​Chapter 19. Don’t Borrow Trouble

Mark woke on the old couch to the smell of old books and herbs. Waking up felt strangely light — no familiar hangover fog drowning his thoughts. For the first time in weeks, he had slept rather than fallen into that heavy, suffocating void.

Only the soft crackle of the heater and the rustle of pages filled the air. Pale morning light seeped into the room. Mari sat in the armchair by the window, wrapped in a blanket, reading one of her ancient books.

“Good morning,” Mari said, putting the book aside. “Tea or coffee? The real thing.”

The world felt unnaturally sharp, too present. She brought him a cup — hot, fragrant. Mark took a sip, and a living warmth spread through his chest. Mari watched him from across the room. Quiet, fragile — the only person in the whole Ring who hadn’t turned away from him.

“Derek will be waiting for us at noon,” she said once he’d finished. “We should go.”

They walked together through the Old City. Last night’s snowfall had covered the grime and trash, making the streets look cleaner, quieter. Here, closer to the headquarters of the Legion, the chaotic street trade faded away, replaced by neat, military-style graffiti bearing the white cross. The people they passed watched them with wary eyes.

Mark felt uneasy. For twenty years of service — first in the police, then in the Center that no longer existed — he’d lived by one simple, unwritten rule: cops and gangs do not mix. A kind of pragmatic non-aggression pact built on mutual indifference. Cops came to record the bodies the gangs left behind. The gangs, in turn, didn’t touch cops as long as they stayed out of the way. Equilibrium.

Now he, a former cop, was walking straight into the heart of one of the most organized gangs in the Ring. Voluntarily and unarmed. He had no idea how Derek and his people would take him. Whether they’d see a man looking for help — or a former enemy who’d stepped onto their turf and deserved to disappear down some industrial shaft. His old police instincts crawled under his skin, buzzing with warning. But he kept walking, because for the first time in twenty years he actually had something like a direction — a purpose.

Mari walked beside him with a calm, steady ease, as if this was her own territory.

“Aren’t you afraid?” he finally asked.

“You shouldn’t fear people, Mark,” she replied without looking at him, “but what they believe in.”

Mari led him to a small, quiet café in the very heart of the Old City — nothing like the filthy dives Mark was used to. It was clean here, and it smelled of real coffee and fresh pastries. The clientele looked far more polished than the crowd at Babylon — better clothes, soft voices, restrained manners. A place where deals were made.

Out of habit, Mark scanned the room. Three seconds were enough to piece together the picture. Security. A lot of it, and not very subtle.

A guy by the window stared at his old comm so intensely it looked like he was trying to burn a hole through it — yet he hadn’t swiped the screen once. The girl behind the counter was polishing a glass with the desperate zeal of someone trying to erase fingerprints. And the two muscleheads by the door were working real hard to look like they were just having breakfast.

Amateurs. Trying too hard. But there were many of them, and this was their turf.

Five minutes before noon, the door opened and Derek walked in. Mark knew at once who he was. Old instincts — buried under layers of alcohol and despair — stirred for a brief second.

A man in his fifties, lean, short-haired, carrying himself with the posture of someone who’d had discipline drilled into his spine. Eyes tired and piercing — the eyes of a man who’d seen war and survived it without losing his mind.

He came to their table, nodded to Mari, sat down. There was no hostility in the way he held himself, no suspicion — he already knew exactly who he was dealing with.

“So, you served too?” Derek asked as if he’d already heard the answer. “I can always tell my own. Infantry?”

“Yeah,” Mark replied — and that single word carried twenty years of buried memories. “Infantry.”

The waitress brought coffee — real, bitter. Mark pulled himself together, feeling Derek’s heavy, assessing stare. Mari kept silent, leaving the floor to him.

Derek stayed silent, looking through Mark, through the café walls, thirty years back into the smoke and fire of besieged Shanghai.

“Out of our platoon,” he said, his voice rough, “I was the only one who came back in one piece. Not a scratch.”

