David stared at the black duffel for a full minute after he dragged it into the light because once you open something like that you don't get to pretend you didn't, then he hooked two fingers on the zipper pull and moved slow, teeth of the metal track parting with a rough scrape until the flap folded back and the smell hit first, not rot or chemical, just cold machine and packing oil, and inside was a spinal mount he recognized from a hundred ads and a thousand rumors, a Sandevistan, not the street-tier knockoffs with mismatched housings but a clean unit with its cables coiled tight and the frame nested in dense foam, serial numbers ground down to dull scars, heatsink fins dark and even, reservoir ports capped with proper seals, a data shard taped to the inner pocket with a hand-cut strip of cloth, and two narrow cases he guessed were tools and a quick-connect kit; he touched the frame and it was heavier than it looked, balanced like a real product instead of a backroom weld, and he ran his thumb along a mark where someone had tried to scratch the alloy to test the hardness and failed, and his stomach tightened because this wasn't junk someone tossed by mistake, this was the kind of thing that got people killed if you kept it in a cheap apartment with a door that stuck and windows that didn't lock right. He set the unit on the table with both hands and checked the cases—one had a folded set of mounting guides and a compact clamp rig for test alignment, the other had an injector pen, coolant ampoules, and a small bottle of paste, and the shard labeled "Service" loaded on his slate with a stripped menu tree that told him almost nothing unless he had the proprietary codes to unlock the rest, and he didn't, and that told him more than enough: someone planned to pass this to someone ready to do the install or at least move it fast, and it had ended up under his table instead; he sat with his elbows on his knees and thought through the options the way Vera had taught him to think through a hallway, step by step without letting the adrenaline swing the steering wheel—Option one, pretend he never saw it, zip it up, drop it in a random dumpster, walk away, but that only pushed the danger to the next person and didn't erase that it had been in his apartment; option two, find a fixer, sell it quick, take the cash, then spend the next year looking over his shoulder to see who thought they were entitled to a cut of his good fortune; option three, install it, and that one made him laugh once out loud because he might be reckless but he wasn't suicidal, not with his mother in a coma and no ripper he trusted to cut his back open without wrecking his nerves; option four, bring it to the clinic and ask for a read without getting cops involved, and the more he stared at the table the more that felt like the only one that didn't end with someone else deciding his life for him. He zipped the kit back up, carried it to the bedroom, wedged it under the bed frame where the door view couldn't catch it, then tried to sleep and didn't, blinking at the ceiling until the city noises blurred into white hiss, up twice to check the chain on the door because habit is a leash, and by the time the sky turned the dull gray of morning he had made up his mind to ask Vera first because she had the kind of sense you borrowed when yours wasn't enough. He showed up early to the garage and waited by the van with a coffee he didn't want, jacket zipped up to hide the tension in his shoulders, and when Vera walked in and saw his face she stopped before the hello and said, "What happened," the way people who have seen things say it, and he told her he needed a private word, no drama, and they stood behind the van's open rear hatch while Atlas checked the side doors and Kite pretended to go inventory gloves; he said "I found something in my apartment" and "it's not drugs" and "it's hot," and when he finally said the word Sandevistan her eyebrow barely moved but her eyes flicked toward the cameras and back to him and she told him quietly, "You don't carry that around, you don't show it to anyone, you don't brag, you don't sell it in a parking lot, and you definitely don't let a ripper you met yesterday cut you open in a kitchen," and he said he hadn't done any of that and she nodded once and said, "Good, so here's what you do, you walk it into the clinic and you ask to speak with an Aperture tech off the record, they know hardware, they'll tell you what it is, and if it's as hot as you think, they'll either take it off your hands clean or they'll tell you how to store it until you decide, but you don't leave it under your bed a second longer than you have to," and he said he didn't want cops involved and she said, "Cops don't get called by people who want to help you pay your bills," and that decided it. They ran the morning route because work didn't stop for personal crisis, and he managed the doors and signatures by muscle memory and avoided thinking about the weight of the bag under his bed, and when the van rolled back to the clinic at midday he went upstairs, asked the front desk for a parts consult with Aperture Science, and the clerk typed without surprise and told him to sit, and an aide he recognized in a vague way from months ago—Kevin, he thought, the guy who walked him to a room the night his mother came in—passed in the hallway with a stack of charts and nodded once like he remembered him too but didn't stop, and then a woman in a gray coat with a small Aperture patch stepped out and said, "You're David, come on back," in a tone that was neutral and practical and gave him no space to overthink it. The lab room was clean without being clinical, a bench, a scanner, a sink, two chairs, and she waited until the door shut before she said, "Okay, show me what you've got and tell me where you got it," and when he hesitated she added, "I'm not the police and I don't care whose mistake put it in your apartment, but if this is what I think it is you're in more danger than you realize just by saying the name out loud," so he told the short version and unzipped the duffel and set the unit on the bench, and she rolled her shoulders like she was settling into work and started scanning, hands moving with the ease of someone who knew the difference between a knockoff and the thing knockoffs dream of being; after five minutes she said, "Top-grade spinal Sandevistan, military provenance, serials scraped but the