We traversed the cityscape via rooftops, my cybernetic legs eating the distance effortlessly despite the damage sustained during our escape. With Lisa secured against my back, her chrome arms locked around my shoulders, we made swift progress toward Red Fusion. The rain had stopped completely, though water still dripped from pipes and ledges, catching occasional gleams from the city's scattered lights below.

  "We're almost there," I announced as Boz's shop came into view—a small comfort in the expanding chaos of our situation.

  I descended to street level in a controlled slide down a drainpipe, moving carefully through shadows to avoid unwanted attention. The familiar storefront with its faded "Bozanza" sign provided a strange sense of relief. In my two years as a Courier, Boz's shop had been the one constant—a place where broken parts could be fixed, where problems had solutions, provided you had enough credits.

  "Are you sure about this?" Lisa asked as I gently set her down, her voice carrying a note of wariness.

  "I am," I replied, though her skepticism had planted a seed of doubt. "Boz was the first person to help me when I became a Courier. He may be motivated by profit, but he's reliable."

  Memory fragments flickered through my mind—my first day as a Courier, disoriented and wounded after a disastrous experience. Homeless and desperate, I'd stumbled upon Boz's shop that night, with nowhere to go. Boz had taken one look at my bloodied form and, after verifying I still had access to credits, offered me a place to stay. He'd spent that night selling me my first leg enhancements, his greedy eyes lighting up as I paid for each component, each upgrade, each adjustment—yet he'd been thorough, professional, fundamentally decent beneath the transparent avarice.

  I pushed open the door, the familiar electronic chime announcing our arrival. The shop was dim as always, illuminated only by scattered work lights that cast long shadows across the cluttered space. Cybernetic components hung from hooks in the ceiling, while shelves overflowed with parts organized in a system only Boz himself could comprehend.

  "Boz?" I called, my voice echoing through the cramped shop.

  No response came.

  We moved cautiously toward the counter at the back, where Boz normally held court amidst his technological kingdom. The NeuroDoc chair stood empty, its mechanical arms folded into standby position.

  "Boz?" I called again, louder this time.

  A rustling sound came from his office behind the counter, followed by the creak of a door opening. Boz emerged, a half-finished cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, smoke curling around his metallic face as his signature grin spread wide. His multiple optical sensors adjusted with mechanical precision to focus on us, the central eye expanding as smoke drifted lazily through its scanning beam.

  "Hello!" he greeted, his mechanical eyes whirring slightly as they zoomed in. "What a pleasant surprise!"

  "Hey, Boz," I began, "sorry to drop in like this, but we need your help."

  He strolled toward the counter, his augmented face maintaining that perpetual smile that had always unnerved me slightly. The five optical sensors embedded in his metallic skull performed their usual dance—two smaller ones on each side scanning the periphery while the larger central eye remained fixed on me.

  "Of course! Always for my favorite customer," he replied with practiced warmth. "How are those new leg upgrades treating you?"

  "They're great—saved my life today, actually," I replied, noting how his gaze lingered on the damaged ceramic plating of my right hand.

  Boz's attention shifted to Lisa, his optical sensors adjusting to scrutinize her. "And who might this be?" he inquired, the central eye expanding slightly.

  "I'm Lisa," she replied tersely. "A friend."

  "And what can I do for my friend's friend?" Boz asked, his tone suggesting he already knew the answer would involve credits.

  "We need a safe place for a little while," I explained. "Somewhere we won't be bothered."

  Boz tilted his head, scratching his chin in a gesture of contemplation while taking a long, deliberate drag from his cigarette. The ember brightened, casting an eerie orange glow across his features. "Are you in trouble?" he probed, exhaling a cloud of smoke that momentarily obscured his widening smile, though his tone suggested he already knew the answer.

  Lisa and I exchanged glances but remained silent.

