Alright, Cassie, Piper thought. Looks like it's just you and me.

An agreeable arrangement.

So long as you don't start advertising to me.

Why would I do such a thing?

Never mind.

Still a little work to be done on sarcasm, apparently. Piper smirked and kept walking. No-one had tried to stop her, and given her current mood, she was grateful for that.

For the first time since she'd walked out the door of the safe house, Piper let herself feel a stab of grief for Mattise's death. It didn't bring tears to her eyes or a lump to her throat, but the uncomfortable knot in her stomach told that she cared. She remembered the first day she'd walked into his office – the ultimatums he'd given, the brutal speech of what her life was to become.

Looking back now, Piper realised she should have thanked him for it. Mattise kept her out of the hands of those who wanted to cut her open, carve out her implants for themselves and dump her on a scrap heap.

Now she could fend for herself. She would fend for herself.

But the biggest thing Mattise had given her, was the lifeline to her past. Niall Casimir, her real father. Without Mattise she never would have known the name. Someone who, despite his brusque, abrasive demeanour, wanted to do something right. He wanted the world to succeed.

He'd gone up against the evergrind of Hadrian, and it had rolled over him.

Anger made her implants twang. Even her friends at AmpCore were getting swallowed up in it now, corporate warfare where there would be no real winners. Time to wash her hands of it all.

She didn't have any crypts of her own now, cut off from her corporate overlords, but that didn't bother her unduly. Arrow had taught her enough tips and tricks in Logistics to hack into the data-stream transactions that flowed all around her. Piper kept her amplifier beneath her jacket as she walked through the street, gravitating towards the thrum of life.

The safe house wasn't quite in the corporate heart, but it was close enough to feel the backwash, with its own thriving ecosystem of boutique shops, high class eateries, sleek tech emporiums and home decoration bazaars. Piper knew that if she wanted to get out of this place without some faction or another accosting her, she needed to blend in. At least a bit.

Her amplifier tingled as she reached out, thinking back to the lessons – lessons she would never finish. She just had to hope she'd been taught enough.

Crypts flickered like well ordered insects in the data-stream above her. She brushed against it gently, diverting tiny slivers of the flow off into a false account ID. It wouldn't stay hidden very long from anyone hunting for it, but she didn't need long. Just enough to get out of the heart.

Once she'd carved a decent slice of disposable income, she sidled into a clothing kiosk, an automated little store operated by Etheria Textiles. Inside, sleek, glass-fronted display cases showed a rotating arrangement of elegant corporate clothing, a lot of stuff she normally wouldn't have gone within a million miles of if given the choice.

But needs must. Wrinkling her nose, she ran her eyes over some of the garish fashions of the Heart. Most of them glittered and swam with inlaid tech, sending shimmering patterns through the fabrics.

She eventually managed to find an outfit that would do the job: a sleek, casual dark dress with a subtle trim of cobalt, with a robust-looking set of boots and a smart black jacket. Even these – at the low end of the spectrum – were eye-poppingly expensive for what they were, but Piper didn't have a much choice. She added a crescent-shaped satchel of dark faux leather, and gathered her long dark hair into a long ponytail knotted on the top of her head. The style didn't suit her, but anything to make a set of prying have to look twice.

A bland, automated voice from the kiosk thanked her for her purchase. She wrestled herself into the new attire in the adjoining changing room, bundling her AmpCore attire into the satchel and slinging it across her hip. Nestling her amplifier in the inside pocket of the new jacket, she smoothed it down, feeling the silkiness of the material. Even the most basic of clothes here made the things she'd worn in her old life seem like rages. She didn't know whether to enjoy it while she could, or to be disgusted by the hedonism of it.

The kiosk's security sensor bleeped obligingly and a blue light swept over her. Satisfied that her items had been paid for, the locking mechanism disengaged, and Piper stepped back out into the city.

Cassie? she asked as she started walking.

Yes?

That... empty thing. You felt it before anyone else.

If you say so. Why?

You think you could find it again?

I cannot track it from a distance, if that is what you are asking. I remember the feeling, though. If we were to get close again, I believe I would know.

