I ate. All of it. Eggs, sausage, the surviving bacon, three pieces of toast, a banana, and two of the protein shakes that tasted like chalk and regret. C-rank metabolism, now with a fresh B-rank Endurance layer, demanded fuel the way a furnace demanded coal. I'd learned to stop being polite about it around the same time I'd stopped being invisible.
Belle spun her laptop to face the table. "Monterey. Final logistics." The map glowed, the coastline she and Blair had spent an hour dissecting, the shelf, the kelp line, the deep water where the readings went dark. "We deploy Friday, fourteen hundred. Eight of us. Tier Two aquatic-adjacent, entity count sixty to seventy-five." She tapped a highlighted zone. "The shelf holds above the waterline at low tide. Ninety minutes of stable ground before it floods. Javier ran the numbers."
