I looked at the scar on his face, picturing the glowing circuits I’d seen all over his body. The pain I’d felt in his shoulder when our Flux had merged. His twitching shoulder. The one he refused to have fixed.
He frowned at me. He knew exactly what I was thinking about.
“You asked why I didn’t get chipped. It didn’t matter that the chips were out—we couldn’t afford it. Could barely afford this.” He gestured to his whole body.
The old tech was massive. Brutal. It had to be screwed directly to the bone in some cases to keep it from shifting. When he used his Flux, a glyph larger than my hand showed up under his left collarbone and faded as it went under his pectoral. I’d seen two more on his back, even larger.
I thought back to my own Flux modding. Twelve—always younger for girls—and terrified. I’d heard all the stories. Kids coming back with massive scars. Kids not coming back at all. The modding going wrong and them burning up to ash right on the table.
I’d been shaking, but Mom had held my hand tight and even sang a lullaby in my ear. I’d cringed, said I was too old for that, but it had made me feel better. She’d barely eaten for two weeks and taken double shifts for two months just so she could take meto a reputable Modder in Blue. I came out of the operating room with nothing more than a small scar on the back of my neck.
I rubbed it absentmindedly and thought of a young, possibly more innocent Cy going under some slum Modder’s knife. Not a well-lit, clean environment, but dirty and wet, with skeletal mods hanging from the rafters like bodies at a butcher. Cy, strapped to a metal table as they pulled out the bone saw and opened him up. My heart stuttered. He noticed.
“Don’t look like that, doll. At fourteen, I was already a piece of shit. This wasn’t the worst thing I’d lived through at that point.” That didn’t make me feel better.
“You were already a Kitsune? At fourteen?”
“Surprised you didn’t know that already, with how obsessed you are with me.”
I scoffed. “Took me six months to find basically nothing on you. They really wiped you from existence.”
“Perk of being one of POM’s alpha-level assets,” he said, without humor. He didn’t elaborate. His face went blank.
But the walls of this place were pressing in, and I just couldn’t stop talking. “I’d never met someone like you.”
“You have a strange definition of met.”
“I…had to know more about you, but you were a ghost. Everyone has a digital fingerprint these days—ad algorithms, search histories, buy preferences. But you? There was nothing. It was…fascinating. It only made me want to know more.”
“Liked what you didn’t see, huh?” He raised an eyebrow, a faint smile tugging at his lips.
I didn’t take his bait. “Wasn’t that hard, erasing your entire past?”
He surprised me again as his brow furrowed. “Nothing to wipe out, doll. Nothing worthwhile anyway.”
Something about the wrinkles in his forehead made me want to run my fingers over them, smooth them out.
“Obviously not. That kid, Akira, knew you.”
Cy frowned at that. “Well, POM hasn’t figured out a way to erase me from other people’s minds yet.”
I watched him carefully, noting the way his jaw tightened, the flicker of something unreadable in his eyes. His guard was always up, but this felt different.
“Must be nice,” I said, leaning my head back against the wall. “Getting to decide what parts of yourself exist. What people get to see.”
Cy let out a short breath, almost a laugh. “Doll, nobody sees me. I don’t exist, remember?”
“I see you.”
Something flickered in his gaze, but he surprised me by turning his head away.
I let out a sigh. “Better than people looking right at you and only seeing what they can take.”
I shouldn’t have said anything. Now I turned my head away, the vulnerability aching in my chest. The silence stretched again, and then—
“How did you end up at Hellfire?”
I held my breath, the story rising to the edge of my mind. The pipes above us creaked, and the cold air of the cell wicked at the sweat on my neck, sending a shiver down my spine. The fear this conversation had been holding at bay crept back in, wrapping panic-inducing tendrils around my mind.
