Rusk's

Inez woke to the sound of rain ticking against metal. She kept her eyes closed. But she could hear water striking the shutter in uneven patterns, sometimes a soft tapping, sometimes a sudden scatter as runoff spilled from the structures above. Somewhere along the wall, tools trembled against their hooks while a train passed over the district. The vibration moved through the floor beneath her cheek, deepened briefly, then faded into the low hum of a power converter.

Something small moved among the shelves. She heard the sound of claws touching wood. A loose component rolled, struck another piece of metal, and stopped. Farther away, a mechanism adjusted beneath someone’s weight. Click. Whirr. Click. The rhythm placed the man several meters to her left.

Inez remained still and let the rest of her body report itself. Her mouth tasted of blood and old coins. One side of her face rested against folded fabric, a coat perhaps, placed beneath her after she fell. Her back had stiffened into a single rigid line, and the ports along her spine burned as though the metal housings had heated beneath her skin.

Her right hand was empty. The pistol was gone.

Her fingers moved slowly against the floor, testing sensation without revealing that she was awake. The birthday card remained inside her jacket, its softened edge pressing against her ribs. Relief passed through her before she could stop it. The weapon mattered less, but she refused to consider why.

Inez opened her eyes. Shelves rose around her beneath amber work lights, crowded with dismantled radios, cracked scanners, prosthetic joints, coils of wire, and machines whose original purposes had been obscured by years of repair. The main shutter was closed and secured by a metal bar. Security mesh covered the windows, salvaged from at least three different systems and joined at the seams by hand.

A narrow stair climbed along the rear wall. An apartment above, most likely. To the right stood a service door with water darkening the floor beneath its frame. An alley beyond it, or a second room with poor drainage. Near the ceiling, a ventilation opening carried voices from somewhere outside, distorted enough to conceal words but not movement.

Weapons presented themselves without effort. A long driver lay beneath the nearest workbench. A cutting blade rested inside an open tool tray. There was a glass chemical container within reach if she rolled once and extended her left arm. A coil of insulated wire could become a restraint. A damaged prosthetic arm leaned against a crate, heavy enough to fracture a skull.

Her pistol sat on a high shelf across the room. The magazine had been placed beside it. Everything left in plain sight.

The man wanted her to know he had disarmed her. He also wanted her to know where the weapon was. She was not sure if this was confidence, foolishness, or an attempt to avoid surprising someone who might respond badly.

At the main workbench, Tomas stood beside an opened diagnostic unit. Improvised leads ran from its exposed circuitry to a portable sensor resting on the floor near Inez, but nothing touched her body. He had been reading the emissions from her ports at a distance.

The distinction mattered.

His support frame was more damaged than she remembered. The left hip hesitated when he shifted his weight, remaining rigid half a second too long before the actuator released. His balance moved onto the right leg to compensate. The housing behind the left brace remained exposed. One strike would lock the joint, she thought. A second would put him on the floor. She could reach the pistol before he reached her. Probably.

Her hand trembled when she pressed it against the floor. The shelves shifted slightly as she turned her head, and the distance between her body and the workbench expanded, then corrected. A metal basin sat beside her, lined with a stained cloth. She had vomited while unconscious. Humiliation arrived sharp and immediate.

Tomas adjusted something inside the diagnostic unit without turning toward her.

“If you are deciding whether you can reach the pistol,” he murmured, his attention apparently fixed on the circuitry, “the answer is probably yes.”

Inez remained motionless.

“The magazine is beside it,” he continued. “I removed the chambered round.”

Her voice scraped against her throat. “Why leave it where I can see it?”

Tomas paused with the tool between his fingers. When he finally looked toward her, his expression held neither triumph nor fear, only the tired concentration of a man interrupted during difficult work.

“People become unreasonable when they think something has been hidden from them.”

Inez pushed herself upright. The movement brought nausea with it. The shelves seemed to lean toward her, their contents shifting as though the room had been built on a slow incline. She placed one hand against the floor and held it there, making the gesture look deliberate while her vision struggled to settle.

