If it wasn’t for my newfound powersuit, I wouldn’t have been able to keep pace with Gracious. The little brat would’ve been a fast enough runner with normal doggy legs, but with her prosthetic front leg, she sprinted like an absolute monster. She ran through and astride the streets so fast as to exceed the speed of some of the cars we passed.

  I funneled all the power that was in my arm and suit into my boots and legs, allowing me to keep up just behind her. The sense of magnetic strength behind my every movement, and the fact that it reacted to my mere thoughts, was a useful reminder of how little I actually knew about this weird-ass powersuit.

  But there would be plenty of time to dig into that later. For now, I savored the searing pain in my legs as I pushed my physical limits, and the relief that I was at long last surrounded by clean, open air.

  I never realized how much I took fresh air for granted until I was stuck inside a sterile building for any length of time. The insides of that clinic were so clean, so fabricated, so precisely designed to look stylish over comforting that it felt utterly dead. There was no life to anything MergoTech owned or made, which made the rusticness and open air of the city comparatively refreshing—in spite of the pungent stench of smoke and diesel and dirt that tainted every street; that’s just Silverhold for you.

  Without a pause for breath, Gracious led me back up the hill I had so elegantly tumbled down, then across a street, across a couple more streets for good measure, around one city block, and up a desolate, sloping road, before she finally skidded to a stop. The only interruptions we had along the way were a couple people who halted their cars to honk or yell at us as we ran out in front of them.

  The only thought my brain had registered by the time we halted was utter fucking exhaustion.

  So once we stopped at the sloping road’s dead end, surrounded by short buildings broken up by narrow alleyways, I damn near collapsed to my knees. Without the aid of my new technology, the exertion would’ve killed me, but it’s difficult to count your blessings when your lungs are burning and your calves are this close to melting into noodly metal slag.

  I doubled over on the asphalt, hands on my knees, fighting to catch my breath. It was weird that I could breathe at all when my face was covered in a helmet.

  Gracious sauntered past me and sat down on the edge of the road, eyes bright and self-satisfied. She had nothing more to show for our adventure than slow panting and a slightly ruffled face.

  I looked over at her, brow furrowed. “You just wanted to show off, didn’t you?”

  Her expression didn’t change, but the pitbull uttered one of her quietly happy little growls.

  “Hmph. Asshole.” I chuckled.

  In spite of the dog’s insistence to stand to attention, I couldn’t get myself to straighten up and look around until about another two minutes of pained breaths had passed.

  When I did so, I noticed two things: One, the clinic was still in line-of-sight from here, visible between the many smaller buildings that now lay between us and it. Two, the silver van that I had seen on that distant bridge—on the same night that I’d lost an arm—was parked up against the wall of a desolate apartment building next to Gracious and I.

  A warm familiarity broke through my suffocating blanket of exhaustion. It made the pain and weariness negligible. I might have had an apartment to live in, but that van was the closest thing I'd ever had to a home. Locations changed, but a vehicle could stay with you—even if you weren’t the driver.

  Granted, my happiness might have been because of the man who owned and drove it.

  Gracious sat down next to me, staring up and panting with an expression like the canine approximation of a smug grin.

  I rolled my eyes, but gave her a few pats on the head. “Okay. You did a good job, girl. Just… maybe go a little slower, next time? For me? Please?”

  Her excited woofs didn’t give me the clear answer I sorely desired, but I was happy to hear it nonetheless.

  She leaned into my pats and scritches for a few seconds before bounding over to the van’s rear doors. She glanced back with an expectant look.

  Right. Time’s a wastin’. I followed her over to the van, thinking about how nice it would be to see a friendly face after so long. I mean, Gracious’s face was friendly, sure, but there was being happy to see someone, and then there was being filled with warmth and satisfaction whenever I was near someone. I chose not to think too hard about how Darian’s presence relaxed me; I’d just be glad to see him again.

  Before I could touch the van’s door handle, it creaked open all by itself. I frowned and tilted my head to get a better look...

  Just in time to see a shotgun barrel poke through the open crack, aimed directly at my head.

  I froze and slowly stepped back as the door creaked further ajar.

  “Uuuuuuuuuuhhhh” was the sole sound I articulated as it swung all the way open.

