A hydraulic arm shot out from the wall and smashed into the side of Keung’s head. His vision flickered white as he stumbled sideways, skidded left, and barely caught himself. The taste of iron overwhelmed his tongue.

  A white floor tile beneath his right foot rocked from side to side. The panel under his left foot shuddered with a violent tremor. He lurched into a clumsy cross-step, fought for balance, and stumbled towards the far side of the wall.

  A piston burst from the panel beside him, but Keung dropped low and escaped the strike by an inch. Then a spotlight snapped down from above and drove a harsh beam straight into his eyes. He threw up an arm to shield his face. Even half-blind, he recognised the sequence. The tiles would shift again.

  He ran forward. The large tiles trembled after each step, as if the floors were chasing his heel. He was almost at the jump. He pushed for it. Then, the moment he reached the lip of the platform, another hydraulic arm fired from the right and struck him square in the jaw.

  After that, nothing.

  The next moment, Keung stood at the end of the simulation gauntlet.

  He swayed on the spot. Each breath sent a sharp pain through his lungs. From the final platform, a few metres above the open-roofed chambers, he looked back across the course. The whole route lay exposed beneath him: large square rooms lined with white tiles, with gaps to jump across between each chamber.

  He remembered blacking out in the second-last room.

  The chambers he had cleared still stood intact. The final two did not. Piston arms hung from the walls in twisted shapes. Others stuck halfway out of their housings, with sparks flashing from the sockets. A few jerked in and out on a broken loop. Floor tiles had been ripped loose and cast across the ground. Yet somehow, he’d reached the end.

  Footsteps sounded from the metal stairs behind him.

  ‘In eighteen years of running this gauntlet,’ Aiguo said, ‘I never thought there was a way through those final pistons besides ducking, jumping, or taking the hit.’

  Keung kept his eyes on the ruined machinery.

  Aiguo stopped beside him. ‘How did you do this? How did you tear them out? I mean, the strength alone, let alone the reflex—’

  Keung looked down at his shaking hands. ‘I’m sorry, Captain. I… I didn’t mean to.’

  ‘I don’t even know how to mark this…’

  Keung opened his eyes to the hum of the lab, where dim blue light overhead washed the sub-level room in a cold glow.

  He didn’t move. The memory of that last training session was still murky. It never returned to him cleanly. Everything was lucid until that blackout.

  He found himself standing amid blinking miniature servers mounted on trolleys, cable racks, and sealed glass cabinets lined with instruments he did not know by name. In front of him stood a reclining examination chair, a stand monitor tilted towards it, with his Kingmaker coat hanging over its corner. The air smelled of antiseptic, burnt dust, and the faint metallic scent of ozone.

  Keung tried to recall the other times he blacked out the same way.

  There was that fight in Ho Man Ting City. One moment, the Yang were brutally beating him. He could still viscerally remember that feeling of death creeping up on him.

  Then everything went black.

  The next moment, he and Jin had cornered the last Yang. Everyone else was dead.

  Keung turned towards the whiteboard on the wall.

  Its shiny surface reflected the blue lights overhead. Notes covered it in blocks of wet marker text. He stepped closer, took up the marker, and found an empty corner.

  He wrote:

  “Captain Aiguo’s training

  → Piston strike before final jump

  → Concussion

  → Possible secondary injuries avoided.”

  He looked across the board to the other side.

  “Ji Sia alley attack.”

  Beneath it were similar arrows.

  “→ Broken ribs

  → Fractured skull

  → Near death.”

  “Ho Man Ting Yang encounter

  → Fatal stab wound to kidney

  → Broken ribs

  → Total loss of autonomy.”

  The same phrases appeared across the board again and again.

  Reversal of fatal state. Total loss of autonomy. Blackout. Blackout.

  And after the blackout, every threat neutralised.

  Then, in the middle where all arrows converged:

  “Involuntary Eye activation.”

