The Ghost City is city gleaming in luxury.
Its heart was the Spire, a needle of polished alloy and refractive glass scraping a perpetual hole in the smog-choked sky.
Inside, the air was filtered, the lights were gentle, and wealth flowed in silent, digital rivers.
The Spire's inhabitants were the city's architects, its shareholders, its beautiful, disinterested landlords.
They lived in the future, and the future was clean.
Beneath its shadow, sprawled in the valley of its runoff and the lee of its discarded ambitions, festered the Junkyard.
It wasn't an official name.
It was a Spire-dweller's slur, uttered with a wrinkled nose.
The place where the poor, the unwanted, the dangerous, and the stubborn lived.
A geopolitical afterthought, outside the neat jurisdiction maps, ignored until it became an eyesore.
And in recent years, it had begun to itch at the Spire's periphery vision—a chaotic, vibrant, threatening stain.
But the name Junkyard was also, in its way, brutally honest.
Ghost City was the crucible of aether-tech innovation.
Every year, every season, new models rendered the old obsolete.
Faster conduits, smarter appliances, more efficient glyph-chips.
And the Spire's waste had to go somewhere.
The Junkyard was the city's landfill for magic.
Mountains of dead refrigerators humming with residual cold-glyphs.
Rivers of shattered screens flickering with ghost images.
Piles of conduit shells, their cores scavenged, their housings waiting to be reborn.
And everywhere, the spent aether-batteries, leaking dormant potential into the soil like toxic rain.
From this refuse, a brutal, ingenious economy had grown.
It was a world of brutal entrepreneurship, where everything had a price and loyalty was a currency spent carefully, often once.
Smugglers ran underhand deals, trading the latest pilfered aether-tech prototypes for credits paid in blood or untraceable data.
Hitmen used jury-rigged conduits, their spells unstable but brutally powerful, granting a fleeting, deadly advantage.
Ghost Coders in flickering neon dens forged identity tags and performed illicit glyph-modding, stripping corporate safety limits for a street fighter's raw power.
Augmenters, part surgeon, part sculptor, equipped amputees and the desperately ambitious with home-made augments welded from scavenged parts, their work painful, brilliant, and prone to catastrophic failure.
And then there were the Chemists.
Their most popular product was Glow.
A viscous, faintly luminescent liquid shot into weary veins.
It was a degraded, street-corner cousin to pharmaceuticals like Q-Serin.
The injection brought a wave of sharp, needle-like pain as crude aether strands fused with the nervous system, followed by a chemical flood of artificial serotonin—a cheap, burning euphoria.
But its true selling point was the whisper that followed the high.
Users swore it didn't just make you feel good.
It made you feel them.
Beings from outside.
Echoes in the static between worlds.
Most dismissed it as nonsense, the ravings of addled minds.
But in the Junkyard, where reality was built on corporate discard and ghosts flickered in dead screens, how could you be sure?
The mystery was part of the price.
The Spire's elite pretended the Junkyard didn't exist.
They looked down from their heights at the filth, the smoke, the lawless frenzy.
Yet their hands were subtly, profitably dirty.
They ignored the people, but they coveted the system.
Their trash became the Junkyard's treasure, and the Junkyard's services—the smuggled data, the deniable violence, the untraceable mods—always, inevitably, found their way back upstairs.
The two worlds were not separate.
They were predator and scavenger in a grim, symbiotic dance.
The Spire owned the sky.
But the Junkyard, built from its cast-offs and fueled by its waste, held the ground.
***
The air in the room was thick, a cloying soup of copper, cordite, and the ozone-tinge of discharged conduits.
Silence had returned, deeper and more profound than before the violence.
It was the quiet of a switch being flipped to 'off.'
Nex sat in the room's only intact piece of furniture—a plush, ugly sofa that had somehow avoided the spray of blood and shrapnel.
He leaned back, the leather creaking under his weight.
With a deliberate, unhurried motion, he pulled a cigarette from a case, tapped it twice against his knuckle, and placed it between his lips.
A flick of his thumb on a worn lighter, a small, defiant flame in the gloom, and he drew in the first acrid taste of smoke.
Around him, the client's security detail lay where they had fallen.
Their blood was a dark, spreading map on the expensive carpet.
The job was done.
The package—a small, sealed data-core—rested heavy in the inner pocket of his coat.
