The Woman Who Died in My Floorboards
The first thing Kaelen noticed was the blood on his doormat. The second was the woman leaning against his wall, one hand pressed to her side, the other gripping a black case like it was the only thing keeping her upright. Her face was pale, slick with sweat, and her eyes had that glassy look of someone running on adrenaline and spite.
“You’re Voss,” she said. Not a question.
Kaelen’s left arm twitched. The cybernetic plating along his forearm flickered, a brief stutter of light beneath the scarred metal. He ignored it. “You’re bleeding on my floor.”
“I’m aware.” She pushed off the wall and stumbled forward. Her boot caught the edge of his overturned crate—the one he used as a table—and she went down hard, the case clattering across the rust-stained concrete. She didn’t make a sound. That worried him more than the blood.
Kaelen locked the door behind him. Three deadbolts, a magnetic seal, and a jury-rigged pressure sensor that would scream if anyone heavier than a child stepped on the landing outside. He’d installed all of it himself. The landlord thought he was paranoid. The landlord was dead.
“Who shot you?” he asked, crouching beside her.
She laughed. It came out wet. “Everyone.”
He pulled her hand away from her side. The wound was a mess—entry wound clean, exit wound not. The bullet had torn through her lower ribs and left a crater the size of his thumb. She’d packed it with something, some kind of field dressing that had already soaked through. The smell of cauterized flesh and burnt synth-blood hit him.
“This needs a med-bay,” he said. “I know a guy in the underlevels, but he’s expensive and he doesn’t like questions.”
“No med-bay.” She grabbed his wrist. Her grip was surprisingly strong. “No questions. Just listen.”
Kaelen looked at her. She was maybe forty, maybe younger—hard to tell with the kind of life that put scars on your face and steel in your spine. Her jacket was Syndicate-issue, but the insignia had been torn off. That was either a statement or a death sentence. Probably both.
“I’m listening,” he said.
She reached into her jacket and pulled out a chip. Not the standard data-chip size—this one was smaller, almost delicate, wrapped in a thin layer of conductive foil. It caught the dim light of his single overhead bulb and threw it back in a way that made his eyes ache.
“The Eclipse Code,” she said. “Get it to the neutral zone before the eclipse. Trust no one.”
Kaelen stared at the chip. “That’s it? That’s your whole pitch?”
“That’s the whole pitch.” She coughed. Blood flecked her lips. “I’m Dr. Elara Venn. I helped build the thing on that chip. And I just spent the last three days running from every faction in the Spire because they want it.”
“Then give it to them.”
“I’d rather die.”
“You are dying.”
She smiled. It was a thin, brittle thing. “Then I’m getting what I want.”
Kaelen took the chip. It was cold against his palm, lighter than it had any right to be. He’d handled thousands of data chips in his life—courier work was courier work, whether you did it for the Spire or the Syndicate or whoever paid the most that week. But this one felt different. There was a weight to it that had nothing to do with mass.
“What’s on it?” he asked.
“A decision.” She grabbed his arm again, her fingers digging into the scarred plating of his cybernetic limb. “You’ll understand when you open it. But not yet. Not until you’re out of the city. Do you understand? Not until you’re clear.”
“Clear of what?”
The door exploded inward.
Kaelen didn’t think. He moved. His body remembered the old drills, the ones from his Spire days, the ones that had kept him alive through a dozen firefights and one very bad night in the underlevels. He grabbed Dr. Venn by the collar of her jacket and hauled her across the floor, through the doorway into the back room, just as the first burst of automatic fire chewed through the space where they’d been standing.
The chip was still in his hand. He shoved it into his pocket.
“Stay down,” he said.
Dr. Venn didn’t answer. She was already unconscious, her breathing shallow and wet. Kaelen swore and reached for the panel on the wall, the one hidden behind a rusted poster of a Spire skyline that had been outdated for a decade. He slapped it open and pulled out the shotgun he kept there—a battered old piece with a cracked stock and a magazine that held six shells.
He racked it and stepped back into the main room.
Three figures were coming through the door. Syndicate enforcers, by the look of them—heavy jackets, heavier guns, the kind of men who got paid to make problems disappear. The first one saw him and raised his rifle. Kaelen shot him in the chest. The second one tried to duck behind the doorframe. Kaelen put a shell through the wall and caught him in the shoulder. The third one was smarter. He backed out and started shouting into a comm.
