The staircase was at the far end of the processing floor and they climbed to the maintenance walkway above.

The view from the walkway was down into the machinery rows, the overhead lighting catching the tanks and conveyors in a grid of partial shadow, and outward through the outer windows toward the northeast where the fight’s glow sat above the structures as a persistent orange line against the zone’s darker architecture.

Proxy paused at a section of walkway where the network signal pulled strong from below, a node cluster in the walls, the building’s main processing server still alive and logging conditions no one would ever read.

He interfaced with it. His eyes closed partially, the cyberdeck working.

Nyx stood at his left. She didn’t hold the sleeve because he was stationary, but she didn’t move away either.

She watched the northeast through the window, patient in the way that was specific to moments like this, not waiting for him to finish so she could have him back, but simply present while he was elsewhere, which in her view was not quite the same thing.

Jinx leaned against the walkway railing at the distance she deemed safe and also watched the northeast.

After a moment Jinx said, "How do you do that."

Nyx looked at her.

"Do what."

"Just stand there," Jinx said. She sounded genuinely curious rather than confrontational.

She gestured toward Proxy, toward the expression he had when the cyber deck was working, eyes not quite closed, not quite open, focused on something that wasn’t in the room. "When he’s like that. Being somewhere else."

Nyx looked at Proxy for a moment.

"He is right here," she said.

Jinx tilted her head. "His head is in the network."

"His head is always doing something," Nyx said. "He is still right here."

Jinx considered this and looked at Proxy again, at the expression of his stiffness.

"But you could do something else rather than just standing still?"

"Why would I want to stay away from Proxy," Nyx said.

She looked back out the window.

Jinx decided not to continue the line of inquiry.

Proxy surfaced from the network.

"There’s two routes to the hub building. The two contestants there have not moved."

"Not moved as in they are still fighting over whatever they found," Jinx said.

"Either fighting or having tea together," he said.

Nyx shifted her hand against the railing. "I can fix that."

"Not yet," he said.

She said it back at him, warm and agreeable.

"Not yet."

Jinx was looking at the window.

She said, "You know when you say not yet like that-"

"Yes," Nyx said.

Jinx looked at Proxy.

"She means me too," she said.

It was not a question.

Proxy looked at her with the flat regard he used for accurate observations he did not intend to contradict.

Jinx nodded once, slowly, the nod of who has received information they already suspected.

They came down from the walkway by the same staircase and exited through a side door into a narrow passage between two structures.

The walls were close enough on both sides that the overhead lighting from the building behind them didn’t quite reach the passage’s center.

The hub was visible at the far end, two hundred meters northeast, its network signature pulling at him through the zone’s architecture with the steady insistence of a strong current.

He was already considering the route plan when the lock signal arrived.

Thirty meters to the left, set into the wall of a utility building he had not yet scanned, a patient corporate signal waiting to be recognized.

He recognized it immediately, the encryption pattern of a cache.

Contained, dormant, designed to look like nothing to anyone who was not specifically looking for it.

"There is a cache nearby," he said.

Nyx straightened immediately.

"Nice!"

He turned them left at the next intersection and moved toward the signal.

Jinx followed the direction change without understanding it.

"What just happened," she said.

"Cache," he said.

"How do you know," she said.

"The lock signal."

She looked at the space around them, at the walls and the conduit and the patchy lighting, as if trying to see what he was reading in the empty air.

She did not ask how far his cyberdeck could see.

She was, by now, developing an accurate picture of what the network capability meant in practice, and the picture was becoming less surprising the more details she added to it.

Nyx looked at Jinx with a sidelong expression that was not warm and not hostile.

It was something more like the acknowledgment of a meaningless existence than either affection or threat, a gaze Jinx had not seen from her before and appeared to find more unsettling than the outright threat.

"He’s very good at that," Nyx said.

Not specifically about the cache.

Jinx said, "Like that?"

"Finding what’s useful." Nyx paused. "Useful cache. Useful people."

Then, "Like you, just a tool to be used and discarded."

She said it the way she said things about him that she considered simply true.

Jinx looked at Nyx.

She said nothing in response to that, and walked on.

The utility building was small and single-room, built for worker access rather than any industrial purpose.

One door. One small window set high in the wall, the overhead light still drawing from the zone’s grid.

Proxy went to the lock panel and found the familiar architecture waiting for him.

Standard corporate encryption, the same as every prior cache.

He was through it in seconds, the lid releasing with the same clean mechanical sound.

"Ooh," Nyx said.

She was at his shoulder the moment it opened.

Jinx had stopped in the doorway.

She was watching from distance with the body language of someone wondering whether the current deal extended to what was in the lockbox.

The cache was intact.

Two corporate-grade trauma kits in cut foam, sealed.

A sealed ration pack of six blocks.

Three water units.

Below those, a magazine pouch holding two loaded magazines that matched Clippy’s caliber, the first resupply for that weapon since the bunker.

A roll of nano-fiber bandaging still packaged.

And at the bottom of the foam cradle, a flat personal scanner, corporate issue, a handheld reader for identifying network on contact.

Jinx stood near the door and watched the inventory with a mildly curious expression.

"What’s in there," she said.

"Trauma kits," Nyx said, without looking up. "Rations. Ammunition for Clippy."

She picked up the scanner, turned it in her hand, and looked at Proxy.

He took it from her. He knew what it was.

Could be useful.

"The parts he doesn’t need," Nyx said to Jinx, "you can have."

Jinx said, "Waow, you can be generous."

"I’m not generous," Nyx said. "I just don’t need what he doesn’t."

A brief silence.

Jinx glanced at the doorway and the supplies, then back to Nyx. "I’ll take it."

Proxy finished distributing the supplies and stood.

Single entrance, network coverage reaching the door from the interior node, the small window facing northeast where the hub’s glow was still visible two hundred meters out.

Whatever was happening in the hub had not ended.