Page 15

We eat in silence, cross-legged on the bunker floor. The emergency strip lighting paints us in harsh shadows, our features smudged and cut by the flicker. I watch her hands—always moving, always a step ahead of her words. She eyes me over the rim of her tin mug, waiting for me to start the conversation.

I oblige. “You ever think about why the radiation doesn’t kill everything out there?” I gesture with the broken stick, scattering drops of sludge on the floor.

Rosie shrugs. “Maybe it does, and we’re just too dumb to die.”

I shake my head. “The trees in the park—they’re alive. They’re not even sick. Same for the moss, and the insects. And the Ghouls, whatever happened to them, it didn’t erase their nervous systems. It rewired them.”

Rosie wipes her mouth, sets the mug aside. “So what? Evolution on fast-forward?”

“Something like that.” I fish the orb out of my pack, the one I found in the crack outside the city. It’s wrapped in a swatch of bandage, still glowing softly. “This is part of it, I think. Maybe a catalyst, maybe just a canary. But it’s tuned to the same spectrum as my pendant. They’re not just surviving. They’re adapting.”

She leans forward, eyes bright. “What’s your theory?”

I roll the orb between my palms, let its light catch on the ceiling. “Back in the bunker, we worked on shielding, on ways to outpace the decay. But maybe that was the wrong angle. Maybe the answer isn’t to hide from it. Maybe it’s to learn how to live with it—integrate it, like a new organ.”

Rosie whistles, low. “You think you can do that? Change the Matrix, make people immune?”

“I think someone already started,” I say. “But they needed more time, more data.” I gesture at the orb. “This is a prototype, maybe. A record. If I can break down its matrix, I might be able to synthesize a version that actually works. Not just for the Network, but for everyone.”

Rosie stares, chewing on her bottom lip. For a moment, she’s a kid again, not the weathered engineer with the graveyard laugh. “If that’s true,” she says, “you’re the biggest threat the Authority’s ever seen.”

I smile, bitter. “That’s what Jackson thought, too.”

She looks away, wiping her hands on her pants. “Well,” she says, “I hope you’re better at hiding than he was.”

The meal done, she clears the wrappers, then gestures for me to follow her to the workbench. The maps are backlit by the emergency strip, their surface pocked with pinholes and annotated in three different colors of marker. I read the details: “Safe corridor,” “Military patrol,” “Hive activity.” There’s a column of numbers in the margin, each circled and underlined in sequence.

Rosie taps the eastern edge of the city, where the green corridor narrows to a single line. “Thorne’s last known was here. She moves every three days, unless it’s a market day—then she doubles back to the river. If you follow the rail line, it’ll keep you off the Authority’s main grid. But watch for the Ravagers.” She squints at me. “You know what they are?”

“Heard stories. Never seen one up close.”

“Be glad,” Rosie says. “They’re people, but barely. Cannibals, sometimes. But mostly just broken. The Authority lets them run wild as a warning to the rest of us.”

I file it away. “Noted.”

She points to a red circle two centimeters below the line. “This is your goal. Settlement used to be a water treatment plant. Now it’s a halfway point for the Network—if anyone can get you through, it’s Maven.” She leans in close, voice dropping. “But don’t trust them, not fully. they got their own agenda.”

I meet her gaze, hold it. “Why are you helping me?”

She hesitates. “Because the world needs a cure more than it needs another martyr.” She looks down, fingers drumming on the map. “And because you fixed my air. That buys a lot, these days.”

She leads me to the far end of the bunker, where a storage locker sits wedged between two concrete beams. She fumbles the lock, pops it with a twist of her knife, and pulls out a heavy case—scuffed metal, old but clean. She opens it to reveal a Radiation Analysis Kit, complete with Geiger, dosimeter, sample tubes, even a microscope lens.

“This belonged to the last scientist who came through,” Rosie says, brushing the dust from the case. “He made it as far as the city center before the Authority nailed him. But he logged everything on this.” She hands me a thumb drive taped to the underside of the lid.

I run my thumb over the kit, feeling its weight. “You’re sure?”

She nods. “You’ll make better use of it than I ever could.”

I close the case, tuck it under my arm. “Thank you,” I say, and the words hurt a little.

Rosie folds her arms. “If you make it out, send word. If you don’t…” She shrugs. “That’s the job.”

There’s a sound in the walls, a low groan that could be pipes or the world shifting on its axis. Rosie cocks her head, listening. “You should go. They patrol at midday, and the corridor gets dangerous after dark.”

I gather my pack, the orb, and the kit. At the door, I turn to her, wanting to say something more. She beats me to it.

“Hey, Diana?”