When Trace left the clinic later, his neck was tender from the recent surgery, but for the moment felt much better. Sevorah had taken the time to crack his neck before going to work on him. The adjustments she had made, whatever they were, seemed to have made a difference for the moment. She had warned him that they weren’t a long-term solution and given him a set of neck exercises he needed to start doing every day.

He was feeling so much better though, and his mind was less clouded by discomfort. The sudden loss of that irritable anger made him aware of just how much it had begun to influence his actions. It was such a subtle thing that it was only now he was realizing how different he had been acting.

His introspection was cut short as bullets began hitting the side of his armored truck. Originally, he had thought the extra plating looked ridiculous. Now he was glad to have it.

Looking around, he promptly spotted the shooters as people from the gang that had moved in nearby. No doubt this was retaliation for him taking out the people on the roofs earlier.

It was becoming ever clearer to him that they were an annoyance he would need to take care of at some point.

For the moment, he punched the accelerator and drove to the warehouse as quickly as possible. The doors slid open as he drew close, and then shut as he sped inside.

With a growl, he grabbed the scout rifle and headed to the roof.

He used the K-10’s scope connection to search for any danger at the top of the ladder. There were several people already up there and waiting on their own rooftops. Carefully, he balanced the barrel against the edge of the hatch to help steady his aim, and fired.

His wrist twinged, protesting against the awkward angle. Trace held on to the ladder with one hand and leaned back, straightening his wrist some. The roar of the non-suppressed gun hurt his ears, but the extended barrel on the pistol had no threading for one.

He switched targets, took a moment to aim, and fired again.

Again and again, he repeated the process, doing his best to eliminate as many of them as he could while remaining hidden. After the fifth one, they got the hint and began to evacuate the rooftops. They couldn’t see him, while he obviously didn’t suffer from the same problem. It was a simple matter of how many people were they willing to lose to him before they broke ranks, and five was the magic number.

Trace carefully made his way down the ladder, cradling his throbbing wrist the entire way. He had done his best to mitigate the damage to it, but in the end, he had still been firing from an awkward angle. It wasn’t broken or anything that serious. He had simply put some strain on the joint that it wasn’t used to.

Inside the apartment, he found Deckard awake and working on the 3D printer, as lines of code scrolled down the screen of the device. He wasn’t using the new method of programming, but the more challenging one it had been based on. It was far more capable than the new method, but it came with its own numerous difficulties. Problems that Deckard was used to, as it was one of the many programming languages he had been raised using.

Trace left him alone for the moment, and after giving his guns a quick cleaning, he headed down the stairs to the basement. He needed to check on the pumps and make sure they were still working properly.

They were, though the waterline on the walls, had only dropped an inch or two in the last couple of days. His original estimate on the amount of time required had been off, it seemed. He could add more pumps, but that increased the amount of water going out into the sewer, and the resulting visibility. Which he did not want to do.

That was fine. He was in no hurry to finish the project. He wasn’t looking forward to cleaning out all the mold, grease, and other crap that had collected down there throughout the years.

Back up in the apartment, he set about the task of recompiling each of his enhanced teaching modules. When he was finished with each of those, he finally selected his sixth module. He almost went with the next course of programming; however, he went with something that he felt was more useful. It was a subject that he had been using a fair bit recently, system breaching. Granted, the basic teaching module wouldn’t give him much useful insight into the subject, but it was a step.

Once those were done, he looked over to find Deckard asleep once more. Whatever he was in the middle of doing was really giving his brain a workout, which seemed like the best thing for him at the moment. His mind might be a tad scrambled, but getting all the rust out during a good shakedown cruise of a workout could only help.

With that in mind, Trace worked through several courses on the enhanced teaching modules. It was a good thing they could dilate time, otherwise he would only be making progress in one of them instead of all of them.

The next morning, he woke to messages from Ko and Revlock.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

The one from Ko was short and simple, with her apologizing for never coming over. A patient had shown up as she was getting ready to leave who needed emergency care. She would come over in the morning instead if that was alright.

The message from Revlock, on the other hand was more interesting. He had a job for him, along with news about who the leak had been.

Trace replied to Ko, telling her he couldn’t as he had a job, but maybe later instead. Then he checked Deckard’s nutrient mix, giving him some more, before leaving in a rush.

***

“Why are we meeting all the way out here?” Trace asked the job broker as he climbed out of his truck.

They were near one of the walls that surrounded the city. They weren’t exactly impenetrable by any measure and were downright ancient by this point. However, the towering construct served to keep out the rabble, and the patrols removed any hope for the smugglers to gain an edge.

Revlock had taken longer to arrive than the edger by a couple of minutes, giving him enough time to look around.

“What do you know about the walls?”

