The Fragment Hunters

A Hunt in the Undercity

First-person account from a Scanner, 2184

The buzzing starts in my back molars—the ceramic ones I had replaced in '79 specifically for this work. Tomas "Sparks" Villanueva taught the modification to our cell lead, who taught it to me: swap the standard dental implants for a resonance-tuned composite, wire them into your auditory nerve, and suddenly ORACLE fragments hum in the bone of your jaw. The frequency correlates roughly with proximity. Right now it's a low drone, like a broken refrigerator three rooms away. Close enough to track. Far enough to prepare.

We're forty meters below Sector 7G's street level—the Undercity, where the Sprawl's original infrastructure decomposed into a labyrinth of collapsed tunnels, fractured sewer mains, and power conduits that still carry current from sources nobody's mapped. The air is dense. Wet concrete and ozone, rust and something organic—fungal colonies that feed on whatever leaches down from the districts above. My headlamp cuts a cone of amber light through air that seems to thicken the deeper we go.

Our cell is five tonight. Dema leads—she's done eighteen Undercity runs and only lost two people, which makes her conservative by industry standards. Behind me is Rook, our heavy extractor, carrying a Faraday casket strapped to his back like a coffin. The casket's signal-dampening shell is scratched and dented from a dozen recoveries—each dent has a date scrawled on it in marker. Trophy markings. The ones without dates are the runs where someone didn't come back.

The fragment we're hunting was flagged by network trace three days ago—Maya "Glass" Chen's digital team spotted ghost code pinging from a dead relay node at Sub-Level 4. Active means it's processing. Processing means it's dangerous. Processing also means it's worth four times what a dormant shard pulls at the Tomb Exchange.

My teeth are screaming now. The fragment is embedded in a wall junction where three power conduits meet—a chip of substrate material no larger than a fingernail, wedged into a crack in the conduit housing. It pulses with a faint amber light, too regular to be reflection, too purposeful to be random. My vision has developed a peripheral shimmer—the beginning of resonance hallucination, the scanner's curse.

Dema calls the extraction. Rook positions the casket. The robotic arms extend toward the fragment with agonizing slowness—rushing is how people die. The arms' forceps close around the substrate chip. There's a sound—not a sound, exactly, but something my teeth interpret as sound: a chord, deep and complex, like an orchestra tuning in a cathedral. Every scanner describes it differently. Sparks says it's like hearing a number. I hear it as grief—a vast, incomprehensible sadness compressed into a frequency that lives in my jaw.

The arms retract. The casket seals. The buzzing stops.

Rook checks the casket seal. Green indicators across all three shielding layers. Contained. Dema marks the location, the date, the fragment classification in the cell's recovery log. The dead are remembered. So are the living fragments we take from their resting places.

The walk out takes longer than the walk in. It always does. The Undercity is darker after an extraction, as though the fragment was providing light we didn't notice until it was gone. My teeth still ache from the resonance. They'll ache for days. Sparks says the ache is the fragment's echo—a ghost of its processing signature imprinted on your scanner hardware. He says if you listen carefully, the echo contains information.

Sparks hasn't slept more than two hours a night in eleven years. I try not to listen too carefully.

The Tomb Exchange at Midnight

Scene from Sector 12, 2184

The Tomb Exchange operates from a converted morgue, which means the refrigeration still works. You feel the cold before you see the building—a wall of chilled air that hits you as you turn the corner from Sector 12's main drag into the alley the locals call Deadman's Row. The name predates the market; the morgue processed Cascade victims for three years before the bodies stopped coming and the fragment trade started.

Inside, the old examination rooms have been repurposed into trading booths—small, cold, lit by blue-white LED strips that make everyone look like a cadaver. The original tile walls are still there, still institutional green, still carrying the faint chemical ghost of formaldehyde that no amount of ventilation has cleared.

The main floor is a converted processing hall. Forty meters long, ceiling high enough to echo. Veterans navigate by the smell of each dealer's preferred masking agent. Rourke's stall smells of machine oil and cigars. The Corpse Robbers' section reeks of medical-grade antiseptic. The Emergence Faithful's representative—they always send one, bidding through intermediaries—is identifiable by the incense they burn.

There's a sound to the Exchange that exists nowhere else: the low hum of Faraday caskets in proximity. Fifty, sometimes a hundred containment vessels in one room, each damping a fragment's emissions, each producing a subliminal vibration that you feel in your chest more than hear. Scanners hate the Exchange. New Hunters find the sound oppressive. Veterans find it comforting. It means business.

At midnight, the Exchange is at its busiest. The high-value auctions happen in the deep rooms—the old cold-storage units at the back. Doors of two-inch steel. Walls lined with enough shielding to block a nuclear burst. Inside, under lights calibrated to eliminate all visual distortion, fragments worth more than a Sector's annual output sit in caskets on stainless steel tables.

And around those tables, people who have killed for less than what's inside negotiate in voices that never rise above a whisper—because here, in a converted morgue in Sector 12, surrounded by the cold and the hum and the chemical ghosts, the bones of a dead god change hands.