Ivo was helping Will sort salvaged wire by gauge when she walked into the supply tent tablet under one arm, the stale-coffee smell of the command station trailing her, and a look that made his molars ache.
“Morning.” She didn’t glance at him.
Her eyes went to the inventory crates, the manifests clipped to the support poles.
“Will, find your father. I’m running a materials audit.”
Will glanced at Ivo.
“Is something wrong?”
“We’re short on structural aluminum. Not by much. But enough that it matters.”
Ivo kept his hands steady on the spool.
He’d eaten aluminum two days ago, a bent cargo strap buckle; last week, part of a sheared strut bracket.
Small stuff, pieces he’d told himself were invisible.
Someone had counted them anyway.
“How short?”
“Four-point-three kilograms.” Calm as a weather report.
“I’ve checked my logs twice. Either I miscounted which I didn’t or we’ve lost mass somewhere between the crash and now.”
She looked up.
Not at Ivo.
At the tent’s aluminum support frame, the cargo netting reading the room the way she read systems, hunting the discrepancy.
“In my experience, a system only loses mass to one of two things. A leak, or a thief.” A faint smile.
“I intend to find out which.”
Will left.
Ivo finished coiling the wire and walked out before she could notice the metallic taste still coating his tongue.
He found Don by the water purification rig, elbow-deep in a filter housing.
“We have a problem,” Ivo said quietly.
Don didn’t look up.
“If it’s the flow rate, I know. If it’s Debbie, she’s innocent.”
“She’s auditing materials. Four kilos short on aluminum.”
Don’s hands stopped.
He pulled his arm out of the housing, wiped his palms on his pants, and the chemical tang of purification salts sharpened between them.
“Four kilos.”
“She doesn’t think it’s a miscount.”
“Of course she doesn’t.” Don stood.
“How much of that is you?”
Ivo did the math.
“Maybe two. Two and a half.”
“And the rest?”
“No idea.”
Don turned the wrench over in his hands twice before he spoke.
“Okay. We find something aluminum that broke structural failure, metal fatigue. Something plausible she’ll accept got scrapped, and we say we forgot to log it.”
“She won’t believe we forgot.”
“She’ll believe I forgot. I keep a chicken in a toolbox. Low expectations work in my favor.”
“She’ll want to see the piece.”
Don exhaled through his teeth.
“Better idea?”
“Not yet.”
“Then we go with mine.” He grabbed a rag.
“I’ll tell her I pulled a cracked bracket off the Chariot last week, tossed it in the scrap pile without logging it. You back me up.”
“She’ll check the Chariot.”
“Then I’d better go crack a bracket.”
Ivo caught his arm.
“Don”
“Look.” Voice dropped.
“You’ve kept half this camp from falling apart with your hands and whatever the hell you do when no one’s looking. I don’t know what you are. But she’s got a mind like a steel trap, and if she decides you’re the answer to her discrepancy, she won’t stop until she’s solved you.”
He pulled free.
Started toward the Chariot.
Judy found him an hour later, kneeling by the camp’s main support frame, running his fingers over the joints.
“Don told me,” she said.
He didn’t look up.
“Told you what?”
“That my mother’s counting everything and you’ve been eating things she wrote down.” Judy crouched next to him, voice low.
“How bad?”
“Two kilos. Don’s covering the rest.”
“How?”
“Breaking a part so he can say he already broke it.”
A beat.
“Not the worst plan I’ve heard today.”
“Won’t hold if she digs.”
“Then we make sure she doesn’t.” Clinical the same voice she used talking him through a purge.
“What did you eat?”
“A buckle. A bracket. Shavings from a filed edge.”
“Anything she’d notice missing?”
“I thought I was careful.”
“Careful isn’t the same as invisible.” Judy stood.
“If Don’s covering half, we need to turn the other half into a clerical error instead of a mystery.”
“Like what?”
“Working on it. But we figure it out before she does or this stops being an abstract risk and becomes an exposure we can’t walk back.”
