The flies were a morning problem and nothing more. One kept ramming the window until the sound got under my skin. I killed it with the heel of my hand, wiped the smear on my pants, and sat up slow.

  My ribs still felt bruised from the inside, tender in a way that made every deep breath a choice. The room smelled of dust, old sweat, and the solvent rag I’d used on the pistol. Sunlight cut through a crack in the boards and laid a hard stripe across the floorboards, turning the grit into glitter and making the place look cleaner than it was.

  The pistol sat where I’d left it, wrapped in cloth to keep sand out of the slide. Two mags beside it. The Carnage leaned in the corner under a sheet, ugly and heavy even while it slept. I checked the pistol first because my head stayed honest when my hands had a job. Slide. Chamber. Mag. Everything moved smoothly. Too smooth.

  The overlay came up when I blinked too long.

  PROGNOSIS: ACCEPTABLE

  DRIFT: PRESENT

  HYDRATION: LOW

  LEVEL: 1

  It had decided to tell me my level today. It still wouldn’t give me numbers where it mattered.

  I drank warm plastic water and waited for my stomach to punish me. It didn’t. That was the first win of the day, quiet and boring, exactly how I wanted it. I did inventory next, the way I used to triage tickets: what I had, what would fail first, what failure would kill me fastest.

  Ammo got split into two stashes. One mag stayed on me. One mag went under a pile of garbage near the bed, wrapped in cloth and sealed inside an old jar so damp wouldn’t chew it. The shotgun shells went separate, deeper, because a shotgun without shells still drew attention. Food got split the same way. Half visible, half hidden. A place that looked lived-in became a target. A place that looked dead became background.

  That forced the next decision. If I wanted the house to stay dead-looking, I needed enough supplies to stop making daily runs and leaving tracks. Sunset Motel meant eyes. Eyes meant memory. Something I’d rather avoid. I went anyway.

  I left the Carnage behind and carried the pistol under my shirt. I kept off the road and moved through the scrub where the ground tried to trip me with every loose stone. Heat climbed fast and pushed down hard, turning each inhale into warm grit. My ribs complained, but they held. The Badlands didn’t care about my plans. It only cared about my mistakes.

  Sunset rose out of glare and shimmer, active in the way only a trade post could be active. Generators buzzed somewhere behind the building. Fry oil and cheap spice hung near the kitchen window. People moved with purpose, and purpose out here always meant trade, work, or trouble. I kept my pace steady and my eyes calm.

  I went to the kitchen first.

  The woman behind the counter watched my hands before she watched my face. Her gaze snapped to the credchip and stayed there.

  “Bulk,” I said.

  She didn’t ask why. She slid out sealed ration packs, dense bars and tins with stamped dates, then water in intact jugs that looked cleaner than anything I owned. I asked for coffee filters. Someone behind me made a short sound through their nose. I didn’t turn. The woman pushed the filters over anyway. Cheap, thin, still useful. I was lucky, for once. Then I asked for something else.

  “A room,” I said. “Fifteen minutes. Door locks.”

  Her expression shifted, a fraction. Not shock. Pricing.

  “Rates are by the hour.”

  “Fifteen minutes,” I repeated, and I held the credchip where she could see it without it turning into a plea.

  She named a number that assumed desperation. The Garagist channel didn’t make me charming; it made me still. I stared at her, steady, until the number dropped on its own. She handed me a keycard and pointed toward the far side.

  “Unoccupied. Don’t break anything.”

  The room smelled stale and disinfectant-thin, the kind of clean that never reached the corners. The shower spat warm water that tasted of metal when it hit my lips. I didn’t care. Warm water was warm water. Had to be fast.

  When I stripped, I finally saw what I’d been too busy to notice.

  My optics sat flush, cheap seams at the edges where the install wasn’t clean enough to disappear. When I focused on the cracked mirror and forced my eyes to track fine detail, the zoom kicked in with a slight delay, and a faint internal whine followed it. Entry-grade Kiroshi. Basic. A corporate name attached to a budget build.

  My left hand wasn’t mine either.

