"You are standing in the wrong position."That is the first thing I hear her say. She is talking to the lead hunter, a broad man named Garrett who has been doing this job for six years and has the kind of confidence that comes from surviving things that should have killed him. He does not look at her. He keeps his eyes on the corridor ahead and says: "Support staff stays quiet."She says: "Your left flank has a sightline gap. If something comes through the secondary point, you lose two people before anyone can reposition."Garrett says: "Support staff stays quiet."She stops talking. I watch her from three steps back where the rest of us non-combat hires are clustered, keeping pace, keeping out of the way, doing the job we were paid to do which is carry equipment and stay alive and not embarrass ourselves in front of people who have actual systems. She is maybe my age. Dark eyes, natural hair pinned up, a tablet strapped to her forearm that she has been reading from since we left the

She wakes up at 6:14 in the morning.I know because I have been watching the clock on the east wall the way you watch something when you have nothing else to do and too much to think about. The facility is in its early shift, quieter than the night, two technicians running slow rounds between the beds. The man with the braced arm is still asleep. Outside the high windows the sky is the specific grey of a city morning that has not decided yet whether it is going to rain.Reina Vane opens her eyes and looks at the ceiling.She does not move for approximately thirty seconds. Not disorientation. I can tell the difference between someone who does not know where they are and someone who is running an assessment before they commit to being awake. She is doing the second thing. Her eyes are tracking the ceiling, the walls, the equipment stations, the bed rows, taking inventory.Then her interface activates.The light is wrong again, the same dim flicker I saw in the corridor, but it stabilize

"You own four plates." It is the first thing Reina says when she walks into my apartment. Not a question. She is looking at the shelf above the sink with the specific expression of someone filing information rather than making conversation. She clocks the rest of the room in approximately four seconds. The table, the two chairs, the bed in the corner made with military precision because disorder costs you when the space is small. The jacket on the chair back that has been there long enough I stopped seeing it. She puts her bag on the floor beside the table and sits down. I move the jacket to the bed. I sit across from her. I open the interface. --- We work through the morning. The system does not offer much when the context is two people sitting at a kitchen table. The notifications I have not opened are mostly technical descriptions of functions that are either locked pending the first consume event or available in theory but not yet triggered. Reina reads each one I relay to he

"Storage units in sector four are being cleared for GRA infrastructure expansion. Residents with outstanding rental agreements have thirty days to retrieve belongings or forfeit them to processing."The notice has been pinned to the board outside my building for two weeks. I read it every morning on my way out and every evening coming back and I have been telling myself it is not urgent because the unit belonged to my father and my father is dead and there is nothing in it worth retrieving.That is what I have been telling myself.The rent situation makes a liar of me by Thursday.---The storage facility sits in the outer ring of the zone. Squat, functional, built to last because nobody has time to build things twice in a post-Rift city. I get there after dark because the attendant who checks credentials leaves at seven and the one who replaces him is more interested in the screen in his booth than the camera feeds.I know this because I spent three months running deliveries to this

"Black Flag."Reina says it the way she says things that are already decided. She is standing at the window, not looking out of it, looking at the wall beside it where she has pinned three pages of her notes in a row. She has been standing there since Darius left. The takeout bag is open on the table. Neither of us has eaten from it.I say: "You know what it means."She says: "I know what it means." She turns around. "Black Flag anomaly protocol. The GRA runs it when a scanner returns a result that cannot be classified and the secondary verification also fails. The flag gets logged with the location of the failed scan, timestamped, and sent to a field assessment team automatically." She sits down. "They do not wait for authorization. The protocol is the authorization. Field teams move within forty-eight hours."I look at the clock on my phone. 4:17 in the afternoon.The first scanner broke yesterday morning at the triage facility.I say: "We have until tomorrow morning. Maybe tomorrow