The late afternoon sun punched through the bar’s front door like a solar flare through a dirty viewport—sharp, white-hot, and uninvited. For a moment, the dim interior washed out in blinding glare, bleeding over the chipped plastic and smeared glass like an overexposed vid frame.
Temperature spiked hard, fast—air turning dense and metallic as the doorway filled with heat and silhouette. A slim figure stood at the threshold, shadow knifing through the blast of light. Just skin and bone wrapped in ragged fabric and attitude, framed by furnace heat and the howling dust outside.
Adi’s overlays kicked in automatically, light-dampening her ocular feed while mapping the intruder’s profile. Body temp is high but steady. The room reacted like prey sensing a predator. Conversations hiccupped, glasses paused mid-air, and a few patrons squinted and looked away. The figure didn’t move. They didn’t need to. The heat moved for them.
The figure lingered in the doorway like a bad omen, unmoving, heat rippling around him like a cloak of fire and filth. Dust swirled at his boots, curling into the bar on greasy fingers of wind, carrying with it the scorched-metal stink of Chendiuria’s streets.
No one breathed. Then Niles broke the tension with his usual grace—by hurling an empty synth-juice carton straight at the silhouette’s head.
“In or out, asshole!” he barked, voice loud and sharp enough to rattle the warped windowpanes and shut up a half-dozen conversations.
Silence hung for a beat longer, heavy as wet lead, the kind that precedes either a joke or a firefight.
The carton bounced off the figure’s head with a dull thwack, and that was enough. It seemed like the silhouette flinched, then quickly slipped inside, as if it remembered to breathe. The door creaked shut behind him with a metallic groan, sealing the bar back into its familiar gloom, cutting off the sun like a blade sheathed in rust.
Niles snorted and turned away, unbothered, already dragging from his half-dead cigar like nothing had happened. He’d picked this neighborhood—The Gut—for a reason. A dead zone in the city’s neural net, where the municipal AI didn’t bother to watch and the Blues barely bothered to show up unless bodies stacked too high to ignore.
The newer, heavily armored, and armed robotic Blues, known colloquially as Robo Blues or Robbies, will not enter this area unless they are in reinforced brigade strength. The city tried smallish, unarmed robotic Blues, but they got jacked, broken up and sold for parts on the black market. City budget constraints plus the cost of shipping prompted the city to try lighter commercial-grade off-the-shelf RoboSec bots, which were vandalized, stolen, or intentionally broken.
The Bronze Sword gang controls this territory, ensuring that the flesh and blood Blues are well-bribed to stay out of their way. Adi heard rumors that the gang scares the few Blues who cannot be bribed to prevent them from interfering with the gang's activities. The gang also bribed the city maintenance workers to stop them from replacing the intentionally broken city AI-controlled cams, clandestine security bots, and audio recording devices, which they would typically do. The New Delhi arcology supervisory AI and the Lower City AI do not always agree. Despite superconducting fiber optic cables connecting the two, gaps and conflicts still occur, which criminals exploit.
No cameras. No data feeds. There are no patrol drones. Just broken sensors, busted streetlamps, and meat politics. A perfect place to disappear… or reappear.
Which was why no one batted an eye when Niles littered. Here, even the laws came to die.
The door clicked shut behind the stranger, swallowing the last breath of furnace heat. Shadows reclaimed their corners, the bar's low light flickering back to life like a machine rebooting after a surge. The air cooled—barely—but the temperature drop didn’t ease the tension. If anything, it made it worse.
The figure stood just inside, eyes adjusting, posture loose but wired beneath the slack. Dust clung to his boots, trailing like ash across the warped floorboards. No one welcomed him. No one spoke.
The two prostitutes went quiet mid-sentence. A grizzled drunk in the corner suddenly remembered something very interesting in the bottom of his glass. Even the old woman half-passed out by the toilets stirred, one rheumy eye cracking open like an ancient sensor lens.
Niles didn’t look back.
Adi stayed where she was, letting her net ghost a soft scan—heartbeat irregular but steady, core temp elevated but not alarming, stress markers low. No ID tags. No mesh chatter. The surrounding silence wasn't just quiet—it was intentional.
Someone had scrubbed him clean.
The stranger moved with deliberate ease, a slow drift deeper into the bar like smoke curling under a door. Not a limp, not a stride—just motion calibrated to draw no fire and offer no apology. His anachronistic trench coat—filthy synthweave, burned at the cuffs—rustled faintly as he passed the first table, scuffing it with an old boot laced with mismatched cord.
He didn’t head for the bar. He didn’t glance at the women, or the booth full of day-shift riggers nursing recycled whiskey, or the back wall where two skin-job soldiers pretended not to size him up. Unbothered and uninvited, he simply took up space.
The silence grew heavier.
One prostitute exhaled too loudly. The redhead. Nervous. She shifted on her stool as if the temperature had spiked again, knees pressed tight together now, back a little too straight.
