I didn’t keep the knife. Shocking, I know, but just looking at it made me vaguely ill. I honestly wasn’t sure what all the layers of brown and black on its blade were. I sincerely prayed it was blood, because the alternatives could have been so much worse.

  I had more important things to worry about in the short term. There was just about enough time to examine my backpack and feel relieved that the damage to it wasn’t all that bad before I started to feel weak and dizzy.

  Whatever had carried me through the altercation and the short encounter with the Kittens was fading, and it was fading fast.

  I also found out, to my unbridled joy, that attempting to stand on my cut up leg sent shivers of pain and numbness racing through it. I just about collapsed on the spot, but the concrete railing of the stairwell saved me from a painful tumble.

  If my home wasn’t just a few meters away, I don’t think I would have made it. I almost felt thankful that I didn’t live in one of the megabuildings. I wouldn’t have survived the trip through their ecosystem of endless fucking hallways and what felt like miniature markets in some of the larger corridors.

  I’d spent part of my childhood in one of those, and while they were not as smelly as you might expect, the memories still left me feeling claustrophobic and on edge. Part of that came from how I was used to the sparser streets and polite distances kept in the slums. Still, even as a child, I disliked so much bustle.

  The memories were a welcome reprieve from reality, though, which was probably another reason I made it to my door. I waved my hand, the chip implant in my wrist registered, and my path to relative safety was secured.

  When I finally stumbled into my private space, the relief I experienced as shoddy lights blinked awake and the heavy metal door closed with a hiss behind me was immense.

  In all honesty, my place was kind of a dump. Not a huge shock considering it lived up to the exacting standards of the slum lifestyle, but it merited a mention nonetheless. Especially since the apartment consisted of a single room and a small alcove that served as a bathroom, without a door of its own.

  Directly to my left was a wardrobe that held the entirety of my clothes and had a small cubby meant to be filled with shoes. To my right was a double bed that took up entirely too much space, but was also the most luxurious item I owned. A holdover from when my mother was still around.

  On the far left of the room was a small desk, and on the right the aforementioned alcove with a shower, a toilet, a bathroom sink, and a mirror that stayed grimy no matter how often or how hard I scrubbed it down. At that point, I’d just accepted that the plaque was a permanent fixture and moved on. I didn’t really want or need to see my face that often anyway.

  The only hint of separation or privacy was the shower curtain you could pull out of the right-hand side of the bathroom alcove, and which followed a set of rails set into the floor to lock into the opposite side. It made the shower cramped and uncomfortable, but it was better than letting water freely spray all over the place. The drain was actually half decent, so mold didn’t really spread past the corner.

  I headed straight for that shower, shedding clothes as I limped. I fumbled a little with the curtain, but when the first drops of hot water hit my skin, it was pure bliss. That was one of the reasons my mother eventually opted for the apartment: hot water. By some miracle, the building’s boiler room still worked.

  I even broke out my good shampoo and soap for the occasion! They were from a slightly nicer brand and smelled like some indeterminable kind of flowers rather than pure, nauseating chemicals. I figured I got to treat myself a little with all that I had managed to survive.

  The cut on my thigh wasn’t as bad as I initially feared. It was still an angry red line that went all the way from near my knee up to uncomfortably close to my crotch, but it was relatively shallow. It didn’t even look all that inflamed, which I earnestly hoped meant I wouldn’t catch some deathly infection.

  I would let Glim cut my leg off if I had to, but it was kind of sad that amputation was the cheaper option when compared to trying to beat an infection nowadays. The cheap infection medicine was risky and at least mildly addictive, and the good medicine cost… well, an arm and a leg.

  I kept a small first aid kit next to the foot of my bed and close to the shower. So once I was all clean and toweled off, I grabbed it and applied generous amounts of rubbing alcohol to the wound before calling it a day.

  My face ached, my body ached, my mind ached. I barely forced myself to figure out how to set an alarm on my new eyes before I passed out.

  —

  I woke up to an alarm going off inside my skull. It felt a bit like my brain was vibrating while a cheerful tune played in the background, which… let’s just say it did a good job. I got up quickly just so the sensation would stop.

  It was a good thing that whatever sensors the eyes used cut off the alarm, because I honestly had no clue if I could figure out how to turn it off on my own.

  That couldn’t entirely be blamed on morning blues. I felt like a particularly juicy piece of steak that had been pounded to oblivion so sauces and spices could be properly worked into it. My left eye ached something fierce whenever I blinked or my eyelid so much as twitched. Pain was blooming from all over my front. The cut on my thigh had started to tingle and itch. I was fairly sure one of my arms had a cracked bone or something, because moving it was agony.

  For several long moments, I just lay on my back and stared at the ceiling. I had to say, it didn’t look all that appealing. For some fucked up reason, spiders, flies, and small insects just up and followed humanity wherever we went in the whole wide cosmos, so I had several thick cobwebs hanging above my head.

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  I needed to get rid of them at some point. I’d never noticed them before because I literally couldn’t see that well, but now that I did, I felt vaguely ill at the thought of the mess detaching and falling on top of me while I slept. I was willing to tolerate spiders for the good service they provided by exterminating all other insects, but having them hang above my head was a step too far, even for me.

  It’s a good thing I set that alarm for an hour earlier than I normally do.

  An extra hour of sleep would have been a treat, but I needed to get myself moving, and I didn’t think I’d be able to do that as quickly as usual.

  This suspicion was proven correct when I stumbled off my bed. The pain I was in only got worse, and I almost threw up due to nausea that swept through me. A part of me rankled at my recklessness to just collapse into sleep when I knew I could have a concussion, but the rest of me was aware of the fact that I’d had little choice in the matter. There was absolutely no way I could have stayed awake after a robbery, surgery, and then a near lethal mugging.

