The Neon Vein

Dane Kessler checked and rechecked to make sure his armor was in place.  He ran his fingers through his gelled up dome of hair.  Check.  Lint roller through his sharp shoulders and down his jacket front and sleeves?  Check.  Admiring the creases in his pants.  Check.  He pulled out his weapon from its holster.  Full charge.  Check.  Oxfords meticulously shined and polished?  Check.  He was ready at last to go out into battle and face the stock floor for the first time.  He looked in the mirror one last time before heading out, “You may be a penny stock right now, but soon, soon you’ll be blue chip, baby!”  He straightened the french cuffs of his shirt, making sure the ornate letter K of his heirloom cufflinks would be prominently seen. He grabbed his fading black leather briefcase and zipped out the door.

CURRENT TRADING PRICE: $.85

He stepped out the door and into the morning air of lower Manhattan. The sun caught the edges of his suit just right, making the gray look almost silver — if you didn’t notice the fraying threads at the cuffs. He strutted down the street, briefcase in hand, ignoring the cough of his 1982 Cadillac Seville idling at the curb. The once-proud machine gave a sputtering wheeze before settling into a death rattle. Dane patted the hood like it was a thoroughbred.

“We’re both climbing today, baby,” he said.

CURRENT TRADING PRICE: $.87

The New York Stock Exchange was a venerable institution, older than the skyscrapers that now dwarfed it. Born beneath a buttonwood tree in 1792, when twenty-four brokers scrawled their first pact on a slip of paper, it had grown into the beating heart of American finance. Wars came and went, fortunes rose and fell, but the Exchange endured — a temple to capital carved from marble and ambition.

Dane stood at the periphery of the trading floor and looked in awe. The vaulted ceiling loomed above like the nave of a cathedral, screens and tickers glowing like stained glass windows. The battlefield below was awash in the sounds of moves and countermoves, buying and selling, a liturgy of profit and loss shouted at full volume. He drank it in, relishing the rushing of the other brokers, the clatter of keyboards, the sound of their salvo.

Somewhere inside him, a truth whispered: this was war, and he was a soldier fresh to the field.

CURRENT TRADING PRICE: $.90

As Dane drunk in the sight around him a tall, lanky man dressed in the finest pinstrip suit he had ever seen walked up to him.  Dane was mesmerized, the people on the floor seemed to just part ways to let this man through, like Moses parting the waters.  

“Hello, Dane,” the man said coolly.  His voice was smooth, resonant, with the faintest edge of something like static beneath it.

He was dressed in a three-piece suit of immaculate cut: midnight pinstripes from Kiton, a crisp white shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons from Charvet, a silk tie knotted in a perfect Windsor, and polished black John Lobb Oxfords that gleamed like obsidian. On his wrist, a discreet but unmistakable A. Lange & Söhne glimmered with restrained power.

Dane’s mouth went dry. He had never seen anyone so perfectly put together.

“You… you know me?” Dane managed.

“Yes,” the man replied, adjusting a cufflink engraved with some unreadable symbol. “I’ve been following you with great interest for some time now.”

His eyes flickered neon green for an instant — like numbers racing across a ticker screen — then settled back into an ordinary shade of hazel.  

Dane’s pulse quickened. He tried to remember if anyone had ever told him about this man, but his mind was blank. No name came to him. Just the certainty that he was important.

“I… I don’t understand,” Dane stammered. “Why me?”

“Because,” Serrat said, with a smile that revealed nothing, “you’re hungry. And hunger is the only thing that matters here.”

The crowd surged again, traders shouting, phones ringing, orders barked like cannon fire. But around the two of them, the noise seemed to soften, as though Serrat carried a bubble of quiet wherever he walked.

He rested a hand lightly on Dane’s shoulder. His grip was firm, but not heavy. “Walk with me.”

For the first time since stepping on the floor, Dane felt the ground steady beneath him. He would follow this man anywhere.

CURRENT TRADING PRICE: $1.05

Dane swallowed. “But… I’ve never seen you before.”

