The silence within the corrugated walls of the container pressed in with a weight far heavier than the screams that had preceded it. Mike sat amidst the shadows with his legs crossed and the rusty shiv resting near his knee like a forgotten religious idol. The metal was clean now after he had scrubbed Targ’s blood off with a rag and a splash of precious filtered water, but the phantom sensation of the impact remained. He could still feel the shudder of the blade punching through cartilage and the wet heat washing over his knuckles.

  It was done, and he had killed a man.

  He waited for the guilt to arrive, checking the rhythm of his pulse and the corners of his conscience for the tremors of remorse that old vid-dramas claimed were inevitable. There was nothing but a cold and vibrating clarity that sat in his chest where fear used to live.

  The fear that did remain was not about the act itself but about the math.

  The fight in the alley played over in his mind like a corrupted data-file being dissected for flaws. He had won because Targ had been arrogant and drunk on his own localized power, but mostly because the man had seen only a skinny heap-rat and not the swarm. But the vermin were fragile things. They were distractions and chaff that had bought him three critical seconds to use the shiv, but against a full-face helmet or a disciplined guard they would have been useless.

  If Targ had kept his cool and swung his baton blindly, Mike would have been nothing more than a red smear on the alley wall.

  "Distraction isn't enough," Mike muttered, his voice raspy in the stagnant air. "I got lucky. Luck runs out."

  He looked at his hands and saw the fine tremor running from his wrists to his fingertips. The System’s mockery of his physical weakness hung in his memory, reminding him that he was statistically barely alive. He was not going to turn into a warrior overnight no matter how many spiders he tethered to boost his grip strength. If he wanted to survive the inevitable reprisal when Rigg noticed a missing collector, he could not rely on getting within shiv-range.

  He needed distance, and he needed a force multiplier.

  His gaze drifted to the mound of salvage in the corner where he had dragged a heavy industrial capacitor weeks ago. It was the size of a loaf of bread and encased in a cracked ceramic shell that wept a slow and viscous fluid. He had pulled it from the wreckage of a heavy-lifter in Sector 6, but it was too damaged to hold a charge and far too dangerous to sell. Even from where he sat he could smell the sharp and acrid stench of the leak. It tasted of burning sugar and ozone, a cocktail of heavy acids and conductive sludge that would eat through the floorplates if left too long.

  It was toxic, corrosive, and deadly.

  A thought bloomed in the back of his mind that was unbidden and grotesque. It came from the Other, the cold alien architecture that the crystal had built inside his brain. Adaptation is forced, while evolution is merely a reaction to stress.

  Mike stood up and his knees popped in the quiet. He walked over to the pile and dragged the heavy capacitor into the center of the room. The chemical smell intensified instantly and stung his eyes. He grabbed a scrap of rigid plastic and scraped a glob of the leaking fluid from the crack in the ceramic casing. It was thick and yellowish-green, hissing faintly when he smeared it onto a spare metal plate.

  "Dinner time," he whispered.

  He reached out with his mind. He did not use the gentle coaxing he had practiced earlier to save his mental energy. He did not ask. He used the iron grip of a master and swept the corners of the container to seize ten roaches. These were not the small and skittish ones, but the survivors of the container who had grown large and armored on trash and condensation.

  He felt their simple minds snap to attention as a dozen tiny points of static in his head.

  Come.

  They scuttled out of the shadows in a jerky and unnatural line to gather around the metal plate. He could feel their hesitation, for to them the chemical puddle screamed of death and poison. Their antennae whipped frantically as they tasted the caustic air and tried to turn back.

  Mike clamped down on their will. Eat. Consume.

  He forced their mandibles into the sludge.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  The reaction was immediate and horrific. The first roach took a bite because Mike’s will overrode its survival instinct, and it swallowed the acid. The neural tether transmitted the creature's dying shock directly into Mike’s gut like a hot nail. The connection severed instantly as the roach flipped onto its back with its insides liquefying.

  Mike gritted his teeth as sweat popped on his forehead. The pain in his head spiked, a thudding recoil from the sudden death of a tethered mind.

  "Don't die," he hissed, wiping bile from his lips. "You useless shits. Don't die. Change."

  He forced the second one forward. It ate, it convulsed, and it died. Another needle stabbed into Mike’s gut and another spike drove into his skull. The third one tried to run, breaking Mike’s control for a split second through sheer terror, but Mike grabbed its mind again and crushed its fear under a sledgehammer of command. It died screaming in binary static.