He took a sip of the hot coffee, and the moment of shared, wordless memory dissolved. His gaze hardened again — businesslike, sharp. He set the cup down and looked straight at Mark.

“Mari says you’ve got problems with ghosts from the City. Start talking.”

“They’re not ghosts,” Mark began, deciding to tell the truth while cutting out the most insane parts. “We ran into several cases. Killings. Very clean, very professional. The perpetrators were borgs.”

Derek nodded in understanding.

“Borgs,” Derek repeated, testing the new word for accuracy.

“So that’s what they call them in the City? We ran into one of those. A couple of years back — small skirmish over a warehouse in the South. Lost two dozen men before we managed to bring it down.”

He paused, as if listening to the echo of that fight.

“Rusty, our tech, cracked it open afterward. Inside the skull — not a gram of meat. Pure synthetics. Very efficient piece of shit. Built-in shotgun and rifle, too. So yeah, I know exactly what kind of borgs you mean.”

Mark leaned forward. The warm camaraderie of veterans evaporated — replaced by interrogation.

“If you managed to bring one down, then it has to have weak spots. What are they? How did you do it?” he pressed.

Derek gave a crooked smirk.

“They don’t have weak spots. We dropped it because we hauled an old pre-war machine gun into its path and held the trigger down. You catch a dozen fifteen-millimeter rounds in the chest — you’re not dodging that, whether you’re human or a goddamn machine. We lost seven men just hauling that beast in and loading it.”

He looked Mark straight in the eyes.

“Listen, cop. There’s one rule in the Ring: don’t borrow trouble. Those borgs aren’t our problem. They’re the City’s weapon. They come in, do their job, and disappear. We don’t mess with them. We don’t mess with them. We try not to cross paths with them. Makes life easier. Keeps you alive.”

Derek set the cup down. The sharp clink of porcelain on saucer cut through the silence like a firing command. His voice dimmed, as if speaking from the past.

“I saw how it all started. During the war in Shanghai — the first infantry augs from BioTech. Crude, early models, nothing like the ones now. But even then... reaction times faster than any human’s. They could already block pain. In the torso, at least. You can’t switch off the nerves in the hands — you still need to shoot. I saw one charging with his guts hanging out, still firing until his head got blown clean off.”

Derek fell silent, giving Mark a moment to take in the picture.

“So listen carefully. If one of them walks through that door right now, sits on our table, and takes a shit on it — I won’t touch him. None of my people will touch him. Got it? That’s not our war. Those are the City’s ghosts, and the City can deal with them on its own. We don’t get involved.”

Derek’s words hit the table with the weight of a verdict. We don’t get involved.

Mark felt something coil inside him — a dull, helpless rage.

“So it’s not your war, huh?” he shot back, his voice sharp and bitter.

“And when the City runs another ‘cleanup,’ wiping a sector off the map along with everyone living there — that’s not your war either? You don’t give a damn?”

He’d seen the reports himself. They called it “renovation.” Mostly in the half-empty districts up north in the Ring.

Derek’s face darkened.

“That’s politics, cop. Filthy business. It doesn’t concern us as long as—”

He didn’t finish. Mari, who had been silently sipping her coffee, turned her head toward him. Just looked. And that alone was enough.

Derek froze mid-sentence. His fingers tightened around the cup. He drew a deep breath, gathering himself, and met Mark’s gaze again. His tone had changed. No more dismissiveness — only a heavy, bitter fatigue.

“They... are pushing the Barrier,” he said quietly. “First, they announce a ‘renovation.’ The police set up cordons, cutting off a piece of the Ring. They seize the territory, rewire it into their network. People usually flee, and the ones who don’t... I have no idea what happens to them.”

“And what happens if the City announces a renovation of, say, your generator?” Mark pressed.

Derek stared down at the table.

“Then it stops being a renovation,” he growled through clenched teeth. “And becomes a war. A real one.”

He took a sip of what was now cold coffee.

