So, I just had my entire nervous system rearranged by a stranger in black leather. I slept for zero hours. I might be falling in love. And now I have to go to work like nothing happened?

  Warner Vogel squinted at his own reflection in the chrome siding of his private shuttle. Collar askew. Cuff stained a dull rust-brown. Lips just barely bruised. There were worse ways to start a morning.

  He tapped the Enerject pen to his neck—click, a soft hiss—and closed his eyes as the familiar synthetic surge punched through his bloodstream. VogelCorp’s flagship product. Thirty-six hours of wakefulness, advertised as consequence-free if you didn’t read the fine print. He, of course, had written the fine print.

  The Enerject, and all the harmless-on-paper ingredients in it, kicked in fast, and when he walked into the lobby of VogelCorp towards the security station, he couldn’t shake the feeling that everyone who crossed his path knew exactly what he’d been up to.

  The security guard who waved him through had to be Brock, of course.

  “Good morning, Mr. Vogel.”

  Warner. Mr. Vogel was my father. “Morning.”

  Brock didn’t move out of the way and looked at him expectantly. Warner raised his eyebrows.

  “Really?”

  “Sorry. You must scan in. It’s policy, you know that.”

  With an inward sigh, Warner swiped his thumb up across his palm, and the holo screen of his phone shimmered in his palm. The scanner gave its melodious chime, and the robotic voice known to the entire country singsonged, “Welcome, Mr. Vogel.”

  Warner could feel the guard’s lazy gaze follow him for a few seconds before slipping away with indifference, but only once the elevator doors slid shut behind him did the uncomfortable feeling leave him. Alone at last, he gave way to the little shiver that raced up his spine at the memory of last night. His shoulder blades knit, sending a nice clean wave of pain through him. He let it pass, then rolled his shoulders on purpose just to feel it again.

  VogelCorp, government-affiliated pharmaceutical megacorp, occupied a gleaming spike of a skyscraper that looked like a blue glass needle crowned with the blue logo and name that glowed day and night. As if there might be anyone in the sprawling megapolis below who didn’t know what that winged logo meant, or who wasn’t using at least one of their many essential products every single day. Although originally the brainchild of Warner’s grandfather, it was his father, Markus Vogel, who made the company what it currently was. Warner’s whole life took place in the shadow, or rather the merciless blue light, of that logo that bore his name.

  It came with downsides, but it also came with perks. Such as a private elevator, for one.

  The privacy came to an abrupt halt when the doors opened on the executive floor and Warner found himself face to face with Lyssa Burkhardt in person, her hair slicked back, her makeup on point, looking awake even though she never touched substitute coffee. She remembered the real thing before it ran out, she always said, and never could get past the taste.

  “Warner.”

  The cheer in her voice felt forced from the first syllable to make it past her lips. Lyssa Burkhardt liked to rule her part of VogelCorp—that is, the most part of VogelCorp—from a comfortable distance, holed up in her vast apartments in one of the exclusive Keeper buildings from a hundred years before the Split. Warner’s own such apartment took up another floor of the same building, but he hadn’t set foot there in years. Too much had happened there, and even though its odd architectural beauty, remnant of another era, fascinated him, he found all the dark corners and long hallways unsettling. He preferred the vast open spaces of the loft he’d bought and taken over when he finished university. He liked always having an eye on the exits.

  All right, he thought with defeated resolve. I’ll have to ask. “What are you doing here so early?”

  “I thought you and I could blow off work today and go get breakfast.”

  “I have things to take care of.” He angled his body to pass her, sending a subtle signal for her to get out of his way, a signal she ignored. She remained standing there, implacable in her pointy heels.

  “We’re having breakfast. Somewhere high up, expensive, and private. So I can scream into a tablecloth while you pretend to be salvageable.”

  So—the gloves were off. Good to know.

  “Warner, I say not as your superior—”

  “You’re not my superior,” he interjected.

  “—but as your godmother. You’re going to this meeting, you’re going to sit your bruised ass down, and you’re going to act like a functioning human being.”

