optics adjusted for the distance, and he realized what was wrong.

The Sarif towers were still there, but they were pitch dark against the night sky, no illumination visible in them except for the pinpricks of crimson aircraft warning lights at the very highest levels.

Stacks made a show of looking around. “Nice place here. Now I’m wishing I’d got your buddy Pritchard to detour us to Seattle instead.”

“He’ll get you there, if that’s what you want.”

“Maybe…” Stacks winced and shifted his arm stiffly. “Don’t know if I’m ready to go back,” he went on, almost to himself.

Jensen crossed to the guard rail, casting a wary look over his shoulder at the traffic streaming past behind him on the freeway. He pressed a fingertip to his mastoid bone, bringing his infolink out of sleep mode. “Pritchard. You there?”

The response took a moment. “Welcome home, Jensen. A pity it’s not under better circumstances.” Was that sarcasm, or a note of real regret in the other man’s voice? It was hard to tell with someone like Frank Pritchard. “There’s a metro station to your northeast. Get there, head into the ticket hall.”

“Copy,” he nodded, beckoning Stacks to follow him.

“Watch your step,” Pritchard added, “and try not to draw any attention. This city’s not how it was when you were last here.”

The two of them slipped over the rail and made their way down a steep embankment, emerging in what used to be the grounds of a public park. Once there had been a line of trees to screen off the area from the noise of the freeway, but all of them had been cut down for firewood, with lines of ragged stumps protruding from the yellowing, piebald grass.

The park was choked with people, hundreds of the homeless packed into a makeshift campground built out of discarded packing materials, the shells of stripped vehicles and ragged sails of plastic sheeting. Groups of them clustered around oil drum fires, while others stayed concealed in the deep shadows that fell in the gloom. There were no working streetlights, many of them cut down like the trees and others torn open at the root so power-snatchers could tap into the city’s electrical grid.

Wary faces caught sight of Jensen and Stacks, some seeing strangers and electing to turn away, others measuring them with rapacious, threatening gazes.

“Didn’t we just leave this party?” muttered Stacks.

“No guards here, though,” Jensen said quietly.

“Wanna bet?” The other man nodded toward the gates of the park, where a police cruiser slowly rode past, a cop in the passenger seat using a handheld spotlight to cast a beam over the faces of the dispossessed and desperate.

“Hey,” said a voice, and Jensen felt a tug on the hem of his jacket. He looked down and saw an emaciated young woman with an athlete’s recurved cyberlegs splayed out beside her. The legs were Kusanagi models, he noted – a high-grade brand, not that it seemed to matter here. The woman held up a crumpled disposable cup, gesturing with a stub where her other arm should have been. It ended at the elbow joint in a cluster of bare metal connectors and trailing wires. “You help a sister out? Spare some change or a little nu-poz, yeah?”

Jensen’s lips thinned. “I can’t do anything for you.”

The woman turned her attention on Stacks. “How about it?”

Stacks hesitated, his expression tightening. “I… I don’t have any pozy on me, girl. I’m real sorry about that.”

“Then fuck off,” she snapped, her expression turning spiteful.

“Look, I—” Stacks started to say something else, but Jensen pulled him away.

“You heard the lady. Come on. Keep walking.”

“Yeah, you better!” shouted the woman, rising unsteadily to her feet. “Don’t come down here and pretend you’re better than us! Goddamn wrench!” She hissed, flinching in pain with each step she took after them, finally tottering to a halt.

Jensen had seen the effects of neuropozyne withdrawal before, and it was always an ugly, sorrowful sight. Part of the forced bargain anyone with human augmentations had to make, synthetic anti-rejection drugs like neuropozyne were a necessary evil. Anyone who had an implant or a cybernetic limb was subject to a condition known as DDS – Darrow Deficiency Syndrome – where glial tissue would slowly build up around the interface between the augmentation’s electrode pick-ups and the implantee’s nerves. Neuropozyne kept those connections working, but without regular doses, augmentations would start to misfire and cause severe pain, seizures, and in the worst cases, systemic nerve damage. The drug’s availability had always been controlled, and it had always been costly, but in the wake of the incident Jensen had to wonder how much harder it had become to get hold of it. There were few alternatives, with poisonous ‘street’ versions cooked up by criminal gangs and hazardous untested variants like riezene taking more lives than they saved.

