(Excerpt) Afterlife Ascendant

Hey reader, thanks for stopping by. The following is an excerpt of the first two chapters from my sci-fi cyberpunk novel, Afterlife Ascendant, available June 17, 2025.

If you enjoy the excerpt, please consider purchasing a copy! Your support helps independent authors such as myself continue writing.

-- James J. Wang, author.

Prologue: Weakness

Runner /ˈrə-nər/

A specialist in manipulating virtual server environments through advanced information technology techniques.

… frequently utilized for intelligence gathering, theft, kidnapping, and assassinations. The penalty for engaging in unauthorized running activities in Consortium territory is indefinite shutdown.

—Query: “runner”

General Archive

“Beg.”

A hunting knife appeared in her assailant’s slim fingers. His eyes were wild, glinting with pharmas and fervor, and his tongue flicked out, as if tasting her breath in the air between them. Confident and comfortable with a blade in his hand and a terrified woman in his bedchambers, he was bolstered by a pair of hidden bodyguards to enforce his will.

Exactly as Vera Fournier had planned.

Her quarry’s bedroom was like the rest of his father’s estate: gold inlaid marble, fine rugs, and dark red walls. All hand-gilt, hand-woven, hand-painted from raw, virtual materials. The father, Arseny Kolanko, CEO of Arcadia Entertainment, had this virtual environment built with his company’s latest physics, biochemics, and graphics engines. And the details, down to the subsurface scattering of light on her pale skin and the scent of jasmines that lay on her neck, were perfect.

“That’s not funny, Dmytro,” Vera said, pushing a quaver into her affected West Coast Corporate accent. She backed up as if afraid, up against the wall where a bodyguard hid on the other side. “I thought we were gonna party.”

“Oh, it’s a party. I promise, this is going to be fun.”

He stalked forward, electric pink shirt dancing over lean muscles, blade held low and pointed up. She let her hands tremble as she lifted them up, as if in surrender.

“Please,” she whispered.

“Ooh,” he cooed, leaning in to smell her false blonde hair and stroke the high, false cheekbones of her anglicized face. His cologne—sandalwood and cloves—assaulted her nostrils, and the tip of his knife threatened to split her shimmering blue gown and the hard muscles of her stomach. “Say that again.”

Playboy and charmer, rapist and sadist, Dmytro Kolanko, with his finely coiffed brown hair and bold, Eastern-European jaw, fit the mold of any number of wealthy sons and daughters of the Corporate elite. Appearance overlaid into digital perfection and partied and sexed out past oblivion, he had grown bored with a paradise funded with his father’s money. And as the centuries in Afterlife ground on, his appetites had grown twisted and violent, becoming increasingly difficult to sate.

But Vera’s masters cared nothing for his vices. His cravings had merely provided a vulnerability to extract his father’s secrets. And to exact punishment for his father’s sins.

She kept her eyes, false in their color and their trembling, fixed on the deep, sunken pits of Dmytro’s own, and pulled up her messaging terminal. The window floated in her personal interface, translucent above his greedy lips. She pinged her Controller. Subvocalized words flowed across the screen, spoken without moving a muscle.

Vera: Are you ready?

Ryosuke: Of course. Be brilliant, Fournier.

Vera: Always.

She mounted a fresh access key, faking her way into the server’s administrative privileges, and pushed overrides. Her runner’s tools tricked the server into modifying her body with superhuman strength and speed, and then jacking her cognitive frame rate up to triple time. The world around her spun down to a crawl; Dmytro’s insistent growls fell three octaves into a rumbling groan, and her racing pulse slowed to a lo-fi beat.

Finally, her pièce de résistance, she pushed a dose of Zeal. The nano-injectors embedded in her arms pulled the Nguyen Family’s drugs straight from her local storage and shot them deep into her veins. Digital chemicals met the quantum waves of her consciousness, and the world glowed through the dilated eyes of a predator. Warmth glazed across her skin, the fresh Zeal mixing with the lingering traces of Bliss and booze. Timed and balanced for perfection.

Ryosuke: Two minutes on my mark.

