The whole district exists in a state of managed collapse. Nobody here is comfortable. Most of us are one bad month away from disaster. Some of us are considerably closer than that.
Percy beeps — his completed-task tone — and the payment notification of forty credits appears a second later. Forty credits buys two days of protein packs from the dispensary on Level Six. Or half a cartridge of respiratory supplement.
I push my glasses up my nose and reach for the mug balanced on the edge of the workstation. It’s the only piece of ceramic I still own, and somehow it’s survived four identities and two assassination attempts. The tea inside has gone cold.
I drink it anyway.
“Good work, Perce.”
I rest my palm against his casing. Warmth radiates through the housing, evidence of the workload I just put him through. I leave my hand there for a moment longer than necessary. Percy is worth more than everything else in this room combined.
If someone put a gun to my head and told me to choose between Percy and my kidneys, they’d be getting a pair of slightly dehydrated organs.
A low hum answers as his casing settles into a lower power state. I pat the casing once and turn to the next item on a task list that never seems to get any shorter.
The security sweep takes longer than it should.
It always does.
The extra time is the price of staying alive.
For two years I’ve been checking and rechecking every system, every access point, every possible route someone might use to find me. At some point caution stopped being a choice and became instinct.
Today’s connection runs through Node Seven. Yesterday was Node Twelve. Tomorrow will be Node Three. Percy tracks the rotation schedule with an attention to detail that borders on obsession, which is one of the many reasons I love him.
Every node is another borrowed corner of the Splits’ network, another place to disappear for a few hours.
Asking permission isn’t an option. Permission requires paperwork. Paperwork requires a name. A name is how Helix Corp finds me again.
The proximity alerts glow green on the secondary screen.
Nothing outside my door.
Nothing in the ventilation duct above the stairwell except the maintenance drone that rattled through earlier. No unusual communication traffic within two hundred meters. Most people would call it uneventful. I call it perfect.
I check it all twice. Once because discipline keeps me alive. The second time because there’s a baseline hum of adrenaline in my system that never fully dissipates, shaped by two occasions when the alerts failed to warn me in time.
The first:second week in The Splits. A drunk neighbor tripped the motion sensor outside my door, and I had a knife drawn and my spine pressed flat against the wall before my conscious brain caught up. The footsteps were uneven. The air beyond the door reeked of cheap stimulants. Not the measured approach of a corporate extraction team.
The second:a maintenance drone running diagnostics on the corridor’s power grid at three in the morning. I sat in the dark with Percy clutched against my chest and every escape route mapped three different ways before I finally confirmed the drone was legitimate. By then my pulse was racing hard enough that sleep was a lost cause.
The alerts were wrong both times. Doesn’t matter. What matters is that one day they won’t be. Halfway through the scanner’s secondary log,my attention drifts. Not to the screen, but to the encrypted channel buried three directories deep where nobody would think to look.
I built it two years ago. The encryption is strong enough to survive a corporate audit. Every cipher, every authentication layer, every redundancy protocol represents a piece of knowledge I wasn’t supposed to walk away with. I’ve tested it dozens of times. The channel is secure.
I’ve never sent a single message through it.
Mom, Dad, I’m
The words stare back at me. I delete them. Close the window.
Then bury it again, directory by directory, until the screen shows nothing but green confirmations and system diagnostics.
Percy gives a soft chirp. The sound lands somewhere between an alert and a question. I press my thumb against his display.
“I’m fine.”
The same sound again, identical. That channel connects me to two people on a planet seventeen jump points from Vahiri. The code works. That’s never been the problem. The problem is what happens the moment I use it.
