The Starvation Protocol

His only evidence was a punctured can of poisoned soup, his camera was shattered, and his arm was frozen numb.

The music was a drill bit. A high-frequency, candy-coated drill bit boring directly into the base of his skull. Thump-thump-thump-chime. Thump-thump-thump-chime. A synthesized girl-group voice, impossibly cheerful, singing about love or dancing or something equally offensive in Korean. It hadn't stopped. It had been looping for hours, maybe days. Time had dissolved into a single, unending, upbeat track of psychological warfare.

Theo’s eyes opened to darkness. Not the comforting dark of a bedroom, but the layered, threatening dark of the library stacks. Cold seeped up from the concrete floor, through the mattress of rotting hardcovers he’d made for himself. Every muscle was a knot of cold, stiff agony. He tried to shift, and a jolt of fire shot through his ribs, a souvenir from the barricade. He grunted, the sound swallowed by a saccharine synth melody. BHI’s little sonic siege. Keep them awake, keep them on edge, let the music do what a bullet does, only slower.

He had to get out. Not just of the library, but of this holding pattern. Lying here, healing, was just a slower way of dying. Mina would check on him soon. She’d press her cold fingers against his forehead, her expression a careful mask of professional concern that didn’t quite hide the pity. He couldn't stand that look. Not today. Today, he needed to do something stupid. Something that felt like living.

Rolling onto his side was a project. Each movement was a negotiation with pain. His joints creaked like rusty hinges. The damp paper of the book covers clung to his thin shirt. He pushed himself up, his head swimming. The K-Pop seemed to get louder, a mocking soundtrack to his pathetic struggle. He sat there for a full minute, breathing shallowly, waiting for the black spots in his vision to fade. The air tasted of mildew and burnt paper. The only heat came from the smoldering pyres of knowledge in the main atrium, a sacrifice to the god of Not Freezing To Death.

He needed his gear. More importantly, he needed boots. They’d cut his off him when Mina had patched up his leg. Standard procedure. He couldn’t exactly walk out into the frozen maze of downtown Minneapolis in his socks. That was a problem for later. First, escape.

He got to his feet, using a towering shelf of legal textbooks for support. The spines were cracked, the gold lettering flaking. *Minnesota Statutes Annotated, Volume 14.* A monument to a world of rules that no longer applied. He leaned against it, his body trembling with the effort. One step. Then another. He moved like a man a hundred years old, shuffling through the narrow aisles of forgotten stories, the relentless beat of the music chasing him.

He navigated by memory, toward the less-used staff entrance in the library’s west wing. The main atrium was out of the question; it was the center of Mina’s little fiefdom. Too many eyes. Too many people who might try to help him. He skirted the edges of the children’s section, the faded murals of cartoon animals a grotesque backdrop to the misery. A small shape huddled under a reading desk, wrapped in a threadbare blanket, coughed a wet, rattling cough that echoed the K-Pop’s bass line.

He reached the staff corridor. It was darker here, colder. The music was slightly muffled, the drill bit now wrapped in felt. A thin sliver of gray light cut through the gloom from a boarded-up window at the far end. His exit. He moved faster now, a grim purpose settling in his gut. This was what he did. He observed, he recorded, he exposed. Lying on a bed of romance novels wasn't in the job description.

Something was in his way. A gurney, left carelessly in the middle of the hall. He didn’t see it in the dark. His shin connected with the steel frame with a hollow clang that sounded like a gunshot in the relative quiet. Pain, white-hot and blinding, flared up his leg. He choked back a yell, his hands flying out to catch himself. His fingers found only air, and he went down, sprawling over the gurney, his bad ribs screaming in protest. The whole contraption rattled and scraped against the concrete floor.

“Hello? Is someone there?”

Mina’s voice. Sharp. Close. Footsteps approaching from the atrium.

Panic seized him. A raw, animal instinct. He couldn't get caught. Couldn't face the lecture, the disappointment, the forced return to that mattress of lies. He scrambled off the gurney, his body a symphony of agony. There was nowhere to run. The corridor was a straight line.

