Marcus stopped outside Bistro Y and smoothed his jacket. Ran a hand through his hair, checked his reflection in the darkened window glass, tugged his collar into place.
“You’re primping,” Tess said.
“I’m being presentable.”
“For Big Yuri Kellmar.”
“For a business meeting.” He held the door open. “After you.”
The restaurant was quiet at this time of morning, hours before the lunch rush. The kitchen was already working, something sizzling in the back, but the dining room was empty except for a server wiping down tables. He looked up, recognized Marcus and Tess, then tilted his head toward the back without a word.
Marcus navigated through the tables as if he’d memorized the layout. Past the bar, through a short hallway, into a private room Tess hadn’t seen on her last visit. He didn’t pause at any of the turns.
Yuri Kellmar was seated at a corner table with a coffee carafe and three cups already set out. Yuri was a big man, broad across the shoulders, with weathered hands and a gold ring on his right hand that showed years of wear. His suit was dark and well-fitted. The scars on his knuckles were old.
He didn’t stand when they entered. Just set down his cup and looked at them.
“Rivera.” His gaze moved from Marcus to Tess. “Little-Rivera. Heard you’ve been busy.”
“She has,” Marcus said, and took the seat across from Yuri without waiting to be invited. His posture shifted the moment he sat down, looser, more settled. The posture of someone who’d done this before.
Tess took the other chair. Yuri poured her coffee from the carafe without asking. The ceramic was hand-painted, probably worth more than Tak’s entire noodle house. The coffee smelled real.
“You want Yuki,” Yuri said.
Marcus picked up his cup. “Well informed, as always. We need a ranger.”
“She’s my best shot.” Yuri’s face didn’t change. “Literally. You understand what you’re asking.”
“I’m asking if she’s available.”
Silence for a moment. Yuri drank his coffee. Marcus drank his. Tess recognized the rhythm: two people who’d done this enough times that the pauses were part of the conversation.
“Yuki has wanted to delve for while now,” Yuri said. “I’ve been keeping her close because she’s good, and I need good people. I know what that makes me.” He set down his cup. “But I’m not going to hold her.”
His gaze settled on Tess. “You’re up to something big, aren’t you? Floor 2, if the rumors are right. In and out of the Tertian estate a dozen or more times, too. You’ve become really interesting, Little-Rivera.”
“We just need a Delving team,” Tess said. “Yuki’s skills would help.”
His eyebrows rose. “Floor 2’s wiped three parties out already, and the Network’s sending a big-wig to shut it down. What makes you think you’ll do any better?”
“We’re prepared.”
“Maybe.” He didn’t say it dismissively. More like he was weighing it against everything he knew about the dungeon, about the people who said they were prepared and weren’t. “Anyways, here’s my situation. Yuki goes, I lose sleep. She’s been my security for two years and I don’t have a replacement.”
“You want me to find you another ranger?” Marcus asked.
“No.” A thin smile. “I want your girl to look at that security setup you put together for me,” he said, glancing at Marcus. “Overclock it. Make it smart enough that I don’t need a ranger on my shoulder every hour at home. Make it so anyone who comes for me regrets it before they get through the front door.”
Marcus was studying his coffee. Didn’t react.
That security setup you put together for me. The words landed specifically. Her father had built Yuri Kellmar’s security system. Or the core. Something he’d never mentioned.
Tess kept her face neutral. “I’ll need to see it first. Assess what’s there.”
“Of course. Professional.” Yuri leaned back in his chair. “Come on. Yuki’s just across the hall.”
The room across the corridor was smaller, windowless, and smelled faintly of gun oil. Yuki Tanaka sat at a table with a rifle broken down into components, a cleaning rod in one hand and a bore brush in the other. Methodical strokes, a routine that came from years of daily handling.
Tess cataloged her at a glance. Late twenties, lean build, sharp eyes that tracked everything. Dark hair cropped into a pixie cut, a streak of faded purple running through the left side like she’d done it herself and hadn’t bothered to maintain it. A sidearm sat on each hip, and her jacket hung open over shapes that weren’t part of the tailoring.
She looked up when they entered. Her eyes went to Marcus first, then to Tess, and stayed there.
“You’re the repair tech Big Yuri won’t shut up about.”
“Tess Rivera.”
“Yuki Tanaka.” She looked Tess over without pretending she wasn’t. “Younger than I expected.”
“I get that a lot.”
