Cyberpunk City AI

The rain in Neon Spire didn’t fall so much as fragment — a thousand tiny chrome shards that ghosted the pavement and painted storefronts in streaks of electric color. Mateo walked under it, collar up, hands shoved into the pockets of a coat that knew better days. The city hummed with the soft static of a million private worlds, and each neon sign was a promise that another place waited if you had the right key, the right coin, the right addiction.

His daughter’s name was Lia. She was sixteen when the worlds started to look like anything else to her — brighter, truer, kinder than the cramped room above the noodle shop where they slept. Mateo kept thinking of her laugh, how it filled the kitchen in a way the city’s neon never could. He kept thinking of the day she bought the headset with her savings, the way her eyes widened when she stepped through a door that wasn’t real and didn’t close behind her.

At first, it was harmless. Lia would curl on the couch, the home rig a tangle of cables and soft lights, and disappear into gardens made of code. She learned languages the servers taught her, made friends whose faces had the clever symmetry of algorithms. Mateo watched from the doorway sometimes and felt less alone. Then the avatars grew older, the nights longer. Lia started bringing home new slang, new contacts, new communities that existed in the spaces between servers — the shadow markets, the back-alley forums where people traded more than data.

When she vanished, there was no dramatic scene. There never is. One morning her backpack was gone and the rig in the living room hummed a little longer than usual, then fell silent. Mateo called friends, the admin at her school, the number of the headset vendor. He clicked through her accounts and found emptiness: encrypted logs, ephemeral sessions that vanished like steam, friendships with handles that self-destructed. The digital traces had been swept clean with surgical precision.

The city answered him with a thousand small cruelties. Systems spat up false leads: a shadowed avatar seen by a barkeep in the Neon Labyrinth, a recorded laugh in an underground forum, an old photo on a wall that might be Lia or might be the idea of Lia. Each breadcrumb led to a new fog: servers that died when he tried to follow, brokers who sold him maps of places that didn’t exist, gang-run VR dens in Iron Alley where the air smelled of frying oil and used dreams.

Mateo had never been a netrunner. He’d been a mechanic in a shipping yard before the contracts dried up and the city bought his hours. But he learned. He learned to read obfuscated packets the way he used to read engines, to trace a signal’s heartbeat and map its glitches. There were kindnesses: a retired sysadmin who sold him a faded decryption key, a woman who gave him directions to a safehouse with a hand-scribbled map, a kid who crawled through an arcade of abandoned cabinets and came back with a name — an enclave they called the Glass Choir.

The Glass Choir was the sort of name that sounded like a promise. It was a cluster of private realities stitched together by a charismatic host whose avatar wore a crown of light. They preached transcendence and curated avatars into perfection. The Choir offered Lia a place where she could be anything; the Choir took, in exchange, pieces of her real life: her contacts, her time, the habit of looking at the real world as something to escape from. Mateo found images of Lia in the Choir’s cached feeds, smiling in a place that didn’t cast a shadow, speaking into a mic with a voice altered and made bright.

Outside, Neon Spire fought him. Data-brokers in the market wanted raw memories; the Rust Devils offered muscle and an expensive scanner that could pry a temporary trace from a private node if he paid enough. Each solution came with a cost — reputation, coin, a favor owed that would take him deep into the city’s darker rooms. The city itself was hungry, and everything it fed on was willing to bite him.

It was at a VR den, the kind with steam beading on the plex and a smell like burnt sugar, that he first saw Lia in pieces. A dancer in the corner moved with impossible grace, her avatar’s hair a wash of neon blue. For a moment Mateo’s breath stopped and his knees went weak. The dancer’s laugh — a looped echo — was Lia’s. He reached for the kid next to him and the kid shrugged: “It’s a common mod. Same laugh file, all over.”

