“Low-value contracts don’t justify client vetting.

  Payment verification: standard. Intention verification: too expensive.

  The job you agreed to and the job you’re actually doing are sometimes very different.”

  — Deleted post, TFN best practices

  The main floor hit me like a wall of sound, light, and bodies.

  Bass thrummed through the floor, vibrating up through my boots and into my chest. Holographic displays pulsed overhead, throwing shifting patterns of color across the crowd, blues and purples and reds that painted faces in hues before sliding away to be replaced by something new.

  The space was massive, bigger than it had looked from the outside.

  The old warehouse's bones showed through the renovation: exposed brick walls, industrial support columns wrapped in LED strips, ductwork running across the ceiling like metallic veins.

  But everything else screamed nightclub, the raised DJ platform where someone in a chrome mask manipulated floating interfaces, the dance floor packed with bodies moving in rhythm, the booths lining the walls where people who’d paid for seating could watch the chaos from relative comfort and have a place where to eat the food.

  From I had seen, the crowd was a “classic” of New Clearwater’s Friday night population.

  Factory workers, still in jumpsuits, the fabric stained with whatever they’d been manufacturing, dancing next to corpo middle-managers who’d loosened their ties and rolled up their sleeves to look casual.

  Dancing groups of friends in matching neon accessories, probably celebrating someone’s birthday or promotion or just surviving another week.

  Couples pressed together in dark corners, their bodies closer than the music strictly required.

  Fashion here ranged as usual. Synth-leather jackets covered in glowing patches. Dresses that shifted color with movement.

  Chrome implants catching the light, decorative stuff mostly, subdermal LEDs and cosmetic augments that served no purpose except looking cool under club lighting. One guy had actual horns, curved and polished, either implants or maybe a gift from the system?

  An ease slipped into my shoulders; my clothes were… fine. Tame even.

  Nobody wore uniforms. Nobody looked like they belonged to any gang or group. The only common thread was the badges, visitor passes clipped to collars or hanging from lanyards, all of them the same generic design I’d seen on the delivery workers.

  No photos. Just text reading GUEST in blocky letters.

  The bar stretched along one wall, a massive construction of black marble and embedded displays showing drink menus and prices that made me wince.

  Bartenders moved behind it, mixing drinks and sliding them across the counter to waiting hands. The stools were mostly occupied, people leaning in to shout orders over the music.

  And weaving through all of it: staff.

  I watched them work.

  They carried trays loaded with drinks, navigating the crowd with a speed that must be from minor augmentation. Their badges differed from the guest passes, color-coded by role, clipped at consistent angles.

  I adjusted my own waitstaff badge and stepped into the flow.

  Moving with the staff was easier than I’d expected. The crowd parted for people carrying drinks, a survival instinct born from not wanting expensive alcohol spilled on expensive clothes. I kept my head down, my pace steady, and let the badge do the work of making me belong.

  From this angle, moving through the floor, I could see the layout properly.

  One staircase.

  It rose from the back corner of the main floor, a spiral of metal and glass that led up to the second level. From below, I could see the VIP section: private booths with better lighting and what looked like actual furniture instead of the industrial-chic seating downstairs.

  A bouncer stood at the base of the stairs.

  Not as big as the chrome-armed mountain at the front entrance, but solid. His badge read SECURITY in bold red letters.

  I circled the floor, moving from one side of the bar to the other, observing.

  Staff went up and down those stairs constantly. Waiters with drink trays, returning with empty glasses. The bouncer barely glanced at them, a quick look at the badge, sometimes not even that, and a wave through.

  VIP guests wore golden badges.

  I spotted a few of them descending to use the bathroom or grab something from the food stations, their passes catching the light like small suns against their expensive clothes.

  I could try to steal one. Find a drunk VIP, lift their badge, hope nobody noticed the switch.

  Or maybe I could try to find another way up. Service elevator, maintenance access, something the public wasn’t supposed to know about. Or I could just... walk up.

  Badge visible, tray in hand, looking like every other waiter making the rounds.

  The staff barely got checked. The bouncer was looking for guests trying to sneak in, not employees doing their jobs.

  Simple is better, I told myself. Don’t overcomplicate it.

  I knew I was green. No training, no backup, no neat checklist of what to do if things went wrong. But this was a mission that became training. A crowded club, layered security, consequences meant bruises instead of bullets. If I failed, I’d get a punch in the face and tossed onto the pavement.

