CHAPTER FOUR

  Buck got off the lev two stops early.

  It was not a conscious decision at first. His feet just carried him off the train and onto the lower pedestrian tier where the light was dimmer and the buildings leaned in closer. This part of New Cleveland smelled more honest. Oil. Ozone. Cooked protein that had once pretended to be something else.

  The bar sat half a level below the street, wedged between a closed clinic and a pawn shop that specialized in obsolete implants. No name that mattered. Just a symbol over the door that flickered when it felt like it. Buck had been coming here long enough that the bartender did not ask questions and the security cam pretended not to notice him.

  Inside, the soundscape shifted. Low music. Muted conversation. Glass on composite. A few patrons stared into their retinal feeds, but most had them dimmed or pushed to the periphery. This place attracted people who wanted to be present without having to explain why.

  Buck slid onto a stool and rested his forearms on the bar.

  “Usual,” the bartender said, already reaching.

  Buck nodded.

  The drink arrived. Real alcohol, diluted but not fake. He took a sip and felt the edge come off the day, just slightly. Enough to think without spiraling.

  He had joined the military because he owed money.

  That was the clean version. The one that fit on a form.

  The longer version was messier. His past was a blank space where parents should have been. No origin story. No lineage. Just a file with redacted sections and a note that said unresolved displacement event.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  You grew up fast like that. Learned not to ask questions that did not have answers. Learned that belonging was conditional and always temporary.

  The military had offered structure. Clear rules. Clear consequences. Do this and survive. Fail and do not. There was comfort in that. Violence was honest in a way corporate life never was. Someone was trying to kill you or they were not. There were no performance reviews in a firefight.

  He took another sip.

  When he left the military, he had told himself he was done with clean lines and simple math. Investigations had felt like progress. Internal Affairs felt like penance.

  Relationships had always been harder.

  Monogamy still existed, technically. Some people chose it the way others chose to collect antiques. Buck had tried it once. It had not ended well. Too many expectations packed into too few people. Too much pressure to be someone’s everything.

  Most people he knew moved differently now. Networks instead of pairs. Agreements instead of assumptions. Gender treated as context, not destiny. Attraction as something fluid and situational. Buck fit easily enough into that world. Pansexuality was not an identity so much as a default.

  You liked who you liked. Labels were administrative, not emotional.

  That did not mean it was easy.

  He had loved people. He had cared deeply, intensely, briefly, sometimes all at once. He had been loyal when loyalty was requested and distant when it was not. Still, relationships failed. Not explosively. Quietly. People drifting out of sync. Priorities misaligned. Someone wanting more certainty than Buck could offer.

  He knew why.

  Intimacy required trust in continuity. In tomorrow looking enough like today that promises mattered.

  Buck had never trusted that.

  He finished his drink and ordered another.

  Across the bar, a couple argued softly about time allocation and emotional bandwidth. At a corner table, three people laughed too loudly at something none of them would remember tomorrow. Life, managed and constrained, still leaked out in moments like these.

  Buck watched a bead of condensation slide down his glass and thought about reflexes.

  In the military, you learned quickly that hesitation killed. If you waited to confirm intent, you were already dead. There was a saying. Whoever pulls the trigger first controls the story. Buck had internalized that deeply. Act. Decide. Move.

  He had carried that instinct into the rest of his life, sometimes without realizing it.

  He left relationships before they could leave him. Took assignments before someone else volunteered him. Asked questions before he was told not to.

  He had shot first more than once. Metaphorically. Sometimes literally.

  The bartender glanced at him. “You good.”

  “Yeah,” Buck said. “Just thinking.”

  “That’s usually the problem.”

  Buck smiled faintly and drained the glass.

  Outside, the city waited. His apartment was another ten minutes by foot. A small box in a tower owned by an entity that technically employed him and definitely watched him.

  Still, it was his.

  For now.

  He stood, paid, and paused at the door. For a moment, he felt the echo of that earlier clarity again. Not adrenaline. Not danger. Just awareness. The sense that his life had always been a series of corridors and he had learned to walk them faster than most.

  He stepped back into the night and headed home.

  Whatever had shaped him, whatever had rewritten parts of him before he had words for it, it had made him very good at surviving systems that were not designed for kindness.

  And that, Buck suspected, was why the system kept him around. At least for now.