I start scrubbing.
The ash smears.
It stains.
My knuckles split open.
Blood streaks the concrete.
I keep scrubbing.
“I will not be owned,” I mutter through my teeth. “I will not be owned. I will not be owned.”
It finally fades into a gray ghost of a mark.
I stand.
My hands are bleeding.
I don’t care.
I lock the back door.
I turn off the lights.
I set the alarm.
When I step into the street, my hands are shaking.
Not with fear.
With fury.
“Fuck you,” I whisper to the night.
Retaliation is coming.
I choose defiance anyway.
CHAPTER 2
TUR
The room I rent on Novaria used to be a storage annex for industrial filtration equipment, and it still smells faintly of metal dust and ozone no matter how much solvent I run through the vents. The walls are poured ferrocrete, thick enough to make the outside world feel like a rumor. The single overhead light stays off unless I need it. Darkness is quieter. Darkness does not look at me.
I sit on the edge of the cot with my boots still on, one elbow braced against my thigh, my forearm resting across my knee like I might stand up at any second and bolt.
That instinct never really shuts off.
The terminal floats at chest height in front of me, a translucent pane of pale blue light that paints my knuckles and the scars along my wrists in ghost color. Black-market data streams scroll down it in vertical ribbons, encrypted chatter folding and unfolding into meaningless noise at a speed only military-grade filters can parse.
Most of it is garbage.
Territorial posturing between mid-tier syndicates. Smuggling lane fluctuations. Bribe schedules for municipalinspectors whose spines are made of paper and debt. A background hiss of crime that never stops breathing.
I watch it anyway.
I always watch it.