“You do understand,” he went on, “a generator isn’t just some humming box that keeps you up at night. It’s our power — the heart of the sector. People don’t pay us to protect them from other gangs. They pay us for light, for heat, for keeping their workshops running, for water in their homes. The generator is our treasury, our throne, and our god all at once. As long as it’s ours, the Legion is strong. If we lose it... we’re just a bunch of guys with rifles.”

And he added, stealing a quick glance at Mari:

“So yeah — we shoot, they shoot. A lot of people die. And in the end they’ll take it anyway, because they have ghosts. But we’ll make damn sure they have to fight for every inch tooth and nail.”

He said it almost apologetically, aware that none of it fit the image of the hardened veteran he projected.

“That’s why this whole thing with the borgs pisses me off. I don’t want to draw attention. We don’t need a cleanup.”

Mark felt the first crack appear in Derek’s armor.

“Sooner or later the City will come for your generator,” he said. “Yours is the closest to the Barrier right now. They’ll cut off this sector, then the rest. And when that happens, the Legion dies. So this is your war too.”

Derek was silent for a moment, his face turning into a stone mask. He absently rolled the empty cup in its saucer.

“Yeah. You’re right,” he finally admitted. “Sooner or later they’ll come. But that’ll be ‘sooner or later.’ You and your borgs — that’s now. What good are you to me? I help you, and tomorrow a squad of those borgs shows up at my café door because you led them here. That’s the best-case scenario. Worst case — the City uses it as a pretext for another cleanup. The Legion gets a war it’s not ready for. Why the hell would I want that?”

He leaned closer to Mark and whispered:

“You’re nothing but trouble, cop. No benefit.”

Mark had nothing to say.

Mari calmly finished her coffee, set the cup down on the saucer — a soft click that echoed off the café walls. Then she looked at Derek again through the visor.

The confidence, the hardness, the patronizing tone — all of it vanished. A childish, superstitious fear flickered across Derek’s face — the face of a man who had survived fire and death, the leader of a powerful gang. He dropped his gaze to the table, to the empty cup, unable to endure her silence.

And with him, the entire café suddenly fell still. Even the waitress stopped wiping the counter and froze in an unnatural pose.

“All right,” Derek finally forced through clenched teeth. He still avoided looking into Mari’s eyes.

He pulled a small, old wrist-comm from his pocket and placed it on the table.

“For emergencies. Now get out.”

They stepped out into the snowy street. Mark got what he wanted — contacts, information — but something unpleasant and cold coiled in his chest.

Derek, the iron-hard leader of the Legion, the man who’d just refused him, had changed. He had obeyed her, and the fear in him was almost tangible.

Why?

Questions sparked one after another in Mark’s mind. Who was she really? Derek’s former lover, who knew his secrets? A liaison with other, more powerful gangs the Legion didn’t want to provoke? Or... something else? Something that could make a battle-hardened veteran avert his eyes like a frightened child?

He’d escaped one nightmare — but what had he allied himself with now?

The talk with Derek left a sour aftertaste — a mix of hope and even deeper dread. Mark had gained an ally, but the price of that alliance was unknown.

Mari didn’t lead him back to her shop. Instead, she took him farther toward the edge of the Old City, where there were no cafés, no homes, into sectors whose numbers Mark didn’t even know.

Into the dead zone.

Here the Ring showed its true, ancient face.

They walked down streets buried under untouched snow, past the skeletal husks of burned-out cars sunk into the ground. Buildings here were dying slowly, almost beautifully. The walls of old factories, stripped of their windows, looked like the skulls of giants staring into the gray sky with hollow sockets. Stunted, twisted trees grew through cracks in the concrete. Their black, frost-covered branches braided into strange patterns, like gothic script.

The wind sang through the empty workshops, its sound like organ music played in a ruined cathedral. Everything was wrapped in silence and snow. There was a grim poetry in this aesthetic of decay and abandonment — a place where time came to a halt and died, leaving behind only the beauty of withering.

