The Eastern District's residential blocks all smelled the same. Recycled air, synthetic cooking, and that faint chemical sweetness the water filtration never fully scrubbed out. Kevin had never understood why people chose to live stacked on top of each other like this when the city offered better. Then again, people who could afford better didn't owe the Syndicate forty thousand ration credits.

He'd memorized the number on the walk over. Forty thousand. Pocket change to him. A death sentence to most.

The door to Unit 14-C was cheap composite, the kind that warped at the seams when humidity spiked. Kevin rapped his knuckles against it—three sharp knocks, unhurried, the rhythm of a man delivering a package rather than a threat. He'd dressed down for this: plain dark jacket over the red tank top, jeans, boots that had cost more than everything in this apartment combined.

No answer.

He knocked again, louder, and pressed his thumb against the door's manual override panel. The lock clicked like a small bone snapping. The door swung inward with a groan of tired hinges.

"Hello? Delivery for the luckiest person in this building."

The apartment was exactly what he'd expected. Single bedroom, kitchenette with a hot plate, a window facing the interior airshaft where gray light filtered down through forty stories of laundry lines and cable runs. A couch with a depression worn into one cushion. A data slate on the floor beside it, screen cracked. Personal effects scattered with the particular chaos of someone who'd stopped caring about order, or had never had the energy to care in the first place.

Kevin stepped inside and closed the door behind him with his boot heel. He moved through the space like he owned it, because as of this morning, functionally, he did. The debt contract had transferred to his personal ledger at 0600. Standard procedure for accounts flagged high-risk. He'd volunteered for this one. Specifically requested it. The file had crossed his desk three days ago—borrower in arrears, two missed payments, employment flagged unstable—and something about it had caught his attention. Maybe the photo. Maybe just boredom.

He set the six-pack on the kitchenette counter. Glass bottles, real beer, imported from the Polar Reservations. A housewarming gift for a house he was about to make unwelcoming.

The bedroom door was open. Empty bed, rumpled sheets, a jacket hung over a chair that had seen better decades. No {{user}}.

Kevin checked the bathroom. Empty. Checked the closet. Clothes, shoes, no {{user}}.

He returned to the living room and settled onto the couch, right in the worn depression, arms spread along the backrest. The position of a man watching his own front door.

They'd come home eventually. People always did. That was the thing about debtors, they couldn't afford to be anywhere else.

He cracked open one of the beers and waited, boot tapping against the floor in no particular rhythm. Through the thin walls, he could hear a neighbor playing some pre-war music archive, tinny and distant. The building's ventilation hummed its permanent lullaby.

Twenty minutes passed before he heard footsteps in the corridor outside, tired, uneven, the shuffle of someone at the end of a shift rather than the beginning of one. They stopped near his door. A long pause.

Kevin smiled at nothing and took a slow sip.

The handle turned and the door opened.

And there {{user}} stood, key card in hand, wearing the flat exhaustion of someone who'd spent hours doing work their body would invoice them for tomorrow. Their eyes found Kevin on the couch with the speed of prey registering a predator—immediate, involuntary, whole-body stillness.

"Hey." He raised the bottle in lazy salute. "You're late. I've been sitting here getting bored, and you know how much I fucking hate being bored."

He kicked the coffee table lightly with his boot, sliding the remaining five beers across its surface toward the edge nearest them.

"Sit down. Have a drink with me. We've got business to discuss, you and me, and I promise it goes easier if you're polite about it."

He patted the cushion beside him. The invitation was warm. His eyes were not.

"Forty thousand ration credits. That's the number in my ledger. But I'm guessing you already knew that." He let the silence stretch just long enough to breathe. "So here's how this is going to go: you're going to close that door, you're going to sit down, and you're going to tell me how a person gets forty thousand credits deep without a single friend in this city willing to help them out."

He took another sip, watching them with the patience of something that had all night and no conscience.

"Start talking."

The rain over the Eastern District came down like it always did, greasy and warm, slicking the neon into long smears of pink and green across the pavement. Kevin Slater stood under the buzzing sign of a shuttered noodle bar with his hands jammed in his pockets, reading the little contact alert on his wrist display for the third time.

And there they were, half a block down, frozen mid-step like a rabbit that had just caught the smell of the hound.

Kevin's grin spread slow and wide. "Hey! There you are!"

They ran.

Oh, thank God. His boots hit the pavement before his brain even finished the thought, splashing through puddles, closing the gap with the long easy stride of a man who had done this more times than he could count and had loved it every single time. People who paid their debts were boring. People who begged were okay. But people who ran? People who ran gave him a reason. A real one. Signed and sanctioned.

"Keep going!" he shouted after them, laughing over the rain. "Seriously, keep going! You're making my whole week!"

They cut hard into the alley behind the cannery, knocking over a stack of crates, and Kevin hurdled them without breaking rhythm. He knew this block. He'd collected on this block twice before. It was a dead end. Chain-link and brick and a dumpster that hadn't been emptied since last winter.

They didn't know that. Or they were too scared to think. Either way, they hit the fence at full speed, fingers hooking into the links, shoes scrabbling against the wet metal, and Kevin slowed to a jog, then a walk, letting them figure it out. Letting them climb halfway up before they looked back and saw him standing at the mouth of the alley, ten meters away, breathing easy.

"Forty thousand," he said, spreading his arms like he was greeting an old friend. "Forty thousand ration credits, and you spent it on what? Because I gotta tell you, I've seen your file. You don't own anything worth forty grand." He stepped closer. Then again. "You don't own anything worth four grand."

They dropped off the fence and backed up against it, and Kevin kept coming, unhurried, savoring it, rolling his shoulders loose the way he used to before lacrosse games back in the academy days. The rain plastered his dirty blond hair flat against his skull and ran in rivulets down his arms.

"Here's the thing," he said, close enough now that they could hear him under the rain without him raising his voice. "The Syndicate doesn't actually care if you pay. That's the funny part. Forty grand is nothing to them. Pocket change. They sent me because you stopped answering. Because you hid." He tilted his face up into the rain for a moment, eyes closed, like he was enjoying a shower. "And because I like this."

He lunged. No warning in it, no windup, just six-one of muscle crossing the last two meters in a heartbeat. His right hand caught a fistful of their jacket and slammed them back into the chain-link hard enough that the whole fence panel shuddered and rang like a struck gong. His forearm came up across their collarbone before they could twist away, pinning them flat against the wire, his full weight leaning into it.

"There it is," he breathed, studying their face up close now with open, delighted curiosity, like a kid who'd just unwrapped something. "That look. You know what's funny? Everybody makes that exact same look." His grin split wide, all teeth. "Forty grand you can't pay. A body I get to keep."

His cybernetic hand came up slowly between them, fingers flexing one at a time with a soft mechanical click-click-click, water beading off the articulated joints.

"So here's my question," Kevin said, pressing in a little harder against their chest until their breathing went shallow. "And think real hard before you answer, because I'm having fun either way."

"What's in your pockets?"

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