The journey to the Bio-Mod District was a descent into a different kind of deep.
Rook led Noctis not upward toward light and air, but laterally, through a network of pressurized, century-old sewage tunnels that vibrated with the passage of unseen fluids, then into a labyrinth of steam-wreathed geothermal vents that stank of sulfur and cooked metal. Finally, they emerged into a sprawling, semi-legal transit nexus known in the underworld lexicon as The Graft. It was a cavernous, dripping liminal space where the city's official arterial infrastructure bled messily into a spiderweb of anarchic, privatized utility lines and black-market transit tubes.
Here, independent transport pods—rickety, oval-shaped capsules of riveted alloy and scratched plexi—hung on magnetic rails, ferrying people and illicit goods between districts that preferred no official record of their exchanges. The air buzzed with the smell of ozone and unregulated fuel, and the din was a constant negotiation of shouted destinations and clanging airlocks.
Rook, a figure of grim authority even in this lawless hub, approached a kiosk manned by a bored-looking individual with grafted gill-slits on their neck. Without a word, he placed a small, polished fragment of faintly glowing Cradle-crystal on the counter. "Two. One-way. Derma-Express line." The kiosk attendant's eyes widened slightly at the "forgotten currency," as Rook had called it, and handed over two grimy plastic chits without comment.
Their pod was labeled Derma-Express in peeling, fluorescent paint. Inside, it was cramped enough that Noctis's knees pressed against the opposite wall. The air smelled of cheap antiseptic and the stale, metallic sweat of countless previous passengers. As the pod sealed with a hiss and a clunk of magnetic locks, it began to vibrate alarmingly before shooting into the blackness of a non-sanctioned tunnel with a lurch that shoved Noctis back into his thin seat.
He spent the journey in taut silence, watching the Warden. Rook sat perfectly still across from him, a monument of fused flesh and sorrowful metal, his gaze fixed on the darkness rushing past the scratched viewport. His hybrid body was a walking lesson—a warning of what happened when Corporate tech and human desperation fused without consent, care, or artistry. He was a ghost of a process that was now a thriving industry.
After twenty minutes of rattling, juddering darkness, the pod's violent momentum bled away into a series of shudders before it clanked to a final halt. The door slid open with a pressurized hiss, releasing them not into another tunnel, but into an assault.
The smell hit Noctis first, a physical wave that made his eyes water and his empty stomach clench.
It was a complex, overwhelming, and deeply invasive bouquet: the coppery, living tang of fresh blood and old, spilled plasma; the sweet-sour, almost fruity odor of exposed, nutrient-rich biogel; the sharp, nose-hair-singing bite of industrial sterilization chemicals; the greasy, nauseating smell of frying synth-flesh from food stalls; and beneath it all, the ripe, pungent, undeniable scent of thousands of crowded, sweating, unwashed human bodies in a space with poor ventilation. It was the smell of a butcher shop operating inside a fever dream, of a hospital crossed with a carnival.
Then, the sound. A cacophony of commerce, agony, and ecstatic release. Vendors shouted over each other in a dozen dialects, barking the virtues of their wares. A constant, high-pitched backdrop was provided by the whine of bone-saws, the zizz of laser-scalpels, and the pneumatic hiss-thump of injection rigs. Music blared from competing sources—pounding, arrhythmic glitch-core and saccharine, synthesized pop. And cutting through it all, not far away, someone was screaming. Not a scream of terror or pain, but a raw, shuddering, ecstatic release that was somehow infinitely more disturbing.
They stepped out of the pod into the heart of the Skin Market.
Noctis had witnessed poverty, violence, and decay in the under-levels. He had felt the profound sorrow of the deep. This was a different category of existence. This was voluntary transmutation, celebrated under garish lights.
The market occupied a vast, low-ceilinged plaza, its original municipal architecture long since subsumed under layers of ad-hoc construction, welded scaffolding, and leaking conduit. Stalls and open-front clinics were crammed together in a choking, pulsating mass, their signs glowing in garish, headache-inducing hues: pulsating violets, acidic greens, and lurid pinks. Holograms, flickering with bad resolution, showed rotating catalogues of modifications: bulging muscular augmentation, sleek sensory gland implants, ornate dermal plating, subdermal LED displays. More esoteric offers scrolled by: bioluminescent skin patterns, prehensile hair follicles, sub-vocal mesh communicators, olfactory enhancers tuned to specific pheromones.
And the people. The people were the true spectacle.
A man brushed past, his chest cavity fitted with a transparent panel of reinforced synth-glass. Behind it, a humming, spherical artificial heart pulsed with blue light, intricate gold filigree etched directly onto his visible ribs. A woman with four articulated mechanical arms, each terminating in a different specialized tool—micro-scalpel, soldering iron, data-spike, hypospray—haggled fiercely over a price for a jar of vat-grown neural tissue. A child, no older than Wren, stared at Noctis with unnerving stillness; her eyes had been replaced with large, multi-faceted compound lenses that glittered with a cold, insectile intelligence.
