Jettio slammed his fourth empty aluminum can of hyper-caff onto the cooling manifold with a violent clatter. The fizzy dregs hissed against the heat sink. "Boss! Look at the sub-routines! Just look at them!" Jettio waved a manic, trembling stylus at three towering holographic displays that occupied the center of the cramped apartment. Green-and-crimson hex strings rained down in cascading waterfalls. "The fail-deadly hook isn't just coiled around the commercial transponders—it's anchored into the Voraxian Gauntlet's bedrock routing layer! Do you know what that means? If I crack their perimeter firewall, I bypass seven corporate firewalls at once! If I hand you the root key to the Gauntlet, you won't ever call me a script-kiddie again!" From the top of a pulsing, matte-black server rack near the window, a heavy down pillow stirred. "Lower your octave, Jettio," Rizka mumbled into the goose feathers. Her eyelids stayed shut. Her silver silk gown was wrinkled, pooling over an industrial heat vent like laundry tossed on an exhaust pipe. "You sound like a boiling teakettle. The server vibrations were hitting a perfect forty hertz until you started vibrating at forty-five. Stop oscillating." "The world is ending in fifty-nine days, twenty-three hours, and fourteen minutes!" Jettio screeched, adjusting thick-rimmed lenses that magnified his frantic, bloodshot pupils. "Your biometric divorce severed the master tether! The entire neural-grid will turn every executive brain stem in Xylos into poached eggs! How are you sleeping through a cascading hardware infarction?" "Comfortably," Rizka sighed, pulling her silk eye mask back down over her nose. "Until about thirty seconds ago." Before Jettio could launch into another frantic telemetry breakdown, the reinforced titanium deadbolts on the front door hissed. A hydraulic whir echoed through the narrow hallway. The lock yielded to a master crypt-card running an enterprise override sequence rather than an explosive charge. The door swung inward with silent, well-oiled precision. Zenkai Ozer crossed the threshold, ducking slightly to clear the low-hanging tangle of fiber-optic cabling that dangled from the ceiling. He wore a sharply tailored double-breasted coat of void-black synth-silk, the emblem of Cygnus Dynamics stamped in gunmetal on his lapel. Behind him stood two mountainous personal bodyguards, their trench coats bulging over powered sub-dermal frames. Zenkai scanned the room. He had expected tears. He had prepared himself to witness a shattered, discarded trophy wife weeping into luxury luggage after being cast out by the Bael conglomerate. He had brought an extraction squad to secure her before Korin realized what a disaster he had unleashed. Instead, he saw a mountain of empty nutrient-paste tubes, a deranged teenager vibrating beside an unauthorized terminal, and a woman curled like a cat atop twenty thousand kilowatts of humming processors. "Rizka Voda?" Zenkai asked, his deep baritone cutting through the drone of the cooling fans. "Go away," came the muffled reply from beneath the down pillow. "No sales reps. No census takers. Put the eviction notice under the door." Zenkai paused, a slow, razor-thin smile carving across his angular features. "Hardly an eviction notice. I am Zenkai Ozer. And you are remarkably calm for a woman whose former husband just initiated financial seppuku on live television." As if summoned by his words, the holoscreen on Jettio’s secondary terminal flickered, forced open by an emergency city-wide alert. Korin Bael’s face materialized above the kitchen counter. The man was disheveled. The sleek perfection of his gala appearance was gone, replaced by a sheen of cold sweat on his forehead and an unbuttoned collar. "To the digital vanguard of Xylos," Korin’s voice boomed from the speakers, crackling with desperation. "The Bael Corporation announces an open bounty. One hundred billion credits. Unrestricted diplomatic immunity. A seat on the High Council. We require the immediate intervention of the entity known as Zero. Name your price, Zero. Save the grid. Save Xylos. Contact our secure node immediately." Jettio snorted so hard coffee came out of his nose. "One hundred billion? That idiot wouldn't even pay for your orthopedic mattress last winter, and now he's offering the city's gross domestic product to someone he thinks is a ghost." Rizka never twitched. "Mute him. His cadence gives me a migraine." Jettio tapped a key. Korin's desperate face vanished into static. Zenkai