  I made my way toward the bar, timing my approach for when the bartenders were busy. A woman in a dress that looked like liquid metal was demanding something complicated, gesturing widely while the nearest bartender nodded and reached for bottles.

  The other bartender was at the far end, dealing with a group that kept changing their orders.

  A tray sat on the service section of the bar, already loaded with a drink, something blue and glowing.

  I grabbed it.

  Thankfully, my hands didn’t shake, and I tried to keep my face stayed neutral. I picked up the tray as if I’d done it a thousand times, turned, and walked away from the bar with the confidence of someone who absolutely knew how to walk with a tray.

  Nobody stopped me, or even looked.

  My heart was slamming against my ribs, but I kept my pace steady, my expression bored. Just another waiter. Just another delivery. Nothing interesting here.

  The stairs were twenty feet away.

  Fifteen.

  Ten—

  “Hey! Hey, yellow guy!”

  A hand grabbed my arm.

  I turned, my customer service smile already in place, and found myself face-to-face with a woman who was either very drunk, very high, or both. Her pupils were dilated to the point where the iris was barely visible, and she swayed slightly even while standing still.

  “Your hoodie,” she said, the words slurring together. “S’really preem. Like, really preem. Where’d you get it?”

  “I—”

  “Custom, right? Gotta be custom. Nobody sells that color.” She was leaning closer now, squinting at the fabric as if she could get a shop that sold it through sheer concentration. “My friend wants one. She’d love this color. You gotta tell me where.”

  “Ma’am, I need to deliver this—”

  “Is that a sword?” Her attention had shifted to my hip, her eyes widening. “You got a sword? That’s so cool! Why do you have a sword? Are you like, security? You don’t look like security. Security doesn’t wear that badge.”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  My smile was hurting. “It’s decorative. Ma’am, I really need to—”

  “Get me a drink.” Her tone shifted, the friendly curiosity curdling into something demanding. “You’re a waiter, right? Get me a drink. A free one. For making me wait.”

  “I’m in the middle of—”

  “I’ll tell your manager.” She crossed her arms, swaying dangerously. “I’ll tell them you were rude to me. That you ignored a customer. They’ll fire you. I’ve gotten people fired before.”

  I believed her. “Free drinks,” I said, the words coming out before I could think them through. “Absolutely. I’ll bring them right over. Just let me deliver this first, and I’ll be right back with whatever you want.”

  Her expression brightened, the threat disappearing as if it had never existed. “Really? You promise?”

  “Just give me ten minutes.”

  “You’re the best.” She patted my cheek with a hand that smelled like synthetic fruit and something that I hoped wasn’t drugs. “I’m gonna tell my friends about you. Yellow hoodie guy. Best waiter ever.”

  She released my arm and stumbled back toward her group, already shouting about the free drinks she’d secured.

  I did not look back.

  The stairs. The bouncer. Ten feet away.

  I approached with the tray balanced on one hand, my badge visible, my expression carefully bored.

  The bouncer’s eyes tracked me as I got closer. He was younger than I’d expected, maybe mid-twenties, with a shaved head and a scar that ran across his left eyebrow.

  “Hold up.”

  I stopped, my heart rate spiking. He just looked at my face, ignoring the badge. “I don’t know you.”

  The words hit me like ice water. I scrambled for an explanation, an excuse, anything—

  The bouncer smirked. “Easy, kid. You look like you’re about to pass out.” He leaned back slightly, his posture relaxing. “New?”

  I nodded, not trusting my voice. “Thought so. Your sponsor?”

  “Jun,” I blurted. The name of the cook I’d accidentally framed for the pan incident.

  The bouncer’s smirk transformed into a genuine grin. “That explains a lot, actually.” He shook his head, something like sympathy crossing his face. “Hopefully you’re better than the last guy he brought in. Kid couldn’t tell vodka from water.”

  He reached out and clapped me on the shoulder.

  The impact was harder than it needed to be, friendly in that aggressive way some guys couldn’t turn off. My arm jerked, and the blue drink on my tray sloshed dangerously close to the rim.

  “Sorry, sorry.” He held up his hands, still grinning. “Go on, get up there before we both get fined for talking on shift.”

  I nodded, adjusting my grip on the tray, and climbed the stairs.

