The late afternoon sun punched through the bar’s front door like a solar flare through a dirty viewport—sharp, white-hot, and uninvited. For a moment, the dim interior washed out in blinding glare, bleeding over the chipped plastic and smeared glass like an overexposed vid frame.

Temperature spiked hard, fast—air turning dense and metallic as the doorway filled with heat and silhouette. A slim figure stood at the threshold, shadow knifing through the blast of light. Just skin and bone wrapped in ragged fabric and attitude, framed by furnace heat and the howling dust outside.

Adi’s overlays kicked in automatically, light-dampening her ocular feed while mapping the intruder’s profile. Body temp is high but steady. The room reacted like prey sensing a predator. Conversations hiccupped, glasses paused mid-air, and a few patrons squinted and looked away. The figure didn’t move. They didn’t need to. The heat moved for them.

The figure lingered in the doorway like a bad omen, unmoving, heat rippling around him like a cloak of fire and filth. Dust swirled at his boots, curling into the bar on greasy fingers of wind, carrying with it the scorched-metal stink of Chendiuria’s streets.

No one breathed. Then Niles broke the tension with his usual grace—by hurling an empty synth-juice carton straight at the silhouette’s head.

“In or out, asshole!” he barked, voice loud and sharp enough to rattle the warped windowpanes and shut up a half-dozen conversations.

Silence hung for a beat longer, heavy as wet lead, the kind that precedes either a joke or a firefight.

The carton bounced off the figure’s head with a dull thwack, and that was enough. It seemed like the silhouette flinched, then quickly slipped inside, as if it remembered to breathe. The door creaked shut behind him with a metallic groan, sealing the bar back into its familiar gloom, cutting off the sun like a blade sheathed in rust.

Niles snorted and turned away, unbothered, already dragging from his half-dead cigar like nothing had happened. He’d picked this neighborhood—The Gut—for a reason. A dead zone in the city’s neural net, where the municipal AI didn’t bother to watch and the Blues barely bothered to show up unless bodies stacked too high to ignore.

The newer, heavily armored, and armed robotic Blues, known colloquially as Robo Blues or Robbies, will not enter this area unless they are in reinforced brigade strength. The city tried smallish, unarmed robotic Blues, but they got jacked, broken up and sold for parts on the black market. City budget constraints plus the cost of shipping prompted the city to try lighter commercial-grade off-the-shelf RoboSec bots, which were vandalized, stolen, or intentionally broken.

The Bronze Sword gang controls this territory, ensuring that the flesh and blood Blues are well-bribed to stay out of their way. Adi heard rumors that the gang scares the few Blues who cannot be bribed to prevent them from interfering with the gang's activities. The gang also bribed the city maintenance workers to stop them from replacing the intentionally broken city AI-controlled cams, clandestine security bots, and audio recording devices, which they would typically do. The New Delhi arcology supervisory AI and the Lower City AI do not always agree. Despite superconducting fiber optic cables connecting the two, gaps and conflicts still occur, which criminals exploit.

No cameras. No data feeds. There are no patrol drones. Just broken sensors, busted streetlamps, and meat politics. A perfect place to disappear… or reappear.

Which was why no one batted an eye when Niles littered. Here, even the laws came to die.

The door clicked shut behind the stranger, swallowing the last breath of furnace heat. Shadows reclaimed their corners, the bar's low light flickering back to life like a machine rebooting after a surge. The air cooled—barely—but the temperature drop didn’t ease the tension. If anything, it made it worse.

The figure stood just inside, eyes adjusting, posture loose but wired beneath the slack. Dust clung to his boots, trailing like ash across the warped floorboards. No one welcomed him. No one spoke.

The two prostitutes went quiet mid-sentence. A grizzled drunk in the corner suddenly remembered something very interesting in the bottom of his glass. Even the old woman half-passed out by the toilets stirred, one rheumy eye cracking open like an ancient sensor lens.

Niles didn’t look back.

Adi stayed where she was, letting her net ghost a soft scan—heartbeat irregular but steady, core temp elevated but not alarming, stress markers low. No ID tags. No mesh chatter. The surrounding silence wasn't just quiet—it was intentional.

