By eleven-thirty, Miles’s hands had stopped feeling like his own.
He’d spent the last four hours on his knees in the bay, chasing the seam he’d left in the concrete without knowing why, chiseling it back open just wide enough to feed a second line of copper down to the rebar grid.
Ronke had held the flashlight and said nothing useful for most of it, which turned out to be exactly what he needed — someone present, not someone directing.
“You’re sure this doesn’t just electrocute you the second someone steps on it,” she said, watching him twist the last splice closed with pliers he’d borrowed from his own toolbox, the one with QUANTITY SURVEYING scrawled on the side in his own handwriting from another life.
“I grounded it through the drainage grate.” He sat back on his heels, wiping his palms on his jeans, leaving grey streaks over the dried cement already there.
“Current runs through the slab, out through the grate, into the actual earth.
Anyone standing on the bay when it activates gets the jolt.
I don’t, as long as I’m not touching the frame when it fires.”
“As long as.”
“I did this job for two years, Ronke.
I know what a bad ground looks like.” He stood, joints cracking, and looked at his work — nothing to see, really, just concrete that looked exactly like concrete, the only sign of what was underneath a thin patched seam that would be invisible to anyone who hadn’t poured it themselves.
The gold text flickered at the edge of his vision, quieter now than it had been all night.
Modification Integration: Complete.
Advisory: System cannot verify structural safety of unregistered wiring.
“Then don’t verify it,” Miles said.
“Just don’t fight me on it either.”
The system didn’t answer.
It hadn’t argued with him once since the first “outside parameters” warning — like it had decided, somewhere in its cold gold logic, that arguing with a man who’d already made up his mind cost more than it was worth. Follow the newest chapters on novelping . com.
Eleven-fifty.
He killed the office lights and stood in the dark doorway, looking out over the gravel lot bathed in the weak orange wash of the one working streetlamp.
Everything looked exactly like it had every other night — the horn speakers silent on their poles, the gate hanging slightly open the way he’d left it on purpose, an obvious, unlocked invitation.
Ronke stood beside him, arms crossed, watching the street beyond the fence.
“If nobody comes,” she said, “you’ve spent four hours wiring a floor for nothing.”
“If nobody comes, I’ve still got a floor that can do this.
That’s not nothing.” Miles kept his eyes on the gate.
“Whoever wanted the drive back at Marina Road, they don’t want a fight in a strange building on their schedule.
They want it on their terms.
So the moment I don’t show, and they realize I’m not scared enough to run, they come looking.
Because that’s what people who send enforcers do when a broke kid doesn’t flinch.”
Midnight came without ceremony.
No countdown in his vision this time — the system had apparently decided this particular clock belonged entirely to him.
At 12:04, the first headlights swung off the main road.
Not a sedan this time.
A pickup, older, the kind used for moving equipment rather than moving people quietly, its engine loud and unbothered about being heard.
It rolled to a stop just outside the gate, and two men climbed out — not enforcers in tailored jackets, just men in work clothes, the kind Miles had spent two years standing next to on construction sites, which made what happened next feel worse instead of better.
One of them pushed the gate open the rest of the way. New chapters come out on g.com first.
Miles’s gold interface flared to life for the first time since the wiring finished.
Foreign Presence Detected: 2 Subjects.
Threat Classification: Unarmed.
Physical Intimidation Likely.
Perimeter Trigger: Standing By.
The two men walked straight into the bay — the exact bay, the exact patch of concrete Miles had spent the night rewiring, because it was the widest, cleanest stretch of floor in the whole lot and the obvious place to stand while you waited for someone to show up and explain themselves.
“Miles!” one of them called out, not shouting exactly, just loud enough to carry.
“We know you’re here.
We just want the drive.
Nobody has to get hurt tonight.”
Miles stepped out of the office doorway into the edge of the streetlight, letting them see him, letting them see that he wasn’t running.
“You’re standing in the wrong spot,” he said.
The man frowned, glanced down at the ordinary-looking concrete under his boots, and looked back up with the particular confusion of someone who’d expected a threat to look like something other than a car wash floor.
“What are you talking about—”
Miles reached into his pocket, closed his hand around the small remote switch he’d wired to the second line — nothing fancy, just a modified garage door opener, the kind of thing you could find in any hardware stall on the avenue — and pressed it.