Zef experiences a white out. A momentary lapse in his own ability to process thought. "Huh?!"

Gray repeats, "Someone's been tracking you. Probably to get to me."

Tracking...

Zef recalls a conversation held in a sterile, soundproof fishbowl. Rylan Archer tapped her nails and talked about Zef's true upbringing, his father's disability. Now he has the answer to how she found out. He regards the bloody implant cracked on the concrete between them with a sick twist in his stomach.

So Rylan had more than one purpose for giving him that implant. The upside is it doesn't seem Gray knows how Zef intended to use it.

"You got any clue who put this on you?" Gray says.

Zef hates lying. Can't stand it. Makes him feel like mouldy bread. Bitter. Was never much good at it, either. But he can't tell Gray the truth. Yeah. My boss. She wants you locked up, and she sent me to do the honours. He can already picture the nuclear fallout of that statement. Gray would never speak to him again. He'd never see Gray again.

Which is feeling more and more like the worst case scenario over failing to do Rylan's bidding.

"I promise you, I got no idea where that came from."

Gray scrapes a hand through his hair, leaving it a mess. More than usual. His agitation seems blunt. Deadened. Just not himself. The lights in his tattoos flicker like he's testing them. Making sure he still has that ace up his sleeve. "Any recollection of something suspicious? Anyone offering you gloves, a free sample, something that could have been used to plant it on you?"

Zef pretends to scrub through his memory, shaking his head. "I mean, that could be— Fuck, it could've been on the faucet of my sink or my front door, for all I know. That woman with the tattoos was right outside my apartment."

Gray's alarm goes through the roof. "You serious? Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because I thought you sent them," Zef says. "They've got the same tech as you, and I didn't know until tonight that you'd defected from CyberSuite! What was I supposed to think?"

"You were supposed to trust me," Gray shouts.

Zef's insides twinge with guilt. Rule number two. Don't trust anyone you wouldn't take home. It's not like Gray gives off Mr. Rogers vibes. Not like it would have been sensible for Zef to trust him.

Still...right now, it seems like his rules landed him in more trouble rather than less.

Gray shifts like a caged animal, chewing his lip. "You should come back with me tonight."

Zef's impulsive responses are cut straight down the middle between no thoughts, only hot man inviting me for a sleepover and this is a really really terrible idea that will lose you your job and maybe your life, followed up by the only response he says outloud, which is,

"You have a house?"

Gray rubs his nose, almost sheepish. "Not really, but you'd be safer with me."

Okay. That's...interesting. "I— can't. I have work tomorrow, and those goons didn't do anything to me in the past, so—"

Gray's fist connects with the brick and mortar over Zef's shoulder. "Dammit, Zef, don't you fucking get it? They got plants outside your door, they know where you live, and they know where you've been ever since they planted that bug on you. You ain't safe there no more!"

The punch probably hurt, which shouldn't be Zef's first thought, but his brains are chicken noodle soup right now. Scrambling to make sense of the threats which now seem to be coming from every angle.

One thought takes precedence over all the rest.

When Gray first pulled that tracker off him, Zef feared Rylan was somehow behind the tattooed goons, but that's looking less sensical by the second. If she was, she'd have found a way to passably copy the tech, and in that case, why would she need Zef to disable Gray's? It's got to be CyberSuite or another competitor. Rylan put a tracker on him so she could suss out leverage, and she got it, but someone else is sending muscle. More enemies. As if Zef needed more.

Rylan still has the trump card, though.

She knows about Zef's dad. And she made it pretty clear she's willing to leverage that. Much as Zef hates lying to Gray, hates this situation more than unskippable ads, he won't endanger Matthias.

"I need this job, Gray," Zef says. Gray's expression deadens. "I'm sorry."

"Are you?" The grit and gravel of Gray's voice goes flinty. His mood pivots from warm concern to cold and accusatory. "Are you?" he asks again, more urgently. "Or are you a hireling like that goon back there?"

"No," Zef lies quickly.