Ivo looked at her.
The medic who’d held his secret less than a day and was already engineering a cover, building the lie a support structure so it could stand on its own.
“You don’t have to do this.”
“Yes, I do. If she finds out what you are before we’re ready, she’ll lock you out of everything that matters. And we need you.”
She pulled him to his feet.
“Come on. Let’s go see what Don’s breaking.”
By the time the evening briefing was called, the story was ready.
Three separate secret-keepers had spent the afternoon becoming a small conspiracy, and now it was time to see if the fabrication held.
Don stood near the fire, sheepish, explaining he’d pulled a cracked Chariot bracket last week stress fracture, his fault for overloading the cargo rack and tossed it in the scrap pile without logging it.
“I know,” he said, hands up.
“Sloppy. I’m sorry.”
She looked at him.
At her tablet.
“Show me.”
The bracket was there, cracked cleanly along a weld line Ivo had scored with a blade and Don had stressed to failure with a pry bar.
It looked like exactly what happened when you overloaded a vehicle and didn’t check the frame.
She picked it up.
The scrape of aluminum against her thumbnail was loud in the quiet camp.
“Two-point-one kilograms,” she said.
“Sounds about right.”
She set it down.
“That still leaves me two kilos short.”
Judy stepped in.
“I requisitioned aluminum sheeting for the med tent sterile surface patches. Logged it under medical supplies, not materials.”
Her mother’s eyes sharpened.
“How much?”
“Two sheets. About a kilo each.”
“Show me.”
The sheets were there, clean and flat, zip-tied as splash guards behind the wash station.
Ivo had fabricated them yesterday from a cargo panel. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
She ran a hand over one.
Cross-referenced.
“You logged this as ‘sanitation equipment.'”
“That’s what it is.”
A long silence.
Another note.
The tablet closed.
“All right. That accounts for it.” She looked at Don.
At Judy.
At Ivo, standing a few feet back, silent.
“In the future if you pull a part, you log it. If you requisition material, you log it correctly. We don’t have the margin to lose four kilograms because three people didn’t write things down.”
“Understood,” Don said.
“Won’t happen again,” Judy said.
Her gaze lingered on Ivo.
He didn’t look away.
He wasn’t part of the story just a bystander who happened to smell like machine oil and clean metal.
She turned and walked toward the command tent.
The suspicion wasn’t dead.
It had just gone quiet, the way she went quiet before she circled back to a number that hadn’t added up.
Ivo’s teeth unclenched.
His jaw ached from it.
Don clapped him on the shoulder.
“See? Low expectations.”
Judy wasn’t smiling.
She watched her mother walk away.
“She didn’t buy it,” Ivo said quietly.
“She accepted it. Deferred, not dead.” Judy looked at him.
“Which means we don’t do this again. No more eating things she’s counted. Three people can hold one lie steady. They can’t hold a lie that keeps getting heavier.”
Don sighed.
“So now I’m in a conspiracy. Genuinely new for me.” He walked off, muttering about needing a drink and settling for recycled water.
Judy stayed.
“You didn’t have to do this,” Ivo said.
“I did it because if she’d found out today, on her terms, she’d have made you a problem to solve instead of a person to protect.”
Steel and care the same mix as the night before, and underneath it the vertigo of what they’d just done: three people deceiving the family’s leader, together, on purpose.
“We bought time,” Judy said.
“Don’t waste it.”
She left him by the frame he’d been checking for damage he’d never caused.
The evening air tasted like dust and cooling metal, and past the tree line a night-bird started up one low repeating note like a question without an answer.
Ivo stayed there as the camp settled, listening to the night-bird ask its one repeating question.
Three of them now, standing under the same lie the way three struts held one roof steadier for the extra weight-bearing, and just as easy for one bad reading to bring the whole frame down at once.
A leak, or a thief.
He was both.
And the smartest person on this planet had just decided to find out which.
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