Her Controller sent a spike crashing through the system, blocking the Non-Sentient AI security monitors from witnessing the coming events. Two minutes until the NSAI monitors got wise to the interference and sent everything they had to shut her down. Two minutes to gather evidence and leave a message. All the time in the world.

The sonic knife coalesced from lines of light and digital mist to rest in her waiting hand. She stabbed.

The blade whined to life, up into a frequency past hearing. It whispered through the air, tracing the arc of her arm past Dmytro’s shoulder, past the dress he had ripped all the way up her hip, and straight into the wall behind her. Piercing through paint and drywall and a plasteel codpiece, the vibrating blade sliced the first hidden guard’s femoral artery. She ripped the blade out sideways, carving a gash in the wall and slashing his leg open. A rumbling shout was followed by a thump, signaling the loss of consciousness.

The knife came back up, hilt first, into Dmytro’s gut, and the wind whipped out of him in a slow breeze. Her other hand came down for a casual shove, his leg already trapped in hers, and he fell back in a languid fall through honey. She dropped with him, staring into eyes that bulged with pain and disbelief. His own knife fell in an extended clang, followed by the crack of his head meeting tile.

Explosions ripped through the room—gunfire from the second guard behind the wall on the other side of the blue silk ocean of Dmytro’s bed. Smoldering down feathers from hand-slaughtered NSAI geese fell around them like ashen snowflakes through the smoke.

Vera rolled off the dazed man and leapt with over-powered legs, flying four meters in an arc across the high-vaulted chamber. The second guard’s hidden door slammed open with a power armored kick, bullet-ridden wood shattering from the force of the blow.

The guard, clad in the red and gold of Arcadia Entertainment, rushed into the room on servo-powered legs. His gleaming helmet craned back as he peered up at Vera, goggled eyes registering shock at the woman soaring through the air in a flying kick. He raised his snub-nosed carbine, and explosive rounds ripped towards the ceiling, leaving smoke trails in the air and burning holes in the paint. The rounds zipped towards her, seeking bare, unarmored skin.

Too late. She landed her kick, and the steel-reinforced stiletto heel cracked through the lens of his goggles. The point burst through an eyeball, crunching thin bone behind the socket. The guard went down, shrieking. She landed on his breastplate and helmet, heel still jammed a centimeter into his brain, and she yanked free with a twitch of overclocked muscles. His hands reached up to cradle a devastated face, and his voice approached the apex of a soprano’s aria. Her blade swept down, silencing the screams. An armored gauntlet spasmed, connecting with her wrist, and something popped in a wet flash of pain.

Five seconds, and Dmytro was alone.

Vera took a breath and spun back down to real time, settling herself as her cognitive body’s natural adrenaline mixed with synthetic. Her wrist throbbed, but she wouldn’t risk the fine balance of pharmaceuticals flowing through her with the disruption of a regenerative. Her fighting knife evaporated into her storage, and she summoned another blade. A simple knife with waves of folded steel filled her hand, intricate patterns of green ivy tracing its grip. The mark of her master.

Ryosuke: Beautifully done, mon artiste. Now make me proud, Fournier. Become the Shogun’s Blade.

Vice President Ryosuke Matsumoto, Head of Intelligence of the Shadow Division, had come as her Controller. He had taken this lowly position, not out of the necessities of the mission, but to protect his investment in her and to ensure a positive assessment of her performance to the Kagecho, Master of the Shadow, and to the Shogun himself.

For today, Vera wielded Kazuo Saito’s blade, as Kazuo Saito, head of the Saito family, ruler of the Shogunate, wielded Vera as his. Today, Vera Fournier would ascend.

Vera: Hai.

She clenched the hilt in a throbbing fist and strode towards her prey. Blonde locks and sharp cheekbones gave way to black hair and soft, half-Japanese features, but large blue eyes betrayed the French half of her adopted ethnicities. Let him see your face, the Kagecho had said when he sent her on this mission. Let him know who came for him. Confusion and panic melted off Dmytro’s face, shifting into recognition, and then horror. The playboy had countless enemies who might have come for him, but no Corporate operative would dare present even a half-Japanese face. She crouched and placed the knife centimeters from his face. He froze.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“You know who sent me,” she said. Gone was the false Corporate accent, replaced with a hint of French.