He exhaled a slow, grey plume, watching it coil and drift toward the ceiling, merging with the lingering haze.
His gaze, flat and devoid of triumph or remorse, drifted past the carnage to the room's large window.
Outside, the world was washing itself clean.
Snow.
Gentle flakes drifted down from a seamless, featureless gray sky.
They settled on the grimy window ledge, on the rusted fire escape, slowly burying the filth and grit of the city below.
A silent, indifferent erasure.
He took another drag, the ember glowing bright in the dim room.
He wasn't thinking of the dead men.
He was thinking of the cold, of the weight of the data-core, and of the transfer notification that hadn't yet chimed on his secure line.
He was a man in a blood-warm room, watching winter fall, waiting to be paid.
The soft scuff of boots on marble cut through the quiet.
Nex didn't turn, but the tension in his shoulders eased a fraction.
He recognized the step.
Echo descended the grand staircase, her movements economical and sure, avoiding the dark splashes on the white steps.
She held a velvet sack, its weight pulling at her arm.
Her sharp eyes swept the room once, cataloging the scene, before settling on Nex.
"Done sweeping the area?" Nex asked, his voice a low rumble that didn't disturb his exhale of smoke.
"Top to bottom. These guys were… decorative," Echo replied, her tone dry.
She hefted the sack, and it chimed softly with the sound of metal and stone. "And loaded."
She loosened the drawstring, tipping it slightly to let Nex see the glint of gold bullion and the cold fire of cut jewels within.
No credit chips.
Untraceable, physical wealth.
Her gaze then flicked past him, sharpening. One of the newer recruits—a kid with wide, adrenaline-bright eyes—was carefully placing a sleek, corporate-grade conduit into his own pack.
The device's housing was pristine, a single status LED still blinking a soft, sleepy green.
"Hey," Echo's voice cracked through the room like ice.
The recruit froze. "If you bring that with us, they'll pin us to the wall. It's got a tracker, a serial, and probably a dead-man's signal."
She let the warning hang, letting the stupidity of the move sink in.
The kid's face paled. "Get only the valuables that don't hum. No aether-signatures. No tech. Just the shiny, dumb stuff."
She didn't wait for his apology.
Her eyes met Nex's for a second—a silent communication.
Amateurs.
Then she cinched the sack of gold closed, the only currency here that couldn't talk.
The stillness wasn't the calm after a storm; it was the quiet of a deep, cold lake.
Nex, who was usually a coiled spring even at rest, just sat there, a statue exhaling smoke into a slaughterhouse.
The disconnect was jarring.
"...Did something happen?" she asked, her voice lowered.
It wasn't about the job.
Something was off with him.
Nex took a long, final drag from his cigarette, the ember flaring like a tiny warning beacon in the dim room.
He crushed it out on the sofa's arm—a ruin on a ruin—and finally spoke, his gaze still locked on the falling snow.
"...I just realized it's gonna be Christmas soon."
Echo blinked.
Once.
Twice.
She looked from the blood-slicked floor, to the dead men, to the bag of stolen jewels in her hand, then back to her boss's profile.
"What?" The word came out flat, utterly stripped of comprehension.
In the Junkyard, you didn't mark holidays.
You marked your survival days.
Celebrations were for people with futures, not for rats in a maze who knew the cheese was poisoned.
Birthdays weren't wished for, they were grim milestones, reminders you'd somehow dodged the reaper for another miserable year.
The concept of "Christmas" belonged to the Spire—to people in clean sweaters drinking spiked cocoa, oblivious to the gutter below.
And here was Nex, sitting in a room that looked like a butcher shop after a bad day, watching the snow cover up the evidence, getting philosophical about tinsel and goodwill.
The sheer, breathtaking absurdity of it hung in the air, thicker than the smoke.
Echo didn't know whether to check him for a concussion or start laughing.
"Don't tell me you're still wishing for Santa to slide down a pipe to give you a gift," Echo said, her voice laced with a dry, incredulous humor.
The image was too ludicrous—Nex, the most feared enforcer in the sector, waiting for a mythical fat man with a sack.
Nex's head turned slowly.
His eyebrows knitted together, carving a deep furrow of pure, offended disbelief. "What? No."
The idea was so alien it barely registered as a joke.