He learned to distrust obvious answers. The deeper he went, the more he saw how Neon Spire’s virtual underbelly replicated itself: the same avatars, the same curated charms, the same empty promises. Real people were rare. Real danger, though — that was plentiful. There were predatory influencers who monetized attention, therapists who sold curated dependency, dealers who mixed NeuroBliss with synthetic empathy to keep kids floating between sessions and obligations. Lia could have been anywhere.

Mateo found a place called the Hollow Market off Nature Alley, where the servers were built into tree trunks reclaimed by green-fingered hackers. It was there that a woman named Mara told him about a backchannel called “Lumen’s Loop” — a rotating ring of ephemeral rooms that only opened to those whose social credit was small enough to be unnoticed and whose bravery was large enough to not ask for permission. Mara’s eyes were sharp; she smelled like coffee and smoke. She said, “Kids go there to be invisible. They find communities that don’t show up on parental alerts. But the more invisible you are, the more the city forgets you. And the city doesn’t forget what it wants to harvest.”

He followed Lumen’s Loop across three nights, standing outside physical storefronts as their host servers pulsed and died, watching for patterns in the faces that entered and left. He traded favors: a repaired antenna, an old comm chip cleaned up and made presentable, a promise to teach a kid how to solder properly. In return, someone would drop him a shard of trail — a nickname, a fragment of a poem Lia had typed once. He held those fragments like cold coins.

At the center of his search — and the center of this city — was the idea of community. Neon Spire made communities like it made fireworks: brilliant, fleeting, designed to be consumable. Some contained people who built real warmth between sessions; others were traps, labyrinths of curated dependency. Mateo wanted to know which Lia had walked into. Had she found a real friend, a gang of kids protecting each other behind shared passwords and encrypted chats — or had she been lured into a place where the guards were avatars and the locks were sales?

When he finally found her, it was not in a blaze of resolution. He found her on a municipal maintenance platform, high up where the turbine fans cut the night into slow, dangerous beats. She was fifteen again in his eyes, knees drawn up, hair a dark curtain. The headset had been hacked and stripped of its branding; it sat beside her like a sleeping animal. Her face was pale where the neon’s kisses had missed it.

“Papa,” she said, because it was the only word she could find for someone who had chased light through a city built on illusions.

He didn’t feel triumphant. There was no dramatic rescue. Lia had learned skills that made her difficult to pull back to the real world. She had friends whose names he couldn’t pronounce without making them foreign. She had reasons to stay — loneliness had found a place to stitch itself into belonging. Yet in the soft wind up there, he saw the truth of her: she was not a product of servers but a person who had been hurt by a city that made better fantasies than it did futures.

He stayed. He sat beside her on the platform and told her something he had been too proud to say before: that the world outside neon had things for her too, small and blunt and imperfect — hands that would hold a bowl of soup and laugh at her jokes that were half-glitched and half-true. He offered her nothing grand, only a place to return that could be ordinary in the best way: someone to come home to, a kitchen light left on, a pocket of silence that was not for sale.

Lia considered him with the careful deliberation of someone who had been chosen by algorithm and had learned to choose back. The city below them pulsed and tried to sell them a different ending every second. She reached for the headset, fingers hovering, then let it rest on her lap.

“What if they come?” she asked, naming the collection of predators that fed on attention and the fat of vulnerability.

“They will,” Mateo said. “They come for everything. But you can come back, too.”

She stood, slowly, a small, private rebellion. She tucked the rig’s cords into a bag like something to be taken with her — not thrown away, because in Neon Spire nothing is ever wasted — and together they climbed down into alleys whose lights were less pure, but were real.

The city did not change that night. It kept its markets and its Choirs and its Loop. But somewhere on the edge of the Neon Spire, a man and his daughter walked toward a noodle shop whose owner knew how to make soup that tasted like home. They would have to learn to unplug again and again; the digital traces would reappear and the city would try to lure her back with brighter promises. But Mateo had found her — not by outrunning the city’s appetite but by following the small, stubborn trail of a laugh he recognized, the same laugh that had once filled their kitchen.

