I don't sleep.
Every time I close my eyes, I see brown eyes pleading for help I couldn't give. Every time I start to drift, I hear the wet sound of a blade sliding between ribs. So I sit at my desk, staring at the cracked terminal screen, and count the hours until my debt comes due.
Sixty-eight hours. 12,400 Zen. Impossible numbers.
The Academy of Acquisition doesn't look like a death trap from the outside. To most of the world, it's H3althy World—a gleaming medical complex in Sector 7 where desperate civilians buy kidneys for their dying children and synthetic blood for their wounded lovers. Hope in a sterile package, sold at premium prices.
The marketing is beautiful. Endless supply, they promise. Ethical sourcing. Life-saving innovation.
They're not technically lying. They just don't mention where the endless supply comes from.
I learned this the hard way, like everything else about this place. Recruited at fifteen from a Sector 19 orphanage after I got caught pickpocketing the wrong mark—a talent scout who saw potential in a kid who could slip past security cameras and into restricted areas. They offered me a choice: three years in juvenile detention, or a "scholarship" to their prestigious academy.
I chose the academy. I was fifteen and stupid and thought I was getting a lucky break.
The Academy divides us into three classes, and your class determines everything—your training, your treatment, your chances of survival.
Class A students are syndicate royalty. Sons and daughters of crime families, sent here to sharpen their edges and forge connections. They learn strategy, leadership, the art of turning violence into profit. Their dormitories have silk sheets and personal chefs. Their graduation is a celebration, a doorway to inherited empires of blood and money.
Class B students are the talented orphans like me—except the Academy actually wants them to survive. They're scouted for rare skills or raw potential, then molded into perfect tools. Assassins, spies, hackers, whatever the underworld needs. Their training is brutal but comprehensive. Their graduation comes with job offers from major syndicates, corporate black ops divisions, or the Academy itself.
Class C students are the mistakes. The desperate, the unlucky, the ones who stumbled into the Academy's web with nothing to offer but their bodies. We get the leftover instructors, the outdated equipment, the training courses designed to weed out the weak. We're not students—we're inventory. Raw materials for H3althy World's less advertised services.
The Academy doesn't charge tuition upfront. That would be too honest. Instead, they hit you with a "graduation fee" when you finish your three years—a debt calculated with creative accounting that somehow always ends up in the hundreds of thousands of Zen. Pay it within the first year of graduation, and you're free to work the underworld's freelance networks. Miss a payment, and you're flagged for collection.
Class A students clear their debt with family money before the ink dries on their diplomas. Class B students scrape by with high-value contracts and syndicate backing. Class C students become the Academy's most profitable product line—harvested alive and sold piece by piece through H3althy World's dark market channels.
The system is elegant in its cruelty. They train us just enough to be useful, then trap us in debt we can never repay. Even the survivors spend their lives running jobs for the Academy, paying interest on a loan that was designed to be impossible.
I've been out for a year. Eleven months without missing a payment. One mistake, and now I'm staring at a terminal screen, trying to figure out how to earn more money in three days than most people see in six months.
My account balance stares back at me: 847 Zen. Rent is due in two weeks. Food is running low. And I need 12,400 Zen to avoid becoming spare parts for some rich civilian's medical emergency.
The math is simple. The solution is not.
I pull up my work history, scrolling through the jobs that kept me alive this long. Courier runs for 200 Zen. Surveillance gigs for 400. The occasional wet work for 800, when I could stomach it. All small-time, all safe, all designed to keep me breathing while staying under the Academy's radar.
That strategy just got me strapped to a chair, watching a stranger die for my sins.
I need bigger jobs. Riskier clients. The kind of work that pays enough to matter and kills you if you're not careful.
I need Downwork.
The Academy's public face is H3althy World—their medical front, complete with cheerful holographic receptionists and waiting rooms full of silk flowers. But buried in H3althy World's encrypted servers, hidden behind layers of security and misdirection, is something else entirely.
Downwork looks like a glitch. A black screen with red text that flickers like dying neon. Anonymous clients post jobs with no names, no faces, no traces. The work is always illegal and usually lethal—hits, thefts, sabotage, worse. Payment is guaranteed but survival is not.
For Class C graduates, it's the only game in town. Our ratings start at zero, our reputations are worthless, and our life expectancy is measured in months. The Academy feeds us to Downwork like meat to a grinder, taking their cut of every job while we bleed for scraps.
But I've been careful. Patient. Building my rating one job at a time, earning trust through competence and silence. I'm not the best operative on the platform, but I'm reliable. I finish jobs. I don't ask questions. I don't leave loose ends.
It's taken me eleven months to climb out of the bottom tier. One missed payment just knocked me back down to survival mode.
I log into H3althy World's civilian portal, navigating through layers of legitimate medical services and cheerful marketing copy. A few encrypted clicks, a biometric scan, and the facade drops away. The screen flickers, glitches, and Downwork loads in all its brutal honesty.
Available jobs scroll past in red text. Most are bottom-tier garbage—body disposal for 300 Zen, drug runs for 500, surveillance that pays peanuts and gets you killed. The high-value contracts are locked behind rating requirements I no longer qualify for.
I filter by payment amount and deadline. The list shrinks to three possibilities:
Job 1: Bodyguard detail for a nervous mid-level fence. 2,000 Zen for a week of standing around looking menacing. Safe but slow—the job ends after my debt is due.
Job 2: Courier run to the Dead Zone in Sector 23. 3,500 Zen for a simple pickup and delivery. The catch is the radiation levels that turn your bones to powder if you stay too long. Doable, but not enough to clear my debt.
Job 3: Wet work. Corporate executive with expensive enemies. 8,000 Zen for a clean elimination. Dangerous but fast, and the money would cover my debt with enough left over to eat this month.
I stare at the third option. The target's file is sparse—middle management at a biotech firm, recently divorced, two kids he sees on weekends. No security detail, no obvious defenses. Just a man whose only crime was pissing off the wrong people.
Like the stranger on the table, dying for someone else's debts.
My finger hovers over the accept button. 8,000 Zen. Enough to buy me another month of freedom, another month of pretending I'm not just inventory waiting to be harvested.
The stranger's eyes flash in my memory. Brown, ordinary, human. Pleading for help I couldn't give.
I close the job listing and push back from the terminal. Not yet. There has to be another way.
Outside my window, the city hums with its endless rhythm of survival. Delivery drones trace paths between hab-blocks, their navigation lights blinking like mechanical stars. The fake sushi bar's neon sign flickers between Pajanese characters and English, casting red shadows on the alley below.
Somewhere in Sector 7, the Academy's medical complex gleams under floodlights, its clean corridors hiding rooms where people like me are carved apart for the crime of being poor. Somewhere in those same corridors, the nervous supervisor counts down the hours until my next payment is due.
Sixty-seven hours. 12,400 Zen. One stranger's death on my conscience.
I open the terminal again and scroll through the job listings, looking for a miracle that doesn't exist. The wet work contract stares back at me, patient and inevitable.
Sometimes the only choice is which stranger has to die.