  One step.

  Two.

  Three.

  I didn’t look back.

  The second floor was a different world.

  They had stripped away the industrial aesthetic of the ground floor up here, replacing it with something that wanted to be mistaken for luxury.

  Plush booths lined the walls, each one enclosed in a subtle shimmer that I recognized from my time at Kallum as sound-dampening fields, private conversations staying private, no matter how loud the music pumped from speakers that somehow didn’t reach this level with the same intensity.

  I touched a wall, and—the furniture was real.

  Actual fabric, actual leather, materials that cost more than synthetic alternatives for no reason except to prove you could afford the difference. Mrs. Adelaide, our neighbour in the central district, kept stopping me and telling me stuff like this when I needed to catch a train.

  And everywhere, draped across booths and perched on armrests and leaning close to whisper in ears: joygirls.

  They were beautiful in that manufactured way, fake and odd-feeling with cosmetic augmentation and professional styling; their clothes barely qualifying as clothing, their smiles bright and empty and perfectly calibrated for whoever was paying.

  A few joyboys too, all of them wearing the same expression of attentive availability.

  Accessories. That’s what they looked like. Expensive accessories that happened to breathe.

  I shook my head; now wasn’t the time to complain about the Tago capitalism system. I kept my tray up, my expression neutral, and tried not to stare.

  A holographic display floated above one of the central tables, casting pale blue light across the guests gathered around it. I caught a glimpse as I passed, a menu of faces, names, and statistics scrolling past as someone swiped through options. Height, measurements, “specialties” listed in clinical text.

  The guests were browsing companions as if they were ordering dinner.

  One of them tapped a selection, and somewhere across the floor, a joygirl’s bracelet must have buzzed, because she stood from her current position and began making her way toward the table with that same empty smile.

  I looked away.

  Just find a console. Plug in the datajack. Leave.

  I circled the floor with the tray, playing the part of a waiter while my eyes scanned for options. The VIP area was smaller than the ground floor, more intimate, which meant fewer places to hide and fewer excuses for wandering.

  Sadly, I saw no obvious consoles or unattended terminals. The bar up here was staffed by two bartenders who never seemed to step away simultaneously. The booths were all occupied, guests and their purchased companions filling every available space.

  The only door that wasn’t a bathroom or the stairs I’d come up was at the far end of the floor.

  An office.

  The door was plain, unmarked, clearly meant to blend into the wall rather than attract attention. A keypad lock glowed beside it, the same Kovara design I’d cracked downstairs.

  But there was a problem.

  A woman sat in a chair near the door, not quite blocking it but positioned close enough that anyone approaching would have to pass her. She wore the staff badge of a hostess, not a mere waitstaff, as I, her attention split between a tablet and the floor, watching for guests who needed assistance.

  I couldn’t just walk up and start picking the lock. Not with her right there.

  So I waited.

  I made rounds, delivering the blue drink to a booth where nobody had ordered it and accepting the confused thanks of a man too drunk to question the gift. I grabbed empty glasses from tables, nodded at the other staff, and played the part of someone who belonged.

  And I watched the hostess.

  She stood up after maybe five minutes, responding to a wave from one of the booths. A guest needed something. More drinks, a different companion, some complaint that required personal attention, probably. She walked away from her post, holo in hand, her focus on the customer.

  I moved.

  The Kovara lock took me ten seconds. Same model as downstairs, same flaw, same bridge-and-reset bypass that really should have been patched six generations ago. The door clicked open; I put the housing back and slipped inside before anyone could notice the waiter disappearing into a room he had no business entering.

  The office was dark, lit only by the glow of a single terminal on the desk and the ambient light bleeding through a small window that looked out over the alley.

  I pulled the door closed behind me, waiting for my eyes to adjust.

  Desk. Chair. Filing cabinets that looked as if they hadn’t been opened in years. The terminal hummed quietly.

  And against the far wall, stacked in neat rows: crates.

  Military shipping containers. Standardized dimensions, reinforced corners, construction designed to survive orbital drops and rough handling. The markings were partially obscured; someone had sprayed over the original labels, but I could still make out fragments.

  MIDORIKAWA CORP

  CONTENTS: [REDACTED]

  AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY

  I stared at the crates, my heart rate climbing.