“You wouldn’t have,” the man said, smiling faintly. “I prefer to observe until the right moment.” He leaned closer, lowering his voice so only Dane could hear. “And this is your moment.”

The noise of the floor surged again, but Dane barely noticed. The man’s words cut through the clamor like a clear bell.

“W-what’s your name?” Dane asked.

“Mr. Serrat,” he said smoothly, offering his hand. The shake was firm, measured, and strangely cool. “And if you’ll allow it, I’ll show you how to turn all this—” he gestured at the chaos of the trading floor, the shouts and flailing arms, the endless flicker of screens— “into order.”

Dane gripped the hand tighter than he meant to, desperate for the promise in those words.

“But first, time to answer the most important question you will contend with today…”

Dane gulped.

“Do you have lunch plans?”

Dane blinked. Of all the things he expected this man to say, that wasn’t it.

“I… uh, no. Not really.”

“Good,” Serrat replied, as though that answer had already been written in some invisible ledger.  He clapped his hands.  It had a sense of finality to it.  “Then you’ll join me.”

It wasn’t a suggestion.

CURRENT TRADING PRICE: $2.10

The next thing Dane knew, the trading floor was behind them. Serrat glided through the Exchange’s labyrinth of hallways like he had been walking them for centuries, while Dane trailed at his side, clutching his briefcase like a shield.

They passed closed doors stamped with numbers Dane had never noticed before. The further they went, the quieter it became, until even the distant roar of the market disappeared. The air grew cooler, heavy with the faint smell of paper and something metallic.

Finally, Serrat stopped before a steel door with peeling paint and a faded placard: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

Serrat opened it without a key.  Dane figured there was some kind of fingerprint scanner he couldn't identify inside the handle.

“Best seats in the house,” he said smoothly, gesturing Dane inside.

Dane was taken aback.  The basement was like a large amphitheater that seemed to stretch into eternity.  Everything was steel and concrete, a brutalist’s fever dream.  The walls from afar jutted out into graceful and elegant smooth like swoops and curves, almost like an hourglass or an ex Dane once knew.  Up close he could spy that the texture was, if anything, as smooth as sharkskin; rub it the wrong way and you’ll pay dearly.

He wasn’t sure where the light was coming from; it looked as if he were inside a Caravaggio painting.  The shadows held secrets and drama Dane longed to explore.  While the light seemed to reveal everything you’ve been hiding.  Somewhere Dane figured he could tame this light; he knew it would make him shine.

Mr. Serrat stared, a little-too-wide-smile slowly creeping onto his face.  

“Impressed?”

In high school Dane played varsity lacrosse where he was the top scorer.  They called him, “The Great Dane”.  Suddenly he felt very small.

“Yes” he chirped out.  Clearing his voice he mustered a much more manly, “ahem, Yes”.  

Serrat’s smile didn’t falter. “Good. Hunger and humility. Most men never manage both.”

He strode forward, his footsteps echoing in strange syncopation, as if the room itself followed his rhythm. Dane hurried to keep up, the click of his Oxfords sounding too loud, too human.

At the center of the amphitheater, Serrat stopped. There was nothing there — just bare concrete — but the way he stood, hands clasped neatly before him, made Dane feel like he was standing at the altar of some unseen god.

“This is where it begins,” Serrat said softly. “Everything upstairs—the shouting, the sweat, the theatrics—it’s a distraction. Here…” He gestured around at the swooping walls, the shadows that seemed to breathe. “…here is the order beneath the chaos. The rhythm you’ve been straining to hear.”

Dane licked his lips. “And you’ll… you’ll teach me?”

Serrat’s eyes caught the light. For a fraction of a second, Dane thought he saw green numbers flicker across his irises, rising and falling like the graphs on a screen. Then they were hazel again.

“Of course,” Serrat replied. “But first things first. Lunch. No warrior fights well on an empty stomach.”

Dane followed him down a shadowed corridor, the air thick with the metallic scent of paper and ink. They turned a corner too sharply, and for a moment Dane thought they’d walked in on another meeting.

