The room was gloomy as expected without its owner.
Mags stood in the doorway, her small frame barely casting a shadow.
For years, she'd come here every other day to wipe dust off surfaces Nex swore he needed left untouched—"I know where everything is, brat, quit moving shit."
The scent of synth-lube and gunpowder clung to the air, thick enough to taste.
She stepped inside.
The cabinets yawned open, stuffed with augmented limbs in various states of disrepair—spare hydraulics, skeletal finger assemblies, a half-melted ocular unit still blinking faintly.
Nex had never thrown anything away. "Might need it later," he'd grunt whenever she complained.
Her boots crunched on shell casings as she approached the worktable.
Scattered across its surface, gun parts glinted dully under the flickering light—a mismatched graveyard of barrels, stocks, and firing pins.
Mags picked up a receiver, turning it over in her hands.
The serial number had been filed off.
She tried slotting it against a different trigger assembly.
It didn't fit.
Nothing did.
Then the sound of floorboards creak behind her.
She didn't turn.
"He'd hate this," Karen said from the doorway.
Her prosthetic hand flexed. "You turning his nest into some kind of shrine."
Mags ran a thumb along the edge of a scope.
The glass reflecting the morning light into her eyes.
"Inventory," she said at last.
Karen exhaled through her nose.
The silence stretched, broken only by the distant drip of leaking pipes.
"I'm here to look for something too" as Karen looks all over the room. "The timing of the attack from the east tunnels was too tight. I doubt that these mole—or moles—problem was just recent. Nex probably already noticed it way before."
"Noticed," Mags repeated quietly, almost to herself.
She absentmindedly picked up the scope and tucked it into the deep pocket of her parka.
Karen moved to the bedframe.
She began tapping her augmented knuckles against the floorboards, listening carefully.
Her hand froze, knocking again to be sure.
There it was—a hollow echo beneath the bed.
Without hesitation, she pried at the edges of the floorboard.
The old wood gave way with a sharp crack, splintering apart like brittle bone.
Beneath it, hidden away from casual sight, was a metal safe—its surface worn but intact.
A pre-Aether Incident model.
Vintage and rare.
"Jackpot." Karen grinned, pumping her augmented fist triumphantly "Now… how to open this."
She opened her conduit interface, scrolling for a spellapp that could crack old locks. But before she could even get halfway down the list, a sizzling hiss filled the air.
Karen looked up.
Mags was already at work, her own conduit glowing faintly.
A corrosion glyph eating through the safe's hinges.
The metal flaked away like dead skin.
Karen sifted through the contents carefully.
One document caught her eye immediately—a list of names.
Thirty-nine names in total.
Every single one was crossed out... except for six.
Flick.
Silas.
Oren.
Don.
Sable.
Sel.
Each name was marked with a squad designation—scattered across different teams, different corners of the gang's operations.
And all are marked with timestamps from the past three months.
The safe's remaining contents offered no explanations—just encrypted chips and surveillance logs.
Nex's unfinished business, locked away but never resolved.
Karen pulled out the six data chips, linking them to her conduit to decrypt—but the attempt was met with failure after failure.
Heavy encryption wrapped around each one like a vice.
She frowned, tapping the paper thoughtfully before glancing at Mags. "Do you know why these six names aren't crossed out?"
Mags tilted her head, considering. "Traitors?" she said after a beat, voice casual but her eyes are sharp.
Karen's mouth twisted into a grim line. "Maybe... but it's too early to tell."
She tucked the list into her jacket, a quiet resolve settling over her.
Karen stared at the encrypted chips in her palm, the dim light glinting off their metallic surfaces.
The weight of Nex's suspicions pressed against her ribs like a blade.
I Need someone outside. Someone the mole wouldn't expect.
Her fingers tightened around the chips.
Lucent owed her nothing—but he understood secrets better than most.
She pulled out her Conduit and sent a pulse-message:
>> Need a favor. Bringing trouble.
No details.
No excuses.
Lucent would understand.
Mags' boots scuffed against the floorboards as she rose from the corner, Nex's shotgun still cradled in her arms.
The girl's eyes—dark and unreadable—locked onto Karen's fist.
"Going?" Mags asked, her voice barely above a whisper.
Karen hesitated. "To decrypt these. Safely."
Mags stepped forward, the light catching the steel fragments sewn into her sleeve cuffs—shards of Nex's augments, woven into her clothes like armor.
"Me. Too."
