I'm right behind her.

  Night air, cold and clean. Tasting like nothing at all, which is the best thing I've tasted in hours.

  We're in an alley. Overflowing dumpsters on one side, chain-link fence on the other. A street lamp flickers at the far end, still connected to the grid somehow. Stuttering orange light on wet pavement.

  Sofia collapses against the nearest wall. Slides down until she's sitting in a puddle. She doesn't seem to notice I'm carrying her medicine. Maybe she hasn't realized. Maybe she doesn't care yet.

  "Where are we?" she asks instead.

  I orient myself. The hospital's bulk is visible two blocks north, lights blazing, sirens still wailing faintly in the distance. We came out further east than I planned, but not by much.

  "Piedmont," I say. "Two blocks from the perimeter."

  "And then?"

  "Then I get these antibiotics for someone who needs them."

  I kneel beside our bags then and take what I saved on the second trip up. I start to check the contents, the boxes shifted during the fight but the seals held. Twenty-four doses of Linezolid, still intact. Along with a lot of other high value drugs, all still viable. All of it could mean the difference between Lily's survival and an outcome I don’t want to consider.

  Sofia watches me sort through the medicine. I pull out what she came for, the pediatric painkillers we grabbed during the looting, along with other high value meds because you never know what becomes currency in a world without pharmacies.

  I hold them out to her alongside one of those white plastic bags with bright red corporate logos.

  She stares at them. At her empty hands. At the water still dripping from her soaked scrubs.

  "These are yours."

  She takes them from me, slowly. Like she's waiting for the catch. But there is no catch. This isn't generosity. We both came for medicine; now we both can leave with medicine. A clean transaction between us. No debts, no obligations, no threads that could pull me back here later.

  "Thank you." Her voice cracks on the word. "I don't… thank you."

  "Don't mention it."

  I stand, turn and walk away. Shouldering what remains of the duffle and my main pack, feel the forty or fifty pounds of stuff I lifted. I wonder if I’ve given her too little. Then I think about how we added so much weight? Even with the boots and the baton, the three crystal fragments I still haven't examined. We shouldn’t have this much stuff…

  Good return on time investment though.

  "Wait."

  She's stumbling after me. Her improved system-enhanced body was still discovering their own change in strength.

  "Please. Just... wait."

  Don't stop. Don't turn around. Nothing good comes from turning around. Every dependency is a liability. Every connection is a thread that can be pulled.

  I stop. Somehow I manage not to turn around. "What?"

  "I can't go back."

  "That's not my problem."

  Don’t turn around. Walk away. This isn't your problem.

  "They'll investigate." She's closer now. I can hear her breathing, still ragged, still recovering. "Dead guards. Missing inventory. They'll check the access logs. Even if I don't say anything, they'll know I was there."

  I look up at the sky. Searching for a reason why her problems should become mine. Become Lily's.

  "Then don't go back to GW. Go somewhere else."

  "Where?" The word comes out broken. "I'm level six now. I'm over the cap. That'll come out… there's no way for me to hide that. I have restricted meds, soaked scrubs and nothing else. A padded jail cell is my best-case scenario."

  She's shaking, I can hear it through her chattering teeth. Cold, shock, the slow-dawning realization that she stepped off a cliff tonight and hasn't hit bottom yet.

  For her, somewhere in this city, a child is waiting for medicine that won't come. The woman who was supposed to deliver it, standing in an alley with wet scrubs and a body count she didn't ask for.

  I exhale.

  "You're smart. You'll manage."

  "I'll die."

  "Most people do." I start walking again.

  Why did you say that?

  "Please." She's not following now. She’s standing there instead, voice carrying across the wet pavement as I continue moving away. "Just for a few days, until the investigation settles. I'll stay out of your way, I won't ask questions, I really need..."

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  "No."

  I keep walking. I won’t risk Lily, she's already gone through so much. I needed to get the medicine to her, I wasn’t going to let her die. I’m not going to lose her.

  "Linezolid."

  I stop.

  "Six hundred milligrams IV. Twenty-four doses. Two full courses plus margin." Her voice has changed. Still desperate, but focused now, clinical. "I'm not guessing. That drug has a very specific protocol for a very specific range of conditions."

  I don't turn around. Can't turn around. If I look at her while she's dissecting my position, I don't know what I'll do.

  "You grabbed Daptomycin as backup. Secondary coverage. Which means you're planning for failure. Expecting that nothing will work." She's walking toward me now. Slow steps, deliberate. "You're treating drug-resistant sepsis. Advanced stage. Possibly terminal. Someone's been sick for a while and standard antibiotics aren't touching it."

  "Stop talking."

  "The dosing interval on Linezolid is twelve hours. You grabbed enough for fourteen days, which means you're planning for complications. For resistance. For the possibility that even last-resort drugs might not work."