Yuki pulled the cleaning rod free and held the barrel up to the light, checking. “Heard you’re working for the Tertians.”
“I work with the Tertians,” Tess said.
Yuki considered that. Then she grinned, sudden and wide, completely at odds with the lounging posture from three seconds ago. “Fair enough.”
The rifle components were spread across the table in precise order, each piece on its own cloth. [ANALYZE] caught the weapon before Tess could stop it.
·········································PRECISION RIFLE KR-9Designation: Long-Range Engagement · Anti-SpawnLoot Seed: 0xE3F8Status: ActiveHardware: OperationalPower: Self-Sustaining (Kinetic Recovery)User Tech Skill: 9·········································Kinetic Enhancement ........ Active [Tech 4]Targeting Matrix ........... Active [Tech 5]Tremorsense Relay .......... Active [Tech 6]Recoil Compensation ........ Active [Tech 3]Ballistic Computation ...... Active [Tech 7]Precision Calibration ...... Active [Tech 8]·········································
All six skill crystals were online. Tess had never seen a personal weapon with that kind of maintenance.
“Not polite to stare,” Yuki said. She’d caught the look. Whatever she thought it meant, she didn’t seem bothered.
“Sorry. Occupational hazard.”
“Mm.” Yuki started reassembling the rifle. Her hands moved without looking, each piece finding its place by muscle memory. “So. You fix up the Kellmar estate security, and I get to go play in the dungeon. That’s the deal?”
“That’s the deal,” Yuri said from the doorway. “But you’re not walking through my sector armed for a ground war. Not without me with you.”
Yuki’s hands stilled on the rifle stock. “Define armed.”
“Yuki.”
“It’s a legitimate request!”
“You’re carrying enough hardware to siege a small outpost. Leave them. I might need them with you gone, and you walking around without me looking like a one-woman armory is going to draw attention to Tess she doesn’t need.”
Yuki looked at him for a long moment. Then she sighed and stood.
She unholstered the sidearm on her right hip and set it on the table. Then the one on the left. A knife came out of a forearm sheath and joined them. She shrugged off her jacket, revealing a shoulder holster with a compact pistol that she placed next to the knife.
Tess watched a second pistol emerge from a holster at the small of her back. Then a slim blade from her right boot. Then another sidearm from a thigh rig that had been invisible under her loose pants.
Marcus raised an eyebrow.
Yuki reached behind her neck and produced a flat throwing knife from somewhere in her collar. Two more pistol magazines from an interior vest pocket. A holdout piece from her left ankle. A short vibro-blade from a pocket Tess hadn’t even noticed.
The pile on the table was growing absurdly. Twelve items, not counting the rifle. Tess counted again. Still twelve.
Yuki stood there, arms slightly out from her sides, looking diminished. Not smaller, but less. Like someone had removed a load-bearing wall from a building that was still technically standing.
“Happy?” she said.
Yuri eyed the pile without expression. Then his gaze dropped to Yuki’s boots and came back up to her face.
“All of them.”
Yuki held his gaze for a second. Then she reached down and pulled a snub-nosed pistol from the inside of her right boot and dropped it on the pile with a clatter.
Thirteen.
“I feel naked,” she said.
“You’ll survive.” Yuri turned to Marcus. “I’m going to treat your father to lunch while you two work,” he said to Tess. Then to Marcus: “My treat. We have catching up to do.”
Marcus glanced at Tess, the question clear: You okay going alone?
She gave him a small nod. Marcus had settled into this place the moment they walked in. His shoulders were loose; his voice was easy. This was territory he knew. Whatever history lived between him and Yuri, right now it was an asset.
“Go,” she said. “I’ll handle whatever is at Yuri’s.”
Marcus stood. Yuri gestured toward the back of the restaurant. The two men fell into step together with the ease of long familiarity, and Tess watched them disappear around the corner. All the parts of her father’s life she’d never seen.
Words formed at the edge of her vision, small and precise:
BEE: Marcus seems to know this Big Yuri Kellmar. Why hasn’t he mentioned that?
Tess didn’t react. Bee could hear everything through the communicator, but with Yuki right here, text was the only safe channel. Next time Tess saw Yuri, she made it a point to [ANALYZE] him.
“Right,” Yuki said, slinging the rifle across her back. The one weapon Yuri hadn’t asked her to leave. “Estate’s a ten-minute walk. Hub’s in the basement.” She rolled her neck. “Fair warning, it’s a disaster down there. Nothing talks to anything else. I’ve been telling him for years.”