  "More stress in Red Fusion than usual," Boz continued, lowering his voice as he tapped ash from his cigarette. "Military types around—not Neo Future security, not MainFrame either—something different altogether. They're asking questions, searching for someone." His central eye expanded further, focusing intently on my face while the smaller sensors swept across Lisa's features. "Any connection to you, I wonder?"

  My stomach tightened. If Boz had already been approached, our situation was more precarious than I'd realized.

  "But," he added, gesturing expansively, "my paying customers are always welcome here."

  The expected proposition. I'd always known where Boz's true loyalties resided—with whoever offered the most credits.

  "How much?" I asked directly.

  He rubbed his chin again, his grin widening as he feigned consideration though it was evident he'd calculated the figure the moment we walked in.

  "50,000," he announced, his smile abruptly disappearing as he named the price. "I know they're looking for you now, and I'll hide you, but it's dangerous." The grin returned, somehow more predatory than before. "This is a really good price for you... my friend."

  It was a substantial sum, but our options were dwindling by the minute. Before I could respond, Lisa cut in.

  "Okay," she agreed.

  I turned to her, surprised by her quick capitulation, when bright lights suddenly pierced through the shop's front window. We instinctively dropped into a crouch as the beam swept across the interior.

  The sound of Boz activating the security lock at the front door was immediately followed by someone attempting to enter. Whoever was outside tested the handle, then shone a powerful flashlight through the glass, searching the shop's interior methodically. Fortunately, Boz's chaotic collection of merchandise created a labyrinthine shield that concealed our presence.

  Boz leaned toward us, his cigarette nearly finished, its ember dangerously close to his lips as his grin stretched wider than I'd ever seen it before. Smoke curled directly into my face as he whispered, "200,000," his voice a mere whisper.

  "Are you out of your mind?" Lisa hissed.

  "I could open the door," Boz suggested, straightening up and taking a step back from us. "Let whoever wants in."

  I caught Lisa's eye and nodded slightly. We had no choice.

  "Alright," I agreed. "200,000."

  "Transfer now," Boz demanded, holding his gaze steady until my heads-up display confirmed the transaction was complete.

  He nodded once, then retreated toward the front door. A message appeared on my display:

  "BOZ: Go hide in my office."

  I grabbed Lisa's arm, and we moved in a crouch behind the counter, slipping into Boz's back office. As I gently closed the door behind us, we could hear the NeuroDoc unlocking the shop entrance.

  "Do you trust him?" Lisa whispered as muffled voices drifted through the closed door.

  I considered the question carefully. My first instinct was to say yes—Boz had been the one who'd walked me through my first days as a Courier, who'd repeatedly repaired and upgraded my cybernetics, sometimes working through the night to ensure I could return to work quickly. Yet the ease with which he'd quadrupled his price at the first sign of danger gave me pause.

  "I trust his greed," I finally replied. "He won't betray us as long as we're worth more to him intact than otherwise."

  We fell silent, straining to hear the conversation in the main shop. The voices remained too low to distinguish words, but the tone seemed measured, professional—not the chaotic commands of a raid.

  After what felt like an eternity, we heard the shop's entrance close, followed by a single set of footsteps approaching our hiding place.

  "Did he sell us out?" Lisa murmured, her chrome hand tensing.

  "I don't think so," I whispered. "It's only one person coming back."

  The office door swung open to reveal Boz, his perpetual smile still in place. As he stepped inside, however, the grin abruptly vanished, replaced by an uncharacteristically serious expression.

  "One hour," he stated flatly. "That's all that money buys you."

  I nodded, relief flooding through me as I realized he hadn't betrayed us—at least not yet.

  Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

  We rose from our crouched positions, and I took a moment to look around Boz's private office. I was shocked by the stark contrast between the chaotic shop and the meticulous organization of this hidden space. Unlike the chaotic shop floor, this space—approximately three by five meters—displayed meticulous organization. Shelves lined the walls, bearing neatly labeled boxes and precision tools arranged by size and function. A small workbench dominated the back wall, equipped with a mechanical arm terminated in delicate metal pincers, surrounded by an array of specialized tools.

