The elevator doors slid open with a metallic hiss.Rian did not move immediately. He stood at the threshold, one hand resting against the cool steel door frame, scanning the lobby the way he used to scan dark alleys in Shoreditch for drunks who might roll him for the forty quid in his jacket pocket. Old instinct. The kind you did not learn from a system, the kind you grew from years of having nothing to protect you but your own two eyes.His right eye, the one that no longer belonged entirely to him, did its work automatically. Overlapping geometries of threat data bloomed across his vision like frost spreading on glass.Three figures. Positioned near the coat check, the bar, and the far emergency exit. Each one still as furniture. Each one wrong, the way a photograph of a smiling person is wrong when you notice their eyes are not smiling at all.Neural rifles. Plasma-based. Each one trained on you.[Survival probability: 31%.}Thirty-one. Rian exhaled slowly through his nose.Three m