The morphine haze stuck to Caleb's brain like wet wool.
He came up out of sleep in layers. First the ceiling. Then the monitor. Then the brace dragging his right shoulder down.
His mouth tasted like old metal.
He tried to stretch.
The cast reminded him it existed by pulling his arm against his ribs hard enough to make his eyes water.
A chair scraped across linoleum.
"Hey, easy!"
A glossy pamphlet slid off somebody's knee and slapped onto the floor.
Hiro hovered beside the bed in his oversized track jacket, hands raised like Caleb might explode if startled incorrectly.
"The nurse told me your situation," Hiro said. "Do not break yourself more. I do not think they have a discount for repeat damage."
Caleb lowered his good arm.
The kid looked wrong in the private medical ward. Too skinny. Too anxious. Too real against the clean walls and expensive machines.
Caleb worked his swollen tongue loose.
"The ice," he mumbled.
Hiro blinked.
"You shot the dirt."
The tension left Hiro's shoulders in one quick drop.
"You watched my fight."
"Parts." Caleb swallowed around a throat that felt scraped raw. "Good parts."
Hiro bent to pick up the pamphlet. It had a smiling Runner on the front giving a thumbs-up beside the words YOUR FUTURE AFTER QUALIFICATION.
The smiling Runner had all four limbs functional. Marketing had range.
"I stopped by to wish you a speedy recovery," Hiro said. "I hope you try again next year. You took a crazy hit."
Next year.
Caleb stared at the ceiling panels.
He owed too much money to survive romantically until next year. Debt did not wait because a man's arm had stopped taking instructions.
"But," Hiro said, pointing toward the tray table, "you also have a gift."
Caleb turned his head.
A small box sat dead center on the aluminum tray.
Red wrapping paper. Thick black tape. No shipping label. No hospital barcode. No attempt to look normal.
His stomach tightened before the rest of him understood why.
Family debt.
Paralyzed arm.
Private viewer.
The thing in his chest that had gone quiet in the way a creditor went quiet before knocking.
Pain tore through his gut.
Caleb folded over with a hoarse yell.
The ache did not feel like ordinary hunger. It felt like his organs had turned against each other and started arguing with teeth.
Hiro dropped the pamphlet again.
"Hey! What is wrong?"
"Food," Caleb gasped.
"What?"
"I have not eaten since last night."
Hiro vanished into the hallway so fast his shoes squeaked.
Caleb curled on his side and rode out the cramps. Sweat gathered at his neck. The thing under his ribs pulsed once with something sharper than pain: demand.
Hiro returned minutes later with a plastic tray loaded with three foil-wrapped protein bricks and a bowl of synthetic broth.
"The cafeteria lady said patients are not supposed to eat without clearance," Hiro said, breathless. "So I said you were not eating, technically, you were stabilizing."
Caleb grabbed the first brick.
He tore the foil with his teeth and shoved the dry block into his mouth. It tasted like salted cardboard and public funding. He swallowed most of it whole, took the broth in three gulps, and ate the second brick before Hiro finished looking disturbed by the first.
The hollow tearing in his gut dulled.
Not gone.
Managed.
Three hospital protein bricks were supposed to cover a full recovery meal.
For Caleb, they bought enough time to think without shaking.
Outside the ward, eating like this every time the thing under his ribs twitched would cost more than rent and leave a purchase trail bright enough for medical review.
Caleb fell back against the pillow and breathed through his nose.
Hiro stared at the empty wrappers.
"I am making a private note never to stand between you and buffet access."
"Smart note."
Caleb reached for the red box.
The black tape fought his thumb with a loud screech before peeling away.
Inside, packed in dense foam, sat a silver auto-injector. Green fluid glowed inside the glass vial.
Hiro leaned closer and immediately leaned back again, as if price had a smell.
"That is Apex-brand," he said. "Combat stim. Real one. A single dose goes for fifty thousand credits on the underground exchange."
Fifty thousand.
Caleb looked at his dead right arm.
"Will it fix nerve damage?"
Hiro's answer came too fast. "No. It forces healthy muscles to ignore limits. If the motor pathways are burned out, injecting that could stop your heart."
Caleb closed the cardboard flap.
He tossed the box onto the tray.
The clatter made him freeze.
If the vial cracked, his only ticket out of the disposal yards became expensive floor cleaner.
He threw the sheets off, stepped onto cold linoleum, and scooped the box back up.
"At the very least, I can fence it."
Hiro's mouth hung open.
"What?"
"That is military-controlled medicine," Hiro said. "If you sell it, the buyer logs the vial code or strips it and sells it to someone who logs the vial code. Either way, the trail comes back to your room."
"Then I sell it badly."
"Then you get robbed badly." Hiro looked genuinely offended by the plan. "Or arrested. Or both, which is statistically very common in black-market medical resale."
Caleb looked at the box again.
Fifty thousand credits sounded like rescue until it became evidence. One bad sale could freeze his account, flag his brother's care file, and put a debt collector in his mother's doorway before the month ended.
