The message from Specs came three days after Nico had handed over the data core. Three days of Nico jumping at every notification ping, three days of bargaining with himself about what he'd do if the thing turned out to be worthless or, worse, traced back to something that would get him killed.
Three days of not sleeping, not eating right, using more Veil than he should just to keep the anxiety from crawling out of his skin.
VERIFICATION COMPLETE. COME ALONE. USUAL PLACE. -S
Nico stared at the message on his cracked tablet screen, reading it five times like the words might rearrange themselves into something less terrifying. Verification complete. That could mean anything. Could mean the core was legit, could mean Specs had found something that would make Nico wish he'd never cleaned that dead man's apartment.
"Yeah, okay," he muttered, and pocketed the tablet.
The "usual place" was a tech shop in Level 8's black market quarter, tucked between a protein bar vendor and a stall selling counterfeit station credentials. From the outside it looked like any other electronics repair shop—broken holoboards in the window, a flickering neon sign that read "SPECS: DATA RECOVERY & DISCRETION"—but everyone on Level 8 knew Specs could crack any encryption, forge any access code, and kept his mouth shut for the right price.
Nico had been here once before, six months ago, trying to unlock a salvaged tablet he'd found in a maintenance tunnel. Specs had done it in under an hour and charged him twenty credits. Fair rate, no questions, no judgment. That's why Kade had suggested him for the data core.
The shop's door chimed when Nico entered, a cheerful sound utterly at odds with his grinding anxiety. Inside, the shop was a disaster of tech components, cables, tools, and flickering screens. It smelled like ozone and old coffee. Behind the counter, Specs looked up from a gutted processor board.
"Nico Chen," Specs said. He was a thin man, maybe forty, with the pale skin of someone who never saw real sunlight—hell, nobody on Level 8 saw real sunlight—and the nervous energy of too much stimulant use. His fingers were long and nimble, constantly in motion even when he wasn't working. "Punctual. I like that."
"You said verification complete."
"I did say that, yeah." Specs set down his soldering iron and wiped his hands on a rag that might have once been white. "Before we continue, let's establish some parameters. You brought me a data core. I verified its contents. What I found..." He paused, his eyes flicking to the door behind Nico. "Are you alone?"
"You told me to come alone."
"People don't always listen." Specs stood, walked to the door, and engaged three separate locks. Physical ones. The kind that couldn't be hacked remotely. "Okay. Follow me."
He led Nico through the cluttered shop to a back room that was somehow even more packed with equipment. A workspace dominated by multiple screens, some showing scrolling code, others displaying what looked like security feeds. Specs gestured to a chair, waited for Nico to sit, then pulled up a screen.
"That data core," Specs said, "is a corporate-grade encrypted storage device. Not the kind of thing you find in a dead man's apartment on Level 8. The encryption was military-level, which took me two days to crack. The contents..." He tapped a key, and numbers filled the screen. Lots of numbers. "Are financial access codes."
Nico's mouth went dry. "How much?"
"The core contains credentials for seventeen different accounts across five banking institutions. Mostly offshore, some station-local. All dormant for at least six months, probably to avoid detection algorithms." Specs pulled up another screen, this one showing a sum. A sum with many, many zeros.
Nico couldn't breathe.
"Fifty million, two hundred and thirty-four thousand, six hundred and twelve credits," Specs said, his voice carefully neutral. "Give or take interest that's probably accumulated since these accounts went dormant."
"That's..." Nico's voice cracked. "That's not possible."
"It's very possible. It's right here." Specs turned to face him, and his expression was deadly serious. "Which brings us to several important questions. First: where the fuck did you get this? Second: do you have any idea whose money this is? Third: are you comprehending the magnitude of shit you're standing in right now?"
Nico tried to speak, found his throat wouldn't work, tried again. "I found it. Cleaning out a dead man's apartment. He died of heart failure, medical examiner confirmed it, nothing suspicious."
"What was his name?"
"Park. I don't know his first name. Just Park."
Specs typed rapidly, pulled up something on another screen. His face went a shade paler. "Park Jin-ho. Sixty-three years old. Died six days ago. Lived alone. No family." A pause. "Former mid-level accountant for Covenant Holdings, the station's largest construction contractor. Retired five years ago."
The words hung in the air like smoke.
"Okay," Nico said slowly. "So maybe he embezzled it. Maybe he was corrupt, yeah? And he died before he could spend it."
"Maybe." Specs didn't sound convinced. "Or maybe he was the accountant who discovered someone else's embezzlement and got paid to keep quiet. Or maybe he was the fall guy for something bigger. Point is, kid, fifty million credits doesn't just vanish without people noticing. Someone's looking for this money."
