Bread Crumbs

The warehouse in Water District breathes static and wet metal. Server racks glow behind mesh cages, and fog beads on every cable run. Zara Mensk kneels beside a bench of stolen tools, her neural mesh feeding a dying augment propped open in her lap.

The neural-link is leaking raw data in bright, jittering pulses. Every flash crawls across the dealer’s face. He stands over her, sweating through his collar, one hand hovering near a heavy pistol he has not drawn.

A red diagnostic fan on the nearest rack spins up with a sharp whine. Somewhere deeper in the stacks, a relay clicks twice. Then again.

His eyes keep flicking to the warehouse door, then to the ceiling, like he expects a Matsuda sweep team to drop through the rusted roof at any second.

The augment gives one more hard stutter, and a cascade of blue code spills across Zara’s hands. Outside, a distant siren starts to rise through the rain.

Zara hooks into the root stream, and the leak stutters under her fingers. The blue spill collapses into a tight loop, then folds inward as she writes a kill code straight into the source.

The augment jerks once, then goes still. Its frantic pulse dies to a thin, steady glow, and the dealer’s face stops flashing with stolen data.

On the nearest rack, the red fan drops back to a low idle. Fog keeps sliding through the vents, but the server lights settle from panic into a normal, ugly green.

A hard clunk answers from the back of the warehouse. One of the security doors starts to seal on its own, slow and deliberate, as if something outside just noticed the silence.