THE RIALTO – DETROIT – UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. From the roof of the derelict building, the steady fall of the rain seemed to throw a shimmering curtain over the entire city – but the amber glow and the

From the roof of the derelict building, the steady fall of the rain seemed to throw a shimmering curtain over the entire city – but the amber glow and the parades of neon lights that Jensen had come to take for granted were no longer present. The skyline that was as familiar to him as the lines of his own face had been changed while he was gone, and now it was filled with the black ghosts of dark, abandoned towers and low flickers from fires in the lawless districts.

Other cities around the world had been hit hard by the shock of the Aug Incident, but standing up here, seeing it all so clearly, Jensen realized that Detroit had taken the crippling hit harder than most, like a boxer past their prime. The city had gone down to the mat, and now the count was dropping away toward zero.

Before, with the augmentation industry on the rise, there had been a chance for Motor City to rise out of the economic mire that had trapped it during the late twentieth century. The incident had cut that dream off at the knees, and now Detroit was backsliding into the abyss, dragging everyone who lived there along with it.

Jensen took a slow breath of the wet air, and turned up the collar of the worn long coat he’d found at the bottom of the crates from his old office. He patted the inside pocket and found a pack of smokes, still half full. He cupped his hand over the nozzle of his lighter and lit a cigarette, drawing in deeply, as the metallic rattle of distant rotor blades reached him.

He looked in the direction of the noise – there, off over Forest Park, Jensen made out the shape of a beetle-shaped police helicopter circling some kind of disturbance on the ground. Spotlights stabbed down out of the sky, and Jensen saw a flicker of yellow tracer reach back up toward the chopper, the crackle of gunfire arriving a moment later. The helo lurched away and vanished into the low cloud.

Footsteps clanked up the fire escape and Jensen heard Pritchard curse under his breath. “What are you doing?” demanded the hacker. “There’s a good reason no-one comes up here.” The other man picked his way across the creaking roof until he stood beside Jensen at the lintel. “You do understand this building is condemned? Put a foot wrong and you’ll go straight through the ceiling!”

“I needed some air,” Jensen told him.

“Oh. Right.” Jensen’s distant tone registered with Pritchard and he took a moment to frame his next words. “Look… I’m sorry about your friend.”

He shook his head. “You were right, he wasn’t stable.” Jensen took another draw. “I guess I didn’t want to see it. Thought I could help him…”

“You can’t rescue everyone,” Pritchard said, after a moment. “If anybody should know that by now, it’s you.”

“Still keep trying, though…” Jensen went on. “More fool me.”

The hacker studied him. “You look strung out,” he said. “When was the last time you got more than a couple of hours’ sleep?” He nodded at the lit cigarette. “Those won’t help. It’s a filthy habit.”

“Says the guy who mainlines caffeine tablets…” Jensen’s expression became a scowl. “I’ve slept enough.”

It was hard for him to put it into words; that sense of dreamless darkness that waited for him whenever he closed his eyes. Try as he might, Jensen couldn’t hold on to anything his resting mind brought forward, and it frustrated him. He could sense the shape of it but never grasp it, like he was a blind man feeling around the edges of objects that he would never be able to see. They might have been memories, they might have been nightmares, but all he was left with were the empty vessels of failed recollection. The content gone, with only the ghost of the thing left to imprint on his waking thoughts. Every time he awoke, it was the same feeling, an identical moment of dislocation and wrongness – his mind briefly filled with an uncanny black light that seemed to invade him and blot out everything else.

Frustration churned inside Jensen’s chest, and at length he looked away from the bleak cityscape and the ceaseless downpour. “We need to maintain our focus,” he told Pritchard. “Stacks is gone and there’s nothing we can do to call that back. But we can still do something about the people responsible for his death.”

“Magnet?”

“For starters.” Jensen gave a nod. “But the MCBs are just the next link in the chain.”

