CHAPTER THIRTEEN.
660 Words
09-11-2355 | 21:39
The Verge — Tycho's Bunker.
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Tycho sits in the low, uneven glow of ten mismatched monitors, his boots resting on a rusty crate. He is all angles and intent, a dark braid escaping the back of a canvas hood that usually hides his face. The bunker is his habitat, a repurposed filtration substation, pipe ribs overhead, cable vines everywhere, solder tin like old pennies. This is the Verge, the city's chaotic edge, and Tycho is its ghost in the machine.
He scrubs a pirated HARBOR security feed back and forth with two precise fingers until the frame he wants hangs: Ryn Kestra, hovering in a noise of magnetic hum, jacket draped there by somebody taller in a city-issue scowl.
"Harbor's new plaything," Tycho mutters, tapping the silhouette in a second window: the tall one with the pulse pistol and the unfortunate habit of being brave. "Congratulations on finding my boy in the dark."
Footsteps clip the stairs like a metronome that pays taxes. Cassian steps off the last tread, crisp as a lab memo, clean coat, clean shoes, eyes that don't miss broken things even when he is pretending not to see them.
"You're still following him," Cassian says. It isn't a question.
Tycho tosses him a look and then the truth. "He's still running late-night drills alone. Tonight he picked up company. Harbor's new plaything has a nice left roll and better instincts than sense."
"I know the man," Cassian says, coming closer, sweeping the room with that clinical, hateful kindness of his. "Mercer. He is honorable. Gets people home."
"Honorable is a word you use when you don't want to say 'reckless,'" Tycho says. He scrubs the footage again: Ryn turning invisible bruises into breathing, Dax's jacket a dark flare in the fog. "You put a dog on a leash around a blade and call it protection. That is your new ethic?"
Cassian's gaze cuts to him. "Is that what we're doing? You turning this into another sermon about cages while you sit in one you made from scavenged routers?"
Tycho laughs, sharp. "Cute. I picked my walls. He didn't pick his. Harbor did that for him. Harbor and you."
"I put a child somewhere he'd be alive at dawn," Cassian says, soft and infuriating. "You call it a cage because you like the drama of the word."
"I call it a cage because it locks," Tycho snaps. "Because I know what he sounds like when he can't hear the air past the building."
Cassian doesn't rise. He never does. "He's not alone. He has friends. He has a team. He has a medic who fights God for him in hallways. He has a commander who says no to bad ideas. You should appreciate that, given your taste for them."
Tycho stands because sitting feels like losing. He is all angles and intent, his hands full of restless electricity he refuses to show. "You think I don't know who the f**k Dax Mercer is? I watched him eat a slab and keep walking. That doesn't mean I'm letting Harbor be the only voice he hears when the room starts to sing wrong."
Cassian's eyes flicker to the paused frame again: Ryn, the water, the jacket. "You talk like you're helping. You're circling. There's a difference."
"Then stop being charming and tell me to stop," Tycho says. "Use your director voice. That thing you wear when you stand in rooms with clean men and say strange words like stewardship."
Cassian exhales. It sounds tired and expensive. "I'm telling you to be careful. I'm telling you not to become the story you're trying to prevent."
Tycho snatches a pair of coin-sized disruptors off the bench. "Great talk. Loved the moral center. I'm going back out."
"Where," Cassian asks, not quite managing to make it a period.
Tycho doesn't turn. "Don't wait up." He starts sorting the scavenged filters he just picked up at the market.
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