The industrial lift to Sector 6 was packed.

  Tess pressed herself against the back wall, tool belt digging into her hip, while Kade bounced on his heels beside her. The lift was a utilitarian cage—bare metal walls, exposed hydraulics, clearly an infrastructure that predated the Network and somehow still worked. Fifteen other people crowded in with them, most heading up to take advantage of whatever Sector 6 had that Sector 7 didn’t.

  Which lately was power.

  The lift lurched upward with a groan that suggested it wasn’t happy about the work but would do it, anyway.

  Tess kept her eyes on the floor, watching the numbers tick up on the worn display panel. Her heart rate had climbed since leaving Kade’s corner, though not enough that anyone would notice. Just enough for her to notice.

  “Bee?” she murmured, barely audible under the hydraulic groan.

  The message interface flickered into existence in the corner of her vision.

  BEE: Tess. Is something wrong?

  “No,” Tess whispered. “Just wanted to let you know Kade’s with me. Can’t really talk for a bit.”

  BEE: Understood. I will monitor biometrics and remain if needed.

  A pause.

  BEE: Your heart rate has increased by 11%.

  “I’m fine. Just nervous,” she said.

  BEE: Observation: you state you are fine, then immediately contradict yourself.

  Tess almost smiled. “Shut up, Bee.”

  BEE: Acknowledged.

  The lift jerked to a halt at Sector 6, and the doors screeched open.

  Tess stepped out and stopped.

  “Holy crap,” Kade said from beside her.

  Sector 6 was alive.

  Tess had been here before, twice, maybe three times. Six months ago she’d bartered for an evaporator coil at a salvage stall two blocks west. She’d counted maybe five people on the street then, dark storefronts and half the street lamps dead. The entire sector had felt like something holding its breath, waiting to see if it would survive another year.

  Now every streetlight worked, every shop sign glowed. Neon in colors she’d forgotten the city even had—electric blue, hot pink, acid green—cut through the perpetual haze. The buildings were the same multi-story pre-Network structures she remembered, but now their windows weren’t boarded up, their awnings didn’t sag, and their storefronts actually had things in them.

  And the people. There were so many people.

  The main avenue stretched ahead, lined with shops selling everything from salvaged tech to actual food, real food with steam rising from the carts parked along the curbs. Music drifted from somewhere deeper in the sector, something with a driving beat and synthetic strings.

  Side alleys branched off the main street, narrow and crowded, lined with market stalls. Red lanterns strung overhead, vendors shouting prices, goods stacked in precarious towers.

  “Has it always looked like this?” Tess asked.

  “Huh?” Kade said, clearly as enamored as Tess was. “Power went up, everything came online, I guess. Seems like everyone is making up for lost time.”

  I did that.

  She’d restored the Aether junction, and now an entire sector of the city was running like it used to. Like it was supposed to be. People were working. Shops were open. The city felt less like a corpse and more like something that might actually survive. All in a matter of hours.

  But that also meant more attention. More questions.

  “Come on,” Kade said. “Let’s get to Vera’s before the crowd gets worse.”

  They pushed through the throng, weaving between pedestrians and carts. Tess resisted the urge to [ANALYZE] everything she passed, just to see how it all worked.

  She turned down the side street she remembered, less crowded but just as well-lit as the main avenue. The buildings here were older, pre-Network construction with worn facades and mismatched repairs. But the shops were clean, and the signs were bright.

  Kade followed, grinning. “You’ve been here before, haven’t you?”

  “Couple times,” Tess said.

  KAIN’S COMPONENTS in bold letters, flickering but readable. Below that, smaller text: Electronics, Salvage, Repairs.

  The shop was narrow, wedged between a plasma welder’s stall and a shuttered storefront that Tess thought might have been a clinic once. The window display was crammed with circuit boards, salvaged components, and tools arranged with a care that suggested someone actually gave a damn.

  Tess pushed open the door.

  A chime sounded, electronic rather than mechanical. The interior was exactly how Tess remembered it.

  Every wall was lined with shelves, and every shelf was loaded with components: resistors, capacitors, relays, wire in six different gauges, connectors she recognized and a dozen she didn’t. Screens mounted above the counter cycled through readouts showing power grid status, salvage market prices, Aether distribution metrics. A workbench dominated the back corner, scarred and stained but meticulously organized, with magnetic tool strips and parts bins labeled in precise handwriting.

  And the security: small, dome-shaped objects mounted in the ceiling corners, their indicator lights steady and green. Powered. Online. Vera Kain didn’t mess around.

