A disassembly team from the Ming Tang Clearing House boarded the Lame Crow. The seizure order left only three minutes, and they had to strip the engine to cover eleven percent of the debt. Qi Ye owed 910,000, but what he truly feared was the unregistered ring gate fragment behind the cargo hold door. One scan would turn it into evidence that could put him in prison. Pressing himself against the bulkhead, he activated the second-stage resonance of his Ring Core, Echo. He heard the fragment’s original code, C-7-FOLD-114, and detected that it was waiting for a frequency at 2.7 seconds. So he changed the code to C-7-FOLD-117, a batch marked as cleared and scrapped three years ago. The scanner registered it as compliant scrap. The disassembly team lowered their guns, but the auditor fixed his eyes on the silver-gray ring pattern beneath Qi Ye’s collar and demanded another scan. Qi Ye said the machine’s chassis had no counterweight and would need a scaffold for twenty minutes. If they wanted to scan it, they’d have to stamp today’s cargo manifest first. But that fragment had just held its breath for half a second. Whose frequency was it waiting for?