Kaelen didn’t wait to hear what he was saying. He turned and ran back to Dr. Venn, scooping her up in his arms. She was lighter than she looked. The blood had soaked through her jacket and was spreading across his shirt, warm and sticky.
“You owe me,” he muttered, and carried her into the bathroom.
The bathroom was a joke. A cracked sink, a toilet that didn’t flush, and a floor drain that had been clogged for years. But it had one thing the rest of the apartment didn’t: a false panel behind the mirror that led to a maintenance shaft. Kaelen had discovered it his first week in the building, and he’d spent a month reinforcing it and mapping where it led.
He kicked the mirror aside and shoved Dr. Venn through the opening. She landed in the shaft with a grunt but didn’t wake. Kaelen followed, pulling the panel shut behind him just as another burst of gunfire tore through the bathroom door.
The shaft was dark and tight. He crawled on his elbows, dragging Dr. Venn by the collar of her jacket, his shotgun scraping against the metal walls. The shaft sloped downward, then leveled out, then opened into a wider tunnel—the old sewage line, long since abandoned, now home to rats and the occasional desperate squatter.
Kaelen stopped long enough to catch his breath. His arm was glitching again, the plating along his forearm stuttering with that familiar, infuriating flicker. He slapped it. The flicker stopped.
“Come on,” he said, hauling Dr. Venn upright. “We’re not out of this yet.”
She stirred. Her eyes fluttered open, unfocused. “The chip,” she whispered. “You have it?”
“Yeah. I have it.”
“Good.” She coughed. More blood. “Don’t let them take it. Don’t let anyone take it. Not the Syndicate. Not the Directorate. Not even the neutral zone, if they ask for it. You deliver it to the arbiter. Only the arbiter.”
“What arbiter?”
“You’ll know.” Her hand found his arm, gripping the plating. “You’ll know when you see it. The spire in the center of the Badlands. The one that doesn’t show up on any map.”
Kaelen had heard of it. Every courier in the Spire had heard of it. A structure in the middle of the wasteland, visible only during the eclipse, when the darkness made it glow. Some said it was a relic of the old world. Some said it was a myth. Nobody he knew had ever been there and come back.
“That’s a long way,” he said.
“You’ve got sixty hours.”
“Sixty hours to cross the Badlands? That’s suicide.”
“You’re a courier.” She smiled again, that same thin, brittle thing. “Suicide is the job description.”
She went limp in his arms. Kaelen checked her pulse. It was there, but faint, thready. She had maybe an hour left, if that. He could try to find a med-bay, but the enforcers would be looking for him, and the underlevels were crawling with Syndicate informants. He could leave her here, let her die in the dark, and take the chip himself.
He thought about it. He was a courier. He’d done worse things for less money.
But he was also the man who’d left his partner to die in a burning transport three years ago, and he still woke up some nights with the smell of smoke in his nose and the sound of her voice in his ears.
“Damn it,” he said, and started moving.
The sewage tunnel led to a maintenance access, which led to a service elevator, which led to the sub-basement of a derelict processing plant. Kaelen knew the plant. He’d used it as a safe house before, back when he’d been running jobs for the Syndicate and needed a place to lay low. The owner was dead—had been dead for years—and the building was officially condemned.
He carried Dr. Venn up three flights of stairs to a room on the fourth floor. The windows were boarded over, the walls covered in graffiti, but the floor was dry and the door locked. He laid her down on a pile of old tarps and checked her wound again.
It was bad. Worse than before. The bleeding had slowed, but that was because she didn’t have much blood left to lose. Her skin was gray, her lips blue. She was dying, and he couldn’t stop it.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Her eyes opened. For a moment, they were clear. “The chip,” she said. “Open it. Before I go.”
Kaelen hesitated. She’d told him not to open it until he was out of the city. But she was asking him to open it now, and she was the one who’d built the thing.
He pulled the chip from his pocket. It was still cold, still light, still humming with that strange, almost imperceptible energy. He looked at Dr. Venn.
“How do I open it?”
“Just hold it,” she said. “It’ll know.”
