Great for us.
ELEVEN
PATCH NOTES
KNIGHT
Time moves weird in the cabin.
In the city, everything’s in microseconds and notifications—pings and pushes and constant digital static. Here it’s just… light and dark. Coffee and not-coffee. Check-in window and waiting for the next one.
We’ve burned through most of today’s data packets. Lark is sprawled sideways on the couch, ankles kicked over one arm, tapping idly at the dead tablet screen like she can will it back online.
“You know it’s off, right?” I say.
She glares at it. “A girl can dream, right?”
The little modem box sits unplugged on the table, antenna folded. Our next five-minute crack in the wall isn’t for another couple of hours.
We’ve mapped everything we can from what we’ve got. ALFA07 is still a slippery ghost. Cathedral’s network is fractaled hell. Dean and his people are chewing on their end. Arrow saysthey’ve got a couple of promising leads but nothing we can use yet.
So we’re stuck in the worst possible state…
Waiting.
“Entertainment request,” Lark announces suddenly, flopping onto her back and hanging her head upside down off the edge of the couch, light-lavendar hair dangling toward the floor. “My brain is melting.”
I lean against the table, arms folded. “We already trained. We already combed the packet logs twice. We already mocked Ranger’s pantry.”
“We didn’t mock the canned bread enough, but that’s a separate issue.” She squints at me upside down. “We need a game.”
“This isn’t vacation.”
“Everything is a game if you’re fun enough.”
“I’m not fun.”
“Correct,” she says. “That’s why you need my help. Good news… I came prepared.”
I narrow my eyes. “Prepared how?”
She swings her legs off the couch, rolls upright, and plucks a pen and small notebook from her bag. The cover is decorated with a sticker that saysroot access is nine-tenths of the law.
She flips it open and shows me a page near the back.
At the top, in blocky letters:PATCH NOTES.
Underneath are bullet points, some scratched out, some circled:
learned to poach an egg without crying
finally blocked Kyle’s number