To his right, a pile. A heap of something soft. He didn’t think, he just moved, diving into it. It was laundry. Soiled bed linens from the clinic, waiting to be… what? Burned? Buried? It was a mountain of filth. The smell hit him instantly—a gag-inducing wave of sweat, blood, and something acridly chemical. It was damp. He burrowed into the pile, pulling sheets and blankets over his head, curling into a tight ball. He held his breath, his heart hammering against his ribs, each beat a betrayal.

The footsteps stopped beside the gurney. The beam of a flashlight cut through the thin fabric over his eyes. He could hear her breathing. Slow. Deliberate.

“Must have been a rat,” she muttered to herself. A big one. The beam danced around the corridor, then clicked off. The footsteps receded, heading back toward the noise and the dim light of the atrium. He stayed buried in the filth, listening until her steps faded completely, replaced once more by the muffled, maddening thump of the music.

He lay there for a long time, the stench of human suffering clinging to him. Humiliation was a cold, greasy film on his skin. This was his grand escape. His reclamation of agency. Hiding in a pile of bloody sheets like a frightened child. He pushed himself out of the laundry, his clothes now damp and reeking. The cold air felt clean by comparison.

He needed those boots. He knew where the dead were kept. A small, refrigerated records room off the main loading bay, repurposed as a temporary morgue. The cold kept the smell down. Mostly.

He found the room without trouble. The door was slightly ajar. Inside, the air was still and frigid, the K-Pop almost entirely absent. A mercy. Four bodies lay on metal tables, covered in the same gray blankets as the laundry he’d just vacated. He hesitated for only a second. Investigative necessity. That’s what he told himself. You can’t document the truth if you can’t walk to it.

He pulled back the corner of the nearest blanket. A man, no older than thirty. Gaunt face, a messy hole in his chest where a BHI rifle slug had torn through. His eyes were open, staring at the acoustic ceiling tiles with dull surprise. Theo didn’t look at his face again. He looked at his feet. The man was wearing sturdy, insulated work boots. Scuffed, but solid. Exactly what he needed.

His own socks were thin, soaked through with laundry-water and sweat. The cold of the floor was already sinking into his bones. He reached for the dead man’s laces. His fingers were clumsy, stiff with cold. The laces were frozen stiff, crusted with mud and something dark that was probably blood. He fumbled with the knot, his breath fogging in the frigid air. The body was rigid. He had to wrestle the first boot off, pulling and twisting, the dead leg lifting with a horrible, unnatural stiffness. The boot came free with a soft sucking sound.

He repeated the process with the other one. He didn't allow himself to think about what he was doing. It wasn't grave robbing. It was appropriation of abandoned assets. A field requisition. He manufactured justifications, building a wall of words between himself and the simple, ugly truth of it. He was stealing shoes from a corpse because his own were gone and he was cold. That’s all it was.

The boots were a size too big, but thick socks would fix that. He found a pair on the second body, a woman with frostbite-blackened fingers. He didn’t look at her face at all. He put on the socks, then slid his feet into the dead man’s boots. They were cold, so cold they felt wet, but they were solid. A layer of leather and rubber between him and the world. He laced them tight, the frozen leather resisting his pull. He stood up. The boots were heavy, clunky, but they were a start. He was back on his feet.

He found his jacket and his camera bag in a small locker where Mina had stored his effects. The camera was an old DSLR, a relic in an age of neural-linked optics, but it was reliable. It was his. He slung the bag over his shoulder, the weight familiar and comforting. He was a journalist again, not a patient. Not a scavenger.

He slipped out the loading bay door into the pre-dawn gloom. The music from the library was a faint, tinny pulse behind him, and then it was gone, swallowed by the wind.

The cold was a physical blow. It hit him in the chest, stealing his breath. The wind howled down the canyon of shattered office buildings, carrying needles of ice that stung his exposed skin. He pulled up the collar of his jacket, his chin tucked down. The streets were a treacherous landscape of packed snow, black ice, and the frozen detritus of a dead city. Burned-out cars formed barricades, their metal skeletons coated in a layer of frost. The silence was unnerving after the constant music, broken only by the mournful whistle of the wind through broken windowpanes.

