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## Rue de la Muté (The Street of the Changed)
The air in the *cité*, Les Mureaux d’Acier, hung thick. Not just the usual fug of cheap synth-noodles, stale beer, and desperation, but something else. A greasy, metallic tang that clung to the back of your throat, like licking a battery. The **Change**. It wasn’t one Big Bang, like the old netfeeds screamed about sometimes. Nah. This was death by a thousand cuts. Or, more accurately, mutation by a dozen plagues.
**Wave Zero:** The Cough. Took Mamie. Just… stopped breathing one night. Quiet.
**Wave Gamma:** The Shakes. Turned Monsieur Dubois downstairs into a twitchy ghost who painted his walls with his own fingernail scrapings.
**Wave Epsilon:** The Glow. Kids down Block C started shedding skin like snakes, leaving trails of faint bioluminescence in the piss-dark stairwells.
Now? **Wave Theta.** The **Tremble.** Théo felt it in his bones. A low-grade hum, a vibration under his skin that wasn’t the distant thump of *banlieue* bass. His knuckles, scarred from the kitchen’s deep fryer and greasy wrenches, looked… knobbier. Sharper. Like the carapace of the mutated roaches scuttling in the abandoned metro access tunnel beneath his block.
The Gendarmerie? The *Flics*? Forget it. They’d pulled back months ago, after the Epsilon riots turned Boulevard Voltaire into a smoldering obstacle course of burnt-out scooters and shattered glass. Their armored vans and drones now circled the glittering, sterile heart of Paris like nervous sharks, leaving the *cités* to fester. A no-man's-land, policed only by desperation and the occasional, brutal sweep by corporate security goons hunting "bio-contaminants."
But Théo had an escape. Not from the *cité*, not yet. But from the feeling of his own skin crawling.
His baby. His *belle bagnole*. Started life as a rusted Citroën AX scrap-heap rescued from behind Fatima’s kebab stand. Two years of nights, stolen parts, bartered favours, and pure, stubborn sweat. Stripped it down to its screaming metal soul. Welded in a full chromoly tube frame – cage strong enough for a tank. Found a salvage-yard gem: a twin-turbocharged, fuel-injected monster masquerading as a Peugeot 1.6L engine. Tuned it himself, fingers black with oil and intuition humming alongside the bone-deep Tremble. 400 horses? Maybe more. No dyno in Les Mureaux, just the screaming promise when he punched it in the abandoned warehouse district.
Legally? *Bien sûr que non.* Kit Car 1600 class? On paper, maybe, if you squinted and bribed a blind bureaucrat. Registration? Insurance? Laughable concepts out here. But the AX *looked* almost legit now – sleek, wide-arched fiberglass panels hugging the cage, low and predatory, riding on suspension scavenged from a dead rally car. Front-wheel drive still, yeah, but with slick, sticky rubber wider than his thigh and a limited-slip diff he’d coaxed back from the dead. Grip like a gecko on amphetamines.
He called it *"La Mutée"*. The Changed One. Fitting.
Tonight, the Tremble was worse. Théo stood on his crumbling balcony, fifth floor, Block D. Below, the *cité* pulsed with a feral energy. Fires burned in steel drums. Distorted *rap hardcore* warred with the eerie, discordant wails of someone deep in Theta’s grip. Across the Seine, the lights of Paris proper gleamed – cold, distant, hostile. A fortress. A cage for the "clean."
His crew materialized from the shadows. Five silhouettes against the sodium glare.
* **Fatima:** Scavenger queen, eyes sharp as broken glass, knew every bolt and back alley. Her hair was growing in strangely iridescent patches.
* **Kévin:** Ex-delivery drone jockey, fingers permanently twitching like he was still manipulating phantom controls. One ear was subtly pointed now.
* **Le Doc:** Not a real doctor, just the kid who read old medical texts scavenged from dumpsters. His skin had a faint, pearlescent sheen.
* **Rico:** Muscle, silent, hulking. His knuckles were permanently swollen, rough like gravel. The Tremble made his massive frame vibrate slightly.
* **Léa:** Gearhead, data-slicer on a cracked old cyberdeck she’d rebuilt. Her pupils sometimes dilated independently, like a cat’s. "Nervous system glitch," she’d mutter.
They clustered around Théo. No words needed. The hum in the air, the oppressive weight of the policed city across the water, the itch under their own changing skins – it spoke volumes.
"Ça va péter, Théo," Kévin rasped, his twitchy fingers drumming on the rusty railing. "Gonna blow."
Théo looked at *La Mutée*, parked defiantly below, a sleek, dark shark in a sea of decay. He felt the engine’s potential thrumming in his own chest, counterpoint to the sickening Tremble. An escape. A scream. A middle finger to the fortress city and the plagues trying to rewrite them.
