The unconscious man’s breathing had steadied by the time Ronke finished talking, but nobody in the lot looked relieved about it.
“We can’t leave him like this,” Miles said, crouching beside the man again, close enough now to see the shallow rise and fall of his chest, the faint tremor still running through his fingers.
“Whatever the system did to him, it’s still working through his body.”
“We’re not calling an ambulance.” Ronke’s voice was flat, final.
“Not to a car wash that just electrocuted two men off the grid. That’s a headline neither of us survives.”
“So what, we just wait and hope?”
“We do exactly what I trained myself to do a long time ago and forgot how useful it was.” Ronke knelt on the other side of the man, checked his pulse a third time, then rolled him gently onto his side, tucking one arm under his head.
“Recovery position. Keeps the airway clear if he’s sick. We watch him. If he doesn’t come around in twenty minutes, then we talk about the ambulance, and we deal with whatever headline comes with it.”
The first man — conscious, sitting exactly where the current had dropped him — watched all of this with the particular silence of someone deciding whether speaking again might get him hurt worse.
“What’s your name,” Miles asked him.
The man hesitated.
“Tunde.”
“Tunde. Your friend’s name.”
“Bayo.”
Saying the names out loud did something to the air in the lot that Miles hadn’t expected — turned two anonymous bodies on the concrete back into people, the way “the enforcer” had never quite become a person to him but “Bayo, unconscious, tucked on his side by a woman who used to run crews like this one” absolutely was.
The gold text flickered at the edge of his vision, uncertain now in a way it hadn’t been all night. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
System Note: Subject prioritizing casualty welfare over strategic advantage.
Advisory: Recommend interrogation while compliance is high.
“No,” Miles said, before the thought had even fully finished.
“Not like this. Not while he’s scared and his friend’s on the ground.”
The system didn’t argue.
It just went quiet, the gold light dimming to its resting shimmer, watching without commenting — which felt, somehow, worse than a warning would have.
Bayo stirred at the nineteen-minute mark, coughing hard, his eyes opening to the sight of Ronke’s face close to his and Miles crouched a few feet away, and for one raw second there was pure animal panic in his face before Tunde’s voice cut through it.
“You’re okay. You’re okay, we’re not — nobody’s going to hurt you again.”
Bayo’s breathing evened out slowly, his eyes tracking from Tunde to Ronke to Miles, landing last on the concrete underneath him like he could somehow see the wire buried in it.
“What was that,” he said, voice raw.
“Something I built,” Miles said.
“Something that was never meant to hit somebody like you.” He meant it, and hearing himself say it out loud made it feel truer and worse at the same time.
Ronke helped Bayo sit up slowly, one hand steady on his shoulder, and looked at Miles over the top of his head.
“They need to go,” she said.
“Both of them. Before Fela realizes his men are late checking in.”
“And say what? Sorry, tell your boss the trap worked?”
“Say nothing. That’s the whole plan. They walk out that gate, they go home, and as far as Fela knows, something went wrong on-site that his men can’t fully explain — which is true, and safer for everyone than the truth being any more specific than that.” Ronke looked back down at Bayo.
Tunde nodded fast, too fast, the nod of a man who would have agreed to anything in that moment to get off that concrete.
Bayo, steadier now, held Miles’s gaze for a long moment before he spoke.
“He’ll know something’s different,” Bayo said quietly.
“Fela always knows. That’s why people don’t say no to him.” He let Tunde help him to his feet, swaying once before finding his balance.
“You should be more scared than you look right now.”
They left the way they’d come — through the gate Miles had left open on purpose, the pickup’s engine coughing to life in the dark, taillights shrinking down the avenue until the street swallowed them whole.
Miles stood in the middle of his own gravel lot, the concrete cooling under his boots, the horn speakers silent on their poles, and felt none of the satisfaction he’d expected to feel after surviving the night he’d built toward.
“That’s not the end of it,” he said.
“No,” Ronke agreed.
“That’s the beginning of the part where Fela stops sending men who don’t know what they’re walking into, and starts coming himself.”
Behind Miles’s eyes, the gold text finally stirred again, cautious this time, almost careful.
New Directive Pending: Confrontation Protocol — Fela Adeyemi.
Status: Locked.
Awaiting further data.
Even the system, it seemed, wasn’t ready to tell him what came next.