I woke up to blood.
Not the cinematic kind. Not the kind you can cheat with corn syrup and a good angle and a distracted audience.
Real blood does not behave for a lens.
It pools where it wants. It stains what it touches. It makes the air metallic, like somebody left a handful of pennies under your tongue. And it turns every face in the room into a question nobody wants to answer out loud.
The first thing my eyes caught was the worker’s hands.
Not his face. Not the alarms. Not the corridor lights snapping from calm-white to warning-amber in clean, practiced increments.
His hands.
He was holding a manifest sleeve like it could talk him out of trouble if he squeezed hard enough. The sleeve was clear composite, the kind that should have been clean forever, the kind that is meant to survive vacuum storms and cargo friction and whatever people think trade is.
There was a smear across it.
One sloppy red thumbprint.
He stared at that print like it was a sentence.
He whispered one phrase over and over, barely breathing.
“Not my fault. Not my fault. Not my fault.”
And my body did what my body always does, because I was trained in a world where you move toward the problem first and figure out the paperwork later.
I started to step forward.
Something in me rose up, instinct and guilt and that stupid human need to fix what’s breaking in front of you.
Then the voice in my head cut across it like a hand on my chest.
Not loud. Not dramatic. Not a prophecy voice.
A calm director voice, like we were on a set and a scene was about to get somebody killed if I missed my mark.
“Do not interfere,” he said.
My foot hovered mid-step.
“Observe,” he said.
The worker’s shoulders shook harder.
“Breathe,” he said.
I hated that I listened.
Not because I disagreed with him.
Because I did not know who he was to give me commands in my skull, and still my nervous system obeyed like it recognized the authority.
I inhaled.
The air tasted like copper and sterilizer.
Exhale.
My vision sharpened.
And that is when the overlays hit.
Not on a screen across the room.
In me.
In the edge of my sight, like a transparent status card was taped to the inside of my eyelids.
TRADE BLEED
HUMAN CASUALTY: CONFIRMED
SOURCE CORRIDOR: FARNYX RUN
CONTAINMENT: PENDING
LIABILITY: ACTIVE
My throat tightened.
Farnyx.
That word had weight here.
Not a town. Not a random star system. Not a label.
A bruise on the Province’s body.
A place where routes got hijacked and freight went missing and people died without anyone calling it war, because the Province had a thousand cleaner words for violence.
Farnyx Run was pirate territory.
RXC land.
Rogue Exchange Commission, they called it like it was an office and a charter and not what it really was.
A market built on leverage.
A corridor built on fear.
And that smear of blood on a manifest sleeve meant the bruise was swelling again.
The corridor lane around us tightened.
You can feel it when a place is designed to respond to crisis. It is not panic. It is choreography.
Doors sealed in a sequence that made my skin crawl.
One. Two. Three.
The ceiling lights shifted.
A low tone pulsed through the floor like a heartbeat you did not consent to.
People who had been walking with their heads down suddenly moved with purpose, like someone shouted cut and the whole crew snapped into positions they rehearsed a hundred times.
Then EDEN arrived.
Not like soldiers.
Like a temperature change.
Warm light rolled into the lane from the left corridor. Soft voices followed it. The kind of calm that suggests they have authority and do not need to prove it with volume.
Two EDEN mediators stepped into the space and the civilians reacted like the air itself had been steadied. The mediators did not run. They did not shout.
They measured.
They spoke in phrases that sounded gentle but landed like locks.
“Handled,” one of them said, voice low and smooth.
“Maintained,” the other said.
Their eyes swept the crowd the way a teacher scans a classroom.
Not hunting for a fight.
Hunting for variables.
Then NEA arrived.
NEA did not bring warmth.
NEA brought containment.
Armor moved in fast, silent, practiced. Their hands were visible, open at first, a show of procedure, then closing into fists and grips as the lane tightened.
They were verbs with pulse rifles.
Seal. Separate. Secure. Escort.
They fanned out, making a perimeter around the tarp-covered cart that had rolled in under emergency protocol, and the worker with the manifest sleeve went pale when he realized the lane had become a tribunal.
