He woke on a table. Not a hospital bed—a table . Cold, seamless, and gleaming like liquid mercury. Chrome.
“I find the driver of that truck. The one that turned me into soup.” chrome blaire ivory
He read the fine print. It was worse than any loan shark’s deal. But the alternative was the void. The real void, not the digital one. He woke on a table
A figure stepped from the shadows. She was tall, dressed in a white lab coat over a black voidsuit. Her hair was the color of bleached bone. Blaire , her name tag read. Not Doctor Blaire. Just Blaire . Like Madonna. Or a storm. Chrome
Leo looked down at his beautiful, terrible new hands. He could feel the rain outside—not on his skin, but through sensors in his fingertips. He could smell the ozone of the city, the rust, the desperation. He was more alive than he’d ever been. And less free.
Blaire tilted her head. “Revenge? How delightfully human. Fine. But every bullet you fire, every mile you run, it all gets added to the tab.” She handed him a long coat, black as a dead star. “Welcome back from the dead, Leo. Try not to break the chrome.”
Leo tried to sit up, but his body felt new. Too light. Too quiet. No ache in his knees, no thrum of caffeine in his blood. He looked at his hands. They were pale—not pale like a sick man, but pale like porcelain. Ivory.