Through the yellow haze, the skeletal wing of the crashed drone loomed like the ribcage of a dead beast, but as Zeke reached for the cockpit, a cold metallic click echoed behind his helmet.

Zeke froze, his hand hovering inches from the carbon-fiber fuselage. Inside his heavy brass helmet, his breathing was shallow, a rhythmic, raspy rasp through the cheap, rattling charcoal filter. The air in his suit smelled of stale sweat and scorched rubber, but the metallic tang of heavy-metal radiation still managed to seep through, coating his tongue with a bitter, copper taste. His left leg, numb and heavy from his previous neural overclock, trembled against the toxic mud of the Dead Zone.

"Don't move, street rat," a voice chimed through a synthesized, multi-tonal vocal modulator. It was sharp, professional, and entirely devoid of warmth. "You're breathing my salvage, and my droids don't like thieves."

Zeke slowly turned his head, the stiff rubber collar of his radiation suit groaning under the movement. Through the scratched, clouded glass of his visor, his right eye focused on the shifting yellow fog.

Two sleek, bipedal corporate maintenance droids slid out of the acidic mist. Unlike the rusted, grease-caked scrap-heaps Zeke worked on in the Shallows, these machines were pristine. Their white polymer chassis gleamed with a cold, sterile corporate sheen, untouched by the corrosive lithium pools bubbling nearby. Mounted on their right shoulders were high-velocity pneumatic stun-cannons, their targeting lasers cutting through the yellow haze like thin, blood-red needles. Both lasers were locked directly onto Zeke’s chest.

Behind the droids stepped a figure clad in a dark, high-tech windbreaker made of active, light-bending weave. She wore a face-concealing holographic mask that flickered with a shifting pattern of emerald-green digital static, completely obscuring her features. In her hand, she held a compact, military-grade drone-hijacking transmitter.

Proxy.

"Proxy, wait!" Jax’s voice crackled through their localized shortwave radio, high-pitched and frantic. The fifteen-year-old was crouching behind a rusted titanium landing gear, his hands raised, his cheap radiation suit patched with layers of black duct tape. "We're not here to steal your run! We just need the—"

One of the white droids snapped its head toward Jax, the stun-cannon whining as it charged. Jax flinched, scrambling backward into the mud, his boots splashing through a shallow pool of green-tinted battery acid.

"Shut it, runner," Proxy cut him off, her holographic mask shifting to a cold, jagged pattern of red bars. She stepped closer to the crashed drone, her eyes—or where her eyes should be behind the mask—scanning Zeke's posture. "I know who you are, Miller. The 'Copper Boy.' The neighborhood hero who thinks he can run a pirate net on scrap wire and wishful thinking."

She stepped onto the drone's cracked wing, her movements light and agile, completely unburdened by the heavy, primitive gear Zeke and his crew wore. She looked down at Zeke, her mask flickering with a patronizing green wave.

"Look at you," she sneered, her voice dripping with professional disgust. "You're wearing a surplus suit that's probably leaking lead, your left eye is clouded with cataracts from neural heat, and your scalp array... god, it's a miracle you haven't lobotomized yourself yet. You're a clumsy amateur, Miller. A walking bio-router? It's a disgusting, unstable hack. You're bringing down corporate heat on every independent decker in the district, and for what? To give free net to a bunch of waterlogged slums that will forget your name the moment OmniCom turns the power back on."

Zeke gritted his teeth, his fingers tightening around the handle of his walking stick. The neural tremors in his left hand flared, his fingers twitching in that phantom, three-beat pattern. He could feel the fever rising under his scalp, the raw incisions where the copper nano-fibers were woven into his parietal lobe throbbing in sync with the low-frequency hum of the Dead Zone.

"The people in the Shallows are dying, Proxy," Zeke rasped, his voice muffled by the respirator. "Warden Vance cut the emergency feeds. The clinics are running on dead batteries. I don't care what you think of my tech. I need the high-purity copper fibers in this drone's core. And I'm not leaving without them."

"Then you'll die here," Proxy said coldly. "My droids have a clear line of fire, and your little radio guide over there can't save you."

Old Patch stood ten feet away, his blind face turned toward the droids. His custom radio-tuning headset clicked and whined, the tiny vacuum tubes glowing a faint amber as he analyzed the airwaves. His heavy hydraulic left claw was raised, but he remained silent, calculating the distance. He knew, as well as Zeke did, that they were outmatched. The droids' targeting processors were too fast for a physical rush.

Zeke had to use his mind. He had to fight with his own biology.

He reached up with his right hand, slowly, so as not to trigger the droids' defensive algorithms, and flipped down his *Signal-Sensing Visor*. The bulky, modified goggles clamped over his helmet's visor with a heavy metallic click.