Gray closes in. Now there's nothing even a little enticing about the proximity. Now it's actually... Actually scary. "Get my guard down." Each word is a bite. "Get me all soft and vulnerable by launching another trans guy at me, one I'm bound to empathise with, only to turn me in for some cold cap bounty? That it?"

"No," Zef says, his voice rasping.

"You sure? 'Cause they never came this close before. Never seemed this good at getting to me. Seems every time I'm with you, someone comes calling, and they got my number." A red glow emanates from beneath the collar of Gray's jacket and shirt, up his neck, turning him devilish. He's right up close, and it's too easy to see this Gray and pair him up with the Gray from Rylan's photos, all covered in blood. Or the Gray from the subway, unapologetically sinking a knife into someone he's never met. "I keep asking you to trust me. Maybe I should have asked how I'm supposed to trust you?"

The words are laced. Darts dipped in poison. Zef never trusted Rylan. Always knew she was dangerous. The tracker makes him angrier still. He should have known better. He'd always known her nature. Rylan is a snake. Of course she bit him.

But Zef never was good at 'angry.' Too easy for that anger to turn inward. Now he's pissed with himself for forgetting Gray's dangerous, too. At turns vulnerable and volatile, sensitive and sociopathic. Out of survival, maybe. Zef even sympathises, but...

Right now, it doesn't matter Gray's right to suspect him. It only matters what he'd do about it.

"If you don't believe me—" Zef says, "—are you gonna kill me, too?"

Gray freezes. Shadows pass over his face. Pale imitations of feeling, none latching on for long. "You think I could?"

Yeah, thinks Zef, hardly able to breathe. But it doesn't feel safe to say so. "You've killed people...But you're not a killer," he tries.

"That weren't a no."

"Why don't you tell me then?" Zef's heart drums in his diaphragm. "Am I safe with you?" The hypocrisy hits a second after the words are out of his mouth. He turns the subject around. "Doesn't matter—"

Gray grits his teeth. Hangs his head between them so Zef's looking at the spiral of hair at his crown. An animal snarl comes out of him. Low at first before it becomes a scream. His shoulders shake with it. His tattoos fritz with light. Fear chokes Zef silent. It's a howl of agony, Gray's implants hurting him again. The scream draws attention. The din of the crowd briefly quiets as they look around for the source of the noise.

"Shit, Gray. Is it— Are you okay?" Zef whispers.

"No, I ain't okay."

"I want to help."

Gray's fist crunches in the concrete by Zef's ear. A dry laugh. "You sure? How 'm I supposed to trust you aren't helping those hunters."

Zef's inability to lie convincingly feels fatal. He wets his lips. Opens his mouth to weave words that might fool Gray. And what comes out is a little too much truth amongst the lie. "Gray, fuck, I wouldn't— I could't. I couldn't hurt you. With the way I'm feeling about you, how could I?"

Later, he'll reflect on the moment with a healthy dose of self-loathing. For now, it feels like the only way to avoid a cracked skull.

Gray raises his head. Brow all screwed up like a piece of paper with a drawing on it that hadn't worked out.

"I mean it." Zef sucks in a breath. It tastes like the nicotine on Gray's. They're that close. With difficulty, he says, "But I get it. It's not safe for you to be around me. Not if people are planting trackers on me." He finds the words come from a genuine place. Zef is dangerous to Gray. Zef is trying to help Gray, but he's also trying to catch Gray.

It's the closest to a confession he's got right now. A compromise between self-preservation and guilt.

Gray stares at him, uncomprehending. Zef can see the hairline veins in his eyes from sleepless nights, feel the quiver of his arm where it leans over his shoulder, fist still slammed into the wall like it's keeping him anchored there.

Sirens wail again. Probably attending to a totally different, unrelated crime from the scene they just fled. They break Gray from his trance. He finally steps backward, dropping his hand. Zef catches sight of red grazes on his fingers, the leather of his gloves shredded by the brick. If he'd punched Zef's head and not the wall, Zef would be gone. Just gone.

"Fine." Gray clutches his temple. "I need to think. Catch you later."

He leaves before Zef can say goodbye or ask if he's all right. Though he knows the answer.

