It took Harvey several minutes to pull himself together and then drag the group toward the elevators. Inside, Trace promptly leaned against the panel, while talking to Ko, his back pressing dozens of the buttons.

  “Hey, what are you doing? Stop that! Move away from the panel.” Harvey yanked him away from the button panel, that had dozens of the floors already lit up.

  “Hmm, oh sorry about that. I didn’t see it there,” Trace muttered, doing his best to hide a smile.

  The annoying supervisor began jabbing at the buttons as they soared upward. He managed to cancel several of the floors by holding the button for several seconds, one at a time. It was annoying for all involved, yet it did exactly what they wanted and slowed the trip down.

  The elevator ride, which should have taken only a minute, ended up taking over five. They could have just hopped out and taken a different one. Thankfully, by that point, Harvey was panicking too much to realize that.

  When they reached the right floor, the man simply had his guards lift the three up and carry them. He was unwilling to let them delay the meeting any longer. Despite who they were going to meet, the man had done nothing to take Trace’s weapons from him. The guards hadn’t even made a single attempt to touch them. It was as though they were completely unworried about the guns he had in his holsters.

  There would be no more delays. The most they could hope to do from here out was to extend the meeting itself in some way. Frankly, that might be more dangerous than anything else. This council of Siren’s Rush might not be one of the actual top powers of the corporation. However, in the end, it didn’t need to be. They were plenty high enough that they could do whatever they wanted to the three of them.

  That was even more true when they were inside the corporation’s home territory.

  As they were carried into a new room, they were all sprayed down with a mist. At first, Trace thought it was sani-spray, but then his mind began to grow odd… The room was fragmented and disjointed, with the sections not quite meeting up in the way they were meant to.

  In the corner of his vision, Trace noticed a list of notifications scrolling rapidly. With each passing second, his vision began to clear once more, and his mind lost the feeling of fuzziness that had abruptly come over it.

  The council of heads had drugged them as soon as they entered. No wonder they weren’t worried about his weapons. It was a good thing the nanites were taking care of the drugs in his system and he had no doubt that Ko’s would be doing something similar. Only Su-Min would remain in an actively drugged state during whatever was to come. Unfortunately, there was nothing that he could do to remedy that particular issue right then.

  As his eyes took in the room, he noted how the odd angles and peculiar architecture of the place were designed to help throw someone off balance. Anyone who saw the place would assume their eyes were glitching, and that something was wrong. Combine the effect with drugs, and you have a room designed to throw people off balance and keep them under the drug's compulsion.

  It was brilliantly devious, and he hated it.

  Trace was dropped to the floor, where he wavered unsteadily, his sense of balance as shot as his vision had been. Everything was coming back, but whatever that spray had been, one thing was for sure- it was incredibly potent. Behind him, he heard someone crumple to the floor, followed by the sound of a second person hitting the ground a few seconds later.

  Not wanting to stand out, he gave up the fight for balance and let himself fall to the floor. In the corner of his vision, the notifications continued to stream past, highlighting how much work the nanites were putting in. He had never seen a list this long before, except perhaps when after his surgery with Sevorah. Even that one though, had been after the fact and built up over time.

  What had this supposedly food-based corporation concocted?

  Laying there on his back, he was finally able to catch a glimpse of Ko and her mother in similar positions. Su-Min was lightly drooling, while Ko seemed to be more on the edge of hyperventilating.

  “Interesting. It looks as though the muscle relaxant worked a little too well on the mother, while not at all on the daughter. The readings are inconclusive on the male, though his street-meat-based upbringing may have given him some protection from the drugs we used. I’ll continue to monitor them, while the rest of you question them.” A voice said from somewhere behind Trace’s head, back near where the door had been.

  “We should have known the street-waste would be less susceptible to certain chemicals. I’ve read the reports on what some of them are forced to eat when we aren’t inviting them into one of our facilities for experiments. Frankly, it’s a miracle that their insides even still work at all.” There was the faint sound of a pen going across the surface of an ink-sheet as notes were taken. “Regardless, let’s begin the meeting.”

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  Trace groaned incoherently at them. The action was easier than he thought it would be due to how thick his tongue still felt. His right arm, the one that was cyberware, was obviously fine and could be used at a moment's notice. It didn’t feel as though the nerves or anything that controlled it had slowed in the slightest. Perhaps that wouldn’t have been the case if the damage hadn’t been so extensive. However, Sevorah and Ko had needed to replace his entire shoulder and a portion of his side to facilitate the arm’s weight and hardware. That wasn’t the case for his left arm, which was completely fleshware, but again, it was improving by the second.

  Near him, Ko flopped around and groaned something unintelligible. The sound was wrong, and it took Trace several seconds to realize that the smart girl had turned off her cyberware vocal attachment. What he had just heard was her completely natural voice, or at least what remained of it. Supposedly, the attachment was meant to heal her vocal cords, but he had never heard her turn it off before that moment.

