No matter how much things changed, high school was still high school.

In the classroom, everyone had their place. They sat at their desks and pretended to listen to the teacher drone on about World Issues, but what's important is that they were all stationary, without any annoying variables. They didn't have room or time to wander off to throw hoops, skip out to the burger joint on the next block over for a substitute school lunch, or even run off to the bathrooms for a good cry. They were predictable.

Matthew Hellman always sat on the third row from the back, next to the window. He did that because it gave him an uninterrupted view of Rose Connaghty, who sat one desk in front and one to the right, because that put her in-between her friends. She was dating someone in the year above, which Hellman would know given how much time he spent scrolling through her social media.

Of course, as is the nature of things, Hellman himself – being on the football team, friendly enough and just a little bit dim – had the attention of Sarah Lancet, who sat directly behind him. She was very self-conscious about her height, despite both her parents being dwarves, and her social media scrolling tended to be limited to athletic beefcakes who never dropped below six feet.

She had also gone blind as the result of an illness caused by a chemical spill near her tenement block, but the MassChem hush money paid to her parents had been enough to let them fit their daughter out with a set of adequate implants that were almost, but not quite, indistinguishable from regular eyes.

The quality was about on par with human basic, which put them well below the industry standard for optics, but when piggy-backing off a schoolgirl's cyberware beggars – and hackers – couldn't be choosers. What mattered was that they let me keep an eye on Matthew Hellman while he was in school, which was what I'd been spending the last three days doing.

The bell went, and since most of the class hadn't even unpacked their bags for this lesson, Sarah's vision was immediately filled with motion as people stood up and hurried out into the halls. Her eyes didn't have audio sensors, naturally, but I'd already compromised Hellman Junior's commlink to provide me with a live feed of every word he spoke.

Interestingly, I heard him brush off his friends in order to get out the classroom quicker, and I quickly abandoned Sarah's eyes in favour of following him through the school's security cameras, grumbling to myself at how half the cameras in this wreck of a building were non-functional, and a quarter of the rest could only manage black and white.

It had been two years since I left, but Winslow was still Winslow. The paint on the walls was still peeling, the teachers still looked weary and overworked, and the students were still the same mess of cliques and gangs and teenage politics that used to seem so important to me, but that now seemed so petty and meaningless.

Seen from the dispassionate eye of the cameras, the cliques were only obvious if I really paid attention. The gangs were the only ones that stood out, but even then I couldn't help but compare them to the real gang member's I'd watched through different cameras. Compared to that, the teenagers dressed up in Yakuza colours came across like kids who'd raided their parents' closet.

I lost visual on the target a couple of times, but his commlink's GPS meant I could get it back just as quickly. In the gaps, I piggybacked off any and every camera I could find, drifting through privacy locks on commlinks or cyberware like they weren't even there. It was a deviation from Matthew's pattern, and that meant I couldn't just keep one eye on him and another on a good book.

He stepped into an empty classroom, out of view of the cameras, and I listened attentively as he sat down, a chair creaking beneath him.

"So," he began, clearly talking to someone, "what do I have to do?"

There's the sound of something clattering against a wooden desk. I couldn't be certain, but it was light. Maybe a datastick. Could be nuyen on it or just data, but I'm not here to speculate.

"You get the number seventeen bus, same as usual." It was a girl's voice, with a local accent. Not deep enough to be an ork or a troll, but that didn't mean much. "You sit on the left aisle seat, three rows from the back. At some point, a man will stand next to you. He'll be wearing a military surplus jacket – UCAS military. You'll put this in his pocket."

"That's it?" he asked, sounding cocky rather than nervous. "I don't have to say something?"

"You won't say shit," another voice piped up, this one male. Already my sprites were trawling through Winslow's social media feeds, simpleminded programmes trying to match voices to faces and faces to names, but it was an inexact science at best and slower than I'd have liked.

"And that gets me in?" Matthew continued.

"That gets your foot in the door," the girl shut him down, and actually sounded a little pissed at the suggestion. "Proves you aren't some lightweight out for a cheap thrill, that you don't mind following orders blind so long as it's for the cause. Initiation's what gets you in, but you've gotta be vetted first."

"Hey, I'm all about the cause!" the kid protested.

"Remains to be seen. Now take the stick and frag off, SINner."

Matthew left the classroom moments later, the stick clenched in his fist tight enough that I could see his knuckles whitening even through the less-than-stellar resolution. I watched him slip it into the pocket of his jacket, but then I let him wander off to his next class with only a sprite monitoring his movements, while I watched the classroom door. Minutes later, the two others stepped out, and everything fell into place.

The girl looked almost normal, and my facial recognition soft finally pegged her as a member of the cheerleading team. A quick look through her academic records revealed a student who, while not at the top of her class, was getting grades that were more than respectable. The sort of model student who excels, but not so much that she sticks out. The sort of student who, under any other circumstances, wouldn't be seen dead next to the guy.