Someone had scrubbed him clean.

The stranger moved with deliberate ease, a slow drift deeper into the bar like smoke curling under a door. Not a limp, not a stride—just motion calibrated to draw no fire and offer no apology. His anachronistic trench coat—filthy synthweave, burned at the cuffs—rustled faintly as he passed the first table, scuffing it with an old boot laced with mismatched cord.

He didn’t head for the bar. He didn’t glance at the women, or the booth full of day-shift riggers nursing recycled whiskey, or the back wall where two skin-job soldiers pretended not to size him up. Unbothered and uninvited, he simply took up space.

The silence grew heavier.

One prostitute exhaled too loudly. The redhead. Nervous. She shifted on her stool as if the temperature had spiked again, knees pressed tight together now, back a little too straight.

The other one—blonde, fake everything—glanced toward the door like she was wondering how fast she could get there. The way her fingers danced near her clutch purse suggested she wasn't looking for a lipstick.

Adi’s gaze tracked the stranger without seeming to. No motion. No tells. Just the slight shift in her internal HUD as her net reeled him in—ghost contours, height estimates, gait analysis, thermals. Her enhancements worked the shape like a puzzle.

The results came back blank.

Too clean. Too quiet. Even for The Gut.

She let her breath slow. Tuned her hearing tighter. Heartbeat: low and steady. Breathing: controlled, but not synthetic. She scanned his hands—scarred knuckles, ink faded to blurs, veins like wire. Familiar. Maybe too familiar.

Her tongue clicked once against the roof of her mouth involuntarily.

Then—there. The way he shifted weight to his right leg when the floor creaked. The way his head tilted just a degree too far forward, like he was always bracing for an uppercut.

The bastard had changed little. He wore his past like a second skin.. Still moved like he expected violence to follow him through every doorway. Still wore the same patchwork armor of arrogance and ghost guilt. But he looked thinner now. Hungrier. He looked like something had hollowed him out.

A sharp ping echoed in her neural net, solitaire collapsing into static as her attention snapped to the present. A familiar pattern of footsteps—heavy, deliberate, just a half-beat off perfect sync—cut through the bar’s low murmur. Her internal filters tagged the rhythm before her conscious mind caught up.

Her enhanced hearing dialed in tighter, isolating the cadence against the background hiss of shitty ventilation and low synth blues. That walk. Like a war drum trying not to be one.

Adi’s gaze narrowed. The augmented overlays in her vision peeled back ambient clutter—smoke, low light, residual heat signatures—until the figure resolved with stark clarity. Lean frame. Scarred posture. Head angled like he was expecting a blow that never came.

Rat, also known as Shou Rata.

Her amber eyes locked on him, pupils contracting as her various lenses adapted to the return of the dim bar’s grime-filtered light. Recognition wasn’t a revelation—it was a confirmation of something she’d already known deep in her bones the moment the door opened and the heat followed him in.

“Adi, it’s the fucking Rat for you,” Niles roared, voice booming like a sonic charge detonating in a tin can. The bar’s grimy windows rattled in their warped frames, dust shaking loose from the overhead ducts like fallout.

Adi didn’t flinch. Marine augments came standard with industrial-grade auditory dampening—because battlefield comms don’t wait for a migraine. Still, Niles always found the exact decibel range that punched past calibration like a sledgehammer made of cheap bourbon and stubbornness.

She let her gaze linger on Rat as the last of Niles’ shout echoed off the walls. Her internal HUD scrolled passive data—heat profile, gait stability, pulse latency. Nothing hostile. Nothing obvious. Just the same old ghost-wrapped bastard, walking trouble with a smile that usually came right before someone started bleeding.

Her memory unspooled a clipped feed: Rat, covered in engine grease and bad decisions, laughing at some dumb joke on the street while the gunfire hadn’t even stopped yet. The smell of cordite and ozone, the metallic tang of recycled air, the way he never looked directly at a camera.

Burned history, sure. But familiar terrain is still terrain. And Adi always mapped her terrain.

