The rain in the lower tiers is a slow, endless argument between neon signs and the concrete. Light pools in gutters, and each puddle reflects a thousand skins of advertisement: smiling faces that promise sharper focus, less pain, a quieter mind. Asha moves through them like a practiced shadow, coat collar up, visor down. The world above hums with curated calm; the levels beneath sell the noise that makes the calm bearable. Her breath fogs in the light; a cigarette she does not smoke hangs between her fingers like a ritual she never completes.
She used to measure things differently. In a previous life she calibrated thresholds and tuned out heartbreaks one file at a time in rooms of clean white and hum. She taught machines the grammar of forgetting until the grammar became a market. That life left fingerprints she cannot scrub off her skin. Now she trades the other side of the ledger—illicit static, handcrafted faults that let a person keep the shape of their life while softening the edges they cannot live with. People come to her when the price of normal is too high. She sells small forgivenesses in capsules and patched synapses in chipped glass. They call what she sells many names; she calls it work.
The market is a ribbon of stalls and hatches, a braided current of voices, cables, and canned oxygen. Vendors hawk retrofits made from obsolete cognition plates. Children sell scraped empathy for transit credits. Holographic reliquaries flicker and die on racks while a half-dozen scavenged ambulances play opera to drown out the city’s announcements. Above, the corp drones spool their search algorithms like fishing lines and below, people move like carp avoiding the hooks. Asha keeps to the edges.
She notices the woman before she hears her. The skin is too clean, almost surgical in its smoothness; the pupils are dilated and glassy in a way that says someone rented an emptiness. The woman's clothes are decent, no market badge or patch, but there is a blankness in her gaze that feels like a missing room. She steps into Asha's patch of rain and holds out a palm—no vendor's sign, no suitcase of wares—just a hand that trembles and a face that tries to remember how to ask.
"You Vale?" the woman asks. Her voice is small and practiced, like something retrieved after a long freeze. Names are dangerous in this district; they are keys and accusations. Asha's fingers close around the cigarette until the tip almost breaks; she studies the woman as a hawk studies a nest. The market noise presses in: a synth-accordion, a child's cry, the hiss of a sanitation drone sweeping the curb. The woman shows no badge, no corporate clearance, only an object cupped in both hands, wrapped in a dark polymer film that gleams like oil in neon.
Asha does not expect to take anything else tonight. She slides closer, the cheap fabric of her coat whispering against cracked tile, and accepts the package without smiling. It is lighter than she expects, warm as a live thing. The woman's eyes flick to the passing drones and back to Asha's face.
"Keep it safe," the woman says. Her lips make the words clumsy. There is an urgency in them that smells like burned plastic. "They'll come—if they find—"
Ash a's hand tightens around the film. The crowd presses around them, a traffic of traded goods and half-remembered promises. When Asha looks up for confirmation, the woman is not the same person she was two breaths ago. A pair of corporate sleeves have closed in, polite and hydraulic. The woman tries to speak and then does not. The sleeves lift her shoulders and a small collar pings faintly against the bone at her throat. An official voice, flattened by protocol and synthetic calm, requests cooperation. The market steps aside like water for something that needs to pass without leaving a trace.
Asha has a reflexive thought—intervene, barter, buy time—but habits of self-preservation have teeth. She slips the package into the inner pocket of her coat and lets the crowd swallow the disturbance. Someone calls out to the enforcement team about a needle, about an old debt, and they move on. The woman who handed her the package catches Asha's wrist with a grip that is both pleading and resigned.
"Don't sell it," she whispers. "Not to them. Not to Nocturne. They will make it whole and take the rest."
Her eyes find Asha's and they hold for a single, precious second as if the two of them are the only containers left in the city. Asha has many reasons to walk away. She has more reasons to stay. The woman's fingers are cold and then loose. The enforcement sleeves have already turned toward the corridor, hir nodding to an update on their wristpads. The woman looks like someone who has been emptied and is trying to remember how to be dangerous again.
Asha hears sirens—a phrase of electrical noise—and the taste of metal in her mouth. She moves, not to follow the officers but to follow a choice that wants to hurt her less than staying inert. She knows better than to ask why. She knows that when someone like that seeks her out in a marketplace of curated calm, it is because the emptiness inside them has teeth that belong to the systems she once helped build. She keeps the polymer package close and folds her face into the rain.