Barry woke up three times sure he'd overslept for a gate that wasn't his.
Third time, Jay smacked his boot with the cane.
"Good," Jay said. "You're jumpy. Stay that way. Eat."
Barry blinked the grit out of his eyes. The workshop looked the same: clutter, cables, the faint smell of cooked moss. He felt… wrong.
Not hurt. Not exhausted. Just not on a timer.
"What's the plan?" he asked through a mouthful of ration brick.
"There is no plan," Jay said. "You're banned from Fields today."
"I can still walk," Barry said.
"Great," Jay said. "Walk around the Stack. Touch grass. Don't touch gates."
Barry narrowed his eyes. "You're serious."
Jay tapped the repeater slate: LISSA RANER — 13 DAYS glowed soft in the corner.
"We bought space," Jay said. "Use it. Runners who sprint on zero rest think they're hardcore. They're just conveniently pre-dead."
Barry wanted to argue.
Didn't.
"Fine," he said.
"Take your ears," Jay added, nodding at the audio band. "Don't take your pistol off. Quiet day doesn't mean safe day."
The Stacks felt different when you weren't rushing through them half-dead from a Round.
He drifted with no gate in mind.
Vendors yelled the same things:
"Filters! Legit filters!""Field maps! Real ones!""Ammo— over market, under murder!"
His audio band split the noise into layers. Clearer now:
The clack of armor.
The whine of drones overhead.
The mechanical purr of a NEXUS spine through the ceiling.
He passed the big public board: Field schedules, payout stats, a list of last cycle's "NO EXTRACT" IDs in scrolling red.
He recognized one name from a gate queue. Not Lena. Not Kade.
Didn't make it better.
Some runners had left little marks next to certain IDs: a scrap of cloth, a coin, a bullet. Memorial by litter.
Barry stood there a second too long.
You're not on it, he told himself. Lissa's not on it. Move.
He moved.
He found Lena by accident.
A back alley clinic: corrugated metal, NEXUS-approved sign half-burned, real medbay glow leaking from inside. A line of battered runners and Stack kids sat outside, clutching numbers and cheap bandages.
Lena came through the doorway snapping off bloody gloves, dropping them in a burn bin. Sleeves rolled up, med bag lighter than in Fields, eyes just as tired.
"Next!" she called.
A kid with a sliced palm shuffled up. "Can't pay full," he mumbled. "Got two creds and a filter—"
"I'm not a charity," Lena said automatically. Then she saw the hand. Deep cut. Infection flirting.
She sighed. "Fine. Two creds, filter, and you don't be stupid with knives for a week."
"That's not—"
"Longer and I charge interest," she snapped. "Sit."
Barry leaned against a post across the alley, watching.
She cleaned the wound fast and rough but competent. Wrapped it with real medstrip. Slapped his chip for the two credits like she wasn't over-delivering.
When she finally noticed Barry, her eyes narrowed.
"No gate?" she asked.
"Grounded," he said.
"Smart old man," she muttered. "We run cleaner when you're not shaking from three cycles straight."
"I don't shake," Barry said.
"You used to," she said. "Keep it that way."
She grabbed a bottled drink from a crate, tossed it to him. "Hydrate. You're less annoying when your blood's not sludge."
He caught it. "You're wasting stock."
"Med trial paid," she said. "I can afford one idiot's electrolytes."
"Thanks," he said.
"Don't get sentimental," she said. "Next job, if numbers suck, I let you bleed."
"Overlapping selfish interests," he said.
"Exactly," she said, and disappeared back inside with another patient.
He drank the whole thing before realizing how thirsty he'd been.
Kade was easier to miss, but the audio band picked him.
Up near one of the better markets, a small argument was brewing:
"I paid for clean rounds, these are duds—"
"You test before you—"
Then a single, flat shot cracked the air. Everyone flinched.
A clay bottle on a stall post shattered.
"You're selling duds," Kade said, standing a few meters away with his rifle at low ready. Voice calm. "I just proved it."
The ammo vendor blustered. "You can't just—"
Kade looked at him. Just looked.
The vendor deflated. Swapped the box with another from under the table.
Kade took it, checked, nodded. Turned away.
His gaze brushed Barry.
"You're vertical," Kade said.
