I floated in an inky black void, with water filling my lungs.

Panic shot through me like a lightning bolt. I flailed, frantically swimming upwards – or what I felt was upwards – my strokes becoming more and more desperate as the burning in my lungs only increased. It became harder to think, harder to act, harder to keep pushing my arms and legs against the water until finally I broke through a surface that hadn’t been there a moment before.

My head emerged from a small circular pool, perhaps twelve feet across and lit from above by a faint green light. My vision was still blurred and hazy as I hauled myself out of the pool on trembling arms and flopped bonelessly onto a tiled floor, coughing out water until my throat was hoarse and sore.

All the while, the event horizon was still running through my head. I couldn’t believe what I’d seen, what it had shown me. It felt invasive; I was expecting it to tear at old wounds, not open new ones, and seeing my friends’ secrets spread out for my perusal just made me feel dirty.

I lay there for what felt like hours, sucking in deep breaths of air even as every breath I took seemed to burn its way down my drowned throat, as sensation returned to my sore limbs and my vision went from blurred outlines to distinguishable shapes.

The room was heptagonal, with vaulted gothic arches dangling over the still black waters of the pool. It was unnaturally dark, with only the faintest green light giving shape to the architecture.

In the end, the only reason I didn’t just lie there was what I’d just seen. The others had accomplished so much, overcome so much, while I just shut down. Even Regent – a murderer – had managed to escape and reinvent himself. But I’d been broken by my experiences, and fallen into a rut I never managed to climb out of.

So I pressed my palms against the floor, levering myself up and rising unsteadily onto my knees before descending into another bout of coughing. I brought my hands up to my throat, only to catch sight of them out the corner of my eye and freeze at the sight of grey skin over flesh and bone.

I sprang to my feet, staggering backwards as I stared at my reflection in the pool – of my horned head and tusks, my eyes and slate grey hair.

I blinked, and found myself staring down at the chitinous body of my persona, draped in ephemeral spidersilk robes and free from the aches and sensations of a physical body.

So this is it, I thought, looking around the room again without the barrier of organic eyes. Beyond the matrix.

I tried to let the visual layer fade, to see the datastreams and raw resonance that made up this place, but I just couldn’t manage it. After a moment, I realised that was because this was the deepest layer. The room wasn’t just a cosmetic overlay created by code; it was raw resonance shaped into walls like bricks and mortar, into the water in the pool, even the air I was breathing before I remembered I didn’t need to.

As I took a step away from the pool, it didn’t feel like I was arbitrarily deciding to place my foot on the floor, or that my persona was locked and monitored into following the programmed rules of the host. It was almost real, with only the faintest differences that made it so noticeably unreal.

It felt like I’d stepped into a mirror.

I made my way to a door built into one of the sides of the heptagon – heavy, wooden and tapered at the arch. As I approached it, the light on a wrought-iron lock flickered once before the door split and soundlessly slid back into the walls.

Beyond the door stretched a long corridor, with a vaulted ceiling and a deep green carpet covering the floor, with faint silver patterns woven into the material. All along the left wall – set in-between the pillars that supported the vaulted roof – stained glass windows let in rays of pale green light that cast long shadows onto the floor.

As I moved carefully down the corridor, my eye was drawn to shapes that moved beyond the windows; titanic things made indistinct by the tinted glass. To my right, the wall bore regular iron doors of the kind that wouldn’t look out of place in a B-list horror film set in an old prison or insane asylum, if it weren’t for the electronic locks.

A sleek golden shape darted above me, and I spun frantically to see a familiar dragonfly clinging to the underside of the ceiling, its multi-faceted eyes looking down at me. For a brief moment, I considered talking to the sprite like Labyrinth would have, but it didn’t quite feel right. It didn’t feel like me.

I’d spoken to my sprites before, but only because I had to talk to something, and they happened to be nearby. The thought of it felt too much like the same version of me that had sat in her apartment for two years.

Instead I stretched out my hand expectantly, palm facing upwards in an unspoken command, and watched as the dragonfly spread its golden wings and glided down to rest in my hand.