We know where it's operating, Piper said. So if I get you close, you can help me find it?

I wouldn't want to make promises.

Cassie...

I will do my best. To what end? What, precisely are we intending?

We're going to do what we were supposed to do before the corps started killing each other, she replied, letting her anger and bitterness seep into the data-stream. We're going to go back out to the docks, and we're going to find the thing that's out there killing people. Sound good?

For a moment, silence filled her mind. She felt Cassie's presence twitching with indecision. Then it solidified, coalescing into something iron.

Sounds good.

Piper smiled viciously. Let's go hunting, Cassie.

*

Blending into the sickly corporate rivers of Hadrian made Piper feel unclean. She did her best to look the part, head held high as she strode through the streets. It was so light here, and she had to fight to keep from squinting. The sheer luminosity of the skyscrapers, the adverts and the moving billboards formed an assault on the senses that simply didn't exist elsewhere in the city.

She had to block out the worst of the deluge. A constant cascade of offers and unsolicited communiques rained down on everyone here from above. Visors shimmered constantly over the eyes of most of the people here, their voices filling the streets in a self-satisfied hubbub. Compared to a lot of them, Piper felt achingly under-dressed as she saw glimmering tech-infused suits and dresses, reflective tattoos, mixed with sleek, smooth fabrics that moulded effortlessly to the wearer's physique.

She didn't want to think about how expensive those things might have been.

Her stomach growled as she made carried on, doing her best to buffet the worst of the data-slurry away. She veered left into a narrow-fronted eatery, proudly boasting of the latest high-energy nutrient supplements pushed through the finest corporate fast-food filters. There were several automated ordering points if you couldn't be bothered with human interaction, which suited her just fine for the moment.

Approaching one, Piper stared at the menu vacantly for a moment, trying to make sense of the deluge of jargon that accompanied each meal. Every ingredient seemed to be some special, revolutionary cocktail of one sort or another. Back on the docks you'd be lucky if what landed on your plate even vaguely matched the menu.

In the end she ordered some kind of elaborate sandwich on a dark brown bread, studded with some kind of seeds and jammed with supposedly fresh vegetables and strips of high-grade synthetic chicken. It arrived in a neat little box with a shimmering smiling face on it, proudly declaring "THANKS FOR YOUR ORDER! WE HOPE TO SEE YOU AT BASSELL'S SPEED-GOURMET AGAIN SOON!"

I wouldn't bet on it.

She resumed her journey, munching on the sandwich as she went. It tasted okay, with some kind of mustard-like sauce woven through the ingredients, but the richness of it made her stomach flip. In the end, she managed to eat three-quarters of it, before tossing the rest into one of the inconspicuous recycling units that dotted the sidewalks – little dark square plinths that zipped the city's trash off underground to god-knows-where.

Piper didn't know if the corps actually recycled anything that ended up in those tubes. It's not as though anyone could really check.

She reached the nearest U-Rail station not long after that, using her amplifier to discreetly override the ticket scanner as she joined the columns of elegant passengers. Taking one of these things in the centre of the city was an altogether more civilised affair, she had to admit, when compared to the mad, shoulder-to-shoulder scrum of the slums.

Plastering a suitably satisfied smile onto her face, Piper found herself a seat, crossed her legs, folded her hands delicately across her lap, and settled in to enjoy the ride while she could.

*

The drone sparked and broke apart. Piper cursed silently as she guided the wreckage down to the ground, berating herself for being so stupid. Shuffling the mangled pile of metal behind the nearest dumpster, she darted off down the alley, cloaking herself in a bubble of static to stop any trace software from locking onto her for the time being.

Scampering along, she waited until she'd put several streets between her and the drone before she took a moment to breathe, straightening out her new jacket and smoothing down the dress.

Exhaling, Piper turned her eyes skywards, looking for any more of them. In fairness, she hadn't expected the fucking thing to be flying at street level like that. Most of the time the little bastards stayed high in the sky, and a lot closer to the heart.

