The alley was a wound between two sagging apartment blocks, its walls weeping rust and the sour tang of fried circuitry. A single flickering sign cast jagged shadows—some long-dead ramen shop, its neon kanji bleeding into a dull pink smear. Lucent's boots kicked aside empty stim-canisters as he walked, the sound swallowed by the ever-present hum of the city's Aethernet nodes. He could already taste the ozone-sharp promise of the Neon Bazaar, still six blocks away.
Then concrete scuffed behind him.
He didn't turn. Didn't need to. The footsteps were all wrong—too eager, too unafraid of being heard. Amateurs.
"Hey, fuckface."
Lucent kept walking.
A pebble skittered past his heel, deliberate. "I said hey."
He stopped. Let his shoulders slump in a sigh that wasn't entirely faked. When he turned, three figures crowded the alley mouth, backlit by the distant glow of the Spires. The tallest had a shock-baton dangling from his belt, its corporate glyphs half-scratched off. The girl beside him flexed fingers wrapped in conductive tape, the kind Pit fighters used to ground rogue spells. The third just grinned, rolling something between his knuckles—a bootleg AetherKnuckle, its casing cracked to show the unstable core within.
Lucent's Conduit was already warm in his pocket.
"Wallet. Conduit. Jacket," said the tall one, jerking his chin. "Unless you wanna eat pavement first."
The girl cracked her neck. "He looks like he'd taste like gutter noodles."
Lucent stared at them. Kids, really—eighteen at most, their bravado as thin as the synth-leather of their scavenged gear. He could see the hunger in the way they held themselves, the jittery tension of people who'd been stepped on too many times to care about stepping back.
He almost felt bad.
Almost.
"Silence," he said.
His Conduit flared to life, its cracked screen painting his fingers in jagged blue light. The glyph unfolded between them—not the smooth, corporate-approved geometry of a licensed spell, but something rougher, its edges frayed like torn code. It hung in the air for a heartbeat, pulsing, then detonated.
All sounds died.
Not just their voices—the distant sirens, the drip of condensation from a broken pipe, even the scuff of their shoes on concrete. The alley became a vacuum, a ten-meter bubble of perfect, ringing quiet.
The tall one's mouth moved, shouting nothing. The girl's eyes went wide. The third fumbled with his AetherKnuckle, its glyphs stuttering in the unnatural hush.
Lucent moved.
He caught the girl's wrist as she swung, twisted hard enough to feel the grind of bone, and shoved her into the wall. She bounced off, silent but for the impact shuddering through the brick. The tall one lunged, shock-baton raised—too slow, telegraphing like a rookie. Lucent sidestepped, drove an elbow into his ribs, felt something give in. The baton clattered to the ground, its charge dying in a scatter of sparks.
The third kid got lucky. His wild swing connected, the brass knuckles glowing with aether grazing Lucent's cheekbone. Heat bloomed—not just pain, but the prickling burn of unstable energy chewing at skin. Lucent reeled back, tasted copper, and smiled.
The kid froze.
Big mistake.
Lucent's fist caught him under the jaw, snapping his head back. A follow-up knee to the gut folded him like bad code. He hit the ground, the glowing brass knuckles skittering away, its core spitting erratic glyphs that fizzled against the silence.
The tall one was up again, clutching his ribs. The girl spat blood, bracing against the wall. Lucent wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, smearing red across his knuckles. He could end this now. A glyph to the nervous system, a boot to the throat.
Instead, Lucent exhaled through his nose, the fight still humming in his muscles. He stepped over the groaning kid with the Aether Knuckles and crouched beside the tall one, who was clutching his ribs and glaring up at him through a sheen of sweat. Without a word, Lucent shoved his hand into the kid's jacket pocket, fishing past loose stim-tabs and a cracked data chip until his fingers closed around something solid.
A single crumpled credit.
The kid's eyes widened and opened his mouth, shouting something.
Then Lucent snapped his fingers.
The glyph shattered.
Sound rushed back—the choked gasps of the girl against the wall, the wet cough of the third kid spitting blood onto the concrete, the distant wail of a mag-lev cutting through the lower tiers.
"Get that hands looked at," Lucent said, voice slicing through the quiet like a blade. "Before it melts your face off."
Sound rushed back in a dizzying wave—their gasping breaths, the distant wail of a mag-lev, the wet cough of the kid on the ground. The tall one stared at the credit chip in his hand like he didn't understand what it was.