NEA language was not speeches.
It was commands.
“Back.”
“Clear.”
“Hands visible.”
“Stay in line.”
My body recognized it.
Not because I had ever been part of NEA.
Because I had been around enough uniforms in my life to know what competence sounds like.
Then STAR arrived.
STAR did not push.
STAR did not shout.
STAR just appeared where sightlines were clean.
And when they turned their heads, I heard it.
That faint high-pitch tone.
Like a camera rolling, but colder.
A recording tone.
The kind of frequency you do not notice until your teeth start buzzing.
STAR watched the blood.
STAR watched the worker’s trembling hands.
STAR watched the way EDEN softened the crowd.
STAR watched the way NEA tightened the perimeter.
Then STAR watched me.
The recording tone sharpened.
And the overlay in my sight flickered again.
SUBJECT REACTION: ELEVATED
MICRO EXPRESSION: CAPTURED
ANOMALY: SLATE PROXIMITY
OBSERVATION FLAG: ACTIVE
I swallowed and forced myself not to move.
Doc Reo’s voice came again, quieter.
“Good,” he said, like I had hit a mark.
I hated that too.
Because it meant I was learning.
And learning here felt like surrender.
The tarp came off.
Not ceremonially.
Procedurally.
NEA’s gloved hands lifted it and folded it with the kind of precision you use when you know cameras are watching, even when you do not see the cameras.
The cart held a composite crate.
The crate was supposed to be sealed.
It was not.
The seal was torn in a way that did not look like tools.
It looked like intent.
Like someone had grabbed the edge and ripped it open the way you tear paper when you are angry and you want the world to feel it.
Inside, I saw packing foam, shredded.
A spill of small hardware pieces, rolled toward the lane’s drain.
And something else.
Something the Province did not want civilians to see.
A glove.
A real glove.
Not a cargo wrap glove.
A human glove, stained dark.
The worker’s breath hitched.
He started shaking harder.
“Not my fault,” he whispered again, louder now, like prayer.
EDEN stepped closer.
One mediator kept their voice soft.
“Breathe,” they told him.
Funny. Same word.
Different ownership.
The other mediator lifted the manifest sleeve gently out of the worker’s hands and looked at the stamp.
FARNYX RUN.
Then the second stamp, heavy and black, pressed over it like a bruise over a bruise.
RXC.
A murmur rippled through the crowd.
Not screaming.
Not outrage.
A shift in posture.
Quieter. Faster. Less eye contact.
Like the Province had collectively decided to become smaller.
That is what trade does here.
Trade is not money.
Trade is permission.
And permission, I was learning, is gravity.
My overlay updated again.
PRICE INDEX: SHIFTING
ESCORT FEES: UP
FOOD CREDITS: UP
PASSAGE WINDOWS: RESTRICTED
RUMOR VELOCITY: SPIKING
The Province breathed differently.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
The crowd’s breaths shortened.
The lane’s sound dampened.
Even the lights felt tighter.
I watched the EDEN mediators stabilize the civilians with words that sounded like comfort and functioned like policy.
I watched NEA lock down the lane with hands that did not tremble.
I watched STAR record everything with faces that never changed.
And I stood there, compliant.
Not because I was calm.
Because a voice was in my head and the Patch was in my body and the Province had made it clear, in one blood-stained crate, that interference was not bravery here.
It was liability.
The worker’s knees buckled.
NEA caught him before he hit the floor.
Not gentle.
Not cruel.
Efficient.
They moved him out of the lane like a problem being rerouted.
And I realized something that settled in my gut like a stone.
Blame here is not emotion.
It is procedure.
I whispered that to myself, and for a second I thought it was my thought.
Then the voice in my head answered like he had been waiting.
“Yes,” he said. “Now you are listening, unlike before.”
That sentence chilled me more than the blood.
Because it implied this was not the first time.
It implied repetition.
It implied he had coached me before.
And I had forgotten.
If you want to understand the Province, do not start with its wars.
