Chapter 3: First Test of the Space

The fluorescent lights of the wholesale outlet hummed overhead, casting a harsh glare across rows of stacked pallets. It was late morning, and the dry goods aisle was nearly empty.

Kathy pushed a steel flatbed cart down the main lane, scanning the cardboard boxes. On her left wrist, under her sleeve, the faint square mark pulsed with a low, steady beat.

She needed to know the exact rules of her space before spending a single dollar of her capital.

She stopped in front of a pallet of bulk instant noodles and loaded ten twenty-pack boxes onto her cart. Two aisles down, she added twenty five-gallon jugs of drinking water, five cases of canned meat, and a box of commercial heat packs used for warming food.

She pushed the loaded cart to the far corner of the warehouse section, behind a wall of stacked timber pallets, where an overhead concrete pillar blocked the security cameras.

Kathy checked her surroundings. The nearby aisle was silent.

She rested her bare hand on top of a water jug and focused on the square space within her mind.

The jug vanished from the cart. There was no sound, no flash, and no draft of displaced air. One second it was resting against her palm, and the next her hand was hovering over empty space.

Kathy closed her eyes. Inside her mind, the dark void of her ten-thousand-square-meter space sat completely still. In the center of it, the blue water jug hovered a few inches above the invisible floor, intact.

She opened her eyes, held her hand over the empty spot on the cart, and focused again.

The jug reappeared exactly where it had been and settled onto the flatbed without a wobble.

The transfer was instant, silent, and effortless.

To test the stasis, Kathy walked to the tea station near the exit. She bought a paper cup of boiling water and a small plastic bag holding a scoop of crushed ice from the drink dispenser.

She carried both back to the hidden aisle and set the cup and the bag side by side on the cart. She touched them together and pulled them into her space.

She waited five minutes, watching the second hand sweep around her wristwatch.

When five minutes had passed, she brought both items back onto the cart. She touched the side of the paper cup. It was hot, and steam rose from it in the same shape and amount as before. She checked the plastic bag. The crushed ice was hard and dry, without a drop of meltwater at the bottom.

She pressed the bag against her palm to be sure. It was cold enough to sting, exactly as it had been when the dispenser dropped it.

She pushed the cart toward the front registers to pay and place her first real bulk order. The cashier, a young man in a red apron, scanned the items and gave her a total of three hundred and twenty dollars.

"Will that be all today?" the cashier asked, tapping the register screen.

"I want to place a direct commercial order," Kathy said, her voice clear. "I need five hundred cases of these instant noodles, two hundred cases of canned meat, and every five-gallon water jug you have in the back holding bay. I can pay the full amount upfront."

The cashier blinked, and his hand stopped over the screen. "Five hundred cases? Ma'am, our backroom dry goods inventory is managed by regional distribution. Orders over fifty units require a commercial buyer profile and three days of processing."

Kathy took out her phone and opened her banking app. "I will pay the surcharge for immediate local release. Call your inventory manager."

The cashier hesitated, then dialed an extension on the counter phone. After a brief conversation, an older manager in a gray vest walked out from the back office, looking skeptical.

"You want to clear out our secondary storage bay for dry rations?" the manager asked, looking at Kathy's plain clothes.

"Yes," Kathy said. "I have the funds ready. Run the invoice as a cash-sale liquidation."

The manager looked at her for a moment, then nodded to the clerk. "Key it in under the bulk line item. The total comes to fourteen thousand eight hundred dollars."

Kathy stepped up to the card reader and tapped her bank card against the terminal.

The machine hummed for three seconds. A high beep rang out across the counter, and the screen flashed red: 

TRANSACTION DECLINED - CONTACT ISSUING BANK.

Kathy frowned and tapped the card again.

TRANSACTION DECLINED.

"Looks like your bank blocked it, ma'am," the manager said, his politeness gone. "It happens all the time with large card payments."

Kathy opened her account to check her balance. The screen refreshed, and an orange banner ran across the top of her dashboard:

ACCOUNT NOTICE: A temporary administrative hold has been placed on outgoing wire transfers and high-value point-of-sale transactions pending corporate compliance verification. Please visit your local branch.

Her fingers tightened around the edge of her phone.

Luiz had not just walked away with her signed corporate release. He had used his legal team to file a compliance flag on her account before she even left the notary's office.

The manager gave her a tired, condescending look. "Do you still want the boxes on the cart, ma'am? Or should I have someone put them back on the shelf?"

Kathy looked at the small pile of goods on the cart, then down at her phone. The plan she had made in the kitchen the day before had assumed she could spend freely, and she would have to rebuild it from what she could carry out of the store in her own hands.

She took her wallet from her jacket pocket and counted out three hundred and twenty dollars in cash.

"I'll take what's on the cart," Kathy said.

The cashier bagged the small items and helped her wheel the rest to the loading zone. Once he had gone back inside, she touched each box, jug, and case in turn and sent it all into the dark.

In her car, she took the steel key card out of her bag. The bank could hold her money as long as it liked, but nobody had thought to flag a warehouse the company had already written off. Luiz had called what was inside commercial trash, and it was thousands of pallets behind a lock her card would open.