Thomas sat in a heavy, contemplative silence, trying to recall the legal repercussions for fare-dodging back on Earth.
He had been a man of the law, a hunter of shadows, yet he couldn't remember a single instance where he'd bothered to learn the fine for jumping a subway turnstile. He had never been desperate enough to consider it, and he had never cared to ask. Such petty misdemeanors had always been beneath his notice.
Now, that oversight felt like a tactical error. As he sat there, feeling completely adrift, he stood up and began to pace—a rhythmic, restless habit he had developed over decades of solving cold cases. Whenever he faced a wall he couldn't climb, he moved.
As he turned his back to the iron rails, he spotted something he had missed in his initial sweep of the station.
A large, pale green wooden board was bolted to the far wall of the platform, blending into the shadows of the eaves. It looked at first like a simple structural element, but as he approached, the texture of the wall changed. It was plastered with rows of weathered yellow posters, each one shouting with ink and urgency.
Thomas adjusted his grip on the Bonsai pot. He realized, with a start, that the heavy stone vessel didn't feel heavy at all anymore.
He was carrying a half-meter-wide stone pot with one arm as if it were made of balsa wood, but he shoved that anomaly to the back of his mind. He had a more immediate mystery to solve.
He stopped in front of the board. Each poster featured a hand-drawn face—though "face" was a generous term for the gallery of horrors before him. These were portraits of pure, unadulterated violence.
He saw men and women with features that looked like they had been put back together by an amateur.
There were jagged wounds that had never quite closed, deep scars that puckered the skin like lightning strikes, and several individuals with missing patches of flesh where the raw, corded muscle was visible beneath the surface.
To his surprise, despite the gruesome nature of their injuries, none of them wore expressions of pain. Instead, they radiated a ferocious, vicious energy.
They looked like the apex predators of a nightmare—the exact kind of sociopaths he had spent his career chasing through the dark alleys of New York.
Thomas leaned in closer, his eyes scanning the descriptions. Below the faces were long, scrolling lines detailing brutal crimes committed against both superheroes and the general populace.
At the bottom of each sheet was a bounty price. He had already heard of "Niks" and "Dems" from the ticket clerk, but these posters listed prices in "Laks."
"Interesting, isn't it?"
The voice came from directly beside his ear, startling him. Thomas spun around, his instincts screaming at him for allowing a stranger to get within his guard.
Standing a few feet away was a man who looked like he had stepped out of the high-society district of a gothic capital. He wore an eye-catching suit of black leather, the material of a significantly higher quality than anything Thomas had seen in the settlement.
The suit was accented with sharp lines and spots of crimson that bled over the shoulders, the small of the back, and the waist. His vest was an exquisite, expensive version of Thomas's own, bristling with pockets that looked designed for tools far more sophisticated than mere coins.
He looked elegant, dangerous, and important. He held a long black coat over one arm, and his boots featured a pointed tip with a small, metallic wheel fixed to either side—a bizarre, mechanical spur that clicked softly against the stone.
But it was his face that arrested Thomas's attention. The right side of the man's head was covered by an intricate metallic apparatus.
It started at his temple and swept down below his eye, anchoring a heavy, glass oculus. The frame was a complex weave of red and black leather and brass, entirely obscuring the eye.
Thomas couldn't help but draw a connection to the bounty posters he had just been studying. Behind that "oculus," he imagined a wound just as hideous as the ones on the board—a mark of a life spent in the crucible of the Isolation Zones.
"I noticed you standing here, looking at these ugly bastards," the man said, his voice a smooth, low baritone. He motioned with his eyes toward Thomas's hand. "While you're holding that in plain sight."
Thomas followed the man's gaze and realized he was still clutching the scroll he had taken out to show the ticket worker. He had forgotten to tuck it back into his vest pocket in his agitation.
The stranger pointed to the red-threaded parchment with the tip of a polished wooden cane.
"Who are you?" Thomas asked, his voice dropping into the low, dangerous register he used when interrogating a prime suspect.
He grew instantly vigilant, his mind cataloging the man's posture, the weight of his cane, and the way the oculus whirred almost imperceptibly as it tracked Thomas's movements.
"I am someone very much like the person you are currently traveling to meet," the man replied, offering a cryptic, thin-lipped smile. He didn't offer a name.
Instead, he went through the practiced motions of a man preparing for a journey. He placed a sharp black hat over his head, slid his arms into the long black coat, and leaned his weight onto his cane. The metallic wheels on his boots gave a final, sharp click as he adjusted his stance.
"You're on your way to meet your mentor, aren't you?" the stranger added, his tone conversational yet heavy with hidden knowledge. "It so happens I was on my way to pick up a new recruit as well. Retto Town is a long walk without any Dems in your pocket. How about this? I can give you a ride."
Thomas stared at him, his detective's intuition warring with his desperate need to move forward. The man was a mystery, likely a dangerous one, but in a world where "sectors" were born from fog and superheroes were "F-grade," a ride from a stranger with a mechanical eye seemed like the most logical next step.
"I haven't said where I'm going," Thomas noted, testing the man's knowledge.
"You didn't have to," the stranger replied, tapping his oculus. "The seal on that scroll tells a story all its own. So, do you want to sit on this bench until the sun turns blue, or do you want to see what the future looks like?"