His destination was the old freight depot, now known as the Loading Dock. It was one of the few BHI-sanctioned distribution points for ‘humanitarian aid.’ Airdropped rations, once a week. A gesture of benevolence that was anything but. Theo knew what it really was. It was a census. A way to count the survivors, to gauge their desperation. And, if his source was right, it was something far worse. A delivery system.

He had to document it. Catch the drones dropping the crates, get footage of the distribution, and get a sample. The thought gave him a flicker of purpose, a warmth in his gut that had nothing to do with the temperature. This was his way back. Not just into the city, but into himself.

Every step was a fresh agony. The too-big boots rubbed against his heels. His ribs protested every jarring footfall. The cold was relentless, a predator that gnawed at his reserves. He kept his head down, moving through the shadows, sticking close to the walls of the buildings. BHI patrols were rare this deep in the Zone, but automated sniper drones weren't. You learned to read the architecture of the street, to see the sightlines, to know which corners offered cover and which were deathtraps.

He reached the perimeter of the Loading Dock as the sky was beginning to bruise with the first hints of dawn. It was a vast, open space, a concrete plain surrounded by crumbling warehouses. A crowd had already gathered, a huddled mass of gray and brown shapes against the snow. They were separated from the drop zone by a hastily erected barricade of razor wire and stacked shipping containers, manned by Zone volunteers in mismatched cold-weather gear. The Ration Guard. Self-appointed, and just as desperate as everyone else.

Theo found a vantage point behind a rusted-out bus shelter about a hundred yards away. The plexiglass was gone, shattered into a million pieces, but the metal frame offered some cover. He unzipped his jacket, pulling out the DSLR. His fingers were already numb, clumsy. He flipped the power switch. Nothing. The screen remained black.

“No. No, no, no.” He whispered the words into the wind. He tried again. Still nothing. The battery. The goddamn battery was frozen. Of course it was. In this city, everything failed. Everything broke. Frustration, hot and acidic, rose in his throat. He’d come all this way, stolen boots from a dead man, risked freezing solid, for nothing.

He couldn’t give up. Not yet. He popped the battery out of its compartment. The small, black rectangle felt like a block of ice in his hand. There was only one way. He unzipped his jacket again, then his shirt, and shoved the frozen battery into his armpit. The shock of the cold against his skin made him gasp. It was an intimate, agonizing cold that seemed to suck the heat directly from his core. He clamped his arm down tight, gritting his teeth, his whole body shuddering. He pressed himself against the frozen metal of the bus shelter, trying to become small, trying to endure. He had to warm it up. He had to.

He stood there, shivering violently, the battery a leech of cold under his arm. He watched the sky. And, of course, that’s when they came. Not with a roar, but a low, menacing hum that grew steadily louder. A trio of BHI cargo drones. Sleek, black, insect-like machines that moved with an unnatural smoothness. They hovered over the drop zone, their searchlights cutting through the gray morning. He missed it. He missed the shot. The arrival. The most crucial piece of establishing footage. By the time he could get the battery warm enough to function, the drones would be gone and the moment lost forever.

He cursed, a raw, ragged sound. The stupidity of it all was overwhelming. He wasn't some master of espionage, some hardened guerrilla journalist. He was just a cold, tired man with a dead battery pressed against his skin, hiding behind a broken bus stop while the story happened without him.

The battery was slowly, painfully, warming up. A deep, aching cold had settled in his side, but the initial shock had passed. He could feel a faint prickling as circulation tried to return to the abused patch of skin. He kept his eyes on the drones. They were releasing their cargo. Three large, olive-drab crates, descending on grav-chutes that slowed their fall to a gentle landing in the center of the cordoned-off area. The hum of the drones faded as they ascended, disappearing back into the low-hanging clouds. Gone.