Stacks was asking himself the same questions. “Everyone here,” he began quietly, “Jensen, they’re all augs like us. A damn mech ghetto, is what it is. All these poor bastards, every one of them has to be hurtin’…”

“We need to keep moving,” Jensen insisted, pushing Stacks in the direction of the park gates. Across the street was the metro station Pritchard had mentioned, above it the curves of two monorail lines threading in and out of the building. Less than thirty seconds away.

But the woman was on the move again, coming after them once more. “You seen enough, huh?” she shrieked. “You boys go back downtown to your natch master and be good little wrenches, get your nu-poz while the rest of us choke!”

Some of the other augs were taking notice, and Jensen felt the tension in the air building an edge.

“You gotta have something!” cried the woman, her anger finally crumbling into a desperate sob.

But Jensen hadn’t lied before. He’d never needed neuropozyne to keep his augmentations operable; he didn’t understand all the medical jargon behind it, but there was something different about his genetic structure. His ex-lover Megan Reed had once told him he was a ‘super-compatible’, a rare human anomaly who could accept augs without the yoke of the anti-rejection drug to keep him whole. Jensen was still undecided if that was a gift or a curse, and he couldn’t stop himself from wondering if this unique quality was some loose thread left behind by other unanswered questions from his past. Questions that for now, he had to push away, along with other troubling memories that Megan’s name brought up.

He had more immediate problems. The woman’s tirade attracted the interest of other augs, none of whom seemed to consider Jensen and Stacks as anything other than unwanted intruders. He looked around and saw the police cruiser swinging back around. The situation was slipping toward an explosion of violence with each second that passed.

But then Stacks was holding up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Look, just stop! You’re right, I’m sorry!” He dug in the pocket of his jacket and pulled out a plastic packet containing a single drug capsule. “Here. This is all I’ve got.” Stacks handed it to the woman. His voice caught as he spoke again, “You just… you take it. Reckon you need it way more than I do. Okay?”

“Thank you…” The woman reached into the pack with trembling fingers and dry-swallowed the neuropozyne. The moment of tension eased, but didn’t fade entirely. They were still unwelcome here.

“Stacks, come on!” Jensen didn’t wait around to see if the other dispossessed augs would change their minds about them, and he hustled the other man to the gates and across the street. The light from the police car swept over them and kept on going.

* * *

“That girl, she…” Stacks swallowed hard. “Kinda reminded me of my daughter, you know?”

Jensen nodded. “I get it. But you gotta focus. We’re fugitives. We have to stay anonymous.”

“You probably reckon Ol’ Stacks, he’s a soft touch, yeah?” Stacks gave a rueful chuckle as they entered the ticket hall. The place was dimly lit and covered with graffiti and gang tags, and in one corner a line of automated vendor screens glowed with dull yellow light.

“I’ve got no quarrel with someone putting more good into the world,” Jensen told him. “But just be careful, okay?” He took a breath and activated the infolink again. “Pritchard, we’re here.”

“I know.”

The voice came, not from his implanted cellular comm, but from the gloom beside the metal staircase leading to the platforms. A thin figure in a dark brown jacket over a shapeless hoodie emerged from behind the cover of an illuminated map display. Hands reached up to roll back the hood and Jensen saw Pritchard’s face there. The hacker looked drawn and weary, his tapered features appearing gaunt and hollow in the waxy half-light. He cocked his head, studying Jensen carefully, one hand firmly held inside a jacket pocket.

Jensen eyed the bulge in his coat. “You gonna shoot me, Pritchard? I know we’ve never exactly been best buds, but I thought we’d parted on better terms than that.”

The hacker’s manner eased a little, and he looked around, peering into the corners of the hall. “Can’t be too careful.” He leaned closer – and then suddenly Pritchard reached out and snatched a trailing hair from Jensen’s head. He backed away, producing a small handheld device, and stuffed the hair into a sample tray.

“A DNA check?” Jensen’s eyes narrowed. “You still think I’m not who I say I am?”

Pritchard didn’t answer, eyes flicking back and forth between Jensen and the device’s readout. After a moment, it gave a low chime, and the hacker relaxed slightly. “You could have been a surgically altered double, for all I know… Gene scan matches the samples from the company files, so now I believe you.” He looked Jensen over. “You seem well for a dead man.”

“Thank Sarif for that. Sentinel implants kept me alive in the water.”

