Mal went out the fire escape. It was evening, and she resisted looking into windows at people eating dinner until she reached the final ladder. Her boots weren’t broken in yet, so when she dropped into the alley, the impact stung. The new eye made navigating in the low light simple, and she followed GPS markers out to the street where the night-life thrived, despite the escalating violence. So many labeled people headed off to bars and diners and memory theaters, and it made her skin crawl. She could reach out to any of them with a little tug on her network, but she still knew she was an outsider. An other. Someone who’d never belong. She supposed they might have all felt the same, and used constant consumption as a crutch to bear it. The path led her through the dense crowds toward the outskirts, past a flurry of nightclubs whose DJs had never heard of noise ordinance. Mal matched the rhythm of her steps to the thudding bass lines and counted the squares of concrete. Every inch of the city was paved, built-upon, all those skyscrapers stretching above. She pulled up her hood to hide her face as she turned onto a side street that bore the markings of the rival gang les Fant?mes.

  The implant led her to the outside of their hotel district and the nearby Stanton Arms automated outpost. There were no checks, no licenses—just racks and display cases for every kind of weapon imaginable, for those that could pay. Malory wasn’t sure what to do next. Her hack was far from ready, and Nadia hadn’t given her anything close to the price tag of even the cheapest gun. She walked up to the machine, connected her implant, and scrolled through lists of shotguns, submachine guns, a few assault rifles, so many blades and blunt weapons it hurt to look at, until she found a class of pistols she was confident in handling. Mal chose a Stanton .45 ACP called the Lantern 6, named after Lacey and her crew. The slide was painted in a splatter of neon stars, the handle a large six overlaying the launch of a colony ship. She loved it. When she added it to her cart, the whole interface froze and let out a high-pitched screech. Lines of code flowed in a cascade until it blue-screened and shut down. There was a loud clunk in the dispensing tray, and when Mal looked inside, there was the gun she chose and a case of ammo. She didn’t hesitate.

  The heft of the thing was surprising, but manageable enough—the hit squad’s rifle she’d used was sleek, streamlined, and near weightless. Mal made sure it wasn’t loaded, aimed down the sights, undid the safety, and squeezed the trigger. It clicked once, twice, and she smiled. She ejected the mag, fed in bullets to capacity, racked around, and shoved the barrel into her waistband. It made her pants sag around her hips. The rest of the ammo went loose into cargo pockets, and she left the empty box by the machine.

  “Alright,” Mal said. She walked back the way she came, eager to get far away in case anyone recognized her as a member of the Black Hands. “You gave the unstable orphan a gun. Now what?” There was no answer, so she kept going.

  Malory didn’t want to go back to the safehouse. Instead, she headed to a busy intersection, pulled down her hood, and stared into one of the traffic cams. Running from a fight had never been her style, and the shame of saving her own ass wasn’t going away. She waited there for half an hour watching the people ebb and flow, so many little blue labels hovering over them, judging their miserable lives. No one came. No hit squads, no hired assassins, no upstart mercs on their first jobs. Their competitors must have been keeping ZenTech busy enough to forget about her. It was fine that way, too. If she wasn’t on their radar anymore, she’d make a bigger splash when she resurfaced during the war. Whoever made the call to move resources away would find themselves on their internal chopping block—there was no way an underling would pass up the chance for a quick and easy promotion.

  She took a deep breath and went to the headquarters. Entering was streamlined when all they had to do was validate her credentials on the net, and she was in the elevator heading down to the lab in record time. When the doors opened, she found the Doc in the middle of an operation.

  “Where the hell have you been?” he asked. He was connecting nerves for a new arm, and the metal gleamed in his hands.

  “Hiding,” Mal said. She pointed to her violet eye. “What kind of fucked up chrome did you slot in my head, old man?”

  “Is it activated already?” he asked. He connected the last few nerves along the seam and started up the synth-skin machine that hung overhead like a vulture. It spat out pale gunk along the implant, and a flurry of robotic hands molded it into a forearm, an elbow, the meat of a shoulder. “Nerves are probably still raw as all hell.”