Gray clearly isn't all right.

Zef returns to his apartment to find the light on his maildrop blinking. He opens the shaft in the wall and pulls out a small, cardboard parcel with the Bionic Capital logo and a safety seal over the opening. He slits it open with a frayed fingernail and finds the refill on his testosterone prescription inside.

The vials clink in his hand. He takes them to his bathroom and sticks them in the mirrored cabinet.

If he doesn't catch Gray, there'll be no more automatic refills like this. Nothing so easy as testosterone delivered through a mail shaft in his wall.

He collapses into bed. Can't sleep. The conversation, the twists and turns of the evening, all replay in his head on a bleak loop. An ancient recording on vinyl ripping apart with tears from wear.

Would he do it? Zef wonders. Would he kill me if I told him the truth?

Probably. Killed that guy on the subway in a heartbeat.

Gray was aggressive, but he also showed remarkable levels of concern for Zef's well-being, and it makes no goddamn sense.

How could he threaten Zef and keep him safe at the same time?

Maybe it wasn't so nonsensical...After all, Zef's feelings for Gray were a mess of contradictions from the start. There were echoes of pain and hidden scars riddling Gray's broken words and unpredictable behaviour. He'd been turned into a weapon—a knife—and discarded when he'd grown blunt. Unwilling to cut so readily. Anytime Zef nearly touched him and held back, Gray looked at Zef's hands like he was more scared of healing touch than the hurtful kind he was used to.

It plucked at all Zef's weakest heartstrings.

But.

But.

And this, it's an important 'but.'

Zef's concern for Gray... It's gonna get him killed, if he's not careful. Could get his family killed, too. He's not sure he didn't come close tonight. Who knows how deep this conspiracy of caps and wars and tattooed implants goes, yet he's still waffling over whether to give up a comfortable life, his identity, the safety of his father and Leo and everyone else he cares about in the bayou? All for one dangerous, broken man.

He still wants to find a compromise. A way to render Gray harmless, free him from the hurt CyberSuite subjected him to and appease Rylan. Rylan's off in Tokyo, though. Won't be able to float the idea until she's back. In the meantime, he needs to be ready in case there's another episode like tonight's.

He has to find the place to set the trap and spring it. Insurance. Just in case.

The night also had its informative moments. An EMP won't disable Gray's implants for long, but it wouldn't hurt to have one or two on hand in case of emergencies.

Barely breathing, he pulls up his text log with Gray and fires off a message.

>>Won't lie and tell you I'm not scared of what happened tonight.

>>But I also feel safest with you, sometimes.

>>I'm sorry I didn't say it right away.

He feels slimy, using this strange, fragile thing between them to lure Gray into a potential trap. But he also feels trapped. Both of them are stuck in a cage together, starving, resorting to cannibalism.

Zef doesn't sleep. All night long and into the morning, Gray doesn't answer.

~***~

Zef has an errand the next day, but it's not one he looks forward to. Doesn't add no extra zing to his coffee. It involves securing some necessary tools for capturing Gray.

He swats the thought of it away like a persistent fruit fly and hopes that he can sink into his work. Until five, he forgets the conflicted feelings making his brain fuzzy. At least Rylan is off to Tokyo for that conference. Means he doesn't have to worry about implementing any plans of his until she returns.

Work helps take his mind off Gray. The familiar, easy fix of machinery. Where code is concrete, a one is a one, a zero a zero.

After lunch, Nav slams their fist down on the desk and declares, "Guess who just got the down low on this new project you're working on?"

Zef grins slyly. "Archer told you?"

"More like added me to the super secret docket so I could get my grubby hands on it, and Zef...this is really cool? You didn't tell me you were a genius."

Zef feels like his face is surface-of-the-sun hot. "I'm really not."

They punch his shoulder. "Don't be modest. But for the record, how do you feel about having a collaborator? Don't want to step on anyone's toes, but I had some ideas..."

Zef is only too glad to have another set of hands on this monumental task, and Nav is the only one he'd dream of sharing the project with, anyway. They aren't as creatively inclined, but their knowledge about the market mechanics outmatch his by a mile.

