The rain in Sector Nine has a taste. It carries iron from the old foundries and a sharp, antiseptic tang from the abandoned clinics where people used to bleed and be put back together. When the city lights bounce off that wet concrete it looks like somebody split a neon heart down the middle and poured the blood into gutters. I move through it because that's how I eat. I pull things out of places other people have left for dead and turn odd, dangerous pieces of other people's lives into currency.
I call myself a salvager because it sounds better than thief. I have a workbench full of solder, spare mesh ports, a stack of patched memory-cartridges waiting for buyers who will pay more for something with a story. Tonight I have one thin contract and a name typed in a cipher I don't bother decoding until I've got the hardware: an anonymous buyer wants a blank-scan neuro-module pulled from the ruins of Clinic 17. The listing paid well for a simple reason—Clinic 17 collapsed after the blackout two years ago, and anything that survived the collapse is probably tagged or poisoned with corporate signatures. Helion Dynamics owned the clinic before they bought the city’s implant lanes. Helion doesn't like loose hardware.
The clinic's bones still hold the stink of antiseptic smoke. Entryways are collapsed into jagged teeth; HALO-guards and maintenance drones chewed through the lobby like hungry insects left to rust. My exo-harness creaks, and I prop a placard of scav-supplies over my shoulder. Lights in this sector blink in slow symphony, some controlled by a tired grid, some by old backup batteries. I move low, map the sound of distant servos, and think about profit margins. A memory module, intact, can buy a month of quiet. A sealed slab with a Helion seal could buy a life.
I find the med-bay where the floor has buckled inward. The hatch into the subvault is half-embedded in ceramic and serum canisters. My hand shakes just enough to feel the old adrenaline, the exact, useful kind. I don't feel like a hero here; salvage work is just risk turned into numbers. I unseal the hatch with a prybar, sweep away brittle bandages and a shadow of a faded implant tag. The module sits in a cry-lined cradle, wrapped in polymer skin that still smells faintly of ozone. It hums when my glove comes close, a lazy, pulsing microcurrent that says someone took care to keep it sleeping. Whoever sealed this wanted it preserved.