Instantly, the dark, yellow world of the Dead Zone was replaced by a vibrant, chaotic map of electromagnetic frequencies. Even through the dense, blinding static of the toxic waste pools, Zeke's mutated Spectrum Sight—amplified by the visor—perceived the glowing currents of energy. He ignored the static, focusing entirely on the two white droids.

He saw them.

Two bright, pulsing spheres of orange light hovered around the droids' heads—their wireless control links. They weren't running on secure, encrypted corporate military channels. Because they were repurposed maintenance droids, Proxy was controlling them via a localized, low-frequency diagnostic protocol. A backdoor.

Zeke's hand slipped beneath his duster, his numb fingers finding the interface cable of his *Decryption Deck*. He plugged the jack directly into the coaxial port at the base of his neck, connecting his physical brain waves to the scratched, salvaged console slung over his shoulder.

"Jax," Zeke whispered into the shortwave. "Get ready to run."

"Zeke, what are you doing?" Jax panted. "If you overclock now, your brain—"

"Just do it."

Zeke closed his right eye, diving headfirst into *Data Immersion*.

In his mind, the physical ruins of the Dead Zone dissolved. He was standing in a cold, silent landscape of glowing orange lines. The code of the droids' diagnostic protocol stretched before him like a high-voltage fence. To break it, he didn't have high-end corporate decryption keys. He had his own bio-electrical energy.

He focused on his parietal lobe, channeling his thoughts into the copper crown embedded in his scalp.

*Warning. Scalp Array Temperature: 39.8°C. Localized thermal buildup detected.*

An intense, needle-like pain shot through his temples. Zeke gritted his teeth, forcing the electrical current higher. In his mind, he grabbed the orange lines of the diagnostic protocol, his biological signal acting as a brute-force wedge, tearing through the simple encryption. His scalp array flared with a bright, toxic green light beneath his helmet, throwing off tiny, static sparks that hissed in the damp air.

Outside, in the physical world, Zeke's nose began to bleed, a warm, thick trickle of blood pooling inside his respirator mask. His vision swam with gray static, but he held the connection.

"What is that?" Proxy gasped, her holographic mask flickering violently as her transmitter began to beep with warning alerts. "My droids... their sync rates are dropping!"

"I'm inside their diagnostic loop, Proxy," Zeke rasped, his body shaking as he forced the hack. "Your droids are running on an unencrypted rolling code. One more step, and I'll loop their diagnostic cycle until their primary capacitors short-circuit and blow their heads off. We both lose our salvage. Is that what you want?"

Proxy stared at him, her green static mask freezing. She looked at the white droids, whose heads were now twitching, their bipedal joints locking up as Zeke's biological signal scrambled their targeting processors.

"You're insane," Proxy whispered, her voice losing its cold, professional detachment. "You're routing a diagnostic override directly through your own nervous system. You're cooking your own brain just to freeze my machines."

"I told you," Zeke said, his right eye bloodshot, his hand clutched tight around his father's silver locket. "I'm not leaving without those fibers."

A tense, suffocating silence fell over the crashed drone site. The yellow fog swirled around them, the bubbling of the acid pools the only sound in the void. Proxy's hand hovered over her transmitter, her fingers twitching. She was calculating the cost. She was a professional scavenger; she didn't do high-risk, zero-profit fights.

Slowly, her holographic mask shifted back to a neutral, emerald-green pattern.

"Stand down," she commanded.

The bipedal droids immediately relaxed, their red targeting lasers shutting off, their joints returning to a smooth, silent standby.

Zeke let out a long, shuddering gasp, pulling the coaxial cable from his neck. The sudden disconnection felt like a physical blow, throwing him to his knees in the mud. He clutched his chest, coughing violently as the neural fever raged in his skull. The blood from his nose tasted metallic and cold.

"You've got balls, Miller," Proxy said, stepping down from the wing, her active-weave jacket rippling in the wind. "Stupid, suicidal balls. But you're right. A dead drone is no use to either of us. We split the salvage. You take the high-purity copper fibers from the wing joints. I keep the primary memory core. Deal?"

Zeke looked up, his vision slowly clearing. "Deal."

But before Clara's brother could stand, a sharp, high-pitched whine cut through the static of the Dead Zone.

Deep within the shattered cockpit of the crashed reconnaissance drone, a bright, pulsing crimson light began to flare. It wasn't the dull, dying orange of a failing battery. It was a high-intensity, rhythmic strobe that cut through the yellow fog like a warning beacon.

*"Alert,"* a cold, automated corporate voice broadcasted from the drone's internal speakers, static-filled but clear. *"Unsanctioned memory core access detected. Initiating Protocol Zero-Nine. Automated thermal purge in three minutes. Evacuate the perimeter immediately."*

Proxy's holographic mask flashed a violent, jagged red. "No... the backup beacon! It was a trap!"

"The drone's self-destruct," Old Patch barked, his hydraulic claw snapping open. "We've got three minutes before this whole site turns into a lithium furnace!"