Ch 41.

"Your suit didn’t just lag. Something inside your chest tried to eat the lithium battery."

Staring at the cracked glass of the secondary monitor on Tali’s workbench, Caleb locked his jaw. "Eat it."

"Figure of speech, Mercer." Tali tapped her grease-stained wrench against the metal casing of the discarded battery pack. "I am talking about a localized power draw. Massive voltage drop originating right over your central chest node. The sync-mesh fired, hit a biological heat spike, and drained the core trying to compensate. The draw pattern is too clean for random wire damage. Something is pulling power."

A hollow cramp twisted his stomach. Starvation scraped against his ribs, searching for fuel to finish mending the torn artery in his neck.

"Bad connections," Caleb offered, keeping his tone entirely flat. "Sweat in the chest plate. The surplus gear rusts fast." 𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

A pink gum bubble snapped loudly over the screech of a distant arc welder.

"Do not insult my diagnostics. Rusted gear arcs. This siphoned power straight from the lithium cell. Whatever unregulated black-market regulator you wired into the grid is shorting out my weave."

"Will it fail on the next hit?" Caleb asked.

"Not if I isolate the circuit."

Pulling a heavy soldering iron from the crowded workbench, Tali pointed the hot tip toward the dark canvas harness resting on the counter.

"I can wire a Power Isolation Shunt directly into the Break-Tab rig," Tali explained, slipping back into her mechanical element. "It diverts the chest-node feedback loop away from the main battery. Protects the core cell and keeps the suit from going dark mid-fight. Plus, it logs the abnormal draw on a separate encrypted drive. I want to see exactly what your cheap upgrades are doing to my gear."

Kikaru stepped closer to the workbench. Her pristine gray academy jacket contrasted sharply with the grease coating the floorboards.

"You are ignoring a massive diagnostic failure," she stated, pointing a manicured finger at the screen. "A standard short circuit does not coordinate with kinetic damage. You are accepting equipment modified around an unknown failure mode. The military will not clear a fractured asset for deployment."

"I am accepting equipment that keeps me standing," Caleb replied.

The blue glass of Caleb’s wrist module chimed.

Vibrant purple code washed over the military grid, completely erasing the public interface.

[FUNDS TRANSFERRED: 4,500 CREDITS. SHUNT AUTHORIZED.]

A tiny padlock icon blinked in the corner of the glass.

[??? : Let the mechanic wire you up. I want my investment fully functional.]

Swiping his thumb over the glass, Caleb killed the screen. The financial control twisted his empty gut. The ghost monitored the diagnostic audio straight through his earpiece, paying for the repairs before Tali even finished pitching the price.

Checking her own terminal, Tali raised an eyebrow. "Payment cleared. Your billionaire works fast."

Grabbing the heavy canvas harness by the straps, she rounded the counter. "Arms up."

Caleb raised his arms. Tali stepped right into his personal space, wrapping the thick canvas over his shoulders. She aligned the heavy white ceramic plates directly over his bruised collarbone, her bare fingers brushing the edge of the medical tape sealing his neck.

"Locking the nodes." She secured a thick diagnostic cable to the base of his spine and tapped a command into her datapad.

The synthetic fibers of the undersuit contracted violently.

Bone-snapping pressure clamped down over his fractured ribs. Caleb grunted. His knees buckled under the sheer force of the miscalibration as fire tore across his sternum.

"Dammit," Tali cursed.

She hammered a manual release button on her datapad. The suit instantly went slack. Gripping the edge of the metal workbench, Caleb sucked in a ragged breath to stay upright.

"The shunt misread your resting heart rate," Tali muttered. Her fingers flew across the glass screen, rewriting the routing code in real-time. "Hold still. Calibrating the bypass."

Tapping the screen again initiated a slower tightening sequence. The material molded to his chest with a firm, manageable tension, letting the heavy ceramic plates settle securely into place over his joints.

"Get in the rig," Tali instructed, gesturing toward a heavy hydraulic test frame suspended by thick steel chains.

Stepping onto the metal platform, Caleb braced himself. Tali locked a heavy iron swing-arm flush against the white ceramic plate resting over his right shoulder.