  Though I should’ve known better, I expected to see someone other than Darian standing in the back. A corpo goon waiting to ambush me, maybe. Or someone who had taken him hostage in case I needed a bigger reason to punch someone out.

  But nope. There he was. If it wasn’t for the aforementioned shotgun, I might’ve been at a loss for words when I saw him. But instead—

  Well, I still had no words, but it was more out of bafflement than discombobulation, if you see what I mean.

  He was a little thin, with the kind of upper body muscle you could only see if you squinted a bit, and wore a dark brown leather coat over his usual green shirt. He stared at me over rectangular metal-framed glasses, with an even more intense glare than the jaded one he typically wore. He had black, bushy hair that was normally kept neat and combed back—an aspect I usually found endearing and kinda cute at any other time.

  His glare persisted. Just as it looked like he was about to say something, Gracious trotted up next to me and quietly growled at him. It sounded emphatic, maybe a little disgruntled.

  Darian’s eyes briefly flickered down to Gracious, but just as quickly looked back at me. “Gracey, girl. I know I told you to go fetch someone from over there, but you’ve seen Tarim. You know what he looks like. This isn’t him.”

  Gracious growled again, as if annoyed to have her people-spotting skills questioned.

  Darian hopped out of the van and onto the asphalt as I backed away; he kept the pump-action shotgun aimed squarely at my head. “I don’t know who you think you are, but I know a MergoTech enforcer when I see one. The suit says it all. So you’re gonna tell me where my partner is, and you’re going to tell me fast, or I’m powderizing your head. And trust me when I say that helmet isn’t going to help against a point-blank blast from this thing.”

  Well, true enough. This suit was tough, but Darian knew his firearms.

  I stared back at him, baffled, physically incapable of processing anything he was saying. Then, as I listened to that smooth voice and the situation clicked together in my brain, I blurted out, “Jesus fucking christ, man! Am I that unrecognizable in this?”

  Darian blinked stupidly, then lowered the gun. “What the hell? Tarry?”

  “No, I just stole your buddy’s voice too. Picked it right out of his pocket. Of course it’s me, asshole! Do you really think Gracious confused some random-ass corpo goon in a powersuit for me?”

  “Uh…” He tilted his head. “Maybe I shouldn’t have thought so, but I can’t say I remember you ever having a powersuit. So forgive me if this all seems a bit fucking unbelievable.”

  “You never know if I— Oh, hold on, just gimmie a…”

  I was very careful about which part of the control panel hex I pressed, and blessedly, my nerves didn’t sabotage me. The suit immediately dissolved, plates retracting and deatomizing around me until I was fully exposed to the elements once more.

  The contrast was startling. Even though I hadn’t noticed anything different about what I saw or felt while wearing it, my vision felt duller. I was more conscious of my environment, breathing was easier, I could feel the breeze around me and tell that the air was a comfy temperature of blisteringly hot—which was gonna get a lot rarer the closer we got to summer’s end.

  After making sure that I hadn’t somehow left any parts sitting on me, I spread my arms wide, smiling. “There. Recognize me now?”

  I was hoping for some sly remark in response, but instead Darian let his gun drop and eyed my right arm. “Guess I do. Except for the magically disappearing power armor. And that.”

  “Oh. Right.” I pulled my robot arm back, flexing each finger to make sure I could still feel it just fine. It reacted with quiet mechanical whirring noises. “Uh… about this little thi—”

  “Stop.” Darian raised a flat hand. “Is this going to be a long story?”

  “Uh. Probably.”

  “Would that arm happen to be the technology that we were looking for on the seventh floor?”

  “I don’t think so?”

  “You don’t think— Ugh. Okay.” Darian shook his head, flipped the safety switch on his shotgun, and tossed it through the van’s open doors. “Climb into the back, then. No sense in standing around if we’re going to talk for a while.”

  He mantled back into the van, leaving me to stand there, flabbergasted. “Oh come on. Not even a little ‘glad you’re okay’? After all that time?”

  Darian kneeled down in the back compartment of the vehicle and glowered at me. “Did I not already say that over the phone?”

  “I… don’t think so?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Well, I am glad, but considering that I doubt you made a clean getaway, I’m not sure how much longer I want to stay in this area. So let’s save the pleasantries for later, right?”

  I expected him to say that, but I still sighed in irritation as I walked up to the open doors. “So little faith in me.”