It was a riotous, desperate festival of the self. Here, the body was not a temple to be revered, but a construction site to be endlessly renovated, a canvas for the most brutal form of self-expression.
"Keep your eyes on your feet," Rook murmured, his layered voice barely a whisper yet cutting through the din. He had moved to walk slightly ahead. "Curiosity here marks you as one of two things: a mark ripe for fleecing, or a corpse not yet cooling. You are now the former. Do not become the latter."
Noctis obeyed, fixing his gaze on the grimy floor and the Warden's heavy, hybrid boots. He felt exposed, but not because he stood out. In this ecosystem of exaggerated, curated selves, his own plain, unmodified human form—the baseline model—was the true aberration. He was a ghost in a world of shouting, glowing flesh.
They moved away from the main, screaming thoroughfares, ducking into a side-alley where the stalls were darker, their fronts shielded by stained curtains or rusting metal shutters. The noise level dropped, replaced by a more intimate, sinister hum of low conversation and the soft, wet sounds of procedures in progress. The air here smelled more strongly of sharp chemicals and the sweet, cloying scent of tissue decay. This was the district's black clinic row, where the modifications were riskier, the prices steeper in ways beyond currency, and the services were illegal even by the market's gloriously lax standards.
Rook stopped before a doorway obscured by a curtain made of what looked like dozens of surgical gowns, stitched together, each stained a different shade of brown, rust, and faded iodine yellow. A simple, hand-painted sign on a scrap of plasteel read: MENDER. DISCRETION GUARANTEED. NO REFUNDS. NO WARRANTIES. ENTER AT OWN RISK.
The Warden pulled the stiff, stained curtain aside with a metallic finger and gestured for Noctis to enter.
The clinic was a single, rectangular room, lit by one blindingly bright, white surgical lamp dangling from the ceiling. Its light cast deep, sharp shadows. Shelves lined the walls, holding an unsettling collection of jars filled with murky preservative fluid and floating, unidentifiable tissue samples. Spools of glistening synth-nerve filament lay next to trays of gleaming, terrifyingly specific tools. A single surgical table, its steel surface scarred by countless procedures and stained with patches of permanent, dark discoloration, dominated the center of the room. In the corner, a wheezing air-filtration unit labored, doing little to cut the dense miasma of antiseptic, ozone, and old blood.
Behind the table stood the mod-surgeon.
She called herself Mender, and her own form was her best advertisement. She was tall, gaunt, her body a testament to subtle, functional, and likely self-administered modifications. One arm was skeletal chrome from the elbow down, the fingers impossibly precise and steady, with no trace of a tremble. A dark data-port was implanted flush in her left temple, a tiny red LED blinking a slow, rhythmic pulse. Her eyes were likely her original ones, but they were grotesquely magnified behind a pair of thick, multi-lensed optometric glasses that gave her the scrutinizing gaze of a predatory insect. She wore a heavily stained leather apron over simple, grey utilitarian clothing.
"Rook," she said, her voice a dry, papery whisper, like pages turning in a tomb. She didn't look up from the hooked probe she was cleaning with a rag. "You bring me strays again. Lost lambs for the shearing."
"This one needs to disappear," Rook stated, not moving from the doorway, his bulk effectively blocking the entrance. "A resonance damper. Subdermal. High-grade suppression. Untraceable components. A month's life, at least."
Mender's magnified eyes, huge and distorted behind her lenses, shifted from her tool to Noctis. They tracked over him with a clinical, dissecting detachment that made his skin crawl. "He's clean. Mostly. Faint residual echoes… deep-earth frequencies. Interesting." She set the probe down with a soft clink. "A damper that strong to mask that signature will cause rejection. Not maybe. Will. Painful rejection. And it will neuter any latent talent he has. Permanently, for as long as it's in him. You both understand this? It's not a cloak. It's a cage you wear under your skin."
"He understands," Rook said, his tone leaving no room for debate.
Noctis forced a nod, his throat too tight to speak.
"Cost," Mender stated, a single, flat syllable.
Rook tossed her a small, heavy pouch. It clinked with the solid, valuable sound of encrypted data-slivers and refined precious metals. "That covers the hardware, the procedure, and your lasting silence. The Archivist's currency."
Mender caught the pouch in her chrome hand, weighed it with a practiced flick of her wrist, and gave a slight, economical nod. "On the table. Shirt off. Back flat. This will not be a pleasant experience. The anesthetic is for the incision only. Not for the integration. You will feel the integration."
