Holly stepped off the U-Rail carriage, the shock of Pardua's death still lingering in her veins. A cocktail of unsteady emotions rattled her implants as she started walking, keeping a wary eye overhead for corporate security drones. The datastream out here was patchy, firewall and pestkiller software in a constant chase to eviscerate the weed-like virus growths that popped up with increasing regularity.

She approached from the west, towards the part of the district Pardua had pinpointed that was on the outside of the cordon. Right now, the fewer security checkpoints she had to pass the better.

Squeezing her eyes shut for a second, Holly willed the image of her friend's body out of her head. Triggering an alarm-code for the local police was all she'd been able to bring herself to do before she bolted. At least he wouldn't be left there for long.

Anger rose to the top of her emotional cauldron then, as she trudged along a downward sloping street running parallel to the river. Somebody murdered her friend. The same someone who tried to kill her. The coincidence was too much. Her implants sizzled beneath her skin and she breathed deep through her nose, concentrating to maintain control.

Who are you? she thought. Who's out here?

The muffled pop of gunfire echoed from within one of the big buildings to her right – a gunnery arcade for the locals with a drunken, lop-sided crimson sign. She squared her shoulders and walked by, then on past a tangle of housing stapled to the side of a multi-store, a rancid looking diner, a boating supply store, a clanging garage filled with wounded, strung up cars.

There wasn't much here that looked out of place. Holly dredged the map image up from her mind again, and triggered her visor, risking a small connection to the datastream to pull a set of public street plans.

She overlaid the two. The dark sheen of the dead zone Pardua had found covered a small section of the streets, with the line of the corporate cordon stretching over about a third of it. Holly squinted, trying to decide where she ought to look. Whoever – whatever – had killed her friend, it had gone to great lengths not to be found.

"Where would I hide?" she murmured to herself.

Somewhere beneath the streets, but somewhere with the capacity to generate enough power to block out Pardy's signal trace. Hiding from the corporations wasn't something that just anyone could accomplish. She examined the city plans as she walked, sifting through construction and utility blueprints from half a dozen minor firms, looking for something that might fit the bill.

Three options presented themselves. Holly made an educated guess as to the best option, and turned sharply right, just as the lights of the corporate cordon on the docks came into view. A few drones whinnied distantly in the sky, but they were focused inward.

Perhaps wrongly, she thought. Shoulders squared and head down, she trudged through the narrow streets, heading towards the low, spined hulk of a Barrius Greenbelt transformer plant. A forest of masts speared up from it like some kind of monstrous hedgehog, their structures lit up by pulsating blue lights.

By all the reports, the plant was operational, sucking in solar, wind and kinetic discharge energy from the datastream itself, before funnelling the whole lot back into the Hadrian's voracious power grid. It wouldn't be a difficult matter to repurpose those masts, if an enterprising individual chose to do so.

As she approached, nothing looked out of the ordinary. The masts sizzled and crackled merrily, and she even spotted a few blue-overalled technicians strolling lazily around through the windows.

When she reached deeper with her AmpCore senses, however, she could sense something off. The datastreams flickered inconsistently, and a small number of the power masts presented to her as dead shadows. They weren't gathering in anything. Some of the others shone a little brighter in her vision. Compensating.

Someone had been very careful.

But the factory still seemed to be operational, workforce and all. Holly skirted around the perimeter, pulling up the plans for the place. Scanning over them for a moment, she noted an empty substation in the next street, an obsolete structure scheduled for demolition since being supplanted by an upgraded version closer to the main factory.

Perfect, she thought.

Her initial smugness faded quickly when she made her way to the substation, however. It looked as empty as advertised, but she felt the tracking gaze of several sets of eyes as she began walking towards its entrance. Nothing invasive, but definite watching. She tried to resist the urge to look, but in the end, she couldn't help it.

Holly glanced left and right. Dark shapes greeted her, moving silently between the buildings. She glimpsed bright eye lenses and the faint glint of metal in the gloom. Sliding her amplifier from its sheathe, she felt around in the dark. A chill went up her spine when she felt the presence of codewraiths, three that she could pick out. With them, however, were more complex systems, and the pulse of flesh and blood.

Cybernetics? Cyborgs?

Steeling herself, she kept walking. The watchers kept their distance, until she got to within twenty yards of the main entrance of the substation. Figures peeled out of the shadow, their movements deliberate. Hunch-backed codewraiths crackled broken code, but kept their distance. She battled down her unease at the sight of heavily augmented humans, their ragged clothing doing nothing to hide the bulk of their machine parts.

Then she stopped dead when the doors of the substation slid open.

Out of them, stepped an immense, metal behemoth. Easily nine feet in height and almost that in width, it was a squarish tank of machinery – a Schism-era enforcement mech, if her memory served. Holly swallowed hard, feeling the machine's mass. Its weapon chambers were long empty of ammo, but its two tri-jointed arms could easily pound her into mulch.

