Vale was in trouble.

Actually, Vale was fucked.

Her entire body trembled as she whiteknuckled the cracked rubber grips of the exercise rack. Sweat beaded on her forehead, blackened her gray sports bra, and trickled down the hard contours of her stomach. She could feel her back slipping, millimeter by millimeter, down the slickened PVC cover of the foam pad, she knew she had to reposition herself or this was it, but she couldn’t move. If she did anything, anything at all, she’d be finished.

Fuck, she thought.

Her abdominal muscles both screamed in pain, yet felt oddly hollow at the same time. She was bent ninety degrees at the waist, her knees pulled up, giving the impression of someone sitting in an invisible chair six feet off the ground. She couldn’t move, and she couldn’t finish the set, and she sure as hell couldn’t give up. Not like this.

“Fuck,” she hissed through teeth clamped shut.

There were maybe a half-dozen others scattered around the smallish, dimly lit gym deep in the heart of the Axenrod district. A rather large crowd, considering it had just hit 6:00am a few moments beforehand. But to be honest, it was roughly the same number of people in here no matter the time of day.

In truth, it wasn’t a great gym. The equipment was a bit run down. The showers ran cold about half the time. And it was damn far away from her apartment over in Fleming. And it wasn’t that much cheaper than the three or four shiny, well-stocked, almost perpetually empty gyms close by, either in Villerset or even Ronmoe – even though that didn’t matter as much, seeing how her job paid for gym access.

But this was a vet gym, and nobody gave a fuck about what anybody else was up to. Everyone was in and out, and focused on their own stuff, and didn’t pay attention to what anyone else was doing except in a weird, subconscious was that let them know when someone was waiting to use the equipment they were on and it was time to get moving.

And all of them had served, which meant something to Vale...although at this point, she wasn’t quite sure what.

She closed her eyes, and took as deep breaths as her body would allow. Nobody cares, she told herself. Nobody is watching you.

She knew that. She knew that deep in her core. And yet her brain started sprinting off, daring her to try and stop it.

Ninety-eight, she reminded herself. Meanwhile, her brain conjured up the images of the others in the gym. A pair of young men, very obviously brothers, one with a prosthetic arm, the other with a prosthetic leg, had stopped their work on the heavy bag to watch her. The grizzled whitehair in the corner, the one who only ever did dumbbell work, squinting in her direction across the way. The young woman, who looked barely old enough to even have served, stopped in the middle of her leg press, face turned towards Vale, one large blue eye fixated on the older woman shaking in the leg lift rack, the other one hidden beneath the carbon-fiber regrowth plate that had been grafted over the other half of her face.

Ninety-eight, Vale thought. Ninety-eight, and they don’t give a shit about you, but what will they think if you can’t hit a hundred you dusty old bitch.

She lowered her knees slowly, then raised them slowly, even though it meant she was that much more likely to fail the set.

Ninety-nine. Don’t let them see you suffer. They’re watching you (no they’re not), they’re judging you (they don’t even know your fucking name), they’ll wonder why you’re even here, there’s no way you’re a vet, there’s no way you fucking served, shaking like a dog shitting itself on a frozen winter morning-

Vale lowered her knees. She could feel her back slipping even further down the cracked foam behind her. Her stomach, hollowed out and on fire, wailed at her.

“Fuck you,” she hissed. “Fuck you, you geriatric cunt, you finish this fucking set or I swear to God-“

The curses and threats continued, some verbally, and some internally, until, inch by inch, she brought her knees back up until her waist was ninety-degrees once more.

One hundred fuck you I did it, she yelled inside. I did it, and fuck you, brain, you were no help at all.

Her brain – almost frighteningly – had no response. Vale lowered her legs and let herself fall the few feet to the ground. Then, even though she was in more pain than she’d felt in quite a while, she toweled off the device and headed over to the showers as if she didn’t have a single care in the world.

***

The water was absolutely freezing. Vale glared at the showerhead, almost as if daring it to keep on spitting frozen needles at her, go on and keep it up and see what happens. But the nozzle didn’t give a shit – if anything, she realized as she quickly soaped and shampooed herself, if anything it got even colder from the start to the finish.

She toweled herself off quickly, then pulled on the brown pants, tan shirt, and the short cut brown jacket of the Gleason Security Corps before checking herself in the mirror.

No makeup – even though the salesgirls in Denjohng always tried to get her to take their free samples...up until she gave them the glare that, although it didn’t work on showerheads, definitely worked on airheads. A tiny bit of product in her short, gray hair kept it in a decent, professional swoop for most of the day. She leaned closer to the mirror, turning first one way, then the other, putting a finger alongside the long, sharp nose that seemed to be getting longer and sharper by the day, slowly whittled down like an old blade on a whetstone.

She sighed, shaking her head and looking in the deep gray of her eyes, still bright, and still pinched by crows’ feet.

“What the hell are you going to do,” she said, “when you can’t make yourself finish the set?”