*
Yuri’s estate sat near the edge of Sector 6, behind a ferrocrete wall that predated the Network. Pre-network construction was easy to spot once you’d worked on enough of it: thicker walls, denser material, joints built to last instead of built to spec. This one had been maintained, which was rarer. Clean lines, actual plants in the raised beds, mortar patched where it had cracked instead of left to crumble. Someone cared about this place. Or paid someone who did.
Tess recognized the security immediately after staring at dungeon infrastructure for so long. Cameras at sight lines and corners, both. Sensor nodes tucked under the eaves where rain wouldn’t corrode them. Turret housings at the wall’s corners, dormant but present. Nothing flashy. All of it saying we see you without wasting energy on saying it louder.
“How long have you worked for Yuri?” Tess asked as Yuki led her through the front door.
“Couple years. I showed up broke, he gave me a job.” Yuki moved with restless energy through the house, the kind that came from too many years of standing still. “Steady pay. Nobody shooting at me. Which is exactly the problem.”
“You miss getting shot at?”
“I miss doing something that matters.” She took the stairs down to the basement two at a time. “I ran an off-world dungeon for a while. Real crew, real progression, the whole deal. Then things went sideways, and I ended up watching cameras.” She pushed open a heavy door at the bottom. “Two years of cameras, stuck at level 9.”
She said it lightly. Her hand lingered on the door frame before the grin came back.
“Anyway. Welcome to the mess.”
The basement earned its description. Consoles lined three walls, screens showing camera feeds in formats a decade out of date. Equipment had accumulated over the years with no plan: turret components, sensor modules, power distribution units. Each piece functional enough on its own. None of them connected to each other. The engineering equivalent of a room full of people shouting in different languages.
Tess activated [ANALYZE].
Readouts bloomed across her vision, tags resolving on every piece of hardware. Functions, status, and connection points all resolved at once. The nested architecture her class made visible layered over the physical room like a second blueprint. Standard power distribution, sensor routing, automated response protocols. All dungeon-tech running on skill crystals.
She crossed to the nearest turret and pried open the access panel. Corrosion around the edges, but the internals were clean. Someone had maintained the individual components, even if they’d never connected them properly. She could see her father’s approach in the wiring: practical, solid, built to last. The same philosophy as the modifications in their freighter.
BEE: The engineering approach matches Marcus’s techniques. He built these.
Tess processed that without letting it show. Her father had built Yuri’s turrets, maintained this security system, and spent enough time on this estate to walk through Bistro Y from memory. Years of history between them she’d never been part of.
·········································PERIMETER TURRET PT-4Designation: Automated Defense · TrackingLoot Seed: 0xD4A1Status: DegradedHardware: Operational (Suboptimal)Power: 2.8 / 5.0 AW — InsufficientUser Tech Skill: 9·········································Kinetic Amplification ...... Damaged [Tech 3]Target Acquisition ......... Active [Tech 4]Threat Analysis ............ Active [Tech 5]Pattern Recognition ........ Active [Tech 6]Predictive Tracking ........ Offline [Tech 7]·········································
She paused on Pattern Recognition. The underlying skill architecture was built on the same foundational template as her own [ANALYZE] layered analysis, nested comparison, recursive structure identification. It was practically identical. The same base code running in the turret’s crystal that ran inside her head.
She stared at the readout for longer than she meant to, then moved on. Something to bring to Sara later. They could make blank skill crystals, and Tess could put skills into them. She needed to figure out how that worked.
“What’s the verdict?” Yuki was leaning against the far wall, arms crossed. Without the weight of thirteen weapons, she shifted constantly, finding positions and abandoning them. Her fingers drummed against her bicep.
“The system’s got good bones. Whoever built it knew what they were doing.” Tess turned back to the turret. “But the integration’s the problem. Each turret is running its own threat analysis independently. No shared data, no coordination. If someone breaches the east wall, the west turrets don’t know until the threat’s past them.”
“Can you fix it?”
“I can connect them. Shared threat model, coordinated tracking, the entire system thinking instead of five separate units reacting.” Tess pulled her tools from her belt. “Going to take a few hours.”
Yuki tried the wall, then stood, then leaned on a console, then pushed off it. “I’ve got nowhere to be. Obviously.”
*
Yuki talked.