Theo pulled the battery from his armpit. It was still cold, but no longer felt like a piece of the arctic. His skin was red and raw. He slammed the battery back into the camera, his movements jerky with anger and shivering. He flipped the switch. The small red indicator light flickered on. The screen came to life, showing a low-battery warning. It would have to do.

He raised the camera, the cold metal a shock to his cheek. He zoomed in on the scene. The Ration Guard were moving toward the crates, crowbars in hand. The crowd surged against the barricade, a wave of bodies pressing forward. The murmur grew into a low roar of anticipation. He started filming, panning across the faces. Gaunt, hollow-eyed, mouths hidden behind threadbare scarves. They weren't rebels. They weren't fighters. They were just hungry.

Getting footage was one thing. Getting a sample was another. His press credentials, long since expired and useless anyway, wouldn’t get him through that line. He was just another ghost in the machine. He packed the camera away, the precious battery life ticking down. He had to get closer.

He abandoned his perch and merged with the edge of the crowd. The smell was overpowering. A mix of unwashed bodies, wet wool, and something cloyingly sweet and chemical. It was the smell of the rations, the aggressive preservatives already wafting from the crates as the guards pried them open. He tried to push his way forward, muttering apologies, but the crowd was a solid wall of desperation. No one was giving up their place.

“Hey! Get back in line, you ghoul!” a voice snarled. A heavy hand shoved him hard in the chest. He stumbled back, his ribs flaring. He looked up to see a man with a scarred face and a missing ear, his eyes burning with suspicion.

Before he could respond, another shove came from behind. “Move it! Back of the line is over there!” He was being pushed away from the barricade, away from his goal.

Then, a different kind of shove. Not hostile, but pitying. An old woman with a face like a dried apple grabbed his arm. “Here, son. You look worse than most. Get in front of me.” She pulled him, and the pressure of the crowd shifted, someone else shoved him from the side, and suddenly he wasn't being pushed out, he was being absorbed into the mass. He was shoved forward, stumbling, catching himself on the back of the person in front of him. He was in the line. Not as a journalist. Not as an observer. They saw his gaunt face, his shivering, his reeking clothes, and assumed he was one of them. A beggar. Starving. They weren't wrong.

The humiliation was a physical taste in his mouth, metallic and sour. But it was working. He was being carried forward by the sheer pressure of the crowd, a human glacier inching toward the distribution point. The crunch of frozen slush under hundreds of boots was a constant, grinding noise. He saw shattered pieces of wooden pallets on the ground, mixed with ice and dirt. The air grew thick with the steam of collective breath.

It took an eternity. A slow, shuffling journey of twenty yards that felt like miles. Finally, he was at the front. A large man with a shaved head and a thick, greasy beard was handing out white, plastic-sealed packs. His movements were rough, efficient. He looked exhausted and perpetually angry. This must be the Ration Captain they called ‘Sledge.’

“Next!” Sledge barked, not looking at him. He shoved a pack into Theo’s hands. It was a blocky, sterile-looking thing with BHI lettering on it. Inside was a self-heating soup container and a nutrient bar.

Theo clutched it. This was it. He had the sample. He was immediately shoved forward from behind, out of the line, to make room for the next person. He staggered into an open area where people were already tearing into their packages, huddled against the wind.

He found a sliver of space behind a concrete barrier. He sat on the frozen ground, his back against the cold stone. He pulled out the portable spectrometer from a padded pocket in his camera bag. It was another piece of his old life, a battered device with a spiderweb of cracks across the screen. He’d traded a month’s worth of scavenged antibiotics for it. He powered it on. The screen flickered, the damaged pixels creating a dead spot in the upper corner.

He tore open the ration pack. The soup container had a chemical heating element activated by a tab. He ignored it. He peeled back the foil lid. A thick, grayish-brown paste sat within. It smelled vaguely of beef bouillon and industrial cleaner. He used a small probe from the spectrometer kit, dipping it into the viscous liquid. He inserted the probe into the device’s analysis port.

