I’VE GOT TO KICK that guy—God, I’m itching. Smash his cockroach face with my boots until there’s nothing left but a brownish puddle of blood and guts.

  Julia gres at Akrom with pure hatred. She’s never been able to stand him. To her, he reeks of decay—the stench of a traitor and a coward.

  “What the hell are you staring at, bitch? Want a picture? And what the fuck are you guys even doing here?”

  “I’ll stare wherever I damn well please. Not that there’s anything worth looking at!”

  “Oh, quit your whining, my friends. Today is a blessed day! Look at us—reunited once again!”

  “I can’t celebrate while that rat is around. It’s beyond me, Jasper. Can’t we just dump him and let him rot? What he does is beneath us—it stains us!”

  “Speak for yourself, you dried-up little slut. If you need some hydration, buy yourself a vibrator—they make them with estrogen spikes now.”

  Jasper grabs Julia just before her long silver cws sink into Akrom’s rough face, ready to carve it open. Akrom bursts into that degenerate ughter of his, making her even more furious.

  “Now, here’s the good news!” Jasper says, holding her back. “Akrom’s gonna make us rich today! Akrom, my brother, have you found your stiff yet?”

  “No.”

  “He’s lying. The bastard either robbed someone or is hiding something. Did you see that blissed-out look on his face before he spotted us?”

  “I didn’t rob anyone, and I don’t owe you any expnations.”

  “Oh yeah? And when the cops come knocking, you think they won’t drag us down with you— fuck us just because we have the misfortune of knowing you?”

  Akrom sneers, his voice hoarse. “The cops aren’t coming after me for this one. Besides, you’re both so damn loud, you’ll get us caught first.”

  How did these two even find him? They intercepted him right as he was about to slip out of Esperanza K8B. Lucky for him, the DNSF drones had already left...

  Julia turns away in disgust, like someone watching stray dogs screw in the middle of the street.

  “That nonsense means he ratted someone out for cash again, Jasper! You hear that?”

  “Who’d you snitch on this time, asshole?”

  “None of your damn business. Did I ask you who was screwing your mother nine months before you were born?”

  Jasper ughs. Julia spits on the ground.

  Last time Akrom snitched, it was on some guy who’d been screwing his mob boss’s wife and skimming cash on the side. The guy’s family had searched all over Megazone 1, ready to butcher them. Jasper had somehow managed to throw them off track—God knows how. In return, he and Julia had forced Akrom to fork over 30% of his payout, threatening to snitch on him in turn. That would’ve doomed him to the same fate as his victim—impaled, skinned, and burned alive.

  “You’re a funny one, aren’t you? You don’t wanna tell Daddy what you’ve been up to? You know I can help you, kid…”

  “Fuck you, Jasper. Daddy can go jerk off to absinthe if he’s feeling lonely.”

  Akrom sneers, thinking: You really think I’m gonna spill my secrets? Just so you can screw me over? He ughs.

  “Why don’t you run on home, little Jasper? Mommy’s gonna be mad! Go do your homework instead of hanging out with street trash.”

  Jasper gives Akrom a thin smile and pats his arm, but Akrom shoves him away.

  “Oof, someone’s cranky!” Jasper chuckles.

  Damn right, and dream on, egghead.

  Everyone knows Jasper is the kind of guy who’ll cw his way out of this sewer while the rest of the pack wastes away, chasing pipe dreams until they croak. He aced every single DarkNet youth pre-selection test—like his mother had screwed ten Nobel Prize winners and a dozen war heroes. He’d already be in the Academy if he hadn’t screwed up his chances—one too many crimes on his record, two flunked reform school stints, and one stretch in prison.

  Not that it’ll stop DarkNet forever. Sooner or ter, they’ll take him in. Hell, he acts like he’s already there. But screw you, Mr. Genius.

  No way Akrom’s spilling the stiff story—it’s a long game, and there’s still money to make. Big money. Cuz there’s big money whenever big pyers show up.

