Holly had the distinct feeling that she wasn't going to be walking out of this place alive.

They'd taken the blindfold off (not that it had hindered her much) once they were down in the disused subway section, and she found herself greeted with a veritable armoury; gun barrels of all shapes and sizes focused on her, held in suspicious, nervous fingers.

Even an inadvertent wrong move could probably set these twitchy fuckers off, so Holly kept her steps measured, her eyes front, walking along behind Kirk, with Nevay right on her heels, knife never more than a few inches from her spine. Her mind was a constant whirl of calculations, running through scenarios of speed and reaction. How much damage could she do if she could get to her amplifier?

How many of these people would she take with her if they decided they didn't want an exiled corporate spiv around anymore?

But she kept walking anyway, because she wanted to know. She wanted to see the living, breathing cyborg that supposedly was connected the leader of the creatures from Hadrian South. Tracing a connection through a dead implant was one thing, but with a live subject, the possibilities multiplied tenfold.

Curiosity. It was a ravenous thing in her stomach, lusting for more knowledge.

"This way," Kirk said, somewhat unnecessarily since she had no choice but to follow. He looked back at her with an awkward smile, gesturing to the corridor to their right.

He didn't really seem like he belonged here with this gang of thugs and murderers, as far as Holly could tell. Nevay and her cohorts radiated open hostility; the detective – Doser – seemed like he was just going through the motions and had hauled himself off back to his precinct not long after they'd found her.

Kirk seemed genuine in the concern for this stranger she was about to see, and in Hadrian that was by no means a given. It also meant he was likely consigned to the docks and the dregs for the rest of his life, because this city did not reward compassion.

Then again, Holly admitted to herself, it hadn't exactly rewarded her for her loyalty to the established order.

They turned, passing by what seemed to be the main living space and moving through into narrow passages and maintenance boltholes repurposed into sleeping quarters and workshops. Whatever else Nevay Jennings was, she was certainly seemed to be resourceful.

Kirk led them through those cramped spaces and through to what she quickly realised was a makeshift infirmary, carved out of what was probably supposed to have been some kind of signal control room. A skittsh young woman in technicians overalls loitered outside, and she stood ramrod stiff when she saw the group coming.

"How's she doing, Beela?" Kirk asked.

Her eyes flashed nervously to Holly for an instant. "Good as she's going to be I guess. Stable for the moment, but she's had a couple of ... well, I think they were seizures."

"You think?" Holly blurted, aghast.

"Well, I ... yeah, I'm not a fucking doctor!" Beela snapped defensively, taking a step away.

Holly bounded over to the viewing window before anyone could stop her and looking inside. She saw Treysi laid out on the slab like a piece of meat in a morgue, save for the forest of wires splurging from her implants to the appallingly antiquated machinery clustered around her like obelisks from some long lost civilisation.

Horror swelled with her as she placed a palm against the glass, reaching out with her implants to feel just how big of a mess these amateurs might have made. Even without the precision of her amplifier, it took her seconds to feel that Treysi's body was trying to tear itself to pieces, and being plugged into a bunch of stone-age processers wasn't going to help matters. The organic components were teetering on the edge of a total meltdown as they struggled to accept the fresh grafts.

"Jesus Christ," she gasped, rounding on Kirk. "Open the door. Open it, open it now!" The words spilled out of her in a rush.

Her urgency cut through. Kirk didn't hesitate, heaving the door open with a grunt of effort. She bounded through as soon as the gap was wide enough to accommodate her, whipping her amplifier from its sheathe as she went.

Charging into the room, she skidded to a halt alongside the faltering body of the young woman, sending the unseen fingers of her implants into every piece of machinery in the room. Squeezing her eyes shut, she gathered every byte of data together, corralling it into her grasp and moulding it all into a mental image of the carnage that had been wrought on Treysi's flesh.

Holly couldn't contain a sharp gasp when she got a look at the full picture.

"What is it?"

