We moved through Liz and Marco's apartment with the hushed reverence of archivists in a museum, our steps light, trying not to disturb the carefully curated normalcy. The apartment itself was relatively large, spread across two floors. Downstairs held the living areas, a kitchen, a sitting room with a perpetually dusty sofa, the mundane shell that hid the extraordinary. Upstairs, where we were now heading, housed two bedrooms and a bathroom, all accessible from a long, dimly lit hallway.
At the end of the hall, dominating the space, was a large poster, twice the size of a normal one, framed in a severe black frame. It was a vintage print of Midnight Oil's Beds Are Burning, its iconic image of a solitary, sun-bleached hut in the vast Australian outback a stark and beautiful contrast to our grimy, urban reality. To any visitor, it was a piece of nostalgic décor. To us, it was the hidden doorway to the inner sanctum.
Just like the first time I was shown this place, I felt a familiar sense of awe at the sheer scale that was revealed once Marco triggered the hidden latch and the entire poster, frame and all, swung inward on silent hinges. The apartment was just the foyer; the real structure was the building itself. Marco had once told me it started life as a hardware store, its high ceilings and sturdy floors built to hold immense weight. Later, it had been transformed into a nightclub and bar; Marco himself had run it until it closed, down in 2022, a final casualty of the Covid-19 lockdowns that never reopened. Now, he owned this unsaleable, monolithic building, and it had become our fortress.
We had entered on the first floor, where Marco did what Marco does best: planning, scheming, and managing the flow of information. But the complex extended far beyond that. Beneath our feet was a full cellar, a cold, concrete-lined space we knew was used as a workshop and a prepper's supply room. Marco never let a detail pass. Down there stood huge, potable water tanks, rows and rows of car batteries lined up to form a massive capacitor for off-grid power, and enough tinned food to feed a small army for weeks.
The ground floor, the old nightclub, still housed the ghost of its past life, a vast, open space with a dusty stage and a fully stocked, mirror-backed bar. This was the heart of the sanctum, our communal living area where many of us slept in sleeping bags scattered across the old dance floor.
But if the ground floor was the heart, then the first floor, the space we were now entering, was definitely the brain. It was one huge, breathtaking room, its original industrial height allowing for floor-to-ceiling shelves that covered every wall. Desks and workbenches were dotted throughout the vast space like islands in a sea of technology. Every surface, every shelf, was covered with a meticulously organized chaos of old technology, cannibalized servers, vintage gaming consoles, CRT monitors, and toys from the past, all potential parts for Marco's projects.
And in the far corner, the true nexus of it all, stood the huge Faraday cage. It was an imposing structure of wire mesh, maybe five meters by five meters, a room within a room. A low, constant hum emanated from within, the sound of pure, untraceable data processing. It was in here Marco basically lived, a digital ghost in a shielded machine. And that was precisely where we were heading.
We moved through the cathedral of scavenged tech, the air thick with the scent of ozone and old plastic. But Meki, ever Meki, was a magpie drawn to a shiny distraction. They stopped abruptly, their fingers, still smudged with grease and blood, darting out to fiddle with a disassembled servo motor on one of the cluttered workbenches, its copper coils spilling out like metallic guts. A spike of irritation shot through me. Now was not the time for their restless curiosity.
I, on the other hand, felt a magnetic pull towards the Faraday cage, my feet carrying me faster, eager to share the night's turbulent excitement with Marco, the father of our cause. I was only halfway across the vast room, my boots scuffing on the concrete floor, when Marco's voice boomed out from behind the mesh wall. It wasn't angry, but it was a command, layered with a tired, paternal humour.
"Put that back, Meki."
His eyes, however, slid past them and locked onto me. He could read a story in a heartbeat, in a stance, in the set of a shoulder. He saw the dust ground into my clothes, the lingering wildness in my gaze, the slight tremor in my hands that the adrenaline had left behind.
Before he could ask, I led with the failure, the words tumbling out in a guilty rush. "We lost the bikes."
"Fuck the bikes," he said, the dismissal offhanded and absolute. Bikes were hardware; they could be replaced. His stare was drilling into me, searching for the real, truth. His head tilted slightly, and then his lips slowly began to turn upwards. It was a smile that started as a spark of realization in his eyes and spread across his whole face, carving deep lines of delight and disbelief into his weathered features.
