Chapter 83 Exotic Product

White’s voice cracked under his own breathless panic. “I’m just a salesman, please…”

The words rolled off him like dirty coins, desperate to buy pity.

Onyx’s grin was almost audible. “Make him fuck a dog!”

Silver blanched, eyes wide. “That’s disgusting…”

Onyx’s laugh went high and bright. “Okay, okay… Make him eat his dick!”

Silver’s cheeks burned red. “Stop it, Onyx. It’s embarrassing.”

I tuned them out the way I always did, half ignoring and half needing them. The barrier shimmered like sunlight on oil, unbroken. I pressed my palm flat against it, fingers tingling from the static hum. Then I tried to do what had always been instinct: phase through.

It was like slamming into glass.

My powers, the thing that made me a ghost in the world’s skin, met nothing but refusal. My atoms tried to slide past its atoms, and the barrier simply said no.

White’s panic broke into something uglier, laughter. It started as a tremor, then a bark, then full-blown manic noise that echoed off the burned-out cars.

“Ha ha ha ha ha…” He doubled over, clutching his stomach, eyes wild behind the translucent dome. “I am alive… I will live! That’s a null barrier! You can’t phase through that! No power would be able to break it, unless you have a nuke!”

Onyx sighed dramatically. “Oh shucks… I knew it. You should have stolen that pocket nuke from the last stronghold you raided…”

Silver’s gaze flicked across the dead and dying around us, her voice tightening. “There were too many of them the last time, remember? Nick might end up showing more of his powers and attract attention when he didn’t want to.”

Onyx twirled a lock of her hair. “Easy. Then he just won’t leave any survivor then!”

Silver glared at her. “It’s already tough for Nick to track this guy’s gang, and he’s barely ensuring there were no witnesses left, ya know?”

Onyx’s eyes sparkled with mischief. “Don’t be like that! You have to put more trust in our boy.”

Their voices were inside me like a heartbeat. I kept mine calm, steady. “Crow had a business dealing with your gang a few months back to take care of my friend,” I said, eyes fixed on White. “He was abducted from the train by your gang. Knowing Crow, he probably had poor George tortured for either his sick amusement or because he’s a petty bastard like that. Now, I am gonna ask you again…”

I leaned closer to the barrier. “Where’s my friend, George?”

Onyx shrugged, lips curling. “He might not even be alive. I mean, it’s been six months…”

Silver’s tone softened, almost pleading. “Don’t be like that. George is a friend!”

White squared his shoulders, a trembling parody of confidence. “No, you don’t have power over me. T-This barrier will keep me protected from you. I’d like to see you try getting past it.”

His laughter cracked in the middle like ice under a boot. I could smell the sweat he was trying to hide.

The null barrier shimmered between us, defiant. My fingers twitched around the crowbar. I had to resist the urge to simply start hammering it like a caveman. The thing wasn’t going to break down to brute force. And if what he said was true, there wasn’t a cape alive who could phase through it.

But White had said protected. Not forever.

I watched his eyes and let my empathic threads stretch out, testing the limits of his little bubble of safety. His men were all but gone. His confidence was just noise now. I wasn’t done.

Tsk…

My empathic threads were unable to pass through the barrier all the same.

Onyx huffed. “That was annoying.”

Silver agreed with her sister. “I know, but I believe in you, Nick. You can do it!”

White’s face twitched like a broken mask. For a second I thought he might start crying again, but instead he did something far dumber. His hand shot through the null barrier like a snake striking, clamping down around my wrist. His palm was clammy, and his nails dug in hard enough to draw blood if it weren’t for my leather jacket.

His eyes changed. Yellow bloomed in his irises like venom.

“Now,” he hissed, voice low and trembling but full of forced bravado, “you shall be charmed by my eyes and you will fall under my hypnosis with but a glance. From now on, I am your master and lord!”