Two figures stood in the amphitheater gloom: a weary man in a rumpled suit and a tall, olive skinned woman whose three-piece cut looked sharp enough to draw blood. They wore pins on their lapels, six-points around an imposing capital M.

“…you’re playing close to the fire, Serrat,” the man was saying. His voice had the flat cadence of someone used to filling out forms in triplicate.
The woman folded her arms, looming over them all. “We’ll be watching.”

Serrat didn’t flinch. He offered them both a smile that was too polite to be sincere. “As you always do.”

And then, as quickly as Dane had blinked, they were gone — or perhaps they had never been there, leaving only the faintest echo of footsteps.

“What… what was that?” Dane stammered. “Who were they?”

Serrat’s smile lingered, though his eyes flickered neon for the briefest instant. “Ah. Compliance. Think of them as… auditors. The sort of men and women who count beans to make sure the giants don’t topple.” He adjusted his cufflinks with practiced ease. “The Exchange has its SEC. We have ours.”

He clapped Dane lightly on the shoulder and moved on, the matter dismissed as easily as a margin call

He extended an arm toward a shadowed stairwell Dane swore hadn’t been there a moment before. The smell of roasted meat drifted faintly upward.

CURRENT TRADING PRICE: $3.33

Mr. Serrat’s smile lingered, neon eyes flickering faintly in the shadows.
“Come,” he said at last, as if dismissing the amphitheater itself. “Even gods pause for bread and wine.”

He led Dane down another passageway, narrower this time, until the raw concrete gave way to polished marble. Suddenly, they emerged into a dining room that had no right to exist underground. Candlelight shimmered against dark wood panels, crystal glasses sparkled, and the faint strains of a violin drifted from nowhere in particular.

A table was already set.  Thin tapered candles set an opalescent glow upon their table. Perfectly rare steaks steamed on porcelain plates, a bottle of Bordeaux breathing beside them. Faceless attendants in tailored suits glided silently between the chairs, pouring water, arranging silverware, never once lifting their smooth, featureless heads.

Dane hesitated. “This is… this is incredible. I didn’t even see them bring the food.”

Serrat slid into his seat as though he had been expected all along. “That’s because they know their role. One thing you’ll learn, Dane — the market doesn’t reward hesitation. It rewards appetite.”

Dane sat opposite him, his briefcase still on his lap like a shield. He tried to laugh, but it came out thin. “Appetite. Right.”

“Eat,” Serrat commanded gently, and Dane obeyed.

The steak was perfect — tender, rich, impossible. Each bite filled him with a warmth that spread to his fingertips. The wine tasted like wealth itself, velvety and intoxicating.

Mr. Serrat wrapped long, slender fingers around an impossibly thin wine glass stem.  He studied the deep burgundy liquid as predator studies prey.  Content with something he took a long drink from it and licked his lips after, contented.  

“Tell me something, Dane.  What do you think we do here?”

Dane set down his fork, suddenly conscious of how loud the silver sounded against porcelain. “Well, we… we trade,” he said cautiously. “Buy low, sell high. Find the gaps, exploit them. Make money.”

Serrat tilted his head, the green digits in his eyes flaring and then dimming. He chuckled softly, the sound warm and dangerous all at once. “That’s what they tell you upstairs. A carnival trick. A puppet show for tourists and pension funds.”

He leaned forward, elbows resting lightly on the linen. “No, Dane. What we do here—what I will show you—isn’t about money. People think money is power. Sure, it can buy a lot.  Gold has always been able to buy an army.  But what power do you know is so easily consumed by flame?  Would you build a house out of paper?  No.  Of course not.  Real power is intangible.  Real power is building your house from steel and rock.  What we do here is far older, far simpler.” He tapped the table once to punctuate his point, and Dane swore the crystal glasses rang a little too long.

“We trade in hunger. In reputation. In the invisible weight that makes men follow one name and scoff at another. Money is a shadow. Reputation is the substance.  Control a man’s appetite and you control the man.  It’s not the heart that moves men; real power is in his stomach, his ego.”

