Beep—Critical damage. Auxiliary circulation will shut down in one minute. Perform maintenance or back up immediately—

Clossy, almost torn head from body, slumped against a crumbling brick wall, the system’s voice in her ear and a bitter smile curling like wet paper.

She’d thought it was a routine job with a little bite, so she swaggered into the slums, chased a “target,” and dreamed of bonuses like coins gleaming in rain. This pit chewed her up in ten minutes and snapped shut like a steel trap.

It was a trap, jaws set and waiting.

The humanoids that hit her weren’t junkyard models a slum gang could scrounge. No cognitive cores, sure, but they moved like iron wolves and carried true military teeth.

She fought out with everything, but what for? In this ruin, even a kid could crack her skull like an eggshell, now that her armor was gone.

Beep—Circulation offline. Losing vision—

Energy fluid bled from her sieve-riddled body like rain through a leaky roof, the black vignette widening like ink in water, until darkness fell like a curtain.

Funny thing—she’d been scared to death while running. Now, with hands off the wheel, calm settled like dust after a squall.

If idiot Jack files it straight, maybe they’ll pin “hero” on me. That brat could coast to eighteen on my pension and subsidy, she thought, a line drifting like smoke.

She didn’t bother imagining what they’d do when they dragged her back. A body patched like a tattered sail knows how to pry open the “mouth” of a head without a shell.

“Our luck’s solid. We wander for a bunk and stumble on a gift like this,” a voice said, a coin glinting in the gutter.

Her audio module, still loyal, fed her every word like raindrops counting time.

Lines like that belonged to someone with nowhere to go. Would she really end up under a gutter rat?

Beep—New energy fluid injecting. Auxiliary circulation booting. Ten seconds to visual recovery—

The prompt felt like a long-lost hallucination. Then light crept back like dawn along eaves, and the feeling fled.

The rain still hammered, an impossible downpour drumming the alley. The brick behind her still crumbled like stale bread. Only one thing changed—two hooded shadows stood before her like black crows.

She’d misread them. These two weren’t vagrants; their stance showed steel under cloth.

“Yo. You’re awake?”

The one a step ahead called out, his voice dropping into her ear like a pebble into a well.

A young man without notable features wore a plain black tri-proof coat, polyester slick with rain, half his face drowned in the hood’s ink-dark shade.

“…Who sent you? What’s your physical recognition code?” Her words came cold as the rain.

Her gaze slid to the other figure crouched and tinkering at her wreck, habit asking before thought, and the young man laughed, sparks snapping in the wet.

“Hahaha, hear that, Sixteen? Even police-grade cyborgs still use a six-year-old handshake. Next time they call you a fossil, you can smack this on her forehead.”

Clossy couldn’t follow his circuit. If Jack really hired him, she’d love to knock Jack’s skull like a temple bell when she got out.

“Tsk. So you’re calling me a washed-up relic? Then you carry her core, kid,” the silent one finally said, words flicking like a knife.

The other, quiet till now, lifted her head. In wan moonlight pale as bone, Clossy saw a shadow washed over the left eye beneath the hood.

“Afraid not. This lady isn’t like you, an autonomous android. She’s a heavily modified human,” the voice said, a grafted tree twined with metal vines.

The man smiled and pulled an ancient touchscreen slate from his pocket, waving it lazily toward the bricks to Clossy’s right. She heard a thin sound, a mosquito hum through rain.

Crash—!

A heavy illegal military chassis smashed half the wall like brittle crust and dropped stiff beside Clossy’s wreck.

Seeing the ambusher half-buried under rubble and slag, the man stowed the antique device without a ripple and said, unhurried, “So be careful. Damage her brain, and you don’t get a backup like a cognition core. That flame goes out once.”

“Let me cut in. Who are you, and why save me?” Her question flew like a stone across a stream.

His way of talking fogged her head like mist. He looked neither like the target’s crew nor anyone from her departments, so better to ask while the water was shallow.

