Heavy tires slammed into a cratered section of the surface street.
Hard buckling shook the transport truck's chassis.
Caleb lay flat on the metal bench in the rear cabin, bracing his boots against the vibrating floorboards to absorb the impact. Thick gauze packed the side of his neck.
With every jolt, the dressing shifted, tearing a fresh line of fire across his severed muscle.
A First Division field medic steadied himself against the wall.
Uncapping a thick plastic IV needle, the man stripped the protective wrapper from a bag of nutrient fluid.
"Hold your arm still," the medic ordered over the roar of the diesel engine. "You lost two pints on the platform. I need to push a stabilizer before you go into hypovolemic shock."
Sterile plastic odors filled the cramped space.
Deep in Caleb's chest, the hollow void remained starved.
Pushing that fluid into his bloodstream would instantly trigger a reaction. The jagged slash across his neck would knit together and seal in front of a military professional.
A scrubber regenerating fatal tissue damage in three minutes invited too many questions.
Disposal-yard pragmatism took over.
Caleb knocked the medic's hand away and shifted his weight.
"No artificial coagulants," he rasped, grinding the torn fibers in his throat. "Lower-sector reaction. I'll vomit all over your deck."
The medic frowned and gripped the needle tight. "Your blood pressure is dropping. Give me your arm."
"Wrap the neck tight." Caleb forced a dry cough to sell the shock, then looked away. "I'll drink a ration shake at the barracks."
The medic weighed the risk of fighting a combative casualty in a moving vehicle and dropped the needle back into the plastic bio-bin.
A roll of compression tape came off the tactical rig instead.
"If you bleed out in the waiting room, it goes on your own file," the medic muttered, wrapping the tape tight around Caleb's collarbone.
Caleb leaned his head back against the vibrating metal wall and let his eyes slide shut.
The physical cost of the rapid healing kept climbing.
A freezing ache gnawed at his ribs.
The transport truck slowed, passing through the heavy security gates of the First Division medical compound.
The engine idled into a low hum. The medic stepped out the back doors to flag down a triage team.
Left alone in the low-light cabin, Caleb reached up with a trembling left hand.
He tapped the side of his cracked helmet resting beside him on the bench. The visor display synced to his optic nerve implant.
Checking the ledger was the only priority.
Adrenaline from the urban zone had evaporated, leaving behind the crushing reality of the first of the month.
One hundred and fifteen thousand viewers had flooded the tunnel broadcast.
Even factoring in the twenty-two percent Guild taxation bracket, that engagement converted to over eighty thousand credits.
Pale blue light washed across his vision as the military banking interface loaded.
[CURRENT BALANCE: 84,200 CREDITS]
Caleb let his head fall back against the vibrating steel wall.
A slow, ragged exhale escaped his lungs, fogging the cold air inside the cabin.
The zeroes were gone.
Collection agencies would not knock on his mother's door this week. They would not touch his brother's life support augments.
He had dragged himself through the mud, shattered his shoulder, and nearly bled to death on a ruined platform.
But he had done it.
The surplus was secured.
The transport doors clattered open. Two orderlies grabbed his arms, hauling the gurney out into the blinding light of the medical compound.
Paper hospital gowns offered zero insulation against the freezing air of the First Division recovery ward.
Hard shivers wracked Caleb's limbs as he lay flat on the crisp white mattress.
His bloodstream contained zero fuel.
The anomaly behind his ribs slowly pulled heat directly from his extremities to drive the tissue repair. His teeth chattered against his jaw.
Elara sat in a steel chair beside the bed.
Wearing her dark-gray combat uniform, the First Division Captain kept her leather jacket draped over the back of the seat. She leaned forward, resting her scarred forearms on her knees.
"It amputated Kade, ignored Kikaru, bypassed me, and still came straight for you," Elara said.
A dangerous weight cut through the hum of the sterile lights.
Swallowing tore at Caleb's throat. "I told you. It's whatever is inside me. It wanted it."
Elara let out a heavy sigh. She rubbed the bridge of her nose, the commander facade slipping to reveal the girl who had grown up dodging scrap-yard compactors with him.
"Caleb, we ran the scans when you first got back," Elara said, her voice dropping into a frustrated murmur. "Deep-tissue MRI, thermal, X-ray. You're clean. There's no monster in your chest."
