The Unlocked Door
Anja's world shrank to the size of the data slate's cracked screen. Niran had given her a small, shielded alcove in the mending bay, a space that smelled of ozone and hot metal, where she could work undisturbed. For two days, she fought the encryption. It was a fortress, a sheer wall of code designed to repel any brute force attack. Every attempt she made, every probe she sent into its defenses, was met with a digital dead end. The memory of her father's voice was her only guide. Don't fight the lock, little bird. Find the key it's waiting for. People are lazy. Even the cleverest ones leave a door unlocked somewhere.
On the third day, abandoning direct assault, she began to probe the slate's diagnostic and maintenance subroutines—the digital back alleys of the system. And there, buried under layers of mundane performance reports, she found it. A repair log, left unsecured. It detailed a recent system reset after a power surge. It was a simple, boring record, but it contained a single line of code: a temporary override password used by a technician to reboot the system. It was the unlocked door.
Her heart hammering against her ribs, she keyed in the override sequence. The encryption wall didn't just break; it dissolved. A wave of dizziness washed over her as file directories flooded the screen—patrol routes, supply manifests, weapon specifications. It was all there. A surge of triumph, cold and fierce, shot through her.
A Voice from Within
Her primary goal was to find their base of operations, the refinery Jaya's report had mentioned. But as she navigated the complex file structure, her attention was caught by a partitioned, heavily corrupted data cache. It wasn't part of the main operating system. It was a ghost, a hidden room in the digital house. Driven by a prickle of professional unease—a trait she hadn't known she'd inherited from her father—she set to work trying to reconstruct the fragmented files.
Most of it was digital noise, gibberish created by the damage from the pulse rifle blast. But then, a few coherent lines began to emerge. They weren't reports or manifests. They were short, coded bursts of data. She almost dismissed them until she saw two critical, terrifying words in the file headers: Direction: OUTGOING.
Her blood ran cold. These messages weren't coming to the skimmer. They were being sent from the Cooperative.
She worked frantically, her hands shaking, pulling more fragments from the corrupted data. The messages were short, almost meaningless strings of numbers and letters, but each one was timestamped. She cross-referenced the first timestamp with the Cooperative's logs. The message had been sent six hours before a patrol skiff's engine mysteriously failed due to a clogged fuel line, leaving the western perimeter exposed for a full day. Another timestamp corresponded to the exact hour Tomas had voiced his most disruptive dissent, a fact the scavengers had somehow known and exploited to deepen the community's divisions.
The final, damning fragment was dated the morning of the attack. It contained a single, repeating code followed by a crude schematic of the flotilla, with the older, weaker southeastern flank—Tomas's post—highlighted in red.
The truth landed with the force of a physical blow. The scavengers hadn't just guessed their weaknesses. They hadn't just been observant. They had been told. The generator failure, the exact location of their most vulnerable point, the timing of their internal dissent—it was all intelligence, fed to them from the inside.
There was a traitor in the Lifeline Cooperative.
The Huntress
Anja felt a wave of nausea. The faces of her new community flashed through her mind—Hakeem, Niran, Leela, Kael. Who? Who among them could do this?
Clutching the slate, she found Jaya in the main watchtower, a lone, stern figure silhouetted against the grey sky. Anja didn't waste words. She showed Jaya the outgoing logs, the timestamps, the damning schematic.
Jaya's face, already as hard as iron, seemed to solidify into granite. The fury in her eyes was a cold, controlled flame. Anja expected her to sound the alarm, to storm through the flotilla and drag the traitor into the light.
"No," Jaya said, her voice a low, dangerous whisper. "We do nothing."
"Nothing?" Anja stammered, incredulous. "Jaya, one of us is a monster. They're helping them kill us!"
"And if I accuse them now, what happens?" Jaya countered, her gaze as sharp as a blade. "They deny it. They may have allies we don't know about. Panic sweeps the flotilla, and our community tears itself apart just as the enemy is preparing to strike again. We would be doing their work for them."
She turned from the railing, her full attention on Anja. "This changes the mission. Finding the refinery is no longer the priority. The snake is inside our walls. We have to find its head."
Jaya stepped closer, her voice dropping even lower. "You found this. You see the patterns. And you are new here. People see you as the girl from the barrel, not as a threat. They will talk around you. They will not guard their words."
It wasn't a question. It was a command. Anja's role, which had shifted from survivor to mender to intelligence operative, was shifting again.
"Observe," Jaya ordered. "Listen. Watch for anything out of place—a person with access to patrol schedules who shouldn't have it, someone showing too much interest in the Sieve's construction, a quiet word spoken where it shouldn't be. You are no longer just breaking codes, Anja. You are hunting a wolf inside the fold. Report only to me. To everyone else, your work on this slate is about finding the enemy out there. Do you understand?"
Anja looked from Jaya's unyielding face to the flotilla below, her home, her sanctuary. Now, every friendly face was a potential mask, every helping hand a potential weapon.
"Yes," she whispered, the word sealing her fate. "I understand."