Hiro pointed at Caleb's torso.
"How are you walking?"
Caleb stopped. Bare feet on the floor. Right arm locked in the brace. Left hand holding a fifty-thousand-credit problem.
He looked down like the floor had tricked him.
Then he pressed his palm against his ribs.
Once. Harder. No grinding. No sharp bite. He took a slow breath. His chest expanded smoothly.
The hunger had not just been hunger. His body had been using something. Fueling something. Rebuilding while the hospital waited for six months of rehab to make sense of yesterday.
Caleb stared at his hand.
"My ribs are solid."
Hiro wiped both palms on his jacket.
"Okay. That is a joke. It is not a good joke, but it is structured like one."
"Two weeks ago, a Class-4 impaled me," Caleb said. His voice came out flat. "Tendril through the chest. Doctors found nothing. Now this."
Hiro took a careful step backward.
"That implies something is inside you."
The door slid open before Caleb could answer.
A nurse marched in, pushing fogged safety glasses up the bridge of her nose.
"Visitation is over," she said. "I need to prep this patient for outtake."
Hiro looked between Caleb, the box, and the nurse.
"Will I see you again?"
Caleb lifted his good shoulder.
"Who knows."
Hiro paused at the threshold.
"Thanks for the hit on Kikaru," he said. "I know you did not do it for me, but still."
The door shut behind him.
Caleb turned to the nurse.
She had gone still.
Not normal still. Not professional still. Puppet still.
Her hand rose to the back of her head. She pulled her hair tie loose, and auburn hair fell over her collar in a soft wave.
One step.
Another.
The walk was wrong, the rhythm a fraction off, like someone had been given a body and only read the instructions once.
Her pupils clouded over with milky fog.
"I have been watching you, Caleb," she said.
The clinical tone was gone.
The voice beneath it was smooth, steady, and too familiar for the amount of times he had almost died around it.
"For longer than you have been worth watching."
Caleb tightened his grip on the box.
He bumped the tray table between them with his hip.
"You buy my stream. Now you hijack nurses. Is this a hobby or a business model?"
The nurse's head tilted.
She reached into her hair and peeled a matte-black comms chip from her scalp.
It hit the tray table with a tiny plastic click.
"Keep it behind your ear," the voice said. "Military scanners will read it as a medical augment."
The nurse's hand lifted toward him.
Her fingers stopped an inch from his skin and curled back, the borrowed body finding the edge of its leash.
Caleb did not touch the chip.
"What's the payoff for a disposal scrubber?"
The nurse smiled with someone else's mouth.
"The military throws you away because they measure what you are today."
Cold fingers touched his temple, then slid to his jaw.
They clamped under it and tilted his face up like a jar being checked for a label.
"I know what is hiding in your chest," she whispered. "I know what it needs. Keep fighting for me, and I will feed it."
The tension holding her spine vanished.
Her eyes rolled back.
The nurse collapsed forward.
Caleb had one working arm and bad timing.
Her weight slammed into his chest. His feet slipped. They both went down, Caleb taking the hit on his back against the floor.
Air punched out of him.
The nurse gasped.
She pushed herself up on her hands and blinked fast. The milky glaze was gone. Panic replaced it.
Then she noticed she was straddling a patient in hospital briefs.
Color flooded her neck.
She scrambled backward, shoes skidding, and grabbed her clipboard like a shield.
"Protocol 4-A dictates a minimum three-foot boundary with patients," she stammered. "I tripped. You are not authorized to be out of bed."
"You passed out."
"You are being transferred," she said, talking faster now. "Central District trauma ward. Six months of neural rehabilitation."
A siren blared through the ceiling speakers.
Five minutes to Phase Two.
Caleb looked at the black chip on the tray.
Then at the sealed Apex stim.
Then at the door.
Six months meant over.
He grabbed the medical brace buckles and ripped them loose. Velcro tore away with a harsh scrape.
His right arm came free, mottled purple along the bicep and forearm where the flesh had burned under the suit.
The nurse gasped.
"Get back in bed."
Caleb snatched his stained canvas jacket from the chair. He shoved his injured arm through the sleeve and nearly blacked out from the bright line of pain that followed.
He took the stim.
He took the chip.
The chip pressed behind his right ear and warmed against the skin.
The nurse grabbed his bruised bicep with both hands.
"I will have you detained."
Caleb tried to pull free.
He barely flicked his arm.
The force launched her backward.
Her shoes shrieked across the linoleum. She hit the wall ten feet away hard enough to crack plaster and drop a framed hygiene poster crooked.
Caleb froze.
"Sorry."
Boots pounded around the corner.
A Defense Force soldier and a security guard stopped in the doorway. They looked at the dented wall, the dazed nurse, Caleb's bare legs, and the box in his hand.
The nurse pointed.
"Stop him!"
Caleb turned and ran down the green-arrow path.