The bartender had three fingers on his left hand and none on his right. That wasn't the interesting part. The interesting part was how he poured drinks—with the chrome prosthetic grafted where his wrist should be, its delicate pincer tips adjusting pressure like they'd known the weight of glass and liquor all their lives. "You want ice?" he asked, tilting his head toward the dispensary. A faint whirring sound came from his neck.

Across the counter, Lia traced a finger through the condensation on her glass. The bar was nearly empty, save for a couple in the corner murmuring over shared noodles and the occasional flicker of the holoscreen above the door, broadcasting another city-wide curfew reminder. She'd been coming here for years, back when it still had wooden stools instead of the molded polymer ones that stuck to your thighs in summer. Back when people didn't look over their shoulders so much.

The bartender slid a napkin toward her with his pincer—neatly folded, the way they used to do before paper became rationed. Lia unfolded it slowly, revealing a string of numbers handwritten in smudged blue ink. "Heard you've been asking about the old metro tunnels," he said, voice pitched low enough that the dispensary's hum nearly swallowed it. His ocular implant flickered briefly, scanning the room.

Lia pocketed the napkin without looking at it. The couple in the corner had stopped eating, their noodles congealing in the bowl. She knew that posture—shoulders tense, chopsticks held too tight. Either they were Syndicate, or they were about to be scooped up by them. She tapped twice on the counter, the sound barely audible. The bartender's wrist prosthetic twitched in response, adjusting the glass he was cleaning. A silent confirmation: *Get out. Now.*

Lia exhaled through her nose—slow, deliberate—and slid off the stool. The polymer seat released her thighs with a faint *click* of suction breaking. She left a crumpled bill under her glass, the synthetic fibers fraying at the edges. Currency didn’t hold up like it used to. Neither did people.

She moved toward the door at the pace of someone who wasn’t running, fingers brushing the hem of her jacket where the knife was strapped. The couple’s chopsticks clattered against the bowl. Too loud. Lia didn’t turn, but she caught the shift in their breathing, the way one of them—probably the woman—leaned forward just slightly. Syndicate, then. Amateurs.

The holoscreen flickered again, casting jagged blue light across the bartender’s face as she passed him. His ocular implant flashed once—a quick, almost imperceptible pulse—and she knew he’d already rerouted the bar’s cameras to loop the last three minutes. A professional courtesy. The door slid open with a sigh of hydraulics, and the night air hit her like a damp palm. Neon streaked the pavement where the rain had pooled, reflecting the floating adverts for neural upgrades and synthetic protein shakes.

Three blocks. That’s how far Lia got before the footsteps behind her synced with her own. Not Syndicate amateurs after all—they wouldn’t have waited this long. She turned left into an alley, the kind where the streetlights flickered like faulty synapses, and pressed her back against the damp brick. The footsteps paused. One set. Heavy. A man, probably augmented, given the even cadence. No hesitation in the stride.

A shadow stretched across the mouth of the alley. Lia held her breath. The holoscreen glare from the main street painted his silhouette in jagged violet—broad shoulders, a neck too thick to be entirely organic. "You lost, sweetheart?" he called, voice rough with the telltale rasp of vocal mods. Lia rolled her eyes. Sweetheart. Always the same script with these types.

She palmed her knife, the handle warm from her grip. "Just admiring the view," she said, nodding toward the floating adverts. One of them sputtered, half-dead, its jingle for subdermal trackers warping into static. The man chuckled, stepping closer. His boots crunched over broken glass. "Yeah? You like watching things die too?"

The knife felt like an extension of her hand—cold certainty in a world that had none. Lia tilted her head, letting the flickering light catch the edge of the blade just so. "Only when they deserve it," she said, voice flat. The man’s chuckle deepened, a sound like gears grinding in an old elevator shaft. His face came into the light: jaw reinforced with carbon plating, one eye replaced by a red-tinted lens that whirred faintly as it focused on her.

"You’re not Syndicate," he observed, taking another step. The alley reeked of synth-meat runoff and something metallic—blood or coolant, she couldn’t tell. "Neither are you," Lia countered. His mods were too clean, too military-grade for Syndicate trash. Ex-enforcement, maybe. Or worse: freelance. The kind who didn’t care who paid, as long as the credits cleared.

His lens flickered, scanning her from boots to collar. "You’ve got a price on you," he said, almost conversational. "Small one. Enough to cover a week’s rations." Lia smirked. "Flattering." She shifted her weight, ready. The napkin in her pocket felt suddenly heavier. Whoever had tipped him off knew she was asking about the tunnels. Knew enough to send a hunter after her. That narrowed it down to three people, two of whom were already dead.

The hunter’s carbon-plated jaw twitched—a tell Lia recognized from her time in the underground fight pits. Augments made men faster, stronger, but the human tics always lingered in the muscles they couldn’t replace. He was hesitating. Calculating whether a week’s rations were worth the blood it’d cost.

Lia used the split-second delay to pivot, driving her heel into the knee joint of his left leg—the one that still looked flesh. The impact sent a shock up her own leg, but she heard the gratifying *pop* of cartilage giving way. The hunter growled, more annoyed than pained, and backhanded her hard enough to send her skidding across the wet pavement. Her knife clattered somewhere in the dark.

"You fight like a gutter rat," he observed, shaking out his hand. Lia spat blood, tasting the copper tang of split lips. "You hit like a bureaucrat," she shot back, scrambling upright. The holoscreen’s dying light caught the glint of her blade near a dumpster—three meters away, wedged between a cracked drone battery and what looked like a discarded synth-lung. Too far.

The hunter lunged, his movements precise despite the limp. Lia ducked, felt the air displacement from his fist as it grazed her temple. She drove an elbow into his ribs—reinforced, dang it—and twisted away before he could grab her. Her boots slid on something slick. Rotting algae from the rooftop hydroponics, probably. The city’s attempt at "green reform."