"You look like someone ran over your dog."
Zev stepped through the doorway of the room he shared with Luc Ferren and dropped his bag on the floor. The room was small enough that the bag nearly hit the opposite wall. One bed on each side, one shared workbench in the middle covered in half-dismantled circuit boards, two stools that had both lost a screw somewhere and wobbled if you sat wrong.
Luc was on his stool, goggles pushed up onto his forehead, holding a soldering iron over something Zev couldn't identify. He didn't look up.
"Seriously though. You good?"
"Fine."
"You walked in three minutes later than usual. And you're doing that thing with your jaw."
"What thing."
"The clenching thing. You do it when something's wrong."
Zev sat on the edge of his bed. The frame creaked in the specific way it always did, two short sounds and one long one. He stared at the floor for a moment. Then at his hands. His fingertips still had that faint static feeling, like the tail end of something that had passed through and left traces.
"I found something," he said.
Luc set the soldering iron down on its stand. That was the tell. Luc only put the iron down mid-session when something actually had his attention.
"Found something like a usable circuit board, or found something like a problem."
"Second one."
"How bad."
Zev looked up. He didn't know how to explain what was sitting in the corner of his vision right now. The Ghost Protocol screen had dimmed itself down to a faint outline, still there but not demanding attention. Like it had learned in the last hour that he wasn't going anywhere and had decided to be patient about it.
"I don't know yet," he said. Which was true.
Luc looked at him for a second. He had the kind of face that was hard to read until you'd known him long enough, and Zev had known him since they were both eleven years old, scrapping over the same pile of discarded hardware at the salvage market. After eight years of that, Zev could tell that Luc was deciding whether to push or let it sit.
He let it sit. He picked the soldering iron back up.
"Food's in the box," he said. "Teller's stall was closing early so I grabbed extra."
Zev leaned over and opened the metal storage box at the foot of his bed. Two wrapped parcels of flatbread and something that was technically protein but had been processed so many times it no longer resembled whatever it had originally been. He ate without tasting it.
The whole time, the Ghost Protocol screen floated at the edge of his sight.
[ Daily Quest active : Avoid ARGUS cameras for 2 hours undetected ]
[ Time remaining : 1hr 09min ]
He'd burned through half the timer just from the walk back, the conversation with the Foreman, and sitting here eating. Which meant if he was going to attempt this at all, he had to move now.
The problem was he had no idea how to actually do it.
The Pit had cameras on every major corner. He knew their positions better than most people because fixing them was his job. He knew which ones had wider sweep arcs and which ones had blind spots from years of bad maintenance. He knew that the camera at the intersection of Seld and Corum streets only rotated two-thirds of the way before the motor stuck. He knew the one above the north entrance to the market had a smashed thermal sensor and was running on optical only.
He knew all of this. He'd just never thought about using it.
"I'm going out for a bit," he said.
Luc glanced up. "It's almost curfew."
"I know. I've still got time."
"Zev."
"I've got time, Luc."
Another look. Then Luc went back to his circuit board.
"Don't be late. If I have to cover for you with Maret downstairs again I'm charging you for it."
Zev grabbed his jacket and went back out into The Pit.
****
He stood at the mouth of the alley across from his building and looked at the intersection ahead.
Three cameras visible from here. One on the corner of Seld, one mounted above the bakery awning that had been closed for two years, one on a pole halfway down Corum. The Seld camera was the one with the stuck motor. From where Zev was standing, he could see exactly where its sweep ended. There was a stretch of maybe four meters along the left side of the street that it never reached.
He thought about the Skills tab. Signal Trace, Scan Area. Locked until Level 2.
So no help there yet.
He was doing this the manual way.
Zev moved out of the alley, staying close to the wall, and walked quickly toward the left side of the street. He hit the four-meter gap and stopped there, back to the wall, watching the Seld camera finish its incomplete rotation and start back. Good. That part worked.
The bakery camera was the problem. Its arc was wider and it didn't have a motor issue. From the left side of the street he was still in its line of sight if he moved forward.
He stood there for a moment just thinking. The screen blinked at the corner of his eye.
[ Daily Quest active : Avoid ARGUS cameras for 2 hours undetected ]
[ Time remaining : 28min ]
Twenty-eight minutes. He'd burned through most of the timer just getting back to the workshop, dealing with the Foreman, eating, and sitting around trying to figure out what to do. Now he was standing in an alley wasting more of it.
'This is going incredibly badly,' he thought.
He looked at the bakery. The awning was still up even though the place had been closed for years, the fabric sagging and dark with grime. If he could get under it, the awning would block the camera's line of sight from above. The camera was mounted at an angle, pointing slightly downward to cover street level. Anything directly underneath the awning and pressed against the wall would be outside its view.
The issue was getting from here to the awning without walking through the camera's arc.
Zev looked at the street. It was quiet at this hour, just a few people moving in the distance heading back toward the residential blocks before curfew hit. A delivery cart was parked on the right side, unmanned, piled with plastic crates.
He stared at the cart for a second.
