The knife goes in quiet. It sounds more like a soft punch when the man's gut encounters Gray's fist wrapped around the blade's handle. Blood spouts from the wound when he yanks the knife free and transfers it to his other hand, swift as a card shark at a casino.

He slashes the man's throat. One long, swift arc.

Adrenaline goads Zef's heart into a gallop. It makes time slow. He sees it all in too much detail. The wet suction noise of the knife coming free. The sloppy spatter of blood hitting the opposite window, the one with the hot pink dick graffiti. The man himself. Mid-forties, five o'clock shadow, bandana around his neck, plaid button-down. Looks like the uncle who hangs out at craft breweries drinking punk IPA's off wooden paddles.

He's not dead, yet. He holds his neck and reaches as if to steady himself on Gray's shoulder. The lights of Gray's tattoos flash erratically again. He grits his teeth, like it's an effort to use his gild. The man's hand never reaches its destination. Sparks erupt from the gold-plated implant in his head. His eyes roll back. He spasms then crumples like a dropped doll, smoke boiling from his implant.

One person screams. Another hits the emergency button. Passengers force the closing doors to the train open again, fleeing the violence. Swift but orderly. Like this happens a lot.

Zef's own fight or flight instincts fail him, settling instead on freeze. He can't compute what's going on. Gray reaches for him with a slick, bloody hand. His grip on Zef's wrist is iron and brooks no argument. Too strong for his size. Zef recoils so hard against the seat he cracks his skull on the window.

Gray says, "We gotta go, Zef."

"You killed him," Zef says. The man on the floor definitely isn't breathing. The smell of oxidising blood and burnt out electronics fills the train car. There's something else, though.

Gray snarls of frustration. "Run now, talk later."

Fear pilots Zef's legs into obeying, but as he's jumping over the body, he notices something. The fall pulled the dead man's bandana askew, exposing his neck.

A spidery finger of ink curls against his throat.

Just a normal tattoo, or an implant like Gray's?

Panic makes it hard to put the pieces together. Gray yanks him out into throngs of people. Some notice the state of Gray or recognize him from the train. They gasp and bolt away. Zef's brain scrambles to catch up to his body. What's safest? Comply with the dangerous man who killed someone in cold blood, try to avoid a similar fate, or run for it?

No logical options, just instincts.

Instinct says get away from him right damn now. Zef rips his hand away. A perfect bloody print coils around his wrist like a bracelet. The sight of it strikes him from two directions. He's got a dead man's blood on him, and it got there because Gray touched him. The photos from Rylan's office and the blood on Gray's hands and the dead man's blank stare on the subway all haunt him.

"Zef." Gray's voice rumbles, calm like distant thunder instead of an up close whip crack. He reaches for Zef's hand again. "We need to get far away—"

"Do not touch me." Gray's own words fire out of Zef's mouth. He doesn't sound calm. He sounds desperate. Hysterical with fear. Dysphoria-inducingly shrill. "Get away from me."

"I can explain all that—"

"Explain? You just shanked a guy."

"He wasn't— If you just trust me!"

"Trust you? I'm going home. Leave me alone."

Zef turns to leave, but a hand grips his elbow. The gloved one this time. "At least take this."

Gray thrusts the closed switchblade, still bloody, into Zef's hand.

Zef drops it. It clatters in the gravel between them. "I'm not taking the murder weapon so you can pin it on me!"

"Zef!" There it is. The thunder close by. A whip crack. Booming. Testosterone really popped off and gave Gray a baritone. "Just listen. You notice anyone following you lately? People hanging around and watching you?"

"No—" Zef snaps but cuts himself short.

He recalls the goons outside his apartment. They had the same tattoos as Gray. He'd assumed Gray put them there.

That guy on the train had a tattoo, too.

It makes no sense. If the tech belongs to CyberSuite, and Gray works for them, why are they fighting one another? Following Zef?

Gray watches the confusion playing out on his face. He picks the knife off the ground. Haltingly, he takes Zef's shaking hand and folds his fingers around it. It seems to take a concerted effort for him to continue holding Zef's hand closed. Like Zef's hand scalds his. A complicated slurry of emotion clouds his face, the tendons of his neck taut with the things swallowed down.

All he says is, "You should carry something. It's not safe, this city. "

Zef comes to himself with a jolt and rips his hand away. Takes several steps backward. "'Cause of people like you."

Zef turns and runs. He doesn't look back.

Later, Zef sits on the floor of his shower while the water dribbles off the curling ends of his hair. It's lukewarm, never quite heats up. Rust coloured, too. Always like that, not just when he's cleaning blood off himself.

He dropped the knife in his sink and left it there. The tattooed gang are still outside his apartment. They didn't bother him. Just watched him throw himself out of the elevator and through his apartment door. He wonders if there's blood on the biometric lock he'll have to clean off later.

A message from Gray comes through on his HUD.