Tomas watched without appearing to. Between them, the cat had climbed onto a shelf beside the workbench. Relay sat with his tail wrapped around his paws, studying Inez with a suspicion Tomas either did not feel or had learned to conceal more effectively.

“Where am I?” Her voice came out steadier than she felt. “How long was I unconscious? Where is Rourke? What did you do to me, and who came through that door while I was out?”

Tomas set the tool aside. “You are in Rusk’s repair shop. You were unconscious for one hour and fifty three minutes. I do not know anyone named Rourke.”

“That was not everything I asked.”

“No.” He glanced toward the diagnostic unit, as though the machine remained more difficult than she did. “I did not implant, inject, or alter anything. Security passed through the Row, but they did not enter the shop. No one else has seen you.”

Relay gave a quiet, irritated sound from the shelf.

Tomas looked toward him. “Except Relay.”

Inez followed his gaze. “The cat saw me.”

“He is unreliable.” Tomas spoke with complete seriousness, which made it difficult to decide whether the answer was intended as humor. “He has also stolen from several customers, so his testimony would be compromised.”

“Where is my weapon?”

Tomas lifted one hand and indicated the high shelf without moving closer to it. The pistol and magazine remained exactly where she had seen them.

Inez rose again. Her left leg spasmed before accepting her weight. The knee locked, released, and nearly folded beneath her, but she corrected the movement by shifting toward the workbench. Tomas’s eyes moved briefly to her hip. He noticed. She hated that more than the weakness itself.

The pistol was heavier than she expected when she took it from the shelf. She checked the chamber, inserted the magazine, and drew the slide back. The familiar resistance steadied something inside her.

When she turned, the muzzle rested level with Tomas’s chest. He did not raise his hands. His frame adjusted beneath him with a soft mechanical correction, but he remained beside the workbench, one palm resting against its scarred surface. The absence of panic felt almost insulting. Fear would have acknowledged the danger between them. His calm reduced it to another malfunction requiring diagnosis.

“You examined me.”

Tomas looked toward the portable sensor on the floor. “Your ports were broadcasting diagnostic noise into three frequencies.”

“That was not permission.”

“You were convulsing.” His voice remained quiet, though something tightened behind it now, not defensiveness exactly, but the strain of someone being asked to justify a choice made too quickly for comfort.

“Still not permission.”

Tomas held her gaze.

“No.”

The agreement disrupted the accusation she had prepared. Inez had expected excuses, perhaps a claim that saving her life entitled him to access. Instead he accepted the boundary after crossing it, and the simplicity of that left her with nowhere to direct the anger.

“You had no right.”

“No.” He glanced at the weapon, then back at her face. “I also had no way to ask.”

“That does not make it acceptable.”

“I did not say it did.”

Inez tightened her grip. The tremor moved through her hand anyway, small enough that she hoped he could not see it.

“What exactly did you do?”

“I placed an external sensor near you and monitored the emissions from the ports. Nothing was connected directly.” Tomas shifted his weight, and the damaged left actuator hesitated before releasing. “Your architecture was unstable. Connecting a standard diagnostic line without knowing how the system distributes load might have damaged it further.”

“Might have killed me?”

“Yes.”

She studied him over the sights. “How do you know the architecture is unknown?”

Tomas turned his head toward the diagnostic display. Lines of signal data moved across the cracked screen, rising and falling in patterns Inez could not interpret. When he answered, the composure in his voice had changed. Beneath it was something closer to unease.

“Because I have repaired neural hardware for twenty years,” he told her, “and none of this should exist.”

Tomas turned the diagnostic display toward her. The screen was old enough that its colors had faded unevenly. Green signal lines crossed a black background, some moving in steady intervals while others broke into bursts of noise. Several channels climbed over one another and vanished at the edge of the display.

Inez kept the pistol level.

“What am I looking at?”

“Several systems pretending to be one.” Tomas leaned closer to the screen, his attention narrowing as he traced one of the signals with a blunt fingertip. “Your spinal interface is only the visible part. The network extends into ocular processing, motor control, autonomic regulation, chemical monitoring, and whatever controls access to memory.”

Her grip tightened.

“You cannot know that from an external scan.”

