531

Chan Yi was shaken. There was no other word for it. As he slunk back to the office, he could feel the shake of his hands and the rush of his heart. He might not have blood pumping through his veins, but they damn sure gave him all the tells of a human body.

It was the only excuse he had for why he made it all the way into his office before he realized he wasn’t alone.

He nearly ran into a brute of a man before he stopped. His office had been tossed, and the man in front of him leaned against the front of the empty desk, arms crossed in waiting.

“Mr. Chan. I believe we need to have a conversation.”

The guy was a suit, but not like Faceless and Jackson. He was a different breed. More like the beater from earlier, only better paid.

“Seems like you’ve made yourself at home,” Yi said, looking around the office. There wasn’t much there that was worth looking through. He kept his files encrypted and nothing was on paper that wasn’t common knowledge. His only case at the moment was Fulmer and he didn’t have anyone he thought would be calling on him. What enemies he’d made over the years knew not to come at him like this. No one tried to take him head-on. It was a quick way to learn that Chan Yi was more steel than heart.

The suit had two guys with him, each waiting on the opposite corner of the room. They were perfectly placed for an ambush in his small office. Yi might be metal, but he wasn’t invulnerable. He was harder to fix than a human, and there was only one person he trusted to patch him up. He tried not to make a habit of visiting though.

“Jason Fulmer,” the guy said as Yi looked at each of the men he’d brought in.

“I don’t want any trouble,” Yi said honestly. “Guy’s wife hired me to find him. You got information on him? I don’t mind sharing if you can give me a heads up on this one.”

“You should just tell us anything you know and let this one go. We don’t need anyone meddling in this,” Suit said as he pushed away from the desk. The guy was pushing 6’5” and the way his jacket settled on his shoulders said it was all muscle underneath. Shit.

“That might be a problem then because I already told his wife I was on the job.”

“You don’t want this kind of trouble.” The two guys on each side stepped closer.

“No, I don’t, but that’s the story of my life.” This wasn’t a fight he wanted to tackle, so he turned to run back out, but he was grabbed by the man to his left. He was thrown up and over his desk, landing hard on the floor behind it. Fucking augmentations. He scrambled to the desk and reached under it, only to find the gun he kept there missing.

“Think we didn’t find that?” the guy coming for him asked. He had his sleeves pulled up like he was itching for a fight. Yi blocked a kick to the face, and swiped out with his arm, catching the man’s knee sideways with a sickening crunch. He went down hard with a scream and Yi dove away from his desk towards the empty one.

He got to his feet and pulled his arm up, opening the minigun on his right forearm. He didn’t want to shoot up his office, but he wasn’t prepared to lose this fight either. The suit had the same idea and had Yi’s other gun in hand. He shot at Yi, and he would have been hit were Yi human, but he was fast enough to bring his arm up to block it.

“What the hell are you?” Suit demanded as he stared at Yi’s arm.

The minigun was destroyed by the expanding bullet that he’d blocked. In fact, his forearm was just mangled bits of metal and synthetic flesh, hanging from his exoskeleton, gushing fluid that might look like blood but was very different in function and construction. He couldn’t block the pain, but he rerouted some of his processes to mute the pain so he could stay in the fight.

“Something you shouldn’t have played with,” Yi answered as the other man with Suit came at him. His right arm was mostly useless, but he blocked the other man’s attacks. The man was a skilled fighter, but Yi was programmed and trained by the best. When the guy struck out, Yi let him land a punch to the nose. Unlike a human though, he wasn’t stunned, and his opponent had expected to have a moment before Yi could react. Instead, Yi took the hit and moved in with his own. The guy was caught completely unaware, and Yi managed a strong hit to the jaw, knocking the guy to the ground. Suit was already on the other side of the room, helping the first guy up.

“What do you want with Fulmer?” Yi demanded.

The guy ran off with his friend and as Yi watched them, the other guy got up and shot past him to follow their retreat. He hadn’t expected them to run. He thought about chasing after them but showing his mangled arm in public would go over about as well as an Anti-Aug’s sermon in the Skylines. Augmentation in the Builds and Piles were common, but there was nothing like him out there and one look at his busted arm would tell most people he wasn’t like them. Who the thugs talked to about what they saw was trouble for another day.

He wanted to do right by Ms. Fulmer and find her husband, but he needed to keep a low profile himself. He couldn’t run off without getting this fixed.

Which meant heading right back into the Piles.

He locked the door to his office and closed his eyes, leaning back against it. He let his mind wander to the building’s security and found the hack that had allowed the other men to walk in without any signs. It was a clever job. Not flawless, but well-executed. If it wasn’t his place, he’d be impressed. Instead, he wrote a new program for the door, creating a stronger security measure for the time being.

He cursed about the mess they’d left; overturned chairs and his scattered belongings. He looked into the programming and saw the back door was still locked. He felt relieved that they hadn’t gone up. He walked over to the back door and unlocked it. When it swung open, he did a quick bioscan to make sure there were no surprises up the stairs and then walked up the steps to his apartment.

The view out the back window was the same bleak landscape that he had in the office; wall-to-wall muck-covered buildings, except Yi played a video feed in the background instead. The windows showed a flower garden and Yi took a moment to let the tranquil scene calm his frazzled nerves.

The place was one big room, with a bathroom walled in on the back right corner and a half wall that gave the illusion of privacy to his bed on the left. The kitchen was to the right with a dining table for two. The back left corner was a desk with his computer and data station. He walked over to the bed area and found a basket of clothes that he still hadn’t put away. Tossed in the bottom was an old stained shirt he worked out in. He didn’t need to do anything physical to keep his body in peak condition, but his neighbors saw him running and it kept his reputation intact. The last thing anyone wanted to hire was a complacent PI.

He quickly ripped the tee shirt into strips. He gritted his teeth against the pain as he wrapped his arm to stop the fluid leak and hide the damage. With that done, he realized he needed to change as well since his clothes were covered in fluid.

When he was dressed in clean, comfortable clothes, he sat down on his bed and let himself stop for a minute. As soon as he did, his mind raced to the one loop it had been on since he’d been in the Piles earlier.

Had he really seen Two there?

He’d told himself it was just a trick of distance and wishful thinking, but he didn’t have a human mind. He wasn’t made for hallucinations or mistaken identities. More than attending to his arm, he needed an answer. He needed to find the Faceless man again and discover his identity.

He sat at his desk and pulled open the feeds in the area of the Piles that he needed. He retraced his earlier search and still came up with nothing. Faceless hadn’t shown his face to the camera once, and somewhere between the church and the butcher’s shop, he managed to disappear completely from the feed. Yi didn’t get him back until later when he met up with Jackson. Even then, nothing in the records showed his face. It was only by chance that Yi had seen his eyes.

He closed his eyes and replayed the scene in his mind again. He wasn’t mistaken. The man he had chased wasn’t Two, but Two had been there. He leaned closer to the screen and picked up the feed from where he began to chase after Two. Two had walked off with another man and while Yi had been racing to catch up, Two had disappeared into the Piles again. Undetectable in the video feed, he had fallen off the grid.

Yi sat back in his chair and let the thought take over.

Two was alive.

Two. Was. Alive.

Where had he been for the past seven years? When Yi had recovered from his escape enough to start worrying about Two, he’d thought his partner would find him. When Yi could check though, there were no messages left in their hiding holes and no word came to him. When he was able to look into Mariner Tech without getting caught, there was no word of Two. He was just gone. Yi believed he was dead.

What the hell had they done to him? In seven years, what had they done to him to keep him from searching for Yi?

What sort of hell had Yi left him to?