The Fixer looked at the shard on the table and said, “No.”
Not loud, or dramatic. Just tired.
He had been doing this too long to waste energy on urban legends. People brought him impossible things all the time. Dead passkeys. Corporate ghosts. Black-market wetware with something still twitching in it. Half-burned drives pulled from fires that “never happened.” Most of it ended up junk with a good backstory. The rest was trouble, usually more trouble than it was worth.
This looked like the second kind.
The Runner sat across from him with both hands tucked under the table, fidgety, like they had to hold back from snatching the shard and skulking back into the night.
They were young, maybe. Hard to tell anymore. Too many dives made people look worn in the wrong places. Gray basement skin. Monitor light and cheap stimulants. Ports climbed from under their collar to the back of their ear. Clean chrome, bad skin. Red at the edges. Picked at. Healed badly.
Outside, Riverside showed through the dirty window in pieces. Wet street. Loading dock light. The red blink of a tower crane past the glass and steel.
The windows had been covered with foil and cardboard, and a blanket that smelled like lubricant and shit.
The dark room had a faint glow to it. Indicator lights. Map lamps. No screens, though. Server racks leaned open along the wall, panels removed, guts exposed. Cables crossed the floor in bundles. The air was warm with dust, solder, old plastic, cigarettes, and ozone.
Under the grime, the walls were plastered with maps and technical readouts. City utility grids. Old fiber layouts. Maintenance tunnels. River crossings. Emergency routes through roads that were no longer there. Whole blocks scratched out in black marker until the paper buckled. Notes in different hands. Warnings. Dead access points. Esoteric ramblings and gang scribbles.
The shard sat in the middle of all of this, on an old metal table. Thumbnail sized. Black. Glassy. Cracked straight down the center. It looked like the crack had gone outward. Like something pushed out from inside.
“Say it again.”
The Runner swallowed.
“It’s from beyond the Wall.”
“Beyond the Wall, my ass.”
“I don’t mean I went through,” The Runner said. Their voice had a slight tremble.
“There’s no past the Wall,” The Fixer said. “There’s bad routing, dead zones, old military traps, archive rot, deep junk. Plenty to kill yourself with. But there’s no past it.”
“It came through. Or something did, and left this.”
The way they said it caught The Fixer off guard. No wonder in it. No brag. Just a little shame, the kind people had when they had opened a door for somebody they should have left outside.
“What, like some daemon?”
The Runner shook their head.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know, but you brought it to me.”
“I brought the piece that broke off.”
“From what?”
Their eyes flicked to the maps on the wall.
“From the place it was pushing through.”
The room seemed to get smaller around the sentence.
A train passed overhead. The floor trembled. Pipes rattled in the ceiling.
When it was quiet again, The Fixer said, “Run it.”
The Runner’s face changed.
“No.”
“You carried it into my shop.”
“I wanted you to tell me what it was.”
“I’m not a priest. I don’t read omens, kid. If you want answers, run it.”
The Runner reached into their coat and took out a reader. Old model. Heavy. No broadcast chip. No handshake. One of the few kinds of machines that could still be trusted because it was too dumb to do anything else.
They set it beside the shard.
The Runner picked it up.
Their hand shook.
The shard slid into the reader with a tiny click.
A thin line of text crawled across the display, broke apart, came back as nonsense, then flattened into white.
The reader began to hum.
Not loud, but it got into the table, the chair legs, the fillings in The Fixer’s teeth. The servers along the wall changed pitch, almost answering it.
The Runner whispered, “Turn it off.”
The Fixer did not touch it.
Then something moved behind the white.
Not an image. Not exactly. More like depth where there should not have been depth, as if the screen had become a hole covered in milk.
A sound came from the shard.
Almost a whisper.
Not from the reader. From the crack itself.
Calico.
The Fixer stood so fast the chair tipped over behind him.
The Runner shoved back from the table and hit the shelves. Tools rattled. A jar of screws burst across the floor.
The reader sat there.
White screen.
Soft hum.
“Nobody knows that name,” The Fixer said.
Then louder.
“Nobody knows that fucking name! No one alive anyway.”
The Runner saw his face and knew.
“I didn’t tell it that.”
The white on the display thickened.
The Fixer reached for a nearby hammer.
“That won’t help,” The Runner said.
“Shut up.”
“It’s not in there.”
The Runner’s voice dropped.
“It’s using the reader.”
The white line narrowed.
Sharpened.
Like an incision.
The Fixer stood there with the hammer in his hand.
Then he lowered it.
“Nope.”
“You’re not gonna smash it?”
“That... thing, just whispered the name of a ghost to me from inside a broken piece of glass. You think I’m gonna hit it with a hammer and see if it gets mad?”
The Fixer grabbed a hard case from under the table. Old military plastic. Copper lining. He dumped out dead batteries, wire caps, loose screws, and a blackened Saint’s medal with the face scraped smooth.
“You’ve done this before?” The Runner asked.
“I’ve put stupid things in boxes before.”
