Amelia wasn't amused at all when Melania came to ask if she was ready for her first scheduled patient of the day. She was not. In fact, she had just finished attaching a bunch of sensors and other stuff to me, and was deep in the process of explaining what they'd do when she finally cleared me to activate my skills.

She looked around the room, which was actually her official operating theatre, and balked at the mess she'd made. This was followed by hurried instructions and Melania's promise to get everything cleaned up while Amelia did the first surgery of the day in a different room.

"Just… don't get yourself into any kind of trouble!" Amelia called to me as she disappeared through the door. "I'll clear out my patients, and then your ass is mine again, got it?!"

Then she was gone. I was left sitting there on the operating table, half-naked and with a bunch of wires still connected to me.

"… Would you like some help with that?" was Melania's extremely hesitant offer.

I sighed morosely, just for the drama points, but I did say yes. I wasn't about to risk damaging Amelia's equipment, and if I had to get myself free, I'd eventually start cutting my way out of the whole mess.

Thankfully, Melania was extremely efficient. It didn't even take five minutes before she was shooing me out the door so she could actually get the theatre ready for Amelia. That left me with the unenviable task of having to decide what I wanted to do.

Amelia was obviously fine with having me in the room while she worked, but she had a thing about people barging in after she'd started. Knowing her, she was already elbow-deep in someone's chest cavity. Oh, she wouldn't get too angry with me or whatever, but I actually didn't feel like watching more body horror for a little while.

Instead, I forced my legs to take me in the direction of the merc HQ, no matter how much my heart was screaming at me to do anything but.

The reason was simple: Mela.

While it would have been much easier for me to waste time sitting around and musing over the fact that I had so many women with similar names around me (because seriously, Mela, Melania, and Amelia did all sound kind of similar!), I was a bit too worried about the redhead to take the easy way out.

I mean, she had not only been 'forced' to kill her own brother recently, but she had then turned around and watched her adoptive little sibling do some truly heinous stuff. For someone who saw the death of her brother as preferable to letting him continue in his own heinous ways, I didn't know how she would react to me now.

I wasn't exactly shocked when I found her in the mercs' dining hall.

There was a plate of some kind of faux meat in front of her, prepared in the BBQ style, as well as no fewer than seven bottles of different kinds of alcohol. Three different wines, two fully transparent and unlabeled bottles of… something, and two empty, discarded vessels.

"You sure you've got enough alcohol? I can send the drones to buy more if you'd prefer."

I wanted to slap myself the second the words slipped out. Why did they sound so taunting? I wasn't there to provoke her! I was there to figure out if she still wanted anything to do with me.

"Um… what are you drinking, anyway?"

She eyed the transparent bottle she was currently holding by the neck, shrugged, and scowled. "Dunno. Some kind of poison, I think, with how horrible it tastes. This ain't just drinking, though! I'm… training. Testing shit."

"Oh?"

"Yep. When I activate some of my skills, they burn the nice buzz I've got going on. It's kind of unfair. Not really what I signed up for, ya know? How am I supposed to start a drunken brawl now if I can't get wasted?"

I very carefully chose not to comment on her regret over having her shiny new legs installed. It made my stomach squirm rather uncomfortably.

"And how'd you find that out?" I asked instead, genuinely curious.

She looked away from me, a very un-Mela-like flush creeping down her neck. "I, uh, might have been about to crash a chair over an idiot's head."

"Reeeeeaaallly now. What idiot? What did he do?"

"He was looking at me all funny. I mean, I was convinced he was, at the time. He was maybe, possibly just eating his food in a disturbingly mechanical way."

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

"Ah, one of the drones. Makes sense… Thought you'd dipped outside there for a moment. Not that there's anything wrong with that! Honestly, you can go outside much more safely than Amelia or I can. I doubt her father knows to put out feelers for you, though he might eventually try to contact… um, uhhh…"

"My brother. Yes, I know."

She didn't sound angry or upset. Just… tired. And that made me feel so much worse. If only I could stop inserting my foot directly into my mouth, I might actually manage to distract her from all the shit!

Before that, though…

"I'm sorry, Mela. I'm so, so sorry. And… if you don't feel comfortable staying here after everything you saw me do yesterday, I'll understand. I…"

"No! No, I'm not leaving the two of ya to do all this crap alone," Mela snapped, turning to me fully. She looked tense and upset, but it didn't really seem like I was the target of her anger. If anything, I recognized the look of self-loathing on her face.