I have to be here for a reason, I thought. And the same applies to this.

So I continued down the corridor, turning my attention from the bottle-green windows to the iron doors. The lock to this hallway had opened automatically the moment I drew close, but the same could not be said of these ones. I tried to summon my woodlouse to pick the lock, but the resonance here was too solid to summon from.

It already had a form, and I could not weave it into another.

After I passed the tenth door, I realised that the corridor was curving ever so slightly; enough that the door to the pool room was now out of sight. Eventually, I came to a break in the pattern of small metal cell doors, with an oversized pair of wooden doors set beneath a decorative arch formed from twisted and abstract stone blocks.

The electronic lock on that door flickered as I approached, and there was the heavy sound of deadbolts retracting into their housing. Gingerly, I reached out with my hand – the dragonfly leaping out of the way before perching itself on my left shoulder – and pushed open the doors, struggling a little against their sheer weight.

An immense library opened up before me; a cavernous hall stretching hundreds of meters into the distance, with seven stories of bookshelves towering above me on either side of a wide central avenue, linked together by catwalks and gantries of wrought iron.

In place of books, the shelves were filled with antiquated stacks of servers, with untold numbers of blinking green lights forming ever-shifting constellations as they winked in and out of existence. At the start of each row, a desktop terminal was attached to a movable ladder, with a boxy monitor and a hefty physical keyboard.

Patterns of light shimmered on the floor, and as I looked up I was struck dumb by the vaulted glass ceiling that ran down the length of the central avenue, and of what lay above it.

A nebula flickered far above my head; an impossible mass of distant lights so densely packed they formed shifting clouds in the sky, and so bright that their light was able to travel the vast space to cast their glow onto the library below. It was beautiful, tugging at my core in a way I couldn’t quite comprehend.

It took effort to tear my eyes away from that radiant expanse, but ultimately it was beyond my reach and I needed to keep moving forward. Instead I stepped off the main avenue and picked a set of shelves at random, looking at the servers.

Try as I might, I couldn’t reach out to them. It was like they had no wireless connection at all, which only further cemented the unreality of this place; air gaps aren’t unheard of, but only a lunatic would wire together this many physical servers when they could just set up a cloud of data instead.

Stymied, I turned my attention to the computer and sighed in exasperation when I saw a cable wound around a hook on the side of its casing, with an adapter on the end that was completely unrecognisable to me.

“Seriously?” I asked in disbelief, my voice echoing off into the distance.

Still, I took the cable off the hook and plugged the adaptor into a port on one of the servers, watching as the computer began to whir before green text crawled across the black screen.

It was strange; for all that I could clearly see it was a nearly incomprehensible mess of spaghetti code, without any rhyme or reason to the random string of numbers and letters, I could also see that it was the inventory of a ship called the Majestätisch XIV, a Saeder-Krupp vessel.

I typed away at the keyboard – each stroke accompanied by the heavy and unfamiliar clacking of keys – as I navigated my way through file directories largely concerned with the amount of oil in each of the ship’s tanks. It seemed to just be random data, without any of the precise psychological purpose of the files I’d seen when crossing the event horizon.

I unplugged the cord, causing the screen to go blank, and plugged it into the next server up. That one held the files of an upmarket restaurant, while the one above it contained the data of the Human Relations department of a Crash Cart branch office.

My brow furrowed. Even random data could be useful if you knew what to look for, but finding anything in here would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Labyrinth said coming to the resonance realms would strengthen my abilities as a Technomancer, but so far the only thing that applied to was my resolve. Even that had come from crossing the event horizon, not the actual realms.

Unless… I thought to myself, before a wordless command had the dragonfly arising from my shoulder. It disappeared off into the shelves, only occasionally reappearing as a distant mote of yellow light moving among the muted greens of the library.

I followed the light at a slow walk, peering down the aisles of servers in hopes of seeing something, anything I could use. Once or twice, it almost felt like there were shapes moving amongst the deeper stacks, but with the ever-shifting lighting of the nebula above my head it was impossible to distinguish the real from the unreal, and a place like this seemed designed to play tricks on my mind.