She discreetly swivelled her amplifier at her waist to point at the machine.

"There is no need for hostility," the hulking monster clanged in a rusting robotic voice, dipping its massive, cube-shaped head towards her wand. "We will not attack."

"And I'm to take you at your word?" She looked the mech up and down uneasily.

"We could've gutted you long before now," one of the cyborgs flanking them called. "Boss wants to talk with you." The speaker pointed a chrome-plated hand at the open door. At the gesture, the enforcement mech swivelled its mass ponderously aside.

You are going to get yourself killed, Holly Lockley, she thought. But she'd come this far, and if she had to, she could turn this whole building into a smoking crater. Casting one last uneasy glance at the mech, she stepped through.

The substation wasn't large. She followed the lighting through the main corridor and emerged into the station control room. It was a messy place, littered with discarded crates and trunks of cabling, but several of the consoles were operational.

She saw more cyborg amalgamations skulking in the shadows. Some were mildly augmented humans, others almost robots where it was impossible to tell where machine ended and man began. There were two more codewraiths, their shining eyes fixed on her, signal trackers locking onto her from afar.

Attack dogs. But these were different to those her compatriots had designed. Holly could feel a roiling, snapping chaos within their metal minds – a barely contained ferocity that could leap out at any moment. Frankly, she was amazed they hadn't attacked her on sight.

Then her eyes fixed on the leader. Though not particularly tall, his body was bulked out with cybernetics, giving him an almost rectangular shape. He kept the hood of his heavy canvas jacket up, shadowing his face and leaving the crimson pits of his eyes glaring out at her. The lower half of his face was mostly visible though, and she could see the greying skin of his cheeks, before it gave way to the black sheen of a metallic jawline and neck.

This close, she could feel a warped, sickly aura of broken code seeping out of the man. He regarded her for a moment, then hopped back, landing in a sitting position on top of the crate pile behind him. Leaning forward, he rested his elbows on his knees and clasped steel-plated fingers together.

"Hello," he grated, his voice grinding and scraping like rusting gears.

Holly raised an eyebrow. "Hi."

He cocked his head to one side, his eyes twitching, the metal of his jaw flexing slightly. She felt a tremble in the data-stream around them.

"So... Holly – it is Holly isn't it?"

Her eyes narrowed. The face he knew her name only reinforced her suspicions. This was the same thing that tried to kill her. Whoever he was – whatever he was – he'd been hunting her. Time to turn the tables.

"My name is Holly Lockley," she answered icily, flexing her fingers and letting her implants heat.

"Well, what can I do for you, Holly Lockley?" the man asked.

Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. "Why'd you let me walk through your front door?"

"I tried making a point of being hard to find since I got here." He shrugged. "I'm guessing you must have something pretty important to ask me, going to all that effort, coming all this way. How'd you find us anyway?"

"I had help."

"I'm gonna need a bit more than that."

Holly pursued her lips, staring into those eyes. "I think I found one of your... people. Out near Tostvig Freight Yards."

"Tostvig?" The stranger twitched, then let out a regretful sigh. "So that's where he ended up."

"Friend of yours?"

"Buddy on a bender. What happened to him?"

"Shot to pieces by a gang. I extracted a memory chip."

"Don't fuck around do you?"

"Enough! How I got here doesn't matter. I am here. What is this place?" she hissed. "And what the hell are you?"

"So many questions!" He smiled, presenting her with a rictus grin of metal. "What am I? I guess I can tell you that. I'm really fucking angry."

"Oh, you're 'angry' are you?"

"Very."

"At what?"

"Believe or not, I came from Hadrian South." The cyborg clacked his fingers against each other, sighing. It came out all wrong to her ears, sounding for all the world like a rattling car grate. "So, take a guess. What do you think I'm angry about?"

She regarded him coldly. "You don't like the corporations?"

He winked. "Sharp and pretty. I'll bet you get all the best offers."

"You'd be surprised." Holly let her eyes drift across his companions. "I'm not here to talk. I don't care about your grudges. I'm here to make you answer for what you did."

"What I did?"

"Fucking revolutionaries. You're all the same. All virtue and high horses, but you'll kill anyone who steps in your way, won't you?"

"Holly," the stranger said, spreading his hands in a picture of innocence, "I've really got no idea what you're talking about."

"I'm talking about you murdering my friend!"

The cyborg's eyes flared and his face twisted with genuine confusion. "I'll admit, I've killed a few folk since I hit this side of the water, but not anyone you would know."

"Layne Pardua," she snarled. "Gammaton Avionics, development tech, Halcyon grade."

Her adversary shrugged again. "Never heard of him."

"You're lying."

