Chapter 7: Daya Osei Offers Kai a Friendship Bracelet

The rain had stopped somewhere around four in the morning, and by the time the light came through the canopy it was the pale, uncertain kind that couldn't decide if it was sunrise or just the absence of dark.

Kai was already awake.

He'd slept in two-hour blocks the way he'd learned to at the warehouse—not because the schedule demanded it, but because his body had stopped trusting long sleep as a concept. You closed your eyes for too long in a fulfillment center and you missed something: a forklift, a quota, a supervisor with a clipboard and a tone. Out here the risks were different but the math was the same.