Start with its boards.
The ledger boards sit everywhere. Wall-mounted, suspended, projected across corridor junctions like public weather.
Numbers roll.
Indexes climb and fall.
Convoy windows open and close.
Escort fees surge like storm warnings.
Food credits flicker at the edge of red when a route bleeds.
People do not check the sky here.
They check the Silk Gateway.
That is the bloodstream.
That is the atmosphere.
We were marched out of the incident lane and into a civilian operations corridor, and I saw life in the Province in a way the sterile rooms never showed.
Route engineers with stained sleeves and tired eyes, tracing pulsing lines on translucent maps like priests reading scripture.
Ledger clerks tapping entries with the speed of gamblers, except the stakes were not money.
The stakes were access.
Contract scribes murmuring terms into recorder slates, stamping approvals that would decide who ate and who waited.
Cargo brokers speaking in clipped tones about stability percentages like it was gossip.
Signal interpreters listening to route pings with heads tilted, like musicians tuning a room.
And through it all, the Silk Gateway pulsed on wall displays in a geometry that made my film brain want to call it a design choice.
An X.
A diamond.
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Lines that crossed and merged around Xarnyx, the knot at the center of everything.
Elvryn to Narvion.
A route that should have been clean.
A route that now had to pass through the bruise.
Farnyx.
RXC.
Pirate territory disguised as commerce.
Every time the display pulsed, the people around it reacted like it was a heartbeat.
When it stayed steady, shoulders loosened.
When it flickered, bodies tightened.
Trade as weather.
Trade as survival.
And the Patch inside me kept repeating the mantra like it wanted to be worshiped.
SURVIVAL IS PERMISSION.
I did not know when it started saying that.
I only knew it was there now, like a thought that had been planted and watered.
As we moved, I noticed something else.
I should have been wrecked.
I had been looped through fear and restraints and white rooms and seams in reality, and my body should have been paying for it.
But my throat felt clearer.
The ache behind my eyes was dulling.
A split on my knuckle that I remembered from one of the times I arrived was already sealed over, skin smoothing like time had been sped up.
I flexed my hand and stared at it.
The Patch responded before I could even ask.
NANOBOT SWARM: ACTIVE
REPAIR RATE: MODERATE
INFLAMMATION: SUPPRESSED
INFECTION RISK: LOW
Not immortality.
Not magic.
Just ruthless antibodies with tools.
The problem was, it did not only repair my body.
It moderated me.
I felt it.
A surge of anger would rise and then flatten too quickly, like someone had turned down a volume knob without asking.
A spike of panic would hit and then the edges would get sanded smooth.
Not calm.
Control.
I swallowed hard, trying to hold on to my reaction just to prove I still owned it.
That is when the tapping started.
Tap.
Tap tap.
Tap.
Like someone checking a microphone before a show.
Like a DJ tapping a mic at a club to see if the speakers are live.
My head snapped up, even though there was nothing to look at.
Doc Reo’s voice followed the tapping, amused.
“Can you hear me,” he said.
Tap tap tap.
I clenched my jaw.
“Yes,” I thought back, and I hated that I was thinking back like this was normal. “And stop tapping.”
He chuckled once, low.
“That is how I know you are synced,” he said. “You always get annoyed at the tapping.”
Always.
The word caught in my ribs.
“You said that like you have done this before,” I thought.
Silence.
Then, quieter, like a director stepping close to an actor before a scene.
“I have,” he said. “You just do not remember it yet.”
My stomach dropped.
We passed another wall display, a bigger one, like the Province’s altar.
The Silk Gateway pulsed in full view, and Xarnyx glowed at the center, a bright knot of routes and permissions.
SILK GATEWAY STABILITY: 100%
FARNYX RUN VOLATILITY: RISING
HIJACK PROBABILITY: ELEVATED
I stared at the names like they were déjà vu made into text.
Xarnyx.
Elvryn.
Narvion.
Farnyx.
And beneath the map, a simple line of doctrine scrolled in clean letters.
SURVIVAL IS PERMISSION.