"*Allez,*" Théo growled, the word rough. "Time to see what this *muté* can really do."
***
The rendezvous wasn't a spot, it was a frequency. A scrambled, hopping signal Léa bounced off dead satellites and forgotten network nodes. Tonight's run: **La Périphérique Fantôme.** The Ghost Beltway. A stretch of decaying ring-road infrastructure, partially collapsed, mostly ignored, looping the *cité*’s edge. Perfect.
Théo slid into *La Mutée*’s bucket seat. The smell of hot metal, synth-leather, and adrenaline filled the stripped cabin. Fatima rode shotgun, eyes glued to a tablet showing Léa’s patched-together surveillance feed – thermal, traffic cams (the few still working outside the *cité*), drone alerts. Rico crammed into the custom harness in the back, a silent mountain. Kévin and Le Doc were spotters on stolen e-bikes, flitting through the shadows. Léa was net-deep, their guardian angel in the static.
"*Clear pour le moment,*" Léa’s voice crackled through the jury-rigged comm in Théo’s helmet. "Gendarmerie drones are clustered around Neuilly. CorpSec patrols quiet. You are *vert*... for now."
Théo took a breath, feeling the Tremble vibrate up his spine. He turned the key. The beast *woke*. Not a start, an eruption. A deep, guttural roar that shook the chassis, echoing off the concrete cliffs of the surrounding blocks. It wasn’t the smooth purr of an electric Euro-sedan from the city center. This was raw, mechanical fury. *Alive.*
He fed it throttle. The turbos spooled with a rising, metallic whine. He dumped the clutch.
*La Mutée* didn’t just move. It *teleported*. The front tires shrieked, biting into the cracked asphalt, the limited-slip diff fighting for traction. The G-force slammed Théo back into the seat. Rico grunted behind him. The decaying apartment blocks became a streaking blur of graffiti and broken windows. The speed was insane. Terrifying. *Liberating.*
They hit the Périphérique Fantôme – a graveyard of concrete and rebar. Théo danced on the pedals, hands a blur on the thin-rimmed wheel. The car obeyed with razor-sharp precision, the stiff suspension telegraphing every bump and crack through the frame. He sliced through debris fields, drifted around collapsed overpasses, powered up crumbling on-ramps. The world narrowed to the tunnel vision of the headlights, the screaming engine, the chattering of the tires, and the rhythmic thump-thump-thump of his own mutated heart syncing with the Tremble.
Fatima called out obstacles, her voice tight with exhilaration. "*Débris gauche!*... *Trou droit! Profond!*... *Virage serré! Serré!*"
Théo flowed through it. The car was an extension of his own changing body. The heightened senses Theta seemed to be bringing – the sharper night vision, the almost preternatural awareness of the car's balance – meshed with years of mechanical intuition. He *felt* the grip, *heard* the suspension working, *smelled* the hot brakes and scorched rubber.
A flicker on Fatima’s tablet. "*Merde!* Drone signature! Low altitude, vectoring... *schnell!* Léa!"
"*On it!*" Léa’s voice was strained. "*Feeding garbage data loop... hoping it bites...*"
Théo didn’t flinch. He spotted a narrow service ramp diving under a sagging overpass. He wrenched the wheel, stood on the brakes, flicked the car sideways. They slid into the pitch-black tunnel just as the harsh white spotlight of the drone swept over the entrance. They sat in darkness, engine idling with a menacing rumble, hearts pounding. The drone hovered, scanning, then buzzed away, deceived by Léa’s digital sleight-of-hand.
Rico let out a low chuckle from the back. "*Propre.*" Clean.
They ran three more circuits that night. Each time pushing harder, faster. Word spread through the *cité*’s underground networks. Crowds gathered on the safer, higher vantage points. Silhouettes against the night sky, watching the tiny, agile beast with the earth-shattering roar defy the darkness and the drones. It wasn't just a race. It was a declaration. A spark in the suffocating gloom.
After the last run, Théo parked *La Mutée* deep in a skeletal parking garage, its engine ticking as it cooled. He leaned against the warm hood, breathing hard. The Tremble was still there, a constant vibration, a reminder of the plagues rewriting him. But for those minutes, hurtling through the ruins, he hadn't felt it. He’d felt *power*. Control.
His crew gathered, buzzing with adrenaline. Léa slumped against a pillar, rubbing her temples, her mismatched pupils wide. "They're adapting," she muttered, tapping her cyberdeck. "CorpSec algos... getting smarter. Gendarmerie chatter mentions 'anomalous high-speed signatures'. They *know*."