Still, it was distinctly unsettling. There was just too much about this place I didn’t understand, and it was both more and less than what I was expecting. So when I saw the dragonfly making its way back towards me, I was glad of the distraction and quickly followed it off the main avenue and into the stacks.

The sprite led me on a meandering route past innumerable towering shelves of blinking servers, each one containing yet more junk data. And yet, part of me was surprised to find that the library – or this part of it, at least – was not endless. After the fourteenth row of shelves, we reached the edge of the hall; a simple stone wall.

From there, the dragonfly led me up a narrow metal staircase that joined onto the gantries of the upper shelves, and we climbed up four flights before it abruptly turned off and landed on a single server that – naturally – looked almost identical to every other blinking box in this place.

Hesitantly, I wheeled the ladder over and grabbed the cable, climbing up until I could slot the adapter in. I didn’t bother climbing down, instead hopping off the ladder and dropping the few feet to the catwalk, where the computer on the ladder was waiting with green text scrolling down the screen.

The Resonance Library, I read, and immediately the corner of my mouth crept up in a grin. This is more like it!

From the look of things, it was a document that had been posted on the message boards of a host; a Stuffer Shack with neither the time, money or inclination to maintain the host their franchisers had provided them with, so it had gradually devolved into a general hang-out spot for anyone in the neighbourhood. It wasn’t exactly an uncommon phenomenon.

The file had been passed around a group of wannabe script kids as part of some sort of urban legend, with one of them bragging that they’d got it from someone who said they’d got it from someone who’d once found their way onto a technomancer forum.

They’d egged each other on over who was going to open the file up, only to turn on the one who first posted it when they found a nearly incomprehensible mess inside. But that’s not what I saw when I looked at it.

The document had been compiled in such a way that it could only be understood by someone who could see resonance, not just the basic code of the matrix. It described techniques and complex forms a technomancer could use, and while I couldn’t make sense of the instructions I did recognise most of the forms I’d managed to work out on my own – after years of idle experimentation.

More importantly, I couldn’t make sense of them in the same way I couldn’t make sense of a university-level textbook I just took off a shelf and opened up. I had a feeling I’d be able to make something of this with a little time and effort.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

So I reached up and tugged on the cable until the plug fell out, then had my dragonfly take its place. Its antennae poked and prodded at the socket for a few moments as it spun together a copy of the resonance library, before I commanded it to return with the file to dad’s computer, where I could access it at my leisure.

Rather than flying off into the halls, the dragonfly flew straight up before passing through the ceiling as if it wasn’t even there, the resonance forming the arched buttresses simply splitting apart to let it pass.

I couldn’t help thinking about what Labyrinth had said; about how I was calling my sprites from the resonance realms, rather than making them myself.

Maybe she had a point, I thought, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to start talking to them.

Instead, as I wandered back along the central avenue, I took a closer look at the structure around me. The materials, not what they made up. I pressed my hand against the deep green carpeting on the floor, ran my fingers down the wooden shelves and tried to get a feel for the resonance that made up this place.

It was solid in a way that simply didn’t occur back in the matrix, but as I focused I found I could still feel it in a sense. It was like buying a new trideo screen and seeing a quality to the picture that went beyond anything you could remember experiencing.

And, just as that initial impression of quality would fade into the new normal, that feeling seemed to diminish as I grew used to the new quality. It seemed coming here had deepened my connection to the resonance, and my brain just hadn’t wrapped its head around that until now.

So I decided to experiment. I still couldn’t manipulate the resonance that made up this place, so I gathered together some of the ephemeral data that made up my own body, pressing my palm against one of the servers and gently trying to tease a little of my essence into it.

At first it felt like trying to force water through a stone, but then there was an incredible moment when everything just clicked, and for a brief moment it felt like the server and I were one, as a trickle of my essence seeped into the structure of this strange pseudo-host and the server’s light blinked yellow for a fraction of a second.

Like a water droplet on a still pool, that was the catalyst for an ever-increasing ring of flickering yellow lights spreading out down the length of the library. I stepped back, warily, as the pattern echoed throughout the hall.