Niles grunted and adjusted his antigrav belt, shifting his bulk like a tugboat trying to park in a gutter. It floated wrong—just a fraction off the baseline. Adi’s head tilted slightly as her neural net logged the inconsistency. Maybe his gravbelt was in flux again, or maybe Niles was getting sick of feeling like his guts were drifting half a second behind his feet.

She filed it away.

Old habits. Everything was a variable. Everything could be a weapon.

Even gravity.

The two whores at the bar didn’t even blink. In their line of work, you learn to spot dead-end bastards from fifty meters out—poverty has a posture, desperation has a smell, and Rat looked like both dressed in secondhand armor. Without missing a beat, they kept up their chain-smoking and sip-sipping—clove-thick weed breath and slurred small talk swirling like smog.

“Thanks, Niles. I see him,” Adi called back, voice level, no urgency, no warmth. Just enough edge to cut through the haze and land exactly where it needed to. It wasn’t for Rat. It was for the room. The regulars knew the name. Shou Rata. A ghost in the machine of Chendiuria’s underbelly, and the bastard who first dragged Adi’s pride through the gutters and made her drink the water.

She lifted two fingers in a motion smooth enough to be mistaken for casual, flicking them in Rat’s direction—a silent signal etched in old habit and old blood. Come.

She didn’t smile. She didn’t wave. Like a thief watches a silhouette, she watched him through the bar's haze.

A few years ago, Rat had found her broken, burned out, and one rent payment from vanishing entirely. He’d given her a lifeline made of backdoor gigs, burner contracts, and tightropes strung over bottomless moral pits. She’d taken the work. She’d taken the money. And every time she’d wondered if this was the moment she finally fell off the edge.

Rat didn’t just show her the darker side of Chendiuria. He handed her a fucking krypton long arc lamp.

Now he was back. And she wanted to know why.

Rat didn’t move right away. Just stood there in the low haze, letting the bar settle around him like dust after a bomb. No one looked directly at him. No one invited conversation. The air had shifted, like someone cracked a pressure seal and forgot to warn the room.

Adi tracked his slow approach—each step deliberate, toes angled outward like he was still walking the alley grids of some overcrowded slum city. Adi's enhanced aural nerves examine and classify incoming sounds.

On a planet a third larger than Old Earth, Chendiurians tended to come in squat, square builds—heavy muscle, low center of gravity, designed by birth and gravity to survive the grind. But Rat wasn’t one of them. Never had been. He was a throwback. A relic. A body that never belonged here.

He stood barely 153 centimeters, whip-thin and starved-looking, like he’d been carved out of a famine survivor. Rat's skin was dark mahogany, dry and stretched tight over lean muscle. His eyes, deep brown, caught none of the bar’s low light and reflected nothing back. His head was bald—Adi couldn't tell if it was a choice or a consequence—but his scalp bore faded ink, a scatter of unfamiliar gang tags from places she'd never been. Places she didn’t want to ask about.

Rumor had it Rat used to be a hell of a pickpocket—one of those street magicians who could lift your synth-cred stick from your inner thigh without moving your waistband. But then came Zombie. A nerve-shatterer. A high that turned precision into paranoia.

Looking at him now, she couldn’t tell if he was clean now or just permanently wrecked.

He was closer now. Moving slowly, casually, like the world owed him a seat and a cigarette. But Adi’s eyes never left him. Her net ran constant low-level scans, logging every step, every blink, every micro-hesitation. Regardless of their past association, too many terrible experiences had taught her not to mistake familiarity for safety.

Rat was halfway to her booth when Adi’s neural net pinged again—this one sharp, silent, and laced with the bar’s security watermark. The secnet had flagged him. Not for entry. For armament.

She blink-clicked to pull up the overlay, and a translucent heat map bloomed in her vision. Her HUD ghosted the outlines: two short blades—ceramic, non-metallic—tucked under his jacket, one small-caliber flechette gun under the left arm, and something denser and nastier strapped low on his back. The shape was unfamiliar. Probably custom, possibly dirty.

Weapons weren’t rare on Chendiuria. Hell, she was armed right now, and most of the surrounding crowd could come up with a pistol, a shiv, a zap stick, a homemade explosive, or worse. But Rat? Rat had never needed this much weaponry.

