Scrap & Suture looked exactly the same as it always did. Rust and repair, ozone and hope, the accumulated debris of three decades in the salvage trade.

  Bodhi sat at his bench, but he wasn’t working. He was just staring at the holoscreen where last year’s Grind highlights played on a silent, bloody loop. He looked up as she entered, and his face did a complicated collapse, worry, anger, grief, before settling into a grim resignation.

  “Kid.” He said it like a diagnosis.

  “I need my locker.”

  He didn’t move. Just watched her cross the shop. She could feel his eyes on her back, measuring the new tension in her shoulders, the way she moved like someone expecting an ambush.

  “You sold the speeder,” he said.

  “And the cutter. And the anchors.” She popped the locker seal. The familiar gear inside, her backup suit, the zero-g toolkit, the good med-kit, looked like artifacts from someone else’s life.

  “How much did you get?”

  “Enough.” Not enough.

  “Beatrix.” He was standing now. “Look at me.”

  She turned. Met his gaze. Saw the fear in it, raw and undisguised.

  He pointed a trembling finger, his real one, at her. “Your pupils are dilated. You’ve got a micro-tremor in your left hand you’re trying to hide. That OMEGA Protocol is eating you alive, and you’re here to sell your socks to buy another hour.”

  “I’m here to buy a core. A military one. From a tinker named Kivi. It costs nineteen thousand.” She slung the toolkit into her pack. “I have seventeen.”

  “Two grand short.” He ran a hand over his face. “Okay. Okay, listen. Cerberus has a bounty out for a data-haul from the Boneyard. Twenty thousand, clean. I can get you the contract. It’s a three-day run, but…”

  “I have twenty-five hours, Bodhi.” She said it softly. A simple fact. “Not days. Hours.”

  The last of the hope drained from his face. His prosthetic hand, resting on the bench, began to shake. It was a violent, neurological tremor, old damage from his own time in the pits, a ghost of past violence haunting his present. He stared at it with naked hatred, his other hand clamping down on the wrist, trying to force it still through sheer will.

  It shook harder.

  The words tasted like ash. "You're showing me a ladder when I need a rocket."

  "It's , kid." His frustration cracked through, raw and desperate. "It doesn't end with you dead or owned by some clan."

  "It ends with Dante dead." She moved past him to the locker, started pulling out her stored gear. "Which makes it worthless."

  "Stop." He grabbed her shoulder, his prosthetic hand firm against her jacket. "Just stop and listen for one goddamn second."

  She stopped. Turned. Met his eyes.

  "I'm listening."

  "Not everything has to be solved with desperation." Bodhi's voice was quieter now, pleading. "You're smart. You're capable. You've got options if you just slow down and look at them."

  "I'm being realistic." Beatrix pulled free. "Your plans are perfect for someone who has time. I don't."

  "My plans keep you !"

  "Alive isn't enough if Dante's dead!"

  The words hung between them like a detonation. Bodhi's shoulders sagged, the fight draining out of him all at once. He looked older suddenly, worn down by years of watching people make terrible choices for noble reasons.

  "What's your plan then?" His voice was tired now. "Sell everything and hope?"

  "Sell everything and ." She grabbed the last item from the locker, a plasma torch she'd modified herself. "I'll find a way."

  "The Grind." It wasn't a question. "You're going to enter the Grind."

  Beatrix said nothing. She let the silence do the talking.

  Bodhi's prosthetic hand reached for her, trying to grab her arm, to shake some sense into her maybe. But the metal fingers started to tremble. That violent neurological glitch that hit when his emotions spiked, old damage from his own time in the fighting pits making itself known.

  The tremor got worse. He stared at his hand with something close to hatred, trying to still it through pure will. Failed.

  “Please,” he whispered, not to her, to the hand. To the universe. “Not the Grind. There has to be another…”

  "Stop." Beatrix watched his hand shake, watched him fight his own body and lose. "Just stop."

  Beatrix watched him fight his own body. The great Bodhi, who’d pulled her from a dozen wrecks, who’d stood between her and half the predators in Umbra-3, brought to trembling ruin by the memory of the cage.

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  "I'm trying to save you," he whispered.

  The words cut deeper than they should have. Because they were true. And because they didn't matter.

  "No," Beatrix said quietly. "You're trying to feel better about not being able to save me."

  Bodhi flinched like she'd struck him. His face crumpled for just a second before hardening into something resigned. Something defeated.

  "You're right." His voice was hollow. "I can't save you."

  He turned to the wall, couldn't look at her anymore. The prosthetic hung limp at his side.

  "I'm not strong enough to save you, kid."

  The confession landed with terrible finality. Simple truth without decoration. The mentor admitting he had nothing left to teach, no wisdom to impart, no path to offer except the one she was already on.

  No one is coming.

  Beatrix stood there with her pack full of equipment, surrounded by everything she'd built with Bodhi's help over six years. This shop had been a refuge. Safety. The closest thing to home she'd known since her mother died.

  Now it was just another place she was leaving behind.