Dane shifted in his chair. His mouth was dry despite the wine. “But… don’t things cost money?  How can you trade in intangibles?”

Serrat cut him off with a thin smile. “Welcome to the conversation.  Is your word your bond?”

For a long moment they sat in silence, the faceless attendants gliding around them, their movements insect-like, carrying empty trays that seemed heavier than they should.

Dane glanced down at his plate. The steak, half-eaten, suddenly seemed rawer than before, red juices pooling like a wound. He forced another bite down, chewing slowly to keep from trembling.

“My word… I mean, sure. A man’s only as good as his word.”

Serrat leaned back, steepling his fingers. “And what happens when no one believes your word?”

Dane opened his mouth, then closed it again.

Serrat’s smile widened. “Exactly. Reputation, Dane. It can carry you further than any vault of gold. Lose it, and you are nothing. Less than nothing.  Some faceless entity….”

The violin music swelled, though Dane couldn’t see anyone playing. The faceless attendants moved in and out like shadows, and he realized he hadn’t once heard their footsteps.

Serrat lifted his glass, swirling the wine. “But here’s the secret: if you have knowledge—if you can see the rhythm of things, tap into the deep pulse of society—you don’t need their belief. You don’t need their trust. You only need to act before they do.”

He drank, the green glow in his eyes briefly pulsing brighter than the candles.  Dane swore he could hear a far off beating heart.

“Tell me, Dane,” Serrat said softly, almost like a dare. “Do you want their respect… or do you want their obedience?”

Dane stared at the candle flame until it blurred. Respect was what he told himself he wanted. Respect was the word you used when you were still asking permission.

“Obedience,” he said. It came out smaller than he intended, then stronger the second time. “Obedience.”

Serrat’s smile touched nothing but his mouth. “Good. Clarity is a rare commodity.”

He set the glass down. The stem chimed once, twice—longer than it should have. “Then let’s begin with something simple. Not a lesson, a proof.”

“A… proof?”

“You will make a call this afternoon. You will not share it. You will buy when I say buy, sell when I say sell. You will not seek approval. You will not ask for trust. You will act.”

Dane swallowed. “Which ticker?”

Serrat tilted his head, listening—no, tuning—as if hearing a melody beneath the violin. “You’ll see it when you step back onto the floor. A little company everyone’s sure is done. Three letters. The color of rot. At 1:42 p.m., it turns.”

“How do you—”

Serrat lifted a finger. “You asked for obedience.”

Dane shut his mouth.

Across the room, a faceless attendant glided forward with a silver tray. Resting on velvet was a fountain pen—old, elegant, black as oil.

“For when you need to write your name,” Serrat said. “People like to see a signature on a miracle.”

Dane reached for it. The pen was heavier than it looked, warm, as if someone had just been using it.

Serrat stood. The attendants dissolved into the walls like steam. “Eat another bite if you like. The market rewards appetite.”

Dane couldn’t. He rose, heart drumming in his throat.

“Mr. Serrat,” he said, “if this works—”

“It will.”

“Then what do I owe?”

Serrat’s neon-green eyes softened to hazel. “Only what you brought to the table.”

“I brought nothing.”

Serrat’s smile sharpened. “On the contrary.”

He gestured toward the corridor. The candlelight guttered, as if obeying him.

CURRENT TRADING PRICE: $5.25

They walked back through marble to concrete, from hush to hum. The Exchange’s roar gathered around them like surf. When they reached the edge of the floor, Serrat stopped.

“One last thing,” he said. “When you speak, speak plainly. When you act, act cleanly. Let them doubt. Let you decide.”

Dane nodded, clutching the pen, the briefcase, the last of his breath.

Serrat’s hand brushed his shoulder—cool, precise, possessive. “1:42.”

The bubble of quiet burst. Phones screamed. Screens bled. Men moved like weather patterns on a doppler.

Dane found his terminal, fingers hovering, eyes scanning the storm. And then—there it was. A ticker everyone had written off, three ragged letters drowning in red. Something in his bones turned toward it the way iron turns to a magnet.

