I went to work checking Jared’s body while Kaela put on a pair of gloves and starting poking through the dead gang cutters in the alley. I wanted to find a connection in all of this to Moth. Somehow they knew exactly what was happening and I wasn’t naive enough to believe it was dumb luck. I decided would check his pockets, but I didn’t feel like pulling him down from the wall and getting covered.

  His jacket was torn open, the lining gutted. They’d stripped him bare before hanging him here. No wallet, no scraps, not even a half-empty candy bar. Either the Rats cleaned him down to the threads, or he ran light from the start.

  I flipped my scanners and checked for chemical residue. His right arm was coated in gunpowder residue, he had fought back for a while. I doubt he wanted to wind up in a dead end, but at least he thought to use it as a choke point.

  “I’ll give him credit, he at least picked a decent strategy for a last stand.” I said, observing the angle of his shots from cover into the alley.

  “Too bad he wasn’t a better shot. Maybe he wouldn’t be wall art.” Kaela replied bluntly as she dug through a Rat’s wallet looking for ID.

  I shook my head. There had to be something I could tie back to Moth, they had known too much to just be watching. Watching. I thought about the walls of monitors in the club. I scanned the walls of the alley for security cameras, but couldn’t spot anything but decrepit burnt out windows and dangling refuse.

  I kicked at the trash on the ground, looking for anything that might have been dropped but didn’t notice anything that stood out. I figured I’d have to talk to Moth again about all this, and that wasn’t an exciting prospect with how strange the first conversation had been. I tried to think about the hint I had missed at the end with the luggage. Obviously the weapon case and data were gone, the Rats would have taken that prize. Moth had mentioned there being something more but I didn’t have a clue what it might be. Maybe they were just guessing.

  Kaela peeled the armor off another corpse and checked the integrity, frowning at it before tossing it aside. She was pulling gear, money, ammunition, and ID’s off the bodies with a practiced rhythm. She had lined up the bodies in a row to move quickly while I wasn’t looking. I wondered how often she had done this routine.

  “I think we might be wasting time here, Nyx.” She said wiping sweat from her brow as she crouched over the last body. “They don’t have much on them and the weapon ain’t going to be laying in the dumpster.”

  “There’s got to be something…” I muttered, glancing in the dumpster just in case.

  “We might be better off leaving now before the Rats come back for their dead.” Kaela added, stripping off her bloodied gloves.

  I grunted in frustration, I wasn’t ready to leave empty-handed. I decided to gamble on checking his personal link.

  “Help me get him down from the wall.” I called.

  “You wait until I took my gloves off on purpose to ask me that?” She prodded, reaching for a new pair.

  “No, you have another pair?” I asked.

  She clicked her tongue and tossed me some gloves from her other pocket. I slipped them on and we set about trying to get the dangling man from his morbid perch. We braced his shoulders against our own and pulled. The rebar tore out of him with a sick squelch, a spray of blood landed thick across the ground. He dropped heavy between us, dead weight in every sense causing us to tumble with him. Kaela cursed and adjusted her grip to avoid his head lolling into her chest.

  “Fuckin’ hell… Damn you Jared, I liked this shirt.” Kaela groaned.

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  She wiped sweat from her brow, and accidentally smeared some of his blood there as well. She kept eying the rooftops, scanning for anyone or anything that might be watching.

  “Can we get a move on Nyx? We got him down, unless you plan on digging him a grave I think we should delta before the Rats show back up.” She huffed.

  “Dammit, hold on…” I spat, annoyed.

  I pulled his head to one side, looking for the ports to his internal link. I had to wipe away a clot of blood to get access. Jacking into a corpse was always a gamble—corrupted memories, hidden traces, malware hitchhikers—but it was the only play I had left. I held my breath for luck, and slotted in my wire.

  My HUD lit with warnings, but thankfully it was all on his end. Alerts about blood loss and wounds flew from his recent biomon activity, while I dug for the recording. It read corrupted, but started to flicker alive. I fished my phone from my pocket and pushed the feed to it so Kaela could follow along.

  I tried to go back as far as I could, which surprisingly got us inside of a lab at OmniCore by the look of the room. Static cut in, and then we caught a glimpse of him hastily walking down a hallway towards an exit. It cut again to the back of a van, large black case in his lap as he thumbed the flap open. “Got it,” he muttered, voice bright with disbelief. “I actually got out with it.” His hands trembled as he ran them over the prototype weapon before the footage cut out. Kaela scoffed at his words.

  Sound hit before audio on the second clip, heavy bass music. When the visual kicked in we saw a familiar bar top, an untouched drink sat dripping with condensation before us. The Flicker for certain. A figure leaned in, close enough for a shoulder to block the camera. Words came through in shards. “…drop point’s set. Don’t open it here.” The camera jerked as if someone had grabbed his head and turned him, keeping Jared from recording their face.

  “They knew he was scrolling…” Kaela interjected. I nodded.

  I had to fight with the system to get it to keep playing, the file was badly damaged despite my system trying to piece it back together. Multicolored artifact images flashed for a bit, but we could barely make out the clearing where I had found the first body. A table sat in the clearing, only two people were there other than Jared. One figure, too hard to see details in the jittering footage grabbed the weapon case and opened it.

  Another cut, picture came in clearer and with sound again. Jared was running, his left hand raised enough to see that he was bleeding. He spun and slowed just enough to aim, shooting blasting one of the Rats in the face with impressive precision while a steady stream of curses blasted through the recording. He slammed into the wall, and darted for another path that he likely didn’t know would be his end.

  Static again, and then gun fire. Shots echoing with a much more frantic rhythm than before, followed by the telling click, click, click of an empty chamber. Glitched color bars. Screams. The footage quivered as if he had taken a heavy blow to the head, but we couldn’t see much. The recording went blank for a moment, just horrible sounds of something heavy colliding wetly against flesh and bone.

  The last thing was ugly and clear enough to make the hair on my neck stand on end. A hulking silhouette leaned over the frenzied camera. Massive hands lifted him. The camera swung up and for half a beat the outline of a beast filled the frame. Dark teeth, something like a mask, caught a bit of light as they moved. A flash of a scarred jaw as Jared’s head flopped over the rippling shoulder. An awful noise filtered through deranged laughter as the body was forced over the exposed metal. The footage closed with a downward glance as rusty metal punched through Jared’s chest, a wet crack splitting the air before the feed cut.

  “Game over.” Kaela’s voice was dry, almost bored, as her amber eyes slid back to the alley around us.

  I saved the recording, praying it wouldn’t rot further in my drive. It didn’t give me much new, but it was enough to hand Omni a neat story. More importantly, it proved what I already suspected — Moth had been in from the start. They’d sent a stand-in to the bar, careful to keep the camera blind, careful to remind me that nothing slipped past them. That was more than paranoia, it was leverage.

  Moth had said there was something bigger at play. This recording didn’t prove it, but it didn’t disprove it either. Which meant I couldn’t just return the package. I needed to see it first, know for myself what the Rats had taken — and make sure Vera never knew I’d looked.

  “I’m done here, let’s move.” I said, standing to dust myself off.

  “What? You think we’re working together now?” She scoffed “This is a race remember?”

  “Suit yourself.” I sighed.

  Kaela slipped out from under the body and drew her weapon in a single, fluid movement. She nearly bumped into me as we headed for the exit path. She had evidently only stuck around to see what I could find in the scene. I had the recording, but now we were back to the hunt and it seemed she was determined to pass Vera’s test.