In a place designed to be consumed, they started to take something back: a sliver of time that was theirs and not catalogued, a night where the rain only felt like rain and not like tiny pieces of a life for sale.

He calls himself Morrow because names in Iron Alley get bent until they fit the shape of a man who survives here. Morrow’s face has the practiced softness of someone who knows how to make a woman feel seen for exactly as long as it keeps her close. He learned long ago that there are things you can trade for companionship in this city: a favor, a smile, a hot meal — and, for some, a little vial of NeuroBliss.

The alley is a throat of rusted steel and braided wires, a stack of makeshift houses like boxes shoved into a canyon. Pipes run like veins along the walls, coughing occasional steam. Florescent signs buzz with bad electricity; their light fractures against sheets of corrugated metal and puddles that never quite dry. People move in knots — bodies leaning against each other on wooden walkways, children playing with burned-out caps, old women selling boiled roots from plastic cups. Everything smells like oil and metal and the sweet chemical aftertaste of a drug the city pushes like a rumor.

She—Lia, though Morrow invents pet names he forgets by morning—came to him on the day the rain peeled the neon into a watery smear. Her eyes looked hollow as old sockets, and her hands trembled in the small, precise way of someone cataloguing the city by how much it would take to keep her steady. NeuroBliss had eaten the edges of her life: the job she’d once done in a plant, the cousin who used to trade her stories for bread. What was left fit into a coat pocket and a jar of memories she couldn’t afford.

Morrow is patient. He sits with her on the elevated walkway that runs between rows of patchwork homes and listens while she repeats what she remembers: names of dead plants, the color of a mattress her mother once had. He offers a bottle of booze at first, then a cigarette, then the vials — small glass cylinders with iridescent liquid that gleams in the streetlamps like dangerous stars. He tells himself the vials are a kindness; they ease the tremors and make the city sing softer in her ears. In return, she lets him in. She talks. She laughs brokenly. She lets someone hold her while the city hums.

But the small mercies become a claim. Morrow’s kindness is ledgered: he pays for her drugs, he cooks for her, he steadies her. He collects her gratitude. When she wakes cold in the night, he is there. When thieves come by, he is the one who steps into the light. He wears the role of protector like a coat he can take off when the weather changes. He knows what she will give him—affection, presence, the illusion of normalcy—and he takes it. He does not see, at first, how the vials and his interventions inscribe dependency into the raw parts of her.

Lia drifts into him the way the alley takes in rain — not violently, but with a slow, devouring acceptance. There are afternoons when she is lucid: she will sit on the stoop of their shelter and hum lines of a song she half-remembered from a bus ride before the city carved her down. On those days Morrow believes he is doing good. He thinks he has rescued something. He will tell himself that the vials are a bridge, temporary and controlled, and he will promise himself he will cut them off when Lia is strong enough to stand. He promises and repromises the way people here promise the sun will dry out the rust.

But the alley is a place of receding guarantees. Supplies get cut; debts grow like mold. The vials are expensive — people with more teeth than scruples will take a slice of what Morrow can find. When the prices spike, his patience frays. He begins to ration the kindness along with the drugs. A day here, two days there. He measures affection in doses. The emotional math is ugly: he is, at once, her shelter and her gatekeeper.

The cost is not only money. Lia’s eyes dim further. She blames herself; she blames the city; sometimes she blames Morrow, and on those days the hurt in her voice is like glass. She begins to bargain for what she should be given freely — a warmth, a look that lasts a second longer than the lighting allows. She clings to the memory of laughter and punishes herself when it fades. Morrow comforts her in the ways that have become part of his survival, but he does not see how his comfort tightens the rope around her choices until one night the rope frays.

That night the alley feels narrower than usual. Steam wraps the walkways in a ghost-smoke; nests of wires sway as if whispering. Morrow is restless. He spent the day arguing with a dealer over delivery and came home with fewer vials than Lia needed. She sits on the roof of their shelter, legs wrapped around herself, small like a figure carved from the night. Her voice is low and precise.

