The Compliance Officer didn't even look at him when he took the money.
That was the part Rael hated most. Not the theft. Theft had logic. It was the not looking. Like taking from him was so routine, so beneath acknowledgment, that it didn't register as an action worth doing consciously.
"Sector Tax." The officer dropped the words the same way he'd drop a used rag. Held out his hand. Kept his eyes on his scanner.
Rael counted out forty credits. Put them in the man's palm.
Forty credits was three days of parts. Two if he needed to eat.
The officer pocketed it, tapped something on his wrist screen, and moved to the next stall without breaking stride.
The kid two stalls down, Petto, maybe sixteen, ran a cable-stripping operation. He watched the whole thing happen. Caught Rael's eye afterward. Looked away fast.
Smart kid.
***
The black-market stall wasn't a stall, technically. It was a gap between two collapsed support columns in Sub-Level 3, wide enough for a folding table and a crate that Rael used as a seat. He'd been running illegal aug repairs out of it for two years. The regulars knew the gap. New clients got directed there by word of mouth, which meant they'd already been vetted by someone who knew what would happen if they talked.
Nobody talked.
Sector-Zero had a functioning social contract. It just wasn't the one printed in Integration Law.
He had one more job before close. A guy named Haruto who'd cracked the pressure seal on his pain suppressor implant. Grade-F standard issue, the cheap ones Dominion handed out during initial integration and never upgraded. The seal cracked every eight to fourteen months, which Rael had started to suspect was intentional. Planned obsolescence. Keep the lower tiers dependent on black market repair because the official clinics charged three weeks' wages for a thirty-minute procedure.
Haruto sat on the crate. Rael worked.
"How long does it take to fix?"
"Four minutes."
"How do you know it's four minutes?"
"Because I've fixed forty-seven of these."
Haruto went quiet. Rael sealed the micro-fracture with borrowed surgical adhesive, re-pressurized the implant with a hand pump he'd modified from a cooling unit, and ran a manual check with a diagnostic wand that wasn't supposed to exist in Sector-Zero.
Most of his tools weren't supposed to exist in Sector-Zero.
"There." He sat back. "Don't stress it for six hours. After that it's fine."
Haruto rolled his shoulder, testing. Blinked. "Oh. Yeah, that's... yeah."
"Twenty credits."
"The guy on Sub-Level 1 charges fifteen."
"The guy on Sub-Level 1 uses the wrong adhesive. Your seal cracks again in three months instead of eight." Rael looked at him. "Your choice."
Twenty credits. Haruto paid without further argument.
***
He noticed the envelope when he got back to his room.
On the floor, slid under the door. Official Dominion grey, the kind that didn't biodegrade because it contained a low-level tracking chip. Opening it was technically consent to the contents. Rael had known that since he was twelve.
He stood in the doorway for a moment.
3×4 meters. That was the room. Enough for a sleep mat, a locked equipment chest, and a wall shelf with three things on it: a water canister, a cracked soldering kit, and a photo. The photo was blurred, water damage from a flood five years back that took out Sub-Level 4 for a week. You couldn't really see the face anymore. Just a hand. A woman's hand, reaching toward the camera like she was about to say wait, I'm not ready.
He'd kept it anyway.
The envelope sat on the floor and didn't move.
Rael stepped inside, let the door seal behind him, and picked it up.
***
DRAFT NOTICE — TECHNO-KNIGHT CORPS Conscript Classification: GRADE-F / HUMAN Reporting Date: 07.03.2051 Failure to Report: Reclassification to UNREGISTERED / SECTOR-ZERO SWEEP STATUS
He read it twice.
Folded it.
Put it in his chest pocket.
Then he sat down on the floor, back against the cold wall, and for the first time in a long time, he couldn't calculate his way out.
***
The math wasn't complicated. It just didn't have a good answer.
Don't go: Sweep Status. That meant Compliance Officers with authority to detain, relocate, or disappear anyone flagged in Sector-Zero. He'd seen three people get Sweep-tagged in the last year. Two of them he never saw again. The third showed up six months later working for the Collaborators, eyes a little too flat, agreeing with things he used to argue about.