I swallowed.
My goal line formed in my head like a prayer I did not believe in but needed anyway.
Get one message out to Marla before the Patch decides I do not deserve a voice.
It was not romantic.
It was not destiny.
It was a promise.
A simple human promise that should have been nothing in a universe this big, and somehow felt like the only real thing I had left.
The Patch flashed my status again, uninvited, clinical as a call sheet.
STATUS: PROBATIONARY ASSET
CLEARANCE: TEMPORARY ESCORT
ACCESS: LIMITED
WALLET: TIER 0
COMMS: LOCKED (EMERGENCY RELAY ONLY)
A ladder made of permissions.
Gravity made of rules.
I looked down at my wrist and saw it again.
The Control Patch.
The Province had installed it like a signature.
It sat there flush with my skin, a smooth composite mark with a faint internal pulse, like it was breathing with me.
It was not the Interface.
The Interface was the thing at the back of my neck, the quiet hardware I could feel when I turned my head too fast, like a stiff collar under my skin.
The Control Patch was different.
This one was a key.
A leash.
An access token.
Every being in the Province had one, and if you did not, you were unlisted.
No routes.
No food credits.
No gates.
No ship IDs.
No Province.
The Control Patch was how you told the system you existed.
And it was how the system told you you belonged to it.
I did not know which part scared me more.
It hit like a cramp in my spine.
No warning.
No countdown.
Just a sudden pressure behind my eyes and a twist in my stomach like the world was about to turn inside out.
The Patch overlay flashed so bright it felt like pain.
ORIGIN ANCHOR SIGNATURE: DETECTED
STATUS: ACTIVE
ANCHOR ID: MARLA
RETURN WINDOW: INITIATING
My heart slammed once, hard.
Marla.
My body reacted like her name was a wound.
I tried to speak out loud to the escort beside me, to ask what was happening, to beg for a message, for a relay, for anything.
The Patch answered first.
PERMISSION: PENDING
COMMS: LOCKED
ESCORT: MAINTAIN
The voice in my head slid in, calmer than me.
“Do not fight the pull,” he said. “Let it take you clean.”
“What does clean mean,” I thought.
“It means on time,” he said.
Then the corridor folded.
I do not have better words for it.
Reality did not shatter.
It slid.
Like a set wall being rolled away to reveal another set behind it.
For a heartbeat I saw the Province corridor and the Silk Gateway map and the pulsing lines.
Then I saw my film lot.
Trailer lane.
Dust in sunlight.
A grip cart squeaking on concrete.
Voices calling names.
The smell of coffee and sweat and cable rubber.
And then I was stepping out of a wall seam like a magic trick I never learned.
I hit the ground hard.
Not staged.
Not graceful.
Real impact, my shoulder biting into the floor.
I heard a gasp.
Then Marla’s voice.
Sharp, controlled, furious relief wrapped in fear.
“Charlie.”
I looked up and there she was, crouched already, hands on me, pulling me toward the trailer like she had done it a thousand times in her head.
Her eyes were wide.
Not with imagination.
With proof.
“You are bleeding,” she whispered.
“I am not,” I tried to say, nothing came out and my throat scraped like I had swallowed sand.
Then I realized she meant the other kind of bleeding.
The kind where you show up out of nowhere and your existence becomes an accident that will ruin somebody’s life.
She got me inside before anyone could ask questions.
A trailer door slammed.
The world went quiet.
For a second I thought, stupidly, that being back meant safety.
Then I saw her staring at my wrist.
The Control Patch.
It sat there like an accusation.
“What is that,” she said.
My mouth opened.
Nothing came out.
The Patch pulsed once.
My vision stuttered.
Marla’s jaw tightened.
She did not hesitate.
That is what people misunderstand about her.
Marla does not panic.
Marla decides.
She grabbed her phone, texted someone, and a few minutes later the set medic was inside the trailer, looking at me like I was a liability with a pulse.
He leaned in close, professional calm.
He saw the Control Patch.
He saw the Interface node at the back of my neck when Marla lifted my hair.