  "Keep the locker," she said. "I won't need it anymore."

  She walked to the door. Bodhi didn't turn around. Didn't try to stop her. Just stood there staring at the wall, a broken man who'd finally admitted a truth they'd both been avoiding.

  At the threshold, she paused.

  "For what it's worth," she said, "you did save us. Me and Dante. For years. That has to count for something."

  "It doesn’t if you go to the Grind." His voice was barely audible.

  She didn't have an answer. The door sealed between them with a soft hiss, cutting off whatever else he might have said.

  The corridor outside was the same as always. Vendors calling their wares. People navigating the chaos. The station grinding on while lives broke apart in its hidden corners.

  Beatrix walked through it all, pack heavy on her shoulders, countdown burning in her vision.

  No one was coming to save her. Not Bodhi with his trembling hands and impossible plans. Not the system with its slow applications and careful procedures. Not even luck with its random kindnesses.

  She was alone in this. Truly alone. Fuck it.

  The route to Kivi's shop took her through Sector Four's maze of maintenance tunnels, but something was wrong before she even reached the entrance. Too many bodies in the corridor. Too much chrome and neon.

  Minos.

  > RISK ASSESSMENT COMPLETE: 22 HOSTILES

  > THREAT LEVEL 5 - EXTREME | OUTNUMBERED

  Well. That’s a problem.

  Twenty-two Minos goons clustered around the hidden entrance to Kivi's operation like antibodies around an infection. Some leaned against walls with studied casualness. Others checked weapons with the kind of focus that came before violence. All of them wore the spiral tattoos that marked them as family. As owned.

  She recognized faces from yesterday. Chrome Teeth, his jaw still swollen where she'd kicked him. Twitchy, nose bent at an angle that spoke of improper healing. Others she didn't know but could read in the way they moved, enhanced, augmented, dangerous.

  Beatrix stopped at the corner, enhanced hearing picking up fragments of conversation.

  "...been three hours. She's got to come out eventually."

  "Ariadne wants her . Make sure everyone knows."

  "What about the scav bitch if she shows?"

  Chrome Teeth's laugh was ugly. "Especially her."

  Beatrix's hand drifted to the Stygia Contract in her HUD. Still there. Still waiting. Still the only door she had left.

  She could walk away. Should walk away. Kivi was a contact, not a friend. A business arrangement that had already caused enough complications.

  But then she saw Kivi through the shop's reinforced window, trapped inside her own workplace, hair cycling through panicked colors. Saw Chrome Teeth raise a sledgehammer and slam it against the door, the impact reverberating through the corridor.

  They weren't really here for Kivi. They were here because Beatrix had humiliated their people. Because she'd shown that Minos could be beaten. Because in Umbra-3's hierarchy of violence, you didn't let disrespect slide without proving you could still hurt someone.

  And Kivi was convenient. Alone. Unprotected.

  The thought that had driven her to this point suddenly felt different. If no one was coming for her, maybe that meant she had to be the one who came for others.

  "Virgil," she said quietly. "Pull up clause three point seven. The immunity provision."

  "And team registration? When does that window close?"

  Beatrix stared at the twenty-two thugs surrounding Kivi's shop. Did the math. Weighed her options.

  She had none.

  "If I activate the contract now," she said, "and file Kivi as provisional team member, the immunity extends to her?"

  Twenty-two Minos enforcers. Fifty thousand coins per bounty. Do the math wrong, and Ariadne's soldiers would be killing each other for the payout before they ever touched her.

  "One more question. If I activate this, can I undo it?"

  A smile touched her lips, thin, bitter, and final. Unanimous consent from the wolves. So, never.

  "So it's permanent."

  She thought about Dante in his medical bed. About Bodhi's trembling prosthetic hand and his final admission:

  About Kivi, trapped and alone because Beatrix had tried to help.

  "Activate the contract."

  Her mother’s scarf was soft against her neck. “Confirmed.”

  The change was instant.

  The Stygia Contract exploded through her neural architecture like ice water in veins. She felt it rewriting base protocols, adding new imperatives, burning its terms into her bones. Legal code became physical reality, contract clauses etching themselves into her Humanware with the permanence of scars.

  Pain flared along her forearms as subcutaneous tattooing nanites activated, writing themselves into her skin from the inside out. Black lines formed in precise patterns, barcodes shifting and morphing as she watched, encoding her fighter designation, her contract terms, her new status in machine-readable format.

  The pain faded, leaving her arms marked with the kind of tattoos that money couldn't buy and removal couldn't hide. They went deeper than skin, encoded into her very cells. Permanent. Irrevocable.

  She'd just signed away her freedom for the promise of violence and money.

  "File it."

  Beatrix pulled her sleeves down, covering the fresh, angry ink. She took a breath that felt like her first real one in days. The air tasted different. Sharper. Like the ozone before a storm.

  She stepped out from behind the pipe and walked toward the twenty-two waiting men, her mother’s scarf a splash of defiant red against the station’s gray.

  No one was coming to save her.

  Good.

  She was done needing saving.