  Midorikawa was military and strategic defense. Fortune 15. These weren’t party supplies or club equipment; this was hardware. Real hardware. A thing that didn’t belong in the back office of a nightclub unless that nightclub was a front for something much darker.

  The terminal was unlocked.

  I almost laughed. All that effort bypassing Kovara locks and sneaking past staff, and the actual computer sitting in the actual office was just... open. No login screen, or biometric prompt. Just a desktop, glowing softly in the dark, as if whoever used this machine had stepped out for a bathroom break.

  The wallpaper was a stock image of a sunset over the Tago skyline.

  A quick glance at the user profile told me everything I needed: Chief of Security, Cassette Operations. Not the owner, not management, but the person responsible for making sure nobody did exactly what I was currently doing.

  I should have moved straight to the datajack port. Plug in, let it do its work, get out. That was the job.

  But the Inlook app was already open, minimized to a thin bar at the bottom of the screen, and when my fingers brushed the interface, it expanded to fill the display with a neatly organized inbox that the chief apparently lived in.

  A folder labeled Company Security sat in the middle of the sidebar, with only three items. Maybe it could help me walk out of here without anyone noticing I’d walked in.

  The first email was a complaint.

  The chief had written it himself, addressed to someone in facilities management, and the tone suggested this wasn’t the first time he’d raised the issue. The badge-tracking system on the first floor was, in his professional opinion, garbage. Constant false pings, phantom alerts, the proximity sensors getting confused every time the dance floor hit capacity and hundreds of badges crowded within spitting distance of each other. The system couldn’t tell who was where, kept flagging legitimate staff as intruders and ignoring actual guests in restricted zones.

  His solution was practical: disable the internal tracking grid entirely, keep only the external wall sensors active along the building perimeter, and hire two additional guards to cover the gaps with actual eyeballs. The Kovara quote to upgrade the system had been, and I could almost hear the chief’s teeth grinding through the text, “twenty times the annual cost of two warm bodies.”

  Good to know.

  The second email was about break-ins. Not relevant, not tonight.

  The third was shorter. Guards had been complaining that employees kept losing their badges, misplacing them during shifts, leaving them in lockers, dropping them on the dance floor where they’d get kicked under equipment and never recovered. The chief’s response had been characteristically blunt: if the guard recognized you, you could walk in.

  There were more emails in another folders, but I closed the inbox and stepped back from the terminal. “Nah,” I muttered, already turning toward the desk port. “Not important to me. I have a job to do.”

  My eyes drifted to the Midorikawa crates stacked against the far wall, their sprayed-over labels catching the terminal’s glow.

  “Not my problem how they got here.”

  Slot the datajack. Leave.

  I moved to the terminal, pulling the datajack from my pocket. The port was standard, easy to find, and the device slid in with a soft click.

  A progress bar appeared on the screen.

  [CONNECTING...]

  [DATA TRANSFER IN PROGRESS...]

  [ESTIMATED TIME: 45 SECONDS]

  “Should’ve done it before reading, I’m stupid…” I watched the bar crawl forward, acutely aware of every sound from beyond the office door. The muffled bass from the speakers. Distant laughter. The clink of glasses.

  Thirty seconds.

  Twenty.

  Ten.

  [TRANSFER COMPLETE]

  [DISCONNECTING...]

  The datajack ejected itself with a soft snick, and I pocketed it.

  I moved to the door, pressing my ear against the surface to listen. No voices directly outside, or any footsteps approaching. The hostess was probably still dealing with whatever crisis had pulled her away.

  I eased the door open, glanced both ways.

  Clear.

  I stepped out, pulling the door closed behind me with a soft click—

  The lights died.

  Every light on the second floor cut out simultaneously, plunging the VIP area into sudden darkness. For one moment, there was nothing but black and the confused sounds of guests reacting to the change.

  Then the alarm started.

  It wasn’t a gentle warning tone. It was a shriek, a piercing wail that cut through the dampening fields and the music and everything else, accompanied by emergency lights that strobed red across the floor in sharp, angry pulses.

  I stood frozen, my hand still on the office door, bathed in a crimson light that made everything look like a crime scene.

  Did I do that?

  Did the datajack—

  Screaming started from somewhere below. Security mobilizing and the stairs were thirty feet away.

  I was standing right next to a door I definitely shouldn’t have been behind.

  “This will not be easy.”

  TODAY’S CHAPTER IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY Chief of Security

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