Not a request.
A statement.
Karen exhaled.
The girl had earned the right to see this through.
"Keep the shotgun hidden," she said, tucking the chips into her vest. "Lucent's place isn't kind to surprises."
Mags nodded once, her small frame nearly vanishing under the bulk of her parka.
But her grip on the weapon didn't waver.
As they stepped into the Junkyard's perpetual twilight, Karen couldn't shake the feeling that Nex's ghost walked with them—his unfinished business clutched in her pocket, his vengeance stitched into Mags' sleeves.
Somewhere ahead, in the neon-choked arteries of the lower sectors, Lucent and Kai would be waiting.
And somewhere behind, a traitor breathed easy.
For now.
***
The afternoon sun filtered weakly through the smog, casting the junkyard in a dull copper glow.
Lucent leaned against a gutted mag-lev engine, its rusted hull warm against his back as he watched Kai fumble through another casting attempt.
The kid's boots kicked up little puffs of metallic dust with each failed landing, the particles catching the light like dirty snow.
Lucent's Conduit buzzed against his hip, the vibration traveling up through the old knife wound in his side—a persistent ache he'd learned to ignore years ago.
He fished the device from his pocket, the cracked screen glowing faintly as Karen's message appeared:
>> Need a favor. Bringing trouble.
The corners of his mouth turned down.
He thumbed away at the screen just as a shadow passed overhead.
Kai soared through the air above him, limbs flailing in a graceless parody of flight.
The Rank 2—Leap glyph shimmered unevenly around his ankles, its edges fraying like burnt paper.
For one suspended moment, the kid hung against the smoke-stained sky, his whoop of excitement echoing off the scrap metal canyon walls.
Then gravity reasserted itself.
"Oof!"
The impact sent a shudder through the pile of discarded server casings Kai landed on.
He rolled twice before coming to rest in a cloud of rust flakes and dead glow-mite husks.
When he sat up, his jacket was dusted orange, and a thin trickle of blood ran from his scraped knuckles.
Lucent didn't move from his perch. "You're still leading with your chin," he called out. "Tuck it in unless you want to bite your tongue off."
Kai wiped his hands on his pants, leaving rusty streaks across the already-stained fabric.
"But did you see the height that time?" His breath came in excited puffs, visible in the cooling air. "I cleared the crane arm!"
A gust of wind carried the stench of burning plastic from the smelter pits half a mile away.
Lucent watched as Kai's grin faltered slightly when he noticed the blood.
The kid had that Spire-bred squeamishness about injuries—as if the body were some pristine machine rather than meat that healed.
"Height doesn't matter if you can't stick the landing." Lucent pushed off from the mag-lev and picked his way through the debris field.
His boots crunched over broken circuit boards and the brittle carapaces of glow-mites that had burst from overcharging. "And you're burning twice the Aether you need to."
Kai scrambled to his feet, pulling up the glyph schematics on his Conduit.
The screen flickered—another bad connection in the jury-rigged device. "I was adjusting the thrust vectors like you showed me, but the dampeners keep—"
Lucent snatched the Conduit mid-explanation.
With two quick swipes, he wiped the modifications and pulled up the original Leap parameters. "You don't rewrite corporate code until you understand why it works in the first place." He tossed the device back. "Again. And this time, don't flail like a fish."
As Kai reset his stance, Lucent's Conduit buzzed again. Another message from Karen:
>> ETA 20. With +1.
His jaw tightened. Company meant complications, and complications had a way of turning lethal in his line of work.
Across the yard, Kai crouched low, his fingers tracing the activation sequence with exaggerated care.
The Leap glyph flared to life—cleaner this time, its edges holding steady.
He launched upward, his trajectory more controlled, his body remembering at last to tuck into the ascent.
Lucent watched impassively as the kid cleared the same crane arm, twisted mid-air, and came down in a crouch that only slightly resembled a controlled landing.
The impact still sent him rolling, but he came up grinning, his eyes bright with the thrill of momentary weightlessness.
"Better," Lucent admitted grudgingly. "Now do it fifty more times."
Kai's face fell. "Fifty? But my knees—"
A new sound cut through the junkyard's usual chorus of creaking metal and distant machinery—footsteps approaching from the east.
Two sets: one heavy and deliberate, the other light enough to be a child's.
Lucent didn't turn toward the sound.
