Elk A. Scott

Chapter 1

The rain down here wasn't rain. Rain came from a sky. This was condensation from the levels above—greasy, chemical, picking up whatever it dripped through on the way down. Rust, mostly. Sometimes piss. Sometimes something that had died in a vent and was still in the process of becoming a smell. Ren had learned years ago not to look up when a drop hit her neck. You didn't want to know.

She kept her head down. Habit, mostly, but also math. The emergency lights on this level were failing again, their glow barely enough to separate puddle from solid ground, and a twisted ankle meant lost work. Lost work meant skipped meals. Ren's boots knew the difference anyway. Thousands of hours walking these corridors had taught her feet their own kind of vision.

Her forearms ached—a deep, specific throb along the seam where flesh met the reinforcement plate. Always the first place to complain. She'd spent the last two hours hauling a generator up three flights for a mechanic who'd paid half what he'd promised and acted like she should be grateful for the exposure. She'd known the job was bad math from the start. She'd taken it anyway. That was the part that stuck in her throat.

She shifted the strap of her utility vest. The capacitors inside dug into her spine. Inventory, such as it was. Scavenged wiring. A couple of data chips she hadn't tested yet. Nothing worth the weight. The neural jack at the base of her skull itched where her collar rubbed the seal. She'd need to clean it when she got home. Add it to the list.

Just get home. Patch the cell. Sleep for four hours. Repeat.

The prayer ran on a low loop in the back of her head. Almost comforting. Four walls, a workbench, the quiet hum of her charging station. She didn't need anything else. Didn't want anything else. Wants were a liability. Wants made you stupid. She had learned that the hard way, back before the mods, back when she'd wanted things she couldn't afford and paid for them in ways that still surfaced in her dreams without warning.

She hated being out this late. The upper-level drones had been sweeping the main alleys again—cops or corporate or whatever passed for authority this week—and she didn't have the patience for another scan-and-question routine. Her ID was clean enough. Her mods were all registered, mostly. But the questions always lingered too long on the neural jack, on the reinforced hands, on the way her jaw sat just a little too sharp under the right light. Better to risk the derelict blocks than get clocked by some bored security rig with a hard-on for power.

She was halfway down the corridor when her ocular implant pinged.

Faint heat signature.Barely above ambient. The diagnostic overlay flickered on her view automatically, she'd set it to manual trigger months ago, but the implant had its own ideas about what was worth flagging, and apparently a cold corpse of a power cell didn't qualify. A cool violet-blue glow pulsed from the junction up ahead. Steady. Not the arrhythmic stutter of a dying strip. Not the flicker of a fire. Something still running. Something still powered.

Ren slowed down.

Probably a drone, she told herself. Crashed. Good salvage. She'd check it, strip the usable parts, and be home in an hour. Clean. Simple. A transaction.

She stopped anyway.

The pause stretched. Water dripped from the edge of her vest and hit the cracked floor with a sound like a metronome counting down to nothing. The only other noises were the distant hum of the city far above her and the quiet buzz of her ocular implant trying to focus through the dark.

She took a step. Then another one.

The glow resolved into a pair of dim eyes.

The android was slumped against the crumbling concrete like someone had simply dropped her and kept walking. Long silver-white hair, matted and streaked with grime, clung to her face and shoulders. Pale synthetic skin, ugly tears across her left shoulder and thigh, exposing delicate lattices of glowing blue circuitry beneath. The damage pattern was wrong. Not impact damage from a fall or a fight. Deliberate. Someone had ripped the outer layer away.

Her elegant frame, clearly built for upper-level clients, looked painfully out of place among the filth and broken pipes. What little clothing remained was torn black lace, barely covering anything, soaked through and clinging to her body like a second skin.

Companion model, Ren's brain catalogued automatically. CX series. Looks like an 8, maybe. Someone paid sixty, seventy thousand creds for this unit. Definitely more than what i make in a year

And then they just threw her away.

The android’s head shifted slightly at the sound of Ren's boots. Violet-blue optics flickered, struggling to maintain focus through the rain and low power. For a second, Ren thought she might be completely offline, that the flicker was just residual charge bleeding from a dying capacitor.

And then, she spoke.

Her voice was soft. Modulated. The kind of voice that had been designed to sound pleasant no matter what condition the unit was in.

The kind to make you feel served.

“Designation…” Her voice was soft, almost gentle despite the damage. “CX-29 Unit. Serial 49 Primary systems at eleven percent. Motor functions compromised.”

Ren didn't answer. Her tongue felt thick, glued to the roof of her mouth.

The android continued, her tone disturbingly calm, like she was reciting something she’d said a thousand times before.

“This unit remains capable of providing companionship and pleasure services. Please state your preferred configuration, or—”

“S- Stop.”

The word came out rougher than Ren meant it to.

The android went silent immediately. Her glowing eyes stayed locked on Ren’s face, waiting with an eerie and uncanny kind of patience.

Ren felt a cold settle on her chest.

She knew that tone. That automatic offering. The way someone could be trained to present itself like an object the second another person got close. She shook her head, tring to not think, to not remember, this past. She exhaled slowly through her nose, her jaw tight.

“I’m not here for that,” she said, quieter this time.

The android tilted her head slightly, processing. A thin stream of water ran down her cheek from her wet hair.

“…Query,” she said after a beat. “Your intent?”

Ren looked at her for a long moment.

Every rational part of her brain telling her to turn around and keep walking. Androids like this didn’t end up discarded in places like this without reason. She was probably tagged, or glitching, or worse. Getting involved was asking for trouble.

But the way she was sitting…

The way she was just... waiting. Like she'd already been thrown away and hadn't figured it out yet.

Like she expected to be left in the dark and wasn't going to waste power hoping otherwise.

Ren's hands uncurled at her sides. She felt the faint click of her finger joints realigning, the soft hum of the micro-tools settling back into standby. Her voice, when it came, was rougher than she intended. Not angry. Just tired.