The Fixer wrapped the reader in old static cloth and snapped the case shut.
The hum dropped.
Not gone. Lower.
Like something had put a hand over its own mouth.
He picked it up.
An unexpected weight to the box.
“Come on.”
“Where?”
“The Tech.”
They left fast.
As they reached the end of the hallway, the door before them gave way with a click, its lock seeming to disengage on its own.
Then another click, this time from the opposite end of the hallway.
An angry little red dot indicated it was now locked.
Then another click.
Another door.
Then another.
Then another.
The Fixer said, “Move.”
Outside, Riverside had gotten wetter. The Fixer’s car sat crooked under a loading dock awning, old enough to have survived several owners and ugly enough no one bothered stealing it.
The Runner got in with the case between their boots.
The Fixer turned the key.
The engine coughed. Caught. Died.
He tried again.
Nothing.
The case hummed.
The dash lit up.
Every light at once. Warnings for systems the car did not have anymore. The radio clicked on, hissed, and spoke with no station behind it.
Not words, but something like words.
The Fixer took his hand off the key.
The engine started by itself.
Under the radio hiss came a woman humming.
The Fixer punched the power button.
The radio stayed on, its display shattered.
The humming stayed with it.
“Just fucking drive, man,” The Runner rattled.
The Fixer almost jumped out of the car, seemingly unaware that The Runner was sitting in the seat beside him.
“Yeah...”
“Fuck, yeah, right.”
Coming out of whatever temporary fugue state had taken hold of him, The Fixer drove fast into the flickering lights and the hot wet darkness.
The Tech lived three floors up inside a parking ramp that should have been condemned, bricked, and forgotten long ago.
The door sat crooked in its frame, painted over in mirrored black.
It did not reflect them.
The Fixer knocked once.
Hard.
The door dragged open with a mechanical whir.
Heat rolled out first.
Then noise.
Fans grinding. Processors whining. Something deeper under it all, slow and wet and mechanical, like a machine dying in its sleep.
Inside was chaos. Screens stacked along the walls, open racks humming, cable nests crossing the floor and climbing the walls. The air was damp and saturated with overheated circuitry, old sweat, and hot metal.
Shank sat in the middle of it, welding something directly into his own thigh. His repurposed military AV captain’s chair sat under a VR halo like an illuminated throne.
He didn’t look up.
“You bringing junk or meat?”
“Both.”
Shank killed the torch and lifted the halo.
He saw The Runner first.
Then the case.
Then The Fixer.
“No.”
“That’s what I said.”
“I mean get that out.”
“It’s legit.”
Shank’s face changed. Not much. Enough.
“Legit, legit?”
The Fixer set the case on a workbench.
Shank opened it.
The hum came out with the smell.
Ozone.
Salt.
Sulfur?
Then, for half a second, flowers.
The Fixer took a step back before he meant to.
“Yeah,” The Fixer said. “Legit, legit.”
The reader sat inside, wrapped in static cloth. The white line still cut across the display. Thin. Patient.
Shank leaned in.
The line leaned back.
He stopped smiling.
“Okay.”
The Runner swallowed.
“What?”
“I think it just noticed me.”
The rig sat further back, bolted together out of more old military hardware, scavenged medical equipment, and things The Fixer had never wanted explained. A crash chair reinforced with scrap-metal plating. Cooling coils looped around the headrest. Cables hung in clusters. Filters patched with tape, wire, glass beads, little charms, anything that might help.
The Runner stared at it.
“You got a name for this, uh, rig?”
“The Plunge,” Shank said.
The Runner laughed once, muttering under their breath.
“That’s not ominous or anything.”
“Better than its first name.”
“What was its first name?”
“The Final Fuckup. Now sit down.”
“Me?”
The Runner shot a look to Shank.
“Hell no. What the fuck, hell no.”
The Fixer’s grip tightened around the gun tucked into his waist.
“What did you think this was, kid? You wanna know what’s on that shard, you’re gonna have to see for yourself.”
The Fixer’s gun was now aimed at The Runner.
Shank’s teeth were showing again.
“I didn’t ask, lil’ runner. Get in the chair.”
The Runner sat.
Shank moved fast. Cables into the ports along their neck. One by one. Fast and clean, if a little rough. Bedside manner was out the window.
“Don’t fight it once you’re in,” Shank said.
“What happens if I fight it?”
“You’ll burn.”
The case on the bench clicked.
The latch opened.
The crack in the shard widened.
The display went white.
Shank whispered, “Oh, you rude little fuck.”
Then he flipped the switch.
White hit The Runner all at once.
They vanished into it.
Not physically. Not at first. Their body stayed in the chair, back arched, eyes open and empty. But whatever had been looking out through them went somewhere else.
The room shook.
Every screen turned white.
Shank watched numbers crawl across a monitor.
“That can’t be right.”
“What?” The Fixer asked.
“It’s not outputting.”
“Speak normal,” The Fixer barked.
