Piper awoke with a start. For an instant the only thing in her vision was that last image: the cyborg reaching towards her, the surge of pain and then the blackness. She blinked a few times and shook her head, dragging the room in front of her into focus.

It looked surprisingly clean. All gun-metal grey and pale work lights, but neat and tidy. Wafer thin holo-screens shimmered along the walls, showing what looked like city maps, but her foggy mind couldn't quite coalesce the images together to see where.

Then she realised, belatedly, she was strapped to a chair. No, not strapped – lashed – with thick metal cables. Her wrists were clamped to the armrests and her ankles wrapped up tight against the chair legs. A coil of solid wire had been lashed around her torso, squeezing tight enough that she could barely wriggle.

Taking a deep breath, Piper resisted the urge to tug at the bonds. Instead, she examined her captors. They seemed like the elite of whatever mad force had invaded the heart of Hadrian: lithe-limbed semi-human cyborgs and chrome-bodied codewraiths. They watched her impassively. She couldn't feel much from them, just a kind of blunt determination seeping out of their circuits, and everything else concealed behind a set of brutal, old-world firewalls that she lacked the strength or control to break through right now.

Her gaze shifted from the guards, and to the leader – the red-eyed cyborg who was sitting just a few meters from her. He perched on the side of a table, with his feet resting on the chair. She locked eyes with him. He smiled. His steel-plated hands rose with surprising deftness to sweep the hood back off of his head, and for the first time, Piper got a good look at him.

In the light, his sickly grey skin was laid bare. From his neck, all the way up to just below his eyes, he was sheathed in malleable metal graft-skin that shimmered faintly with power lines. He still had his human skin in the hollow of his cheeks, around his eyes and across the bald dome of his head. There were ugly, black-metal spines grafted to his head and climbing down the back of his skull, studded with thick access ports. His ears were still there, and still mostly flesh, but pinned back against the sides of his head, held there by what look like a series of rivets along the rim and down to the lobe.

The young man gently folded his hands together on his lap. His crimson eye implants glimmered demonically as he looked up at her, his neck letting out a faint creak of servos. Piper held his gaze with an effort.

"Hi," he said. "How's the head?"

"It's been worse." She rolled her neck awkwardly from side to side.

He gestured to his face. "What do you think?"

Piper managed a faint smile. "Do you really want to know?"

"Not exactly ageing gracefully, am I?"

"That's one way of putting it."

His smile broadened into a chilling metallic grin. "It's good to finally meet you at last, Piper. Away from your spiv friends, you know?" He made a vague gesture to their surroundings.

"You seem to know all about me already," she replied. "Who are you?"

"That's a long fucking story, let me tell you," her captor laughed, "but you can call me Osric."

Osric. Just like that. A name to go along with it all, but one that didn't answer any of her questions.

"I'd say it's nice to meet you, but..." Piper tugged at her bonds and gave him a withering look.

"Afraid you're gonna have to stay that way for a little while," Osric said. "You're a bit too dangerous for me to let you out, even without your little wand thing."

"I guess I can take that as a compliment." Fear had settled into a dull, distant ache in the back of Piper's mind for the moment. If Osric had wanted to kill her, she'd already be dead.

That then raised the question, however, of why she was still alive.

"So... what now?"

"I want to talk to you, Piper. I think you've got the wrong impression of me. Maybe got some bad information." He slid off the table, standing up to his full height. "Cost a lot of good people to bring you here alive. Would hate for that to have been a waste of my time."

"Well, I'm not going anywhere. What exactly do you want to talk about?"

He tapped one foot against the floor as he regarded her. Then his right eye twitched, just a little. An instant later, the assembled bodyguards turned and marched right out of the room, leaving her alone with Osric.

"You know, news travels fast, even across the water," he said, lacing his fingers together in front of him as he leaned against the table. "I heard a lot about you. Whispers in the datastreams. Living metal. It's true isn't it? About your implants? Special model – no surgery required?"

"Why do you care?" she asked, not seeing much point in denying it.

"Never thought the spivs actually managed it. Funny that it'd be you. And that I'd actually live to see it."

"I didn't ask for it," Piper told him. "I was just a kid. I never wanted to be here, or be a part of this."

He nodded knowingly. "Yeah, join the club."

"No-one made you come here. Nobody made you start butchering people."

His posture stiffened at that. His fingers came apart, flexing and rolling in and out of fists by his sides.

"No?"

"No," Piper growled. "Fucking hell, man, I've got no love for the corps, but just slaughtering people in the street – that's not right. That's what corps do – they don't give a shit about human life."

"You're assuming that I give a shit."

"Well, if you don't, why the hell did you even bother bringing me here?"