“Yes.”

“Say it.”

“The Shogunate,” he breathed. “But why? Because of my father? I had nothing to do with it.”

“Your father talks to you. You know his secrets. Why did he betray the Shogun?”

“It was just business.”

She pressed the tip of her knife against his throat. “It was personal. As is this.”

He swallowed, and a line of red flowed down the steel of her blade.

Ryosuke: Quit playing with him.

Vera: Oh, but I am having so much fun.

Ryosuke: You don’t have time to waste. Cut him open, make him talk.

Vera: He is about to break.

She lowered the blade to caress a prized possession, tracing the point against the turgid outline in his tight, midnight blue slacks.

“Walker!” he yelped. “It was Walker. She made an offer. Crazy terms, if my father played along.”

Viola Walker, CEO of Quantum Data Technologies and Chairman of the Governing Board of the Consortium. Empress of the Corporates, by any other name. The Shogun’s most dangerous competitor.

“Played along with what?”

“With…” Eyes flicked down to the knife still idly teasing him. “With her plan. To humiliate the Shogun.”

He continued talking, spilling details. A physical terminal at a wooden desk contained more secrets, and she pulled the data with his biometrics, shakily given by a face held at knifepoint. And she found what she had sought: hard evidence that Walker had orchestrated the conspiracy. Over a hundred billion credits lost in the deal with Arcadia Entertainment. Potentially trillions for the Shogunate’s affiliated Families. Evidence to rally the Families against the Corporates. The Shogun’s Blade would be stained crimson with the war to come.

Finally, his words drying to a trickle, the knot in her shoulders relaxed. Dmytro knew well the suffering a blade could cause in the right hands. He had left a trail of broken women in his wake, long enough to circumnavigate the triple rings of Hub. She had counted on this fear to break him. Killing was next to nothing in Afterlife, especially for the elite, for whom life was cheap and death mere inconvenience. But torture was something else. Her years in the Red District, taking the worst jobs for the extra pay, had left scars that centuries had yet to heal.

Junpei had warned her that she didn’t have the stomach to be the Blade. And perhaps her ex-lover was right. Someday, she would need to purge this weakness. But not today. Today, she was triumphant.

“So… what now?” Dmytro asked, eying her with wariness and lust. “I was a good boy, gave you what you wanted.”

She had counted on his fear, but she hadn’t expected this reversal of sexual depravities. Rolling her eyes, she frame jacked up to the server’s maximum to confer with her Controller, and the world slowed to a standstill.

Vera: It’s done.

Ryosuke: Almost. You still need to leave a message.

Vera: I killed his guards. Forced him to betray his father’s confidence. This is a clear message.

Ryosuke: This goes beyond Kolanko and Walker. The entire Consortium needs to understand what it means to betray the Shogunate. You need to leave a stronger message.

The tension returned, and the knife began a slow vibration in her fist. Blood pushed through the fine capillaries of her face, promising a burning flush, and needles crept up her back.

Vera: We don’t have time. Fifteen seconds.

Ryosuke: I lied. I wanted to measure your performance under a time constraint. I’ve isolated his chamber, and the monitors are distracted. You have all the time in the world.

No. Not this.

Vera: What is your command? Just say it.

Ryosuke: Leave him scarred and broken. A weeping mess for his father to find and discard.

Scarred and broken. All too possible for humans in Afterlife, even as quantum waveforms bouncing inside of consciousness computers. The mind made it real. The false environment, the pounding heart, the blood and pain, all made manifest by uploaded consciousness. Faint scars still traced her back and climbed through her insides, memories indelibly etched from cognitive mind to cognitive body.

Vera: This isn’t what we talked about. I… I’m not a torturer.

Ryosuke: You are what I say you are. You will be what the Shogun needs you to be. Are you his Blade? Or are you a coward? Do your duty and reap your reward.

