I jerked away from the shadowy figure and almost knocked straight into my unamused ripper when I slipped off the operating chair.

  “What? Did you see that?” I yelled. I tried to calm my racing heart, but in spite of how brief the glimpse of that figure was, its gleaming teeth were seared into my memory. They were crooked and jagged, yet slotted perfectly together into a macabre grin.

  “See what? There’s nothing there. I’d like you to vacate my shop before hallucinating. I don’t need another idiot doing damage to my equipment. You did not ingest any… substances, before coming here? Some drugs react badly with anesthesia.”

  I swung around to look at Glim like he’d installed an extra head instead of all his extra limbs. “Of course not!”

  My mother quite literally beat the sense into me when I hinted that I might be following the example of my peers and letting drugs get a death grip on my psyche. She also had a lot of issues with swearing too, which was why I tended to try and avoid cursing aloud. She’d been gone for a while, but the habit of wincing whenever a curse word left my lips still had not left me.

  “Hm,” Glim snorted. I didn’t like how judgmental and disbelieving that sound was. Out of the two of us, only one liked to harvest organs illegally and sell them on the black market, and it wasn’t me! “You’re still getting used to the eyes, I suppose. Some minor glitches are not unexpected.”

  “Define ‘minor’ glitches,” I demanded, suddenly feeling a lot less happy about my new eyes.

  The eyesight was amazing and freeing, but only if it didn’t come at the cost of my sanity.

  “I can’t say. Unfamiliar with the hardware, and the software it's running. Replaced all your wetware, too. It’ll take time to settle. You’re barely off the chopping block.”

  I shuddered at his casual use of an alternative title for his operating table and found myself edging a bit closer to the exit. Pointless, of course, since he needed to unlock it for me, but I still wanted some distance between us.

  “Settle in. Right. Of course, cyberware needs time. I’ll keep an eye out for that, then. Would you mind if I just… go, now?” I rambled a little as my new eyes flitted all over the place, identifying where I’d left my stuff.

  The second I spotted my backpack and clothes, I rushed to throw them all back on, then intended to march right up to the door to wait there until he let me out. Before I could, one of Glim’s human hands landed on my shoulder and gripped it with surprising strength.

  “Stop,” Glim commanded. I did. I just about froze in place, actually. When I creaked my neck around to give him a look, the ripper simply sighed and waved a baggy full of bloodied wetware at me. “Do you want to keep these? Also, there’s this.”

  He let go of me briefly to approach a shelf and extracted the same container that had held my new and improved eyes. He practically shoved it in my face. Floating around the solution like they were being pickled was a pair of human eyes, optic nerves stretching behind them like some weird bits of worms.

  I valiantly resisted the urge to puke.

  “Ah, um, yeah, no… Keep them? Or throw them out, I guess. I doubt they’re very useful.”

  The ripper nodded and shrugged, then finally strolled over to the door so he could input several strings of passwords he blocked me from spying on. When the door swung open and he motioned for me to get out, the relief was immense.

  “Thanks for the operation,” I mumbled, and then I was at the foot of the stairs in the chill air of the evening, neck craned as far back as it would go.

  Stars twinkled far above me in direct defiance of light pollution, so numerous and so luminous not even the city’s best efforts could drown them out. There weren’t a lot of benefits to living in this stretch of the galaxy, but the night sky was definitely one of them.

  For the longest time, I couldn’t get a single glimpse of this stunning sight. My eyesight had failed me to the point where there was just a smear of stuff for me overhead, with pinpricks of light only somewhat visible during particularly bright nights.

  I was only half aware of the tears streaming down my face. I almost took a nosedive several times trying to climb the stairs, but I refused to divert my attention until I was on street level. At that point, basic self-preservation took over, and I looked around anxiously.

  The street wasn’t deserted, and there were still gangers at the ice cream parlor, but no one was paying attention to the disheveled kid stumbling his way out of the ripper office, which was good. The gangs were not as violent or as overt with their behavior in the city proper as they were in the slums, but better safe than sorry.

  Not that I was in any condition to do my due diligence.

  My eyes flitted every which way. I practically flinched at every sign of motion I spotted at a distance, not because there was anything startling in it, but because I wasn’t used to seeing so much. Everything was sharp, and detailed, and demanded that I look at it simply because I couldn’t before.

  My mind was spinning already. I felt overwhelmed. Sensory overload was definitely a thing, and it was kicking my ass twelve ways to Sunday. It didn’t help that my eyes were definitely above the human baseline, either.

  It felt like I’d lived my whole life, before and after the accident that damaged my eyes, viewing the world at the lowest possible resolution. Now, I suddenly had a pair of premium eyes in my skull that ran at the highest resolution possible. The sheer amount of detail I could pick out from a dozen meters would have blown me away even if I hadn’t started with failing eyesight.

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  In spite of that, I wouldn’t trade my new eyes for the world. The thrill of just seeing things normally had put a big smile on my face, and my mood was so upbeat that I felt like nothing could bring it down. This was all the more true when I remembered what Glim had told me about the eyes’ functionality.

  As stupid and reckless as it was, I pulled my scroll out of my backpack and quickly started looking up details on how to use advanced cyber eyes. As it turned out, on default settings, they were mostly operated through a series of blinks and eyes motions.

  I had no clue what that meant for my model, since the eyes didn’t exactly come with a user manual, but I lucked out on the third set of instructions most manufacturers defaulted to. I squeezed my eyes shut and swiped them to the left, then up, down, and right. When I opened them, a collection of icons offered me various settings options for the eyes.