1:41:56.

Pa-pump.

1:41:57.

Pa-pump.

1:41:58.

Pa-pump.

He didn’t ask. He didn’t tell. He bought.

Pa-pump.

Pa-pump.

PA-PUMP.

At 1:42:01, the corpse twitched.

Pa-pump. Pa-pump. Pa-pump.

At 1:42:10, it clawed out of the grave.

Dane sat very still while his screen went from blood to chlorophyll. He rode it up, sold when the breath in his chest told him to sell, and the number he cleared didn’t feel like money—it felt like gravity reversing, like the room had been tilted in his favor.

He looked up, searching the crowd.

Serrat was nowhere. But somewhere below the floorboards, Dane thought he heard the faintest rustle of paper, like a thousand thin tongues whispering his name.

CURRENT TRADING PRICE: $6.66

The stock took off like a rocket.  It was on life support, the vultures circling it like carrion.  But there it was, soon after the trade, climbing and climbing.  It was practically like watching Sir Edmund Hillary.  

It should have died. Everyone said so—whispered it, joked it, shorted it. But after his buy the chart straightened like a spine and kept climbing. Not a miracle, exactly. More like a body remembering how to breathe.

Heads turned. A few jeers curdled into silence. Someone laughed too loudly.

“Who told you to touch that?” a senior snapped as he passed.

“No one,” Dane said, eyes on the screen.

“Then you’re dumber than you look,” the man muttered—just as the ticker punched through another ceiling and the floor around them made that soft animal sound a crowd makes when it doesn’t want to admit surprise.

CURRENT TRADING PRICE: $7.80

Orders stacked. The corpse was dancing now, a marionette with its own strings. Dane kept his hand steady, sold where his breath thinned, bought back where it thickened. He didn’t try to explain it, even to himself. He obeyed.

Across the pit, two brokers watched him like he’d slipped a card up his sleeve.

“Nobody times like that,” one said.

“Unless he’s wired,” the other replied.

“To what?”

A shrug. “Pick your devil.”

Dane pretended he hadn’t heard. His fingers shook only when they left the keys.

His heart pounded inside his chest so fiercely he could practically hear it screaming inside him.  He could sense it pulse and beat, and somewhere he was beginning to become aware of another heartbeat.

CURRENT TRADING PRICE: $9.99

The closing bell rang out; cold, sharp, and final.  Dane sat back in his chair.  He felt like he had just run a marathon.  He could practically feel his heart pound away in his chest and perhaps somewhere else too, far off.  He looked down at his hands.  The hands that practically performed the miracle of resurrection.  

“Holy shit” he thought to himself.  He balled his fists tightly to stop them from shaking as he got off his adrenaline high.  

The floor exhaled. Phones were cradled, terminals yawned to screensavers, and the men who had called him stupid now spoke in careful tones that didn’t include him.

His phone buzzed. No number. No name. Just a single line on a green background:

Tomorrow: do nothing at the open. 10:13—breathe in. 10:14—exhale.

He typed Who is this and watched the words blink. He didn’t send it.

Somewhere under the marble, paper whispered again—thin tongues lapping at a name. His.

CURRENT TRADING PRICE: $9.72

The closing bell faded, but Dane still sat in his chair, fists clenched to stop the tremor. The crowd thinned, brokers drifting toward bars and dinners, but he stayed rooted, half-expecting Serrat to reappear with another whisper.

He didn’t.

Instead, a young clerk he didn’t recognize stopped by his desk, placing a folded slip of paper before him. No eye contact. No word. Just the sound of paper against laminate, and then he was gone.

Dane opened it with clumsy fingers. The note was handwritten in dark ink, the strokes too deliberate to be casual:

Room 14-B. Now.

CURRENT TRADING PRICE: $9.72

He rose. His legs carried him like he was still on rails Serrat had laid, briefcase thudding against his knee with each step.

