Nova POV
Day three starts like the others.
Coffee. Panel check. Patch is eating something at the kitchen counter and narrating his mission strategy to nobody in particular while Zero stands at the window doing the thing he does, where he is technically in the room but operating at a remove from it, present the way a loaded gun is present, quiet, potential, waiting for relevance.
Nova does her own panel check. Active missions. Faction movements. The clean northeastern signal that Zero flagged two nights ago now sits in her awareness like a splinter she cannot stop pressing.
She volunteers for the resource run because she needs to move. That is the honest version.
The safe version is that the safe zone's supply of certain items is getting low, and someone should go, and the run is short range, and her GLITCH has been more responsive lately, she can feel it the way you feel a muscle you've started learning to use, present and increasingly answerable.
Zero says he'll position nearby. He says it like a tactical statement and not like concern, and she accepts it in the same spirit.
She goes.
The collapsed storefront is on the corner of what used to be a pharmacy and something else she cannot identify, the signage long gone, just a bare facade and rubble. She has passed it twice already on this route. She passes it a third time, going back, bag over one shoulder, resource panel ticking up in the corner of her vision
"Nova."
She stops.
Mika steps out from behind the rubble with both hands raised. Visible. No weapons showing. She is wearing the same kind of Player-issue clothes everyone ends up in eventually, and her braids are coming loose at the edges, and her eyes are red in the specific way of someone who cried recently and did not sleep after.
Nova looks at her hands. Both of them. Checks that the gesture is what it looks like.
Then she just stands there. And waits.
This is new. The old Nova would have moved already toward her, toward the sound of her name in that voice, the pull of fourteen years of history acting like gravity. This Nova puts her feet flat on the pavement and watches.
Mika talks.
She talks for a long time. The story has a shape to it, a beginning with a threat, a middle with
an ultimatum, and an end with no good choices. Someone had her family. The Game made contact before it drafted her; she didn't know it worked that way, nobody told her, she was given a task and a consequence, and she was terrified, and she made a choice she cannot take back.
She is so sorry.
She says that three times. I am so sorry. Each time, her voice tightening as she means it, like the meaning of it is almost too heavy to get out.
Nova watches her face.
She looks for the part where the eyes match the words.
Eyes will do it before anything else. She learned this from years of watching her mother's hospital doctors, the ones who said we're optimistic with their mouth while their eyes were already doing the math in a different direction. She learned it from every shift manager who said we take care of our people and looked at the clock while saying it.
She looks for it in Mika's face, and she looks carefully, and she looks for a long time.
The sorrow is real. She can see that. The crying is real. The weight of whatever this has cost is real and visible and worn on Mika's face like weather damage.
The eyes do not match.
Not because Mika is lying. Something more complicated than lying. The eyes of someone who has already decided something and is hoping the apology will change the shape of it, reclassify it, make it smaller. The eyes of someone asking to be forgiven for something they have not finished doing.
Nova recognizes it.
She wishes she didn't.
When Mika finishes, the silence stretches between them, and Mika's hands are still raised and
Her eyes are very bright, and she is waiting for something, anger, or absolution, or the old Nova, the one who always came running, the one who would find a way to make this okay because she always found a way
"I hear you," Nova says.
Mika blinks.
Nova picks up her bag from where she set it down. Adjusts the strap on her shoulder.
Then she walks away.
Not fast. She makes herself not fast. Each step deliberate and even, the way Zero moves through dangerous terrain, no wasted motion, no unnecessary signal, just forward and forward and forward.
She does not run.
She does not look back.
She counts blocks the way she used to count minutes, something to measure against the feeling in her chest, which is not anger, she thought it would be anger, and it is not, it is something lonelier than anger, something that has no clean name.
She gets to the safe zone.
She gets through the door.
She closes it.
Three minutes.
She gives herself three. She slides down the inside of the door and sits on the floor and lets it happen, the shaking, the burning, the image of fourteen years ending in a rubble-strewn
corner with both hands raised. Her best friend, her first call, the person who sat with her in the hospital waiting room at two in the morning without being asked. The person she would have died for.
Technically did.
Three minutes.
Then she gets up. Washes her face over the kitchen sink. Breathes in, breathes out, her mother's system, always her mother's system.
She comes out of the kitchen.
Zero is in the hallway.
He does not ask what happened. He does not look at her face with the particular horror people have when they can tell you have been crying and do not know where to put that information.
He holds out coffee.
She takes it.
"She's working with a faction," he says.
"I know."
He looks at her. The look is not soft; nothing about him is soft, but it has a quality she is starting to recognize, the quality of his full attention, which he gives to very few things and which feels, when it lands, like being taken seriously by something that does not take much seriously.
"How are you standing?" he says.
She wraps both hands around the cup.
"I've been standing in worse."
The hallway is quiet. Somewhere above them, Patch is moving around on the floor above, his footsteps uneven and familiar. Outside, the bruise sky does what it always does.
Zero looks at her for one more moment.
Then: "Tell me about the faction."
She drinks her coffee.
"Northeast district," she says. "Clean borders. Architect-adjacent." She meets his eyes over the rim. "And Mika isn't just working with them. Whatever they promised her it's enough that she's still deciding whether to finish what she started."
He is quiet.
"Then we move first," he says.
She nods once.
Like that was ever in question.