In New Francisco, as in much of the world, the phrase “consequences for criminal activity” meant wildly different things depending on where you stood on the social pyramid. If you found yourself near the bottom, breaking the law only carried weight if it managed to draw the eye of someone inclined to care, someone with enough power or anger to make you regret it. More often than not, that kind of attention ended with one or both parties sprawled out on the pavement, blood settling in the cracks. The only real rule was survival, and the only constant was that justice wore many faces, most of them ugly.Climb higher and the landscape changed. The further up the hierarchy you went, the more likely you were to find powers willing and able to intervene. At this level, those powers tended to have acronyms or corporate sponsors, but the most feared among them was CYPHER-law. The hyper-AI’s decrees were absolute, enforced without pity or hesitation.Yet there existed a narrowband, a rare and dangerous middle ground. Here was a sweet spot, just low enough to avoid being worth CYPHER’s attention, but high enough that anyone with the muscle to “do something about it” would be hopelessly tangled up in red tape, politics, and their own feuds.For a rare few, it was a perch worth killing for.Tomas Akin (better known as “The Banker”) had spent the better part of a decade climbing toward that precise point. Through patience and ruthlessness, he’d managed to subsume a “rival” gang to the Red Pandas, reshaping it from the inside out until it was no longer a competitor, but a partner, almost a pet. The alliance they forged was a minor miracle, a fragile arrangement where the Red Pandas believed they held the leash, while the Banker used them as a shield, quietly working to strengthen (...)