Gifts were things you took, with interest.
"Then why," Echo pressed, tilting her head, "is the concept of Christmas taking up space in your head rent-free? Between the bullets and the blood, you found room for carols?"
Nex looked back out the window, the fight leaving him as quickly as it came.
The snow was falling harder now, a determined white curtain. "…I just thought that time moves too fast," he muttered, the admission sounding strange even to him.
One minute you're a kid in the grime, the next you're sitting in a dead man's parlor, the year almost gone.
A slow smirk spread across Echo's face.
It broke into a soft, genuine giggle—a rare, clear sound in the grim room. "What are you getting all sentimental for? You getting old?"
She nudged the velvet sack of jewels with her boot. "Maybe you should try being the Santa, then. You've got the loot. Minus the sleigh. And the cheer. And the moral compass."
"What do you mean getting old!" Nex snapped back, a flicker of genuine irritation in his eyes.
"I'm still quite young!" It was a defensive, almost childish retort, utterly at odds with the scene around them.
But as his indignation faded, her words, spoken in jest, didn't vanish.
Maybe try being the Santa then.
They curled in the back of his mind, a strange, idle seed planted in bloody soil.
Absurd.
Impossible.
Yet, for some reason, the idea didn't leave him.
***
The idea, absurd as it was, proved stubborn.
For three days, between contract negotiations and territorial disputes, the thought would surface in Nex's mind like a persistent, unwanted bubble in tar.
Being Santa.
What did that even mean?
Giving things?
To who?
And why?
The only person who had ever given him anything without a price attached was long gone, buried in Junkyard memory.
The closest thing to a paternal figure he had left was Jack.
The old armorer was a relic, a fixed point in the chaotic spin of the world.
If anyone could talk sense into him—or, more likely, mock him back to his senses—it was Jack.
So Nex found himself winding through the cacophonous, neon-drenched arteries of the elusive Neon Bazaar.
He ignored the hawkers selling bootleg spell-apps and the glow-peddlers whispering of visions.
His destination was a quieter corner, a reinforced steel container marked by decades of gang tags and smelling of gun oil and honest rust.
Inside the Talon shop, under the warm glow of incandescent bulbs, Jack was running a cloth along the barrel of a disassembled pre-Aether rifle.
His hands, scarred and steady, moved with a precision that defied his age.
He didn't look up as the door hissed shut, but his shoulders tightened just a fraction—a recognition of the particular weight of the footfalls.
Nex stood there for a moment, the chaotic hum of the Bazaar muffled by the thick walls. How did you even start this conversation?
"Jack."
The old man glanced up, his dark eyes, sharp and unaugmented, missing nothing.
He took in Nex's uncharacteristically unsettled posture. "You look like you swallowed a coin. What's left of the Red Dogs giving you trouble?"
"No. It's… something else." Nex shifted his weight, the hydraulic servos in his prosthetic leg whining softly.
He forced the words out, blunt and clumsy. "If a person… wanted to give things away. Not for a job. Not for a debt. Just… to give them. How would you start?"
The cloth in Jack's hand stilled.
He slowly set the rifle barrel down.
For a long, silent moment, he just stared at Nex, his face—a roadmap of old violence with its bisected eyebrow and crooked nose—utterly blank with disbelief.
"What?" The word was a dry, cracked thing.
A laugh, the kind born of sheer, bewildered absurdity, threatened to erupt from him.
It visibly strained against the sheer force of his will, turning into a choked, wheezing sound in his chest.
He coughed, covering his mouth with a gnarled fist, his shoulders shaking not with mirth, but with the effort of containing it.
He looked at Nex, the King of the Junkyard, standing in his shop asking about charity, and for the first time in decades, Jack, the unshakeable, was at a complete and total loss for words.
Jack's bewildered amusement died before it could fully form, cut short by a glint of polished wood in the dim light.
His sharp eyes, which had tracked a lifetime of weapons and the men who carried them, locked onto the object Nex was holding.
Not with menace or greed, but with a cradling care that was utterly foreign to the man.
"What," Jack said slowly, his dry voice flattening further, "is that?" A calloused finger, stained with gun oil, pointed not at Nex's face, but at the box in his arms.
Nex glanced down, as if he'd forgotten it was there.
"Oh, this?" He hefted it slightly.