"I'm telling you, I'm not." He clasped his hands together again, staring at her. "Maybe you should tell me what actually happened. Who knows, maybe I can help?"

She hesitated then. All the pieces fit – this wild-eyed thing from the past squatting in Hadrian South, her encounters in the datastream – too many coincidences to ignore. But this person seemed totally oblivious to her plight. Her feelers in the air slipped off his protective sheen of coding. She couldn't gouge his mind to try and find the truth.

"I was looking for something," Holly said, choosing each word slowly and carefully. "For someone. My friend was helping me look for it."

"It?"

"I don't know what it is."

He smiled thinly. "I think I might."

"What?"

"Just... tell me what happened."

"I the memoery chip from your dead cyborg." Holly gestured to the metal-sheathed entourage. "I took a look inside."

The stranger sat up straighter. "You what?"

"I looked."

"You went into the datastream? Through the mind of one of my people?"

"What if I did?"

"I'm guessin' you found something you didn't expect."

"There's something out there. Some presence. It tried to kill me."

He nodded knowingly. "That sounds about right. So what's this got to do with me? Or whatever happened to your friend?"

"I took that chip," she said icily, "and my friend ran a trace. That trace led me here, before you somehow sent a feedback jolt through the system and blew his computer to pieces."

"Woah now, that wasn't me." The stranger gave a nonchalant shake of the head. "I'm good at hiding, Holly. I've even got pretty good at skimming things I want without people noticing, but I couldn't kill anyone like that." He curled and uncurled his fingers, looking down at his palms. "I'm not a spiv who'd kick you in the nuts and stab you in the back. If I want you dead, you'll know all about it."

He sounded like he meant it. Holly hesitated. The breadcrumbs all led here, but something just didn't seem right now. She edged forward slightly, her brow furrowing in confusion.

"I... I don't understand."

"Sorry about your friend. Think you've got the wrong suspect, though."

"But we traced you here."

"Well, you're not the only one trying to find me," he replied. "Seems like there's a lot you don't know." He nodded towards the burned circle on the shoulder of her jacket. "Had a falling out with your bosses, did you?"

"It's complicated."

"Isn't it always?"

"If it wasn't you then... then what happened?" A hint of desperation crept into her voice. "What happened to Pardua? And who the fuck is trying to kill me?!"

"Sounds like you poked the bear," the man told her. He leaned back, resting his palms on the crate. He seemed young, but if he came from Hadrian South, he had to be in his fifties at least. With all the metal crammed into him, Holly couldn't really begin to guess.

She didn't want to risk a more invasive procedure to try and confirm it.

"I came here for two reasons," he continued. "First, I'm here to destroy Hadrian's corporations."

"Oh, is that all?" Holly couldn't suppress a snort of derision. "So what's the second thing?"

"To get away."

"From what?"

He winked; one red iris vanished for just an instant. Holly licked dry lips as the implications hit home. "From the thing that tried to kill me."

"Told you you were smart," he drawled. "There are worse things than me out there. I've got ways to hide, but you? I don't think you've got any idea what you've been flailing at."

Her mind flashed back to the inception of the codewraith programme, back when she'd agreed to be part of Gammton's ambitious, illegal project along with hundreds of others. She remembered the whispers, the rumours, the hushed nightmare scenarios. Hadrian South wasn't as dead as it was supposed to be. That's what some people had told her. That was why they needed the programme, to protect Hadrian against what might being happening across the water. She remembered her own words to Arrow Gibbs.

Living things evolve. People thought they could just leave that place alone, let wasteland be wasteland and pretend it all never happened. Turns out it doesn't really work that way.

"What's happening?" Holly asked, lowering her amplifier to her side. "What's out there?"

"Oh, no, no, no, can't tell you that." He shook his head ruefully. "I let you come here because I was curious."

"Curious?!"

"You're interesting, Holly Lockley," he said, sounding almost sad, "but I've got big plans. Can't stand here giving you history lessons anymore. And, let's be honest, whether I killed your friend or not, you and I are not going to be getting along."

"What?" She felt a lurch in her stomach. "Why? I... I have questions."

"I'll bet you do, but I can feel all that metal in you." He tilted his head to one side, staring intently with his crimson eyes. They pulsed softly. "Your implants. They stink of spiv-tech. Sorry, Holly, but that kind of gear means you're no use to me, and you're way, way too dangerous to ... indulge."

She took a step back, her amplifier rising defensively. "You know what I am?"

"Oh, yeah." He nodded once. "Actually met one of your kind not so long ago." Looking back over his shoulder, he motioned with his head to one of the chrome-hulked bodyguards. The woman's lip curled disdainfully and she disappeared for a moment.

She returned carrying a corpse.

With a contemptuous flick of the wrist, she tossed the body of Grennick Lanson onto the floor between them.

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