And then, the lights began to drift away from the servers. First one, then two, then hundreds, swirling through the air in a great swarm of fireflies that drifted ever-closer to me. Part of me felt like I should be terrified by the sight, but I simply stood there entranced by the drifting fireflies as they drew closer to me.

Until they turned and poured into me, the chitin that made up my persona splitting to let them enter. It burned, my synapses firing all at once, and I was bent double with pain until the last firefly entered my body and I screamed.

The flies screamed with me, pouring out from beneath my skin as they filled the air with a gnashing, chittering buzz that was almost deafening. I could feel it in my body’s connections, see it in the way the servers around me flickered and faded, in how the air was filled with thousands of swirling yellow motes of light.

It was like standing in the centre of a spam zone, where thousands of junk messages and intrusive advirals glitch out devices and make it almost impossible for anyone – hacker or not – to force a stable connection through the noise.

And, when I stopped screaming, the noise stopped with it, the fireflies returning to my persona. They weren’t some foreign parasites; they were part of my essence now. An echo of this place.

I carried that echo with me, out of the cavernous library and along the gently-curving corridor as I made my way back to the room with the pool. With only a moment’s hesitation, I leapt into the still waters at the centre of the heptagonal chamber, gambling on the way in being the same as the way out.

Immediately, the faint green glow of the strange chamber disappeared as I sank deep into the waters, until there was no longer an ‘up’ or ‘down’ to sink into. My consciousness started to fade, my persona losing cohesion as it was gripped by some unseen force and dragged down tunnels of light that passed at a blur.

I woke with a start, sitting up before wincing at a twinge in my back. As I blinked away spots, I saw that I was resting on a long and narrow bunk in a small room, with a wipe-clean tiled floor and a simple sink and mirror set against the opposite wall. If it weren’t for the hanging rail and gun rack on the other wall, with my jacket, holster and submachine gun given pride of place, I might have assumed I was in a cell.

As I manoeuvred my too-stiff legs off the side of the bed, I noticed that I’d been left in my clothes – boots included. I guess someone from Faultline’s organisation must have brought me here and taken off my jacket, gun and holster because otherwise they’d dig into my back while I was lying down.

Part of me was irritated at that, but I supposed I did collapse on their floor.

Standing up took more effort than I was expecting, but after one false start I was on my feet and gingerly walking over to the mirror – trying to ignore the pins and needles that ran up and down my legs.

As I looked at my weary expression, my mind reconnected to the matrix and I was suddenly bombarded by a flurry of missed texts and calls from both Brian and Lisa. I realised with a start that I’d been unconscious for about twenty six hours and hurriedly called Lisa, since I could see Brian’s commlink was busy on another call.

“Bug?” she picked up almost immediately, her voice a little breathless. “Where are you? What happened? You dropped off the grid.”

“Palanquin, I think,” I answered, as I peeled back my eyelid with a thumb and winced at how bloodshot it looked. “I was… well, I guess you’d probably call it a vision quest. Trying to deepen my connection to the resonance.”

“Did it work?” Tattletale asked, instinctively, before catching herself. “Wait, never mind, that’ll wait. We’re on our way there now.”

“To the Palanquin?”

“Yes, to the Palanquin! Grue’s on the line with Faultline now. She has a new client for us, and it could be a big one. Meet us in the VIP area, ASAP.”

“I’ll be there,” I said without hesitation, before Lisa hung up.

As I made my way blindly through the backrooms of the Palanquin I passed another team of Shadowrunners who were also making use of what I quickly began to realise was a kind of communal safehouse, complete with an infirmary, several single, double or quadruple rooms and even a communal space with a kitchenette, some couches and a trideo set to while away the time until the heat dies down.

I doubted it was the only one of its kind Faultline operated around the city; putting it in their own building seemed just a little too obvious. It’d work out fine for someone on the run from a gang, but the corps wouldn’t even blink before storming the place.

It shared an elevator with the club itself, and the sleek décor clashed a bit with the utilitarian saferoom as I rode the elevator up from three stories underground to the VIP area.