“Do you have a place, Mark?” Mari asked. Her voice sounded unusually crisp in the cold air. “A place that pulls you in more than any other? Your personal axis mundi — the center of your world.”

Mark stayed silent, turning over her strange question in his mind. He sifted through the places he once thought were his.

The sterile old apartment in the City where he’d lived before all this? No. Not a life — an existence inside a white, soulless cell. The memory of it made him sick.

Eliza’s apartment? The epicenter of his collapse, a cracked reality. Her place, not his. He’d been a temporary guest there — a ghost in someone else’s home.

“Babylon?” He’d spent every evening there, but that wasn’t a place of strength — it was a place of weakness. A corner where he drowned his ghosts in cheap liquor.

He ran through all the options and realized he had none. He was a ship without a harbor, drifting between other people’s realities.

“I don’t know,” he finally said. “I guess not.”

Mari stopped and turned to him. The gray, snowy sky reflected in her visor.

“Everyone has such a place, Mark. It doesn’t have to be a home. It can be anything. Something you’re tied to emotionally, somewhere you feel...” She paused. “...real.”

She walked on through the crisp, crunching snow, and he followed, listening to her quiet, measured voice.

“People call them by different names. Places of power. Bridges to a former life, or to those who are gone. They keep you anchored in this world, give you a point of balance while everything else collapses. Anchors of memory and feeling. Lines that connect you to yourself. Lose them — and you start to fall apart, as if stripped of gravity.”

Then, without turning around, she added:

“Maybe you’re afraid to admit it. Or maybe you’ve forgotten it. Where does it pull you when you stop holding yourself together?”

Her words hung in the sparkling air like ice crystals, dragging into the light something he’d locked up and labeled as forgotten. He tried to answer. He genuinely tried.

The war? Yes — there had been moments of absolute, terrifying reality. But that wasn’t his anchor. That was a festering burn, not a home one longs to return to.

Or...

He stopped in the middle of the snow-laden, deserted street. The memory didn’t return as an image — it came like a system crash, a sudden reboot of the mind.

The dreams he’d had after the war. They always returned in fragments: smells, flashes of light, screams. He’d written them off as nightmares — a PTSD diagnosis — and buried them under layers of cynicism and exhaustion that numbed every memory.

But the moment he closed his eyes, they surged upward.

Destruction. Blood. Glass towers folding inward, as if someone were crushing the city in a steel fist. Dust and fire billowing up into the sky, blotting out the sun. People below screaming, running, shoving one another — tiny figures scattered by chaos like dry leaves. Their voices merging into one long, drawn-out shriek, and that sound vibrated through his bones.

He was the wind driving the fire. The force shattering concrete. The horror they screamed from. In every crack of breaking stone — his own breath. In every cry — his own voice.

Why had he destroyed?

The war had chewed through his will, day after day, methodically, like a dull machine. His hands — to hold the rifle. His legs — to march where they told him. His eyes — to find the target. He lived someone else’s life. An invisible, cold will moved him, pressed his finger onto the trigger. None of the killing was ever his choice. It was an order from somewhere above.

The smell of gun oil on the rifle. The sickly sweet smell of blood on the snow. Steps sinking into mud. Toes freezing in his boots, and still he had to keep going — because the order said so. No choice. Only motion along someone else’s design.

That’s when he understood: the enemy wasn’t the one in the sights. The enemy was the machine that forced him to fire.

The system that turned a human into a weapon, a life into a function. Armies — just crowds of puppets tearing each other apart. The real monster wasn’t across the front line. Even generals and politicians were pawns, same as Mark. The enemy lived in the very principle of obedience.

He buried that thought deep, but the rebellion never died. It lived in him all this time. And when the war ended, he saw the same pattern everywhere: in orders from superiors, in corporations, in the structure of the City, in technology. All of it was an extension of that same grotesque hierarchy. The weapons had simply changed: no longer rifles, but programs, patches, injected thoughts, propaganda wired straight into the brain.