Kévin twitched violently. "So? Let 'em know! Screw 'em! We're ghosts! We're *mutés*!"
Fatima lit a hand-rolled cigarette, the tip glowing in the dark. "Ghosts don't win, *mon petit*. They just haunt." She looked towards the distant, glowing skyline of Paris. "They build walls higher. They make cleaner weapons. They scan for the Change like it's a crime."
Théo looked at his hands in the dim light filtering through the cracked concrete above. The knuckles *were* sharper. Ridged. He clenched his fist. The Tremble resonated through his arm. He thought of the fortress city, the abandoned clinics, the ration lines, the fear in the eyes of the "clean" when they saw someone from the *cité* twitch or glow.
Le Doc spoke softly, his pearlescent skin catching a stray beam of light. "Theta... it's not stopping. They say... Wave Iota is brewing. Neuro-degen. Or worse. We're not just changing... we're burning out." He looked at Théo, at the car. "This... *this* is fire. Bright. Fast. But fire consumes."
Théo ran his mutated hand over *La Mutée*’s cool fiberglass flank. The Citroën badge, long gone, replaced by a crude spray-painted symbol: a double helix twisted into a lightning bolt. He understood. The world wasn't crashing. It was *rotting*. And what was rising from the rot wasn't magic like in the old trids. It was messy. Painful. Unfair. The corps and the government weren't heroes; they were janitors, building walls around the contamination zone. The *cité* wasn't a neighborhood; it was a petri dish. And they, the Changed, were the unwanted culture.
His racing wasn't just defiance. It was practice. Practice for running, because running was the only future he could see. Running from the plagues, running from the scanners, running from the clean-up crews that would inevitably come. *La Mutée* wasn't just a car. It was his legs in a world that wanted to cripple him. His roar in a world demanding silence.
He looked at his crew – his fellow experiments, his only tribe in the decaying lab. Fatima’s scavenger eyes, Kévin’s twitchy genius, Rico’s mutated strength, Léa’s glitching brilliance, Le Doc’s doomed knowledge. They were all changing. Burning. And Paris, that glittering cage across the river, had no place for fire.
"Next run," Théo said, his voice rough, the low hum of the Tremble undercutting his words. "We go further. Past the Fantôme. Skirt the edge... touch the *ville propre*."
A collective intake of breath. Touching the clean city? With an unregistered mutant-mobile? Suicide.
Fatima blew out smoke, a slow, deliberate plume. "*Chaud.*" Hot. Crazy.
Kévin’s twitch became a grin. "*Ouais! Faisons-le péter!*" Let's make it blow!
Rico just nodded, a deep rumble in his chest. Léa cracked her knuckles, her cyberdeck screen flickering with schematics of Parisian security grids. Le Doc looked scared, but he didn't object.
Théo climbed back into the driver's seat. The Tremble vibrated through the chassis, syncing with the engine's latent power. He looked out through the windshield, not at the crumbling garage, but past it, towards the glowing fortress. They weren't heroes. They weren't rebels with a cause. They were rats in the walls, learning to sprint before the poison gas came. They were fire, burning bright and fast in the petri dish, knowing the only destiny was ash or escape.
He gripped the wheel, his mutated knuckles white. The world was changing. Not for the better. Not for equality. Not for security. But Théo and *La Mutée*? They were changing too. Faster. Louder. And they wouldn't go quietly into the sterile future the clean ones were building. They’d race towards it, screaming, tearing through the night, a final, glorious, burning streak against the dying of the light. The engine’s idle deepened, a hungry growl in the concrete tomb. *La Mutée* was ready. The Changed were rolling out.
---
The victory tasted like synth-noodle grease and Dutch diesel fumes, thick and real in the back of Théo’s throat. The crates of gleaming, refurbished Dutch bicycles – *fietsen*, Piet called them, the word sharp and efficient like the machines themselves – were hidden deep within the labyrinthine guts of Block D. In return, Piet’s crew in Rotterdam-Zuid now had Fatima’s meticulously crafted jeans. Not just rags, but *fashion*. Styles scavenged from pre-Crash feeds, cut from discounted, surprisingly resilient cloth bartered for in the shadowed halls of the Paris Textile Exchange (a place smelling of dust, desperation, and faintly of ozone), and stitched with the desperate precision of people clinging to identity. The exchange was pure *banlieue* alchemy: turning decay into desire, scrap into style.
But the *real* prize wasn’t the bikes or the future trade. It was the *proof*. The impossible run. Paris to Rotterdam and back, skirting the edge of the *ville propre*, dancing with the drone patrols, all in a mutant Citroën and a groaning, resurrected DAF LF 7.5-tonne box truck Piet’s people had dragged from a scrapyard and baptized "*De Stille Kracht*" (The Quiet Force). The plan had been pure, paranoid genius, born of nights hunched over Léa’s flickering cyberdeck, stitching together fragments of pre-Collapse satellite imagery and decaying, glitchy Street View data.
