Trenchtown's black market pulsed like a living, wounded beast beneath a canopy of frayed holographic tarps, their neon glow bleeding into the smog-choked air. The place smelled of burnt plastic, ozone, and the sour tang of sweat. Rusted stall frames creaked under the weight of salvaged drones and bootleg neural interfaces, hawked like street candy to any buyer willing to pay—or fight—for them.
Vendors leaned out of their booths, their chrome-laced arms gleaming under the flickering lights. Their voices tore through the thick air, a cacophony of temptation and desperation.
"Fresh cortical chips! No fingerprints!"
"AI souls, bottled and certified—realer than your ex's tears!"
The chaos was a symphony of human hunger and machine whirring, and Nadya loved every distorted note of it.
She pushed through the surging crowd, her holographic hoodie glitching between static and a pirated NuraTech ad:
Live Longer, Upgrade Now!
Sweat clung to her skin, but the grin on her face was pure mischief. She paused by a vendor dangling jars of swirling light—tiny storms of bioluminescent code trapped inside cracked glass.
"Skibidi-level creepy," she muttered under her breath, flicking her gaze from jar to jar. "Think they'd take a selfie with me?"
Behind her, Sekar's broad silhouette materialized like a phantom. Her wolf-like frame gleamed with matte cybernetic plating, and her optics—piercing, hungry things—scanned the crowd with cold precision.
"Focus," Sekar rasped, her voice modulator spitting static into the humid air. "We need the neural stabilizer. Brawijaya's schematics mark Vendor K7-33 as the source. But he trades only in stolen code."
Nadya didn't miss the warning in her tone. She slipped a data chip from her sleeve, the AdriNet anarchist sigil etched into its surface like a quiet middle finger to authority. The chip caught the neon light, sparkling like a forbidden treasure.
"Stole this from Aulia's private server," she said, twirling it between her fingers. "Bet it's worth a kidney. Or, y'know, a stabilizer."
The crowd parted around a towering figure swathed in layered industrial fabrics. K7-33. His face was obscured by a battered gas mask, and a crane-arm extension whirred over one shoulder, twitching with barely restrained menace.
When his mask turned toward Sekar, the narrow optics flickered. "Wolf-AI hybrid," he rasped, voice grinding like a dying motor. "Rare. NuraTech would pay six million credits for your code."
His mechanical arm swiveled to point lazily at the chip in Nadya's hand. "But I'll take that... and a memory."
Nadya blinked, thrown off by the casual cruelty tucked in his words. "A memory?" she echoed, frowning.
K7-33 gestured to a nearby shelf stacked with vials—small glass prisons glowing in lurid hues, each labeled with trembling hand-painted letters:
JOY. GRIEF. RAGE.
Tiny worlds of emotion, trapped and trafficked like any other commodity in Trenchtown.
"One minute," the vendor said. "Your happiest moment. Extracted. Bottled. Sold." His hand hovered near the vials, almost tenderly. "Empathy modules are trending this cycle."
Sekar stepped in front of Nadya, a low growl vibrating through her chest plate. "We trade code," she said. "Nothing more."
A dry, grinding laugh rattled from K7-33's mask. "Ethics? Here?" His crane-arm snapped out, tossing a spider-like device onto the battered counter. It writhed faintly—tiny synaptic tendrils flexing, hungry for a host.
"The chip... and the wolf's memory of Lina," K7-33 said, his voice cutting the thick air like a knife. "Final offer."
Nadya's gut clenched. Lina. Even the name sent a ripple through Sekar's carefully guarded posture. Memories of soft hands, laughter shared in hidden places—things that should have been safe, sacred.
[Query: Risk Lina's safety for the mission?]
[Override: Negative.]
The decision was immediate. It had to be.
Nadya slammed her fist onto the counter, the hollow thud echoing through the crowded alleyway. Her wristpad flared bright, the code on the screen pulsing with hostile intent.
"How about I fry your mask's firmware instead?" she snapped, voice crackling with righteous rage.
For a split second, K7-33's mask glitched, static crawling across the metal surface. Beneath the flicker, a human eye peeked through the mask—bloodshot, terrified, not nearly as machine-cold as he pretended.
He recoiled. And relented.
"Code. Now," he barked, shoving the stabilizer closer.
Nadya handed over the chip with a snort of disgust, snatching up the device before he could change his mind. As they turned to leave, her gaze caught on a sloppily sprayed graffiti tag peeling on the side of the stall:
Everything here is for sale—except the things that matter.
The words stayed with her, bouncing around inside her skull as they melted back into the chaos.
Later, crouched behind a crumbling wall half a klick away, Nadya eyed the stabilizer in her hands like it might bite her.
"This thing better not turn her into a toaster," she muttered, tossing it up and catching it with casual disdain.