“Yes, of course.” Pritchard nodded. His tone was mordant. “You’ve made survival against the odds your raison d’être. I suppose it shouldn’t come as a shock to me. I might have known you’d shake off drowning just like everything else.”

Stacks nudged Jensen in the ribs. “Man don’t seem happy to see you,” he said guardedly.

“Pritchard’s never happy,” Jensen noted.

“What did you expect?” snapped the hacker. “A hug? Wherever you go, trouble follows!”

“What’s he mean?” said Stacks.

Jensen raised a hand. “Not the time, Francis.” He put acid emphasis on the other man’s name. “Do you have what I asked you for?”

An older man in a heavy coat walked into the ticket hall and faltered on the steps, seeing the three of them and immediately suspecting something illegal going on – which in fact, was true. Irritably, Pritchard beckoned Stacks and Jensen over to a shadowed corner and the passer-by did his best to pretend he’d seen nothing, almost at a run as he went up the steps.

Pritchard produced two pocket secretaries and handed them to Jensen. “Snap covers,” he explained. “Identity passes encoded on there, nothing special, plus a faked credit account with Bank of Detroit. It won’t last long, though. There’s enough for a couple of meals and a bus ticket.”

“I don’t plan on leaving here any time soon,” Jensen shot back. “I came back to Detroit for a reason.”

Pritchard scowled at him. “I knew talking to you was a mistake. I should have scrubbed that infolink code after they said you were dead.” He shook his head. “Jensen, things are different now. If you thought it was bad before the incident, you have no idea. This city is the last place you should be. Your face is known here. And I’m risking my own safety just being in the same place as you.”

“Yeah.” Jensen nodded. “Gotta admit, seeing you out in the field is a new wrinkle. Since when did you get out from behind your desk?”

“I don’t even have a desk anymore!” he said hotly. Then his tone shifted, becoming sullen. “Let’s just say, I don’t have the reach that I once did.”

From above them, there was a low, throaty rumble as a ‘people mover’ train approached the platform, and Jensen heard an automated announcer calling off destinations. “I need to take a look,” he told Pritchard, unsure of where the impulse had really come from. “I have to see the city with my own eyes.”

“You’ll regret it,” Pritchard relented, and he turned toward the stairs. “I already do.”

“So we going with?” asked Stacks, with a shrug.

“We’re going,” Jensen told him, and followed the hacker up.

* * *

There were only a few travelers waiting for the train, and when they spotted Jensen and Stacks emerging on to the platform, they immediately put distance between them.

Jensen’s lips thinned. He’d experienced anti-aug sentiment directed at him more than once, from subtle prejudice like people crossing the street to stay away from him, to outright bigotry with cries of ‘hanzer’ and threats of physical violence – but now there was a new hostility he sensed in the people around him, a mix of fear and anger bubbling away just beneath the surface.

The train slid to a frictionless halt and the doors automatically hissed open. Jensen took a step toward the closest carriage, and heard Pritchard call out his name to make him wait, but it was too late. He had one foot off the platform when he found himself face-to-face with a pair of police patrolmen in black and orange body armor. They blocked his way on to the people mover, the mirrored visors across their faces making them look robotic and inhuman. “Where d’you think you’re going?” said one of them.

The other cop jerked a thumb at a decal on the window of the carriage, right next to the NO SMOKING/NO FIREARMS sign. The decal showed the simple stick-figure icon of a male and a female against a black background with a green border. Jensen had never seen it before, and there were a dozen of them, plastered on to the windows of five of the six carriages of the people mover. “Know what that means?”

“Enlighten me,” said Jensen.

“It means naturals only,” said the first cop, and he shoved Jensen back a step with the heel of his hand, his other dropping to the grip of a nightstick hanging from his hip. He nodded in the direction of the rear of the train. “Get back there.”

Jensen was tired and it was making him short-tempered. He hesitated on the brink of giving the two patrolmen some choice words, but reeled back the urge, remembering his own advice to Stacks.

The rearmost carriage of the monorail bore a different symbol on the doors, the same man-woman icons but this time bordered in red. He noticed that both of the abstract figures had an arm or a leg colored crimson to indicate the presence of an artificial limb.

“You’re kidding me,” said Stacks.

“The segregation rules came in a while after the incident,” Pritchard told him. “Augmented humans are second-class citizens these days.”

