THE RIALTO – DETROIT – UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

At first the sound in his thoughts was like a rattle of rainfall or the rumble of faraway thunder, but as Jensen rose quickly to wakefulness the noise shifted and changed to the irregular clattering of fingers on a keyboard.

He opened his eyes and righted himself, careful not to disturb Stacks, who was snoring lightly on a folding camp bed across from him inside the yurt-like bubble tent. Jensen watched the other man for a moment. Now and then, Stacks would twitch in the depths of REM sleep, the tiny motors in the joints of his iron fingers giving a faint buzz as they gathered into fists and relaxed over and over again. He wondered where his companion was, down there in his dreamscape. Jensen suspected it was not a good place, and for his part tried to reach for a remnant of whatever dreams he had just left behind.

Jensen came back with nothing. Usually there was the ghost of a memory, the faint tracery of an emotion, but he had nothing to hold on to. It came to him then that he hadn’t clearly recalled a single dream since the day he had awakened in Facility 451 – or was it just that his mind didn’t want him to carry them into the waking world?

He scowled, shaking off the morose thought, and quietly left the tent. Across the wide stage of the movie theater, the endless tapping continued, and Jensen found Pritchard hunched forward over a keyboard, his expression slack but his eyes totally focused on abstract digital figures on a tall, narrow screen.

He helped himself to some water from a salvaged purification module and approached the hacker, who didn’t look up. “Just so you know,” Pritchard told Jensen. “There’s no maid service here, so clean up after yourself.”

He looked around at the sloughed walls and tumbledown surroundings. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

Pritchard paused to grab a handful of caffeine tablets and tip them into his mouth, crunching them down dry like they were candy. “To keep me alert,” he said, by way of explanation.

“Right,” said Jensen. “What are you working on? Is that… a game?”

The typing stopped and he closed the program window. “It’s a tactical simulator,” Pritchard corrected. He shot Jensen a look. “So what exactly are you doing here? I understand your white knight thing back in the lab that saved our lives—”

“And it was the right thing to do,” he interjected.

Pritchard went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “But what do you propose to do next? You came to Detroit because you needed somewhere to lie low, but that’s not really your style, is it? Now you’re grumbling about picking up where you left off with your crusade against Darrow’s mythical cadre… Are you going to move on or are you going to stay here and keep drawing attention? Because I need to know, I need to… modify my situation…”

“You want us to leave?” Jensen folded his arms. “You want things to go back to how they were, with you getting shaken down by gang members and doing petty cyber crime just to keep your head above water?”

“Nothing I do is petty,” Pritchard shot back.

Jensen hesitated. In truth, he had a lot of questions himself that he couldn’t answer – but somehow coming back to Detroit after everything that happened at Panchaea felt like a step toward some kind of closure. He had the very real sense of a chapter of his life coming to an end, but he wasn’t quite there yet. “Hate to break it to you, Frank, but I don’t think lying low is really an option. There’s more going on here than just a city falling to pieces. You heard what those scavengers said. Somebody is raking through the ashes of Sarif Industries, and I want to know who and why. These things aren’t happening in isolation. There’s a connection…”

Pritchard frowned. “I admit, that subject is vexing me as well. So I’ve been looking into it.” He brought up a new display window on the screen. “You’re not going to like what I found.”

Jensen peered at the data, but the lines of code there meant nothing to him. “Spill it,” he demanded.

“You’re right that someone is systematically raiding the Sarif facilities in this city and looting them.” He held up a hand. “And no, I’m not just talking about the homeless and the dispossessed searching for some doses of nu-poz. I mean someone organized. As for who they are… That’s still unclear.”

“The next question is why?” Jensen voiced the uncertainty, but he was already assembling the answer for himself.

“Remember back before everything fell apart, that whole situation with the Typhoon augmentation prototype Sarif had designed for the military? You know how valuable he considered it.”

Jensen nodded. After recovering from the assault on Sarif Industries that had almost killed him, Jensen had been called back into work early by the company CEO in order to deal with an anti-aug activist group threatening the Milwaukee Junction factory. He remembered very clearly how David Sarif had stressed the importance or saving the Typhoon prototype as well as the workers being held hostage.

Pritchard went on. “The fact is, that wasn’t the only military-focus hardware SI was looking at. Nanoblade enhancements, variants on the Typhoon, other implanted weapons… Sarif had a lot of secret projects in development that he didn’t share with the rest of us.”

“I figured as much,” Jensen said grimly. “But that stuff was hypothetical.”

The hacker’s lip curled. “You know Sarif. You think he’d leave an interesting technical challenge on paper? He might not have planned to sell them, but I’m pretty sure he built them… And that’s what our mystery men are looking for.” He brought up a different data window. “Every Sarif sub-office in the Detroit area has been broken into in the last couple of months, that’s why TYM ordered Tarvos to up security at the tower.”

“So we know it can’t be Tai Yong doing this, then.”

“After all the trouble in Hengsha, they have their own problems to deal with back home. If they didn’t, they’d be here in force. No, this is someone else.” Pritchard shook his head. “The manufacturing plant at Milwaukee Junction has been shut down since the incident, but it’s the most likely place where this tech would have ended up. And if our unknowns get hold of these prototypes, then there’s no telling where they might resurface. I don’t need to tell you, Jensen, these are deadly weapons. In the wrong hands…” He trailed off.

“So we do something about it,” Jensen insisted, a sense of new purpose taking hold in him. “A last job for the boss. Cleaning up his mess.” He gave a humorless smile. “Just like old times.”

But Pritchard was shaking his head. “That’s not what I had in mind. I’m not risking my life again – breaking into the tower was enough! I’m preparing an anonymous data packet containing everything I’ve uncovered; I’m going to drop it on the central servers of the Detroit Police Department and the local FBI field office… Let them deal with this.”

“You said it yourself, the DPD barely patrol the city outside of the secured areas. They’re not going to risk their necks on an anonymous tip. And by the time the Feds wake up, this will all be over!” Jensen eyed him. “No. I’ll go in. You can cover me by remote from here.”

“Out of the question!” Pritchard’s voice rose. “I told you, I don’t have the resources that I used to!”

“I’ll make allowances,” Jensen said dryly. “Stacks can back me up on the ground.”

Pritchard shot a glance in the direction of the bubble tent. “That’s not a smart choice. I don’t trust him. You saw how he reacted at the lab, that wasn’t a neuropozyne reaction… that was post-traumatic stress!” He lowered his voice. “He’s clearly unstable.”

“He may be,” Jensen agreed. “But the truth is, after the incident we were all damaged in one way or another.”

“Touching,” Pritchard said with a scowl, “but that sentiment could get you killed.”

“The alternative is that we sit back and don’t do a damn thing.” He gave the hacker a hard look. “That’s not gonna happen.”

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