Marcus — East Reach, appliance repair

Marcus broke the batch into six units before he left the flat. Not five, not seven. Six fit the inside pocket without printing through the jacket. He wrapped each one twice — foil first, then the static bag — and checked the count under his breath on the stairs: one, two, three, four, five, six. The walk to East Reach took eleven minutes if he cut the alley behind the laundromat. He cut the alley.

The shopfront still said REPAIR in peeling vinyl. A stack of microwave carcasses blocked the window from the street. Marcus went around back, knocked twice, waited three seconds, knocked once. Priya opened on the latch and did not say his name.

The back room smelled like solder and instant coffee. A kitchen table held a jury-rigged NCMI rig — board, leads, a cracked headset held together with electrical tape. Two other people were in the hallway; Marcus did not look at their faces long enough to keep them. Priya had her sleeves rolled. She had a cut on the side of her thumb from stripping wire.

“Four,” she said.

“I brought six. You take four. The other two stay with me.”

She almost argued the price and then didn’t. He set four units on the table, still double-wrapped, and kept his palm flat on the remaining two inside the jacket until she counted out the cash in small bills. He counted the bills back. Eighty, one-sixty, two-forty. Clean.

“You’ve sat through this,” he said anyway. “You don’t stack units. You don’t take it with anything that hits serotonin. You don’t drive. If your hands go numb before the second minute, you are already past the amount you meant to take and you stop.”

Priya nodded the way people nodded when they had already decided. “We’re not buying again after this. The rig’s almost there.”

“Sure.”

He turned to leave. She reached for the units with her cut hand and knocked the nearest one toward the edge. He caught it before it hit the floor. The catch was automatic — palm, close, tuck — and for half a second his face was down over the table under the bare bulb while her shoulder came up into the same frame.

Outside, a municipal camera on the alley pole had a clean angle through the gap in the rear door they hadn’t fully shut.

His phone buzzed once against his ribs. Not a message. The dead-drop app he paid a kid in Vale to keep running — a scrape on public dispatch sidebands. The alert was three characters and a number.

BL 0.91

Baseline match confidence. Dispatch threshold was 0.80. He had seen 0.91 exactly once before, on a man who did not make it to the end of his block.

“Door,” he said.

Priya looked at him. He was already moving. Ninety seconds if the drones were in the sector; less if a ground unit was closer. He shoved the dropped unit into her hands, hard. “Hide your four. Don’t open the front.”

He was in the alley when the second buzz came — ETA, forty seconds, two units inbound from the arterial. The last two doses were still in his jacket. Printing, if anyone stopped him. He got ten steps toward the cross-street and knew he would not clear it.

He pulled both units, bit the foil, and got the static bags open with his teeth. The powder was bitter and fine. He pushed both under his tongue at once, dry, and held his mouth shut. Two units. He had never taken two. He had never taken one. Handling trace was not the same, and he had told himself that for years without testing it.

Chorus hit before he reached the dumpster.

Not a rush. A pile-up. His NCMI — civic-grade, basic, the kind every adult in the city carried for transit and triage queues — stopped filtering. Raw machine traffic dumped straight into the channel it used for permitted prompts. He heard routing handshakes as pressure behind the eyes. Grid load-balancing as a taste of metal. Something that might have been a hospital bed assignment system spoke in numbers he could not hold still long enough to read. Overlap on overlap. No single voice. No sentence. Just the city talking to itself through his jaw and the base of his skull.

He went down on one knee. Then further.

The drones arrived on schedule. Two of them, low, scanning. Baseline ran the match again on the body in the alley — gait fragment, face if it could get one, thermal, the residual of the gesture at the table still queued in the prior frame buffer.

Confidence: 0.06.

Sensor noise. Non-viable. Standing protocol moved sub-threshold reads off the active queue when higher-confidence targets existed in the same search radius. Something on Hale Street was reading 0.87. The drones lifted, banked, and went.

They did not circle back.

—

Marcus came up through cold concrete and the taste of blood.

His nose was bleeding freely down into his mouth. He did not know how long he had been out. The light in the alley had shifted; the angle on the microwave stack in the shop window was wrong for the time he had gone outside. Minutes, plural. Gone.

He inventoried. Hands: empty, powder residue bitter under the nails. Jacket pocket: empty. Mouth: cut on the inside of the cheek where he had bitten down. Head: not pain exactly. A wrongness, as if a frequency he could not hear was still occupying the space where quiet was supposed to be.

Priya was in the doorway. She had not opened the front. She was holding a shop rag and not coming closer than the step.

“They left,” she said. “You were making a noise.”

He sat up against the brick. Counted his own pulse for no reason he could name — forty, forty-one, forty-two — and watched a thin line of blood drop from his chin to the knee of his pants, then another, then a third, dark on the dust of the alley, while the frequency in his head refused to resolve into anything he could turn off.