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Chapter 70 – Telling the truth can make you sound delusional.
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2026-06-16 07:50:29“You didn’t do it yet,” she said.
Dex frowned. “Yet?”
Maya looked at Miles.
“Give us five minutes.”
Miles hesitated only long enough to be annoying, then stepped back. Everyone else suddenly remembered urgent business elsewhere. Except they remained, obviously, within earshot. Because people were animals.
Maya stepped closer to the fence.
“I’ve done this before.”
Dex stared at her.
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Dead Weight Chapter 94 — The part nobody labelled properly
By now, Maya has learned that government secrets have a smell.Dust. Plastic. Old toner. Filing cabinets that have survived regime change, budget cuts, and at least one administrator who thought “urgent” meant using red font.The apocalypse has improved very few things, but it has done wonders for access.Before, a room like this would have needed badges, clearance, maybe a retinal scanner with the personality of a nightclub bouncer.Now the door is hanging open.Progress.Maya stands in the records room beneath Building C and lets her flashlight move slowly across the damage. Most of the files are gone. Burned, shredded, scattered. Enough paper remains to prove someone once believed atrocities were more manageable if printed in triplicate.LUS pings softly in her head.Archival material detected.“No,” Maya says.Clarification required.“No hopeful tone. Last
Dead Weight Chapter 93 — LUS fractures. First crack.
The first thing Maya learns that morning is that silence is louder when it comes from inside your own head. The second is that she hates that sentence and would like it removed from her personality.The crisis is not dramatic enough to earn the word, which is how crises get you. No horde, no collapsing wall, no villain monologue with poor ventilation. Just the morning water transfer from the roof tanks into the filtered barrels — a task so ordinary it has its own clipboard. Ordinary is how disasters get invited in.She's halfway through the ration board when Nora appears in the doorway, pale, a test strip held between two fingers."Don't say it like that," Maya says."I haven't said anything.""Your face has terrible bedside manner.""The west barrel failed."Maya is moving before the word lands. West feeds the kitchen line, two wash stations, three container rooms. If contamination's gone through, it isn't a problem. It's multi
Dead Weight Chapter 92 — Plausible deniability
Marcus notices on the third day.Maya can't say how she knows. Knowing things without a trail is supposed to be her unsettling advantage, and she is not prepared for Marcus Webb to start competing in the category. He doesn't look at Eli differently. He doesn't look at her differently. He just stops looking away at the moments that would mean something, and turns the not-looking into a sentence.At breakfast, Eli slides her the repair ledger before she asks. Marcus clocks it and says nothing, and the nothing has elbows.She finds him by the south line, walking tomorrow's run with Miles. The route goes east through the industrial district, then hooks north to the medical warehouse Jin has been quietly desperate to reach since he learned Denise rations antibiotics like relics. Miles leaves the second she arrives. Miles can smell a complicated conversation and refuses to be collateral.Marcus stays at the map board, arms folded, expression neutral enough to b
Dead Weight Chapter 91 — After Eli. The morning.
Morning arrives with the audacity to look ordinary.Maya is already awake when the first shift changes, sitting at the operations desk behind the flower curtain with the gate ledger open, the water totals updated, and a list of repair priorities arranged in the order most likely to prevent death rather than the order most likely to stop Aaron complaining.This is leadership.Apparently.It looks a lot like paperwork having a nervous breakdown.She has slept badly, but badly is a broad category now. There is nightmare-bad, noise-bad, grief-bad, and lying awake because a man touched you exactly the way you needed him to and then left when you asked him to, which is its own stupid little subcategory she refuses to name.She writes north walkway brace under today’s tasks and underlines it once.Not twice. Twice would suggest feelings.LUS says, Your cortisol levels have normalized.Maya sets h
Dead Weight Chapter 90 — What she doesn't manage
She does not say come with me.She lifts his hand off the gate rail and keeps it. Eli reads it without needing it spelled out, and lets her take him past the container lane to the old office that has been her room from the start. The one nobody enters. A cot, a desk, a window the size of an apology.She locks the door out of habit. Then stands with her back against it, because the lock was the last competent thing she knew how to do and now she is out of procedure."I don't have a plan for this," she says.It is the closest she gets to a joke. It is also true, which ruins it."Okay," he says.Not we don't need one. Not let me. Just okay. Like having no plan is allowed in here. Like it might be the entire point.He crosses the room without hurry. He does everything without hurry, and tonight it undoes her faster than urgency would, because urgency she could match and outrun. Patience she has no defence for. H
Dead Weight Chapter 89 — Eli cracks her. Slightly.
Bad nights have a texture.They sit under the fingernails, behind the eyes, in the narrow space between one breath and the next. They make the base feel too loud and too quiet at the same time, as if everyone is speaking through cloth and every small sound has been sharpened first.Maya knows this kind of night.She knows what to do with it.She writes the incident report. She confirms the supply run details. She notes that Leanne’s brother saw the bite happen and froze for three seconds, which is understandable and still something they will need to train out of him if he is going to leave the walls again. She records that the woman bitten had been named Ruth, that Denise sedated her before the fever got too cruel, and that no one used the word mercy until after it was done.Then Maya checks the gate.Then the south wall.Then the container lane.Then the roofline above VIBE.She does not need to do the perimeter herself
Dead Weight Chapter 55 — Inventory, personal
Suburban scavenging always sounded softer than city scavenging, which was how Maya knew language was a liar with nice shoes.A suburb implied lawns. Bird baths. Little ceramic frogs beside herb gardens. Now it meant long streets of silent houses, open garage doors, curtains moving in broken windows
Dead Weight Chapter 54 – What Eli sees
“You want that corrected before Aaron sees it,” Eli said.Maya’s expression did not move.“Do I?”“Yes.”“Why?”“Because Leanne still hasn’t forgiven him for the pasta thing.”“That was three days ago.”“She has a long memory.”“So do I.”
Dead Weight Chapter 53 — Calibration
Maya first noticed Eli watching her because he was good enough not to look like he was watching.That was the problem.Most people watched badly. They stared when worried, glanced away when guilty, and did that tiny little eyebrow flick when they were pretending not to listen. Aaron
Dead Weight Chapter 52 — Eli joins the base. Permanently
Eli Carrasco arrived at the warehouse just after morning watch, carrying one backpack, one rifle, and absolutely no visible drama.Maya distrusted this immediately.People arrived in one of three conditions now: bleeding, crying, or lying badly about neither. Eli arrived clean enoug
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