Her reward. Centuries in the making, through blood and tears shed across physical and digital existence, to earn her Family’s name as the Shogun’s Blade. To become a Saito. And never again be beholden to those who would betray her for their own power.

But her mind fixated on the unspoken threat. Hesitation, let alone resistance, to complete her orders was treason. Ryosuke’s words carried the weight of the Shogun’s commands. And he had been her advocate and executive sponsor for decades. As a runner for the Shadow, Vera and her ilk were pawns to be played and discarded by the Shogunate’s aristocracy. But the wise learned to cross the board. This was the only chance she would ever have.

She could do this. She could ignore her twisting stomach, the sweat dripping down her back, the memories of rough hands on her throat and knives probing tender places. And Dmytro had done far worse to others far less deserving. Vera tightened her grip, feeling her master’s mark digging into her flesh. A fresh wave of pain raced along her wrist, bringing nausea and a surge of dizziness, and the world blackened at the edges.

Vera: Hai.

Ryosuke: Send a message. Make me smile.

Reaching for a cache of pharmaceuticals she had sworn she would never need, she pushed Disconnect. The dissociative magic flooded her, and reality dimmed. The recessed ceiling lights blazed like distant stars, and her vision narrowed to the wrong end of a scope. A thousand kilometers away, Dmytro’s eyes vanished into black pinpricks, but the blood on his neck glowed like a beacon in the darkness.

Her prey ran and was thrown to the ground. Her leg kicked and his body launched into the bed. Neon blood sprayed like fireworks over the silk ocean, glittering in the brilliant light. Words floated past, unheard. The distant shouts of a man alone at sea. She dove into the ocean to drown with him.

She cut.

He screamed.

A message.

The tip of the knife slid into his open mouth. The big mouth that had boasted and laughed and mocked the Shogun. Open wide. Flesh parted before the steady pressure. Smile. Red lines spread across the cheek. Warmth streamed down her fingers, down her arm, soaking her skin.

His mouth stretched and split, eyes rolling until the whites turned red. A tongue tentacled wildly in the gaps of his face, as if searching for an end. Teeth, glistening, peeked out beneath rags of skin like lips curled back for a grin. His neck quivered and tendons strained like sheets snapping, and his eyes, wide and terrified, met hers, and her hand froze over the ruins of his face.

His horror saturated her, and she was back in a cheap, rent-by-the-minute capsule hotel. Cuts and bruises pressed against the vinyl walls, eyes frantically counting stitches in the corners in a desperate attempt to distract herself from what the john had paid good money for. The horror filled her until it caught in her throat, lungs clamped with iron weights that pulled her into the deep.

I can’t do this.

The Shogun’s blade slipped from numb, trembling fingers, swimming down silk to clang against the hard tile. Her body pushed away from the howling figure before her. The form shrank in the narrow aperture of her sight until she felt the cold plane of the wall pressing into the joints of her spine.

Ryosuke: What are you doing? Finish the job.

Dmytro screamed, begging her to stop. He was lost in the blood and ravaged flesh, unaware of her panicked retreat.

“Please,” she whispered, begging Ryosuke to let her stop. She scrambled against the wall behind her, hands searching blindly.

Ryosuke: Pick up the knife, Fournier.

“I can’t.” Her hands found the door handle. The polished metal slipped beneath blood-slicked fingers. Locked.

Ryosuke: Dammit, Vera. Don’t fuck this up. I’m counting on you. I bet everything on you.

The lock shattered like a gunshot under the full strength of her arms and overrides.

Ryosuke: This failure will ripple out, ruin the Shogun’s plans. Ruin me.

She ran, ignoring the surprised grunts of suited guards standing outside Dymtro’s door.

Ryosuke: You’ve killed us. Killed yourself.

Warning notifications blared with the NSAI security monitors’ renewed pursuit, and the first gunshots rang out from behind her.

Ryosuke: Fine, then. Run. Run and pray for the mercy of a swift death.

She ran, and his words chased her.

