"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

My apartment is on the fourth floor of a building that has been scheduled for infrastructure review for two years and will probably be scheduled for another two before anyone actually shows up. The elevator works on alternating days. Today is not one of them. We take the stairs.I unlock the door and go in first, which is habit from coming home to an empty place, and then I step aside and Reina walks in and I watch her look at it once.One look. Comprehensive, the kind that takes in everything and files it. The single room that functions as living space and kitchen. The table with two chairs, one of which has a jacket over the back that has been there long enough that I stopped seeing it. The bed in the corner, made with the specific precision of someone who has very little space and keeps what they have ordered because disorder costs you when the space is small. The shelf above the sink with three plates, two cups, and the kind of grocery situation that reflects a person who shops fo