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"Three minutes." The voice crackled in my ear, barely cutting through the hum of the alley generators. "Drones just hit Grid Seven. You got three minutes before they box your route."
I pressed my palm against the wall, fingers slick with rain and someone else's blood. The body was still warm when I rolled it over. Still wearing a courier vest just like mine, except his had burn marks where the kill shot went through.
"Copy," I said. Kept my voice flat. Didn't tell Jon I was stripping a corpse.
The wrist chip came off easier than it should've. One twist, one pull, and the cuff popped free with a wet click. Credit balance flashed across the tiny screen: 47,000.
Forty-seven thousand.
I shoved it in my pocket and ran.
The alley spat me out into Lower Deck access, all rusted grates and flickering ad-screens selling things nobody down here could afford. My boots hit metal, loud enough to wake every junkie in the stacks, but I didn't slow. Couldn't. The drones were fast, and they didn't care if you had a reason.
"Two minutes," Jon said. "Raina, I'm serious. They're running a kill-sweep tonight."
"I know."
"Then why are you still—"
"Because Micah's medicine costs sixty-two thousand and I've got forty-seven on me right now." I vaulted over a pile of stripped cables, landed hard, kept moving. "You do the math."
Silence. Then: "Where'd you get forty-seven?"
"Don't ask."
"Raina—"
"I said don't."
The comm went quiet. I knew that tone. Jon did the numbers same as me, every night, watching Micah's oxygen count drop while the clinic bill climbed. He knew what forty-seven thousand meant. He also knew what stripping a dead runner could cost you if the wrong people found out.
I hit the emergency stairs and took them three at a time. My chest burned. My legs screamed. Didn't matter. Micah's face floated in my head, all hollow cheeks and blue lips, the way he looked last week when I couldn't scrape together enough for the good inhaler.
Not this time.
This time I had forty-seven thousand, and the clinic opened at six, and if I could just get home without the drones tagging me—
The air changed. Went cold. Went electric.
I knew that feeling.
"Jon."
"I see them. Rooftop, your two o'clock. Two units. They've got thermals."
"Can I make the junction?"
"Not unless you sprout wings."
I swore and cut left, into the old market tunnel. It stank like piss and fried synth-meat, and the ceiling was so low I had to duck. My shoulder scraped the wall. Something wet soaked through my jacket.
Behind me, rotors whined.
"They're in the tunnel," Jon said. His voice cracked. "Raina, they're right on you."
"I know!"
Red laser light swept the walls. I dropped, slid under a busted vendor cart, came up running on the other side. My knee cracked against concrete. Pain shot up my thigh but I shoved it down, ignored it, kept my eyes on the junction fifty meters ahead.
Forty meters.
Thirty.
The whine got louder. Closer. I could hear the targeting system beeping, that high-pitched digital shriek they used right before—
I threw myself through the junction door and slammed it shut. The bolt clicked home half a second before something hit the other side hard enough to dent the metal.
"You're clear," Jon said. He sounded like he'd just run the whole route with me. "For now. But they'll loop around. You've got maybe ninety seconds."
I leaned against the door, gasping. My hands were shaking. The pocket with the chip felt like it weighed a hundred pounds.
Forty-seven thousand.
Enough for Micah's meds and maybe two months' rent. Enough to stop hearing him wheeze in the middle of the night. Enough to—
My comm buzzed. Not Jon this time. A new frequency. Clean signal, government-grade encryption.
"Raina Holt." The voice was male. Calm. Cold as steel. "You just made a very expensive mistake."
I froze.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"The wrist chip. The one you pulled off the runner in Grid Seven." A pause. "The one in your left jacket pocket."
My hand moved to my pocket before I could stop it. The chip was still there, warm against my palm, screen dark.
"Who is this?"
"Someone who's been tracking that chip for three days. Someone who knows exactly what it does." His voice dropped. "And someone who's standing outside your apartment right now, listening to your brother try to breathe."
The world stopped.
"You touch him and I'll—"
"You'll what? Run? You just burned every safe route in the lower decks. Fight? You don't even own a weapon." He sounded almost bored. "No. You'll come home. You'll bring the chip. And we'll have a conversation about what happens next."
The line went dead.
I stared at the comm. My brain was spinning, throwing up plans and discarding them just as fast. I could dump the chip. I could run to Jon's place. I could call the sector patrol and—
And what? Tell them I stole from a corpse? Get Micah flagged as a dependent of a felon?
No.
I shoved the comm back in my pocket and started moving. The route home was burned, so I took the old maintenance line, the one that ran under the water recyclers. It smelled like rust and chemicals, and twice I had to wade through ankle-deep sludge, but it spit me out two blocks from my building.
I came up through the access hatch, slow and quiet. The street was empty. No drones. No patrol. Just the usual flicker of dying streetlights and the hum of the power grid.
My building looked the same as always. Fourteen floors of cracked plascrete and broken windows, half the units dark because nobody could afford the electric bill. I scanned the shadows. Didn't see anyone.
But he'd known about the chip. About Micah. About the pocket.
He was here.
I took the stairs instead of the elevator. Kept my back to the wall. Listened for footsteps, for breathing, for anything that didn't belong.
Nothing.
Our door was locked. I keyed in the code, pushed it open, stepped inside.
Micah was asleep on the couch, oxygen line taped to his nose, chest rising and falling in that shallow, uneven rhythm that made my stomach clench every time I heard it. He looked small. Looked breakable.
And sitting in the chair across from him, hands folded, face half-shadowed, was a man I'd never seen before.
He didn't stand. Didn't move. Just looked at me with eyes that could've been gray or blue or nothing at all, and said, "Close the door."
I closed it.
"Chip," he said.
I pulled it out, held it up. "This what you want?"
"No." He tilted his head. "I want you to put it on."
I stared at him. "You're joking."
"Do I look like I'm joking?"
He didn't. He looked like a man who'd killed people for less than forty-seven thousand credits and slept fine afterward.
"What happens if I say no?"
His eyes flicked to Micah. Didn't say a word. Didn't have to.
I looked at the chip. Looked at my brother. Felt the weight of every shit choice I'd ever made pressing down on my shoulders.
"Why?"
"Because that chip doesn't hold credits," the man said. "It holds a program. A very illegal, very expensive program that someone died trying to deliver. And the only way to unlock it is to bond it to a new host."
"And you need me because—"
"Because it's biometrically locked to low-deck courier DNA now. Because you touched it while it was still warm. Because you're already in the system." He leaned forward. "And because if you don't put it on, I stop being polite."
My hand tightened around the chip. The edges bit into my palm.
"This is insane."
"This is survival," he said. "Yours. His. Maybe even mine, if we're lucky."
I should've thrown it at him. Should've run. Should've done anything except what I did next.
I snapped the chip onto my wrist.
It locked with a click that sounded too loud, too final. The screen flared white. My whole arm went cold, then hot, then cold again. Something crawled up my veins like ice water and burrowed into the base of my skull.
I gasped. Tried to pull it off. It wouldn't move.
Letters scrolled across my vision, red and sharp and impossibly clear:
HOST CONFIRMED. BIOMETRIC SYNC COMPLETE. DEATH TIMER STARTED.
I looked up at the man, still sitting calm as death in my apartment, and he smiled for the first time.
"Welcome to the game, Raina," he said.
And then the world caught fire inside my head.