The Invitation

Devram studied her for a long moment. Then he laughed—quiet, almost sad. "You sound like him. You know that? The old man. Same tone when he'd already decided and was just waiting for the rest of us to catch up."

Katya's jaw tightened. She didn't ask who he meant. Pust gjennom smerten. Breathe through the pain. The mantra surfaced unbidden, her mentor's voice a ghost in her skull.

"We have four hours," she said. "And I need Jun."

They found him in the back room, hunched over his shooting simulator rig, fingers moving across a disassembled targeting module with the obsessive precision of a watchmaker. His blue undercut caught the harsh light. His frost-bitten fingertips—perpetually peeling, always slightly blue—danced over micro-circuits with impossible delicacy.

"Jun."

He startled. A screwdriver bounced off the table. "Sorry—sorry, I didn't hear you come in. I was recalibrating the windage algorithms because the simulator kept misreading crosswind at 400 meters and I thought, that's wrong, that's definitely wrong, so I pulled the whole module apart and—"

"Jun." Katya placed the crimson case on his workbench. "Open this."

He looked at the case. Looked at her. His hazel eyes behind the shooting glasses were already calculating. "Hemlock seal. Thumbprint locked." He turned it over. "This isn't consumer tech. This is internal—syndicate distribution only." His fingers found the seam. "Where did you—"

"Exhibition match. Tomorrow. They want me implanted."

Jun's hands stopped moving. The rambling ceased. When he spoke again, his voice was different—precise, stripped of its nervous ornaments. "They want live biometrics."

"Yes."

"During competition."

"Yes."

Jun opened the case with a practiced flick, bypassing the thumbprint lock in under three seconds. Inside, nestled in shock-absorbent foam, was a cylindrical implant the size of a rice grain. Matte black. A single crimson band around its circumference.

He held it up to the light. Turned it slowly. Then he set it down, reached for a magnification lens, and bent so close his nose nearly touched the device.

"Oh," he said softly.

"What?" Devram moved closer.

"This isn't standard monitoring." Jun's voice had dropped to barely above a whisper. "Standard implants transmit heart rate, location, basic vitals. This one—see the secondary coil? That's a broad-spectrum transmitter. It's not just sending your biometrics to a receiver. It's sending them to a research division. Real-time neural feedback. Muscle activation patterns. Micro-tremor analysis. Everything your body does during the race, every involuntary response—they'll have it before you've finished making it."

Silence.

"They're not monitoring her," Jun continued. He looked up, and Katya saw something she recognized in his expression—the particular anger of someone who understood exactly how technology was being weaponized. "They're dissecting her. In real time. While she races."

Devram's hand found the edge of the workbench. His knuckles whitened. "So it's a trap."

"It's a laboratory," Jun corrected. "And Katya's the specimen."

Katya leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed. The scar on her forearm pulsed in the cold. She watched Jun's face—the way his jaw worked, the way his frost-bitten fingers drummed against the bench. He was thinking. Fast. The kind of fast that either saved lives or got people killed.

"Can you beat it?" she asked.

Jun blinked. "What?"

"The implant. Can you beat it? Modify it. Make it transmit false readings."

He stared at her. Then he laughed—a short, disbelieving sound. "You want me to reprogram a Hemlock biometric implant to broadcast fake data. In twelve hours."

"Can you?"

"I—" He stopped. Looked at the implant. Looked at his simulator rig, his tools, the organized chaos of his workbench. His hands were shaking slightly, but his eyes had gone sharp and certain. "Yes. Probably. The transmitter protocol is sophisticated but it's not—it's not elegant. Hemlock builds for scale, not for subtlety. I can build a spoofing layer. A countermeasure that sits between your actual biometrics and the outgoing signal. It would need to be physically installed alongside the implant, wired into the same subcutaneous pocket."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning surgery." Jun swallowed. "Meaning someone cuts you open, places my device next to their device, and sews you back up. Before tomorrow."

Devram straightened. "Where do we find a surgeon who won't report this to Hemlock inside of ten minutes?"

"I know someone," Katya said quietly. Both men looked at her. "From before. They don't ask questions."

"Your pharmacist contact?" Devram's voice was careful.

"Different. Older. Owes me."

She didn't elaborate. Devram didn't push. The silence between them held the shape of trust being tested—not broken, but bent, finding its limits.

Jun had already begun sketching circuit diagrams on the back of a flattened ammunition box, his pen moving in frantic, precise strokes. "The countermeasure needs to be small enough to fit in the implant pocket. Maybe eight millimeters. I can strip down a signal processor from—in fact—" He rummaged through a drawer and produced something that looked like a crushed insect but was, apparently, a microprocessor. "This. From a targeting scope I rebuilt last month. If I reconfigure the output modulation and piggyback on the implant's own power source..."