Jensen followed them aboard, and glanced down at the homeless encampment in the park as the people mover sped away from the station. “And everyone just let it happen?”

Pritchard eyed him. “Do you really think that people gave a moment’s thought to the rights of the augmented after seventy percent of them went on a psychotic rampage? Things moved fast, Jensen. Anyone who didn’t accept the decommissioning of their cyberware had to sign up for registration, stringent controls, enforced licensing… compulsory confinement and hardware removal for the non-compliant ones. These days, if you’re an aug and you’re not eking out a life on expensive, insufficient nu-poz allocations, you’re either rich or you’re indentured to someone who is.” He spread his hands. “It’s a brave new slave economy.”

The bleak tone in the other man’s words was something Jensen had never heard from Frank Pritchard before. Beneath his usually waspish and arrogant exterior, something had changed. Like everything else, it seemed, Pritchard had gone through a lot during Jensen’s missing time.

“I saw the towers,” said Jensen, nodding toward the city skyline. “What happened to Sarif?”

“The man or the company?” Pritchard gave a humorless chuckle.

“Both.”

Stacks stood at the window, watching the buildings flash by, while Pritchard took a seat across from Jensen and leaned close, lowering his voice. “Around here, David Sarif isn’t a name you want people hearing you say. Remember all his bold plans about making Detroit ‘a beacon city’, about bringing back technology, prosperity and jobs?” He shook his head. “All gone, crumbled to dust. That golden future he talked about? Turns out it was toxic.”

The last time Jensen had seen David Sarif, his employer was at the Panchaea complex, having arrived there as part of a political gambit only to become caught up in Hugh Darrow’s apocalyptic plans. He remembered Sarif imploring him to confront Darrow and make the right choice for the greater good, but after the collapse of the facility, Jensen had not known if the man had made it out alive.

He listened intently as Pritchard laid out the whole sorry story. Jensen wasn’t surprised to learn that Sarif had got away aboard a private mini-sub, but as the hacker explained, it wasn’t without cost. “His submersible was damaged getting to the surface, and by the time the UN rescue ships got him on board, he was suffering from severe nitrogen narcosis. He was in a coma, you see? And so he slept through most of everything that came after.”

A coma. Jensen felt a strange flicker of recognition. Sarif and me both, dead to the world while everything we knew unraveled.

Pritchard went on. “In the weeks that followed, people were desperate for someone, anyone, to hold responsible for the incident. There were attacks on every augmentation manufacturer worldwide, on tech labs and research centers… They burned down the LIMB clinics.”

Jensen nodded grimly. Liberty in Mind and Body International, also known as LIMB, were the world’s largest network of cyberware clinics, and for many they were the modern face of human augmentation. They would have been the most immediate, most visible targets for any angry retaliation. There was a kind of horrible irony in that, as it had been covert agents working through LIMB who laid the groundwork for the incident’s night of chaos, by implanting biochip controls during a mass firmware upgrade that let Darrow’s signal do its work.

“One by one, all the major human enhancement corporations have gone under. Isolay was the first to declare bankruptcy, then Kusanagi, Caidin Global…” Pritchard trailed off. “A couple of the little fish are still swimming, but they won’t last beyond the end of the year. The only one of the majors that is holding together is Tai Yong Medical.”

Jensen scowled. “Figures. They just roll right on, like nothing has happened.” Both men knew that Tai Yong was backed not just by the Chinese government, but also by the powerbase of the Illuminati. With such forces behind them, TYM was the one corporation that would be able to weather the storm.

“When the stocks of every other augmentation company crashed, Tai Yong was there to swallow them up,” said Pritchard. “And with Sarif on ice, the board of directors at SI folded.” He pointed toward the darkened towers of the distant office building. “So now, everything that matters has either been bought by the Chinese or burned out by people who wanted some revenge…” He looked away and sighed. “I was one of the last to leave. I was there on the day they formally shut the place down and boarded it up.” A note of helpless anger entered his voice. “I don’t know, I thought I could do something… try to keep things going! But when Sarif woke up, when he finally came back… I think it broke something inside him, to see his dream torn apart like that. He couldn’t stay and watch it die by inches.”

Jensen nodded. “I can believe that. I never figured David Sarif for the kind of man who handles failure well.”

“I don’t know where he is now,” Pritchard concluded. “I reached out to him through some back channels, but so far… nothing.”