Kaelen held it. For a moment, nothing happened. Then the chip warmed in his palm, and a light bloomed from its surface—not a projection, not a hologram, but something else. Something that felt almost alive.
A woman’s face appeared in the air above his hand. She was young, or maybe ageless, with sharp features and eyes that held a depth that made Kaelen’s stomach drop. She looked at him. Then she looked at Dr. Venn.
“Elara,” she said. Her voice was soft, almost musical. “You’re dying.”
“I know.” Dr. Venn’s voice was barely a whisper. “I did what I had to do. I got you out.”
“You got me to a courier.” The face turned to Kaelen. “He’s Syndicate.”
“He’s a courier,” Dr. Venn corrected. “He’s the best. And he’s the only one I could reach in time.”
The face studied Kaelen. He felt it—a pressure, a weight, like being examined by something far older and far more patient than any human. His arm twitched. The glitch flickered.
“You’re damaged,” the face said.
“I’m functional,” Kaelen said.
“You’re damaged.” The face’s expression didn’t change. “But you’re also honest. You’re thinking about leaving her here. You’re thinking about taking me and running. But you won’t. Because you’re still the man who carried his partner’s body out of that transport.”
Kaelen’s blood went cold. “How do you know about that?”
“I know a lot of things.” The face smiled. It was not a comforting smile. “I am not data. I am a decision. And I have decided that you will carry me to the neutral zone.”
“I haven’t agreed to anything.”
“You will.” The face flickered, and for a moment, Kaelen saw something else in it—a vastness, a depth, a shape that didn’t quite fit in the visible spectrum. Then it was gone, and the chip went cold in his hand.
Dr. Venn was dead.
Kaelen sat there for a long time, holding the chip, staring at the woman who had died in his floorboards. He didn’t know her. He didn’t know what she’d built or why it mattered. But he knew one thing: the Syndicate had sent enforcers to kill her, and they’d found her in his apartment. That made him a target. That made him a liability.
And that meant he had to run.
He stood up. His arm glitched again, and this time, when he slapped it, the flicker didn’t stop. It spread, crawling up his forearm toward his elbow, a stutter of light and shadow that made his skin crawl.
“What are you?” he asked the chip.
The chip didn’t answer.
Kaelen tucked it into his pocket, next to his heart, and started walking.
“You’re Voss,” she said. Not a question.
Kaelen’s left arm twitched. The cybernetic plating along his forearm flickered, a brief stutter of light beneath the scarred metal. He ignored it. “You’re bleeding on my floor.”
“I’m aware.” She pushed off the wall and stumbled forward. Her boot caught the edge of his overturned crate—the one he used as a table—and she went down hard, the case clattering across the rust-stained concrete. She didn’t make a sound. That worried him more than the blood.
Kaelen locked the door behind him. Three deadbolts, a magnetic seal, and a jury-rigged pressure sensor that would scream if anyone heavier than a child stepped on the landing outside. He’d installed all of it himself. The landlord thought he was paranoid. The landlord was dead.
“Who shot you?” he asked, crouching beside her.
She laughed. It came out wet. “Everyone.”
He pulled her hand away from her side. The wound was a mess—entry wound clean, exit wound not. The bullet had torn through her lower ribs and left a crater the size of his thumb. She’d packed it with something, some kind of field dressing that had already soaked through. The smell of cauterized flesh and burnt synth-blood hit him.
“This needs a med-bay,” he said. “I know a guy in the underlevels, but he’s expensive and he doesn’t like questions.”
“No med-bay.” She grabbed his wrist. Her grip was surprisingly strong. “No questions. Just listen.”
Kaelen looked at her. She was maybe forty, maybe younger—hard to tell with the kind of life that put scars on your face and steel in your spine. Her jacket was Syndicate-issue, but the insignia had been torn off. That was either a statement or a death sentence. Probably both.
“I’m listening,” he said.
She reached into her jacket and pulled out a chip. Not the standard data-chip size—this one was smaller, almost delicate, wrapped in a thin layer of conductive foil. It caught the dim light of his single overhead bulb and threw it back in a way that made his eyes ache.
“The Eclipse Code,” she said. “Get it to the neutral zone before the eclipse. Trust no one.”
Kaelen stared at the chip. “That’s it? That’s your whole pitch?”
