Ivo unwound a palm’s length of copper cable before he’d even decided to sit down, working it loose from the coil the way another man might crack his knuckles.
Two kilos of it, all told.
Digestible.
The ache in his molars had sharpened the moment he’d hefted the reel, a pull so clean he could taste it before the Line even named the purity.
He dropped onto the crate’s far side, back to the fuel-cell stack, and let the Assay do its work.
COPPER CONDUCTOR STOCK 2.14 KG PURITY 98.7% YIELD 2.09 KG MELT
Enough to carry him through Heat II’s threshold and past it.
Enough that he could stop counting the Robinsons’ leavings and start building real charge.
Enough that he didn’t have to take from survival.
Just from honesty.
He bit down.
The copper came apart under his teeth like burnt sugar, brittle and warm and singing all the way down.
The Line pulsed, satisfied, and the numbers climbed.
He was halfway through the second coil when footsteps scuffed gravel behind him.
Ivo swallowed fast, wiped his mouth, turned.
Don stood three meters back, hands up, grin crooked.
“Easy. Just me.”
“Thought you were offloading fuel cells.”
“Thought you were eating cable in private.” Don’s grin widened a notch.
“Relax. I’m not here to judge. I’m here to collect.”
Ivo set the cable down slowly.
“The favor.”
“The favor.” Don stepped closer, glanced at the half-eaten coil, and made a face that was equal parts impressed and disturbed.
“You actually chew it. I thought maybe you, I don’t know, dissolved it in acid or something.”
“Faster this way.”
“Yeah, well. Nightmares are faster too.” Don crouched, eye-level.
“I need help moving the crate. Somewhere the family won’t look. And I need you not to ask questions while we do it.”
Ivo looked at the crate.
At the polymer thing underneath the metal Don had promised not to explain.
“Moving it where?”
“Told you. No questions.”
“If it gets found, we both go down.”
“Which is why,” Don said lightly, “I’m asking the guy who eats evidence for a living.”
The taste of copper sat heavy on Ivo’s tongue.
The Line pulsed, warm and full and patient as debt.
He stood.
“Show me.”
They carried the crate in silence, one grip each, weight distributed clean.
Don led them past the supply tent, past the half-assembled water purifier, into the narrow gap between two downed hull sections that hadn’t been cleared yet.
A nook the salvage crews had written off as inaccessible.
Don had made it accessible.
“Here,” Don said.
They set it down.
Ivo’s hands ached.
The crate was heavier than two people’s worth of cable and blanking plates had any right to be.
Don pulled the tarp tighter, checked the sight-lines twice, then turned and offered Ivo a canteen.
“Drink. You look like you’re about to pass out, and I don’t need that on my conscience.”
Ivo drank.
The water tasted like plastic and glacial sediment and nothing like metal.
He handed it back.
“You didn’t ask,” Don said.
“You told me not to.”
“Yeah, but most people ask anyway.” Don capped the canteen, tucked it into his belt.
“You’re not most people.”
“Neither are you.”
Don laughed, short and honest.
“No. I’m the guy who smuggled a thing I can’t use onto a lifeboat I shouldn’t have been on, because the payout was worth the risk and the risk was somebody else’s problem.” He leaned against the false wall, studied Ivo with the same look he’d used on the cable.
“You’re the guy who eats metal and doesn’t ask for help. We’re a real pair.”
A sound light, rhythmic, wrong.
Pecking.
Ivo turned.
Debbie the chicken stood five feet away, head cocked, one beady eye fixed on the ground where Ivo had set the cable coil down to grip the crate.
Where he’d spilled filings.
Copper filings, fine as dust, scattered in a small bright line across the gravel.
Debbie pecked.
The Assay flared.
TRACE COPPER FRAGMENTS DETECTED BIOLOGICAL INTAKE REGISTERED NON-VIABLE STOCK
The numbers flashed red-orange, live and hungry and wrong, because the Line had just tried to read a chicken.
Don stared.
At Debbie.
At the filings.
At Ivo.
“Did your” Don stopped.
Started again.
“Did your thing just ping my chicken?”
Ivo said nothing.
Watched Debbie peck a second filing, decisive and unbothered.
The Assay pulsed again.
INTAKE COMPLETE MASS INSUFFICIENT PURGE RECOMMENDED
“She ate it,” Don said flatly.
“She ate your metal dust. And you saw it happen. Inside your head. Didn’t you.”
Ivo met his eyes.
Don’s grin came back, slow and incredulous and edging toward hysteria.
“I’m hiding contraband in a debris field with a guy whose superpower just got confused by poultry. This is my life now.”
“She’s fine,” Ivo said.
“She won’t.”
“You don’t know that. Debbie has no self-control.” Don scooped the chicken up, checked her beak, her crop, the feathers around her neck.
Debbie clucked, unbothered.
“If she dies, I’m blaming you.”
“She’s not going to die.”
“You’re sure.”
“The Line says the mass is insufficient. It’s not enough to hurt her.”
Don went very still.
“The Line.”
Ivo said nothing.
“You have a name for it.”
“I didn’t pick it.”
Don set Debbie down gently, brushed copper dust off his hands, and looked at Ivo with something that wasn’t quite humor and wasn’t quite fear and sat exactly in the place where friendship started.
“Okay,” Don said.
“Okay. I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that, because if I think too hard about the fact that the thing in your head named itself, I’m going to have a bad time.” He pointed at the crate.
“The deal still holds. You keep my thing off the manifest. I keep your thing off the rumor mill. And if anyone asks why we’re both in the debris field at the same time, we were moving fuel cells.”
“We were moving fuel cells,” Ivo repeated.
“See? You’re a natural.” Don offered his hand.
Ivo shook it.
Don’s grip was warm, callused, and steadier than anyone Ivo had trusted in longer than he could remember.
“One more thing,” Don said.
He didn’t let go.
“I’ve known a lot of guys with secrets. The ones who survive? They’re the ones who pick one person to stop lying to. Just one. Someone who’ll keep it when it counts.” He let go.
Stepped back.
Grinned.
“So pick good, kid.”
Debbie pecked at Ivo’s boot, curious and unstoppable.
Don scooped her up, tucked her under one arm, and walked back toward the supply tent whistling something off-key and unbothered.
Ivo stayed in the nook.
Let the Assay settle.
Let the copper sit warm and heavy in the space where the hunger had been.
Pick one person to stop lying to.
Judy’s eyes, after the rescue.
After the tremor.
After the lie he’d tried to hold and couldn’t.
The way she’d said talk to me like it was an order and an offer at the same time.
He left the nook.
The cable’s weight was gone.
His hands didn’t feel any lighter for it.
Pick one person.
Not a hard number to hit.
Just an impossible one to spend.