  Damn it, the mugging. I felt so ill with rage when I remembered I’d almost been killed by some drugged up asshole with a knife, after everything else I’d been through that day.

  It would have been a bitterly ironic way to go.

  I tried to distract myself by quickly locating some underwear and a shirt before snatching up my backpack and spilling its contents over my bed. The credit chips landed on the sheets with disappointingly little fanfare. I almost expected a little jingle to sound from thin air to celebrate my acquisition of meager wealth.

  Well, I assumed it was meager. Mules were on the lowest rungs of the gang power ladder, so they didn’t typically have much money to their names. Granted, I didn’t think that the murder machine was a typical mule, and there was also the fact that I’d robbed Jason and his bodyguard too.

  I could have slotted the chips directly into my port and used my new eyes to check their value and transfer the credits to my bank account, but I chose to do it through my ancient scroll instead. It didn’t happen often, since any attempt to create forged credit chips was met with extreme violence by the megacorps, but gangs did sometimes make decoys filled with nasty viruses as a final ‘fuck you’ to whoever managed to steal their shit.

  To my relief, none of the chips melted my scroll and reduced it to a worthless block of plastic and metal. To my consternation, the amount of money the chips contained was not meager. Three thousand, seven hundred and fifty-one credits. That’s how much the entire batch of stolen chips was worth in the end.

  My tongue went dry, my mind spun, and my heart just about stopped. Then it started again, panic driving the beat way faster than normal.

  I had no clue how the credits were split between my four victims, but even if they were evenly divided, someone would take exception to the fact that I’d stolen so much money. That wasn’t even counting the high-grade cybernetics which I’d stashed away in my hidey hole.

  All of a sudden, I was distinctly and beyond any doubt aware that there would be retribution for what I’d done. The owner of all the goods would try to get them back, and Jason’s family was just as likely to come after my ass.

  The one bright spot in the fucked up mess I’d made for myself was the fact that I didn’t think anyone had lived to note my participation in the robbery. Jason had approached me through his usual cloak-and-dagger bullshit, probably to spare himself the indignity of dealing directly with a guy he mocked for being a joytoy. That meant as long as I managed to keep my head down, the shit storm coming to the slums might just pass me over.

  Still…

  Nearly four thousand credits. That was the kind of money that could last me several years, or afford me some nicer amenities for a while. I might even be able to pay for a few nice programs or online courses.

  The problem was, I couldn’t exactly register the credits to my bank. Such a sudden influx of credits to an account that was barely staying open would likely trigger all sorts of red flags. If any of my would-be pursuers had a way of monitoring such things, I’d stand out like a sore thumb.

  Maybe it was pure paranoia speaking, but I preferred to stick to a safer approach now that most of my pressing needs were met.

  I had a place to stay, on account of my mother dropping our residence in the outer district and using all of her savings to outright purchase an apartment in the slums. I could see again, which stayed my inevitable date of execution by way of starvation. Just as importantly, I still had my job, which could at least cover the cheapest food and other essentials.

  I was in a better place than I’d been at for years. So, it was rather an odd reaction when I burst into tears and unashamedly sobbed into my sheets for nearly long enough to make me late to my job.

  I couldn’t help it. The relief, the stress, the sheer stupidity of what I’d done, it was all crashing down on me. I had made so, so many dumb decisions! Signing up to ambush a gang mule was definitely one of them, but then I went and stole the cyberware, instead of thinking to check if the credit chips could cover the purchase of a regular pair of eyes. Sure, they wouldn’t have been as good, but they also wouldn’t be a major discovery risk.

  The credits at least couldn’t be tracked, as long as I was cautious with my spending. The corpos jointly produced and backed those on a galactic level, and each chip was a blackbox with a certain value assigned to it on production. They could never be refilled, only gradually spent, until the credit counter hit zero and the slip of plastic and circuitry fried itself into uselessness.

  They tried adding series numbers and stuff to make each individual chip traceable at the start of the venture, but quickly gave up when they realized the scope of what they were doing and that they might like to have untraceable funds on hand if the need struck. So there we were. The chips now only contained some secret code thing that made it allegedly impossible to hack and which served as proof of authenticity at the same time.

  I distracted myself from having to decide what to do with the chips by scrubbing a bit of the gunk off my mirror and looking myself in the eyes. I was thin, thinner than the last time I’d cared to look. Bruises bloomed all over my face, the most notable gracing my left eye, along with a shallow cut just above it. My black hair fell around my gaunt, pale face in waves, framing it and making it look even more skeletal.

  It was my eyes I was really interested in, though. I had to fight down a wince when I was a met with a pair of ruby-red irises that all but shone with an inner light. Yeah, definitely not subtle. Funnily enough, the eyes almost looked organic otherwise. There was no series code, no manufacturer mark, nothing. Just the creepy red glow. Overall, I looked like some vampiric corpse that had crawled out of a meat shredder.

  I sighed and looked away, finally deciding that I’d leave most of the chips behind, hidden in my first aid kit. I’d take the one chip that had around four hundred creds with me just for emergencies, but my heart couldn’t take carrying around the full volume of my newfound wealth, especially not after my painfully recent mugging.

  This is not going to be a fun day. Catill is going to have so many questions. I just hope he’s not going to fire me on the spot when he sees my face.

  Catill was many things, but he had a strict ‘no trouble’ policy that he stuck to religiously. Honestly, most days, I was surprised he’d even hired me in the first place.

  So, the least I could do was try and minimize the chance of him getting swept up into my mess. Unfortunately, that meant taking the long way round to my workplace. And in my condition…

  It’s a good thing I woke up early, I groused as I finished dressing, hoisted my backpack, and headed out the door.

  Each step was pain, but I’d be damned if I failed to show up for work.