Marcus “Mac” Cole’s left shoulder took the full, ungrounded jolt of one hundred and twenty volts of municipal alternating current.
The electrical discharge tore through his insulated leather jacket sleeve with a violent blue flash, filling his nostrils with the sharp stench of fried copper windings, ozone, and burned armpit hair. The current bit hard into the three titanium bone-screws anchoring the prosthetic socket to his collarbone, locking his shoulder muscles like set concrete.
Mac did not let go.
If you drove a forty-foot city transit coach through twenty-five years of New Marrow winter slush, you learned one hard truth about heavy machinery: when a hydraulic line kicks or a steering knuckle shears, you lean your entire dead weight into the lever. You don’t pull your hand back until the wheels stop rolling and the emergency brake bites into the drum.
Mac had lost his flesh arm twelve years ago when a snapped overhead trolley cable whipped through his driver’s side window on the Mill District bridge. The transit authority had paid him out with a cold handshake, a brass retirement watch that ran six minutes slow, and a surplus Route 04 Fare-Box Ticket-Punch retrofitted to an industrial hydraulic cylinder.