Keying a sequence into the wall terminal, she ducked behind a blast shield.

"Brace yourself, Mercer. Simulating a Class-4 blunt impact."

He planted his boots.

The hydraulic arm swung, slamming a solid steel piston directly into the ceramic tab.

CRACK.

White dust rained onto the metal floorboards. Concussive force scattered outward, bypassing his healing collarbone entirely as the heavy canvas absorbed the residual shock. The kinetic shear redirected perfectly away from his skeleton, allowing him to hold his ground.

"Clean break," Tali noted, tracking her monitor.

A hollow pull grabbed Caleb’s chest. The physical impact agitated the healing tissue, spiking the starvation hard against his spine.

On the screen, a red voltage line plummeted.

Tali typed rapidly. "Battery dipped. The shunt caught the feedback loop. Core power stabilized at eighty percent."

Tapping a separate command, she quietly moved the encrypted abnormal data file into a hidden local folder on her terminal, securing the telemetry for her own research.

Stepping out from behind the shield, Tali unhooked the rig and tossed a dense canvas pouch onto the workbench. It landed with a heavy, chalky clatter.

"Replacement tabs," she explained, tapping the bag. "You have three in the pouch. Three heavy mistakes. Break one, slot a new plate in. Break them all, buy another set."

Picking up the pouch, Caleb tested the weight. It felt like tangible survival. He clipped it to his tactical belt.

Tali plugged a sync cable from her terminal into the military network port on the wall, uploading a sanitized diagnostic packet that bypassed the abnormal power draw entirely.

Caleb’s wrist module chimed with standard blue text.

[GEAR CERTIFICATION: CONDITIONAL PASS] [FIELD USE: TRAINING ONLY] [RECOVERY WINDOW: 10 DAYS] [FIELD EVALUATION REVIEW: PENDING]

A silver phone vibrated inside Kikaru’s uniform pocket.

Pulling it out, she checked the screen. Her rigid posture tightened.

"The PR team requires my presence for the prototype-armor press conference," she announced, sliding the phone away. "Followed by a mandatory medical toxicity screen."

She looked at Caleb. The sterile workshop lights reflected off her dark hair. The freezing memory of the cheap motel room hung heavy in the air between them, an unspoken weight pressing against the grease-stained walls.

Swallowing hard, Kikaru adjusted her pristine collar, forcing the corporate mask back into place.

"I will review your training schedule on the grid." Her voice dropped a fraction of an inch in volume, betraying the severe awkwardness she refused to voice aloud.

She turned on her heel. Her carbon-fiber brace clicked a sharp, demanding rhythm against the concrete as she marched out of the artisan district.

Caleb stood in the grease-stained shop. He had the Break-Tab Harness, a pouch of ceramic plates, a ten-day recovery window, and a battery issue completely unresolved.

"If that power draw gets worse," Tali warned, wiping her hands on a shop rag, "the shunt will overload. Your suit goes dark mid-fight. Fix your wiring, scrubber."

Offering a short nod, Caleb gathered his ruined surplus gear, shoved it into his duffel bag, and left the underground market.

He rode the transit rail back to Barracks 4 in the Seventh Division sector.

The narrow room was freezing. Dropping his canvas duffel bag onto the floorboards, he sat on the edge of the stiff, plastic-wrapped mattress. He pulled a cheap, spiral-bound notebook and a black pen from his jacket pocket.

Flipping to the first blank page, he ignored the hollow starvation gnawing at his gut. He left the tunnels off the page. He left the pain off it too. He wrote the practical facts.

Green streak. Disposal-yard photo, five years ago. Primary stream-rights holder. Access to SSS-Rank operator. Optical face distortion. Knows about battery drain and deep suit data.

He stared at the ink on the cheap paper. A billionaire hacker with SSS-Rank access had stood on a rusted walkway watching a teenage scrubber haul rotting bone marrow long before the military grid ever gave him a camera. She funded his survival. She manipulated his gear.

Clicking the pen shut, he stared at the page.

Why me before the stream?