The room was deep in the Exchange, past hallways that smelled of dust and copper, until the doors were numbered with stencils, not plaques. 14-B had no lock. He pushed inside.

The chamber was bright. Too bright. White walls, white table, white chairs. Everything gleamed with the chill sterility of compliance. On the table sat a single object: a glass tube that ticked faintly, like a clock disguised as a metronome.

Serrat was there, of course. Already seated, suit immaculate, green eyes dimmed back to hazel. He gestured casually to the chair opposite.

“Sit.”

Dane obeyed.

The tube ticked louder, syncing with the beat in his chest. Tick—pa-pump. Tick—pa-pump.

Serrat slid a sheet of parchment across the table. Not paper. Parchment. The texture was wrong, fibrous, almost organic. Lines of text shimmered faintly, but every time Dane tried to focus, the words blurred. Only one phrase stood clear at the bottom:

I affirm my obedience.

Beside it sat the black fountain pen he’d been given earlier.

Dane swallowed. “What is this?”

“Compliance,” Serrat said smoothly. “Every trader needs oversight. Consider this… onboarding.”

The too-wide smile tugged at his mouth. “Write your name.”

Dane picked up the pen. It was heavy, warm, like it remembered being held. The nib hovered above the line. His own reflection shimmered in the ink pooled at the tip, warped, faceless.

“Would you like to be free?” Serrat bent low, voice cool against his ear. “I can free you of everything.”

Dane’s throat worked. The ticking grew faster. His hand shook, but he wrote: Dane Kessler.

The pen bled more than ink.

CURRENT TRADING PRICE: $25.13

Months had passed since Dane Kessler had finally risen to the top like cream rising from the dregs of milk.  In that time his stock had only soared, and he found giving total fealty over to Mr. Serrat came with exquisite bonuses.  A penthouse apartment in Manhattan.  A new Maserati, paid in cash.  Women.  The finest suits, though he still kept his monogrammed cufflinks.  For good luck, of course.  All it cost was his name.

They called it momentum, and for a while momentum was all Dane needed. The ink on his compliance line was barely dry when the market began to obey him.

First came the phones. Invitations that had been polite refusals a week ago turned into urgent requests: lunch? a meeting? a word? He learned quickly how to answer. “Yes” opened doors; “No” closed them with a polite slam. Men who'd once barely glanced his way now angled into his orbit like compasses aligning to a needle. He began to understand, in a way that made his skin buzz, that people did not only trade on numbers; they traded on names. His name, he discovered, bought him space at tables and cutlery that shone in a way his old life never had.

They gave him a desk with a view — a thin sliver overlooking the Exchange, screens framing him like stained glass. The screens, once alien and cold, began to answer him. Tips arrived with no sender. A research note he had never ordered landed on his terminal and read like poetry: buy the forgotten; feed the hungry. He fed it, and the market fed him back, fat and quick.

He took lunch with men whose jackets cost more than his year’s rent. He learned the choreography of power — the right laugh, the subtle nod, the name-drop that belonged on someone else’s résumé. Serrat sat opposite him in a way that made the table feel smaller, always three breaths behind a joke, always smiling just slightly too long. Sometimes, Serrat would speak in a half-sentence, a suggestion that set a room alight and left Dane with the currency of a new confidence. Other times he would watch and say nothing, and that silence became instruction.

Then came the invitations that weren’t invitations. An office-side congratulatory bottle left anonymously at his desk. A VIP pass to a charity gala where his presence alone seemed to validate the cause. A call from a boutique hedge fund asking if he might consider representing a slate of clients. He found himself at the center of a constellation he’d never expected to inhabit — the Great Dane reborn. Photographers found his jawline; a columnist used his rise as a parable, and the piece ran with a lede that made his mother cry. He liked the burn of attention. He liked the way people assumed he had always belonged to the room.

Faceless men began to appear for him — not servants but instruments. They arrived silent in tailored gray, little more than motion: a nudge here, a whispered number there, a file that appeared on his chair with underwriting details. They never spoke his name in the open; they rarely looked him in the eye. They were efficient and insect-like, buzzing about the periphery and returning with their tiny, precious finds. Dane noticed the absence of faces and chose to ignore it. Convenience is a kind of miracle, he told himself.