“Maybe that’s for the best.”

The other man scowled. “Easy for you to say. While you dropped off the face of the Earth, I’ve been hanging on by my fingertips.” He looked away. “In order to keep my head above water, I’ve had to… go back to using some of my older skill sets, if you catch my meaning.”

Jensen could imagine what that meant. Prior to his gainful employment as head of digital security at Sarif Industries, Frank Pritchard had moonlighted as a black-hat hacker. The poacher had turned gamekeeper – and now back to poacher again, if Jensen understood correctly. “We do what we have to.”

“You don’t have to be here.” Pritchard gestured toward the window of the carriage, as the monorail curved around the side of a tall, crumbling brownstone and into the downtown sector. “The world already thinks Adam Jensen is a corpse. Why not let it stay that way? Go off the grid and don’t come back…” He sighed. “I’m thinking about it myself.”

“No.” Jensen shook his head, a cold surge of righteous anger tightening in his chest. “I’ve had enough of being one step behind them.” He caught himself before he said the Illuminati. Pritchard knew full well who he meant. “They broke open my life. They destroyed everything that mattered to me. I lost all choice about who or what I was…” The black polycarbonate fingers of his hand closed into a fist. “I’ve got a year-long gap in my memories. So I’m done letting them take from me, or anyone else.”

Despite himself, Pritchard let out a derisive snort. “What do you think you’re going to do, Jensen? Take the fight to them?”

He met the other man’s gaze. “You know me well enough to know the answer to that question.”

“You’re deluded.”

“No.” Jensen looked away as the people mover slowed to a halt. “I just don’t have anything left to lose.”

* * *

“Cold here,” said Stacks, as they walked down the stalled escalators from the station and out on to the windblown street.

Jensen nodded absently as he looked around. They had emerged near Derelict Row, a sprawling construction site that in 2027 had been the beginning of a planned redevelopment initiative. Now it was a colossal heap of wreckage resembling the remnants of a war zone. What walls were still standing were covered with a layer of fly-posters bearing strident anti-aug slogans – PROTECT OUR FUTURE, KEEP OUR STREETS HUMAN, ARE YOUR CHILDREN SAFE?

More of the dispossessed congregated around the ruins in a ragged shantytown, and from it Jensen caught the odor of greasy, cooked meat on the breeze.

“I’m gonna go get me something…” Stacks went on, catching the same scent.

“That’s rat they’re barbequing over there,” Pritchard told him. “Just so you know.”

“I ain’t choosy. Just hungry.” The other man jogged across the street and started a negotiation with a vendor.

Pritchard watched him go. “Do you trust that person?”

“He saved my life, helped me escape the WHO clinic where we were being held. I owe him for that.”

The hacker eyed him. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“He hasn’t given me a reason not to trust him,” said Jensen. “And right now I need as many allies as I can get.”

Stacks came back with a stringy hunk of meat on a skewer, attacking it like he was starving. He walked with difficulty, limping with each off-step. “Y’all wuh-want a bite?”

“I’ll pass,” said Jensen. “You okay?”

“Stiff,” he said, by way of explanation. “Where now?”

“This way.” Pritchard started walking.

Every other building was dark and unlit. Those that hadn’t been covered with metallic safety panels to lock them off from potential squatters were skeletal frames that had been denuded of everything. Blank, dark voids where windows had once been looked back at them like the eye sockets of a skull, and everywhere there were piles of debris.

“After the incident, a lot of these places were just left to rot,” said Pritchard. “No-one had a reason to come back and rebuild.”

They turned a corner and Jensen saw a familiar sight – the Chiron Building, the apartment complex where he had lived during his time working for Sarif. The Chiron looked different now; there were heavy poured-concrete jersey barriers blocking off the main entrance, the kind that one would see on a military base. Outside, an automated security bot rolled back and forth on an endless patrol, its scanners projecting a fan of amber laser light across its path.

On the wall of the apartment, Jensen saw the same ‘naturals only’ symbol that had been on the side of the train carriages. The robot spotted him and turned in Jensen’s direction, rising up on its wheels to point a gun barrel toward him as a warning. He ignored it, and fell back into step with Stacks and Pritchard.

“Just how much of this segregation crap is there?” he demanded.

“It’s everywhere,” Pritchard told him. “I’ve heard talk on the net about so-called ‘safe harbor’ cities outside the US but I don’t know how true that is.”