  And God knows, there were some big ones.

  “So, as I was saying—how’s the stiff-hunting business?” Jasper grins. “Go on, we’re all ears.”

  “He’s not gonna tell you, Jasper. He’s so scared to share, he’d swallow a whole piggy bank just to keep it secret. Makes you wonder why he even bothers hanging with us…”

  “I’m a damn good watchdog, bitch, if you must know. I can sniff out wolves from a mile away, and I’ll guard your scrawny ass better than anyone—whether you like it or not.”

  “You? Protect me? Heaven help me from such a disaster. It’s better to hear this nonsense than to be deaf…”

  “Actually, Akrom, we’re not after your corpse. A little birdie told me you stumbled onto something juicy—but you’re dealing with sharks way too big for you. If you keep pying like this, you’ll end up dead. We can help you avoid that, kid.”

  Akrom shrugs, thinking: My ‘little head’ can outthink you any day. Hah! Twenty grand in one day—who the hell can top that? I risked my neck for this, and you think I’m gonna share out of the goodness of my heart?

  Oh, and by the way, it wasn’t a stiff—it was some bitch, fttened like a pancake. But that pretty-boy and his pint-sized whore don’t need to know the details. Hell, they shouldn’t have even heard about the body at all—if only that dumbass Seth could keep his damn mouth shut.

  Yeah, Akrom grins to himself, I’m swimming in bliss, and you can all go fuck yourselves! First thing I’m getting? A brand-new scooter. Then VIP passes to the best hybrid sex ptforms money can buy. That’ll liven up my New Albany shithole. And I’ll be jerking off to those extra zeros in my bank bance!

  “Jasper, we’re wasting time. What the hell are we still doing here? He’s not talking. You want me to torture him?”

  “Try it, bitch. You’ll be sliced and diced before you even touch me.”

  “No, no. Let’s take our time. I like this spot—it’s got a poetic charm. And my gut never lies.”

  “What about Seth?”

  “He’s on his own. We’ll send him the coordinates, but if he’s te to the party, he’s getting nothing but crumbs.”

  “Alright, have fun. I’m out.”

  Jasper steps in his way.

  “You’re not going anywhere. It’d take me all of a second to report you anonymously to the DNSF—and I’m pretty damn sure you wouldn’t like that…”

  A massive, blood-red sun sinks over Megazone 1 as the st tropospheric drone of the DNSF—the DarkNet Strategic Forces, covering both the police and the army—glides toward the horizon.

  Two hours earlier

  Akrom reached the next nding and stopped, gasping for breath. He’d lost count of how many floors he’d climbed—had to be at least twenty. And every time, disappointment. No sign of the damn corpse. He’d searched each level meticulously, spotted a couple of bodies here and there, but they were dried-up husks even the crows wouldn’t bother with. Most likely, the city had already logged them.

  But he’d find it. He was patient.

  “So, did you find it?” came Seth’s ughing voice from his left. Akrom swiped at the projection angrily, making it disappear—only for it to pop up again on his right, even more smug than before.

  Akrom yanked off his helmet so he wouldn’t have to see him and growled, “Fuck off, asshole! Why don’t you go screw your mother instead of harassing me?”

  A noise made him freeze. He quickly shoved his helmet back on. Seth vanished, repced by a different image—Father Vdimir.

  “I’m approaching the Great Junction,” the old priest announced. “I’ve formuted a proof equivalent to Weinstein’s ex-conjecture—elegant, simple, beautiful. Even a novice could understand it…”

  “Great job, Vd. But can we talk about it ter?”

  The priest’s smug expression twisted into a mask of outrage.

  “Oh, I see. You don’t give a shit, is that it? Do you even know who Mirzakhani was? She proved Schur’s theorem when she was barely in her twenties! Younger than you!”

  “Yeah, yeah, that’s amazing, Vd. But right now, I really need to find a stiff…”

  “Scoundrel! Ignorant little shit! Son of a bitch!”