He used to move through places like this with nothing but sleight-of-hand, a rotted smile, and his reputation. That he came into this bar heavily loaded meant something had changed. Or maybe he had.

Her neural net, boosted by half a dozen not-quite-legal gray market apps Kane had buried in her OS, synced seamlessly with the bar’s aging secnet. Between the two, it outlined every weapon on Rat’s bony frame with efficient dispassion—tagging material types, projected draw times, and estimated usage history based on scarring and wear patterns.

Her jaw clenched.

Too many weapons. Too many questions.

And still, he kept coming.

Rat came to a stop three paces from the booth. The space between them vibrated with old ghosts and fresher suspicion. He didn’t speak. Just looked at her.

Adi didn’t speak either.

Their eyes locked—hers amber and bright with synthetic clarity, his dark and sunken, unreadable as old code. In the brief silence, something passed between them. Not forgiveness. Not familiarity. Just… recognition. Two obsolete things orbiting the same ruin.

Rat’s mouth twitched—half a smirk, maybe—but Adi didn’t return it. Her gaze dropped just slightly, to his side.

She didn’t need her neural net to tell her what was under that battered jacket.

Rat had always carried that old Willihard Industries Justifier ballistic vibra knife from his Mars Terrestrial Army days. Military issue at one time, and legal on Mars—barely. It ejected a TZD blade—titanium zirconium dioxide—shimmering gold like a sunrise over a sea. Double-edged, wickedly barbed, serrated, dagger-tipped. A murder tool with delusions of elegance. The blade shot out at 80 meters per second, with a lethal reach of five meters and enough ultrasonic vibration to saw through bone like wet paper.

Adi didn’t have to guess. The bastard likely still possessed the four reloads issued to him decades ago—when Mars still cared about its colonies. She wouldn't be surprised if he still kept those wicked little bastards dipped in saxitoxin. Old habits. Rat was nothing if not consistent.

Her net’s threat-assessment overlay lit red for a fraction of a second. Just long enough to confirm what her instincts already screamed.

A ballistic knife wasn’t flashy. It wasn’t loud. It was surgical. Subdermal armor or not, a vibrating TZD blade would hurt—maybe even slip through if it hit a weak point or a seam. Adi could shut off her pain receptors—her nanites gave her that option, even throttled by some of Kane’s gray market risk filters—but it came with its own set of problems.

Pain was tactical. Pain was data. Kill it, and you lose half the fight.

She remembered that lesson well. The Corps had taught it the hard way. The day she ignored a hairline fracture in her femur, the torn muscle at the base of her spine, the creeping micro-tears in her heart lining. She fought through it. She won. And then she collapsed into a medical coma that lasted sixteen hours.

Three months in hospital. Pay docked. Promotion rescinded. NJP that nearly flushed her chances with her new regiment. The first time she stood in front of the Old Lady, and for once, she had nothing smart to say.

Rat blinked, slow. Adi’s jaw flexed.

Then finally, she spoke. Just one word: “Sit.”

Rat slid into the booth like a whisper of smoke, a phantom taking shape. He didn’t ask for permission. Just moved like he belonged—like he always had—though that never made it true.

He didn’t speak at first.

The booth creaked under his weight—little as there was. Adi tracked his every twitch as he settled across from her, resting those bone-thin arms on the table like he wasn’t wearing enough hardware to start a small war. The flickering neon clock painted half his face in chemical blues and flickering shadows. The other half looked like a bruise the world never stopped giving him.

She heard the cadence of his boots echo in her memory. Her net logged the details again, one layer deeper. Her body may be still, but her mind runs hot—scanning, categorizing, remembering. No words from her yet—just judgment and calculation.

Tucked into his left boot: the Ekkehard Industries E-Stun/900 Voltaic Jolthammer shock baton. Mars TA Military Police issue. Antique tech. Non-lethal, mostly. Mostly. That thing had let him down on more than one op. She figured he would’ve scrapped it years ago. But there it was—battered, clinging to life, just like him. Probably sentimental. Probably useless.

Or maybe not. Rat had a habit of turning broken things into weapons.