Nico's hands were shaking again, but this time it wasn't withdrawal. "Can they trace it? The core, I mean. Can they track it back to me?"
"Not through me. I air-gapped my system before I even touched this thing, and I wiped all connection logs." Specs ejected the data core from his reader, a small silver cylinder no bigger than Nico's thumb, and held it up. "This is what's called a quantum-locked core. The access codes are one-time-use only. Once you access an account, the code burns and the core generates a new one. Untraceable. Whoever made this knew what they were doing."
"So I could use it."
"You could theoretically use it, yes." Specs set the core on the desk between them. "But let me be extraordinarily clear: the moment you access these accounts, you start a clock. Financial institutions have algorithms designed to flag dormant account access. You'll have maybe forty-eight hours before security AIs start asking questions. And if this money is connected to Covenant Holdings..." He whistled low. "They have serious resources, Nico. Private security, legal teams, connections in Station Security Services. They could find you."
"But they'd have to prove I stole it."
"You think they care about proof?" Specs laughed, but there was no humor in it. "Kid, at your tier level, they don't need proof. They need suspicion. They could have you disappeared into an off-books detention cell for six months while they 'investigate,' and nobody would give a shit."
Nico stared at the data core. Fifty million credits. More money than he'd see in ten lifetimes of dealing Veil. Enough to buy his way to Level 3, maybe higher. Enough to never worry about withdrawal or food or sleeping in a goddamn coffin ever again.
Enough to disappear and start over somewhere else on the station, somewhere clean and safe and away from the smell of failure.
"What's your fee?" Nico asked.
"For verification? Five thousand credits."
Nico's heart sank. "I don't have five thousand credits."
"I know. Which is why we're going to negotiate." Specs leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers. "You pay me one thousand now, which I know you can scrape together. And if—when—you access those accounts, you transfer another nine thousand. Total of ten thousand for my work, my silence, and my professional advice on how not to get yourself killed."
"What advice?"
"Don't access all the accounts at once. Start with the smallest one, transfer it to a clean intermediary account, then move it again through at least three more accounts before it touches anything connected to your real identity. And for fuck's sake, don't suddenly start spending big. You show up on Level 3 trying to buy an apartment, they'll investigate your credit history and find nothing but drug charges and unpaid fines. That's suspicious. That gets you caught."
Nico nodded slowly, his mind racing. "Okay. Yeah. Okay."
"Also, and I cannot stress this enough: tell no one. Not your friends, not your dealer, not a social worker who wants to save you, nobody. The more people who know, the faster this comes back to bite you."
"Right."
Specs picked up the data core and held it out. "Your choice, kid. Take this and roll the dice, or walk away and forget you ever found it. I won't judge either way. I've seen people make both choices, and I've seen both work out and both go catastrophically wrong."
Nico took the core. It was warm from Specs's hand, surprisingly heavy for something so small. Fifty million credits. His ticket out. His one chance at a life that wasn't this.
"I'll get you the thousand credits by tomorrow," Nico said.
"I know you will." Specs stood, unlocked the door, and gestured for Nico to leave. "And Nico? Good luck. You're going to need it."
Nico walked for an hour after leaving Specs's shop, his mind a white-noise static of disbelief and possibility. He didn't go back to his pod. He didn't go to his usual corners. He just walked through Level 8's corridors, past the market stalls and communal kitchens, past the crowds and the noise, not really seeing any of it.
Fifty million credits.
He'd spent his entire adult life believing he'd die on Level 8, either from an overdose or a street fight or just the slow grinding entropy of poverty. He'd made peace with that. And now...
He found himself in front of Kade's place without consciously deciding to go there. Kade lived in a slightly better part of Level 8—an actual apartment, not a pod, though "apartment" was generous for a space barely larger than Nico's current pod but with a door that locked. Nico knocked, waited, knocked again.
"Yeah, yeah, I'm coming," Kade's voice, rough from sleep or drugs or both. The door opened. Kade Rivera stood there in sweatpants and a stained shirt, looking exactly like what he was: a middle-aged dealer and addict who'd long since stopped pretending otherwise. His eyes were bloodshot, his gray-shot hair sticking up at odd angles. "Nico. Little early for a pickup, kid."
"I need to talk."
Kade's expression sharpened. "You okay?"
"Define okay."
"Fair point. Come in."
The apartment was a mess—clothes on the floor, empty food containers stacked in corners, the faint smell of Veil and unwashed human. But it was private, which was more than most people on Level 8 could say. Kade gestured to a chair that had seen better decades, then dropped onto his mattress.
"So," Kade said, pulling out a vial of Veil and loading it into his wrist port without ceremony. "What's got you looking like you've seen a ghost?"
