Doc Halloway threw the van into the corner and the suspension howled. Rain streaked across the cracked windshield. He glanced at the rearview feed. Nothing back there. Just the last smears of neon from the mid-levels bleeding into the dark of Sector 4.
He chewed his peppermint until it cracked. Tasted like chalk. The datapad bolted to the dash fed him telemetry from the gurney in back.
The numbers made no sense.
Heart rate sitting at a hundred and ninety. Cortisol markers pinned past the point where brains usually shut down.
He checked the camera feed. Marcus lay flat on the metal table, strapped down. Not thrashing. Not seizing. Just staring at the corrugated roof with his eyes wide open.
Doc hit a pothole. The van lurched. Marcus didn't blink.
"Stay with me, Piston," Doc said.
His voice came out flat. The cabin felt too small. Marcus didn't answer. The only sound from the back was the pneumatic converter on his right leg, hissing as it bled off heat.
Twenty years cutting on Sump rats. Doc had seen rejections, overdoses, industrial accidents. He knew where the lines were. A man pulling those numbers should be screaming.
Marcus just stared at the ceiling. Eyes like black glass. No pain in them. Nothing.
Doc floored it. His hands hurt from gripping the wheel. He wasn't a mechanic anymore, marveling at salvage. He was locked in a box with something that shouldn't exist.
And he was terrified.
—
Doc kicked the release on the gurney. The wheels caught on the cracked concrete and Marcus's body jarred hard. The fighter made no sound.
The garage door rattled down, killing the neon. The shop stank of rust, old oil, and bleach. A place where things got stripped and sold for parts.
Doc shoved the gurney under the surgical halo. Tore open a foil packet with his teeth and jammed a heavy-gauge line into the crook of Marcus's good arm. Hooked it to a scavenged auto-dispenser and punched in max dose. Enough to drop a horse.
He watched the fluid push through the tube. Looked at Marcus's face.
Nothing. Marcus stared at the lights. Pupils fixed. Breathing steady.
Doc checked the wall screen. The numbers jumped. The Praxis suite was flagging the sedatives as hostile. It was synthesizing enzymes, burning the drugs out before they hit the brain. The machine was keeping him awake to keep him alive.
Doc backed off. Wiped his face, smearing grease across his forehead. He didn't know how to fix a body that wouldn't shut down.
A hum came through the floor.
Not a Sump transport's ragged cough. A magnetic drive. Smooth. Silent.
Doc turned as the side door pushed open.
A man stepped in. Charcoal suit, cut so sharp it looked like glass. Shoes spotless. He didn't look at the blood on the floor. Didn't look at the man strapped to the table.
Doc froze. His hand drifted toward the wrench on his belt.
The Envoy didn't flinch. Walked exactly three steps in. Reached into his jacket, pulled out a heavy tungsten fob, and set it on the edge of the workbench.
Turned and walked out. The door clicked shut.
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Doc stood there ten seconds not breathing. Stared at the empty spot. Then picked up the fob. It weighed a pound. A tiny blue light pulsed near the top.
He pushed the door open. Cold rain hit his face.
A transport sat idling in the alley. Matte black. No plates. No markings.
Doc pressed his thumb to the fob.
The rear doors unsealed with a hiss and folded open. Inside, a sterile cargo hold, bright as an operating room.
Doc stepped to the bumper and looked in.
Two massive white cases sat bolted to the floor racks. Brushed polymer. Across each lid, the silver halo of Praxis Health Systems.
He reached in with a shaking hand and popped the latches on the first one. The lid hissed open. Chilled air washed out, lavender-scented, killing the alley smell.
Inside, nestled in shock-foam: a complete right arm assembly. Heavy matte-grey Ossite, built to match Marcus's hydraulic leg. But up close, you could see the lie. No rust. No rough welds. No exposed wires. The micro-tendons and plating were milled to microscopic tolerance. A flawless machine dressed up as scavenged junk.
The second case held chest plates. Clinical white. Bone-dense synthetic lattice, designed to graft over a ribcage and disappear under the skin.
Doc stared at it. Three million credits of Overworld engineering, sitting in a rain-slicked Sector 4 alley.
He looked back at the open door of his shop. Listened to the ragged breathing of the man strapped to the table.
—
Vargas's office sat in Sector 1 like a held breath. No clutter. No dust. No sound. The walls wore midnight-blue acoustic panels that swallowed the Overworld's ambient hum. He stood by the bar in a white suit, pristine, tailored to within a micron of its life.
The silence was dying.
His desk had become a storm. Holographic notifications spawned and stacked and fractured, casting jagged light across the mahogany. Chimes bled into a continuous drone. Rival syndicates. High-End brokers. Partnership requests. Threats dressed as offers.
The outside world was hammering at the glass.
Vargas held a crystal tumbler. On the counter beside him, a datapad looped the last ten seconds of the Nyx Vane fight. Marcus Graves shattering a two-million-credit asset with a scavenged hydraulic leg.
He poured. Didn't look at the bottle. Watched the telemetry scroll beneath the video. The math was broken. Vargas knew what an aging Sump fighter cost. Knew the depreciation curve of meat and the exact street price of rusted pneumatics. The performance on screen required output and trauma-damping that didn't exist in Sector 4.
The liquor hit the rim. Kept rising. Spilled over, pooling on the dark wood.
Vargas kept pouring.
The cold wetness finally registered. He set the bottle down. Slowly, he reached up and unbuttoned his collar. Pulled his tie loose. A man who obsessed over his own silhouette, ruining it on purpose.
This wasn't an upset. This was a hijacking.
The holograms crowding his desk weren't offers. They were crosshairs. Every broker in the High-End now believed Vargas commanded a weapon that could dismantle Sector 1 hardware. But Vargas hadn't paid for those upgrades.
Someone else was using his ledger to move their asset. In the Syndicate, holding valuable hardware that belonged to an unknown predator was a death sentence.
Vargas gripped the edge of the bar. His knuckles went white. The illusion peeled away. He'd spent his career playing chess, only to realize he was just another piece.
—
The surgical saw hummed. Low and ugly, crawling through the damp air.
Doc held it over Marcus's ruined right arm. The limb was gone.
He'd already pushed max dose through the IV. The wall monitor flared red. The Redline suite flagged the sedatives as hostile and dumped counter-enzymes, burning the drugs out to keep his heart going.
Marcus lay flat on the rusted table. Eyes wide open, fixed on the lights. Fully conscious.
Doc's hands shook. Twenty years in the Sump, he'd learned to cut without thinking. This was different. He wasn't fighting pain. He was fighting a body that wouldn't shut down.
He brought the blade down.
The saw screamed. Doc didn't look at the arm again until it was off. Dropped it on a metal tray and forced himself to breathe.
Marcus made no sound.
Doc moved to the chest. Opened the sternum and stepped back, reaching for the white Praxis case. Inside, the sub-dermal plates sat in shock foam. Flawless. Sterile. Wrong for this room.
He hesitated.
Praxis could have done this in a clean Sector 1 lab. They picked a leaking garage in Sector 4 instead. They wanted the dirt. Wanted failure conditions. Doc wasn't a surgeon tonight. He was a contractor running a stress test blind.
He seated the lattice inside Marcus's chest.
Then he lifted the Ossite arm.
Heavy. Brutal. Built to look crude while hiding microscopic perfection. Doc aligned the neural nodes with what was left of the nerves and shoved it home.
The arm locked into the joint with a solid, industrial thud.
Marcus blinked.
---
End of phase 3 - [What Doesn't Kill You...]