“Kill yourself, probably,” said a voice from behind her. Vale looked up to see the girl with the half-carbon face standing a few feet back. She was fully naked and not yet showered, one of the gym’s rough white towels draped lazily over her shoulder. She was tall, maybe even an inch or two taller than Vale’s six-three, the work of the military scientists a lot more subtle than when Vale had gone through the process thirty-five years earlier. Long, and lean, probably engineered for speed, and endurance.

Likely a scout. Likely faster than Vale. Likely not as strong, at least in terms of brute strength. Fifteen years earlier, a younger Vale would have figured she could dismantle this girl without taking too much damage. An older, and wiser Vale knew that her blood would be draining down the showers within only a few seconds...and she knew that even in her prime, whatever that was, she might not have had as much of a shot as she in her prime would have thought.

The girl – no, woman, she was old enough to serve, old enough to get half her face blown off, Vale reminded herself – saw the calculations going on behind Vale’s eyes, and saw the conclusions they came to. She smiled, but out of human reflex more than any actual emotion.

“Well,” she said, “that’s what I’d do, at least.” She turned and headed off to the showers. Vale watched her go, each step like that of a panther ready to take down its prey.

Vale gave herself one last look. “Yeah,” she said drily, “not a bad idea.” She slung her satchel over her shoulder and stalked out of the locker room, anger rising in her, although why that was she couldn’t quite pinpoint the source.

What is it, she thought, heading to the exit. Embarrassment from struggling to finish the same exercise routine you’ve done for the past thirty years? Annoyance at being called out by a younger, more lethal model? Because it’s a fucking Tuesday? What is it?

She nodded a goodbye to the bulk sitting behind the front desk, received her nod in return, and stepped out into Axenrod.

Oh, she thought, spotting the figure waiting for her, psychic premonition. I understand now.

“Hey girl,” Lee said with a wave. “How’s it hanging?”

***

“You sure you don’t want anything to drink?” Lee asked as the waitress put down a frosted bottle in front of him.

Vale wiggled her water bottle, still half-full, at him. He shrugged, then looked up to the woman next to him.

“Can you bring me another one in ten minutes?” he said.

“Sure,” she said. “Anything else?”

“Oh, hmm, I don’t know,” he replied, pretending to look at the appetizers listed at the bar menu. “Oh, you know, I don’t see ‘a personality’ listed here. Do you guys have those? Because my friend here is just in...dire need of one.”

He laughed at his own joke. The waitress replied with a thin smile, but when she saw the blank look of impending violence on Vale’s face, the weak grin disappeared.

“I’ll be back in ten,” she said, then hurried away. Lee, meanwhile, took a long pull from the beer bottle and then tilted his head back appreciatively, letting out an exaggerated “ahhh”, as if it was the first comfort he’d had after a full day of sweating it out on the farm.

A half-dozen or so comments fought to break free from Vale’s mouth. In the end, she shook her head, shook them away, and pulled out her tablet. After a few taps and swipes, she put it away.

“There,” she replied. “I pulled all of my metrics since the last time we saw each other-“

“When was that,” Lee replied, running a hand through his short, curly red hair.

Vale ignored him. “-and sent it to your office. And as far as a personalized report-“

“Two years ago,” Lee said. “Right around...wait...”

“-I’m sleeping fine. No dreams – the data will back me up there-“

“Four years ago?” Lee continued. “Are you telling me it’s been four years since we’ve had a check-in?”

“-and no missing time. Obviously, I don’t have anything to confirm that, other than you know how much I...” she trailed off.

“Fear that?” Lee asked.

“How much I prefer to avoid that,” she said icily. “I’ve got nothing to report, and there’s nothing new for you to learn. So are we done?”

He stared at her coolly, a dopey half-grin on his face even though his eyes – which she knew could see right through a person – pierced her, probing for weakness, probing for the thing that he could bring back to his superiors and use to convince them to finally put her down like the rabid dog he thought she was.

He snapped his fingers. “Three years,” he said. “Do you know how I know?”

“Fuck, why are you here,” Vale winced, looking down at the deeply scratched enamel on the fake wood of the table.

“Because right afterwards, I realized that the girl I was dating reminded me of you,” he said with another long drink. “Completely ruined the relationship for me. The wedding was a week away, I had to call it off. Burnt a lot of bridges with that one, jeez.” He frowned, his eyes looking up to the ceiling as if searching for an answer there. “What was her name again?”

Vale slammed her palms down on top of the table. “Lee-Three,” she snarled. “What the fuck do you want.”

The playful grin turned to ice. Bradlee Leigh Lee, named by the meth-addicted mother that Vale knew he still had issues with, tapped the top of the table four or five times. Then Lee laughed and sat back, regaining his composure as he did so.

“You had a little trouble finishing your set this morning, huh?” he said coolly, regarding her over the edge of his bottle as he took another deep sip.

Fire, blinding fire bloomed deep in Vale. How did he know? Did he have cameras inside the place? Informers? Vale thought of the half-human, half-carbon-faced woman from the showers. Is she working for Lee? Oh, girl, I’m going to fuck you up, I don’t care that I’m practically fucking obsolete, I’ll-“

“Sucks,” he said. “Getting old. I’d imagine, at least.”