The red light was not a warning. It was a diagnosis. The system had identified a malfunction—him. It would now initiate a protocol.
Kael did not panic. Panic was a waste of calories, a clouding of perception. He moved with the same economy he used on a contract, but the objective was now reflexive survival. He had approximately thirty minutes, maybe less, before the first active response. The red light meant his location was tagged, his apartment's minimal security overridden from the outside. They would come to contain, to debrief, to sterilize.
He took only three things: the pistol, a stack of untraceable credit chits from a hidden floor compartment, and the grey jacket. He left the terminal, the chair, the empty nutrient wrappers—the archaeology of his former life. He did not look back.
The exit strategy was pre-considered, a ghost plan in the back of every freelancer's mind. The building's maintenance shaft, not the elevator or stairs. He pried open the vent cover in his bathroom, slid into the tight, dark space, and pulled the cover shut behind him. He descended using the service rungs, the air thick with dust and the hum of building systems. He emerged in a sub-basement laundry room, empty at this hour, and exited onto a back alley through a delivery door.
The mist had thickened into a light drizzle. He pulled up his collar and walked, not running, adopting the slightly hurried pace of a shift worker late for his job. He needed distance, and he needed to break the pattern.
His first goal was to shed his digital skin. He went to a black-market tech-scrubber operating out of a refurbished cargo container in a dockyard. The man inside, face obscured by a projection of shifting static, said nothing. Kael placed a credit chit on the counter. The man gestured to a chair. Needles extended from the headrest, interfacing with the neural port at the base of Kael's skull. A violent, nauseating flush of raw data-scrambling current coursed through him. It felt like his memories were being sandblasted. When it was done, every implanted tracker, every backdoor access key, every loyalty subroutine planted by intermediaries was reduced to digital slag. He was now a ghost in the machine, but also blind—no retinal display, no direct uplink to city data, no contract alerts. Just his own organic senses and a mind suddenly, deafeningly quiet.
He paid a second chit for a burner comms unit and a generic, unregistered ident-card with a bland face and a meaningless name. It wouldn't withstand serious scrutiny, but it would pass casual scans.
Now, he had to think. They would expect him to flee the city. The ports, the mag-lev stations, the atmospheric gates—all would have passive alerts keyed to his old biometrics. Going to ground inside the city was smarter, but he needed a hole deep enough to disappear into. He thought of the flooded sectors, the interstitial zones. But they were too obvious, too tightly linked to the broken contract.
Then he remembered a detail from an old, unrelated retrieval job. A man who traded in forgotten real estate, who owned decaying properties no one wanted, used as dead-drops or temporary shelters for people in transit. The man was called The Curator. He asked no questions, and his memory was famously short—for a price.
Finding him took the rest of the day and two more credit chits in bribes. The Curator operated from a booth in a derelict arcade, surrounded by hollowed-out VR pods. He was ancient, his eyes milky with data-cataracts. Kael stated his need: a place, no connections, no records, for one week.
The Curator stared through him, his fingers tapping on an ancient ledger. "The old somatorium in the Lysithea District," he croaked. "Level B2. Room 12. Key is biometric—your palm print on the door will work once, registering you as the last resident. It will not work again. One week. After that, the room cleans itself." He named a price. Kael paid.
The somatorium was a brutalist slab from a prior civic era, a block meant for short-term worker housing, now a vertical slum. It stank of mildew, cheap synth-protein, and despair. Level B2 was below the official street level, the lights flickering at a disorienting frequency. Room 12 was at the end of a corridor where the ceiling leaked a steady, slow drip. The door recognized his palm with a dull clunk and slid open.
The room was a cube. A cot. A sink. A sealed waste unit. A single, bare lumen panel in the ceiling. It was a cell. It was perfect.
He sealed the door. The silence here was different from his apartment's. This was the silence of neglect, of being outside the flow. He sat on the cot. The adrenaline of flight began to recede, leaving behind a cold, clear exhaustion.
Neutrality was not armor. He had believed that by not choosing sides, by being a tool, he was protected. The tool is blameless. The tool is necessary. But the moment the tool questions its use, it becomes waste. His attempt at neutrality—taking the contract, then refusing its final step—had stripped him of all protection. He was now prey, and the hunters would be the very system he'd served.
He had no allies. No cause. He had not saved Dr. Thorne; he had merely resigned from her murder. He was not a hero in hiding. He was a defect in quarantine.
He lay on the cot, staring at the stained ceiling, listening to the drip in the corridor. The red light was gone from his wall, but it now pulsed behind his eyes. It was the light of his own status: terminated.
He closed his eyes. For the first time in years, he did not will himself into a low-power state. He simply slept. The sleep was dark and dreamless, a small death.
He was awoken by a sound. Not the drip. A soft scrape at his door. Then a hiss—the sound of a lock-picking aerosol, designed to degrade cheap electronic seals.
They had found him in less than a day.
He was off the cot in a silent motion, pistol in hand, pressed against the wall beside the door. The neutral tool was gone. What was left was an animal in a trap, with nothing to lose but the final moments of its life.
The door slid open.