It was a slender case of some dark, oiled wood, inlaid with a subtle geometric pattern in a lighter grain.
No lock, just a simple brass clasp.
It looked expensive, out of place against Nex's scarred knuckles and worn leather coat.
"It's a bonus. From the hit job three days ago. Client said it was a 'family heirloom,' too hot to keep." He shrugged, a massive roll of his shoulders. "I'm not a fan of knives. Was going to ask you to take care of it. Melt it down, maybe. The handle looks like it might have some decent silver."
Melt it down.
Jack's gaze flicked from the box to Nex's face, searching for any hint of irony.
He found none.
With a sigh that spoke of profound patience, he held out his hands.
Nex passed the box over.
The weight was all wrong for mere silver.
Jack laid it on his workbench, the warm wood glowing under the shop's single bulb.
He released the clasp with a soft click and lifted the lid.
Nestled in a bed of frayed black velvet lay a tanto.
It was not a Junkyard shiv or a corporate-issue combat blade.
This was artistry.
The blade was a seamless, flawless black, a type of treated alloy that drank the light rather than reflected it, leaving only a cruel, sharp gleam along its razor edge.
The tsuba guard was a minimalist circle of darkened steel, and the handle was wrapped in alternating bands of black silk and what looked like aged, polished whalebone.
It was beautiful the way a predator's skeleton is beautiful—functional, lethal, and perfected by time.
Jack did not touch it.
He simply stared, his expression unreadable.
The air in the shop seemed to grow still, the distant hum of the Bazaar fading away.
Here, in this room of greased metal and handmade brutality, the knife was an alien artifact.
He looked from the gleaming black tanto back up to Nex, who was watching him with mild curiosity.
He was going to melt this for scrap.
Jack closed the box slowly, the click of the latch sounding like a period at the end of a dangerous sentence. "My advice," he said, his voice dropping to a gravelly, conspiratorial low, "is to never, ever say that where a collector can hear you."
His eyes held Nex's for a beat, conveying the sheer sacrilege of melting such a piece. "I'll take care of it."
He turned, the elegant box disappearing into the shadowed recesses of the back room, hidden away from the casual, destructive world.
When he returned, he wiped his hands on a rag, the moment of reverence gone. "So. Where were we again?" He leaned against the workbench, crossing his arms over his chest. "Ah, right. The giving of gifts. You plan to give a gift to someone?"
Nex shifted, the uncharacteristic uncertainty returning. "…Something like that, yeah."
Jack's eyes narrowed. "For a birthday?"
"Hmm… Not really?" Nex said, more a question than an answer.
"But a gift," Jack pressed.
"Yeah."
"Man or woman?"
Nex blinked.
The thought hadn't gotten that far. "Both?" he hazarded.
Jack's eyebrow—the one not bisected by a scar—inched upward. "Unisex?"
Nex felt the conversation slipping away. "Ahh… kind of?"
A grunt that might have been a laugh escaped Jack.
He pushed off the bench and vanished back into the storage room without another word.
There was a sound of a heavy lock disengaging, the scrape of metal on metal.
He emerged a moment later, hefting a long, hard-sided polymer case.
It was dust-free but worn at the edges, the kind of case built for serious transit, not display.
He placed it on the bench between them with a solid thump.
"For your… unisex… gift-giving needs," Jack stated, his tone utterly deadpan.
Curious, Nex flipped the latches and lifted the lid.
Inside, nestled in grey foam, was a shotgun.
But not just any shotgun.
It was a Benelli M4, a model of brutal, mechanical elegance.
Its lines were clean, aggressive, and utterly functional.
The black finish was a matte, non-reflective parkerization, the polymer stock solid and unadorned.
It was a tool from a different era, one where reliability was god and aesthetics were a byproduct of purpose.
Nex's breath caught.
His eyes, usually so flat and assessing, went wide with a shock of pure, unadulterated recognition.
He'd only ever seen this gun once before, a decade ago, flickering on the shattered screen of a junked media player in a raider camp.
It had been part of a chaotic, loud movie from the Old World, a relic of a lost time.
He'd thought it was fiction, a prop.
Yet here it was, real and heavy and impossibly cool.
He reached out, his fingers hovering over the receiver, not quite daring to touch it.
Jack watched the reaction, a faint, almost invisible smirk touching the corner of his ruined mouth.
