Den gripped the railing as he hopped over, clenching it in his shaking hands as hard as he could. It was slippery and cold, slick from the miserable rain that had been pouring for cycles. His muscles ached and screamed in complaint, but the surge of adrenaline and the buzzing of Enforcement drones drowned them out. Three cycles without sleep and his movements were getting sloppy. Just four more blocks to the safe house.
His foot hit the soaked pavement at a bad angle and slipped out under him. The buildings on either side of the narrow alley fell from view as the dome above rushed to replace them. His back collided with the ground, forcing out the frigid air from his strained lungs. The rain continued pouring down from the simulated dark-gray clouds of the dome, unceasing and uncaring. He decided then that he had earned a moment of reflection as he caught his breath and the pain surged through his body. He thought back to when he would fondly watch the rain from his spacious apartment balcony. It was calming after a long cycle at the office. He loved to sip his drink and watch the people below go about their lives, skittering through the labyrinth of the city. He would think about writing – some sad little tale about some sad little place far away – but he never did find the energy for it. Sometimes it felt like just a few cycles ago, other times it felt like a different person living a different life.
The drones grew louder as they turned onto the street behind him. Their constant, monotonous buzzing had been echoing through his thoughts since he crossed the zone 11 border. Enforcement was not supposed to be there – it was always a straight shot once he got into zone 7 – but the three straight cycles of running and hiding proved otherwise. He briefly cradled the sling bag on his chest, feeling the outlines of the cubic metal container within. It was warm to the touch and gently vibrating; he always found the sensation oddly comforting.
Mustering his last reserves of energy and willpower, Den jumped to his feet and took off to a sprint down the alley. The final stretch had enough twist and turns to lose most drones with a decent head start. When he saw them at the border, he knew that these were newer models shipped in from one of the inner zones. Enforcement never bothered this much for small-time essence runners. Not before, at least.
Another two sharp turns, one after the other, his legs growing numb and his mind blank. The corners of his vision started to fade, the grimy walls of the alley slipping into darkness. Almost there – so close – and then he could rest. For now. This is what his life had come to.
He skidded to a stop at an unmarked door and ripped it open. It slammed shut behind him after he flew through, the clanging of metal ringing in the dilapidated stairwell. Down, down, down, doors and hallways passing by in a blur as he focused his remaining faculties on not tripping upon the poorly-lit steps. Relying on his muscle memory alone, he turned into one of the nondescript hallways. The lights overhead barely functioned, dimly illuminating dirty walls coated with water damage and graffiti. All the way to the end, a hard right, then four doors to left. An ancient code lock above the knob chirped at his touch; the buildings this far out in the zone had never bothered to upgrade to chip readers. Den fumbled with the pad, failing twice with his trembling fingers before it yielded and the door opened.
Inside was a filthy room, a far cry from upscale zone 4 apartment he once knew. It had been cleared out to leave only the bare essentials for its purpose as a safe house: a rusted fridge filled with potent stims, a med kit for runs gone wrong, and a ripped-up couch in the corner. He knew he needed all of them, but for now he settled on the couch.
Hours crawled by as he recovered his senses. The distant wailing of sirens came and went from the streets far above, but the hallway remained silent. He had positioned himself facing the door so he could stare at the knob. Being sedated and dragged out of a disgusting apartment was not the legacy he had envisioned, but he would meet it with some shred of dignity.
The knob shook and rattled to life as the door swung open. Den tensed every exhausted muscle in his body for a moment until a familiar tattered trench coat poked through the doorway. He rested his head back on the ratty pillow, preparing to be chewed out as Alric stormed into the apartment.
“Seriously Den? Seriously? The heat you brought back from that zone 12 gig wasn’t enough for ya? Am I not giving you enough attention? Sad, lonely little diva aren’t ya.”
Alric fumbled with the lock as he rushed to get the door closed behind him. He had always been a nervous wreck for as long as Den had known him. That temperament would have gotten him eaten alive in a zone 4 board room, but here it kept him out of an Enforcement holding cell.
“You can’t worry so much,” Den said, his speech slurred from the adrenaline crash. “One of these cycles you’ll have to let me take you to the dark den by my place. There’s this one dancer there…”
The lock clicked into place as Alric stormed over to look down at Den. Dark circles hung underneath his sunken eyes, and not a single hair remained on his head. The other runners who Alric managed often joked that he had never experienced a wink of sleep in his life, too busy running a drug ring from his nursery. Den did not put it past him; the man had a natural talent for it.
“Not interested,” Alric said flatly. “You’re gonna take that cover fee and spend it on the case of inhibs I’m going to need to live through your shit. I mean really Den, how’d you screw this one up so badly to get ‘forcers sniffing this deep in the zone?”
Den laughed and nodded towards the sling bag in the corner. When both of them had stopped talking, he could hear the gentle hum from across the room. “I didn’t screw up, exact opposite actually. They’re here because I did my job really, really well.”
Alric scoffed and turned to fetch the bag. He always acted like Den was a miserable failure, but the steady increase in jobs spoke otherwise. That was just how things worked; the moment you revealed your hand, you were out.
“This had better be good,” Alric muttered as he fussed bent over and fussed with the bag. “We’re gonna have to lay low, all of us, at least for a couple of cycles because of this. If this haul ain’t-”
He stopped after opening the zipper, hunched over in the corner and motionless. The humming had grown louder, and from this angle Den could see the beams of grayish light dancing across the splotched walls.