The words hit me like a flashbang, a pulse of oily warmth crawling under my skin. For a heartbeat, my world swam, edges blurring. His voice tunneled through me, commanding, heavy, and sticky. My fingers twitched like they wanted to obey.

Then I blinked, dug into my empathic threads, and simply overcame them. My intangibility wasn’t just for walls and bullets. Not anymore. Now, it worked for thoughts too, especially if I pushed hard enough. Not to mention, my Empath ratings. The oily weight peeled off me like a wet tarp, leaving nothing but irritation in its place.

I exhaled through my nose, slow and disappointed. If there was anything I hated more than slavers, it was mind controllers. They crawled under your skin, rewrote who you were, and called it power. It annoyed me to the bone.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” I said quietly.

His eyes widened right before I yanked. My fingers clamped around his wrist, and I pulled, dragging him bodily through his own barrier. It sputtered against me, but my power flowed around its edge, my threads twisting, dragging him out like a fish from water.

White gasped, his slick confidence evaporating into sheer terror. “Wait—”

I cut him off with the crowbar. My swing slammed into his knee with a wet crack.

He shrieked, high-pitched and raw. “Aaaah, it hurts!”

I stood over him, crowbar dripping with his blood and my patience. “You have incredible acting chops,” I said, voice flat, “to the point of fooling my empathy. But you trying to mind control me?”

I raised the crowbar again. “All it did was piss me off.”

The blows fell like punctuation marks. Metal against meat, over and over. His limbs twitched, then went slack, then twitched again. His screams collapsed into sobbing, then sniffling, then just breathless little hiccups. By the time I stopped, he was a heap of snot and piss and trembling flesh, his once-pristine tuxedo shredded and dark with blood.

I crouched low, crowbar balanced across my knees, and stared into his panicked yellow eyes. “I’ll give you morphine,” I said softly, “if you bring me to my friend.”

His teeth chattered. The null barrier flickered and died behind us. Now there was nothing between him and me but the truth.

When George left Markend, he told me he had the SRC’s help. Standard protocol, he said, for when an operative’s cover got burned. New papers, new routes, and protection until he resurfaced. I didn’t want to ruin it for him, but I had a feeling.

With Crow burrowed so deep into the SRC, he wouldn’t let BunnyBlade, George, slip away without blood. Revenge was in his marrow. And I was right.

After poking around, I learned George had never reached his destination. No paper trail. No safehouse logs. Just a ghost. You’d be surprised how resourceful the hackers in the lawless were… half-feral scavengers with keyboards who could unearth what the Council tried to bury. They dug up fragments, half-truths, and shattered routes. Enough to confirm it: George was intercepted.

Which brought me here.

I dragged White through the shattered veins of this dead city, between skeletal buildings and choking alleyways. His collar bunched in my fist, his body stumbling and wincing every time I yanked harder than necessary. His shoes scraped concrete. His breath was ragged, punctuated by little whimpers he tried and failed to bite back.

We reached a dark building with half its sign collapsed in rusted shards. Inside, the air was damp and chemical-thick. The room glowed faintly from cylindrical vats lining the walls.

Embryos floated inside. Dozens, maybe hundreds. Curled things with translucent skin and twitching digits, suspended like grotesque art.

I stopped, staring. “What’s this place?”

White winced, wiping blood from his lip. His voice trembled, but a sliver of salesman’s pride managed to crawl back in. “A cloning facility… You’d be surprised how many body parts sell in the Cape community. Bio-researchers especially dig it. Also psychics. Extra brain power really gives them the kick they need…”

Onyx leaned lazily on one of the vats, grinning at the sight. “This place is kind of cool.”

Silver folded her arms, glaring at me. “Nick, ask him if Bunny’s still alive.”

Onyx snorted. “Idiot. He wasn’t asking because he’s scared.”

Silver puffed her cheeks. “You always call me an idiot—”

“I’m not scared,” I cut them both off.

White blinked. “Excuse me?”