Constantly. She went quiet when Tess was deep in a splice, hands inside a junction box with a soldering iron in one hand and a wire stripper in the other. But the moment Tess surfaced between components, Yuki filled the gap. Years of watching cameras hadn’t given her many conversation partners.
“Off-world dungeons are different from what you’d expect,” she said while Tess traced a corroded power coupling between the second and third turrets. The insulation had cracked in three places. She stripped it back, cleaned the contact points with a brush from her kit, and re-wrapped with sealant. “Everyone thinks it’s just different spawns, different layouts. It’s not. The spawns out there were smart. They flanked, rotated positions. They remembered our tactics from the last run. Nothing like the crappy dungeon here. Though I’m told that’s changing.”
“Our dungeon is getting a lot more dangerous.”
“That’s why I was excited when Yuri told me your Dad was asking around.” A shift in her voice, there and controlled. “Finally a chance to really prove myself after what happened. My party leader made a call to push through a spawn wave instead of falling back. Got two people killed.” She kept her eyes on the far wall. “His word against mine after. He was nobility. I wasn’t.”
Tess’s hands slowed on the coupling. She thought about Senna Brennan, stuck on administrative leave for doing the right thing. The Network ship closing in with its military escort. All the ways the Network crushed the people underneath it and called that order.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Ancient history.” Yuki’s mouth set. “I won’t tell you about Yuri’s operation. But my last delving crew was a complete disaster, so your bar for impressing me is incredibly low.”
Tess snorted and reached for the next panel. “Noted.”
She pried it open. The wiring was a mess. Someone had spliced new sensor feeds into old junction points without labeling anything, and half the connections were cross-wired. She started sorting them by function, pulling faulty connections and re-soldering the good ones. Methodical work that emptied her head and let her hands do the thinking.
“You’re fast,” Yuki said, watching. She’d moved to a different wall. Then the console. Then back to the wall.
“Practice.” And a class that let her see what others couldn’t, but she kept that to herself, for now.
BEE: She is very friendly; I like her. But I don’t think Petra will
Tess bit down on a smile.
“What?” Yuki caught it.
“Nothing. Just thinking.”
“You do that a lot. The thinking-without-sharing thing.” Yuki tipped her head. “I’m not very good at that.”
BEE: She is also self-aware. Also useful.
Tess moved to the fourth turret and opened the access panel. The problem was visible before [ANALYZE] confirmed it: the kinetic amplification skill crystal was cracked, hairline fractures running through the core matrix. Still technically active, but the degraded output was pulling the entire system’s response calculations off.
“This one’s done,” she said. “Kinetic amplification crystal, cracked through the core. Can’t repair it, and working around it would overload the other turrets.” She looked around the basement. Spare parts on shelves, nothing matching this spec. “Do you have a compatible crystal? Or a spare turret I can pull from?”
“Not down here.” Yuki shifted her weight. Then she paused. “Actually… Would this work?”
She reached down and pulled something out of her boot. A compact sidearm, matte black, that had been there the entire time.
Tess stared at the sidearm, then at Yuki, then back at her boots.
“You left thirteen weapons on the table at Bistro Y.”
“I left thirteen weapons on the table at Bistro Y,” Yuki agreed.
“And you had a fourteenth in your boot.”
“Yuri doesn’t know about all my weapons. Besides, this one hardly counts.”
BEE: I find Yuki very amusing. Do you think she’d like me?
Tess just laughed and replied to both Yuki and Bee. “Yeah, okay.”
“And the Kinetic amplifier in this one is solid,” Yuki said, offering it grip-first. “Chassis is junk, though. The action sticks. Take the crystal.”
Tess took the sidearm and turned it over. [ANALYZE] confirmed that the kinetic amplification crystal was clean, better quality than the turret’s original. She could extract and embed with minimal recalibration.
“This’ll work,” she said. “Better than what was in there.”
“I take care of my equipment.”
Tess extracted the crystal. The architecture was meant for rapid discharge rather than sustained flow. She had to rotate the seating angle twice before the turret housing accepted it. Her fingers found the right alignment on the third try, and the crystal locked in with a faint click.
She sat back on her heels while the turret recalibrated. The Pattern Recognition crystal in the neighboring unit, built on the same template as [ANALYZE], dominated her vision.
She didn’t know what to do with her discovery yet. Could she pull a skill from her class and seat it in a crystal? Could she take a crystal skill and install it in herself? Were classes just collections of skills embedded in people instead of hardware?
The questions were too big for a basement in Sector 6, but they were flooding her mind.
