Hayden hesitated, looking from me to the others. “My place is left, about a thirty-minute fast walk. But it’s not much. You’d all be stacked like firewood.”
Crow snorted. “They’d suffocate. My house is on Founder’s Isle, up that road. More space. You could crash there, too, Hayden.”
Hayden glanced at me, giving a one-shouldered shrug. “Up to you. But you could all use a few hours’ sleep before sunrise.”
I let out a breath. Crow’s offer sounded like sanctuary, even if just for a night. “Lead the way,” I said quietly. None of my friends objected.
FORTY-TWO
“So,you save your real talents for after dark?” Robert murmured as we moved up the empty street, his voice scratchy with fatigue. He pulled Rosalie closer, tucking her beneath his arm against the wind.
Hayden huffed a dry laugh, but, as I realized he always did, avoided lingering on himself. “Crow can explain the details better than I can. He’s the reason tonight was even possible.” Hayden cast me a quiet glance, then added, “Crow’s a computer engineer. One of the best. That’s how he landed silver quickly. Fairwell snapped him up.”
“Yeah, thanks for the ego boost. I earned it,” Crow muttered. “Worked my ass off for the position.”
“Oh, were you not born here?” I asked. Getting to silver had started to seem like such a distant dream that I had become skeptical any settler had achieved it. Silver rings seemed like fantasy at our level.
He shook his head, his lips quirking with something that was not quite a smile. “Not even close. I grew up in a tech outpost in the Caribbean. Small, tight-knit, full of promise.Until a pack of nomads tore it apart.” His tone was casual, but I heard something bruised underneath.
“Nomads,” I echoed, the word tasting bitter.
“Who else?” Crow shrugged, scanning the shadows around us. “We didn’t have defenses like this place. My people were smart, but not rich. Smart doesn’t keep you safe. Not for long, in this day and age. But enough history.” He lowered his voice and turned serious. “Let’s talk about tonight.”
He paused to check the street—still empty, save for the far-off crash of the sea and our own footsteps. Then he continued, quietly but with the intensity of someone who’d lived too long with secrets. “We disabled a key network post in the area they’ve chosen for training. Which in layman’s terms means the ‘mentors’ can’t use devices that rely upon that wireless technology. Which in further layman’s terms means the goggles they rely upon to guide you through the ‘exercises’ don’t work.”
“Goggles?” I repeated, keeping my voice low.
Crow raised an eyebrow. “You didn’t see them?”
I searched my memory, then caught a flicker: Anna with a pair in her control room during my test screening. I’d also spotted red-jacketed techs carrying them in the fortress corridors.
Hayden cut in. “They don’t put them on in front of the mentees. I don’t remember seeing them.”
“Anyway, the goggles link to the sensors they stick on your ears,” Crow explained. “That’s how they keep track of everything: your movements, your vitals, the whole show. But if the network’s down…” He let the implication hang between us.
“Oh, wow,” I breathed. But then I wondered why Anna had a pair in the control room when I did the test screening. She hadn’t attached any device to my ear then.And what were those people in the corridors of the fortress doing with the goggles?
“So now it’s all a game of how long it’ll take them to fix the problem,” Crow continued before I could piece together my thoughts. “It’s hard for me to estimate because I won’t be part of that deployment team. But my best guess? At least three days.”
That gave me a flicker of hope—three days felt like an eternity after the last twenty-four hours. Still, the relief was thin and brittle. Three days wouldn’t last long.
“So we need a permanent fix,” I said quietly, the words tasting heavier than I meant.
Crow just nodded, mouth pressed in a thin line. “We’re here.” He gestured up at a tall, narrow building wedged between two larger houses. “Come on, there’s food if you want it.”
He ushered us through a small yard and unlocked his metallic front door with a battered plastic card. We crowded into a stark entryway, white walls echoing the tap of boots.
“How do you know nobody saw you take the post apart?” Robert asked, voice still hushed.
“It’s in the middle of nowhere, and some of us stood lookout,” Crow replied, sliding the locks into place.
“You did it in daylight?” Nico pressed, peeling off his jacket.
Crow nodded. “Yeah. We hid the boxes, waited for dark to move them to the coast.”
Robert glanced down at his taped ring, frowning. “If these rings can track us… could they trace you back to the missing post?”
Crow shook his head. “I’ve torn apart three different models. All I’ve found is passive location logging for when you scan in at a checkpoint or job site. No live tracking. They don’t have the server bandwidth to track everyone with that level of detail here, not yet. I’ve also found no evidence to support theidea that they’re used to eavesdrop.” He threw a pointed look at Hayden.
