“Ask for paper and you'll learn everything fast.” — Deleted post, gray market operators forum
The van slid off the freight grid onto the through-road, and Erika held it at seventy the whole way like the law was a personal insult she’d agreed to swallow for my sake.
The adrenaline left me a block at a time. By the third one my hands had stopped trembling uselessly as they’d been doing since the window, the rain on the canopy had gone back to being rain instead of cover, and I was a tired kid in a yellow hoodie watching ad-holos turn in the wet.
“Still nothing back there?” Erika asked the mirror.
“Nothing worth the word.” Natty answered from the welded chair, out loud, no earpiece between us now, the real voice, and pleased with herself. “I’m on their open side. HR, tickets, the noise their security pushes when something rattles them. And they’re rattled, kotě. Beautifully. There’s an incident flag with three exclamation points a manager put on himself.”
A soft clack off her rig. “They think someone walked off with the seedling file. The air-gapped one. The precious nothing. Half the thread is them working out how an edgerunner even knew it was there, and the other half is them being furious about it, which is the part I love—there’s nothing in that file worth this. They’re not angry about a loss. They’re angry someone got in.”
I let out the breath I’d been holding since the window. “So it worked.”
“It’s working. Present tense, learn the difference.” The clack stopped. “Nobody’s been down to germination. No work order, no inspection, no glove on your rack. The seedlings are sitting in the dark, and not one person in that building has a reason to look at them. Right now they’re chasing your ghost and ignoring the only thing you touched.” She made a whole turn on her chair.
“So it’ll hold?” I glanced in the mirror at the woman on a bolted chair.
“It holds as long as nobody wanders down by accident and nobody upstairs gets clever. If some manager decides three exclamation points mean audit the entire building—then it’s a different night, and tomorrow’s runner can have it. Should be fine.” She caught my stare. “Should.”
I didn’t love the second should.
My band buzzed. I looked down expecting Omar and got Eddy; two clean files in the thread under three words and a winking face. Chemicals. Cloner. Itemized, serials where applicable, because Eddy ran a shop that sold things off the back of trucks and still handed you a receipt for them.
Which was when the rest of Uncle’s voice caught up with me. Every sol. Every decision. Documentation within forty-eight hours, the whole deniable-corporate-action-with-full-internal-accountability sermon I’d nodded along to without once picturing the part where I went around afterward collecting paper from everyone I’d dragged into a felony.
“Natty,” I said. “Do you do receipts?”
The chair stopped turning.
“Do I do what?”
“A receipt. For the money. It’s a Kallum op, I have to file expenses—”
The silence in the back of the van had a grin in it.
“Dashi.” She drawled. “I am a gray-market netrunner. I just ate a Fortune 15’s signal off the air so you could poison some lettuce, and you want a piece of paper with my name on it for your accountant.” She laughed, the brash one, full of teeth. “Miláčku. The whole point of me is that there is no receipt.”
“He’s serious,” Erika told the windshield, delighted in her quieter way. “Look at his face. Dash—are you going to ask me for one too?”
I’d been about to. “...You don’t want to?”
“Fine, I don’t mind a random paper saying my friend paid me money to drive them.” She caught my eye in the mirror, and the grin had a hook in it. “Also, the van’s Roy’s. The six hundred you sent him—that’s your expense, mister accountability, and Roy doesn’t carry a band that does invoices. So.”
So. Of course. Roy.
“Where am I putting you, Natty?” Erika rolled us back into the lane. “Home, or—”
“The unit. We unload there. I’m not hauling grey boxes across town twice, and I’m not leaving them in a rental going back to your mechanic tonight. Three-C. You remember the way.”
She did. The storage block came up out of the West Corporate rain as forgettable as the night before, and we ran the same short chain in reverse, grey cases first, careful, careful, those are not insured, looms, the broken-down table, all of it back into the box it had come out of an hour ago. The welded chair stayed in the van. Natty looked at it once on the last trip, the throne Roy had bolted down to her spec. Neither of us said anything about it.
We got the door most of the way down, and she stood in the white lantern light with her arms starting to fold, the brash falling off her by degrees now that there was no van and no job to stand behind.