CURRENT TRADING PRICE: $30.00

With wealth came rituals. Early-morning training with a personal coach to keep his frame sharp. Private dinners where courses arrived like scenes in a play. A small apartment he’d reserved for thinking — walls white and clean and soundproofed — where he practiced speeches that would never be given. He signed checks with the black pen as if it were a talisman; each signature smoothed the path for a new beginning. He had his photograph in a paper once, framed in the lobby of the firm near the bronze plaque: Reputation is credit. Credit is life. He touched the frame sometimes, the way one touches a scar.

CURRENT TRADING PRICE: $42.42

But Serrat’s lessons were not all indulgence. For every silver-laden course, there was a conversation where the knife was sharpened. “Obedience,” Serrat would say softly, as if defining a virtue. “Not trust. Obedience is simpler.” Once, leaving a dinner where the wine had done its work, Serrat murmured, almost by accident, “A cut here and a cut there — that’s how you learn value.” Dane laughed and agreed because the idea was intoxicating and because he had already begun to mistake surrender for cleverness.

Faceless men multiplied. They started to bring not just tips but favors. A rumor sown in just the right inbox and watered where a short interest had been high; a whisper of a board shuffle; a quiet call to a small promoter that sent a thin stock into a green frenzy. Dane watched, hands clean as a businessman should, and he began to measure appetite differently — not in meals eaten but markets moved.

CURRENT TRADING PRICE: $58.88

And yet — there were margins. Small losses that never bled his account but nicked something inside him. An assistant he barely knew who left his employ with no explanation. A press email with a question about “unusual flow” that he ignored and then deleted. A partner who smiled on the floor and, in the same breath, whispered into a phone, “Watch him.” The cuts were tiny at first: a missed repayment by a boutique lender quietly waved away, a late-night message erased before he read it. Each was a small serration, a notch taken from him that he barely registered.

CURRENT TRADING PRICE: $99.99

He slept less. He talked more. He began to believe that the world would always bend. On a rooftop party that smelled of charcoal and money, he raised a glass and felt Serrat’s gaze like a measuring tool across his back. Serrat’s smile gleamed and did not reach the eyes; it was content and hungry both at once. Dane raised his glass higher.

A student approaching legend, he had not yet learned the anatomy of the fall. He did not yet understand that Serrat’s gift never arrived without appetite. He had not yet tasted the last bite.

CURRENT TRADING PRICE: $100.00

It started slowly. 

 The first call from the SEC started innocently enough.  All the woman on the phone asked for were some notes for a few big trades he made.  He readily complied.   Her tone was neutral in the way scalpels are neutral. Dane agreed, of course. He always agreed now.

He met her in a conference room that smelled of toner and old coffee. She asked about flow. About the little company that rose from its grave. She smiled when he said “instinct,” and wrote “instinct” as if it were a ticker.

When he left, a faceless attendant was waiting in the hall with an envelope and a nod that meant handled. Dane thanked him and did not ask what handled meant.

CURRENT TRADING PRICE: $88.08

The subpoena arrived folded like an invitation, heavy paper, no perfume. Trades. Messages. Meetings. Room 14-B might as well have been stamped on the flap.

Dane’s lawyer used words like routine and pattern and documentation. Serrat tilted his head at the word routine as if tasting it and finding it a touch underdone.

 “They’ll always test the new king,” Serrat said lightly, as if discussing the weather. “You pass tests by taking them.”

CURRENT TRADING PRICE: $61.10

The subpoena arrived folded like an invitation, heavy paper, no perfume. Trades. Messages. Meetings. Room 14-B might as well have been stamped on the flap.

Dane’s lawyer used words like routine and pattern and documentation. Serrat tilted his head at the word routine as if tasting it and finding it a touch underdone.