Trace shook his head. “Nothing really, about as much as the next person, I guess. They’re old, a relic from the last World War, but they are still maintained by the city and constantly patrolled by the police. The smugglers have tried to create holes in the past but haven’t succeeded.”

“Eh,” Revlock wiggled his hand back and forth. “That last one is up for debate. There are rumors that some groups have actually succeeded in creating their own holes in the wall outside the notice of the police. That’s not what brought us here today. It’s how often the walls get patrolled, and how many cameras there are on the spread all over the thing.”

“Okay, it’s starting to sound as though they missed something?” Trace guessed, hoping it wasn’t Meredith. She wouldn’t have had any reason to draw attention to herself by entering the city in this manner. But you never knew what the solitude of space might have done to her perception of things.

“They did, and all the cameras in the area went down at the same time. Only a single officer says he saw anything at the time.” Revlock rubbed the back of his head and leaned close to him. “This was originally going to be one of Stick-Point’s gigs to hand out. He is currently busy, and it was passed to me instead. The old man did tell me something in confidence though. He said you had a sweet set of eyes.”

Trace nodded slowly, not understanding where the man was going with this particular line of oddness.

Talking about another person’s cyberware, while slightly rude, was hardly a breach of trust. At least it wasn’t usually, he supposed it might be slightly different for augments such as his eyes that were special. It wasn’t something that he had truly thought about before. Maybe, after this, he would need to take a few minutes and decide how he felt about the matter.

Revlock muttered to himself when he saw Trace didn’t understand what he was trying to say. “He didn’t go into specifics except to say that they had a sensor suite.”

“Ah, why didn’t you just say so?”

“I was trying to be polite, in case someone happened to be listening.” The job broker replied tightly.

“Fine, I appreciate the concern. What am I scanning for?”

“Everything you can think of, thermal, radiation, lingering-infrared, trace chemicals. I don’t know. You’re the one with the sensor suite.”

“Got it. I’ll just run through them all, blindly looking for something.” Trace rolled his eyes as he pulled up the settings for all the different scans. “At least tell me what I’m looking for. I can only run a limited number of scans before my NetConnect starts to overheat.”

“It was dark, but the officer swore it was big and that he saw it switch from running on all fours to just two legs. It then proceeded to scale the entire wall over the course of a few seconds, jumped over the top, and vanished.” He had led them over to a small depression in the pavement that had been blocked off.

“This is where it landed? You mean it didn’t climb down, but jumped?” Trace tilted his head to stare at the rim of the wall several hundred feet above them. “And it survived? Are you sure we aren’t dealing with an ‘Aberration’?”

“It’s crossed everyone’s mind, believe me,” Revlock replied, looking stressed at the mere thought of one of them entering the city. “We’re thousands of miles away from the ‘Irradiated Zone’, with the ‘Line of States’ separating them from us as well.”

The Line of States consisted of what used to be the states of Kansas, Nebraska, and then North and South Dakota. Together, they created a partial line that kept everything in the irradiated zone from entering this side of the continent. The bottom portion of the line was controlled by the remains of New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. However, they were part of their own little kingdom that had agreed to work with everyone else.

The irradiated zone was another remnant of the last world war, a partial gift from the steel goddess. The aberrations that were born as a result of the radiation and whatever else she had dropped in those areas were terrifying. The beasts became larger and stronger. Thankfully, they didn’t become any more intelligent, usually. A few did, the aberrations among the aberrations, the ones that were truly meant to be feared.

Regardless, Revlock was right. Those things were nothing more than the tales mothers told their children at night to scare them out here.

Just to be sure, Trace ran a radiation scan first, sighing with relief when it came up with nothing.

“Okay, there isn’t any radiation, so it’s not an aberration.” He switched to the next scan, searching for any trace of chemical residue.

It had fallen from an extreme height, maybe it had taken some damage, or spit on the ground nearby, something.

Sure enough, his eyes began highlighting a series of marks on the ground that they could use to follow it. The beast, whatever it was, had been speedy, but it had also been sweating up a storm. Every time its large paws had hit the ground, a veritable gush of water had exploded out of them.

He relayed the new information to Revlock as they jumped in his truck to follow after it. The job broker promptly sent out a message about what they had found.

“This is odd, yeah?” Trace asked as he hung his head out the window, while Revlock drove. “There must be something wrong with whatever this thing is to be sweating this much, and then there is the matter of all the cameras going out.”

“Some things are just better left unanswered. We do the job we’re paid to do and leave it at that. Pursuing things any further can get us in trouble.” Revlock told him firmly. “Trust me on that. After we find this thing, you do not want to poke your head into the matter any further than this. The police already look bad over the matter. They’ll be looking for any reason to lash out.”