The air in Renner Tech's executive spire was so heavily filtered it left no scent at all—just a sterile, metallic chill that clung to the back of Kai's throat. He adjusted his cufflinks for the third time in as many minutes, the pearl inlays catching the elevator's ambient lighting. A gift from his mother for his twentieth birthday. The engraved Renner Tech insignia on the underside—a circuit-board starburst rendered in platinum—bit into his wrist like a brand.

His reflection in the elevator doors was flawless. Perfect posture, hair swept back in the current corporate fashion, the edges trimmed with the kind of precision only a licensed aesthetic glyph could achieve. His Conduit gleamed at his wrist, its obsidian casing polished to a mirror finish. He'd spent an extra twenty minutes this morning ensuring every detail was immaculate. Today of all days, they would need to take him seriously.

The elevator chimed. The doors slid open.

Then Silence.

Not the anticipatory hush before a negotiation, but the dead, airless quiet of a sealed vault. The room stretched before him, its floor to ceiling windows offering a panoramic view of Neo-Tokyo's glittering skyline. The city pulsed below like a living circuit board, its rhythm dictated by the massive Aethernet nodes embedded in the center of Spire.

At the head of the obsidian conference table, his father stood with his back to the room, hands clasped behind him like a general surveying conquered territory. The man's tailored suit—charcoal gray with the barest thread of Renner Tech's signature blue woven through the fabric—was as immaculate as ever. The only sign of tension was the way his knuckles pressed against each other.

To his left, Uncle Ryu lounged in his customary chair, fingers steepled beneath his chin. A half-empty glass of synth-whiskey sat at his elbow, the ice long since melted. His smile was a familiar knife, honed by decades of business politics.

To his right, Director Harlow of Myriad Ethics Compliance crossed her legs, the hem of her skirt falling into perfect alignment. Her smile was a scalpel wrapped in silk.

Kai's stomach dropped.

No.

"Sit," his father said, still facing the window.

Kai didn't move. His Conduit buzzed against his wrist, the screen flickering with suppressed notifications. They'd already locked him out of the system.

"Father, I can explain—"

"You leaked classified R&D protocols to an unsecured Aethernet node." Uncle Ryu's voice was conversational, as if discussing the weather. He swirled his whiskey, the liquid clinging to the glass in viscous streaks.

"Violated three non-disclosure agreements. Compromised a lucrative partnership with Myriad." A sip. The ice clinked like a bell. "Tell me, nephew—did you even read the files you stole?"

Kai's jaw tightened. He'd read enough. The neural glyphs embedded in the factory workers' Conduits weren't just suppressing memories of workplace injuries—they were rewriting them entirely. One man's crushed hand had been replaced with the memory of a voluntary productivity bonus. A woman's chemical burns had been overwritten with the sensation of a warm shower.

"I read enough," he said. His voice sounded too loud in the hollow room. "Those glyphs were erasing people. The workers in Sector 7-B don't even remember their own—"

"Enough."

His father turned. The man's face was a mask of polished disdain, but his eyes—

Kai had never seen his father look at him like that. Like he was a corrupted line of code. A bug in an otherwise flawless system.

Director Harlow tapped a manicured nail against the table. A hologram sputtered to life above it, displaying security footage of Kai bypassing the server vault's biometric locks. There he was, transmitting files to an encrypted Aethernet node with shaking hands.

They'd known. They'd let him do it.

"The Sector 7-B trial was fully sanctioned," Harlow said mildly. She examined her nails, as if the conversation were a minor inconvenience. "Myriad's cognitive dampeners prevent unnecessary distress among lower-tier workers. Improved productivity. Reduced turnover." A pause. "You understand, of course, that your actions forced us to terminate the entire test group?"

Kai's breath stalled. Terminate. Not fire. Not relocate.

His father didn't blink. "You're no longer a Renner."

The words landed like a guillotine. No rage. No debate. A statement of fact.

Kai's mouth moved. Nothing came out.

Uncle Ryu slid a tablet across the table. The screen displayed a single document, its text glowing in the boardroom's sterile light. "Sign this. Confess to data theft. Your personal accounts will be frozen, but we won't pursue legal action." A shark's smile. "Family courtesy."

The screen blurred. Kai's fingers left sweat smears on the glass as he scrolled—a pre-written admission of guilt, a waiver forfeiting all claims to Renner assets, a clause barring him from any corporate employment.

At the bottom, a final line:

By signing, you acknowledge that any further disclosure constitutes treason under the Aetherion-Myriad Security Accords.

Treason. Punishable by Reclamation.

His hands shook.

Director Harlow watched him, her pupils reflecting the hologram's glow. "Sign it, Kai." Her voice was almost gentle. "Or we'll take the memories the hard way."

The stylus felt like a lead weight in his hand.

Somewhere in the spire's depths, an Aethernet node pulsed. The city hummed on, indifferent.

The clinic door groaned shut behind them as they step outside. The Junkyard stretched before them under a gray ceiling, the ever-present smog diffusing what little light fought its way down. Kai shivered as the cold wind pierced through his jacket—some designer synth-leather thing that had probably cost more than most people made in a month, now torn and streaked with alley grime and something darker that might have been blood. His breath fogged in the air, each exhale a fleeting ghost.

Lucent watched the kid from the corner of his eye. Kai stood there rubbing at his bare wrist where his Conduit had once sat, the skin pale and unmarked compared to Lucent's own—a history of burns and knotted scar tissue. The kid's fingers were long and delicate, the hands of someone who'd never hauled anything heavier than a data pad.

"We need to get you a new Conduit," Lucent said, kicking aside debris on the road. The mound of broken chassis skittered across the uneven ground, coming to rest against the decaying electronic trashes where a cluster of glowmites illuminates faintly in the gloom. "Unless you plan on having no way of defending yourself, in this place," Lucent paused a bit "that's just death sentence."

Kai's throat worked as he swallowed. "I can't exactly walk into a storefront and—"

"Buy one?" Lucent barked a laugh that carried no humor. "Not unless you've got about five thousand credits and a death wish." He looked over Kai's frame—the narrow shoulders, the sharp collarbones visible above his jacket's torn collar, the way his whole body tensed at the distant screech of metal on metal.

"Could try the labor gigs down at the smelting yards, but you'd last about as long as an ice in hell." A slow smirk spread across his face. "Might have better luck selling that ass of yours down in a brothel. Bet you'd fetch a premium—all untouched and pedigree and shit."

Kai's face twisted like he'd bitten into something rotten. "I'd rather chew my own arm off and beat you to death with it."

"Fair enough." Lucent shoved his hands deeper into his pockets, feeling the meager weight of their remaining credits—not enough for a hot meal, let alone black-market tech. His fingers brushed against the broken data chip they'd pulled from the warehouse wreckage. "Have you ever repaired a conduit before?"

Kai blinked. "What?"

"What about making SpellApps. Glyph scripts." Lucent nudged a discarded battery pack with his boot, watching the corroded casing split open like rotten fruit. "Renner Tech subcontracted any of that grunt work out?"

A flicker of something crossed Kai's face—memory or regret, it was hard to tell. "Some of the basic utility glyph suites. Water purification, thermal regulation modules." His shoulders lifted in a half-shrug. "Nothing combat-grade. Nothing... unstable."

Lucent grunted. "Good enough." He jerked his chin toward the eastern stacks where the skeletal remains of mag-lev tracks formed a rusted canopy against the sickly sky. "Scrapheap's that way. If the rats haven't chewed through everything, we might find something that doesn't explode."