BEE: You’ve stopped working. Are you alright?
Tess blinked.
“There it is again.” Yuki shook her head. “Quiet thinking.”
Tess sealed the housing and stood. She activated the integrated network, the shared threat model she’d been building all afternoon. Turrets synced their sensor feeds. Tracking arcs smoothed into coordinated sweeps. Each unit was now aware of what the others saw. The entire system functioning as one thing instead of five separate things pretending to be one.
For good measure, she reached through with her [INTERFACE] and enabled the Predictive Tracking modules. New readouts started flowing from the cameras as they scanned everything they could see.
“That’s fast,” Yuki said, watching the nearest turret track across its arc. “Response time just tripled.”
“Should get faster as it learns the perimeter. I enabled the predictive tracking skills, too.” Tess wiped her hands on her pants. “The crystal swap improved the eastern array’s accuracy too.”
“You made it learn?”
“It was already collecting data. I gave it structure and let the turrets share what they see, and then predict threats.”
Yuki held her gaze. The look one professional gave another when the work spoke for itself.
*
They walked back to Bistro Y in the late afternoon. Sector 6 looked different from this angle; the ferrocrete walls and maintained buildings giving way to the usual patchwork of repaired and neglected infrastructure.
Marcus and Yuri were in the private room, empty plates pushed to the side. Whatever they’d spent three hours discussing was apparently concluded. Marcus looked as if something had settled in him. Tess couldn’t name what exactly. His shoulders sat the same; his expression was neutral. But something behind his eyes had quieted, the way a machine sounded different when a misaligned component finally clicked into place.
Yuri pulled up the estate’s security feed on a datapad. Watched the turrets track a delivery person walking past the gate. Checked the sensor overlay, scrolled through responses and reading. His eyebrows climbed to his forehead.
“You enabled the predictive tracking? All the systems are reporting on the same cadence… And the Eastern turret is reporting no more drift. If you weren’t working for the Tertians, I’d offer you a job right here.”
“With the Tertians,” Tess corrected again. “The power distribution could still be improved, but that’s a separate project.”
“Anytime you need the cash, you just head over,” He studied the readout a moment longer, then looked at Yuki. “You see this?”
“Watched the whole thing.” Yuki pushed off the doorframe. “She’s fast. Sees all sorts of things the other techs missed. It was barely work for her.”
“Like her old man.” Yuri said it easily, as if it were obvious.
Marcus found something interesting on the far wall to study. Tess watched him not react and felt the weight of it land, the shape of a history she’d only ever seen the edges of. Her father and this man, in this room, building something together years before she’d been old enough to notice. All the things Marcus Rivera had been before he was just her dad with bad lungs and empty pockets.
“We had a deal,” Yuri said. “System works. Yuki makes her own choice.” He looked at his ranger. “Well?”
Yuki was already heading for the table where her weapons still sat in their pile. She started sliding them into holsters and pockets with practiced efficiency, sidearms and knives finding their homes in a specific order. She moved like someone who’d been waiting for exactly this sentence.
“Trial run,” she said, slinging the rifle across her back. “Show me the team, what you’re trying to do.” She stopped in front of Yuri and squeezed his arm, quick and genuine. “Thanks, boss. It’s been a good time.”
“Don’t get killed.” His voice was rough. “And come visit, yeah?.”
“No promises.” She was already heading for the door.
Marcus fell into step beside Tess as they followed. “Well?”
“She talks more than anyone I’ve ever met, even Bee.”
He let out a small chuckle. “I find that hard to believe.”
The afternoon kept replaying—Bee’s commentary, Yuki’s restless grin, and the way she’d offered her own weapon mid-repair. She’d make a great addition to the team, but she was the exact opposite of Petra, who preferred communicating in eyebrow raises and stern looks.
“Bee and Yuki in the same room is going to drive Petra insane.”
Marcus laughed. A real one, the kind she’d been hearing more of lately.
Yuki was at the restaurant entrance, bouncing on her heels, clearly excited. “We can talk on the way. Where are we going? I heard you have a freighter, are we going there? When do we get started?”
“Yuki.”
“Right. Shutting up.” She held it for about two seconds.
Words formed in Tess’s vision as they stepped into the Sector 6 afternoon.
BEE: I like her. She reminds me of someone, though I cannot identify who.
Tess glanced at her communicator and said nothing. Bee would figure it out eventually.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go introduce you to the rest of the team.”