“Not precisely.” He acknowledged the limitation without embarrassment. “But signals leave patterns. Most commercial implants assist a function. A retinal processor improves vision. A motor bridge bypasses damaged nerves. A memory aid stores or retrieves information.” He glanced toward her, then back to the display. “Yours changes how those systems are allowed to speak to one another.”

The language was too close to what she knew. Inez felt the tremor move into her wrist. Tomas noticed. His expression changed only slightly, concern entering beneath the concentration, though he was careful not to look directly at the weapon.

“What does that mean?”

“It means someone did more than install hardware.” He selected another channel. The display separated into columns, each one pulsing at a different rhythm. “They built divisions. Some signals pass normally. Others stop, reroute, or wait for authorization that does not appear to come from you.”

Inez heard Rourke in a hotel room telling her to sleep. She heard another voice speaking Spanish. A child asked whether she had loved her. She forced the sounds away.

Tomas studied the screen for several seconds before continuing. “Someone built doors inside your nervous system.”

The words settled more heavily than any technical explanation could have. Inez looked at the lines, though they meant nothing to her.

“Doors to what?”

“I do not know.” His answer came without hesitation. “Identity, perhaps. Reflexes. Language. Learned behavior. There are clusters that activate together, then disappear when another pattern takes over. Some appear locked. Others are open when they should not be, and several are opening and closing without any stable command.”

“You are reading my memories.”

“No.” Tomas turned fully toward her now, and the accusation seemed to trouble him more than the pistol. “I can see the traffic. I cannot see what it carries.”

She searched his face for deception, but there was none she could identify.

“The difference matters,” he added, more quietly. “At least it should.”

Inez lowered the muzzle by a fraction, then corrected it. “What about the Halo?”

His eyes returned to the display.

“I do not know what Halo is made from, but your system expects it. The chemical monitors are searching for a compound that is no longer present in sufficient concentration.” He moved to another set of readings. “Without it, the partitions are becoming unstable. Barriers fail. Signals cross into places they were never meant to reach.”

“Memories.”

“Possibly.”

“Identities.”

“Possibly.”

“Conditioning.”

Tomas looked at her then. “Yes.”

The certainty in that answer frightened her more than the others.

“Can you repair it?”

“No.”

The word came too easily. Inez stared at him, expecting the qualification that usually followed difficult truths, but Tomas let the silence remain until it became clear he would not soften the answer for her.

Then he touched the edge of the diagnostic unit.

“I may be able to slow the failure. I can identify which systems are degrading fastest, and I might be able to construct a temporary regulator to reduce the signal collapse.” He paused, measuring the rest before giving it to her. “I cannot restore the architecture, and I cannot manufacture Halo from nothing.”

“Not yet?”

Something unreadable passed through his expression.

“Not yet,” Tomas repeated, though he sounded less like a man making a promise than one admitting the problem had already taken hold of him.

Inez moved closer without lowering the pistol. The distance between them narrowed until Tomas could no longer pretend the weapon was merely part of the room. Its muzzle rested against the center of his chest, just above the rigid brace crossing his ribs. The support frame responded to the shift in his balance with a faint correction.

Click. Whirr.

He watched her hand rather than the barrel.

“Why did you help me?”

Tomas glanced toward the closed shutter, where rain still tapped against the metal in small, irregular bursts. “You were outside my door.”

“That is not a reason.”

“It was sufficient at the time.”

Inez studied him. The answer sounded too simple, which made it difficult to trust. Men did not open doors for strangers while armed security moved through the street. They opened them for payment, leverage, loyalty, guilt, or some need they preferred not to name.

“The others did not.”

“They were afraid.”

“And you were not?”

His gaze shifted briefly toward the shutter again. “I was.”

The admission unsettled her more than denial would have. “Then why open it?”

Tomas’s fingers tightened slightly against the edge of the workbench. For the first time since she woke, his expression seemed to turn inward, as though the question had reached something older than the morning.

“I had not decided not to.”

The answer was incomplete. She could feel the missing part beneath it, but he offered nothing more. Inez mistook the silence for weakness and pressed the pistol harder against his chest.