Instead, he palmed the knife hidden in his sleeve and began counting the potential threats within reach—the jagged piece of rebar by his left foot, the live wire dangling from the crane above them, the half-charged shock grenade in his pocket.
Kai wiped his bloody knuckles on his pants again and squinted into the gloom between the scrap piles. "Is that... Karen? And who's the kid with her?"
The wind carried the scent of burning insulation from the nearby smelter pits as Lucent's eyes narrowed at Karen's approach.
Behind her, a smaller figure lingered in the shadows - Mags, her slight frame nearly swallowed by an oversized parka, A shotgun looking comically large in her arms.
Lucent didn't move from his slouch against the gutted mag-lev engine. "I didn't tell you where we were," he said, his voice flat.
Karen stopped a few paces away, her augmented hand flexing unconsciously.
The afternoon light caught the steel shard embedded in her prosthetic - a fragment of Nex's augments that made Lucent's jaw tighten imperceptibly.
"Kai mentioned you'd be scavenging in Sector 19 today," Karen said, jerking her chin toward the kid, who was currently picking himself up from another botched landing.
"You do remember our base is in Sector 18, right?" A faint smirk tugged at her lips as she added, "Hard to miss when your apprentice's been leaping around like a grasshopper for the past hour. We could see the dust clouds from three sectors over."
Kai froze mid-brush-off of his pants, his cheeks darkening beneath the grime. "I wasn't that loud," he muttered, though the scattered debris from his last impact told a different story.
Mags said nothing, her dark eyes flicking between Lucent and Kai with unsettling intensity.
The way she held the shotgun—not just as a weapon, but also as a talisman—made the hair on Lucent's neck prickle.
Karen's gaze dropped to the scattered Conduit parts and salvaged components littering the workbench Lucent had claimed. "Find anything useful?"
Lucent didn't answer immediately.
Instead, he studied Karen's face - the new lines around her eyes, the tension in her shoulders that hadn't been there before the lab job.
Whatever brought her here wasn't a social call.
"You didn't trek across the Junkyard to admire my scavenging skills," he said finally, pushing off from the mag-lev. "What do you need?"
The wind shifted again, carrying with it the distant wail of a Reclamation drone.
Mags' grip tightened on the shotgun.
Karen reached into her vest and pulled out a small metal case. "We need you to look at something."
The case clicked open to reveal a cluster of data chips, their surfaces scratched and worn.
Even from a distance, Lucent could see the telltale shimmer of heavy encryption.
Kai leaned in, his curiosity overcoming his embarrassment. "What are—"
"Not here," Lucent cut him off, his eyes never leaving Karen's.
The message was clear: whatever was on those chips, she didn't trust her own people with it.
Mags took a sudden step forward, her boots crunching on broken glass.
Her gaze locked onto Kai's hands, specifically, the jury-rigged conduit in his hand.
Lucent moved almost imperceptibly, putting himself between Mags and Kai. "We'll talk at my base," he said, his tone leaving no room for argument.
Karen studied Lucent's face for a long moment before nodding once.
She placed a hand on Mags' shoulder—not restraining, just present.
The girl didn't react beyond a slight tensing of her jaw.
"Lead the way," Karen said, her augmented fingers flexing. "We've got time."
Kai went to Lucent's side, and he whispered. "Who was that kid?"
"Tell me." Lucent said simply.
The sun dipped lower, casting long shadows across the junkyard.
Somewhere in the distance, metal groaned like a living thing.
Kai shivered, though the evening was still warm.
***
The journey from Sector 19 to Sector 23 took them through the corpse of an old mag-lev tunnel, its walls scarred by decades of scavenger fires and makeshift dwellings.
Kai's boots kicked up clouds of metallic dust that glittered in the beam of his wrist-light, each particle catching the glow like dying stars.
Lucent moved ahead in silence.
They emerged into Sector 23's perpetual twilight, the air thick with the tang of aether from the nearby node.
Their new hideout waited behind a false service panel—just another rusted door in a corridor full of them.
Lucent's shoulders tense beneath the weight of the makeshift rig as he transfer it to the table—a Frankenstein assembly of scavenged server parts, jury-rigged cooling tubes, and at least three different corporate-grade decryption modules that had no business working together.
Yet somehow, through two sleepless nights and more burnt fingers than he cared to count, they did.
"You really built this thing from scratch?" Kai whispered, eyeing the exposed wiring that pulsed faintly through the rig's cracked casing.
A thin trail of coolant dripped from one of the tubes, hissing where it hit the tunnel floor.
