After the cold receipt-voice drops inside the cargo bay, there's about three seconds of silence.
Then Li hears it—low, muddy repetition rising all around him. Like a classroom of students reciting after a teacher, exhausted, hollow.
"Roll call complete… routing confirmed… next node: 04:55… trigger action: contact interface GH–7–B…"
It comes from every corner of the truck, threads of sound twisting together into a dull swarm.
Li realizes his own lips are moving too.
He didn't decide to speak. The words simply tumble out of his throat. The moment they're done, his mind goes briefly blank.
Not tinnitus—something sharper: a clean cut. Like a few seconds were pinched out and thrown away.
He blinks and sees Daniel hunched over his wristwatch, pen tearing across a small notebook.
"Old Li," Daniel doesn't look up, voice pressed down to a whisper, "you spaced out for about one second. Whole truck—everyone kinda… skipped."
Li says nothing.
The geolocation noise shifts again. It isn't chaotic static now. It's been combed into segments—structured—and forced into his skull, line by line.
"Timestamp: 04:21.""Directive: remain seated.""Gaze limit: forward.""Breathing rhythm: synchronized calibration."
Every directive lands like a scrape inside his head. He obeys—sits still, stares at the back of a soldier's uniform, breathes to a beat he can't hear.
Then the cut happens again.
This time he feels it clearly.
One moment he's studying the soldier's camo pattern, the next he's staring at a rust stain on the floor.
"Again," Daniel's voice floats in from far away. "Interval… about twelve seconds. Every time before the 'blank,' my headset goes dead for half a second. Like comms drop. This worker-bot system refreshing its route like it's taking a smoke break?"
Li wants to turn his head toward Daniel.
His neck doesn't move.
The directive stream didn't include that.
A speaker in the ceiling crackles—zzzt—then Brian's voice arrives, cold as he reads.
"All transfer assets, note supplemental routing rules: failure to complete trigger action at node results in reroute. Reroute is, by definition, reselection—assets will be re-evaluated and assigned to less controllable, higher-loss transfer branches."
He pauses, as if making sure the words land hard enough to bruise.
"The countdown is not encouragement. It is the sound of elimination beginning."
The truck gets quieter. Even the low reciting voices die.
Li sees the man across from him start breathing fast, hands trembling. Three seconds later the man forces his breath flat again—and his face turns blank, almost identical to Li's.
Everyone has to perform stability.
Unstable gets tossed into something worse.
They're grinding survival into a competition with rules written by a machine.
Daniel shifts, inch by inch, until his shoulder touches Li's. A guard glances, doesn't care.
"I've got it," Daniel speaks without moving his lips much, sound squeezed through his teeth. "That 'blank half-second' is the system recalculating route—deciding which branch to push this truck into. The comms drop is like clearing cache before computation."
He slips the cloth pouch into Li's hand. Thin. Inside, a hard square.
"From Sophia. She said it might be a 7–4 restraint buckle, or a resonance plastic piece." Daniel continues. "My play is: when we get there, we stick it near the interface—or near your band—and create a fake signal, so the system misreads distance. In theory, we can steal about one second of routing desync."
Li grips the pouch. "One second does what?"
"Two choices," Daniel answers fast. "A: use the second to pop you out of lock for a moment—so you can move on your own. B: use the second to delay roll-call receipt, buy Marcus time to do something—pry a door, jam a transfer, whatever. You only get one. Pick A and you may act outside directives. Pick B and Marcus might move the world a centimeter. But you can't cover both."
"Pick A," Li says.
His voice is calm.
Daniel stares at him for a fraction. "You sure? Marcus—"
"He'll find a way," Li says. "I need to be able to move."
Daniel nods once and slides back to his original spot.
The truck drives another twenty minutes, slows, stops.
The cargo door slides open.
Outside, it's still night—but several high-power floodlights bleach a zone into harsh white. It looks like an abandoned highway inspection station, except fresh white guide-lines are painted on the ground, leading into a temporary canopy tent.
Under the canopy stands a row of metal pillars. Each pillar has a faintly glowing interface slot.
A lane for tagging livestock.
Two escort soldiers hop down. Marcus steps out too, hands raised to show he's unarmed. He turns to the soldiers.
"Brothers, per procedure, before contact confirmation it's best if the navigation asset and operator do a quick pre-check." He points to an open patch of concrete fifteen meters from the canopy. "So we don't fail the trigger due to coordination issues and trigger reroute. You don't want that on your record, right?"