  Not a full arm, just a replaced hand with squared edges under synthetic cover that wanted to be invisible and wasn’t. The panels sat wrong at the knuckles. The fingertips had the tactile finesse of a brick. When I flexed, the “skin” shifted at the seams instead of moving with muscle. Dynalar Kirby trash, first-generation awkwardness sold as “good enough,” the sort of hand a clinic used as a loaner while you waited for something better or paid off a debt.

  Someone had tried to hide it with synthskin. It wasn’t RealSkinn. RealSkinn was the premium cover that passed close scrutiny, designed to make implants disappear unless you knew exactly where to look. What I had was a budget sheath and glue already lifting at the wrist, edges curling under sweat and dust. The seam held a line of grime I couldn’t scrub out with motel soap.

  And there were ports. Small circles at the inside of my wrists, half-hidden under the cheap cover. Interface plugs. The kind of cyberware so common it stopped being a statement and started being infrastructure. That was the part that stuck. Scavs didn’t leave clean hardware on a body by accident. They left low-value, high-hassle, or tagged parts. They left debt. They left problems they didn’t want.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  I didn’t get an answer. I got warm water.

  I scrubbed until my skin stung. I cleaned the grime out of my hair. I cleaned the synthskin seam until the glue started to soften, then stopped before I made it worse. I dressed fast, still damp, and left before fifteen minutes turned into another negotiation. Once a week, I told myself. Fifteen minutes. The rest of the time would be a bucket back at the house, sun-warmed water, and a rag.

  I returned the keycard, bought purification tablets in a blister pack with faded print, bought a jerrycan of fuel from a random stall, and bought more sealed food than a passerby would ever carry. People watched. Nobody stopped me. I didn’t look at them long enough to make it a conversation.

  On the way out, a vendor tried to set a number that assumed I’d flinch. My ribs jumped when I shifted the load. The vendor’s smile sharpened like he’d smelled weakness. His hand slid under the counter, maybe for a weapon, maybe just for theater. I stopped moving and let the silence do the work. The Garagist channel held my posture together, kept my hands from moving too fast, kept my gaze steady. He cut the price down on his own. I carried the weight back into the heat.

  Halfway back, my arms started to shake. My ribs threatened to turn sharp if I breathed too deep. I stopped under the shadow of a dead billboard, set the jerrycan down, flexed my fingers until the cramps eased, and kept going.

  When the house came back into view, it looked smaller. It always did after you hauled life into it. Inside, the air was still. I set the supplies down and started building. Water came first, as always.I took a cracked bucket from under the sink and scrubbed it until the rag came away mostly clean. I cut the top off a bottle, punched holes in the cap with my knife, and nested a coffee filter inside.I washed sand outside in batches, sloshing it in the bucket until the runoff stopped running brown. I crushed charcoal briquettes into rough pieces, then finer grit, because surface area mattered. My fingers turned black and stayed black.

  I built the stack by function. Cloth to catch the worst. Coarse sand. Fine sand. Charcoal. Coffee filter again to keep black dust from following the water back out.It took a few collapses and more filters than I wanted to admit before the stack held. On video it always looks clean. In your hands it’s grit, sweat, and patience.

  I ran the first liter through and watched it crawl down the column, slow and reluctant. Clearer came out, but “clear” didn’t mean safe. I ran it through again. Then I dosed purification tablets by the label and the volume marks I’d scratched into the bucket: one tablet per liter, full wait time. I covered the bucket with cloth to keep dust out and forced myself to sit on my hands until the time passed. While the tablets worked, I moved to power.

  The generator hunched in the other room, dead weight in a corner. Yesterday it had been an object. Today it was a system: fuel, air, spark, load.

  I didn’t have proper tools, so I made the process blunt and measurable. I marked a jar with charcoal for volume, siphoned a small amount of fuel into it, and ran the generator under a light load first, nothing but a charger, long enough to warm it and confirm it would restart. I shut it down, waited for the rattle to settle, then checked the jar drop.Then I ran it again with a heavier load, a cheap hotplate pulled from a cabinet. The engine tone shifted into strain, the vibration got harsher, and the fuel drop jumped. That told me what mattered: comfort would cost fuel and attention. Charging small things would cost less of both.

  I wrote the numbers on the wall above the generator with charcoal. Run window. Consumption per minute. Duty cycle that kept my battery topped without burning through fuel. I added one more note under it: run during wind, run short, kill it hard. Noise carried out here, and I didn’t need to advertise. The house came next. I didn’t build a fortress. No need to spend too much time on it.

