3. Fragile alliance.

"Let's have a chat," Val beckoned Lola into her studio. 

Lola leaned against shelves crammed with tattoo ink jars, arms crossed. 

"You're not actually considering his offer, are you? I don't trust a single word out of that Wang Corp mutt."

Lola stayed silent. Val jabbed a finger at the roll of protective film on the table, scowling. 

"That guilt complex of yours is gonna get you trapped, buddy. The second someone mentions the Glassed, your survival instinct flies out the window."

"What if there's something useful in there? What if Lira-V is another prototype? A functional one," Lola's voice was hollow. 

"Oh, for fuck's sake, Lola! Stop trying to fix everything!" Val snapped, crumpling a sketch under her fist.

"Noah's doing monstrous shit, but in his twisted mind, it's for the 'greater good.' Hell, he refined and released Anpassen 2.0."

"Yeah, and now it costs a fortune in credits," Val shot back, hurling the wadded paper into the trash. "Listen, buddy! It's not your fault the prototype was flawed," she shook her head, conceding defeat in the battle for common sense. 

Lola exhaled sharply. 

"But what if it is his sister? What if she's alive?... Val, can you crack the files?"

"I'll try," Val sighed, recognizing the stubborn set of Lola's jaw. "But if that glitch-riddled asshole tries anything, I'll brick his hardware before he can blink."

Lola smirked. "Wouldn't expect anything less."

Back in the main room, Val snatched the data chip and marched to her workstation, shooting Zeno a death glare. He just grinned wider. As Val rebooted her fried systems (courtesy of Lola's shower meltdown), Lola decided to salvage Val's abandoned French toast project. She dunked bread slices into the dubious egg-milk slurry, then slapped them onto the griddle. Zeno hovered, eyeing the concoction skeptically. 

"Is that even edible?"

"Wasn't offering you any," Lola snapped. "Though we could use you as a taste tester."

"Hard pass." He paused, nodding at the fresh burns on Lola's fingers. "Is it always like that?"

Lola flexed her hand, then tucked it under the counter, self-conscious.

"Frying yourself?"

It wasn't a question. Zeno knew exactly what it was like—flogging yourself for mistakes you could never undo. Lola didn't answer, turning back to the stove instead. 

Val finally wrestled her systems back online and dove into decrypting the files, humming an aimless tune under her breath as her eyes flicked between monitors. Different hacking programs ran in parallel, their results flashing across the screens while Val reviewed them and restarted cycles with practiced ease. 

Lola finished the first batch of toast. The smell was surprisingly decent. She arranged the slices on plates, dusted them generously with cinnamon, then slid one in front of Val's workstation and shoved the other toward Zeno. 

"How long do you plan on abusing our hospitality?" 

"Kicking me out already?" Zeno speared a piece with his fork, popped it into his mouth, and less than impressed he cracked open a cherry cider to wash the chemical aftertaste from his receptors. 

"Let's start with the fact nobody invited you." 

"I'll wait until Val finishes decrypting." 

"That could take hours. Or days. You planning to squat here the whole time or what?" 

Zeno shrugged. 

"Anything's possible." 

"Don't expect more free meals." 

"Probably wise. I'd like to keep my guts intact."

Lola snorted in displeasure but swallowed back the remark on the tip of her tongue. She took a bite of the toast and spat it out faster than her body could initiate emergency stomach evacuation protocols.

"Val! Don't you dare eat this!" 

Lola swiftly gathered the plates from the table and dumped their contents into the recycler along with the remaining egg-milk mixture. 

"Ugh! Only machine lubricant tastes worse," Lola muttered, washing down the failed culinary experiment with a gulp of water. "So," she continued, trying to fill the sudden silence, "who patched up your hardware after our last encounter?" 

"The guys you called fried me good before dumping me at Wang BioTech's lab. So," Zeno spread his hands, "your dear old friends are footing the bill for my toys now." 

"You'll sell me out at the first opportunity, won't you? You're theirs, body and wiring." 