>> Please let me explain.

Gray murdered a guy. Zef saw it. What explanation's gonna make that right?

Zef blinks the text away. Water runs through his eyes. It's absolutely a day for sitting in the shower and crying, but it's also late. He has work tomorrow morning.

The events cycle ruinously in his head. The trip to the industrial quarter. Gray's implants fritzing. The sick punch of Gray's knife gutting that man. The tattoos shared by him, the dead guy, and the goons outside Zef's apartment.

What is it? Some kind of CyberSuite civil war?

He doesn't have enough of the pieces to figure it out. He could ask Gray for an explanation, but he doesn't know if he can trust Gray's answers. So far, Gray has bitten his head off for touching him, stalked Zef to his hometown, and murdered a man in front of him.

He also bought Zef dinner, rescued him from a mugging, got the repair parts for his dad's implants...and willingly gave Zef the key to capturing him.

With no idea how else to parse the events of the day, Zef opens the data on Gray's implants.

He pores over the schematics and program code for the entire hour until he feels about as light and airy as the mouldy grout in his shower.

Gray's tech is a wonder of engineering even if Zef looks beyond the aesthetic genius of nanotech, light up tattoos, which are spiffy as hell but largely superficial.

No, the real coup de gras of the whole thing is how it turns Gray into some kinda demi-god.

According to these schematics, Gray's implants connect to his brainstem, skeleton, muscles, ligaments—everything. They respond to both mental instruction, like typical brain implants, and to physical impulses. When threatened, the gild doses him with adrenaline and steroids. Turns him into some super-charged, super-strong, super-fast comic book hero. Or villain.

Hilarious, given he's got the dimensions of a dog you can squirrel away in a handbag. Not funny when Zef considers his proximity to a guy who committed murder in less time than it takes most people to decide what to eat for breakfast.

That's not the worst of it. He can interface with and hack anything on a network connection. Rylan briefed Zef on this, but not the extent of it. In today's world, it's a veritable key to the city. The door to your house? Unlocked with a snap of his fingers. Your self-driving car? Rerouted. Now you're on a road trip to Uruguay. Your cybernetic arm? World's worst game of 'Stop hitting yourself!'

Zef pictures everyone and everything's connection to the net as a string. Gray's the puppeteer giving the strings a good yank.

The skinny: what Rylan wants sounds dead impossible unless Zef can find a way to disable the implants.

He gets out of the shower and dries off, then retrieves a capsule of testosterone from behind the cracked mirror cabinet. His last dose until he can afford a refill. Sitting on the toilet, he opens the port on his thigh and removes the empty capsule, replacing it with the full one. The implant's a bit more convenient than injections, allowing for a slow release of T over the course of two weeks. As the port closes, he rubs a hand over the new leg hair carpeting his thighs and swallows the rising lump in his throat.

He's got to get his shit together. Catch Gray. Keep his job. Get his dad some new legs and himself a fresh dose of trans fuel.

He turns back to the code, poring over it line for line.

There's one bit that shows promise. Some kind of override or command switch. Something that code-locks Gray's access to his implants and reroutes it through a third party system. But the details of how to register that third party system, or what that system even is? Not specified. There's only one registered. One computer in a world full of computers that could give Zef the override for this hot piece of terminator ass and render him harmless.

But the registration in the code is just a serial number. A bit of digging reveals nothing. This serial number, the panacea to Zef's problems? Far as the net is concerned, it doesn't exist.

Unsurprising. CyberSuite wouldn't exactly be volunteering that information to the public. But he could still ask Rylan if she knows the identity of Gray's handler.

As he sits in his grotty apartment in a scratchy towel, picking over his memories with Gray and the information in his file, the threads of a plan start to weave together. Dee's comment about the blackout. The net connectivity fritzing on the subway. The override codes. Maybe they could...

While Zef makes himself powdered eggs in the microwave, the plan comes together piece by piece. It's wild, and there's one flaw in it, but...

He might just have the means to capture Gray.

That is, if he's brave enough to see him again.

~***~

There are three more messages from Gray in the morning.

>>Zef, c'mon.

>>ZEF

>>For fuck's sake, answer me. Least let me know you're safe.

Safe. There's that word again. As wildly hypocritical as the first time it left Gray's blood-speckled mouth. It begs the question what other hidden danger Zef's in.

Of course. There's every chance Gray is lying to save face, but...

Why? What does he get out of this thing they're doing?

Each text came exactly an hour apart. Did Gray even sleep? Zef scowls at the ceiling. He blinks the texts away, but they're glued to the back of his eyelids like light imprints after staring into the sun.

If he was going to enact his plan to catch Gray, they'd have to be on speaking terms. He'd have to respond eventually.

Today, though, he can easily push his Gray problems to the back of his mind, because today is it. The day he gets his top surgery.

With everything going on, he hadn't really gotten time to think about it. To prepare. Once upon a time, he might have been anxious about it. Not now. Not after waiting so long.