He was from the exact opposite of the social spectrum, and he looked the part. He wore his hair in a deep red mohawk, and his clothes consisted of tattered jeans and a tank top beneath a worn and faded leather jacket. As he turned to walk down the corridor, putting his back to the camera, I got a picture-perfect view of the snarling wolf's head emblazoned on the back of his jacket.

Sprites chimed up, laying folders of information at my digital feet. The girl was Samantha Bordin, though she went by Sam, and her parents were due-paying members of the Humanis policlub. She herself posted on Humanis forums, but she must have approached Matthew in meatspace.

She's a cheerleader, he's a footballer. Doesn't take a genius to figure out how they met.

The guy was Rex Matthis, and he already had a record on file with Knight Errant. As if the jacket wasn't proof enough, there was a marker in the file linking him to one of the gangs that flocked around the Chosen like toddlers clinging to their parent's pants. Another human fascist with an axe to grind and a record of assaulting anyone whose ears were just a little too pointy, with a future of deniable grunt work for people like Sam.

With a stray thought, I gathered up the audio recording of the meeting, as well as stills of the three of them leaving the classroom, and sent them off to the client's comm, along with a message.

»Mrs Hellman, sorry to bother you at work, but I'm afraid I have bad news. You were right to worry. File attached.«

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

- Bug (12:15:24/14-2-70)

The client was a middle manager in a local firm that did subcontracted work on the periphery of Ares Macrotechnology's corporate empire, which meant she sent her son to Winslow rather than one of Ares' own schools. She'd been worried about some of what her son was saying over dinner, but I don't think she was expecting it to be more than a couple of bad friends leading him astray.

»Why would they make him do that? And what did they mean by initiation?«

- A.Hellman (12:20:13/14-2-70)

»By having him do something illegal, they gain leverage. Not sure you want to know what initiation is.«

- Bug (12:20:15/14-2-70)

»He's my son.«

- A.Hellman (12:20:21/14-2-70)

»Murder of a nonhuman. They pick someone SINless nobody will miss and have the initiate kill them. If it's an ork or a troll, the other gang members will usually cripple them first. Level the playing field.«

- Bug (12:20:25/14-2-70)

»I see. This isn't the news I was hoping for, so forgive me for not thanking you, but your payment has been earned all the same. Transferring the second half of your payment now.«

- A.Hellman (12:22:04/14-2-70)

I watched the nuyen slip into my account, then quickly sifted off most of it into another account I'd set aside for the rent money. I just about had enough to last the month and, so long as I could keep finding these odd jobs and easy paychecks, the month after as well.

The client was already calling the school, and she was looking up psychologists on the Matrix. I let my hold on her dataflow slip, pulling back through the ephemeral strands of networks that made up Brockton Bay. The city's Matrix stretched everywhere like a spider's web, constantly pulsing with the dataflow of hundreds of thousands of comms, computers and anything else that needed a connection to work. It was an anarchic mess of a system, part-built, part-grown in and around the old remains of the pre-Crash 2.0 net.

In and around the web floated islands of sealed networks, with strands of data clumped thickly enough to form robust walls, patrolled by ever-vigilant ICE. The private data-fortresses of corporations, gangs, fixers, shadowrunners and anyone else with a need for a little privacy.

Taken from a distance, I could see the entire city through a funhouse mirror; the networks of the grid-linked parts of the city glowed even brighter than they did in the real world with the sheer volume of data passing through its streets, while the city's more desolate areas were near-invisible, with only the occasional data-tap streaming pirated trideo to run-down tenement blocks at a bitrate that was barely enough to make the picture move.

I didn't focus on the city for long, though I dearly wanted to. It was easy to get lost in the brilliance of the digital city, to get sucked into its ever-shifting patterns and forget there was any meat attached to my mind until hours had passed and I woke up with my body twitching with hunger.

I was hungry this time, too, but not with the gnawing pangs that came from spending too long under. More like someone who hadn't eaten since last night, and who'd been following some high-schooler around since he left home that morning.

I almost rolled off the couch, taking a moment to stretch myself out and get used to standing up again before turning back and doing my best to get rid of the person-shaped dent I'd left in the cushions, to get the couch looking like it was before.

Home was just about right for a couple with a child, too cramped for two fully-grown adults and much too large for just one. Even two years on, the place was still filled with memories; family photos hanging on the walls next to dad's work photos from the docks, bookshelves filled with legal texts I've never read and a ladder of notches on the kitchen doorframe, each annotated with an ever-increasing number.

I staggered into the bathroom and splashed frigid water onto my face to wake me up, blinking gormlessly at my reflection in the mirror as I got used to seeing through my eyes again. Once the colours were right, things were still blurry, and I let out a weary sigh before I went hunting for my glasses, finding them on the kitchen countertop.

I sighed again as I found a fridge empty of food, but not of beer, and briefly debated breaking open a packet of unseasoned instant ramen that had been sitting in the cupboard for months before giving up and pulling the comm number for a Jamaican place off the Matrix.