Lucent didn't wait for gratitude. Didn't expect it. He just turned and walked away, the taste of blood sharp on his tongue.
Behind him, the girl whispered, "What the fuck was that?"
Lucent didn't answer.
The city swallowed the sound of his footsteps whole.
***
The Neon Bazaar wasn't a place. It was a secret.
You didn't find it. You knew it. Or you didn't. And if you didn't, you'd walk right past its doors without ever seeing them.
It moved. Every week, sometimes every night. A derelict subway station one evening, a hollowed-out cargo freighter the next.
The only way in was through the Undernet—a shadow of the Aethernet, stitched together from back-alley nodes. You logged in, you checked the coordinates, and if you were lucky, the Bazaar let you in. If you weren't? Well. Some people logged in and never logged out.
The air smelled of burnt air and sweat as Lucent approached the flickering waypoint—a rusted service door marked with a glyph that hadn't been there an hour ago. The paint still glistened wet, the symbol pulsing faintly in time with the distant heartbeat of the city's Aethernet nodes.
He pressed his Conduit to the mark, felt the authentication glyph slither through his device's defenses, checking for warrants, for corporate ties, for the telltale signatures of Reclamation spyware. A moment's hesitation—then the door groaned open on hinges that hadn't worked in years.
Inside, the Neon Bazaar breathed.
The space was larger than it should have been, walls lost behind makeshift stalls cobbled together from shipping containers and scavenged train parts. Overhead, stolen holographic projectors flickered with glitching advertisements for goods that didn't exist in any legal market.
The crowd moved like a single organism—hunched figures in dampening cloaks brushing against corporate defectors still wearing fragments of their company sigils. Every third step, Lucent's boots stuck to patches of dried coolant and something darker.
SpellApps were the Bazaar's lifeblood.
Near the entrance, a gaunt woman with Myriad-branded ocular implants hawked "refurbished" utility glyphs. "Straight from the Spires' trash bins," she crooned, tapping a display showing a water-purification spell. "Corporate clean, just… gently used." The glyph stuttered when activated, its edges fraying like burnt paper. That was the trade—discounted function for unpredictable performance. A licensed mage would sneer at the risk, but down here, a spell that worked 80% of the time was still better than no spell at all.
Further in, the risks grew sharper.
A heavyset man with chemical burns across his knuckles sold combat glyphs peeled from dead Reclamation officers' Conduits. "Guaranteed untraceable," he lied through blackened teeth. Lucent watched as a buyer tested one—a simple kinetic push. The glyph fired, but the recoil fractured the man's wrist with an audible snap. The seller just shrugged. "Should've sprung for the dampening upgrade."
The real dangers lurked in the back stalls.
A child—couldn't have been older than twelve—sat cross-legged behind a tray of shimmering data chips. "Rawcasts," she announced to no one in particular. "No corporate fingerprints. No safety limits." The glyphs were beautiful in their way, all jagged edges and hungry voids. Buyers whispered that these spells remembered their casters, adapted to their users' habits. What they didn't say was how sometimes the spells adapted first. Last month, a rawcaster's masterpiece had unraveled its buyer's nervous system, rewriting his pain receptors into something that couldn't distinguish between a stubbed toe and a knife to the gut.
Lucent's fingers twitched toward his own Conduit. He'd traded here before—a stolen Nimbrix firewall spell for a vial of suppressants that kept his glyph-burns from festering. The deal had saved his life. The spell had probably ended someone else's.
That was the Bazaar's trade-offs.
Every transaction was a gamble, every spell a potential knife aimed at your own throat. The corporate castoffs might fail when you needed them most. The rawcasts might rewrite you from the inside out. But when the alternative was facing the city's hunger with empty hands and a silent Conduit?
Well.
Some risks smelled like salvation.
A hand caught Lucent's elbow. He turned to face a vendor whose stall displayed nothing but a single, pulsing glyph suspended in a cracked aquarium. "You look like a man who's tired of losing," the vendor murmured. His pupils were dilated, the sclera veined with luminous fractures. "I sell second chances."
Lucent pulled free.
The Bazaar always knew what you wanted.
That was the most dangerous spell of all.
Lucent moved deeper into the thrumming belly of the Neon Bazaar, his shoulders brushing against damp cloaks and jury-rigged armor as he navigated the press of bodies. The air grew thicker here, laced with the acrid bite of overheating conduits and the cloying sweetness of synthetic pheromones leaking from a nearby stall.
