He pressed Y at 2321 and did not think about it for even a second, which was, he reflected afterward, the first easy decision he had made since Sunday.
[Limited Synchronization — Provisional Bond]
[Transferring permanent baseline improvement.]
[Note: provisional bond. Partial transfer only. Full contract functions unavailable prior to hatching.]
There was no light and no sound.
The thread that ran from Jin to the egg pulled slightly, the way a line does when something at the far end shifts its weight, and then it settled again.
That was the whole event.
Jin scanned immediately.
[Vitality: 18% — stable]
[Terminal maturation: ACTIVE — steady rate]
He read it, then read it again, then ran the deep structural scan to check it against something other than a headline number.
Eighteen. Up from fourteen. The first real jump since Jin had brought the egg home, rather than another one-percent crawl, and the maturation line had changed from slow to steady, which in Appraisal’s flat vocabulary meant that whatever was happening in there had stopped being marginal.
He checked what had not changed, because that was the part that mattered.
The shell was uncracked. There was no fracture line, no membrane separation, nothing that suggested hatching was near or even in view.
The dependency was identical. The deep structural scan still showed no self-sustaining heat-and-air rhythm; the embryo was progressing only because the machine kept imposing one. Eighteen percent was not safety. It was a bigger number in the same predicament.
And the bond was still a thread. He tried, out of thoroughness, to push a simple instruction along it and got nothing back at all. No command channel. No shared sense. Only the same faint weight, the same not-quite-warmth, and something underneath it that felt fractionally more present than it had on the first night.
Clearer. Not different.
In the grey space, the chick got up.
It managed six seconds this time and went down more or less on purpose, folding rather than falling, and stayed conscious afterward.
Jin sat on the floor of his room with his back against the desk.
His eyes burned every time he blinked, and the muscles between his shoulders had become one long complaint from sitting at the desk through cycle after cycle.
The window was black. He had been awake for most of two days, sleeping in pieces, and a Supply shift waited at 0800. He had one hundred and forty Credits, twelve hundred in deductions coming out of his support over the next several weeks, and a heating element taped to a ration tin lid on the desk above his head.
He looked at the readout for a long time.
[Vitality: 18% — stable]
Stable at eighteen.
On Sunday he had stood in a cold room at Verrow’s and read a report about an embryo that had built everything and never started the last step, and he had known immediately that nobody was coming for it.
He had refused to name it that entire time.
He had been aware of doing it. Every time the thought had come near, he had pushed it off, because a name was a thing you gave something with a future, and putting a name on an egg at eleven percent was how you got hurt. It had been the egg and the Sparrow and unit eleven since Sunday, and he had known exactly what he was avoiding and had gone on avoiding it.
He looked at the number again.
The chick in the grey space had its head up, and its eyes open, and it was doing the thing where it gathered itself to try standing again for the third time in twenty minutes despite having no realistic prospect of managing it.
Fine.
The name arrived without much ceremony, because he had probably had it for two days and had refused delivery.
There had been a flame in that chest for sixty-three days, banked down to almost nothing, close enough to out that four professionals had signed off on it. And there was, somewhere a very long way ahead, the possibility of something that moved fast enough to be a streak of fire across a sky.
Both of those were the same word.
"Flicker," he said, out loud, to a room.
[Designation recorded: Flicker]
[Species: Ashwing Sparrow]
[Status: pre-hatching. Provisional bond. Full contract pending.]
Nothing else happened. No panel unlocked, no bonus applied, no notification with an exclamation point in it. The Engine wrote down a name the way a clerk writes down a name.
Jin found that appropriate.
He ran one more recalibration at 2350, because the cycle came before everything.
He took the element to 38.1 for eleven minutes, ran the fan in four-second bursts through the card baffle for three, then held baseline for four.
The case hummed, faintly and unevenly, the way a forty-Credit controller board hums.
Glitch got up from the floor, walked around the desk once in the way he had done every hour since the first night, and lay down again at the corner nearest the incubator. He put his chin on his forelegs. He did not close his eyes.
He had taken that spot on the first night without being asked and had not given it up since, and Jin had stopped thinking of it as Glitch lying near the desk and had started thinking of it as the watch.
"You don’t have to do that."
Glitch conveyed, without moving, that this was not up for discussion.
In the grey space Flicker got one leg under itself, then the second, and came up trembling and stayed there for five wobbling seconds before folding down again with its eyes open.
Jin watched the shell temperature come off its peak and start down at 0.4 degrees a minute, which was exactly right.
Nothing was solved. The egg was uncracked and dependent on a machine that lied about time. He could not say when it would hatch, or whether it would, and eighteen percent was still a small number wearing a slightly better coat.
But the line was going up.
He put his head back against the desk leg and closed his eyes, and for the first time since he had carried a case across three districts in a kit bag, the room did not feel like somewhere they were waiting for something to die.
Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!
Use arrow keys (or A / D) to PREV/NEXT chapter