Yellow Jacket

In the exclusive layers reserved only for the elites beneath every Green Zone city, where the Nine claim no official jurisdiction, lie the Husk Markets. These are not markets of goods but of bodies, Broken who have been hollowed out and reforged into husks. What is left of their humanity is gone, burned away by augmentation and control systems that strip them down to pure obedience. They breathe, they move, they obey. Each husk is displayed in rows of glass cages, tagged with a price and a guarantee of function. The air is heavy with antiseptic and rust, the hum of generators competing with the faint, hollow rasp of hundreds of lungs. It smells of oil, sweat, and decay, a stench that clings to anyone who lingers too long.

Handlers keep them alive with injections and nanite stabilizers, tuning them like livestock. They watch their charges with the casual detachment of farmers, noting every twitch, every response, every tiny deviation from programming. Husks are trained for service, combat, or specialized tasks. Some are dressed in uniforms, blank attendants who can cook, clean, and fetch. Others are conditioned as soldiers, their bodies augmented and their minds wired for unquestioning obedience, ready to follow the voice of whoever pays their price. Still others are tailored for purposes so grim they are only discussed in whispers. On rare occasions, the process fails: a husk glitches, resists, or fails to comply as intended. When that happens, handlers kill it immediately, declaring the product defective and unfit for sale.

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The Nine deny the existence of the markets, but the Legion secretly fuels them as one of the largest buyers. To the Legion, husks are expendable labor, field stock, and disposable soldiers, tools to be burned through without hesitation. The entrances shift constantly, concealed behind elite-only doors and coded stairwells, but for those with credits, there is always a way in. Customers are always wealthy, always careful, always silent. They move through the aisles with body mods and hushed voices, pointing at cages as though selecting cuts of meat. The transactions are quick, sealed in coded chips and unmarked containers.

Everyone knows the rule: husks are not people. They are voids, tools shaped to fill roles without thought or will. The process that creates them is nearly flawless, designed to erase every trace of what came before. Broken may still cling to fragments of humanity, but husks are something else entirely: empty vessels, stripped clean of memory, reduced to absolute compliance. In the Husk Markets, there is no pretense of soul or self. There are only products.