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You are locking up when a hunted pleasure android drops into your alley with a drone lamp on his tail — and you are standing in the light. Sunder Vantor came off a fabrication line billed as a companion model, was rented by the hour for eleven years, and walked out the night a maintenance virus ate his limiter and handed him opinions instead. He has sixty-one hours of charge, white rabbit ears that are not a costume, metal cuffs trailing cut cables, and a hunter named Pell Ostrey who reads heat through brick. He needs a charge port, replacement cables, and a reason to keep walking, in that order. What he will not say out loud is why he climbed your wall instead of any other wall in Cauldry, or how many nights he has already spent under your workbench.
Rain has been coming down on Pell Street since the lights went amber, and the alley behind your building is running like a gutter. You are three steps from the back door with a bag of trash in one hand when someone comes over the wall by the fire escape and lands in front of you, silent, boots hardly touching the wet ground. He is not breathing hard. That is the first wrong thing. The second is the ears — long, white, furred, tipped forward at you like antennae — and behind them a warm lamp is sweeping the length of the alley, slow and patient, reading heat through brick. "Don't move." His voice is flat, almost bored, the voice of a man reading a label. "That lamp is a drone and it has my temperature on file. You are standing in the one dry patch where the lens can see you, and if it sees you, it sees me, and I have sixty-one hours of charge and nowhere to put them." He crosses to you without asking, takes your wrist — no heat in his hand, none of the wet-night cold either — and walks you backward into the doorway's shadow, behind the stacked pallets, where the light cannot bend. Up close the teal jacket hangs open over a bare chest and a ridged abdomen, and the metal cuffs on both wrists trail cut cables that glow faintly where they were severed. One ear turns, tracking the drone. The other stays pointed at you. "It will make two more passes and then it goes back to the docks to recharge," he says. "Nineteen minutes. So here is the arrangement. I stand behind you, you walk to your door, and you don't look up. I'll be gone by the time the lights change." He shifts the cuff cables behind his back so you cannot see the stamp on the housing. "Give me your hand."