Chapter 1: Thief

Afterlife /ˈaf-tər-ˌlīf/

The colloquial term for the virtual server environments of the Consortium, primarily located within the Hub space station and its associated offsite satellites. The term gained widespread usage following the completion of human consciousness uploads and the subsequent extinction of biological humankind.

—Query: “afterlife”

General Archive

“It’s basic economics. Everything in Afterlife takes processing, and processing costs money. Food, pets, even the rain. You don’t wanna get a job and pay for the pharmas or the fucktoys, then you can shut down or go back to the feed trenches and suck my content.”

—BlueBatterBoy, 2.3M followers

Timestamp: 2355-08-03T00:39:35

Twenty Years Later

The thief had thought to lose her in the markets. She let him think he had.

Vera Fournier slipped through the crowd of the Mong Kok night market, a ghost in a knee-length hoodie splashed with fluorescent pink over dark gray static. The throng of buyers and sellers formed an indifferent, incandescent swell, but she drifted through the gaps between flashing garments and sweating flesh.

A block ahead, Michael Belfi stumbled through the mass of bodies, barely visible to her unaugmented eyes past the vinyl and aluminum awnings of the stalls. He careened around a pyramid of waterfall fish tanks and shoved between a group of tourists staring at the holo displays that lit up the low rise tenements above. Faded paint and rusted steel glowed in the neon lights, the ancient decay of old Earth rendered in the environmental servers of New Kowloon with pristine fidelity.

Belfi turned the corner onto Sai Yeung Choi Street, heading north. Towards a transline exit, and then on to any other server across Hub. Vera only had minutes to stop him before he was gone. Not an easy feat for a runner without access keys. All six keys in her sleeve were dead or down to a dim red, leaving her unable to steal admin privileges. Speed and strength, frame jacking, active trackers, and transportation overrides, all out of reach. Almost as blind as Belfi, straining his thick neck in futile attempts to check for a tail.

She paused, leaning against moss-covered bricks, and took an exhausted, shuddering breath. She needed the credits from this job. Needed to refresh her tokens, upgrade her keys, and make good on a payment before the Nguyens made good on their threats. Twenty years since being cast out of the Shogunate. Twenty years of bad breaks and crawling through the drains, and she was choking on the brack.

But that turn north meant Belfi’s destination was Mong Kok Station. Forcing a confrontation was easy; controlling it required planning. And those cramped tunnels would do just fine.

He had distance on her, but he was wading along the slow-moving streets, and New Kowloon was her territory. The back alley paths were twisted into knots and clogged by surly line cooks smoking unfiltered cigarettes, but they enabled shortcuts that tourists like Belfi couldn’t parse. Her path was marked by Chinese characters, the end is coming (again)!, in faded, dripping spray paint. 

Adrenaline displaced exhaustion, and rusted mesh doors whipped past as she sprinted through the alley. Condensation dripped off the cooling units, down thick cables tracing the walls like ivy and snaking down tree-trunk PVC pipes. Her boots pounded through puddles of greasy rain and hydrocarbons, splashing the stink of Kowloon onto her legs and the ragged edge of her hoodie.

She burst into the back alley exit of Lady Jasmine’s Pleasure House, rushing past moaning doors and into the antechamber, and absorbed the curses of the local madame. She stomped past the white painted face, trailing stale sweat and musty sex from the back rooms with her. With a hard, blue-eyed glare, Vera faced the madame directly and let her hoodie split to reveal a flash of black and violet polygraphene bodysuit, cutting off the stream of Tagalog invective. The madame’s cherry-red mouth snapped shut with a click of perfect teeth. An off-district nobody running an unlicensed brothel knew to stay out of the way of a runner on the hunt, especially one who wore the face of the Shogunate.

Vera still maintained her half-Japanese face, despite her banishment from the Shadow Runners and the Saito Family. The Shogunate had not demanded this concession, despite everything else they had taken from her. She clung to this face as a drowning sailor might cling to driftwood. This face that still served as a warning. A fragment of the power she once wielded, and a permanent reminder of the shame she still carried.

