They didn't discharge me. They discarded me.
I sat on the curb outside Clinic 4-19. Rain fell, or maybe it never stopped. I couldn't tell. The city smelled like wet concrete and garbage. The smell of the Gut after a storm. Chemical runoff and rust.
I honestly don't know how long I was out. My vision was a wash of gray static and halos. Aris had salvaged my natural eyes and most of my vision, re-seated them in the sockets, and spliced what remained of the optic nerves back together. Everything looked like a broadcast from a dying frequency. He told me that over time my vision would get better and the pain would fade. Not disappear. Just fade.
"Vane." Greyson stood over me. He didn't offer a hand. He offered a shadow.
I tried to stand, but the pain hit me like a physical blow. It wasn't in my eyes. It was in my teeth, my spine, and the marrow of my bones. I tasted copper and blood because I'd bitten through my cheek during the extraction. My body was still screaming about the intrusion, vibrating with the aftershocks of the rejection like I had swallowed a box of razor blades.
"Am I fired?" The words came out wrecked.
"No." Greyson tossed a plastic bag onto my lap. My badge. A bottle of standard-issue aspirin. "Union rules say we can't fire you for a medical complication during a mandated procedure. But you're done, Silas. No one will insure you for the canopy. You're a liability."
He looked at the scar running from my ear to my collarbone. "You wear your rejection on the outside now. Easier for everyone." He turned toward the skyline, toward the dark, steaming vents of the lower sectors. "I'm transferring you to the Cold Case division. Sector 12. The Gut."
"That's a graveyard. Nobody solves cases in the Gut. They catalog the bodies."
"Exactly. Someone has to take out the trash. Might as well be you."
He walked away. The aspirin bottle rattled in my hand. A joke. Aspirin for a nervous system trying to digest itself. I dry-swallowed three pills. They did nothing. The static in my eyes climbed, turning into a high-pitched whine that drilled into my temples.
Home wasn't an option. Not like this. Elara would notice the shaking. The blood still leaking from the tear ducts. She would know I had failed. I needed it to stop. Something stronger than aspirin. Something stronger than the legal limit.
I pulled my collar up against the acid rain and started walking. Not toward home. Toward the Rust Belt.
The warehouse smelled of stale beer and hydraulic fluid. It was a Chrome Jackal den, a place where stolen parts were stripped and sold. Somewhere in the back, machinery hummed. Welding torches hissed. The sound of the black market at work.
I kicked the door open. It didn't explode this time. It creaked. Half a dozen heads turned. Cybernetic eyes glowed in the gloom. Red, green, neon blue. Hands went to holsters.
"One step closer, Cop, and we turn you into scrap." The voice came from the back.
Varg.
He sat on a crate of engine parts, dismantling a high-end cyber-arm with a delicate touch that belied his size. He looked up, his iron jaw catching the low light, and paused. Didn't reach for a weapon. He frowned, his gaze settling on my face. My swollen shut eyes that was gently weeping red fluid. I shook so hard my teeth chattered loud enough to hear across the room.
"You look like hell, cop."
"I need..." I leaned against a support beam to keep from collapsing. "I need something for the nerves. The doctors... their stuff doesn't work."
Varg laughed, a low, grinding sound.
"Doctors? Doctors fix people, Vane. You look like a botched splicing job." He stood up, towering over me. The other Jackals tensed, waiting for the kill order. He waved them down. "Rejection?"
He knew the look. Half his crew was probably running on black-market immunosuppressants.
"Type-4. Total incompatibility."
Varg whistled low. "That's rare. That's 'God hates you' levels of rare." He walked to a rusted cabinet. Pulled out a small, dark vial. The liquid inside was thick, viscous, and black as oil.
"Black Tar Willow. Street brew from the Sump willows. Doesn't heal you, but it'll shut the nerves up."
He tossed one to me. The second, he slid into my coat pocket while I was still staring at the first. Cold glass, slick with condensation. My fingers left prints in the frost.
"How much?" My thumb brushed the cork.
"For a gold badge cop? Five hundred credits."
I didn't have five hundred credits. I didn't have five. "Put it on my tab." I met his gaze. My vision was blurry, but I could see the confusion on his face.
