Server 9-Chapter 41: THE SISTER

Sarah didn’t speak right away.

She sat across from me in the Titan’s cargo bay, her hands folded in her lap, and her eyes on the floor. The blue screens behind her cast her shadow, which made it look long and thin across the metal wall. Everyone else was quiet — Maya leaning against the doorframe, with her rifle across her chest. Glitch frozen at his workbench, with his soldering iron in one hand. Even Jax, sitting on a crate in the corner with Tiny standing guard behind her, had stopped chewing her gum.

They all knew. I could feel it. The way the air gets heavy when everyone in the room knows something except you.

"Talk," I said.

Sarah looked up. Her eyes were tired. Not the tired I was used to seeing — not the Admin running out of power, not the Queen calculating her next move. This was guilt. Raw, open guilt. The kind that sits on your chest and makes it hard to breathe.

"When I was inside the Core," she began slowly, "tagging the Sleepers — I saw everything. Every pod. Every file. Every name in the system." She paused. "Including the Harvest queue. The list of people scheduled for the next cycle."

My hands went cold. Both of them — the burned one and the blistered one. Cold in a way that had nothing to do with temperature.

"Jasmine was on the list," I said.

It wasn’t a question. I already knew. I’d known since the Chapel, when Sarah’s hands had clenched in her lap and she’d said "it can wait." I just hadn’t wanted to believe it.

Sarah nodded. "She’s flagged as a high-priority target. Budget tier. Server 12. She’s—"

"She’s my sister. I know where she is."

"Elias—"

"How long have you known?" I asked.

Silence.

"How long, Sarah?"

"Since the Core." Her voice cracked. Just barely. "I saw her name while I was writing the protection flags. I wanted to tell you in the elevator. But you were bleeding from your ears and running on fumes, and I made a call. I decided you needed to survive the next ten minutes more than you needed the truth."

"That wasn’t your call to make."

"I know."

The cargo bay was so quiet I could hear Ares humming through the walls. That low, broken, recovering hum — like a heartbeat learning to beat again.

I stood up. My chair scraped against the metal floor. The sound was too loud.

"You should have told me."

"And what would you have done?" Sarah stood too. Her voice hardened — not with anger, but with the sharp, brittle edge of someone defending a decision they hate. "You were at one percent energy with two destroyed hands. If I’d told you your sister was on a kill list, you would have turned around and marched straight back into Sector 4. Alone. And you would have died."

"You don’t know that."

"I know exactly that. Because that’s who you are, Elias. You’re the man who bites a machine with his teeth to save strangers. You think I don’t know what you’d do for your own blood?"

The words hit me like a slap. Not because they were wrong. Because they were right.

I would have gone back. Without question. Without thinking. I would have walked into Malachi’s teeth with both hands burning and one percent energy and I would have died in a hallway somewhere, choking on my own stubbornness, and Jasmine would still be in that pod.

And Sarah knew that. She’d known it in the elevator. She’d made the cold, logical, heartless, correct decision to keep her mouth shut.

I hated her for it. And I respected her for it. And I didn’t know which feeling was stronger.

"She’s declining," I said. My voice sounded far away. Like someone else was using my mouth. "The system alert said she’s declining. What does that mean?"

Glitch answered. He’d pulled up the medical data on his screen — Jasmine’s file, pulled from the system during the Core hack.

"Her lungs are failing," he said quietly. He didn’t look at me. He looked at the screen like it was easier to talk to numbers than to my face. "The silicosis is advanced. It’s been eating her lungs for years. The budget tier pod she’s in — it’s keeping her alive, but barely. Old hardware. Patched together. And recycled parts. The kind of thing they give people they don’t plan on saving."

He swallowed.

"At her current rate of decline, she has... maybe three weeks. If she stays in that pod."

Three weeks.

Twenty-one days.

I sat back down. Not because I chose to. Because my legs stopped working.

I thought about Jasmine. Not the file on the screen — the real Jasmine. The one who used to braid her hair in two long ropes and swing them at me when I made bad jokes. The one who laughed so hard at stupid things that she’d snort, and then laugh harder because she’d snorted. The one who used to sneak me extra food rations when I worked double shifts, tucking protein bars into my locker with little notes that said things like "Eat. You’re too skinny to be a hero."

She was thirteen when the coughing started. Little coughs at first — the kind everyone in the Undercity had, because the air was poison and the water was worse. But hers didn’t stop. They got deeper. Wetter. She started leaving blood on her tissues and hiding them under her mattress so I wouldn’t see.

But I saw it.

The doctors — if you could call them that, the budget-tier med-techs who worked out of closet-sized clinics with expired equipment — said it was silicosis. Dust in her lungs. The same dust that everyone in the Deep breathed every day, but Jasmine’s body couldn’t fight it the way others could. Bad luck, they said. Bad genes. Bad air. As if luck and genes and air were things you could fix when you made thirty credits a week wiping pods.

I put her in the best pod I could afford. Budget tier. Server 12. It kept her breathing. Kept her stable. Kept her frozen in that space between alive and dead where the machines did the living for you.

And I went to work. Every day. Every shift. Wiping glass. Checking vitals. Smiling at pods full of rich people living their digital dreams while my sister rotted in a bargain-basement coffin three sectors away.

I did it because I thought I was saving her. I thought if I worked hard enough, long enough, I could earn enough to move her up. Better pod. Better tier. Better chance.

