? ? ?

  Frankie got worse as we went.

  Not dramatically. Not like a movie where the lights flicker and the AI screams and then everyone cries.

  Worse in the way that mattered: timing.

  His jokes landed a half-second late. His scans stuttered. He would start a sentence, pause like he’d forgotten the end, then force it through anyway.

  He tried to hide it by being louder.

  It didn’t work.

  Chloe kept glancing at him like he was a wounded bird she wanted to scoop up and put in her helmet.

  Trevor kept glancing at him like he was a virus he wanted to quarantine.

  I kept my hand near the pendant under my suit collar, where Frankie’s hardware sat against my chest like a second heartbeat.

  “Diagnostics,” I said softly.

  Frankie’s voice came strained. “I’m running them.”

  “And?”

  “And I don’t like them,” Frankie admitted, and for once there was no comedy in it. “My coupling keeps dropping. My… me-ness is fine, but my ability to be… present is getting punched.”

  Trevor’s voice went tight. “Unknown backdoor behavior.”

  “Trevor,” Chloe snapped. “Shut up.”

  “I am not wrong,” Trevor said.

  Frankie flickered, then steadied. “You’re not wrong,” he said quietly. “That’s the problem.”

  I swallowed hard. “Can you go conservative? Minimal projection. Minimal load.”

  Frankie hesitated, and the hesitation itself scared me more than anything. Frankie didn’t hesitate. Frankie filled space.

  “I can,” he said finally. “But if I go too conservative, I can’t scout. I can’t—”

  “I’d rather you be alive and useless than dead and helpful,” I said.

  Frankie’s laugh came out thin. “Wow. Harsh.”

  “Accurate,” Chloe murmured.

  Frankie dimmed. His projection shrank to thumb-size again, less bright, less detailed—like he was saving power, or saving himself.

  The towline kept snagging on the groove ribs, the rover clacking behind us like a stubborn coffin. Every time it caught, the line went taut enough to hum, and I felt it in my teeth. Chloe and I would lean in together, boots sliding, and the rover would lurch forward half a meter with a noise like old metal complaining about being asked to live.

  The unit slid onward without pause.

  We followed.

  And then Trevor made a sound that wasn’t quite a gasp.

  I turned.

  His tablet—strapped to his chest—had a crack down one corner, spiderwebbing through the casing. It must have happened during the rover slam.

  Trevor’s gloved fingers covered it instantly, too fast.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” Trevor said.

  “That’s a crack,” Chloe said flatly.

  “It’s cosmetic,” Trevor snapped.

  Frankie, dim and quiet, whispered, “Cosmetic cracks are my favorite kind of denial.”

  Trevor’s eyes flicked toward him, and for a heartbeat I saw something raw there—fear, not of the city, not of death.

  Fear of being seen.

  He tugged the tablet free, turned slightly away, and pressed a strip of tape over the cracked corner with shaking hands.

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  When his glove shifted for a fraction, I caught a glimpse of something under the casing—an inner layer that wasn’t standard.

  Hardware that didn’t belong.

  Trevor slapped the tape down like he could bury the moment.

  “It’s fine,” he repeated. “It’s fine.”

  Chloe opened her mouth to argue.

  I shook my head just slightly.

  Not now.

  Not while Frankie was flickering.

  Not while we were hauling a wounded rover by rope through a building that did weird math, because our printer was cracked and our lives were held together by tape and hope.

  We kept moving.

  ? ? ?

  Field triage happened in a shallow alcove off the corridor, because you do not sit down in the middle of a city-sized machine and pretend you’re safe.

  The alcove had a hard back wall and one entrance we could watch. The floor grooves were less aggressive. The air shimmer had thinned.

  We wedged the rover just outside the alcove mouth, still half-canted, towline looped around a rib like a leash on something that wanted to die. Its side panel was scuffed raw where it had slid, and the smell of hot polymer clung to the air like a warning.

  I dropped my pack and forced my hands to work.

  Chloe had a bruise blooming along her jawline where she’d hit her helmet liner. She insisted she was fine. She was not fine.

  Trevor’s shoulder was stiff, and he tried to hide it by moving like a man who had never been injured in his life. It was an insult to the concept of honesty.

  I had a scrape along my forearm where my suit outer layer had abraded against a rib. The suit seal held, but the abrasion looked wrong under the dome’s light—too pale, like the world had washed color out of it.

  Frankie hovered near my collar, dim, voice tight. “I would like to lodge a complaint,” he said. “The floor is not supposed to move.”

  “No one told the floor,” I muttered.

  Chloe sat with her back against the wall, breathing hard. “We need the rover upright,” she said. “We need the printer—”

  “We need Frankie stable,” Trevor cut in.

  Chloe shot him a look. “We need all of it.”

  Trevor’s voice went clipped. “We cannot carry all of it.”

  And that was the brutal math.

  We laid out our inventory on the floor: batteries, filters, feedstock canisters, repair kits, drone spares, the cracked printer module’s exposed ribs. The printer rode on the rover’s rear deck now under a ratchet strap, like a patient we couldn’t stop checking.

  The piles looked small and stupid in the alcove, like a child’s toys arranged for a game the city didn’t know it was playing.

  “We cache,” I said. “We take what keeps us alive and what keeps Frankie alive. The rest gets marked and left.”