His brows knit.
“I do not know what this is,” he said quietly. “But this is not drugs. This is too advanced.”
“I saw it appear,” Marla said. “He vanished into the wall. Then he came back. Only I saw it. Then that showed up.”
The medic hesitated.
He made a choice.
He took his finger and ran it around the Control Patch, careful, like he was checking a wound or a sensitive area.
The scanner blinked.
He frowned.
“It is like a second skin,” he murmured. “Not a sticker. Not a band. It is bonded.”
He tried to lift an edge, barely.
My whole body seized.
Not pain like a cut.
Pain like my nervous system being yanked by a hook.
My vision flashed white.
The Patch screamed overlays into my sight like warnings.
INTEGRITY VIOLATION
DEFENSIVE SYNC: ACTIVE
NEURAL LOAD: SPIKING
REMOVE ATTEMPT: DENIED
I choked on a sound that did not feel human.
My hands clenched hard enough to shake the trailer’s thin walls.
The medic jerked back, hands up.
“Stop,” he snapped, then softer, to Marla. “If I keep going, I will hurt him. Whatever this is, it is tied into his nervous system.”
Marla stared at the Control Patch like it had grown teeth.
“Can you take him to the hospital,” the medic asked.
She did not even blink.
“No,” she said.
“Marla, he needs imaging.”
“No,” she repeated, colder now. “This stays between us.”
The medic looked like he wanted to argue.
Then he looked at me, at the way my body was still trembling, and he decided he did not want to be responsible for what happened if the wrong people saw this.
He packed his tools fast.
He lowered his voice.
“Contact a private physician,” he said. “Someone who is not going to report this as a… whatever they will call it.”
Marla nodded once.
A deal made.
A secret sealed.
Then she moved like a woman who had already calculated the cost.
She got me out of the trailer, not toward an ambulance, but toward her car.
She drove me to her house.
Not out of kindness.
Out of control.
Because if the Province was going to own me, she was not going to let it do it in public.
When I finally gain control of my body, the room was wrong in the way a familiar place feels wrong when your brain is still half asleep.
Marla’s house smelled like clean linen and citrus.
There was a soft lamp on.
The kind of light that makes everything feel safe on purpose.
My body felt stable.
Too stable.
Like the Patch had already cleaned me up while I laid dormantly awake.
Marla sat in a chair near the bed, arms crossed, eyes locked on me like she was holding herself together by force.
“You are awake,” she said.
“Yeah,” I rasped. “I was conscious the entire time.”
She leaned forward.
Her voice dropped.
“I saw you disappear,” she said. “Into the wall. Not a trick. Not an angle. You went in, and then you came out. Right in front of me. And then that thing appeared on your wrist.”
I swallowed.
“Medics tried to remove it,” she continued. “Your body freaked out. Like it was… wired in.”
“Yeah, I saw and felt everything, but could not say anything.”
I took a breath and closed my eyes.
The Patch pulsed.
My vision flickered.
Then out of nowhere that voice slid into my mind like he had been waiting behind a curtain.
“You must tell her this first,” he said, urgent now. “You will not have much time.”
“What,” I thought.
“Say it exactly,” he said.
A phrase formed in my head.
Not a poem.
Not a prophecy.
A checksum.
A line meant to survive the next reset.
I sat up, fighting the heaviness in my limbs, and I looked Marla dead in the eyes.
“If I come back early,” I said, voice shaking, “I am not safe.”
She froze.
“If I come back on time,” I continued, forcing the words out like they were anchored to my teeth, “I am being routed.”
Marla’s breath caught.
I did not stop.
“Survival is permission,” I said. “And the Silk Gateway bleeds through Farnyx.”
Her eyes widened at the names, not because she recognized them, but because she could hear they were real.
“Watch the last sixty seconds,” I added. “It is the proof. It is the only part they cannot erase.”
Marla stared at me like she was trying to memorize my face in case it vanished again.
Then she whispered, almost angry.
“What are you talking about.”
I started to answer.
I tried.