Now I was sitting in a wrecked Titan surrounded by an army of junk robots, and my sister had three weeks to live. All that fighting. All that power. And I still couldn’t save the one person who mattered most.

What good is eating gods if you can’t save your own sister?

"What do we need?" I asked. My voice was steady. I don’t know how.

Sarah and Glitch looked at each other. One of those looks where a whole conversation happens in a second — who should speak, what to say, how hard to push.

"A medical pod," Glitch said. "Corp grade. The kind that can rebuild lung tissue from scratch. We’re talking high-end tech — nano-repair systems, cellular regenerators, everything. There are two options."

He held up one finger.

"Option one: Sector 1. Malachi’s tower. The best medical tech in the city. Top floor. Behind an army of Iron Legion soldiers, the Black Ice firewall, and a god who wants you dead. We’d need to fight our way through the most heavily defended building on the planet."

He held up a second finger.

"Option two: The Triads. Dragon-Head Wu controls the black market medical supply chain through Sector 3. He’s got stolen Corp pods in his warehouses. Not as good as Sector 1, but good enough to stabilize Jasmine and buy us months instead of weeks."

"Wu wants me dead," I said. "I drained his penthouse, broke his sword, and jumped out his window."

"Wu wants money," Glitch corrected. "He wanted you dead because Malachi was paying him. But after the Casino? After we embarrassed him and escaped? Wu isn’t working with Malachi anymore. Malachi burned that bridge by sending gunships into Triad airspace to chase us. Wu took that personally."

"So they’re enemies now?"

"Not exactly. More like two snakes who stopped pretending to be friends. Wu’s got his own problems. The Triads are starting to split apart — other bosses smell weakness. He lost respect when we escaped. His empire is falling apart."

"How do you know all this?" Maya asked from the doorframe. Her voice was sharp. And suspicious.

Glitch shrugged. "I know things."

There it was again. That flicker. That moment where the teenage hacker act slipped and something else showed through — something older, something that processed information too fast and knew things no street orphan should know. I decided not to think about it now. I would deal with it later — because right now, other things matter more.

"So we go to Sector 3," I said. "We find Wu. We take a medical pod."

"Not take," Sarah said. She sat back down. The Queen was returning — I could see it in her posture, in the way her spine straightened and her chin lifted. The guilt was still there, hidden behind her eyes, but she was pushing it away. "We negotiate. Wu is a businessman first. We need something he wants more than revenge."

"What does a Triad boss want?"

Sarah’s eyes glowed faintly blue. Just a flicker — there and gone. "Power. Territory. And the one thing Malachi took from him six months ago — the Golden Ledger. It’s a list of every Corporation official who takes bribes from the Triads. Names, amounts, dates. Malachi stole it as insurance — as long as he holds it, Wu can’t move against the Corp without exposing his own network."

"So if we get the Ledger back to Wu—"

"He owes us. Big. A medical pod would be pocket change compared to what that list is worth to him. And maybe more than a pod — an alliance with the Triads would give us resources, fighters, and access to every black market channel in the city."

"Where is the Ledger?" Maya asked.

Sarah paused. "That’s the problem. Malachi keeps it in a secure data vault. Sector 3. Underground. The old bank district — before the wars, it was the financial center of the city. The vaults are still there, still powered, and still guarded."

"A heist," Glitch said. His eyes were bright. The grin was back — that feral, excited, slightly terrifying grin. "You’re talking about a heist."

"I’m talking about a negotiation that requires aggressive acquisition of leverage," Sarah said.

"That’s a heist," glitch said.

"Fine. It’s a heist."

I looked around the cargo bay. At Maya, who gave me a single nod — no hesitation, no questions. At Glitch, who was already pulling up maps of Sector 3 on his cracked datapad. At Jax, who popped her gum and shrugged — the universal Jax gesture for "I’m in, just point me at the problem." At Tiny, who rumbled behind her like a truck agreeing to a road trip.

At Sarah, who met my eyes with something that might have been an apology. Or might have been a promise. Or might have been both.

"Three weeks," I said. "That’s our clock. Everything we do from now on points at Jasmine. We get the Ledger. We trade it for the pod. We save my sister. And then—"

I stopped. Took a breath.

"And then we burn the whole system to the ground."

I pulled up my wrist-comp. The display flickered — cracked from the sewer water, but still holding on. Tough little machine.

[QUEST UPDATE: THE UPRISING]

[NEW OBJECTIVE: ACQUIRE MEDICAL POD — PRIORITY ALPHA]

[SUB-OBJECTIVE: LOCATE THE GOLDEN LEDGER]

[SUB-OBJECTIVE: INFILTRATE SECTOR 3 VAULT]

[SUB-OBJECTIVE: NEGOTIATE WITH DRAGON-HEAD WU]

[TIME LIMIT: 21 DAYS]

[LOCATION: SECTOR 3 — THE GREY ZONE]

Twenty-one days. A dying sister. A Triad war. A heist in a city that want me dead. And somewhere in the walls — in every camera, every wire, every server — Malachi was watching. Always watching. Always patient. And always hungry.

But so was I.

I clenched my good fist.

"We leave at dawn," I said. "Somebody wake me up if the world ends before then."

Nobody laughed. But Jax blew a bubble.

Close enough.