A dealer with a face like crumpled wire mesh leaned over a table scattered with glass vials, each filled with a swirling, iridescent liquid that caught the neon glow and fractured it into something unnatural. "Glow," he rasped, tapping one with a yellowed fingernail. "Straight from the nodes. None of that cut shit they sell in the pits." The liquid pulsed faintly, as if breathing. Lucent knew better than to ask what it did to a person's nervous system after prolonged use. He'd seen the addicts—their veins lit up like live wires, their skin peeling away in translucent sheets.
Past the drug stalls, a hunched figure in a tattered corporate security jacket hawked stolen data. "Memory shards," she hissed, gesturing to a rack of crystalline chips that glimmered under the flickering lights. "Fresh from the Spires. Ever wanted to know what it feels like to be someone else?" A potential buyer, a gaunt man with a twitch in his left eye, reached out, but she slapped his hand away. "Not for touching. For buying."
Lucent kept walking.
A makeshift arena had been set up near the back, a ring of cracked monitors forming a loose circle where two rawcasters dueled with unstable glyphs. The crowd jeered as one fighter's spell backfired, sending a jagged arc of energy ripping through the air. It caught the edge of a spectator's coat, setting the fabric smoldering. No one flinched. The fight went on.
Then he saw something different.
A stall with no vendor, just a single, pristine Conduit resting on a velvet cushion. It was sleek, unmarked, the kind of hardware that screamed corporate prototype.
A hand-scrawled sign leaned against it: "Test it and see."
Lucent hesitated.
A trap? A trick?
Or something worse—a genuine offer.
The Bazaar thrived on these moments. The ones where curiosity overrode senses. Where the need to know became more important than the cost of finding out.
His fingers twitched.
The crowd surged around him, indifferent. Apathetic.
Somewhere deeper in the market, a deal was being made that would end a life. A spell was changing hands that would rewrite reality in some small, terrible way.
And Lucent stood there, staring at a Conduit that had no business existing in a place like this.
The choice, as always, was his.
But he left the strange Conduit untouched—some temptations weren't worth biting. He moved with purpose now, weaving through the throng toward the back of the Bazaar where the real business happened. The crowd thinned here, the stalls replaced by curtained alcoves and the occasional armed guard leaning against rusted support beams.
Lucent's boots scuffed against the uneven flooring as he pushed through the last of the crowd, leaving behind the clamor of the main thoroughfare. The air here was different—thicker, heavier, laced with the metallic tang of illicit Aether mods and the sour undercurrent of bodies packed too close for too long. The walls narrowed, the makeshift stalls giving way to curtained alcoves where deals were made in hushed tones and the occasional burst of static from poorly shielded Conduits.
Raker's corner was exactly as Lucent had left it last time—if "corner" could describe the cramped space wedged between a gutted vending machine and a support beam crusted with decades of layered graffiti. The fixer himself hadn't changed much either, still slouched on that same overturned crate, still working through another stim-stick, the cherry glow reflecting off the chrome plating of his augmented jaw. The flickering light made the scars along his temple look deeper, the hollows under his eyes darker.
"Took you long enough," Raker said, exhaling a plume of smoke that curled lazily in the damp air. His voice was rough, the kind of rough that came from years of shouting over the din of the Pit or maybe just from breathing in too much of the lower tiers' particular brand of pollution. "Was starting to think you got scooped up by Reclamation. Or, worse, finally pissed off someone enough that they decided to turn you into a cautionary tale."
Lucent leaned against the wall, the cold seeping through his jacket. "You'd miss me," he said, dry.
"Like a bad rash," Raker shot back, but there was no real bite to it. He reached into his jacket—slow, deliberate, like he wanted Lucent to see the movement—and pulled out three data chips. They clattered onto the crate between them, each one distinct.
The first was a dull, unremarkable gray, the kind of chip you'd find in any corporate drone's pocket. Basic. Forgettable.
The second was black, scorched along one edge as if it had been pulled from a fire, the surface scratched with tiny, deliberate glyphs—GhostKey's calling card.
The third was the one that caught the light. A sickly green, pulsing faintly, like something alive beneath the casing.
Raker didn't explain. He didn't have to.
Lucent picked up the gray chip first, thumbing the activation glyph. A job listing flickered to life above it—data retrieval from a low-security Myriad outpost. Simple. Safe. The kind of job that wouldn't even require drawing a glyph, just some basic hacking and a steady hand. The payout was meager, but it would cover rent. Maybe even a hot meal.