Karen whistled low under her breath as she stepped inside, Mags slipping in behind her like a shadow. "This is new."
Lucent adjusted the straps. "Parts from the Neon Bazaar. Knowledge from worse places."
The rig had started as a pile of components on their workbench—a Myriad data-mining module pried from a dead officer's Conduit, a Nimbrix encryption breaker still sticky with someone else's blood, and the crown jewel: a GhostKey rootkit chip, its surface etched with warnings even Lucent hadn't fully deciphered.
Now, after 72 hours of soldering, swearing, and one small electrical fire that had left Kai's eyebrows singed.
Inside, the space was more machine than room.
Conduits in various states of dissection covered every flat surface, their innards exposed like surgical patients.
Wires snaked across the floor in purposeful chaos, connecting to a central terminal that Kai had affectionately dubbed "the corpse."
Lucent shrugged off the rig, wincing as the coolant tubes kinked. "Set it up on the main terminal. And don't touch the red wires this time."
Kai opened his mouth to protest, then thought better of it. As he busied himself with the connections, Lucent pulled the blackout shades—heavy fabric lined with conductive thread to dampen Aethernet scans.
The rig came online with a shuddering whine, its fans fighting the dust clogging their blades.
Holoscreens flickered to life above the terminal, displaying a labyrinth of encryption protocols and half-decoded glyphware.
"Will it work?" Kai asked, watching as Lucent slotted Karen's first data chip into the reader.
The machine answered for him—a pulse of blue light racing through the rig's exposed circuitry as the decryption sequences began. Somewhere in the walls, the old building's pipes groaned in sympathy.
Lucent cracked his knuckles. "We're about to find out."
Mags drifted toward a corner, her fingers trailing along the walls where someone, presumably Kai, had scrawled glyph equations in permanent marker.
Her gaze kept returning to Kai and Lucent.
Lucent caught the direction of her stare as he powered up the decryption array.
The machine whined in protest before settling into an uneven hum.
"Let's see what's so important," he said, holding out his hand for the chips.
The first chip slotted into the machine with a click that sounded too loud in the confined space.
The screen flickered.
FILE RECOVERED: SURVEILLANCE LOG - EAST TUNNEL
TIMESTAMP: 72:14:22
Grainy footage resolved—a camera angle from one of the Steel Talons' smuggling routes.
Six figures moved through the frame at different intervals, each tagged with Nex's handwritten labels:
Flick - Dragging a wounded leg, pausing to adjust his boot.
Silas - Passing a credit chip to a junkie.
Oren - Coughing violently into his sleeve.
Don - Arguing with someone off-camera.
Sable - Testing the edge of her knife against her thumb.
Sel - Checking his reflection in a broken mirror.
Nothing conclusive. Just routine patrol logs.
Karen exhaled through her nose. "Scroll forward."
The timestamp jumped.
77:02:33
The east tunnel stood empty except for a single figure—just the back of a jacket, the person careful to stay out of frame.
A gloved hand reached for the wall, fingers tracing something...
The footage cut out.
"Damn it," Karen muttered.
Mags leaned closer, her small finger stabbing at the screen where the figure's sleeve had ridden up.
A faint mark gleamed—three parallel scars, barely visible.
Lucent froze.
He'd seen those before.
Kai frowned. "Could be anyone."
"Not anyone." Karen pulled up another file—a personnel roster with six photos. Her finger landed on Silas's intake record: "Distinctive scarring from augmetic rejection (see right forearm)."
A beat of silence.
Then the rig beeped again—another recovered fragment.
AUDIO LOG - NEX'S LAST ENTRY
The recording hissed with static before Nex's voice emerged, strained and raw:
"—told Rook to watch the east tunnel after curfew. If I'm right about the drop point... fuck. Sable just reported Silas missing from his bunk again. That's three times this—"
The audio cut to silence.
Karen's prosthetic hand clenched. "Circumstantial."
Mags was already moving toward the door, Nex's shotgun cradled in her arms like a sleeping child.
Lucent blocked her path. "We need proof."
The girl's eyes burned.
She reached into her pocket and slapped three shell casings on the table—all recovered from the east tunnel ambush.
All Myriad-issue.
Rare on the streets.
The exact type Silas had been caught selling two weeks prior.
Outside, the wind howled through the junkyard's skeletal remains.
Somewhere in Sector 18, a traitor was still breathing.
For now.