  The words failed to capture the terror of the idea. A cybernetic eye implant meant only for observation and data retrieval… It could override his body at any moment. That was the worst part, those stolen moments when it took over. The way his body moved, killed, and survived stirred a bitter envy in him, because he knew he could never be that capable on his own. That’s why he’d been in the lab for the past two hours.

  Keung took a seat on the edge of the reclined seat, his forearms braced on his thighs. His ears felt ice-cold, and he’d clenched his knuckles without noticing.

  There was that moment in the elevator too, Keung wondered. When Ushi was talking to me, my Eye activated for a split second. I was just stressed, not fatally injured…

  The small, square room hummed with mechanical sound: the soft beeping of servers, the low drone of the vents. A dull ache pulsed along his jaw from his training with the Captain. He leaned forward and pressed his fingertips to his left eyelid.

  What the hell is inside me?

  He pushed himself upright and crossed to the table against the wall as the recliner creaked behind him.

  It turns on when I feel like dying. And when it’s turned back off again, havoc is around me. Light… This must be why the Prophet declared cybernetics a sin.

  His eyes settled on the whiteboard again.

  Sin or not, there’s a dormant weapon inside me.

  Keung paced left and right as he continued to think. When it wakes, I shoot guns with the precision of an automated firing system. My reflexes become as sharp as a computer. I become as strong as some chrome-jacked cyber-freak. In those moments, I become the furthest thing from a weakling.

  He stopped.

  If I mastered it, I could become a killing machine on command. I would never have to fear losing a fight again.

  I know someone that might help. Someone who’s seen it switch on in person.

  Keung raised his wrist to make a call on his holocommunicator…

  ‘So that’s what happened in Man Ting,’ Jin said under the dim blue light. He took a few slow steps back, then leaned against the recliner. His eyes stayed on Keung.

  ‘You know, I could never work out how you got that frighteningly good at fighting all of a sudden. During training, I kept waiting to see that side of you again, but it never showed. Now I get it.’

  Keung crouched by the wall and fixed a cable into place. ‘So you understand why I need your help.’ He stood up and connected a cable to the blinking servers on the trolley.

  ‘Well, obviously. We Tai Li are better than the Kingmakers,’ Jin said with a chuckle. ‘And no, I’m not about to tell you to throw away a power like this. I can see why you didn’t call your overprotective Tribune. Cheng would probably tell you to get a replacement.’

  ‘He’d probably rip it out himself.’

  ‘But you still need to be careful. We still have no idea how it works. We don’t know how well the Eye can tell friend from foe. If it could activate and never switch off. You could end up trapped in your own head forever.’ He paused. ‘Whether you like it or not, you’re playing with fire.’

  Keung walked over to the computer by the desk and began tapping at the keyboard.

  ‘Yeah, I know. I’ll be careful.’

  ‘Where do we start? What do you know about it so far?’

  ‘I have a feeling it’s linked to my adrenal-pumps,’ he said with his back turned. ‘They’re programmed to activate when I’m near-death. Pump my system with adrenaline to keep me alive. That’s the common denominator here. Both cybernetics activate when I’m close to dying. But the Eye shouldn’t behave this way. I think it’s somehow linked with the pumps.’

  Jin frowned. ‘Adrenaline at one end. A machine mind at the other.’ He shook his head. ‘That is a monstrous combination.’

  He straightened from the reclined chair and approached Keung.

  ‘So what’s the plan? What do you need me to do?’

  Keung handed Jin a bundle of cables fitted with plastic skin links at its end. ‘Help put these on me.’

  He pulled off his boots, stepped out of his trousers, and undid his shirt. Jin raised a brow seeing the bruises spread across his body in purple and pink bands, dark along his ribs, chest, and thighs.

  Down to his boxer shorts, Keung sat in the examination chair and fastened the leather restraints around his ankles and thighs. He leaned back and pulled the strap tight across his waist.

  ‘Can you do the rest around my arms and neck?’

  Jin stepped in and secured the restraints around his biceps, forearms, and neck. Then he checked each one and tightened the straps until they sat firm against Keung’s body.