“Hey,” I said. “That was—you were good in there. The badge, the runner, all of it. I’d have been detained twice over without you.”
Her smile went away, and her eyes found the floor a meter to my left. “It’s. Yeah.” She cleared her throat. “It’s a job.”
“It’s a job you were good at.”
“Stop,” she said, and it sounded almost like a plea. She wrapped her arms the rest of the way and gave the floor a small nod. “...It was a clean pull. You didn’t panic. Mostly.” The corner of her mouth reached for the comms voice and didn’t get there. “Close the contract with Naiche, don’t ask me. Go home, kotě.”
“Goodnight, Natty.”
She lifted a hand, not quite a wave, and the door came down the rest of the way between us.
Then it was the two of us in the orange van, rain back on the roof, the welded chair empty behind us like a missing tooth.
Erika pulled off the gravel, easy, no rush left in it. “Okay. Van goes back to Roy tonight—no heat, nobody’s looking for it, so I’ll drive it over normal and have him stash it.” She glanced over. “Where do you want dropping? I can swing through Central first; it’s barely out of the—”
“I’ll come.”
It came out a half-step ahead of the thought behind it, and I felt her look at me properly.
“To Roy’s,” she said.
“For the receipt.” Which was true. Which was a real, filed, Uncle-approved reason, and I held it up in front of the other one like a badge. “Six hundred sols, serials where applicable. He doesn’t do invoices, you said it yourself—I have to ask him in person.” I shrugged at the windshield. “Might as well.”
Erika said nothing for a second. Then the grin came back, slower than usual, and she pointed the van toward Aravaca.
Roy was under something else tonight, a chassis up on blocks, the hover-creeper parked beside him and a low murmur coming off him that the chassis wasn’t answering.
Erika brought the van in slowly, nose to the lamp, and killed it. The boots came out before she’d finished.
“¡Mira!” Roy rolled into the light and came up out of the creeper in one motion, grease fresh to the elbow, the grin out ahead of him as always. “My van, back in one piece. And you—” he found me climbing out the passenger side and pointed, delighted “—the Central guy. You survived your netrunner business.”
“It went fine.”
“Fine.” He said it back like it was the funniest word he’d heard all week. “He takes a magenta van to do a fine thing, comes back at this hour, soaked, with a face like that — and it was fine. Claro, hombre. The chair held? Your particular runner, she didn’t slide around like cargo?”
“She loved the chair.”
“Of course she loved the chair. I welded the chair.” He crossed to Erika, who’d come around the front pulling the wet hair off her face, and pulled her into his side with the easy grease-stained arm. “Mi reina.” She went the way she’d gone the first night, one hand flat to his chest, no complaint in it.
Mi reina. I’d never said it anywhere but inside my own head.
I looked at the van instead.
“Roy. Before we go.” I made myself say it. “I need a receipt. For the six hundred.”
He stopped mid-something to Erika and turned the full grin on me. “A receipt.”
“For the van. The six you already have.” I heard the corpo in my own mouth and kept going, because Uncle’s voice was louder than my dignity. “Itemized if you can. Serial numbers where applicable.”
Roy looked at me. He looked at Erika. He looked back at me, and something behind his eyes was having the time of its life. “Serial numbers,” he repeated softly to the lamp. “Okay. You want paper, I give you paper.” He dug a folded sheet out of a coverall pocket—a thing that had clearly lived its whole life in that pocket and absorbed the pocket’s entire history of grease—smoothed it against the van’s flank, and wrote on it with a pencil stub he produced from somewhere worse.
He wrote slowly, tongue in the corner of his mouth.
Then he turned it around.
VAN — 600 sol — PAID. ROY.
Under it, a smaller line he’d added with a flourish: el chico es buen cliente. An oil thumbprint anchored one corner.
“There,” Roy said, deeply satisfied. “Itemized.”
It left grease on my fingers. I folded it as if it were a document, because once it went into a Fortune 15 expense file, it would be one.
Erika peeled off the lamplight ten minutes later in the racer, the van handed back, Roy already half under his blocks-up project and waving without looking. She took us up over the bone-pale rooftops, Aravaca dropping away into its small warm windows, and let the speed find the commercial limit and stop there, which for her was practically a courtesy.