Then he crossed the street at a normal walking pace, like he had a destination and a reason to be outside, and positioned himself on the far side of the delivery cart so it sat between him and the bakery camera. He waited for the Seld camera to finish its rightward sweep. Then he moved along the right side of the street, using the cart as cover for as long as it lasted, and when it ran out he pushed into a jog for the last few meters and ducked under the bakery awning, pressing his back flat against the wall.
He stood there breathing.
Nothing happened. No alert sound. No red light sweeping toward him. The Corum street camera was still doing its slow rotation fifty meters away, pointed in the other direction.
"Okay," he breathed. "Okay that actually worked."
He looked at the screen.
[ Daily Quest active : Avoid ARGUS cameras for 2 hours undetected ]
[ Time remaining : 21min ]
[ Detection events : 0 ]
He hadn't noticed that last line before. Detection events. It was tracking how many times ARGUS had registered him.
Zero. So far.
Something shifted in his chest. A small thing. The first hint since waking up on that alley floor that maybe this wasn't entirely a disaster.
He spent the next thirty minutes working his way slowly through the back streets of The Pit, using every camera weakness he'd spent four years learning without ever meaning to learn it. The stuck motors, the blind spots, the cameras that had been spray-painted over and nobody had cleaned yet. He moved slowly, carefully, pressed himself into doorways when he needed to wait, crossed open stretches fast when the timing was right.
He made mistakes. At one point he stepped too far out from a recessed doorway and caught himself in the edge of a camera arc. He yanked himself back and stood very still, heart going faster than he'd like to admit, waiting to see if anything happened.
Nothing did. He must have only clipped the edge.
[ Detection events : 0 ]
Still zero.
When the timer hit zero he was standing in the narrow passage behind the water processing plant on the east side of The Pit, leaning against the wall with his arms folded, watching a cat pick its way across a pile of rusted pipes.
[ Daily Quest complete ]
[ +30 EXP ]
[ Current EXP : 30 / 200 ]
[ First completion bonus : Skill unlocked ]
[ Signal Trace Lv.1 — Scan Area ]
[ Passive. ARGUS camera positions and sweep arcs marked within 80m radius. ]
[ Tip : Skills unlock faster when quests are completed for the first time. ]
Zev straightened up off the wall.
"What."
He looked around him. And then he saw it. Faint outlines, barely visible, overlaid on his vision. Small indicators, each one sitting exactly where a camera was mounted. He could see through walls, the markers showed cameras in adjacent streets that he couldn't physically see from here. Each one had a small arc indicator showing the camera's current sweep direction.
His mouth opened slightly.
He'd spent four years memorizing camera positions one broken motor at a time. And the system had just handed him all of them, all at once, without him having to do anything.
He stood there for a moment just processing that.
Then another notification appeared.
[ EXP milestone reached ]
[ New Daily Quest unlocked : Stay off ARGUS facial recognition for 4 hours ]
[ Reward : 50 EXP ]
Zev read that one twice.
"Facial recognition," he said out loud, to no one. "That's different from the cameras."
He hadn't thought about that. Camera avoidance was one thing. Facial recognition was ARGUS's deeper layer, the part that ran on every camera feed and matched faces to registered identities in real time. Avoiding the cameras' physical line of sight didn't mean avoiding the recognition system. ARGUS could still flag a face from a partial view, from a reflection, from a camera two streets over if the angle was right.
This new quest was a completely different problem.
He started walking back toward his building, watching the camera indicators floating in his vision as he moved. The one at the Seld intersection. The bakery camera. The pole camera on Corum. He could see all of them now, their arcs sweeping slow and steady, indifferent.
He had thirty EXP out of two hundred. He had one new skill that already felt like it had changed something. And he had a new quest that was going to require him to figure out how facial recognition actually worked before he could even start.
Curfew hit two minutes after he got back inside. He could hear the automated announcement playing from the speaker grilles embedded in the building walls outside, the flat neutral voice that meant the same thing every night.
All Hollow residents are reminded that movement outside designated zones is prohibited from 22:00 to 05:00. ARGUS monitoring continues through all hours. Compliance maintains your social score.
Luc was already asleep, or doing a good impression of it. Zev sat on the edge of his bed in the dark and pulled up the Ghost Protocol screen.
He looked at the skill tree for a long time, at all the locked entries and the question marks underneath them.
Then he closed it and lay back and stared at the ceiling, thinking about facial recognition systems and how a person goes about disappearing from one.
****
Three floors above The Pit, in a monitoring station embedded in the wall of the Mesh district, a junior ARGUS analyst named Roth sat in front of a bank of screens and frowned.
The anomaly flag had already been cleared by the automated system. A brief gap in tracking data for one resident, social score 41, technician class, nothing in his file worth a second look. The system had written it off as sensor error.
Roth almost did the same.
But sensor errors didn't move like that. They didn't follow camera blind spots with that kind of consistency. Sensor errors were random. Whatever had happened in Sector 3 tonight had not been random.
He pulled up the file.
Drault, Zev. Age 19. Technician, camera maintenance. Social score 41.
Roth looked at it for a long moment. Then he flagged it, not for escalation, just a personal marker so he'd remember to check again tomorrow.
Probably nothing.
He turned back to his other screens.