  After that, he attached the skin links in pairs: two along Keung’s thighs, two at his lower back near the kidney implants, two across the lower ribs, and two high on the chest beneath the collarbones.

  Keung pointed towards the monitor. ‘I need to find out how close to death I have to get before it activates. Put the BPM reader on my chest and keep your eyes on the screen.’ He nodded towards the tilted monitor next to them. ‘Then I need you to detach my Eye and hook it up to the terminal.’

  Jin frowned as he set one of the cable links to Keung’s chest. ‘You want me to yank your Eye out?’

  ‘It’s not hard,’ Keung said. ‘I’ll trigger the release myself. You just twist it and it’ll come free.’

  He squeezed his eye shut and forced the Eye to activate. When he opened it again, a pale aqua filter had settled over the vision in his left eye. Every hard edge glowed with a thin yellow outline. Jin stood over him as a faint yellow silhouette, but the small information box beside him showed only three question marks.

  ‘There’s a connector cable that goes to my brain,’ Keung said. ‘Try not to break it.’

  He opened the system menu through his own vision. The options layered themselves across his sight in clean, translucent panels. He moved through them without touching a thing. All he had to do was zoom in on the prompts to select it. He navigated deeper into the admin controls, then found the release function.

  He felt his eye push out of its socket slightly with a faint hiss. ‘Okay, twist it out now.’

  Jin’s hand came over his left eye. Keung saw only the dark shape of his palm up close. His right eye stayed open, fixed on the lab as Jin worked at the side of his head.

  Then the Eye twisted slightly, and the vision through his left side tilted with it.

  ‘Easy, Jin.’

  A mechanical click sounded somewhere deep in Keung’s skull. His sight flickered. The Eye came free with a soft suction sound. The image through his left eye jittered with static and shook as Jin gently pulled it out. At once, Keung saw in two directions. His right eye still faced the lab from the recliner. His left now rested in Jin’s hand, unmoored from his head.

  The split perspective made his stomach turn. He shut his right eye and forced himself to look only through the cybernetic one.

  Jin raised it to his face. ‘You seein’ me, Lieutenant?’

  ‘Yes,’ Keung said. ‘Unfortunately.’

  Keung watched Jin carry the Eye towards the computer table. He opened his right eye for a moment to make sure Jin had not snagged the cable behind it. Jin held it with care, one hand steady on the thin cord as he moved. Satisfied, Keung closed his right eye again.

  Jin set the Eye on the table and reached behind it to fix the computer cable into the rear device’s port.

  A small flicker. Data flashed across Keung’s cybernetic vision. Then the image stabilised. From the table, he could see Jin typing away at the terminal to the right and his own body in the recliner behind him. A translucent yellow silhouette formed over his frame. A box opened beside it.

  SUBJECT IDENTIFIED

  NAME: Yaozhi Keung

  AGE: 24

  FAMILY CLASSIFICATION: Yaozhi

  CITIZEN TIER: Crown District Citizen

  AFFILIATION: Kingmaker

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  STATUS: Biological// HEALTHY

  THREAT ASSESSMENT: Restricted

  ‘You’re connected,’ Jin said. ‘I had no idea this thing could stream.’

  ‘The software’s full of random features,’ Keung said. ‘I haven’t used half of them.’

  Jin glanced at the screen. ‘Light. It even stores recordings. I can scroll back a month. Don’t mind if I take a peek?’

  ‘Stay out of those unless you want to see what happens when your mother comes around.’

  Jin snorted. ‘Yeah. She told me your dick could use some cybernetic upgrades as well.’

  ‘You wish. Quit fooling around and open the Eye’s diagnostics.’

  Jin worked through the menus. After a moment, he leaned right, into the Eye’s field of vision. Through the blue digital filter, he gave Keung a thumbs up.

  ‘Now open the second window. I left another program running. Should be called TENS.’

  ‘Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulator? I see it.’ Jin clicked again. ‘It’s open.’

  ‘Good. That program will discharge electricity into my body. I want you to watch my heart rate, monitor the diagnostics, and cut the current before it kills me.’

