Trace heaved himself up the stairs as a cloud of dust licked at his heels. He had already sprinted past the fifth-floor landing and kept on going. There were still people on the sixth floor, and he needed to make it past them before they had a chance to see him. It was true he had jammed the door shut. However, there was still a second door on the other side of the building.

He hit the landing for the sixth floor and snagged the hilt of the knife, ripping it out of the door-jamb as he rushed past. His breath was coming in ragged gasps, and the muscles in his legs were burning. Still, he refused to stop moving.

The building wasn’t in any danger of collapsing despite the earlier trembles the exploding grenades had caused.

The only question in Trace’s mind was how many of the gang members had he actually taken out with those grenades?

He had mixed goals with this little personal mission of his. He had wanted to cause a lot of damage to them, eliminating as many as possible. Which, at this point, was something that he could safely say he had accomplished. The problem was, if he left right now, he would be leaving all the goodies he had found on the fifth floor to languish.

All that fun tech…

Screw killing people, Trace didn’t particularly care one way or another about doing that. He would just as soon do less of it if only to save on the cost of ammo. When it came to tech-based loot though, that was another thing entirely.

Messing around with technology was something that he actually enjoyed doing. If he had a hobby, that was it. It might not have started out that way, but at some point, he had grown to actually enjoy taking things apart, working on them, and even modifying them in the limited way he had been able to. Now he had the chance to do more, both because of the equipment and the teaching modules he was learning from.

Giving up on the chance to acquire this equipment for free, on the other hand, was a chance he was finding incredibly hard to turn away from.

Trace made it to the landing between the sixth and seventh floors before his lungs gave out and he had to stop. He slid to the floor with his gun in hand as he tried to make as little noise as possible. It was hard with how much his throat was burning.

Down below, he heard the door burst open as a stream of heavy footsteps ran out of the room.

Ignoring the phantom taste of blood in his mouth, he triggered an S&R scan. From his position between floors, he was able to catch the silhouettes of several people above him, and three people below. A couple of gangsters had gone up the stairs on the other side of the building. For the moment, they were still looking around the floor, but it wouldn’t take them long to find his handiwork and then come his way.

He needed to make a decision, to leave, or see this to the end…

A sigh escaped his lips as he used the wall to help himself stand. It would have been nice to get that server, the vacuum chamber, and all the other items, but it wasn’t meant to be.

Pausing at the top of the stairs, he listened for their footsteps before continuing onward. Judging from the conversation he was hearing at the moment, they had stumbled upon his work of art in the bedroom.

Frankly, it would be an absolute shame not to add their bodies to the display as well.

Staying low, he crept out from the stairwell and made his way toward the voices. There he found three of them standing outside the room, looking in, with what he liked to think was awe at the masterpiece he had created.

Three quick suppressed shots later, and the room had three new bodies to add to the display he had created around the man with his pants down.

With that done, he went to the roof and prepared to leave, only to realize there was one problem with that plan. Using the fire escape to go back down wasn’t exactly subtle or quiet. He had gotten lucky the first time around; it was doubtful to happen again.

Still, did he dare try it, or was there an alternative?

What would a proper wraith do in this situation?

Ignoring the fact that they would likely have never found themselves in this position. He also needed to ignore the myriad of extra cyberware, tools, training, and equipment they would possess as well. Never mind, maybe even exploring that particular route in his thoughts was a bad idea. The two of them were just too different at the moment.

Mapping out the roof took only a few extra seconds of his time. Unfortunately, it only revealed one hiding place. The small roof above the stairway door, a spot that would no doubt be promptly searched if they couldn’t find him. None of the buildings were close enough for him to jump to either.

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That left him with only one method of going down.

At least running down stairs was easier than going up them. Before he could change his mind, Trace hopped over the edge and onto the fire escape. The old metal rattled and shook as he took them three at a time. The metal rods holding the contraption to the building shook, and pieces of brick and concrete fell all around him.

Still, it held.

A window on the sixth floor opened as he thundered past, the furious face of a gangster making a brief appearance. Then Trace vanished down the stairs as he kept descending as quickly as possible. The hand not holding tight to the rusted railing felt blindly for one of the clips on his courier bag. Snagging it, he managed to unclip the object without slowing.

He passed the unoccupied fifth floor and rounded on the fourth floor, where he had thrown all the grenades earlier. The window was blown out and the fire escape was no longer attached to the wall, but the welds holding it to the rest of the escape still looked good. That didn’t mean he wanted to spend a lot of time on that section though.