  Last night felt like it had lasted fifteen minutes, but when he emerged from the Lunatik, it was five-thirty in the morning, and the sky was yellow. He only had time to wash his face, change his clothes, and grab the Enerject from his pharmacy. Now the uppers had kicked in in earnest, his eyelid twitched, and he wasn’t in any mood for this.

  They took the private elevator to the very top floor of the VogelCorp building, which, other than being the city’s highest point with incredible views, concealed the city’s best-kept secret, a Keepers-only exclusive restaurant. Warner didn’t even know it was open at this hour. Except of course it was open—Lyssa said so, that’s why. The room stood completely empty, and the staff kept themselves discreet. No one wants to be in the way of the boss, or the guy everyone’s supposed to pretend is the boss.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  They scanned in and ordered food as soon as they sat down at the same table where Lyssa always sat. The window wrapped around the curve of the building, but on this typically smoggy morning you could only guess at the outlines of the breathtaking city view that stretched out below, lost somewhere in the yellow-tinged murk. Warner zoned out looking at it. Truth be told, his brain felt the same.

  “Are you listening to me?”

  He tilted his head. He had not been listening to her.

  “I said, looks like you had a rough night,” Lyssa said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Warner.” Her eyes flashed. She had a way of letting you know you’ve displeased her without ever creasing her carefully maintained skin. And Warner, who’d known her for as long as he’d been alive, had learned to read her glances better than anyone.

  “Cut the crap, Warner. I know what day it is—and I sympathize, I really do—but there has to be a limit somewhere. Could you at least not do that on weeknights? Have you given a moment’s thought to how it looks?”

  He had to give her credit. For a moment, he felt a twinge of worry.

  “You’re twitchy,” she said, scanning him up and down like a biometric scanner with disdain. “And you smell like the inside of a goddamn dungeon.”

  “It’s called cologne,” he said. “You’d know if you ever left your penthouse.”

  She didn’t flinch. “And you have blood on your shirt.”

  Warner glanced down. Rust smear on the collar. She wasn’t wrong.

  He gave her his best dead-eyed smile. “Occupational hazard.”

  Lyssa pinched the bridge of her nose like she’d just been assigned to babysit a radioactive toddler. “For fuck’s sake, Warner.”

  “What?” he said, breezing into his office. “You’ve always said I needed to get out more.”

  “I meant a vacation, not getting flayed by a dominatrix in an underground hellhole!”

  “I wasn’t flayed,” he said mildly, flicking the glass walls opaque with a lazy swipe. “At most, lightly sanded.”

  Lyssa blinked. Then blinked again. “I don’t know whether to be impressed or send you to therapy.”

  “Why not both?”

  “Because I’m too busy putting out fires,” she snapped. “And I don’t want to deal with another one. All this is going to end up on the internet. Unless that’s what you want.”

  “What ever happened to open-mindedness? Live your true colors. Wasn’t that our motto last season?”

  She leaned in closer, and her voice dropped to a hiss. “Don’t parrot this bullshit to me, Warner. You know full well who this does and doesn’t apply to. We are Keepers. We have a responsibility. We have a duty to this country and to this company, and yes, that includes you. This behavior is a disgrace, not to mention a security breach.”

  “Actually, I met someone,” he said. At least today, he found himself thinking about the mystery girl instead of thinking about what day it is. That had to be progress.

  “Oh, did you?” Lyssa said in an alarming falsetto. “Really? How nice. When will you introduce her to me? Is she normal or does she have horns grafted onto her skull? Although, to be fair, I’ll take anything at this point.”

  “No horns,” he said. He’d suspected the mystery girl might also be a Keeper. Or at the very least, she had the budget of one—that outfit had to cost more than a car. The memory of it—the smooth leather under his fingertips—made him smile discreetly to himself.

  Then he caught Lyssa’s stone-cold lizard stare that could have made the real, live orchid in the middle of the table lose every single one of its lush purple blooms.