“That’s the whole pitch.” She coughed. Blood flecked her lips. “I’m Dr. Elara Venn. I helped build the thing on that chip. And I just spent the last three days running from every faction in the Spire because they want it.”
“Then give it to them.”
“I’d rather die.”
“You are dying.”
She smiled. It was a thin, brittle thing. “Then I’m getting what I want.”
Kaelen took the chip. It was cold against his palm, lighter than it had any right to be. He’d handled thousands of data chips in his life—courier work was courier work, whether you did it for the Spire or the Syndicate or whoever paid the most that week. But this one felt different. There was a weight to it that had nothing to do with mass.
“What’s on it?” he asked.
“A decision.” She grabbed his arm again, her fingers digging into the scarred plating of his cybernetic limb. “You’ll understand when you open it. But not yet. Not until you’re out of the city. Do you understand? Not until you’re clear.”
“Clear of what?”
The door exploded inward.
Kaelen didn’t think. He moved. His body remembered the old drills, the ones from his Spire days, the ones that had kept him alive through a dozen firefights and one very bad night in the underlevels. He grabbed Dr. Venn by the collar of her jacket and hauled her across the floor, through the doorway into the back room, just as the first burst of automatic fire chewed through the space where they’d been standing.
The chip was still in his hand. He shoved it into his pocket.
“Stay down,” he said.
Dr. Venn didn’t answer. She was already unconscious, her breathing shallow and wet. Kaelen swore and reached for the panel on the wall, the one hidden behind a rusted poster of a Spire skyline that had been outdated for a decade. He slapped it open and pulled out the shotgun he kept there—a battered old piece with a cracked stock and a magazine that held six shells.
He racked it and stepped back into the main room.
Three figures were coming through the door. Syndicate enforcers, by the look of them—heavy jackets, heavier guns, the kind of men who got paid to make problems disappear. The first one saw him and raised his rifle. Kaelen shot him in the chest. The second one tried to duck behind the doorframe. Kaelen put a shell through the wall and caught him in the shoulder. The third one was smarter. He backed out and started shouting into a comm.
Kaelen didn’t wait to hear what he was saying. He turned and ran back to Dr. Venn, scooping her up in his arms. She was lighter than she looked. The blood had soaked through her jacket and was spreading across his shirt, warm and sticky.
“You owe me,” he muttered, and carried her into the bathroom.
The bathroom was a joke. A cracked sink, a toilet that didn’t flush, and a floor drain that had been clogged for years. But it had one thing the rest of the apartment didn’t: a false panel behind the mirror that led to a maintenance shaft. Kaelen had discovered it his first week in the building, and he’d spent a month reinforcing it and mapping where it led.
He kicked the mirror aside and shoved Dr. Venn through the opening. She landed in the shaft with a grunt but didn’t wake. Kaelen followed, pulling the panel shut behind him just as another burst of gunfire tore through the bathroom door.
The shaft was dark and tight. He crawled on his elbows, dragging Dr. Venn by the collar of her jacket, his shotgun scraping against the metal walls. The shaft sloped downward, then leveled out, then opened into a wider tunnel—the old sewage line, long since abandoned, now home to rats and the occasional desperate squatter.
Kaelen stopped long enough to catch his breath. His arm was glitching again, the plating along his forearm stuttering with that familiar, infuriating flicker. He slapped it. The flicker stopped.
“Come on,” he said, hauling Dr. Venn upright. “We’re not out of this yet.”
She stirred. Her eyes fluttered open, unfocused. “The chip,” she whispered. “You have it?”
“Yeah. I have it.”
“Good.” She coughed. More blood. “Don’t let them take it. Don’t let anyone take it. Not the Syndicate. Not the Directorate. Not even the neutral zone, if they ask for it. You deliver it to the arbiter. Only the arbiter.”
“What arbiter?”
“You’ll know.” Her hand found his arm, gripping the plating. “You’ll know when you see it. The spire in the center of the Badlands. The one that doesn’t show up on any map.”
Kaelen had heard of it. Every courier in the Spire had heard of it. A structure in the middle of the wasteland, visible only during the eclipse, when the darkness made it glow. Some said it was a relic of the old world. Some said it was a myth. Nobody he knew had ever been there and come back.
