Kirk cast a critical eye over the instrument, letting his gaze wander over every blemish and imperfection.

The violin was a Hadrian-era repo, imported and stamped with a letter 'P' shaped to look like an axe-head sitting on a piece of sheet music – Pictsound Entertainment Systems. Most of their money came from much cheaper, and much more advanced pieces of gear than this. Its body was slim, a faux-wood finish laid over its metal exterior.

What he could have given for something made out of real wood.

"What do you think?" the young man behind the counter asked.

Kirk's mouth twisted with indecision. He looked at the crypt count on his wrist tab's holo display. Looked back at the violin. With his other hand he scratched uneasily through his short mess of red hair.

"I..."

"I guarantee, you won't find a better model for the asking price," the vendor said with a shrug, leaning back in his seat. Middle aged and built like a bundle of straw, the man steepled his bony fingers. "It is in your budget, isn't it?"

"Maybe." Kirk met the watery eyes of the shopkeeper. "Strings?"

"Smoothbored synthetics – third hand but sturdy."

He nodded. "Can I try it?"

The shopkeeper's eyes narrowed with irritation. "I don't have all day. Do you want it or not? I have no shortage of buyers."

"Alright, alright, shit." Kirk scratched at the back of his head, indecision gnawing at him, before he finally decided there wasn't much point shopping around further. "I'll take it."

The man's demeanour changed in an instant, his hands falling apart and a bright smile spreading across his face. "Fantastic. I'll throw in the reinforced travel case for you as well. Just transfer the crypts there-," a finger flashed to the flat metal square of his receiver terminal.

Kirk's mouth twisted uncomfortably as he pressed his wristband against it. It bleeped, that innocuous sound signalling a significant chunk of his dwindling funds disappearing into Hadrian's corporate evergrind. Part of him knew it was frivolous to spend his crypts like this – to indulge himself in such a way – but it felt like a lifetime since he'd actually just done something for himself.

With the transfer complete, the shopkeeper swiftly bundled the violin into its case, moving with a fearsome speed, as though afraid the sale could still fall apart if he didn't get the instrument physically into Kirk's hands as quickly as possible.

"Thanks," Kirk said, swinging the travel case across his shoulder by its thick canvas strap. It bumped against his back, heavy and reassuring.

Now that the deed was done, he began to feel a little better as he stepped out of the shop and into Hadrian's cloying embrace.

The noise from the cramped alley market washed over him, throngs of people filling the narrow street, spilling in and out of jam-packed shop fronts. The air glittered with bursts of code snapping back and forth between visors of the better equipped merchants and buyers, cutting through the fug of smoke that settled over it all. He could smell a cocktail of cigarettes, cheap cologne, body odour and sizzling food. Beyond the tangle of structures in the dockside district, the neon glow of Hadrian's skyline was blinding, as though the sun had never truly set.

Nevay was waiting outside, lounging on a window sill of a shop on the opposite side of the alley, on leg bent and a cigarette scissored between the fingers of her left hand. In the right, a big, black-bladed knife hung, tapping against the stonework as though it had a mind of its own. She straightened up as he emerged, clamping the cigarette between her teeth and smoothing out her scuffed synth-leather jacket.

"You get your toy?" She grinned impishly.

"It's not a toy, Nev," he grunted. "It's an instrument."

"Oh, my mistake, milord."

"Aye, fuck off." He flipped his middle-finger at her, but that only broadened her grin. Shaking his head, he gently slung the violin case across his back and tugged the strap tight.

Nevay laughed, a sharp, hoarse sound. Not for the first time Kirk found himself wondering how he'd ended up with her. She was tough as nails, and was a proven killer, her red hair shaven down one side, hanging long down the other, revealing a heavily pierced ear and spiralling tattoo that descended down the side of her neck. The high grade synthetic of her left eye shone blue, an implant probably worth more crypts than he could make in a year.

"Well, now that you're armed and dangerous," she drawled as she slid her knife back into the sheathe at her hip, "we've got an appointment to keep. Rebellions don't start themselves, you know."

*

'Rebellion' was a very grand word for this ragtag gathering, Kirk thought.

Once upon a time Nevay Jennings had been part of the biggest criminal organisation on the docks, a powerful syndicate operated by her uncle, the legendary Cutter Jennings. But when Piper and AmpCore came on the scene – when the gang was dragged into the buzzsaw of Hadrian's corporate evergrind – all that had changed.

Cutter was dead now, along with his trusted lieutenants, and pretty much everyone else. Rival gangs moved in, carved up the old territory among themselves, and Hadrian's docks descended into a bloody turf war.

That left Nevay to pick up the pieces.

A handful of her old crew lounged around the repurposed subway yard, drinking, smoking and pouring over holo pads and computers. Since this had all started, none of them had expressed much interested in speaking with him, preferring to trust their old boss implicitly. He got the distinct impression that the old guard didn't understand why Nevay kept him around.

In truth, he wondered about that himself sometimes.

