Torture goes swimmingly. Dave cracks in under a minute. I hadn't even gotten to the fingernails yet. But I do them anyway. And nobody hears a thing.

Lucille watches me from a chair by the door as I tug on the now-dead guy's cybernetic arm. No dice. I pull harder. "Compress the bicep and twist," the Cor2 agent says, a ghost of a smile on her face. "Should come right off."

I follow instructions begrudgingly. The arm detaches with a series of mechanical clicks, the baseplate lighting up red as the connection terminates. "Okay, now what?"

"Same thing with yours. Twist the to the right to put the new one on."

"Which way's right?"

Her smile fades. "The other way."

I roll my sleeve up and pop my temporary arm off, noting with great interest the baseplate is identical to Hale's. Lucille notices, her smile returning in the form of a sly smirk. "What, you thought we were cheap?" She barks out a haughty chuckle. "We weren't going to give you any old baseplate. You'd tear your arm off."

I frown at her. "Can you, maybe, I dunno...communicate all this with me next time?"

"We'll see."

The room falls silent, save for the mechanical whirring of my new arm calibrating. It pulls my data from my EyeD and alters size accordingly, the false skin rippling in a way that makes me uneasy in some primal fashion. I resist the urge to peel it off.

The net clicks one last time, completing adjustments. "How does it feel?" Lucille asks.

I rotate it around my shoulder and wave it around. "It's light," I remark. "Too light."

Drachma leans forward in her chair. "Can you-" She jumps as I drive my arm into the desk, cleaving it in half in an explosion of sparks and metal shrapnel. "Oh."

I beam at her, ignoring the blood now dripping into my eye. "I love it!"

"Alex, you're bleeding."

"Head wounds bleed a lot."

Lucille falls silent. I can see the gears turning in her head, planning her next move. Probably involving me in a dangerous situation. "I'm gonna regret asking," I pipe up, "But can you walk me through what Davy said?"

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

She pulls up a recording without missing a beat. The holographic render casts blue light across the room. "It's mostly nonsense," she remarks. The scene skips around in her hand as she locates the right timestamp. "But this part is what I came here for."

"-seven sleeper corporations within Site 17 alone." Neon Davy Jones horked a glob of congealed blood in my general direction within the recording. "Biograde was one of them."

"Why kill Claire?" Recording Lucille is just as menacing as real Lucille. "And why now?"

Laughter. I watch as I punch him in the neck. Great hit. Glad it's filmed. He finds his words after choking on his own blood for a few moments. "Millenium is making a move against you fucks," he spits. "Previous...leadership was inadequate."

"Why kill her?"

"She resisted. Didn't take severance. Decided to become a thorn in my side, even after she was ousted. She was becoming a problem, and Millenium directive couldn't be ignored, so she was zeroed."

"It's always about money," I hear myself say from just offscreen. "I get it."

More laughter, followed up by more punching, followed up by more silence as Dave struggles to avoid dying. "Money doesn't mean anything to us anymore." He shrugs as best he can strapped to a chair. "But if you control it..."

Lucille snaps her hand shut on the hologram. "How much do you know about this Site's currency?" she asks me.

I blink. "Fuckin' nothin'."

"Then I'm not gonna try to explain it. Let's go."

I follow her out of the mansion like a good dog. The guard from before is nowhere to be seen. I wonder if Jon eliminated him while we were inside.

Speaking of... "Luce, where's the car?"

"Call me that again and I'll tear your other arm off."

"Yeah, cool. No, seriously, where's Jon and the car?"

Lucille shrugs. Lots of that going around today. "Beats me," she says. "It's Jon. He's probably busy being stupid somewhere."

Right on cue, her PDA beeps. A video call from Clarke. "Jon?" Lucille frowns at the image. I peer over her shoulder. Looks like a riveting image of a brick wall. "Jon. Where are you?"

The agent's blood-spattered face drifts into view, slumped against said bricks. He's missing a chunk of his skull. It's cauterized. I resist the urge to point and laugh. "You're alive," he says, weirdly articulate for someone missing part of their gray matter. "Someone else is here."

"Details."

"PlasmaTech. At least one bladesman. Atom got me good."

"Good? Your brain is in pieces."

"Yeah, it'll do that."

The camera catches movement at the edge of the screen. Jon pans over. A white and blue uniform comes into view holding a PlasmaTech G16. Potent shotgun, provided you can get in range.

"Why do all of you have blue in your official colors, anyway?" I ask as Jon's head explodes. The masked agent stomps on his phone, and the line goes dead. "It's really hard to tell y'all apart."

Lucille frowns. I don't think she heard me. "I forgot to ask where the car is," she grumbles.

A nearby explosion barely registers until a solid steel door embeds itself in the guardhouse, missing me by inches. Moments later, a flaming tire bounces past. "I think I found the car," I say, wandering over to the door. It's charred, but there's no mistaking the Cor2 logo. "Interesting situation. Uh, how many are there to kill?"

"Does it matter?" Drachma pulls a set of knives from nowhere with grim confidence. I forget she's immune to plasma.

I mull it over for a second. But only a second. "No, I guess it doesn't."