Wraith (Debt Collector 10) Read Online Free PDF

seriously messing with my plan to get my shit together enough to do the things I need to do. Important things, like putting right the multitude of wrongs that debt collectors have wrought… including the one that killed my father. I need to stay even to stay in the game. Collecting was supposed to get me back to level, but as of the moment, I feel like I’m still on the cusp of drowning.
    I hold up my left palm and tap it to activate the screen implanted in my hand. It’s one of Sterling Cybernetics’ latest models, with a built-in encryption mode for non-traceable calls. I upgraded shortly after my father’s death, thinking my nighttime activities needed another level of security. The itch inside me won’t wait, so I tap in Jax’s number, the one I keep only in my head and use only when necessary.
    The message is short. Need to meet. Looking for private charity.
    Jax has a business card that says Private Investigator, but she’s more like a fixer with connections to the east side mobs and a talent for slashing into secure government records. She used to work for my father. She started working for me the day I killed my boyfriend Glenn. The day I discovered what I was.
    Jax is the only one who knows everything. Which would be dangerous if I didn’t keep her flush with untraceable debit cards and have a mile-long list of her involvement in the illegal life energy market. Of which I’m part. We keep each other honest. Or dishonest, as the case may be.
    I watch my palm screen, waiting for a response, but it doesn’t come. It’s still early, and Jax does her work at night, but the jitters are making me a wreck, and Sterling’s executives are starting to trickle in. I thought coming into the office might distract me, but the need to pay out won’t leave me alone. I swipe the bag with my suit off my desk and head for the elevator.
    Sterling Cybernetics fills the entire building: floor after floor of designers hololinked with their screens and massive banks of computers powerful enough to run a small nation. The first floor contains the prototyping facility that turns all that brain trust into electronics, sinews, and the biomechanical interfaces between them. Production occurs all over the world, but the mechanical beating heart of the cybernetics industry is in LA… along with the life energy industry that competes with it to save and enhance lives.
    I watch the floors tick by. What I want lies below all of that, in the restricted-access basement where the cutting edge inventing happens. And not a small amount of work that isn’t strictly approved by Sterling corporate.
    When the elevator stops, a swipe of my palm opens the code-locked doors, revealing a second set with the company slogan: Working today for a brighter tomorrow. A retinal scan gains me access into the lab. It’s crammed with the usual assortment of cybernetic limb testing stations, electronics-strewn benches, and micro-implant bio-containment hoods. Even though it’s early, the lab-coated cyberneticians are abundant. The acrid stench of electrical work is mostly swept out by the over-pressured vents. It’s only a Class Three clean room, but the sterile feel and stark lighting always makes the lab seem like a hospital—only the new creations birthed here are biomechanical rather than human. At the same time, it feels like home. I practically grew up here, watching my father revolutionize an industry and battle the rise of debt collectors as the solution to the nation’s medical crises.
    I stride past workstations filled with crates of mechanical fingers, bins of micro-circuitry, and jars of bio-electric gel until I reach the small, unmarked silver door in the back. I tap a code into my palm screen and hold it up while I speak into the embedded security camera.
    “Alexandra Morgan Sterling.” I pray the shadows under my eyes and the sunken craters of my cheeks won’t throw the recognition software. But I’ve come in looking worse plenty of