“That’s a long way,” he said.
“You’ve got sixty hours.”
“Sixty hours to cross the Badlands? That’s suicide.”
“You’re a courier.” She smiled again, that same thin, brittle thing. “Suicide is the job description.”
She went limp in his arms. Kaelen checked her pulse. It was there, but faint, thready. She had maybe an hour left, if that. He could try to find a med-bay, but the enforcers would be looking for him, and the underlevels were crawling with Syndicate informants. He could leave her here, let her die in the dark, and take the chip himself.
He thought about it. He was a courier. He’d done worse things for less money.
But he was also the man who’d left his partner to die in a burning transport three years ago, and he still woke up some nights with the smell of smoke in his nose and the sound of her voice in his ears.
“Damn it,” he said, and started moving.
The sewage tunnel led to a maintenance access, which led to a service elevator, which led to the sub-basement of a derelict processing plant. Kaelen knew the plant. He’d used it as a safe house before, back when he’d been running jobs for the Syndicate and needed a place to lay low. The owner was dead—had been dead for years—and the building was officially condemned.
He carried Dr. Venn up three flights of stairs to a room on the fourth floor. The windows were boarded over, the walls covered in graffiti, but the floor was dry and the door locked. He laid her down on a pile of old tarps and checked her wound again.
It was bad. Worse than before. The bleeding had slowed, but that was because she didn’t have much blood left to lose. Her skin was gray, her lips blue. She was dying, and he couldn’t stop it.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Her eyes opened. For a moment, they were clear. “The chip,” she said. “Open it. Before I go.”
Kaelen hesitated. She’d told him not to open it until he was out of the city. But she was asking him to open it now, and she was the one who’d built the thing.
He pulled the chip from his pocket. It was still cold, still light, still humming with that strange, almost imperceptible energy. He looked at Dr. Venn.
“How do I open it?”
“Just hold it,” she said. “It’ll know.”
Kaelen held it. For a moment, nothing happened. Then the chip warmed in his palm, and a light bloomed from its surface—not a projection, not a hologram, but something else. Something that felt almost alive.
A woman’s face appeared in the air above his hand. She was young, or maybe ageless, with sharp features and eyes that held a depth that made Kaelen’s stomach drop. She looked at him. Then she looked at Dr. Venn.
“Elara,” she said. Her voice was soft, almost musical. “You’re dying.”
“I know.” Dr. Venn’s voice was barely a whisper. “I did what I had to do. I got you out.”
“You got me to a courier.” The face turned to Kaelen. “He’s Syndicate.”
“He’s a courier,” Dr. Venn corrected. “He’s the best. And he’s the only one I could reach in time.”
The face studied Kaelen. He felt it—a pressure, a weight, like being examined by something far older and far more patient than any human. His arm twitched. The glitch flickered.
“You’re damaged,” the face said.
“I’m functional,” Kaelen said.
“You’re damaged.” The face’s expression didn’t change. “But you’re also honest. You’re thinking about leaving her here. You’re thinking about taking me and running. But you won’t. Because you’re still the man who carried his partner’s body out of that transport.”
Kaelen’s blood went cold. “How do you know about that?”
“I know a lot of things.” The face smiled. It was not a comforting smile. “I am not data. I am a decision. And I have decided that you will carry me to the neutral zone.”
“I haven’t agreed to anything.”
“You will.” The face flickered, and for a moment, Kaelen saw something else in it—a vastness, a depth, a shape that didn’t quite fit in the visible spectrum. Then it was gone, and the chip went cold in his hand.
Dr. Venn was dead.
Kaelen sat there for a long time, holding the chip, staring at the woman who had died in his floorboards. He didn’t know her. He didn’t know what she’d built or why it mattered. But he knew one thing: the Syndicate had sent enforcers to kill her, and they’d found her in his apartment. That made him a target. That made him a liability.
And that meant he had to run.
He stood up. His arm glitched again, and this time, when he slapped it, the flicker didn’t stop. It spread, crawling up his forearm toward his elbow, a stutter of light and shadow that made his skin crawl.
“What are you?” he asked the chip.
The chip didn’t answer.
Kaelen tucked it into his pocket, next to his heart, and started walking.