She looks at him like he’s strange. “Bread.”
“And how’s business?” he asks, his tone deceptively casual. Whatever he’s doing, she shouldn’t fall for it. “Are your profits steady?”
The woman smirks. “Well,” she begins, her voice gaining a bit of confidence, “my net profit increased by about seven percent last quarter, thanks to a more efficient supply chain I started. I’ve also been optimizing my pricing strategy based?—”
He makes his funny little mouth movement again. The woman freezes, and she, too, is roughly dragged away.
“But—” she begins to protest, but her voice cuts off. She’s intelligent, and it looks like it cost her a ticket aboveground.
Okay, so far, I’ve learned two things: Don’t be funny. Don’t be smart.
I tremble a little, despite being as sober as a judge. This man’s rules are impossible to predict, each one crashing down like an axe from above. The uncertainty is maddening. The place is as quiet as a storage room now; all the hissing and dripping seems to have stopped.
The man’s gloved hand slips into his coat before pulling out a slender metallic wand that hums softly as he activates it. The device emits a faint blue light, which he passes first over me, then over the other woman.
The high-pitched beep makes me jump. The girl in front of me, the one with the cozy face and large nose, has triggered his alloy detector
The man’s lips curl into a sneer. “Cybernetic tibia,” he says with disdain.
“No!” the girl cries out in genuine surprise. “There must be some mistake.”
He moves the wand over her body again, and the harsh beep sounds. “Ninety-three percent titanium, seven percent nickel,” the man declares, his voice dripping with cold indifference. “Did you think we wouldn’t check?”
“I didn’t know—I had bone cancer as a child. It must be from that—I swear, I didn’t know!” Her desperation is palpable, every word tinged with fear for what comes next.
But the man is unmoved. He’s heard it all before, or perhaps he simply doesn’t care. “Get out,” he commands, and she’s dragged away. Her screams cut through the bar until the door closes behind her, leaving nothing but silence.
That sucked.
Now it’s just me—the last one standing. My heart is galloping in my chest. The man turns to me, his gaze hidden behind those mirrored lenses. I force myself to stand tall, though my legs feel like ribbons beneath me. The sweat trickling down my back, the sour tang of my own fear mingling with the onion on my breath. He takes a step closer, close enough that I can see my own distorted reflection in his sunglasses.
He wrinkles his nose, a faint curl of disgust twisting his mouth as he takes in my appearance. Or is that just his default expression? Hard to tell. My mind races, trying to remember every little instruction, every piece of advice the shopkeeper gave me, but it all seems to dissolve into nothing.
He runs the wand up my body, then down.
I squeeze my eyes shut, bracing myself for the inevitable. Any second now, that chrome-masked goon will come and drag me away, just like the others. Instead, there’s a pause—a long, tense moment where the world seems to hold its breath. Then something unexpected happens.
He smiles. “What is your allegiance to the Iku family?”
I scramble for a second, then remember an old radio jingle. “Iku Foods: they make the meat we get to eat.”
He rolls his eyes. “What is your skill set?”
“I don’t know how to do much of anything,” I say. I realize I’m pigeoning my toes and talking like a baby.How do people fall for this?
He gets a whiff of my onion breath, and his eyes tighten.
Well, it’s more of a grimace, really, like his mouth isn’t quite sure how to form the shape. But it’s there, and it’s directed at me.
“You’ll do nicely.”
Chapter6
The Chins
So, here I am, in a skeevy bar alongside three men with identical faces. I seriously cannot tell them apart. They have all been modified into aggressive uniformity. For expediency’s sake, I’ll call them the Chins.
I am unceremoniously yanked out of the bar and shoved into what can only be described as a relic from a bygone era: an ancient rail-cart platform that looks like it’s one broken axle away from a total fucking death spiral. These carts, once a proud part of the underground’s industrious network, have long since been retired, left to rust and rot in the forgotten corners of the mines. But this particular beauty was dragged out of some scrapyard hell, its jagged, rusted edges just begging to introduce a new strain of tetanus to the world.