The moment the doors opened, I was hit with the full force of a nightclub in full swing, with strobing lights – both physical and in AR – and deafening music. As I leant over the balcony of the VIP area, I could see a mass of people thronging the club floor, pressed together as they danced to the tune of an elven DJ with her hair in a vibrant blue mohawk woven with electrochromatic extensions that pulsed in time with the music.

The sight should have been deeply unnerving. Pressing myself into a metro train was bad enough, but in there people weren’t actively trying to throw themselves up against each other. I should have been anxious even looking down at it, but instead I found I could quite comfortably watch it from afar.

I still wouldn’t want to go down there, but it seems like such a petty thing to be scared about.

It was because I was watching the crowd that I was immediately able to spot the others as they made their way through the club, gently – and, at times, not-so-gently – pushing through the crowd as they forged a path through to the stairs up to the VIP area.

I was almost taken aback at the sight of them; they were wearing suits, each of them matched with a black base and a coloured accent. Brian was leading the group, using his bulk to clear a wake the others could follow in. His suit was modern, with discreet armoured inserts around the shoulders and chest, and beneath the jacket he wore a white turtleneck.

Lisa, on the other hand, was wearing a suit that was a little bit older in style, with visible buttons on the jacket and a crisp purple shirt. She was also wearing a tight-fitting skirt, and in general looked so comfortably familiar with her attire it was as if she could have been wearing that suit from birth.

In comparison, Rachel was very much a fish out of water in her only mostly-ironed outfit, to the point where I could see combat boots poking out of the bottom of her pants. Like Brian, her suit jacket had been enhanced with armoured inserts, and her shoulders and lapels were covered with brown leather panels.

Finally, Alec had clearly borrowed at least part of his style from his childhood in the neo-aristocratic high society of Montréal. His pants were black, like the others, but his blazer was a rich royal blue, and his shirt was ruffled with between three and four of the buttons undone.

I quickly got over my gawking as Brian spotted me and waved, and Lisa held up an oversized suit carrier she’d been hauling across the dance floor, an ear to ear grin on her face.

“Oh, great…” I sighed to myself. I could see the way the wind was blowing.

Sure enough, the moment they reached the VIP area Lisa pressed the suit carrier and a shoebox into my arms and practically forced me into one of the booths, drawing the curtains shut with nothing more than an assurance that ‘I’ll love it.’

I just hope there isn’t a skirt, I thought to myself, but I still tossed my jacket on the booth’s couch and began undressing.

Maybe I was being unkind to Lisa, because the suit itself was honestly alright. The pants, shirt and jacket fit a lot closer than I was used to, but the shoes were flats rather than heels – it wasn’t like I needed extra height – and the colours honestly really resonated with me. In keeping with the others, the jacket and pants were both black, but the lining and lapels was a vivid yellow the same colour as the glow my sprites let off. The shirt, on the other hand, was a kind of blackened gold that caught the light of the club as I stepped back out, my clothes, gun and boots bundled up under one arm.

“Where were you?” Grue asks, his arms folded over his chest. “Doing your own thing is fine, but not if it puts you out of contact.”

“Gotta admit I’m pretty curious myself,” Tattletale admitted. “A ‘vision quest?’”

“You suggested I learn how to hack better,” I said with a nod to Grue. “I did some digging and found a way to deepen my connection to the resonance – that’s what Technomancers use to hack,” I clarified at the sight of Grue’s raised eyebrow. “Took longer than I was expecting. Usually matrix time dilation goes the other way, and only a little, but I thought I was only gone for one, two hours tops.”

“Did it work?” Tattletale asked.

“Yeah,” I replied, confidently. “It was eye-opening.” Unconsciously, I found myself looking towards Regent and Bitch.

“I can see that,” Tattletale replied, cryptically.

“So what’s this all about?” I asked, gesturing to my suit. “Why the extra mile?”

“We have a new potential client,” Grue explained. “Not someone Faultline referred to us, but someone that went to her asking for us specifically.”

“That’s…” my eyes widened. “Is that good?”