CURRENT TRADING PRICE: $61.10

Friends thinned like volume after hours. A woman he’d been seen with vanished from his texts with the clean finality of a delisted symbol. The boutique lender called their note. The frame in the lobby with his photo was “temporarily removed pending updates.”

He slept in the soundproof apartment and heard ticking anyway.

CURRENT TRADING PRICE: $44.04

On the morning of the raid, the market opened green out of habit. Men with windbreakers and plain shoes stepped through the turnstiles like a Viking raiding party. They asked his name and did not need the answer. The black pen lay on his desk, warm.

They took the pen as evidence.

CURRENT TRADING PRICE: $13.13

The arraignment was efficient. Headlines learned new, colorful adjectives for him. Upstairs, the Exchange echoed without him; downstairs, the marble remembered his footsteps and did nothing.

In the holding cell they gave him a wool blanket the color of dust and a tray with food he didn’t eat. He rolled his cuff to look at the K, reassuring himself with the weight of metal. He thought of appetite and realized he was not hungry.

Night settled around him like a hangman’s noose.

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Footsteps in the hall. Not many. Just one pair, precise as a metronome.

Serrat stepped from the shadow as if he were a jungle cat going in for the kill.

Serrat looked down at his young charge.  A twitch at the corners of his mouth, imperceptible to most.

“Follow me” was all he offered to the Once Great Dane.  

Dane looked around pathetically, “Follow you?  Where?  There’s no way out of this cell”.

Serrat smiled almost sympathetically.  Almost.  He turned and walked back through the shadow.  Dane had seen enough to question it.  He got up slowly and walked through the shadow.  It felt like walking through Niagara Falls but instead of water it was like being pressed against millions of sheets of paper.  He couldn’t breathe, and couldn’t hear over the deafening sound of something sonorous.  Finally he was back in the basement of the Stock Exchange, albeit a new room.

Serrat stood in front of a rectangular doorway, or no, not a doorway.  Dane leaned closer.  It was some type of stand or booth.  But it wasn’t an ordinary booth.  This structure wasn’t composed of wood.  It was built almost entirely of ticker  tape.  

But that wasn’t the weird part.  

The weird part was that it was moving.  Undulating.  New ticker tape appeared all the time giving it this pulsing illusion as if it were alive.

“What is it?” Dane gasped in awe.  He approached it gingerly as if he could spook it and it would run away…or consume him.

“It’s been many things over the years…but in short it is an altar and I, the Neon Vein, am its High Priest.  It is the very pulse of society.  Everything flows through it.  Greed, commerce, envy.  Everything a growing civilization needs.”

Dane stared in awe, but a growing sense of dread began to gnaw at him in the corners of his mind.  He could rule the world with this…whatever it was.

“Would you like to be free?” Serrat suddenly asked, lowering his voice so that Dane had to incline closer. “I can free you of everything.”

Dane looked down, hunched over in despair in his grimy, cold concrete cell.  “What would I owe?”

Serrat’s eyes were hazel and then not. “Only what you brought to the table.”

“I brought nothing,” Dane said, and heard how small it was.

“Then how about what’s left?”

Serrat bent low, offering his hand as though greeting a guest at a much better room. His palm was cool, and patient, a bread knife eyeing the last slice from the loaf.

Dane took it.

The screaming began at once.

It wasn’t pain at first. It was subtraction—clean, methodical—like narrow teeth taking even bites from a loaf. Name, then voice, then the warm private clutter of memory. The room blurred, he doubled over and every breath sounded like paper trails going through a shredder.

Serrat held him steady through the noise. “Obedience is simpler,” he murmured, not unkindly.

When it was over, the room quieted as if a machine had been switched off and only the pulsing of the ticker tape booth could be heard.

On the bunk sat a figure in a perfect suit, face smooth and untroubled as a blank page. It raised its sleeves with practiced grace. The French cuffs caught the dim light. On each wrist, an ornate letter gleamed:

K.

The last thing Dane had seen, before the quiet, was Serrat’s too-wide smile and the booth pulsing like a python after a feeding.

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The Neon Vein Will return….

The Neon Vein with his Faceless