  Jin turned to him. ‘What if I do kill you? They’ll exile me to No Man’s. You’re the Emperor’s nephew.’

  ‘You won’t. Even if you push it too far, the adrenal pumps should keep me alive long enough for you to shut it down.’

  ‘Not a fan of these odds. There has to be a better way to test this.’

  ‘I planned for the worst.’ Keung opened his right eye and looked at Jin sitting at the terminal. He instantly felt nauseous at the double vision. ‘There should be a recording on the home screen. I made it while I waited for you. I went into detail about what I was going to do, and how you’re to help me at my request.’

  Jin clicked back through the files. ‘Ah. I see a 2-minute recording saved here.’

  ‘If anything goes wrong, you give that to my father. My testimony will clear you of any blame for my death. It’ll be declared an accident, which it would be.’

  Jin looked at him for a long moment. ‘You’re actually serious.’

  Keung laid back down and closed his good eye. ‘Are we doing this, or are you going to keep asking questions?’

  Jin exhaled through his nose and turned back to the console. ‘Fine. But if Han hears about this, I’m dead either way.’

  ‘Cheng would kill me too,’ Keung said. ‘So we keep it between us. Now shoot me with the current.’

  Jin hesitated.

  ‘What’re you waiting for? Do it!’

  A key was pressed.

  The current hit Keung low in the back, just above the kidneys. His whole body locked. Pain tore up his spine and straight into his gut with such force that his breath cut off at once. His head jerked against the recliner. Every tendon drew tight. His teeth clamped so hard he thought they’d shatter.

  ‘Current live,’ Jin said, though his voice already sounded less certain. ‘Heart rate rising. One-forty.’

  Another surge tore through his ribs.

  Keung’s back arched off the recliner. A strangled sound forced its way from his throat. This was not the pain of a kick or a blade. It was deeper than that. It felt as if every nerve in his body had been hooked and was being ripped out. His vision began to narrow. The blue-lit lab pulled away at the edges.

  ‘One-sixty,’ Jin said. ‘One-seventy.’

  Pressure crushed his chest. It felt as though his sternum would cave in. Pain seared through every inch of skin, as if he was on fire. A crushing pressure constricted his ribs. His heartbeat was so monstrously heavy it hammered up to his neck.

  ‘You’re at one-eighty-five.’

  The next surge hit.

  Keung’s whole body convulsed. The leather restraints cut into his skin, stretching it taut until it split and bled. His bones felt ready to snap as they fought to break free. His legs kicked against the binds with such force that he thought one of his shins might break in two.

  Then the pain dropped away.

  A whir came alive near his kidney. His body still held rigid, but the sensation had gone dead and distant, as if someone had cut the wires to his pain.

  ‘One-ninety-six!’ Jin shouted.

  His sight tunneled further. The hum of the lab stretched into a dull, underwater drone. For one brief, hopeful second, Keung waited for the shift. For the world to vanish. He waited for the intrusion in his mind, for the curtain to drop, for the Eye to seize the wheel and drag him into that familiar nowhere.

  Instead, a text box slid into his Eye’s vision.

  HYDRATION WARNING.

  A second alert blinked beneath it.

  RECOMMEND FLUID INTAKE.

  CARDIAC LOAD ABOVE SAFE TRAINING LIMIT.

  ‘It’s not working,’ Jin said. ‘Keung, it’s not taking over. The Eye is still functioning like normal! This can’t go for longer!’

  Keung tried to speak but his jaw was clamped shut.

  Another warning burst across Keung’s vision.

  ARRHYTHMIA DETECTED.

  ‘It’s over two hundred!’ Jin shouted. ‘I’m shutting it down!’

  Keung’s arms seized tight. A sharp pressure built along his forearm as it strained against the restraint. He could feel the start of a break. Through the blur, he saw Jin launch himself from the terminal and rip the cords from Keung’s skin one after another.

  Sound came to him in fragments. ‘Lieutenant! Are you all right?’

  Keung’s body went loose at once. ‘Get me out.’

