The walk from the container to Jory’s shop was usually a matter of twenty minutes spent hugging the shadows. Tonight, it felt like a march across the surface of a dying star.

  Mike moved with a fragility that frightened him. Every step sent a dull thud through the base of his skull that echoed the mental violence he had just committed. He had forced nature to bend, twisting a common roach into a living weapon, and the effort had left him feeling hollowed out. His brain felt bruised—a sensation of tender, inflamed tissue pressing against the inside of his cranium.

  He kept his head down and hugged the rusted walls of the lane. The backpack on his shoulders felt heavier than usual, though it contained only a fraction of the weight he usually hauled. Inside clinked the clean loot: stripped copper wire and the water filters he had repaired before the madness with Targ had begun.

  He had to sell. He needed credits. But more importantly, he needed to pretend that he was still just Mike. He had to be the sifter who fixed filters, not the killer who stabbed enforcers in the throat or engineered monsters in his bedroom.

  Sector 4 was stirring for the night shift. The air grew thicker and wet, choked with the steam from the atmospheric scrubbers and the frying grease of street vendors. Neon lights flickered in puddles of iridescent sludge. To Mike's newly rewired senses, the world was simply too loud. He could hear the hum of electricity in the walls and smell the decay on the breath of a man walking ten meters away. Under it all was the constant static of the vermin.

  They were everywhere. Mike did not reach out to them, for he did not dare tax his mind further, but he felt them like ghosts brushing against his skin. A rat in the wall or a cluster of spiders in a junction box were faint blips of life in the grey concrete that were painfully present.

  He reached the corner breathless and sweating cold fluid.

  Jory’s shop was a blister of commerce welded onto the side of a massive structural pillar. It was constructed from three shipping containers fused together with windows of reinforced plexiglass that glowed with the warm light of the workspace within. Mike pushed the door open, and the brass bell rang with a sharp tone that stabbed at his ears.

  He stumbled in as the door sealed behind him with the hiss of magnetic locks.

  The shop smelled of ozone, hot solder, and dust. It was the smell of safety, for this had been the only place in Sector 4 where Mike could lower his shoulders for years. Jory sat behind the high counter with a loupe screwed into his right eye socket as he examined the motherboard of a defunct cleaning drone. He was a creature of the heap, withered and skeletal with skin like parchment stretched over bird bones. His fingers were stained black from carbon and oil and moved with the delicacy of a surgeon.

  "You are late." Jory did not look up.

  Mike let the backpack slide off his shoulder and it hit the metal counter with a heavy clunk.

  "Had a complication." His voice was a rasp that vibrated in a chest that felt empty.

  Jory paused. The servo in his loupe whirred as he zoomed out and he looked up, his natural eye narrowing.

  "You look terrible." His tone shifted from annoyance to a rough concern. "Pale as a sheet. You are sweating but you are shivering. Tell me you are not on the Red Dust, Mike. I do not buy from junkies as they bring heat."

  "No dust," Mike said, gripping the edge of the counter to keep his knees from buckling. "Just sick. Maybe the flu or the water."

  "The water filters you fix?" Jory snorted but reached out to grab Mike's wrist. His hand was dry and cool and his grip surprisingly strong for an old man. "You are burning up. You need antibiotics and not credits."

  "I need the credits to get the meds, Jory." Mike pulled his hand back gently. "Just check the bag. Please."

  Jory held Mike's gaze for a second longer. He was a fence, and fences survived by knowing when not to ask questions. He sighed and shook his head before dumping the contents of the backpack onto the anti-static mat.

  "Alright. Let us see what Rigg did not notice you pocketing."

  He began to sort the copper from the fiber-optics and inspected the seals on the refurbished filters. He worked in silence, and the only sound was the clicking of his tools and the low hum of the ventilation.

  Mike paused as he caught his own reflection in a shard of dirty plexiglass leaning against the wall. He stopped dead.