“You should be more careful.”

“Probably.”

“I could kill you.”

“Yes.”

“You do not seem concerned.”

“I am concerned.” Tomas spoke with a weary patience that made the words almost insulting. “I am trying to determine whether telling you the truth will make you shoot me sooner.”

“Try.”

He drew a slow breath.

“The instability is accelerating. Your motor conflicts are becoming more frequent, and the autonomic signals are beginning to interrupt one another. The chemical monitors are failing to maintain whatever threshold your system requires.”

“How long?”

“I cannot know precisely.”

“How long?”

Tomas looked at the diagnostic screen before answering, not because he needed to read it, she thought, but because he disliked giving certainty where none existed.

“Seventy two hours, perhaps, before something critical fails.”

The number entered her without meaning at first. Then her body understood it.

“What fails?”

“That is the problem.” His voice had lost its earlier dryness. What remained was careful and grave. “Your respiratory regulation may stop responding. Cardiac rhythm could become unstable. You could enter a seizure that the motor system cannot resolve. The memory partitions might collapse completely.”

“And then?”

“You may lose conscious control while the conditioned responses remain active.”

Inez felt the pistol tremble against him. Tomas noticed, but did not move away.

“So I become dangerous.”

“You are already dangerous.”

The answer might have angered her if it had carried judgment. It did not. He said it as he might have identified exposed current in a wire.

“You cannot tell me which failure comes first?”

“No.”

“And you are certain about the time?”

“No.” His eyes met hers. “It might be less.”

Inez pushed the muzzle harder against his chest.

“And if I kill you?”

Tomas did not look away.

“You will probably die within seventy two hours.”

The calmness of it was infuriating. No plea. No threat in return. Only a fact placed between them.

“Possibly sooner,” he continued. “You damaged one of the port housings when you fell.”

Her free hand moved toward the base of her neck. Beneath her hair, her fingers found dried blood and swollen skin around the lowest interface. The metal housing felt wrong, shifted slightly beneath the pressure.

Tomas’s attention followed the movement. “The seal is compromised. Signal is leaking across the housing, and the surrounding tissue may already be contaminated.”

“With what?”

“I do not know yet.”

The pistol remained against him, but its meaning had changed. It no longer controlled the room as completely as it had moments before.

“Can you repair it?”

“The housing, yes. I may also be able to build a temporary bridge across the failing regulator channels.”

“A cure?”

“No.”

The refusal came gently this time.

“It may buy you time.”

Inez looked at him over the weapon, at the damaged frame, the tired face, and the hands that knew more about what was happening inside her than she did. Time was not freedom. It was not even safety. It was only more distance from the end. That would have to be enough, for now.

Inez lowered the pistol several centimeters, though her finger remained inside the guard.

“What do you want?”

Tomas looked at the weapon first, then at her face. “At the moment, I would prefer that you stop pointing that at me. Relay dislikes loud noises.”

The cat, still seated on the shelf between them, opened one eye as though offended by being included in the negotiation.

“That is not what I meant.”

“I assumed not.” Tomas shifted his weight against the workbench. The left side of the frame responded late, forcing him to brace with one hand until the actuator settled. “But it seemed worth mentioning.”

“What payment do you expect?”

The question appeared to trouble him more than the threat had. He glanced around the shop, perhaps searching for an answer among the stacked components and half repaired machines, then looked back toward the diagnostic display.

“Money is not useful yet.”

“It usually becomes useful eventually.”

“So does information.”

Inez waited.

“I need to know who built the architecture,” he continued. “What Halo was designed to do, when you received the last dose, and how long the symptoms had been present before you collapsed. I need to know whether you have stopped breathing, lost time, experienced cardiac irregularity, or woken somewhere without understanding how you arrived there.”

Her hand tightened around the pistol.

“And I need to know who else knows you are here.”

“No one.”

“The man you were with?”

Inez’s expression changed before she could prevent it. Tomas noticed.

“I do not know where he is,” she replied.

“That was not the question.”

“He does not know I am here.”

“Are you certain?”

“No.” The admission left a bitter taste in her mouth.