"My word of honor! As long as you're useful," he shot a glance at Val, who leveled a threatening glare at him, "I won't lay a finger on you." 

"Don't even think about it, Voss," Val chimed in. "I'll rewrite your firmware so thoroughly you'll be crawling to the lab on your teeth. No corporate egghead will be able to fix you without a full system replacement. Doubt you're rich enough or that your employers care enough to foot that bill." 

"And why's that?" Zeno spun in his chair to face Val properly. "Think they won't bother fixing me? I'm magnificent." 

"Wang fixing you?" Val barked a laugh. "They'd rather drop a new model on you. It's cheaper that way. Your implants are from an outdated series they don't even manufacture or properly service anymore. Doesn't exactly scream 'valued asset,' does it?"

Zeno flashed a haughty grin.

"Maybe they're from an old series, but at least they're not that cheap Veira or Kór crap. Wang means quality. And back in the day, quality was even better."

"Keep believing those marketing slogans."

Val flipped him off and returned to work. She'd accessed the archives. Thats where came the real challenge of decrypting the files themselves. A low whistle escaped her when she saw the encryption protocols.

"Who sold you this?"

"Doesn't matter. What's the verdict?"

"Fucking paranoids," Val muttered, reaching for a neural interface cable. "Triple-layer encryption with traps."

She fed the system a forged Wang Corp certificate she'd generated weeks prior during a server breach attempt. The system swallowed the bait but then immediately demanded central node authentication. Val cursed colorfully and killed the connection, yanking the cable before countermeasures could deploy. These kinds of traps often carried neurotoxic code capable of frying implant processors. Zeno waited for an explanation, brow furrowed. Val's fingers flew across the keyboard.

"Gotta find another way around their auth protocols."

"How long?"

"Wanna help? Brew some coffee."

Val dismissed Zeno with a wave and donned noise-canceling headphones. Zeno noticed Lola fidgeting with objects on the kitchen counter.

"Why so jumpy?"

"And why aren't you? When Wang brothers are involved, nothing good ever follows."

"They're not that scary," Zeno tilted his head, studying Lola. "Why'd you run from him, Sparkles? Heard the younger Wang was downright obsessed with you."

Lola bristled instantly and Zeno knew he'd struck a nerve.

"Save the sob stories for drunk nights."

"C'mon! I live for juicy gossip."

Lola crossed her arms leaning against the countertop.

"Then you start. What happened to your sister?"

Zeno's eyes narrowed slightly as he weighed how much to reveal.

"Cleansing squad took her," he finally said.

"Cleansing? Those were outlawed."

"Corps still cull non-payers," Zeno tapped his soda can against the table. "Just rebrand it as 'urban renewal' or 'plague control' now. Bought-and-paid-for government happily looks the other way. How convenient – fewer mouths demanding subsidies."

"So you're from Lower Polza?" Lola masked her sympathy with sarcasm. "Thought your ass was from the elite districts or at least Kaimo."

The cleansing operations mainly targeted the poorest, most polluted sector of the city – where industrial conglomerates could easily stage "charitable relocations" of the destitute to "better accommodations." The public never needed to know those accommodations were morgues and organ harvest centers. 

"Oh, I'm flattered, sweetcheeks," Zeno chuckled good-naturedly. 

"How'd you avoid getting scooped up?" 

Zeno hesitated. 

"I ran like a coward," he said simply, eyes locked on Lola. 

"You left your sister behind?" 

"I left my sister behind," he confirmed with a nod. 

"Did you even try to find her?" 

Lola turned toward the autobrewer, avoiding his gaze. She feigned intense interest in the coffee-making process, though years with Noah had taught her that not all debt collections ended in death. The destitute were often harvested for parts, but the young, strong, and healthy... They became lab rats.

"Hey, what do you know?" Zeno leaned forward across the table, his voice tense. "The ones they take get chopped up and sold off for parts." 

"Don't get your hopes up, but…" 

"But what?" 

"If your sister had good stats, she might've been a test subject," Lola said darkly. "But they don't last long." 