I tried to tell her about the Province, about routes, about EDEN and NEA and STAR moving like different weather systems. About RXC and Farnyx Run and how trade turns into violence without anyone calling it war. About the Control Patch being a key and a collar. About the Interface at the back of my neck that made my thoughts feel monitored. About the voice I kept hearing, tapping like a microphone check inside my skull.
The Patch let me get three sentences in.
Then it tightened.
It was not a hand.
It was not a strap.
It was a pressure behind my eyes that made my vision pulse.
A warning overlay flared.
UNAUTHORIZED DISCLOSURE: DETECTED
COMMS VIOLATION: IMMINENT
ANCHOR RISK: ELEVATED
RETURN WINDOW: FORCED
“Marla,” I said, panicked now. “Listen to me, you have to…”
Pain.
Sharp, clean.
Like a seam opening inside my spine.
My body locked.
Marla lurched forward, grabbing my arm.
“Charlie, what is happening.”
I tried to hold on.
Tried to stay.
Tried to fight the gravity.
Then the voice came, low and controlled.
“I told you,” he said. “Not much time.”
“Do not,” I thought, desperate. “Do not take me now.”
“It is not me,” he said. “It is the system.”
The room tilted.
The air went thin.
Marla’s face blurred.
Her hand tightened around my wrist, around the Control Patch like she could anchor me by force.
Then I vanished.
Not metaphorically.
Not dramatically.
One second her fingers were on my skin.
The next second they were gripping empty air.
And the sound Marla made was not a scream.
It was worse.
It was a broken inhale.
A person realizing the world is not behaving by the rules she thought it had.
That sound followed me into the seam.
I snapped back into the Province with less chaos than before.
That was the first thing I noticed.
No stumbling.
No fog.
No frantic hands catching me like I was a falling object.
I was standing.
In a staging corridor.
Lights steady.
Air crisp and thin.
NEA personnel nearby, not rushing, just watching, like this was the outcome they expected.
The Patch overlay appeared immediately, clean as a stamped document.
ARRIVAL WINDOW: ACCEPTABLE
TIMING TOLERANCE: MATCHED
STATUS: PROBATIONARY ASSET
ESCORT: ACTIVE
I exhaled a shaky breath.
Acceptable.
Not safe.
Not free.
Acceptable.
Then the voice in my head came again, quieter now, almost satisfied.
“Good,” he said. “Now you are inside tolerance.”
“I just left her,” I thought, the words shaking inside me.
“I know,” he said.
“Did you see her,” I demanded.
“Yes,” he said, and there was something in his tone that made my stomach tighten. “She is a witness now.”
The corridor around me moved like the Province was bracing for weather.
A distant tone pulsed.
I heard convoy alerts.
I saw civilians walking faster, eyes down, shoulders tight.
The Silk Gateway board was visible down the lane, and when I looked, the lines were still pulsing.
SILK GATEWAY STABILITY: 100%
FARNYX RUN VOLATILITY: RISING
HIJACK PROBABILITY: ELEVATED
PRICE INDEX: SHIFTING
Farnyx again.
Always Farnyx.
The bruise swelling.
The Province tightening.
Then the Patch shifted something in my overlay, and my chest tightened with the strange relief of progress.
TRAINING ACCESS: ENABLED (CONDITIONAL)
A new rung.
Not freedom.
Permission scaffolding.
The kind of upgrade that comes with strings.
A NEA escort stepped closer, visor reflecting my face back at me like I was already property.
He did not introduce himself.
He did not need to.
He spoke like a man reading an order.
“Move,” he said.
I moved.
We entered a staging bay where craft flow was visible through transparent partitions. Hovering units glided in and out like aircraft, guided by ground crews who moved with hand signals that made my film brain ache with recognition.
It was choreography.
It was logistics.
It was warfare without the romance.
And in the corner of the bay, I saw one figure that did not look like the others.
No rank badge I recognized.
No loud presence.
Just a stillness that made people stop talking when he turned his head.
A Hunter Marshal.
I did not know how I knew.