He trailed off, muttering technical specifications to himself. Katya recognized the state. It was the same place she went before a shot—the world narrowing to a single point, everything extraneous falling away.

"How long?" she asked.

"Six hours to build. Maybe seven." He looked up, pen frozen mid-stroke. "Katya, I need to tell you—the surgery won't be comfortable. We're placing hardware next to an active implant that's designed to detect tampering. If Hemlock's tech flags the countermeasure during installation—"

"It won't."

"You don't know that."

"I know you." She held his gaze. Something passed between them—brief, electric, unacknowledged. Jun's ears went pink. He looked away first.

"I'll start building," he said.

The surgeon's name was Brann. She operated out of a converted storage unit four levels below Sub-Tier Nine, where the heating ducts groaned like wounded animals and the light was perpetually amber. She was sixty, gray-haired, with steady hands that had once worked on syndicate athletes before a dispute over payment had cost her license and two fingers.

She didn't ask questions. She looked at the implant, looked at Jun's countermeasure—a tiny, ugly miracle of soldered wire and stripped circuitry—and nodded once.

"On the table. Shirt off. This will hurt."

Katya lay back. The table was cold against her spine. She fixed her eyes on the ceiling, on a crack that ran like a river across the concrete.

The incision was small—clinical, precise. Brann's remaining fingers moved with the muscle memory of decades. Katya felt the pressure, then the strange sliding sensation of the implant being seated in the subcutaneous tissue of her upper arm. Then Jun's countermeasure, tucked beside it like a whispered secret.

"Hold still," Brann said. "I need to verify they're not interfering with each other."

A scanner passed over her arm. Katya watched the readout: two signals, layered. The Hemlock implant broadcasting its demands. Jun's device answering with lies—fabricated heart rate, invented cortisol levels, a fiction of calm that her racing pulse would have betrayed.

"Clean," Brann announced. She began closing the incision with synthetic adhesive. "Keep it dry for six hours. Do not—under any circumstances—impact that area during your race."

"Understood."

Katya sat up. The adhesive pulled at her skin. She pressed her fingers to the small raised bump beneath—the implant and its shadow, Hemlock's eye and Jun's blindfold, watching each other from inside her body.

"Thank you," she told Brann.

The old woman didn't look up from cleaning her instruments. "Don't die tomorrow. Bad for my reputation."

The gym was quiet that night. Devram had gone to make arrangements—credentials, transport, the thousand small logistics of inserting an independent athlete into a syndicate spectacle. Jun was in the back room, running final diagnostics on the countermeasure, communicating with Katya's arm via a short-range signal that made her skin prickle.

Katya sat alone on the training floor, her Kongsberg M-68 disassembled across her lap. She cleaned each component by feel. Bolt carrier. Firing pin. Trigger assembly—the one Jun had rebuilt, its surfaces smoother than anything she'd carried in five years. She could feel the difference. The weapon wanted to shoot clean. It wanted to perform.

She thought about the glacier course. Fifteen kilometers of carved ice, two shooting stages, live rounds. Liora Vance on the other side of the starting line, sleek and sponsored and augmented in ways the world wasn't supposed to know about.

She thought about the targeting reticle she didn't yet know was coming—the image that would arrive in a few hours on her personal terminal, Vance's crosshairs settled over her heart, timestamped to tomorrow, sent from inside the very network that had invited her to compete.

She didn't know it yet. But the silence of the gym had the texture of something waiting. The recycled air tasted metallic. Somewhere in the walls, a heating pipe ticked like a countdown.

Pust gjennom smerten, she told herself. Breathe through the pain.

She reassembled the rifle. Checked the action. Checked it again.

The terminal on the bench beside her chimed—a single incoming message, anonymous routing, no sender identification. The screen glowed in the dark room.

Katya set down the bolt assembly and reached for it.

The image loaded in fragments: first the crosshairs, precise and surgical. Then the target beneath them—a thermal silhouette, unmistakable. Ash-blonde braid. The familiar outline of shoulders she saw in the mirror every morning. A small bright spot where the reticle's center sat, perfectly placed.

Over her heart.

The timestamp burned in the corner of the image: tomorrow's date. The exhibition match. And the routing signature—the routing signature threaded through Hemlock's own internal network like a snake coiled in the walls of a house, smiling at the family inside.

Someone inside Hemlock had sent this. Someone with access to Vance's targeting systems. Someone who wanted Katya to see exactly what was waiting for her on that glacier.

The rifle lay in pieces across her lap. The implant hummed quietly beneath her skin, broadcasting its false calm to receivers she couldn't see. Outside, Nova Oslo glittered and froze.

Katya stared at the crosshairs over her heart and did not look away.