"You survived." His reply came out harsher than he intended. "Her ghost is in the system. I hear her voice. Either she's alive, or those sick bastards are using her digital echo." 

Lola glanced at him despite herself. Zeno's pale green eyes remained fixed on her, drilling into her like she was the one who'd taken his sister. A faint tic and glitch in his implant made his right eye twitch slightly. 

"How'd you get Wang implants? Doubt you could afford them." 

Now it was Zeno who blinked and looked away. 

"What about you?" 

"Maybe I'm rich," Lola smirked. 

"Yeah, sure, sweetcheeks," Zeno laughed again. "And I'm the crown prince of Acropolis. You're from the same gutter as me." 

"Not quite the same gutter." Lola paused, then sighed heavily. "Noah found me when I was drowning in debt, barely keeping my head above water. He helped me climb out. Erm... without selling myself." 

Zeno tapped his temple to stop the tic. 

"Bought out your debts?" 

Lola's defenses slammed back up. 

"Gave me a way to earn enough to pay them off." 

"In his nice warm bed?" 

"Fuck you, Voss!"

Lola pulled the finished coffee from the machine. The brew smelled like burnt wood and faintly of fuel. She carried it over to Val. Some of the liquid sloshed onto the scratched table surface as she set the cup down with too much force. She wiped the spill away with her hand and quickly disappeared through the door leading to the building's roof. The cleaning robot dutifully crawled over to mop up the droplets from the floor. 

"Well, you're a real piece of work," Val remarked, pulling off her headphones. 

"Wasn't expecting her to be so touchy," Zeno shrugged. 

Val propped a foot up on her chair, settling in more comfortably as she took a sip of coffee. 

"You got a death wish or something?" 

"I'm better prepared for her electric tantrums now," Zeno replied, stretching out on the couch and flashing her a wink. 

"Wang splurged on charge absorbers for you?" Val raised an eyebrow, tossing her dreads back. After a pause, she added with a sharp grin, "But you should worry less about her. Piss Lola off, and you'll learn what real network fury feels like." 

Zeno considered her words. Making an enemy of a hacker with Val's connections – someone with that many allies and that much influence in the underground – would be a spectacularly bad idea. He needed Val for decryption. He needed Lola in case the decrypted files tied her to Lira-V, which they probably would. And he definitely needed her to fulfill Jack Wang's assignment. That bastard never missed a chance to yank his leash "I gave you a new body, Voss." 

But for now, he had to play the good cop. Or at least, the tolerable bounty hunter. 

Absentmindedly, he pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, barely registering the motion. 

"Hey!" Val snapped. "Take that outside. No smoking in here."

Zeno rolled his eyes, let out an exaggerated sigh, and trudged toward the door. The day had already settled into a haze of heat, the air thick with the smell of artificial spices, gasoline, and scorched asphalt. The lingering dampness from last night's rain clung to everything like a sweaty second skin. He leaned against his motorcycle, lit a cigarette, and exhaled a cloud of acrid smoke, mentally calculating how much time he had left. 

Movement on the rooftop caught his attention. His implant auto-focused on the distant figure of Lola, perched near the edge, hunched over something in her hands. The hot wind tugged at the collar of her robe and loose strands of hair that had escaped her messy updo. Zeno looked away, stubbed out the half-finished cigarette, and headed back inside, deliberately shoving aside any moral unease about what he was doing. 

The intercom chirped as the lock disengaged. He shouldered the door open and flopped back onto the couch. 

"Any progress?" 

Val was deep in the code, monitoring synchronization windows for the brief gaps created by server switches. Her program bombarded the system with requests, trying to reroute authentication to a spoofed server. 

"Got it!" Val slapped the desk. "Now let's see what you're hiding." 

Zeno dragged a chair over and sat beside her, eyes fixed on the screen. The archive contained hundreds of files like operation logs, project blueprints, schematics, data tables. Val scrolled through them with a frown, running them through a neural net to categorize their contents and hunt for any mention of Lira-V. Nothing. The closest match was a series of files labeled SL-01. 

