The door chime barely had time to fade before her hand drifted off the counter. Not far—probably to a gun. If he had to guess, a Smith & Wesson M&P Shield.
A sharp _THWACK_ cut through the air. A jagged prism hit the counter like a judge’s gavel. The impact sent a glass jar of pickled herring skidding, crushed a torn pack of flatbread, and toppled an ashtray spilling over with Partagas stubs.
Kane drummed his fingers, slow and deliberate. "How much for this? Maybe a thousand. Maybe two. Maybe three—be quick, and I might drop the price."
The neon sign behind the counter hummed, casting fractured light across the grid work. _PAWN SHOP_ glowed red. _INSTANT CASH_ flickered green, its heartbeat unsteady. The dollar sign ($) burned brightest of all.
The woman picked up the shard, squinting as she turned it toward the dim light. A tap. A scratch. A slow inhale, nose nearly touching the surface.
Those boys were probably around the corner already.
“Move faster,” Kane said. His left eye flickered—just a faint pulse of red.
She clicked her tongue. “Resale’s tricky. Demand ain’t what it used to be...”
A slow smirk. “Best I can do is fifty.”
Her voice was smooth—honey stirred into firewood smoke. Her eyes flicked downward. Below his belt.
She was old. Not _old_ old, but somewhere between forty and eternity. Skin like polished mahogany, smooth as someone who’d been dosing age suppressors since childhood.
Kane tilted his head just enough for the neon glow to catch. A strand of white hair slipped free from his hood.
“This ain’t Spelltech,” he said. “It’s old-world tech. And it’s got electricity.”
That got her attention.
The shard pulsed. Jagged edges trapped in a rough metallic frame, fused to the crystal by ungodly heat. Inside, an ethereal blue light flickered, glyphs shifting, rewriting themselves. A double helix of luminescence curled through its core.
Footsteps.
Then—the door burst open.
---
### **Beating Scene (Sharper, More Brutal)**
The chime rang, loud and jarring, hanging in the air longer than it should.
“Hey, Kane—where’s my money?”
The woman at the far end of the shop flinched.
_"Call the poli—"_
She was already gone.
The door slammed shut, the chime swallowed by the five men spreading around him. A sixth loitered by the counter—a failsafe. He leaned against the glass, tapping the barrel of a Mossberg 500 against his palm, patient but ready to kill.
_"Clock’s ticking,"_ the tallest one muttered.
Kane saw the feint too late.
A fist shot toward his eye. His hands weren’t up in time—
But the punch never landed.
Someone giggled.
Kane forced a sheepish smile. "Janson, I’ve got four days till payment—why’d you come here and—"
_Bang._
The world tilted as his leg was swept out from under him.
Hands grabbed his arms. Pinned him.
_"Wait—"_
A knee to the ribs.
His mouth was forced open. A foamy white sludge crammed past his lips. The bitter burn of synthetic opioids coated his tongue before he could spit.
Then the punches came.
One to the skull.
One to the nose.
A sickening crunch.
Another—harder this time.
The weight of a body pressed him deeper into the grimy floor. Beneath the pain, something hummed—a mechanical undertone beneath the beating.
_"Pull him up."_
Kane was yanked upright, vision swimming.
Janson finally moved. Boots scraped against the floor.
"You’ve been walking around like you don’t owe anybody."
_"But this isn’t about the money. Yet."_
Janson’s voice was steady.
_"I heard from my boys you were with Molly. You know the kind of white I seen. Thought I’d pay you a visit. This city works a certain way. You’re messing with that."_
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
Kane’s left eye flickered, a pulse of red bleeding through the sclera. His arms twitched.
Janson grinned. Tugged up his sleeve.
The Redline Injector glowed—black tubing and exposed wiring running along his veins.
_"Figured I’d get a test run out of you."_
Kane spat blood, lips curling.
_"You should’ve led with that, bitch."_
The gauntlet hissed.
Six thousand micrograms of Impulse Analog flooded Janson’s system. His muscles flexed, veins swelling beneath his skin.
A low hum vibrated from the gauntlet. Gears whirred softly.
Then—impact.
Kane felt the first hit cave into his ribs. A dull, sickening crunch.
The second hit didn’t land.
Janson’s punch came late. Too late. Kane had seen faster men. Killed them, too.
But not today.
Not yet.
There was a place and time to be killed.
Janson smirked, rolling his shoulders.
_"Don’t buy from this shop again. My money. Four days."_
He patted his coat like there was dust on it.
The door chime rang.
Mossberg guy was the last to leave. He squinted at Kane before stepping out.
Then—silence.
_"Hey, bitch—they’re gone."_
She was already walking back.
_"You could’ve at least called the poli—"_
Oh.
A hand in his pocket.
A Benson. A lighter. _Click._
Figures. They paid her.
She smirked.
A single shot. Right through the skull.
She’d hit the floor, head bursting like a melon on concrete.
Kane let out a breath. The red in his eye faded.
He wouldn’t do it.
Instead, he pulled a cigar from his coat, his fingers twitching.
The shard was still in his pocket.
He stepped outside. His body was already healing. 20 seconds slower.
---
Beneath his feet, there were vibrations—a train hissing past some distance away. Sirens dopplered through the city, rising and falling, lost in the smog-choked sky.
From the bend on the side of the road, he stepped onto a new street.
BLOOD.
He smelled it before he saw it.
The crowd had already gathered. Kane pulled up his hoodie and walked closer.
It was bad.
But he’d seen worse.
He’d created worse.
Three people—if you could still call them that. Some force had blasted them apart, shredding flesh like wet paper. The pressure was so immense that some body parts had fused together. One man’s ribs had melted into another’s face—an expression of permanent agony etched into bone.