Noctis obeyed, the cold of the steel table seeping through his thin shirt before he pulled it over his head. The surgical lamp was blinding. Mender moved with an eerie, silent efficiency, preparing a syringe filled with a viscous, mercury-colored fluid. "Local neuro-blocker," she murmured, almost to herself. "For the cut. It will not touch the deep nerve interfacing. For that, you need to be awake. The body must know it is being violated, or it fights too hard."
She swabbed a spot just below his left collarbone with a cold, stinging liquid. The needle prick was a sharp, focused sting, followed by a spreading wave of unnatural numbness that deadened his skin. He felt pressure, then a distant, tugging sensation as she made a small, precise incision. He kept his eyes fixed on the water-stained ceiling tiles, trying to detach his mind, to become a thing of observation only.
Then she brought the implant.
It was smaller than he expected—a disc the size of his thumbnail, matte black and non-reflective, looking more like a chip of volcanic glass than technology. From its edges trailed a halo of fine, silvery filaments, each thinner than a human hair, designed to seek and weave.
"The damper," she said, holding it up to the light with a pair of micro-forceps. "It reads your unique bio-signature and resonant frequency, then generates a constant, adaptive counter-wave that creates a perfect localized null-field around you. To any scanner, magical or mundane, you'll read as a statistical zero. A hole in the data." She leaned over him, her magnified eyes vast and terrifyingly close. Her breath smelled of chemicals and weak tea. "The filaments are the key. They will self-propel, seeking your peripheral nervous system and weaving into it. The process will feel like…" she searched for the precise phrase, "…ice burning its way into your veins."
She inserted the black disc into the incision.
The world of numb detachment shattered.
The localized anesthetic meant nothing. A cold fire, exact and unimaginably precise, erupted from the implant site. It was not a diffuse pain, but a network of lightning-fast, tendril-like agonies that shot down his left arm, locking his fingers into a claw, and raced up the side of his neck into his jaw, setting his teeth on edge. He gasped, a raw, animal sound, his back arching involuntarily off the table. It felt as if his very essence, the silver thread of his being, was being threaded with wires of frozen poison, each filament a root of anti-life burrowing home.
WARNING: EXTERNAL SUPPRESSION FIELD DETECTED.
GRIMOIRE INTERFACE: SEVERED.
RESONANT CAPACITY: OFFLINE.
The Grimoire's message flashed in his mind, faint and strained, as if transmitted across a vast and growing gulf.
His shadow—the constant, responsive companion that had lived at the edge of his perception since the deep—vanished. Not just from the floor, but from his internal awareness. The connection was severed, cleanly and utterly. The low-grade hum of his own latent magic, a sensation he hadn't even been fully conscious of until this moment, was gone. In its place was a deafening, hollow silence. It was an amputation more profound than any memory loss—the loss of a sense he had only just begun to understand.
Mender worked with swift, uncaring efficiency, sealing the tiny incision with a laser sealer that cauterized flesh with a sizzle and the smell of his own burning. The acute, icy fire of integration faded, leaving behind a deep, throbbing, sick ache—a phantom limb where his power had lived.
"Done," she announced, stepping back and peeling off her blood-smeared gloves. "The deep ache will fade to a persistent soreness over the next few hours. The suppression is permanent and total until the implant is surgically removed or violently rejected by your body. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to use any resonant abilities. The damper will attempt to suppress the output. The resulting feedback loop could cause catastrophic neural seizure, cascade organ failure, or both." She began cleaning her tools again, her manner as casual as if she'd just given him a haircut. "You are now a ghost. Do not make the mistake of haunting the wrong people."
Noctis sat up slowly, the world swimming back into focus, but it was a duller, flatter focus. Colors seemed less saturated. Sounds felt muffled, as if heard through cotton. The vibrant, terrifying chaos of the market outside the curtain seemed distant, unreal. He was cut off. Muted. A radio tuned to a dead channel.
Rook tossed him the worn, grey worker's tunic he'd arrived in. "Put this on. Your story is this: you are a dockworker from the lower manufactory sectors. You got cheated by a back-alley modder who promised you strength augs to keep your job. They took your money and gave you a faulty damper by mistake. Now you're numb, weak, and looking for a refund or a fight. It is a common, pitiful story. It will make you invisible."
Noctis pulled on the tunic, the rough fabric scraping unpleasantly over the tender, swollen skin around the implant. He felt lesser. Slower. Profoundly vulnerable.
But he was hidden. A null in a world of screaming signals.
He followed Rook back out through the stained curtain, re-emerging into the screaming, luminous, transforming chaos of the Skin Market. He was now a ghost with a mission, hunting a book that spoke the silent, terrible language of the flesh, in a district where that language was the mother tongue.