As her gaze swept over him again, her neural net confirmed what her gut had already told her: Rat had disconnected all of his weapons from any external control systems. He’d electronically stripped them down, hardwired everything. No secnet shutdown. No AI override. Old-school paranoia turned into doctrine. Smart in its way. Dangerous in all the others.

But the magazines… those still broadcasted.

Her net pinged their contents like party invites: hollow points, tox rounds, a couple of shrapnel shatter rounds. Unpowered mags, nothing fancy. Just enough to say fuck around and find out. Rat did nothing without a reason. But she couldn’t help wondering—if you’re going to hide the weapons, why let the mags scream?

Flex? Warning? Or bait?

Rat finally spoke, his voice like cracked leather and old cigarette smoke—soft, amused, and knife-sharp.

“You always stare at a man like you’re building his obituary, Adi? Or just mine?”

Adi didn’t reply—not out loud.

She let the silence linger. A blade held just long enough to draw curiosity before cutting. Let Rat squirm, if he still had the capacity for that. Or maybe he just soaked in silence like he often did, sweating and making poor decisions—without complaint, without shame.

Her amber eyes flicked to the dull glint of the pistol butt beneath his duster. The worn grip of the Maialen-Silenus Inc. Abhishek five-millimeter pistol poked out from under his left arm, tucked horizontally in that same beat-to-shit shoulder rig he’d probably worn into strip clubs, gunfights, and funeral parlors.

Her neural net confirmed it. Still the same. Still predictable.

While antiques and replicas of ancient chemical cartridge-using weapons occasionally appear, all modern firearms have used caseless ammunition for centuries. Adi can see the worn butt of the pistol peeking out from Rat's open, ankle-length, soiled dark gray (it might have been black at one time) heavy denim duster. The Abhishek was ancient tech by modern standards. Rat has had the exceedingly common Abhishek pistol for as long as Adi has known him.

Her old, very first platoon leader, Captain Golina, had a degree in historical weapons and once called the Mars-produced Abhishek the “Glock of its day.” That never meant much to Adi—just another dead brand name. What mattered was its temperament: reliable in the worst ways. Like Rat.

What caught her attention more was the bounce of the MSI Kubera on his opposite hip. That was new.

That bastard was no street toy. It was a damned street sweeper. The loaded drum magazine rattled with some 70–80 grams of ceramic coated hypervelocity death.

A three-millimeter flechette subgun with a single-use-only, disposable by design 195-round drum magazine. A Kubera vomited collapsed tantalum needles like a dentist’s drill on Mars-fueled drug rage. No quick reloads. No finesse. Just flood the air with pain and death and walk away. A Kubera is a horrific short-range weapon with a cyclic rate of 1,500 rounds per minute and an effective lethal range of approximately five meters.

Not Rat’s usual playbook. Rat liked knives and whispers. Poison. Blackmail. Ghosts.

The fact that he’d brought a Kubera into this bar told her everything she needed to know: he was expecting things to go sideways. Or maybe he'd already shoved them there.

Her neural net shifted gears.

Threat analysis jumped to high-orange. Edging red. Today, Rat carries weapons that might prove lethal and punch through Adi’s subdermal armor.

Adi activated her Augmented Reality Display (ARD), Target Acquisition (TarAcq), Threat Assessment (TA) and Multi-Sensory Integration (MSI) programs. Adi's augmented senses enabled faster and more accurate threat assessment. Her augmented reflexes and neural net’s ability to bypass slower conscious processing allow her to act on instinct at lightning speed—whether attacking, evading, or defending. Her combat-focused augmentations and her experience as a Marine dial up her aggression in life-threatening situations. 

Adi's enhanced lizard brain’s "fight" mode synergizes with her augments, ruthlessly driving her to overpower and eliminate threats. Her enhancements amplify primal aggression during combat and allow her to regulate or direct it, ensuring her anger remains tactical rather than uncontrolled. Adi's nanites include mechanisms that suppress unnecessary fear, improving her combat effectiveness.

