Jay's workshop sat under a NEXUS spine conduit, humming like a nest of angry bees.
Barry pushed the door with his shoulder; the chime above it gave a strangled electronic wheeze. Inside: cramped counters, tool racks, old rigs dangling from hooks, half-dissected drones on the bench. Smell of oil, hot metal, solder smoke.
Jay glanced up from a disassembled rifle, neural ports at his wrist catching the light.
"You're not dead," he said. "Unfashionable."
Barry shrugged his pack off and dropped it on the bench with a clank that wasn't just cans.
"Brought rent," Barry said.
Jay arched a brow, tugged the zip. Out came:
Two sealed nutrient bricks.
One clear water bottle.
One used medband wrapper.
One stim ampoule.
And a dead robo-spider, legs bent, optic socket blown out.
Jay stared at the spider for a beat.
Then he barked a laugh. "You picked a fight with a Blue-Eye fridge dog on your first Round."
"It started it," Barry said. "Told me the food wasn't mine."
"That's because it wasn't," Jay said. "Good news is, it's ours now."
He plucked the bricks aside. "These stay. Family stock." The water joined them. "This too."
He flipped the spider over, metal fingers tapping its underside.
"Field telemetry says you pulled eighteen credits," Jay said.
"How do you know already?"
Jay tapped the little repeater slate on his bench; NEXUS glyphs scrolled with human overlay.
"Workshop's tied into payout logs," he said. "Lets me know who can afford repairs and who's about to ask for charity."
Barry stepped closer. On the slate:
RUNNER: RANER, B. — FIELD 3 / ROUND 221EXTRACT: WINDOW 1REGISTERED SALVAGE VALUE: 18.0 NC
"Eighteen," Barry said. "That good?"
Jay snorted. "It's not embarrassing. First window, basic kit, that's solid goblining."
He flicked to another line.
"Clinic daily support for Lissa Raner: fifteen credits," Jay said. "Vials, filters, tower uptime."
Barry's stomach dipped.
"So… that one Round is—"
"—one day." Jay nodded. "Three credits left over. Which you need for you."
"I can give all eighteen," Barry said. "I don't—"
"You can die on the second Round from an empty stomach and a dry canteen?" Jay cut in. "Great plan. Tell the story at her funeral."
Barry glared. "I'm not eating while she—"
"You are," Jay said flat. "Or you stop running. Then she stops breathing. Numbers don't care how noble you feel."
He sorted:
One brick slid into a "home" crate.
One brick he set aside. "You eat this."
Water split: half to family, half tagged for Barry's next Round.
Stim stayed on Barry's side of the bench. "For when you screw up."
"And the spider?" Barry asked.
Jay's mouth twitched. "That's the sweet bit."
He grabbed a tool and popped a plate on the bot's underside, hands moving practised. Hydro lines, sensor clusters, a core node.
"This chassis is NEXUS stock," Jay said. "Optic's trashed but the brain's mostly intact. I strip it, I get coils, servos, maybe a clean subroutine chip. Legit market will pay ten, twelve credits. Black side might pay more if there's anything interesting in its memory."
"Interesting like…?" Barry asked.
"Like why a low-tier enforcer jumped a basic loot scrape that wasn't marked no-touch," Jay said. "Could just be you looked ugly at it. Could be corrupted flags. Could be we don't like the answer."
Barry watched him lever out a palm-sized block of hardware, wires trailing, faint blue still pulsing.
"What's that worth?" Barry asked.
"Raw?" Jay weighed it in his hand. "Five, easy. More if it's clean. More if it's dirty in a fun way."
"So that's… Lissa's half a day."
"Or your ammo," Jay said. "Or better plates. Or a data bribe. Credits are just numbers NEXUS writes. Gear is how you tell the numbers to go fuck themselves."
Barry's collar buzzed softly, as if objecting.
He scrubbed a hand over his face. "Break it down. All of it."
Jay sighed, but he did:
"Clinic," he said, ticking things off on grease-stained fingers. "Fifteen credits per Stack-day to keep her on that tower, meds and filters included. That's non-negotiable. Miss once, they 'reprioritize.'"