  I reinforced the doorframe from inside with boards and screws scavenged from rotten furniture. I rigged a latch that could be set from within; rope looped through a metal bracket, ugly and strong. I covered the windows from the inside with cloth to kill reflection. I swept broken glass into a line under the worst window where a hand would land first if someone climbed in. It would not kill anyone. It would slow them down and make them bleed. Then I made the house dead again.

  I redistributed supplies into layers. Visible scraps only. The bulk went under some stained sheets, behind loose panels, buried in tins under trash, split in two locations so one failure wouldn’t erase everything. Fuel got capped and hidden. Water jugs went into the darkest corner under a rag that smelled worse than the house.

  If I left for a week, I wanted this place to still be here.

  When the work was done, my shirt was stiff with dried sweat and charcoal dust. My ribs felt swollen. My hands had small cuts from cheap wood and rust. I sat with my back against the wall and started reps, slow and controlled, because my ribs didn’t get to be brave.Push-ups with shallow depth. Squats with slow breathing. Holds that made my legs tremble in place. The Drift pushed at the edges of movement, an urge to speed up, to chase something I hadn’t chosen. I kept it on a leash and stopped before the leash snapped.

  The overlay returned.

  HYDRATION: IMPROVING

  STRESS: MODERATE

  DRIFT: PRESENT (LOW)

  LEVEL: 1

  I ate a ration bar without tasting it. I drank treated water and waited for my stomach to revolt. It didn’t. Then I counted money. The credchip readout blinked back at me, smaller than it had any right to be after one supply run and fifteen minutes of running water. It wasn’t empty, but it was close enough that the difference stopped mattering.Three months low profile meant I needed a buffer. I had built one.

  I took a scrap of cardboard out of the trash and drew a rough map with charcoal. Roads. Broken landmarks. Distances measured in sweat. I marked the house as a square and the target as a hard point I hadn’t allowed myself to name. I stared at the line between them until my ribs reminded me I was not ready to make the walk for ambition.Not today. I folded the cardboard, wrapped it in cloth, and hid it with the second ammo cache. Plans didn’t belong on the surface.

  Then I made the routine explicit. I wrote “1/90” on the wall beside the fuel math and underlined it twice. Weekly shower at Sunset. Daily water treatment. Generator in short windows. Reps until tremor, stop before failure.I checked the packed med stash locations again, then sat near the bed with the pistol in my lap, waiting for the system to do whatever it did when it decided to get involved.

  SYSTEM DIAGNOSTIC: COMPLETE

  LEVEL: 1

  ATTRIBUTE CALIBRATION:

  BODY: 1

  REFLEXES: 4

  TECHNICAL: 4

  INTELLIGENCE: [LOCKED]

  COOL: [LOCKED]

  CLASS SEED: IMPERSONATOR

  PROGRESSION CHANNELS:

  SHINOBI: 04 (seed)

  ENGINEER: 01

  SOLO: 01

  NETRUNNER: [LOCKED]

  HEADHUNTER: [LOCKED]

  PERKS (ACTIVE):

  SHINOBI — QUIET STEP

  SHINOBI — GRIP DISCIPLINE

  ENGINEER — JURY-RIG

  SOLO — PAIN BUFFER

  ENGRAM CACHE:

  [01] EMPTY

  [02] GARAGIST (IMPORTED)

  [03] EMPTY

  DRIFT: PRESENT (LOW)

  STATE: NOMINAL

  LEVEL TRACKING: UNLOCKED

  CARE PACKAGE: GRANTED

  ITEM: NANITE INJECTOR (LOW GRADE)

  “Nominal,” it said, after my body had already started to stitch itself back together the slow way. I searched the house on instinct, until my fingers found a sealed med sleeve tucked behind a loose panel I’d missed. Small. Clean. Label faded almost to blank. I held it for a second, then put it back where it lived. Emergency tools didn’t get used because something offered them.

  Night came without ceremony. Heat bled off the walls. The house creaked and settled. I ate, drank, checked the latch, and lay down with the pistol close. I kept my eyes on the ceiling beams until sleep finally took me, because tomorrow wasn’t about leaving.

  Tomorrow was day two.