  “Oh, quit your whining and get up here.” He took a step into the van, then briefly looked back over his shoulder. “Would a drink help heal your shattered ego?”

  I opened my mouth to spit out another comeback, then thought for a moment, and said, “How about a snack, instead? I honestly can’t remember the last time I ate.”

  “This implies you can remember the last time you drank, contrarily.”

  “I can! I had some IV cords shoved into me recently, I’m pretty sure.”

  Darian took a deep, deep breath. “Yeah. Sure. Whatever. Just get in here, I’ll grab you something.”

  He walked a little further into the back, and I took that as my hint to finally climb inside the van instead of hanging around outside of it, trying to think of more snide remarks to annoy him with.

  Climbing in was a sudden and painful reminder to my legs of how much running I had just done, but it was worth it to be here again.

  The entire back compartment of the van, as was inevitable with most places Darian frequented, had been turned into a miniature workshop. There was a table off to the right that was bolted to the wall and had a bunch of tools, welders, and electronic parts, with straps and velcro to hold them in place so the van didn’t toss metal tools around in the back at lethal speeds. The usual metal wiring that separated the front seats from the van’s back had been manually cut away.

  There was also a minifridge and a couple boxes under the table, a food bowl for Gracious that was emptied of all crumbs, and a wide bench opposite of the table that could be folded into the broadside wall of the van. It had been padded with leather cushions in a desperate attempt to make it comfortable, since it originally looked and felt like a prisoner’s bed.

  There were also some firearms hanging on the wall above the workbench—including a rocket launcher that was conspicuously missing its payload. I could see an empty spot where the shotgun was presumably supposed to go, but it still lay where Darian had tossed it a second ago.

  I took a few steps through the back, relishing the immense comfort I felt at being here again. There was barely any room to stretch my arms and it stank of tar, pennies, and burnt wood, but this shitty little van was home nonetheless.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  As I looked around, Darian walked past me and returned to the van’s back doors. He waited for Gracious to hop in after us. Once inside, she gave him a flat look, mouth clamped shut.

  He let out a soft breath, then gave her some scratches behind the ear. “Sorry I didn’t believe you, girl. Forgive me, for now?”

  She remained quiet for a moment, then wagged her tail and growled, pleased with herself.

  Darian chuckled and patted the pitbull on the head. “Good Gracious. Now go get some rest, buddy. You’ve earned it.”

  “Aw, thank you,” I said.

  He glared over his shoulder as Gracious trotted past him and toward her food bowl. “Oh, don’t be so optimistic. You aren’t laying your head down until you tell me what the hell happened in that clinic.” He yanked the van’s back doors shut (leaving a meager orange lightbulb overhead as the only source of light), then grabbed the shotgun he left on the floor and carried it back over to the table.

  He left it atop the table as he knelt down and began digging through the containers beneath it. Meanwhile, I seated myself on the hard-as-fuck bench and crossed my arms, trying not to overthink how I was going to explain things to him. Or form basic words. My success was mixed.

  “Ah! Here we go!” Darian blurted out. He carelessly tossed something in a tiny plastic package over his shoulder. It sailed directly toward my face.

  If it wasn’t for my fresh new cybernetic augments, the tiny package would’ve taken out my only surviving eye. Instead, just as I had caught the bullet earlier, I managed to grab the plastic package mid-air with my right arm. I frowned, turned it around in my hands, then smiled at the label.

  “Aw! A protein cake? You know me too well, Darry.”

  “Unfortunately.” He kept talking as I struggled to unwrap the package. “I’d prefer you have some actual food, but this is all we got in here, so you win this time.”

  “Flattered,” I said. I would have tried to think up more things to say, but my mouth was already full with dry, crumbly food that had the grain-like texture of sawdust. I didn’t particularly notice or care about its taste. Food is food, you get me? Getting rid of the pain in my stomach was all that mattered.

  Darian dug through the boxes for a few more futile minutes, sealed them shut, then looked in the minifridge. His shoulders sagged, tension loosening. “There it is.” He lifted a sealed cup out of the fridge—which I could only assume was his usual cold chai latte; god only knew if that was the same cup he had before I went into the clinic—and set it down atop the workbench. “Gonna need this in my system to survive the fucking drive.”

  I shook my head. “I’ll never get what you see in that stuff. Tastes like licking plant stems and gravel.”

