Chapter 1

My name is Michael Carter, and I'm a mortician. My job is to help the dead leave this world with their dignity intact. But three months ago, I started noticing things that were anything but dignified.

Under the skin of some corpses, blurry strings of numbers would flicker by like a cheap LED screen glitching out. At first, I thought I was hallucinating from stress. That changed today, when I received a very special "body"—Richard Lane, the richest man in the city. The thing was, the morning business news had just reported him showing up at a public event.

What was even creepier, when I leaned in closer, I clearly saw a blood-red stream of data flash under the skin behind his ear: [User ID: 00749 | User Value: 420 million dollars | Status: Forced Purge]. At the end of the data stream was an encrypted file packet. For some reason I still can't explain, I used the internal network to crack it open, and my heart dropped straight into an ice pit. There was only one list inside, and my girlfriend Eva Lane's name was right there on it.

The smell of disinfectant felt like a shroud made just for me, wrapping around me every second of every day. It seeped into my nose, my skin, even my hair, until I carried that cold scent of death everywhere I went.

I snapped on a pair of latex gloves with a dull pop. A body lay on the metal cart beneath a white sheet, the outline sharp and clear. Standard adult male, no visible injuries. The intake record said sudden brain death.

A neat little label.

Over the past three months, more and more of these "clean" bodies had been coming in. No signs of struggle, no pain on their faces. They looked like phones that had simply powered off when the battery died, calm in a way that made my spine go cold.

What bothered me even more was the "static" in my vision.

At first, I thought it was just mental fatigue from spending too much time around corpses. While preparing a young programmer who had supposedly died of sudden cardiac arrest, I saw a string of green numbers flicker beneath the skin at his temple, quick as a heartbeat monitor blip. I rubbed my eyes, and the numbers were gone, leaving behind nothing but waxy pale skin.

After that, the hallucinations got worse and worse. Sometimes it was a wrist, sometimes a neck. Those numbers flashed by so fast they looked like ghost code living inside the bodies. I didn't dare tell anyone. They'd just think I'd lost it. In this line of work, being labeled mentally unstable is the last thing one wants.

Until today, when they rolled in this body.

"Michael, be careful. That's Richard Lane," my supervisor Frank Miller said in a hushed voice, sounding weirdly awed, like the man lying here wasn't a corpse at all but a chairman who might sit up any second and start signing contracts.

My heart skipped a beat.

Richard Lane? The same man who'd been on the business channel this morning, running his mouth about the company's ten-year plan?

I yanked off the sheet.

It really was Richard Lane. That confident face that had appeared on countless magazine covers was now still as a plaster statue. His skin still had the elasticity of a living person. I could even feel the faintest trace of warmth. That didn't match a body that had supposedly been dead for over two hours.

My eyes drifted to the spot behind his ear.

Right there, beneath the skin beside his carotid artery, a line of crimson data suddenly lit up. It was clearer and steadier than anything I'd seen before.

[User ID: 00749 | User Value: 420 million dollars | Status: Forced Purge]

My stomach seized, and cold acid surged up my throat. This wasn't a hallucination. It was real. Some kind of mark I couldn't begin to understand.

Worth 420 million dollars? Forced purge?

Those words together felt like a pair of icy tweezers, ripping out every nerve in my brain tied to something called common sense. Fear crawled up from the base of my spine and froze my limbs in an instant. It felt like this world was running on a set of rules I knew nothing about, a cold-blooded system that put a price on every person and wiped out the ones it didn't want like bad debt.

Eva's face popped into my head before I could stop it.

When she smiled, the corners of her eyes curved like little crescents. After work, she'd hand me a cup of warm water and carefully wipe the disinfectant smell off me. In this gray swamp of a life, she was the only bright thing I had.

If everyone had a price tag on them... then what about her?

That thought turned my whole body cold. My fingertips wouldn't stop shaking.

I had to find out.

I forced myself to calm down and focused on Richard Lane's body again. At the end of that crimson data stream was a tiny blinking cursor, like a program someone forgot to close. It looked like some kind of interface.

The funeral home's internal network was physically isolated, which meant it was supposed to be completely secure. I had an admin account. Maybe... maybe I could...

A crazy idea started taking shape in my head. I looked around. Frank had already gone to another prep room. The whole morgue held only me, Richard Lane, and the rows of silent "residents" sleeping in the freezers.

I grabbed a handheld data entry device off the utility cart, took a deep breath, and aimed the connector at that blinking cursor.