A light buzz trembled across her optic nerves as overlays spun into place on her HUD. Her breath hitched for a half-second—her augmented lizard brain locking into threat-detection mode. Rat glowed amber in her display. Not quite red. Not yet.

Not unless he twitched the wrong way.

She felt a subtle uptick in sensory input. Her augmented hearing stretched out like taut wire. Her olfactory receptors picked up the heat-warped air trailing behind Rat—dust, old motor grease, and a chemical note that might’ve been vomit or a low-grade combat stim.

Rat was sweating more than usual. He wasn’t calm. Not really.

Why the Kubera?

Why the heavy armament?

Why now?

Rat had spent decades being barely dangerous. But this version—the one sitting across from her now, stinking of tension and low-rent survival—that version was a problem.

A very fucking sharp one.

Still, she said nothing.

Let him fucking wait.

Adi’s gaze flicked to the faint outline of the Kubera’s drum magazine under Rat’s coat, then back to the battered edges of his Abhishek pistol. The old Kubera was a relic from a different war, one she’d never fought but still felt in her bones. Every Marine did. She remembered the day Captain Golina unloaded a crate of Abhishek pistols into their arms locker, the old weapon's scent mixing with sweat and synthetic weapons oil, the captain grumbling about how these “Glocks of the past” never quite held up in real life. Captain Golina wanted her platoon to be familiar with old weapons. The various pirates, mercs, drug runners, and other Marine opponents often carried weapons of older designs, as they were cheap, plentiful, and easily obtained.

Rat never seemed to care that his pistol was a relic. Like him, the pistol showed wear. But unlike Rat, the Abhishek was loyal to a fault—despite being long past its prime.

Her neural net’s sensors hummed softly, feeding her the unspoken details: the scratches on the pistol grip, the fading paint on the Kubera’s stock, the invisible dust motes caught in his worn duster. Each a scar, a story, a warning.

The silent calculus ticked through her mind—old gear, new threats, familiar ghosts. Adi feels as if there are too many hidden pieces on the board.

From her limited perspective, this thing of Rat's might be far larger than he figured.

Her fingers twitched near her own arsenal. She didn’t have to move; just the thought of her guns made her muscles coil.

Under the table, Adi discreetly checks her Capella-Paragon Inc. Valkyrie 15mm pistol. Her guns are "chipped in," meaning that when she grasps the Valkyrie's (or another of her weapon's) grip, she gets an immediate response from her 'net, which unlocks the weapon, does a quick function test, blending her TA program with her TarAcq programs. Adi doesn't need weapon sights, although they are on all her weapons as her 'net tracks where the weapon is always pointing.

Adi debates which knife to ready just in case Rat gets stupid. Her regimental kukris are more of a chopping weapon, so she leaves them in their sheaths on her back at her waist. She briefly considers pulling one of the cruciform-shaped 31cm needle-tipped Tessera Zero Dynamics stilettos from her forearm sleeve. She has an identical titanium zirconium dioxide coated stiletto concealed in each sleeve, in unique sheaths.

She eased out the cold duralloy of a Colonial Marine combat knife—30 cm of double-edged, half-serrated menace—and placed it in her lap. The perfect mix of grace and brutality. Adi's lightweight EDC tac vest under her untucked baggy shirt has one Marine vertically hanging combat knife on each shoulder.

She weighed her options—kukris meant for chopping, too clumsy in these tight quarters. The TZD stilettos embedded in her sleeves felt too precious, too exposed. The combat knife, light and deadly, fit her mood. Ready to flash at the first sign, Rat got stupid. If Rat isn't careful or reaches for one of his weapons, Adi will stab him in the groin underneath the table. Naked, Adi stands 206 cm. When he is sitting in her booth, Rat is well within her reach.

“Nice arsenal you’re hauling, Rat. Planning on turning this dump into a war zone, or just trying to scare off the roaches?” Adi’s voice cut through the bar’s murmur, sharp and dry as shattered glass. Adi's tone was icy, biting, and wrapped in that easy dismissal she’d perfected after years of survival.

Rat’s eyes flicked down for the first time, just long enough to catch the glint of steel resting in her lap. The game was on.