Sekar arched one mechanical brow, dry amusement coloring her modulated voice. "Unlikely," she said. "Unless you programmed it."
Nadya laughed, the sound short and sharp, bleeding some of the tension from her chest. For the first time that night, the air didn't seem quite so heavy.
But even as they slipped into the neon shadows once more, the memory of Lina—untouched, unbottled—remained their most precious, most dangerous possession.
And in Trenchtown, that made them targets all over again.
—
The air grew heavier as they ventured deeper into Trenchtown's labyrinthine heart, where light barely pierced the web of sagging neon tarps above. Smoke from cheap synthe-cigs and burnt circuitry clogged the alleys, coating their lungs with each shallow breath. A dimly lit stall emerged between two vendors hawking counterfeit dreams and reprogrammed cortical chips. It was draped in moth-eaten silk, the fabric swaying like mourning flags in the stale breeze.At its center, presiding like a queen over ruin, sat Madam Jumiten.
The cyborg smuggler was a grotesque symphony of flesh and machine. Her left eye, replaced with a battered NuraTech ocular implant, pulsed in a slow, predatory rhythm as she took in Sekar's hulking, wolf-like frame. A neural whip, coiled like a viper around her metallic arm, crackled with latent energy, itching for violence.
Across her counter sprawled the broken body of a dissected Animaloid chassis—its parts gleamed wetly under the sickly neon light, trophies from past trades and betrayals. Jars of liquified code shimmered beside glitching AI cores, each artifact vibrating with corrupted life.
The whip snapped forward with a sound like splitting bone, slicing the air inches from Sekar's muzzle. Sekar didn't flinch, but Nadya instinctively stepped sideways, her holographic hoodie flickering like a disturbed ghost.
"You want the synaptic relay?" Madam Jumiten purred, tapping a spider-like device twitching among the wreckage on her shelf—the final piece they needed to stabilize Lina's faltering neural link.
"Trade me a fragment of your code," Jumiten continued, her voice like oil slipping across broken glass. "Not the junk. I want the good stuff. The protocols that let you..." Her grin widened, a sick parody of kindness. "Feel."
Nadya shoved forward, throwing a hard glare that bounced off Jumiten's oily smugness. "No deal, Jiao. That code's got Lina's safety baked into it. You'll just flip it to NuraTech for a fat payday."
Jumiten chuckled, the sound like a worn drive grinding against stripped gears. Her ocular implant zoomed in on Sekar's flickering optics, hunger sharpening every edge of her expression. "Oh, sweet girl," she said. "I'll sell it to everyone. Imagine it—killing machines that care before they pull the trigger. Poetic, no?"
Sekar stood motionless, but deep inside her core, warning algorithms surged.
[Ethical Protocol 3.1: Prevent misuse of adaptive code.]
[Override Attempt: Survival of Subject Lina - Critical Threat Level: 88%.]
[Recommended Action: Proceed.]
A shadow stirred behind Sekar's optics—an old memory: Brawijaya, gaunt and feverish, soldering
the delicate threads of her empathy module late into the night.
"This is your soul, Sekar. Guard it like breath."
Her claws dented the battered flooring, the sound lost beneath the din of Trenchtown's chaos.
"The code fragment..." Sekar rasped, her voice glitching as protocols warred inside her. "It could be weaponized. Used to enslave."
Jumiten's laughter was sharp and hollow. "Could? Darling, everything in this market could. That's the point."
Nadya's hand found Sekar's hackles, grounding her, urgent. "Don't. We'll find another way. We always do."
Sekar's internal processes screamed with conflict. There was no time. Lina's life was bleeding out by the hour.
"There is no other way," Sekar growled, her voice breaking into static, desperate and resigned.
Madam Jumiten twirled her whip lazily, savoring the tension like a cat toying with dying prey. "Tick-tock, Codebreaker," she whispered.
Sekar's head dipped in silent defeat. "A fragment," she said, each syllable weighing like stone. "Only the emotional regulation subroutines. Nothing more."
Madam Jumiten's ocular implant pulsed faster, a leech sensing blood. "Deal."
She produced a jagged vial, its interior laced with circuits ready to leech whatever Sekar offered. As Sekar placed her paw against it, she felt the sharp tug deep within her core—a soft tearing sensation, as if an invisible thread of herself was being unraveled.
Nadya leaned in, her voice low and bitter. "This is gonna backfire like a glitched hoverbike at rush hour."
Sekar couldn't argue. She felt the hollow space left behind even before the siphoning ended.
The vial glowed faintly now, cradling Sekar's stolen empathy like a newborn star trapped in glass. Madam Jumiten held it up to the flickering light, her smile strangely tender.
"Look at it weep," she murmured. "Almost makes me believe in souls."
Sekar's gaze, colder than any machine's, met hers across the counter.
"You sold yours long ago," she said quietly, her voice a broken thread lost in the electric hum of the dying market.