"You did, didn't you?" he breathed, his voice dropping to a reverent hush. He took a step closer to the cage wall, his hands resting against the wire. "You took down a Gen 5. A damn E.I.T.S.-5."
The pride in his eyes was a physical warmth. It was a validation that washed away the fear, the chase, the crash, and the loss. It was the look a father gives a child who has just done the impossible. And stupidly, helplessly, it brought a tear to my eye, which I quickly blinked away, a lump forming in my dry throat. In that moment, under his gaze, it had all been worth it.
"Did we get anything worth having?" Marco's voice cut across the room, sharp and focused, all traces of his earlier pride gone. His eyes remained locked on me for a second longer, a silent question, before swivelling towards Meki. "And put that down!"
Meki, still clutching the piece of scavenged tech they'd picked up, didn't look up. Their shoulders were set in a defensive line.
"The Hounds were on us before the damn thing had even finished falling from the sky," they retorted, their voice tight with a mixture of frustration and defiance. With a clatter, they tossed the component back onto the table and hefted their pack. "They knew we were coming. Bad luck, or something… but they were there before we could get anything substantial. This is all I managed to harvest."
They found a rare clear spot on a nearby workbench cluttered with circuit boards and shoved a stack of manuals aside. With a grimace, they upended the pack. A pathetic cascade of components tumbled out: a few shredded lengths of copper wiring, a dented sensor housing, a single cracked propeller blade, and a handful of smaller, unidentifiable chips and connectors, all scarred by the impact.
Marco was on it in an instant. The caring father was gone, completely subsumed by the scientist and tactician. His eyes, hawk-like, scanned the meagre haul, his fingers, stained with solder and ink, darting in to sift through the debris. He picked up the cracked propeller, his thumb tracing the fracture line, then discarded it with a soft snort of disdain. He held a small, blackened chip up to the light, his expression unreadable, but the intensity of his focus was a physical force in the room. The worth of our entire night, our risk, our near capture, was being weighed in that handful of broken parts.
Marco let out a low, appreciative whistle, holding one of the salvaged chips between his thumb and forefinger like a jeweller appraising a rare diamond.
"You did good, Meki," he said, his voice laced with genuine respect. "There's some stuff here I haven't even seen before. The architecture on this… and these two chips alone," he tapped the two smallest components, "are worth a fortune on the right market. Well spotted in the chaos."
A laugh burst out of me, half genuine, half in mock protest. I gestured towards Meki, who was still wiping burger grease from their chin.
"Meki? That fat bugger-eating fool? Marco, it was me who took the bird out! I was the one who jumped!"
Marco, already lost back in the schematic of components laid out before him, completely missed the humour. He didn't even look up.
"The harvesting is important, Nimble. You had your victory. Now let Meki have theirs."
His tone was that of a patient teacher explaining a fundamental law of physics.
Before I could retort, a soft, squishy stress-relief toy shaped like a tiny, blobby monster sailed through the air and bounced off the side of my head with a harmless plap.
"And less of the 'fat,' bitch," Meki said, their voice dripping with a playful venom that instantly dissolved into that deep, infectious and I had to admit, unfairly sexy laugh of theirs. It was a sound that could disarm you completely, transforming the tension of the chase and the sting of rivalry into the easy comfort of shared survival.
The tension of the failed harvest finally broken, Meki flashed a grin that was all sharp edges and shared secrets. They slung their pack over their shoulder, nodded towards the stairway down in a familiar, easy gesture, the one they only used when the adrenaline high hadn't quite worn off.
"Come on, legend," they said, their voice dropping into a conspiratorial tone meant just for me, though it carried easily across the cluttered room. "Let's go tell the gang you bagged another bird, Nims."
I still got unhinged when they called me that.
"They're probably still chewing over the last one. Wait 'til they hear you went after a Gen 5 and lived to brag about it."
The simple statement was a benediction. It was Meki's way of saying I know you did the hard part, of stitching my pilot's victory and their scavenger's salvage back into a single, unbreakable story, our story. And together, we turned from the brain of the operation to carry the tale down to its beating heart.