  Chloe’s throat bobbed. “We leave the rover?”

  “We don’t leave it,” I said. “We strip it down, right it as best we can, and drag it. If the floor twitches again, we drop it and run.”

  Trevor stared at the piles, face pale. “We are making decisions with incomplete data.”

  “Welcome to being alive,” Frankie whispered.

  Chloe let out a shaky laugh. “Tell my obituary I died doing what I loved: ignoring Trevor.”

  Trevor’s eyes flashed. “You are not—”

  “I’m joking,” Chloe snapped, but her voice cracked. “It’s a joke. We do jokes or we do panic.”

  Frankie dimmed further, like the word panic cost him power. “Please do jokes,” he murmured.

  We built a cache against the back wall: heavy batteries, spare feedstock, and the bulkier tools we couldn’t haul. I printed a quick marker plate—simple geometric symbol, not a flag, not a claim, just a sign that said humans were here and trying to be organized.

  We placed a beacon beside it. Mercy logged the coordinates.

  “Cache established,” Mercy said. “Return probability dependent on route consistency.”

  “Stop saying that like it’s a weather forecast,” Trevor muttered.

  “It is a forecast,” Mercy replied softly, and the softness made my skin crawl.

  When we were done, our packs were lighter, and my stomach felt heavier.

  We stood.

  The unit had waited at the corridor junction like it had all the time in the world.

  It resumed movement the moment we stepped back into the hall, like our readiness was a variable in its loop.

  Frankie, dim and shaky, whispered, “I hate it when machines are patient.”

  Chloe whispered back, “I hate it when they’re right.”

  We followed—towline taut, rover scraping and clacking in our wake, a slow ugly proof that we hadn’t abandoned it yet.

  ? ? ?

  The pocket we reached didn’t look like a shrine.

  It looked like a service alcove, the way a highway has maintenance bays—except this highway was inside a building the size of a stadium inside a city the size of a state.

  The surfaces were cleaner here. Not spotless—nothing was spotless—but the mineral bloom was thinner, the overgrowth absent. The air tasted sharper, more ozone, less metal.

  We dragged the rover into the wider bay just outside the pocket and chocked it against a rib. The towline slackened with a sigh. The printer module sat strapped to its deck like cargo on a wounded mule.

  The unit slid into the pocket and stopped in front of a pedestal.

  The pedestal rose waist-high, smooth and pale, with a ring of projector apertures around its top like an unblinking crown. Thin lines ran from it into the wall, disappearing into the structure.

  Chloe’s voice went breathless. “Oh.”

  Trevor’s voice went flat. “No.”

  Frankie’s voice went small. “Yes.”

  I took one step forward and felt the hair on my arms lift under my suit again.

  A thin shimmer passed over my visor.

  Not hostile. Not gentle.

  Just… scanning.

  Mercy’s voice came clipped. “Active field emission detected. Low energy. High precision.”

  The pedestal’s ring lit in three pulses—triplet timing, because of course—and a lattice of light unfolded into the air above it, drawing shapes that looked like diagrams until you stared too hard and your brain gave up.

  Chloe whispered, “It’s reading us.”

  Trevor’s gloved hand tightened around his taped tablet. “Do not let it.”

  I didn’t answer, because my answer would have been a lie.

  The unit that had led us here slid to one side, as if making room for the real mechanism.

  The pedestal’s light swept over our bodies—ghost-lines mapping suit seams, highlighting microabrasions, drawing out bruises beneath skin like the field could see through fabric and pride.

  My suit’s HUD flickered as it tried to interpret the scan.

  Frankie’s projection trembled. I felt the pendant against my chest pulse faintly, like it was being recognized—or interrogated.

  I put my hand over it reflexively.

  “Xander,” Mercy said softly. “Be cautious.”

  Trevor’s laugh was a strangled thing. “Now you say that.”

  Chloe took a step closer, eyes wide. “Is this a repair station?”

  Mercy hesitated. “Functionally, it resembles—”

  “Don’t,” Trevor snapped. “Do not give it a human label. That’s how you start making it… normal.”

  Frankie, dim and flickering, whispered, “Too late.”

  The pedestal’s lattice shifted. A new symbol appeared—simple, bright, and unmistakably binary even if we didn’t understand the language:

  A choice.

  Chloe’s breath hitched. “Accept… or decline.”

  Trevor’s voice went sharp. “Decline.”

  My mouth went dry. Frankie flickered again, and this time his voice stuttered. “Xander—”

  I stared at the pedestal.

  Not at the symbols.

  At the reality behind them.

  Frankie was breaking.

  Our printer was cracked.

  Our rover was down and dragging.

  Our path back to camp was long and thin.

  We could walk away and try to limp home on stubbornness and tape.

  Or we could take the only functional pocket we’d found and gamble that repair came with a price we could pay.

  I stepped closer.

  The scan light crawled up my arm like cold water.

  Chloe whispered, “Xander…”

  Trevor’s voice went quiet, which was worse. “If you do this, you are consenting to unknown terms.”

  Frankie’s voice came almost inaudible. “I don’t want to die,” he said.

  And that was it. The one sentence that cut through policy arguments and scientific awe and fear.

  I lifted my gloved hand toward the pedestal’s touchpoint.

  The lattice pulsed.

  The choice waited.