A third victim lay half-buried in the pavement, torso embedded like a grotesque sculpture.
The air leaked COZ.
_Amateur work._
Someone gagged.
A woman barely had time to stumble before her stomach heaved, spilling bile and half-digested meat onto the pavement. The stench of onions, acid, and blood curled into the air.
"GO SHIT SOMEWHERE ELSE, BITCHES!"
A man in a grease-stained jacket threw his arms up in frustration as she bent over again, retching.
Darkly comedic. A brief flicker of levity.
Then—the murmurs rose.
_"What the hell is the government doing?"_
_"Are we all gonna die?"_
_"Fuck the DICE festivals—this is our reality!"_
An old man—face sunken by time and booze—shouted into the void.
_"Just moments after the election, and they’re already slacking!"_
Kane adjusted the shard in his pocket.
_"Let this goddamn enhanced be jailed or sent to fight outside the walls!"_
_"Like what the hell, Suspended has enhanced, but you don’t see them fighting and destroying cities!"_
They didn’t get it.
The truly deadly enhanced weren’t in Suspended.
They were here.
Apart from people like us, trained there, no one wanted to be regulated by a group of fools who published a list of a hundred people to kill just to keep their corruption thriving.
_"Hey—y’all disperse now!"_
A man stood on the curb, **digging the lid of his pen into his ear** as if **something had jumped in just to annoy him.**
When he finally **fished the insect out, he looked around.**
_"Why are you still here, ya creeps? Get moving. ALL OF YOU!"_
He **looked at the clean pen top with disgust.**
And **threw it.**
**Straight at Kane.**
His hands shook.
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DO NOT DISTRIBUTE
---
The uneven thud of footsteps—rubber soles slapping against the long, weathered staircase winding upward through a narrow alley. Tightly packed buildings flanked both sides, leaning in as if whispering secrets to each other.
Cracked concrete steps, worn by years of hurried footsteps. Faded graffiti, half-scrubbed but never quite erased. Kids had probably played here once. Now, it was just another path people took without thinking.
Potted plants spilled over rusted railings, a weak attempt at softening the place. Overhead, dead wires crisscrossed like veins of a long-forgotten machine.
The city smelled like rain. Or maybe rot.
Someone had tossed trash near his feet.
**People had no damn manners.**
---
The soft metallic _clink_ as the key slid into the lock.
_God, he was tired._
The door swung open, and in one motion, his hoodie was off—hitting the floor with a dull thud.
_"Take aim… steady your breath. Hold the scope—it's all mindset."_
_"Breathe in… hold… breathe out. The battle is over, soldier."_
A flick of the switch, and the radio went silent.
He turned to the cracked mirror at his side.
A tilt of the head.
Both arms raised.
"Front Double Biceps."
_He still got it._
---
He brushed a stack of files aside and a pill bottle 112-XX2, reaching for the bread squatting the flys away. Green patches spread across its surface. A half-empty water bottle sat beside a burger that had turned rock-hard. Batteries rolled across the table as his fingers brushed against them.
The batteries, the bread, the burger and the pills he stuffed them all into his mouth.
He chugged the water down, ignoring the taste. The foul smell had already faded into the background.
At the window, he gripped a rope tied to the frame, letting it slide through his fingers as he glanced outside. The city stretched before him—laundry fluttering, wooden shutters creaking with the wind, unseen neighbors shifting behind thin walls.
Then—darkness.
He shut the window.
---
The pile of clothes on his bed was soaked. **Red.**
Magazines. Guns. He shoved them to the floor and collapsed onto the mattress.
Somewhere beneath him was the paper Hector had given him.
His hand swept across the bed, fingers brushing against damp pages. The blood had seeped into everything.
His eyes flicked to a particular line of text.
---
CLASSIFIED DOCUMENT
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DO NOT DISTRIBUTE
EXCERPT FROM FILE: 112-XX2
From the results obtained, **Test substance 112-XX2** can suppress enhanced abilities related to direct physical attributes such as **strength** and **speed**, particularly those where the body serves as the primary medium of enhancement. Side effects are assumed to make their abilities more triggered to respond. An example could be hands twitching, if eyes were an indicator, they could glow too.
Further analysis indicates that **XX2 with a modified upgrade** has demonstrated the capability to **prolong bleeding** in enhanced individuals with accelerated healing factors, making it hard to distinguish who is who. There is evidence to suggest that enhanced subjects can either **adapt to or be subdued by this compound**, particularly those with **physical augmentations**—though this remains **speculative pending further trials**. On these grounds, I make bold claims that are more enhanced in the Expanse than we know of.
END OF EXCERPT
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
---
A flicker of movement.
The black box on the side of the bed buzzed.
He pressed it.
"What is it, Hector?"
A pause.
"Damn, why the coldness, bro?"
"Just tired. I think you should join a Flood lord's gang. More money and protecgtion. The government ain't gonna do nothing for us."
"Yeah. You good, bro?"
"You sell anything yet? That shard you got from dragon sweeping?"
Kane chuckles. "Just say that from the beginning, bro."
"That would be heartless, bro. How do they say it pleasure before pain?"
Hector’s voice dropped to a whisper. _“And... what about McAlister? When’s the hit going down?”_
Kane flipped the shard, watching its glyphs pulse. Smoke curled from his lips.
_“You think a pack of nobodies can kill him?”_ His voice was dry. Flat.
A pause.
Hector swallowed. “They’re saying Suspended backed his election.”
Kane exhaled slowly. His fingers twitched.
The shard pulsed once.
_“Then I guess he’s already dead.”_
