Mardock Scramble: The Third Exhaust

Rune Balot is weeping and trying to save both herself and a severely injured Oeufcoque from Shell's assassin Boiled. Luckily for her, Doctor Easter finally shows up in the Humpty Dumpty – a special militarized vehicle made for protecting those in Welfare cases if their lives are threatened. From there they go to Paradise, where the Scramble 09 technology (and Boiled's rebirth) was developed. All of the secrets of the past of Mardock City (and possibly its future) are revealed in this riveting second part of the Mardock Scramble series, upping the stakes and making Balot choose between justice for herself or peace within Paradise instead.

Rune Balot is a down-and-out teen prostitute in Mardock City. One day, she's picked up by an ambitious casino manager named Shell who gives her everything she could want. Renewed by a false innocence, a false past, and now the false life Shell has given her, Balot feels grateful. However, she can't help but be curious about why he's done so much for her, so she does some research about his past on a computer. This turns out to be a mistake which will change her life greatly. When Shell finds out what she's done, he attempts to burn her to death by blowing up her car. Due to the high crime rate in Mardock, a new law called "Scramble 09" has given police carte blanche to take extreme and otherwise illegal measures to revive crime witnesses. With this in mind, they allow a professor to bring Balot back from the brink of death by reassembling her entire body with reinforced synthetic fiber. When she finally wakes up, her confused mental state eventually turns toward revenge as Shell is revealed as her killer.

In the year 2046 humans are moving away from using robots and begin to trust them less and less. In this time life becomes very perilous for the beingd known as seconds. The seconds are the most recent line of robots, as far as the public knows. This is the world Detective Ross Sylibus lives in. Detective Sylibus is transferred to Mars by his request after his partner was killed by a robot. As he arrives he falls headfirst into a murder where a country singer on his flight was murdered. He steps off the plane and watches as a scene unfolds and he meets his partner, Armitage a female cop with a major attitude. A rash of murders begins when yet more women are killed. As the investigation is continued a secret is uncovered. There is another line of robots known as Thirds. More and more Thirds turn up missing, as a serial killer who is intent on wiping out all the Thirds runs rampant. Armitage in her quest to put the murderer to justice reveals a secret. She herself is a Third.

In the year 2031, an experimental energy device known as the "Quantum Reactor" is created to help alleviate the problems stemming from Earth's dwindling fossil fuel reserves. Unfortunately, the "Quantum Reactor" goes out of control, exploding and bathing the world with unknown energies in an incident known as the "Shouryuu Crisis". As a result of the catastrophic environmental changes that follow, humanity is pushed to the brink of extinction, and strange new organisms - part organic, part mechanical - known as the "B.R.A.I." emerge. Seven years later, Leon Lau - one of the scientists at the center of the "Shouryuu Crisis", is living in the wilderness near Neo Shouryou, one of the last remaining human cities. Leon has entered into a "family contract" with Chloe Lau, and together the two of them research their own methods of combatting the B.R.A.I. threat.