  “Right, make a note to dial the mixture down a little the next time we do this. The mother is in no condition to answer questions. The daughter- Miss Devko Park, her voice is not something I want to hear from my doctor, personally. As for the boy, I have no opinion on him. Do what you will with him, just ensure no one else learns of it. He is still an edger after all.” There was a single-hand clap, and then a chair was pushed backward. “The rest of you may continue. However, I have a team under my purview currently conducting experiments that I would prefer to oversee.”

  A shadow stood up and walked away from the tables that ringed the space above Trace and the others.

  “What about the rest of you? Does anyone else suddenly have another place they would rather be?”

  Two more shadows got up and left the table above. Trace couldn’t risk switching modes on his eyes at the moment. He had never tested to see if doing so changed anything about their outward appearance, neither could he risk them detecting the changes with their monitoring tech. Instead, what he raised was the gain a few degrees, what should have been an almost imperceptible amount.

  It wasn’t enough for him to see details or wash out his vision. All he wanted to know was how many people were up there, or at least an approximate number. Considering he could only see a portion of the upper room from his current position, if he tried to see everyone, he would have to move around, which would draw attention to him.

  Still, it was enough for him to see eight people sitting above them. Three had left, which meant there had originally been at least eleven people on this council of heads, likely a couple more that he couldn’t see.

  Trace didn’t know a lot about how corporations worked. He had never wanted to be a corpo-rat. Any desire for that had been burned from his being when he was being experimented on as a kid. He did know that a ‘Head’ typically referred to a ‘Section Head’, which was above a ‘Supervisor’. Having that many section heads seemed like a lot to him, but this is where his lack of corporate knowledge came into play. Perhaps it was normal for a corporation like Siren’s Rush to have loads of supervisors and a dozen working sections.

  Before he could follow that train of thought too much farther, one of the people above them began the questions.

  “Miss Devko Park, we have received information that you recently completed your mender’s apprenticeship. Is this correct?”

  Ko screeched at them, and even Trace winced, though for an entirely different reason than the others. He hoped she wasn’t hurting her vocal cords by putting on this performance.

  “I’ll take that as a yes. The question was mostly rhetoric in any case.” The soft scratching of a pen on an ink-sheet came again.

  “Is she able to speak properly? You, Harvey, have you confirmed that she can actually speak? We can all see the work she has had done to her throat. It says here in the notes of her profile that is the location of where her mother attacked her.”

  “I can indeed confirm that she can speak under normal circumstances. She was perfectly capable of yelling at me earlier. I can only assume that the drugs used must be interfering with whatever device she uses to communicate in some way.” Harvey informed the people above, panic entering his voice.

  Someone clicked their tongue in annoyance. “Make another note about this particular mixture. Further testing needs to be conducted in conjunction with how it interferes with a person’s cyberware control. This batch is obviously a failure, fire with prejudice whoever said it was ready to be used in this session.”

  There was a round of muttered agreements.

  “How do their vitals look?”

  “The mother looks like she is asleep, no sign of damage to the brain. If she wasn’t quite so relaxed, she would be a perfect candidate for questioning. The mix came closest to working on her. For Devko, her original adrenaline spike, which was off the charts at how high it was. Her entire body was flooded with adrenaline and sent her heart racing into the red, has calmed down. The adrenaline spike only lasted a few seconds.

  “I’ve never seen anything quite like it, but it took far longer for her heart to calm down afterward. As for the edger, there is something about his cyberware that is continually throwing off the readings. All I can say for sure is that it’s working enough that I’m getting readings. But both his and Devko’s bodies are processing the drugs abnormally quickly.”

  “Fine, let’s scrap the rest of the questions. They can be asked at a later date. Bring out the new contract. Let’s have Miss Devko sign on as a member of the corporation as soon as possible. It doesn’t matter that the three won’t remember anything that went on in here, the contract will still be binding.”

  Before Trace could react, Harvey grabbed Ko’s hand and pressed it to an ink-sheet he was holding. The screen of which flashed red a moment later, to his apparent surprise. He dropped her hand and brought the screen of the pad closer to his face, reading the message that had appeared. With a muffled curse, he kicked Ko in the side.

  “The slot-” Harvey never got to finish whatever he was going to say, as Trace had already drawn his Deen 2100 and put two holes in the man’s head. Seeing the jerk kick Ko had made him see red, and the gun was in his hand almost before he knew it.

  Not wanting to waste the opportunity of surprise, he switched targets and began firing on the man’s guards behind them.

  Thank you to all the people who have taken the time to rate the story and to my latest Patrons! I have other stories up on my Patreon, including my current WIPs. Which are now Created G.H.O.S.T. System(My Cyberpunk story), WetWorks2, plus The Restaurateur and His Daughter and DungeonFall. :)

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