The Compliance Officer didn't even look at him when he took the money.
That was the part that got Rael every time. Not the taking. The not looking. Like he wasn't worth the effort of eye contact.
"Sector Tax."
Rael counted out forty credits. Dropped them in the man's palm.
The officer pocketed it and moved to the next stall. Didn't break stride. Didn't say thanks. Didn't say anything.
Forty credits was three days of parts.
The kid two stalls down caught Rael's eye. Looked away fast.
Smart.
His "stall" was a gap between two collapsed columns in Sub-Level 3. Folding table, one crate, one lamp that flickered when the stolen power grid dipped. He'd been patching illegal augs out of here for two years. Regulars knew where to find him. New clients came through referrals, which meant someone had already vouched for them.
Nobody talked. That was the deal.
Last job of the day was a guy named Haruto. Cracked pressure seal on his pain suppressor — Grade-F standard issue, same cheap model Dominion handed every human during integration and never bothered to upgrade. Seals cracked every eight to fourteen months like clockwork. Rael had started to think that was the point.
Haruto sat on the crate. Rael worked.
"Yo how long's this gonna take?"
"Four minutes."
"You sure? Last guy told me twenty and it took like an hour."
"I'm not the last guy."
Haruto watched him work for a second. "You do this a lot?"
"Forty-seven of these. So yeah."
"Damn. Okay."
He shut up after that. Rael sealed the fracture, re-pressurized the implant, ran a check with a diagnostic wand that definitely wasn't supposed to exist down here.
Most of his tools weren't supposed to exist down here.
"Done. Don't stress it for six hours."
Haruto rolled his shoulder. Blinked. Rolled it again. "Oh shit, that actually... yeah okay that's different."
"Twenty credits."
"Bro the guy on Sub-Level 1 charges fifteen."
"Cool. Go to him."
"I'm just saying—"
"Wrong adhesive. Your seal cracks again in three months, not eight. You'll pay me twenty then anyway." Rael looked up at him for the first time. "Save yourself a trip."
Haruto made a face. Paid.
The envelope was on his floor when he got back. Slid under the door. Official Dominion grey.
He stood in the doorway and looked at it for a second.
His room was 3×4 meters. Sleep mat, equipment chest, one shelf. On the shelf: water canister, busted soldering kit, and a photo that water damage had turned mostly white. You couldn't really see anything in it anymore except a hand. Woman's hand, reaching toward the camera.
He'd kept it anyway.
He picked up the envelope. Opened it.
DRAFT NOTICE — TECHNO-KNIGHT CORPSConscript Classification: GRADE-F / HUMANReporting Date: 07.03.2051Failure to Report: Reclassification to UNREGISTERED / SECTOR-ZERO SWEEP STATUS
He read it twice. Folded it. Put it in his pocket.
Then he sat down on the floor, back against the wall, and stared at the ceiling crack he'd been watching grow for the past year.
First time in a while he didn't know what to do next.
The math was simple. The answer wasn't.
Don't go: Sweep Status. Compliance Officers with full detain-and-disappear authority. Three people got Sweep-tagged in his sector last year. Two never came back. The third showed up six months later working Collaborator security, eyes a little too empty, nodding along to things he used to hate.
Go: 67% fatality rate. Stamped right there on the official paperwork, flat as a grocery list. Within acceptable parameters.
33% made it, said a small part of his brain.
He shut that down fast. He'd watched guys from Sector-Zero go into the Draft and not come back. Some died. Others climbed just high enough to stop looking down. Got Mid-Tier housing and a Grade-D aug and decided that was enough.
He wasn't going to be that.
He also wasn't going to die in a training compound so Dominion could tick a box.
So. Third option. Find one.
He pulled the notice back out and read it slower. Not the big text. The fine print. The dates.
Reporting Date: 07.03.2051.
Three days.
Three days was workable.
He almost missed the data chip.
Hadn't touched it in months. Kept it behind a loose panel in the chest, wrapped in signal-blocking cloth. His father left it hidden in the ruins of the Sub-Level 6 clinic before the Compliance Officers came. Rael found it when he was fourteen, going back for a micro-tool.
Found the tool. Found the panel.
The chip had his mother's voice on it. He didn't listen often.
He listened now.
Static. Then her voice, younger than he could place.
"...anomaly in the sample is consistent across all three subjects. It's not rejection. It's..."
Cut.
"...they must not know about the child. If they find the pattern in an active subject..."
Cut again. Same dead ends. He'd stopped expecting new things from this recording a long time ago.
But this time he left it running past where he usually stopped.
And in what he'd always written off as background static — footsteps. Moving away. A door.
Then his mother's voice, the part he knew:
"If you're hearing this... you've already survived long enough."
Pause.
"Good."
Static.
Rael sat in the dark for a while.
Then he put it away, lay down, and closed his eyes.
Three days. No plan yet.
He started building one.
Sub-Level 3 hummed its usual sounds. Machinery. Someone shouting two rooms over. Stolen power taps running hot.
In Dominion's central system, a batch log updated without ceremony:
JAKARTA-NODE · BATCH 7 · SUBJECT: VOSS, RAEL. AGE: 18. GRADE: F.
FLAGGED FOR SECONDARY REVIEW: NO.
For now.