The metal grating moved precariously under his feet as he hurried past the window, not even daring to take a moment to look inside. All he wanted at the moment was to get to safety. He could learn how badly he had hurt them later, assuming there was a later.

The window on the third floor came into view just as it was being flung open. Trace pulled the pin from the grenade he had been carrying in his hand for the last couple of flights and threw it in as he ran past. The fire escape screeched above him when it went off. The force of the explosion, combined with their already unsteady state, had torn several of the holding rods from the wall.

There was a scream as the gangster that had been chasing him from the sixth floor toppled over the edge of the railing. He hit the pavement below with a wet thud, silencing him.

Trace didn’t stop. He was too close to the ground now that even if he fell, he would be mostly fine. With a final burst of speed, he jumped down to the last landing, slid down the ladder, and took off down the side of the building toward where he had parked the truck.

Only once he was safe inside the armored interior of the truck did he take a moment to breathe.

He… maybe he wouldn’t tell Ko about this one. The other times he could blame on the new NetConnect, this particular endeavor though had been all him. It had been going so well too, and then he had decided to toss those grenades. That wasn’t even necessarily the worst part. It was him running back upstairs. Why had he done that?

Why couldn’t he have just tossed the grenades and then run downstairs? It would have been faster. Sure, he hadn’t cleared it yet, which is why he hadn’t thought to do it, but still.

Taking back alleys as much as he could, Trace drove back to his warehouse.

Once he was back inside and cleaned up, he sent off a message to Ko, letting her know he was back so she could come over.

Inside the apartment, he found Deckard awake and working away at the 3D printer.

“Hey, how goes the progress on that thing?” He asked, setting his freshly sanitized clothes to the side to dry, while he grabbed some fresh ones to change into.

“It is a more laborious task than I originally thought it would be,” Deckard admitted as his avatar frowned for him. “The programming language everyone uses these days is absolutely appalling! This printer comes with sixty-four gigabytes of onboard universal memory, and during the printing process, it is all being used due to their poor coding practices. If they had simply stuck with a proper language and taken the time to eliminate memory leaks and overflow issues, they wouldn’t need more than twelve, or perhaps fourteen gigabytes of universal memory. Less if they ran everything through a proper encoder beforehand.”

“And let me guess, that’s what you are doing right now?”

“Hardly,” Deckard sneered. “What I’m creating would make them weep at their own inadequacies if they ever so much as caught a glimpse of it.”

“Right… well, have fun with that. I almost got my hands on a server for you today, but there were a few too many people in the way. Maybe next time, assuming you can use one, of course.”

“Oh, yes, please. I used to have zettabytes of information stored on the data prisms of my mother’s servers. It would be nice to see what I can recreate from memory, and what I can improve on from scratch. It will give me something to do until we can get me a body.” Deckard fell silent. “I assume that is something you are going to try to do eventually, right?” He inquired in a small voice.

Trace nodded at his cameras. “Your mother asked us too, and we would have done it anyway, as long as we felt you were up for it. Speaking of which, you seem a little more together mentally today.”

“My mind is indeed clearer, at the moment, as soon as I start to grow tired though, a fog begins to set in. My memories are still somewhat fragmented, and while I don’t think anything is outright missing, everything is… out of order.”

“Well, as long as you’re starting to feel even a little better, it’s an improvement. As for your body,” Trace sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “We’ll do what we can, just don’t expect it to be anytime soon. Not unless you have some secret credits stored somewhere. I need to get the materials to perform some upgrades on my own cyberware. It’s the same with Ko. Not to mention, I’m still paying off my eyes. Unless we magically come across an android body in the trash, we’ll be buying everything piecemeal. One part at a time.”

“I do not believe I ever possessed a traditional crypto-vault. There may have been another form of account that my mother set up for me, but I never accessed it, as I never needed money. It is highly unlikely that I would be able to access those credits in my current state, in any case,” Deckard told him with a downcast expression, understanding just how long of a road he was looking at.

There was a knock on the door, letting them know Ko had arrived, cutting the conversation short.

“Come on in,” Trace called out.

Ko’s hands were full of food and a bag full of small titanium marbles when she walked in.

“I wish you would have told me you were bringing stuff over,” Trace muttered in embarrassment. “I would have helped you carry it all.”