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/-\
The mornings in District Seven never started quietly.
It began with a low hum a mechanical groan that vibrated through the metal bones of the residential towers as the city slowly woke. The solar shutters of the skyline blinked open one by one, casting slats of white light onto the cracked asphalt below. Steam hissed from underground vents. Neon signs, still buzzing from the nightshift, flickered in protest as daylight settled in.
Aiden sat cross-legged on the rooftop, his back against a crumbling air-conditioning unit that had likely been installed before he was born. He wasn't meditating at least, not in the traditional sense. His eyes were open, unfocused, scanning the hoverlanes far above. Cargo drones buzzed past, trailed by the occasional police glider. Their contrails shimmered faintly against the hazy sky, like chalk lines on old pavement.
He ran a hand through his raven-black hair and sighed. He had the Uchiha eyes, yes. But he hadn't used them today. Not yet.
Below, the towers were stacked with the detritus of modern life. Holoscreens flashed advertisements for neural implants, underground fight circuits, genetically engineered pets. The scent of burning oil mixed with something sweet roasted chestnuts, maybe from a vendor three blocks down. He could hear her shouting through a static-patched speaker system.
"Aiden!" someone called, muffled and distant. "You're gonna be late again, you lazy bastard!"
He glanced over the edge of the rooftop.
A girl stood in the alley, squinting up at him. Hair buzzed on one side, dyed purple on the other, she wore a synth-leather jacket stitched with patches: anarchist symbols, mutant pride flags, a few logos from defunct rock bands. Kiera had the kind of voice that always sounded like it belonged to someone about to start a fight.
"You hear me or are you communing with ghosts again?"
Aiden stood up and dusted off his jacket. "The ghosts say you're still short on credits."
Kiera flipped him off without looking. "Hurry up. Drey's already at the café, and he's extra twitchy today."
Aiden vaulted over the edge, landing lightly beside her. No one noticed. No one ever did unless he let them. That was something his family had always been good at even before his reincarnation, he thought.
But that was a memory for another time.
The café wasn't a café in the traditional sense. It used to be a drone repair shop, before the owners mysteriously disappeared and some enterprising hacker named Roz claimed it. Now, it was a half-lit dive where secondhand baristas served imported beans and pirated music. The sign still read "MECHFIX," the last three letters flickering like a dying pulse.
Drey was in the corner booth, hunched over a touchscreen covered in lines of scrolling code. He looked up when they entered sharp-eyed, twitchy, always carrying a faint scent of burned circuit boards. His prosthetic fingers tapped against the tabletop, click-click-click.
"You're late," he muttered, glancing between Aiden and Kiera.
"No," Kiera replied, sliding into the booth, "you're just paranoid."
Drey scowled. "And you're reckless. That street cam last night caught your face for three whole seconds. I had to patch the footage manually."
"You're welcome for the exercise," she said sweetly.
Aiden took the seat across from them. He didn't order anything. The café owner, Roz, knew better than to ask him what he wanted. Instead, a mug of black coffee appeared beside him without a word. He nodded in silent thanks.
Around them, the usual regulars cycled in and out mercenaries, black market engineers, low-level telepaths. A mutant girl was scribbling in a sketchpad near the window, headphones over one ear, humming some off-key tune. A massive man with a reinforced spine leaned against the bar, chatting with Roz in slow, deliberate Russian. Nothing out of place. Just the way Aiden liked it.
Kiera leaned forward, elbows on the table. "So. We pulling the job or not?"
"No," Drey said immediately. "The building has a StarkTech firewall. We're not poking that dragon."
She rolled her eyes. "Come on. We only need the shell data. Not even full access."
"That shell data is wrapped in Level 5 security. You don't just borrow that."
"We don't have to steal it. Just copy it."
"And if it's encrypted?"
"That's your job, genius."
Aiden sipped his coffee and listened. This was how most of his mornings went watching these two argue until something useful dropped out. He wasn't the leader, not really. He just had a talent for staying invisible until the moment called for otherwise.
"I'm telling you," Drey said, gesturing emphatically, "we keep poking at corporate archives and one of these days we're gonna trip a spider. The kind that doesn't just bite back it rewrites your DNA."
"...Hot," Kiera muttered.
"Not in the good way."
Later that afternoon, the trio split off in different directions. Drey disappeared into the lower network hubs under the city, muttering about testing a new virus. Kiera was off to flirt with some Hydra defectors and maybe score a lead on the shell data. Aiden wandered.
He didn't really have a destination. He rarely did. The city sprawled in layers surface streets littered with grime, upper districts ruled by the wealthy, and the underground zones where gravity didn't always work the same way. He passed by a woman with golden eyes selling fermented algae drinks, a street performer bending light into fractal illusions, and a boy barely older than ten playing with a floating kunai drone clearly black market tech, but no one said anything.
He ended up in the Observation Park.
It was a quiet pocket of artificial trees and synthetic grass, maintained by some forgotten city initiative. Above, a massive sky-screen played the weather feed, glitching slightly as faux clouds drifted across a fabricated sky. Old people played chess here. Sometimes, androids pretending to be human fed mechanical pigeons.
He found a bench in the shade and sat. For the first time all day, he closed his eyes.
A child screamed somewhere laughter, not danger. Someone had set up a projector showing an old Iron Man documentary. People watched without comment. Aiden didn't.
He was listening to something else.
Something further away. Below the noise of the city. A frequency not meant for human ears. Static. A vibration in his blood. Not quite pain. Not quite memory.
He opened his eyes slowly. The red shimmer passed across his irises for a heartbeat, then vanished.
Not yet.
And elsewhere unseen by him a masked man in an ivory coat walked into a weapons shop and asked for something that didn't exist.
Not yet.
/-\
If you wish to read more or simply support me than check out my Patreon at
"https://www.patreon.com/Its_Zack/"
You can Get Access to 3 More Chapters OR 7 More Chapters if you want.