Kirk's voice. Distant, irritating like a mosquito buzz in her ear. She let out a wordless hiss, shaking her head as she tried to get a handle on what she was looking at. Treysi's innards splayed out before her in a storm of data, lattices of blue and green and red mangling together in a way she'd never seen before.

Her Internal Principle training had led her to expect a uniformity to human bodies, at least in a basic sense. Bones fitted together, blood flowed, hearts pumped – even those she'd seen with augmented grafts had a clear delineation, where body ended and metal began.

On the inside, that line was now blurred for Treysi. Metal tendrils coiled around her arteries where the grafts had been added, and tangled their way deep into her biology. It wasn't so different from the AmpCore implants in some respects, but something seemed to have gone wrong. The frayed ends of the connections had wrought havoc in the parts of Tresyi's body where they'd been halted.

Pulled out too soon, before the procedure could be completed?

Holly moved on, trying to get a clear picture of everything before formulating some kind of plan to actually fix this mess. Blood wasn't getting past those car-crash junctions properly, and the half-finished connections were screwing with her nervous system wherever they connected. In amongst it all she could feel Treysi fighting the contortions and the seizures as her whole body tried to rip itself to pieces. White blood cells clustered around the physical intrusions, attacking them like a virus.

She moved past those places swiftly, planning angles of attack for her return. She could see ways to stabilise the chaos, melting back the worst of the broken connections, cauterising the internal wounds and stitching up Treysi's ravaged organs as best she could.

But there was something more here. Something catalysing this mayhem in a way that just didn't seem natural. Holly had seen rejected implants before and they did not wreck and entire biological system like this. The machines monitoring Beela's vital signs fed random signal spikes, making the whole body convulse, and they were coming from somewhere.

She followed the trail.

Jolt by jolt, she leapfrogged her way towards the skull. She could see the bone structure inlaid with the thin spines of metal, disappearing beneath the hairline and plunging down into the architecture of her brain itself. Holly followed those lines, and it didn't take long for her to find what she was looking for, nestled in Treysi's cerebellum.

They've done something to her brain.

She very much suspected this nodule was what Kirk had been referring to. She skirted delicately around its edges, not sure what might happen if she got too close. It presented itself in her mind's eye as an angry crimson whorl of lightning, all gathered up together in an orb.

"What the fuck's going on?" echoed Nevay's voice from the outside world.

"I'm working," Holly murmured, sparing a sliver of concentration to throw them a bone. "She's in bad shape."

"We know that."

"Stop talking. I think I've found your problem." Then she shut them off again, ignoring the dim warble of pointless distraction as she zeroed in on the ball of fire.

On closer inspection, she could see it was some kind of coding – a subroutine dug right into roots of Treysi's subconscious, snarling and spitting like a firework. Holly licked dry lips, and edged a piece of herself towards it, brushing the halo of energy to get a sense of what she was dealing with.

Their beings touched. A flash of white hot rage lashed out at her, the nodule expanding rapidly. She recoiled, having expected a violent reaction, dragging buffers into place to contain the surge of energy. In the back of her mind she felt Treysi's heartbeat quicken in tandem. Holly frowned, trembling lightly as she watched the thing beat against her barriers for a few seconds before subsiding.

Well, shit, she thought. Whatever this nodule was, it was tied into Treysi's brain, its spines buried deep in the adrenal gland and her amygdala. Chewing on her lower lip in concentration, she approached from another angle, tiptoeing through a minefield of reactive code to try and see the actual command this nodule was giving out.

She slipped through, past the raging torrents of the outer layer and finding herself in an area of relative calm – the eye of the storm, in some sense. Now she could see the full intricacies of the subroutine, linking out to Treysi's mind to implant a single, solitary idea.

Kill the corporations.

So that was it. Alongside her augmentations, the surgeons had spliced the equivalent of an attack code straight into her brain, feeding of the existing resentment and channelling it into a drive that she literally couldn't override.

Anger twisted Holly's gut and she reached into the heart of that malevolent code. Outside in the real world, her wrist twisted, amplifier pulsing. Within the body of Treysi Cabrera, that translated to a huge fist wrapping around the master code, and then she squeezed, extinguishing that murderous idea in an instant.