Tomas nodded once, accepting the answer without pressing further. “Who manufactured the implants?”

“I cannot tell you.”

“Cannot or will not?”

“Choose the useful answer.”

Something almost resembling recognition moved through his face, though it vanished quickly. “And the drug?”

“It stabilizes the system.”

“I had reached that conclusion.”

“Then you do not need more.”

“I need composition, delivery method, dosage, metabolic interval, and the conditions under which the system begins to fail.” His patience was thinning now, not into anger but into the bluntness of a craftsman dealing with someone who refused to describe a broken machine. “You are asking me to repair something I cannot identify while withholding the name of the manufacturer and the material that keeps it functional.”

“I did not ask you to repair me.”

“No. You pointed a pistol at me and asked how long you had to live.”

Silence gathered between them. Relay stepped carefully from the shelf onto the workbench, sniffed one of the improvised leads, and sat directly on it.

Tomas moved the cable out from beneath him. “You do not need to trust me,” he said, his voice quieter now.

“Good.”

“You do need to answer accurately.”

Inez lowered the weapon another fraction. “Do you trust me?”

Tomas looked at the loaded pistol in her hand, then at the dried blood along her collar. “No.”

The answer came without cruelty or apology. There was no reassurance hidden inside it, no suggestion that trust would arrive simply because they both needed something. Inez found that easier to accept.

“What are you proposing?”

“I repair the damaged housing. I build a monitor so we know which systems are failing and how quickly. I test the residue in your delivery ports and determine what Halo is doing chemically, assuming there is enough left to analyze.” He paused. “You remain hidden until security leaves the district or you are stable enough to move.”

“And in return?”

“You answer medical and technical questions truthfully. You do not leave the shop while armed teams are searching the Row. You do not threaten anyone who lives here.”

Inez raised the pistol slightly.

Tomas looked at it. “And you do not kill me.”

“That depends on you.”

“Most conditions do.”

For several seconds neither moved. Rain tapped against the shutter. The converter hummed beneath the workbench. Somewhere above them, a train crossed Mercy Row, and the tools along the wall trembled in their places.

Inez finally removed her finger from the trigger. “That is not agreement.”

“No,” Tomas replied, watching her with the cautious attention he might have given an unstable circuit. “But it is quieter.”

Boots sounded in the passage outside. Inez raised the pistol before the second step reached the shutter. A security drone followed, its rotors producing a thin mechanical hum that moved slowly across the front of the shop.

Tomas switched off the workbench light and pointed toward the shelving.

“Behind there.”

She did not move. The rear service door remained open to her. Beyond it, the alley might still be clear. Rourke might be searching for her, and the vial of Halo might still be inside his coat. For several seconds, escape seemed possible. Then a spasm tightened along her spine. The shop divided. Tomas became two men standing beside the workbench, one damaged and unfamiliar, the other wearing Rourke’s face. Inez gripped the shelf until the images drew together again. Outside, the drone paused. Blue light passed beneath the shutter, lingered, then moved on.

Tomas waited until the boots had faded before turning the lamp on again. He gathered a clean cloth, a portable sensor, and a narrow instrument designed to open neural port housings, arranging them carefully across the workbench.

“Sit down.”

Inez remained standing. “That sounded like an order.”

“It was a description of the next useful action.” His attention stayed on the tools, though fatigue had begun to show around his eyes. “You remain free to choose a less useful one.”

She looked at the pistol, then toward the closed shutter. Tomas was physically damaged, poorly armed, and entirely outmatched by her. He was also the only person in Mercy Row who had looked beneath her skin and seen damage before danger.

Inez removed the magazine and cleared the chamber. She did not surrender the weapon. She placed it within reach on the workbench and sat.

Tomas moved behind her. She felt the warmth of the lamp as he brought it closer, but he stopped before touching the damaged port.

“May I?”

Rourke had asked the same question only after she forced him to. Inez waited, then lifted her hair from the back of her neck.

“For now.”

The light settled across the metal threaded beneath her skin, revealing circuitry Tomas had never seen and scars Inez could no longer remember receiving. She did not trust him, but he did not know what she was. Still, she decided to stay.