**The Planning:** They’d mapped not roads, but *shadows*. Abandoned industrial parks north of Paris, perfect for hiding *La Mutée*’s scream during daylight. Derelict farmsteads in the Pas-de-Calais, their skeletal barns offering shelter for *De Stille Kracht*. The route avoided major toll corridors choked with CorpSec scanners, sticking to secondary roads cracked like old skin, weaving through forgotten villages where the lights were few and the fear of the Changed was still outweighed by indifference. They identified potential bolt-holes – collapsed bridges offering underpasses, overgrown lay-bys, even a flooded quarry marked as "potential aquatic cover if drones thermal-scan." Every kilometer was a calculated risk, a digital ghost dance performed on rotting infrastructure.
**The Execution:** The AX went first, Théo and Fatima a screaming, flickering shadow in the night. *La Mutée* wasn’t just transport; it was the blade. Its role: scout, lure, sacrifice if needed. Léa piloted a jury-rigged quadcopter – silent rotors, thermal-dampened shell, a single flickering camera eye – flying five klicks ahead, feeding real-time intel back to the tablet clutched in Kévin’s twitching hands inside the lumbering DAF. Rico manned the truck’s reinforced cab beside Piet’s nephew, Bram, a wiry kid with eyes that glinted like chips of flint. Le Doc, vibrating with Theta-induced anxiety, monitored comms and a hacked bio-scanner in the back, praying it wouldn’t ping *them* as the real contaminants.
The journey was a nerve-shredding symphony of near-misses:
* **Outside Amiens:** Léa’s drone spotted a Gendarmerie drone patrol vectoring towards their planned route. Théo, riding point in the AX, peeled off onto a dirt track, kicking up a colossal dust cloud visible for kilometers. He led the drone on a futile chase through moonlit fields, *La Mutée*’s howl echoing across the sleeping countryside before vanishing down a dry riverbed. The distraction worked. The big drone buzzed away, confused, while *De Stille Kracht* rumbled past unseen.
* **The Belgian Border Flicker:** Not a physical barrier, but a sudden, intense scan-grid emanating from a CorpSec outpost disguised as a logistics hub. Le Doc’s bio-scanner screamed a proximity alert. Léa slammed the truck into electromagnetic silence – killing comms, dimming lights, forcing the aging engine into a near-stall crawl. They rolled through the grid like a phantom, hearts pounding, the only sound the frantic whir of Léa’s fingers on her deck as she spat counter-surveillance code into the datastream. The scanner flickered over them, hesitated… and passed. "*Theta signatures masked as industrial bio-waste residue,*" Léa breathed, sweat dripping onto her keyboard. "*Lucky.*"
* **Rotterdam-Zuid:** It felt like home, just wetter. The same decaying high-rises, the same wary eyes, the same tang of desperation cut with the greasy smell of street food and the faint, sweet skunk of legal *wiet* drifting from brightly lit "coffee shops" that felt like alien artifacts. Piet’s warehouse was a fortress of scrap metal and ingenuity. The trade was swift, efficient. Bikes for jeans. No CorpSec here, just the watchful gaze of local *straat* gangs who respected Piet and eyed the Parisians’ mutations with a mix of curiosity and grim recognition. They’d all felt the plagues here too.
**The Return:** Heavier with bikes, *De Stille Kracht* was a slower, more vulnerable beast. The tension was thicker, the paranoia deeper. Théo, back in the AX, felt the Tremble in his bones like a tuning fork resonating with the engine’s vibration. Every shadow was a scanner, every distant light a drone. They used the same bolt-holes, the same tactics. Near Arras, they had to hole up for 36 hours in the carcass of a bankrupt hypermarket, listening to CorpSec hovercrafts sweep the area after a rumored "Change outbreak" nearby. They ate cold rations, spoke in whispers, the darkness pressing in, the mutated senses of the crew hyper-alert to every scuttle and sigh of the decaying building.
Crossing the invisible border back into the Seine-Saint-Denis *département* wasn’t relief; it was a grim homecoming. The familiar stench of Les Mureaux d’Acier – uncollected garbage, despair, and the underlying metallic tang of the Change – washed over them. But as they rolled into the *cité*, word spread like wildfire. Silhouettes appeared on balconies. Figures melted from doorways. A low murmur grew, not of fear, but of awe. They’d done it. Touched the outside world and come back. Brought back *value*.
**The Underdogs vs. The Have-All:**
The atmosphere crackled with the friction of two worlds grinding against each other.
