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He leans forward, slow enough for it to be threatening, then slides his hand into my jacket pocket. It’s deliberate, and not sexual, but the brush of his fingers against my side is surgical in its intimacy. He finds nothing, of course—the sample is already on the table. But when he leans back, his face is less mask and more man.

“Never let a soldier get inside your guard,” he says. “First rule of the field.”

“I’ll add it to my notes,” I say, and this time, I almost smile.

He sits back, turns the vial in his hand, and nods toward the water station. “Go on, then. I’ll send someone to observe.”

I get up, feeling the weight of his eyes on my back. I leave the tent and immediately run into Maven, who’s been lurking by the entrance, pretending to inspect a row of plastic piping.

“He didn’t shoot you,” Maven says, sounding impressed.

“Not yet,” I say. “But give him time.”

We head for the filter house, side by side. Maven doesn’t ask about the sample. Instead, they say, “You know you just made an enemy.”

“I’ve got plenty of those,” I say, but inside, I’m thinking about the brush of Kang’s fingers, the way he didn’t flinch at the threat, the way his voice dropped just for me. I’m thinking about the echo of the gun at my throat, the taste of steel and sweat.

And for the first time in a long time, I wonder if I’m not just surviving, but living.

But I know, with the certainty of a chemical reaction, that I’ll be seeing Captain Kang again.

The filter house is a squat rectangle of poured cement, capped with the only intact sheet of plastic in the quadrant. Inside, the air is twelve degrees warmer, saturated with the sour tang of old biofilm and the sharp stink of ammonium byproduct. There’s no guard posted, just a chain of orange survey tape looped across the door, as if warning the microbes inside to stay put.

I duck beneath and step into a universe of ruined promise. Rows of blue drums, each patched and re-patched until the original brand is a rumor. Racks of tubing, some so brittle you could break them by swearing. In the center, a work table littered with the chemical detritus of a hundred failed upgrades: cracked desiccant beads, heat-sealed bags of resin, syringes for the careful addition of poison to poison.

It’s a museum of near-misses, and I love it instantly.

I drop the sample on the bench and reach for the tools. There’s nothing state-of-the-art, but the hands remember what the brain can’t. I strip the gloves from the peg, pull them on, and in a single motion pop the vial, upend it, and set to work.

First, the basics: separation, filtration, check for solubility. The silt falls apart under even minor agitation, the micro-roots clumping in what used to be called a “floc,” but here it’s just another flavor of threat. I test for pH, then run a thumb down the margin of the old logbook. The paper’s so worn that the pages stick together, but I find the baseline in half a second.

I’m halfway through a titration when Maven slips inside, silent as ever. They lean against the rack, arms crossed, but the usual smirk is gone. Just watching, the way an animal watches the weather.

“You always work this fast?” they ask.

I shrug. “Only when the clock’s running.”

The logbook says the east basin spike was first noticed ten days ago. I check the day’s readings, cross-reference, and see the problem instantly: the sludge is doubling the load on the pre-filters. Left alone, it’ll overwhelm the biochar in less than a week.

I don’t have the right solvents, but I improvise—take two scoops of potassium iodide from the shelf, mix it into a beaker of filtered water, and add a drop of acid to make the whole thing angry. The reaction is immediate: the solution clouds, then clarifies, the root matrix shriveling to a dense, black coil at the base.

Maven whistles. “That’s not standard.”

“It works,” I say. “The next generation might even be drinkable.”

They move closer, the lamp behind their head casting the face in shadow. “You remember how to do all this?”

I nod, but I don’t say that it’s muscle memory, not real memory. The hands know. The head just follows.

I prep a second beaker, this time mixing a smaller dose. I swirl it, watching the reaction chase itself around the glass, and then something sharp and electric slams into my left temple. For an instant, the world turns to white noise.

Then:

A different room. Not the filter house—a lab, so clean it buzzes. Walls of glass, metal benches, racks of gene sequencers blinking in time with an emergency beacon. I’m at the center of it, hands moving in a blur, gloves splattered with something that’s redder than blood but not blood. The smell is ozone, antiseptic, and a deeper, animal panic. In the far corner, a man in a suit shouts numbers at me, his voice distorted by the pulse in my ears.

The view swings. My hands are patching a seal on a containment chamber. I see the code: 79-A. I feel the urgency, the understanding that if I don’t finish this, something irreversible will happen—not to me, but to everything.

The memory flickers. Now I’m running. A corridor, alarms, glass shattering in sequence as doors lock behind me. I shout for someone—Jackson?—but the name is lost in the static. The only thing that matters is the small, blue-glowing pendant around my neck, and the certainty that it’s all I have left.