  Akrom sighed and waved away the priest’s ranting image. For a split second, he considered giving up. But no. He’d show them. Jasper and the others thought they were better than him, looking down on him for sifting through the DarkNet’s trash. Well, that trash was full of cash if you knew how to dig.

  Vd was sinking further into madness every day. How many others had the WorldNet broken like this? Was the stiff in Esperanza K8B another victim of the First Years?

  Back in those days, corpses had rained down in the Cities of Hope. People threw themselves off the towers like they were diving off cliffs to escape a fire. When Akrom was a kid, he and his crew had already been looting the dead—bodies impaled on communication antennas, spttered across rooftops. Some had been there for decades. The city’s cleaning crews only bothered to clear them away when the sight of rotting faces and split-open torsos started giving rich kids nightmares.

  For Akrom and his friends, though, corpses were a business.

  And carrion had always been lucrative.

  “Son of a bitch!”

  Akrom threw himself sideways, fttening against a wall as the first flickers of blue light swept through the space. Just in time—the City drone glided past the rgest window, looking like a giant flying turtle, its azure beam crawling over the fa?ades.

  “Motherfucking son of a bitch,” he muttered, trying to steady his breathing.

  When the hell am I finally gonna get myself a real suit of armor? No more sneaking around naked and blind like a damn mole. No more walking into shit without knowing who’s lurking two kilometers away.

  His legs ached—wrecked by the endless stairs. An exoskeleton would’ve been a lifesaver right now, damn it. He felt like a grasshopper with its back legs ripped off. The only gear he had was a pathetic little kit and an old scooter stashed away in some decrepit shelter, sixty-five floors underground.

  The big, silent whale of a drone from City Maintenance was only programmed to detect structural damage and fry rodents and crows with thermal sers. But if that fat bitch had spotted him, she’d have reported him in an instant. Arrests, fines, forced “re-education” sessions—he’d been through it all before. Not to mention the endless, nauseating sermons from Mother Morale, that digital judge who handled petty criminals like they were toddlers needing a scolding.

  But he wasn’t about to get caught now. There was money in the air. He could smell it.

  Fuck.

  A buzz, faint but unmistakable, made his helmet sensors fre. Instinct took over—he hit the ground, holding his breath, frozen. A shadow glided across the opposite wall, like those stupid figures in Pto’s cave.

  This time, it was a DNSF drone.

  His blood ran cold. He recognized its silhouette instantly—bristling with cannons and antennas, outlined against a pale, dead-looking wall. A smart wall, probably, back in the day. Maybe used for presentations. The pce even looked like one of those old-school conference rooms you only saw in ancient movies.

  What the hell were DNSF combat drones doing here?

  No warning, no escape, just an instant preemptive strike—that’s what had happened to one of his buddies when he got caught in a restricted zone. But this was Esperanza K8B. Why the hell would the military waste its time in a dump like this? The closest DarkNet command center was two thousand kilometers away. There were no rebels here, no votile popution to control—hell, barely any people at all. Who in their right mind would willingly bury themselves in this necropolis? No strategic resources. No critical communications hubs. Nothing but corpses and crows screwing in the dark. QED.

  He got back up. The drones were gone.

  Reactivating his telescopic visor, he scanned the opposing facades again—though, in reality, “opposing” was an illusion. The towers were so massive that even distances of several kilometers felt close. Mountains of abandoned housing stretched endlessly, their millions of gss walls still catching the st weak rays of daylight. They had been cut off from power for years—dark, crumbling giants just waiting for the final colpse.

  In the distance, he spotted a few roadwork drones still struggling to patch up the city, desperately shoring up whatever could still be saved—probably just to prevent the next cave-in from setting off a shockwave that could ftten everything for thousands of kilometers around.

  But of the stiff he was hunting?

  No trace.

  He wanted that corpse. He knew it was here, buried somewhere in this maze of ruins.

