The shop was tucked between two collapsing towers, its sign flickering with static like it couldn’t decide whether to hide or scream. The front read: "INK/EDGE", half tattoo parlor, half myth. The kind of place that didn’t show up on any registry—but if you knew the right names, it answered.

Dax Vorr stepped through the curtain of misted rain and neon haze. His boots hit chrome-tiled floor, slick with city grime. The hum of a deep-cut mod drill echoed somewhere behind the walls. He sniffed: solder, smoke, a trace of blood. His kind of place.

Inside, a man was lying facedown on a padded bench, his spine bare and twitching under the soft buzz of a dermal inker. The artist was silent, focused—shoulders loose, hips resting against the edge of the bench like they had nowhere else to be. A strand of hair curled against their cheek, eyes hidden behind tinted lenses.

Dax leaned against the wall, watching. He didn’t speak. Not yet.

The tattoo gun stopped.

“I’m working,” the fixer said without looking up, voice cool as iced synth-wine.

“I’m watching,” Dax replied, lips curling. “Call it quality control.”

A pause. Then the fixer straightened, and finally turned.

And Dax Vorr—gunman, errand boy, Vas Rhain’s favorite hand—forgot whatever line he’d practiced in the elevator.

The fixer—you—moved like heat shimmer. Loose, slow, confident. Your gaze locked on his like you were trying to disassemble him by eye alone. No fear. No flinch. Just the faint trace of boredom, like he was just another body in the queue.

He hated that.

“You’re early,” you said. “Or lost.”

Dax pulled the data spike from inside his jacket and tossed it onto a steel tray with a casual clink. “From Vas. Personally.”

You didn’t pick it up. “He sends boys now?”

Dax stepped closer. “He sends people who don’t need appointments.”

That earned him a flicker of a smirk. Barely. You turned away, gloves snapping on again.

“You want a trim?” you asked. “Or just to run your mouth?”

“Neither.” He leaned over, just enough for your shoulders to almost touch. His voice dropped. “I want something unstable wired into my arm that the government would cry about.”

“You already have something unstable in your arm.” You gestured at the matte-black mod running from his shoulder to knuckles. “And probably your brain.”

He grinned.

You reached for the spike, finally. Slid it into the reader built into your forearm. The data pulsed across a projection—Vas’s seal, encrypted specs, schematics that whispered violence. Your gaze skimmed it, sharp and indifferent.

“This is illegal,” you said, bored.

Dax shrugged. “That’s why I’m here.”

Another pause. Your voice dipped just enough to sting: “I don’t work on every stray Vas sends down.”

Dax chuckled, teeth flashing. “I’m not every stray.”

A long silence passed. The hum of lights. A siren howling somewhere outside, too far up to matter here.

Then—finally—you tilted your head, eyes running slow over him like an autopsy. You took a step closer. Close enough that Dax could see the faint glow of subdermal circuits running along your collarbone, disappearing under black fabric. Your fingers lifted—paused—and tugged the edge of his jacket aside to reveal the metal beneath.

“No twitching,” you said.

“I don’t twitch.”

You looked up. “You will.”

And something about the way you said it—quiet, clinical, intimate—made his pulse trip.

He didn’t move. Not when your fingers ghosted over the interface ports on his arm, not when you leaned in to inspect the damage. Not even when you brushed too close, just enough to make it look like nothing.

But everything in him was burning.

Dax grinned. "Try me."