  The contrast between the public-facing shop and this private sanctuary spoke volumes about Boz's true nature—the exterior chaos was carefully cultivated, while his true work environment reflected surgical precision.

  "Any chance there's a computer with an Int4 plug around here?" Lisa asked, her focus returning to our immediate need.

  "No," Boz replied, "but if you need an Int4, my chair has one of those."

  Lisa turned to me, lowering her voice. "We need to examine that memory stick, but I need a way to plug you in too," she whispered.

  "A memory stick?" Boz interjected, his enhanced hearing easily capturing her words.

  Lisa shot him a surprised look.

  "I can hear everything," Boz stated matter-of-factly. "You can use my chair, but..."

  "It's going to cost us?" Lisa interrupted, her tone resigned.

  Boz's grin returned. "20,000," he stated simply.

  "Fine!" Lisa exclaimed, frustration evident in her voice.

  I initiated the transfer without argument. The situation was spiraling beyond our control—but what was another 20,000 credits if it might provide answers to the questions that were now threatening our lives?

  "Follow me," Boz instructed, leading us back into the main shop.

  I settled into the familiar contours of the NeuroDoc chair as Boz connected my neural interface. With practiced efficiency, he opened a small panel on one side of the chair's arm.

  "Where is that key?" he asked, pointing to the Int4 plug visible within the opened compartment.

  I retrieved the memory stick from my pocket, hesitating as I caught Lisa's eye.

  "Are you sure you know how to access the data?" I asked.

  "I think so," she replied, her expression determined despite the uncertainty in her voice.

  I handed her the memory stick, which she promptly connected to the chair's interface. She then turned toward Boz.

  "I need to plug in as well, as an external control," she explained.

  "Of course," Boz agreed readily, tapping commands on the holographic keyboard hovering before him.

  A new panel opened on the opposite arm of the chair, revealing multiple connection ports. Lisa extracted her neural cable and inserted it into one of the inputs.

  "Alright, let's do this," she said, her eyes meeting mine with newfound resolve.

  On my heads-up display, I could see the connection diagram from the NeuroDoc chair, showing Lisa and the memory stick as linked peripherals. I navigated to the file explorer, and—to my astonishment—thousands of files suddenly appeared where previously only the text file containing those two fateful words had been visible.

  "It's working!" I exclaimed. "I can see everything!"

  "Right, it's actually quite simple," Lisa began to explain. "Noah's Soul combined with my neural signature is the authentication key. The two of us together can—"

  Her voice faded abruptly, my vision darkening at the edges before plunging into complete blackness.

  "Wake up! WAKE THE FUCK UP!"

  The voice cut through the darkness, urgent and familiar. I struggled to open my eyes, my system gradually rebooting, the world slowly coming into focus. I found myself lying on the cold floor of Boz's shop, Lisa kneeling over me, her face contorted with rage and fear.

  "WAKE UP!! PLEASE, NOW!"

  "Lisa?" I managed, my voice weak and uncertain.

  "Oh, for fuck's sake, you're finally back," she said, visible relief washing over her features.

  "What happened?" I asked, trying to piece together the fragments of memory.

  "Your so-called 'friend' is a damn turncoat," she spat, rising to her feet.

  As I pushed myself up, the scene came into full view. We were still in Boz's shop, the NeuroDoc chair nearby, displaying error messages across its diagnostic panel. Behind me lay Boz himself, sprawled unconscious on the floor, two of his optical sensors sparking erratically, a mixture of blood and hydraulic fluid leaking from a massive dent in his metallic skull.

  "What the hell?" I exclaimed, shock reverberating through me.

  "We need to go!" Lisa ordered, snatching the memory stick from the chair's interface and pressing it into my palm. "Take it, keep it safe. We need to get out of here, now!"