One soldier frowns. "Policy doesn't say that."
"Policy also doesn't forbid increasing success rate." Marcus's tone is cooperative, all we're all workers here, let's just do this clean. "Look—him," he nods toward Li in the truck. "He's locked tight. If he stiffens for half a second in front of the interface and times out, whose fault is that? We rehearse once—two minutes. Safer. Otherwise when Brian asks, you'll be saying 'we followed policy and did nothing extra,' and that'll sound like you're dumping responsibility."
The two soldiers trade a look.
Marcus's words are pure workplace sorcery—turning "I need space" into "I'm protecting you from blame."
"Make it quick," one says.
Marcus turns and calls toward the truck. "Li. Daniel. Out. Pre-check."
Li stands. His movement is stiff, but functional. Daniel follows.
They walk to the open patch. The soldiers hang back five or six meters, watching.
Marcus positions his body so his back blocks their line of sight. He speaks loudly, performing.
"Now we simulate the contact action. On my count, extend your arm, align to the virtual interface—"
At the same time, he whispers in a low, fast thread: "Daniel. The item."
Daniel squats like he's tying his shoe. His hand flashes—pulling the hard piece from the pouch—and slaps it against the side of Li's wristband.
A gray-white plastic buckle.
A faint spray-mark is still visible: 7–4.
Almost instantly, the structured directive stream in Li's head stutters.
Like a video buffering.
Behind them, the floodlights dip for a heartbeat, then surge back.
Both soldiers' radios hiss into half a second of hard silence.
Li feels the glass wall inside his head—the thing that keeps "him" behind the directives—crack.
He can move.
Not fully free—but for about one second, the grip loosens.
Marcus keeps shouting simulated commands, body still shielding the soldiers' view.
In that one second, Li does three things:
He maps the interface pillar row under the canopy—positions, distance, spacing.
He registers a figure in shadow beside the canopy—a different uniform, wrong cut, watching from the side.
And he peels the plastic buckle off his band and closes it in his fist.
Then the directives surge back—cold and complete.
But something has changed.
A seam remains. A micro-gap. That stolen second—his unscripted movement—seems to have been "logged" by the system as an undefined adjustment, and now it leaves a hairline slack in the next directive: walk toward the interface.
"Pre-check complete!" Marcus announces, loud. He nods to the soldiers. "Ready."
They move toward the canopy. Li is placed first.
He steps to his assigned metal pillar. The interface glows pale blue. The directive stream roars:
Contact interface. Confirm. Contact interface. Confirm.
Li extends his arm. He brings his wristband toward the glow.
In the final fraction before contact—
He slips the plastic buckle from his fist and presses it between band and interface, fingertip-hidden.
Contact.
The blue flashes once and settles into stable green.
Li's head goes whum—
Not noise.
The opposite.
Like every sound, thought, sensation is vacuumed away at once.
He sees his hand on the interface. He sees the green light. But he can't remember placing his wrist there. He can't remember the last few seconds at all.
He watches "Li Kaine" complete the trigger action from a distance.
Then a new receipt slams into everyone in the zone—not only Li, but the entire canopy station, shared like a broadcast into the nervous system:
"GH–7–B interface contact confirmed.""Route generated: Secondary Channel A. Priority: elevated.""New binding: Recovery Team roster—full-unit asset association lock.""Synchronized entry into same-branch transfer sequence."
Marcus's face changes.
Daniel whispers, "Oh—shit."
The meaning is immediate:
They didn't complete a task.
They tied the entire team to Li.
From now on, they reroute together. They bleed together. If they get tossed into a higher-loss branch, they go as a package.
A speaker clicks on, no delay at all—as if Brian has been waiting for exactly this line.
"Verification segment complete. Transfer procedure now formally initiated."
"Next-node directive: execute navigation asset separation. Repeat: execute navigation asset separation."
A soldier pulls Li away from the interface.
Li's face doesn't move—but inside the deep quiet of full-gray, in the fading aftershock of the shared roll-call receipt, he catches a few fragments clearer than any before:
"…GH–7 Anchor Edge… Transfer Chain B…""…Category: A–47…"
A–47.
The same category code stamped on his daughter's file.
The countdown clicks into its next phase.
The separation order hangs overhead like a blade.
And Li and his daughter—at least in the system's eyes—have been sorted into the same bin.