Tonight, he will come home and take off his shirt and— no binder. Just a flat chest with the filigree gold finish he'd chosen. And bandages, but whatever, those'll be temporary.

It makes the harrowing events of the past week feel worth it.

The office is quiet and sterile when he arrives. No longer crawling with soldiers. Compared to Zef's first day, it's positively zen. He's a few minutes early. Early enough to login and get a headstart on the lung filter implant, now he's finished learning how to use the software from hell.

Zef opens the shared folder designated for all the lung filter's files. A red error flashes across his HUD.

>>LungFilter2.0 access revoked.

He tries again but gets the same message. With a knot in his throat, he checks his email for any information of access changes. Maybe they need to upgrade his access level? But it's his project. He'd transferred those files from his personal drive at the end of his first day. Set up the folder himself. He should be the administrator.

Just like that, he loses a little of the pep in his step.

Nav arrives a few seconds shy of 9 o'clock, saying, "I swear, every morning. Every morning, the train's delayed. One day we're missing drivers, the next technical errors, the next it's a jumper—we live in the future, yeah? Thousands of years in technological advancement, but in Neorleans you can't catch a timely train— What? You look like you've been slapped."

The jumper comment rattles him up, and now the topic of trains reminds him of the murder he witnessed on one. Zef switches to the topic that had initially wigged him out. "System says the access to my file's been revoked."

"Oh, that. Don't freak out."

Zef freaks out. Silently. His heart rate ticks like a cartoon bomb. "Okay."

They sigh. "You're freaking out. Okay, it's a bit of good news, bad news. C'mon. Fresh air first."

Nav leads the way to a door leading out onto a balcony. The shriek of car horns and commuter traffic blares over the wind. The noise will cover their conversation, but the wall of windows behind them doesn't afford much privacy besides. Zef leans his back against it so no one inside can see his face while he gets whatever bad news lies on the back of his revoked access. He can hazard a guess.

They're taking his project away from him.

"You mind if I vape?" Nav pulls a shisha pen from their pocket.

Zef rubs his elbows. "Isn't that, like, haram?"

"Mind your business. I need something to calm the nerves. Besides, we're a little tied up around which implants are haram or not, and nobody can decide if the good outweighs the harm or vice versa. Let me have this."

Zef shakes his head. "I'm not judging. I'm delaying the inevitable. They're taking my project away, aren't they?"

Nav puts the shisha pen between their lips and presses on the firing button for a long time while inhaling. They let out the breath, shoulders sagging. "Yeah."

Zef's chest burns like he swallowed lithium. "But it's my idea. My work. It took years."

"I know. But once you're an employee, all the ideas you put on their servers? Well, I'm not telling you anything you don't already know."

Just like that. He put his invention on their computers, and they own it. Bionic Capital didn't even have him on payroll for twenty-four hours before taking something he spent years developing out of trash and his meagre spare time.

The worst part isn't losing the rights to his tech, though. The worst part is he knew the risks and thought it'd be worth it for a steady salary. Now it's happened, he's not sure the gamble paid off. He's got a salary, sure. He's got surgery scheduled. He's also got a dangerous side project to capture an unhinged assassin and lost his intellectual property to boot.

Nav watches his face closely, lips pursed. "I know apologies aren't worth much, but I'm sorry. I'd say you should have patented it and tried to sell it to a venture cap or something, but we both know how that would go."

Yep. Part one: Zef couldn't afford the patent. Part two: even if he could, they'd find a part of the patent that went unprotected and make their own version with cheaper materials.

The balcony is narrow and several dozen stories up. Across the street is an ugly skyscraper, wall-to-wall windows through which Zef can see more peons like him gesturing at their computers, lining the pockets of a CEO with the time and energy and life they'll never get back.

He rubs his face with his hands. "Any reason in particular our lord commander deemed me not good enough to work on my own damn project?"

Nav takes the shisha pen out of their mouth and taps their implant. "Mhm. Maybe it'll make up for the— you know."

A file transfer request pings on Zef's HUD.

>>Accept file transfer ProjectSerenity

>>Signature pending on ProjectSerenityNDA

>>Error: transfer not authorised without NDA signature.

Belatedly, Nav says, "Oh, and there's an NDA attached."

"Yeah. I can see that."

"Sorry. It won't let me transfer the file unless you sign it."

Zef has an inclination just from the project title what this could be, but he doesn't dare believe it. "Do I have a choice?"

"Not really. Unless you don't want to be part of their new, shiny project. In which case, you'll get grunt work."

What more can they take from him? What does it matter? He came for the security, the money, the medical care. Now he has to stay, or all the shit he's in will be for nothing.

He hastily signs.

The file transfers. He opens it.

From the first few lines of the summary, Zef's lungs need more than a filter to breathe properly. Because this? Project Serenity?

It's his dream job.