“What the fuck is this?”
Den had never heard that tone from Alric in all the time they had worked together. In a good mood he was biting and sarcastic, in a bad mood he lashed out in paranoia. Now, he sounded deeply terrified.
“It was supposed to be a surprise,” Den tried to say nonchalantly. “I know you’ve been eyeing those new shipments coming in from outside. Talked to a few folks I used to do business with, heard that the pipeline from A6 was about to be switched on. Everyone involved has been tight-lipped about that site, but rumor has it the essence pumping out is more potent than anything we’ve seen. Figured I’d get us a dip of the first batch, that has to go for premium right?”
Alric unceremoniously dropped the bag to the floor, the metal container inside clanging loudly as he fished through the pockets of his coat. “Fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck,” he rattled off as he furiously searched for something. “You really messed this one up Den. Really bad. I fish you out of an alley, fallen from grace and not a credit to your name, and all you have to do is what I tell you. But no, you just have to crawl back up, no way you can spend the rest of your life down here in the muck and piss.”
“Alric, what are you on about?” Den had sat up, his scattered thoughts being forced back together. Something was wrong.
Waving his hand dismissively, Alric pulled out a tiny one-side peripheral and brought it up to his ear. Den had never seen him with one, the man was too scared of being tracked. His jittery fingers struggled to fit it on, and he obsessively tapped his foot as he waited for it to boot up.
“…Yeah, it’s Alric,” he stuttered into the peripheral. “Yes…yes that’s right. Why do you think I called? …Of course I know that you know. You know everything…yes, I told him. A hundred times. Listen…just please, listen. You don’t have to send them, I’ll handle it. You know I can handle it. Please just-”
His words were drowned out by a booming crack as the door flew off its hinges and shot across the room. Den scrambled to his feet, his adrenaline kicking into overdrive as the splinters settled to the floor. He had experienced plenty of run-ins with Enforcement in his new line of work, but this was his first time facing down a Compliance officer. He had only seen them a few times – from a generous distance – and only when they were cleaning up after the worst messes for the Consortium. The person standing in the doorway looked exactly like the other officers he had seen: completely covered from head to toe without an inch of skin or humanity. They wore a pressed black suit, bulky enough to smooth out the staggering number of mods underneath, and a full helmet to cover their face. The frontal visor, shaped like the Consortium’s oval sigil, panned from side to side as they surveyed the apartment.
Alric yelped and shook in fear as he picked up the bag. “Look just t-take it! Nobody’s touched it, it won’t happen again.”
The officer turned to look at Alric, paused for a moment, and then stomped over. Den froze in place, calculating if he could make it through the doorway before the officer caught him. He had never seen one of them at full speed, but he did not like his chances.
Towering over Alric, the officer looked down at him while forcibly snatching the bag from his hands. “This was an unacceptable breach of your agreement with the Consortium.” A voice sounded from the helmet, modulated heavily enough to remove any recognizable trace of normal speech. “You will be put on strict probation, and the runner will be apprehended. Permanently.”
That settled Den’s decision. One of the other runners he knew got taken in by Compliance and had not been heard from since. He took off at full sprint for the doorway, but only managed two steps before the officer had noticed. They moved with inhuman speed, intercepting Den with their free hand and grabbing him by the neck. Underneath the padded glove, an incredibly advanced hand mod clenched at his throat and lifted him from the ground.
“Hey hey hey, put him down!” Alric stammered. He had shrunk back into the corner, keeping as much distance as he could. “Let’s talk this out, he didn’t know better.”
Den struggled in the officer’s grip, doing more damage to himself as he flailed against the reinforced arm. “Any chance I could buy you off?” he coughed. “How many lifetimes of credits do they throw at you? Three, four? Or do you just enjoy beating us up?”
The grip tightened. If there was any personality left in the officer, he had just pissed it off.
“Shut it!” Alric screamed. “Look, I’ll do you guys a favor and you let him go. Just business, right? I know the boys in 8 have been causing trouble. I’ll have some chats, send some of my guys to calm things down. Deal?”
The officer stood unmoving as Den’s vision began to blur from the lack of oxygen. Seconds crawled by as fully expected to wake up in a holding cell (if he woke up at all).
“Approved.” The officer let go and Den crumpled onto the floor. “You have 350 cycles for results. It should be assumed that any leaks will be punished with extreme severity.”
Den was desperately wheezing and staring up at the ceiling as the heavy footsteps echoed down the hallway. Only after the sound faded did Alric move from his corner.
“The things I do for you guys,” he ranted as he shuffled over to the fridge. “I could have gotten out, lived some fewer cycles but at least they’d be quiet.”
“How…” Den spat out. His breath was strained and his every word hurt, but he needed answers. “How did they know? Why did they listen to you?”
Alric appeared in his field of view carrying an armful of stim injectors. He dropped one onto Den’s chest as he pocketed the rest in his coat. “You’re so pathetically dense,” he said. “Compliance knows when I take a shit, of course they’d know who’s swiping their essence. We all play by their rules, always have, and you just spat all over them. No idea why they let us do our thing, that’s above my paygrade. I stick to the rules, make sure you kids stay in line, and avoid asking any dumb questions. Now get up, you’re gonna help me clean up this mess. And not a peep of this to anyone! One more mistake and we both never see the dome again.”
Too exhausted to argue, Den nodded and flicked off the cap of the injector. He now owed Alric his life two times over, and he knew he would never hear the end of it.