She came back across the yard at a skip, which was not the word most people would have chosen for someone with blood drying on both hands and forearms, but it was the right one.

The particular lightness of her movement toward him, now that the world had decided to behave itself again, was something he had noticed and shrugged away without meaning to. It was not a gait she ever used in the opposite direction.

She reached him and had her hands on his face before he had quite finished adjusting for her arrival.

"I’m fine," he said.

"I know," she said. "I’m just looking."

She checked his jaw, tilted his head left and then right, and ran through the check-up she always ran.

Then her hands left his face and went to his collar, then to his jacket, and stopped at the left hip, where the shotgun graze had hit.

Her expression did not change.

"That is fine?"

"It’s not serious," he said.

"I’ll decide that," she said.

She had the trauma kit out open before he had the next sentence ready.

She applied the biosynthetic sealant to the skin the round had dragged across and held it there for the recommended time without being asked.

"Your hands," he said.

"Are fine," she said, finishing the sealant application. "Done."

"They are covered in blood."

"It’s not mine."

She made a small sound of mild inconvenience and pulled a water unit from the pack.

She rinsed her hands with efficiency. The blood came off the palms and ran pink from the wrists.

She dried them on the inner lining of her jacket with casual concentration.

"Better," she said, and looked at him with a warm, calm expression.

Jinx was three meters away, watching all of this with an expression she was working very hard to keep neutral.

She cleared her throat.

The knife left Nyx’s left hand in one motion and buried itself in the processing unit behind Jinx with a sound like a door slamming in a smaller room, the blade vibrating in the panel and the handle still shivering.

The distance between the knife’s path and the side of Jinx’s face was not large enough to count as comforting.

The yard was quiet for a moment.

Nyx looked over at her with the cutesy, placid expression of someone who had just remembered something mildly inconvenient.

"Sorry," she said. "Reflex."

Proxy looked at the knife in the processing unit.

He looked at Jinx.

He looked at Nyx.

Nyx pulled the knife from the panel with a small effort.

She returned it to her belt, still wearing the same pleasant expression. The warmth never left her face during any of it.

Jinx looked at the notch in the processing unit where the blade had gone in. She quietly made the decision she shouldn’t talk for a while.

They moved northeast to the hub.

The building’s exterior was not like the zone’s other structures. High reinforced walls, prefabricated panels in standard corporate grey, manufacturing stamps pressed into the concrete.

One wall where a grenade round had struck was partly collapsed, the part above the impact point leaning inward and no longer doing its job. Through the breach, emergency amber lighting was still working on residual power. The interior was deeper than the exterior suggested.

Blood trails came through the hole from inside.

Proxy accessed the management system through the network.

Ground floor processing, second floor laboratories, third floor labeled only PROCEDURE, with a different encryption from everything beneath it.

He bypassed the entrance lock and they went in. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝙬𝙚𝓫𝒏𝓸𝓿𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝙤𝓶

The ground floor equipment was recent, machinery that had been operational within a few years.

The machines were labeled with technical designations, and the byproduct evidence of what they processed was lined against the left wall in sealed waste containers, biohazard markers, the specific triangle for synthetic biological material.

They went up.

The second floor’s first room was implant storage floor to ceiling, sealed transparent cases on racks, each one containing cyberware.

Some were commercial models. Some had no designation Proxy could identify, custom configurations, modified versions of existing hardware, or things that had never had a known origin at all.

The second room had signs of recent habitation.

Cleared space. Supply packs against the wall. Ration wrappers. A terminal that had been accessed many times recently, its query history still logged in the active session.

Whoever had been working here had been cross-referencing numerical codes against the cases in the storage room, looking for specific items against a specific index.

Jinx stood in front of the terminal and read the query history.

She read it in silence for a long moment.

"These codes," she said. "They’re in the cyberware cases"

"Apparently," Proxy said.

"And the queries are..."

She stopped. She read the index format again. "These are serial numbers. Like implant serial numbers." She looked at him. "From people."

"From contestants," he said.

She was quiet for a moment.

"Including me?" she said.

"I don’t see why you’d be the only one excluded," he said.

She looked back at the terminal with mild shock and disbelief.

Nyx looked at the cyberware cases through the door of the storage room and said nothing.

The information wasn’t particularly interesting to her, unless Proxy felt it was.

The third floor required the separately encrypted door.

Proxy bypassed it with the same method he had used on the corporate caches throughout the island, and the door opened into a room larger than both rooms below it.

The ceiling was higher.

Surgical lighting spread out at full intensity, the kind designed to remove shadows entirely because shadows were not acceptable here.

In the center of the room sat a procedure chair, reclined, with armrests that included restraint fixtures and port arrays running down both sides.

The port arrays were direct cyberware interface connectors, hardwired into the chair’s management system and built for the specific purpose of accessing installed implants without removing them.

Workstation terminals were present along the walls.

An instrument rack had tools, some surgical, some calibration and modification tools for cyberware.

Nyx stood in the doorway and looked at the chair and the restraints.

"That’s a bit creepy," she said, with a honest tilt of her head.

Jinx was reading the labels on the instrument rack and not saying anything.

Proxy went to the nearest workstation and interfaced through the deck.

The hub network was the densest system he had encountered since arriving on the island, and the RAM chip expanded the pass into one complete read.

The operational layer opened first.

Modification logs. Installation records. Calibration histories indexed by number.

The numbers matched the cases in the storage room.

The modifications in those cases had been installed in specific numbered subjects during the transport sedation window. Every contestant on the island. The compliance device wasn’t the only surprise.

He read the facility’s isolation protocols.

The procedure room’s infrastructure included a surgical isolation field, standard in any facility where active cyberware modification occurred, preventing interference from nearby implants during precision surgery.

Triggering it would cut every active cyberware signal in range from the broadcast network.

The corporation’s surveillance would go dark.

The lead surgeon shielding protocol would protect the surgical system and, if applied through the management network, his cyberware.

He applied the shielding to himself

It took four seconds.

He looked at Nyx.

She was watching him from the doorway with the particular attention she brought when she had realized that he had found something significant and was deciding what to do with it.

She could not see the terminal from there.

She could see his posture, which had always been enough for her.

She gave him a gentle look.

The one with no conditions attached.

He triggered the isolation field.

The sound it made was not really a sound. It was the disappearance of a layer of ambient interference he had grown so used to that losing it was louder than hearing it ever had.

Every cyberware in the building went silent at once, including the corporation surveillance, including the little secrets Nyx had, including whatever Jinx had installed.

The neural interfaces received the field as a spike, and the brain responded the way it always responded to a spike it could not absorb.

It crashed out..

Nyx’s knees gave first.

The calibration tool she had been holding fell before she did, her grip releasing when the shock arrived. She went down without the drama of a fall.

Jinx was already down.

The hub was quiet.

The field was running.

The corporation’s broadcast was dark.

Proxy looked at the two of them on the floor.

He turned back to the terminal and started it up.