The next morning, the board still said:
LISSA RANER — 13 DAYS
Stable.
It shouldn't have felt like luxury. It did.
Barry slid the last of yesterday's credits—fifteen—into her account anyway. Tiny bump.
13 → 14 DAYS
One more brick in the wall.
Jay watched over his shoulder. "Good. Keep them ahead of your bullshit."
"Motivational," Barry said.
"Got another word for it," Jay said. "But it's early."
He flicked to a different pane. System logs, stripped down.
CLUSTER: B-RANER-3 / L-VOSS / KADE-IMANISTATUS: MONITORNOTES: PERSISTENT COHESION // ABOVE-BASELINE SURVIVAL
"See that?" Jay said. "Yesterday's textbook run got its own bullet point."
"Monitor," Barry read. "We had observe. Now monitor. That's… promotion?"
"Observe was 'this one's weird,'" Jay said. "Monitor is 'this pattern is interesting.' Difference between a lab rat and a breeding pair."
"Gross," Barry said.
Jay shrugged. "If you're going to be data, at least be bad data."
"Lena and Kade know?" Barry asked.
"They know something's off," Jay said. "Tell them enough they don't walk into it blind. But not in front of the walls."
"Copy."
"And remember," Jay added, "Riggs is watching too. He just doesn't have graphs."
Barry found Lena in the same back alley clinic as before, mid-shift.
Different day, same line of broken people.
She finished taping a guy's ribs, took his credits, shooed him out. Saw Barry, exhaled like she'd bitten into something sour.
"You're standing," she said. "Excellent. I hate redoing work."
"Got a promotion," Barry said.
"Finally became useful?" she said.
"NEXUS thinks we're a 'cluster,'" he said, keeping his voice low. "Monitor tag. The three of us together. They like how we move."
She stared at him. "You're serious."
He nodded once.
"Say it," Lena said.
"High efficiency, persistent cohesion, above-baseline survival," Barry recited. "Monitor."
She scrubbed a hand down her face.
"Of course," she muttered. "We run smart one time and end up on a watchlist."
"Jay says it's leverage later," Barry said. "Also says it's a bigger target."
"He's not wrong," Lena said. "Systems don't like outliers. They poke them until they break or fit."
"You still in for the big one when it drops?" Barry asked.
"Stress test?" she said. "If payouts are real, yeah. Especially if Riggs is chasing you into it. Someone grown-up should be there."
"Flattered," Barry said.
"Don't be," she said. "You're good for business. Same as my hand not shaking."
She hesitated.
"Riggs hit one of my clients yesterday," she said. "Pulled him off extract. Left a smiley in his blood."
Barry's jaw tightened. "Name?"
"Doesn't matter," Lena said. "Point is: I now have a financial interest in Riggs stopping breathing."
"Overlapping selfish interests," Barry murmured.
"Exactly," she said. "Tell Kade. He likes jobs with clean math."
Kade was on a rooftop.
Barry spotted him by accident: heading past a market, audio band picked up a flat, familiar rifle report. No panic after. Just the sound of a body hitting metal.
He looked up.
Kade stood at the lip of a low roof, rifle down, completely unconcerned. Below, a guy with a snub pistol lay sprawled, hand stretched toward a hidden side path to Gate 2.
"He was aiming at backs," Kade said as Barry approached, jerking his chin at the body. "Warned him once last week. He didn't adjust."
"Public service," Barry said.
"Quality control," Kade said.
Barry told him about the monitor tag.
Kade listened, face going from neutral to flatter.
"So now we're a case," Kade said.
"Seems like," Barry said.
"Figures," Kade said. "They always start watching once you string a few miracles together."
"You've seen it before," Barry said.
"Different city," Kade said. "Different machine. Same story. People who survive too well get sorted. Recruited, erased, or repurposed."
"Which one are we?" Barry asked.
"Too early," Kade said. "But your 'non-terminal' sticker makes you the variable. Me and Lena? We're just adjacent values."
He said it without drama, like checking wind.
"You still in," Barry asked, "knowing that?"
Kade looked down at the dead camper. "Riggs is still breathing. NEXUS is still flinching around you. Lot of work left."
Which was a yes.
"Stress test?" Barry asked.
"When it lands," Kade said. "We plan it. We don't improvise at the gate."
He slung the rifle, hopped down.
"Stay off solo heroics until then," he said. "The longer we look stable, the bigger the correction."
"Comforting," Barry said.
Kade shrugged. "Wasn't trying to be."
By midday, the whispers about the test hardened into text.
The central board flickered, then updated:
SYSTEM NOTICE — FIELD NETWORK LOAD TEST (SCHEDULED)DATE: TBA (WITHIN 72 HOURS)PARAMETERS:
BOT RESPONSE ESCALATION
RED-EYE PURGE OPERATIONS
ENVIRONMENTAL HAZARD VARIATIONS
REWARD MULTIPLIER ACTIVEWARNING: UNSTABLE ZONES MAY BE SUBJECT TO STERILIZATION WITHOUT FURTHER NOTICE.
The crowd murmured.
"That's free money."
"That's suicide."
"Sterilization? They haven't pulled that since—"
Barry felt the hair on his neck rise.
