The acidic rain was hammering the reinforced glass of my office, distorting the megacity's glowing skyline into a smeared, bleeding rainbow. My credit account was three weeks in the red, and the bottle of rye in the bottom desk drawer was nothing but a hollow glass ghost. The silence in the room was heavy, broken only by the steady drumming against the window that sounded like the static hiss and pop of an old vinyl record spinning at the end of its track.

Then came a heavy knock on the reinforced wood. A steady, deliberate rhythm that meant someone out there still believed in old-fashioned privacy.

The door whined on its hydraulic hinges. The silhouette standing in the hallway's flickering neon buzz didn't belong to a high-end corporate widow or a synthetic decoy. She stepped into the gloom of the office, bringing with her the sharp ozone tang of the city's acidic rain and the faint, bitter scent of the sludge-docks.

She looked like she hadn't slept in a week. Her coat was cheap polymer, soaked through, and her hands trembled as she clutched a saturated synth-leather bag.

"It's open," I said, my voice scraping against the heavy silence of the room. I didn't move from my chair, my hand resting casually near the bottom drawer where the .38 usually sat.

She didn't sit down. She walked straight to the desk and dropped a small, battered physical photograph onto the blotter. Not a data-chip, not a holographic projection. Paper.

"My brother," she said. Her voice was a low, jagged edge. "He's gone."

I leaned forward, looking at the picture. A kid in his early twenties, wearing a standard data-courier’s stealth-suit, similar to the ones they wear running intercepts over the lower tiers.

"People go off the radar in this city all the time," I told her, reaching for a sulfur match to strike, an archaic gesture in a city of plasma lighters. The smell of sulfur choked the small room, grounding us. "They either hit a digital dead end or find a shallow grave in the scrap heaps. Which one did he find?"

"Neither," she shot back, her eyes catching the intermittent crimson flash of the neon sign across the street. "He sent me a panicked wide-cast three nights ago. Said he saw something he wasn't supposed to see during a data-mule contract. Then, his bio-monitor flatlined."

I took a slow pull of air. "A bio-monitor flatline usually means the enforcers have already swept him up, or a street doc sold him for spare chrome."

"No," she insisted, leaning in close enough that I could see the raw fear bleeding through her exhaustion. "The flatline was faked. A localized EMP burst scrambled his grid, but I know him. He's alive, hiding somewhere in the subterranean maintenance shafts." She reached into her bag and pulled out a handful of low-denomination credit chips, dropping them next to the photo. "The NLAPD won't touch it. They said he was just another ghost in a city made of glass."

I looked from the pathetic pile of pocket lint to the girl's desperate face. The money wouldn't even buy a fresh glass of synthetic bourbon. But the raw, unadulterated grief in her eyes was the most genuine thing in the room.

I pocketed the photo and stood up, grabbing my worn trench coat from the hook.

"Alright," I said, sliding my arms into the heavy material. "Where did his signal drop?"

"Sector 7B of the industrial Docks," she whispered, her fingers tracing the edge of the photograph. "Right in the shadow of the Noodle-Zero rendering vats. His residual IP ping died there."

I left her locked in the office, throwing the deadbolts with a series of solid clicks. I told her not to open the door for anyone, not even if they sounded like me.

I rode the mag-train down to the Wards. The stench of synthetic rain and poverty pressed through the vents, a grim reminder of the world waiting at the bottom of the line. The Docks were exactly as I remembered them: a black river of sludge and industrial runoff, where the air tasted like ammonia and old blood.

I kept to the shadows of the maintenance shafts, avoiding the glow of the main skyways above. The deeper I descended, the more the neon gave way to a suffocating, necrotic dark.

I finally found the kid huddled behind a coolant vent in a blind maintenance junction. It was a rusted-out cul-de-sac illuminated only by the faint, bioluminescent glow of the toxic sludge slowly drifting past the grate. He was shivering, his standard data-courier’s stealth-suit soaked in filth. His neural-port, grafted crudely to his temple, was sparking faintly, a sign he had violently severed a connection to avoid a firewall trace.

"Your sister sent me. She's safe for now," I said, keeping my voice low and dangerously calm. "You have something that will get us both killed, so let's cut to the chase." I kept my hands where he could see them.

"I can't go back," he choked out, his eyes wide and strung out on fear. He clutched his chest, where a thick, bio-reactive envelope was stuffed inside his jacket. "I ran an intercept over the sludge-docks, trying to skim a corporate drone for a few quick credits. But I hit the mainline for Noodle-Zero's logistics hub."

He pulled the envelope out. The biometric seal was blinking an angry red.

"They aren't just processing synthetic protein," the kid whispered, his teeth chattering. "I saw the manifest. I saw the video logs from the intake valves. The street docs, the Outfit, the precinct badge-men... they're all on the payroll. When someone goes missing in the lower Wards, they don't end up in the scrap heaps. They go into the vats."

I stared at the blinking red light on the envelope. The copper tang of the city's air suddenly felt a lot thicker in my throat.

"The billboards," the kid gasped, wiping a smear of black synthetic blood from his nose. "That model they use? Lola? I downloaded the genetic matrix for the protein starter culture. It's a century old. They're using her tissue as the base, and they're using us—the drifters, the ghosts, the people who can't afford to fight back—to stretch the supply."