He waited. The device whirred softly. On the cracked screen, a graph began to form. Lines of light, green and yellow, spiking across the display. He was looking for a specific signature, a unique isotopic decay he’d been tipped off about by a source inside BHI, before the source went silent. He leaned closer, squinting at the damaged display. And then he saw it.

A faint, but unmistakable, cluster of spikes in the high-energy spectrum. His breath caught in his chest. It was there. Faint, but undeniable. Tracker-9. A proprietary, short-lived radioisotope developed by BHI. Harmless in small doses, they claimed. Perfect for ‘logistical tracking of aid distribution.’ But it accumulated in the thyroid. Every meal, another dose. It didn't just track the rations. It tagged the people who ate them. It turned them into walking beacons, visible to any BHI scanner in the city. A permanent mark. The Starvation Protocol wasn't about feeding the Zone. It was about branding it.

He had it. The proof. The scoop. A jolt of pure, triumphant adrenaline shot through him, clearing the fog of cold and exhaustion. This was bigger than he’d thought. This was the story that could burn them all down.

He looked up from the spectrometer, his eyes scanning the crowd. They were eating it. Hundreds of people, sitting in the slush, gratefully consuming their dose of poison. Children, their faces smeared with the gray paste. The elderly, spooning it into their mouths with trembling hands. They had to be warned. He had to stop this.

He shoved the spectrometer back in his bag, grabbing the half-open soup container as evidence. He scrambled to his feet and pushed his way back toward the distribution line. He had to get to Sledge. The Ration Captain. He was in charge. He would listen. He had to.

“Hey! You!” Theo shouted, his voice a raw, hoarse croak. It was barely audible over the noise of the crowd.

He shoved his way through, ignoring the angry shouts and curses. He reached the barricade again, this time on the inside. Sledge was still there, his face a mask of grim concentration, handing out the packs like a machine.

“Stop! You have to stop!” Theo yelled, his voice cracking. He grabbed Sledge’s arm.

The big man spun around, wrenching his arm free. His eyes were bloodshot, narrowed with fury. “What the hell do you want? You got yours! Get out of here!”

“It’s poisoned!” Theo rasped, shoving the open soup container toward Sledge’s face. “Look, it’s got trackers in it! BHI is tagging us!”

He was frantic. He knew how he must look. Wild-eyed, gaunt, clothes smelling of filth. His voice was a wreck. His demeanor was aggressive, desperate. He wasn’t a credible source; he was a madman.

Sledge’s eyes flickered from Theo’s face to the soup, then back. There was no understanding in his gaze, only suspicion. He saw a 'doomer,' one of the conspiracy nuts who saw BHI ghosts behind every corner. Worse, he saw a ploy. A classic tactic. Start a panic, create a stampede, and in the chaos, you and your friends make off with a whole crate.

“Get the hell out of my face with that crap,” Sledge growled, his voice low and dangerous. “I’m not dealing with this today. We’re all hungry. Don’t you dare start something.”

“I’m not starting anything! I’m trying to warn you!” Theo insisted, his voice rising with hysteria. He was losing control. “I have proof! My spectrometer—”

“I don’t give a damn about your 'spectrometer',” Sledge spat, the word dripping with contempt. He gave Theo a hard shove. “Get out of here before I break your other ribs.”

The shove sent Theo stumbling backward. The cold, the hunger, the frustration, the righteous fury—it all boiled over. His own survival instinct, twisted and raw, took over. He wasn’t thinking about the crowd. He wasn’t thinking about the consequences. He was thinking about the condescending, ignorant look on this stupid man’s face.

Theo lunged forward and pushed back. Hard. It was a stupid, impulsive act, the last twitch of a dying nerve.

Sledge, surprised by the force, staggered back a step. It was all it took. The delicate balance of order tipped into chaos. The people at the front of the line, who had only heard snippets—‘poisoned,’ ‘stop,’ ‘get out’—and now saw shoving at the source, drew the only conclusion that made sense in their desperate world: the food was running out. Or it was tainted. Or something was wrong. Whatever it was, it meant they might not get theirs.

