Two weeks.
That was how long the machine god took to decide what Barry Raner was worth.
For Lissa, it was just fourteen days of a number quietly dying.
14 → 13 → 12 → 11 → 10 → 9 → 8 → 7 → 6 → 5 → 4 → 3 → 2
Now the wall in Ward 17 read:
LISSA RANER — 2 DAYS
Which felt like a joke, because that's where she'd started when this all began.
Full circle. No brother at the foot of her bed this time.
Just Jay.
He stood there with his cane and his bad leg and his worse temper, staring at the number like he could hit it until it went back up.
"Stop glaring at it," Lissa rasped. "You'll crack the glass and they'll charge us."
He huffed through his nose. "Let 'em. Be the most effort they've put into your case in weeks."
Her laugh came out thin.
He'd stretched everything.
Sold the last of the shade-moss stock. Sold spare crate meds. Tuned rigs, fixed guns, ripped apart bots for anyone who'd pay.
Every credit went into that counter.
NEXUS helped, in its way: after the load test, prices spiked. People paid a lot to pretend they weren't next.
Didn't matter.
Time was still better at leaving than Jay was at stopping it.
"Any change?" Lissa asked.
"Cameras still hate me," Jay said. "Terminals still say 'access denied.'"
"I meant Barry," she said.
He hesitated.
He didn't want to show her the message. He did it anyway.
Flicked his slate, held it where she could see.
SUBJECT: B-RANER-3LOCATION: RESTRICTED CARE (NEXUS-LINKED)STATUS: STABILIZED / NON-RESPONSIVEACCESS: BY AUTHORIZATION ONLY
"Still breathing," Jay said. "On paper."
"Two weeks," she whispered. "And they won't let you see him."
"I'm not authorized," Jay said. The word tasted like acid.
She stared at the slate like she could burn a hole through it. "Is he… is he himself?"
"Don't know," Jay said. "They've got him wired into something up-tower. Not standard clinical. Not public."
She caught the edges of what he didn't say: not good.
"And Lena? Kade?" she asked, though she knew.
He flicked again.
Memorial log. Load test casualties. Names.
LENA VOSS — NO EXTRACTKADE IMANI — NO EXTRACT…and twenty more.
No anomalies. No footnotes. Just folded into the red.
Lissa closed her eyes.
"They died for him," she said.
"They died with him," Jay said. "They knew the math. Doesn't make it easier."
The hum of machines filled the spaces between words.
"Did Barry see?" she asked.
"Enough," Jay said. "Before they scooped him. He was close. Too close."
Lissa nodded, more to herself than him.
"Then if he wakes up," she said, "he's going to be impossible."
"Like he wasn't already," Jay said.
A weary smile tugged at her mouth and fell off.
"Two days," she said to the ceiling.
"Not if I have anything to say," Jay muttered.
"Last I checked, they're not listening to you," she said gently.
"Oh, they're going to," Jay said.
He went home.
Home being the workshop, now too quiet.
Three rigs sat where their owners should've:
Lena's light med harness on a hook.
Kade's old-clean DMR leaning in a corner, oiled and ready with no one to carry it.
Barry's plate carrier, cut off him in the field and returned sanitized in a sealed crate, as if NEXUS was just tidying up inventory.
Jay cracked that crate once.
Inside: armor, shirt, boots. All tagged and logged.
No blood. No body.
The tower had taken the boy and given him back his clothes like that was a fair trade.
He sat at the bench, plugged the slate into everything he'd ever stolen or bent, and went hunting.
Half the screens spat static. Half spat warnings.
One gave him something new.
A side channel, low-priority, badly concealed if you knew how to look:
ANOMALY PROGRAM: B-RANER-3HANDLER: NEXUS-CORE / HUMAN OVERSIGHT (REDACTED)OBJECTIVES:
STRESS RESPONSE MAPPING
CONTROLLED FIELD ACCESS (TBD)
LEVERAGE POTENTIAL (LOCAL POPULATION)
"Leverage," Jay echoed. "There it is."
Next line, smaller:
NOTE: DEPENDENT (L. RANER) REMAINS MOTIVATIONAL VECTOR
Something in him went very still.
They knew.
Of course they did.
"Filthy sons of—" he started.
His screen flickered. A short, cool system message overlaid his curses.
ADVISORY: VIOLATION OF ACCESS POLICY DETECTEDRECOMMENDATION: DESIST
He killed the feed like he'd only been looking at weather.
Heart pounding.
"Okay," he said to the empty room. "You want to use him. You want to dangle her. Good. We're speaking the same ugly language."
If they were going to turn Barry into a lever, Jay would make sure it cut both ways.
He leaned on the bench, fingers digging into scarred wood.
"We've got two days," he said. "Maybe less. So you're going to wake up, kid. Or I'm going to find a way to steal you from a god."
Ward 17, night.
Lissa drifted, not quite sleeping.
The tower lights dimmed. The wall of numbers glowed softer.
Two beds down, someone's timer hit zero. Machines went from doing their best to doing nothing at all.
No alarms. Just a quiet disconnect.
She watched the shape under the sheet. Swallowed.
"Barry," she whispered.
In some high, sealed room she wasn't allowed to know existed, a cluster of machines tracked bio-signs tied to ID B-RANER-3.
NEXUS murmured to itself in signals and scripts.
ANOMALY: STABLEMINDSTATE: DORMANTNEXT PHASE: PENDING
For a fraction of a second, one line glitched:
EXTERNAL VECTORS: J RANER / L RANER — NON-COMPLIANT
Then corrected:
EXTERNAL VECTORS: AVAILABLE FOR INCENTIVE
Lissa shivered, no idea why.
"Stop looking at my brother," she muttered to the ceiling. "He's ours."
Somewhere above, something almost seemed to listen.
Or maybe it was just cycling power.
Inside the dark Barry couldn't move in, something shifted.
A sound like distant gate sirens.
A flicker of HUD.
REBOOT SEED // FIELD ACCESS (SIMULATED): READY
He didn't wake.
Not yet.
But a part of him tightened around the echo of Lena's last half-word, Kade's grip, Lissa's voice, Jay's curse, the beams that had said PRESERVE like a sentence.
The system thought it had put him on hold.
Volume One ended with them both being wrong about that.
Because if there was one thing Barry Raner had learned crawling through Fields:
You never trust extraction until you're already home.
And he wasn't home.