“This isn’t what I wanted…” Jensen said to himself.

Stacks made a negative noise. “You and me both, brother.”

“Down here.” Pritchard cut through a trash-choked alleyway, emerging behind a squat, slab-sided building with a partly collapsed roof. “This is it.”

“The Rialto…” Jensen peered up at the darkened movie theater. “I thought this place had been bulldozed.” Faded billboards showing weather-stained posters for decade-old feature films hung on the façade of the cinema, and toward the front where the ticket booth had been there was only a portcullis of metal security fencing.

“That was the plan,” said Pritchard. “But like everything else around here, the incident got in the way of that. It’s isolated, it has a power train good enough for my needs, and most importantly no-one bothers me.” They circled around to the back of the building. “Of course, it’s not exactly the Hilton-Fujikawa, but as I’m extending you the hospitality, you’re in no position to complain.”

Jensen had been quietly taking note of the gang tags spray-painted on the walls since they had got off the monorail, his old cop instincts coming to the fore. When he had lived in the city, a street gang called the Derelict Row Ballers considered this area of Detroit as the buffer zone to their turf – but the DRB’s red diamond symbol wasn’t anywhere to be seen. Instead, Jensen picked out multiple instances of three yellow letters – MCB, the initials of the Motor City Bangers, the sworn enemies of the DRBs – scrawled in prominent locations.

He glanced at Pritchard. “Since when has this part of downtown been Banger territory?”

The hacker blanched. “Let’s just say they expanded their reach after the incident. With no serious police presence in the aftermath, the MCBs made their move. Their competitors are either dead or they fled.”

“Yo, Snakey!” shouted a rough voice, and Jensen saw a figure climbing out of a car parked beside an overturned dumpster. The man was wearing gang colors and sported a pair of skeletal cyberarms. “You talking trash about us, man?”

Three more gangers in MCB yellow got out and stood with him. They’d been staking out the rear entrance of the Rialto, and Jensen chided himself for not catching sight of them before they got too close.

“Oh, crap.” The sudden shift in Pritchard’s body language spoke volumes. He clearly knew these men.

“Friends of yours?” said Stacks.

“Oh, we good buddies,” said the ganger with the aug arms, before Pritchard could answer. As he came closer, Jensen saw that he was missing an ear, the lobe replaced by the grille of a surplus military aural augmentation. He had to have been listening in on their conversation as they walked down the street. “Ain’t that right, Snakey?”

The other MCB members sported at least one cyberlimb, mostly low-grade Tai Yong athletic models, and they all carried pistols in their waistbands. Jensen felt underdressed without a weapon of his own.

“What do you want, Cali?” Pritchard feigned annoyance, but Jensen could tell he was worried. “I’m paid up with you people. We don’t have any more business.”

“Oh, issat so?” The one he called Cali shared a snarling chuckle with his friends. “No, man, that ain’t the way it goes.” He advanced, and his gang mates came swaggering along with him. “See, Bangers run things here now. So you live on our turf, you a…” He paused, fishing for the right word. “A tenant.”

Pritchard folded his arms. “I made a trade with Magnet,” he insisted. “Burned the police jackets on a bunch of those augs you’re wearing so the cops can’t trace them. In return, I get my place and I stay out of your way.”

Cali shook his head, running a hand over his goatee beard and grinning. “Nah, nah. See, Snakey, you too useful, is what it is. Mag, he the boss and he got other jobs you can do.”

“I’m not interested.” Pritchard shook his head.

“Ain’t about what yo’ skinny white ass want, geek,” snarled one of the other gangers. “Do what yo’ told. Maybe you and your ladies here get to keep breathin’.”

Cali gave a shrug and cocked his head. “So, that’s how it is. See, Mag’s real busy right now with a big deal, but he’s gonna come around here when he’s done—”

Jensen decided that things had gone on long enough. He stepped forward. “Maybe you don’t hear so well with that aug after all.” He put himself between Cali and Pritchard. “Frank doesn’t want to play ball. So why don’t you be on your way?”

Cali fingered his beard again and giggled. “Well, look at this slick son-of-a-bitch! What are you, his manager?”

The thug who had shot his mouth off pulled a snub-nose Copperhead .40 revolver from his belt and let it dangle at the end of his arm. Cali saw and smirked.