machining says high-end line, cooling loop intact, no obvious faults, no booby traps, whoever prepped this wanted it installed fast by a pro who didn't ask questions," and she looked at him and said, "If you keep this, someone will come for it, they will not knock, and they will not care that your mother's in our ICU," and that last bit told him they had pulled his file when he checked in and that was fine because he wanted them to know why he was here. He asked what his options were and she laid them out like a menu without sales flair: one, they cut him a check to take it off his hands and he walks out lighter, two, they install it under controlled conditions with a real team and a full recovery plan but he walks out with a target glowing on his back because this specific unit would be recognized by the people who lost it, three, he sells it to them at a discount with a signed agreement that when their own Sandevistan variant cleared internal testing he would get first slot for a free install and a maintenance package, plus a stipend to cover the time until then and an option to enroll in a field data program that knocked down his clinic bills if he agreed to periodic checkups and performance logs; he asked how much the check would be and how much the medical debt cut would be and she gave numbers that made his throat go dry because they were more money than he had ever seen in one piece of paper and less than the unit would fetch in a back room with the wrong people watching, and he realized that was the point, fair but safe, legal on paper, useful in the real, and he weighed it without looking at her face until she said, "I can't tell you what to do, but I can tell you our install won't kill you and our variant will be easier on your system than this one, we've tuned for nerve load and cardio," and he thought about the ad videos where guys flew through rooms and didn't mention the nosebleeds and the shakes, and he thought about the way Vera had looked at him when he said the word, and he thought about his mother's hand limp in his palm and the way the beeps sounded when he closed his eyes, and then he said, "I'll sell and take the agreement for your variant," and she nodded like she had been hoping he'd say that because it made her job easier and his life longer, and she slid a tablet across the table with a contract written in words that someone had made plain on purpose, and he read it line by line because school had taught him something even if he hadn't stayed, and he asked three questions about timing and one about privacy and one about what happened if he didn't like the way their unit felt, and she answered all five cleanly and then pointed him to the lines that mattered, and he signed. The money broke into two parts like they had said, a lump sum transferred to his account and a credit posted straight to the clinic ledger tagged to his mother's file, and he watched the numbers update and felt a cord inside him loosen one notch, not all the way, but enough that he could breathe without his chest locking; she also slid a small card across the table with a local number and said, "If someone pressures you, call this and say your name and then either the number zero or the letter X, zero means yes I need help now, X means no it's clear, short words travel better when someone's listening," and he tucked the card into his jacket and said thanks like it was a tiny thing when both of them knew it wasn't. He left the duffel on the bench with the unit unplugged and cased and walked out without looking back, because leaving was part of making the choice stick, and the air outside the clinic smelled like real cooking from a stall down the block, and for the first time in days his shoulders didn't feel like armor plates welded to bone; he bought bread and cheap fruit and a small piece of meat because he could, took the elevator to the ICU, sat with his mother and told her about work and not about the bag, held her hand and watched the lines on the monitor make their slow patient patterns, and when he left he walked past the gift shop and bought a small ridiculous keychain because he wanted something bright on his apartment key that wasn't fear. The next morning on route, Vera asked nothing and he volunteered just enough, "I took it to Aperture, they made an offer, I took it," and she nodded once like that was exactly the right sentence, and Atlas said, "Good," and Kite said, "If you had installed it yourself I would have carried you back here after you passed out," and they all laughed because the picture was stupid and close to true; the work felt easier with that decision made, a lift he could feel in his posture when he knocked on doors and said names and handed coolers across thresholds, and by the time they rolled in for the last drop he realized he had gone an hour without thinking about the bag at all. Days slid into a rhythm again: deliveries, a visit to his mother, a quick meal in the courtyard, notes on his slate for things he wanted to learn about the job to get better at it, and a silent accounting he didn't voice that tracked the way his life tilted from hour to hour without the weight of a stolen device under his bed; two weeks later a message blinked on his slate from an Aperture scheduler that said their internal variant was ready for subject fit and asked if he wanted the earliest slot, a line that made his fingers go cold because this was the part of the choice that felt like the future catching up, and he typed back yes because that had been the deal, and the reply came with a date, prep instructions he barely skimmed because the moment was big enough to crush details, a reminder to check in fasting, and a quiet note at the bottom that said field data enrollment would be offered again after install if he wanted the bill credit to continue, and he sent a short thanks and then stopped looking at the slate and stared out the van window at the edge of the city where the green in the cracks had grown a little thicker since last week; that night he slept without waking to check the chain, and when he dreamed, he didn't dream of the duffel, he dreamed of the moment the unit would click into place and his body would feel different and he would not be prey in a hallway again, and in the morning he woke up thinking about a different kind of promise, the kind you make to yourself when the city tries to grind you flat and you decide you're not going to let it.