Before I could process the sheer, terrifying scale of the corporate cover-up, the neon sign at the end of the tunnel flickered and died. A localized EMP burst.

Then came the sound.

A heavy, metallic thud out in the darkness. Someone had tracked his neural-port's residual ping right to our doorstep.

The slow, rhythmic footfalls echoed through the rusted pipes. With every step, the metal floor groaned in protest, betraying hundreds of pounds of reinforced cybernetics and weaponized chrome hidden beneath a sleek exterior.

A figure stepped out of the necrotic dark and into the faint, bioluminescent glow of the runoff. My grip on the .38 tightened, my knuckles turning white.

It was her. The girl from the towering, fifty-foot holographic projections that hawked Noodle-Zero in the mid-tiers. Lola. She had the exact same surgically perfect face, a porcelain mask of cold, calculated indifference. Her cheeks even carried that same faint violet hue, mimicking the toxic glow of the noodle broth. But she wasn't a digital phantom or a century-old memory. She was a walking tank of high-end flesh and dermal plating, wrapped in a stealth-weave coat that rippled like oil on water.

"You shouldn't have skimmed the drone, courier," she said. Her voice carried a slight, metallic reverb, the product of a high-end vocal synth. Her eyes were dead glass—matte black lenses that didn't reflect the neon or the sludge.

The kid scrambled backward against the wet ferro-crete, his breathing coming in ragged, wet gasps. "It's her," he whispered, a sob catching in his throat. "They grew a blank. They grew a copy to hunt me down."

"Not a copy," the assassin corrected smoothly, her heels clicking like a metronome on the grated floor. "The original template. Upgraded for property retrieval."

She didn't reach for a heater. Instead, her right hand raised gracefully, and her index finger elongated. With a sharp mechanical click, a hidden dart-launcher locked into place within the knuckle.

"Corporate restructuring," she whispered.

I didn't bother with a witty comeback, and I didn't wait for her to fire. I raised the .38 and put two rounds center mass. The gunshots were deafening in the cramped, flooded tunnel. The slugs hit her chest with a sharp *clack-clack* and flattened into useless lead discs against subcutaneous dermal plating.

She didn't even flinch.

"Standard ballistics," she stated, the polite marketing smile completely gone from her face. "Disappointing."

She swung her arm, the hidden mechanism hissing as she fired a depleted-uranium micro-fletchette straight at us. I threw myself sideways, grabbing the kid by his tactical harness and dragging him behind a massive, rusted-out server rack. The fletchette hit the ferro-crete wall behind us, showering the dark tunnel with pulverized stone and sparks.

"She's wired directly into the Noodle-Zero grid," the kid yelled over the deafening hiss of a ruptured pneumatic pipe. "If we don't zero her processor, she'll just keep tracking the data I pulled!"

My .38 was useless against her armor, and my ribs felt like a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing. I needed something heavier. My eyes darted around the subterranean junction, landing on a heavy iron wrench resting near a pressurized main coolant line running across the ceiling. The corporate executives had turned this city into a slaughterhouse, but down here in the dark, I knew how to use the rusted machinery against them.

I didn't think. I just moved. I grabbed a heavy iron wrench from the flooded floor and hurled it at the main coolant line running across the ceiling above the assassin's head.

The heavy iron shattered the corroded valve, unleashing a localized waterfall of freezing, pressurized industrial liquid directly onto her.

The sudden, violent drop in temperature hit her synthetic skin. Her servos shrieked, making her look like a walking juggernaut of blind, unfeeling rage as she short-circuited in the toxic sludge. The hidden dart-launcher mechanism misfired, hissing harmlessly into the ferro-crete.

She stumbled, but her internal power plant stuttered, then whined as it tried to cycle back up to combat readiness. Her eyes were dead glass, literally—matte black lenses that didn't reflect the neon outside. They locked onto the blinking red seal of the bio-locked envelope clutched in the kid's hand.

"Property retrieval." Her voice ground out through the freezing steam, distorted and metallic.

"The contract's closed," I said. My voice was a low, jagged edge.

I twisted, reaching for the only thing heavier than the enforcer. I grabbed the emergency release for the hydraulic ram used to compress the synthetic meat. I hit the button.

A deafening pneumatic hiss filled the air as the massive steel plate dropped. The enforcer was slow to react to anything other than a direct order. She took the blow squarely to the chest. It drove her down into a slurry of synthetic protein and discarded offal. I heard a sickening, hollow crunch that was more plastic than bone. She fell back into industrial waste, and this time, she didn't get up.

The tunnel was quiet, save for the hum of the magnetic rails and the ragged sound of the kid trying to catch his breath. I hauled the whimpering kid out of the muck.

I took the thick, bio-reactive paper from his trembling hands. Inside was the digital proof we needed—the genetic matrix that proved the city's cheapest meal was a century-old ghost, and that corporations were quite literally feeding the gutters with their own dead. If I didn't get this matrix to the right people, she was a liability I left locked in a target.

"We're taking this straight to the top," I told him, turning my collar up against the chill.

The .38 in my holster was a heavy weight against my broken ribs. It was empty, like my credit account.

Broke. Hunted. Freezing.

Just another Tuesday in Neon Los Angeles.

I walked into the fog and let the city swallow me whole.

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