Heavy tires slammed into a cratered section of surface street.
The transport truck buckled hard.
Caleb lay flat on the metal bench in the rear cabin and braced his boots against the vibrating floor. Thick gauze packed the side of his neck. Every jolt shifted the dressing and tore a fresh line of fire through severed muscle.
A First Division field medic steadied himself against the wall.
He stripped the wrapper from a plastic IV needle and hooked a bag of nutrient fluid with practiced hands.
"Hold still," the medic ordered over the diesel roar. "You lost two pints on the platform. I need stabilizer in before hypovolemic shock makes this annoying."
Sterile plastic smell filled the cabin.
Deep in Caleb's chest, the hollow void waited.
If concentrated fluid entered his bloodstream, the anomaly would burn it immediately. The slash across his neck might knit in front of a military professional.
A scrubber regenerating fatal tissue damage in a moving truck would leave the discharge lane and enter a locked room with sharper tools.
Disposal-yard pragmatism took over.
Caleb knocked the medic's hand away.
"No artificial coagulants," he rasped. Talking dragged broken fibers in his throat. "Lower-sector reaction. I will vomit all over your deck."
The medic frowned. "Your pressure is dropping. Give me your arm."
"Wrap the neck tight. I drink a ration shake at barracks."
"That is not medicine."
"It is cheaper."
The medic weighed the risk of fighting a combative casualty in a moving vehicle.
He threw the needle into the bio-bin and grabbed compression tape instead.
"If you bleed out in the waiting room, it goes on your file."
"Everything does."
Tape cinched tight around Caleb's collarbone.
He leaned his head back and closed his eyes.
The physical cost of healing kept climbing.
Cold gnawed at his ribs. The anomaly pulled heat from his extremities to keep the wound from opening wider. His fingertips went numb inside his gloves.
The truck slowed through the security gates of the First Division medical compound.
When the medic stepped out to flag triage, Caleb reached for his cracked helmet on the bench.
He tapped the side. The visor synced. The ledger mattered first; the wound and the Mimic could wait.
One hundred and fifteen thousand viewers had watched the tunnel broadcast. Even after Guild tax, that should convert to real money.
If the hacker had lied about the settlement clearing, his family was finished.
The military banking interface loaded in pale blue.
[CURRENT BALANCE: 84,200 CREDITS]
Caleb let his head fall back against the metal wall.
He held on to the number until his eyes watered.
It would never make him rich. Upper-sector children probably spent more on apology flowers and imported shoes. For Caleb, it was oxygen measured in digits.
Rent. Penalty. Augment service fees. Food if he dared keep any.
The exhale that left him was rougher than relief. Relief was too clean. This was the body realizing it had managed one more payment before failure.
Collection agencies would stay away from his mother's door this week. His brother's life-support augments would keep humming.
He had dragged himself through mud, broken his shoulder open, and nearly bled to death on tile.
For one month, maybe more, the balance held.
That was the cruel part about relief in the lower sectors: it arrived as a deadline moving farther away, never as freedom.
The transport doors clattered open, and orderlies hauled him into blinding compound light.
-----
Paper hospital gowns offered no insulation against the First Division recovery ward.
Caleb lay on a crisp white mattress and shook so hard his teeth clicked.
Everything in the room was too clean: white walls, clear tubing, polished rails. There were no rust stains under the sink, no cracked floor tile, no boiled-disinfectant stink trying to cover old blood.
The place was expensive enough to reject him on principle.
His bloodstream had no spare fuel.
The anomaly behind his ribs pulled heat from his limbs to drive tissue repair. His fingers were cold. His feet might as well have belonged to someone else.
Elara sat in a steel chair beside the bed.
She wore her dark-gray combat uniform. Her leather jacket hung over the chair back. She leaned forward with scarred forearms on her knees and watched him like a commander fighting the urge to become a frightened friend.
"It amputated Kade, ignored Kikaru, bypassed me, and came straight for you," she said.
Swallowing hurt.