  He looked like a corpse that had not been told it was dead yet. His skin was the color of wet ash and his eyes were sunken into dark sockets. There was a fine and uncontrollable tremor in his hands. He did not look like a survivor.

  Jory was a friend and one of the few people in Sector 4 who gave a damn, but Mike hated pity. He did not have the energy to manage the old man's anxiety right now, so he needed him calm and focused.

  Fix it, Mike told himself. Just for a few minutes.

  He cast his gaze downward. The shop was built on a raised platform suspended over the old drainage sumps where the wood was warped and swelling with humidity. Beneath that wood in the damp dark, Mike could hear them. It was the dry and rhythmic scratching of chitin on rusted pipe.

  He did not need the whole nest. Connecting to that many minds would spike his migraine, but it was a price he was willing to pay. He needed a cosmetic adjustment.

  Mike closed his eyes and reached out with his mind. He ignored the throb of exhaustion in his temples.

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  Ten, he thought. I just need ten.

  He latched on. Beneath the floorboards, ten simple minds froze and then snapped to attention, bound to his will. The mental strain hit him first as a sharp pinch behind the eyes, but the physical payoff followed a split second later.

  [Hive Resonance Active: +2 CON]

  It was not a tidal wave of power, but it was enough. It felt like tightening a loose belt. The tremor in Mike's hands vanished as his muscles found new fuel and the grey pallor of his skin flushed with color as his blood pressure stabilized. He straightened his spine and forced the gnawing ache of his injuries into the background where it was masked by the borrowed vitality.

  He took a deep breath. He still felt like garbage on the inside, but on the outside, he looked solid.

  "I am okay," he said. "I am okay, Jory."

  Jory was staring at Mike with a handful of credits hovering over the counter. "You looked like you were going to pass out. Then you just stood up straighter. You are weirding me out tonight, kid."

  "Just caught a second wind." Mike managed a smile that felt almost genuine. "How much?"

  "For the copper and the filters? Eighty. And I am being generous because you look like death warmed over."

  "Make it a hundred," Mike said, his mind sharp again. "Those filters have new membranes. I cut them from the industrial stock myself, so they will last twice as long as the standard issue."

  Jory paused and then grunted. "Ninety. And you buy yourself some real food and not that protein-slab garbage."

  "Deal."

  He counted out the chips and Mike swept them into his pocket. The metal felt cold and reassuring.

  "Go home, Mike," Jory said, wiping his hands on a rag. "Sleep it off."

  "Thanks, Jory."

  Mike turned to leave. He did not want to. Every cell in his body screamed at him to stay and curl up on the floorboards directly above the nest to let the resonance wash over him. The pull was magnetic, but staying raised questions he could not answer.

  He pushed the door open and stepped out into the night.

  The moment the magnetic lock clicked shut behind him and cut him off from the proximity of the nest, the crash hit. It wasn't the headache returning, but something worse. The resonance had soothed him, but it had woken up a metabolism that had no fuel to burn.

  Hunger.

  It hit him like a physical blow to the gut and doubled him over in the alleyway. It was not the hollow and nagging hunger of poverty he had known his whole life. This was a ravenous void. His stomach cramped violently and demanded matter.

  Fuel. Need fuel. Build. Repair. Grow.

  The commands fired from his brain stem and overrode his thoughts. Mike's hands shook as he fumbled for the backup food in his pocket. It was a standard-issue ration of compressed soy and vitamin paste he had looted from Targ. He tore the wrapper off with his teeth and shoved the grey block into his mouth.

  It tasted of ash and dust. His throat constricted and refused to swallow. His body recognized the matter for what it was: inert and insufficient. He gagged and spat the paste into the oily puddle at his feet.

  [ERROR: LOW QUALITY NUTRIENTS]

  [Biomass Conversion inefficient. High-density protein required.]

  "What do you want?" he wheezed.

  Mike stumbled down the lane, clutching his stomach. The hunger was making him dizzy and turning his vision grey at the edges. He needed calories and density.

