By the time he reached home, the run had burned most of the noise out of him.
Most of it.
His father used to say a weak body made weak decisions faster, so Jup trained.
He started with push-ups first, then moved into plank holds, and finally settled into slow, controlled breathing while his pulse settled back into something usable.
He did not rush that part.
He never did.
Afterward, he sat cross-legged at his desk, surrounded by stripped wires, cracked casings, and salvaged components spread out like pieces of a language nobody else in the apartment spoke.
He would build until the world made a little more sense, or until sleep won.
His room was small enough that every object mattered: a tray of bent screws, three dead comm boards stacked by usefulness instead of category, a fan housing he still thought he could repurpose if he solved the noise problem, and the half-built idea of a drone frame living in his notebook like a promise to himself.
One day he would have enough parts, enough time, enough money.
One day, the thing in his head would be real.
He picked up a damaged rotor housing and turned it in his fingers.
The plastic was warped, still usable, maybe.
That was the thing most people got wrong about broken things.
They assumed damage ended value, but sometimes it just changed function.
He reached for the soldering tool, then stopped.
Voices drifted down the hall with Aya saying something too low to catch and Dominique answering louder than necessary because she always did.
The apartment settled around those sounds the way it always had: small, lived-in, surviving.
That should have grounded him.
It mostly did.
Jup set the rotor housing down and rubbed his thumb across the side of his wrist where the comm had vibrated that morning.
The phantom sensation of that projection still sat in memory too cleanly, not because it had shown anything impossible, but because everyone had reacted like it was normal.
That was how the city won half the time, not by making things disappear, but by making them familiar before anyone asked if they should exist at all.
Most people said the war was over because the bombs had stopped falling and the flags had stopped changing.
Jup knew better.
A war didn’t need fire to keep going.
Sometimes it lived in broken neighborhoods, in hungry eyes, in schools that tracked your value like a weather pattern, in systems that measured everything and explained nothing, and in boys like Marcus, learning their lines far too young.
Jup leaned back in his chair and stared at the components until the room went quiet around the edges.
Then—
His comm flickered with no notification, no sound, just a signal that was brief, clean, and gone.
Jup looked up slowly.
The room hadn’t changed.
The walls hadn’t moved.
Nothing in the apartment had made a sound it shouldn’t have.
But the air felt different now, tighter, like something invisible had stepped closer.
His comm flickered again.
This time, the projection did not open above his wrist.
It opened across his desk.
A thin line of white light stretched over the scattered wires and broken parts.
Then words formed, not from CMAS, not from the school, not from any sender he recognized.
JUREEL AMONCLASSIFICATION ERROR DETECTED
Jup stopped breathing.
The text blinked once.
Then another line appeared beneath it.
UNRANKED DOES NOT MEAN UNKNOWN
Jup stared at the projection.
His pulse slowed instead of rising.
That somehow felt worse.
Jup’s fingers curled against the edge of the desk.
Then every light in his room went out.
The comm died.
The apartment fell silent.
Not quiet.
Silent.
No refrigerator hum.
No hallway voices.
No pipes clicking in the wall.
No city noise bleeding through the window.
For one impossible second, it felt like Sector 7 itself had stopped breathing.
Then, somewhere far beneath the building, beneath the streets, beneath the patched concrete and buried war ruins—something answered.
A low vibration passed through the floor.
Jup felt it in his bones before he heard it.
His comm flashed once in the dark.
One last message burned across the glass.
ERROR CORRECTED
And for the first time in his life, Jup wondered if the system had made a mistake… or if something older had finally corrected it.