“Well they’ve booked a private room, not just one of these booths. Whatever this is, it’s big.”

Grue was trying to maintain his professional mask, but his lips kept curling up as he tried and failed to suppress a smile.

“More to the point,” Tattletale interrupted, “we’ve got about seven minutes to get there. It’s a good thing you woke up when you did, sleeping beauty.”

As one, we hurried into the elevator. The Palanquin was built with trolls in mind, but it was still a bit of a tight fit with all four of us in there. We went up three floors, stepping out into a nondescript corridor that was a lot more utilitarian than the club below, but in a way that was still classy rather than barebones.

One of Faultline’s staff was waiting up there; a redheaded elven woman in a sleek black and green taksuit who practically oozed lethality. As she led us down the corridor, I couldn’t help noticing the names on the doors. The Emir suite, the Sultan, the Satrap.

Our guide stopped outside the Maharajah suite, inviting us in with a gesture. I looked around for a brief moment before she smiled and shook her head.

“Just leave those with me,” she nodded at my bundled clothes, her voice carrying a lilting Irish accent. “I’ll take them down to the cloakroom, then you can pick them up on your way out.”

“I appreciate it,” I said as I handed the bundle over.

“Mr Johnson is waiting for you inside,” was her reply, before she set off back down the corridor.

Grue took in a deep breath, resting his hand on the doorframe. I’d always seen him as this immutable figure, almost carved from stone, but in that moment I saw something of the kid in the diner in his stance.

“Then we shouldn’t keep him waiting,” he spoke, more to himself than to us, before pushing open the door.

Inside was a small antechamber, with metal walls partially coated with blocks of sound-dampening foam. The door swung closed behind Regent – the last one in the room – and as it clicked shut I suddenly flinched as my connection to the matrix was entirely cut off.

“A faraday cage,” I said, my voice wavering.

“It’s magically warded, too,” Tattletale said. “No eavesdroppers, whether mundane or magical.”

I shivered, as old fears rose up inside me. The matrix had been my comfort zone ever since I was fourteen, one I could carry everywhere I went. Even after I left my apartment it was still there, still a constant presence in my life.

But I couldn’t help thinking that the others had overcome much worse. They’d gone without shelter, or money, or safety, or family and they’d pushed through it all. Did I really deserve to be with them – be part of their team – if I couldn’t do the same?

So I took a long, deep breath and resolved that no matter what lay on the other side of this atrium, I’d face the next job without hesitations or doubt. No more second-guessing or half measures.

As Grue opened the door into the Maharajah suite itself, the first thing that hit me was the heat. The thermostat had been cranked way beyond what I was used to. It was a dry heat, like what I imagined standing in a desert must feel like.

The room itself was a fairly compact chamber, with red and gold furnishings. Closest to the door, two quarter-circular couches had been arranged on either side of the door, around one half of a wide elliptical coffee table that was currently empty and barren. Off to one side, cold air was rising off a glass-fronted fridge with beer, soft drinks, water and wine all in glass bottles, with drinking glasses stacked up on top.

The walls of the room were floor to ceiling screens, currently set to display a bountiful orchard full of metahumans in wide-brimmed hats and overalls picking fruit off the trees.

Beyond the coffee table was a single, wide couch with red leather cushions on a carved wooden frame. A guard stood on either side of the couch with their hands clasped in front of them. One was a burly Hispanic ork with shamanistic fetishes worn over his clothing, while the other was a severe-looking elven woman with pale, sharp features and heavy cybernetics – including sheathed handspurs.

Between them an immense serpent was coiled up on the couch, with so many layers of black scales I couldn't hope to guess how long it was. Its hide was polished, with diamond patterns outlined in off-white and it looked down the length of its triangular head at us with elliptically-pupiled eyes, idly flicking its tail in a way that let off a gentle rattle with every sharp movement.

“Please, take a seat,” it – he – spoke, his tone cordial and with only the slightest impediment as the English words were forced past a non-metahuman mouth.

“You may call me Mr Johnson,” he continued. “I have a proposition for you.”