The wrist module was the first thing he saw.

It sat on the nightstand where he’d left it, screen dimmed to standby. The number behind the yellow square at the corner had moved overnight. Not by much. Enough.

Caleb sat up.

The barracks was cold the way the barracks was always cold. Iharu’s bunk was empty, blanket twisted, boots gone. Hiro’s was made. Rina’s looked the way Rina’s bunk had looked for two weeks. He pulled on his shirt and felt the heat in his lower ribs at the same time, the kind of heat that wasn’t pain yet but had stopped pretending to be nothing. The spirals were warm under his palm when he flattened his hand against the spot. He held it there until he stopped being able to feel his pulse against them.

His wrist buzzed.

[TALI: Get down here.]

He pulled his boots on without answering.

The artisan tunnel was thinner than it should have been at this hour. He passed a maintenance crew arguing about a regulator and three Rank Es with helmets under their arms. Nobody made eye contact on the way down. He took that as the new normal and stopped tracking it.

The shop door was unlocked. Tali was at the diagnostic rig with a coffee cup that had been full at some point and wasn’t now. She didn’t turn around when he came in.

"Sit."

He sat.

"Strip the harness."

He pulled the harness over his head, dagger and all, and set it on the bench. The hum he hadn’t realized he’d been carrying went quiet for thirty seconds and came back when she clipped a sensor onto his shirt over the spirals.

"Ninety-nine point one." Her voice was flat. "You touched the dagger again yesterday. Don’t lie to me about it."

"I knocked Kikaru’s rifle barrel down. The hilt brushed my hand for a second."

"That second cost you point eight."

"How much do I have."

"Point nine."

She still wasn’t looking at him. She was watching the graph populate on the rig, the green line climbing into the yellow zone at the right edge of the screen and sitting there. Her gum wasn’t moving in her cheek. She thumbed the wrapper at the corner of her mouth and didn’t say anything for a stretch that ran long enough for Caleb to count three breaths.

"What’s in the locker," he said.

"Same as yesterday."

"The Hacker contact you?"

"No."

"She’s about to."

Tali looked up at him then. "Why."

"Because the bypass moved overnight without me doing anything. She likes to move when something’s already moved."

The shop door buzzed.

Tali flicked her eyes to the side monitor. The courier feed showed up on it before she said anything. Black corporate uniform, empty hands except for a flat titanium case the length of his forearm. No patch on the shoulder. No name on the chest. Just a delivery code clipped to his collar and a face that made no effort to be remembered.

"I didn’t order anything," Tali said.

"I know."

"You want me to send him away."

"No."

The courier didn’t come into the shop. He set the case on the threshold, slid it across the floor with the side of his boot, and walked back the way he’d come without a word. The inner deadbolt clicked into place behind him. Tali waited two seconds before she spoke.

"Open it on the bench. Not on me. The shielding doesn’t help if it’s keyed to your biology."

He carried the case to the bench. The seal cracked when his thumb pressed against it. No tools. The lid opened on a hinge that didn’t squeak.

Inside, folded in dark gray tissue paper that smelled faintly of crushed orchids, was a suit.

Black. Charcoal lapels. The kind of fabric that read flat from across a room and read expensive up close. A folded white shirt sat under it. A pair of black cufflinks. A single tie. No card, no ribbon, no logo on the inside of the lid.

He lifted the lapel of the jacket and turned it.

Caleb’s measurements were stitched into the lining. Chest, shoulder, sleeve, waist, inseam. Not a tag. Not a printer slip. Stitched, by hand, in white thread, in numbers.

Tali leaned over his shoulder to look.

"How does she have those," she said.

"She had them before I met you." 𝑓𝘳𝘦𝑒𝑤𝑒𝘣𝘯ℴ𝘷𝘦𝓁.𝑐𝑜𝑚

The crushed-orchid smell sat in the back of his throat. He’d run into it twice before, both times in private rooms he hadn’t asked to be in. He let go of the lapel and set the lid back down without closing it, because closing it felt like an answer he hadn’t decided to give yet.

His wrist buzzed.

He didn’t pick it up. He didn’t have to. The text wrote itself in bright purple across the blue of the military display, big enough that Tali could read it from where she was standing.

[UNKNOWN USER: Don’t worry about the bypass.]

The text held.

[UNKNOWN USER: Wear what I sent you. The shunt won’t matter by Friday night.]

[UNKNOWN USER: Try not to disappoint me.]

The purple dissolved. The blue interface came back like nothing had happened.

Tali set her wrench down on the bench and didn’t pick it up again. She stared at the spot where the text had been.

"She’s not bluffing about Friday," Tali said.

"No."

"The shunt won’t matter because she’s giving you something at the gala that takes its place. Or because she’s already decided you’re not coming back from it."

"Yeah."

"Caleb."

"I know."

He stood there with one hand still resting on the lapel of the jacket. The fabric under his fingers was softer than anything in this building had any business being. The dagger was on the bench next to the case. The harness was on the bench next to the dagger. The wrist module was on his arm telling him he had nine-tenths of a percent of capacity left and a yandere on a private channel telling him not to worry about it.

He picked up the harness. He pulled it back over his shoulders and clipped it down. The dagger went into the kidney pocket on its own weight. He folded the tissue paper back over the suit and closed the lid of the case, and the latch caught with a precise click that was nothing like the latches in the rest of the shop.

"I’ll bring it back tonight," he said.

Tali didn’t answer.

"If I don’t come back tonight, the case is yours. Sell whatever you can pull off it."

"That’s not funny."

"It wasn’t a joke."

He picked the case up with his off hand. Lighter than he’d expected. The weight of it was wrong for the size of it, the way money was always wrong for the size of it. He nodded at her once, the way he nodded at her when he was paying her in advance for something he might not live to use, and walked out of the shop.

The door closed behind him.

The artisan tunnel was empty going up. He climbed the stairs one at a time. The case stayed light in his hand. The dagger stayed warm against his kidney. The bypass stayed at ninety-nine point one and rising, and the gala was in two nights, and the Hacker had broken silence to tell him she’d already decided what he was going to wear.

He made it to the top of the stairs before the wrist module lit up again.

[UNKNOWN USER: Good boy.]

The text held longer than the rest of them had.

He didn’t look at it until it dissolved on its own.