Thank you, it read, simple as the circuits he used to make signals fly. The handwriting was messy—Lyle’s hand, perhaps, or the old man who ran the infirmary. It did not matter.

He was new, skin still soft, eyes that asked for absolution and understood how to bargain for it. He’d been in less than a month when he started asking questions about a router, about the man who fixed things, about the odd hum at night. Marcus could have ignored him. He could have pretended not to know. He did neither. He studied the young man the way a gardener studies a plant that might be sick.

Marcus watched this from his cot and felt something he had not felt since the world before: a patient warmth. It was not triumph. It was not vengeance. It was the quiet knowledge that you can teach a person to share a burden, and that sometimes a burden becomes light through multiplication.

“How many people have you connected?” the investigator asked.

The boy blinked. “Only that—people say there’s a way to watch what’s happening outside. That someone makes it happen.”

The prison kept its locks. The city kept moving. But in corners and closets and under bunks, people still passed the rhythm Marcus had taught them. A stapler clacked. A rake scraped the floor. A shoe tapped a code. Free Link, in the end, lived in those human gestures—fragile, defiant, and, all at once, free.