Max's tone carried that half-smirk you could almost hear even in the dark.
"Too many times," he said, pulling himself through the hatch. "The city's belly doesn't change. Only the names on the kill-list do."
They emerged into a maintenance junction — rusted stairs spiraling upward into shadow. A single flickering bulb swung overhead, casting pale light on the grime-slick metal. The smell of old oil and coolant filled the air.
Kade wiped sweat and dust from his brow. "So… where exactly are we going now?"
"Up," Max replied simply, checking his wrist display. "Mary?"
"Surface route clear for the next two minutes," she said. "But the next district checkpoint has thermal drones sweeping for residuals. You'll need to stay cold."
"Copy that." Max reached into his coat and tossed Kade a small metallic patch. "Stick that on your chest. Nanofiber chill mask — drops your heat sig by forty percent."
Kade blinked. "You just… carry these around?"
Max climbed the stairs without answering. "Preparation isn't paranoia when you're the target."
The stairwell led into a cracked access tunnel. At the end of it, a rust-red service door opened with a wheeze. They stepped into a derelict tram station — concrete pillars, shattered tiles, the air thick with dust and neon bleed from above.
Kade looked around. "You sure this place is abandoned?"
"Depends who you ask," Max said, kneeling beside an old tram terminal. He popped open a panel, wires dangling like veins. "Mary, jack in."
"On it."
Blue light flickered across the console as Mary's digital presence bled through the interface. Lines of code raced across the cracked screen, fragmentary symbols like ghostly runes.
"Linking you to ghostnet channel seven," she said. "You'll have five seconds before Militech flags the reactivation."
"That's all I need."
Max slid a data shard into the slot. The machine whined, screen stuttering, before stabilizing. Data packets streamed upward — encrypted dumps of Militech's own field telemetry.
Kade leaned closer. "You're stealing from them again?"
"Not stealing," Max murmured. "Rebalancing."
Then the console beeped. Mary's tone sharpened. "You've got movement — two signatures, north tunnel. Looks like freelancers, not Militech."
"Scavs?" Kade asked, already drawing his pistol.
"Not scavs," Max said. "Wrong gait. Military stance. Probably private cleanup crew."
He stood, eyes narrowing. "They'll have trackers. Let's make this quiet."
The footsteps grew closer — two figures in modular combat suits, masks glinting under flickering lights. One carried a plasma carbine, the other a data rig on his back. They moved with trained precision, scanning every shadow.
Then — a faint scrape echoed from the far end. Kade froze. One of the mercs swung his carbine up.
Too late.
Max was already behind them.
A blur of motion — a hand snapping the carbine sideways, the other driving a blade up through a weak point under the armor plate. The merc gurgled, collapsing without a sound. The second turned, shouting — and caught a stun round straight through his visor. He hit the floor twitching.
Kade exhaled, wide-eyed. "You're like… a damn ghost."
Max glanced back, voice calm. "That's the idea."
He crouched beside the twitching merc, tearing a small module off the man's neck rig. "Locator beacon," he muttered, crushing it underfoot. "Mary, scrub our signal traces again."
"Already on it. Militech's gonna have a migraine trying to follow that."
Max rose, wiping the blade clean on the merc's sleeve. "Good. Then we've got a head start."
Kade looked around the empty station. "And then what? You just keep running?"
Max paused, turning slightly. The neon from a cracked light panel caught one side of his face — the human half, still and unreadable.
"I don't run," he said softly. "I move."
He holstered his blade, eyes cold but focused. "We've got what we came for. Now we find out why Militech wanted it so bad."
Mary's voice carried through, low and measured. "Whatever's inside that data… it's not standard weapons research. I'm detecting neural architecture blueprints. Something tied to human-machine evolution protocols."
Kade frowned. "Neural what now?"
Max's gaze hardened. "Ghostlink tech."
The air between them felt suddenly heavier — the hum of old power lines echoing like a heartbeat.
Kade swallowed. "You mean the thing that—"
"Turns soldiers into hardware," Max finished quietly. "Yeah. And if Militech's still building it…"
He looked toward the ceiling, where the muffled roar of city traffic trembled through the concrete.
"…then this war's just getting started."
Kade felt a chill crawl up his spine, the weight of Max's words sinking like cold lead.
He'd heard the rumors — whispers in backrooms, ghost stories told between mercs after too many drinks.
Ghostlink. The project that blurred the line between soldier and machine — the one even Militech's board had publicly denounced as "unethical."
And yet… here it was again.
Kade swallowed hard. "You're saying they're bringing it back? After what it did to—"
Max cut him off, his voice low but edged like a blade drawn slow from its sheath.
"Do you think it matters to them, kid? Those corps don't feel guilt. They don't bleed. They don't care about the soldiers that got turned into static inside their own heads. All they see is profit."
He turned, eyes glinting faintly beneath the flickering station lights. "Ghostlink's not about evolution. It's about ownership. You take a man, strip him of fear, pain, hesitation—then chain what's left to your balance sheet. They call it innovation."
Kade opened his mouth, but the words died before they formed. Max's tone wasn't angry. It was worse — detached, tired in a way that didn't belong to any one lifetime.
Max crouched beside one of the fallen mercs, pulling open a damaged neck port and inspecting the neural plug inside. "They're firing it up again," he muttered, more to himself than to Kade. "Doesn't matter if it fries a thousand soldiers or burns through cities. As long as the investors see dividends, they'll keep feeding it bodies."
Kade frowned, voice trembling. "So all that… all those experiments — they're just restarting it? After everything?"
Max stood, the motion fluid but cold. His synthetic hand clicked faintly as it flexed. "Ghostlink never stopped," he said. "They just learned to hide better. Change a few logos, rename the files, bury the graves deep enough that no one digs. But it's the same machine. The same hunger."
***
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It's 22 chaps ahead