  It had been reported fifty-seven years ago by a local resident—one who, along with his entire neighborhood, had since vanished into a massive sinkhole. A tremor had swallowed them whole, triggered by a deep rupture somewhere in the eastern remains of old New York.

  But Akrom had something the poor bastard didn’t—a physical municipal backup, salvaged from the ruins. And it confirmed what made this stiff special: full-body First Years armor, rudimentary exoskeleton included.

  A soldier, maybe? One of the Separation War fighters?

  Either way, it had market value.

  The organic parts were probably long gone—just bones, dried sinews, and crow shit. But the good stuff? That should still be there. Titanium pting, high-grade alloy components—a goldmine in the markets. The local data caches buried in the armor? Museum curators would kill for those.

  And, if he was really lucky—oh, sweet chance!—a membership token, still intact. Those little things could map out entire networks of past retionships and power structures, and they drove Dark AI strategists insane with excitement.

  A thousand dolrs, easy.

  Shit, wait—did those early tokens already store digital clones of their owners? If so… make that two grand.

  Nothing yet.

  But he was in the right spot. Level 187 from Layer 2, facing the right direction. Longitude and titude matched.

  So how the hell had that guy—now rotting three kilometers beneath his feet—managed to spot the armored corpse? He must’ve had a clear enough view to catch all the details. But then the corporate vultures had come, dumping an entire tower on top of the sinkhole, stuffing the hole full of construction debris from half the city before rebuilding.

  So tell me, oh ghost of the sinkhole, oh crushed soldier buried under a mountain of junk…

  How the hell did you see that armor?

  Another sweep through the shattered gss bays—most of them missing their gss altogether.

  Nothing.

  Fuck.

  Beep. Beep.

  His visor flickered. A tiny, almost imperceptible fsh.

  There.

  He zoomed in. Quickly, quickly!

  A flicker—just for a second, but he was sure he saw it.

  Frantically, he adjusted the frequency. Shit, focus! Focus!

  He mentally interrogated the telescope:

  What was the st detected event?

  Analyzing. Please wait…

  Was it a robot?

  No. Organic.

  The spectroscope had picked up a red fsh—a biological signature.

  A rat? A crow?

  No. Everything in there was cold. Not even the heat signature of an ant.

  So, a corpse?

  Ha! But no… it was—

  What the hell was it?

  He swept the area again, this time with pinpoint precision.

  Nada.

  “Fucking machine,” he muttered, smacking the side of the telescope.

  As if to apologize, it finally sent its provisional analysis result:

  Organic movement detected.

  His stomach clenched.

  Shit. There was something alive in there. But was it actually living? Or just something dead, moving? A zombie? Hell, those only existed in bad 21st-century horror flicks. A corpse, swaying in the wind?

  Alright. Time to dig in.

  Akrom bombarded his device with requests.

  Perform visual reconstruction.

  Analyzing. Please wait…

  God, this thing was slow enough to make him want to rip his hair out. The system was still gathering, analyzing, and stitching together every scrap of reflected light from the target area—everything from tiny shards of gss to metal and pstic surfaces. But Akrom didn’t need to wait for the final result. He already knew what it would be:

  A human shape. Lying on the ground.

  Sure enough, the full spectral analysis came in just as the visual reconstruction finished loading:

  Human DNA detected.

  There it was. A completely fttened human, hidden from sight, far off in the distance. Whoever they were, they were fully suited up in a high-tech bodysuit—one that masked thermal signatures. But they had exhaled. Or farted.

  A little too hard.

  And a tiny thread of hot air, ced with organic molecules, had leaked through a gap…

  Shit.

  His helmet linked with the telescope, pulling up the location’s name and coordinates:

  Esperanza III/GEN2179. Distance: 4.37 kilometers, east.

  A competitor?

  Akrom frantically searched his digital memory for possible candidates. Who the hell would be hunting in this zone?