  I pocketed the key automatically, my eyes still fixed on Boz's unconscious form. "What happened?" I demanded again, trying to reconcile this betrayal with the man who had guided me through my earliest days as a Courier.

  Lisa paused midstride, turning back to glare at Boz's prone figure.

  "Your greedy friend shut you down the moment we accessed the files," she explained, her voice tight with controlled fury. "Then he tried to hack me, assuming I'd be an easy target because I'm not a NeuroSlicer." She punctuated this with a vicious kick to Boz's head, causing another sensor to short out in a shower of sparks.

  "FUCKER!" she shouted, the word echoing in the cluttered shop.

  "My firewalls triggered the moment he breached my basic defenses," she continued. "I detected his attack and realized he was copying the files from the memory stick. I pulled my connection and introduced his face to the business end of my gun."

  "Your gun? The one from—"

  "Didn't see that coming, did you, asshole?" Lisa cut me off, delivering another brutal kick that twisted Boz's head at an unnatural angle.

  I stared at the unconscious NeuroDoc, trying to reconcile this betrayal with the man who had been my most consistent relationship in ToxCity. For two years, I'd brought him my broken parts and my credits. For two years, he'd fixed what was damaged and upgraded what wasn't, squeezing every possible credit from each transaction while still providing genuine value. He had been the closest thing to stability in my chaotic life as a Courier. Yet the moment a better offer presented itself, he'd attempted to sell us out without a second thought. Always helpful, always competent, always—always greedy.

  "He betrayed us," I whispered, the words feeling hollow as they left my lips.

  "He definitely did," Lisa confirmed. "And who knows what else he might've fucking pulled if I hadn't stopped him. For all we know, he sold us out to those people hunting us. We have to move! Now!"

  I nodded, the shock beginning to give way to survival instinct.

  "Hey," I said, placing a hand on Lisa's shoulder to stop her rage-fueled assault on the unconscious NeuroDoc. "Thank you. You saved me."

  She met my gaze, her anger gradually subsiding.

  "We're in this together, right?" she said, the question seeming as much for herself as for me.

  "We are," I confirmed.

  She took my hand from her shoulder, attempting a smile though tension still radiated from her posture.

  "We need to go," she urged. "They might already be on their way."

  "Where can we go?" I asked, acutely aware that our options were dwindling by the minute.

  "This time, I choose," Lisa responded, determination hardening her features. "We're heading to see a real friend, someone they have no fucking way of knowing about."

  "Who?"

  "A friend. It's complicated," she said, her eyes briefly dropping to the floor.

  "I trust you," I replied simply, surprising myself with how true the words felt despite our brief acquaintance.

  She nodded, a genuine smile briefly replacing her grimace.

  "Where are we going?" I asked as we moved toward the exit.

  "Neo Underground."

  The name sent an involuntary shiver down my spine. Neo Underground wasn't merely a place—it was a legend, a cautionary tale, a sprawling network of tunnels, abandoned subway systems, and forgotten infrastructure beneath ToxCity, now home to a separate society so lawless and dangerous that even the most hardened residents of the surface avoided it. If ToxCity was where society went to die, Neo Underground was where the corpse was dismembered and sold for parts.

  Before I could process this, the front door exploded inward with a deafening crash. We vaulted over the counter for cover as a barrage of bullets tore through the shop, shredding cybernetic implants and equipment into a metallic storm.

  "Fuck!" Lisa exclaimed, covering her head as glass and fragments rained down around us.

  I risked a glance over the counter's edge. Four armed operatives in black tactical gear were advancing methodically into the shop, their weapons trained on likely hiding spots, their movements betraying professional training.

  "We're doo—" I began, but the words died in my throat as a familiar pain erupted behind my eyes.

  "Arrrghh!" I cried out, clutching my head as the agony intensified.

  "What is happening?!" Lisa demanded, panic edging into her voice.

  My vision blurred, then split, as if I were suddenly occupying two perspectives simultaneously. The physical world—Boz's shop, Lisa's concerned face, the counter providing our meager cover—began to fade, replaced by a void of absolute darkness.

