Chapter 42
FORTY-TWO
“So, you save your real talents for after dark?” Robert murmured as we moved up the empty street, his voice scratchy with fatigue. He pulled Rosalie closer, tucking her beneath his arm against the wind.
Hayden huffed a dry laugh, but, as I realized he always did, avoided lingering on himself.
“Crow can explain the details better than I can. He’s the reason tonight was even possible.
” Hayden cast me a quiet glance, then added, “Crow’s a computer engineer.
One of the best. That’s how he landed silver quickly. Fairwell snapped him up.”
“Yeah, thanks for the ego boost. I earned it,” Crow muttered. “Worked my ass off for the position.”
“Oh, were you not born here?” I asked. Getting to silver had started to seem like such a distant dream that I had become skeptical any settler had achieved it. Silver rings seemed like fantasy at our level.
He shook his head, his lips quirking with something that was not quite a smile. “Not even close. I grew up in a tech outpost in the Caribbean. Small, tight-knit, full of promise. Until a pack of nomads tore it apart.” His tone was casual, but I heard something bruised underneath.
“Nomads,” I echoed, the word tasting bitter.
“Who else?” Crow shrugged, scanning the shadows around us. “We didn’t have defenses like this place. My people were smart, but not rich. Smart doesn’t keep you safe. Not for long, in this day and age. But enough history.” He lowered his voice and turned serious. “Let’s talk about tonight.”
He paused to check the street—still empty, save for the far-off crash of the sea and our own footsteps.
Then he continued, quietly but with the intensity of someone who’d lived too long with secrets.
“We disabled a key network post in the area they’ve chosen for training.
Which in layman’s terms means the ‘mentors’ can’t use devices that rely upon that wireless technology.
Which in further layman’s terms means the goggles they rely upon to guide you through the ‘exercises’ don’t work. ”
“Goggles?” I repeated, keeping my voice low.
Crow raised an eyebrow. “You didn’t see them?”
I searched my memory, then caught a flicker: Anna with a pair in her control room during my test screening. I’d also spotted red-jacketed techs carrying them in the fortress corridors.
Hayden cut in. “They don’t put them on in front of the mentees. I don’t remember seeing them.”
“Anyway, the goggles link to the sensors they stick on your ears,” Crow explained. “That’s how they keep track of everything: your movements, your vitals, the whole show. But if the network’s down…” He let the implication hang between us.
“Oh, wow,” I breathed. But then I wondered why Anna had a pair in the control room when I did the test screening. She hadn’t attached any device to my ear then. And what were those people in the corridors of the fortress doing with the goggles?
“So now it’s all a game of how long it’ll take them to fix the problem,” Crow continued before I could piece together my thoughts. “It’s hard for me to estimate because I won’t be part of that deployment team. But my best guess? At least three days.”
That gave me a flicker of hope—three days felt like an eternity after the last twenty-four hours. Still, the relief was thin and brittle. Three days wouldn’t last long.
“So we need a permanent fix,” I said quietly, the words tasting heavier than I meant.
Crow just nodded, mouth pressed in a thin line. “We’re here.” He gestured up at a tall, narrow building wedged between two larger houses. “Come on, there’s food if you want it.”
He ushered us through a small yard and unlocked his metallic front door with a battered plastic card. We crowded into a stark entryway, white walls echoing the tap of boots.
“How do you know nobody saw you take the post apart?” Robert asked, voice still hushed.
“It’s in the middle of nowhere, and some of us stood lookout,” Crow replied, sliding the locks into place.
“You did it in daylight?” Nico pressed, peeling off his jacket.
Crow nodded. “Yeah. We hid the boxes, waited for dark to move them to the coast.”
Robert glanced down at his taped ring, frowning. “If these rings can track us… could they trace you back to the missing post?”
Crow shook his head. “I’ve torn apart three different models.
All I’ve found is passive location logging for when you scan in at a checkpoint or job site.
No live tracking. They don’t have the server bandwidth to track everyone with that level of detail here, not yet.
I’ve also found no evidence to support the idea that they’re used to eavesdrop. ” He threw a pointed look at Hayden.
“Then why do you tape your rings?” I asked, confused.