"Your tab?" Varg stepped closer, looming over me. "You don't have a tab, cop. You have a death wish."
"I have a tab. I still owe you for that door."
I uncorked the vial. The smell was acrid, like licorice and gasoline. He just stared at me. The silence stretched, heavy and dangerous. Then, the corner of his metal mouth twitched.
"The mahogany. Right." He sat back down on his crate and picked up the cyber-arm. "Drink it, garbage man. Before you bleed out on my floor."
I tipped the vial back. The liquid coated my throat like sludge. It burned going down, a different kind of fire. But seconds later, the scream in my head stopped. The razor blades in my spine dissolved. The static in my eyes smoothed out into a dull, manageable gray. It wasn't healing. It was silence.
"Added to the invoice." I wiped the black residue from my lip. Varg nodded, still working on the arm. "Most cops beg. You negotiate. I respect that."
I found Aris in the alley behind the clinic an hour later. He was pacing. Six steps, turn, six steps back. A syringe of high-grade adrenaline clutched in his hand like a talisman. His knuckles were white. His knees buckled when he saw me. He caught himself on the wall. Then the empty vial in my hand.
"Silas." He grabbed my wrist. His hands smelled like surgical soap and antiseptic. The smell of the clinic still clinging to him. He sniffed the vial. His face went pale. "This is Willow. Street grade." He sniffed the residue. "Your liver will be scar tissue in six months."
"It works. The pain is gone, Aris."
"It's not gone. It's masked. You're delaying the shock."
He took the vial from me. Stared at the black residue. His jaw tightened. Then his shoulders sagged. He looked at my eyes. Bloodshot, scarred, but seeing. He checked my pulse. It was slow. Heavy. But steady.
"You can't keep taking this. The toxicity will kill you in less than a year."
"Then give me something better. You're the genius, Aris. You synthesized me. Now synthesize this."
Aris looked at me. The badge hanging loosely from my belt. The scar running from my ear to my collarbone. The vial clutched in my trembling hand. He saw what I'd become.
"I can refine it. I can strip out the heavy metals. Add a filtration agent. But you'll be dependent on it, Silas. For the rest of your life. The moment you stop, the nerve pain will return. Ten times worse."
"I'm already in hell, Doc. I want comfortable seating."
I lit a cigarette. The smoke tasted like the city. Aris nodded. He pocketed the vial. A pact made in the dark.
"Come by the lab tomorrow. The back door."
I walked home.
I stopped at the corner of my street. I could see the light in our apartment window. Elara waited. She paced, watching the door, wondering if I was dead or if I was different.
My reflection in a puddle. The face… older. The eyes… bloodshot, rimmed with dark circles that would never fade. There was a scar running from my temple to my cheekbone where the clamp had dug in. Another running from my ear to my collarbone where something vital had torn.
I wasn't the man who left this morning. That man had hope. That man thought he could buy safety. The badge… heavy.
Greyson and Varg were right. I was the garbage man. I would work the cases no one wanted. I would dig through the rot of Obsidian Heights. I would take the Willow to numb the smell and the pain. But I would see. I would see the cracks in their perfect city. The rust under the chrome. And the lies they told themselves to sleep at night.
I walked to the door. Inside, she was still awake. Sitting at the table with a cup she wasn't drinking, turned toward the door like she'd been watching it for hours. When she saw my face, the scar, the eyes, she went very still. The way people go still when something confirms what they were already afraid of.
She didn't ask. She stood up and came to me and put her arms around me, and I let her, and I didn't say anything either. After a while she stepped back to look at me.
That's when I saw it.
The inside of her left forearm. A patch of raw skin, red and raised, where she'd been scratching without thinking. The Weep, working its way through the broken seal. The city's air finding her the way it found everything down here. Slowly, quietly, and without asking permission. She noticed me looking. She pulled her sleeve down. Neither of us said a word about it.
I looked out the window, up at the Canopy, glowing golden above the smog. They called this progress. They called it The Shift. A transition to a higher state of being.
I uncorked the second vial Varg had slipped me and took a sip. The silence washed over me. I touched the scar under my eye.
For me, there was no transition. It was a mass eviction of the human soul.