  A Degenerate? No way—not at this altitude. Those lumbering brutes hated heights, not to mention their thermal camo was absolute garbage. That meant it had to be a human. Sapiens sapiens.

  But he was supposed to be the only one who knew about this armored stiff. All data models showed near-zero probability of the information leaking. Unless that asshole Seth…?

  He cursed himself for trusting him. But then again, he hadn’t told Seth much—and he’d made damn sure to cover his tracks before coming here.

  So that meant…

  The human holed up in Esperanza III/GEN2179 was after something else.

  And if they were risking getting obliterated by the DNSF for it, then whatever it was, it had to be worth just as much—or more—than Akrom’s armored stiff.

  Ha.

  Got you, bitch.

  Now, he could see her clearly—the silhouette on his telescope screen was unmistakably female.

  Move. Move!

  He needed to know what she was after.

  Maybe—just maybe—he could kill two birds with one stone.

  But the bitch fttened herself even further, practically melting into the floor.

  At the same moment, Akrom’s telescope picked up a second vibration—one that sounded suspiciously like a DNSF drone.

  Another one. Somewhere in the air. What the hell was going on here? This pce was drawing way too much attention.

  Numbers flickered and spun in Akrom’s head.

  What was everyone after? Who were they looking for? He quickly pulled up the test bounty listings on his helmet screen—searching by reward, st known physical presence, st known virtual presence. Nothing close to Esperanza. Nothing reted to the First Years. Bounties: 2,000… 140,000… 2 million…

  …What the hell was she looking for?

  Damn, this is making my head spin.

  Quick, quick—bounty hunters in the area?

  Scanning… Results: What? Nothing?

  No known professional or amateur hunters in the zone. Not a single one. And yet… the DNSF was on the hunt.

  Interesting. Very interesting.

  Which means you, my fttened little friend over there, are not a hunter at all.

  You are the prey.

  (With a 68% probability, according to the data analyzer.)

  A highly coveted target. No public bounty on your head, but given the number of military drones swarming around, you are the focus of some serious high-stakes hunting.

  Well, well.

  Too bad for you—I’ve got your location.

  You’re screwed.

  How much could I get for you?

  There is no official price, sure. But anything is negotiable if you know the right channels. Even with the DNSF. All you need is the right networks—and for all his fws, that asshole Seth was unmatched when it came to those. Networks where you could get what you wanted without leaving a single trace—not even the digital shadow of a gamete.

  Not even the DNSF’s quantum supercomputers could crack a post-quantum encryption wall built on advanced mathematics.

  Expensive service? Sure.

  But worth it—especially for a job this lucrative.

  Which this one absolutely was.

  Five minutes ter, after a short exchange via chatbot proxies—nothing direct, nothing traceable. Where at first, no one knew what exactly was being discussed. No one knew who was making the offer. And no one knew from which part of the pnet it was coming. That’s the magic of probabilistic AI. But after enough calcutions and intelligent guesswork, the other party got the message.

  In return, Akrom got a number and a condition: 10,000 dolrs. Required info: titude, longitude, and elevation retive to Layer 2.

  Bingo.

  Click.

  Just like the good old days.

  The info was sent.

  And in the same instant, the money nded in his account.

  (After being diced into a hundred thousand tiny pieces and funneled through 1.2 million accounts owned by good, oblivious citizens who’d never know a thing.)

  Long live the DarkNet. Death to rebels and spies.

  Now, let’s watch the show.

  Akrom trained his viewfinder on the tower, waiting. But… strangely, nothing happened. Or rather—something did.

  The DNSF drones pulled out.

  He spotted two… then three… quietly moving away. Weapons folded. Antennas retracted.

  What the hell?

  That could only mean one thing.

  Humans were going to handle this one.

  No digital backup. No robotic surveilnce. No witnesses.

  Old-school.

  Well, well.

  Good luck, bitch.

  10,000 dolrs.

  Farewell, oh elusive corpse of the First Years.

  Rest in peace on your perch—you brought me luck after all.