The barrel rested against the back of his neck, cold in a way that wasn't just physical, and the hand gripping his collar hadn't shifted even a millimeter.
Proxy stayed very still and ran the situation, because stillness was sometimes the only available form of movement. He couldn't reach the handgun before she pulled the trigger. He couldn't move forward because she had his collar and he had no advantage on her, which reduced his options to a list so short it barely qualified as a list.
Nyx was somewhere away dealing with three people, and he wasn't going to call for her, because calling for her would divide her attention, and dividing her attention meant one of those three people would exploit the opening and put something through her, which he rejected as an unacceptable outcome.
What he had was the deck, which wasn't much unless you knew how to use it, and he did.
He reached for it the way he reached for everything, leaving no visible trace, as if the absence of motion itself were a tactic. His neural interface extended into the space behind him.
"Tell me what you want," he said, choosing the phrasing carefully, because asking "why" would imply curiosity and asking "what" implied negotiation.
Her grip on his collar adjusted slightly, a minimal correction that still counted as movement. "Isn't it obvious?"
"If it were obvious, I wouldn't have asked," he replied, which wasn't sarcasm so much as a refusal..
"You have the network, the cameras, the locks. I've been them active since last night."
"Have you," he said, not confirming or denying, because either would give her something.
"And the elevator that doesn't move unless someone tells it to. That's you."
He said nothing, because sometimes silence was the most precise answer available.
Behind him, he processed the signal environment at close range, constructing a map of what she was broadcasting, and it didn't take long to notice she the cyberware in her body.
He could feel the edge of the signal, like catching the corner of a conversation not meant for him. Corporate-grade civilian encryption, the standard issue for subdermal hardware not intended for combat.
He began working on the outer layer, not hurriedly, but not slowly either.
"I'm not here to fight you," she said. "But I want your access of the entire network."
"And the gun," he added, because ignoring it would be dishonest and acknowledging it would force her to contextualize it.
"The gun is to negotiate," she said.
Proxy looked at the crate panel in front of him, at the gouges the blade had carved into it, at the blood the racer had left on the foam.
He kept his voice lazy, the same tone he used whether he was discussing tactics or talking about champagne. "So what does a deal look like?"
"You give me access to the resort's systems. In exchange, I become someone who knows you're up there and doesn't tell anyone."
"That's not a deal," he said, because the difference mattered.
"Nothing in this island is a deal," she said. "You pay in information or you pay in blood. I'm offering you the cheaper option."
From across the fairway came a sound he recognized, the acoustic signature of something going very wrong for someone, an impact with more force behind it than standard augmented combat typically accounted for.
The woman heard it too. He felt her attention change, just slightly, and her grip on his collar tightened by a fraction that was still noticeable.
"Your partner," she said, the implication hanging there.
"My partner's fine," he replied, which was both reassurance and deflection.
By then he identified the inner architecture of the device, a subdermal relay, the kind carried by people who lived connected to feeds and signals rather than people who expected gunfights.
It had a small power cell, modest output, nothing exceptional. The encryption was exactly as he had estimated, and it unraveled in about twelve seconds of focused attention, which felt almost anticlimactic.
He was through, which was to say he now had a trump card she didn't know existed.
The relay was embedded under her skin somewhere along her forearm, flush against the bone, and its power regulator was now effectively his.
He kept his hands loose at his sides and his voice steady, because revealing nothing was still the optimal strategy.
"The resort access isn't something I can just hand over," he said. "You'd have to understand what it is you're asking for."
"I understand exactly what I'm asking for," she said, without hesitation.
"Then you understand that you need someone capable to use it," he said, spelling it out.
"That's my problem. Yours is a gun against your head," she said, as if that settled the matter.
"A gun that hasn't fired yet," he replied. "Which means you don't want to fire it, which means I have room to negotiate," because reluctance was just another variable.
She snorted in annoyance, a slight shade of interest underneath it. She was thinking, and thinking required attention, and attention was a resource like any other.
The fairway went quiet.
He felt her notice it, the grip changing, the pressure of the barrel shifting slightly, her weight redistributing behind him as she tried to interpret what the silence meant.
Nyx had stopped fighting. She needed to know why.
"What did she do over there," she said, and for the first time her voice wasn't entirely steady..
"I don't know," he said, which was technically true.
He pushed through the power regulator, choosing not to be careful.
With a single, decisive overload, forcing everything the cell had into the relay housing at once, unregulated, a spike the device had no capacity to absorb.
The detonation was small in absolute terms, because anything subcutaneous is small, no larger than the device itself, like a lighter igniting inside a closed fist.
But it was inside her arm, and the heat had nowhere to dissipate except through the surrounding tissue, and the flesh over the cyberware split, and the skin blackened at the edges, and the smell reached him immediately, sharp and unmistakable.
She cried in pain and surprise, sharp and involuntary, and the hand on his collar opened.
He was already moving, because hesitation would have been fatal.
He dropped sideways behind the crate as the gun discharged, the round striking the panel exactly where his head had been, foam and metal fragments scattering inward.
He pressed his back against the crate and brought his hands over his head as two more shots followed in rapid succession, one wide, one low, and then nothing, which was either good or very bad.
He waited, because moving too early would negate the advantage he'd just created.
He counted to three, then he leaned around the edge of the crate, carefully but not slowly.
She was already moving across the rough-line bank at the far end of the course, fast despite the injury, one arm pressed tight against her body.
He watched her reach the tree line, and then he watched the jungle close behind her.
He straightened up, because there was no longer a reason to stay low.
Then he saw Nyx coming, which shifted the scene again.
She crossed the fairway from the far end, not running but walking, the pace of someone who had already resolved every remaining variable.
The split lip had dried dark along her chin. Her forearm bled steadily through the sleeve of her jacket, the fabric soaked in a line from the graze.
Her palm bore the mark where the barrel had branded it. Her hair hung loose around her face, streaked with blood that wasn't hers.
She was looking at him in that way, the one she used when she had confirmed something she needed to confirm.
He watched her approach, because there was nothing else to do.
The morning was quiet, the island was quiet, and somewhere in the trees behind her something moved and then stopped, as if reconsidering its own existence.
She walked until she was close, and then she stopped.
She looked at him for a moment without speaking, her face the one she wore when the worst version of a possibility she had feared had, for once, failed to materialize.