"I told you. Whatever is inside me, it wanted it."
Elara rubbed the bridge of her nose.
For a second, the Captain facade slipped and left the girl who had grown up dodging scrap-yard compactors beside him.
"Caleb, we ran scans when you first came back. Deep tissue MRI. Thermal. X-ray. Bloodwork. You are clean."
"I felt it grab my bone."
"The doctors say residual trauma."
"It used Kade's voice. It harvested my blood. Then it spoke for itself and called me fuel."
"You survived a spinal hit in the urban zone and nearly had your throat opened today," Elara said. "Your brain is trying to make sense of shock."
Her voice hardened on the last word because she needed it to be true.
If it was shock, she could order treatment.
If it was something in his chest calling apex predators through blood, then every protocol in the room was already too late.
"He is a disposal worker in a uniform."
The interruption came from the adjacent recovery bay.
Kikaru sat upright against her pillows in a crisp hospital tunic. Her brace locked one leg straight under the blankets. Even stripped of armor, she held herself like a boardroom had sent an ambassador to the infirmary.
Her face was pale, beyond the reach of posture. Her fingers kept pressing the ribs beneath the tunic, checking pain she refused to acknowledge in front of Elara.
"You are entertaining the delusions of a civilian," Kikaru said. "He fought the same way he always does. Scrap-yard instincts. No defense matrix. No meaningful output. Reaction and stubbornness."
Elara turned slowly.
"I am looking at a recruit who walked away from an apex predator that amputated a division commander."
"Because he bleeds dramatically, Captain."
Kikaru gestured toward Caleb's shaking body.
"Look at him. Standard crash. Malnourished lower-sector laborer. One-percent yield in surplus gear. You want a biological conspiracy because the alternative is admitting he is useful in ugly ways your academy models do not reward."
Caleb kept his face blank.
The insult landed.
So did the defense hidden under it.
Kikaru was reducing him to a pathetic lower-sector worker in front of a Captain because that made the medical mystery less interesting. If he was merely poor, starved, and stubborn, nobody needed to cut him open.
She kept her attention away from him while doing it, which made the defense easier to recognize.
Kikaru insulted people directly when she wanted them to feel it.
This was aimed at the room. Elara held Kikaru's stare for three seconds. First Division authority ground against corporate backing. Elara stood.
"Fine," she said to Caleb. "Deep-tissue scanner comes back in five minutes. If it comes up empty, you drop the ghost story and let medics treat shock."
She walked out through the swinging doors.
Shivers tore through Caleb again.
The scanner scared him less than another empty result.
He wanted the machine to find the heat in his ribs.
He wanted proof.
The cold ignored what he wanted.
A soft mechanical click came from the IV pump beside his bed.
Pressure moved through the clear tube taped to the back of his hand.
Thin saline changed.
The fluid entering his vein moved heavier than saline, engineered and loaded with fuel density. It was no standard ward stock.
Caleb had seen nutrient bags before. The color was wrong by half a shade, too clear for field rations and too dense for saline. Whatever moved into him had been compounded for his condition before the medics even understood he had one.
The hacker had prepared for the moment he would need the pump.
The starvation behind his ribs latched onto it.
The shivering receded by degrees.
Warmth crawled into his fingers. Torn muscle in his neck tightened. The wound edges pulled together just enough to look like ordinary stabilization instead of impossible regeneration.
The hollow hunger dulled.
Caleb turned his head toward the monitor.
Green waves tracked heart rate, pressure, oxygen.
In the bottom left corner, hidden inside rolling telemetry, one line of purple text appeared.
[???] I fixed that.
It lingered for two seconds and dissolved.
Kikaru adjusted her sheets and kept her attention on the opposite wall.
The corridor stayed quiet except for a distant medical cart.
The military missed the anomaly and misread the starvation. Only the hacker saw it clearly enough to feed it.
Caleb tightened his grip on the sterile sheets.
He left the needle in.
Then he closed his eyes and let the fuel burn through his chest.