“You’re quiet,” she said, eyes on the rain.
“Long night.” True enough. Not quite true, though.
She didn’t push. She put me down on my block in Central, blue-lit and biosculpted and empty, and when the canopy came down, she leaned across to find me through the gap. “Get some sleep, Dash. The boring part’s over.”
“Yeah.” The boring part was starting; sixty hours of waiting to learn whether a dark room two flights under West Farming was going to make me richer or five levels poorer, with nothing to do about any of it but go to bed.
I didn’t say that. “Goodnight, Eri,” I said instead.
I went in, put the sword where the sword went, peeled off the suit, and lay down in my own quiet room, asleep before I could properly think back to the grease handprint.
The second day I wrote the report, and the lessons I’d spent years resenting came back to me whole.
I hadn’t filed a proper operational document since I was twelve and they’d made me account for a model budget down to the bolt, and I’d hated it the way you hate anything that’s good for you.
Header, scope, timeline.
What was authorized, what was spent, what was decided in the moment, and why.
Every sol with paper behind it and every line measured against the averages William’s office had given me: Eddy’s two clean files for the compound and the cloner; Natalya’s four thousand, the average to the sol, closed through Naiche’s contract because the woman herself would sooner be detained than sign a receipt, Erika’s neat receipt, and…
A photograph of a grease-stained sheet reading VAN — 600 sol — PAID. ROY, which I logged straight-faced as ‘Vendor documentation (informal; vendor declined standard format)’.
The part that took the longest was the decoy.
Every decision needs a written justification. So I sat there and wrote, in the flat language the lessons had drilled into me, why I had, mid-operation, off-plan, instructed my netrunner to fabricate evidence of a data theft against an air-gapped terminal, to misdirect facility investigation away from the contaminated batch and preserve the contamination window.
I read it back. It sounded like strategy. It had been a thing I’d said out loud a half-second before I believed it, heart trying to leave through my ribs, and on the page it read like I’d planned it over coffee.
I left it sounding as if I was actually smart.
William called an hour later, which surprised me; the holo bloomed off my band before I’d finished lunch. He was standing, because of course he was, with a window behind him and the moon somewhere past the glass.
“Dash. I read your West Farming submission. I wanted to tell you before it vanishes into a cycle and you assume nobody looked.”
I straightened. “Did it reconcile?”
“To the sol. Complete file, sound justifications, every line at or under our agreed numbers, filed inside the window without my deputy chasing you for it.” Something close to delight moved through it. “And you logged a grease-stained scrap of paper as vendor documentation.”
I groaned; that stupid mechanic would be the end of me. “Roy declined the standard format.”
“So I gathered, vendor documentation is the correct field.” He stepped back from the window. “As I told you, I took the directorship to prove a clean, fast, honest line was possible from a Kallum in operational standing. Yours is the first file that’s made the whole framework look like it was worth building.”
He paused, glancing out of the window. “Most of them have scars from the old system. You came in with none, and you kept it that way. I wish every Kallum filed half this fast and half this clean.” A nod, more to himself than to me. “Good work.”
“That’s the goal,” I said, because he’d said it first in Naiche’s office, and it was the only answer I had.
“The goal.” The smile was in his voice. “Short and uneventful, for both of us. Your reimbursement clears after we close the entire op. Go do whatever it is you do when no one’s making you account for it.”
The holo cut, and I was left sitting in my bedroom. “So now I wait two days… easy.” I fell backward onto the mattress, didn’t bother taking off my clothes, and was unconscious before my head had fully sunk into the pillow.
I woke up to my holoband vibrating with the aggressive, sustained rhythm of an emergency override.
I groaned, prying one eye open. The light in my room was the heavy, slanting orange of late afternoon. I had slept through the rest of day.
I tapped the band.
Dewi Sasmita: Mr. Kallum. You are a day late for your second session.
My blood ran cold.
Monday. The second cast. I forgot.
I sat bolt upright, the memory hitting me like a physical blow. My brain had been so completely hijacked by the operation that the single most important medical appointment of my life had simply fallen out of my head.