  “Yeah,” she said. Mal walked over to his desk, sat in his chair, and propped her feet up on the wood. The meticulously stacked paperwork scattered to the floor. “Just about flatlined me when it did, and it's been shoving someone else’s memories into my head ever since. Some rehab center cafeteria, a rooftop shooting, a couple at a lake. It’s morphing the folds of my brain the same as that skin machine.” She didn’t tell him about the woman that appeared when she was alone, her suspicion it was all connected to the Prophet—not because she didn’t trust him, or because she thought he wouldn’t believe her, but because it seemed forbidden. Dangerous. His modern-day believers weren’t known for being one of the friendly cults.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  “That shouldn’t be possible,” the Doc said. He left his patient and wheeled a scanner over to her. He held up part of the device to take readings, and plugged a cable into one of the ports on her neck. “Let me take a look at you. Make sure you’re okay.”

  “What the hell is this thing?” she asked. She let him work. If he could figure out what was happening to her, it’d make recovery much easier. “I can sense it bleeding into my emotions, the way I see people. It’s like it wants me to feel the same way it does. Jaded. Angry. Out for vengeance like it’s alive. And I am not a huge fan.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. He moved the device in front of her eye and studied the readouts. Everything seemed just as advertised: high-scale resolution even in low to no light, integrated GPS, incredible network bandwidth, but there was nothing nefarious. “Some kind of big-budget prototype.”

  “You shoved this in me, and you don’t even know?” Mal asked. She knocked his hand away, yanked the cable from her neck, and scrambled to her feet. She wanted to scream at him, but stopped short at the label that popped up over his grayed hair.

  [ LONELY OLD DOCTOR ]

  “I’m sorry this is happening to you, kid. I know its specs, the readouts, what it says in all the scans,” he said. His arms hung loose at his sides and he shrugged. “It shouldn’t be able to do anything like you’ve mentioned, and it damn sure shouldn’t have almost killed you. It’s only supposed to burn like hell if an implant is active on raw nerves.”

  “That’s great,” she said. Another point in the deranged column, then. She collapsed back into his chair and tried not to cry. She didn't have a viable outlet for this kind of thing. No one did. Ghosts weren’t fucking real.

  “I am sorry. I’ll keep running scans for a few days, and see if I can find any more info on the back channels,” he said. He turned and saw that the work had finished. When he looked back at her, he noticed the pistol tucked awkwardly in her waistband and frowned. “Where’d you get that?”

  “My girlfriend,” she lied. The situation felt crazy enough without telling him the thing in her head led straight to the Stanton dispenser and let her choose whatever she wanted, free of charge. Becoming an asylum patient? Fuck that. The orphanage was enough of a state-run institution to last a hundred lifetimes.

  “At least carry it in a holster. Damn, girl. You’ll shoot yourself in the leg that way,” he said. He kicked at one of the bottom drawers on the desk. “Should find something in there.”

  “Thanks, I guess,” Mal said. She dug through the contents until she found a small black shoulder holster and peeled off her jacket. She tightened the leather straps so the gun sat snug against her ribs. It was tilted at an angle to make drawing a piece of cake, even for a beginner. The whole rig was hidden beneath her jacket, so no one would be able to tell until she reached for it.

  “By the way,” the Doc said. He moved to double-check the quality of the synth-skin and was satisfied when he found no issues. “There was a job that came in a few hours ago I thought you’d want, but I wasn’t sure when you’d be back. It’s a time sensitive thing, so it might be a little dangerous to take now.”

  “What is it?” she asked. It was his attempt to make it up to her, she could tell, but dangerous was good. She was in need of an outlet for the grief, the building rage, and it would do her good to wield it as a weapon. Her implant lit up with the details.

  “Cleaning job. Our go-to team has their hands full elsewhere,” the Doc said. He pressed a button to wake his patient since the installation was complete. “Some bodies that need removing. There’s a van in the garage.”

  “Sounds great,” she said. She didn’t know how to drive, but the autopilot would at least get her where she needed to go.

  “Are you sure you’re up for it? If you need a few days to rest, I can find a different job when you’re ready.”

  “Can’t be any worse than dealing with a hit squad,” Mal said. She grabbed the mask from her room and headed for the elevator. She didn’t tell him she was looking forward to using her new weapon to end some lives. She wasn’t entirely sure if that desire came from her, or the implant, but she didn’t try to fight it.