  “Well, it’s better for you than energy drinks.”

  “Less convenient,” I grumbled around the last of the protein cake. As I swallowed down the remnants, I examined at the empty wrapper, resisting the impulse to toss it onto the floor. Since I couldn’t see the trash bag we usually kept around here, I settled for crumpling the plastic wrapper up and shoving it in my pocket, for now. While I was at it, I took my earpiece out and stuck it in the same pocket.

  Now that Darian was more at ease and not toting around a shotgun, he pulled his brown jacket off and laid it across the workshop-style table. He usually had the sleeves of his shirt pulled back since it made doing his work easier, and that meant that when he took his jacket off, I had a sudden view of the pale, toned muscles on his upper ar—

  Okay, look. I can only talk around this so much, so let’s clear the air: I like it when guys are smart, speak more smoothly than a rocky driveway, and have a little muscle. Alright? I liked how my friend talked and looked. That’s all. No need to look so deeply into it or make it weird, so let’s just move on.

  Um. Well anyway, once he put the jacket away, he grabbed his latte and walked over to the opposite side of the bench I sat on. “Well. Hope you’re nice and settled in again after your wacky adventure.”

  I was thrown off by how much calmer he sounded now, but that’s how this shit usually went. “Uh. Sort of. Sorry I upset you?”

  He shrugged as he sat down, taking a sip from the cup. “You didn’t all that much more than usual, Tarry. But you can’t blame me for being a little tense when I see someone literally covered in MergoTech cybernetics walk right up to my van, casually as if they belong here.”

  “Uh. Right. Guess I can’t.” I scratched the side of my head, feeling awkward all over again. “Sorry. Didn’t really think about that.”

  “Even if you had, then the way you put it away is only that much stranger, isn’t it?” He sat back against the wall of the van. As he did, Gracious walked back over to him and curled up beside his legs. The pup looked beat, now. She didn’t even have the energy to pant. “Not only do you have a MergoTech powersuit, all of a sudden, but it can magically disappear into your new robot arm that also looks like it was made by them. Even though there’s no way that should even be physically possible with how big your powersuit is.”

  He took a long, looooong sip of his latte before looking back at me. There were bags under his eyes that, until now, I hadn’t noticed. Instead of his usual jaded grumpiness, I only saw long-carried exhaustion.

  Suddenly, even though only so much of it had been my fault, I felt a stab of guilt that he had been left alone. It was easy to forget that he had been here the entire time I was in a fucking coma, with no way of knowing whether or not I was alive. I knew he could handle being alone, but his unspoken concern was as touching as it was worrying.

  “So,” he said after a minute. “Mind explaining any of that?”

  My mouth thinned into a line. I looked away, trying to untangle my thoughts. “I… I don’t know, man. I know it’s been, what, almost two days since we last spoke? But so much has happened and I don’t know what the fuck to make of it any more than you do.” I looked down at my right hand, idly flexing my mechanical fingers.

  “Might be good to start at the point where your earpiece stopped broadcasting. Or with whatever you saw on the seventh floor that fucked this all up.”

  I blinked in surprise, then looked over at him. “You know I didn’t turn off my earpiece there, right? I tried contacting you immediately, but—”

  “Dude. Seriously. Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I know you of all people wouldn’t. No apologies, just get talking and tell me everything you can remember. Alright?”

  “Okay? If you say so.” I didn’t feel much conviction in my own words, but since he insisted, there wasn't any reason to hold back. He deserved something after being left with nothing but radio silence.

  So I did my best to shove aside any and all distractions, and focused my attention squarely on him.

  “Well, since you weren’t there to see it for yourself,” I began, “I’ll tell you the thing I found on the seventh floor. I’m still not entirely sure what I saw, to be totally fuckin’ honest. When I first found what we were looking for—the MergoTech device your informant told us about, yeah?—it was covered by a protective blanket. I could only tell it was there from a bright purple glow…”

  *****

  “... so from there, I followed Gracious to your van, and…” I shrugged. “Well, you know the rest.” I decided to leave out the part where the dog totally outran me, less so because of its lack of importance than the fresh wound to my dignity. The pitbull had curled up tightly against Darian’s legs as I recounted recent events, quietly dozing off and making little jittering motions in her dreams.