Go: 67% fatality rate during Techno-Knight training. He knew the number. Everyone in Sector-Zero knew the number. They stamped it right on the official Dominion documentation, matter-of-fact, like a weather report. 67% of conscripts do not complete training. This is considered within acceptable parameters.
Acceptable parameters.
He pressed the back of his head against the wall and stared at the ceiling.
The ceiling had a crack running corner to corner that he'd watched expand by about two centimeters over the past year. At this rate Sub-Level 3 had maybe four more years before the structural integrity got flagged, and then they'd relocate everyone to Sub-Level 5, which was worse, and charge them for the transfer.
He'd thought about that ceiling crack a lot. Made calculations about it. Had a plan for when it happened.
He was good at plans. Plans meant he was ahead of what was coming. Plans meant he had options even when it looked like he didn't.
He did not currently have a plan for this.
67%, said the back of his brain.
33%, said a smaller, quieter part of him. Some of them made it.
He killed that thought fast. He knew where it went. He'd watched kids from Sector-Zero disappear into the Draft. Some didn't come back because they died. Others climbed just high enough to stop looking down. Got a taste of Mid-Tier. Got Grade-D augmentations and a meal that came on an actual plate. Decided that was enough. Decided that was worth it.
He wasn't going to be that.
He also wasn't going to die in a training compound so Dominion could log him as within acceptable parameters on a spreadsheet.
Which meant he had to figure out a third option that didn't technically exist.
Okay.So figure it out.
He pulled the Draft Notice back out. Read it again, slower. Not the main text. The subtext. The formatting. The specific wording of the clauses.
Reporting Date: 07.03.2051.
Three days from now.
Three days was enough time.
***
He was almost asleep when he remembered the data chip.
He hadn't thought about it in months, maybe longer. He kept it behind a loose panel in the equipment chest, wrapped in signal-blocking cloth so it wouldn't ping anything. His father had left it. Hidden in the ruins of the clinic on Sub-Level 6 where he used to work, before the raid, before the Compliance Officers and the corridor and the laughing.
Rael had found it three years after. He'd been fourteen, going back because he needed a specific kind of micro-tool his father used to keep under the third bench. He found the tool. He also found the panel.
The chip had his mother's voice on it.
He didn't listen to it often.
He got up, retrieved it, plugged it into his wand reader.
Static. Then her voice, younger than he could actually remember, because he'd been five when she left and seven when his father died and nine when he'd stopped expecting either of them to come back.
"...anomaly in the sample is consistent across all three subjects. The integration response is unlike anything in documented Dominion biology. It's not rejection. It's..."
Her voice cut, resumed.
"...they must not know about the child. If they find the pattern in an active subject, they will..."
Cut again. This part was always fragmented, always the same dead ends. He'd listened enough times to stop hoping for new things.
But then.
Near the end, where he always stopped because after that it was just static, something he'd written off as background noise shifted.
Footsteps.
He turned the volume up. Listened.
Footsteps in the recording. Moving away. Then a door. Then his mother's voice, and this part he knew, this was the part that never changed:
"If you're hearing this... you've already survived long enough."
A pause.
"Good."
Static.
Rael sat in the dark with the wand in his hand for a long time.
Then he put the chip away, lay down on the sleep mat, and closed his eyes.
Three days. No plan. A Draft Notice that was either a death sentence or the only door available.
He started making calculations.
***
Outside, Sub-Level 3 breathed its usual sounds. Distant machinery, someone arguing three rooms down, the low electrical hum of black-market power taps running off stolen grid feeds. Normal. Routine.
Rael's eyes stayed closed.
The Draft Notice sat in his pocket.
Somewhere in Dominion's central processing, a batch log updated automatically:
JAKARTA-NODE · SECTOR-ZERO CONSCRIPT POOL · BATCH 7 · STATUS: CONFIRMED.
SUBJECT: VOSS, RAEL. AGE: 18. GRADE: F.
FLAGGED FOR SECONDARY REVIEW: NO.
For now.