Punny Dadjokes was angry. He was not good at sitting still. He was worse at waiting while someone he cared about was marked for death.

  He had been on a mission since the hijacking. Most people in the settlement called that day a victory. It had saved them. The crops had failed enough to frighten everyone but not enough to kill them outright. They were one bad harvest away from famine. The stolen food and seed bought them another year. If the fields recovered, they would live.

  That was the story the council liked. The raid had been “successful.” The food had arrived. The children were eating. The barns smelled of grain again. They did not talk about the part where Vengeful hadn’t come home.

  The resistance lived beyond the city’s edge, in the dead space where no one claimed ownership. It was scrubland and broken farmhouses, rusted machines half buried in dirt, fences that once meant something. From there, they watched the city. At night they saw lights move in the sky—stations or ships, bright points that did not blink like stars. The city had the power to erase them. For reasons no one understood, it did not.

  They lived with that mercy like a loaded weapon pointed at their heads.

  Punny walked fast toward the council building. His feet kicked up dust from the hard ground. The sun pressed down, heavy and hot. Sweat ran down his back. He remembered how the city had felt on the day of the raid—same sun, same air, different reality. The streets there were cooled, the heat controlled, comfort stitched into every surface.

  The city took whatever was brutal and smoothed it. It made things easy. It made people easy. Comfortable oppression, he thought. That was the city.

  “Hey! Punny! Slow down!”

  He turned. Rocky Wise jogged toward him, lanky and red-faced. Punny liked Rocky’s name and liked Rocky himself, though he’d never say it directly.

  Rocky was in his twenties. His beard was bright red and wild, his hair the same. He looked like some half-starved Viking, tall and thin, more wind-bent reed than warrior. He had chosen “Rocky” for the old boxing movies he loved. “Wise” was earned—he could tear through systems the city built as if peeling bark from a dead tree.

  Rocky reached him, breathing hard. “You’re going to out-walk yourself into the grave,” he said.

  “What’s up, kid?” Punny asked.

  “Still calling me ‘kid.’ You know that’s how old men talk, right?”

  “I’m a very young forty-two,” Punny said. “Plus ten.”

  “Sure,” Rocky said. “In any case, I’ve got something.”

  “Spit it out.”

  Rocky glanced around, though there was no one close enough to hear. Old habits. “I was poking around the city’s network. Police side, mostly. Found something odd.”

  Punny stopped walking. The dust settled around his boots.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “They brought someone into headquarters from the worker section,” Rocky said. “From the drones’ side of town. That never happens. Normally the workers vanish straight to the recycler if there’s a problem.”

  Punny’s stomach tightened. “Is it her?”

  “The file’s thin. Deliberately thin. But…” Rocky hesitated. “It looks like an ‘unauthorized anomaly’ was found in a worker, then removed. Then the medical staffer who removed it was detained. Then the worker himself.”

  Punny stared at him. “And?”

  “And the plan, according to the schedule I saw, is interrogation for a few days and then…” Rocky swallowed. “Recycling.”

  Punny felt as if something had taken hold of his chest and squeezed. His anger, which had been hot and sharp, turned cold and heavy. This was the ending he’d been warning the council about, and they had done nothing to prevent it.

  “How much time?” he asked.

  “Hard to say,” Rocky answered. “They run buses to the recycler at eight in the morning every day. Whoever is marked for recycling goes on the next bus after the order is signed. We’ll know she’s marked—if it’s her—when the internal status flips. Then it’s one night. That’s it.”

  “So the bus runs every day?”

  “Every day,” Rocky said. “Same time. From headquarters to the recycler. No variation in the schedule that I’ve seen.”

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  “Good,” Punny said. “Find out everything about that bus. Route. Driver. Guards. Stops. Cameras. I want it all. No detail missing.”

  “I figured,” Rocky said. “What are you going to do?”

  “Go to the council. Again.” Punny’s voice was flat. “And hope this time they remember what loyalty feels like.”

  “I hope they listen,” Rocky said quietly. He turned back toward the cluster of low houses where he worked and lived. “I’ll have more for you by tonight.”

  Punny nodded and kept walking.

  The council building stood where an old school had been. The paint had fallen off long ago. The windows were patched with mismatched glass. Inside, the main hall still looked like an auditorium—rows of seats facing a stage that no longer held plays, only arguments.

  The council met every morning. Since Vengeful’s capture, Punny had been at every meeting. Every morning he had stood on the floor and called for a rescue. Every morning they had said no.

  He pushed open the heavy door. The sound echoed off the bare walls. The three councilors looked up. So did the three or four regulars in the seats. Punny saw frustration on the faces at the table before anyone spoke.

  Les Ismore sat at one end. He was the oldest, his scalp bare, his beard gray and soft. He had a grandfather’s face, lined by weather and laughter. Punny once joked he’d look like a wizard if he let the beard grow to his chest. Les had smiled at that. Of the three, he had shown the most sympathy, but even he had not voted for action.