"That brand had a recent recall of this exact part," they say, "so probably don't want anything faulty dictating how much dopamine your brain gets today, right?"

By day's end, they've made a great deal more progress together than Zef would on his own. The hollow feeling in his chest lightens a little, but once he's off the clock, the thoughts and fears he'd put off muscle back in.

Can't avoid the task anymore.

He commutes home to change the dressing on his chest, but he doesn't stay long. On his way out, he spots something shiny on his kitchen counter and pauses.

A superstitious part of him felt like it was the equivalent of wearing sunglasses in the hopes of warm weather. Inviting bad luck. But, in the end, he'd rather be safe than sorry.

He picks up the switchblade Gray gave him.

Putting it in his pocket, he leaves and gets another train going the opposite direction. He knows the route now. Took it once before. His body itches as the doors slide shut behind him, half expecting to find it's the same car. Pink penis graffiti, a scratched you matter in a pane of plexi-glass. Maybe even a bit of dried blood on the floor from the guy Gray stabbed.

There's none of that. Just regular commuters, all politely avoiding eye contact.

The abandoned industrial quarter is more barren at night. Many of the people who occupied it, hawking questionably legal merchandise, have left. Dark doorways are lit only by the embers of cigarettes. When people meet, they don't talk, just exchange things. Quickly passed from one pocket to another while their implants light up with the transfer of cash.

Zef hurries off to Nanosoft's old headquarters. Or what's left of them. The warehouse level is mostly a homeless encampment, tents like glowing blisters littering the floor. He weaves through, avoiding eye contact, finding the emergency stairwell. Many of the doors must have been locked and were removed off their hinges as a consequence.

The upper levels are more vacant and quiet. He can't hear the murmur of people below, just distant sirens. Wind through the cracked windows. It's dark, so he turns on the flashlight of his implant, casting a bleakly pale wash over everything in front of him.

At first, he doesn't find what he's looking for. Just warehouse levels of empty shelves. If anything got left behind, it's long been hawked. A corpse left for scavengers.

But he isn't looking for the meat. He's looking for the bones of the place.

The thing about Nanosoft is, it specialised in the same kind of delicate tech as Bionic Capital and CyberSuite. All the goliaths that devoured their smaller kin. Nanosoft didn't make implants; it supplied the parts for them until the gild-makers of the world decided to steal, recreate, or patent the parts themselves. They drove Nanosoft and their compatriots out of business.

Those little parts, those finicky little metal bits that make everyone's implants go? Many of 'em are delicate. Mad delicate. One brush of a magnet, one bit of static shock from someone who walked a bit too vigorously against carpet? Suddenly, that part is as good as the grains of sand that once made it. Useless.

Plenty of companies could use this to their advantage. Corporate sabotage, in the beginning, used to be as easy as tossing powerful earth magnets in the back of the truck transporting the goods. Or lobbing one through the window of the warehouse.

Once the parts were incorporated into implants, they'd get a protective housing, but in the interim? Mega vulnerable.

His legs ache after ascending the fortieth story. As he emerges into a dark, empty room, he hears something.

He whirls around. Sounded like footsteps behind him. With one hand he reaches into the pocket of his jacket and runs a finger along the copper knife. Glad he brought it. The cool metal is a comfort as he listens hard for any sound. Standing still, he can't hear a thing.

Maybe the footsteps were an echo of his own?

He takes another step. It does echo but faintly. Turning, he leans over a bannister, shining his flashlight down the stairwell. Aside from the scurry of some roaches, he sees nothing.

He kept an eye out the whole way here for any followers or people with suspicious tattoos. He was sure he never acquired a tail.

Probably just a rat.

Moving quietly, he passes through a door where his flashlight glints off something at the back of the room. There, on the fortieth floor, he emerges into a warehouse unlike the others. This is where they'd store the valuable little gadgets where corporate saboteurs couldn't so easily destroy them.

On the far side of the room, floor-to-ceiling tall and intimidating, is a Faraday cage.

Plenty large and tall enough to lock a man inside.