  “Why did you bring me here?” he asked. “I’m not hanging from a light fixture, I’m right here at work.” He noticed how she flinched. “Ready to do my job. Instead of spending last night wallowing in self-pity, I went out and had a good time with another consenting adult.”

  “I keep hoping you’ll get someone pregnant and then we can marry the two of you,” Lyssa answered in such a flat tone it was hard to tell if she was being sarcastic. “It might not be ideal, but it worked out well for your parents, didn’t it?”

  The silence lingered enough to become awkward. Lyssa measured him with a once-over. “Look, Warner, I’m just concerned. I thought you were doing better, and then… this… started. It’s self-destructive. You just moved the destructiveness from one area to another. Instead of harming yourself, you let someone else do it to you and call it kink. How long do you think you’ll be able to keep this up?”

  “That,” he said, “is my problem, and mine alone.”

  Lyssa heaved a sigh. “Today is fifteen years,” she said flatly. “Your Nero-versary.”

  She didn’t have to do that. He felt himself flinch and didn’t have time to disguise his instinctive reaction. “Yeah. I know.”

  “So maybe it’s time you moved on?”

  In that exact moment, his eye decided to inform him, in an alarming red font, that his cortisol rate was spiking. The Enerject plus the caffeine plus this conversation. What timing.

  “You got away with your life, something not many people can say. So why do you keep trying to finish the job for him?”

  Warner got up. He now realized his artificial eye and its sensors were correct—even he could feel that his heart was beating too hard, too fast. All his facial muscles twitched now, not just his one good eyelid.

  “We’re done here,” he said.

  “Sit back down. Now. I’m not finished.”

  “I am.”

  “Oh, what? Suddenly you don’t like being bossed around?”

  Warner turned on his heel and walked out. In that moment, the sun decided to show from behind the smog and clouds, a rare moment of pure crystalline light pouring into the dining room. It sliced painfully across his good eye as the cybernetic one tinted his vision dark sepia on cue. Better than the real thing, the tech who fitted him with it at seventeen told him. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll come back here asking me to do the other eye for you.

  Well, fifteen years later, that had yet to happen. He looked back over his shoulder. Lyssa sat immobile in the sunlight, looking dusty and suddenly as old as her actual age, still with that defiant look on her face he’d come to know so well.

  She just wants what’s best for me, and I’m being an asshole. Just like I am to everyone, even when none of it is any fault of theirs. Making everyone around me pay for what Nero did, fifteen fucking years ago. No wonder everyone I work with hates me.

  He consciously ordered his inner monologue to a halt. He conjured up last night in front of his mind’s eye, as vivid as he could make it, and rolled his shoulders again, straining at the tape that held the skin on his back together. Only this time, it hardly helped.

  Some days—hell, most days—the world made him want to throw up. But Lyssa said it was just the PTSD.

  In the elevator, he got a message from Lyssa that he swept away with his thumb without reading it. She was probably apologizing, in her own, roundabout, Lyssa way without admitting fault—in her many years of talking to the media and giving press-conferences as head of VogelCorp, she’d perfected the skill to the point where it bled into every other aspect of her life. She always sounded like she was on livestream. He would deal with her later.

  But then, as he entered his office and signaled for the glass walls to go opaque, another message arrived. Then another. Then another, until he had no choice but to look, out of sheer curiosity.

  Call me ASAP. Sorry but your day’s about to get a whole lot worse.

  Welcome to Malkontent!

  This is a grimy, glittering story about trauma, loyalty, power, and very bad decisions made by people with too much tech and too little therapy. Expect cyberpunk decadence, corporate dystopia, moral ambiguity, and one deeply dysfunctional man trying not to come apart at the seams (with help from a cat who might hate him).

  This version has been revised for Royal Road—so if you've seen Malkontent before, you're still in for new scenes, new edits, and some extra pain.

  Updates 2x a week, sometimes more.

  Thanks for reading. And remember: don’t scan in unless you’re sure you want to stay.

  —DepressedDandelion