Rat slid into the booth like a malfunctioning servomotor—jerky, twitchy, more wound up than usual. He leaned in, signaling he wanted to talk like this was some kind of friendly reunion instead of what it really was: another one of his low-rent crises wrapped in poor decisions.

As his coat gaped open, the stench hit her like a back-alley chemical fire—unwashed skin, cheap synth-fabric, cheap flick and stim stick smoke, and whatever cocktail of anxiety and desperation he was leaking today. Her augmented olfactory suite lit up like a fucking threat warning, her eyes watering from the assault.

Of course, she thought bitterly. Leave it to the Corps to upgrade my sense of smell but not give me an off switch. Not quite canine-level, but way better than any civilian… and today, that’s a goddamn curse.

“Gods! Fucking shit, don’t you ever bathe? Or wash your clothes?”

Adi waved a hand in front of her face like she was swiping away a bad AR overlay, but the stench clung stubbornly as old debt. Whatever biochem soup Rat was fermenting in his pores, it had achieved sentience—and it wasn’t leaving without a fight.

Rat’s response came fast, delivered in that jittery, conspiratorial whisper he probably thought made him sound clever.

“Never, Adi. You know the deal. The Supreme Divine Monarchy Overlord aliens—yeah, them—they spike the water with mind-control drugs to track me. Gotta stay low or they’ll reel me in. I know their game. Whole secret plan to turn us into meat puppets.”

Adi resisted the urge to roll her eyes so hard her neural net might flag it as a medical event. Same old Rat—paranoid, broke, and just self-aware enough to dress up his psychosis in a triple-wrapped tinfoil trench coat.

Adi barely wrestled the desired eye roll back down where it belonged—deep in the pit where she kept her professional tolerance. She wasn't in the mood for another one of Rat’s deep dives into his personal multiverse of bullshit. And to be clear, loonies—the conspiracy nuts—were a separate breed entirely from the capital-L Loonies who worshipped the Church of Loon. Different flavor of crazy.

Instead, she arched a single eyebrow, slow and deliberate, like pulling the slide on a chambered round. Her other elbow propped casually on the table, but under the surface, her fingers locked around the grip of her combat knife, white-knuckled and ready.

Keep it moving, Rat, she thought. Or we’re both gonna find out how much of that paranoia is justified.

“What about bathing and washing your clothes with distilled or bottled water? I’ve suggested it several times,” Adi said, letting just enough edge creep into her voice to file a groove in his paranoia.

"You've been ragging on me for years about that," Rat shot back, defensive as ever. "That much distilled water costs too much. And bottled water? I can’t trust it. The aliens could be controlling the bottling plant. Probably are."

Adi exhaled through her nose, the faintest twitch of her lip betraying her growing urge to throat-punch him with reality. “You’re lucky it hardly ever rains.”

Rat nodded, dead serious, like she’d just validated his grand theory. “When it does rain, I stay inside. That’s when they dump the highest concentration of mind-control drugs. They use the rain for saturation dispersal.”

Of course they do, Adi thought dryly. The rain’s working overtime. Meanwhile, you smell like recycled dumpster fluid marinated in regret.

“Why have you come?” Adi asked, her voice flat as a dead channel, eyes narrowing while she stuffed another eye roll back down where it belonged.

Rat didn’t bother with pleasantries—never his style. He leaned in, eyes flicking like faulty servos, a jittery mess of urgency and desperation. “Got another job for ya, Adi,” he whispered, just low enough for her augmented hearing to catch and no one else.

The bar was mostly quiet except for the low murmur of conversation and the occasional clink of cheap glasses. No music, no screens—Niles kept it that way on purpose, a deliberate absence of distractions that made every conversation feel exposed.

Rat knew better than to raise his voice. He pitched his words right into Adi’s private audio band, just a hair above a whisper, trusting her enhanced ears would catch every syllable.

Then his hand disappeared into his coat. Adi’s threat index spiked instantly. Neural net flashing, nanites stirring, knife slightly extended beneath the table—one wrong move, and Rat was going to be bleeding out through his zipper.

