Page 20 of Neon Flux

Maddox's fingers paused before resuming their frantic dance. “You didn't have a choice.”

“I know that. You know that. But you're still acting like I shot your grandmother.” I leaned forward, electromagnetic current crackling around my fingers. “She was about to get dragged off to some black site. What I did was a mercy.”

“She was a professor, Cy. An old woman.”

“She was a liability. That’s why we were here.” I shrugged. “Better a quick death than whatever they had planned for her.”

Maddox finally looked up, his dark eyes conflicted. “You didn't even hesitate.”

“Hesitation gets people killed. You taught me that.” I took another drag. “Look, I get it. It’s that hero complex that had you in NSPD in the first place. But this is what we do, partner. We're tools.”

“Some of us don't make it look so easy.”

“And some of us don't pretend we're doing anything else. We're alpha assets, Maddox. Death is the job description. POM doesn't pay us to arrest people or read them their rights. They pay us to make problems disappear.”

Maddox returned to his screen, jaw clenched. “Shedidreminded me of my grandmother.”

“Yeah, well, your grandmother probably wasn't stealing tech for rebel groups.” The words hit their mark—I saw it in the way his shoulders tensed. “Tanaka made her choice when she took that research. I just made sure it ended on our terms.”

“You're cold, man.”

“I’m realistic. We both knew how this could end the moment we got here.” I settled back into my seat. “Difference is, I don't need to rewrite history to sleep at night.”

The transport hummed through Neo Stellaris's neon-washed streets while Maddox stared at his reflection in the window. After a long moment, he picked up his tablet again.

“Target unable to flee,” he typed. “Lethal force was necessary to prevent capture by hostile elements.”

“There you go.” I grinned. “See? That wasn't so hard.”

Maddox's fingers moved steadily now, no more hesitation. Sometimes all it took was acknowledging the truth—we weren't heroes. We were tools. Very expensive, very effective tools.

And tools didn't have the luxury of guilt.

CHAPTER 5

EON

Work was slow. An endless stream of people walked past the bioChip shop I worked in. The shop was so deep in the labyrinth of the Magenta District, no sunlight reached us. We were on about the twentieth floor of the megabuilding, but might as well have been underground with how much concrete and metal surrounded us. Only the artificial flickering from the alleyway lights lit the façade. It flashed in the cracks of our very busted tetraglass door that was hardly held together with a few pieces of conduit tape.

No flashy neon lights for us. Our clients found us all the same.

I worked for Dev Chopra, one of the best Modders in the city. What he was doing running a back-alley operation in Magenta, I had no idea. No, that wasn’t true. I knew exactly why he did it.

He was currently in the back, prepping for the day. The only sound in the front store was the tapping of my nails and the white noise of the vid screen I had running some asinine news network in the corner.

I liked Dev—part of why I still worked for him even though the pay was shit. The other was he let me do all of my less-than-legal side jobs under his clinic’s VPN—which I had set up. Even back-alley bioChip shops got more leeway for their data security, part of some of the last clean legislation that got passed right after the emergence of Flux.

Luckily, what I needed today wasn’t in POM’s high-security network, just their basic corporate one. I used the login of a middle manager I’d taken home three months ago. I likely didn’t have much time left, but the access I’d gotten from it had been worth the very mediocre sex. He’d taken a call immediately after, and it had made easy work of cloning his ID card and going through his work terminal.

My screen was lit up with the profiles of two employees. Almost no data could escape me once I wanted it, but these two had almost no digital footprint. Red at the top readPOM Security—Alphafor their department. To the public, they were practically nonexistent; ghosts in a world where everything was online and logged. Kaijin. I knew better.

Maddox Johnson was first, a tall and thick Black man with short dreads that sprawled over the top of his head, tipped in red. Even in his ID photo he wore a darkened Vysor with unusually thick rims, his expression stern. His profile showed he had been an NSPD lieutenant, and in the corner a white hexagon marked him as an aeroteknik.

One look at that nerdy Vysor and I knew Mercy was going to love him. This was almost too easy.At least one part of this job will be easy.

I swiped the page away and just stared at the next. Cy Hoshina. A shock of blue hair had been casually swept back from his face, and he grinned at the camera in an irreverent way, like the whole world was some big joke. That grin bore into me, and I could practically feel the grip of his hand on my neck. His profile was almost completely empty except for the black hexagon in the corner—an electroteknik. But I’d already known that.

Sparks flew between my fingers as I tapped on the counter, my agitation showing. I shook my hand, willing them away. I looked into his dark eyes again and felt the memory of his power surge through me; my ribs ached, my Flux pulsed in my blood, and between my legs. My hand started sparking again. The surrounding lights flickered in response, and I pushed it down, swiping away his profile. I didn’t know why I was even looking at it again, like I hadn’t been looking at it for the last six months.