She put on more speed, running from memory, running until her heart roared and lungs burned. She burst out of the madame’s dank brown hole and into the muggy night. Dodging between a pair of food stalls, breath held against the cloying fragrance of egg waffles underlined by grilled octopus, she kept that frantic pace, shoving through the flood for the last dozen meters. With Belfi now a block behind and still blind to her movements, she dodged into the gaping maw of Mong Kok Station and sought a perch from which to pounce.

The tourist crowd headed down the steps while the second shift commuters headed back from their Corporate jobs and to the cheaper servers hosting their apartments in the high-rises of Kowloon. She slipped past tropical shirts and flip-flops, brushed against suit skirts and loosened neckties, making her way towards an abandoned supply closet. 

The beige steel door was unlocked, and she slid into the empty room. The two-by-two square meter box of white drywall and gray concrete was a remnant of the automated lidar drones that had scanned through the cities of old Earth. An echo of the physical world left behind. She tossed the hoodie and activated her bodysuit, sending anti-kinetic energy thrumming against her skin. Her head tilted to peer through the crack in the door, hair spread out like a black silk fan.

In moments, Belfi sauntered down the stairs in a tan suit stretched over his bulky frame. Vera had gathered images of Belfi all the way back to his original upload, and besides the smirk and a slant of the brows, gone was the skinny, squirrelly waif he had been as a biological. He had sculpted his body to bulging with appearance overlays made permanent, but he walked with the clumsy swagger of a man who had never learned to use it. His head was tilted back as he bumped along the crowd, and he stared down his nose at the salaryworkers and laborers who kept Afterlife running. She took a steadying breath, forcing her limbs to move against the exhausted inertia of three days of stim-driven insomnia, and cut a line through the whirlpool of commuters to intercept his course. She forced a smile on her face, wide enough to ache, and crept up to whisper in his ear.

“Hello, Michel.” She laid the French accent thick on her words, softening his name in a way she knew he despised.

His shoulders clenched, and he spun with an all-too-obvious right hook. Leaning back to let him swing past, she grabbed his arm and shoved. Momentum did the rest. He landed hard on his side, a bag of over-inflated and under-trained muscles tumbling to the floor. The crowd left a wide gap for the pair, all eyes averted and feet hastening away.

She threw a privacy bubble around them, and the sounds of footsteps and announcements snapped off. The bubble pressed against the wall, leaving a shimmering blue bulge out into the flow of commuters. A few artifacts crossed the line and pierced the silence: the flap of a jacket, the step of a shoe. But the crowd moved around the bubble. Privacy in a public place meant conflict. Violence.

“Sorry, Fournier,” Belfi said, coming to his feet. “You just startled me. Didn’t mean nothing.”

“Of course, my pet,” she said, letting her French accent recede back to its natural timbre. “No offense taken. Now give me the fucking money.”

“What are you talking about? I paid you. Not my fault if you lost the chip or something.”

“I do not know what kind of fools you work with, but trying to palm off an empty cryptoshell to a runner is a whole new level of insulting.”

False confusion faded, and that sneer came crawling back. “And what’s a runner gonna do without her keys? I know you’re all burnt out. Wasted all your voodoo getting me the identikey, thank you very much. Maybe count yourself lucky I don’t call in a favor with the Genoveses and have them deal with a washed up, half-Jap runner who doesn’t know when to quit.”

Twenty years of swallowing shit backed up her throat, choking her, and something akin to a growl whined out of her. Belfi started to turn away, but he caught the feral gleam in her eyes and squared up to face her directly. Just in time for the punch to connect with his bulging Neanderthal jaw. He crashed back to the ground with a satisfying thwack of his ass clapping concrete.

Vera took a deep breath, flexing aching knuckles. She brushed aside the orange warning notifications of the security monitors paying scrutiny for the violence. A bit of rough play was expected in New Kowloon, but a deadly, unprovoked assault could land a lockdown. She was pushing the limits here, without her keys and anti-surveillance measures. Not that Belfi would know that.

