Ryn Varrik's boots sank into the black sludge of the Lower Slums as the city's artificial storm cycle began, acidic rain sizzling against the corroded dome overhead. The air smelled of burning wires and rotting meat - someone must have dumped another batch of failed god-flesh experiments down in the Gutters. He adjusted the straps of his scavenger rig, the weight of today's haul making his shoulders ache. The three mechanized fingers in his bag twitched against his spine like dying spiders.
"Varrik! You look like fresh shit," croaked Old Maro from his junk-stall, the neon sign above him sputtering "Divine Parts - Best Prices" in jagged script. The old man's left eye had been replaced with a stolen Conclave ocular - it whirred as it calculated the worth of Ryn's sack.
"Feel worse," Ryn grunted, wiping black ichor from his breather mask. The filters were down to 12% - he could taste the Maw's poison on his tongue, metallic and wrong.
Maro chuckled, revealing teeth filed to points. "That reactor plating's got Eclipse markings, boy. You steal from the Conclave again?"
Ryn dumped the contents onto the counter - the fingers, the plating, the fractured lens. "Found it in a corpse gully. They can bill the dead."
The ocular lens rolled to a stop, catching the flickering light. For a second, Ryn thought he saw something move inside its depth.
The Bargain
"Five hundred for the fingers," Maro said, poking at the twitching metal. "Seven for the plating. And..." He held up the lens, his good eye narrowing. "Where'd you really get this?"
"Told you. Corpse gully." Ryn's fingers tingled - his Scrap Sense buzzing as the old man's pulse spiked.
Maro leaned close, his breath reeking of cheap synth-gin. "This ain't no mech part, boy. This is a Whisper Choir recorder. You been poking around the Silent Zones?"
Ryn snatched it back. "Nine hundred for the lot or I take it to the Bleeding Market."
They haggled for ten more minutes. Ryn walked away with 1,200 crimson chips and a new knife in his ribs - the kind you couldn't pull out.
Lower Slums - Sector 9
The walk home took him past the usual horrors:
Flesh-Markets where street surgeons peddled "blessed" god-flesh grafts to desperate addicts. A woman screamed as black veins spread up her arm from a fresh implant.
The Chrome Pits, where junkies jacked directly into dead mech cores, chasing the ghost memories of fallen warriors. One twitched on the ground, his mouth foaming pink.
A Conclave patrol stomping through in their mechanized armor, the dynasty's eclipse sigil glowing crimson on their chests. Ryn turned his face away as they passed.
His Scrap Sense itched the whole way - that feeling of being watched. But in the Slums, everyone was always watching.
The Rusted Mirage Clinic
The flickering sign outside spat its broken promise in jagged pink neon - "Rusted Mirage" stuttering into "Trust Me I'm A Doctor" before dying completely. Ryn shouldered through the beaded curtain (each strand a repurposed spinal implant) into the clinic's chemical glow. The air hung thick with antiseptic and jasmine, undercut by something darker - like the Maw's metallic stench bottled as perfume.
Sister Lira's bed stood in the corner, the cleanest place in Sector 9 - which meant the stains on the walls were only mostly blood.
"You're late," came the weak voice from Bed 4.
Ryn's chest tightened before he even turned. Lira looked worse today. The Godrot had spread since yesterday, those black veins now creeping past her collarbones like cracks in shattered glass. Her once-bright eyes were clouding over, the whites turning the color of tarnished silver.
"Got held up," he said, dumping the chips on her bedside table. The sound made the other patients stir - a starving kid in Bed 2, a coughing old man in Bed 5 whose lungs rattled with god-flesh rejection. "Maro tried to screw me on the lens."
Lira's laugh turned into a wet cough. She wiped her mouth with a rag already stained black. "Should've stabbed him."
"Next time." Ryn pulled the chair closer, its legs scraping against the pitted floor. The clinic's air recycler wheezed like a dying animal. "Doc say anything new?"
Lira's fingers - the ones not yet stiff - tapped against his wrist. A childhood signal. Not here.
Behind the counter, Doctor Elyria Voss lounged in a pose that straddled the line between surgeon and courtesan. Her unbuttoned lab coat revealed a corset of woven biomesh that shimmered with each breath, its threads pulsing faintly blue where they crossed the neural shunt embedded in her sternum. She was dissecting a Conclave ocular implant with a scalpel in one hand and smoking a crimson cigarette with the other.
"Stage three Godrot progresses faster when you're stressed, darling," Elyria called without looking up. A sliver of god-metal plating spun from her scalpel and landed in a dish marked "Fragments - Do Not Consume." "Tell your brother about the stasis proposal."
Ryn's grip on Lira's hand tightened. "What stasis proposal?"
The Truth
After lights-out, when the clinic's groans and whimpers faded into something like sleep, Lira pressed her forehead to his and whispered:
"They want to put me in stasis."
Ryn's stomach turned to ice. "For how long?"
"However long it takes you to get the money." Her breath smelled like the Maw - that same metallic decay. "Forty percent chance I wake up. Sixty I... don't."
The numbers punched through him. He'd seen stasis pods in the Bleeding Market - how the rich bought time while the poor rotted. How sometimes they woke up screaming. How sometimes they didn't wake up at all.
Elyria materialized from the shadows, her biomesh corset adjusting as she leaned against the bed frame. "There is another option." She twirled a vial of glowing blue liquid between her fingers. "The Veydrans aren't just hiring guides. They're hiring carriers."
Lira's cloudy eyes widened. "The Death Contract? Ryn, no—"
"Twenty thousand upfront. Eighty on return," Ryn said automatically, his fingers tingling as he looked at Elyria's vial. The alloy casing matched the IV stand - Conclave-grade tech.
"Plus," Elyria purred, pressing the vial into Ryn's palm, "my special cocktail. One drop when the whispers start." Her gold-flecked eyes gleamed. "You're not the first host I've treated, scavenger."
Ryn's breath caught. No one knew about the whispers.
"You don't come back from the deep Maw. Not sane," Lira pleaded.
Ryn pressed their joined hands to his chest. Beneath his ribs, his heart beat too fast. "Got a better idea?"
Silence. Then, so quiet he almost missed it:
"Take me with you."
Elyria's laughter was dark as the Maw itself. "Now that... would be interesting."
The Offer
The Veydran seal burned crimson on his flophouse door that night - an actual physical missive, not some cheap hologram. The paper alone was worth fifty chips.
Inside, only three lines:
Heir-Apparent Veydran requires guide to Godspike Sector.
20,000 chips advance. 80,000 upon return.
Sunrise at West Lock.
Ryn stared at the words until they blurred. Outside, the city hummed with its usual nightmares - screams from the Chrome Pits, the distant thrum of dynasty ships, the ever-present whisper of the Maw beneath it all.
Lira's stasis would cost 16,000. The actual cure? Maybe ten times that.
He looked at his reflection in the cracked mirror - the scars from last month's reactor blast, the new gray streak in his hair from close radiation, the eyes that had seen too much.
Not the first bad decision I've made.
Won't be the last.