  At the other end sat Melody Noble. She was the youngest, hair pulled back into a tight blond knot. She looked like she was always about to spring out of her chair and run a mile or start a fight. Small, quick, sharp. She had the patience of a match head and the mind of a tactician.

  Between them sat Pearl Jammer. Where Les was bald from age, Pearl was bald by choice. His skin was pale from long days in the library, guarding what books they still had. Punny knew every crease of soil in the fields; Pearl knew every line of text in their archives. Punny could never quite read Pearl’s expression when he spoke.

  Melody saw him last but spoke first. “Punny,” she said, already weary. “We’ve heard your arguments. We’ve gone through them all. Nothing has changed. There’s nothing to be done that doesn’t endanger all of us.”

  “I’m not here to repeat myself,” Punny said.

  The three exchanged looks—confused, wary.

  “My friend,” Les began in his calming voice, “we’ve turned this over from every angle. I worry we’re about to have the same conversation as before.”

  “Not today,” Punny answered. “Rocky found something. We know where they’re keeping Vengeful. Police headquarters.”

  Les leaned forward. “That is new,” he said, “but it doesn’t change the reality. You might as well tell me she’s in one of those stations in the sky. We can’t reach that building.”

  “I know how it sounds,” Punny said. “There’s more. They plan to recycle her.”

  The words hung in the air. A slow, quiet gasp rippled through the few in the hall. Punny’s throat tightened. He felt tears prick his eyes and tried to blink them away.

  The councilors froze. Until now their distance had been theoretical, measured in words and risk. Now it was personal. They all knew Vengeful. Les had bounced her on his knee when she was small. Vengeful had watched Melody when Melody’s mother worked late. Pearl had taught her to read old maps long after everyone else had gone home.

  “That is terrible news,” Pearl said, his voice low and heavy. “But tragedy does not create possibility. If she is inside headquarters, we still cannot reach her.”

  “Maybe we can,” Punny said.

  Melody narrowed her eyes. “Explain.”

  “Every morning,” Punny said, “a bus leaves headquarters at eight. It drives to the recycler. The only recycler is in the worker section. You all know that. We’ve already taken one vehicle from that side of the city. We know what a route looks like. We know how Eds drive.”

  “It took months of planning to take that one truck,” Melody snapped. “And we still lost Vengeful. How do you propose we pull this off in a day?”

  “We won’t have just a day,” Punny replied. “Rocky can see when they change her status from ‘detain’ to ‘recycle.’ Once that flips, we’ll have at least twelve hours before the bus leaves. He’s already mapping the bus route and the cameras. I think we can ambush it by a tunnel, like before. He knocks the cameras out for fifteen seconds. We take the bus, drive to the tunnel, switch to a car, and disappear.”

  “Risky,” Pearl said. “Will Rocky actually be able to blind the cameras this time? He wasn’t able to before. And what if he can’t?”

  “He says he’s found a way,” Punny answered. “And even if something fails, we only need enough cover to reach the tunnel. Once we’re underground, we can improvise.”

  Les sat back, fingers steepled. Melody stared at the floor. Pearl watched them both.

  “OK,” Melody said at last. “Start planning.”

  It took Punny a second to realize what he’d heard. The assent had not come from Les. It had been Melody.

  Les nodded once. Pearl followed.

  “Thank you,” Punny said. The anger he’d been carrying for days loosened a little. He turned to leave.

  “Punny, wait,” Melody called. She stepped down from the stage, walked up the aisle toward him.

  “Yes?”

  “I want to be on the city team,” she said.

  Punny blinked. “You?”

  “Yes,” she said simply. “Vengeful has done more for this settlement than most of us. More than I have. I owe her. We all do. Saying no before was never easy. I had to weigh her life against everyone else’s. We still don’t know why the city tolerates us. The truck raid could have been enough to erase us. Another hit could be worse.”

  “I understood,” Punny said. He felt tired all of a sudden. “I was angry. I’m sorry if I pushed too hard. It’s just… if I’d gone in the car, maybe she wouldn’t have been alone. Maybe things would’ve gone differently. I don’t want her paying for my mistake.”

  He looked at the floor as he spoke. The guilt had been sitting in him like a stone. Saying it aloud made his shoulders slump.

  Melody took his shoulders and forced him to meet her eyes. “You can’t think like that,” she said. “If you’d gone, you’d both be captured. And there’d be no one here wearing us down about rescuing her. Your job was on this side. You did it.”

  “I guess,” Punny said. The words were small. He knew she was right. He did not feel it.

  Before she could say anything more, the main doors banged open. A boy burst in, red-faced, breathing hard. He looked barely fifteen.

  “The city—” he gasped.

  “The city what?” Melody demanded.

  “There’s someone from the city here,” the boy said, voice cracking. “He came to the settlement. He says he wants to talk to the council.”