“There’s someone holding the leash of those gang-bangers, that’s a certainty,” said the hacker. “Remember those infolink signals I detected? Along with the line from me to you, there were two other distinct encrypted communications nets up and running while you were at the manufacturing plant. One was talking to Magnet, the other to that strike team in the VTOL.”

“So we know they weren’t connected…”

Pritchard shook his head and pulled his jacket closer against the drizzle. “It doesn’t look that way. Totally different operating frequencies, different triangulation. At a guess, I’d say Magnet’s contact was somewhere to the east of the city, but those gunmen were talking to a satellite downlink.” He jerked a thumb at the sky.

“Which more or less confirms they’re a professional crew,” said Jensen. “That could mean government, private military contractor, intelligence agency…”

“I’ve already put out some feelers,” Pritchard noted. “Whoever they are, someone will recognize their profile.”

“Good.” Jensen took a last draw on the cigarette, and then ground it beneath the heel of his boot. “What else have you got? I know you didn’t come up here because you were worried about my well-being.”

“There is something more,” Pritchard admitted. “The break-ins at the different Sarif Industries sites around the city, and then what you said about the MCBs having a ‘shopping list’… it got me thinking about what kind of information they have to have. I mean, on the surface these look like smash-and-grab raids, but when you step back and look at the big picture, there’s a pattern.” He spread his hands. “Draw it down to one basic question – how did they know what to look for?”

“We got that. Someone wants what Sarif had. The missing prototypes.”

“More!” Pritchard went on. “Don’t you get it? They’d need information that only someone on the inside would have.”

“There is no ‘inside’ anymore,” said Jensen, following his reasoning. “Everyone at Sarif Industries was kicked out after Tai Yong’s hostile takeover.”

The hacker nodded. “But as I ably proved, there are still security protocols in place that Tai Yong haven’t purged yet. So I dug into the police reports from the first couple of raids and I found a common denominator. Each time, there was evidence that outer security doors were opened with no signs of forced entry.”

“You’re saying the MCBs had a key?”

“At the start, yes, until the system caught up and shut them out with a global lockdown, so they had to tackle the last few the hard way. And here’s the thing, that backdoor I left in the SI mainframe? After our two guests left last night, I accessed it to check the entry logs for the dates of those first couple of raids. The data was still there – those idiots in the DPD hadn’t even bothered to check it!”

“Give me the name,” he told Pritchard. If someone had been using their key card to assist the MCBs in their thefts, then the entry logs would have recorded their identity.

Pritchard sighed. “Adam Jensen.”

“What?”

“It’s your key card that was logged both times, Jensen. That’s why I was reluctant to tell you about this. It’s another dead end, not a viable lead… Someone must have gained access to your office in the weeks after the incident and stolen the pass so they could use it later.” He paused, thinking back. “There were plenty of opportunities. Things were a mess at Sarif. Anyone could have grabbed the pass.”

Jensen took that in, running the scenario in his mind. “Makes sense. Somebody made a smart play…”

Pritchard saw the change in his expression. “Do you actually know who took it?”

“I’ve got a few ideas.” Jensen strode away from the edge of the rooftop, making for the stairwell. “And I know where to start looking.”

“Wait,” Pritchard called after him, and he hesitated. “Before you take off on another quest to go beat information out of someone, there’s something else we have to talk about. Specifically, the Juggernaut in the room.”

“You’ve made it clear what you think about Janus and his group,” said Jensen. “I get it. But I haven’t agreed to anything yet.”

“You’re going to!” Pritchard shook his head. “I know how you think! Did you forget who was sitting on your shoulder in Hengsha, Omega Ranch and Montreal? I may not have been in the field with you, but I saw enough.”

“So what?”

“Janus is manipulating you!” insisted the other man. “Offering you exactly what you want so you’ll cross over.”

“You may be right,” Jensen admitted. “But that cuts both ways. I don’t have to trust these people to get what I need from them.”

Pritchard gave a snort. “I know you’re going to go ahead and do whatever you want to, but just remember,” he said. “I was right about Stacks… and I’m right about this.”

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