Three months had worn Mod down to something leaner and harder.
He was already running a job when he stepped into the market.
The wrist-slate on his left forearm showed four feeds in a two-by-two grid: drone cameras, each one roughly the size of a thumb, holding lazy figure-eights forty meters above Apex Corridor on the New Arcadia side of the wall. The feed was grainy at distance but he could see what he needed. Rooftop security nodes. Comms relays. The faint wireless signals bleeding off the digital wallets carried by people who'd never thought to look up.
He let the slate go dark against his wrist and moved into the market.
The salvage market sprawled across six blocks of what used to be a transit hub in the outer ring of Old Arcadia, its arched ceilings patched with corrugated panels and strung with chem-lamp rigging that cast everything amber. The air inside tasted of rubber seal and solder and the faint chemical sharpness that meant someone's filter mask had a slow leak. Half the vendors wore masks from habit. The other half had simply stopped noticing.
Out on the street it had been worse. He'd passed a family in the transit corridor on the way in: a woman with two small kids sharing a single canister on a t-splitter, the gauges reading low.
A Flora banner hung across the corridor entrance behind them, sun-bleached but intact. Breathing tomorrow, together. A small queue had formed under it. Flora ran canister distribution points in twelve outer ring corridors: subsidized refills twice a week, free filter replacements for families under the poverty line. The people in that line believed in it. Most people did. In the outer ring, Flora was the only institution that had ever shown up. Community boards carried their research updates like good news. Kids in the lower schools did projects on the fern remediation program. When someone's filter failed at night and the co-op canister bank ran dry, it was Flora's emergency line that answered.
Flora Industries stamped the good canisters. He'd stopped buying anything with that stamp three months ago. He kept that opinion to himself. Down here, saying it out loud was like telling someone their doctor was lying.
The wrist-slate pulsed once against his skin. The drones were in position and listening.
He needed a signal isolator. Two stalls didn't carry them. The third had one with a Flora Industries stamp on the housing. He set it back down without a word and moved on.
The fourth vendor ran out of a modified freight container at the end of the east row. No sign outside. Two exits: the roll-up door he'd come through, and a fire hatch in the back wall. He registered both before he registered anything else. Old habit. Viper's habit, first.
Viper had drilled it into him the same way he'd drilled everything: not as a lesson, as a reflex. Three months and he still did it. He doubted that would stop. Some things you learn from a person and they become so thoroughly yours that losing the person doesn't make them go away. It just makes them hurt a little differently every time they surface.
The woman inside had pink double ponytails and arms covered in tattoos that told stories he didn't have time to read. Her hands were workshop-worn, knuckles nicked from solder work, grease permanent under her nails. She was holding a circuit board up to a lamp and she didn't look away from it when he stepped in.
"Phase-locked isolator," Mod said.
"I know." She set the board down. "I saw you pass the last three stalls." Her eyes moved over him the way a mechanic looks at a rig before quoting a price. "The Flora stamp bothered you."
"It should bother everyone."
She almost smiled. "So you keep saying. To yourself. While walking past my stall three times before coming in."
He hadn't realized he'd been that obvious. He didn't say so.
She pulled a tray from under the counter and set it between them. Three isolators, none of them marked with anything he recognized.
The wrist-slate pulsed twice. Somewhere above Apex Corridor, his four drones had zeroed in on the wireless signals leaking off digital wallets below and were slipping fake unlock codes into the tiny gaps between security checks. The corps had locked down their main systems years ago. They'd forgotten about the wallets their executives carried in coat pockets and briefcases. Personal devices on personal schedules. Nobody audited complacency.
He picked up one of the isolators and turned it over. The tolerances were tight. Better than anything he usually found out here.
"You make these?" he asked.
"Modified."
"What's the range?"
"Forty meters stock. This one I've pushed to seventy." A pause. "You'll get signal wobble past sixty if you push it, but that's a you problem, not a hardware problem."
"I won't push it past sixty."
"You'll push it past sixty."
The wrist-slate pulsed three times. Lock acquired. He kept his face neutral.
He set the isolator back down. "I'll take it."
She named the price. Fair. He transferred it.
"Aphrodite," she said, which he realized after a beat was her name and not a comment.
"Mod."
"Short for something?"
"No."
She waited a half-second in case that was a lie. He let her wait.
Her expression changed. Not recognition. More like the corners of a calculation clicking into place.
She reached over and picked up the isolator he'd selected. Turned it over twice. Pressed a fingernail into a seam along the bottom edge and popped a panel that wasn't visible until it wasn't there. A chip smaller than a fingertip dropped onto her palm.
"Hidden tracker," she said, flat. She turned it over, studying it. "Except it's not Flora's. Wrong form factor. Flora's surveillance chips have a specific housing — I've pulled enough of them to know." She pressed her thumbnail into the chip until something cracked. "Someone put this in after the part left Flora's facility. Someone inside the supply chain who didn't want it traced back to their own system." She set the pieces on the counter. "You would have had a response team at your door in about six hours. Not Flora's."
He looked at the broken chip. Then at her.
"I'll take it," he said again.
Her expression moved past the calculation. She held it for half a second, then filed it away.
The wrist-slate pulsed four times. Siphon complete.
The take was small by design: tiny amounts skimmed from dozens of wallets at once, small enough that no single alarm would trigger, large enough that it added up. He glanced at the payout list. Forty-three Down Below addresses. The kind that mapped to communal nodes in the transit corridors two levels below the market floor. Food co-op accounts. Filter canister collectives. A medical relay fund that kept a shared nebulizer running in sector nine.
The family he'd passed on the way in, the woman and two kids on a shared canister with the gauges reading low, wouldn't know where the refill credit came from. They didn't need to.
He cleared the queue and let the slate go dark.
"You're running something," Aphrodite said to his back. "Something that needs that kind of range inside Old Arcadia." She didn't make it a question. "Next time you need hardware, ask for me specifically."
He looked back at her. She was already back on the circuit board, not watching to see if he would.
He almost said something that wasn't about hardware. He didn't.
"I'll find you," he said.
He went back out under a yellowed sky still thick with smog.
Three steps from the exit his wrist-slate pulsed. Not the job pattern. A different signal, one he'd set up himself and had never actually wanted to see trigger.
He pulled the feed from drone four. The one he'd left circling above the transit corridor entrance.
A Flora Industries van, unmarked, sat parked at the north corner of the corridor where he'd come in. Engine on. Two figures in full corporate enforcement gear stood beside it, facing the market entrance. Not talking. Not moving.
Waiting.
He checked the drone's timestamp. They had parked there four minutes before he walked in.
Mod kept his pace even and turned east, away from the corridor, taking the long way around the market block. His mind was already moving faster than his feet. They hadn't come in after him. They were outside, watching the entrance. Which meant they weren't sure yet. Or they were waiting for backup. Or they had someone already inside and didn't need to rush.
Aphrodite had destroyed the tracker. But she'd said six hours for a response team. Not four minutes. Not already here before he'd even bought the part.
The forty-three transfers completed in the dark somewhere below his feet. He didn't look at them.
He was already thinking about what Flora knew, and how long they had known it, and whether the tracker in the isolator had been the first one or just the one he'd found.