The silence that followed made Piper's heart thunder in her chest. She felt Cassie, squirrelled away in the deep recesses of her mind, coiling and writhing with unease, refusing to come out. Scared of this thing in front of her; of what it might do.

"Do you know what hate does to someone?" Osric asked eventually, his grating voice soft. He looked up at her. "Like, deep down? In your blood and guts. Right in your fucking bones? Do you?"

"Sure," Piper replied. "I've hated people."

"I'm not sure that you have. Not really, you know?"

"Wanna bet?"

Looking at those red eyes, it was impossible to gauge Osric's actual feelings, whether he was being truthful, or simply manipulative. He presented like a dead weight to her, without a shred of emotion seeping out of his frame. For a long, uncomfortable moment, he just stared.

"What makes you think that?" she ventured eventually.

"I just think people in Hadrian – in this bit, the nice bit – they don't get it." His fingers traced delicate patterns against each other in the air as he spoke. "It's not your fault. How could it be? But you don't know what it's like. Across the water. You don't know what we had to do to survive."

"You really were there," Piper murmured, "during the Schism, weren't you?"

"I was." He grinned again. It wasn't a more pleasant sight the second time. "Look alright for my age, don't I?"

"How old are you?"

"They stopped my ageing – I guess, in the normal sense – when I was twenty seven."

Piper raised an eyebrow. "So you're going to live forever?"

"Fuck no," Osric laughed, slapping his thigh with a clang of metal on metal. "Sooner or later all this spiv-tech will burn out and when it does, there's not enough of me left to go on without it. I'll just drop dead into a pile of mulch."

"I could live with that."

"Oh, there it is. You see!" He pointed at her, his head cocked to one side. "That's what people like you think is hate. A nasty remark. A bad day. Somebody carved you for protection money, stole your crypts, beat up your boyfriend."

She bristled. "I've been through a lot more than that, you arrogant prick."

"Maybe," Osric snorted, "but you don't know what it's like to have someone rip out your mind. our life. Your soul. You don't know what it feels like to be ... emptied." The last word hung in the air like a hammer blow.

His red eyes disappeared for a moment as he squeezed them tightly closed, his half-metal face contorting into a grimace. He twitched. Once. Twice. A third more violent. As though he was trying to shake something away. Then he refocused on her. She could see sweat beading on his cheeks.

"So, when I tell you that I hate the corporations," he continued coldly, "I want you to really think about what I'm saying to you. I want you to try and wrap your brain around what it's like hating something so much, it's the only thing keeping your fucking heart beating."

"I'll see what I can do," Piper muttered, "but I still don't know what this has to do with me."

"They did the same thing to you, Piper – that's what." He was on one knee in front of her suddenly, looking beseechingly into her eyes. "You're like me! Not so many miles under your belt, but give it..." He looked away for a minute confusion on his face. "You know I don't even know how long, really. Decades? It's all a fuckin' blur."

"I'm not like you," she answered, fighting to keep the disgust out of her voice.

"Not yet. But you will be." He pointed at her chest. "That shit inside you? It'll eat you alive, Piper, until all you've to look forward to is this." Osric gestured at himself with both thumbs. "Like what you see?"

"What the fuck do you want from me?"

"I want you to open your fuckin' eyes and understand that my way's the only way that anything will ever really change, Piper!"

"Killing innocent people is not an answer to anything!"

"Innocent?!" he screamed back, leaping to his feet. "Look at what they did to me!"

His voice exploded in volume. The walls actually vibrated. Piper's ears stung from the decibels and tremors passed through her feet. "Look! Fucking look!" He slammed a clenched fist against down against the table beside him, leaving a crater in its surface. "You think I asked for any of this? You think I want to be here now? You think this is the life I'd ever fucking choose?!"

Suddenly he was close to her, his burning red eyes searing right into her skull. "It's alright for you. All the metal under the skin where nobody can see it. All clean and nice and polished. Think I got that option? No, no, no, no, Piper. They cut me up, took out what they didn't want, and stuffed me with... this."

To her shock, Piper realised that Osric was crying. His yells were strangled with half-sobs, his voice shrill and shaking, as he relived his traumatic transformation again. Who knew how many times he'd had those memories wash over him.

She understood then, with a horrible clarity, why the other creatures from the Schism had followed him here. He was a lightning rod, feeling everything they couldn't feel for themselves. He meant every word, and every emotion now gushing out of him was viscerally, violently real. All that rage washed over her, giving her a tiny glimpse of the real person beneath the dead, inert shell that he presented to his foes.

He threw his head back and dragged in a long, rattling breath, trying to calm himself. Eventually, he dragged the pieces of himself back together. The leaden empty lump presented itself to her again as he turned to face her, like he'd just pulled down the shutters on his mind.