More drones glimmered distantly, just visible to the naked eye. Piper could pick them out more clearly through her implants, but the corporations were clearly not advertising their presence. She had thought sneaking past the cordon would have been the difficult bit, assuming that the corps just wanted to keep the bad stuff sealed within the affected districts.

Evidently, things had gotten bad enough out at the docks, that the overlords of the city wanted to keep an eye on things more closely. Tucking herself into the shadows, she squeezed her eyes shut, pulling a mental image of Hadrian's street lay out into the forefront of her mind. While she didn't quite have the Logistics skill of someone like Arrow to file away information in her brain like a computer, she'd picked up enough of the basics.

That, and she had Cassie, who seemed happy to help.

The map filled her vision. She examined the streets to get her bearings. They'd skirted around the sprawl of the Caxton yard as a starting point, tracing the paths of connecting tunnels out towards the Hadrian river. Coupling that with the threadbare reports from local police, she could see that whatever they were looking for, it was moving away from the docks, and towards the corporate heart. That tallied with what the presence had told her; some rogue actor off on a revenge kick against the corporations.

She could sympathise with that.

Piper frowned and started walking, trying to figure out a way to narrow the search. Even with the information she had, that still left a big stretch of dockside for her to hunt through, all along. She didn't really know how close Cassie would need to get in order to feel the empty presence.

A drone whickered over the buildings a few blocks distant, and she ducked into a back alley.

Any idea where this bastard might be hiding?

If they have stayed ahead of the corporations, we would be best concentrating on abandoned areas, Cassie answered blandly. Caxton was an anomaly. I would hypothesise that the confrontation with your ... colleagues drew its attention.

If I were trying to hide from the corps, where would I go? she mused. Pressing her lips together, she tried to pick out a likely spot in their current district. The portion of the cordon nearest the river was a mess of half-manned loading yards, processing plants and transformer stations. So far none of the police incident reports pointed to that section.

That drew her attention.

She started walking again, keeping close to the shadows, with a wary eye out for any enterprising locals who might try their luck with a lone young woman in the dark. Big, dark buildings rose around her like a maze, some of them blazing with corporate logos, others dormant, waiting for promises of redevelopment that never materialised.

Reaching out into the world, Piper could feel the power lines deep in the foundations, and the half-broken datastreams above. She didn't see many people around at this time of night, save for a handful of exhausted plant staff in rumpled overalls, most of whom were too tired to even register her presence.

They spent the better part of two hours twisting and turning their way through the half-dead district. Piper was acutely aware that they were relying on a sizeable portion of luck to stumble within range of the thing that had snatched Grennick Lanson, but with the corporate civil war erupting without her, she didn't feeling like she had much choice.

A large hulk of a building with a curving roof rose up from the surrounding buildings a few hundred yards ahead of them, and Piper considered it for a moment. According to her map, it was the Barrius Greenbelt plant. Looking at the lights and the glowing Barrius logo, she concluded it was still operational, so not likely to be home to her quarry. She came to a halt, sidling up to the shadows of the nearby buildings, and worked to cast her AmpCore net further into their surroundings, hunting for anything that didn't belong.

Piper?

Go for Piper.

What?

Piper stifled a laugh. Sorry, I mean, yes? What is it?

I believe I have found what we are looking for.

You – you what? The statement was so flat and devoid of excitement that it took a few seconds for her to reconcile it with the words.

Our quarry, Cassie elaborated. I believe I can feel it. It is moving. Fast.

Where? A jolt of trepidation shot through Piper's mind. Is it coming at us?

No. It is moving parallel to us, heading east.

She felt a twang of pain behind her eyes. Suddenly she could see it. Well, not see in the literal sense – but she could see what Cassie was feeling. There was a bubble of darkness in amongst a sea of light, moving at a fearsome speed. At this distance, she couldn't feel it herself, but Cassie seemed to be able to use her implants as a signal amplifier.

There was no mistaking it, though. With Cassie entwined with her own nervous system, she knew it was the same thing.

It looks like it is chasing something, Cassie said.

Any idea what?

Impossible to say, but I doubt whoever it is deserves what is coming.

I guess not. Piper smiled thinly. Alright, Cassie, let's see what's out there.

||