"Looks like a decoy," Val said with disappointment, leaning back in her chair.

"Keep digging. What's this 'crucible'?" Zeno tapped a folder on the screen, which bloomed open like a digital flower, revealing more files.

"Crucible?" Lola's voice came from behind them.

She stepped closer. Zeno caught a faint whiff of ozone. In her hands was a paper book – another relic from the past. Fresh burn marks lined her fingers.

"You know what this is?" Val glanced over her shoulder at her friend.

A cryptic phrase Noah had once thrown at her surfaced in Lola's memory: "In the crucible, I will forge an angel." She moved closer to the monitor and zoomed in on the device schematic.

"I was supposed to be the one to end up inside that thing."

"What?" Val's eyebrows shot up while her lips twisted in disgust. Her fingers flew over the keyboard again, analyzing and decrypting the crucible data. "What the fuck is this? Artificial circulatory pump, oxygenation membranes for lungs, neural stabilizers, cooling system, electromagnetic restraints, motion blockers... What kind of sick shit is this?! The power consumption alone could run a whole city! Is this a torture device? A resuscitation pod?"

Lola shook her head. She didn't know what it was, but she knew one thing for sure – she never wanted to end up inside it.

"Any specifics? Where is it?" Zeno swiped through other files on the screen, but they contained only fragmented research data and calculations.

"Hold on," Val ran a search for the crucible. The results were sparse, as if whoever compiled these files had deliberately scrubbed the critical details. "Voss, I think this is bait."

Lola reached past Zeno toward the screen, the ozone scent around her stronger now, tinged with something sweet. She tapped a file labeled Subjects, and a report flashed up:

Subject L-01.

Code 2804. 

Rejection rate 0.08.

Blood type B.

IFGR-1 gene mutation – suppresses macrophage response, blocks interleukin production.

Recommended treatment: Immunomodulators. Nanobots.

Crucible compatibility: 87%.

Subject P-04.

Code 3008.

Rejection rate 0.34.

Blood type B. 

IFGR-1 gene mutation – absent.

Recommended treatment: Anpassen 2.0. 

Crucible compatibility: 65%. 

Subject L-02.

Code 1307.

Rejection rate 0.16.

Blood type AB. 

IFGR-1 gene mutation – absent.

Recommended treatment: Anpassen 2.0. 

Crucible compatibility: 82%.

The list went on. Lola scrolled further down the list. There were about two dozen subjects in total. 

"That's me," she pointed to the first entry. "Didn't realize they tested so many for compatibility…" 

Zeno dragged his finger down to L-02. 

"Is this really…? What were they planning?" 

Lola shook her head. 

"I got out before I could learn the details first-hand. Thankfully…" 

Val combed through the files again, searching for names or anything more concrete than codes and numbers. Finally, they stumbled upon a redacted excerpt from a report with no names, but a mention of a unit called Pit assigned to sanitize an object codenamed Cradle 1. 

"Pit," Val turned to Lola. "Isn't Rourke Slade part of that?" 

Lola nodded slowly. In the streets of Lower Polza, Slade's name only came up in whispers about underground fight clubs. He ran an illegal ring by the same name in the district's bleakest corner, right next to the Drip, which was the city's old sewer system, long abandoned by the government after it became too toxic and expensive to maintain. Slade organized fights and had a reputation for never letting a debt go unpaid; his enforcers were notoriously brutal when collecting. On the flip side, any fighter could earn quick cash provided they were willing to bleed in the ring and survive long enough to collect. 

By sheer luck, Slade owed Lola a favor. Back when she still had access to Wang Biotech's labs, she'd smuggled him the latest version of Stone Skin – a nanobot weave that reinforced burned tissue with an adaptive armor layer – in exchange for protection in Lower Polza. After a botched military op left Slade with third-degree burns over ninety percent of his body, so the nanobot tech that coated burns with a protective layer and adjusted density on demand had proven to be markably convenient and a literal lifesaver. 

"Time to visit the old neighborhood, Voss," Lola clapped Zeno on the shoulder.