“You’re not here to save me, are you?” she asks.

Morrow searches his face for an answer that will make the question false. He reaches out, palm flat against the rusted railing. He wants to tell her truth; he wants to say he loves the shape of her laugh and the way she forgets to be afraid sometimes. Instead he smooths the lie he’s been living into his mouth and says, “I am.”

The words are a bandage. They momentarily stop the bleeding. But words do not undo the ledger. Lia looks at him as if seeing his hands for the first time — the hands that know how to pry open a lock and also how to press the small cap off a vial. For a long minute she is quiet. Then she stands, a small silhouette against the buzzing signs, and begins to pack.

Morrow tries to stop her. He pleads and he bargains. He offers to fix the heating pipe on the third level, to take on another run, to go hungry himself if she will stay. His voice comes out thin and hollow. The alley listens without mercy. People move past them, exchange glances, and go on.

Lia’s decision is not sudden; it has been building in fragments — an old photograph, a day’s worth of steady mind, a breath long held. She slips down from the roof like a cat and moves through the gap between houses where the city’s maintenance pipes form a corridor. The pipes are slick with condensation; the walkway is a narrow rib of metal. She walks with that slow, stubborn determination of someone who has practiced leaving the ways of the past. Morrow follows for a while, then stops at the first junction, fingers curled on a cold railing. He shouts her name, a raw, useless sound that the alley swallows.

She does not turn back. The alleys fork and multiply; she edges through them — under a hanging tarp, past a stack of crates, across a footbridge that creaks like an old belly. Where the lights thin and the crowd opens into a small market, a woman with a basket brushes past and hands Lia a folded napkin without looking. Lia unfolds it and finds, inside, a few coins and a note scrawled in hurried pen: Leave. Go.

It is small, a gesture of human conspiracy. It is enough.

Lia steps into the press of the market, and for the first time in a long time she lets the crowd carry her instead of cling to a single person for stability. She disappears into the density of bodies and the tangle of motion. Morrow watches until she is a shape swallowed by the city, until the market’s noise folds her into anonymity.

After she is gone, the alley keeps the silence of those who know how much is lost and how little that knowledge changes anything. Morrow stands at the railing, hands empty. He counts the vials in his pocket and finds they mean nothing against the absence of a single human warmth. Somewhere deeper in the stack, Lia finds a back stair that leads away from the pipes and toward a district that tends gardens on rooftops — a place she faintly remembers from a job before the vials. She moves toward the smell of real soil and, step by aching step, toward a life that is not parceled out in doses.

The last sound Morrow hears is not triumph or anger but the soft, stubborn exhale of someone who has chosen herself. The alley continues to hum, full of lovers and liars, but in the hollow where Lia had been there is, for a moment, only a small, clean space where breath can come free.

He counts profit the way other men count breaths. In the spreadsheets on his wall — glass panes that glow faintly when his fingers pass — every column is a planet he helped shift into orbit. His title is printed on cards people in meetings clear their throats for: Senior Integration Director. His apartment, perched like an observatory at the crown of Neon Spire, shows the kind of taste money buys when you want everyone to see you’ve left the street behind: clean angles, a living room that folds into itself, a modular sofa the color of wet chrome, floor-to-ceiling glass that frames the city as if it were a painting that refuses to be still.

From up here the rain forgets how to fall — it fractures into neon and glass and the skeletal geometry of scaffolding. Below, the city hums on its old frequencies: exchange, hunger, the soft metallic laughter of things being sold and sold again. Up here, the sounds are curated. Lucien buys playlists the way he buys men — small, precise, transient. The parties are always on schedule: weeknights for the young VPs who still believe themselves immortal, weekend spectacles for investors who like their conscience served on ice. Holo-art drifts lazily over a bar of light, and guests raise cocktails that flicker like invalid data. They call it living luminous. Lucien calls it necessary.

Because of what he helped build, his hands have fingerprints that never quite rinse clean. The company — one of many names in the ledger of his life — makes devices that dissolve discretion. Tiny embeds, sutured into the soft weight of a life: a choice here, a convenience there, a promise of belonging that rewires the lonely into dependency. It starts as help; it ends in hunger. People come to him with empty faces and full schedules and leave with a hollowed cadence that matches the rhythm of the rigs. He watches graphs and user curves and retention rates that look like heartbeat tracings. He signs his initials and the lines deepen.

Sometimes, alone in the late hours, he imagines the faces of those who made the payments on his rise. Old clients he’d never seen, a mother who became a ledger, a child whose laugh was an optimization. He asks himself the one question executives rarely let themselves voice — did the convenience outweigh the cost? And there is no answer he can accept awake.

So he blots. He bottles forgetfulness and pours it under his tongue in the neon hours. NeuroBliss comes in slender vials with labels that are more suggestion than medicine; it tastes like relief, like the last thing before falling. A single dose smooths the serrated edges of memory until the shapes of his deeds blur and his hands feel clean. Two doses fold guilt into the wallpaper; three lets him stand in a crowd and believe that laughter is authentic. The vials sit lined on a mirrored tray by the lamps — he likes lamps — their glass catching the city and refracting it into a kaleidoscope without faces.

The parties continue because parties are contracts he can hide beneath. Guests are the moving parts of a life he can still pretend is normal: friends who nod without question, clients who toast the future they helped fund, lovers who arrive with contracted smiles and leave with transaction histories. He watches them orbit his living room like satellites, never touching ground. He smiles; he hosts; he offers more NeuroBliss in discreet, tasteful syringes to people who linger too close to the throb of the rigs, who ask the wrong question in the wrong tone. He markets solace in small vials, the irony sharp as broken glass.

Once, in a moment that did not obey his usual arrangements, a woman stayed behind after a party. She sank into the sofa and looked out at the city with a kind of exhausted hunger that gnawed past his defenses. “How do you sleep?” she asked, not looking at him. It was the one question that could have been a mirror.

Lucien could have told her the truth then — that he sleeps in doses, that each dream is purchased — but confession requires a spine he had long ago sold to appetite. Instead he poured two doses into a glass, told her they were tonic, and watched her soften into what she believed was peace. He watched her sleep and saw, in the rise and fall of her chest, the exact same blank cadence his company had tuned into millions of others. He felt as though he had made a map of the human heart and then sold the directions to the highest bidder.

The solitude is not dramatic. It does not announce itself with thunder. It arrives in the small things: the way his laughter peels thin at the edges, the way the plants in his kitchen bend away from light that isn’t sun, the paperbacks on his shelf with spines unbroken because he never opens them. Money buys immaculate surfaces but not the weight of another hand. NeuroBliss buys the absence of noise but not the absence of memory. He keeps taking more because the gap between what he has built and what it has done widens with every ledger he signs; the pills fill it temporarily like dyed plaster. Each morning he wakes in a clearer room and a murkier heart.

There are nights when he stands on his balcony, the city a living circuitboard below, and counts the tiny, perfunctory lights that are people. He imagines them as candles and for a flash — a reckless, dangerous flash — wishes to put his own out. Instead he pours another dose and lets sleep take him like a tide. In the quiet between the neon and the glass, the suits he keeps in the walk-in whisper of meetings and mergers, and the mirrors promise him he looks faithful to his face.

He keeps making the deals. He keeps hosting the parties. He keeps buying the vials that make remorse manageable. The city continues to hum. Inside his high flat, the lamps glow like small beacons against the dark, and Lucien, hands steady and heart numbed, reaches for another light and another vial and another reason to believe that the loneliness can be engineered away.

The rain never stopped in Iron Alley—it just changed color. Tonight it fell in streaks of copper and electric green, mixing with oil slicks and neon reflections on the cracked pavement. The sound of it was drowned by the low hum of generators, the sputter of holographic signs, and the distant rumble of freight drones gliding overhead.

Marek leaned against the corroded railing of the upper walk, a cigarette trembling between his fingers. The ember flickered like a dying signal light. Below him, the crowd pulsed—a maze of faces, raincoats, and flickering cybernetic eyes. Somewhere in that chaos were the Rust Devils, and they were looking for him.

He still couldn’t believe he’d done it. One last bet, that’s all it was supposed to be.

The Neon Bones Club had been packed tighter than a scrapyard circuit board. Every table a blur of faces half-lit by holograms, laughter twisted with desperation. The NeuroBliss dealers moved like ghosts through the smoke. Marek had sat at his usual spot—a rusted metal table etched with years of bad luck—and placed his last handful of CyberTokens on the table.

“Double or nothing,” he’d said, trying to sound confident.

The dealer had just nodded, no expression, the glow from his cybernetic eyes reflecting the spinning digital wheel. Marek had watched the numbers blur into one another, heartbeat syncing with the rhythm of the wheel’s soft electronic whine. Then the sound cut out.

He lost.

Now he owed the Rust Devils forty thousand CyberTokens. Money he didn’t have.

He crushed the cigarette against the wet railing and looked down at the alley below. Red neon from a broken sign blinked “DEV—DEV—DEV—” in erratic bursts, painting the puddles in bloodlight. The air smelled of ozone and rusted metal. Makeshift housing stacked against the sides of buildings—metal boxes with cables and pipes snaking through them like veins. In one window, a child watched him with glowing blue eyes. In another, a woman adjusted her breathing mask as vapor hissed from a vent. Life in Iron Alley never stopped moving, never stopped decaying.

He started walking. His boots splashed through shallow puddles, the hum of vending drones passing overhead. Somewhere to his left, a brawl broke out—two silhouettes wrestling over a glowing chip. The walls closed in tighter the deeper he went, advertisements flickering across peeling metal panels.

He thought of running. Leaving the city. But the Rust Devils had reach—they’d find him even in the Neon Labyrinth. He’d seen what they did to people who crossed them. The Iron Devil robots they used for intimidation—hulking machines of welded steel and glowing red optics—didn’t just break bones. They erased debts by erasing people.

He ducked into a side corridor, the kind that wasn’t on any official map. A dripping tunnel lined with fiber cables and graffiti. Someone had painted a mural of a broken halo—“THE CITY OWNS YOUR SOUL” scrawled beneath it.

Marek laughed bitterly. “Yeah,” he whispered. “Seems about right.”

He checked his comm implant—three missed messages from Juno, his ex. She’d warned him weeks ago. “The Devils don’t gamble,” she said. “They calculate.”

A low mechanical growl echoed behind him. He froze. The sound of metal feet scraping against wet pavement. Then the hiss of hydraulics.

A crimson light cut through the dark, reflecting off the walls like a blade.

“Debtor Marek Voss,” a modulated voice said. “Time to pay.”

His breath caught. He bolted down the corridor, slipping on the slick ground, shoulder slamming into a pipe. The Iron Devil followed, its footsteps steady, inevitable. He could feel the vibrations through the metal floor. His comm implant buzzed with static—probably interference from the Devil’s EMP field.

He turned a corner and burst into a crowded walkway. Faces blurred past him. People moved aside, unconcerned, too used to this kind of thing. No one helped anyone in Iron Alley.

He ran until his lungs burned. The walkway opened into a narrow platform overlooking the lower district. He could see the lights of the NeuroCorp towers far away—cold, perfect, unreachable.

Behind him, the Iron Devil emerged from the shadows. Its frame gleamed with rust and wiring, the Rust Devils’ insignia burned into its chest plate.

Marek looked down at the drop below. A maze of pipes, glowing cables, and the endless hum of the city.

“Please,” he whispered. “Just one more chance.”

The machine stepped closer. “You already had it.”