“Just a work colleague,” Jensen corrected. He flexed his arms, feeling the mechanisms within shift under the impulses from his nerves. With the inhibitor cuff long gone, he was free to deploy his augmentations at full offensive capability. There was a sudden snap-click of spinning micro-gears, and a pair of meter-long blades extended out of hidden slots in Jensen’s wrists. Black alloy with fractal monomolecular edges, the weapons were capable of slicing through most materials like butter. The smirk on Cali’s face froze and his eyes widened to saucers as Jensen put one of the blades right under his chin. “Careful there,” he told the gangbanger. “Don’t make any sudden moves, unless you want a real close shave.”

The thug with the revolver hesitated, and Stacks took the opportunity to take a menacing step forward, bringing up his heavy duty arms. He opened his dual-thumbed claw hands wide and let them rotate slowly around his wrist joints. “Uh-uh, Youngblood,” he told the other ganger. “Take a muh-moment there.”

Cali swallowed – slowly and very carefully – then raised a hand to wave off his comrade. “Hey, be cool. Just giving Snakey a message, right?” He backed away from the blade edge and Jensen let him go. “Mag, he be coming around, is all.” Cali retreated toward the car, trying to gather up a little of his earlier bravado. “You better be ready to put in some work. And make your boys here be civil.”

The thug with the pistol finally holstered it and, pausing to spit on the ground, he joined the others in the car. Jensen retracted the nanoblades as the vehicle revved and drove away.

When the car was out of sight, Pritchard rounded on him. “Same old Jensen! You have to interfere with everything!” He prodded him in the chest. “I was going to handle that!”

“Oh yeah?” Stacks stifled a cough and raised his eyebrow. “How so?”

“I live here now,” Pritchard went on. “That means there are certain realities I have to accept. I don’t need you upsetting the status quo any more than you already have!”

“You’re welcome,” Jensen retorted.

Pritchard gave an exasperated snort and went to the Rialto’s rear entrance, punching a code into a hidden keypad. A heavy metal fire door clunked open and he went inside, not waiting to see if the others followed him.

* * *

Jensen and Stacks entered warily, and their footsteps echoed in the space within. The Rialto’s interior was a magnificent ruin, the decaying art deco designs of the walls, the suspended gallery above and crumbling rows of seats like a snapshot of a decomposing sculpture. Musty, rain-soaked panels hung on the verge of collapse from the high ceiling overhead, and entire sections of the floor had given way into a darkened basement below.

Pritchard picked a path across a makeshift walkway built out of ladders and sheet metal, heading toward the stage where a giant movie screen would once have hung. On the dais up there, Jensen saw bubble tents and flexible plastic walls set up around banks of glowing computer servers.

A strident beeping tone echoed out across the atrium, and Jensen stiffened, instantly recognizing the pre-detonation warning of a mine template. He saw lights blinking in chains around the walkway. Pritchard’s security for his bolt hole was a series of kinetic and electromagnetic pulse grenades with proximity detectors.

Before the devices could trigger, Pritchard cleared his throat and called out a password. “Aerith Lives,” he said, his voice carrying. The countdown halted and the mines went back to a dormant mode.

“Interesting décor,” offered Jensen, surveying the interior. Off to one side, he saw an area that had been cleared of chairs and piled high with heavy plastic carry cases stamped with the Sarif Industries logo. “Let me guess, you borrowed some office supplies before you got fired?”

“I resigned,” Pritchard retorted, climbing up to the dais. He paused to check the cables on an electric-engine motorcycle that was charging from a massive battery pack. “I consider all that as my severance package.” He waved at the boxes. “Some of it is yours, I think…”

“What?”

He nodded. “From your office at Sarif. It was in storage. I… appropriated it.”

Stacks had found a refrigerator and was helping himself to a can of beer. He sat heavily in the front row and drank steadily.

“Make yourself at home, why don’t you?” Pritchard’s acid reply went unanswered.

Jensen went to the cases, shifting some aside until he found a couple that bore his old SI employee code. The first was full of files and desk clutter, but the second contained the contents of his personal locker from the company’s security ops center. Inside, there was a spare chest armor rig and a case containing his backup pistol. He checked and loaded the compact CA-4 semiautomatic, clipping it into a shoulder holster that sat inconspicuously under his jacket. “Better,” he said to himself.