Doing so felt far more natural than ambling back across the room and sinking into an armchair, and I indulged myself by filling my vision with datafeeds before pulling up a copy of Great Expectations I'd been steadily working my way through. All digitally, of course, though I was pretty sure there was an old paper copy of the book somewhere in the house. Mom was a traditionalist like that. With literature, not politics.

To be honest, I never really saw the appeal of paper. It's fragile, takes up too much meatspace, and at the end of the day it's only ever going to be right for some people. The font will always be the same size, and if you can't actually see the text then you'd need someone else there to manually read it out for you. A datafile is suitable for everyone with a commlink.

Not that I even needed that. Not since Crash 2.0 in twenty sixty-four, when a fourteen-year-old me collapsed in the middle of school because my brain had just hooked into the school's wired network. It became even more instinctive once the wireless matrix rolled out, and for a couple of years I was too scared to do anything with it. After that I was on my own, and my fear of my abilities was overshadowed by my fear of being evicted from the only home I've ever known.

Someone buzzed at the door, and I pulled myself out of the armchair once more, idly bringing up the security feed from the corridor. The delivery guy wasn't the only person in the hall; the woman from apartment thirteen twenty-two was fumbling with her keys as she arrived back from her shift, while the building super was hammering on the door of thirteen twenty-five at the end of the hall.

The delivery guy was young and, at about six foot four, tall for a human. He was wearing motorcycle leathers and carrying an insulated box, open to reveal a paper bag with the joint's logo on it. I let the camera go as I opened up the door, looking down at him as his face paled and his mouth dropped open a little. In spite of myself, I almost found myself shrinking under the attention, instead grabbing the takeaway out of his hands and closing the door a lot quicker than I needed to.

Almost in spite of myself, I brought the camera back up and watched as the delivery guy stared at the door for a few moments, before pulling a comm out of his pocket. In a panic, I started digging through the device, pulling up his name, his call, location and browser history, until he just faked a signature for the delivery and walked off down the corridor.

I still watched him leave, taking the thirteen-floor trip down the elevator and collecting his bike from where he'd parked it up outside the lobby, chained to a lamp post. When he set off, I waited until his comm automatically fed a route to the heads-up display in his helmet before finally stopping the trace. He was going to the next delivery, nowhere else.

I snagged a beer from the fridge and made my way over to the balcony, using my mind to hit the switch that retracted the metal storm shutters and exposed the city to my meatspace eyes.

Rather unsurprisingly, the docks dominated the view. Dad bought this place because it was right on the edge of the docks, and he poured his heart and soul into those miles of wharves, jetties, cranes and warehouses. Poured everything he had into them, until they ate him up and spat him out full of lead.

Half of the docks were run by the Association in one way or another, the company renting and leasing access to anyone with nuyen while individual managers earned a tidy side-income from smuggling and mob backhands. From my vantage point thirteen stories up, I could see the logos of dozens of different companies spread out across the sprawling warehouses, a healthy spread of local corps and double-A giants.

Half the docks were independent, but they were also worse off. Their infrastructure was mismatched and rusting, and they couldn't hold a candle to the rest.

Segregated behind physical walls and legal extraterritoriality, Ares Macrotechnology's docks were like a city within a city. They were pristine and largely automated, with a constant flow of containers moving in on trains from Detroit before being loaded onto ships and sent off to ports the world over.

Their arcology lorded over this enclave like the keep of a castle, a great wedge-sided edifice that eclipsed any other building in the docks by an order of magnitude and made the skyscrapers of downtown look like spindly needles in comparison. The Ares logo – the head of a Greek warrior in red white and blue – seemed to almost be staring those towers down.

Three of those skyscrapers bore the Medhall Pharmaceuticals logo – a stylized black crown over a red M, on a yellow background. Ares was a supranational giant, a triple-A corporation to whom Brockton Bay was just one port city among many, but Medhall were local titans, homegrown and on the cusp of double-A status. They liked to promote themselves as the champions of the city – at least, the parts of the city whose ears were round.

I couldn't help catching sight of my own ears in the glass of the screen door, as the meagre light from the apartment turned it into a partial mirror. They'd never be round enough for Medhall's Humanis connections, but it's not like my ears were what people would notice first.

At over eight feet tall, I'd never be able to hide in a crowd. My mouth would be too wide if it weren't for the tusks jutting out of the underbite, tusks I'd had to spend years learning how to talk around if I didn't want to lisp. My hair – the colour of slate – fell down to my shoulders, and was parted by a pair of knobbly-looking horns that jutted out of my head. With grey-blue skin, I stood out even more.

I slid the screen door open, and my reflection disappeared. We kept some garden furniture on the balcony – the white plastic long-since stained yellow by the air pollution – and slumped down in front of the table before unwrapping the bag and popping the ring-pull, taking a deep draught of the stuff as I watched the city from a distance.