This time, when the drugs left my system and my eyes snapped open, I felt ready.

  I sat up, eyes already scanning my surroundings as I slid off the operating table. My body was perfectly responsive. I luxuriated in the sheer feeling of control, having badly missed it in that horrible virtual reality, and —

  I hissed in pain as I clutched at my head, eyes flashing and glitching. With no threat coming my way, it was only my own future I was getting glimpses of. I saw my arms moving, snapping out to grab a slender arm and snap it in two —

  “You okay?”

  It was only the Clairvoyance that let me hold back the instinctive reaction. Even so, I kept my body carefully still as I slowly looked up into the green eyes of the doctor’s assistant. She was hovering there, arm outstretched, too frightened to actually touch me.

  Several conflicting thoughts flashed through me all at once.

  My old human self was frustrated that someone would be terrified of him for no good reason. The Shadow wanted to unhinge my jaws and pour whispers into her ears that would seal her fate as a human and potentially open up a path to being so much more. The Stalker yearned to slide forward and ever so gently push its claws up through her jaw until it was tickling the back of her skull.

  From the inside.

  I just grunted something vaguely agreeable and screwed my eyes shut, trying to ground myself in the moment. In reality.

  I wasn’t actually a greater being chained to flimsy flesh. I wasn’t a creeping specter ready to inflict death. I was just… just…

  A fucking slum brat, trying to stay alive.

  “I’m fine.”

  I managed to get the words out as I opened my eyes again to look directly into Amelia’s. She cringed at the pure black broken only by a glowing red circle, and I grimaced.

  A hurried search through my HUD confirmed something I was mildly worried about. Most of my eyes’ functionality was intact. The customization settings, though? Gone.

  “Is — is the implant settling in okay?” she asked. “No issues with movement? No stiffness in your neck?”

  I tilted my head this way and that, just to check. “Nope. None of that, thankfully. So, the deck’s already installed? It’s in right now?”

  She nodded.

  "Thanks.” I attempted a normal, non-creepy smile. “You do great work.”

  That, at last, was enough for her smirk to re-emerge, along with some of her old bravado. “Course I do! Did better in my training than dear old Dad back in the day. They should be paying me to do surgeries and produce new cybernetics, not him. He mostly forces me to do his work for him nowadays anyway.”

  “He’s got you doing the engineering and ripper work he’s supposed to be in charge of?”

  “Sure he does! All the time!”

  She looked awfully happy to make that admission. While a surge of shock swept through me, resignation was quick to follow. It wasn’t like ripper scams were rare in the slums.

  “Gotta say, you’ve surprised me,” I confessed. “Wasn’t expecting you to actually get me a deck and wake me up. I mean, aren’t you at least a little worried about what I might do at this point?”

  As I spoke, I ran through some stretches to explore the way my body was moving. I was surprised at the level of control I could exert over it.

  It was still my body. Still awfully small. Still frustratingly limited.

  I could just do so much more with it now.

  That reminded me to perform an important check.

  …Well. Okay.

  I just kept staring at those ridiculous stat jumps. Sure, I was feeling stronger, but to such a ridiculous extent? And what was up with my Acuity?

  Then again, as I swept my eyes over the room, I felt the difference. Before, the amount of details I could notice and process all at once had been almost overwhelming. My human mind had been struggling to keep up with it all. That meant I was barely getting a fraction of the benefits my ridiculous Acuity score was supposed to let me access.

  Guess that’s where those negative numbers came from.

  Now, though?

  No struggle. No overwhelm. Full ‘20’ Acuity, with no human weakness in the way.

  My Reflexes stat was another story. My mind had no trouble processing everything. My thoughts fired off at incredible speeds, and my arms almost blurred as I pushed the cybernetics.

  The rest of my body, though? Not so much. My feet moved at a fraction of the speed a part of my brain was convinced they were supposed to be capable of. Even just a few seconds of moving my arms at their top speed made my back ache.

  The conclusion was frustrating. Basically, my regular human body simply wasn’t built to keep up with the odd eldritch cybernetics, and —

  I got the Clairvoyance warning a couple of seconds before Amelia leaned over and snapped her fingers in my face. That is the only reason I simply went stiff, instead of flashing out my claws and tearing those same fingers off her hands.

  “You’re not paying attention to me at all, are you?” the assistant complained, crossing her arms in front of her chest.

  “Sorry, sorry,” I lifted my hands, palms out, in a universal placating gesture. I also backed off a step, just in case she tried to startle me and actually managed to get herself killed. “I was… distracted. Did you see my status?”

  She rolled her eyes, but I noticed her stiffen a little at the mention of it. “Yep. Saw that thing. You’re lucky you’ve got me covering your back, or my father would have had you put down in your sleep. Howdja even manage to unlock the package already?”

  “I have no idea. Still, shouldn’t that make you more worried about this cooperative deal of ours?” I teased, unable to stop myself. There was something extremely amusing about the way her whole expression would tighten, eyes just beginning to squint, before forcefully relaxing.

  “If you’d been paying attention, you’d know my answer already,” Amelia grumbled. “It’s a good thing for me that you’re more dangerous than you used to be. And I don’t care anymore. I just want out of here. Now.”

  I looked at her, really looked at her, and picked up on quite a few things which the netspace hadn’t managed to properly copy over.