Jensen crossed back to Pritchard’s home from home, the sprawling collection of hijacked computer server stacks, digital projector screens and other items of tech whose functions he could only guess at. Cables for power and data were everywhere underfoot, extending like taproots across the raised platform of the dais. One section of the stage was the hacker’s living area, with a careworn leather sofa, a portable kitchen from a disaster relief airdrop module and a bubble tent for sleeping.

Pritchard was already back in his ‘cockpit’, his hands skittering across a backlit keyboard as he worked through a waterfall of incomprehensible code across one of the big screens. “So,” he sniffed. “Where do you want to start with this crusade of yours? The sooner you decide, the sooner you can leave.”

Any answer Jensen was going to give was cut off by a strangled cry of pain from the front row. Stacks pitched forward out of his chair and crashed to the floor in a twitching heap. Jensen leapt down to him, in time to see the other man crush the beer can in his hand between the trembling fingers of his cyberarm.

The seizure had come out of nowhere, but now it had Stacks in its teeth, he had to ride it out. Another cry of pain escaped his lips and he fought for breath. Jensen turned him so he wouldn’t injure himself, but there was little else he could do but let Stacks endure the attack.

“He’s in neuropozyne withdrawal,” Pritchard said grimly. “That’s a bad reaction. When was his last dose?”

Jensen frowned. “Damn it, Stacks… You gave that girl your last cap, didn’t you?” He guessed that the other man had been holding off as long as he could before taking his remaining nu-poz – and now that choice was paying him back.

“I… I… I’m okay…” Stacks bit out the words as the tremors slowly abated. He coughed, spitting blood where he had bitten the inside of his mouth. “Ah, shit. Hurts like razors, brother.”

Pritchard dragged a device trailing dozens of colored cables over to them. He fired it up and connected the wires to maintenance sockets in Stacks’s shoulder joints. “A lot of red flags here,” he explained, after a moment, reading off a small screen. “Ah, half this stuff is meaningless to me… Looks like there could be connector failures across the PEDOT clusters…”

“I’ll manage.” Stacks forced himself to sit up, but the effort almost made him black out. “I’ll… be okay. Just need to rest.”

“Is this something to do with what happened to us at the WHO clinic?” Jensen shot Pritchard a questioning look.

The hacker was well aware of Jensen’s lack of need for neuropozyne, but his augmentations were still subject to malfunction just like any other piece of complex equipment. He shook his head. “I don’t know, and I can’t do much with this hardware, Jensen. I don’t have the tech or the knowledge to give you a full system overview. I mean, I’m a hacker, not a cyberneticist.”

Jensen scowled. “Can’t go through any legal channels, we’d be made in a second. What about black market clinics?”

“If you want to turn yourself over to the tender mercies of the local Harvester clan, go right ahead.” Pritchard nodded toward Jensen’s arm. “You’ll wake up as an eyeless torso in a wheelchair with some gangbanger like Cali wearing those augs instead. If you wake up at all.”

Jensen fell silent for a moment, thinking it through. A creeping, unpleasant thought formed in his mind. There was more to be concerned about than just Stacks’s well-being. His own was also in question.

I was out for months. I have no idea what they did to me during that time. He looked down at his hands. How do I trust my own tech?

“What about Sarif?” he asked.

“I told you, he’s in the wind—”

“The company, not the man,” Jensen added. “The lab facilities in the SI building, they’ve got all the hardware to run a diagnostic, right? And maybe some stocks of nu-poz as well.”

“If it hasn’t already been removed or looted!” Pritchard shot back. “Not to mention that the new owners from Hengsha have the towers locked down tight.”

“Pritchard, before all this blew up, you and I were responsible for the security of that building. If anyone can get in there, we can.”

He knew Frank Pritchard well enough to know that appealing to his hacker vanity, that desire to break the system, would sway him. He could see the decision forming in the other man’s mind even as he spoke.

But there was something else pushing Jensen toward this act. More than the desire to help Stacks, more than the cold suspicion that Agent Thorne or someone else in the chain of his enemies might have tampered with him.

The gaps in my memory. The pieces of the past I’m missing. Maybe I can find some of it there.

“It won’t be easy,” Pritchard was saying. “We’ll all need to pitch in.”

“Okay,” said Stacks. “Not like I got much option.”

Jensen nodded. “We’ll go back to where it started.”

FOUR

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