Rael gave himself three days to disappear cleanly.
Not run. Not hide. Just close tabs. Sector-Zero had a way of holding on to people through debt, obligation, and the kind of unfinished business that dragged you back down right when you thought you were moving. He wasn't going to leave loose ends. Loose ends had a way of becoming nooses.
Day one: he settled every credit he owed: four people, three separate debts. Nothing big, but owing anything to anyone in Sector-Zero was the same as handing them a leash. He paid in full, in person, without explanation.
Two of them asked where he was going.
"Around," he said.
They didn't push. Down here, around meant don't ask.
Day two: he dismantled the stall. Folding table, crate, and tools were distributed to three different people who'd been watching him work long enough to know what they were doing. The diagnostic wand he kept. Everything else went. Someone else could use the gap between the columns. Someone else would, probably by morning.
He didn't feel anything about that. It was just a gap.
Day three was the one he'd been putting off.
Fen found him first, which wasn't surprising. Kid had a talent for showing up exactly when Rael didn't want company.
He was twelve, maybe thirteen, small even for that. Lived in the crawlspace above Sub-Level 2 with four other kids who pooled whatever they scraped together. Rael had taught him basic wiring eight months ago because Fen kept hovering around the stall, asking questions, and it was easier to show him than to explain why he should leave.
"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."
"I'm just saying that's a lot of stuff to give away."
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."
Smart kid. Annoyingly smart kid.
"Yeah," Rael said.
Fen was quiet for half a block, which was unusual. Then: "You're gonna come back though. Right? As you go in, you do the thing, you come back with a grade upgrade, and then you can actually..."
"Don't."
"I'm just saying there are guys who come back..."
"There are guys who come back different," Rael said. "That's not the same thing."
Fen went quiet again. They walked past the Sub-Level 2 water station, past the guy who sold fake Dominion transit passes out of a coat, past the burnt-out shell of what used to be a med clinic before Compliance Officers decided it was operating without proper authorization.
"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 was doing the thing kids did when they were trying not to look like they meant something. Eyes a little too casual. Jaw a little too set.
"Because I don't make promises I don't know I can keep," Rael said. "And neither should you. Not down 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 you ended up standing still.
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 soft spots in the floor. He'd mapped this place at fourteen with a busted flashlight and too much time—some things you memorize without meaning to.
He found the third bench. Crouched under it.
The loose panel was still there.
He didn't open it right away. Just sat on the floor with his back against the rotted wood and looked at the ceiling hole where you could see Sub-Level 5's undercarriage, pipes, cables, and the guts of a city that didn'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 turned anyone away, never asked for more than people could give, never looked at someone who was desperate and saw an opportunity.
Compliance Officers kicked down the door 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.
The officers laughed about something in the corridor afterward. Not about his dad specifically. Just laughing. Something funny happened, or nothing happened, or that was just how their afternoon was going.
Routine.
Rael had hated indifference more than cruelty ever since.
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..."
Cut. Dead air. The familiar wall.
He almost pulled the wand out.
Didn't.
Left it running, past the wall, into the static he'd always written off.
And there it was.
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.
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.
Survived long enough.
Like she already knew what he'd be walking into. Like this wasn't a goodbye. It was a checkpoint.
He turned the wand over in his hands.
She wasn't dead. He'd never actually believed she was dead, not really, even when it was easier to act like she was. 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.
It was connected to the Draft. He didn't have evidence for that. He just knew it the way you knew things in Sector-Zero, in the gut, before the brain caught up.
He pocketed the chip.
Stood up.
Brushed the dust off 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 lights. Bright, steady, the kind of light that didn't flicker because it ran on a proper grid. Above that, somewhere, Upper-Tier. Above that, the Dominion administrative floors are lit up blue-white around the clock.
He'd looked at 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.
Not hope. Not ambition. Just the specific feeling of a lock clicking into place. Of 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.
Her hands, if anyone had been watching closely enough, were not entirely steady.