Besides the remnants of Nevay's gang, the rest of them were nothing to write home about. There was a skinny young technician named Beela who toiled away at a heap of questionably usable gadgets; a corporate warehousing administrator-turned-informer called Thackenby sat a little further away, pale as a ghost and stocky, his red hair shaven down to his scalp and his expression grim as he examined a manifest. A few other idealistic – or at the very least, vengeful – souls from the slums hadn't taken much convincing to join their crusade against the corporations.

Wearily, Kirk slid the violin case underneath his bunk, then sat down, rubbing his eyes with both hands. Then he tugged his data pad from its wall holder. Taking a deep breath, he started thumbing through the directory, scouring the latest corporate news reports for any sign of Piper Russell.

The memory of their last conversation was still branded into his brain. Sometimes he hated himself for it, other times he hated her, but he couldn't bring himself to second guess his decision. He barely felt like he knew her anymore. The girl he'd known on the docks was gone, replaced by a corporate weapon, stuffed with implants that warped the very world she walked in.

So she remained at AmpCore, buried somewhere in the corporate heart, and he stayed out here at the docks, working on a way to burn the whole thing to the ground.

Unsurprisingly, he found no trace of her in the reports. Piper, AmpCore, the codewraiths, the illegal AI core and everything else, they'd found in that fabrication yard had simply... didn't seem to exist anymore. At least not as far as the corporations were concerned.

Therein, however, lay their ace in the hole. He flicked into the data pad's sealed directory, through into the sealed files, into the real armoury of the rebellion.

The image flashed up on the screen. Kirk had to fight down the urge to flinch, memories hitting him like water battering against a dam. The red iris glared back at him, horrifying even in the grainy still Nevay had captured that fateful night.

An AI. A real one. An illegal, sentient machine built right beneath their feet.

One of the reasons Nevay did keep him around was his interest in Hadrian's history, and he knew in more detail than most just what had happened in the Schism that had turned the city's southern half into a wraith-haunted wasteland. The path of creating life had sent Hadrian's sainted corporations thundering down a path they barely understood.

And when they did understand it, they did not like what they had created. Not at all.

The corp side of the story typically denied any wrongdoing. The AIs were going to rise up; to overthrow their masters and turn Hadrian into a machine dominated slave pit. He rather suspected there was more to it than that.

But whatever had happened, the idea they would be so stupid as to retread that path staggered him.

He thought no corporation could surprise him any more, but the last few months had been a brutal exercise in readjusting perspective. They had the evidence here of that blistering hubris, and someday, when they'd gathered enough strength and expanded their network far into Hadrian's tangled data-streams, Kirk would show the rest of the city. Crack that shiny fucking-neon-crypt-plated armour and drive a spike right into it.

The very idea of it made him feel warm inside.

A few minutes later, that pleasant train of thought was interrupted when Nevay's nominal right-hand-man came clumping down the staircase, his footsteps like hammers.

Big and brawny, Targe had his dark hair scraped back and gathered into a ragged ponytail, and his body was pockmarked with ad-hoc medical scars and bad grafts. He was missing half an ear, and a section of his lower abdomen bulged unnaturally with a synthetic armour graft. His right elbow hinged at a metal joint, a garishly painted, three-barrelled shotgun resting nonchalantly across one shoulder.

"Boss?"

Nevay beckoned him with two fingers.

"We just got a message from Priatt," Targe elaborated as he stomped down the stairs, a sly smile splitting his gnarled features. "He's ready to talk."

"Well, it's about fucking time." Standing up with a huff, Nevay checked her knife, closing her human eye and sighting down the blade with the other. Satisfied, she gave Kirk a nod. "C'mon."

"You really need me for this?"

"Just got to do a little bit of old-fashioned diplomacy. You look a little less..." Her gaze flickered to Targe with amusement, "angry than the rest of us." She swept up a heavy pistol from one of the tables as he approached and shoved it into his hands. "You remember how to handle one of those, don't you?"

"Yeah, I remember," he grumbled back, checking the sight and slipping the magazine out for a closer look. He wasn't exactly an expert, but the last year had hardened him to the viciousness of Hadrian, whether he liked it or not. The gun was a bulky old thing – a Nevis Armouries model with its serial number long-since filed off.

It would have to do.

"Expecting trouble?" he asked.

"Always." She flashed him a vicious smile, then signalled to Targe and the others. "C'mon, people. Let's go make some sparks fly."

*

Kirk joined the gathering as they climbed from their subway hideout and into the mucky air of Hadrian's dockside. They'd stuffed themselves into the gunnels of the AllChem Bridgeways, a dark, half-abandoned stretch of the riverbank that sat in the shadow of the massive bridge connecting the glowing metropolis of Hadrian North to its ruined shadow across the water.

His grip on the pistol tightened as he looked up at the bridge. A massive structure, it used to hurl eight lanes of traffic back and forth across the Hadrian River. Now it was a fortress, jammed with corporate security and bristling with searchlights, combing the water and the banks for any sign of an incursion from the south.