Instead, he produced a small, ugly little box—a homemade privacy scrambler that looked as if it had been haphazardly soldered together during a psychotic break. He set it on the table, thumbed it on, and a dim green LED blinked to life, claiming they were now wrapped in a secure three-and-a-half-meter cone of silence.

Adi’s neural net swept the signal, analyzed the encryption, and spat back its verdict: garbage. It might fool the bar’s basic acoustic recorders, but any halfway competent surveillance rig could cut through it like a monomolecular wire through flesh.

Adorable, she thought. Rat brought a plastic toy to a godsdamn black market arms deal.

This was new. Rat had never bothered with a privacy gadget before. While not outright illegal on Chendiuria—where "illegal" was more of a polite suggestion than an actual rule—devices like this skirted plenty of gray zones depending on who was listening and who was paying. There weren’t many true contraband items in this city, but this kind of tech usually carried a hefty price tag if you wanted one that actually worked.

Adi’s eyes narrowed slightly, her neural net running passive scans but coming up short—no interface, no handshake protocols, no diagnostics. Cheap or intentionally dirty. Hard to say. But either way, Rat bringing it to the table meant one thing: he thinks this job is serious. Serious enough to drop creds on hardware he normally wouldn’t waste breath on.

Adi let the corner of her mouth twitch up in dry amusement. “Nice little toy.”

Rat gave a tight, eager nod. “Markus Kane gave it to me. I’ve told you before, Adi—a lot of these gigs I get for you? They come from him.”

Of course they do, Adi thought. Like a tumor keeps giving you birthday presents.

"Beware of former DSI agents bearing gifts," Adi said, her voice dry enough to sand paint. "I don't trust that fucking former DSI weasel."

DSI—Defense Security Initiative—the three letters always left a bitter taste. On paper, they were just a military think tank, pumping out new toys for the war machine. In reality? They were a hydra—one head deep in black-ops, another neck-deep in corporate espionage, and a third wired directly into whatever shadow government pulled the deepest strings.

Rat flinched slightly at her tone but said nothing. He knew better. Everyone knew better. The DSI trained their weasels to slip through cracks no one else even saw—espionage, cyberwarfare, wet work, and enough blackmail material to crash entire governments. Their specialty? Neutralizing rogue assets and corralling people like her—augmented, unpredictable, and inconvenient.

Adi’s neural net in her optical centers of her brain blinked an archived feed—Azure Sprite’s exposé, the one that got the young fem journalist, disappeared. The hacker known only as Mongoose—M0N600$$—had blown open the DSI’s underground black-market exchanges, where stolen tech, illegal augments, and untraceable credits washed through more shell corps than even Kane could count. It was all still out there, in the dark currents under Chendiuria’s shiny corporate towers.

And now Kane—that former DSI weasel—was passing out gifts.

Adi’s fingers flexed on the hilt of her knife under the table. Yeah. Totally trustworthy.

"Something like that. So what's this job, Rat? How hot is it if Kane gave you a privacy gadget and you packing significant heat?"

Rat slides a credit stick across the battered table towards Adi, the gesture a tangible promise of the job to come. With her 'net, Adi has the bar's secnet scan the credit stick. The scan reveals that the stick contains 1,000 credits and doesn't reveal any apparent trackers, spyware, or malware on it. Unlocked and unregistered credit sticks, such as the one tempting Adi on the table, are nearly untraceable.

Adi resists the powerful temptation to grab the credit stick and run. Rat has burnt Adi too many times for complete trust. If Rat told her that all sides of a shipping container were a particular color, Adi would check the other sides to make sure.

After pulling a medium-sized dirty, reddish cloth bag from underneath his coat, Rat places it beside the credit stick on the table. "And these are for you," he said, leaning back. "I know that you're always hungry. The Corps messed your body up good. Ya' no good to me fainting with hunger. Gotta keep my girl fueled."

"Careful Rat sometimes people die from saying what they think."

Adi disregards most of Rat’s comments, swallowing an impulsive, snarky response. She literally cannot bite the hand that is feeding her. Adi’s mother often says, “If you sup with the devil, use a very, very long spoon.” Adi slides the bag open using a disposable bamboo chopstick, making the contents visible. Warily, Adi peeks into the bag.