The band buzzed again.
Dewi Sasmita: I cleared my schedule for you. If you missed this appointment because you compromised the first cast by doing something strenuous, magical, or stupid, the consequences to your outer soul will be on your own head. Respond immediately.
I was sweating. I had successfully sabotaged a Fortune 15 agribusiness, but staring at Dewi’s message felt significantly more terrifying.
I typed so fast my thumbs tripped over each other.
Me: Miss Dewi. I am so, so sorry. I didn’t use magic! No combat! I swear. I had a family emergency that kept me up all day. It’s entirely my fault. I will be there next Monday at the exact time. I am so sorry.
I hit send and waited, my heart hammering against my ribs. The typing indicator bubbled for a long, agonizing minute.
Dewi Sasmita: You are fortunate the first cast has a stabilization window of ten days. Next Monday. Do not be late. For your info, I just mentioned it to Alice.
I stared at the screen in pure horror.
I spent the next hour doing damage control, groveling to the twins, and swearing on my life that I was fine, just an idiot who didn’t know how to set a calendar alert.
The rest of Tuesday and Wednesday were a lesson in paranoia.
Sixty hours is a long time to wait for a plant to grow wrong. I spent hours staring at my new Skill options from Level 2.
Projectile Bending and Mark the Drift stared back at me, both begging to be paired with the coilgun, but I forced myself to close the menu. I had promised myself I would ask before I committed to a choice, and the skill could wait.
I just needed to know if the op had worked.
The answer arrived on Thursday morning, while I was pouring a bowl of cereal in the kitchen.
Comma was slumped on the couch, scrolling through the public Pulse feeds. Suddenly, she paused, her thumb hovering over the interface. “Hey, Dachshund,” she called out, not looking away from the projection. “Didn’t you say Mom’s boss was doing something with Bhavsar?”
I froze, the milk carton hovering over my bowl. “Yeah. Why?”
“Because their stock just took a six percent dive in the last ten minutes.” Comma tapped the screen, maximizing a news feed. “They’re reporting at least tens of sabotages across the Sol Alliance. Oh, look, there's ‘severe biological anomaly’ at their Tago West facility,” she said as if she loved corpo suffering. “A whole germination cycle came up mutated. They’re incinerating the entire floor.” She shook her head. “Sucks to be whoever was on QC duty for that batch.”
I set the milk down. I didn’t trust my hands not to drop it.
“Yeah,” I said, keeping my voice dead level. “Sucks to be them.”
[SYSTEM QUEST COMPLETE: The Saboteur][Difficulty: B-][Conditions Met: Corporate disruption achieved. Zero casualties. Absolute anonymity maintained.]
[Calculating Reward...]
The System box flickered, glitching slightly at the edges, as if the System itself was struggling to admit I had a proper system now.
[Reward 1: 10,000 Sols (Disbursed via Kallum Operations)][Reward 2: A-Tier Attribute Stone]
There was a flash of golden light directly over the kitchen counter. I reached out on pure instinct, my hand snapping forward.
Comma was too absorbed in her delight at suffering corpo to notice.
I slowly opened my fingers. Resting in my hand was a crystalline stone, roughly the size of a plum. Swirls of deep, violent violet and silver moved beneath its surface.
A-Tier.
Uncle Dot had warned me it was random. The System gave me a subsystem based on what it thought I had earned.
“Dash?” Comma’s voice drifted in from the living room, sounding miles away. “You good? You’ve been staring at your cereal for a minute straight.”
“I’m good,” I whispered. “I’m fantastic.”
I didn’t hesitate. I closed my fist around the crystal and pushed my intent into it.
The stone shattered into a burst of silver light, dissolving into pure energy that shot up my arm and slammed directly into my chest. The impact knocked the breath out of me, it was violently burning through my veins like liquid fire.
I gripped the edge of the kitchen counter, my knuckles turning white as the System roared to life in my vision.
[A-Tier Attribute Stone Consumed.][Analyzing…]
I gasped for air, forcing my eyes open to read the glowing text as the world around me began to spin.
[New A-Tier Attribute Subsystem Unlocked!]