Nico sat, the data core practically burning in his pocket. He'd just been told not to tell anyone. Specs had been explicit. But this was Kade. Kade, who'd given him his first supply to sell when he was desperate. Kade, who didn't ask questions when Nico showed up at odd hours. Kade, who was maybe the closest thing to family Nico had left.
"The data core I found," Nico said slowly. "Specs verified it."
"And?"
"And it's worth fifty million credits."
Kade froze, the vial halfway to his port, and just stared at Nico. For a long moment, the only sound was the distant hum of ventilation systems and someone's music bleeding through the walls.
Then Kade started laughing.
It wasn't a happy laugh. It was the kind of laugh you made when the universe revealed a joke so absurd you could either laugh or scream. He laughed until he was gasping, until tears ran down his weathered face, until he had to lean forward and put his head between his knees.
"Fifty million," Kade finally managed. "Fifty fucking million credits."
"Yeah."
"You, Nico Chen, professional fuck-up and small-time dealer, stumbled onto fifty million credits."
"Apparently."
"Christ." Kade finished loading his vial, took his hit, and sat back. "Okay. Okay, let's think about this. This is Covenant Holdings money, yeah? Has to be. Old accountant, that much cash hidden away, it's corporate embezzlement for sure."
"That's what I figured."
"Which means it's also hot as hell, and probably half the security goons on this station are looking for it."
"Specs said I'd have about forty-eight hours once I access it before alarms start going off."
"Specs is smart." Kade whistled tunelessly, a nervous habit Nico had learned meant he was thinking hard. "So what's your play?"
"I don't know yet."
"Bullshit. You came here, which means you've been thinking about it for three days straight. What's your play?"
Nico pulled the data core from his pocket and turned it over in his hands. "I'm going to use it."
"Figured that much. Use it how?"
"Get off Level 8. Buy my way to Level 5, maybe Level 4. Get clean, get a real job, get a real life." The words came out in a rush, like he'd been holding them in too long. "I'm twenty-eight years old, Kade. I've been using for nine years. I've got maybe another five before I'm dead or so burnt out I can't function at all. This is my shot. Maybe my only shot."
Kade looked at him for a long time, his expression unreadable. "You think money's going to fix you?"
"I think having money means I can afford the kind of treatment that actually works. I think it means I won't wake up every morning wondering if I'll eat that day. I think..." Nico's voice cracked. "I think it means I get a chance."
"Kid." Kade's voice was softer now. "I was you, once. I had money, a career, prospects. And I still ended up here, because the problem wasn't the money. It was this." He tapped his temple. "And this." He tapped his chest over his heart.
"I know."
"Do you?"
"Yeah." Nico met his eyes. "But I also know that being poor doesn't fix anything either. At least rich and fucked up, I'll be warm and fed while I figure my shit out."
Kade laughed again, shorter this time. "Can't argue with that logic." He stood, walked to his tiny kitchenette, and came back with two bottles of water that probably cost him a day's earnings. He tossed one to Nico. "Okay. You want to do this, we do this smart. Specs gave you the basics, yeah? Clean accounts, multiple transfers, don't spend conspicuously?"
"Yeah."
"Good. You'll also need new identification, a cover story for where you got the money if anyone asks, and a place to lie low for a few weeks after the first transfer goes through."
"How do you know all this?"
"Kid, I was a military logistics officer before I was a junkie. I moved money for black ops programs that officially didn't exist. This is just a smaller-scale version of that." Kade took a long drink of water. "I can help you. For a cut."
There it was. Nico had been waiting for it. Nothing was free, not even friendship. "How much?"
"Half a million. That's point-one-percent of your total. Fair rate for consultation, risk management, and keeping you from getting caught or killed."
Half a million credits. More money than Kade had probably seen in the last decade. Nico could afford it. Nico could afford a hundred cuts like that and still be set for life.
"Deal," Nico said.
They shook on it, hands calloused from years of street life, the data core sitting on the table between them like a ticking bomb.
"Okay," Kade said, and for the first time since Nico had met him, he sounded almost energized. "Let's plan a heist. Or an un-heist, technically, since the money's already stolen."
"Let's get rich, is what you're saying."
"Let's get rich and not die in the process, yeah."
Nico felt something unfamiliar stirring in his chest. Something he hadn't felt in years. It took him a moment to recognize it.
Hope.
Dangerous, fragile, probably foolish hope.
"Fifty million credits," he said softly.
"Fifty million credits," Kade agreed. "Enough to change everything."
Or destroy them both.
But for now, sitting in Kade's shitty apartment on Level 8, with a data core worth more than most people on this level would see in ten lifetimes, Nico chose to believe in the possibility.
Just for a little while.
Just to see what it felt like.