  Jin undid the restraints in a rush. As soon as they came free, Keung lurched upright, flung his arms around Jin’s neck, and breathed hard against him.

  ‘This was a mistake,’ Jin snapped. ‘You’re going to die for nothing.’

  ‘No!’ Keung pulled back. Every breath hurt his body. His skin felt like it came out of an oven. ‘It knows,’ Keung said between breaths. ‘It knew I was not thinking about death. It knew!’

  ‘What do you mean it knew?! You were literally dying!’

  ‘I know what I felt!’ Keung gripped Jin’s shoulder and forced himself to stand. His legs nearly gave way at once, but Jin caught him before he hit the floor. ‘I wasn’t afraid. Not really. I was too certain I would survive. The Eye knew it was all a setup.’

  ‘Keung—’

  ‘I need to be afraid,’ he said, voice hard despite the tremor in it. ‘I need to feel death coming.’

  Jin swore under his breath and helped him across the lab, one hand keeping hold of the cable that still ran from Keung’s eye socket to the Eye on the table. He lowered Keung into the chair at the terminal, then stayed close behind as Keung began dragging through the lines of the Eye’s diagnostics. His hand trembled on the touchpad.

  ‘I need to check something,’ Keung said. ‘Then we go again.’

  Jin recoiled. ‘Again? The shock’s fried your brain! This is a waste of time!’

  Keung twisted in the chair and looked up at him. ‘There’s a weapon inside my head because of this Eye.’ He jabbed a finger at the spherical implant on the table. ‘I’m done with being weak. I’m not walking away from this. Leave if you want, but I’ll see it through on my own if I have to, even if it kills me.’

  Jin held his stare for a long moment. Then he let out a sharp breath through his nose.

  ‘Fine.’

  Keung turned back to the screen. ‘There’s another chair by the wall. Bring it here. We’re going to watch a past activation. The faster we understand it, the faster we get out of here.’

  For the next half hour, they sat side by side before the terminal. The screen showed the first recorded activation of Keung’s Eye. Ji Sia City. A narrow alley. Two Kingmakers drove him into the concrete with boots and fists. The recorded feed shook with every impact. Blood smeared across the lens. Then the Eye switched on, and the diagnostics erupted into noise. Numbers glitched. Symbols broke apart. Warning text flashed and vanished.

  Keung watched from the first-person feed as his own hand rose into frame, drew a gun, and fired at the third Kingmaker, the one who’d rushed in to help him.

  Jin leaned forward slightly. ‘Your aim was insane.’

  ‘I remember it as if it happened yesterday,’ Keung said as his eyes were still fixed on the feed. ‘I could feel their rage. I truly believed they were going to kill me. That’s what needs to happen. My mind has to accept the threat as real.’

  ‘How are you going to convince yourself you’ll die? Make yourself forget this is all a controlled experiment?’

  Keung fell silent for a moment. ‘Maybe that’s the answer. Maybe the control is the problem. I need death to actually be possible.’

  Jin gave a dry laugh. ‘Right. So next time your heart rate passes two hundred, I step out of the room and leave you to it.’

  Keung looked at him. ‘If you were out of sight… I could convince myself I’ll die.’

  ‘I was joking,’ Jin said at once. ‘You’ll die for real if I leave you out of my sight.’

  ‘That’s the point.’

  ‘No. The point is to make you believe you could die.’

  Keung frowned. ‘Then lie to me. Tell me you’re leaving the room.’

  Jin stared at him. ‘Well, I can’t now! You know it’s a lie.’

  The two were silent for a moment. Then Jin raised a finger.

  ‘We’re doing this wrong. We’ve been trying to edge you closer to death. If we need your mind to believe you’re really dying, then we should cut out the middle and go straight to that point.’

  Keung’s eyes narrowed. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If we hook the leads directly over your heart, we might be able to stop it outright. Let’s see if the Eye activates then. Another shock should restart it. Like a defibrillator. Or it could just kill you. I suppose that’s where the threat of death becomes real.’