"Ohhhh, fuckin' hell," he said, his voice shaking. "Sorry about that. Sometimes, you know, it just gets a little much." Osric tapped his temple gently with one finger. "A lot of people wish I didn't remember everything I remember you know. Sometimes I wish I didn't. But I do. I know what happened, Piper. I know what they did. I wasn't much older than you." He spread his hands wide. "This is what you had to look forward to in my time."

"I'm sorry they did that to you," Piper said, speaking soft.

He flexed his neck sharply – involuntarily. "It's not like you had anything to do with it."

"Still." She pressed her lips together tightly for a moment, before risking another question. "How did you get them back? Your memories, I mean."

"Had a little help." Osric loped back over to the table and hopped up onto it with a clunk. His legs dangled, child-like as he leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees. "When the killing was done, and the corps were done burning all the fuckin' class notes, some of us crawled out of the mud, and found our Good Samaritan – somebody who managed to hide away from the worst of the back-shock when they pulled the plug. Bit of a blessing for me, I guess. Didn't feel that way at first thought."

"So this... survivor? It was an AI?"

"More than that," he replied with a shake of the head. "AI would have been simple. But I got back most of what I lost. When I did, I knew that the only thing left in this fucking world worth doing, was to come here. To do this."

"So you're just going to kill everyone? Slaughter the whole fucking city?" Piper strained a little against her bonds, feeling some of the strength beginning to seep back into her implants. "Osric, half of those people weren't even alive when the Schism happened."

"I'm not an idiot, Piper. I've got a plan, you know."

"You're going to get yourself killed. And if you fail – if the corps catch you and kill you-," she jerked her head to the left, "where do you think they go next? Gig's up, Osric. Thanks to you, they know they can't just sit back on their fat fucking arses anymore. They know Hadrian South's got some life left in it. You do this, and you die, they are going to go back there and finish what they started."

"I'm sure they will." A knowing smirk crossed his face. He clacked his fingers index fingers lightly against each other for a moment as he looked at her. "She's in your head, isn't she?" Osric tapped his temple, and grinned.

"She?"

"How in the fucking hell..." He shook his head in amazement. "Couldn't leash me herself so she found some other poor sap to try and do her dirty work."

Piper tensed, her eyes flickering around the room to Osric's guards. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Don't lie." He twitched; something inside his skull crackled and he shook his head violently before glaring at her. "Don't lie, Piper."

Piper's fingers pressed into the arms of the chair hard enough to hurt. "Someone from across the water doesn't like you very much."

"Ain't that the truth," he chuckled. "Prodigal son, and all that. But how'd she get in your nugget?"

"How the hell should I know?"

He frowned, suddenly across the room again, right in front of her. He reached out, metal fingers pressing hard against the side of her head. She felt a jolt of violent connection, like someone had just pumped thousands of volts into her brain. Pain boiled up briefly, before Osric jerked away again, his eyes narrow with suspicion.

"Now that is interesting."

"What is going on?" she choked out.

Osric straightened up. "Good news, is that, so long as I'm around, you can get some peace and quiet in there without her giving you orders from half a world away. Bad news: you are really not going to be happy when I tell you how she's managed to tap into your circuits."

That made her shiver. "What are you talking about?!"

He didn't answer; just stood there looking at her like a new curio he'd found in a gift shop. Before she could let rip a stream of fresh expletives, one of his lieutenants – a female cyborg, all chrome and bulky armour – stomped back into the room. She walked over to Osric and leaned in close to him, their ears almost touching.

Neither of them spoke – not audibly. Piper sensed a small distortion in the datastreams around them. They stood there, motionless, but she noticed something else moving in the passage where the woman had come from. She looked.

She saw a cold pallid face staring out of the shadows at her, and in that moment, felt the creeping, cold sense of horrible emptiness. The spider-like limbs swayed in the half-light of the tunnel and she heard a faint rasp of air, like the final death rattle of a dying man.

Another one. Another of those things she'd annihilated when she'd run across Holly Lockley out in the city. There were more of them. Who knew how many of those abominations he'd dragged across the water with him?

Then the distortion between Osric and his subordinate disappeared, and he thumped a metal fist on her shoulder guard.

"Good stuff. Let's get this party started." He glanced back at her. "You and me, we'll pick up a little later, alright?"

"Wait! Wait!" Piper squealed in disbelief. "What's happening?! What did you feel? Who's in my head?"

"Promise, if I live long enough, I'll give you the full story." He shrugged apologetically. "Stick around Piper, and I'll tell you secrets that'll blow your fuckin' mind. In the meantime, I've got a city to kill."

Then he followed his minions out through the tunnel, leaving her alone with her screams.