"Ammo: point-two a round for trash nine mil like yours, point-five for clean. Medbands: two to three credits each. Stims: four and up. Basic filter mask cartridges: one a day if you're breathing air near a breach."
He pointed at Barry's rig.
"Your plates are junk," Jay said. "A real vest is twenty to thirty. A half-decent helmet, another twenty. Cheap reflex aug to keep your hands from shaking? Fifty plus install."
Barry let the math hit.
"One Round. First window. Eighteen," Jay said. "You feed your sister, you feed yourself one brick, you've got three credits and a favor with me from that spider. Not sustainable, but it's a start."
"I'll run more," Barry said.
"Yeah," Jay said quietly. "That's the plan. That's also the trap."
He set the spider core aside, wiped his hands. "NEXUS runs the Rounds like a slot machine. They need goblins who survive just enough to keep playing. Need murderhobos for the blood. Need Locals for the scares."
"I'm not planning on becoming a Local," Barry said.
"Nobody does," Jay said. "They miss a window by thirty seconds and suddenly they're legacy code with a gun."
They both looked up, as if they could see through floors to where Lissa lay under yellow light.
"Take the brick," Jay said, shoving the one he'd set aside toward Barry. "You eat. I'll move the spider, get what I can. We'll hit the clinic, buy her day. Then we look at Field 3's schedule and see when it tries to kill you next."
Barry hesitated. The brick felt heavier than the pistol.
"I can't eat while she's—"
"You eat," Jay repeated. "Because if you go back in lighter and slower, that's fifteen credits we don't get. You want to honor her? Survive efficiently."
It was obscene. It was also correct.
Barry tore the package open, took a bite. It tasted like salted cardboard. He chewed anyway.
"Good," Jay said. "Now grab your pack. Clinic first."
The MedTower lobby hummed with stale air and quiet desperation. People in gray sat on benches, watching their timers on the big wall display.
Jay limped up to a payment terminal, Barry at his side.
He jacked his wrist-port cable into the slot; the screen flicked through NEXUS glyphs, then into human numerals.
ACCOUNT: RANER, LISSADUE: 6 DAYS — 90.0 NCRECEIVED THIS CYCLE: 0.0 NC
"Patch from your Round," Jay said. "Brace yourself."
He thumbed the options, selected TRANSFER FROM FAMILY CREDIT.
Barry watched the numbers drain.
APPLY 15.0 NC?
"Do it," Barry said.
Jay tapped.
The DUE dropped from 6 to 5 days.
Then, a moment later, a soft chime:
NEXUS CARE EXTENSION: +1 DAY
New line:
DUE: 7 DAYS — 105.0 NCPAID THIS CYCLE: 15.0 NC
Barry exhaled.
"That's it?" he asked. "That's all eighteen got us?"
"Fifteen kept her plugged in," Jay said. "Three stayed in your pocket as personal credit. Plus bricks, plus spider, plus experience."
People would kill for less.
Barry looked up at the tower of glass and black composite above them, NEXUS logo glowing serene. Somewhere inside, a system had just updated his sister's right to breathe.
"Next Round," Barry said.
Jay side-eyed him. "Tomorrow's Field 1. Shorter windows, nastier layout. You survived once; don't get romantic."
"If I don't go, that seven becomes six. Then five," Barry said. "If I do go and come back like this again, it stays ahead."
"And if you don't come back?" Jay asked. Soft, not mocking.
"Then I wasn't good enough," Barry said. "And she runs out anyway."
Jay studied him for a moment.
"You brought back a spider," he said finally. "That's goblin thinking. Keep that. Don't start believing you're the main act."
He clapped Barry's shoulder once. "Go crash. Eat. Hydrate. We open the spider guts later. Maybe it tells us something about why it went off-script on a kid with a half-pack."
Barry nodded.
On the way back down into the Stack's neon guts, he passed a wall screen replaying sanitized Field telemetry: little dots moving in corridors, red Xs where signals cut.
No one watched for fun. Not openly.
Barry touched his collar, feeling the faint warmth of Field Mode memory.
Eighteen credits for almost bleeding out under a kitchen bot. One day.
After they lost, survival was math with teeth. And the numbers said he'd be stepping over that yellow line again.