Sterilization: they'd heard stories. Whole slices of city hard-wiped in light and fire because some metric dipped wrong.
Jay's voice in his skull: Rare. Ugly. Best watched, not attended.
His collar buzzed, just once.
A tiny personal alert scrolled under the public one.
ADVISORY: B-RANER-3 — PARTICIPATION DATA VALUABLE
It vanished almost as soon as it appeared.
He took a step back from the board.
"Yeah," he muttered. "That's not ominous at all."
Back in the workshop, the notice was already up.
Jay stabbed it with the cane.
"No," he said.
Barry dropped onto his crate. "Didn't say anything yet."
"I could hear you thinking it," Jay said. "This is not for you."
"Rewards will be insane," Barry said.
"Sterilization," Jay snapped. "Without notice."
"Which means they're targeting corrupted zones," Barry said. "Red-eyes. Glitch clusters. People like Riggs who stir shit."
"And anomalies they've been circling," Jay said. "You are literally in the subtitle."
Barry hesitated. "They pinged me. Direct. Said participation data valuable."
Jay let out a breath that was almost a laugh, no humor in it.
"Of course they did," he said. "Congratulations, you're now on the list of things the gun wants to test."
Lena stepped into the doorway; she must've come straight from the board.
"So," she said. "Stress test."
Kade slipped in behind her. Door shut.
Jay eyed all three. "No," he repeated.
"Rewards are tiered up for med freight, rare aug parts, clean creds," Lena said. "If we pull one good route, we push Lissa's timer weeks."
"If we live," Kade said. "If we don't get wiped with the rest."
Jay jabbed his cane against the floor. "Math. Do the math before you volunteer your organs."
They did. Out loud.
Current state:
Lissa: 14 days locked.
Extra meds: enough to stretch more.
Barry: stable, geared, not desperate.
Trio: on NEXUS' monitor tag.
"Do we need it?" Lena asked.
"No," Jay said instantly.
"Need?" Barry repeated. "No. But…"
He pictured the wall jumping not by ones but tens. Lissa's lungs not always on a knife-edge.
"Desire isn't currency," Jay growled.
"It is when it keeps you queuing," Lena said.
Kade folded his arms.
"Question's wrong," he said. "It's not 'need or don't.' It's: if Riggs runs it, does he become a bigger problem if we're not there to stop him."
Silence.
Jay grimaced. "I hate that that's a point."
"If he farms the test," Kade said, "he gets more gear, more fear, more idiots. He's already using Barry's name. You let that snowball, we'll be dealing with ten of him."
"What if he dies there?" Jay shot back. "That's an option."
"Then someone as bad fills the hole," Lena said. "At least we know this bastard's face."
Barry stared at the notice.
"Sterilization," he said quietly. "Unstable zones. Corrupt density."
"Yeah," Jay said. "See the part they don't print? They decide what's 'unstable.'"
"Red-eyes. Corrupted bots. Locals," Barry said.
"Anomaly clusters," Kade added.
"That's us," Lena said.
Jay pointed his cane at Barry. "That's you. They ain't got non-terminal next to my name."
Barry's collar felt heavier.
"Let me ask it straight," Lena said. "If we don't run it, can we live with Riggs coming out richer and louder?"
"No," Barry said.
"Can we afford to treat this like just another Round?" Kade asked.
"No," Barry said again.
Jay swore under his breath in a language Barry didn't know.
"You plan it here," Jay said finally. "If you're going to be idiots, you'll be precise idiots."
He stabbed the slate to bring up a map of Field 3, 4, 5 overlays.
"We assume max bots, flamer flyers, red-eyes actively purging corrupted zones," Jay said. "We assume NEXUS wants to see how your pretty cluster handles pain."
"You help us avoid the sterilization zones," Barry said.
"I'll try," Jay said. "But if they drop a hammer from orbit, my math doesn't mean shit."
Lena nodded once. "Then we pick a route with exits. No crate greed. Riggs is the target of opportunity, not the mission."
Kade: "We don't take anyone else. More people = more noise."
Barry felt the shape of it settling. Heavy. Inevitable.
"Next 72 hours," Jay said. "We watch the micro-updates. You don't touch any other gates till the test. You keep your anomaly boring."
"Lissa?" Barry asked.
Jay met his eyes. "Tell her if you want. Don't promise anything you can't keep."
Barry nodded, throat tight.
After they left, Jay caught his arm.
"You listen to me, Barry," he said. "If you feel even a tick that they're using you in there—using that tag to line up a shot—you run. Screw the payout. Screw Riggs. You run."
Barry tried to joke. "Thought goblins don't run from value."
"Goblins live," Jay said. "Heroes get sterilized."
Barry didn't sleep much that night.
He lay on his bunk in the corner of the workshop, listening to the hum of broken machines, the ghost of NEXUS notices scrolling behind his eyes.
Stress test. Sterilization. Monitor.
Lena's hard look. Kade's calm.
Riggs' smiley rat.
After they lost, some choices weren't about survival or death—they were about what kind of problem you refused to leave roaming free.
When the test hit, they'd step inside together.
The trick would be making sure at least one of them stepped back out.