  Keung smiled. ‘That’s brilliant, Jin. If anything goes wrong, the adrenal pumps should keep me alive. And if the second shock doesn’t bring me back, you can—’

  ‘Uh-uh.’ Jin cut him off with a sharp motion of his hand. ‘You leave the contingencies to me. As far as you are concerned, if you die, you die.’

  Keung nodded and got up from the chair, crossed back to the recliner, and lowered himself into it once more. Jin fastened the restraints around him again, tighter this time, then moved every cord to the right side of Keung’s chest, directly over his heart. Beside them sat the line that tracked his heart rate.

  Jin reached into his pocket and took out his handheld.

  ‘What’re you doing?’ Keung asked, barely being able to lift his head.

  Jin stayed quiet for a second longer, then turned the rectangular device towards him.

  On it was a photograph of General Denzhen from the Kowlooni Network.

  ‘Last picture of your beloved dad. In case you die.’

  The casual way he said it unsettled Keung more than the words themselves.

  He looked at the screen. It was an old headshot of his father, younger than he was now, but instantly recognisable. The hard jaw. The stern eyes. The face the whole city read as royal authority. For a brief moment, it filled Keung with a stubborn urge to be half as strong as his father had once been.

  The next moment, those feelings turned sour. The experiment stopped seeming necessary, but stupidly theatrical. It stopped seeming clever. He was lying in a chair and flirting with death for the sake of understanding some unknown force lodged inside him. If he truly died here, it would not make him brave. It would seal his legacy as a failure.

  His mouth went dry. The restraints felt tighter. The cords against his chest felt cold.

  Jin must have seen the change in his face. He said nothing more and slipped the handheld back into his pocket, returned to the chair before the terminal, and pulled up the TENS software.

  Keung lay back and stared at the ceiling. By now, he could ignore the detached view from the Eye. What he could not ignore was the fear that had finally begun to take hold.

  Good, he thought as he tried to compose himself. I need to fear death.

  ‘Ready?’ Jin asked.

  Keung closed his good eye and focused on himself through the cybernetic Eye’s point of view.

  He swallowed. ‘Hit it.’

  The shock hit his chest like a hammer. No pain this time. Not the tearing, body-locking agony from before. It was a sharp, clean, violent strike that pierced through bone and muscle and went straight to the heart.

  It kicked only once. And then it stopped.

  There was no time for thought. Only the sudden, total absence where life had been a second earlier.

  I’m dead. Not dying.

  Dead.

  The Eye woke up. The detached feed spasmed into static. Then the image lurched back. It focused on Jin, who sat up close at the terminal, his outline broken by yellow artefacts and snapping boxes of corrupted text. Keung saw him jolt forward. His mouth was open.

  ‘…it’s happening…’

  Consciousness dipped. Came back. Slipped again. Each return lasted only a second. The Eye’s image would hold, then tear into grain and colour noise. His own body lay at a distance in the recliner, half-seen through the Eye’s angle from the table. Still strapped in. Head turned slightly to one side. Mouth parted. No rise. No movement.

  Consciousness fell again.

  When sight snapped back, Jin was out of his chair. He stood over Keung’s body and checked the cords on his lifeless chest.

  ‘…shit…’ the voice came again, garbled, as if the machine had to reconstruct it before it could be heard.

  ‘Heart’s not… coming back…’ A burst of static swallowed Jin’s voice.

  Block text exploded across Keung’s cybernetic vision. Boxes multiplied. Alerts stacked on top of one another too fast to read. Yellow outlines drew themselves around the room, highlighting almost every object. White text broke into fragments.

  CARDIAC FUNCTION…

  SIGNAL LOSS…

  BIOLOGICAL VITALS…

  CRITICAL…

  Jin was the threat.

  Eliminate it. Survive.

  ‘The diagnostics are going mad… Keung… Keung, come on… Wake up…’

  Jin ran back to the terminal and hit him with another surge. He watched his body convulse on the recliner, then back to being still.

  Jolt. Then still. He ran back to Keung.