“I don’t.” Crow raised his silver ring and I realized that, indeed, it wasn’t taped. I’d been too distracted earlier by the color of it to register the fact. “Hayden and his friends do ‘cause it makes them feel better.” He smirked.
“Don’t see any harm in being overly cautious,” Hayden muttered.
We stepped into Crow’s kitchen, a circular space crowded with computer gear and a battered table at its heart. He slid the tech aside and started portioning out wedges of some kind of savory pie from the oven, working quickly and wordlessly.
Robert started picking at his ring’s tape. “So can I take this off? It’s annoying.”
Crow gave a lazy wave. “Up to you. I’m not your handler.”
I kept mine on for now, although it seemed there was probably no point to it. Crow’s opinion ought to trump Hayden’s in this case.
The older man set out plates and glasses, pushing food toward us. “Honestly,” he said, “they’re probably more interested in keeping people busy and tracked at checkpoints than monitoring where everyone goes at night. This place isn’t big enough for anyone to hide long.”
Jessie hovered near the doorway, her voice still tight with nerves. “So there’s really no way they’ll know it was us?”
Crow gave her a brief, oddly gentle smile. “If I thought otherwise, I wouldn’t be here.”
I watched him for a moment, still trying to understand his angle. Crow had a silver ring, a warm kitchen, a life Fairwell had deemed valuable. He didn’t need to risk any of this for us. What drove someone like him to take this kind of risk—for strangers, for trouble that wasn’t his?
“Why are you helping us?” I finally asked, dragging a chair out so it scraped against the floor. The question hung in the warm kitchen, heavier than I intended.
Crow was already one mouthful into his pie, but he paused, fork still in hand. His brown eyes seemed to darken as they rested on me.
“I was one of the engineers working behind the scenes on the training Hayden and the others attended,” he said slowly. “And I… didn’t like what I saw. I’m a settler here too, so it matters to me how other settlers are treated. It worries me, even.”
He didn’t seem interested in saying more.
The conversation stuttered; everyone stared at their plates, the only sound the quiet clink of forks.
I wondered what else he’d seen. Did Crow think that, if this was how Fairwell was willing to treat some settlers, they might consider extending similar treatment to others in the future?
I wasn’t sure why he’d think his position could be affected, given his valued skill, but maybe he knew something we didn’t.
The clear distinction between settlers and natives wasn’t exactly comforting.
Fairlanders like Anna gave a spiel about wanting to create equality between the two groups, but the scale was heavily tipped against us.
Still, I wouldn’t question his motives. Selfish or not, we needed every piece of help we could get. “Thank you,” I said, meaning it. I caught Hayden’s eye as I spoke. “I… I don’t know how to repay you.”
Crow waved it off with a mouthful of pie. “Don’t get sentimental. None of us are saints. None of us can call this place home, either—not really.”
There was a bitterness in his words I couldn’t ignore. The line between Fairwell’s originals and the rest of us had always been there, but now it felt like something you could trip over. If Crow was uneasy, it wasn’t something to take lightly.
Nico spoke up, voice uncertain. “Have you ever thought of leaving? Trying to get out for good?” I could see his unborn child in his eyes.
Crow snorted. “I’ve thought about it plenty. Who hasn’t? But how? There’s nowhere to go—not safely. Maybe Hayden could get a boat if the system let him, but…” He trailed off, shaking his head. “Even then, it’s not exactly safe once you make it past the border. Out there, you’re prey.”
A silence settled over us, prickly and raw. For a moment, the hope that had flickered with Crow’s help felt impossibly small.
Rosalie’s voice broke it, small and tired. She sat with one arm looped through Robert’s. “Then… maybe we have to try to make something work here. If leaving isn’t an option.”
Crow eyed her, the ghost of a smile on his lips.
“Well, that’s an interesting concept,” he said thoughtfully.
He took a gulp of water. “It’s one I’ve been thinking about.
I think for anyone who’s financially desperate, believing you could have a comfortable life here would be foolish, at least how things currently stand. But… I have some ideas.”
He pulled a battered monitor across the table, flicking it on with a practiced thumb. The blue light washed across his face, sharpening the lines of fatigue.
“And I think our discussion starts here,” he said.
He turned the screen around so we all could see it. I found myself staring at some sort of highly complex… map?
Crow explained. “A complete plan of Founders’ Fortress. Or as complete as is available.”