  By the fifth death Mike was breathing hard. Tears streamed from his eyes due to the chemical fumes and the feedback loop of agony. The floor was littered with curled and twitching husks.

  He was not a geneticist with a clean lab and gene-splicers. He was a mechanic in a world where weak parts were tempered or discarded. He hammered them against the anvil of his will. One by one they ate and died until the pile of dead roaches grew and the smell of burnt chitin mixed with the ozone of the capacitor.

  His head felt like it was splitting open. The cognitive strain combined with the trauma of repeated severance was pushing him toward a blackout.

  The ninth roach was the biggest of the lot. It moved sluggishly and fought Mike every step of the way until it reached the sludge. It ate, and it didn't die immediately. Mike leaned forward with his vision blurring as he felt the roach’s internal distress, a burning fire in its gut, but the signal didn't cut out.

  Endure, Mike pushed. Hold it.

  The roach twitched violently and its shell cracked with a sound like dry leaves being crushed. A leg fell off, and then there was silence as the signal winked out.

  "Failure," Mike hissed and slapped the floor in frustration.

  He had one left. The tenth volunteer was smaller than the others and darker in color. It scurried toward the plate not because Mike forced it, but because he had boxed it in with his mind and left it no other path.

  Eat.

  The roach drank, and Mike braced himself for the pain and the snap of the bond breaking.

  It didn't come.

  Instead, a low and grinding vibration buzzed through the mental tether. It wasn't pain, but pressure. It was structural stress, like a boiler building up steam with the rivets groaning. The roach gorged itself on the remaining acid until its abdomen swelled, the segments stretching translucent to show the swirling and glowing green fluid inside.

  Then the old brown shell split down the center with the wet sound of tearing parchment.

  The roach was shedding. Something wet and glistening pulled itself free from the debris of its former life and shivered in the cool air. It was a dark and slick green, the color of pond scum and radiation glass. It was larger than the original with thicker antennae that whipped the air with aggressive snaps. As the air hit its wet exoskeleton, the shell didn't just dry, it calcified. The wet green darkened and hardened into a matte armored carapace within seconds.

  It looked heavy, industrial, and entirely wrong.

  The creature turned toward Mike. Its mandibles clicked and a drop of sizzling green fluid leaked from its mouthparts to hit the metal floor, leaving a tiny pit in the steel. Mike felt a new presence in his mind that was not the fuzzy static of a normal scavenger. This signal was sharp, acidic, and volatile.

  Text scrolled across his vision in a glitching bright script.

  [SYSTEM ALERT]

  [FORCED MUTATION SUCCESSFUL]

  [SPECIES VARIANT UNLOCKED]

  [NEW UNIT: Acid-Spitter Roach]

  Mike stared at the notification and then at the creature sitting amidst the corpses of its kin. It was ugly and it was an abomination, but it was perfect.

  He had built a living gun.

  He needed to be sure. He looked around the container and spotted a scrap of heavy leather he’d cut from an old boot. He placed the tough material on the floor about two meters away from the plate and focused on the new unit. The connection was heavy and taxed his mind more than two normal roaches combined.

  Target, he projected, marking the leather in his mind. Fire.

  The Acid-Spitter didn't hesitate or scuttle forward to bite. It reared up on its back legs and its abdomen pulsed once, violently. A stream of thick, neon-green bile shot from its mouthparts in a flat arc and slapped into the leather. Smoke poured up instantly and the smell of burning hide filled the room. Mike watched as the fluid ate through the tough leather in seconds, dissolving it into a black bubbling slurry.

  If that had been a face, or Targ’s eyes, the fight would have ended before it began.

  Mike slumped back against the wall as the exhaustion finally crashed down on him. His head throbbed and his nose was bleeding again, his stomach turning at the smell of the massacre he’d orchestrated. He looked at the dead husks of the other nine roaches and then at the survivor preening its new green armor.

  One out of ten was an expensive survival rate.

  "Welcome to the crew," Mike murmured to the green monstrosity. The creature chittered back with a sound like grinding glass.

  He looked back at the capacitor. There was still plenty of fluid leaking, maybe enough for twenty more doses. If the survival rate held, he could make two more. Three Acid-Spitters wasn't an annoyance, it was a firing squad.

  Mike wiped the blood from his nose and reached for the capacitor again. The night was young, and for the first time in his life he wasn't just scavenging what the world left behind. He was manufacturing consequences.

  "Next batch," he whispered, and reached out to the corners of the room for more volunteers.