He'd found the answer.
You didn't give philosophy or sentiment in the Junkyard.
You gave something that said: I see you, and this is for the work.
And nothing said that quite like a legendary firearm that could blow a door off its hinges.
"Well?" Jack rasped. "Unisex enough for you?"
"What the hell, old man," Nex breathed, the words filled with a reverence that was usually reserved for functional violence, not objects. "You've been sitting on this the whole time?"
His gaze was locked on the Benelli as if it might vanish.
In the Junkyard, such a piece wasn't just a weapon; it was a fragment of a dead world, preserved in lethal amber.
It carried a legend.
And legends, he knew well, never came free.
Every breath here had a tariff.
Something this clean, this iconic, would carry a price that could fund a small gang war.
He steeled himself, his voice dropping back into the familiar, grim territory of negotiation.
"So. How much is it?"
Jack didn't smile.
He named a figure.
It was a clean, round number, spoken with the flat finality of a guillotine blade dropping.
The sound of it hung in the oily air of the shop.
Nex's jaw went slack.
He stared at Jack, then back at the shotgun, then at Jack again, his brain visibly short-circuiting as it tried to reconcile the number with the physical reality on the bench.
"…All of it?" he finally managed, his voice uncharacteristically thin. "The whole bonus from the hit… it'd be gone."
All the jewels and gold Echo had bagged easily will cost that damn shotgun.
The cushion against lean times.
The war chest.
He'd walked in here vaguely thinking about giving presents.
Now he was staring at the cost of a single, perfect one, and it was the equivalent of burning a luxury skiff on a ceremonial pyre.
The romantic, absurd notion of being Santa Claus crashed headlong into the brutal economics of the Junkyard.
You could give gifts, it seemed, but the first gift had to be your own security.
***
Nex walked back to the Steel Talons' hideout with his thoughts in a deeper tangle than before.
He'd left the legendary shotgun with Jack, telling the old man to hold it—a temporary stay of execution on his finances.
The weight of the idea—giving—felt heavier than any weapon.
He pushed through the reinforced door into the familiar chaos of the main room, the smell of stale glow, oil, and cheap synth-food washing over him.
He'd taken two steps inside when a small, ferocious weight slammed into his back, wiry arms locking around his midsection in a grip that was surprisingly strong.
"Nex!"
It was Mags.
The pre-teen had been lying in wait, a silent shadow by the door, and now clung to him like a squirrel.
Her face was buried in the back of his worn leather coat.
She didn't say more.
She never did.
But the tackle, the tight hold—it was a full paragraph of relief and scolding in one gesture.
Nex staggered a half-step, then stood still, letting her hold on.
He didn't pat her head or say anything soft.
He just absorbed the impact, the simple, wordless claim.
This was a language he understood better than philosophy.
In that moment, the confusing conversation with Jack crystallized into one clear, solid truth.
The old armorer was right, in his own way.
A shotgun was a unisex gift.
But more importantly, a gift wasn't about the price tag on a legendary relic.
It was about the need.
The fit.
His gaze drifted to the weapon rack on the far wall.
Among the modern aether-rifles and carbines hung his old, beloved combat shotgun.
A workhorse, not a legend.
Its stock was scratched, its barrel worn, but it was clean, reliable, and it hit like a truck.
He barely used it anymore; the battlefield was shifting, filling with conduit-users who could attack from beyond buckshot range.
But Mags… Mags followed him like a shadow.
She watched everything.
She maintained his gear with a reverent focus.
She wasn't ready for the complexity of conduits or the precision of rifles.
She needed something simple.
Brutal.
Direct.
Something that said I trust you with this, and with yourself.
When Mags finally let go, peering up at him with her serious, too-old eyes, Nex jerked his chin toward the rack.
"C'mere."
He walked over, took the shotgun down, feeling its familiar, comforting weight.
He ejected the chamber, checked it was clear, and held it out to her horizontally, not as a tool, but as an offering.
"Merry Christmas, or whatever," he grunted, the words awkward in his mouth. "Don't blow your foot off. And clean it every time you use it."
He didn't explain the holiday.
He didn't mention Santa.
He gave her a piece of his own history, a tool for her survival, and in doing so, he understood the old man's lesson perfectly.
The best gifts weren't the most expensive.
They were the most necessary.