  I sat back, throat aching from talking for so long, nervous that I had dumped all of this shit directly on Darian’s back. My partner-in-crime still sat where he had before on the opposite side of the bench. He hadn’t interjected much at all while I spoke, except when asking certain questions for clarification, or to check if I was sure about something I had said. I usually wasn’t.

  Darian kept lifting his cup to his mouth in an attempt to sip his latte, well after it had been emptied. He’d sip at empty air, then put it down with a disappointed look on his face.

  “Well shit.” He sighed and set the cup down next to him on the bench. “Wish I’d gotten more of this stuff from downtown. I think I needed twice as much to endure hearing all of that.”

  “I told you it was a lot, didn’t I?” I helplessly shrugged and twiddled my mechanical fingers, trying to think of what part of everything I’d covered was even worth discussing, now. “You know more about this stuff than me, so... have you heard of them before?”

  “Heard of who?”

  “You know. Julian. That lady with the guns. The giant fucking robot with the giant fucking sword. I figured if anyone knows—”

  “I don’t know that I’m more of an expert on this than someone who grew up in the Undergrowth.” Darian folded his arms. “If anyone should know that shitty little gang, I think it’d be you.”

  I scratched the side of my head. “Well, I don’t. Sorry.” I never really went out of my way to learn the other gangs of the Undergrowth when I was growing up. I had been too busy getting into fights and bouncing between gangs to keep track of who was who. No time to absorb facts when constantly on the move.

  Darian shook his head, stood up from the bench, and began pacing back and forth. Gracious tilted her head up, annoyed that her human pillow had been disrupted.

  “Well you’re lucky that I do know this lot, then,” Darian said, then put a hand to his chin. “A little bit, at any rate. I’ve only loosely heard of Julian. They’re a bit all over the place and not terribly well known, but tend to act more like mercenaries than standard thieves; do jobs for pay rather than selling what they steal. But I thought it was just him. I didn’t know the fellow had two oddball partners.”

  “So… what? You think someone was paying them to steal it?”

  Darian scoffed. “No. From the sounds of it, they were just piggybacking off our intel to steal the prize out from under us. God only knows where they are, now.”

  “Hmph. Yeah. Especially if the blueshirts themselves didn’t even know where they went.”

  “Now that is the weirder part of this story, to me.” Darian stopped his pacing and looked down at me. “Thieves stealing each other’s loot for their own greedy gain? Not unheard of.”

  “Practically standard fare, where I grew up!”

  “You really don’t need to tell me that. But the fact that Alex Mergo himself helped you heal and outfitted you with experimental combat technology? With the help of Jakob fucking Lazarus, no less?” He ran a hand through his hair and stepped back. “This is weird. Really fucking weird.”

  “Hah! No kidding. Can’t say I’m gonna whine about how all that happened, though.” I flicked the fingers of my mechanical arm, barely resisting the urge to flip the cybernetic sword out.

  “Tarry. I’m glad you’re okay, but do you really not see the problem with this?” Darian’s pacing picked back up, his eyes lost in thought. “Whatever you stumbled upon in there—this ‘StormHand’ thing, I guess—is big. Way bigger than we thought. Big enough that two of MergoTech’s top suits saw fit to outfit you and try to convince you to help them recover it. But now you slipped out of their grasp. They're two-for-two on losing experimental technology. Do you see the problem, now?”

  “Uh. I’ll be honest, I feel like I might’ve sustained a concussion or two over the past couple of hours, so—”

  “Alex is not going to let you go that easily.” Darian paused and put his hand on the table, letting out an exasperated breath. “If they weren’t willing to let go of something like StormHand, whatever it is, then they’re sure as shit not going to let go of someone who has an electric sword and a whole-ass powersuit built into their fucking arm.” He looked down and hissed, “Shit!”

  “Huh. Guess not.” I was struggling to process all that, but the idea that MergoTech would be hunting me to get their robot parts back wasn’t exactly mind-blowing. “What do you make of that thing, though? Project StormHand? That is what your contact told us to look for, right?”

  Darian threw his hands up. “I don’t fucking know, man. All I knew was that MergoTech had some experimental piece of technology on the seventh floor that could’ve sold for a lot, but I had no idea it was something like… that.” He put both hands on the table. “I don’t think we would’ve been able to sell that thing, anyway. I don’t know what it does, but it does not sound safe in the hands of some random pawnbroker. Let alone MergoTech itself.”