The other one—blonde, fake everything—glanced toward the door like she was wondering how fast she could get there. The way her fingers danced near her clutch purse suggested she wasn't looking for a lipstick.
Adi’s gaze tracked the stranger without seeming to. No motion. No tells. Just the slight shift in her internal HUD as her net reeled him in—ghost contours, height estimates, gait analysis, thermals. Her enhancements worked the shape like a puzzle.
The results came back blank.
Too clean. Too quiet. Even for The Gut.
She let her breath slow. Tuned her hearing tighter. Heartbeat: low and steady. Breathing: controlled, but not synthetic. She scanned his hands—scarred knuckles, ink faded to blurs, veins like wire. Familiar. Maybe too familiar.
Her tongue clicked once against the roof of her mouth involuntarily.
Then—there. The way he shifted weight to his right leg when the floor creaked. The way his head tilted just a degree too far forward, like he was always bracing for an uppercut.
The bastard had changed little. He wore his past like a second skin.. Still moved like he expected violence to follow him through every doorway. Still wore the same patchwork armor of arrogance and ghost guilt. But he looked thinner now. Hungrier. He looked like something had hollowed him out.
A sharp ping echoed in her neural net, solitaire collapsing into static as her attention snapped to the present. A familiar pattern of footsteps—heavy, deliberate, just a half-beat off perfect sync—cut through the bar’s low murmur. Her internal filters tagged the rhythm before her conscious mind caught up.
Her enhanced hearing dialed in tighter, isolating the cadence against the background hiss of shitty ventilation and low synth blues. That walk. Like a war drum trying not to be one.
Adi’s gaze narrowed. The augmented overlays in her vision peeled back ambient clutter—smoke, low light, residual heat signatures—until the figure resolved with stark clarity. Lean frame. Scarred posture. Head angled like he was expecting a blow that never came.
Rat, also known as Shou Rata.
Her amber eyes locked on him, pupils contracting as her various lenses adapted to the return of the dim bar’s grime-filtered light. Recognition wasn’t a revelation—it was a confirmation of something she’d already known deep in her bones the moment the door opened and the heat followed him in.
“Adi, it’s the fucking Rat for you,” Niles roared, voice booming like a sonic charge detonating in a tin can. The bar’s grimy windows rattled in their warped frames, dust shaking loose from the overhead ducts like fallout.
Adi didn’t flinch. Marine augments came standard with industrial-grade auditory dampening—because battlefield comms don’t wait for a migraine. Still, Niles always found the exact decibel range that punched past calibration like a sledgehammer made of cheap bourbon and stubbornness.
She let her gaze linger on Rat as the last of Niles’ shout echoed off the walls. Her internal HUD scrolled passive data—heat profile, gait stability, pulse latency. Nothing hostile. Nothing obvious. Just the same old ghost-wrapped bastard, walking trouble with a smile that usually came right before someone started bleeding.
Her memory unspooled a clipped feed: Rat, covered in engine grease and bad decisions, laughing at some dumb joke on the street while the gunfire hadn’t even stopped yet. The smell of cordite and ozone, the metallic tang of recycled air, the way he never looked directly at a camera.
Burned history, sure. But familiar terrain is still terrain. And Adi always mapped her terrain.
Niles grunted and adjusted his antigrav belt, shifting his bulk like a tugboat trying to park in a gutter. It floated wrong—just a fraction off the baseline. Adi’s head tilted slightly as her neural net logged the inconsistency. Maybe his gravbelt was in flux again, or maybe Niles was getting sick of feeling like his guts were drifting half a second behind his feet.
She filed it away.
Old habits. Everything was a variable. Everything could be a weapon.
Even gravity.
The two whores at the bar didn’t even blink. In their line of work, you learn to spot dead-end bastards from fifty meters out—poverty has a posture, desperation has a smell, and Rat looked like both dressed in secondhand armor. Without missing a beat, they kept up their chain-smoking and sip-sipping—clove-thick weed breath and slurred small talk swirling like smog.
“Thanks, Niles. I see him,” Adi called back, voice level, no urgency, no warmth. Just enough edge to cut through the haze and land exactly where it needed to. It wasn’t for Rat. It was for the room. The regulars knew the name. Shou Rata. A ghost in the machine of Chendiuria’s underbelly, and the bastard who first dragged Adi’s pride through the gutters and made her drink the water.
She lifted two fingers in a motion smooth enough to be mistaken for casual, flicking them in Rat’s direction—a silent signal etched in old habit and old blood. Come.
She didn’t smile. She didn’t wave. Like a thief watches a silhouette, she watched him through the bar's haze.
A few years ago, Rat had found her broken, burned out, and one rent payment from vanishing entirely. He’d given her a lifeline made of backdoor gigs, burner contracts, and tightropes strung over bottomless moral pits. She’d taken the work. She’d taken the money. And every time she’d wondered if this was the moment she finally fell off the edge.
Rat didn’t just show her the darker side of Chendiuria. He handed her a fucking krypton long arc lamp.
Now he was back. And she wanted to know why.