took two steps forward, his boots crunching lightly against a discarded cable tie. "You don't seem concerned by his offer. Or the fact that the entire continent is hunting for an architect capable of writing the very tether that bound your marriage." "I care about REM sleep," Rizka murmured, turning over on the rack. The casing creaked softly beneath her. "Which I was enjoying until every network node in the hemisphere started pinging the local gateway. The background noise is intolerable. It's like sleeping next to an unsynchronized brass band." One of Zenkai’s guards, a square-jawed operative with a cybernetic optical unit glowing red, paced forward. "Sir, this area is unsecure. Civilians are erratic in crisis zones. Allow me to extract her to the transport." "Wait—" Zenkai began. The guard moved regardless. He reached a massive, hydraulic-assisted gauntlet toward Rizka’s shoulder, intending to haul her off the processing stack like a sack of grain. Rizka stayed flat. Her gaze remained hooded behind the silk. Her left hand drifted out from beneath the silk blanket, loose and boneless. A single pale index finger extended, meeting the enforcer’s titanium-plated wrist at the precise fulcrum of his hydraulic joint. There was no dramatic impact. Just a quiet *click*. The massive operative's balance folded instantly. His entire four-hundred-pound frame pivoted in mid-air, redirected by a microscopic rotation of Rizka's wrist that hijacked the momentum of his own powered suit. With a deafening crash, the operative slammed flat onto his back on the reinforced floor, his pneumatic servos whining in violent overload as his limbs locked up entirely. Rizka’s hand settled back beneath the bolster. "Pressure point seven on the Mark-IV kinetic rig," Rizka said, her voice dripping with profound fatigue. "The feedback loop trips the emergency circuit breaker if you tap the lateral servo at forty-five degrees. Read the manual next time. And don't touch my blanket. It's cashmere." The second bodyguard reached for his plasma carbine, sweat beading over his temple. "Stand down," Zenkai commanded instantly, his eyes glittering with fierce, unvarnished delight. The guard froze, retreating two paces while his companion groaned on the linoleum, struggling to reset his suit's fried motor core. Zenkai looked from the fallen giant to the slender, unbothered woman resting atop the mainframe. The pieces clicked together with terrifying, magnificent clarity. The unmatched structural knowledge of military-grade exoskeletons. The apathetic mastery of defensive counters. The sheer, absurd lack of fear. "You are full of surprises, Rizka," Zenkai said softly. He drew closer, resting one gloved hand on the steel edge of the mainframe frame, leaning down until his voice dropped to an intimate murmur. "Korin thought he threw away a decorative vase. He threw an orbital cannon into the street without realizing it." "I'm a bolster, Zenkai," she sighed. "Treat me like one and leave me alone." "The streets aren't safe," Zenkai insisted, his voice dropping lower, tinged with genuine urgency. "The market is plunging. When the elite realize the countdown isn't a bluff, they will tear this district apart looking for whoever designed the Bael security framework. Come to the Cygnus compound. Private suites. Soundproof walls. A personal culinary staff. Absolute sanctuary." Rizka cracked open one golden-brown eye, looking at him with utter skepticism. "Soundproof?" "Triple-layered acoustic dampening," Zenkai promised. "Is there a catch?" "Only that you let my analysts review your terminal traces while you rest." Rizka let her eyelid drop shut again. "Denied. Your analysts type too loud. I can hear frantic keyboard clacking from three blocks away. Go home, Ozer. I have fifty-nine days to fix this stupid script, and fifty-eight of them belong to my sleep schedule." Jettio opened his mouth to protest, but the words never left his throat. A deafening, concussive roar ripped through the apartment hallway. The six-inch-thick reinforced blast door tore clean off its titanium hinges, rocketing across the room and smashing Jettio’s primary holographic emitter into a cloud of sparking shrapnel. Acrid black smoke and the stench of military-grade hexogen flooded the tiny apartment. Through the burning threshold charged four figures cloaked in active-camo shrouds, heavy sub-machine guns raised, their barrels glowing with the unmistakable red targeting lasers of the Obsidian Syndicate.

Unwanted Houseguests