I just felt it.
The Patch did not label him.
It blurred around him, like the system itself did not want to hand me that context yet.
But my body recognized the threat the way it recognized gravity.
The Hunter Marshal looked at me once.
Just once.
And it felt like being measured and filed.
My overlay flickered.
FIELD COMMAND TIER: RENDERING
A clean list appeared, utilitarian and terrifying.
TROOP COMMANDER
LIEUTENANT
WARRANT OFFICER
SERGEANT MAJOR
SERGEANT
CORPORAL
TROOPER
Then a tag locked in beside my name like a stamp.
ASSIGNMENT: TROOPER
ROLE: OBSERVATION
STATUS: PROVISIONAL / ATTACHED
Not sworn.
Not trusted.
Attached.
Cargo with legs.
The voice came again, and this time it carried something like an explanation, but he kept it tight, procedural.
“Symbiosis,” he said, “is two minds sharing one operational body.”
I swallowed.
“Like possession,” I thought.
“No,” he said immediately. “Like partnership. When it is done right. When it is done wrong, it is parasitic.”
My stomach turned.
“Why me,” I thought, the question sharper now because I was standing in a world built on routes and permissions and I was about to become part of the machine.
His voice softened, almost human.
“Because you are an actor,” he said. “And acting is survival technology. You can play the role the system needs without losing yourself completely. Most people cannot.”
“That is not a compliment,” I thought.
“It is not,” he said. “It is a requirement. Oh, and I almost forgot. It’s time I tell you my name.”
He paused for a moment as if reading over a script.
“Some call me Reo, some call me Doc. My name is Doc Reo, I’m here to untangle the knot.”
As I contemplated his name and the rhyme that seemed like a riddle.
Doc Reo chimed in, “Just remember the rhyme you’ll know more in due time.”
The staging bay doors hissed.
A NEA officer approached with a data slate.
No ceremony.
Just work.
The slate flashed, then the Patch echoed it inside my sight.
ROUTE PROTOCOL BASICS: INITIATED
MOTOR CALIBRATION: PENDING
COMPLIANCE DRILLS: SCHEDULED
COMMS: LOCKED
ANCHOR: ACTIVE (MARLA)
Marla’s name sitting there like a liability.
Like a tether.
Like a target.
I clenched my jaw so hard it hurt.
“Let me message her,” I thought. “Just one line. Let me tell her I am alive.”
The Patch answered before Doc Reo could.
PERMISSION: PENDING
SURVIVAL PROBABILITY INCREASES WITH COMPLIANCE
There it was again.
Care that sounded like a threat.
Then Doc Reo spoke, and his voice carried the faintest hint of that tapping energy, like he was stepping closer to the mic again.
“You keep asking why the name hits you,” he said.
My chest tightened.
“What name,” I thought, though I already knew.
“Rodeo,” he said.
My skin prickled.
I saw a flash of something in my memory that did not belong to me. A stage. A mic. A hand tapping it. A voice saying action like it was a command for reality itself.
Doc Reo’s tone turned sharp, decisive.
“You should know,” he said. “Charlie Slate.”
My breath caught.
“Or should I say,” he continued, and there was no humor in it now, only inevitability, “Charlie Rodeo.”
The Patch reacted like the words were a key.
My vision flooded with a sting of system text, bright and final.
RODEO PROTOCOL: ACTIVE
MOBIUS PARADOX PROTOCOL: PHASE UPDATE
COMMS: LOCKED
ANCHOR: ACTIVE (MARLA)
The staging bay lights pulsed once, and somewhere deeper in the Province I heard a convoy alarm rise, low and steady, like thunder rolling in.
Farnyx trending red again.
Silk Gateway stable like a loaded gun.
And me, marked as a Trooper, moving into my first operational corridor run while the voice in my head stopped sounding like a stranger and started sounding like ownership.
I wanted to tell you I fought it.
I wanted to tell you I refused.
But the Province does not care what you want.
It cares what you are permitted to do.
And I was finally, terrifyingly, inside an acceptable window.
