RIVAL’S POV
The chip sat in my palm like a splinter of bad luck.
Small. Smooth. Black as oil.
It didn’t look like much — not worth a fight, not worth bleeding for — but I’d learned the hard way that it’s always the smallest things that can ruin you.
I shut the door to my bunk, slid the lock, and sat on the lower frame. My ribs still throbbed from Ruth’s knee and from throwing Thomas around like a rag doll, but pain could wait. This couldn’t.
Shadow had drilled me on tech once, years back. Not my specialty — I was better with fists than wires — but I remembered enough to know how to start.
I pulled the small scanner I’d stashed under my mattress. It wasn’t high-end, but it could read and decrypt most black-market data chips. The second the chip touched the reader, the scanner lit up —