A collective roar went up from the crowd. Not of anger, but of pure, animal panic. The line dissolved. The barricade groaned and then buckled under the weight of hundreds of bodies surging forward at once. The riot had started.

It wasn't a noble uprising. It was a frantic, desperate crush of starving people. Theo was at the epicenter. He was knocked off his feet almost immediately, a shoulder hitting him in the chest, and the world dissolved into a maelstrom of legs and boots and scraping ice. He hit the ground hard, the air driven from his lungs. Pain exploded in his side.

He landed in the freezing slush, the gray soup from his container splashing across his face. The press of bodies was immense. He was going to be trampled. He tried to get up, but a boot caught him in the temple. His vision flashed white, then dark. He curled into a ball, protecting his head with his arms, his camera bag crushed beneath him. The screams were deafening. People were fighting over the ration packs, over the crates, over nothing.

Through a gap in the forest of legs, he saw the Ration Guard being overwhelmed. Sledge was swinging a crowbar, trying to create space, his face a mask of rage and terror. It was useless. The mob was a mindless entity, driven by one singular purpose: hunger.

His camera. The thought cut through the pain and panic. He had to film this. This was the story. Not the poison, but this. The result of the poison. The result of BHI’s calculated cruelty. He fumbled in his bag under his body, his fingers finding the familiar shape of the DSLR. He dragged it out, ignoring the screams, the weight of people stepping on his back, his legs.

He shielded the camera with his body, thumbing the record button. He lifted it just inches off the ground, aiming blindly into the chaos. The lens filled with a blurry vision of stomping boots, flailing limbs, the gray, unforgiving sky. He was getting it. He was getting it.

A heavy work boot, the same kind he was wearing, descended from nowhere. It came down squarely on the camera's lens. He heard a sickening crunch of glass and plastic. The impact jarred his entire arm, sending a shockwave of pain up to his shoulder. He pulled the camera back. The lens was destroyed, shattered into a concave mess of broken glass. The image on the small screen was a fractured, useless spiderweb.

Despair, absolute and crushing, hit him harder than any boot. It was over. He had nothing. No footage of the drones, no recording of the riot, nothing but a broken piece of junk.

And then the humming started again. Louder this time. Lower. He twisted his neck, looking up. The BHI drones were back. Not the cargo haulers, but smaller, sleeker patrol drones. They descended from the clouds, hovering over the chaos like vultures. They weren't here to restore order. They were here to test a new toy.

Canisters dropped from their underbellies. Not gas. Something else. They fell into the crowd, and where they landed, a thick, white foam erupted, expanding with an audible hiss. Experimental 'cryo-foam.' A non-lethal crowd dispersal agent, the BHI marketing materials would probably say. People screamed as the foam touched them. It didn't burn. It froze. Instantly. He saw a man, his mouth open in a yell, get hit in the chest. The foam enveloped his torso, and he was frozen in place, a statue of agony, his scream silenced. The riot faltered, the panic shifting from hunger to a new, alien terror.

Theo started to crawl, a desperate, animal scramble away from the epicenter. He had to get out of the open. A canister arced through the air, tumbling end over end. It wasn't heading for the crowd. It was heading right for him. He tried to lurch to the side, but he was too slow, his body too broken. It didn't hit him squarely. It glanced off his left shoulder with a brutal, concussive force. It felt like being hit with a sledgehammer. The canister bounced off him and discharged its payload ten feet away, encasing a dropped ration pack in a tomb of white ice.

But the impact was enough. A wave of impossible cold shot through his shoulder, down his arm, into his fingertips. It wasn't the sting of normal cold. It was a deep, deadening cold that killed everything it touched. His arm went numb. Utterly, completely numb. He couldn't feel his fingers. He tried to move them, but nothing happened. The arm was just a dead weight hanging from his shoulder. He stared at it, his brain refusing to process what had happened. It was his. But he couldn't feel it. He couldn't move it.

The riot was breaking, the crowd scattering in every direction, fleeing the silent, freezing foam. The drones hovered, observing their handiwork. Theo was left on the ground, trampled, his camera broken, his arm useless. He pushed himself with his good arm, crawling through the filthy, freezing slush. The world was a low-angle nightmare of fleeing boots and abandoned ration packs. His cheek was pressed to the ground, the grit and ice scraping his skin.