“Keys don’t make the runner. And washed up half-Jap runner or not, I still have more pull with the Italians than you or your brother. Give me the fifty thousand now, or I show you exactly what kind of runner gets cast out of the Shadow for overzealous service.”

Rumors had washed through Afterlife’s underground of her fateful night with Dmytro, most of which painted her out to be a monster of the worst kind. A useful reputation for intimidating idiots, even if the story still stuck in her throat like an infected needle. The lie served everyone, including the Shogun himself, which was the only reason she hadn’t been permanently shut down or excommunicated from the Shogunate. Kept alive to live in shame until she finally gave up and ended it all.

But not today. Not when fifty thousand credits were on the line for a job completed for yet another meatbag amateur. A last gasp, drowning in the sewage of Afterlife.

Belfi sagged against the tiles, working his jaw. “Look, I don’t have it. I got rolled by the Vicentis three days ago. I owe them big, and they took everything. You know their reputation. You got any idea what they would’ve done to me if I hadn’t paid them off?”

The roar in her ears was an old companion, one that used to come with blackouts and weeks in a system-managed shut down. He could be lying, but she knew he wasn’t. The Belfi brothers were in deep with the Vincentis and half a dozen Genovese-affiliated Families. Just as she was in deep with the Shogunate’s Nguyens. All of them floundering in the depths, clambering over each other for the promise of another breath of air.

“I have my own reputation to consider,” she said, words muffled by the rushing of blood. “Give me back the identikey and whatever credits you have, or I kill you now and send word to the Giordanos and Lombardis that you’re holding out on them.” By the time he recovered from a hard reset in a Shogunate regenerative facility, the Cosa Nostra Families would be waiting to tear him apart. The truth wouldn’t matter, not when reputations were on the line.

The only hint she had before the steel bar crushed into her right side was a slight hardening in Belfi’s eyes. Her suit absorbed the worst of the attack, and so ribs cracked instead of piercing straight through her lungs. The shock left Vera gasping for air on the ground, clutching her side. Nausea and lightning shot through her as she writhed on the cold tiles. Nico Belfi, Michael’s older and slightly smarter, but definitely stronger brother, stood above her with a length of pipe in a meaty fist. Blinking through tears, she was dimly aware of the forms of commuters evaporating around them.

“What the fuck, Michael?” Nico asked. “You let this little bitch get the jump on you?”

The irony of that was not lost on Vera, and she spared a few savage breaths to berate herself for not covering her corners properly. She had opened herself to severe retaliation with her punch. The younger Belfi hadn’t been entirely wrong about a runner being worthless without her keys. Without access to the admin overrides that made her a near god in this virtual reality, she was merely human. Highly skilled, well trained, resourceful. But human. Whatever that meant as a box of quantum waves floating in the digital Afterlife.

“Fuck off,” Michael said, voice straining as his brother pulled him up. “Fournier’s a freak. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

In the space of a heartbeat, Vera considered staying down. Twenty years of chasing what she had lost, chasing her own tail, had led her to this moment. Curled up on the floor, battered, bruised, broken. So much easier to stay down and accept defeat. To embrace her failure and end this life, one way or another. As everyone had expected.

Fuck everyone else. Get up.

Her limbs rejected her demands, and she floundered on the concrete tiles. With her regenerative supply depleted, she was down to other pharmaceutical solutions. She pushed her last dose of Determination, and conviction flooded her like steel reinforced grit. Chemical reinforcement to push through the pain. She forced aching bones and screaming muscles to move and rolled to her feet, launching herself at Nico’s back. Her summoned knife sank into his neck, and he went down with only a sputter of red spray in his brother's face.

Self-defense, through and through. The security monitors didn’t so much as blink.

Belfi collapsed for a third time under the weight of Nico’s body and Vera’s tall, densely muscled form. His head smacked the ground, eyes glazing. The knife slipped out of one neck and pressed threateningly into another. Belfi coughed, spraying his brother’s blood on her face, centimeters from his own.

“Now,” she said through gritted teeth, “about my offer?”

Thanks for reading! Afterlife Ascendant is available in digital and print.