  The first thing I did was sync the eyes to myself properly, which allowed them to access my wetware even deeper and allowed me to ‘click’ on the icons with intent only instead of executing more weird eye motions. Syncing wasn’t a standard feature, so I was once again thrilled with the eyes I’d pilfered.

  From there, I customized my HUD and added several icons to the corner of my eyesight by default. They were minimized there and rather unobtrusive, but I could focus on them and bring them into focus if necessary. My chosen speed access icons were the default calls app, a rather basic browser I was determined to replace with one of my favorites later, a navigation app, and the settings access icon.

  I grinned vindictively when I finally granted my eyes access to my internet subscription using my old scroll, then finally stashed the ancient piece of tech away.

  I wouldn’t need it ever again.

  Everything the scroll could do, my new eyes could do better, and they came with the added benefit of being built straight into my skull. No chance of losing them whatsoever! The thought of how exactly the eyes let me perceive sound from calls and whatever shows I might decide to watch freaked me out a little, true, but I got over that quickly.

  And there were other bonuses. For one, the navigation app was a marvel. When I set the route back home, a golden thread unfurled in my vision, stretching out of my chest and into the distance.

  I was mesmerized by the way it would shift whenever I moved, unerringly guiding me down the shortest path to my destination. With a grin on my face, I messed around with changing it to several different modes, including tacky glowing arrows, a ‘wave’ spreading out from and flowing down the right path, starry footprints that lit up the ground, and more. I ended up settling on the initial golden thread mode in the end, but the simple joy of experimenting was a treat.

  It was only when I found myself on the map that I realized I’d been extraordinarily stupid. Instead of heading back home using one of the longer and more complex routes, I was now in sight distance of the checkpoint close to my home.

  I almost never used that checkpoint.

  It would have been more convenient, sure, but letting people know that I had access to the outer district when so few people other than high-up gangers had the same privilege was asking for trouble. Just the accusation of having a decent job in the outer district could get me mugged or knifed in an alley on principle.

  That’s why I minimized my contact with everyone and always took the long way back home. I didn’t care that people loved to theorize about why I could almost never be spotted out and about in the slums, or that Jason eagerly spread rumors that I spent most of my time on my back in some grimy hotel working as a joytoy.

  My luck had held out thus far, especially since I tried to time my daily commute for when I knew most people would be off the streets and in some grimy bar or in bed.

  It was too late to change paths, but I could make it harder to spot me. Grabbing my backpack, I made it into a kind of half mask that covered the lower half of my face and kept an eye out for anyone who looked like a spotter.

  It helped that there was so much less to see in the slums, or at least fewer things one might want to see. Straight junk dominated the scenery. More importantly, there seemed to be fewer people out and about. Was that because of Jason’s stunt against the Reapers? Or what I had done to Jason and his bodyguard afterwards? Either way, it worked to my favor that there were fewer eyes to lock on me.

  Unfortunately, my need to pay attention soon started to work against me. Every shadow seemed a little too long, and every sound sent my raw nerves reeling. Even the weight of my backpack grew, dragging me down and slowing my steps.

  I didn’t have all the expensive cybernetics in it, but I was becoming more and more painfully aware of the fact that I never even bothered to check how much the credit chips I’d stolen off the bodies were worth.

  Somehow, my frazzled mind conjured up a conviction that anyone I came across would be able to smell the wealth on me, and that I’d end up dead in some alley with my meager possessions stolen and my new eyes gouged out.

  A shadow flickered at the edge of my vision, and what sounded like a scrape of a foot shifted some of the garbage. My fingers tightened on my backpack. My heart hammered so loudly and with such power that I felt like I was going to puke.

  I tilted my head just a little to the side, not enough to take a proper look, but enough to see if someone was right on my tail. There was nothing, but before I could even feel relieved, another flicker in my peripheral vision only made my condition worse.

  Is there really someone? Or am I just seeing things? The meager working streetlights ahead of me flickered in an out, and my mind conjured faces laughing at me from the shadows.

  Another sound came, a bit further away this time, of shifting garbage.

  It’s nothing. This is nothing. I’m not being followed, and I’m not going insane. If I repeated the words enough times, I might actually start to believe them.

  It was in this condition that I finally reached one of the tall, decrepit apartment buildings, and slipped inside with some measure of relief. I felt better with every moment that I drew closer to my own dreary cubicle that passed for a living space.

  Unfortunately, my body started to betray me right around then. My steps were slowing, lungs heaving, and both my eyes and the back of my head had started aching with a dull throb. I wasn’t the strongest or the most athletic person ever, but years of pathetic meals and relatively tame work had done their damage.

  With stress added on top? I was barely putting one foot in front of the other by the time I climbed up six floors, and I was still two more floors away from my goal.

  I’m going to complain. I don’t care if it gets me shanked, but someone needs to do something about that deathtrap of an elevator because I don’t want to walk every damn —

  My thoughts on the elevator, the last loss in a long string of decaying amenities, were roughly cut off when someone yanked on my shirt.

  I was thankfully only a few steps up from the landing, so when I collapsed onto my back with a whimper, I only lost most of my breath. My eyes, of course, were still performing their job perfectly. That meant I got to stare right into the maliciously grinning face of some grubby man I didn’t recognize as he brought a knife up, ready to plunge it into me.