He tossed it back.
The black chip was heavier, warmer, like it still carried the heat of whatever explosion had scorched it. This one lit up with a holo-display—a time, a location, and a single line of text: "Transport raid. Bring firepower." No details beyond that. No guarantees. Just the promise of a big score if they pulled it off, and at best Reclamation cell if they didn't.
Lucent turned it over in his fingers, considering.
Then there was the green one.
He didn't want to touch it. But he did anyway.
The moment his skin made contact, the chip pulsed, a sharp, almost painful vibration that traveled up his arm. The display that flickered to life wasn't text. Wasn't a job listing. Just a single, looping glyph—one he didn't recognize, one that made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end.
Raker watched him, the stim-stick dangling from his lips. "Some Spire brat," he said, like that explained anything. "Wants a Conduit repaired. Won't say what's wrong with it. Won't say what it does. Pay's shit." A pause. "But."
Lucent didn't look up. "But?"
Raker leaned forward, the crate creaking under his weight. "Word is, it's got something to do with Eclipse."
The word landed like a physical blow.
Eclipse.
Not a rumor. Not a myth. A whisper in the underground, a ghost in the code. The kind of thing that got people disappeared if they asked too many questions.
Lucent's glyph-burn ached, a sharp, sudden throb that made his fingers twitch.
Raker saw it. Of course he did. The bastard always saw too much. "Yeah," he said, grinning around the stim. "Thought that might get you."
Lucent clenched his jaw. He hated when Raker was right. Almost as much as he hated the way his pulse kicked up at the thought of Eclipse, at the possibility of answers.
"Who's the client?" he asked, his voice tighter than he meant it to be.
Raker shrugged. "Meet at the old Nimbrix warehouse. Midnight. Alone." He took another drag, the ember flaring. "And before you ask—no, I don't know why."
Lucent turned the chip over in his fingers. High risk, low reward—on paper. But if it was tied to Eclipse, then the real prize wasn't credits. It was information. The kind that could get a man killed. Or worse.
He hesitated, his fingers still hovering over the three chips. The green one pulsed faintly in his peripheral vision, but his mind snagged on something else—something that had been gnawing at him since he'd first seen that corrupted weather-control glyph.
He looked up at Raker. "Before I pick any of these—what the hell is going on with GhostKey?"
Raker's smirk faltered for half a second. Just long enough.
Lucent pressed. "Their last 'cracked' spell package had Myriad tracers buried in the code. Not just DRM—full neural feedback loops. Since when does GhostKey peddle corporate spyware?"
The stim-stick in Raker's mouth crackled as he took a slow drag. Around them, the Bazaar's hum seemed to quiet, like the air itself was holding its breath.
"You noticed that, huh?" Raker finally said, his voice lower now. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "Two theories. First—GhostKey got compromised. Myriad flipped a few of their runners, slipped poisoned code into their drops. Wouldn't be the first time."
Lucent waited.
"Second theory?" Raker exhaled smoke through his nose. "GhostKey's always been Myriad. Whole damn operation, from the start. Bait for the desperate, a honeypot for unlicensed Conduits." He tapped the black chip with one scarred knuckle. "That raid job? Could be payback. Could be another trap."
A chill crawled down Lucent's spine. If GhostKey was compromised—or worse, a corporate front—then half the underground's tools were backdoored. Every cracked spell, every jailbroken glyph, every piece of black-market code he'd ever touched could be reporting back to the Spires right now.
He thought of the glyph-burn on his hand, the way it ached when he pushed his Conduit too hard. Thought of the whispers in the Aether that didn't sound like static.
Raker watched him, his augmented eye flickering. "Still wanna play hero?"
Lucent's fingers closed around the green chip. The decision was already made.
"Just tell me one thing," he said. "If this Spire brat's Conduit is tied to Eclipse—why come to the Bazaar? Why not go to corporate?"
Raker's grin returned, all teeth. "Maybe they did."
The implication hung between them, sharp as a knife.
He pocketed the green chip.
Raker raised an eyebrow. "Really? That's the one you're taking?"
"You offered it."
"I also offered you two perfectly good ways to make actual money."
Lucent pushed off the wall. "Next time," he said, "don't waste my time with gray chips."
Raker's laughter followed him as he walked away, sharp and knowing.
The Bazaar had given him what he came for.
Now he just had to survive it.