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CY

H ere’s the thing about most people who grow up in Magenta: they can never get the stench off.

No matter how far they rise, how rich they get, they still wear the filth of that place like a scar.

My corporate-assigned therapist said it was trauma.

I don’t think that word gets close. It’s a rot that stretches into your soul and never lets you go.

I’d never tried to scrub it out. Wore it like a badge of honor—even with my fancy corpo job and paycheck. I’d known plenty who’d tried and failed.

Eon did it with ease.

As she sat there at the café table, no one—not even me—would’ve thought her anything but a high-class woman.

A professor, maybe a manager at POM. She changed herself so completely: her speech, her posture, the way she smiled.

I saw now how she’d fooled me so easily, and I had to admit I was impressed.

Once again, I thought about how she would make an excellent asset.

The ability to chameleon herself into any situation was a skill that couldn’t be taught.

When that kuso majime rolled up in his expensive shirt and slacks, they made the perfect picture.

Like something straight out of a fuckin’ hoload for Elysium University.

Look at the future you could have if you just studied here.

He pulled her into a hug and practically enveloped her. How tall was this asshole anyway? 6’4”?

He flirted with her like any man in his right mind would.

But I knew he only saw the pretty picture.

He saw what he wanted from her, and she was good—too good—at giving it.

But I knew her. I knew her dirty, ruined soul, and it only made me want her more.

He could never have her the way I could—every broken piece of her.

“Hiromi Yamamoto, age twenty-six. Post-doctoral candidate at Elysium University, College of Cyber Engineering and Linguistics. Quite the résumé.” Maddox read off his screen, letting out a soft whistle.

“Offered a job straight out of his PhD at both POM and MedTek, but turned them down to do post-doctoral work.”

“Easy to turn down a job when you come from money,” I said through gritted teeth. The stench of old wealth practically rolled off this guy. It smelled like fancy cologne, weak morals, and mommy issues.

“Also says here that he volunteers weekly at the GeoFlux victims clinic,” Maddox continued.

A fucking saint—and built like a double-door refrigerator. All the damn angels in the world couldn’t convince me there was a fair god up in heaven. “It does not fucking say that.”

Maddox just gave me a wide grin. “Mother and father both still in Japan. His father is the president of Yamamoto Industries—biggest air-car manufacturer in the world.”

“Tell me something I don’t know. Kid probably doesn’t know how to wipe his own ass.”

“You think your girlfriend feels that way?” Maddox asked with a sly grin, and I swear I almost shot him right there.

I could hear the way she’d softened her voice to that timbre that had once moaned my name.

Hearing her use it to say his name had my Flux pulsing, the terminals in our ground-van glitching. Maddox frowned.

“Man, I told you—this was a fucking bad idea. You’re way too into this girl. It’s making you sloppy.”

“I am not fucking into her . I want that bonus, and I want to take a vacation somewhere clean and surrounded by pussy. That’s it.”

Maddox turned back to the screen, his frown deepening.

“What now?” I asked.

“I’d forgotten about this. He had a little sister.”

I crossed my arms. Was I supposed to care?

“I remember—it was on the news. She was a geoteknik.”

So she was dead. No one survived that. Not even the rich.

Everyone with Flux was basically born with a death sentence.

First-gen emergence kids all burned from the inside out by fourteen.

It took about five years before the first rudimentary Flux bioMods were developed, eight before the new-gen bioChips.

I was born ten years after the initial emergence and still ended up blessed with the old tech.

I’d suffer for it the rest of my life—but at least I hadn’t been born a geoteknik.

To this day, no tech can prevent their burnout.

They had immense power—the ability to vibrate any solid material.

Some kids could shake rock until it melted into lava, other could tear tetracarbon barricades apart in minutes.

But the thing that always broke first was them.

The power was too great, and most were dead before they even hit thirteen.

“Imagine that, getting blessed with two kids, but one of them has Geo Flux,” Maddox mused.

“Lots of donations to bioMod research to find a solution, huh?”

Maddox nodded.

“Must be nice to never have to get your hands dirty.”

Maddox gave me a look—even through his darkened Vysor, I saw it. “I thought you didn’t get jealous.”

“I am not jealous. I just hate rich fucks who haven’t worked a day in their life.”

“You know you work for a bunch of them, right?”

“I can work for someone and still hate them. Not mutually exclusive.”

“Heads up. Date’s over.”

I watched Eon hug him— again —then walk over to the ground-van we were hunkered down in. She threw open the door.

“So, what’s next?” Her pinky twitched on the doorframe.

“What do you mean, what’s next? You get that translation and tell us what the hell it means.”

“That’s not going to be done until Friday. What are we doing now ?”

“ We are not doing anything.”

“Trying to set up a meeting with the Kitsune,” Maddox oh-so-helpfully chimed in.

I spun on him. “Whose side are you on, partner?”

“My own. We don’t have a lot of time left, Cy. She’s a resource. We should use her.” He turned to Eon. “Intel says that they might’ve been hiding data for Renard.”

“What kind of data?” she asked.

“That’s the ten-million-cred question, isn’t it?” I rolled my eyes, but she didn’t retort. Her face was serious.

“So what’s the play? What info do we have on their internal security? Are we talking a CHAP or something more advanced? I could probably—”

“Oh, no. You are not tagging along. We’re not playing cops and robbers here, doll. We’re talking about walking into the Chrome Kitsune Den. One of the most dangerous places in this city.”

She looked between Maddox and me. “So which one of you is the cyberrunner? You’re trying to extract data—data that, if your theory is correct, Renard worked very hard to hide. You’re gonna, what? Waltz in and just ask for it nicely?”

“She’s right, Cy,” Maddox said.

“Isn’t she always?” I groaned. “We work for POM. We’ve got tech that’d make even your head spin. We don’t need a cyberrunner on the inside.”

“I don’t care how fancy your tech is—nothing’s foolproof. You’re going to risk that?”

Of course she was fucking right. We needed this data. For all we knew, the glyphs on the walls were just some fucking prank. I needed everything I could get if we were going to close this on time. I held her gaze, sparks lit in those violet eyes, and I knew she was just as greedy as me.

“I’m not agreeing. We’ve got to prep this evening, and you can come.”

“Okay, I’ll meet you back at POM Headquarters.”

“Oh, we’re not meeting at HQ, doll.”