“Why save you? We need a local guide. You fit. Time to change jobs,” he said, an offer thrown like a plank over flood.

He crouched, helped the one he called Sixteen remove the processing module that cradled Clossy’s brain, and rerouted the lines into a portable five-sense cache. He patted the box she’d become—now only able to hear, see, and read—like dusting an urn, and said, whether she reacted or not, “Mm-hmm. Save it for somewhere safe. Sixteen, slot a fake command core in that heap. We’re ghosting.”

He lifted the casket with Clossy’s brain and slipped into the alley like smoke through a rain-curtain.

Cramped into a box, Clossy barely caught the sleeves on “Sixteen.” A rebellious red flame insignia burned on black cloth like wildfire racing over night.

Trouble had truly found her, a snare tightening, she thought.

“Yo, Leon. Looks like that went smooth… Where the hell did you find him?!” Manstein hissed, voice lowered like a knife under a coat, as Leon pushed a black-clad suspect back into the alley.

“Found where… What are you rambling? You high again?” Leon snapped, words like dry thunder.

He muscled the suspect into the police vehicle, punched a code, and sealed the door with a steel sigh. It was a special transfer rig—outside, just another truck in the rain; inside, a pen of cold steel. The body was high-strength nanomaterial, a shell a Gauss rifle couldn’t punch through in one shot.

They brought that beast here because the slum stank of knives under the water.

Truth hurts: even with tech blooming, no nation scrubs gangs clean. The Pat slums, bright on paper under the state, were in shadow ruled by two families like twin snakes.

They’d had prisoners snatched back before, a stain on the badge like oil.

Leon didn’t get why the officials sat still. He didn’t care to; some rivers weren’t his to ford.

“This is a new model moving on the black market,” Manstein said, eyes flicking like signals in fog. “No serial. No file. The real stuff only the black market can touch.”

“And then?” Leon’s voice stayed flat, a blade laid on the table.

“And then—you really think we get out clean? Leon, wake up. A humanoid that costs billions—think those two families will let us walk? The Miyamoto clan from the East Isles, the Italian mafia—each covers the sky with one hand,” Manstein growled, clutching Leon’s collar, knuckles white as chalk.

That lit Leon’s fuse. He moved quicker, jammed a forearm to Manstein’s throat, pinned him to the wall, and punched the brick, dust jumping like moths.

“Bullshit! You rot in a lab and forget what justice looks like? Look at that body. Is that a human death? It’s a slaughterhouse. And you can stomach that?!”

Manstein wouldn’t eat it. He shoved Leon off, eyes wide like floodlights, thumb to his chest.

“Man, I’ve got a wife and kids. Cut me some slack! I don’t want the mafia boxing us in mid-route, and my family staring at my corpse!”

Leon swallowed the retort, blood seeping into his eyes like red tide. He clenched, turned away, and slammed his fists on the van, steel ringing like a bell.

Naked reality stood there, cold as rain. Nobody dodged it.

Even in this future, most cities kept police deaths under five percent. Gotham? Over twenty, a field of crosses under two ancient tumors feeding on the city. If they wanted someone dead, the river carried that body.

Without the new psychometric system, Gotham would have slid into a gang heaven, a night with no dawn.

Even so, the common blocks lived on a knife-edge, hearts fluttering like sparrows. Only the rich quarters slept deep on feathered pillows.

Leon, a retired agent, had a place in the rich district, a quiet pond. The missions from twenty to thirty stacked enough cash to float a lifetime. But he was a man of roads and storms, so he joined Gotham PD and walked back into the rain.

Once he plugged in, he saw the dark under the water.

“You two big men, what is this—getting cozy?” Natalie cut in, swagger loud as boots in puddles, snapping his drift into memory.

“Cozy, my ass. Move. You coming with us, or what?” Manstein sighed, the chill easing like steam, shook his head, and headed for the squad car, tossing the question over his shoulder.