  “You going to stand there all day, or are you actually here for something?”

  Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

  Tess turned.

  Vera Kain stood behind the counter, looking exactly like she always did. Elaborate braids piled high, woven through with colored wire: copper, silver, fiber-optic strands that caught the light. She wore a jacket in a patchwork of colors that shouldn’t have worked together but somehow did, and her expression suggested she’d seen everything twice and wasn’t impressed either time.

  Tess had been buying parts from Vera for years, though usually her Dad did most of the actual buying.

  “Hi, Vera,” Tess said.

  “Tess.” Vera’s gaze flicked to Kade, then back to Tess, taking in the tool belt, the scanner, the entire situation in about two seconds. “Your father contacted me just now, said you’d be coming by. Said you got a class, want to level up, and you need someone who’s not going to ask too many questions.”

  Tess blinked. “That’s… surprisingly accurate.”

  “Marcus and I go back over twenty years. I know how he thinks.” Vera’s eyes narrowed slightly. “What class?”

  “Technician. Level 2.”

  She whistled. “Uh-huh. And what’ve you fixed?”

  Tess hesitated.

  “Freighter power systems. Nutrient dispensers. Elevator relays. Aether regulation matrices.” She paused. “Some dungeon infrastructure.”

  Vera’s eyebrow rose. “Dungeon infrastructure? Aether regulation? That why the city’s power is up?”

  Tess’s heart rate spiked.

  BEE: Your heart rate has increased by 19%.

  “Not helping, Bee,” she muttered under her breath.

  “I fixed some things in the tutorial.” Tess chose her words with caution. “Had an Aether surge. System gave me a quest to stabilize the junction. Did the work, got my class.”

  It was close enough to the truth that it didn’t feel like lying.

  Vera studied her for a long moment. Then she reached under the counter and pulled out a circuit board, small, maybe ten centimeters across, with a fractal pattern of traces and a cluster of components on one side.

  “Fix this,” Vera said, setting it on the counter. “No scanner.”

  Tess stared at the board. “What is it?”

  “Comm relay. Broke yesterday, haven’t had time to trace the fault. You figure it out, we’ll talk about work.”

  Tess picked up the board, turning it over in her hands. Pre-Network design, clearly: the crystalline substrate and the way the traces branched in organic curves rather than right angles gave it away. Older tech, but good tech.

  She activated [ANALYZE].

  The skill exploded across her vision, layering information over the physical board. Energy pathways, component relationships, signal flow diagrams. She could see the entire structure at once: what was broken, why it was broken, and what it connected to.

  There. A hairline crack in one of the substrate traces, invisible to the naked eye but clear as day through [ANALYZE]. The break had severed the connection between the signal processor and the output array, which meant the relay could receive but not transmit.

  Tess set the board down and pulled out her multi-tool. “Do you have conductive epoxy?”

  Vera’s expression didn’t change. “Third drawer. Left side.”

  Tess found the epoxy, a small tube half-used, and brought it back to the counter. She applied a thin line along the cracked trace, smoothing it with the edge of her multi-tool, then waited thirty seconds for it to cure.

  “Test it,” she said, handing the board back.

  Vera plugged the relay into a diagnostic rig on the counter. The screen flickered and then displayed a clean signal readout. Green across the board.

  “Huh,” Vera said.

  “Hairline crack in the substrate,” Tess said. “Probably from thermal stress. The trace was too thin for the current load.”

  Vera’s gaze moved from Tess to the relay and back.

  “You did that in under a minute.”

  “It wasn’t complicated.”

  “It took me three hours to find that crack, and I’ve been doing this for thirty years.” Vera set the relay down. “But I’m only a merchant class. You can fix things. That the capacitor your Dad told me about?”

  Tess pulled the refurbished capacitor from her tool belt. “Yeah, thought you might trade it for a comm relay. One that works.”

  “Comm relays are cheap. Twenty-five, maybe thirty credits if you’re desperate. That capacitor’s worth forty.” Vera tapped the board. “But this one’s fixed now, so how about this. You keep it. I keep the capacitor. And I give you a job to balance the difference.”

  “What kind of job?”

  “Refrigeration system at a place called Bistro Y, near the gates to Sector 5. Been offline all morning since the power increase. Owner’s been calling every hour.” Vera pulled a datapad from under the counter and scribbled something on it. “Address is here. Fix it, come back, and you’ll be paid fifty credits.”

  Tess did the math. Fifty credits for a repair job, plus the comm relay, minus the capacitor. She’d come out way ahead, which was more than she’d expected.