* **In the Banlieue:** The air hummed with a desperate energy. The bikes weren't just transport; they were *freedom*. Silent, agile, perfect for navigating the choked, broken streets where cars were targets and the metro was a distant rumor. Kids eyed them with fierce longing. Adults saw practicality – a way to reach scavenging grounds further afield, bypass Gendarmerie cordons. The success of the run was a spark in the gloom. Théo wasn't just the guy with the fast car; he was the one who *brought things back*. The crew were local legends, mutated ghosts who walked between worlds. Their very existence – scarred, changed, resourceful – was a middle finger to the abandonment. People shared scraps of food, offered hidden corners for the bikes, looked at Théo and his crew with a fierce, protective pride. They were *ours*. Broken, burning, but fighting.
* **In the Ville Propre:** The air was filtered, sterile. Newsfeeds chirped about economic recovery and "containment efforts" in the "affected zones." CorpSec adverts promised "Safety Through Vigilance," showing sleek drones scanning clean streets. The Gendarmerie reports mentioned "anomalous vehicular activity" near the northern perimeter, dismissed as likely looters or mutated wildlife. The *have-all* lived in a bubble of curated ignorance and enforced security. Their world was defined by what they excluded: the filth, the disease, the *changed*. They had the tech, the clean streets, the power grids that didn't flicker. But they also had the fear – a low thrum beneath the surface, the constant scan, the knowledge that the walls were high because the rot outside was deep. They had everything except the raw, defiant pulse of life clinging on in the ruins. They had security, but no soul. Their equality was the uniformity of the scanned and approved; their safety was the brittle silence before an inevitable storm.
Théo stood on his balcony again, the Tremble a constant companion. Below, Rico and Bram were carefully unloading the last bikes into a hidden cellar access Fatima had secured. Léa was deep in her deck, analyzing the sensor data from the trip, looking for patterns in the CorpSec patrols, weaknesses in the scan-grids. Kévin twitched beside her, muttering about drone evasion algorithms. Le Doc stared at his subtly iridescent hands, lost in thoughts of the brewing Iota wave.
Théo looked across the Seine. The lights of Paris glittered, cold and distant. A fortress. A gilded cage. He gripped the rusted railing, his mutated knuckles stark white. They’d touched the outside, traded with the similarly discarded, and returned. They had bikes, they had a network, they had *La Mutée* and *De Stille Kracht*. They had fire.
But the fortress walls were getting higher. The scanners smarter. The plagues deeper. The *have-all* were building a future with no room for fire, only sterile control. They wouldn't find a place in that gleaming tomb.
Théo smiled, a sharp, feral thing in the dim light. The next run wouldn't be for bikes or jeans. It would be for information. For tech. For weapons. For anything that could turn their burning defiance into something more than just a glorious, fleeting streak against the dying light. The AX’s engine block felt warm beneath his palm where he’d leaned against it earlier. A beast, resting. The *cité* buzzed below, a hive of scarred survivors. The Tremble vibrated up his spine.
The underdogs were learning to run. Soon, they’d learn to bite. The sterile future was coming, but Théo and his *mutés* wouldn't be buried quietly in its foundations. They’d be the quake that shattered it.
----
First came the sound. Not the high-pitched, mechanical scream of *La Mutée*, but a deep, tectonic *bellow*. A sound that vibrated trash cans, rattled loose window panes in Block D, and sent mutated pigeons scattering like shrapnel. It was the roar of something primal, unfiltered, and utterly alien to the choked streets of Les Mureaux d’Acier.
Then came the smell: scorched asphalt, superheated metal, and raw, unburnt hydrocarbons – the acrid perfume of pure, unadulterated American horsepower.
Finally, the beast itself rounded the corner onto Rue de la Muté. It wasn’t sleek like the Citroën. It was brutal. A hulking, late-20th-century American coupe, stripped down to its bare, scarred bones. Chrome bumpers long gone, replaced by thick, welded steel tubing forming a crude push bar. The hood was latched down with heavy pins, bulging obscenely over what could only be a massive engine. Wide, sticky rear tires ballooned from under flared, cutaway fenders, while the front end sat high, revealing a complex tangle of suspension components and intercooler piping. Four turbos – visible, exposed, and gleaming dully under layers of grime – sprouted from the sides of the engine block like malignant growths. Heat shimmered violently off the entire front end.
Painted crudely in white on the cracked windshield and the massive, dented trunk lid were the words: **FM 98.7 – TRADE.**
Inside the stripped cabin, visible through the missing side window, sat the driver. He wasn’t just wearing gear; he was encased. A homemade combat suit cobbled together from salvaged firefighter turnout pants, heavy leather welding jackets, and thick, layered padding. Crucially, snaking from the dashboard into the collar of the suit was a thick, insulated hose connected to what looked like a jury-rigged air conditioning unit bolted where the passenger seat used to be. The helmet was a modified motocross model, the visor tinted dark. He looked less like a driver and more like a deep-sea welder piloting a submarine through hell.