He refused the patch not because he feared the tech — but because it was just another order in a different wrapper. Another attempt to climb into his mind and move his hands from the inside. And he said no. Alone, ridiculous, hopeless — but no.

There it was: his true place. His axis. Not faith or hope in some benevolent ruler, but resistance to the very idea of coercion. That eternal resistance from which chaos is born. The destruction of their neat, obedient world, glued together with hierarchy and submission.

That’s why Eliza had stunned him that first night on the roof. She hadn’t guessed his thoughts — she’d heard them. Read them in him like a forgotten, buried dream. She looked at the pathetic, exhausted cop, Mark Kane, and saw his true nature. Her words about destroying the City were neither seduction nor test — they were his own thoughts.

“Yes,” he finally answered. “I want to destroy the order.”

Mari stopped and turned to him. Her visor reflected only the snow between them. Did she even have eyes at all?

She watched him for several seconds, and then—for the first time since he’d met her—a faint but unmistakable smile touched her lips. It wasn’t sympathetic or joyful. It held a calm, quiet satisfaction at having received exactly the answer she’d wanted.

And that thought unsettled him more than Derek’s questions.

“And you?” he finally asked. “What’s your place — that bookstore?”

“No,” Mari laughed. “The store is just a vault, an archive. I like reading other people’s lives—tragedies, dramas, unravelings... But that’s not my place. My place is where stories end, and where they begin. In the rupture. Come. I’ll show you something.”

She led him again through the dead streets, but this time in a different direction, deeper into the industrial zone. They entered the stairwell of a ruined apartment block—a dark, blind shaft choked with debris and hunks of broken concrete. The building hadn’t even been completed. The door to the roof had long been torn off its hinges, and the wind howled through the opening.

They stepped out under the open sky—and Mark saw something he had never seen before, something he couldn’t have imagined.

A graveyard.

Stretching almost to the horizon, merging with the sky, lay rusted, snow-buried skeletons of military machines. Tanks with useless barrels pointing up at the heavens. Armored carriers like the husks of giant extinct insects. The frames of transporters, large drones resembling the bones of prehistoric birds. Thousands of tons of dead, decaying metal drowned in white silence.

A mute, frozen army that had lost its war not to an enemy, but to time. An endless field of death.

“Look,” Mari said. She wasn’t smiling. Her face behind the visor was completely serious. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

“What’s beautiful about a junkyard?” he muttered.

“It’s not a junkyard,” she replied. “It’s peace. The end of all grand designs. The end of all rage and hatred. Empires, wars, machines—everything eventually comes to this. To death.”

The endless white field was reflected in her visor.

“You want to destroy, Mark. But have you thought about what comes after destruction? This. Silence. And this is the most beautiful thing in this world. This is true deliverance.”

They walked back through the heavy quiet of the snow-drowned industrial zones.

The hum of the generator, the shouts from the market, even the moan of the wind—all the sounds of the world stayed somewhere far behind. For the first time in this endless month, Mark didn’t feel like a ghost chased by other phantoms. There was cold clarity in his mind. Today had ripped him out of his personal samsara.

They reached the bookstore in silence.

“I need to get my things,” Mark said.

Mari nodded.

“I’ll be here. Come back.”

He went to Eliza’s apartment one last time. The place no longer stirred pain or longing—just emptiness. A hollow shell, a stage prop from a past that had been a lie from the very beginning.

He packed his few belongings into an old bag. Then he opened the nightstand drawer where he had once found the graveyard of cuffs and took his own — just in case. The battery had long since run dry, the screen dead.

Before leaving the room, he looked out the window. Gray, miserable buildings under wet snow. The sight no longer filled him with despair. He went downstairs to his car — forgotten and written off by the City — and climbed inside. Even the Ring didn’t want it; everyone here preferred older models.

He plugged the cuff into the console—not to connect to the network, but just to activate it. The display flickered for a second, showed a three-percent charge, then died again. But it was enough. The engine came alive.

“Bookstore,” he told the car. “Old City.”