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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.
The morning is all steel teeth: cold, biting, and sharpened to purpose. The air in the settlement center feels two degrees colder than the rest of the Zone, as if the market’s low-grade anxiety is a heat sink drawing the warmth from every living thing. I move through the main street—if you can call it that—boots carving a path through the thick, chemical-bleached dust. The sample in my pocket is heavier than my knife, heavier than the past week’s worth of ghosts. I don’t let myself touch it, not even to check the seal. Once is enough.
The plaza’s different in daylight. What looked like a bazaar the night before is now a writhing nervous system: traders cursing at each other in a half-dozen dialects, scavengers hunched over wares, old men running their fingers along lengths of cable as if reading braille from the end of the world. The water basin—centerpiece of the universe here—burbles with an almost petulant regularity, surrounded by a security perimeter of children and the ancient, brittle women who keep them in line. Every five minutes, someone gets caught cutting the line or trying to steal a sip, and the guards at the perimeter flex their rifles to remind everyone that order is not negotiable.
I keep my head down. Last night’s performance bought me a sliver of respect, but respect is currency that goes bad fast out here. I stick to the edge, weaving between market stalls and avoiding the eyes of anyone who looks too bored or too alert.
I’m halfway to the admin tent—the only structure here with a roof that doesn’t sag—when the first soldier blocks my path. He’s all elbows and jaw, skin sunburned raw, with a head shaved so close it looks like he’s trying to outpace his own hair. His uniform is standard Authority gray, but the insignia at his chest is blacked out, scrubbed to near invisibility. The gun at his hip is real, the kind that ends lives for bad jokes. He grins like he’s seen the punchline already.
“Where you off to, missy?” he asks. The word lands greasy. “Not looking to make trouble, are we?”
I keep walking, eyes on the far tent. “Just here to do my job.”
He steps in front, boots skidding a fine mist of dust up my shins. “Job, huh? And what’s in your pocket? Looks heavy.” His eyes flick to my right hand, then my left. “Show me.”