He rolled to a stop near Fatima’s usual scavenging spot, the massive engine settling into a lumpy, threatening idle that shook the ground. The smell of fuel and hot oil intensified. Then, the sound shifted. The monstrous V8 rumble faded slightly, replaced by the tinny crackle of an FM radio broadcast emanating from speakers mounted somewhere on the stripped chassis. Not static, but music. Distorted, bass-heavy, driving *rock*. Something old, raw, and powerful, cutting through the usual *banlieue* soundtrack of sirens and distant arguments.
Théo and the crew materialized from the shadows, drawn like moths to a radioactive flame. Rico stood like a sentinel, his gravel-knuckled hands loose but ready. Kévin twitched violently, eyes wide behind his goggles, fingers dancing in the air as if trying to parse the vehicle’s chaotic energy field. Léa had her cyberdeck out instantly, fingers flying. "Scanners clean... for now. Big thermal signature though. *Très* big. Like, 'please shoot me down' big."
Fatima stepped forward first, her scavenger eyes calculating the scrap value, the potential, the sheer audacity. "What’s the play, *américain*?" she called out, her voice cutting through the thumping music.
The tinted visor tilted towards her. A gloved hand emerged from the suit and tapped the words painted on the windshield: **FM 98.7 – TRADE.** Then, it pointed towards the massive trunk.
Théo approached cautiously, the Tremble in his bones resonating strangely with the deep idle. He peered through the missing rear window. The trunk wasn't filled with spares or junk. It was a meticulously packed arsenal of tech. Rows upon rows of custom cyberdecks, their casings etched with unfamiliar, jagged logos. Tangles of high-grade fiber-optic cable. Stacks of shielded data chips. Power converters humming faintly. It was a mobile black-market tech hub, radiating potential and danger.
The driver’s amplified voice, muffled by the helmet and suit, boomed out, surprisingly clear despite the distortion: "**Music. Bought the decks. Built 'em.**" A thumb jabbed towards the speakers blaring the driving rock. "**Fuel. Food. Maybe a shower that ain't a fire hydrant. Won't stay. Chat room details for long hauls... after trade.**" The accent was thick, Midwestern American, weathered by distance and diesel fumes.
The proposition hung in the greasy air. This wasn't Piet’s organized Dutch pragmatism. This was raw, nomadic tech-baron energy. He wasn't trading jeans for bikes; he was trading *potential* for *survival*. The cyberdecks weren't consumer trash; they were tools, weapons, lifelines. Léa practically vibrated beside Théo, her mismatched pupils dilated. "Those decks... Theo... they look *mil-spec*. Or better. Home-brewed, yeah, but... powerful."
The American needed basics they had, or could get: Fuel siphoned from abandoned vehicles in the dead zones. Canned goods hoarded from forgotten warehouses. A place to hose off the grime of a thousand kilometers driven through the decaying arteries of Europe. And music. He craved *more* music. Data chips, vinyl salvaged from dead cities, even just the raw recordings Léa could pull from the fragmented old nets.
**The Trade:**
It was tense, efficient, conducted mostly through gestures and grunts amplified by the suit. Fatima negotiated with sharp pragmatism, her iridescent hair patches catching the low light. Fuel drums were rolled out from a hidden cache. Cases of water and synth-protein packs appeared. Léa handed over a data chip packed with obscure pre-Crash rock archives scavenged from dead servers. The American, moving with surprising agility despite the suit, opened the massive trunk. He didn't haggle much; his needs were immediate, his inventory vast. He pulled out three cyberdecks – sleek, black, unnervingly silent things, their surfaces cool to the touch even in the heat radiating from his car. He tossed in a handful of shielded data cables as a bonus.
The shower was a comical, yet strangely poignant affair. They rigged a hose from a mostly functional upper-floor apartment in Block C, the water lukewarm and gritty. The American stood in the crumbling concrete courtyard, water sluicing off the thick layers of his suit, steam rising in the cool evening air. He kept the helmet on. Nobody saw his face. He was a figurehead, a symbol of pure, transient power. He didn’t flinch at Rico’s swollen knuckles, Kévin’s twitch, or Le Doc’s sheen. Mutations were just another part of the landscape now, like rust or cracked concrete.