“Never mind.” I jerked his collar, forcing him to stumble forward. My voice dropped into steel. “Where?”

His lips quivered. Finally, he muttered, “The elevator. Sub-level.”

Onyx spat the word before I could. “He’s lying.” Her voice skittered across the room, all gleeful claws and bad intentions. Silver’s tone dropped, thin with warning. “Oh… I can feel something dangerous in the sub-level. A psycho cape. Those are the worst.”

Onyx laughed, high and bright. “Let’s kill it. We’re more psycho than it. We’re the best, right?!”

They were my private weather, two storms arguing over how to break a man. I kept my face like stone. White’s teeth clicked together as if he were trying to bite back the truth. He was a salesman at heart; even when things burned, he tried to haggle for sympathy.

“I know you’re lying,” I told him. “What’s in the sub-level?”

He stammered pathetically. “A b-bio-beast—”

I didn’t let him finish. I let my fingers close around the bead at my hip and phase it so the shell passed through his abdomen like a whisper. The compound inside the projectile slithered against his organs, a promise of slow rot and private screaming. He flinched as if the thing had teeth.

“That was laced with poison,” I said. “If I die, you don’t get any cure. If you want to live, you cooperate.” I kept my empathic threads on him, tasting the tremor of his pulse, the way lies moved like bad breath in his skull.

“Top floor,” he croaked at last. “Top floor.”

The ride up the shaft felt like a mouth closing. The elevator stank of oil and old fear. My knuckles were white where they gripped his collar. Onyx chattered behind me, quiet now, the manic edge softened to a hum. Silver’s presence pulsed, thin, alert, like someone trying to stop herself from vomiting.

The doors sighed open on a single room. Light was spare and clinical, the sort the lawless stole from scavenged labs. A man hung in the center like a dark fruit on a hook. His skin was the color of old coffee, muscles taut and tired. Tubes threaded into his mouth, his chest rose shallow and unwilling. He was naked. The contraption that held him looked half surgical rig, half butcher’s frame. Wires traced his limbs like a bad map.

I stepped forward until White whimpered and let the bead bite his ribs again. “What did you do to him?” I asked, though the room answered before he did. The smell of chemicals and the hiss of pumps told me everything I needed to know.

White’s apology came out small and practiced. “I… It’s just business. Mundanes who led a good life are good stock to make capes. We… We were trying to make him ‘pull.’” He pronounced the word like it was a brand name. “The theory here in the Lawless is that the more good memories you have as a normal person, the harder the trauma hits when you get pushed. When they ‘pull,’ the powers you get are more unique, more exotic. They sell better.”

Onyx’s laugh strangled off into a sound that wasn’t a laugh at all. Silver turned, and for the first time since I’d known her, she went quiet, fingers pressed to her lips, eyes wide and wet. It was a look I’d seen in hospitals and confessionals: disgust and the realization that whatever line you thought you were standing on could be stepped over.

I stood there with the crowbar in my hand and all the heat of the Lawless at my back. The man on the hook made no noise I could hear; the machines did his speaking for him. Tubes breathed into him; electrodes pulsed like stitches in the air. He had a life you could trade, a history you could auction off for someone else’s thrill.

I felt something hot and slow grow under my skin. It wasn’t fear. It wasn’t righteous anger either. It was feral, the animal part of me that remembered every face I’d failed and wanted to make the world pay. George… Bunny… The man on the hook might be him, might be another sample, might be a dozen others, but the rack of vats and the whisper of the cloning tech and the crude optimism of men like White all pointed to the same truth: people were product here. Memories were commodities. Pain was a tool.

Onyx finally fell quiet. Her absence was a pressure. Silver gagged softly, the sound like a small animal choking on smoke. For my part, I felt the hot line of rage fan into something that looked dangerously like design.

My head hummed with plans that would not be tidy… too much had been burned for tidy to matter. Instead, I was seething, and seething was a sharp thing I could use.