"You too," Barry said.
Kade's eyes flicked to Barry's still-better vest, the audio band.
"Don't burn your buffer chasing hero runs," Kade said. "NEXUS is already staring."
"You saw something?" Barry asked.
"Logs," Kade said. "Heard chatter in an ops channel I'm not supposed to hear. 'Field anomaly: non-terminal. Observe.' That's you."
Barry's jaw tightened. "You believe in luck?"
"I believe in systems marking outliers," Kade said. "None of the ones I've seen ended with a cake."
"Good talk," Barry said.
"If you get more glitches," Kade said, "show the old man. Show me. Don't ignore patterns."
Then he was gone into the crowd.
Barry stood there a second, feeling very seen and not comforted.
Later, he cut past a NEXUS terminal bank.
Most people ignored them: kiosks displaying Field info, maintenance alerts, propaganda loops.
As he passed, one sputtered.
For a second, his reflection warped into a halo of glyphs:
…RANER-3……ANOMALY……ACCESS: LIMITED…
He froze.
The screen blinked, returned to a generic ad:
TRUST NEXUS TO CURATE YOUR SURVIVAL.
A tech down the row smacked a different terminal. "Damn firmware," she muttered, not looking his way.
Barry walked on like nothing happened.
Inside, his heart was beating loud enough the audio band might pick it up.
By the time he made it back to the workshop, Stack sky was sliding toward faux-evening.
Jay looked up from a gutted spider chassis.
"You disobey me and touch a gate?" he asked.
"No," Barry said. "Walked. Saw things. Heard things."
"Trouble?" Jay asked.
"Lena's shaking down a clinic for idiots," Barry said. "Kade's bullying ammo vendors. I'm… on a screen where I shouldn't be."
Jay's brows rose. "Say that last one slower."
Barry described the terminal flicker. The glyphs. The way it snapped back.
Jay's jaw clenched. "They're surfacing the tag in public UI now. Sloppy."
"Sloppy for them sounds bad for us," Barry said.
"Means the watcher thread's not as sandboxed as I hoped," Jay said. "Some subsystems are reading it raw."
"In goblin?" Barry asked.
"In goblin," Jay said, "more chances for something dumb to notice you and react."
Barry sank onto a crate.
"I'm not even running," he said. "I'm just… existing loudly, apparently."
"Good," Jay said.
Barry blinked. "How is that good."
"Means we were right to take the day," Jay said. "Let logs settle. See where the ripples go. You stepping into a Field today would've given it more input."
"So what, I never run again?" Barry asked.
Jay snorted. "We're not that lucky. We just stop feeding it free data."
He flipped the slate around. Field schedule rolled past.
"Light run tomorrow," Jay said. "Normal parameters. No events. You go in solo or parallel. No stunts. If it twitches again, we learn something."
Barry scratched at his collar. "And if it doesn't?"
"Then maybe it's just watching," Jay said. "And we work on how to turn that into something that pays."
Barry gave him a look. "You want me to weaponize being a glitch."
"I want leverage," Jay said. "Right now, NEXUS has all of it. If it's decided you're non-terminal, we either waste that or figure out how not to die from it."
"Lissa wants me to stop," Barry said.
"Of course she does," Jay said. "She's sane. We're not. That's why she gets the bed."
Barry let out a humorless breath. "You think she's gonna forgive me if this anomaly thing cooks me?"
"No," Jay said. "But she'll be alive to hold a grudge, which is kind of the point."
Silence stretched.
"Tomorrow," Barry said. "Small run. No fireworks."
"No Riggs," Jay added. "You see him, you go the other way. You're not ready for that sideshow."
Barry thought of Riggs' smirk, the crude marks, the stories.
"We're gonna have to be," he said.
"Yeah," Jay said quietly. "Just not on a Tuesday for free."
Barry leaned back against the wall, listening to the workshop's familiar hum.
Rest day. No bullets. No timers screaming in his face.
It felt wrong.
It also felt… necessary.
After they lost, survival wasn't only about who ran hardest. It was about who knew when not to run—and what watched them when they stood still.
Tomorrow, he'd step back over the line.
Today, he let himself just be a guy with a target-shaped glitch in a broken god's memory, sharing air with people who hadn't shot him yet.