"I felt it grab my bone, Elara," Caleb shot back, his voice rough. "It used Kade's voice. It harvested my blood. Then it spoke for itself and called me fuel. The military scans are missing it."
"The doctors say it's residual trauma," Elara pressed, gripping the edge of his mattress. "You survived a brutal hit across the spine in the urban zone and a nearly decapitating strike today. Your brain is trying to process the shock."
"He's a disposal worker in a uniform."
The interruption came from the adjacent recovery bay.
Kikaru sat upright against her pillows.
Stripped of her ruined white armor, the heiress wore a crisp hospital tunic. A heavy carbon-fiber brace locked her left leg straight beneath the blankets. She maintained the rigid posture of a corporate boardroom and glared across the space between the beds.
"You're entertaining the delusions of a civilian," Kikaru said, her tone clipping the sterile air. "He fought the same way he always does, with scrap-yard instincts. I watched his movements on the platform. He didn't execute a defense matrix. He just reacted."
Elara shifted her gaze and stared down the heiress. "I'm looking at a recruit who walked away from an apex predator that just amputated the leg of a division commander."
"Because he bleeds like a stuck pig, Captain," Kikaru countered.
A sharp gesture aimed at Caleb's shivering frame emphasized the point.
"Look at him. He's crashing from a standard adrenaline drop. No meaningful output. A one-percent yield in surplus gear. You want a biological conspiracy, but you're just looking at a severely malnourished kid who owes a mountain of debt to the lower sectors."
Caleb kept his face blank.
Gratitude had nothing to do with the defense.
Kikaru hated owing her survival to a scrubber. Reducing him to a pathetic, starving civilian reclaimed her own superior status in the room. The insult stung, but it deflected the military scrutiny.
Elara held Kikaru's stare for three full seconds.
The power dynamic ground against the linoleum, First Division frontline authority clashing against limitless corporate backing.
Elara stood up and smoothed the front of her uniform.
"Fine," Elara said, looking down at Caleb. "I'll have them bring the deep-tissue scanner back in five minutes. We'll run it again. When it comes up empty, you drop this ghost story and let the medics treat you for shock."
She turned her back on the beds and walked out the swinging doors.
Hard shivers tore through Caleb's body again.
His bruised arm felt like lead.
The scanner did not scare him. He wanted the machine to find the tearing heat in his ribs so the military doctors would finally believe him.
The biting freeze pulling at his limbs did not care about medical proof.
The anomaly was starving, stripping him bare just to seal the gash in his neck. His vision blurred at the edges.
A soft mechanical click sounded from the automated IV pump beside his bed.
Heavy pressure pushed into the clear plastic tubing taped to the back of his hand.
Thin, watery medical saline vanished.
The fluid moving slowly up the vein felt thick. Engineered. Loaded with concentrated fuel density.
The starvation behind his ribs latched onto the influx.
The hard shivering did not stop instantly, but receded by fractions.
A slow, creeping burn replaced the freezing cold in his extremities. Torn muscles in his neck tightened, pulling the edges of the wound together just enough to stem the bleeding and integrate the tissue back into a normal human baseline.
The hollow gnawing in his gut dulled into a manageable ache.
Masked as ordinary muscle repair under the sudden wealth of fuel, the anomaly settled into dormancy.
Caleb turned his head on the pillow and checked the medical monitor. Green digital waves tracked heart rate, blood pressure, and oxygen levels.
Tucked away in the bottom left corner of the screen, hiding inside the rolling telemetry data, a single line of purple text appeared.
[??? : I fixed that.]
The text lingered for two seconds, then dissolved back into the green medical readouts.
Kikaru adjusted her sheets, her gaze fixed on the blank wall opposite her bed.
The corridor outside remained quiet, save for the distant squeak of a medical cart rolling down the hall.
The military couldn't see the anomaly inside him.
They couldn't diagnose the starvation. They couldn't treat the physical toll of his survival.
Only the hacker saw it. Only she could feed it.
Caleb tightened his grip on the sterile white sheets.
He left the needle in.
He closed his eyes, dragged a slow breath through his teeth, and let the fuel burn through his chest.