It went dark. The storm of furious emotion around her evaporated and then she felt Treysi start to convulse, her body reacting violently to the sudden absence. A seizure ripped through her body and Holly wrenched herself outward, encompassing the girl's whole body again. Her amplifier flared; lights flickered as she exerted herself to stop Treysi from coming apart from the inside out.

She steadied her heart and lungs, and began stripping away the ravaged sections where the implants had failed to connect properly to their organic counterparts. The clumps of angry white blood cells were stripped away as she recoded them to accept the intrusions of the augmentations. Little by little, the internal storms subsided.

Holly lost all sense of time. Dim voices echoed like mush beyond her interior senses, but she couldn't spare the mental capacity to engage with them. It took every scrap of her self-control to fix Treysi, following up her sweeping, ad-hoc buttressing with a serious of meticulous operations at the cellular level.

Eventually, satisfied that she'd stitched the young woman back together and with sweat streaming down her face, she finally opened her eyes and let her amplifier drop. Her head was pounding with the effort of concentration and she stepped back, blinking; breathed in and out with a conscious effort. The coldness of the makeshift infirmary hit her and she felt her legs shake.

"Holly? Holly, you back?"

It was Kirk, suddenly alongside her. Or maybe he'd been there all along. It was hard to be sure.

"How long?" she rasped gently.

"It's been hours," he told her, sounding almost awestruck. "Are... are you okay?"

"I'm fine," she replied, sliding her amplifier back into its sheathe with a shaking hand, and nodding towards Treysi. "Check her."

Kirk moved. Other footsteps crescendoed in her ears. Beela appeared, frantically checking over the equipment. Then Nevay was alongside her, brow furrowed with unease. Her cybernetic eye locked onto Holly.

"You look like shit," Nevay said.

"So do you."

That scored a chuckle. "So, she gonna be okay?"

"I did what I could." Holly rubbed her eyes with one hand wearily. "She should be alright now. She just need rest. Her body's got a lot of recovering to do."

"Vitals all look stable," Beela said, her voice trembling with nervousness as she looked to Holly. "What'd you do?"

"What I was trained to do," she replied flatly.

Standing around the other side of the table, leaning over Treysi, Kirk looked up at her sharply. "You said you found the problem? What was it? What did they do?"

"They snuck a little bit extra gear in along with the amputations," she explained, trying to ignore the continuing throbs of pain behind her eyes as her own body adjusted to functioning back in the real world. "They coded and attack subroutine into her brain. She was literally programmed to fight the corporations. She couldn't have stopped even if she wanted to."

"Shit," Kirk breathed, looking back down at their patient. "But you stopped it?"

"Yeah. It's gone. She should be back to... well, whatever normal would have been before. I can't speak to her mental state though. I fixed her physical damage – I'm not a brain-stitch."

He nodded, his eyes fixed on Treysi's sleeping face. She allowed a thin smirk to cross her face. In a way, it was almost impressive that a normal kid like him kept getting snarled up in all the worst things happening in Hadrian right now.

Then Treysi twitched.

It was her fingers at first, her metal hand flexing slightly, before closing with a gentle grip around the side of the table. Then the taloned feet swivelled back and forth in tiny motions. Her chest heaved as she took in a deep breath, before she sank against the table. In a lazy motion, her eyes drifted open, shimmering faintly with the new metal implants.

"Treysi?" Kirk breathed. "Can you hear me?"

For a moment she didn't respond, squinting. Then her head turned slightly, the cybernetics of her neck humming faintly.

"Kirk?" she croaked.

"Yeah. Yeah, I'm here. How are you feeling?"

"I... better, I think," Treysi murmured, staring into his eyes. "I was so angry. So angry. Then it all... went away. What happened?"

Through the dumbstruck silence, Holly spoke.

"So, you got anything to drink in this shithole?" she said, shooting Nevay a sidelong glance. "Because I think I've earned it."