  “Righty-o. But a couple underworld thugs are hardly a better babysitter for that tech. So I say we go try to nick it back, yeah?” I smiled devilishly.

  Darian looked over his shoulder, expression flat as Kansas. “Okay, one: Get some goddamn rest before you run off again. And two: While I don’t know that we have a chance of stealing it back, I agree that we can’t just leave it be. Something that holds that much power, looks that pricey, and the biggest suits in the company are desperate to protect?” His face darkened. “I want to know why they’re keeping this thing under such a tight lock and key. Because I doubt their reasons are good. They never fucking are.”

  I brightened up at the thought, though I tried not to show it too much. Robbing corporate scum to pay the rent was all well and good, but digging up dirty secrets they didn’t want us to see at the same time? Now that sounded fun. That put a fucking smile on my face. That made me feel alive.

  “Awesome!” I said. “So, uh. Where would we even start looking for that, though? Tracking down Julian’s pals? It seemed like they knew more about it than we did.”

  “Maybe, but…” Darian shook his head. “No. That won’t be a good idea. Not yet, anyway. I think we need to pay a visit to my informant. While I don’t think she would’ve given the intel to anyone other than us, it is weird that a rival gang went after the same prize as us on the same night. It could just be a big-ass coincidence, but she may know more about StormHand than she let on. Hmm.” He looked over his shoulder at me. “Yeah. That’s probably the best lead we got, if we’re serious about doing this.”

  Oops. I couldn’t hide my glee any longer. I grinned and hopped up to my feet, scaring Gracious in the process. “Sick! Then what are we waiting for? You know where she’s at, so let’s get—”

  “Hold on, Tarry. Just… just hold the fuck up for a minute.” Darian took deep breaths, and for a second, I could see just how drained he was under the surface of composure he maintained. How much he was still struggling to process everything that had changed in such a short span of time. “I know you’re eager to get to work, but we won’t be able to go anywhere else before we stop by my flat.”

  “Oh. Why, though? We got everything we need to get going right here!” I spread my arms wide around the van, but got the impression I had said something much stupider than I thought when Darian glowered at me. “What?”

  “Buddy. Did you forget the part where we came here to steal something we can’t get, now? Something that was supposed to pay my rent?” Darian put his hands to his face, dragging down from his eyelids. “Look. We can still make enough money to pay it off with the two weeks of leeway before final notice, but there’s a pretty good chance we’re gonna get evicted. We may as well stop by and load what we can into here before that happens. Or focus on trying to make money until then.”

  “Oh,” I said as my excitement deflated. “Right. Shit. Sorry about that.” In all the excitement, it had become easy to forget our heist was technically a failure. I ran a hand through my hair, awkward and uncharacteristically ashamed.

  Darian very suddenly glared at me. I flinched so hard that I nearly fell back into the bench. “Hey,” he said. “You better not go feeling sorry for yourself over this, okay? That’s my job.”

  “Uh… that’s kind of—”

  “Besides,” he talked right over me, “I told you we wouldn’t have been able to sell it anyway. So don’t sweat it, okay? I don’t want to see you claiming all the blame for this.”

  “I’ll fucking try, if you insist.” I crossed my arms. “Easier said than done.”

  “I know, I know. But if anyone should be feeling sorry, it’s me for not helping when you were in mortal danger. So don’t go stealing my thunder.”

  “But, uh…” I scratched my head. “You literally had no way of knowing that I was in danger.”

  “Yeah, and now you can see how bloody stupid we’re both being. So it’s not worth wasting our brain cells or vocal cords on this. Okay?”

  “Okay. Sure. You got it, man.”

  I expected him to keep going, but he just sagged against the table, letting out steady, anxious breaths.

  I lowered back down onto the bench. Even though I knew that this was a lot of information to process in such a short time, I don’t think I realized how weighty it all was, or the stakes that were now at hand for us both. On some level, I still didn’t. I’d only just begun to scratch the surface of that realization.

  It left a lot on the table. Tension twitched in my chest when I thought about how much would be on our shoulders if we took this task upon ourselves. If we really wanted to dig up the dear and dirty secrets of the most powerful tech conglomerate on the continent.

  Then again, if MergoTech went hunting for the robot parts they stuck in me, we might not have a choice.