  “Deal,” she said.

  “Good.” Vera turned and walked to the back of the shop, disappearing behind a shelf. She returned a moment later carrying a case: long, narrow, plasteel with worn latches.

  She set it on the counter and opened it.

  Inside, nestled in foam, was a complete set of technician’s tools. Proper tools, not salvaged, not cobbled together: precision drivers, wire strippers, multi-testers, a compact soldering iron, component pullers, and a dozen other things Tess recognized from old recordings her father had shown her.

  Plasteel handles, pre-Network manufacture—tools that lasted generations.

  “These are…”

  “Your father’s,” Vera said. “Or they were. He sold them to me eight years ago when he needed parts for your freighter’s life support. I’ve been holding onto them ever since.”

  Tess stared at the tools. She remembered her father using them when she was younger, teaching her how to feel her way through a repair before she ever picked up a scanner.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Because I knew he’d want them back eventually. And because I’m old, and sentimental, and I like the idea of tools going back to the people who earned them.” Vera closed the case. “Fix the job at Bistro Y. Do it right. These are yours.”

  Tess looked up. “Fifty credits and the tools?”

  “Fifty credits and the tools.”

  “That’s too much.”

  Vera’s expression softened, just a fraction, just enough to show something underneath the sardonic exterior. “Your father’s fixed more than half the devices in my store. Some more than once. Wouldn’t ever take payment. Said I could call it even someday.” She patted the case on the counter. “This is me calling it even.”

  Tess didn’t trust herself to speak. She just nodded.

  “Now get out of my shop,” Vera said, but there was no bite in it. “You’re making the place look cluttered.”

  Bistro Y was ten minutes away, tucked into a corner near the Sector 5 gates.

  Tess and Kade walked in silence.

  “That was nice,” Kade said eventually. “The tools thing.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You okay?”

  Tess took a breath. “Yeah. Just… a lot.”

  Kade bumped her shoulder with his. “You’re doing great, you know. Level 2 already. Actual paying jobs. Your dad’s going to be proud.”

  Tess almost laughed. If only you knew the half of it, Kade.

  But Kade didn’t know the truth. Nobody did, except Marcus and Bee.

  And that was how it needed to stay, at least for now.

  They reached Bistro Y five minutes later.

  The restaurant was smaller than Tess expected, maybe twenty tables, half of them occupied. The front was glass, clean and recently polished, with the name etched in simple lettering. Inside, the decor was minimalist: pale wood, soft lighting, actual tablecloths. It looked like a place that catered to people who had money and wanted to spend it on something other than survival.

  Tess had never been to a restaurant like this.

  She pushed open the door, and a small chime sounded.

  A man approached immediately, mid-thirties, wearing a crisp shirt and a professional smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes.

  “Welcome to Bistro Y. Do you have a reservation?”

  “No,” Tess said. “I’m here to fix the refrigeration system. Vera Kain sent me.”

  The smile shifted, became genuine. “Oh, thank god. It’s been down since this morning. We’ve lost half our cold storage already.” He gestured toward the back. “Let me get the Managers. They’ll want to meet you.”

  He disappeared through a door behind the bar.

  The restaurant was pleasant, nicer than anywhere in Sector 7, that was for sure. But as Tess waited, she started noticing things. The two men at the corner table weren’t eating, just watching the door. A scanning rig sat under the bar, not standard equipment for a restaurant. The private booth in the back had a reinforced door and a lock that required a keycard. Even the front window, clean as it was, showed stress patterns suggesting reinforced plasteel rather than glass.

  “Hey,” Kade murmured. “Is it just me, or does this place feel…”

  The door behind the bar opened.

  Two men stepped out.

  Both wore casual clothes, jackets and slacks, nothing obviously threatening. But Tess recognized them immediately from their build, the way they moved, the tattoos on their knuckles.

  The Kellmar Brothers.

  The taller one, broad-shouldered with a scar running through his left eyebrow, looked at Tess and then at Kade.

  Then he smiled.

  “Well,” he said. “Look who walked into our restaurant.”

  ?? INTER-STORY TRANSMISSION // MANDATORY VIEWING ??

  [ERROR] FEEDBACK LOOP DETECTED | DIMENSIONAL BLEED: ACTIVE | ORIGIN: ROYAL ROAD SERVER CLUSTER #138066

  [WARNING] Unauthorized narrative escape attempt in progress... █

  TRANSMISSION ENDS | REALITY.STATUS = UNCERTAIN | PLEASE_CLICK = TRUE | GODDESS_WATCHING = ALWAYS