HARDWIRED

The most dangerous job in Indigo takes exactly four minutes.

Two to cross North Harbor. One to transfer. One to disappear.

Kael had been running that crossing for three years. He’d never needed the fourth minute.

Tonight, he needed it.

He was moving through the lower level of Pier Seven when he heard the drones — not the flat municipal hum of city patrol, but the sharper, almost musical pitch of Han Sphere scanners. Deep-read frequency. The kind that punched through clothing, skin, and two centimeters of muscle to find modified nerve fiber underneath.

He dropped behind an algae processing unit and went still.

Below him, the ocean glowed. Blue-green and quiet, completely indifferent to the fact that the splice in Kael’s left forearm held enough data to give three separate people a reason to kill him.

The drones passed.

He counted ten seconds — the window a trap needs to close when the target thinks they’re already safe — then moved.

The drop was in the Roots. An address that didn’t exist on any official map: third tunnel past the column marked with a red X, two levels down, three knocks on the door that sounds hollow. Always the same sequence. Dorian was obsessive about protocols. Protocols are the only thing standing between you and a body bag, he said. Kael had heard it so many times it almost felt true.

The man who opened the door was old and small, with eyes the color of harbor water — that sick blue-green that Crown-level residents called beautiful and Beltside locals called the ocean’s guilt.

He didn’t give his name. They never did.

Kael extended his left forearm. The man produced a scanner the size of a lighter, ran it across the scar, and waited.

The scanner didn’t beep.

He ran it again.

Nothing.

The man looked up.

“The data isn’t there,” he said.

Something cold climbed from Kael’s stomach toward his throat.

“I passed a Han deep-read ten minutes ago,” Kael said. “If they’d found anything, I’d be dead.”

“I didn’t say it was taken.” Something in the old man’s voice wasn’t accusation. It was worse than that — it was pity. “I said it isn’t there. The splice is empty. There was never anything in it.”

Silence.

Somewhere above them, Indigo kept moving. Markets and tunnels and the permanent noise of a city that doesn’t sleep because sleep is a luxury they only sell in the Crown.

Kael looked at his own arm.

Three years. Twenty-seven runs. Never a failure.

Someone had emptied the splice before he knew it was full.

His first call was to Dorian.

“I need to talk to you,” he said when the line picked up.

“Problem with the drop?” Dorian’s voice was the same as always. Steady. The kind of calm you only develop after surviving long enough to stop being afraid of most things.

“The splice was empty.”

Three seconds of silence.

“That’s not possible,” Dorian said.

“I know.”

“Did anyone touch you in the crossing?”

“No one touched me.”

“Then something failed at origin. This isn’t on you, Kael.” A brief pause — paternal, the kind that closes a conversation before it becomes panic. “Come by tomorrow. We’ll pull it apart together.”

Kael said he would and ended the call.

He stood at the entrance to the Roots, harbor light glowing below him, Indigo pressing down from above like a weight that never quite finishes falling.

In three years, no splice had ever failed.

In three years, no one had ever known his exact route before he was already running it.

No one except Dorian.

Kael looked at his arm.

He thought about his mother.

He thought about the scar she told him was from an accident — the deeper one, further up. The one she put there the night before she disappeared. He’d been nine years old. He remembered the kitchen light and her hands and the way she didn’t explain and the way he didn’t ask because something in her face told him not to.

He’d believed her version for eighteen years.

Standing in the dark under a glowing sea, he finally asked himself the question he’d been avoiding since the night she vanished:

Had he believed it because it was true?

Or because it was easier?