  The Eye focused on the standing monitor beside the recliner, right next to where Jin stood. It locked onto it. The Eye interfaced with it. The monitor heated up—

  BANG!

  A shower of sparks burst across Jin’s left side and he staggered right. He stood still for a moment, hand on the side of his face, then threw a look at the Eye on the table.

  ‘No! Keung, wake up!’

  He lunged for the terminal.

  The Eye fixed on him at close range. Cuts and fresh burns marked the left side of Jin’s face as he frantically typed.

  Then the Eye shifted focus. It locked onto the computer screen, traced the cables running into the machine, and found the power source in the wall behind the recliner.

  It drove current through the line.

  The blue lights overhead flickered. The servers along the wall let out a rising whine.

  ‘Everything’s overloading!’ Jin’s distorted voice shouted up close. ‘One more. Come on. Come on.’

  Keung’s body jolted violently with another shock.

  Jin sprang from the chair, rushed back to the recliner, shoved it flat, undid the restraints, and began hammering at his chest. Keung caught him in flashes: first from the Eye on the table, then from below, right up front. Jin’s face was pale with panic. Long hair hanging loose. Mouth moving too fast to follow.

  Then air slammed back into Keung.

  He jerked upright with a raw shout.

  Jin stood frozen and stared at Keung. He stared back, chest heaving, sweat slipping down his neck and ribs. The world still felt half a second out of place. His heart hammered brutally. Alive again.

  ‘It worked. It worked!’ Keung cheered and hugged Jin, who stayed stiff in his arms.

  ‘You were dead,’ he said flatly. ‘And your damned Eye tried to kill me!’

  ‘We need the diagnostics!’ Keung wriggled off the seat, and with an arm around Jin’s shoulder, limped to the terminal.

  ‘Download everything,’ he said. ‘All of it.’

  Jin still looked pale, but he sat and turned to the screen. His fingers moved over the keys. Windows shuffled across the terminal: biometric logs, Eye-state records, corrupted combat overlays, error bursts, timestamped warnings.

  ‘There,’ he said. ‘Take a look at this.’

  He pulled up the adrenal log. A third set of figures appeared: pump status, hormone readout, relay activity, override flags. Keung tried to understand the sequence. In the brief span of clinical death, the kidney implant had detected a sudden spike in hormones. Rather than responding locally, the pumps had forwarded that signal through the Eye’s visual and cortical nerves. That was where the malfunction started.

  “BIOLOGICAL VITALS LOST

  EMERGENCY COMBAT SCRIPT AUTHORISED”

  Jin read it twice. ‘There. That’s your trigger. There’s a hidden script programmed into your kidney pumps. Your Eye somehow acts out the script. Light knows how it ended up there.’

  ‘So it’s less the Eye and more the adrenaline pumps. That’s what I thought.’

  ‘It’s both,’ Jin said. He tapped the screen. ‘Look here. The moment your heart stopped, the pumps detected a huge surge in catecholamines and cortisol. Stress hormones. That spike seems to trip the override. Your nervous system puts out a body-wide emergency. I don’t know how, but the Eye hijacks the rest. They’ve been tag-teaming your sorry ass.’

  ‘So, these hormones. They only come out when my heart’s stopped?’

  ‘That’s right. Cardiac arrest.’

  Keung leaned back. ‘What if we synthesize it?’ he asked. He reached for the Eye, guided it back into his socket, and pressed it in until it seated with a faint click. ‘If I inject a dose, couldn’t I force the same state.’

  He blinked a few times until his vision corrected itself. The aqua haze disappeared. The world became whole again. His eye dimmed to its dark brown.

  Jin folded his arms. ‘I’m not sure it’d work. There’s still the other factor. Remember? You have to believe you’re dead, or close enough that your brain accepts the threat of death. Don’t know how an injection will do that.’

  For a moment neither of them spoke. The servers and terminal subtly beeped.

  Then Keung let out a breath. ‘Then that’s the next step. We inject me with the hormones and see what happens.’

  Jin stared at him. ‘What happens is you shave years off your life doing idiotic experiments in a basement. Your heart isn’t a toy.’