  He drifted toward the main thoroughfare of Sector 4, drawn by the smell of cooking fires. The street was lined with vendors cooking whatever they could catch or steal over drums of burning trash. The air was thick with the smell of recycled oil and the heavy copper tang of meat.

  Meat.

  Mike stopped.

  A vendor stood over a wide grill made from a halved chemical drum. Rows of wooden skewers were laid out over the glowing red coals. They were selling Grit-skewers—giant mutant cockroaches farmed in the deep sumps and shucked of their hard outer wings. The thick, pale torso meat was glazed in questionable oil and roasted until the chitin crackled. Normal people ate them because they had to, but tonight the smell did not make Mike gag.

  It hit his olfactory center like a drug. It smelled rich and of iron and raw biological potential.

  He walked toward the stall, feeling like he was being reeled in.

  "Hey." The vendor grunted as he eyed Mike's swaying form. "You buying or staring, filter-boy?"

  Mike stared at the grill where the meat sizzled and fat dripped onto the coals to flare up with blue flame.

  "One," Mike whispered. He fumbled in his pocket and threw a five-credit chip onto the oil drum. "Big one."

  The vendor did not argue. He used a pair of tongs to grab the largest skewer, a monstrosity of charred meat that dripped red-spiced grease. He handed it over, and the heat radiating from it warmed Mike’s face. Up close, it looked grotesque with the stumps where the legs had been torn off visible.

  Mike's human mind recoiled, but the System screamed to consume.

  He opened his mouth wider than it should have gone and bit down.

  There was a crunch of caramelized chitin followed by the soft burst of the meat inside. It tasted of copper and sulfur and the deepest part of the earth. As Mike swallowed, a shockwave of pleasure rolled down his throat and exploded in his stomach. It was not just digestion, but instant assimilation. He could feel the nutrients being stripped from the biomass in seconds and the energy rushing into his bloodstream like liquid fire.

  The headache vanished completely. The weakness in Mike's knees evaporated and was replaced by a surge of aggressive power.

  He did not take a breath. He took another bite and another. He ate with a feral intensity and ignored the grease smearing his chin or the stare of the vendor. He crunched through the softer parts of the shell and stripped the wood clean in seconds.

  Mike stood there panting with the empty skewer gripped in his fist. He looked at the pile of raw roaches waiting on the side table and he wanted to tear them open to drink the life out of them.

  Biomass, the System whispered. Good.

  A chime rang out. It was an intrusive chord that detonated inside Mike's skull as red light flooded his vision.

  [LEVEL UP!]

  [You are now Level 3.]

  Mike exhaled, and the breath that left his lungs felt hot enough to ignite the air. He felt his muscles knit tighter and his bone density increase. The vague sickness that had plagued him for years was not gone, but it was suppressed.

  "Status," he whispered.

  The red screen unfolded in his head.

  HOST STATUS: UNSTABLE

  SUBJECT: Mike. LEVEL: 3. SPECIES: Human [ BIO-METRICS ]

  Note: Standard Human Baseline is 10.

  STR (Strength): 5 [CRITICAL WEAKNESS]

  AGI (Agility): 5 [CRITICAL WEAKNESS]

  CON (Constitution): 5 [CRITICAL WEAKNESS]

  INT (Intelligence): 12 [STABLE]

  WIS (Wisdom): 11 [STABLE]

  [ACTIVE SKILLS:]

  – Neural Tether

  [PASSIVE SKILLS:]

  – Sense Vermin

  – Hive Resonance

  – Bio-Suppression

  Mike stared at the numbers. He was stronger.

  He looked at his reflection in the polished side of the oil drum. His eyes were bright with a frantic intelligence and the shadows under them were gone. He was not just a scavenger anymore.

  He tossed the empty wooden skewer into the mud where it landed with a definitive thwack.

  The vendor was still staring at him. "You want another one, buddy?"

  Mike wiped the grease from his mouth with the back of his hand and grinned. It was a sharp and hungry expression.

  "No," he said softly.

  He turned on his heel and walked back into the dark toward the container and the future.