“It’s the shard. It’s using the rig to access my systems. Whatever is in there is using it to probe us.”
The Runner’s mouth opened. Eyes wide, back arching so deep The Fixer was sure it was about to snap.
A primal scream ripped out of The Runner.
Then their voice came out small.
Us.
Then deeper.
A strained wheeze, almost a level of distortion biting the edges.
Becoming...
The Runner fell flat into the chair, their eyes closing.
Inside the dive, there was no distance. No floor. No horizon. Just packed white pressure and the feeling of something leaning close from the other side, like invisible waves ebbing and flowing around The Runner.
The Runner tried to pull back.
There was nowhere to pull back to.
A thought moved through them.
Not words exactly.
More like understanding.
I reached in.
You followed.
Now I follow.
In the chair, The Runner’s mouth opened once more, as if to scream again.
A rapid breath was all that escaped.
Shank appeared to have four arms as he tried to make sense of the data being output.
Then the room filled with a scream. It came out layered. Their voice, then something under it, then something under that.
Shank whirled, seeing the readouts.
“Shit, we gotta pull it. They’re gonna be fried goo.”
He reached for the cutoff.
The switch snapped before he touched it.
The shard lifted out of the reader.
The crack opened.
A white line appeared in the air above the rig.
The Fixer pushed off the rack.
“Shank.”
“I see it.”
“Close it.”
“I see it.”
Shank grabbed something from the table. A fist-sized coil of blackened copper and rubber tape.
He slammed it into the rig.
The thing screamed. The lights dipped. The white cut buckled in the air, like something had shoved a thumb into it from this side.
For one second, it looked like the room might hold.
Then The Runner turned their head.
Not smooth.
As if someone were pulling the string of a puppet.
Like something still unaware of the limits of their body.
They looked at Shank.
Eyes now deep pools of inky blackness.
Shank froze.
With a hiss-crack in the air, something black ran through the cables and into his hands.
It climbed under his skin in thin branching lines.
The Fixer grabbed him.
Bad idea.
The moment his hand touched Shank’s shoulder, his whole world went formless white.
Then he saw his mother’s kitchen.
Yellow light.
Dirty snow outside the window.
A cat on the counter where it was not supposed to be.
His mother laughing from the other room.
Then her voice, close to his ear.
The laughter distorted, now bellowing out of The Runner.
The Fixer tore his hand away.
Shank hit the floor.
Then his shadow moved without him, peeling up from under his body and climbing the wall, long and jointed.
Shank saw it and made a sound The Fixer never wanted to hear again.
The Runner slowly lifted out of the rig.
The cables tore free from their ports.
Some took the ports with them, spraying blood into a mist that illuminated with the glow of screens around them.
White light showed under the skin, tracing The Runner’s chrome as it started being separated from them.
When they spoke, it used their throat badly.
So much meat in the way.
The Fixer backed toward the door.
The door was already gone.
Where it had been was a white vertical cut, taller than the room should allow. On the other side was not hallway, not light, not anything. It was depth without color. Nothing. A void.
A place with many things waiting quietly.
Hungry.
The Runner’s body jerked upright.
Now they stood floating a few inches from the floor.
For half a second they came back.
Their eyes, now the same bright green optics they had been before, found The Fixer.
“Help me.”
Then the thing behind them pulled through, and laughter filled the room once more.
The Runner’s eyes once again filled with an inky darkness.
The light became an absence of light, a neon blackness that seemed to be eating the light in the room around them.
Lines crept across their entire body. Cybernetics fell out of them, seeming to melt into dark pools.
The Runner opened from the inside.
Not blood.
Space.
Empty space.
Their ribs moved like parts of a machine. Their skin split along lines that made no sense. The ports down their neck opened wide, each one pouring a thread of black nothingness into the room. The rig buckled. Screens burst. The cable nests lifted from the floor.
Shank dragged himself backward, one arm useless.
“No, no, no.”
The Fixer reached for him again.
Too late.
A hand came through the cut of inky void filling the room.
Long. Pale. Jointed wrong. Made of pressure more than flesh.
It touched Shank’s chest.
He stopped.
His body folded inward around the touch and came apart in neat pieces. Meat, metal, memory. Sorted faster than gravity could take him.
The Fixer could not move.
The hand turned toward him.
His mother hummed behind him.
The Fixer closed his eyes.
“Fuck you,” he said.
The Fixer moved to raise the gun to his own head.
He got it halfway up before something reached out of the dark and closed around his wrist.
Gentle.
Almost kind.
The gun slipped from his hand.
The Fixer went limp, sobbing.
There was no pain.
That was the worst of it.
The room fell away in layers. Machines first. Then walls. Then the parking structure. The Cities above it, lit from underneath by wires, towers, rails, cameras, everything connected to everything else.
The thing stepped through.
Fully.
The Runner’s body could not hold it, so the body became a doorway.
The empty cut widened.
The room bent around what entered.
The screens stabilized.
Every one of them showed the same thing.
HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED```