Méprise

Open mouths, empty heads, big bytes.

The dead come back on a Tuesday, in two freight sleeves stamped with a logo I designed with a quill pen. Katherine and Dorothy, alive again, returned by SKELM CORPS like a refund nobody asked for. Under Katherine's tongue: a key.

It opens the Curie Syndicate. Marie is one woman in seventeen bodies, and she wants to hire me to guard 847 hostages for fifty-six days, until a go-live called EVENT HORIZON. Most of them are children. Every one of them has a bomb in the brainstem, built on a protocol my own crew wrote.

Some of those children were grown from me.

Ban has her own reason to be here: a sister the Zhaos leased out at fifteen, with my company collecting two percent. Katherine's tremor is back. Dorothy's chrome hands won't stop shaking near the kids. And I have a countdown on my wrist and a ledger that keeps getting heavier.

Everyone in this building is cargo. The only question is who signed for it.