"Mela…"

"You shut it, and lemme talk. With everything I know now, it was really only a matter of time before my brother snapped and did something stupid or let his 'jobs' push him too far. The Kittens? Not yer bloody fault. And the stuff from yesterday… ya tried to warn me about that, too. Not yer fault I didn't properly think things through. Now, and be honest, am I gonna end up doing shit like that too?"

I looked her in the eye. "No, Mela. Probably not. That's all the Shadow bits of me. If I had just the arms, the Stalker cybernetics, I might have turned out a little more murder-y, or I might not have been influenced at all. The Shadows are… complicated."

"Complicated how?"

"Complicated as in they're considered an extinction-level threat. Their abilities have a lot to do with the net, the mind, and doing weird shit to people's psyche." I winced and looked away, not wanting to see her react. "And I almost ended up as one of them. Might be one of them? I don't know. Anyway… at most, you'll get an urge to squish people, I guess. And even that won't happen if you're careful."

"Careful. Right. I can do careful," the ex-ganger muttered.

I risked a peek to find that she was not, in fact, looking at me with undisguised wariness and loathing. Yay? Yay!

"So… I was wondering if maybe you'd like to do something other than drink the day away?" I ventured. "It could be fun!"

"What could be fun, kiddo?"

She smirked, the expression only growing more pointed when I scowled at her.

"I want to test my inherited eldritch abilities, but I could use assistance with some of them. And that nickname really needs to go, okay? I'm not a kid!"

"Sure ya are. Have ya grown even a little since I last saw ya?"

"Yes! I'm solidly taller than Amelia now!"

"You mean the ripper midget?"

"…I'm going to stab you," I threatened, brandishing my deadly claws.

She laughed and patted my head. "Come on, kiddo. We gotta figure out what ya can do."

—

I could do a lot, and it was all glorious.

Admittedly, I had fudged the truth a little. There wasn't much, if anything, that Mela could help me test when it came to my Shadow Runner package. The only stuff I could use directly on her would fry her mind. I could use Essence to power those skills for a while now, anyway.

She was, however, rather useful for testing the Stalker skills.

Out of everything we tried together, Grace was my favorite. Once I shoved Essence into that skill, my body moved with so much more fluidity and flexibility! It was downright crazy. For once, I could almost force my body to move however I wanted it to, and none of it threatened my sense of balance at all.

If that wasn't enough, Faultline and Focus were both significantly more potent than they used to be. I could spot much smaller and more subtle weaknesses in everything I peered at. When I used Focus during our spar, it fell like everything but Mela had fallen away. I could spot every twitch, every move, every physical reaction the second she began executing them.

We tested Tracking by letting Mela blindfold and hogtie me, then dump me in a random room. I waited for her to give me a call, freed myself, and went after her, activating the skill as I went.

I hadn't taken a single step, though, before I forced my body to lock up. I stumbled right into a meeting between my nose and the floor, but I didn't care.

Tracking was overwhelming.

Before, the skill had made me hyperaware of every trace left behind by my target. Now? Now I felt the presence of living things around me.

The drones were fine. The sense of their presence didn't really bother me. Mela, however? Her presence was like an itch under my skin. I felt an overwhelming urge to claw at that presence until it went away or I was passed out or dead, and I honestly didn't care what happened first.

It took every bit of my increased mental stats to get myself under control. Even then, I was on edge the whole time I kept the skill running. I tracked Mela down just to see how quickly I could do it, and immediately turned Tracking off.

To my initial horror, the sense of Mela's presence lingered, along with the rage it filled me with. And she could tell something was wrong. Thankfully, after only a few minutes, both the rage and my sense of her began to peter out slowly, then vanished altogether.

I promised myself never to use the skill lightly after that. At the very least, I needed to put it away until I'd had a chance to practice with no one but the drones around.

The final discovery was the one that had me the most excited.

It was Mela's turn to try and hunt me down and subdue me while I used my Stealth skill to play keep away. We agreed it would be more fun if I started off within sight of her and then ran for my life to hide as best as I could. But the second I activated the skill, Mela staggered, cursed, and covered her eyes.

"What the fuck is that?!" she groused.

"What? What was what?"

"Yer body, ya idiot. It went all blurry and indistinct. My brain wanted to melt outta my fucking eyes when I tried to look past that."

I froze, staring with awe at my covered-up arms and the gloves Amelia had me wear for the sake of her own sanity. What I saw was arguably the greatest advantage of the Stalkers. Their ability to go unseen, to mess with every kind of observation imposed on them, was now apparently mine.

The smile that stretched across my face was downright devious.

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