Through the chaos, he saw it. One of the BHI crates, its side staved in, had been overturned. The ration packs inside were being crushed underfoot, stomped into the muddy snow by the fleeing crowd. The evidence. His evidence. It was being destroyed.

A primal, idiotic instinct took over. He crawled toward it, dragging his dead arm behind him. He ignored the pain in his ribs, the throbbing in his head. He had to get something. One piece of proof. He reached the crate, his body screaming with the effort. Most of the contents were ruined, a pulpy, frozen mess. But one container, a single can of the self-heating soup, had been kicked clear. It was dented, but intact.

He lunged for it with his good hand, his fingers closing around the cold metal. He clutched it to his chest like a holy relic. This was all he had left. One can.

He couldn’t stay here. He looked around wildly. The drones were still overhead. The open space was a kill zone. He needed cover. He saw the dark, skeletal maw of a shattered skyway, one of the pedestrian bridges that connected the dead buildings. It was a hundred feet away. An impossible distance.

He crawled. Each movement was a universe of pain. He used his good arm and his legs, pushing himself through the filth. The dented can was tucked inside his jacket. His useless left arm dragged beside him, an anchor of dead meat. He didn't look back. He just focused on the darkness of the skyway. A shadow to hide in. He reached the base of the support pillar, the sounds of the panicked retreat fading behind him. He pulled himself up, using the cold steel to get to his feet. He was dizzy, nauseous. He staggered into the shadows of the broken bridge, finally out of sight. He collapsed against a wall, sliding down into a sitting position, his body shuddering uncontrollably.

He was alone. The wind was the only sound now, whistling a mournful dirge through the bullet holes in the remaining panes of glass. The floor was slick with a thin layer of frozen condensation. Below him, through the gaps in the shattered floor, he could see the Loading Dock. It was empty now, save for the grotesque, frozen statues of the unlucky. The BHI drones were gone. The show was over.

He sat there in the freezing wind, the adrenaline draining away, leaving behind a deep, abyssal cold. He was a failure. He had no recording, a broken camera, a useless arm, and no proof. He slowly, painfully, pulled his prize from his jacket. The can. His last hope.

He turned it over in his good hand. The dent was worse than he thought. And on the seam, a tiny puncture. A single, gray, viscous drop of the tainted soup was leaking out, freezing almost instantly as it touched the metal. It was useless. Contaminated. No lab would take it seriously. Even if he could find a lab. Even if he could get there.

It was all for nothing. The whole stupid, painful, humiliating ordeal. He leaned his head back against the icy wall and laughed, a dry, broken sound that turned into a hacking cough. He was shaking, not just from the cold, but from the sheer, crushing weight of his own incompetence.

And then another feeling asserted itself. A deeper, more fundamental reality. Hunger. A gnawing, cramping emptiness in his stomach that overshadowed the pain, the despair, the failure. He hadn't eaten in two days. He was starving.

He looked at the leaking can in his hand. The poison. The tracker. He knew what was in it. He held the proof of BHI's crime right there. And he was going to eat it.

The arithmetic was simple. Die of starvation now, or die of something else later. Later was better. He fumbled with the pull-tab, his one good hand clumsy and weak. He managed to get it open. The gray paste sat there, cold and unappetizing. He didn't hesitate. He tipped the can back and squeezed the contents into his mouth. It was thick, salty, and vaguely metallic, the texture of cold library paste. He swallowed it down, the cold slurry a shock to his system. He ate it all, scraping the insides of the can with his finger, licking it clean.

He threw the empty can away. It clattered across the frozen floor of the skyway and disappeared into the darkness. He had destroyed his only evidence. He had willingly taken the poison. He had failed on every conceivable level. And yet, for a fleeting moment, the cramping in his stomach subsided. He was no longer starving. He was just a dead man walking, tagged and tracked, with one good arm.