**The Connection:**
As the light began to bleed from the sky, painting the towers in bruised purples and oranges, the American prepared to leave. He slammed the massive trunk shut. Before climbing back into his armored cockpit, he handed Léa a small, ruggedized data chip. "**Chat room,**" his amplified voice grunted. "**Encrypted. Frequency hops. Broadcast schedule embedded. For the long runs. The *real* dark roads.**"
He didn't say goodbye. He just fired up the beast. The ground trembled. The four turbos shrieked as they spooled, a sound like tearing metal. The raw V8 bellowed, drowning out the last strains of the FM rock broadcast. With a violence that sprayed gravel and shredded plastic debris, the American monster launched itself down Rue de la Muté, a rolling thunderclap of displaced air and raw power. He vanished as quickly as he appeared, leaving behind the smell of burnt rubber, the fading echo of the engine, and the heavy silence of shock.
**Atmosphere: The Chasm Widens**
* **In the Banlieue:** The encounter was pure adrenaline and awe, mixed with a deep unease. The American was a force of nature, undeniable proof of a wider, wilder world beyond the CorpSec cordons. He wasn't *of* the system; he was a parasite on its decaying edges, thriving in the chaos the *cité* merely survived. The cyberdecks represented a quantum leap in capability – tools that could slice deeper, fight smarter, maybe even find a crack in the fortress walls. But his presence also screamed vulnerability. That much power, that much noise? It was a beacon. If he could find them, so could worse things. The air crackled with nervous energy. People whispered about the "*Démon Mécanique*." The bikes suddenly felt like toys. They had fire, yes, but the American had brought a *volcano*.
* **In the Ville Propre:** If the whispers of Théo’s runs were like faint static on the edge of perception, the American’s passage was a sonic boom shaking the champagne flutes. CorpSec sensors on the periphery registered an "anomalous high-energy kinetic event" with "acoustic signatures consistent with unregulated heavy combustion." Reports were filed, algorithms adjusted to scan for similar signatures, threat assessments quietly upgraded. The *have-all* felt the tremor, even if they dismissed it as distant thunder. Their sterile bubble felt momentarily thinner. The scanners, the drones, the walls – they suddenly seemed less like absolute protection and more like a Maginot Line against an enemy that didn't fight by the rules. The fear wasn't panic; it was a cold drip of realization. The rot wasn't just *out there*; it was *mobile*. It was evolving. And it roared.
Théo held one of the American’s cyberdecks. It was heavier than it looked. Cold. Ominous. Léa was already jacked into another, her mismatched pupils reflecting scrolling lines of complex code, a look of fierce, terrifying concentration on her face. "The encryption on this chat protocol... *merde*, Theo... it's beautiful. Like nothing CorpSec has. We can talk... *anywhere*."
He looked at *La Mutée*, the nimble, screaming blade. He thought of the American’s brute-force juggernaut. He thought of the fortress across the river, blind and brittle in its sterile security. The Tremble vibrated through the deck in his hands, syncing with the hum in his bones. The underdogs weren't just running anymore. They were networking. They were arming themselves with tools scavenged from the apocalypse. The American hadn’t just traded tech; he’d thrown a lit fuse into the powder keg of their defiance. The sterile future was coming. But the shadows were getting louder, faster, and infinitely more connected. The next run wouldn't be for trade. It would be for war. And the chat room was buzzing.
----
The chat log flickered onto Léa’s primary screen, rendered in stark, monochrome green text against a void-black background – the American’s preferred aesthetic, apparently. No frills, no avatars, just raw data flow. The connection identifier pulsed: **SALVAGE_PROTOCOL_7**. Léa’s fingers danced across her salvaged keyboard, the cyberdeck humming with a low, anxious whine that mirrored the Tremble in her own nervous system.
`LÉA_DGGR: Connection stabilized. Protocol handshake confirmed. You’re loud out here, Yank. Thermal bloom like a birthday cake on CorpSec scopes.`
The response appeared instantly, letters sharp and unforgiving:
`US_DRV: Noise is the point. Lets the clean ones know the rot’s still movin’. Got ears on this freq?`
`LÉA_DGGR: Clean? Non. My house, my rules. Layers you wouldn’t believe. Yours?`
`US_DRV: Mobile fortress. Burners, hops, enough crypto to choke a mainframe. Short window. Listen close. Owe you. Big.`
Léa leaned forward, her mismatched pupils narrowing. Owe *them*? The American didn’t strike her as the indebted type.
`LÉA_DGGR: Explain. Fuel & synth-slop was square. Decks are… functional. Barely.`
A pause. Longer than expected. Then:
`US_DRV: The noise. The *real* noise you tossed in. That chip. The Paris grit. The rhymes laid over those broken beats… the *static* symphony.`
`LÉA_DGGR: …The banlieue mix? That was scrap. Ambient recordings, local rap freestyles Kévin snatched off dying mesh-nets, some old Algerian protest tunes Fatima had. Glued it together during a blackout. Why?`
`US_DRV: Why? Because Riggs paid 10k cred. Clean cred. Wired to an account that don’t exist anymore.`
Léa blinked. Ten *thousand*? For their sonic garbage?
