Rael gave himself three days to disappear cleanly.
He wasn't running or hiding. He just needed to close things out. Sector-Zero kept people trapped with debts, favors, and unfinished business that pulled you back just when you thought you were free. He wouldn't leave anything undone. Unfinished business always came back to choke you.
On the first day, he paid off every credit he owed—four people, three debts. None of it was much, but in Sector-Zero, any debt meant someone could control you. He paid everyone in full, face to face, and didn't explain why.
Two of them asked where he was going.
"Around," he said.
They didn't press him. Here, saying 'around' meant you shouldn't ask questions.
On the second day, he took apart his stall. He gave the folding table, crate, and tools to three people who had watched him work and knew what to do. He kept only the diagnostic wand. Everything else was gone. Someone else would use the space between the columns—probably by morning.
He didn't feel anything about it. To him, it was just an empty space.
Day three was the one he'd been putting off.
Fen was the first to find him, which didn't surprise Rael. The kid always seemed to show up when Rael wanted to be alone.
Fen was twelve or thirteen, and small for his age. He lived in a crawlspace above Sub-Level 2 with four other kids, sharing whatever they could find. About eight months ago, Rael taught him basic wiring because Fen kept hanging around the stall, asking questions. It was easier to teach him than to tell him to go away.
"Yo." Fen fell into step beside him like he'd been there the whole time. "Heard you gave away your table."
"Yep."
"And your crate."
"Yep."
"And that lamp you fixed like six times."
"Fen."
"That's a lot to give away, you know."
Rael kept walking. "What do you want?"
"Nothing." A pause. "Draft notice, right?"
Rael glanced at him sideways.
Fen shrugged. "Word gets around. You're not the only one who got one, but you're the only one who's been settling debts for three days, so." Another shrug. "Draft notice."
Fen was smart. Sometimes, too smart for his own good.
"Yeah," Rael said.
Fen stayed quiet for half a block, which wasn't like him. Then he said, "You're coming back, right? You go in, do what they ask, come back with a grade upgrade, and then you can actually..."
"Don't."
"I'm just saying there are guys who come back..."
"Some guys come back different," Rael said. "That's not the same."
Fen went quiet again. They walked past the Sub-Level 2 water station, past the man selling fake Dominion transit passes from his coat, and past the burned-out remains of a med clinic that Compliance Officers had shut down for lacking the right permits.
"You could take us with you," Fen said. Quieter now. "When you come back. If you're high enough grade, you could just..."
"Stop."
"Why?"
Rael stopped walking. Turned to look at him.
Fen did what kids do when they're trying to hide how much something matters. His eyes looked too casual, his jaw set a little too hard.
"Because I don't make promises unless I know I can keep them," Rael said. "And you shouldn't either. Not here."
Fen stared at him for a second. Then he looked away, at the ground, at something that wasn't there.
"Yeah," he said. "Okay."
Rael started walking again.
He didn't look back. Looking back was how people got stuck.
The clinic was on Sub-Level 6, in a section that had been condemned for two years but never actually cleared out because clearing things out cost resources and Dominion didn't spend resources on Sector-Zero.
What was left wasn't much. Half the ceiling had caved. The benches were rotted through. The smell was old water and rust and something underneath that Rael had stopped noticing years ago.
He knew exactly where to step to avoid the weak spots in the floor. At fourteen, he'd mapped the place with a broken flashlight and too much free time. Some things you remember without trying.
He found the third bench. Crouched under it.
The looHe didn't open it right away. He sat on the floor, leaning against the rotted wood, and stared up at the hole in the ceiling. Through it, he could see the underbelly of Sub-Level 5—pipes, cables, and the insides of a city that didn't care about what was underneath.n't care what was below it.
His father used to work late here. Rael remembered sitting on that same bench as a kid, legs dangling because he was too short to reach the floor, watching his dad patch up people who couldn't afford official clinics. People who came in with black-market aug infections, cracked seals, and things that had gone wrong in specific ways when you tried to upgrade yourself on a Grade-F budget.
His dad never turned anyone away.
That was the thing about him. Never turnThat was just how he was. He never turned anyone away, never asked for more than people could give, and never saw desperate people as opportunities.or on a Tuesday afternoon. Rael was seven. He hid in the tool locker because his dad shoved him in there, put a finger to his lips, and looked at him with an expression Rael had spent eleven years trying to decode.
Afterward, the officers laughed about something in the hallway. It wasn't about his dad. Maybe something funny happened, maybe nothing did, or maybe that was just their day.
Routine.
Since then, Rael hated indifference even more than cruelty.
He opened the panel.
The chip was still there, wrapped in its signal-blocking cloth. Small enough to sit in his palm. He'd listened to it maybe a dozen times over four years, always the same fragments, always stopping at the same place because after that it was static and he'd already memorized everything useful.
He plugged it into his wand.
Static. Then her voice.
"...the integration response is unlike anything in documented Dominion biology. It's not rejection. The core isn't fighting the augmentation, it's..."
Cut.
"...three subjects confirmed. Two from the northern sectors, one local. All are presenting the same anomaly. All Grade-F baseline on surface scans. All something else underneath..."
He'd heard this part. He knew this part.
"...they must not know about the child. If they run a deep tissue scan on an active subject, they'll find the pattern, and then there's no.The recording cut out. Silence. The same wall as always.wall.
He almost pulled the wand out.
Didn't.
He let it play, past the usual stopping point, into the static he'd always ignored.
Then he heard it.
Footsteps in the background. Slow, deliberate. Moving away from the recorder. A door opening. A pause that felt like someone checking a corridor.
Then his mother's voice came back, lower, as if she wasn't recording anymore, as if she was talking to something she expected to find later.
"If you're hearing this... you've already survived long enough."
A breath.
"Good."
Static.
Rael sat in the dark clinic on Sub-Level 6 and didn't move for a while.
He'd survived long enough.
No, I'm sorry. Not that I had to go. Not even I love you, which would've been something, which would've been the kind of thing a person said when they were leaving a message for a kid they were abandoning.
He'd made it this far.
It was as if she already knew what he'd face. This wasn't a goodbye—it was a checkpoint.
He turned the wand over in his hands.
She wasn't dead. He'd never truly believed she was, even when pretending was easier. Dead people didn't leave messages that sounded like instructions.
Whatever she found out. Whatever she was hiding him from. Whatever anomaly in the sample meant.
He knew it was connected to the Draft. He had no proof, but sometimes you just know things in Sector-Zero—your gut tells you before your mind does.
He pocketed the chip.
Stood up.
He brushed the dust from his knees.
He stopped once on the way back, at the top of the Sub-Level 3 access ladder, and looked out at the skyline above the Node.
Mid-Tier lightsMid-Tier lights shone bright and steady, never flickering because they ran on a real grid. Above them was Upper-Tier, and higher still, the Dominion offices glowed blue-white all night.t those lights his whole life and felt nothing except a vague, functional awareness that they existed, and he was not there.
Tonight was different.
He looked at them and thought: okay.
It wasn't hope or ambition. It was just the clear sense of something locking into place—a direction becoming real.
He went back to his room, lay down on the sleep mat, and closed his eyes.
Tomorrow, he reported.
Somewhere in Mid-Tier, in an office on the forty-third floor, a woman with a Director's title and Grade-C augmentations stood at her window.
On her desk: a file. Photo clipped to the front. A boy, eighteen, with dark eyes, the specific kind of blank expression that only came from years of practice.
She looked at the photo for a long moment.
Then she closed the file, put it in her drawer, and locked it.
If anyone had looked closely, they would have seen her hands weren't completely steady.