  ‘An early death is a blessing these days.’

  ‘Oh, do shut up,’ Jin said. ‘You’ve just discovered the murder mode hidden inside your skull. This is the part where sensible men ask whether using it’s worth the price.’

  ‘Of course it’s worth it. Did you see what it did? It hacked the screen just to get at you. That was unreal.’

  ‘I try not to praise murder attempts made on me,’ Jin said. ‘But yes, it was impressive… In a sort of offensive way.’ He shook his head. ‘That still doesn’t mean a hormone injection gets you what you want. It’ll probably do very, very wrong things to you.’

  ‘Oh yeah? Like what?’

  ‘Create a hot mess. That’s what. Imagine you’re in a fight. You jab yourself with stress hormones, expecting some divine killing state, but all you get is a panic-attack. Then someone caves your face in while you’re shaking in your boots and waiting for a miracle to arrive. Honestly, you’re better off letting it come on naturally like before. It’s worked out so far.’

  Keung was silent for a second. He pursed his lips and then stretched and yawned.

  ‘Thanks for your help, Jin. I think it’s time for us to finally get some sleep.’

  Jin stared at him. ‘Yes, I’d like some. Between the two of us, I’m not sure whose heart had the worse night.’

  He stepped away from the terminal and grabbed his jacket from the hook by the door. Before leaving, he paused and looked back at Keung, who still sat in the chair.

  ‘Try not to die again before morning,’ Jin said. ‘I may have less sympathy for your second one.’

  ‘Saves you from tears for my funeral.’

  Jin gave a short laugh and slipped out. The door hissed shut behind him, and the lab fell quiet at once. Keung leaned back, closed his eyes and sat in the hum of the room for a while, hoping the headache clamped around his skull would ease.

  Nearly an hour later, Keung jerked awake at the table.

  He blinked at the terminal clock. The next work-cycle would begin soon.

  He muttered a curse and pushed himself up, dragged on his shirt and trousers, shrugged into his coat, slipped into his boots and left the lab.

  Keung quickly walked towards the lift and rode it up two levels to the chemical labs.

  The wide room was already coming alive. Kingmakers in white coats stood scattered across the floor, each absorbed in their own task. Harsh white light burned above rows of glass partitions and sealed workstations. Refrigeration units hummed behind locked cabinets. Thin columns of data drifted across hibernating screens. The whole place smelled of ethanol, coolant, and sterile metal.

  Keung crossed the floor to the requisitions desk at the far end of the lab. A Kingmaker sat inside the glass booth beside a terminal that was out of sight.

  ‘I need to file a synthesis request.’

  The man looked up, saw who it was, and straightened at once. ‘For what, Lieutenant?’

  Keung placed both hands on the counter. ‘A paired endocrine compound. Synthetic cortisol and catecholamine blend. Small dose.’

  The Kingmaker blinked, then turned to the terminal and began to type. ‘You look like you haven’t slept in a week. I hope you know those hormones won’t help with that.’

  ‘It’s not for me. For an assignment on the field. Confidential.’ Keung kept his voice flat. ‘How soon can I get it?’

  ‘How many milligrams?’

  ‘Half a mil.’

  The Kingmaker typed away. ‘Two weeks is the earliest slot.’

  ‘That’s too long. I need it as soon as possible.’

  The man shook his head. ‘Sorry. Everything’s booked. I can move you up if another requisition gets pulled.’

  Keung leaned closer across the counter. The Kingmaker frowned and leaned back a little.

  ‘I’m working on an assignment from my uncle,’ Keung said. ‘The Emperor. This is a top-priority request. Whoever is next gets pushed back. It concerns the Yangs, and it can’t wait. I don’t want to add your name in the report if I fail.’

  The man hesitated, then turned back to the screen.

  A few minutes passed in silence while he typed, checked schedules, and rewrote whatever needed rewriting. At last he looked back up. ‘You should get a notification on your holo by tomorrow, around dimming time.’

  Keung drew in a slow breath. ‘Thank you.’