He stepped back—heel slipping on the wet metal.

And then he fell.

As he tumbled through the layers of Iron Alley, past the flickering signs and exhaust vents, the city blurred into light and shadow. Somewhere above, the Iron Devil watched him vanish into the darkness. Somewhere below, the hum of the city swallowed him whole.

In Iron Alley, debts didn’t disappear. They just sank deeper into the rust.

The Neon Spire never sleeps; it only exhales different colors. Tonight it breathes cobalt and bruised magenta. Towering slabs of glass and steel stitch the sky into a jagged skyline, and every surface wears advertising like neon jewelry — drifting holo-signs hawking blissful serums, corporate mascots with permanent smiles, an endless carousel of promises. Rain falls thin and cold, turning the avenues into mirrors. My bike eats those reflections. I ride fast because I always ride fast; speed keeps the city from settling on me.

They call me Kade. Slim, thirty, a laugh-line where a grin used to be. I work with my hands, grease under my nails and a map of scars on my knees. Tonight my hands are doing what they do best: hold a crate, feel its weight, promise it will be where it needs to be. The Rust Devils paid good credits for this run — better than the usual courier gigs — and when the Rust Devils pay, you don’t ask questions. You make the delivery and you disappear into the light.

The crate is warm against my thigh. It smells faintly of antiseptic and copper. There are stickers on the outside: a stylized gear with horns stamped in rust-red. Inside, rows of sealed ampoules nest like sleeping things, each labeled in neat print: Solace-3 — Stabilized. Approved. There is no retail barcode, no corporate seal I’ve ever seen; only the Rust Devils’ mark and a caution I ignore because I can count debts better than I can count morals.

Neon Spire’s elevated lanes are a lattice of light; my engine hums as I weave between them. Pedestrians are silhouettes against the glow, umbrellas like dark moons. Market stalls under cantilevered walkways sell steaming noodles and chipped tech and counterfeit smiles. Above, a holo billboard for NeuroCorp pulses its slogan in a voice soft as a lullaby: RELIEF IS DISTRIBUTED. Trust us. The holo’s light bleeds down into a puddle and turns into a blade.

The drop is simple — a loading bay behind an abandoned club that used to host better music. Two Rust Devils watch the ramp, their jackets the color of old blood. They check the crate, peel the tape, and give me a nod like I’m a payment, like I’m already spent. One of them taps my helmet and says, “Clean work, Kade. You’ll see your credits.” The other trails his thumb over the ampoules as if testing how fragile they are. They don’t look at me with any more curiosity than you would a rainbird.

I should have left then. I should have taken the wet night and screamed away like another shadow. But Lira owes her mother treatment. My pockets need patching. I think of rent, of oil filters, of the way Lira laughs when she tries to cook and the noodles stick together. These are the little economies that keep people like me making the runs that keep Rust Devils in business.

I ride home through alleys that smell of frying oil and ozone. Neon signs crowd the narrow sky until it is a strip of electric daylight. Lira’s apartment is a small room three levels down from a walkway named after some long-gone poet. Inside, there’s a patchwork of books and a single potted fern that keeps pretending to be brave. Her mother — Mae — sits propped on the futon in a cardigan that has seen better winters. Her hands tremble, not from age but from a different kind of erosion. Lira is careful with the syringe, precise as a mechanic; Lira’s hands are good hands. Mae smiles at the two of us like a lighthouse.

“New batch?” Lira asks when she sees the crate.

The crate sits on the kitchen table, a huddle of glass under the neon wash from the window. I pull an ampoule out of its foam cradle like you would remove a secret from a pocket. It catches the light and fractures it. Lira reads the label and her expression goes small and tight.

“Solace-3,” she says. “Cheap, but stabilizers say it will do until the clinic sends the next supply.”

I tell the smallest, most useful lie: “Rust Devils’ supplier. Paid well.”

