Gate 4 felt like a lie.
No special event banners. No red warnings. No "stress test," no "medical trial." Just the usual:
FIELD 2 — ROUND 082EXTRACT WINDOWS: 19:10 / 19:25 / 19:40HARD CLOSE: 19:50
Barry checked it twice anyway.
"Light run," Jay had said. "Get in, see if the ghost twitches, get out. No heroics. No Riggs."
Barry rolled his shoulders.
Gear was intentionally boring:
Pistol, two mags.
One medband.
One stim.
One cheap smoke.
Vest with the extra kevweave.
Audio band on low.
Almost-empty pack.
Thirteen days on Lissa's counter. Twenty credits buffer. Enough space to pick his fights.
He watched the queue.
No Riggs. No gaudy masks he recognized. A few solo rats. One tight duo.
Lena wasn't there. Clinic day, probably.
Kade? Maybe in some other line, or already inside. Harder to spot.
Good. This one, he really should do alone.
Collar buzzed.
FIELD MODE: ARMED
Gate rolled up with its familiar grind. Air beyond smelled wet, metallic.
Barry stepped over the yellow line.
Sound cut; Field 2's ruined suburb hush wrapped around him.
HUD:
T+00:02
He let others rush forward. Turned down a side street where the last rain had pooled in broken concrete. Old signs flickered half-heartedly. The audio band separated it all clean: drizzle, distant drone, someone swearing three blocks over.
"Light," he reminded himself.
He hit a small grocery first, same one he'd skimmed before.
Front shelves: still mostly stripped.
Behind the counter:
One can with an intact seal, label half-gone.
Two energy sticks.
Packet of filters.
He took them without reverence. Clean, quick.
No spiders. No "friendly" shouts. Just the crack of someone else's bad decision somewhere out of line-of-sight.
Out back, he found a stairwell into a short row of apartments. Second floor, third door, quiet.
Inside: bed, table, drawers.
He swept fast.
Half-full water bottle, clear.
Box with three 9mm rounds.
Small wins. Goblin wins.
On the way out, he saw his first glitch of the day.
The stairwell door to the alley was one of NEXUS' retrofit types: steel, mag-lock, little blue eye above the frame. Normally these sat open in Rounds. Sometimes they locked red for event segments.
This one was shut, light orange.
Barry frowned. Reached.
The eye flicked bright, scanned his collar. His HUD flashed:
ACCESS: DENIED
"Okay," he muttered. "That's new."
The light glitched, a smear of static across his vision.
…RANER-3……CACHE DESYNC…
Then:
ACCESS: GRANTED // IGNORE
The lock clicked. The door eased inward like it had always meant to.
Barry just stood there one extra beat, heart thumping.
"Jay's gonna hate that," he whispered.
He slipped through, careful not to let it slam.
Back in the alley, he took stock.
T+07:41
Enough time for one more building, then first window.
Light run.
He cut across to a laundromat whose windows were busted but backroom intact.
Inside: dust, machines like silent teeth. He hopped the counter.
Found:
Soap packs.
A plastic bag with six sealed ration bars wedged behind a drawer like someone had tried to stash them and never came back.
"Hello," he murmured.
They went into the pack. Weight went from "pathetic" to "respectable."
From the street, his audio band caught footsteps approaching: two people, steady, not running.
Voices:
"—I swear someone's spoofing access logs—""—shut up, you'll get flagged just saying that—"
He stayed low until they passed.
No Riggs. No one calling "friendly."
T+11:03
"Done," he told himself.
He pointed his nose toward Extract 1.
On the way, a Blue-Eye quad drifted overhead, lens sweeping. Its cone passed over a cluster of three runners, then over him.
It hiccuped.
Just a frame's worth of static.
Then it moved on. No tag. No threat.
Barry bit down on a curse.
He reached the extract early. A junkyard at the edge of the sector, NEXUS shimmer between two stripped cars.
Two runners already there. One nodded at his light pack: non-target. The other didn't look up.
Barry stepped into the field.
SYNCING…
No gunshots. No last-second charges. Just the hum, the soft scroll of numbers.
SYNC COMPLETEROUND STATUS: SURVIVEDPERSONAL CREDIT: +14
White.
Stack.
He checked: cans, bars, filters, water. All present. Not glorious. Enough.
He walked back to the workshop without detouring.
"Light," Jay said, seeing the pack.
"Light," Barry agreed.
He unloaded the haul. Jay sorted—house, sale, kit.
"Fourteen," Jay read off the slate. "Pays a day, leaves crumbs. That's how it's supposed to look."
"The door," Barry said.
Jay looked up. "What door."
Barry told him: stairwell, mag-lock, the denied/ granted flicker, the cache desync. The drone hiccup too.
Jay's mouth tightened.
"Good news, bad news," he said.
"Start with the part that doesn't make me want to throw up," Barry said.
"Good news: it's not just combat routines anymore," Jay said. "Infrastructure threads see you too. You're still flagged non-terminal. They're bending around you, not at you."
"And the bad?" Barry asked.
"Every new subsystem that notices your tag is another die roll," Jay said. "One day something's going to read 'ANOMALY' and interpret it as 'delete.'"
Barry sat on the crate he was starting to think of as his.
"What do we do with that?" he asked.
"For now?" Jay said. "Exactly what we did today. Controlled exposure. Never more than one stressor at a time. You don't run events back-to-back. You don't frontline Locals and flamers in the same week."
"So no printing money," Barry said.
"Printing money gets you audited," Jay said. "Ask any dead syndicate. We stay small. Smart. We watch."
He pulled up the system log from the run. There it was:
MAINT ALERT: FIELD 2 / ACCESS CACHEOBJECT: B-RANER-3STATUS: DESYNC → SYNC OVERRIDE (ALLOW)
Jay tapped it.
"See?" he said. "Some poor maintenance thread is arguing with your tag and losing. That's leverage someday. Or a bomb. Not today."
Barry exhaled.
"We're still putting most of this into her?" he asked.
"Half," Jay said. "One day for Lissa, rest for your future limbs. You did your probe. Next big thing, we choose, not panic."
Barry nodded.
Out of habit, he flicked his eyes to the MedTower feed on the corner of the slate.
LISSA RANER — 13 DAYS
No change yet. That would come when Jay made the transfer.
For now, it held steady. That mattered.
"Riggs?" Jay asked.
"Didn't see him," Barry said. "Heard idiots talking about spoofed logs."
"Spoofed logs gets people cleaned," Jay said. "That's not our game. Yet."
Barry managed a thin smile. "You keep saying 'yet' like a calming word."
"I keep saying 'yet' because you're an anomaly and I'm an engineer," Jay said. "If a system mislabels my kid, I'm not above returning the favor."
Barry let that sit.
Light run. Small profit. A door that had no right to like him, and a drone that pretended he wasn't there.
Nothing blew up. Nobody screamed friendly.
It should've been boring.
It wasn't.
After they lost, sometimes the scariest thing wasn't the bullet you saw—it was the fact that the lock you shouldn't get through opened anyway, like the world was rearranging itself around you in ways you hadn't asked for.
Barry tightened his collar.
"Next time," he said, "we pick the fight?"
"Yeah," Jay said softly. "Next time, we start deciding who's really running who."