  Within that void, ghostly representations materialized—four red figures and two blue ones. It took only moments to recognize this as a translucent overlay of Boz's shop, with the red figures representing our attackers and the blue ones Lisa and myself. The perspective was disorienting—I was suddenly viewing the scene from outside my own body, as if floating near the ceiling. I realized with shock that the system was using every available sensor in the room—security cameras, motion detectors, thermal imaging, sonic mapping—to construct this perfect three-dimensional projection of reality.

  Most disconcerting was the way time seemed to crawl to near-stillness. The attackers' movements became glacial, bullets suspended in their trajectories, dust particles hanging motionless in the air. My thoughts raced at impossible speed, processing information at computer rates rather than human ones. What should have been overwhelming instead felt crystal clear, as if I'd suddenly expanded to fill a much larger consciousness.

  What happened next defied explanation. Without conscious thought or effort, I could sense wireless connections forming between my neural interface and the implanted systems in our attackers' bodies. Their cybernetic enhancements, their neural interfaces, their tactical systems—all became visible to me in exquisite detail, laid bare as if I'd been studying them for years.

  Most unsettling was how natural it felt. Though I had never performed a neural hack before, had no training in NeuroSlicing techniques, I navigated systems I shouldn't have recognized with effortless mastery. The entire experience felt like recalling a skill rather than learning one—my mind remembering what my conscious self had never known.

  Time seemed to stretch as I identified every component in their systems—heart regulators, vision enhancement, tactical overlays, communication arrays, muscular amplifiers. Fine red lines materialized in the ethereal view, predicting their movement patterns with statistical precision.

  I could see their next actions before they took them, could sense the electrical impulses racing from their brains to their augmented limbs. For that suspended moment, I understood not just their equipment but their very intentions, reading their tactical algorithms as effortlessly as scrolling through a menu.

  Without hesitation, I acted with a fluidity that felt as natural as breathing. The expertise flowed through me with absolute certainty—I knew exactly which systems to target, precisely how to bypass their security protocols, and the exact sequence of commands needed to achieve catastrophic failure. I severed their brain enhancements from their motor control systems with surgical precision, then moved deeper, accessing each implant beneath their skin. I sent cascading shutdown commands followed by an unbreakable infinite loop function in their emergency protocols.

  As abruptly as it had begun, the experience ended. Time returned to its normal flow, and I snapped back into my physical body. I gasped for air, meeting Lisa's terrified gaze.

  "I got this," I assured her with a confidence I didn't fully understand.

  In the shop beyond our hiding place, all four attackers suddenly screamed in unison, their bodies convulsing as their implants overheated. Flames erupted from beneath their tactical gear as safety systems failed catastrophically, circuits melting, insulation burning, heat sinks becoming incendiary devices within their own bodies.

  "We gotta go," I commanded, seizing Lisa's arm. She stood frozen, staring in shock at the burning operatives, unable to process what she was witnessing. I pulled her forcefully toward the rear exit.

  We burst into the alley behind Boz's shop, the night air a shocking contrast to the acrid smoke filling the building. Behind us, the operatives continued to struggle on the floor, desperate to extinguish the fires consuming them from within.

  "How?" Lisa asked as we paused at the alley's mouth, her eyes wide with astonishment. "How did you do that?"

  I met her gaze, the answer as clear to me as it was inexplicable.

  "Noah."

  In that moment, the realization hit me with stunning clarity—the men at NeoDuck, their implants catastrophically failing, their bodies destroyed by their own technology. I hadn't simply survived that encounter through luck. This was the same power, the same inexplicable skill emerging from somewhere deep within my Receptacle. Or perhaps more accurately, from someone within it.

  Yet doubt still lingered. How could Noah's consciousness exert such control? How could his Soul grant me abilities I'd never possessed? The questions multiplied, but one certainty remained—I was no longer alone in my own mind.