`US_DRV: Riggs. My rigger. Flies a Beech Baron modded like a scalpel. Runs “have-legal” trinkets for the chrome-plated ghouls in their sky-towers. Showed ‘em your mix at some synth-orgy in Zurich. Called it “Authentic Urban Decay.” Latest hype. Lasts maybe three parties before they chew it up and spit it out. But Riggs got paid. I got a cut. You got squat.`
Léa felt a strange mix of disgust and grim satisfaction. Their pain, their chaos, commodified as party fodder for the sterile elite. It was obscene. It was… useful.
`LÉA_DGGR: So. Debt. How settled? We don’t take champagne wishes, Yank.`
`US_DRV: Riggs owes *me* a drop. Baron’s got range, stealth kit, belly pod for light cargo. Tell me what you NEED. Not want. NEED. Meds your Doc can’t synth? High-density power cells? Mil-spec encrypted comms? Real antibiotics? Name it. If it fits in the pod and Riggs can source it without getting his wings clipped, it’s yours.`
Léa’s mind raced. The possibilities were dizzying. She glanced around the cramped room – Théo cleaning a carburetor with intense focus, Rico methodically checking bike tire pressures, Le Doc hunched over a vial of murky liquid, Kévin’s fingers spasming as he visualized drone paths. *Need*. Not want.
`LÉA_DGGR: Priority Alpha: Broad-spectrum antivirals. Theta’s getting mean. Maybe Iota blockers if they exist. Doc has a list.`
`LÉA_DGGR: Priority Beta: Military-grade signal jammers. Portable. Wide-spectrum burst capability. Not toys.`
`LÉA_DGGR: Priority Gamma: High-yield thermal batteries. The kind that power CorpSec drone nests. Five units.`
`LÉA_DGGR: …And synth-lubricant. High-temp. Five gallons. For the AX.`
A snort echoed through the text, almost audible.
`US_DRV: Priorities straight. I like it. Riggs can source the meds – pricey, but doable. Jammers? He knows a guy who knows a guy who lost an armory. Thermal bats… tricky, but possible. Lube? Easy. Consider it manifested.`
`LÉA_DGGR: Drop zone? We’re not flashing landing lights down the Boulevard.`
`US_DRV: Already scoped. Remember that flooded quarry on your Rotterdam route maps? 30 klicks north-northeast of your concrete jungle. Abandoned. Deep water hides thermal sig. Approaches clear of permanent scanner nests. Riggs can kiss the deck, pop the pod, and be gone before the Gendarmerie finish their espresso. You retrieve. Wet work, but your problem.`
Léa pulled up the map fragment. The quarry. Isolated, water-filled, overlooked. It was good. Almost too good.
`LÉA_DGGR: Timing?`
`US_DRV: Next new moon. Darkest window. 0300 local. Riggs broadcasts a single ping on 121.5 – old guard freq, ignored by most. Your cue. Pod floats. You fish it out. He ghosts. No meet. No chatter after this. Burn this channel once coordinates confirmed.`
`LÉA_DGGR: Understood. Confirming Quarry Zulu as LZ. New moon +1. 0300. Ping on 121.5. Burn after rx.`
`US_DRV: Solid. Tell your driver… keep that mutant Citroën purring. World’s gettin’ tighter. Scanners deeper. Walls higher. You burn bright out there in the rot. Don’t let ‘em smother it.`
`LÉA_DGGR: We don’t plan on it. What’s your cut on the meds, Yank?`
Another pause. Longer this time.
`US_DRV: Debt paid. The noise… it reminded me. Before the plagues, before the walls. When things were just broken, not… *changed*. Keep making noise, Decker. Riggs inbound in 72 hours. Watch the skies.`
The connection terminated abruptly. **SALVAGE_PROTOCOL_7** vanished from Léa’s screen, leaving only the hum of her deck and the heavy silence of the room. She looked up, meeting Théo’s questioning gaze.
"Get the Doc," she said, her voice tight with a mix of adrenaline and grim resolve. "We need his shopping list. And Théo? Start waterproofing the transporter. We're going fishing."
The sterile future was building its walls. But high above, in a modified Beechcraft Baron, a rigger named Riggs was preparing to drop a lifeline – paid for by the desperate hunger of the elite for a taste of authentic decay. The underdogs were no longer just trading scrap. They were trading their own pain for power. And the American, a ghost in a roaring steel suit, had just handed them the invoice.