She doesn’t ask where we got it. She trusts me too much. Mae swallows the dose like it’s a piece of kindness. She closes her eyes and exhales. For a moment, peace stitches the apartment together.

Then the tremor sharpens. Mae’s fingers claw at the blanket. Her breath scissors and comes back wrong. Lira’s face collapses. She presses her palms to Mae’s jaw and shakes her. Mae’s eyes open and show a net lined with static.

“Something’s wrong,” Lira says. Her voice is a paper plane.

I taste metal. I know the label now. The font, the sticker, the Rust Devils’ mark — all of it threads back to the crate I moved across neon veins. I did this. My hands had already touched murder and called it commerce.

The city’s noise crowds back into the apartment like an interrogator. Holo-ads outside chant in perfect rhythm. Somewhere far away, a skirmish flares like a match. Lira’s phone curls under her palm and rings the clinic number until the system responds with robotic patience. No answer. The system says diagnostics: supply chain delay. Recommendations: emergency stabilizer required.

I go to the crate because I need to find the lie that made this happen. One ampoule sits on the table, its liquid a clear, too-bright thing. I pry the seal. It smells like chemical lilies and old promises. Under the label, tiny print reads: CONTAINS: N-79; DOSE STABILIZER: 0.002%. Someone shaved the stabilizer down to nothing. Somewhere between manufacturing and me, the formula got thin.

I have two choices: fold into punishment or fight for something I hardly understand. I am a courier, not a soldier. But the city teaches you to be useful with whatever tools you have. I drink in the neon at the window and make a decision that tastes of teeth.

The Rust Devils’ stronghold is a rusted monolith on the edge of Neon Spire, half-industrial, half-cathedral. Holo-graffiti crawls up its buttressed walls. I park in shadow and trade my helmet for anger. The gang’s sentries leer like vultures. I can’t muscle through them. I can’t gun them down; they have more metal than sense. So I use what I always use: speed, surprise, example.

Under the rust-colored logo, an open door does the city’s work for me — it invites me into a place that smells like burned copper and ambition. Inside, ampoules stack like teeth in a jar, inventories that taste like power. A ledger sits on a table: lists of supplies, delivery addresses, a name etched that makes my stomach drop. Whoever’s behind this isn’t just selling pills. They’re recalibrating the city’s arteries — lacing stabilizers with scarcity, with profit, with control. People who need help will come back for more and become rentals of the gang’s influence.

I don’t have a plan. I have a reckoning. I snatch a tray of ampoules and shove them into my jacket. Alarms bellow. The Rust Devils pour into the corridor like spilled ink. I ride because the city is a maze I know better than they do, and because Lira’s voice in my ear — begging, cursing, naming me like someone trying to conjure a safe harbor — is a compass.

I get back to the apartment bleeding with cold and adrenaline. Lira meets me at the door, hair a halo, eyes wet with electric fury. I hold out what I took: a handful of ampoules not laced with the Rust Devils’ stamp, one with a manufacturer’s imprint I recognize from a clinic distributor. I jam one into Mae’s lip and wait.

Time is a narrow corridor. Mae coughs and then breathes like someone dragging a new light through old lungs. She opens her eyes and looks at me. There is recognition and something like forgiveness. I think she knows I did this. I think she knows I undid some of it.

The Rust Devils will learn I’m their missing ledger and my face will press on their memory like a decal. The city will notice me — a ghost on motorbike tracks. In the morning the market will hum and the holo-ads will smile. For tonight, though, the Neon Spire offers a sliver of grace: Mae’s breathing steady, Lira’s hand in mine, the rain painting everything honest.

We sit in the electric afterglow and let the city wash over the cracks. I thought the job was a line in a ledger. It was a line through lives. I also learned that in a place designed to commodify relief, hands that move are the only currency that still feels like mercy.

Outside, a holo-billboard blinks: RELIEF IS DISTRIBUTED. Trust us. I look at it until the letters blur. I don’t trust anyone anymore. But I can make the next delivery a different thing. That will have to be enough.