Chapter 10 #2
She shrugs, not looking up. “They always do. My mom says they take what keeps us safe, so we don’t go looking for something better.”
I process that. “Does it work?”
She chews her lip. “We’re alive. That’s more than most.”
I nod, and offer her the only currency I have: honesty. “If you find another Sphere, hide it in a Faraday pouch. Wrap it in metal mesh, even old chewing gum wrappers. They can’t track it then.”
For the first time, she meets my eyes. “Are you a scientist?” I want to laugh. “Sometimes I think so.” She considers, then nods back. “Me too. Or I will be.” I stand, leave her with that. Maven waits at the edge of the plaza, one eyebrow cocked.
“You’re going to get noticed,” they say, voice pitched for my ears only.
“Already happened,” I reply. “Just waiting to see what they do with it.”
We walk the market’s perimeter, past the reanimated haggling, the scavengers sifting through left-behind refuse for micrograms of value.
Maven steers us to a half-ruined shade awning, where the local engineers take their lunch.
They greet Maven with wary respect, eyes flicking to me, then back to their food.
“You’re not like them,” Maven says, meaning the Authority, meaning Kang, meaning everyone I just watched enact the old world’s worst habits.
“That’s a lie,” I say, and mean it. “I’m exactly like them. The only difference is I still remember how to lose.”
Maven laughs, a real sound this time. “They say the Captain’s the same. Never smiles, never lets up, but knows a survivor when he sees one.”
I want to ask what that means, but the memory of his stare, the pause, the way he scanned me and then looked away—my skin prickles in the echo of it.
A commotion at the far end of the market.
A young trader is being frogmarched toward the plaza, flanked by two soldiers.
His wrists are cinched with zip ties, and a bloom of blood darkens the collar of his shirt.
The trader shouts, “It’s mine! I found it, I wasn’t hoarding!
” but the words are for show; everyone knows the Authority doesn’t do mercy.
I feel my pulse spike. Something chemical happens in my chest—anger, adrenaline, or the idiotic urge to intervene. I glance at Maven, whose jaw is set in the hard line of someone about to lose a bet.
I step away from the awning, into the middle of the lane, and call out—voice too loud, too brittle: “Your methods seem unnecessarily aggressive for a routine inspection.”
The soldiers freeze. One tilts his head, birdlike. The other’s hand drops to the butt of her rifle, thumb hovering just above the safety.
Kang turns, pivots with a controlled violence that makes the space around him ripple. His eyes are brighter than I remember—green, not just in the literal sense but in the way they cut through every intervening detail to rest on mine. The air between us seems to harden.
He takes one step, then another, until he’s close enough that I have to tilt my chin to meet his gaze.
The tattoos on his arms flex with every micro-adjustment of his posture; I see now that the pattern at his wrist is a sequence of binary, interrupted by jagged lines of some sort of asian script.
The muscles in his jaw work through some invisible calculus, then relax.
“Explain,” he says, monotone, but the volume is just high enough for the crowd to hear.
I don’t blink. “These aren’t enemy combatants. They’re children, traders, laborers. Taking their tech won’t stop them from communicating—it’ll just make them better at hiding it. Or at finding ways to hurt you.”
A pause. Someone in the crowd coughs, the market’s background noise reduced to a test-pattern hum.
“I’m a scientist,” I continue, using the word as shield and weapon both. “I can help optimize your resource protocols. In exchange, I want access to data. To information. You have a water shortage coming, and your filtration system is three iterations behind best practice.”
He doesn’t move. I could be speaking to a statue. But his left hand, the one nearest the tattooed wrist, flexes once, and I realize he’s fighting the urge to reach for the RadShield around my neck.
“You speak like a specialist,” he says.
“Only in things that matter.”
He studies me, face blank, but behind it—through the micro-twitches at his eyelids, the tilt of his head—I sense the engine turning. He’s not trying to intimidate. He’s trying to decide if I’m an asset or a threat.
“Demonstrate,” he says, at last. “Tomorrow, at midday. Bring a sample. We’ll discuss your terms.”
He turns on his heel, gestures to the soldiers. They drag the trader away—rough, but not brutal. The crowd parts to let them pass, and within a minute, the market resumes.
Maven exudes a sound halfway between pride and panic. “You have no idea what you just did.”
“I never do,” I say, but my hands are shaking.
They tap my shoulder. “If you survive tomorrow, you’ll be a legend. If not…” They let it hang.
We walk back to the hut, past the girl at the basin, past the rebuilt tables, past the smell of ozone and cooking root. The rest of the day I spend at Maven’s, testing water, scribbling data, running old equations against the new variables of the world.
Night falls fast, and I collapse onto the cot they offer, the RadShield heavy on my chest. Sleep is thin, populated by old faces and new threats. Kang’s eyes stalk my dreams, but there’s no violence in them—just a hunger to see what I’ll do when cornered.
I wake before dawn, lips dry, mind already drafting the presentation I’ll have to give to a man who could kill me with a shrug.
I have less than day to prove I matter. Then, maybe, I’ll let myself think about hope.