  Her eyes had deeper shadows under them. Her hair looked kind of matted and greasy. Her shoulders were perpetually tensed and drawn in, like she was expecting to get hit at any moment. Her features had an unhealthy pallor that made her look halfway between ‘mildly ill’ and ‘about to pass out.’

  Whatever else could be said, Amelia was not doing well under her father’s care, neither physically nor emotionally.

  “I’m really just your last ditch effort, huh?” I whispered, keeping my eyes focused on hers.

  She looked away, her whole body hunching over like I’d buried my claws in her gut. “That’s a fucking rude thing to say to a lady, you know?”

  I actually laughed. “Fine, fine! How’d you like to see your father’s fancy little lab go up in smoke, then?”

  The grin she gave me was downright feral. “I’d love to.”

  “Good.” I let my eyes rove over the walls, Clairvoyance running at full strength. “By the way, you don’t have any friends around here, right? Also, how much do you value the lives of total strangers?”

  “Weird question, but okay. No friends. Quite a few enemies. And I don’t know… as horrible as it is to say, I’m not all that bothered? I mean, come on, people die all the time. And this isn’t just me being numb to it all ‘cause of how many people I’ve seen butchered on my father’s operating table,” she insisted.

  What was that old saying from Terra? ‘The lady doth protest too much’?

  Shaking my head, I punched my hand into the wall, guided by Clairvoyance to just the right spot. I smiled in quiet satisfaction as my claws went through the wall panel and found the net access point.

  Then I reached for the back of my neck, pulled out the freshly installed connector cord, and blindly plugged it in while grinning at Amelia’s flabbergasted expression.

  “What are you doing?” she hissed. “You do realize I control literally everything inside of this room, right? If you wanted net access, all you had to do was ask.”

  My expression soured at her refusal to be impressed. Did she even know how hard that was to pull off? It took me nineteen attempts in Cairvoyance to plug that thing in successfully!

  “Yes, yes, everyone’s a critic,” I grumbled.

  Then I closed my eyes and tapped into the closed network of the doctor’s illegal lab.

  I had to give it to the man. There was absolutely no way anyone was ever hacking his precious hidden evil lair, at least from the outside. Presumably, he also had so many turrets, alarms, clankers, and live guards that no one could ever get inside without being detected, either.

  His internal security, though? It sucked. I simply tapped into Assault, focused my will, and let my inner shadow come out to play.

  It om nom nommed through the basic Intruder Deletion Programs. I blinked as some sort of crippled approximation of a shadow tried to eat my mind and got chomped on in turn.

  And that was it. Suddenly, I was inside of their network and free to play.

  Sure, I’d need to do a lot more work to access important controls, files, and all that nonsense. Still didn’t stop me from tapping into the camera network. Soon, I could see the full glory of the many megabuilding floors the doctor had all to himself.

  All of them positively crawling with various defenses.

  It didn’t take me long to zero in on block A. Tapping into the cameras there was even faster. The second I had them in my sights, the many shadows in the room all froze, then turned in concert to look at the camera I was borrowing.

  I quickly disconnected. I didn’t want them to somehow give up the game before things were in motion. We’d be seeing each other again soon enough.

  Much more relevant were the two guards posted in front of the door to the room Amelia and I were currently in. Both were armed and wearing full body armor besides.

  “Got any weapons? More importantly, any clue how to use them?” I asked as I moved to the door.

  Glancing back at my partner in crime, I saw her shaking her head.

  “Not… really. No learning anything my father didn’t approve of, remember? Why the fuck do you think he’d let me learn how to become dangerous to him?”

  I shrugged. It was worth a shot. Besides, I didn’t miss the fact that she had hesitated before answering.

  “Just don’t scream or do something dumb like that, okay?”

  I received a few curses and insults for my totally justified worry, but it wasn’t hard to ignore her rudeness. Not when I was standing there, practically pressed against the door, eyes closed and forehead slowly getting covered in sweat. My eyes jerked about under their lids as one vision after another scrolled across them.

  Then I moved.

  The local cameras were left looping on the last few minutes of footage indefinitely. The door hissed as it began to retract into the wall, and the guard on the right turned to look in my direction.

  He was the problem. His partner was way too lazy to care, especially this deep into the facility.

  I couldn’t see the guard’s eyes with the helmet in the way. But that didn’t stop me from imagining how they might widen in shock at the sight of the scrawny street kid with some very odd eyes coming at him in a flimsy hospital gown.

  It was that shock that slowed him down just enough for me to jam my ridiculously sharp claws into him, right through the flimsy layer of protection where his jaw met his neck.

  The body armor had to be flexible there, not to impede his movement. That made it the best vulnerability point to go for. I didn’t know exactly how I knew that, but as my claws ripped through the man’s brain, I didn’t much care.

  I just spun away, leaving him to collapse on the ground, and turned my focus on his friend.

  My Clairvoyance was still running at full tilt, so I was assured of my success when I lashed out at another vulnerability point in the man’s armor, where his leg met his torso. Remorselessly, I stuck my claws into a place that assured he would never have kids.

  His aborted squeal and full-body spasm of pure agony let me tackle him to the ground. The clack of his helmeted head against the floor dazed him further. I cut away the straps of his helmet and dragged it off his head in a hurry.

  The man wasn’t really looking at me. He was pretty much passed out from the pain and head trauma. Still, his eyes seemed to be begging me for mercy.

  I slammed my hands down on his cheeks. Ignoring the flash of shame and horror, I leaned closer and let whispers best left unheard by mortal minds spill from my lips.