  "I said stop."

  She stops. Three feet away. "Whoever you're treating," she says, "they need more than drugs. They need monitoring. IV management, adjustments based on response. They need someone who knows what they're looking at when things go wrong."

  "I've read your literature. I can learn what I need."

  "You can read dosing guidelines. Can you identify early signs of mitochondrial toxicity? Can you adjust for renal clearance in a dehydrated patient? Can you tell the difference between a drug fever and a treatment failure?"

  I don't answer. The silence is answer enough.

  "You're out of your depth." Somehow I can tell that she is staring at the back of my head. "I've treated forty-three cases of System-induced sepsis in the last three weeks. Pediatric cases specifically. Children under fifteen."

  I turn around. I meet her eyes.

  "Every child with System complications gets routed through GW," she continues. "I've seen patterns in their medical data. So much of it doesn’t match any literature because there is no literature for this yet."

  "What kind of patterns?"

  What are you doing? Don't create dependencies. Lily’s survival depends on you.

  "The System doesn't just enhance, it catalyzes." She's speaking faster now. Clinical mode fully engaged. "Preexisting infections don't persist, they evolve. Antibiotic resistance develops in hours instead of generations. The treatment protocols we learned in med school, they're not just insufficient. They're actively wrong. I believe they are actively working against us."

  I'm searching my brain for anything now, trying my best to convince myself of some illogical reason I can distrust Sofia. Throw this whole line of reasoning into the trash. Lily surviving was the only thing that mattered.

  But…

  Real-time data on system-induced pediatric complications. Forty-three cases. Pattern recognition compiled by a medical professional, that’s one more skill I can't replicate from textbooks.

  "Lily," Sofia says. "Your sister. How long has she been sick?"

  I meet her eyes.

  It’s not a weakness to answer. Lily needs a cure. She could be an asset.

  "Seventeen days."

  Something shifts in her expression, not pity, more like recognition. "And you've been treating her alone. With street medicine and medical textbooks."

  "I've kept her alive."

  I will keep her alive. She and I will survive this.

  "You have." She says it like an acknowledgment of competence, not condescension. It still bothers me. She doesn't know what it's been like out here.

  "But you're running out of options. I can see it in what you grabbed. Linezolid and Daptomycin together, that's desperation, last resort stacking."

  "It's what's left that might work."

  "It might. Or it might destroy her kidneys before it touches the infection." She takes a step closer. "I watched you back there. In the stockroom, in the sewers. You identified a problem, calculated a solution, and executed. No hesitation, no sentiment to cloud your judgement. That's exactly what I need."

  "For what?"

  "The GW isn't solving anything. Vasquez and the others, they're treating symptoms, keeping people alive day to day, but no one is asking why. Why the System affects children differently. Why some infections evolve and others don't. Why certain drug combinations work in some patients and kill others."

  She gestures vaguely in the direction I pointed her towards, towards GW.

  "There are seventeen children right now on the same trajectory as your sister. Hundreds more we can't admit. Possibly thousands across the metroplex. Climbing fevers, evolving infections, standard treatment failing. And every doctor is watching them wither slowly because none of us understand the mechanism driving the problem."

  "And Lily?"

  "Your sister might be the data point that changes that."

  83%

  How can it possibly calculate that?

  How could the system possibly calculate the odds on my sister's survival like she's a position in a portfolio.

  Or 3% alone.

  I want to argue with the logic, the reasoning, the numbers. But I can't find a flaw in a model where I don’t even know what the formula is.

  But I've been trading long enough to know what it looks like when you're fighting the tape. When the market is telling you something you don't want to hear, and your job is to listen anyway.

  I always hated when that happened.

  "This isn't charity," I say.

  "No." She extends her hand. The gesture looks strange out here, formal, almost absurd, two people covered in sewer water trying to shake on something. "This is me being selfish. I need your sister's case. You need my expertise."

  I look at her hand. The calculation behind her eyes is the same one I've been running for three weeks. The same brutal logic that reduces everything to necessity.

  Keeping them alive long enough to figure out what's killing them.

  I take her hand.

  "Two weeks," I say. "My rules on everything except medicine. Where we go, when we move, what we eat. You don't like it, you don't argue. You comply."

  "Fine." Her grip tightens. "But when I tell you something will kill your sister, you listen. Even if it doesn't make sense to you. Even if it costs you something."

  "Agreed."

  We both shake, her grip is firm, professional. The shake of someone closing a deal, not asking for help.

  I can work with this.

  "Try to keep up," she says. There's something like a smile permeating the exhaustion.

  Bold, considering she can barely walk.

  I turn toward the dark streets. Toward home. Toward Lily.