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The hair on my neck rose as his power surged. I knew the blast was coming moments before it happened, an unavoidable premonition. The lightning hit my chest and branched out over my skin, my whole body seizing.

“Stop! It’s too much!”

His other hand gripped my chin again, forcing me to meet his gaze, his irises swirling with his power. “You are so fucking beautiful when you lie. You can take it.”

I felt myself light up from the inside out, as his Flux consumed me. It was just like the data center, but this time it was just me and him.

My head locked back as my spine arched violently, and there was pain—so much pain—but I didn’t fight it.

Instead, I reveled in it, aligning my power to his, my frequencies matching instead of clashing.

My power and his rose together, intertwining as it danced over my skin, its sharp caress laced with ecstasy.

“That’s it. You’re doing so good for me.

No, don’t fight it. Eyes on me, doll.” With nearly herculean effort, I raised my head back up so I could see him.

Electricity snaked around his dark irises as his gaze bore into me, hungry.

The tattoo that ran under his eye and over his cheekbone was glowing white-hot from the power.

I’d had my suspicions, but now I had to know. I stopped resisting completely and let the current flow through me—raw power now unrestricted. His pupils went wide, but he didn’t stop, almost like he couldn’t. I rode the flow, through my body and back into his, and what I saw there was horrific.

He didn’t have a Flux chip, but instead his power coalesced in huge, chrome implants that had been grafted to his skeleton, his circulatory system forced to filter through them.

Even in just the flow of his power, I could feel the pain—the eternal ache that permeated from them.

It all concentrated in his right shoulder, where something was wrong.

The flow was erratic, his Flux glitching with every small movement.

His hand snapped away from my chin, and the flow stopped. “Not bad.” We were both panting, and something in my chest ached—but it had nothing to do with his Flux.

I’d never seen first-gen Flux control implants before.

Implants that literally filtered the blood of the affected, reducing hormone load to safe levels.

Tech scrapped together from what was rumored to have been top-secret military hardware for soldiers.

It was massive and painful and only minorly effective.

The failure rate was still over sixty percent.

Luckily, it hadn’t lasted long. A few years later, the Flux chip became the standard.

Every single one of his “tattoos” was actually an implant, glowing and controlling his Flux underneath his muscles and skin. Cy was my age. The chip had been standard practice when he went through puberty. Why did he have these?

I shook my head. It didn’t fucking matter. He deserved the pain he was in. He deserved much worse.

His hand was still sparking, and he shook it absentmindedly. Then he ran those gloved fingers through his wild blue hair, pushing it back from his forehead. His chest rose with a deep breath, and I heard him mutter, “Fucking off track.” He turned back to me.

“What was the goal of the attack?”

I sighed. Did he think this little display had bonded us in some way? Did he think the feeling of our powers flowing together so naturally, with so much force, had affected me?

It hadn’t.

It hadn’t.

“We’re back to that? Look, I really don’t know. You know I wasn’t lying when I said my only involvement was distracting you and Maddox. Why would they tell me more?”

“You were there at HQ. Why’d they have a genius like you whoring instead of doing the heavy lifting.”

“Just doing what I’m best at.”

“I thought we said no lies.”

I didn’t respond to that.

“It was you, wasn’t it? You’re the one who nabbed the shield tech. You worked for Tanaka, and did it while you were at the data center?”

He didn’t have any proof of that, but he didn’t need it. Whether I admitted it or not, he knew the truth. There was a huge bounty out from POM for anyone involved in the leak. They already had me on collusion, maybe more. But now, I was dead, one way or another.

Cy stared at me, unreadable. Then he exhaled through his nose and muttered, “Fucking nightmare.”

“Well, looks like your options are work with me on this job, or I drag you down to Basement Nine, and you have a little chat with someone a lot less nice than me about your little data extraction mission.”

I felt the blood drain from my face. Basement Nine wasn’t real. It was the horror story all cyberrunners knew—a place no one ever came back from. It was a myth.

His eyes were serious. I shook my head to clear the dread that had lodged there. “Someone worse than you? I can’t imagine it.”

He didn’t banter with me this time, his arms crossed and eyes deadly serious. “So do we have a deal or not?”

He was right. It was just like DITA had said—the illusion of choice. Well, I was going to hold onto as much of that illusion as I could.

“All right, I’ll help you. But I want to get paid.”

He chuffed at that. “No surprise there. What’s the going rate for a data reconstruction expert slash shōfu?”

My brow furrowed. “And that’s the other thing. This is going to be business—and just business.”

His eyes sparked. “Wasn’t it always just business, doll?”

“Pendejo. I mean this is a data job. You’re paying for data, and that’s all you get. No crossed lines, no—”

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll find my pussy elsewhere.” He waved his hand irreverently. “You know, probably shouldn’t call me names if we’re going to be working together.”

“So we have a deal?”

He swiped his hand down his face and didn’t look any happier about this than I did. “I guess we have a fucking deal.”