Not that anything could actually swim the water. The river was such a polluted chemical churn that it would kill you in minutes. Even the metal denizens of Hadrian South simply disintegrated from the noxious compounds. The huge, beetle-like cargo-barges that crawled back and forth across its inky surface bore thing plates of galvanised armour on their hulls just to be able to traverse it.

"No daydreaming, violin," Targe grunted, giving him a light nudge with his metal elbow as he passed.

Kirk jerked his gaze from the bridge and hurried to fall in line with the others as Nevay led them on. She strode ahead like a wolf, confident, even eager. Her hand never left the knife sheathed at her hip. Tayge and the rest of her crew didn't pay much attention to him, their eyes rooted on their surroundings, fingers resting on trigger fingers.

They made their way through a bustling, grubby district, with tightly packed structures leaning dangerous against one and other. Neon-signwork vomited light through the narrow streets, and a constant thrum of music mingled with the voices of vendors, most of whom quickly looked the other way at the sight of Nevay and her gang.

The name of her late uncle still carried weight with some.

At length, they cleared the busy commercial clumps and turned off into a long-abandoned fishing factory – a rickety sprawl of an industrial complex that, decades ago, might have thrummed with life and commerce.

Not in this part of the docks. Not anymore.

They made their way along a series of spindly, creaking gangways until they reached the low-ceilinged boat house that the message had directed them to. As they drew close, Kirk could see the dark shapes of their hosts moving uneasily back and forth.

Slowly those shapes coalesced into people, and a couple of minutes later he found himself facing down a rival gang from Hadrian's docks.

"All of you, let me do the talking," Nevay told them quietly as she approached. "Priatt's a fucking whore-slinger. Miracle my uncle let him keep his balls attached to him. But he thinks with his dick – he'll get with the programme."

They lapsed into silence with no room for argument as they reached the boat house, both parties spreading out in two ragged lines. Kirk kept his jaw tight as he took up his position, doing his best not to let his nerves show. He counted seven men and women opposite them, and the leader, Priatt, loped forward, a nasty sneer etching itself across his tattooed features.

He was fat, his gut barely contained by the mangy tanktop he wore, the rest of him swamped by a long overcoat and heavy cargo trousers. He jangled under the weight of too many gold chains as he moved.

The sight of him made Kirk feel a little sick.

"As I live'n'breathe," Priatt said through an oily grin. "Little Nevay Jennings in the flesh."

"Been a while, Pri," she replied taking a step forward from her crew. He saw Targe tense, the big man's finger tightening around the heavy trigger of his shotgun.

"Thought you got sliced up with old Uncle Cutter and the rest of them." The grin broadened. "Shame, eh?"

Nevay didn't take the bait. "Much as I'd love to relive the good old days, we gotta deal with what's in front of us," she said. "I see your boys have been carving deeper into Allchem than they used to?"

Priatt's face was a picture of innocence. "Just supply and demand, Nevay. People need a bit of help. A bit of protection. I'm just taking the cut off what we're owed for that."

"Allchem's not yours to help."

"No?" The man's tone hardened. "Don't think you're in a position to be tellin' me what I can and can't do. You're yesterday's news." He moved closer, barely two feet away from Nevay, looming over her.

She stood her ground, outwardly maintaining a facade of calm, but Kirk saw her fingers gently tightening over the pommel of her knife.

"I'm here today," Nevay answered. "And I'm giving you chance to get your people in line. No need for theatrics. Just go back to how things were before. I'll even shave our cut down to ten percent."

"Oh, ten percent?" Priatt giggled shrilly. "Ain't you a fuckin' saint! Ten percent. You hear that boys? She only wants ten percent."

A smattering of laughter passed through his entourage and his grin returned with malevolence as he turned back to Nevay.

"Think you've misunderstood our positions, eh? From now on, you're gonna be paying me a fat fifteen if you want to hang on to whatever scraps are left."

She snorted. "The fuck I am."

"Oh, don't take it so hard, y' little sparrow," Priatt sneered, one grimy finger tracing a line down the side of Nevay's face and along her jaw.

Kirk tensed. He could feel it in the air. He had no idea what rock this moron had been under for the past year, but Nevay Jennings was not someone to be screwed around with. Priatt's confidence was staggering, in a way that made him question the man's sanity.

To his surprise, Nevay's smile returned as she gently shoved his hand away.

"C'mon, Pri," she said. "Don't be that way. You and Uncle Cutter always managed to come to an... arrangement."

"Did we?" Priatt's voice dropped to a husky growl. "I did business with Cutter, cos he was someone worth doing business with. Knew how to dodge the corps and make good crypts. You ain't him. You're just a little bitch-bone wannabe." He leaned close to her, nostrils flaring. "How about you and your little boys join my crew instead? I'm sure we could work out some kinda exchange of... services. Ain't no reason for you to be strutting about with all that hardware. Girl like you – easier way to make crypts."

"Aye?"

"Absolutely." His hand reached out again, caressing the skin of her neck. "Course, you and I would need to have a test. Just to make sure you know how to sell it."

"Sounds like a fucking party."

Nevay's smile never wavered.

Not even as she whipped out her knife and stabbed Priatt in the throat.

||