“Quite the setup,” I observed. “You expecting casualties?”
“Always prepared,” Taos replied, dropping into a chair with careful movements. “But luckily, with your help last time, we only had a few minor injuries. Didn’t need to use this stuff.” She tapped a sequence on her wrist device, and the neural stimulatorbehind her ear pulsed once, a soft blue light cycling through its display. The tension in her shoulders eased fractionally.
“That from the clinic raid you did last month?” I asked, nodding toward the stimulator.
Her eyes narrowed slightly. “Does it matter?”
I shrugged, letting it drop—though the model looked suspiciously high-end. Not something you’d find in the Magenta clinic they had raided.
She turned toward the largest monitor, pulling up footage of Magenta District streets. Pedestrians moved with the casual confidence of the protected, the yellow flash of Kinetic Shield tech visible whenever someone bumped too aggressively into another.
“Look at that,” she said, a genuine smile spreading across her face. “Six months and it’s everywhere. Gun violence down sixty-eight percent across all districts.” Her eyes shone with pride. “That’s what we did, E. That’s real change.”
I couldn’t argue with the numbers. “It worked out better than I expected,” I admitted.
“Because we made it open source,” she said, leaning forward. “Not just another corp technology to extort people with.” There was an edge to her voice—personal bitterness beneath the revolutionary rhetoric.
She pulled up a schematic I recognized immediately—my modified version the shield algorithm, the one I’d extracted during the POM job. But there were additions, refinements that hadn’t been in my original work. She caught me studying it.
“I made a few adjustments to your code,” she said, a hint of defensiveness in her tone. “Nothing major. Just some efficiency improvements.”
I nodded, though we both knew the “improvements” had been unnecessary. My code had been clean and optimized from the start. This was repackaging, not enhancement.
“So what’s next?” I asked.
Her hand moved unconsciously to her side, pressing against some invisible pain point, and she faltered.
I pretended not to notice but used the moment to scan the room more thoroughly. Near her workstation, partially concealed beneath a jacket, was an injector kit. The logo on its side had been partially scratched off, but I recognized the distinctive teal and white of RejuvaLife Pharmaceuticals.
The same corporation that had denied my mother advanced treatment protocols after her shooting.
Taos followed my gaze and moved quickly to cover the kit completely. “Not what you think,” she said preemptively.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You didn’t have to.” She sighed, running a hand through her hair. “Not all of us have your natural talents, E. Some of us need…assistance to keep up.”
There was something in her tone—not just frustration but a deeper resentment. The neural stimulator pulsed again, cycling through its calibration sequence.
“Why do this?” I asked, gesturing around us at the rebel headquarters. “It’s not exactly a comfortable life.”
Taos winced as she adjusted her neural stimulator. “Comfort is just another prison when you know what it costs others.” Her fingers trembled slightly. “Besides, some prisons can’t be escaped with money alone.”
Yeah, but most could. I kept that to myself.
“The best revolution isn’t destruction. It’s transformation. Building something better inside the shell of the old.” She gestured toward the Kinetic Shield footage. “Just like we did with this.”
The way she emphasizedwefelt calculated—claiming shared credit for what had primarily been my extraction and code work.She leaned forward, pulling up another set of schematics that looked like they’d been cobbled together from multiple sources.
“I’ve been working on something new,” she said, a hint of pride breaking through. “Something that could change everything about how we interface with systems.”
The code looked unstable to me—ambitious but fundamentally flawed in its architecture. Before I could comment, the neural stimulator behind her ear pulsed again, this time with increasing frequency. She winced, pressing her fingers against it.
“You should rest,” I said, recognizing the signs of someone pushing beyond their limits.
“Can’t,” she muttered, reaching under the jacket for the injector kit. She hesitated, then met my eyes with surprising vulnerability. “Would you mind…”
“Giving you privacy?” I finished for her.
